The Hammer and the Blade (35 page)

  As soon as they crossed over the hills, the acridity in the air over the Wastes put a scratch in the back of Nix's throat. Waves of heat rose from the surface, as if the world were feverish. The thermals made it easy to soar at speed. He glanced down and the jumbled, ruined terrain reminded him of the skin of a pox patient soon to die – dry, discolored, lined with jagged cracks and bulbous pustules. He tried not to think too much about it.

  Using the setting sun as his guide, they flew west until Nix saw below them the enspelled road they'd followed. It stretched through the scarred terrain in a clean, straight line. Height provided perspective and in the distance Nix saw the other roads that joined it, the angles at which they met, the arcs the outer lines described. At first he did not believe what he saw. But it made sense. Four roads had come together at the cardinal points at the sea of glass.

  He angled higher to get a better view, scanned the terrain with his sharp eyes, and it only confirmed his initial thought. He cursed in amazement but it came out only as a squawk.

  The roads formed a shape, a shape he knew. He could not see the entirety of it, of course, but he could see leagues of it, and it was enough. The implication was clear. The roads were not roads at all. They were the lines of a binding cross, a circle divided into quadrants by perpendicular lines, a tool used to summon, contain, and constrain horrors.

  He squawked and cawed at Egil but the priest just made a confused squawk in response. Egil couldn't see it. Nix could see it, but he could hardly believe it.

  Almost the entirety of the Demon Wastes was circumscribed by a magic circle, an arcane symbol carved into the face of the world, a circle that delimited an area leagues in diameter.

  He tried to imagine the time and power it would have taken to scribe such a symbol, but could not wrap his thoughts around it. He struggled in vain to come up with a compelling reason to scribe it in the first place.

  His mind worried at the problem. Was it connected to Rakon's plan somehow? Could the circle be designed to contain the Vwynn? Or perhaps to hold some other horrors that slept under the broken land?

  Had the civilization that once ruled the lands have inadvertently awakened something under the earth, scribing the circle as a way to hold it, perhaps while they fled the region? Or had the civilization been trying to
draw
something toward Ellerth? Perhaps to use as a weapon?

  He looked skyward, in his mind's eye seeing magical energy reaching up from the circle and into the vault of night, into neighboring planes and dimensions, drawing and pulling creatures and magical esoterica from all over the vault of night. He imagined flaming objects shrieking toward Ellerth, drawn by the power of the symbol carved into the face of the world. He imagined balls of stone and metal and flesh and scales slamming into the surface, leaving the once-fertile plain a ruined waste inhabited by degenerate devils. He imagined slits in reality forming in the air, saw spirits and demons and devils slipping through, summoned by the symbol.

  He thought the idea fanciful, but then… he'd seen much. Anything was possible.

  He pushed it from his mind and gave it no more thought. He didn't need to know the purposes of the people who'd once ruled here. He knew Rakon's purpose, and that was purpose enough.

  They flew on in dour silence, chasing the sun, chasing the sisters, heading to the center of the binding cross, to the glass sea, where sat the prison of Abrak-Thyss.

  Nix stayed as high as he was able, hoping thereby to avoid the swarms of fiendish, bat-like creatures that patrolled the night skies of the Wastes.

  They eyed the air ahead, looking for the sylph and its cargo, their speed westward stretching the day's length. Frustratingly, they saw nothing. After a couple hours in the air, Nix felt his body tingle. He knew what it meant. He tried to curse, but the beak allowed only an angry squawk. He angled downward for the earth. The tingling increased and his body started to shift back, the magic unable to maintain such a foreign form for long. Egil followed him down and they alit on the rockscape of the Wastes as their bodies painfully reverted back to their normal form.

  "Shite!" Nix shouted.

  Egil held out his arms, checking his form, his gear. "What? Change us back. You still have the wand."

  "I need to touch the thing into which I change us, Egil. You see any gulls about?"

  "Shite," Egil said. He started to say something else but Nix held up his hand.

  "Don't! Don't!"

  "Damned gewgaws," Egil said with a grin.

  "Fak you."

