The Demon Horsemen (2 page)

She pushed him aside and scrambled to her feet, searching for the third soldier. She found him madly trying to beat off Whisper. She lunged with the bloodied knife—and was startled when something punched her
in the side, sending her sprawling into the bushes. Struggling to suck in her breath, frantically fighting the enfolding branches and leaves, she tried to stand, only to collapse again, as if her legs were refusing to work. Men were shouting, closing in on her. Again she tried to rise, but it seemed her body was determined to stay down, disobeying her will. Red-trousered legs appeared in her distorted line of vision. The voices were directly above her now.

‘Lucky shot,’ a man remarked.

‘Will she live?’

Three more shots rang out.

‘Did you get it?’ the first man said.

‘Point blank.’

‘Well, it still managed to disappear into the undergrowth.’

‘Gone to die.’

‘You ever seen a rat that big before? It was huge.’

‘It’s dead now.’

‘So is she if we don’t stop the bleeding.’

‘Careful. This one’s a killer.’

‘If she tries anything, pull the trigger.’

A grinning face appeared above her, a young man with a red cap and a stubbled chin. Hands pulled at her legs and arms and she yelped as pain shot through her shoulder. She wanted to fight, but her energy had melted into the earth. She closed her eyes.

‘
M
eg! Meg, come quickly! It’s Whisper!’

Meg pushed back her high-backed chair and headed for the stone corridor connecting the reading room to the library. She found Chase and Wahim crouched over a small black form stretched out on the marble floor. Blood pooled around the little animal’s body. Meg gasped and pushed past Chase to kneel beside Whisper.

‘She’s been shot,’ Wahim said.

‘Where’s Swift?’ Meg asked.

‘She hasn’t come back,’ said Chase apprehensively. ‘Do you think…?’

‘Whisper wouldn’t leave her out there alone,’ said Meg. She turned to Wahim. ‘Find Erin and bring him here. Quickly!’

Wahim ran from the chamber, calling Erin.

‘What do we do?’ Chase asked.

Meg ignored the question, her attention focussed on the bush rat’s shallow breathing. She carefully searched the black fur and found two holes, one behind the neck, another in her stomach. ‘You poor little—’ she began and choked, tears welling as she fought back a sob. For almost fifty years, Whisper had been her constant companion, her saviour in dangerous moments, her
sanity. Whisper had watched over her when she was shot by Kerwyn marauders and left to die at the edge of the stream in Summerbrook.

‘Can you heal her?’ Chase asked.

Erin entered. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked, and squatted beside Meg. ‘Oh, in Jaru’s name,’ he muttered and pressed his right hand against the rat’s soft fur.

‘I can heal her,’ Meg said.

Erin pushed her hand aside. ‘No, I will. Besides, with the amber inside her, she’s already beginning to self-heal. Where’s Swift?’

‘We have to find her,’ said Chase.

‘I’ll go,’ Meg declared, rising.

‘I’m coming,’ Wahim said.

‘And me,’ Chase added.

Meg fixed them with a cool glare. ‘You will both stay here where it’s safe. You’re no match for soldiers with peacemakers. Do whatever Erin asks to help him heal Whisper. I’ll bring Swift back.’

‘Alone?’ asked Chase.

‘Alone,’ she said.

She looked down at Erin who was gently stroking Whisper’s fur and crooning. ‘Are you sure she’ll be all right?’

He nodded. ‘You know I can do whatever it takes. The amber in me is the same as the amber in you. And this is my sister, after all. She will live.’ He smiled as reassurance, but Meg saw the fear behind his mask.

She turned to the chamber entry, touched her chest where the sliver of amber was embedded and focussed until a blue haze of light formed in the doorway. ‘I’ll bring Swift back,’ she reiterated to Chase and Wahim, then walked into the portal.

Chase nodded to Wahim and both men lunged for the doorway, but the portal vanished before they reached it, leaving them in the empty corridor.

Meg assessed the changes in the Khvech Daas ruin, saw the path cut through the foliage and headed for it. She had to locate Swift quickly. With Whisper so badly injured, it was almost certain that Swift was in equally serious trouble.
Or dead
. She flinched at the dreadful thought that she may have lost another member of her family, and before she had even been able to claim her as her granddaughter.

