Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Page 44

  "Get them!" Kirkus cried. "Stop them!" He started chanting, his fingers flashing. A cloud of fire belched into the sky at the front, igniting man and horse alike.

  It was like tossing a torch into a midden pile. All pretense of organization vanished. A Slumber escaped Vitar's lips and vanished into the battle; Solon Hovered, rising suddenly above the fray and immediately taking an arrow to the side; Carren rattled off a Cyclone which tore into the front just after Kirkus's Detonation, hurling as many of Isaic's men skyward, screaming, as the enemy's.

  "Stop!" Takra yelled. "Carren! You're killing our own―!"

  Kirkus chanted again, his eyes wild, and launched a second Detonation into the front. Under a cloud of screams and ravenous fire, the soldiers there—Isaic's and the enemy's—sprinted for the safety of the city. Isaic's charging foot soldiers slowed, terrified by the chanters' spells, leaving the bridge wide open to the enemy.

  "No!" Takra slapped at Kirkus's hand. "Look what you're doing!"

  Solon returned to the ground, wincing and clutching at the arrow in his abdomen. "I took a hit," he said, wonderingly.

  Kirkus saw the arrow and blanched. He looked at Takra, then Vitar, then back to the arrow, mouth gaping.

  "What do we do?" Vitar asked again, surrounded by screams and panic. "Kirkus! What do we do?"

  Kirkus sucked at the air in panic. "I . . . I don't―"

  Takra cycled through the strategies they'd discussed, but all of them seemed suddenly juvenile, the memory of childhood games played a lifetime ago. She felt a panic to match Kirkus's rising in her chest and choked it down before it could kill her.

  "The bridge," she said. "If you can Detonate, Detonate on the bridge. We need to bring it down."

  "We'll need to move up," Vitar said. "Right now it's―"

  "Then move up!" Takra looked at Vitar and the others. "If you can't Detonate, aim anything you have into the army across the river." She pointed at the mass of enemy soldiers, pressing toward the bridge from the far side. "Slumber, Ves, whatever you have. No spells at our side—ever! Over the river only!" As the chanters started to obey, pressing ahead into the churn of soldiers, she called, "And for the love of summer, no Hovers! Keep your feet on the ground!"

  "I'm . . . I'm sorry," Solon managed, grimacing as he fumbled at the arrow. "I didn't . . . I didn't think . . ."

  Takra squeezed his hand. "Find a Kesprey. They should be behind us, should be moving up soon. Wait here and they'll find you."

  He nodded numbly. Clenched his teeth.

  "I killed the wrong men," Kirkus stammered. "I . . . I panicked, I didn't―"

  "Forget it," Takra said. "Come on—we need to get in range of that bridge." She started forward. Vitar and Carren had already vanished into the charge. I should have told them where to regroup, she realized too late. We should have had a plan for—

  Kirkus grabbed her wrist. "I can't," he babbled. "I'm too dangerous. I'm like Syntal. I―"

  She slapped his hand from her wrist and grabbed his instead. "Shut up," she snarled, and jerked him into a run.

  ii. Harth

  Vanished and Hovered, hanging invisible fifty feet above the battlefield, he had an invaluable bird's eye view. He couldn't make out everything—night had fallen, bathing the whole scene in the ghostly blue light of Darnoth's newest moon—but he saw enough to understand how things were going.

  The plan, as far as he could see, had fallen to sehk.

  There were no reinforcements from Colmon, for one: Lyseira's priest in the town had either never received Isaic's bird or chosen to ignore it. The townspeople Harth could see were all fleeing deeper into town, vanishing into the city streets. Not one of them even had a weapon.

  On the other hand, Kirkus's chanters had gotten in range of Oak Bridge and begun pelting it with Detonations, slowing the enemy onslaught—but in the lurid glow of their spells he could see they were dangerously exposed, too close to the front line. And worse than that, the bridge stubbornly refused to catch fire.

