The False Martyr (99 page)

Beside him, the man who
was the Order’s final arbiter far more than him gripped a bow,
arrow already notched. Jaret showed not the slightest emotion as he
stared down at the frightened clump of wounded men in the camp
below. The survivors of that morning’s battle, many of them could
barely stand or hold their weapons. Jaret had told them that he was
taking Joal’s spearmen to find and kill the creatures. He had left
ten of the least certain to protect them and never returned. Though
it was closer to dawn than sunset, not a one of those men slept. A
ring of torches illuminated their stoic faces as they watched the
trees, reacting to every whir on an insect or scramble of a
squirrel. Yatier had formed them into a crude defensive formation,
but they knew what it meant that their commander had not returned.
They knew what was coming, could only imagine that the creatures
had already killed their comrades, that they were alone in facing
the horrors that had already defeated them once this day. And their
emotions had risen accordingly as the night stretched on and Jaret
failed to return. Now, it radiated from them like a fire. It
disrupted the lines of possibility emanating from them, made their
actions hard to predict. But then, they didn’t really matter. As
long as the bait stayed in the cage, it didn’t matter how it
paced.

And fear was the goal.
Everything else had been a lie. The spearmen who were supposed to
be hunting the creatures were asleep. They had been told that
nothing was out of the ordinary. They had been sent to their beds
spread across both sides of the stream that defined the Camp and
told to sleep. Lius had helped them on their way, had subtly
manipulated the forest around them to make their sleep deep,
dreamless, and undisturbed even now.

With another slow breath,
Lius released his emotions – the risk of them now was not
theological, it was to his life and that of every person here – and
focused on the Tapestry around him, on all the strands of
possibility that made up the Order. The creatures were close and
coming straight at them. They descended on the two men who had been
set to guard the final bridge leading into the Camp. In a profound
betrayal of the creature’s nature, only the slightest gurgling cry
escaped from those men as they died. The things lived for pain,
fear, hate. They fed off of raw emotion, sought to create it above
all things, but here, they killed quickly, silently before the men
knew that they were even near. Because, they serve a higher power,
Lius realized. Someone was commanding them, and they obeyed. Even
though it was counter to their nature, stealth was what they needed
and that is what they provided. It did not serve Lius’
plan.

“
Now,” he whispered from
his trance, careful to remove any emotion.

Jaret released the arrow
he had been holding then followed it. He yanked a helm onto his
head, adjusted the breastplate he wore, pulled his swords, and
charged down the hill where he had been waiting.

The arrow hit the
youngest, simplest, most terrified of Joal’s spearmen in the
thigh.
What kind of monster shoots his own
men
? Lius wondered as the boy started
screaming. He howled to the heavens as his every fear was suddenly
realized. The murmurs of the men around him turned to shouts as
they searched for the source of the attack. At the same moment,
thunder roared across the camp and rain started to fall. Big, cold
drops hit the men sleeping in the forest, directed by Lius’
weavings to disturb their sleep if the screaming were not enough.
And in seconds, four hundred men were awake, were listening to one
of their fellows scream, and were afraid.

The creatures, already
flowing across and around the narrow bridge into the Camp, paused
as they sensed another set of men – the spearmen camped on their
side of the stream – come alive. Their fear like the scent of blood
to a jackal, they hesitated, torn now between two
targets.

Jaret hit them in their
moment of doubt. A man without emotion, they had not sensed him,
did not even know what to make of such a creature, and he made good
use of that surprise. He slashed and chopped and stabbed his way
through them until he stood between them and the bridge that lead
to the Camp. He made his stand there, seeming to defend the bridge,
yet to Lius watching it all through the lens of possibilities,
Jaret was not defending the bridge as much as he was choosing which
of the creatures would be allowed to pass.

Despite or because of
Jaret’s effort, dozens of the creatures flowed into the Camp and
the wounded men waiting there. Yatier rallied his charges. He
shouted orders over the thunder and rising wind of the storm. The
men responded. They lifted a crude palisade that they had
constructed from sharpened branches just as the creatures hit them.
The trembling spearmen who had been left to guard them formed
around the palisade as Yatier, hobbling on bandaged feet, screamed
for them to hold. Behind those, the knights and legionnaires who’d
survived that morning’s encounter tried for all they were worth to
hold weapons despite hands that were mangled and broken, to stand
despite decimated feet, broken ankles, disjointed knees and hips.
Their armor had been stripped. They were tired, frightened, in
pain. The only capable men among them were boys who’d never fought
in their lives. They had no chance.

The palisade and spearmen
took down the first wave of creatures. Those creatures were varied,
large, small, serpentine, insectoid, nearly human. They drove
themselves into the palisade until it fell, threw themselves on
spears and took the men holding them to the Maelstrom with them.
They consumed the only strength the wounded knights and
legionnaires could muster, leaving easy pickings for the second
wave. And thanks largely to Jaret, that wave consisted almost
entirely of black humanoids with oily fur and enormous mouths lined
with needle teeth. The cousins of the thing that had tortured Jaret
in the Emperor’s care, he knew well the pain they could cause but
also the benefits it brought with it.

The rain fell harder,
building to a downpour, and Lius manipulated it. As the creatures
drove into the wounded with swords, axes, and knives meant to kill,
the men slipped away, falling in mud, buffeted by sudden wind, or
cast back by blinding flashes. And when their weapons missed, the
creatures turned to their nature. They bit. Gaping maws opened and
flashed down into shoulders and arms and necks. Men screamed,
howling in pain as the poison hit them. The creatures reveled in
that pain as rapture took them. They lost their purpose and bit
again, too overwhelmed by the ecstasy of it to finish the men
before them.