She scanned the city ruins for signs of other people and was surprised to find nothing obvious—no dragon egg fabric, no smoke, no movement to indicate the presence of Kerwyn soldiers. She touched the amber embedded in her chest. A long time ago, before she had rejected the responsibility that came with bearing the sliver of amber passed down the generations, A Ahmud Ki had told her that her power was limited only by her imagination. ‘You are a Dragonlord,’ he said. ‘What you will to be will be.’ He taught her how to search minds while they were interrogating a captured Kerwyn soldier.
If I can search a mind, then I can search
for
a mind
, she reasoned now. She carefully checked that she was alone, then closed her eyes, cleared her mind and began scouting the city.

The first thoughts she encountered startled her. They were alien: simple images of darkness and grass and water and warmth. And then she opened her eyes and smiled. Rabbits. She was encountering the minds of rabbits. She had to be more specific in her search, more refined. She closed her eyes again and concentrated.

She found a collection of human thoughts and flitted through them: thoughts of food, a sharp edge on a knife, anger, amusement—and then fear and pain. She homed in. The thoughts were scattered—images of a soldier with a raised fist, immense pain flooding
through, a fleeting glimpse of a black bush rat, a boy, a girl, the soldier again. Swift was alive.

Meg pulled back from the depth of Swift’s mind to establish a direction, moving her feet to align with the thought impulses. When she opened her eyes she was facing south-east, towards the old temple ruin near the river.

She started to walk but even at her quickest pace it would take some time to reach the ruin and time wasn’t Swift’s ally. She needed a quicker way. A portal would be instantaneous, but she had no visual cue of the temple or its immediate area because she had never been there. If only she could fly…

‘It brings back memories.’ Remembering A Ahmud Ki’s admission ignited another possibility. He had tried to teach her how to take the shape of a bird, but circumstances intervened and the lessons were never completed. He used words to cast his spell, but she didn’t need words. She simply had to imagine what she wanted to be.
I was going to take the shape of a kookaburra
, she remembered.

She formed the image of a kookaburra in her mind now and imagined the shape as her own. Her spine tingled, and then it was as if her legs were ripped from under her—the ground raced up to meet her and she fell face…no,
beak
forward. The revelation stunned her. She stumbled, disoriented by the sudden change in perspective and the unusual appendages. She had
become
a bird—a real bird! She staggered a few steps and felt her tail touch the dust—her
tail
! She stopped moving to focus on what she could feel. Wings. She stretched them as she would stretch her arms and, turning her head, saw the flecked brown and white feathers spread away from her body. The air rippled them.
I am a bird
, she thought with elation,
a kookaburra
.

She tipped back her head, seeing the line of her kingfisher beak pointing skyward, and tried to warble, but what escaped her beak was a gasp followed by a cough and a strange strangled squawk. She caught her breath and lowered her beak.
I can’t laugh like a kookaburra
, she realised.
Why?
But the answer formed as soon as the question.
Because I’ve never been a kookaburra
. Panic set in.
I’ve never flown before, either
.

She searched her memory for A Ahmud Ki’s account of his experience of changing form. When she had asked what happened, he had replied teasingly, ‘Oh, you have to do it to find that out.’

Now she understood: he had
discovered that being a bird
was only achieved by
being
that bird.
I’ve never flown. How can I know what to do now
? She sighed and focussed on her energy source. The rush and change of shape as she readjusted to her human form made her dizzy again. She took a few moments to steady herself, then started for the old temple ruin. ‘Walk it is then,’ she muttered.

Meg counted thirty-two Kerwyn soldiers. Four stood over Swift, whose bloodied form was tied by her wrists to a low wooden bar straddling a pair of collapsed pillars. The girl’s agony enraged Meg. She recalled a time when she had seen men tied to stakes on a hillside, prisoners of a shaman who had executed them one by one with his limited magic, and her wild anger that had generated a lethal fire.
I will not kill at random
, she warned herself now.
My anger must be controlled, focussed. I accept who I am, what I can do
.

She spotted an expanse of folded white fabric piled against the crumbled stonework of the old Hohdan temple—a deflated dragon egg—and spied the wooden carriage that would normally hang beneath the
fabric partially hidden in the ruins. The Kerwyn soldiers had resorted to patient subterfuge to catch their quarry.

She studied the men and their stations in and around the temple ruins, searching especially for those on watch. She identified three sentries secreted at points in the ruined building and surrounding foliage, positioned to take a clear shot with their peacemakers at anyone approaching or entering the space where Swift was being held. She guessed there would be others.
How do I do this?
she pondered.

She crept back through the dark green bushes and undergrowth along the river until she reached a ruined building that might once have been a shop or a house. She hid behind the collapsed stone walls and assessed another angle of approach to the temple ruin. When she was satisfied she could get there without being spotted by any of the soldiers she’d seen, she focussed her energy on a large, rotted wooden beam in the rubble. White smoke curled from the wood and then it ignited, flames licking along the edges, the smoke filtering skywards.

