Windcatcher: Book I of the Stone War Chronicles (37 page)

As they looked at each other, the distance was less than a hundred feet, but it might as well have been a hundred miles. What became of the soldier, he did not know.

But Raylan would not be safe there forever; the sun would come up soon enough, and Corza would be able to come at him. The High General had the clear advantage, as he still had his sword, and Raylan’s leg obstructed free movement.

As Raylan tried to come up with a plan, Corza looked at him.

“We meet again, young soldier. I believe Raylan was your name, right?” said Corza. “It’s clear you’ve got nowhere to go. Why don’t you give up and go with me, quietly?”

Raylan did not answer. Looking at Corza, he felt his anger rise.

“What’s with that look? Have I done something wrong?” Corza said, laughing. “Tell you what…if you tell me where you hid the egg…I’ll let you go. No harm done.”

“You must be insane, if you think that I will give anything to you,” Raylan answered, while he got up to look around the rock formation he was on.

“Ah, he speaks,” Corza taunted. “How did you get here, then? Where are your friends? Did my wolves get the better of them?”

Raylan saw Corza grinning.

“Not really…your wolves should both be laying at the bottom of the river, somewhere,” said Raylan, in his most indifferent tone.

He saw the anger rise on Corza’s face. As Raylan looked around, he saw that a few small rocks actually led around the tree roots, out of sight of Corza’s prying eyes.

As he jumped off the other end of the rock, Raylan balanced himself on the small stone patches. Skipping from one to another, he heard Corza call after him.

“You can’t run far, boy! I’ll find you. That egg will be mine, and I will put you so deep in the mines, you won’t see any sunlight for the rest of your life.”

Moving around the corner, he saw that Corza was right. As he stood on the last stone, there was nowhere else to go. Even the tree roots were no help there. But he refused to return and give that weasel the satisfaction.

Let him wonder where I’ll be. Once first light breaks through, I’ll just have to make a run for it.

“Raylan, you’ll never make it,” Corza shouted. “Before long, reinforcements will be here. The Kzaktor will be dormant again, and I’ll have my hands on you faster than a whore can lift her dress for a bag of gold.”

As the night went on, Corza kept yelling at him, trying to get a reaction. Raylan almost spoke up a few times, but bit his tongue, looking everywhere for a way out.

As he saw the moonlight fade away and the small patches of sky started to show its morning colors, he was ready to make his move. He picked up a rock and threw it some way out. Instantly, the sand snaked toward it and the rock was swallowed into the ground. He would have to wait longer.

As he let out his breath, slowly trying to think, his ears registered a soft sound.

“Pssst…”

Looking around, he did not see anything.

“Pssst….up…here…”

The language was poor Terran. As he turned around, he saw Otis, dangling along the side of the tree, only fifteen feet above him. A smile broke out on Raylan’s face.

Without a sound, Otis went back up into the tree. Once up there, he lowered the cable down again, allowing Raylan to attach it to his harness. Raylan gave three small tugs to the cable and immediately he felt the cable tighten, as he was lifted off his feet.

As he ascended toward the lowest branch, he kept close to the tree trunk, so Corza could not see him. The sun was coming up, and by the time he pulled himself onto the branch, he saw a number of soldiers on horses approaching their position.

Corza finally left his safe refuge, ordered one of the soldiers from his horse and mounted up, right away. They moved around the tree where Raylan had waited the entire time and found nothing. Corza was furious.

“Find him!”

They heard him bark orders as the soldiers sped off in different directions. While Raylan followed them with his gaze, Otis quickly packed up his backpack and quietly motioned Raylan to follow him back to the others. It was clear Corza wouldn’t be able to find him any time soon.

It was midmorning by the time they all found each other again.

In order to find Raylan, the group had decided to split up to cover more ground. They made sure one of the descender carriers was always in visual range of any person that did not have one. By following the chase noises, they had set out in the most likely direction, trying to keep up with the horses on the ground.

“It was a good thing you circled back a number of times, or the distance would have been too big to bridge,” said Sebastian.

As they had moved away from the known tree paths, they moved a lot slower, as they needed to traverse at different heights and search for suitable routes to follow in the general direction of the chase. In the end, it had been Corza’s own shouting and taunting that had helped Otis locate Raylan on the far side of the tree.

Gavin grabbed Raylan by the back of the neck with both hands and pulled him forward, touching foreheads.

“You just have a knack for getting into trouble, don’t ya?” Raylan heard his brother say.

Raylan laughed, sheepishly.

“Sorry about that…”

“Just be thankful you didn’t end up in Corza’s hands. I promise you, you wouldn’t have liked the company,” remarked Sebastian, as they quickly redistributed the food haul into equal loads.

“You know who he is?” Raylan asked. “He’s the same person who attacked us, some weeks ago. He turned on his own group, before sending out these monstrous wolves made of stone after us.”

“Stone wolves? Are you sure they were made of stone? Were there ghol’ms, too?” Sebastian asked worried.

“Ghol’ms? What are ghol’ms?”

“Stone statues, black as night…but they move…they…live,” Sebastian explained, while searching for the right words to describe the walking terrors.

“Svetka once said that her father told her a story when she was little…this was before she was captured and made a sex slave. Her father used to travel a lot when she was little, coming back with all kinds of stories. This particular one was about an ancient religion in the southern regions of the mid-continent.

