When the Heavens Fall (63 page)

Another rumble of thunder sounded. No, not thunder, the ground was shaking. An earthquake? As the tremors grew in intensity, the waves breaking on the shore started to swell. A hundred paces ahead light blossomed in the depths of the lake, first white, then yellow, then deepening through orange to red. Flames? In the middle of a lake? No, that couldn't be right. And yet suddenly the water was boiling and bulging like a hot spring as something ascended from the depths. Vapor rose in hissing clouds as a fiery shape broke the surface, and within the flames Parolla saw twin pits of blackness that might have been eyes, long arms ending in blazing swords, wings tucked tight to narrow shoulders.

A flicker of fear tugged at her guts. A wave an armspan high came rolling toward her as if the water itself were fleeing the arrival of the creature. Parolla took several quick steps back from the edge of the lake, but the wave still caught her, climbing the shore and spilling onto the road to swirl round her legs. Water poured into her boots. It was several heartbeats before the wave started to recede, pulling at her legs as it retreated.

Tumbal Qerivan materialized beside her. When she glanced across she found him staring at the creature with a look of awe.

“
Sirrah,
what is that thing?”

“A tiktar, my Lady. An elderling from before the dawn of the First Age. I had thought them all dead.”

“No doubt they are,” Parolla snapped. “Can you not sense the thread of death-magic holding it?”

Tumbal inclined his head. “Of course. In my excitement, I was not thinking. Never did I imagine I would behold such a wonder in the flesh.”

“I expect you'll be seeing it at much closer quarters soon.”

“Thou must flee, my Lady. The elderling's strength is formidable.”

Parolla did not need to be told. She had felt the unveiling of the tiktar's power like a slap in the face. It seemed she'd been too quick to dismiss the threat offered by Mayot's undead servants. It seemed the old man might even have fed her some easy meat in the settlement to make her lower her guard. “Flee,
sirrah
?” she said, her gaze settling on the elderling's wings. “What is the point? It would chase me down easily enough.”

The tiktar unfurled its wings and lifted itself clear of the lake with a single flap. Even from this distance Parolla could feel the resulting disturbance in the air. Did the elderling's presence here explain the dearth of Vamilians in this part of the forest? Had the creature been lying in wait for her?

“What do you know about these tiktars?” she asked Tumbal.

The Gorlem blew out his cheeks. “Little, sadly. One of the elder races, without question. Sired, so the ancient writings claim, in the fiery tears of the god Hamoun. Legend has it they were hunted to extinction by the Antlered God himself…”

Parolla was no longer listening. The tiktar had risen to the height of the treetops, its head turning from side to side as it searched for something.

“Move away from me,” she said to Tumbal.

The Gorlem did as he was bid.

Parolla gathered her power and wove wards about herself. A shadow settled on her vision, dampening the glow of the tiktar's aura. The elderling's head snapped round, and as its gaze locked to Parolla's she felt the strength of its will, the depths of its cunning. Within her the darkness simmered, and she found her fear draining away. She gave a slow smile. In the settlement she'd wondered if there were any among Mayot's servants who could challenge her. Now she was about to find out.
Come on, then. What are you waiting for?

As if in answer, the tiktar gave a triumphant shriek. Casting its power out before it like a battering ram, it angled its wings and dived.

But not at Parolla.

It was only then that she saw Andara Kell, mounted on his horse halfway round the lake to her left. His outline was small at such a distance, and Parolla might easily have missed him were it not for the glittering wards of death-magic that suddenly flared about him. Wrestling with his horse's reins, he drew his sword. A wave of black sorcery flashed from it to meet the tiktar's dive. As it hit home the elderling gave another shriek, of rage this time, but it did not slow its descent. It streaked toward its target, trailing flames like a comet.

Andara's retreating horse took him behind a cluster of trees and out of Parolla's sight. She did not therefore see the instant when the tiktar struck, simply heard it as a
whoosh
as of a barrel of blayfire oil catching light. Picking her way through the dead animals on the bank, she moved forward for a better look. When the combatants came into view again she saw Andara's horse go up in flames. Its cries sounded across the lake until a single swing of one of the tiktar's swords cut it in half.

