Vengeance

by Gail Z. Martin

  Corran muttered a curse. “Wonderful. Now we’ve got smugglers to worry about on top of monsters, guards, and bounty hunters. Maybe the guards and bounty hunters will go after them and leave us alone.”

  “We should be so lucky,” Rigan said with a sigh. “But I wouldn’t count on it. What do you want to bet that whoever’s behind the smuggling and pirates has paid off all the right people, maybe cut them in on the deal?”

  “Not much of a bargain if it violates the trade agreement and brings the League down,” Aiden pointed out.

  Rigan shrugged. “You’re thinking about the long run. Thieves don’t. They’re all about the profit for them today. They bet that by the time things fall apart, they’ll have taken their money and be long gone.”

  “Just like Machison didn’t care if his monsters killed off the Guild’s members who were making the items Ravenwood needs for its trade obligations, so long as he kept control,” Trent said.

  “We’re going to have to watch our step,” Corran warned. “Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves caught between the Crown Prince and the criminals. I hate to say it, but we’ve got to let this go. Let’s do what we came out here to do—hunt monsters, protect the villagers, teach them how to protect themselves. Ravenwood is going to have to look out for itself, without our help.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “How in the name of the gods do we even kill those?” Rigan swung his sword two-handed at the nearest of the creatures that had overrun the farm. The monsters stood about as tall as a large dog, with six spidery, jointed legs and a hard white carapace. They looked like a cross between an insect and a crab, only much, much larger. In the moonlight, their shells looked like bleached bones and corpse flesh, and they smelled like dead fish.

  “Try an axe,” Trent shouted, wading in between two of the monsters, setting about himself with a two-sided axe.

  Aiden had called the thing a higani when they had found the body of one of the creatures after it had been trampled by a herd of cows. The long serrated legs ended in sharp tips as wicked as any blade. The mouth had a beak like a falcon, sharp and strong enough to rip and rend.

  Worse, they attacked in swarms.

  Corran, Ross, and Calfon hacked their way through a steady onslaught of the higani on one side of the field, while Rigan, Mir, and Trent took on more of them a few yards over. Rigan had brought his heaviest sword, but even so, it took his full strength to sever the creatures’ limbs at the joints. Mir set to with a sledgehammer, which cracked the hard bodies and splintered the long, arachnid limbs.

  Ross wielded an iron bar, which stunned the higani but required more strikes to damage them than the sledgehammer. Swords worked best on the joints, which were the weakest spot.

  “Are there more of them?” Trent asked, working his way through the clicking, clattering horde. Like the rest of them, his arms and legs were bloodied where the sharp legs had sliced through clothing and skin.

  “Gods, I hope not. They’re relentless,” Corran replied, his expression grim.

  Aiden had alerted them to the ripples a candlemarks ago. It was the soonest they had ever managed to confront the monsters after noting the disturbance in the energies. Rigan wondered if the anomaly that brought the monsters through from wherever they had been summoned had really ended. His magic felt… off, like a headache building before a storm, and his nerves were raw.

  Are there more of these things waiting to come through? Or something worse?

  Calfon signaled from where he had been laying a trap for the creatures, giving a loud, shrill whistle. Few monsters, regardless of their type, survived fire. While Corran, Rigan, and the others kept the higani occupied, Calfon had unloaded the bundles of corn stalks they had brought with them for this very purpose. He stacked the sheaves in a waist-high circle open in one section, and liberally doused the dry stalks with oil and moonshine, then stood back and lit a torch, waiting to spring the trap.

  Fewer of the higani clicked and clattered across the field than when the hunters arrived, and the dismembered bodies of their fallen comrades distracted some of the monsters, which stopped to pull fresh meat from the broken carapaces. Rigan and the others warily lit torches they had brought with them and formed a line, jabbing at the creatures with the torches to force them into Calfon’s trap.

  The pain in Rigan’s head spiked sharply, causing him to stumble and bite back a groan. Corran shot him a worried look, but Rigan waved him off, intent on finishing the hunt. Let’s get rid of these things and go home. Aiden can give me something for the pain.

