The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) (34 page)
In awe she watched the soul attach itself to the shifting, insubstantial cloud beneath them raising them up. Cianna realized what she was looking at were the kelpies, for the pulling in her stomach told her as much. What startled her more than anything, however, was the fact that the kelpies were the souls of dead humans.
This she could use. Reaching out with her wyrd, she grabbed tightly ahold of the kelpies coming toward her. In shock at being commanded in such a way, the kelpies dropped the bodies of Clara and the man she had recently killed. They fell slowly through the thick air, and once they were clear of the kelpies they fell with an impossible haste to splash into the swamp which made up the border.
Cianna turned and fired with her crossbow as she heaved the kelpies up and over the large jade bridge. They wreathed around her, consuming her in their shimmering fog and blocking her from view of those on the bridge.
Mistress, command us!
They pleaded in such a volume that all on the bridge could hear their deadly whispers.
Kill!
Cianna raged.
Kill all who oppose me!
She felt a twist within her which was partially the kelpies, partially something else she couldn’t describe, though it felt like corruption.
The kelpies instantly swarmed over the mass of hunters as another wyrding from Pi and Flora rocked the bridge on its very foundations, tossing hunters here and there. The air vibrated with raw power.
Within moments the men who assailed them were nothing more than blood stains on the bridge as the kelpies carried their fallen bodies over the edge, chasing them down into the oblivion of their watery tombs.
It took them some time to gather their thoughts after the fight. For long moments they all stood where the battle had placed them, breathing heavily into the cool, moist air. Thoughts chased themselves through everyone’s minds, and there was more than a few tears shed over the loss of Clara.
“It’s okay,” Deven said somberly. “She might have gone through her trials already. She might still live.”
“You know she hadn’t,” Pi sobbed.
In time Cianna turned, shaking herself out of her contemplation. With that movement the thoughts chased themselves away and reality came swimming onto her with such clarity that it hurt her eyes and mind to conceive her surroundings.
“What now?” She asked with a croaked voice. “Where’s Chy?”
“I sent him away when the battle started,” Flora said, and nodded to a weeping Pi. The young woman stood straighter from where she clung to the bridge where Clara had met her demise. She cupped her hands to her mouth and there she whispered something that only her palms could hear. There was a slight green glowing of her wyrd, not a noxious green as one would expect from the corruption of the well, but instead a soft, spring green, almost like sage. She held her hands up and there Cianna saw a small, shifting, glowing green ball. Languidly it drifted from her hands and bobbed down the bridge in the direction they were traveling.
“Where do we go from here?” Pi asked. “What are we going to do, Flora?”
“Hold your heads up!” Cianna said sharply. “Clara would not want this, she would not want you to fall apart. We travel now to the Necromancers’ Mosque, and from there to the Realm of Earth.”
Deven and Pi looked at Flora, who nodded her consent. They all looked to Cianna then and nodded, for they saw within her something they hadn’t seen so well in Flora: a leader.
T
he black lightning-like energy licked out of Porillon’s fingers, and tendrils caressed the ground and trees where moments before the LaFaye youths had fled. Where the energy touched, the forest and ground blackened and shriveled. The Norns knew that at any moment she would turn that energy on them. They knew the spell was designed to feed the wyrder from the life-force of the object touched. A wyrding like that to an unprotected person would kill them in a matter of moments.
Together they worked, the three sorceresses in tandem to the one dalua sorceress. The Norns wove their wyrd together into a ward of sorts, so when the maniacal wyrd from Porillon touched them it would not kill them, but instead tap into the wyrd of the surrounding area to feed her in their stead.
Before long she did exactly what they knew she would. With a snarl of dismay that the LaFayes had effectively escaped her once more, she wrenched the black tendrils in their direction. As if they were the blood on which the leach of wyrd fed, the tendrils attached themselves to the ward and began to pump the wyrd back into Porillon, who fed greedily. This caused one other problem, however — it meant that when the warding finally failed Porillon would be even more powerful than she had been previously.
The Norns had to work fast so that she would not be alive to see to their destruction. Anger at the escape of the ones they came for fueled their wyrd, and they conjured power to them. They had intended it to be the power of the Goddess, for she was the one they served, but since they had absorbed the power of Chaos through the well so beautifully they now had a new master. The power they called to bear upon Porillon was meant to be a conjuring of power and light. It was a conjuring of power alright, though it wasn’t light.
They threw back their heads, and most unlike the violent wyrd that was being wielded that day, the power that oozed from them was not violent in its leaving and directing. The power, black mixed with putrid yellow, oozed from their open mouths and noses like pipe smoke. It rippled and eddied down to the ground where the hands of the three possessed forms directed it toward their assailant. Still more and more of the wyrd-smoke was released from their bodies and flowed toward the laughing dalua sorceress that attacked them with the full might of Chaos.
