Blood of War (53 page)

The soldier glanced down and Thalor distinctly saw him go pale. The young man's head turned and this time Thalor did hear what he said though it sounded hollow, and very far away.

“He's hurt,” the soldier shouted. “Need some help here!”

And finally, as if those words were an incantation, some sort of arcane release, Thalor's tongue worked again. “Help me,” he croaked.

“We will, Prelate. Never fear.”

Other faces appeared, other soldiers. Reowynn's face came into view and it was grim. A few barked orders and someone else—how many blasted soldiers were there anyway? Oh right. He had an army. Forgot.—began ministering to his injuries. Was it bad? There was fire in his arm. More than that. Someone had doused it with pitch and lit it. They should be beating it out, throwing water on it. Somewhere behind him, amidst the roaring that sounded like an angry sea, someone screamed and it was a terrible scream, filled with fear and pain.

“Hang on, Prelate.” Something hard and flat was shoved between his teeth. “Bite down on this.”

He bit. If he thought there was fire in his arm a moment ago, then what the young Soldier did, turned it into a volcano. He screamed around the thing in his mouth and blackness crept in at the edges of his sight. All the color washed out of the world and it blurred, seemed to bounce up and down crazily.

“Got it,” the Soldier muttered.

“Here. Drink this.” The hard thing was removed from his teeth and something cool and bitter trickled into his mouth. “It'll help with the pain.”

It was about then that he realized that the sounds of yelling and cursing had eased. He tried to look under the horses again but there were too many soldiers around him. He could not breath. Too many people.

“Make some room for him,” Reowynn's voice cracked and Thalor could have kissed him when the crowd moved back, letting in blessed air. And, to Thalor, “Things are settling down, Prelate.”

“Wh-what happened?” he croaked.

“An ambush. There are reports of others coming in throughout the forest.”

There was a bandage on Reowynn's shoulder, white with an irregular red spot in the middle.

“You're hurt.”

Reowynn grunted and Thalor thought it might have been a chuckle. “Not so bad as you, My Lord.”

“Me?” He was hurt? The fire. Right. He would have to check his burns later.

“They took two arrows from your arm. You won't be arm-wrestling anyone for a while.”

Oh. He looked down and saw the bandage wrapped around his arm. It too had its own red spots. His robe was a ruin of shredded linen and blood.

“You think you can stand, Prelate?”

He
was
standing. But. No. No, he was on his back, on the cold, damp earth. How odd. How had
that
happened?

“Yes,” he said. But it was a whisper. He cleared his throat, spat a wad of mud tasting stuff and tried again, “Yes.” Better.

Slowly, carefully, he was lifted and again the world spun, bounced up and down, and the blackness at the edge of his vision encroached further until all he saw was gray light at the end of a long tunnel. He shut his eyes tight and shook his head.

Life trickled back into him. When he opened his eyes again, he breathed deeply and the world settled and stilled under him. He looked down, saw the soldier who had given his life to protect him, face buried in the dirt, with an arrow sticking out of his back, high up, where it had likely punctured his lung.

“What happened here?” he demanded. Suddenly he was angry,
furious
. “What in the name of the pits of darkness happened?”

“Ambush,” Reowynn repeated. “A dozen or a few more were hiding in the trees. I don't know what they expected to accomplish.”

It did not take a genius to know what the fiends had tried to do. Was Reowynn protecting him from learning that someone had tried to assassinate him?

Reowynn eyed him strangely. It took Thalor a moment to realize he had spoken his thought aloud. “No, My Lord. Killing you would have been a pleasant bonus for them, but my personal feeling is they're trying to slow our advance and whittle our numbers.”

Reowynn turned and gave terse orders to one of his captains. They were to make camp. Double the sentries. Prepare areas for the wounded.

“How many?” Thalor asked. “How many of ours were wounded?”

“Ten, maybe fifteen. Nineteen confirmed dead and probably three or four more before nightfall. All ours.”

