Stained Glass Monsters (22 page)

"Captain?" Lieutenant Danress asked.

The grim lines on either side of his
mouth deepened. "Something is coming." He turned a fraction toward
Rennyn. "Bring them up from there. This is another trap."

Wryly reflecting on Lady Weston's
opinions about Kellian leaders, Rennyn obediently hoisted sixty
people up a cliff. Since people and especially mages had an
intrinsic resistance against Thought magic worked directly on them,
this was not such an easy thing as throwing individual rocks about,
and she was glad of Lieutenant Danress' steadying hand on her
shoulder. She'd already used a lot of energy with her offensive
spells in the Eferum, and had to take them in clumps.

"Arrowhead formation," Captain Faille
ordered, underlining the command with a brief hand gesture. The
Sentene rearranged themselves immediately, drawing the Hand mages
with them so that only a small line remained on the cliff's edge
and the rest spread back in a triangle. "Return to the camp, my
Lady," he added to Rennyn.

Rather than divide his attention, Rennyn
retreated: not to the camp, but back and to the left. Faral and
Meniar shifted out to flank her. And they all waited. There was no
sign of whatever attack was coming. The breach had closed, and
Rennyn had killed the Eferum-Get before they'd even reached it.
Still, she was learning to recognise that the Sentene trusted
Kellian instincts for good reason.

Her world was growing more complicated.
She wanted to protect them. A sense of responsibility for the
Kellian had overtaken her, along with a growing attachment. It was
exactly as she had anticipated and very much not wanted. She hadn't
missed that they were all calling her "my Lady" now, and not just
because it was a deal less clumsy to say than "Montjuste-Surclere".
A return gesture for her grandstanding in the Hall of Question.

"There!"

Out beyond the shadow of the cliff,
where the sea had lightened to stripes of oyster and pearl, a black
shape had broken the shining lines. At first Rennyn thought it was
a ship, but then it vanished, only to resurface a few moments
later, much closer. Something very large, swimming.

It was moving at an incredible pace. If
they hadn't been all staring out to sea from a cliff-top vantage
there would have been almost no warning. As it was, Captain Illuma
gave several curt orders and everyone moved further away from the
drop to the beach. A few of the Sentene mages began writing on
slates, but most of them had already cast their offensive spells,
and were simply holding them on trigger till their target came
within range.

The swimmer struck the rock below,
ramming it like a goat in rut. The impact was enough to shake more
than a few mages from their feet, and a large section of the cliff
fell away. The thing made a booming, moaning noise and then rose so
they could properly appreciate what they were facing.

A column of muscle, greenish-grey with a
pattern of scales overlaid by a sheen of slime. It was well over
fifteen feet in width, and would tower over every building and most
trees Rennyn had ever seen. The head, rising well above the top of
the cliff, was a massive wedge of streamlined bone, crested with a
frill of yellow and green, and most otherwise mouth.

Sea serpent. For all the tales of them
wrecking ships, Rennyn had never begun to picture the scale of such
a thing. It dropped its jaw to make its drawn and mournful cry, and
display fangs as tall as she. The stench was sickening: year-old
fish gone well beyond fetid. Its eyes were long and dark and Rennyn
saw in them a gleam of sorrowing intelligence before thirty
battle-ready mages released their arsenals.

Flesh fountained in every direction and
the massive head whipped back, then fell out of sight, crashing to
the water below. Even the sea seemed to hold its breath, then
Captain Faille gave a sharp hand-back signal and the Sentene
hastily drew further away from the cliff's edge as the creature's
long body began to thrash and spasm. Its death throes were brief
but intensely violent, sending large sections of the cliff
tumbling. Then – hush. The waves soughed, the gulls remembered
their voices, and the Sentene approached the edge to look down at
water churned to a bloody froth and coil upon coil of muscle
relaxing in death.

The Sentene broke into squads: to
recover their equipment from the beach, search out whatever was the
source of the compulsion which had drawn the serpent here, and not
incidentally shift a corpse. Unhappy to own the name
Montjuste-Surclere, Rennyn walked back to camp. And here were
Kendall and Sukata, eyes wide and weary. Her students. A study in
contrasts and probably another thing she was going to regret.