  All along the bank, soldiers on each side had unslung their bows and begun blindly firing across the river at each other. The air swarmed with buzzing arrows, the cries and screams of the fallen. Clericlights popped up in the darkness on both sides, illuminating targets as quickly as they vanished again, and tendrils of blue and white flickered in the midst of the bloodbath: Lyseira's Kesprey, tending to the injured where they could. But there were nearly twice as many archers on the far side of the bank as there were here. He had no idea if the Kesprey's ministrations would make a difference in the long run, and there were priests on the other side, too.

  He descended to General Brutus's wagon, dropped his spells to conserve his energy, and reported as ordered.

  "The bridge is still up?" Brutus snapped. "How? Too wet?"

  "Might be," Harth said. "Or . . ." He hesitated. He couldn't be sure of what he'd seen, it was too dark, but . . . "I think it's stone."

  "'Oak Bridge' is made of stone?" Brutus barked.

  "That's what it looks like. I can't be sure, but it would explain why they can't bring it down."

  Brutus fumed in the darkness. "The bridge is still the choke point. Are the fire spells holding them off?"

  "They're slowing them, but . . ." Harth shook his head. "They're still coming across. Kirkus only has so many chanters who can Detonate." An idea sparked in his mind. "But maybe we can try something else. Cyclones on the bridge—we can maintain them, block it off entirely. Maybe," he went on, a hunter's thrill running through him, "even rip it from its moorings."

  "Can your chanters do that from here? We have no way to get word to the others."

  "No," Harth admitted. "They don't have the skill." He had ten Arwah with him all told—held in reserve, at Brutus's request—but the bridge was too distant. It became harder to command the Pulse the farther away one tried to do it, and the bridge had to be a quarter mile up the riverbank. It might not be impossible, but it would be an enormous strain. Possibly a deadly one.

  He swallowed his fear and said, "But I might be able to."

  "Good," Brutus said. "Quickly!"

  Harth re-chanted, wrapping himself in new Vanish and Hover spells, and rose once more into the air. When he had a solid vantage, he Ascended again—not above the ground, but above reality.

  The intoxicating beauty of the Pulse flooded over him. The desperation and madness of the battlefield transformed into pure ideas, millions of minute details. He brought the chant for Cyclone to mind and readied to invoke it.

  But the bridge was too far. To reach it, he had to go higher.

  He unfurled his mind and let the winds of the Pulse catch it, buoy it upward. He saw the problem play out beneath him like a fishing line unspooling. A heady thrill of power ran through him as he saw the solution.

  Distance is an illusion, he realized. Just like life and death, like everything in the world. From the proper place within the Pulse, there were no problems without solutions. The very concept of a "problem" was simply a knot to be untied.

  Yes, he could place a Cyclone on the bridge from here—from anywhere. He could place a hundred of them, a thousand. He could tear the bridge from the bank with a thought; could eliminate it from existence, if he chose.

  It will entice you. Syntal's first warning, given so long ago, imbued now with the added strength of his longing for her. You won't want to stop. And he didn't. The memory of her, of what he'd lost, made him want to release a shriek of rage that would rend the heavens. He could do it.

  But she wouldn't have wanted him to.

  He tore his mind from the cosmos and forced it to settle in the clouds. The chant crackled from his tongue like the commands of a god, reordering the air to his liking—but he couldn't deny the reality of distance. Doing so would destroy him. So he reached instead, simultaneously omnipotent and powerless, balancing on the ridge of his own existence to place his command as far out as he could.

  Then he wrenched himself back, Descending into reality and desolation. In the
flicker of torches and clericlight he saw his Cyclone towering over the bridge, sucking up enemy soldiers and spraying them into the night.

  Heavy. Oh, God, so heavy. He kept his fist extended, dragging the tornado slowly along the stone, but the weight of all three spells at once threatened to crush him. The Cyclone's extra distance made it as heavy as a fifth-Seal spell, and he was already holding up one of those.

  He felt dizzy. Nauseated. The bright taste of blood in his mouth was the realest thing he knew.

  Please, he thought, willing Takra or Solon or any of Kirkus's chanters close enough to act to hear him before he broke. His fist quivered. The Cyclone trembled.

