The Legend of Asahiel: Book 03 - The Divine Talisman (26 page)

She rocked him gently, whispering still, and turned forward once more. With her first step toward the trees, the boy buried his face in her shoulder.
Allion could see the lad trembling, his arms so tight about Marisha’s neck that it seemed he might choke her. But the healer nodded that she was fine, and so they rejoined the camp’s flow.

Its passage seemed louder here, sounds echoing amid the trunks, netted by the branches and leaves. Allion kept one eye on Marisha, to make sure she and the boy were all right. With the other, he searched for birds and ground animals—rodents or squirrels or a mouthwatering hare. But he saw only insects—and few enough of those. He hoped that those sent to forage their distant flanks would not find the land so completely deserted. The ministers he’d spoken to had claimed sufficient food stores to keep this host fed for up to six days. Unfortunately, they had already been on the march for three, and had yet to cross Partha’s lands by half. If forced to march all the way to Kuuria, as now feared, further emphasis would have to be placed on rationing and supplementing their existing stores.

They churned on without event, until the monotony and Allion’s weariness began again to dull his senses. This time, instead of sailing an ocean, he was aflight amid mountain slopes, buffeted by windblown snows—great icy flakes tinged with pink. He wasn’t certain of his destination, only that he could not rest until he had reached it. And wherever it was, it remained a long way off.

Then he heard the thunder, distant peals that nevertheless threatened his winging course. The winds strengthened, seeming to wail.

“Allion. Allion!”

His eyes snapped wide. Marisha gripped his arm, her face urgent. The other still held the boy, who shook now as if they really were caught in a snowstorm.

The crowd was astir, and small wonder. From somewhere ahead and to the northwest, on their right flank, came the clangor of weapons and the blare of horns calling for additional arms. In response, the civilian throng was gathering tight and edging south through the trees like a herd beset by predators.

“Come,” Allion said, taking her by the arm and joining the crush. It was either that or be swept under by it. He could tell by the size and swiftness of the swell, the intensity of the crowd’s terror, that whatever had caused this wave was perhaps the largest attack they had faced yet. Child or no, he might have cut against the rush, to join those battling upon the northern fringe, but there was also the southern flank to consider. He had promised to look after the position abandoned by Gage’s squad—and it was time to do so. While the small packs of Illychar encountered over the past few days had shown no capacity for coordinated attacks, Allion couldn’t help but wonder what this people might be running so heedlessly into.

His fears proved true when—from almost on top of him, it seemed—an elf dropped from one of the apple trees. Had he been its target, he would have been dead before he knew what hit him. Instead, it was a man beside him who spun and fell back into his own pushcart, blood pulsing from a flayed throat.

Allion slipped from beneath his ready bow and notched an arrow to the
string. By then, the elf was gone, having killed again before scrabbling up the tree’s trunk and leaping from its branches to those of another.

The hunter let that one go, for there were more, he now saw, dropping like rotted fruit. He caught one through the throat as its spear found a woman’s heart, and shot a second through the cheek, disrupting a swordthrust that would have gutted an old man.

They were not all elves, either. A scythe came whistling around a narrow trunk, gripped in the hands of a man who months before was no doubt using it to harvest wheat. His flesh was pale, but not yet shriveled or putrid. Perhaps after a few thousand years…

Allion’s arrow plunged into the man’s eye socket. If the coil did last that long, its eventual wearer would not be using that orb to see. He turned back to Marisha then, who was rushing with the child back toward a group that had halted its retreat and was forming up around the base of an empty tree. There, she put the child down and drew her knife, shoving the boy safely behind her.

All around, others were doing the same, healers and farmers and tradesmen coming together and brandishing what weapons they had. Shrieks of terror and wails of sorrow were giving way, he noticed, to furious shouts and spontaneous commands. Carts and wagons were thrown together to form makeshift barricades, from behind which longbows hummed. A shattered people, perhaps, but not one that would surrender what little they had left without a fight.