Andara had already thrown himself clear, and he came to his feet in time to parry a cut from the tiktar's other blade. A flurry of blows from the elderling drove him back into the trees, and his attacker followed, setting fire to the trunks nearby. The combatants disappeared from sight once more.

Parolla chuckled.
And to think I believed the ambush was meant for me.
Such conceit. And yet, something told her she had not seen the last of the tiktar. For in the heartbeat their gazes had met, Parolla had felt an unmistakable sense of threat in the elderling's look, like a warning of intent. If it succeeded in defeating Andara, she suspected it would come for her next.

She looked at Tumbal. “Can Andara win? Can he defeat that thing?”

The Gorlem shrugged helplessly. “How can I say? I know even less of Shroud's disciple than I do of the elderling.” His expression brightened. “Perhaps we should stay to—”

“No,” Parolla cut in. “Whoever should win here, I would be foolish indeed to pass up this chance to slip away. With luck the two of them may keep each other busy long enough for me to finish my business with Mayot.”

Tumbal's face fell, but he bobbed his head. “As thou say'st, my Lady. Thou art correct, of course.”

Returning to the road, Parolla pulled off her boots and emptied them of water. A final look at the burning trees along the road to her left, then she turned to the Gorlem.

“I think we'll take the right fork,
sirrah
.”

*   *   *

A group of undead spearmen stood between Luker and Chamery, and the Guardian detonated his Will in their midst, hurling them from his path. Chamery was whirling his staff in a circle, spraying sorcery in every direction and laughing all the while. One of the waves of power flashed toward Luker, and he threw up a Will-shield, ground his teeth as the death-magic slammed into it. An accident, that attack? This once, Luker would give the boy the benefit of the doubt.

As his horse butted another undead from its path, the Guardian sheathed his left sword and reached out to Chamery. Grasping the mage's outstretched hand, he hauled him onto the mare behind. The contact left Luker's fingers numb, and he shook out his hand, already regretting his decision to come to the boy's help. If Chamery turned on him now, unleashed everything he had at close quarters …

Luker swung his horse round.

Merin and Jenna were no more than a flicker of movement between the trees to the north, and Luker spurred his mount toward them. Half a dozen Vamilians blocked his way. As he gathered his Will to scatter them, Chamery's left hand appeared in his peripheral vision. A crackle of sorcery briefly drowned out the mage's laughter, and a burst of death-magic flashed from his fingertips toward the Vamilians, burning them to ash before rolling on to shear through the base of a tree. As the trunk toppled, another volley of sorcery tore into it, and Luker rode through a rain of glowing cinders and splinters of wood.

“Watch it!” he shouted over his shoulder. “One stray burst and you'll hit the others.”

Chamery's only response was another laugh. Luker wished someone would let him in on the joke; he was struggling to see anything funny about their predicament.

He could make out Merin and Jenna more clearly now, fighting back-to-back against a constricting ring of attackers, and the Guardian wondered if the tyrin still objected to her coming along. Jenna thrust the point of her spear into the throat of one of her assailants. It lodged there, and the weapon was torn from her hands as the Vamilian fell to the ground. She pulled a dagger from the baldric across her chest and sent it spinning into the eye of another spearman. The Vamilian did not so much as break stride.

“Keep moving!” Luker called, not knowing if the assassin could hear him.

From the north a group of undead was closing on his companions, two four-armed spearmen at the front. The Guardian urged his horse to greater speed. A Vamilian warrior jumped into his path, and Luker's right sword flashed out to sever the man's sword arm. Another undead reared up, ahead and to his left, but when Luker tried to unsheathe his blade on that side, he found his fingers—still numb from the contact with Chamery's hand—could not clutch the weapon's hilt tightly. The half-drawn sword slipped back into its scabbard.

The mare veered into the Vamilian, trampling him underfoot.

At that moment Merin reached into his belt pouch. There was a glimmer of white as he pulled out a glass globe.