  Rigan blinked, trying to clear his blurred vision. Colors seemed more vivid, sounds were louder, and the smell of wet, decaying plant matter suddenly overwhelmed him so much that he feared he might retch.

  What’s wrong with me? Rigan wondered, trying hard to keep his mind on the objective, forcing himself forward one step at a time. His headache throbbed and a distant squealing noise rapidly amplified to an ear-splitting intensity.

  The hunters had nearly reached the trap, jabbing and goading the higani with their torches, forcing them into the circle of corn stalks. When the last of the creatures skittered inside, Corran and Ross threw down sheaves to close off the entrance.

  “Go!” Corran shouted. Calfon and the hunters threw their torches onto the wall of oil-soaked stalks, which caught fire with a rush, sending flames high into the sky. Inside the burning ring, the higani shrieked and clattered as the heat caused their shells to sizzle and crack.

  Rigan fell back a few steps, putting one hand to his temples. Mir and Trent were closest to him, and they followed, concerned. Rigan saw Corran turn and start toward him. The pressure inside Rigan’s head grew unbearable, and he cried out in pain. In the same instant, a shimmering translucent curtain of energy appeared in the air between where Rigan, Mir, and Trent stood and the other hunters.

  For a split second, it looked to Rigan as if something had torn the air and ground apart. A gaping hole appeared when the coruscating light curtain parted, engulfing Rigan and his friends.

  One minute, they stood in a fire lit clearing. The next, they tumbled into darkness. Rigan’s headache vanished, and he realized that the unusual sounds and odors were gone as well.

  “What in the name of the gods just happened?” Trent murmured, getting to his feet. Mir and Rigan stood, dusting themselves off, and looked around.

  “What do you see?” Rigan asked, not daring to trust his senses.

  “Everything bright and dark—no colors,” Trent said, carefully turning to look around them, his knife gripped white-knuckled in one hand.

  “Yeah,” Mir echoed, sounding like he was close to panic. “Nothing looks right. Something’s drained away all the colors. And where’s the fire? Where are Corran and the others?”

  “The trees are wrong,” Trent added, his stance ready for a fight. “We aren’t in the same place we were a moment ago.”

  Mir looked at Rigan. “Why? Do you see something different?”

  Rigan nodded, and his stomach gave a flip as cold fear gripped him. “Sometimes, I can see the energy around someone or something that’s got a lot of magic. It’s like a glow, and sometimes it’s different colors. Now, all the colors are wrong, and I see the energy like shadows—like the magic is polluted” He wondered if they also smelled the wet dirt-rotted plant stench and if they could hear the maddening squeal that swirled almost at the upper range of his hearing.

  “Where are we?” Trent’s eyes were wide with fear, and he looked as if he was barely keeping his composure.

  “I think we’ve been pulled through a Rift,” Rigan replied.

  Mir and Trent turned to him, horrified. “You mean the holes the monsters come through?” Mir gasped.

  Rigan nodded, feeling as if he was barely hanging on to sanity. “Yeah. When we were driving the higani into the fire, I thought I was getting a vision or having a seizure. My head hurt, my eyes didn’t seem to be working right. I could hear and smell strange things—”

  “Yo
u mean the way this place smells like a swamp and that sound that’s like a rusty hinge only way, way worse?” Mir replied.

  “Uh huh.”

  “So if we’re through the Rift, where are we? And how did we get here?” Trent asked. He kept scanning the horizon for threat, and Rigan felt the same need on a basic, primal level. Old, deep instinct warned him that they had become the prey.

  “Who cares,” Mir snapped. “How in the name of the Dark Ones do we get home?”

  They stood in a forest of trees the likes of which Rigan had never seen. The trunks were tall and slender, and the leaves hung in long ribbon-like tendrils, which to his eyes appeared blood red. The light that filtered down took on a reddish cast, and the loamy scent in the air smelled of blood and decay. Beneath the trees, the forest floor was fairly open of underbrush, but hilly and littered with enough boulders and large, fallen trunks to provide plenty of hiding places for predators.