  "I jest because this problem is easily solved," Egil said. "We find a flock of those winged things we encountered before. Touch one of those. Change, and continue the pursuit."

  "You call that easy? A flock of those nearly killed us all."

  "Aye," Egil said. "You have a better idea?"

  "No. Let's go find some. Wait…"

  "Wait what?"

  Nix checked his body, saw that the cut in his stomach was healed, most of his burns. "My wounds seem healed. Reconstituting after the transmutation must help the body heal."

  "I take back what I said about your gewgaws," Egil said.

  With that, they readied weapons and stalked off. The sun stared at them, red and orange, just hanging on over the horizon. The both knew that nightfall would bring the Thin Veil, and the Thin Veil promised horror.

  "The roads here aren't roads," Nix said to Egil, making conversation to distract himself. "They're the lines of a binding cross. I could see it from the air."

  Egil stared at him. "So what does that mean?"

  Nix made a helpless gesture. "I don't know."

  "Bah. Then stop worrying about it. It's ancient. Whatever happened here happened long ago. Ponder it when we next sit at the Altar of Gadd in the
Slick Tunnel
, yeah?"

  Nix nodded slowly, letting go of the problem. He appreciated his friend's pragmatism.

  "Aye. Let's find a hole and get airborne." 

 

 

 
 

They kept their eyes open for Vwynn, but saw none, saw nothing but the cursed red earth of the Wastes. After about a half-hour, they located a likely hole in the ground. The soft mound around the lip of the hole, bones and bonemeal, was spongy under their boots. Warm air emanated from the aperture, carrying with it a fetid, organic stink. Nix could hear distant rustling, a faint squeaking.

  They looked west, where the sun was about to fade under the horizon. Nix held the wand in one hand, his hand axe in the other. Egil had shed his cloak and held it in one hand. The priest looked to Nix.

  "We grab the first one we can, before the whole swarm gets clear," Nix said. "We change and we get the Hells clear."

  "Aye, that," Egil said. "Try not to get carried off this time."

  "I'll do what I can."

  The priest cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted down the hole. Squeaks and intense rustling sounded from deeper down in the hole. Nix had the eerie sensation of the entire earth shifting below his feet.

  "Ready, now," Nix said, tensing.

  They could hear the creatures moving, shrieking, but none emerged from the hole. Egil, holding his cloak at the ready, looked over at Nix with raised eyebrows. Nix shrugged, leaned over the hole. Lots of movement somewhere below, but nothing coming up.

  Suddenly the swarm burst from the earth ten paces to their left, a dark cloud of flapping wings, scales, and fanged mouths. A cacophony of their angry shrieks polluted the air. The cloud of the flock turned and wheeled toward them.

  "Shite!" Nix said. "There, Egil!"

  With nothing else for it, Egil and Nix ran straight toward them. Immediately Nix was swimming in an ocean of wings, shrieks, claws, and teeth. The creatures ripped clothing and flesh, tearing holes in Nix's skin, drawing blood. Nix flailed frenetically at the creatures, threw one to the ground, stomped it, struck another from before his eyes, took another by the throat and held it before him. He drew the wand and spoke a word in the Mages' Tongue. The wand warmed, the golden tip glowed, and he moved to touch the creature he held, but another of the creatures, perhaps drawn by the light, snatched the wand from his hand.

  "The wand!" Nix screamed, lunging after the creature. But the weight of the creatures that clung to him proved too much and his leap turned into a stumbling fall. He crushed a few rolling on the rock, but dozens more took their place and tore at any exposed skin. He rose to all fours, trying to spot the one that had taken the wand.

  Egil, covered in the creatures and bleeding all over, dove after the winged fiend bearing the wand, his cloak spread wide like a scoop. The priest enveloped the creature, hit the ground in a roll, his body crushing half a dozen of the creatures, and rose, soaked in his blood and theirs. His cloak, looped into a bag, bounced about from the movement of the creature's he'd caught.

  "Here, Nix!"

  Scores of the creatures swarmed them. Nix climbed to all fours, the creatures tearing at his flesh. He could barely see, so thickly they flew before his face. He stood, flailed through a fog of them.

  "Keep talking!"

