But it wasn’t just Jeirran, was it? Aritane had summoned other Sheltya and all had brought the same tale from the dark mysteries of the ossuaries of the different sokes. He shivered at the thought of those hidden bones, silent until the Solstice sun linked Misaen’s realm to Maewelin’s not five days since. The wisdom of ancient blood could not be denied. After thrice ten days of waiting and preparing, it decreed now was the time to carry battle into the lowlands.
“Do we go?” Beard’s sly face was eager, the man licking his lips with an unpleasant relish. His mail was already rusting and smeared with dirt, but his sword was bright and keen.
Another uncontrollable shudder rippled through Teiriol. “We go!” Sword before him, he scrambled out of the gully, Ikarel at one shoulder, the beggar boy Nol at the other. Unreasoning fury spurred Teiriol irresistibly on. These lowlanders would die beneath his blade to recompense him for being born to such a straitened bloodline. Their blood would requite that snowfall that robbed his father of fingers and feet. These spoils would make amends for the pitying glances from girls guessing his miserable patrimony down to the last pennyweight. The lowlanders were responsible for everything, with their greed and deceit, the foul magic of their wizards! His confused grievances dissolved into a killing rage.
Teiriol swung at the traitor before him. He spat a curse as his blow was turned aside and hastily blocked a scything stroke that tried to hack the jaw from his chin. Nol was jabbing ineffectively, hampered by unfamiliar armor and more hindrance than defense on that side. Ikarel was trying to get a thrust in, but was vacillating with fear. The traitor’s eyes flicked from side to side, face fixed. A searing pain clawed down the back of Teiriol’s hand, blood fouled his grip, the sword slipping in his hand.
He hesitated and in that moment the traitor’s low stroke shattered Nol’s knee. The child fell, whimpering in agony amidst the rioting voices of men and horses. The spurting wound gushed scarlet until scant breaths later, he died on a choking sob, life’s blood soaked away into the thirsty soil.
Horror almost betrayed Teiriol to the same fate. A rush of men he did not know, recruited by Jeirran’s eloquence on the journey down from the heights, saved him. The boy’s body was kicked aside by urgent feet and the traitor was driven back, all his energies taken up with staying alive beneath the hail of hate-filled blows. Blades flashed bright in the sun beneath streaks of blood and muck as they rose and fell with the weight of untold years of grievance. Teiriol hacked at the man’s guard, the sticky wetness of Nol’s blood on his hands goading him to ever fiercer fury. He brought his sword around and down, again and again. The foe stumbled, hard-baked ruts in the road treacherous beneath his feet. Ikarel, still hovering, saw his moment and sunlight flashed on steel thrust in hard and direct.
In the instant Teiriol expected the razor-sharp point to cleave the traitor’s neck, Ikarel was thrown backward, clean off his feet. Ripped from the melee and flung away, he hit a mighty tree with an audible crack. Branches splintered and, falling helplessly, Ikarel landed broken beneath them.
Two more died for a moment’s lapse as the unseen assault startled them. The traitors were fighting with the coward’s backing of false magic, Teiriol raged. He lifted his sword but something unseen was tying his arms to his sides, threatening to strangle him. Faint blue radiance crackled in the air, the snares of sorcery and terror choked him. As the men around him broke and fled, Teiriol stumbled backward, but the soil beneath his boots was splitting, crumbling, and betraying him with every step. He fell heavily, unable to save himself with arms pinioned, mired to the knee in broken clods of earth.
Eresken abandoned the youth’s confusion and cursed at the scene below. The mages and the woman had taken cover behind a fallen tree, cowering behind the fat and bearded man who was swinging his massive sword two-handed to deadly effect. Five gory bodies lay in motionless testimony to the folly of getting within his arc.
A mage stood up and flung a handful of fire. It flew, straight as an arrow, at the foremost attacker. Clinging to his chest, it ate through mail and leather, devouring the man’s clothing, his skin, his hair. The corpse collapsed in a shower of sparks, the metal of his useless armor glowing white hot. The sparks glowed against the dark earth and then began moving of their own volition, spreading and searching out another victim. One man looked down with horror as his boots ignited and the all-consuming flames seized him.