A bloody mess ensued, continuing unabated for several long, frantic moments. As many fell under friendly fire, Allion feared, as under the blades and shafts wielded by their enemies. Little by little, however, their formations tightened, becoming more organized. Soon after, their superior numbers began to overwhelm those who came at them, killing the most reckless marauders and sending the rest back into the mists. A company of legion soldiers from farther back along the line streamed forward, some ahorse, all armed and armored. Their arrival hastened the Illychar departure and swiftly secured their breached position.

Not swiftly enough
, Allion noted, surveying the carnage. Scores lay dead, and many of those wounded would soon join them. He spotted only a few elves, known to be Illychar. Among the humans, it would take longer to discern which bodies had belonged to friends, and which had been foes. A small-scale slaughter, perhaps, but one that overwhelmingly favored the enemy in terms of cost.

A hand took his. He found Marisha, blood smeared upon her knife. She had not been kept from the fighting. From the north, the sounds of battle still rang, but these, too, had slackened. It seemed the hour was won.

The cries of grief and denial began at once, long before the moans had a chance to subside. Even as soldiers hacked apart the most stubborn of the fallen Illychar, husbands mourned wives, mothers their children, sisters their brothers. Many more dashed about, seeking those who were missing, just now
realizing, in some cases, that those who had marched beside them were gone.

“Come,” Marisha said, tugging firmly, determined as always to save those she could.

Allion resisted momentarily, waiting to make sure that the blood-soaked ground had in fact been made safe. One body looked much the same as the rest, and he feared that one she might bend to help would in fact be an enemy, waiting to slit her throat.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Though he had only meant to stall, he realized suddenly that someone was missing. “Where’s the boy?”

“With the others,” she said, turning to point.

But when she looked back, she must not have seen him, for she began to cast about worriedly. Allion did so with her. Together, they hurried over to the rally point where she was certain she had left him.

“Right here,” she insisted, an edge of despair creeping into her voice.

“You,” she said, tugging at an old man’s sleeve. “There was a boy among you, blond curls, this tall.” She gestured. “Did you see where he slipped off to?”

The old man grunted and shook his head, eyeing her dagger and pulling free of her clutching grasp. She might have gone after him, but Allion put a hand on her arm, drawing her about.

A sickening warmth stirred in his gut, yet somehow he made himself show her what he had found. Marisha gasped, then rushed ahead, pushing through those that came between her and where the boy lay facedown—draped like a bloody rag atop a corpse.

She dropped and seized him by the shoulders, turning him about. To their relief, the child resisted, wrenching free to embrace the body he had found. A woman’s body, Allion observed, too pale for one who had just died, with hair that might have been the same color as the boy’s own, were it not for the dirt and blood that caked and clotted its tangled strands.

Marisha covered her mouth in horror. “Allion,” she whispered, “do you think…?”

The woman’s skull had been smashed. Half her face was missing. But that which remained had the same color of eye, and her tunic was of the same coarse wool, dyed blue and green like the boy’s own. It was impossible to tell for sure, but Allion knew what Marisha was thinking.

This could well have been the child’s mother.

Certainly, the boy’s tears seemed to suggest as much, his wracking, voiceless sobs telling them plainly that at the very least, the Illychar
resembled
someone dear to him. And in the eyes of a traumatized five-year-old, perception meant as much as truth.

Marisha covered the lad, lending what silent support she could. Allion realized then that he, too, was trembling, and made a fist to steady his hand. He felt a hardening within, as though his sorrow and pain were a mortar cured by the heat of his rage. He would accept no blame for
this
. Whatever his role in the Illysp’s emergence, he refused to hold himself responsible for
such atrocities. Killangrathor, Torin, the Sword—none of it need ever have happened. Had he and Jarom followed directions in the very beginning, had his headstrong friend not insisted that finding the Sword was the only way to oppose the wizard—

“That one dead?” a voice asked brusquely.

Allion whirled. The collectors had arrived. “Butchers,” they’d been dubbed, and with good reason. The ministers and commanders had agreed: Flames would draw more attention than they dared. So too would the clouds of carrion-eaters come to feast on any left out in the open. The only way to deal with their slain was to chop them up and bury the scraps—beneath the earth, or beneath mounds of stone, whichever was more readily available. A cruel and shameless desecration, but better that than letting Illysp take them.