  Then another rose behind it, covering the far side of the bridge—and another, drifting lazily into the middle space. The enemy soldiers fell back. The bridge was secure.

  He let the spell go, his mind spasming, but forced himself to stay in the sky a moment longer. With the bridge blocked, the situation quickly improved. He could already see an opening for Isaic's soldiers at the front to swarm and surround the enemy that had crossed, trapping them against the river and the howling bridge. The volleys of arrows and spells crossing the river hadn't slowed, but the Kesprey were doing their work on this side, supporting Isaic's men and limiting their losses even as the enemy was continually whittled down. How long will they endure that? he wondered. If the chanters can keep up those Cyclones, attrition may win us this fight. He started back to the ground, dropping his Vanish early to try and save some little strength, and prepared to report.

  If the troops see that opening, he thought.

  And if there are no more surprises.

  iii. Helix

  The little girl with the red hair, just like his. The woman with the raven hair, beautiful, mysterious, and sad.

  Wars and treachery. Peace and laughter. Victory and defeat. Death.

  So much death.

  He gasped for breath against the flood of visions, thoughts flailing for purchase. Here and now! he screamed. Here and now! But he was limp and powerless in the raging rapids, being buffeted mercilessly from one future to the next. The words meant nothing.

  The streets of Tal'aden melted into the spire of Thakhan Dar. A warm fireplace became a cauldron in the sky. None of it comprehensible, none of it discrete.

  A swarm of soldiers would thunder into town on horseback, the churning river on their right. A storm would thrash the sea. An old jewel would steam through a clenched fist. Lyseira would betray her own. The river would be on their right. Keswick would fall, Tal'aden would fall, Southlight would fall—in time every kingdom and city on Or'agaard would fall. In time Or'agaard itself would fall. The river would be on their right.

  On their right.

  He shot out his arm and grasped a rail. Wrung it with both hands. Drove a splinter into one palm that finally forced a howl of pain from him, a slap to the consciousness that gave him an instant's reprieve—and he seized it, the here-and-now, with a wail.

  Sounds crashed into him: howling wind, the screams of the wounded, a constant buzzing like a thousand wasps. Were they real? Were they now?

  "On their right!" he shouted. He fumbled after the thread of the near-future and saw General Brutus would be just outside the wagon, with Harth and his chanters. Helix stumbled outside, grabbed Harth by the shirt. "The river's on their right!" he yelled. "Not the left! They're coming from the north! The other side! They're going to flank us!"

  Harth would look at him dumbly, the brilliance in his eyes too sophisticated for such mundanities.

  "They're coming now!" he roared. They would circle around, slam into them from the east, crush them between new reinforcements and a river bristling with arrowheads. They would melt into fireflies like the motes of light that swarmed Ordlan Green at midnight, become an army of wolves that howled at a necromancer's army. The sky would—

  No! Here and now! He dragged himself back from the brink, careening and desperate, wondering if anything he'd said had mattered—or if he had even said anything at all.

  "Where?" Brutus demanded.

  "Is there a north road?" Helix stammered. "It has to be."

  "How many?"

  Helix flinched, shook his head. The churn surged beneath him, tempting him with the answer but straining to devour him. "I didn't . . . an army, I don't know."

  Brutus would point at Harth. "Can you show him?"

  Helix nodded.

  "Get word to Captain Xavier, beneath the red banner," Brutus told Harth. "He should be able to redeploy. And bring your unit—it's time."

  "M'sai," Harth said. "Arwah, with me." He sounded like a commander, not a street thug. 'Arwah, with me'? It was surreal, ridiculous. They were all playing at war.

  Harth took his hand. "Hold on to me now, Helix. All right?" And his friend started through the mud, dragging him along as Hel echoed all around them.

  iv. Lyseira

  She stumbled through a Helscape of anguish and violence. Fell to the mud near a body that might have been living or dead, fumbled for its neck to check for a pulse while a spear of fire—a distant Godsflame—ignited in the corner of her vision. Cries and roars and howls assailed her, melted into a twisted sludge of bedlam.

