Taellaneth Complete Series Box Set

by Vanessa Nelson

  Wondering why the remnants were gathered here, she half-rose from her crouch and immediately dropped down again, Kester’s hand firm on her shoulder a moment after she had moved, fingers tense.

  One of the nightmare creatures was in the valley below. A limbless mass of dark, it was making its way along the trail of amber, catching the remnants with one of several mouths opened around its form.

  As it moved on, it seemed to grow. Fuelled by the magic, Arrow realised, stomach twisting. The Erith had always known that surjusi had a particular fondness for their magic, and now she could see why. It was fuel. The creature below was increasing in size before her eyes as it moved along the trail. It had been perhaps the size of a horse when it started and was now larger than one of the vehicles the Erith used.

  She wondered how the magic remains had come to be here and turned her gaze back along the path the creature was following. There was no amber left behind it, but there was a darker pile of what looked like the same thick dust left behind when she had fought the surjusi before.

  The creature was currently feasting on the remnants left by other dead surjusi.

  Her mouth was dry, throat tight, mind spinning too fast. It was one thing to know the surjusi liked Erith magic. Another thing altogether to see it being consumed in this other realm.

  The creatures that had attacked them before, as enormous as they had been, had not released any amber when they fell. Starved of magic. Perhaps weaker, desperate, which is why they had attacked so persistently even when the sword was cutting through their ranks.

  The sword at her back pulsed and she scrambled to gather her focus and damp down its presence and her wards. If the creatures could find specks of amber that dull, they would have no difficulty in finding her trail.

  A shift in the darkness behind the eating monster and what Arrow had thought was another rock rose up from the ground and simply smothered the creature. There was a struggle of some kind, the dark mass writhing, a sound almost too low to hear ringing through Arrow’s head, and then an explosion of dust, the cloud falling to the ground where the first monster had been, the second gathering itself back up.

  From the fallen creature specks of amber rose. Slightly fainter than before.

  Arrow felt sick. The eaten magic could be used again. That was why it was so faint. It had been swallowed down from an Erith, perhaps a long time ago, and was now being consumed again and again by surjusi, keeping them alive until more fuel could be found.

  She was trapped in a realm where the inhabitants wanted to eat her and there was no escape.

  A scream caught in her throat, no sound emerging. She did not want the creature’s attention.

  A quick glance showed that it was still feeding on the Erith magic. There was a thick trail ahead of it, keeping its attention.

  Even as she watched she could see other masses gathering on the side of the valley. More demons drawn by the promise of food. Kester’s hand on her shoulder tightened again, gently pulling back. He wanted them to move. She agreed.

  She drew back from her watching point as slowly as she could, trying to keep her breathing even and steady, Kester noiseless beside her. There were no creatures near here, which was pure luck she was quite sure. She moved as quietly as she was capable of back away from the valley, sending her senses out quickly to check where the active magic was. Whoever was holding those wards had clearly found a way of defending against these creatures.

  Once she was satisfied she knew the direction, she set off as quickly as she could manage, Kester keeping pace as before.

  ~

  They had been walking for what felt like hours, neither of them speaking, when Arrow spotted something on the ground not far from the trail. A small speck of something bright against the dark soil.

  She stopped, Kester beside her, and walked over cautiously, crouching beside the thing to inspect it.

  “What is that?”

  “It looks like a piece of t-shirt,” she said, the human term translating awkwardly into Erith. It was a vivid, pale green, and appeared to have been cut into a small square.

  “There looks to be another ahead.”

  Arrow picked up the first one, moving with Kester to the next. When they reached that one, they found another ahead of them.

  “This is human clothing,” she confirmed, comparing the three squares. They were the size of her thumbnail.

  “There is another ahead.”

  They moved on again and found that there was, indeed, another one. And one beyond that.

  “It is a trail,” Kester concluded while Arrow was still trying to puzzle it out. “They are more or less in a straight line.”

  “The humans? The other ones with backpacks?” Arrow speculated.

  “Shall we go and see?” There was a gleam in his eyes that suggested he was looking forward to meeting those humans.

  After another two dozen or so of the little green squares, they saw a pair of figures in the distance ahead.

  “Dorian and Juniper,” Kester said. He hesitated a moment. “I suppose we should join them.”

  “There may be advantage to numbers,” Arrow agreed. And she had questions. Many questions.

  The magicians were comically relieved to see them, Juniper’s face wet with tears. Kester suggested they stop for a little while, share some food, and the magician sank to the ground with a deep, shuddering sigh.

  “We thought we’d lost you completely,” Dorian said. There was no anger or bitterness in his tone. He sank to the ground next to Juniper, the backpack in front of him. “We were trying to keep in the same direction.”

  “The squares,” Arrow noted, and handed him the pile she had collected.

  “Yes. There was a t-shirt in Brian’s pack, right at the top.” The remnants of the t-shirt were stuffed into Juniper’s belt.

  “You were off course,” Kester told them. His common tongue was accented but understandable.

  Dorian’s face tightened and Arrow thought he looked sick.

  “I thought we might be. But there’s nothing around here to navigate by. No stars. No roads. Not even a river to follow. We were heading for higher ground.”