All ours. He took the meaning. No bloody Salosians then. Interesting. He shook off the men who were still holding him up, suddenly revolted by the contact, suddenly revolted by his own weakness.

He turned his glare to the forest. The lack of sound suddenly made sense. There were heretics in the forest scaring off the animals, waiting, just waiting for their moment to pounce, to attack the forces of good, of right, the forces of God.
Him.

“Burn it,” he hissed. “Burn it all.”

“My Lord,” Reowynn said. “Your army would be trapped-”

“
To blazes with them!
” he shrieked. He breathed deeply, regaining control. “This place must be cleansed.
Burn it.
”

He turned, pushed the pain in his arm away from his mind and grasped for his Source. The warmth of arcanum infused him as he raised his hands over his head. He almost shrieked in ecstasy as heat flowed from his fingertips.

His power pulsed within him, beating in time with his hammering heart, then flowed from him in raging torrents that slammed into the trees with earth-shaking force. Blasts shook the world and entire trees were blown to burning splinters. Those splinters shot deeper into the forest to join his expanding wave of energy. Great fires started in a dozen places at once, raging infernos that reached the canopy and began licking hungrily at the dried branches above.

Waves of heat washed over him and he rejoiced. Lowering his arms, panting, he turned his crazed grin on Reowynn.

Reowynn, wan, wide-eyed, whispered, “What have you done?”

* * *

Jorge stood transfixed on the rampart, staring west at the thickening blanket of smoke over the forest. It had grown quickly. The afternoon sun was partially blotted out; only a ruddy circle peeked through the ever thickening pall. He already breathed the scent of burning wood.

Though miles away, every brother and sister at the Abbey had felt the immense surge of power from the forest. It had been like a slap in the face. Now the ramparts on the outer Abbey wall were lined three deep with Salosians who gaped pale-faced at the oncoming onslaught, and the courtyards below where filled with warriors and workers all staring questions upward at the brothers and sisters.

Still miles away, the prelacy forces had not reached their defensive wards. Jorge had believed that those wards would hold the Soldiers of God at bay for a time at least, but now with the addition of this widespread blaze battering at the shields, well, Jorge was not so certain they would hold at all.

“Here they come,” muttered Mikal at his side.

He nodded weakly, sickened.

Chapter 46

He leaned forward holding the heavy limb for balance. It would not do to fall out of the tree from this height. He watched as the sun vanished into smoke above the trees to the west, watched as the massive army poured through the trees ahead of the growing fire like blood through veins, watched as the building perched on the plain near a shallow cliff seemed to shrink in on itself.

He continued to watch as the last of the failing light dissipated into diaphanous veils of dusty rose and rotten orange and those veils parted, leaving behind pure, sweet black. To him, it was like the world was shedding its disguise, its cosmetics, and was now showing—he tittered at this—its true colors.

He stifled the laugh that bubbled in his throat before climbing down, letting himself drop the last few feet to the ground. He found his lieutenant waiting for him.

“We move closer, Herkan. But we do nothing until things get really confused. Then we get our prize.”

Once the sea of white capes—mostly gray now, due to the smoke and dust—began their siege, the defenses would be concentrated on the west. The invisible yet deadly wall that surrounded the building and its environment had posed something of a problem, but Gixen gave silent thanks to his master for exerting its power and seeing them through safely. The eastern end of the cowering building would be largely unmanned. Perfect for a small force to get in and out without being detected.

Herkan nodded and saluted. That was why Gixen liked Herkan. No questions asked, no need to repeat orders, no need to hear the particulars of plans already laid. He simply listened and did as he was told. He was a fool, certainly, but at least he did as he was told.

Gixen looked south as though he could see through the trees and smoke, and again he stifled a laugh.

Chapter 47

Kurin had once told him, a long time ago, long before any of this madness began, that the sunrise seen from the west coast of the Sun Sea was breathtaking. He had been up in his tree, near the little cabin he and Daved had shared, admiring the moonlit gauze that stretched across the velvety blackness when Kurin—then, passing himself off as nothing more than an old vagabond healer—had joined him. That night, Jurel had heard more about the world outside Galbin's farm than he had heard ever before.