“A moment’s pity, I beg you,” Marisha pleaded.

“A moment may be all they need to strike again,” one of the butchers replied callously, taking the dead woman by the wrist. “The whelp can come and watch, if he’d like, though I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“There’s plenty of dead to gather,” Allion snapped. “This one can set aside for now.”

“So says half we come across,” the butcher’s partner argued. “’Fraid pity’s out of season.”

Allion could have throttled the men for their uncompromising gruffness. But his own anger was misdirected, and he knew it. For he understood now where all of this had truly begun, and who must answer for it.

He put a hand on Marisha’s shoulder, and drew her gaze. There were others who still had a chance if given immediate attention. They were wasting time here—though he prayed she would not make him speak such coldhearted words.

She didn’t, choosing instead to pry the boy’s fists from the dead woman’s clothes and pull him aside. One of the butchers had already signaled to a nearby “griever”—priests and clerics, mostly, whose unenviable task it was to console the inconsolable, and to clear the way for the butchers to do their grisly work. This one was a great burly man who nevertheless spoke to the quivering boy in soothing tones as he bore the child away.

Marisha looked after him for a moment, then set her jaw and moved to attend her own tasks.
It will be all right
, Allion wanted to tell her, but knew that it wouldn’t. Not until all of this suffering had been accounted for. Not until those responsible for it had been destroyed utterly.

As he strode wordlessly on Marisha’s heels between a pair of trees, he couldn’t help glancing back at the collectors as they hauled off that dead woman—and at the many other teams piling corpses amid the lanes of that orchard. As her tangled hair scraped across the ground, gathering mud and leaves and fallen apple blossoms, a simmering vow began to build within the hunter’s mind.

Perhaps the Illysp would never be stopped. Perhaps this scourge would indeed continue until it had claimed each of them, reducing those with bodies
to slavering demons, and the rest of them to ashes or useless scraps of flesh. But if the gods granted him the power to fulfill just one oath before he met his own end, he knew now what that must be.

By his own hand if none other, Torin would be destroyed.

H
E WATCHED HER STROLL AWAY
from him with an ache in his breast, and his gaze trailed longingly after. Then she turned, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and gave her little dance, her lithe frame frisking in place to a silent melody. Her smile flashed—a wondrous, dazzling smile meant only for him. The expression she wore was as mischievous as it was beautiful. Lips parted, and her words spilled forth: “Welcome home, Immortal One.”

Though spawned by his own imagination, the message caught Torin by surprise. The memory itself was more than familiar, an image he must have relived a thousand times over. Unalterable, save for the words. Those were different every time. Gazing now with a fiend’s eyes upon the dark, forested cliffs appearing through the clouds below, it was not difficult to imagine what had caused her to speak these ones.

Yawacor.

Home.

An unbidden feeling, yet easy enough to trace. His time upon these shores had been marred by strife and bloodshed and failure. And yet, he had discovered here persons and places that had resonated so strongly within that it seemed as if they must have somehow been a part of him all along. Upon departure, he had known only regret, the burning need to see what more he might be leaving behind. To see these shores again was like watching the first rays of sun cut through the clouds after a storm, touching his soul with warmth and peace.

An absurd notion, given his reluctance to set foot upon these lands to begin with. Even more so, given the conditions under which he made his return. Yet he welcomed the feeling nonetheless, basking in the wonder of hopes refreshed and memories bestirred. For they were all he had that remained his own, his only protection from the pain.

He had been relying upon such memories for some time now—more and more each day. Unable to cope with the mayhem unleashed and murders committed, he had slipped deeper within, where the horror of his own deeds was less likely to reach him. It was here that Dyanne waited, she whom his Illysp self did not yet know anything about. Images of their brief time together flitted through his mind. And with each visit, each memory relived, he felt a little less the monster he had become, and more the person he wished to be.