"Did that come out of the Hells?" asked
Kendall, for once more awed than pugnacious.

"No. Well, perhaps originally. As a rule
a breach wouldn't be big enough or open long enough to fit
something like that through, but it's likely it was Eferum-Get
once. They adapt to this world after they reach it, just as we
change if we stay too long in the Eferum. But nothing came out of
the breach this time, so far as I could tell."

"Then how come–?"

"It was under a compulsion." One of the
Hand mages, the stocky, short one whose name was either Intsen or
Insen. He stalked up, scrubbing a hand across his face angrily.
"Tell me, Lady Montjuste-Surclere, how is it that no matter what we
prepare we are circumvented? Why are we always on the back
foot?"

This was hardly answerable, and Rennyn
only looked at him as others of the Hand and the Sentene Senior
Captains came to join them: a council of war.

"Our opponent sees the advantage of
constantly changing tactics," Captain Illuma commented neutrally.
"We should not be surprised by that."

"Changing tactics is one thing,"
Magister Intsen said, setting his feet. "But this – how is what we
saw today even possible for someone in the Eferum?"

"I don't know." Rennyn glanced at the
lightening horizon. "The hurdles he has to overcome – we have days
between each incursion, while he has only hours. And that attack
was specific to the breach point being on the water's edge, which
even we didn't know until yesterday afternoon. I suppose that
unlike me he may be able to pinpoint the breaches ahead of time,
but even with that, to bring that serpent here from outside the
bounds of Tyrland–" She lifted her hands. "Perhaps he's come
through a natural breach and is now operating in this world."

Not a comforting thought, and she wasn't
the only one who glanced at the green hills around them, wondering
if they were being watched. If her Wicked Uncle was no longer in
the Eferum, the danger of everything coming undone had increased
immensely. He could take Solace's focus and complete the
attunement. Worse, he could decide to hunt Seb.

"Even if that is the case, he is likely
to wait until the attunement is complete, and take the focus from
you then," Captain Illuma said. "His current intent appears to be
to reduce our numbers."

He was certainly taking a few pointed
shots at the Sentene. Rennyn wondered how much of her Wicked
Uncle's actions were within Solace's plans, and whether she could
be fortunate enough never to meet him again.

Captain Faille signalled for the
pull-down of the camp to begin, evidently not seeing much value in
sitting around asking 'why?'. "We will no longer focus our
preparations purely on attacks out of the Eferum," he said
matter-of-factly, and headed back to the cliff's edge.

Feeling cramped, Rennyn went for a walk
up the nearest hill, trying to pretend Faral and Meniar weren't
trailing discreetly behind. She returned none the wiser as to
whether her Wicked Uncle had an agenda of his own, but refreshed
enough to face the coach journey. One of the Ferumguard handed her
a steaming bowl of oats laced with honey and fruit, and she sat on
the coach's step to eat.

"Is he a better mage than you?"

Kendall, eyes groggy from a night spent
watching and waiting, had reverted to her usual charming self.

"Almost certainly. Just not as strong."
Rennyn weighed the castings she'd experienced. "Though that, too,
might have changed since our last encounter. If he's in this world,
he can summon a focus, and I doubt he faces the dangers we do. The
Grand Summoning may even impact focus-summoning, though hopefully
not casting in this world."

She could see the girl methodically
working through that one. "So, even if you stop the Grand
Summoning, we might end up with some incredibly powerful
part-monster running about trying to take over the kingdom? One
that keeps Night Roamers for pets?"

"One that eats people himself, unless I
miss my guess."

"What does he look like?"

"Human. Unremarkable. Like Solace, but
with the Surclere colouring." With a curl of amusement, she
considered the girl's cropped head. "
Not
like Seb."

The girl pulled a face, her now-familiar
glower darkening her eyes. "So where are we going next?"

"South-east, into the forests. We'll be
going past Sark."

"And Falk?"

"As near as is safe."