“Shroud's pity, man, wait!” Luker yelled.

But either the tyrin did not hear his words or chose to ignore them, for his arm snapped out and the globe went sailing through the air at the approaching four-armed warriors.

Odds were, Merin had never witnessed the power of the globes firsthand, but Luker had, and the experience with the Kalanese soulcaster had taught him that if you wanted to avoid getting caught in the sorcerous backlash, you'd better throw the damned thing as far as your arm would take it. And how far was the globe going to fly with trees on every side?

He reached out with his Will to catch it.

A spear came hurtling toward him from between the trees. No time to sway out of the way. As he batted it aside with a flick of his mind, his concentration on the globe faltered.

It smashed against the bole of a tree, barely two dozen paces ahead of Merin and Jenna.

Not far enough.

There was a rip of air, then the roar of a storm-tossed sea. A huge wall of gray water, taller than the tops of the trees, appeared at the point where the globe landed and went thundering away in the direction of Merin's throw. The trunks in its path snapped like twigs, and the approaching group of undead vanished beneath the towering swell just as Luker drew level with Merin and Jenna. He halted. The ground was shaking as if a troop of cavalry were bearing down on them. A smaller wave came foaming and crashing through the trees—smaller, but still big enough to loom over Luker in the saddle. To make him wonder why he was sitting here when he could have been fleeing the other way. What was the point in trying to run, though? Better chance of outrunning old age.

Gathering his Will, he fashioned it into a barrier in front of the party. Merin and Jenna, unaware of the invisible wall now shielding them, turned in their saddles and braced themselves for the water's impact.

The wave hit Luker's Will-barrier with a force that made him wince, throwing jets of spray into the air that came splattering down on the Guardian moments later. He blinked water from his eyes. To either side of his shield the wave swept past in a white-flecked tide, plucking Vamilians from their feet. One man was lifted high and folded round a branch. Another was driven into a trunk with bone-breaking force. He tried to grip the wood as the water churned about him, but he was dragged free and sent rolling and spinning to thump into another tree.

Suddenly Luker realized he hadn't extended his Will-barrier behind the party, too. Water now came sloshing round the legs of the horses, and Merin's mount tottered sideways into the invisible shield. Luker's mare whickered and reared. He felt a weight slide from the animal's rump, heard a curse and a splash as Chamery landed in water. The Guardian grunted.
Well enough.
The boy could do with cooling down.

As quickly as the wave had come, it began to subside, leaving the ground submersed like the party had stumbled into a bog. Luker spat out a mouthful of water. It tasted of salt. He was as wet as if someone had emptied a barrel over his head. Still, things could have been a lot worse. As he recalled, Merin hadn't even looked at the globe when he took it from his belt pouch. Might have picked fire instead of water.

Letting his Will-barrier fall, the Guardian turned to survey the devastation. The closest Vamilians were fifty paces behind, bedraggled but mostly unharmed. Even now they were clambering to their feet and reaching for weapons. The section of forest ahead had borne the brunt of the water-magic. The first wave—the bigger one—had created a rough clearing a stone's throw across, littered with branches and the stumps of shattered trees. Fish twitched on patches of clear ground. Fish trapped inside the globe when the wave was caged?

Luker had seen stranger things in his time, he supposed.

Movement to the north snared his attention, and he saw a hooded swordsman splashing toward him. The stranger's cowl concealed the upper part of his face, but a neatly trimmed beard was visible on his chin. One of the undead, Luker realized, for he could sense a thread from the Book emerging from the man's chest. The figure wore black leggings and boots, and an unadorned leather breastplate beneath a cloak of gray wool.

Something familiar about him.

With a growing sense of unease, Luker noticed the swordsman's clothes were dry. The stranger could only have been a short distance from the globe when it smashed, so how in Shroud's name was he still standing when everyone else had been carried away? And why wasn't he wearing the same robes and antique armor as the other Vamilians?

The man raised his hands and pulled back his hood.

The air crawled in Luker's throat.