Kath nodded and walked a quick perimeter, watching the fog like he expected it to pounce. The dark smoke matched the shadowy clouds above.
Ijanna went down to a cross-legged position in the dirt – she tried not to think too hard about the fact that the dust she sat on consisted of ground-up bones and Dragian ashes – and breathed deep. She closed her eyes, sensed her own heartbeat, tasted the scalding wind. She Breathed the Veil, and blood smoke rolled off her black tongue.
She felt the fumes of the Bonelands fill her like a cloud of glass. The atmosphere had been tainted by thirty years of exposure to broken Vossian war machines, but each time she breathed out she became more attenuated to that vile air, and she shaped her bloody breath to match the roiling fumes. Soon she felt she could control the unnatural desert fog.
Ijanna opened her eyes and the mist started to dissipate, revealing soiled plains and clefts of shadow-stained rock.
“
Some of the things you can do are truly incredible,” Kath said. “Ijanna?”
“
Yes?”
“
Do you know why I chose to stay?” he asked.
She was still tremulous at the thought of how she’d hurt him, how she’d deceived him.
He deserves better than that…and so do you. Your bond may have been made against your will, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the company of a friend. There have been precious few of those.
“
I think so,” she said with a soft smile. “But why don’t you tell me anyway?”
She felt Kath’s eyes on her, sensed the beating of his heart.
“No,” he said. His tone was friendly, much more like the Kath she’d known back in Ebonmark, the man from the time before the Chul had ripped his world apart. “No, if you already know…chances are you’re right. But there
is
something I should say out loud, just so we’re clear: I’ll work with the Red Hand so long as they’re helping you, but not a moment longer.” She heard him bite back something else he’d wanted to say. “Not a moment longer,” he repeated.
Ijanna took a deep breath and nodded. The mists continued to uncoil, and soon they could see the burning black sky.
“I understand,” she said.
A blood-curdling screech pierced the air, so sudden and jarring Ijanna nearly jumped out of her skin. She rose with the
thar’koon
in hand, and Kath wheeled around with his axe. They turned just in time to face an enormous dark cat, some six feet tall at the shoulder, all knife fangs and razored fur, black and smoking skin and eyes like glass pools. It bounded out of the dissipating fog with alarming speed and brought down Kath.
Foul-smelling saliva splashed from the misshapen maw. Thick talons pushed Kath against the ground and broke the desert crust beneath him. He managed to wedge his axe beneath the feline’s ungainly head, and the creature roared with a sound like tearing metal. The body thrashed violently, a blur of shadows and tail.
Ijanna Breathed the Veil and wrapped herself in a shield of edged force before she leaped forward. Steel and teeth flashed. She brought the
thar’koon
down with a cry and sliced the creature’s head from its torso. Kath grimaced beneath a flow of sickly grey blood before he shoved the lashing corpse away and rolled onto his feet. The cat’s claws had dented his shoulder plates and he was covered in ooze that looked and smelled like swamp muck, but he appeared uninjured.
“
What in the One Goddess’s name
was
that thing?” he asked.
“
A Razorcat,” Ijanna said. “They’re common to the Bonelands. I’m surprised we haven’t met any before now.”
Ijanna froze. The air was utterly silent aside from Kath’s breathing. Thick pockets of black smoke still partially obscured the jagged rocks and hills to the north and east. The stretch of wastes they’d crossed was littered with low stones and shattered pieces of granite and quartz. The Razorcat’s musk hung heavy in the air, a sour smell like urine and sweat.
“Kath, be ready,” she said. She separated the
thar’koon
halves and hooked them together at the base, forming a double-sword with the bone hilt at the center. Blood-red smoke curled across putrid pools, and as the fog collapsed she realized what had created it in the first place, and cursed herself for not recognizing it sooner.
“
What’s wrong?” Kath asked.
“
Razorcats hunt in packs,” she said. “They bend the shadows to conceal themselves, but if the pack is strong enough they can generate their own camouflage.” She looked at him. “Like dark mist.”
“
Oh, Goddess...” Kath cursed.
The moments stretched on. They stood back to back, Kath easily towering over Ijanna, their blades held ready and their feet planted firm. More of the blasted wastes came into view as the smoke cleared. Ijanna’s heart pounded in her chest.
Glistening purple-black fur and midnight fangs slithered out of the fog. The flesh beneath the unnatural quills seemed almost scale-like, and the creature’s head was as large as Ijanna’s torso. The beast came at them lightning fast, and it was all Ijanna could do to twist away from its attack and deflect its talons with her double blade. It raced by, gathered itself and snarled, its knifed tail lashing the ground like a serpent.
Two more of the creatures emerged from the shrinking fog, and then another. Within moments six of the monsters surrounded she and Kath from a hundred paces out, eyes gleaming like broken blades, teeth flashing. Their smoking bodies shifted in and out of focus. Claws tore dirt and stone from the ground as they circled, and their purrs sounded like blades being sharpened.
“What do we do?” Kath asked quietly.
Ijanna tensed and readied herself. Fear flowed through her veins. She was shaking, and though she knew it was ridiculous she didn’t want Kath to know how terrified she was.
“The best we can,” she said, and she readied to Breathe when a flash of red and white light burned through the mists. Beams of crimson and ivory flame enveloped two of the Razorcats. The air burned with sulfur, and the high-pitched screech of dying Razorcats echoed into the sky. Nauseating black smoke poured from the bodies as several of the creatures fell writhing and screeching to the ground, their flesh and fur melting away beneath the touch of molten lances.
The surviving Razorcats conjured swirls of mist to cover their escape, and within moments they vanished into the shadows.
“Nasty things,” a voice said from behind them.