  He sounded as though he were admitting failure. But it seemed a sensible plan to Arrow. Without her extended senses and Kester’s sense of direction, she would have been easily lost. No wonder the humans had resorted to cutting up a t-shirt, and looked so relieved to see her and Kester.

  “There is a presence of Erith magic,” Arrow reminded him. “Can you sense it?”

  “Neither of us can. We’ve tried.”

  “Ended up with a blinding headache and nosebleed,” Juniper put in, voice small. “Both of us. Even tried to combine our power. Didn’t work.”

  “You can find it, though, can’t you?” Dorian asked, tilting his head up to Arrow.

  She settled on the ground nearby, Kester moving with her, and nodded once.

  “The ground also rises mostly in one direction,” he told them. “Go in a circle each way and you will feel it. If you are lost and keep heading up, we should find each other eventually.”

  The magicians absorbed that information in silence.

  “How did you get here?” she asked them.

  “What do you mean? We walked. Well, ran a bit. Then walked.”

  “I do not mean to this spot of ground. I mean into this realm,” Arrow clarified, tilting her head as she considered Juniper. The woman was worn, tears drying on her face, and did not seem to be deceitful. Still, the question needed to be answered.

  “We were in the room. With the spell,” Dorian said. “There was someone wearing a cloak. They threw power at you.”

  “We went to try and stop them, and they threw power at us. At lot of it.” Juniper shuddered.

  “Pushed us into the portal,” Dorian finished.

  “I grabbed his arm as we fell,” Juniper admitted, and even in the poor light Arrow could see the blush. “So we landed together.”

  “Did you see the stone
s in the room?” she asked, and felt Kester’s attention sharpen. She had told him very little about the break-in at the workspace and her investigation with Zachary. The bare facts. Nothing more. Certainly none of the speculation in her mind.

  “The white things covered in blood?” Juniper’s face wrinkled in confusion. “Yes. Why?”

  “You did not recognise them?”

  “No. Should we?” Dorian’s confidence was returning, his jaw set.

  “You are sure you have never seen them before?”

  “No. What’s this about?”

  “Does the name Oliver Anderson mean anything to you?”

  “No one I know,” Dorian answered, scowl back in place.

  “He founded Sanctuary,” Juniper said, unexpectedly. “He was supposed to be a powerful magician. Not a member of the Collegia, though.”

  Arrow absorbed that in silence whilst Kester passed around a water bottle and shared out one of the protein snacks from the backpack.

  “Did he create the stones?” Kester asked, speaking Erith.

  “I believe so.”

  “The same ones that were stolen by magicians from the human’s Academy,” he continued, carefully avoiding words that sounded too close to the common tongue equivalents.

  “The same.”

  “Someone had planned that portal spell,” he concluded, face grim. “Brought the stones there. Brought the sacrifices. That would not have been easy.”

  “No. And harder with all the security around.”

  “There were a lot of disturbances in the night. But nothing seemed to breach the perimeter.”

  “Well, we did not think so,” Arrow said, shoving her hands into her hair, forgetting it was pulled back into a ponytail. Her fingers got stuck and the fastening slid out of place. “Clearly, we were wrong.” She tugged the band out of her hair and gathered it up again. It was getting easier with practice, and she did not miss the multiple hair pins she had used when living among the Erith.

  “How did they manage to get past the patrols and the wards?” Kester wondered aloud.

  “What are you talking about?” Dorian asked, his jaw set.

  “Just wondering how the magician managed to get the spell set up in the Abbey without being noticed,” Arrow told him in common tongue.

  “I was wondering that as well,” Juniper said. “There was a patrol through the cellars at least twice every day. And surely it took longer than that to draw the spell.”

  Not a foolish woman, Arrow concluded.

  “We should keep moving,” Kester suggested, still speaking Erith. “We do not know how surjusi track their prey.”

  “We can think while we walk,” Arrow told the humans.

  ~

  The landscape had changed again. The ground underfoot seemed to be mostly smooth sand, but there were shaped rocks scattered all around. A mixture of shapes, roughened and worn with age. Some oval, some squat rectangles, a few blocky squares, the most common shape being long, slender rectangular shapes.

  There was no path so they had to step over the rocks in their path, the rocks vibrating gently as they passed through. Looking ahead, Arrow could see the end of the rocks not too far away, the ground after that looking smooth and undulating. At least as far as she could tell with the limited sight she had.

  “They kind of look like bits of people,” Juniper commented, stepping over another rock.

  “What do you mean?” Arrow glanced around, apprehension coiling in her stomach.

  “You know, the models you get as kids. You get different bits of people and you can … Oh. Of course. I guess Erith don’t have those toys?”

  “No,” Arrow said slowly, better part of her attention on the rocks around them.

  They had all stopped walking, but the rocks were still vibrating, visible trembling making soft grating sounds against the ground.

  The rocks did look like basic building blocks of anatomy, Arrow realised. There, ahead of her, one of the ovals was next to a longer rectangle that might be shoulders. And the squat square underneath could be a torso, with the spindly rocks being limbs. Upper arm, forearm, a set of stick-like rocks as fingers.