“This religion had a guardian of red clay to protect the innocent from harm. But the guardian was corrupted by the men who sought power and it went on a rampage. It was eventually calmed down by a peasant woman with the purest devotion to the religion’s god. The guardian then crumbled and formed the mountain that oversees the red earth plains in that region.

“That guardian was called ‘gholem’ or ‘ghol’m’. That’s where we think the name comes from, but these things are no guardians…they’re too good at destroying…everything…”

“Well, we fought a stone warrior before encountering the wolves, if that’s what you mean,” said Raylan, “but we saw only the wolves; no stone warriors were there when he tried to capture us...Why? Who
is
he?”

“Like I said, that’s High General Setra…Corza Setra. He climbed up the ranks by killing and backstabbing, and, apparently, because of his skill with strategic planning. Or so everyone told me in the mines. He’s got no regard for human life, whatsoever……especially if that life is in the way of whatever he wants at the time. He visited the mines and quarry often. And after each visit, new stories of terror would always buzz around in the tunnels.”

Sebastian looked at them and let out a sigh.

“You’ve made yourself a dangerous enemy, if he’s got it out for you, personally. This man has experimented on humans to find out what makes us tick and how to greatly extend suffering in the process. He is thought to have created the ghol’ms, although I personally think he just took credit for someone else’s work.”

“He created them? How can a man even do that? Is it some kind of magic?”

“It might as well be. No one knows how it works, precisely. But by piecing things together from stories, we know life is taken to give life to the statue.”

“We’ve seen this. One of the soldiers sacrificed himself before the statue started to move,” said Raylan.

“Well, that’s not what is normally done. They can sacrifice anybody to get the statue moving.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Gavin.

Sebastian looked at him with hollow eyes.

“Because they forced us to make them…That’s the purpose of the mines. It is a ghol’m production site…”

Both Gavin and Raylan fell silent at this point. The idea of more of these statues being created somewhere was a very unpleasant thought, and it was clear Sebastian did not feel fully comfortable talking about it.

“We better get moving. We still have a long ways to go,” he said, while getting up.

Chapter 12

Sacrifice

Galirras looked up at the sky. With the wind gently blowing, the leaves parted enough for the stars to be seen every now and then. He heard people softly talking. The nighttime meant minimal lights and low sounds. Most of the people in the tree settlement remained indoors or went to sleep early.

The young dragon tried to do the same, but he could not sleep anymore. He had just woken up from a dream and felt restless. He did not know precisely what he had dreamed about, but it felt like he was awakened by a song.

He had been feeling uneasy ever since Raylan left. It was very well pleasant to talk to Xi’Lao and he enjoyed meeting Galen, earlier that week. But, they were merely brief distractions from the fact Raylan was not here.

Galen had told him all about the wolf attack he survived. The dragon heard the story before, multiple times, from different people, but he did not want to be rude and interrupt. The large man grew tired after his recollection of events, and Richard had coaxed him back to bed—to rest up and to be ready, in case they would be leaving when Gavin, Raylan and the others got back.

The problem was that Galirras was not allowed to move at all. His body grew restless and it became more difficult to find a comfortable position on the platform. He was under permanent guard even when he slept, but at least they were not constantly pointing their crossbows at him, anymore.

On the first day—after Raylan left—he had tried talking to the guards, but they had ignored him, either out of a sense of duty or out of fear. He had half-expected the fear, which he still found strange because he did not seem that scary to himself.

For the last few days, Galirras had put a lot of effort and practice into improving his wind manipulation, being careful he was not seen. He was mildly pleased with the amount of progress he had made, although he still got tired quicker than he would have liked. Playing around with leaves and flames had become relatively easy, so as a challenge, he had searched for something bigger. He had found it, when he saw the children playing with a ball made of straw.

Asking them over, they had given in to their curiosity; though, some of them needed some convincing. They had approached the edge of the platform, where they threw the ball to him from a safe distance. He had nudged the ball back a few times with his head, making sure it did not accidentally end up falling off the platform. Just when the children became more comfortable with him, Svetka had shown up and rebuked them for coming close to such a dangerous animal. They had darted away at the first sound of her voice, and left their ball in their rushed retreat.

From that moment on, Galirras had used the ball for practice. At first, it had not moved at all, so he experimented with different streams and approaches, using larger areas of air to funnel into a tighter stream. After an afternoon of practicing, he had been able to move the ball at least six feet. But during the night, after he had slept, he improved his technique some more and easily directed the ball all around the platform.

Having now mastered the movement of the straw ball, Galirras found himself alone—and still confined to the platform—for the fourth night in a row. He absentmindedly pushed short bursts of air out of his nostrils, manipulating the moving air into small bubbles and rings of sparkles. The shapes got bigger as they floated upward. He tried different techniques and speeds of moving air. He wished others could see the shapes he was able to make, but it seemed Raylan was not the only one who did not see the small sparkling air particles. In fact, none in their group were able to see it.

Perhaps it really is a dragon thing.

Galirras felt his stomach rumble. He wanted to hunt. They had given him some small game, but now he wished he had not eaten everything at once. He could use a nice, juicy deer. His stomach answered with a rumble, as he felt saliva drip out of the side of his mouth.

For a moment, he considered waking up Richard to ask for more food, but decided against it in the end. Instead, his attention was drawn to small, high-pitched beeps, which seemed to be coming from some small-winged, furry creatures. They differed in size, but were rarely larger than the kinds of birds he had eaten before. He tried to grab one out of the air, but it somehow dodged him at the last moment. He tried a couple more times, but every time, the small creatures were either too fast or were able to steer clear of his jaws.