  "Here, over here, here," Egil said.

  Nix grunted against the pain, killed the creatures where he could, and kept moving. He took care only to protect his eyes. Egil met him halfway and Nix stuck his hand into the priest's makeshift bag. He felt the wand and pulled it free, taking a bite on the hand from one of the captive creatures. He touched the wand's end to one of them and, without hesitating, touched the glowing end first to Egil then to himself. When his skin started to tingle, the magic taking hold, the swarm of creatures shrieked and fled off, perhaps sensing the unfolding magic.

  Bleeding, gasping, the two of them stared at one another as their human forms sloughed away and they transformed into creatures small, scaled, and winged.

  Nix's vision was not normal, nor sharp-eyed like the gull's form, but was instead a field of reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and blacks, and it took him a moment to realize that he was "seeing" temperature differences. He adjusted to the new sense as best he could, shrieked at Egil, and took wing to the west. He hoped the magic would last long enough to get them to the sea of glass.

  Of course, he wasn't sure what they'd do if they caught up with the sylph. They'd be stuck in the form of the scaled, winged creatures. Nix supposed he could annoy them to death with his shriek.

  Anticipating Egil's commentary, he rebuked himself.

  
Damned gewgaw
s, he thought.

 

The sylph bore Rakon and his sisters west, back over the cracked earth of the Wastes, knifing through the sky at speed. Rakon stood in the center of the sylph's swirl, supported by an invisible pillow of air.

  Winds howled and gusted all around him, the sylph ecstatic in its joyous, rapid flight. Rakon, too, was exultant. He held the Horn of Alyyk in his hands. Made by Abn Thuset, a note blown from the horn was said to break the strongest of binding wards.

  Perhaps Abn Thuset had intended to use it on the great ward of the Wastes, as a way to unleash the Vwynn on Afirion enemies. Perhaps the wizard-king had used it to free the creatures bound in the Wastes from time to time.

  In the end, Rakon didn't know and didn't care. He only knew that, if the secret histories he'd read were correct, he could use the horn to free Abrak-Thyss and save his house.

  Pressure built in his mind as they neared the center of the Wastes – his sisters' growing fear laying siege to his mental defenses. The drugs he'd given them must have been wearing off. Rusilla and Merelda had proven enormously resistant to his alchemy. Their terror gnawed at the edges of his mind, haunting his consciousness.

  They floated beside him, arms and legs limp, their hair and dresses spread out gently on the invisible bed of the sylph's winds. They looked like spirits, archons descending from the Three Heavens.

  He regretted the sufferings his sisters must endure, but he knew they would accept them in time, as his mother had. He'd enter into a false marriage with the more fertile of the two, and soon the Norristru line would be renewed, and his position, and that of his house, would be secure for another generation.

  The sylph gusted over the Wastes, covering miles in moments. The setting sun reddened the sky to the west. Minnear would rise full soon after sunset. The Veil between worlds would thin to a wafer.

  Ruins dotted the landscape below him, the gravestones of the dead civilization that no histories named. Ahead he saw the ring of ruins encircling the sea of glass. It glistened red in the setting sun, an ocean of blood.

  Vwynn coated the ring of ruins like flies on a corpse, thousands of them, lurking in what shade they could find among the jagged bones of stone. They must have crept forward to occupy the ruins after the caravan had left. And yet none dared touch the glass. Yet.

  They looked up, eyes glittering, and let out a collective snarl as the sylph descended onto the sea of glass. The winds of the sylph faded and Rakon put his feet down on the smooth surface. He felt the pressure of the Vwynn's regard like a physical thing. It was all around him, thick in the air, their anger a weight on his person.

  The fear projected by his sisters grew to panic, infected him, sped his heart. The Vwynn, too, seemed to feel it. It, too, was thick in the air. Motion in the dark places in which they sheltered spoke of their agitation: growls, snarls, the scrabble of claw on stone.

  "We'll need to leave immediately after freeing Abrak-Thyss," Rakon said to the sylph.

  The wind whispered the sylph's agreement.

  Rusilla's voice sounded in his head, penetrating his defense, a desperate plea from far off.
Don't… Rakon.