“Innat ar rial, nar fedrian rek!” Eresken concentrated on the balding mage with every fiber of his being. Satisfaction warmed his malice as he felt that mind, so focused, so disciplined, but so pitifully undefended. Working swiftly, Eresken wrapped it around with myriad images of the Forest, spiking the illusion with a terror of being lost in trackless woods that was inadequately concealed in the back of the mage’s mind. Eresken felt how order and learning were so highly valued, and sowed seeds of whimpering fear in a distrust of the unknown. Rising panic at feeling abandoned and alone blurred the wizard’s concentration and the ground beneath Teiriol’s feet stabilized.
Howling wind came up from nowhere, from all directions and none, dust and leaves swirling around the attackers, the heavy gusts restraining them bodily as they sought to advance. The traitors were unaffected though, Eresken saw with anger, seizing their chance to take a stance either side of the big man, backs to the dubious protection of the fallen tree.
Eresken snatched at the second mage’s mind. This was harder than the first, thoughts flicking rapidly from one notion to another. The Soluran’s terror at the prospect of a violent death sparked frantic desire to do as much damage as possible. This impulse warred with fear of the consequences, constraints of law and an inborn reluctance to kill. Eresken thrust his own will deep into the man’s mind, stirring up a maelstrom of long-forgotten events, unsought remembrance, distorting anything where uncertainty of recall offered his malice a fingerhold. As the man’s recollection spiraled into chaos, Eresken started picking at the reason he could sense frantically groping for control.
A sharp pain at the back of his neck startled Eresken into an oath. He slapped a hand to his collar, as if at a biting insect, bemused to see a smear of blood on his palm. A second sharp pain caught him just below the jawbone and a dart fell to the ground with a cold gleam of steel. As he spun around, Eresken’s arcane senses, so long honed by harsh discipline, easily pierced the tangle of undergrowth.
There she was, the redheaded whore, believing herself safe as she crouched motionless, white-faced, lips bloodless. Eresken glanced back to the road where the three swordsmen were now hard pressed, Teiriol and his followers now free from assault by the stricken wizards. Rage threatened to curdle Eresken’s concentration; the woman he saw there was an image woven of false magic to cover the bitch’s folly as she tried to take him with her petty pinpricks. He lashed out to rip into the vulnerabilities he had sensed in the wizards but now found those minds barred against him. He battered harder, but could find no way in through desperate focus on some archaic ward.
No matter. He would have his vengeance on the woman and then deal with the rest. Eresken took a pace toward the slut’s hiding place but the ground seemed to shift beneath him. This was no treachery of earth or water but his own body was betraying him, he realized, as confusion between eyes and ears threatened to make him nauseous. Eresken felt his control slipping away like water running out between his frantically grasping fingers. A mad euphoria soared within him; what did it matter? Freedom beckoned, tempting, sensual, release from all care, duty and fear. He had been drugged, Eresken realized dimly.
Scalding anger clearing his head just long enough for him to seize on the first principle of mind over body, fundamental lore beaten into his memory. He drew breaths of deepest trance, focusing within himself for the taint of poison and bending his will to burning it out. The confusion still swirling around his consciousness began to recede and Eresken reached for the nearest source of power to bolster his own, drawing pitilessly on the frail resources of the Mountain Men. They were only here to serve him, after all.
A single blow to the pit of his stomach sent him crashing backward into the thicket. The breath was knocked out of him and, before he could gasp for more, knees crushed his ribs, hands gripping his throat sought to squeeze the very life out of him. Blood thundered in his temples. Eresken opened his eyes to see the woman above him, hatred burning in her green eyes. She knew him, he realized and, in that instant, he was glad of it. She would know who killed her. He dug nails into her hands, tearing at her skin, twisting to bite at her wrists. She would know that he had finally repaid her for the humiliation of being captured by her and her fellow spies. With a convulsive heave, he threw the bitch off, her fury no match for his greater weight. She would die at his hands as her lover had died at his father’s. Eresken sprang to his feet, reaching for his sword.
Hot agony rippled through his gut. Wetness oozed down his belly and into his groin, warm slickness turning cold. Eresken groped beneath the heavy links of his hauberk to feel the hilt of a dagger driven up into his belly in the harlot’s first assault. He fell to his knees as sickening pain flooded him, every pulse of his heart striking fresh torment from the wound.