  “We need to find a place we can defend,” Rigan said, “until I can figure things out.”

  “The Rift goes to someplace else, someplace that isn’t our… world?” Trent said, and for the first time since he had known the hunter, Rigan heard fear in the man’s voice.

  “That’s what the old texts say,” Rigan replied. “We’ve never gotten to a place where the monsters came through so soon after they appeared. I think that’s what I felt back there—the passage hadn’t really closed, not all the way.”

  “Why did it suck us through? We’re not monsters?” Mir protested.

  “Probably an accident,” Rigan said. “Like getting pulled under with the current when the tide goes out. Nothing personal, but you can drown all the same.”

  “Up there.” Trent pointed to a shallow cave on a steep hillside. “If there’s nothing already living in it, we could hole up there. It’s high enough we could see anything coming from three sides.”

  “And we’d be safe from whatever’s out there—unless it can scale a cliff,” Mir finished. He did not have to mention that ghouls and some of the other creatures they had fought could do exactly that.

  “Come on,” Rigan said, setting out at a stiff pace. “We don’t want to be out here in the dark longer than necessary.”

  Even the moonlight seemed wrong, casting shadows as if it were noon but without the warmth of the sun’s rays. Whatever the source of the light, it enabled them to see, and they climbed the hillside without incident.

  “Did you hear that?” Trent asked, freezing in place.

  A howl echoed in the distance, and a few seconds later, the answering calls sounded all around them. Overhead in the branches, Rigan heard scurrying and scraping. They were not alone, and he had no desire to find out what made those noises.

  Trent entered the cave first, holding aloft a candle he took from the pouch on his belt, lit with flint and steel from his pocket. He had his sword in his other hand, ready should something already have made the cave its hiding place. Rigan and Mir turned outward, making sure they were not attacked from behind.

  “It’s clear,” Trent called out to them. “It goes back a dozen feet or so and ends. Pretty dry; doesn’t look like anything’s been living here for a while.”

  Rigan collected the dead leaves and branches that littered the cave floor. “Gather what you can. I’m betting the things here don’t like fire any more than they do back home.”

  Before long, they had a fire burning across the mouth of the cave and had laid in enough wood from pieces strewn across the hillside to last them through the night. They pooled the meager provisions from their belt pouches and shared water from their wineskins.

  “Now what?” Mir asked as they leaned back against the rough stone.

  “I wish Aiden and I had spent more time with the old manuscripts,” Rigan admitted. “We were focused more on what might come through the Rifts than on how the Rifts opened. But there’s one thing we’re fairly certain about—blood magic summons the monsters, so it must be able to open the Rifts.”

  “So we have to kill someone to get out? That’s lovely,” Trent muttered.

  Rigan shook his head. “Blood magic doesn’t always require the taking of life, although some very large workings probably do. As the witches I learned from liked to say, it’s all about intent.”

  “Meaning?” Mir looked at him with an expression torn between hope and terror.

  “Meaning I need to think about it,” Rigan replied, feeling his headache nag at the back of his skull. “I have some ideas, but I’m too tired to try anything right now. And I think we ought to get the lay of the land a little better, too.”

  “I don’t want to stick around and get eaten,” Trent warned.

  “Believe me, neither do I,” Rigan replied. “But I need to get a better feel for the way magic works here—and where the energy currents run. There might be places where it’s easier to… tear open… the fabric between here and there.”

  “Exploring doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Mir replied warily. “Those things we hear moving around out there, this is their home. We’re definitely at a disadvantage.”

  “Let’s take shifts standing guard, and get some rest,” Rigan suggested. “In the morning—if there is morning here—I’ll start probing with my magic. Don’t want to do that now, in case it gets the attention of something nasty.”

  Rigan knew that his friends disliked waiting, and he could not fault them for their impatience. Even so, they also grudgingly agreed that anything more would be better left until they were rested. Trent volunteered to take the first watch.