  Even as she thought that, the vibrating increased, the rocks shifting on the ground, some gathering closer together.

  “This does not look good,” Kester said, one hand going to his sword hilt.

  “No.” Arrow agreed.

  “Are they moving?” Dorian was staring at the rocks nearest to him.

  “Yes. I don’t like this,” Juniper said. It was not the plaintive cry of fear but the same grim tone Kester had used.

  “Move,” Kester ordered, switching to common tongue. “Quickly. The edge is ahead of us.”

  They started to run, progress hampered by the rocks that were gathering more quickly now, and the shaking of the ground as so many rocks moved over its surface.

  They were perhaps a hundred paces from the edge of the rock field when the first one rose. A completed humanoid form, the oval, faceless head seeming to stare in their direction, slender arms and legs fused somehow together, torso made up of two square stones that pivoted as the thing turned its shoulders to them.

  The stick-like fingers that had seemed so slender when lying on the ground looked more like knives as the thing began walking towards them, ground vibrating further under its feet.

  “It’s huge,” Dorian whispered.

  The thing towered over Kester, tallest among them. Bigger than Undurat, Arrow would guess.

  “Can you do something?” Juniper asked, turning to Arrow briefly.

  “I doubt it. There is no spellwork I can sense. And the sword is quiet.”

  “Keep moving,” Kester urged. “They look clumsy.”

  “You want us to outrun rocks?” Dorian asked, incredulous, even as he moved on.

  “Got a better idea?” Arrow asked between breaths, trying to keep up with the others.

  The first figure had been joined by more, crowding in from all around.

  “It’s an entire bloody army,” Dorian said. “Juniper, grenades.”

  The two magicians stopped, selected a pair of vials from each of their bandoleers, and hurled them into the mass of rock figures ahead of them.

  “Duck,” Dorian advised as the vials hit the first figures.

  Arrow crouched down, Kester beside her, the magicians following.

  A moment later a series of blinding flashes and resounding booms sounded, a shower of rock fragments cascading overheard, bouncing harmlessly off Arrow’s wards.

  They straightened as soon as the fourth one had exploded. Ahead of them was a thick cloud of dust, and the fragmented remains of the rock figures that had been blocking their way.

  “Move,” Kester urged.

  They were close to the edge. So close.

  A pair of figures abruptly came into view in front of them, the small group stumbling to a halt, nearly colliding with the outstretched hand of the closest figure.

  “Great. Knives for hands,” Dorian commented, reaching for another vial. He glanced across at Juniper and they threw their vials together.

  The group ducked down again, under Arrow’s wards.

  The shower of rock particles was smaller than it had been and when they rose, ready to move again, they saw why. One of the rock figures had stepped in front of the other. The first had been destroyed, bits of it scattered about. The one behind was still intact, faceless head tilted in their direction, long arms with their knife-like hands spread out.

  “Anything?” Dorian asked, a hint of panic in his voice.

  “Not enough time,” Arrow told him. She glanced over her shoulder and wished that she had not. The other rock figures had gathered and were coming towards them ground trembling with their footsteps.

  Before she had time to think of anything, Kester had moved past her, sword and long knife in his hands, moving with the grace of a trained warrior. He whirled to the side as one of the hands reached for him, slicing back in a move that made Arrow’s e
yes widen, the blade of his sword cutting through the join between the knives and the limb. The knives fell, clattering to the ground. Kester danced around behind the figure and swept his sword down again, severing the other arm at the shoulder joint.

  “Move,” Arrow told the humans before Kester could speak. Even as they surged forward, the severed limbs were quivering, moving back towards the main body.

  Kester waited, weapons ready, until they were past him, then turned and ran with them, blades glinting in the poor light.

  The edge of the rock field was upon them, the smooth surface finely grained sand that slid under their feet. Arrow’s legs tried to go in different directions and she stumbled, trying to find her balance. From the cries she suspected the humans were in the same difficulty. Kester stayed on his feet, sheathing his weapons and sliding across the ground as if ice skating.

  “Try this,” he suggested.

  The humans seemed to get the concept at once, following him with comparative ease. Arrow had never skated in her life. With rock figures shaking the ground behind her, she did her best to copy the movements, following in their wake.

  The slippery sand lasted for what felt like miles. Arrow was drenched in sweat, aching from head to toe, when they reached the end and were back to normal ground.

  Even as their feet met solid ground, the ground vibrated and she turned back.

  “Are they following us?” She heard her own voice rise into a squeak.

  “Run,” Dorian suggested.

  “That way.” Arrow pointed towards the trace of Erith magic, closer and sharper although still a good distance away.

  They ran.

  CHAPTER 13

  Even in a realm where she was not getting all that tired, and even with the threat of rock figures and surjusi, she could not run forever. When she nearly tripped over her own feet for the third time in quick succession she gave in and stumbled to a halt, hands on knees. Her legs were trembling with effort, there was a stitch in her side and her breath was coming in horrible, noisy gasps. She was covered in sweat under her clothes, feet abraded and sore despite her boots. The human-made footwear was not designed for running.