“Save me!” Eresken poured every scrap of heart and will into a despairing appeal, reaching up and out and beyond the woods, past the gray crags of the stony heights, beyond the windswept expanse of the plains and out across the vast, trackless ocean. With a suddenness that made him gasp more than any shock of pain, another mind seized his. As he was lifted bodily away, consciousness crushed beneath a pitiless grip, Eresken welcomed oblivion rather than face his father’s wrath.
He came to himself in a leafy hollow, so similar to the one he had left that he jumped to his feet, looking in all directions for the murderous trollop with her assassin’s daggers. The knife that had stabbed him rattled to the ground.
“Calm yourself.” The voice within his head rang with contempt, a stinging slap behind his eyes an added rebuke.
Eresken clutched at his belly. His trews and shirt were torn and damp with blood but the skin beneath was whole. His fingers traced the cicatrices of a new scar with dismay.
“You can carry those marks as a reminder of your folly,” the voice told him curtly. “Be grateful I was minded to let you off so lightly.”
“You are indeed merciful,” replied Eresken wordlessly with a sinking dread. “Where am I?” He snatched up the dagger.
“Just far enough away to keep you from being gutted like a seal pup.” There was amusement in the voice now. Eresken breathed more easily; better to be the target of mockery than rage. “Get down to the road and head east,” ordered the voice.
“Yes, Father.” Eresken obeyed hastily, slipping and adding fresh scratches to hands and face. Reaching the road, he ran, armor heavy on his shoulders and rattling with every step. Sweating freely, his pace did not falter until he rounded a bend to see bodies strewn across the bloodstained track.
He skidded to a halt, clutching at his head with clumsy hands. Dark brown eyes looked out at the carnage and grim satisfaction curved Eresken’s mouth in a smile not his own.
“Not what we hoped for but something can be made of it.” The lips shaped words echoing and far distant. “Use this and if you impress me your earlier failure may be overlooked.” The voice turned cold. “Disappoint and it will go hard with you.”
Eresken staggered beneath a blow to the very center of his being, senses reeling. Then the presence in his mind was gone, leaving only an echoing memory of helpless blindness. To be used as another’s eyes was bad enough when it was expected, he raged silently; to be taken like that unheralded was infinitely worse. Hastily stifling disloyal anger, Eresken took a deep breath and brought his hands together in front of him, palm to palm and fingers matched and spread. In a soft voice, he recited the incantations to center his mind afresh. That should satisfy any spies lurking to steal his thoughts, he thought in that one secret part of his mind he hoped was still inviolate.
Teiriol’s troop lay all around, some hacked with swords but more struck down by magic. Three were burned beyond recognition by foul, creeping fire. Others lay unmarked but abnormal angles showed bones broken by the hammer blow of unnatural winds. One corpse was still smoking, a black score traced down from head to the shattered ruin of a foot, white bones stark in the charred flesh. Another lay with jaw shattered and hanging limp, the bones of the face broken like an eggshell with fragments driven deep into the brain, which showed gray and gelid in the depths of the wounds.
“How do they do this?” muttered Eresken aloud.
A feeble croak sought to answer him. Eresken looked around, startled. The sound came again and he followed it to the ditch beside the road. Distraught blue eyes looked up from a mire of leaves and blood. “Teiriol?”
“I ran away,” sobbed the younger man. “I ran away. I was trying to bring them all back, trying to get them to rally, but once the lightning started, once I saw Seja hit—” He broke off with a cry of pain and Eresken saw his sword hand was useless, naked spikes of shattered bone sticking out of the wrist, the fingers hanging bloodless and limp, thumb all but severed. Teiriol cradled the ruin of his arm helplessly, weeping like a child.
“What happened?” Eresken shook him furiously but Teiriol was incoherent with pain and distress. Eresken seized his chin and forced it up; Teiriol’s eyes widened at the shock of the sudden assault.
So that was the way of it, Eresken thought grimly as he stripped out memories, heedless of the pain he was inflicting. The mages had hit Teiriol’s men with foulest sorcery, the swordsmen going on to hack down remaining resistance. The Mountain Men had died unable to defend themselves against double assault of spell and blade. The Soluran mage had sprung the woman from the empty air and they had run, the black-haired man slinging the wounded wizard over one shoulder, the traitors to the ancient blood on either side.