  “I wonder what’s going on back home,” Mir said as he stretched out on the uneven floor of the cave and struggled to get comfortable.

  “Gods, what do you think it looked like to them?” Rigan replied, wrapping his cloak tight against the chill. “Did we just vanish into thin air?” For the first time since they tumbled through the Rift, Rigan thought about how the men they left behind would react to their disappearance. Corran will be beside himself, fit to be tied, he thought. Aiden might figure out where we’ve gone, but that’s cold comfort unless he can also figure out how to get us home. Corran’s not going to take this well—losing Kell, and now me.

  “Do you think Aiden and Elinor might be able to magic something up for us?” Mir asked, settling down to sleep.

  “Maybe,” Rigan said. “But how will they find us, even if they do figure out how to open the Rift? And what if they try and more of the monsters get out?”

  “Then you’re going to have to come up with an answer,” Trent responded from his post near the mouth of the cave. “Because I don’t think we’ll last long here on our own.”

  Despite the circumstances, Rigan fell asleep almost immediately, exhausted from the battle and the hard trek across hostile terrain. He dreamed at first of their home in Ravenwood City, an apartment over the workshop, and of Kell singing off-tune as he cooked dinner. Rigan saw himself at work with Corran busy nearby. He felt a mix of contentment and sorrow that his dream-self did not fully understand.

  The scene shifted, and Rigan was in the house he and the others had claimed Below. Despite being underground and in need of repair, the close quarters had given it a feeling of warmth and safety that got him through those early days on the run. He longed to stay, knowing that by comparison to what would come after, they were safe and comfortable.

  The scene changed once more, and this time Rigan did not recognize the setting. Darkness surrounded him. He called out, but no answer came, but the sense of being observed, of another presence, remained unmistakable. Rigan knew with gut certainty that whatever watched him was immensely powerful; not human, nor friendly. He sensed the presence a long way off and feared capturing its attention. He caught a glimpse of something blacker than a starless sky, felt its regard for just an instant, and recoiled from the touch of something so utterly terrifying and alien. It knows we’re here.

  Rigan woke gasping, on the cold floor of the cave, and it took him a moment to place himself. “Your
watch,” Mir said, wearily returning to his spot on the floor. Trent lay snoring a few feet away, bundled in his cloak.

  Rigan staggered to his feet and sipped a mouthful of water from the wineskin. The temperature had dropped, making him wonder if this place had day and night or whether it remained forever twilight. When he reached the mouth of the cave, he added wood to the fire and saw that one of his fellow hunters had laid down a line of the salt mixture inside the fire, along with their iron weapons end to end, to ward off spirits. Nothing seemed to have threatened them thus far, and Rigan didn’t know whether that was due to their safeguards or because the monsters hadn’t noticed them. Something did. But that was no regular monster. Whatever it is, I don’t want to meet it.

  He peered outside into the gloom and saw the glint of red and yellow eyes staring back from the shadows. The monsters have definitely noticed. Wonderful.

  For the moment, the night was silent, save for the rustling of paws and hooves in the underbrush. The howls had subsided, as had the high-pitched whine. Perhaps not so coincidentally, so had Rigan’s headache.

  If the fire and the salt lines remained unbroken, Rigan’s watch would provide him little to do, something that he desperately hoped remained true. To pass the time, he cast his memory back over everything he could think of from his studies—first with his tutor Damian and then with Aiden and Elinor that might suggest how to get home.

  It’s not the same as the After, he thought. We’re not dead. Pretty sure my grave magic would tell me if we were. So is the Rift—and what’s on the other side of it—natural or a creation of the blood mages?

  The more he thought about it; the more Rigan leaned toward the idea that what lay beyond the Rift was natural, even if the portal between the “real” world and his present location was not. So if it’s natural, why isn’t it connected to the regular world? Then he thought about the monsters that had not been conjured, beings like the strix and the shapeshifter that were “natural” in the sense of not magicked or under the control of a witch.