Blackhand (29 page)

He saw Aul look toward the legion of Abanshi and Vaerian soldiers before her and his eyes followed. The chain of men stretched beyond the horizon. The vanguard had left yesterday afternoon, while the last warpacks were just departing. There were eighty thousand men, thirty thousand horses and five thousand wagons. The column was a day’s ride in length. He could tell she did not like his desire to avoid bloodshed. His strategy clashed with her Abanshi spirit.

“The Abanshi and the Forestlands have been at war for a thousand years,” she said. “I wouldn't count on their cooperation. If diplomacy were an option, we would not have assembled the greatest army in history. At some point, you will have to fight. You have forced the divine piece to your will before, you can do it again. Grief is the god's weakness, not yours.”

Quintel did not answer. He didn't want Aul to know his intentions if a battle erupted. She would find them cowardly. If he could not get the two armies to bypass each other, he planned to flee, putting as much distance between himself and the conflict as he could. From there he would make his way to Sirian Ru without the liability of his human allies. And then he did not know what he would do.

At the Iron Gate, the procession was delayed. The canyon pass had been sealed by the avalanche machines and boulders choked the way. Engineering crews worked for days to clear a path wide enough for the wagons, finally resorting to building a makeshift bridge over the debris. Many more of the black power stones were collected from among the crushed Thogs. Some of the creatures still possessed movement in their pulverized limbs. The Abanshi and Vaerians hacked at their torsos until the stones came loose. In time, the column moved forward.

The army entered the great emptiness and began the trek toward the Forestlands. Quintel had taken the same path many years before during his banishment. He had almost died then, but now hunger, fatigue and dehydration meant nothing to him. This was not true for the thousands of men and horses who traveled with him. 

Soon the roads would disappear and bottomless fissures would mar the land before them. To overcome this barrier, a great tunnel, many miles long, had been cut beneath the worst stretch of the broken terrain centuries earlier. Smooth trails and stores of supplies filled the tunnel's hollow center. In a few days, they would descend into the manmade cavern, shortening their journey while maintaining the companionship of their stocks.

As he followed the column, Quintel again questioned his decision to join the attack. He felt he should be wandering the wilderness, away from humans, mastering the great being within him. Not marching in a column of armored warriors.  He felt he should be seeking out the Lanya.

But when would Ru again be at such a disadvantage? What new creatures would the god build if he left the field? What mistakes would he correct in his design?

Quintel had seen the answer to his dilemma in Ru's own heart.  He knew the time to move was now. He knew he had no choice.  Yet the knowledge did not succor him.

As the army crawled forward, Quintel stayed close to Aul. He could have bypassed the column, but he wanted to see her light and hear her voice. Her confidence blazed and gave him comfort. She had donned the mantle of a queen again, but deep within her heart, he saw passion burning for him. And he liked it.

And what of his own passion? He had been consumed by its flame, drowned in its fluids. As any man, he had felt such sensations before, but nothing like what overcame him with Aul. Her heat had touched him off like an oil-soaked pyre. He was powerless against the feeling. It overcame him as completely as the god's sorrow. It was a weakness.

This thought made him again want to put distance between himself and his sister.   And he knew there was another queen with whom he required audience.

“I'm going to move ahead,” Quintel said as night draped the sky. “I will meet you at the tunnel's entrance.”

“Do you know where it is?” Aul asked.

“I will find it.”

She smiled with closed lips. “Until then.”

He shot down the road, disappearing into the darkness. Soldiers and horses startled as he passed, frightened by the shadow flying by them in the night. Quintel veered away from the main route, taking to the roadless landscape, gliding over its surface without a sound.

His mind flew outwards, over the parade of soldiers, beyond the broken wilderness, into the Forestlands. The few dozen Thogmasters who escaped the Lanya had managed to pass word of their defeat through relay and signal. Further on, he saw the Forestland armies gathering from the corners of the four kingdoms. They had not rallied their human forces earlier, expecting the Thogs to take care of things. Clusters of men and equipment now gravitated toward the Abanshi border where the forest stopped and the mountains began. The groups ranged from well-equipped militias to ragtag bands of villagers armed with pitchforks. It was not an impressive defense.

As his senses soared over the forest canopy, something else caught his attention. A tower moved down a dirt road, lurching forward as if alive, its conical roof peeking above the treetops. He went in closer. There were dozens of them. Each was forty feet tall, pulled by teams of oxen. Their exteriors were covered in steel and wood plates. Firing ports for archers encircled the structure on several levels
.
They were mobile castles.

His mind turned away from the green forest and moved toward the northern edge of the world, passing the decimated peak of God's Finger without stopping. He was looking for the Lanya. They were out there somewhere and they
alone held the answers to his questions.  Skirting along the edge of the world, he sought some trace of their existence in the roiling clouds. Legend said they lived on a floating island hidden in the mist surrounding the edge of the world. Yet he could not find them. As he circled the rim of the earth, he felt Sirian Ru's gaze always upon him, subtle but overbearingly present.

Passing over the white storm of winter, now in the southern quadrant of the world, Quintel decided to give up and return to his running body. As he inhaled, a face appeared from a mountainous gray thunderhead before him. He recognized its angular features. It was the leader of the Lanya. She looked upon him and her misty mouth opened.

“Thus,” she said, and an explosion of knowledge struck him like a bolt. She knew what he sought and gave it to him with a tap from a spiritual hammer.