Three figures emerged from the last vestiges of fog to the west. All of them were cloaked, and they drew back their heavy hoods as they approached. One was a short black-haired woman with large and expressive eyes and a rich purple cloak, while another was a stocky man cloaked in green, his thick face covered with a short white beard.
Their leader stepped forward. His cloak was charcoal black, and the bracers on his forearms were rune-carved silver. His boots were hard leather capped with steel toe plates, and the lower half of his face was covered by a piece of cloth that left only his eyes and blonde hair exposed. Even from a distance his flesh looked ghastly, like he’d been badly cut or burned, or both.
Each of the three held slender rods made of black steel and wood; the heads were made to resemble open dragon’s mouths churning streams of dark smoke, doubtless the source of the fire beams that had driven off the Razorcats.
“I presume you’re Ijanna,” the shrouded leader said in a bold tone. He had a ring of a Den’nari accent, but his pale skin and fair hair marked him as having Allaji blood.
Ijanna looked at Kath and took a step back, still holding her blades ready.
“You’d be correct.”
“
Good,” he said.
The leader’s boots crushed smoldered stones and freshly charred Razorcat flesh. When he came to within a few feet of Ijanna and Kath he bowed deeply. In addition to the injuries on his face his hands also looked malformed, like the flesh had been peeled away and forced to grow back incorrectly. His eyes were pale grey, nearly white.
“My name is Gilder,” he said. “And I welcome you into the company of the Red Hand.”
Forty-Four
The Red Hand party was thirteen strong. Gilder explained that was the traditional size for their expeditionary parties, as that number was specifically needed to perform rituals which allowed them to pool their efforts and keep the amount of life-force lost by any individual Bloodspeaker to a minimum. The specifics were well beyond Kath’s understanding.
Gilder and his lieutenants led Kath and Ijanna toward the distant spires. The Bloodspeaker told them how the Red Hand had recovered from the blow dealt by the death camps, and that in fact their ranks had swelled to nearly three hundred under the direction of Malath Zayne, the most wanted man in all of Jlantria. The thought of that many Bloodspeakers banded together made Kath’s blood run cold.
He watched the Red Hand carefully as the group marched towards their camp. He was grateful to them for saving his life, but that did little to assuage his worry or anger. Kath had been raised believing Bloodspeakers were evil – they were the Unmaker’s children, creatures of darkness and deceit. And while he’d accepted that Ijanna was meant for something more, her magic still tainted their relationship.
What am I meant to do?
he asked Corvinia when he silently prayed at night, but she had yet to answer, and he hadn’t seen any signs. Was he supposed to protect Ijanna so she could find a better path, one that didn’t involve bringing the Blood Queen back to life? Or was that truly what was meant to happen?
He thought about his family. He saw Julei carrying her cat around the house with a terrified expression on its face, heard Calestra reading him
The Dragons of Blacklake
. Drogan and Illistra smiled as they sat out on the porch, the sun setting in the distance. He smelled hot roasted chicken, baked beans and fresh rolls as the family sat around the table and held hands to pray to the One Goddess before dinner.
A sort of glow filled Kath when he had those memories, but when they faded he was left only with sorrow. Kath’s legs were weak, and his stomach clenched like he’d been stabbed in the gut. He was crying, but no one seemed to notice.
Lost now, all lost. All of his family was gone, and they weren’t coming back.
What did we do to deserve this?
The Red Hand all bore the unnaturally black tongue of Bloodspeakers, but unlike Ijanna they took no pains to hide them. The woman had cold blue eyes that seemed to illuminate the air around her, the broad-shouldered man with the white hair had the countenance of a gargoyle, and Gilder…Kath couldn’t tell if the man had contracted some sort of flesh disease or if he’d been tortured and burned, but whatever had happened he looked like something straight out of a nightmare.
He didn’t trust any of them, because they were liars and monsters all. Kath knew he was being narrow-minded, but he felt he’d earned that right. Only Ijanna was different, and even
she
needed to be watched. He still wondered about her sanity – how could she be in her right mind if she was raised believing she was supposed to resurrect Carastena Vlagoth?
The Red Hand seemed to feel the same way about Kath as he did about them, and Gilder kept Ijanna close and only spoke to her in hushed tones. The other two kept their distance, casting occasional suspicious glances Kath’s way. He couldn’t hear what they said, but he wasn’t really listening. His mind was elsewhere.
He was looking forward to killing Malath Zayne.
The group approached the ungainly spires, jagged stones like rusty swords standing some thirty feet tall. Nearly a dozen of the crumbling monuments stood there on the field of rock and ash. Kath saw dark silhouettes move near the base of the spires, and several horses were tethered to rope lines between the stones. Cloaked figures armed with bows and rods perched atop the rune-carved markers.
It seemed to take hours for them to cross the last stretch of desert to the Red Hand’s camp, and Kath was beginning to realize how exhausted he was. His face was glazed with sweat. Blood pulsed in his neck, and he felt himself growing lightheaded. His pain and fatigue must have shown on the outside, as well, and to his surprise it was Gilder who asked if he was all right. Kath just nodded; he wouldn’t show weakness, not in front of these creatures.
Why am I so tired?
Yes, it had been a hard week’s travel and they’d already been through hell, but he still shouldn’t have felt so suddenly fatigued.
Not when I’m so close. Not when I’m about to meet Malath.
From the shadow of the stones he saw the ruins of Corinth, one of the few remaining cities of what had once been Gallador. Even at a distance the damage to the city was clear: many of the walls were broken, the leaning towers were cracked, dozens of buildings had collapsed and all but one of the roads leading into the city had been reduced to shattered slate.
Kath squinted to try and get a better look, and he swore he saw activity down in the city. People moved about on the broken parapets and toiled near a massive pit – some sort of excavation was taking place, and the ruins of Corinth were being patrolled by an occupying force.