Lius turned his attention
to the stream. There were fewer of the creatures there now as the
majority had turned toward the easier and more tantalizing
opportunity presented by the frightened spearmen on their side of
the stream. Their screams soon added to the turmoil, echoing
through the pounding of the rain and rumble of thunder, drawing
ever more creatures to them.

But it was not going to be
enough to save Jaret. Despite the dwindling number of creatures and
every advantage the Order could afford him, he was nearly
overwhelmed. He was covered with gashes delivered by the creatures
even faster than Thagas’kuila’s poison could heal them. He limped
and staggered as a small lizard thing clamped onto his calf with
its razor teeth. Blocking a serrated sword on one side, he missed a
jagged club that smashed his arm on the other, sending it limp to
his side and taking him to his knees. His eyes turned to the stream
behind him, searching for the moment of his escape. It was supposed
to have happened by now. The pattern should have delivered him, and
if it didn’t come soon, even Thagas’kuila’s gift would not save
him.

Lius broadened his view,
looking out over the pattern he had created. It was a delicate
thing, created in only a few harried hours. And it had already
changed. Some of the strings had moved ever so slightly – a
squirrel darting the wrong direction, a rock rolling an inch too
far, a fly missing a spider’s web. It was enough to create a ripple
in the fragile pattern, enough to ruin everything.

Lius strained to connect
those possibility, to understand what had gone wrong, what he could
do to fix it. He had seen this storm coming. It had dumped torrents
of rain, had swollen the stream north of them to bursting, but that
water was being held by a beaver damn a mile away. Lius’
manipulations were supposed to result in that dam breaking. It was
supposed to have happened already, and if it didn’t soon, Jaret
Rammeriz was going to die. Panic pushed into the calm of Lius’
meditation, but there was nothing he could do now. A creature
looked toward him on his hill, sensing his growing fear. It would
have him in a second, would be on him. But there was nothing he
could do . There was no time, and the one thing a Weaver needed was
time. He opened his eyes, looked out over the misery before him,
and felt his control crumble.

The wind, rising to a howl
dislodged an ancient, nearly hollow cottonwood near where the
stream split around the camp. It took a pair of pines with it. The
crash of its fall was deafening even over the pounding of the
storm. The ground half a mile away shook as it struck. A small
creature with impossibly long arms abandoned its attempts to get
through Jaret and ran instead toward Lius’ hill, tracking the line
of the stream straight at him.

Lius let out a long slow
breath and said a prayer of thanks.

The water came. It slammed
into the fallen trees, was blocked from the western side of the
split and rushed in its entirety to the east. It burst over its
banks, surged down the hollow, and crashed toward Jaret, who was at
the creatures’ mercy.

Too
late
, Lius thought.
By the Order, it was too late.
A ten
foot tall creature smashed Jaret to the ground with a mighty
backhanded blow and followed with a mouth like that of an
alligator. Jaret’s injuries were too much even for the poison to
heal. The small thing still clung to his leg, shaking its head to
keep the wound open. One arm hung limp. Those alligator jaws would
take the other clean off, and no amount of healing poison would fix
it. And only twenty paces away the creature that would kill Lius
was coming. It had him in its sights, and there was nothing that
the monk could possibly do to stop it.

Jaret’s broken arm came
up. Healing just in time, it shot up and planted a dirk in the
creature’s throat as the jaws slid to the side. With a mighty cry,
Jaret swung down with his other hand. The sword cleaved the
creature on his leg, sent it and a chunk of his calf spinning into
the stream below. And with all the power he had left, Jaret
followed. He sprung to the bridge, bound across it in staggering
strides with three of the things close behind.

The water hit just as he
leapt the final feet. It caught him, spun his small body, and threw
him into a tree with a force that would have shattered his ribs if
not for the breastplate he wore. The bridge, a simple construct of
wood and rope, was swept away along with the creatures that had
been upon it and the opposite bank. The thing that was coming for
Lius was caught in the ropes of the bridge, tied and dragged under
the current as the water heaved up the side of the hill. And the
few remaining things on that bank gave up. They turned and fought
through a hail of falling branches and howling wind toward where
their fellows were butchering the spearmen who had been camping on
that bank.

At that same fortuitous
moment, three hundred other spearmen ran in from the west. They
tore into the creatures caught in the rapture of torturing the
defenseless men who had been left in the camp for that very reason.
They panted spears in the creatures almost before they could pull
themselves away. Yet the men they’d saved only continued to scream,
to howl and writhe in pain that shook the spearmen to their cores.
Their wounds closed, bones stitched, tendons reconnected. But the
cost of that healing was the most intense pain any man could ever
know, and they had no choice but to express it.

The rain pounded down,
lightning filled the sky, thunder shook the very ground, the wind
made it hard to stand. Trees and branches fell. The stream leapt
its banks to the northeast, sent water sloshing across the legs of
the men and creatures who fought there, threw them to the ground,
washed them into trees, battered them, killed them. Even if it had
been late, the pattern had worked exactly as it was supposed to.
The plan had been exactly the terrible success that it was supposed
to be.

Alone, watching it all
from the top of a small rise, Lius could not tell if the water
streaming down his face was from the rain or his tears.

#

The knights and
legionnaires stared still with wide eyes. Many held themselves as
if they might come apart from the shaking of their limbs. Others
simply stared at their hands or arms or feet where there had been
terrible injuries a few hours before. They flexed their hands,
moved their arms, prodded at their feet in disbelief then looked at
the black shapes around them, at the oily black fur, the beady
eyes, the huge mouths full of needles, and finally, at the heavens
above. Their bodies were healed, but their minds were shattered.
Not a one of them had ever experienced anything like the poison of
those creatures. Their previous injuries, even the pain of being
stretched on that field, had been as nothing compared to that
wrought by those creatures’ poison, and even now, they felt it
burning their blood.