In a torrent, he saw how to hide his soul from Ru's watchful gaze. The Lanya queen showed him how complex, mandala-like sequences of thought could fold his spirit into a controlled form that would be invisible upon the ethereal plane. She showed him the elaborate steps involved in controlling his volcanic spirit. The process was so adorned with detail he would not have found it by himself in ten lifetimes. Turns upon quarter turns, folds upon triple folds were required in the process. He realized that once he successfully navigated the labyrinth of thought, Sirian Ru would not be able to see him unless they stood face to face.

Quintel had his answer from the Lanya.

Ru’s attention fell upon him with the weight of an anvil. The god feared his contact with the Lanya and Quintel saw it. Sirian Ru's consciousness flitted about the clouds where the Lanya leader had materialized, seeking any errant strand of thought to expose her intent. Failing, the god whirled around to face Quintel, looking for something that would tell him what had transpired. But the god saw nothing. Quintel withdrew and refilled his body on the other side of the world.

As he ran, Quintel analyzed the Lanya’s puzzle. Intricate and mysterious, the spell’s finesse hypnotized him as he studied it within his mind. He walked the pattern through his imagination, seeing how each turn and fold played a role in making him invisible upon the spiritual plane.

On the final step of the process, he saw something that stopped him cold. He froze in mid stride and studied the climax of the Lanya’s path. There was a side
effect to the incantation. A cost for the results he desired. When the last fold of his flaming spirit was tucked away, his human soul would be completely absorbed by the god fragment. His spirit would lose form and spread through the divine light like a cup of wine spilled into a crystalline lake. His human half would die.

Was this a trap? Did the Lanya hand him the map to his own destruction? How had they known what he sought from them? Why would they help him after trying to capture him earlier? Did they want him dead?

No. He sensed something else in the complex instructions. Something that closed a circle, patched a defect; something that would correct Yuul's error and meld him with the deity without seam.

Now he had to answer a single question. Was that what he wanted? To lose himself entirely for the sake of controlling the god fragment? Too much had to be weighed. Quintel decided to wait before following the Lanya’s guidance. He would remain visible to Ru for a while longer.

He found the mouth of the hidden tunnel before morning. It was near the main road. To a human eye, it was indistinguishable from the side of the mountain. But beyond its walls, a system of pulleys, levers, bearings and gears allowed the portal to open if a traveler knew the command. He hooked his thumbs into his belt and waited for the army to arrive.

Morning burned away the darkness. Above him, in the cloudless blue sky, he felt a part of Sirian Ru's mind watching him.

Chapter 34

They were coming.

From the parapet of his highest tower, Sirian Ru stared out at the horizon. He had nothing left. His army was crushed. The Agara had been eviscerated. He had fifty thousand Thogs in reserve, but what use were they? If he sent them out, they would be butchered like the others. Only a few of the new versions were finished and they were a strange lot.

There was nothing standing between him and Yuul's monster.

Ru had reached too far when he entered Aul's castle. The monster had seen him, seen his thoughts. The Abanshi queen was seducing the creature when Ru came upon them. Had the god but waited a few moments longer, they would have consummated their bond. The thing would have become entangled in earthly pursuits and been distracted from its goal. Instead, Ru had taken a chance and the thing had seen his dread.
Once the Abanshi knew what he feared, why hesitate? The hybrid knew the time to attack was now. The god had handed the information over like a gift.

He had underestimated the Abanshi’s insight. Ru still thought of the thing as a human. He would not make that mistake again.

Ru had gotten a good look at the thing during its fight with Grom. He saw the little piece of Yuul that had broken off inside the human. How odd that such a small bit of a god could be so much trouble.

But trouble it was. The armies of the West were on the move, a formidable line pouring from the mountains with the blazing half-god at their flank. The end, the end, the end. A final parry and he was done.

The new soulstones he pulled from his body were a bizarre collection of trinkets. The changes required brought chance into the formula. No longer were the stones identical spheroids. Now they came shaped liked diamonds, cubes and polyhedrons with all number of facets. The creatures they spawned were diverse and unpredictable.

To purchase time, Ru planned to scatter the redesigned Thogs in all directions, letting them kill everything in their path. They would distract the hybrid, whose loathing of death would send him running all over the map. That would give Ru the pause he needed to use his new knowledge.

He had learned much in his failure. All the pieces were now visible and defined. Ru knew what Yuul had set loose upon the world, and he knew it could be hurt. The human may have killed the Agara, but not without cost. The Abanshi had traded a limb for the victory.

Ru had also seen the human's other shortcomings. There were some things the little Abanshi simply could not do. When his defensive maneuver was finished, Ru would have time to concentrate on those faults.

Sirian Ru stood upon the windswept ledge of his castle and raised his arms into the air. Below him, thousands of the obsolete Thogs mobilized without a word. This army was not meant to fight. He had something else planned for them.

Each Thog marched to the factory, picked up an armload of the obsolete soulstones from the stockpiles, and headed west, burdened with as many of the black spheres as they could carry.

Ru's castle sat at the end of a peninsula on the eastern edge of the world. The peninsula was thirty miles wide at its narrowest point. Narrow enough to bottleneck an advancing army.

The god waved another hand and the hundreds of new Thogs he had grown also headed west. Their duty would be different from the others. They would break into small groups and spread out in different directions.  On the trek, they would destroy every farmstead, village and town they came upon, even those of Ru's faithful Forestland. With no uniting leader, the Forestland’s ragged armies were of no use to him. They could, however, purchase the time he needed to raise a shield.

The god attempted something that might be beyond his power. The mechanics existed, but the scale was outrageous. Sirian Ru knew his theory was sound, but he also knew things had not been working out as planned lately. If he had any other strategy, he would have stopped his marching armies and considered it. Unfortunately, circumstances had reduced his options to a single choice.