  This body was dead; she saw its empty eyes in the flash from an enemy's miracle. She staggered back to her feet and lumbered toward the next one.

  In the aftermath of the riot in Keswick, she had hated herself for what she'd wrought. She hadn't flinched from her role in every maiming, every death; she had lashed herself with them, forced herself to see them. They had haunted her nightmares since. Her craving to avoid more bloodshed had driven her to scatter God's winter wheat to every part of the kingdom she could reach, in the blind hope that the people's simple gratitude would divert a river of blood.

  Awash now in the nightmare of war, such hope felt ridiculous. That Akir even let her conceive of such stupidity was a cruel joke.

  She didn't remember why they were here. She didn't remember why it mattered. She remembered only the parade of faces—lifeless, anguished, or ferocious by turns—which had haunted her every moment since the sun had sunk and the fighting had started. A limitless, reeling cacophony of suffering, an infinite demand on her finite capacity to heal.

  And always, with every miracle, she was too late—the hurt had already been inflicted. She couldn't prevent it. She could only prepare its victims for fresh carnage.

  When she heard the echo of her name shatter against the tumult of combat, caught remnants of it drifting through the nightmare like a remembered scream, she thought she had to be imagining it; that it was a rogue cry of accusation from her own thoughts. But it wasn't. It was real.

  Fifty feet away, beneath the meager shelter of a skeletal copse of trees, Captain Xavier had taken a defensive position. The griffon and the lance glared out from his crimson banner, blaring defiant light: a miracle she had placed, she dimly recalled, before the river of blood had started running. It was an oasis of brilliance in the darkness, a steady beacon of order. He had called her. He could see her name forming again on his lips even from here.

  She left the grasping hands of the dying and made her way to him.

  "We've been ordered north," he barked: words that implied there was another place beyond this one, outside the endless murder falling from the skies. "There's a second attack coming from that direction." Harth was there, she realized, his eyes too clear to be shrouded by darkness, and Helix—both stained with mud and soot, both scratched but whole.

  "There's also an opening north of the bridge," Harth said. "I saw it from the command post. With the bridge impassable, the force that's gotten across can be surrounded if you act fast."

  "How many clerics do you have?" Xavier was still looking at her, asking a question that made no sense. She didn't have clerics.

  "What?"

  "How many healers?" he demanded again. "We need as many as you can spare!"

  He was asking her because she was their leader. She had brought them into this.
Her.

  Ylise had been with her in the Helscape at one point. Shaviid and Rayonth, possibly more. Now she could get them out of here, take them somewhere new. "M'sai," she shouted.

  "Do you have a way to signal them?" Harth asked.

  "Signal?" The word had an inscrutable taste, its concept utterly alien. There were no signals in the Helscape.

  "Lyseira," Helix said. They had burned out his eyes; he stared blindly into the chaos at her left. "We need you. Stay with us."

  "A sign, something visual," Harth pressed. "Did you work something out?"

  They had, she suddenly remembered. A thousand years ago in another world, they had.

  She called a trickle of fire and pressed it to one heel of her staff, igniting it with clericlight. Then she hoisted the weapon high and began to wave it back and forth in lazy circles. "Kesprey!" she called. "Come if you can hear! Come to me!"

  "Get word to the second company," Xavier called to a runner. "Tell them to flank the enemy from the north while they're still pinned against the bridge."

  "Kesprey!" she shouted again. Her voice betrayed her—tortured by smoke and blood and screaming, it collapsed under the weight of her need. She dragged it up again, forced it into the darkness. "Kesprey! Here! Come here!" She had barely remembered how to give the signal; what were the chances the others would remember to obey it? One prolonged minute stretched into another as the night churned with the buzzing of arrows and the wails of war, and no one answered her. No one came.

  They're all dead, she thought. Every last one of them, every peasant who had survived the riot in Keswick and heard the voice of Akir, had come to this place of horror to meet their end. She was the only one left once again, the final survivor.

  "Kesprey! To me!"

  That was her role, her purpose in life: to trick others into caring, to trick them into following her, to watch the world slit their throats.