With a sigh, Jurel kicked a stone, sending it skittering along the beach where it disappeared into the moonless night. It made a barely audible splash as it skipped into the Sun Sea, slipping below the surface, stealing into the depths, another drowned soul. Empathy, Jurel thought, sometimes took the strangest forms. He snorted. Hard as stone. Hard as iron.

Hard as a sword.

Behind him, past the stretch of satiny beach, beyond the trees of the park where the rich often broke fast with fruits and spiced wine while the sunrise took place, Grayson City was a slumbering beast. A foul, stinking, dangerous, slumbering beast. Its fetid breath oozed past him, causing him to wrinkle his nose. As Jurel was discovering, cities were disgusting places; he had no idea how anyone could live in such warrens, like rats in their dens. The alleys were filled with garbage, the streets were layered with a hundred years of manure—even the horses and oxen displayed their disdain—and a million chamber pots filled with offal thrown from windows. The city, living up to its name, was charcoal gray, splotched and mottled as though the beast was diseased by the smoke of the thousands of fires used for cooking and heat every day. There was, carried on the feathering, salty breeze, the stench of death from the docks and the fishing district a mile or so up the beach.

Jurel found it difficult to believe Kurin's story that people came from all over the kingdom to be here.

Thoughts of the city were secondary to Jurel. His mind was far too embattled remembering his encounter in his place. He put a hand to his breast pocket, unconsciously tracing the straight edges of the small box that rested there like a promise, or a threat.

Far to the east, far, far away, across the vast Sea of the Sun, the Eastern mountain range caught fire. Even at that distance, Jurel could see the ragged peaks biting into the simmering sky as the sun began to bubble over the cauldron, strewing a million oscillating sparks onto the sea.

Without thinking about it, he reached into his pocket and stroked the oiled paper. Slowly, gently, he pulled the package from his pocket and lowered his eyes to its dully glistening surface. Tenderly, reverently, he unwrapped the paper and stared at the plain greenish box, slightly tattered at its edges, in his hands.

As the sun grew over the distant mountains, he pulled the top off the box and stared at the object inside. It was a medal. A medal of valor. He had seen this medal many times. It was the one Daved had earned after the attack at Killhern where he had found Jurel. The one he had earned only moments before turning in his walking papers.

Jurel lifted it by its purple silk ribbon from the box with numb fingers and stared at the graven image of the eagle with its outstretched wings lovingly crafted in bas-relief. A stray shard of light reflected from one eye.

For a moment he was mesmerized but took an instant to look in the box. At the bottom of the box, Jurel found a ratty, raggedy piece of folded parchment. This parchment had not fared well; it was torn in places, and there was a large bloodstain on it.

And just like that, he knew what it was. Carefully, hesitantly, and with trepidation, he unfolded the page and read again words written in Daved's utilitarian hand that he had already committed to memory a year before:

Master Kurin,

Good day, sir. If you are reading this then it means that Jurel has arrived safely. In this, I would rejoice and I would appreciate word of my son's welfare, if you are able and willing.

I write this not out of desire for friendship or courtesy but because my son needs your help. Things have not gone well for Jurel here and he has been forced to leave the farm at once. He knows very little of the world and, as resourceful as I know him to be, I fear he would not survive long. So I send him to you, as the only person he knows outside this farm, and in hopes that you will be able to provide some assistance. Perhaps no more than a bed for a few days.

He is a good man, hard-working, intelligent, and courteous. Perhaps you or someone you know might offer employment to such a diligent young man.

Please, tell my son I love him and will endeavor to see him when next I am in town.

Sincerely,

Daved Histane

The ratty page fell from fingers that were beyond numb, beyond remembrance. Hot tears welled up in Jurel's eyes.

“
Why?” he croaked.