Around them the ground and trees began to blacken as the ward they had put in place against Porillon sapped the very life itself out of the once-happy village of Greenwood. It was moment by moment becoming a black, charred wasteland devoid of life, as even what birds were left began to drop out of the branches dead.
The smoke wyrd of the three women found its mark and began coiling around Porillon like yellow and black snakes. She began to struggle and the life-sapping black wyrd tentacles she wove at them began to fizzle as the Norns’ wyrd overcame her, enclosing her in a ball of wyrd.
She started screaming, and the Norns were finally able to let down their ward. The ball was consuming her this very moment, they knew. However, something else was happening within the orb that they couldn’t see, for Porillon was able to control Chaos better than they were. In fact she was even able to channel the rudimentary wyrding they had placed on her to her advantage. She fixed a destination in her mind, and channeled the full presence of the wyrd through her body. In a shattering ripple of wyrd the black orb exploded outward.
Trees and plants were utterly decimated, and some of the more youthful vegetation was instantly turned to dust from the sheer impact of the wyrd upon the air. The very air itself split in a boom that they had never heard before, but to their ears sounded like a huge explosion of naphtha and fire.
The Norns had to cover their faces against the branches and other debris that littered the air. The noise burst their eardrums, brought blood to their noses, and damaged their very bodies as the pressure of the sound assailed them. The presence of the noise tossed them through the air as if they were nothing more than rag-dolls in a tornado. They bounced off trees and their bodies shattered off boulders so hard as to tear the large formations from their previous perch in the ground.
Broken and bleeding, Dalah, Rosalee, and Grace lay on the ground, blood and thicker fluids running from every orifice of their bodies, and some new ones that the melee had created. Slowly their bodies began to reform and restructure in a cacophony of snapping bones and sucking liquid sounds as internal organs, tendons, and muscle tissue reformed itself.
When the three of them rose, readjusting parts of their anatomy with squelching noises, they saw no trace of Porillon, only the black crater that was left of Greenwood in her passing.
They walked the whole length of the ruinous town looking for any evidence of Porillon or the ones they trailed. The LaFaye youths had escaped into the forest before, but surely they hadn’t gotten that far before the destructive force of Porillon struck out.
Grace turned to see the other two women looking out where the youths had fled. There she saw a shimmering black shadow retracing its path further and further into the forest. Before it had been blotted from view, but now they could see further into the woods.
“They went in there.” Dalah stated it assuredly, and there was no need for her to say where they had gone precisely. The being that wore the face of Grace seethed and toiled within its borrowed shell. She could feel the power of the shadows as they slipped away with a liquidity that belied what was held beyond their veil. None would know that within the small cloud of shadows rested a place of such holy wyrd.
“Yes they did,” Grace said. She watched the dark blot fade from her sight. She turned and looked to the redhead standing behind her.
“The Shadows Grove has helped them as we should have known it would,” Rosalee said.
“Yes,” Grace replied.
“What now?” Dalah asked.
The being that was within Grace strode back to the center of the once-thriving township of Greenwood and looked up at the skittering clouds high above. She clasped her hands behind her and rocked back on her heels, thinking. The sorceress Norn which held the plump old lady scanned the memories of Grace and smirked a little as she remembered telling the LaFayes that if anything happened they were to meet her in the Realm of Earth, at the Guardians’ Keep.
“I think it is high time we pay the Realm Guardians a visit,” Grace said with a smile that the other two mirrored.
What Now?
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FLIP THE PAGE FOR A GLIMPSE OF BOOK 4: A GUARDIAN OF SHADOWS
Joya hummed with power, with wyrd. She gazed into the sinister fogbank of the Shadow Realm and desired nothing more than to step into it, be enveloped in its darkness, and become one with its borders. The shadows called to her, and her heart answered in turn. She shivered.
How could she be so drawn to this accursed land, after all she had learned about it in her childhood? This was the land of dalua, of chaos hounds, of alarists. This was the land of the cursed, of the damned, of the negative side of spirit. The people within the Shadow Realm hated those from the Holy Realm. She was from the Holy Realm. Why did Joya ever think it was a good idea to come this way?
She closed her eyes and braced herself against the lure of the shadows. She had to be strong; this was a test. This was the Shadow Realm. But if she thought about it too long, Joya could feel the shadows licking out of the border between the Realm of Earth and the Realm of Shadow to caress her skin: calling her, welcoming her home.
“What do you think we’ll find inside?” Jovian asked, more than a slight quiver of fear and anticipation in his voice. It broke Joya’s communion with the swirling abyss before her.