She eased out of the building and paused to see if she was being watched, then crossed a vine-tangled roadway into another ruin. From there she made her way through a maze of shattered walls, partially blocked doorways and bushes towards the temple. She stopped to listen every few paces, and flinched when she startled a rabbit from the undergrowth. Behind her, a column of white smoke rose and thickened. Ahead and to her left she heard a shout. The soldiers had seen either the smoke or the rabbit. She tensed in anticipation. When she was certain there was no one coming in her direction, she pushed through the undergrowth with more speed, moving as quietly as she could towards the temple.

To her disappointment, very few of the soldiers had left the area, although most were staring in the
direction of the river and the smoke. A soldier stood over Swift, his hand brutally gripping her hair. He appeared to be asking her something. When she didn’t answer, he shook her head and spoke again.

There was no choice. Meg pointed at the shoulder of the first of the three soldiers on watch higher in the temple ruins and a bolt of amber energy shot from her finger. The soldier screamed and flopped against the wall, his peacemaker falling to the ground below. Meg was already firing at the next man, who cartwheeled from his post into the undergrowth. Her third target was lifting his weapon when Meg’s bolt struck him in his right arm.

Pandemonium erupted among the soldiers at ground level. To add to the confusion, Meg conjured a fireball in their midst, although she aimed to miss as many as possible to minimise injury. The roaring flame scattered the men, several dropping their peacemakers as they dived to the ground or ran for safety. She conjured a second fireball, which exploded several spans in the air, and sent energy bolts smashing into the stonework. Five soldiers came running out of the bushes from the direction of the fire she had set as a diversion, and she sent them scrambling for their lives with half a dozen deliberately aimed energy bolts.

Meg relaxed her arms and amplified her voice to sound above the crackling flames. ‘I order you to carry your prisoner to the far side of the stone bridge. Place her on the stone slab by the building with the blue tiled facade and return to the other side of the bridge. If you do this, I will let you live.’

She waited for a response.

‘Who are you?’ a voice called.

‘Do as I command!’ she replied.

Again, she waited. This time, a group of six soldiers emerged from cover among the broken temple walls,
peacemakers at the ready, eyes frantically searching the surrounding vegetation for their assailant. Two other soldiers crossed towards Swift and one raised his peacemaker to her head. ‘We don’t bargain!’ he yelled.

Meg’s heart sank. She feared that a young soldier inside the temple was very badly injured, and now this soldier was complicating the situation with his bravado. Worse, with his muzzle pressed to Swift’s temple, he was turning the stand-off into a deadly gamble.

‘This is not about hurting anyone,’ she stated with all the authority she could muster. ‘Let your prisoner go.’

‘Whoever or whatever you are, come out of hiding or I swear I’ll kill this bitch!’ the soldier bellowed.

The other soldiers readied their peacemakers. Meg knew that the moment she stepped into view they would shoot her. She was too dangerous to leave alive. She had a variety of options still, but chose expediency for Swift’s sake. She pointed her finger at the defiant soldier. The energy bolt blew off his head and his body crumpled at Swift’s feet. Meg put aside her sickening disappointment at having to resort to violence and called out to the remaining soldiers.

‘I won’t ask again. Four of you will carry the young woman to the north side of the river. And you will do it now.’

Several soldiers backed away into the undergrowth, their fear overriding duty. The rest argued among themselves. Finally, four of them warily crossed the space to Swift, giving quick glances at the decapitated corpse as they untied her. One of the men gagged, then vomited. Swift slumped as the ropes were loosened. Meg kept a watchful eye on the soldiers not involved in releasing the girl, hoping that none of them would rediscover the courage to jeopardise the situation.

The soldiers’ progress to the northern bank of the river was painfully slow. When they reached the stone
bridge, Meg made a small portal and passed through it to appear on the opposite bank at the entrance to the building she’d identified to the carriers. The four soldiers hesitated when they saw the white-haired old woman in the ruined doorway. She beckoned them to approach and motioned for them to lay Swift on the slab of stone.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for your friends who have been hurt. If you bring them here, I can heal them.’

‘What about Hordemaster Caster?’ asked a dark-haired young man. ‘You killed him.’

‘He would have killed my gra—my companion,’ she replied calmly. ‘I gave him a choice.’

She glanced across the bridge and spotted three soldiers taking aim with their peacemakers. Amplifying her voice once more, she called to them, ‘Put the weapons down. You’ve seen what I can do.’