There was a valley where home used to
be, flat and wide like some great round footprint. All the world
which had been Kendall's for fifteen years was gone, had been
stepped on.

Around the road they'd used, trees lay
flat or splintered, radiating out from the heaviness' outer ring,
where a crust of debris was oozing slowly up. At the centre a woman
in white would still be lying. Kendall probably wouldn't have been
able to see her, even if it hadn't been raining. Too far away. But
the rain, a steady downpour, made it easy to judge just how big an
area the heavy air now covered. It was huge, a grey dome where
ordinary drops suddenly became a grey blur of needle-hard darts.
They weren't allowed to go close enough to hold a hand into it, but
Kendall could see the impact, the way those darts churned and
stitched the ground. The whole of the world thrummed and was pulled
by the weight of that air.

And everywhere were angry people. The
cordon of militia, dripping and scowling as they blocked a road but
not the fields beside it. The miserable clumps of townsfolk
returning to view the wreck of their lives before the next
expansion. The Hand and Sentene mages, faces hidden by hoods they'd
attached to their uniforms, silently surveying a magical problem so
immense they couldn't even go near it, let alone fix it. And the
Kellian.

Angry Kellian were scarier even than the
crab-thing. They were all grey and unseeable in the rain, but so
intensely there they were like storm clouds lowering. They didn't
frown or mutter or anything like that, but energy, a coiled
readiness for action, rolled off them until Kendall could hardly
stand to be near them. Even Sukata felt like someone who might turn
and rip your head off at any moment, if she decided you were to be
held to account.

Only Rennyn Claire seemed unmoved. She'd
eyed the dome critically, cast a couple of spells, then pulled a
big book out of one of her bags and sat in the coach making notes.
The Black Queen's focus hung from her wrist, awkward and obviously
heavy, but she'd made no move to take it off since leaving
Asentyr.

Ignoring the wet, Kendall drew back from
the coach so she could watch the way everyone moved about Rennyn.
The Hand mages hovered, itching to see what she was writing. The
Sentene mages and Kellian, angry as they were, still kept a
protective eye on her position. Militia and townsfolk angled for a
glimpse in the coach door, wondering who warranted such heavy
protection. Captain Faille standing near the rear wheel, surveyed
everyone else because it was his turn to be bodyguard. He only
moved his eyes, and felt liable to crush anyone who came near.

Not that any assassin had a chance. They
were travelling with a third of the Sentene: some had stayed behind
another day to deal with the natural breaches which followed the
ones they knew were coming, and another group had gone ahead to
prepare the ground at the next site. Like the White Lady, no
outsider could get near Rennyn.

Kendall headed back to Rennyn's coach
just as Captain Illuma, becoming a little less like an imminent
storm, crossed as well. "Do you wish to observe the next expansion,
my Lady? We have time enough to delay."

"No need." Rennyn peered out the coach
door, studying one of the big cracks in the ground which radiated
out from the heaviness. "Have there been earthquakes?"

"It is a stable region. But the last
expansion was felt well into Sark. That helped speed the
evacuation."

"My best guess is that the final
expansion will fall short of the southern edge of the city. But
there will be considerable damage purely from the concussion."
Rennyn turned back to Captain Illuma, started with, "Have–" then
stopped, and looked fleetingly annoyed. "I've added minimum and
maximum range for the final distortion to the map, but the range of
the concussion and debris is outside my expertise."

"Where are they putting everyone?"
Kendall asked.

Captain Sarana looked down from her
unnecessary height and said: "Esson, Nelk, a dozen other locations.
Mages of the Sentene and the Hand have been working with the
non-specialist forces in ensuring that there are strong circles,
and some kind of shelter. Temporary measures, since a large portion
of the evacuations are merely precautionary and only the very
southern fringe of the city is expected to be left uninhabitable.
Much of Sark will be able to return to their homes and repair."

And a lot wouldn't, would be looking for
places to live. Bundling her wet smock and trying not to drip on
everything, Kendall thought about where Mayor Dorstan and the
Lippons and everyone from Falk had ended up as Captain Illuma
nodded and set them moving toward the military camp coordinating
the evacuation.