Rythe Falls (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Gurt sighed and shook his head. He turned his face toward the sky, one last time. About their heads, a swirling storm of red light, all coalescing about the massed army just a short ride away.

             
'They don't see it, do they? How can they not see it?'

             
Perr made some kind of movement with his shoulders that might have been a shrug. The man was perhaps the least expressive human Gurt had ever known. He didn't know why, but for some reason he liked the man. No give in him, not an inch.

             
'I admit, I'm about to piss myself. Don't know why. It's not like we're going to battle. You ever get that?'

             
Perr grunted. Gurt had no idea whether in agreement or if the man just had a little wind.

             
That eerie red light felt like a rain storm. Heavy, as though it was getting ready to lash down. But it was just light, right? Light didn't have weight. Wasn't like rain, or blood, or steel.

             
Yet there was that sense in the air, like a good storm charging up. Two of them sitting proud in nice shiny steel, too.

             
It's not a storm,
Gurt reminded himself.
And we're dead anyway, right? What does it matter? Maybe there's some kind of red lightning up there, maybe red rain. Maybe invisible creatures, large or small, once called the Elethyn. Maybe those Sun Destroyers really have the whole world tied up in a bag.

             
'Doesn't matter, right?' said Gurt, not realising he spoke aloud. Perr was so quiet Gurt often found himself answering for the man.

             
'Nothing ever did,' said Perr.

             
Gurt nearly pissed himself right then at the man's voice. But he held it in and grinned instead.

             
'No, I don't suppose it did,' said Gurt. 'Shall we yank the Yemandril's tail?'

             
Perr smiled and nodded, just a tiny inclination of his head. He put his visor down. Gurt didn't have a visor, just a simple helm.

             
But then, it didn't matter, did it?

             
If these bastards wanted them dead, all they had to do was fry them up in their armour.

*

Jek raised his hands to send fire tumbling from the sky into the two men who were galloping toward their ranks like lunatics, now.

             
His hands dropped.

             
I'm seeing...things...

             
'Speculate!' came the first cry, then another, until the outer edges of the great army was in sudden disarray. He turned his head to look behind, to the left, the right. Then back again.

             
What trickery...?

             
The two men in steel were riding hard, like demons, and all around the ranks of his proud army, a great wall of fire shot outward toward something unseen, and then back into his warriors. Bayers and Tenthers were blasted into the air, hundreds of fighters, mages, warhounds, all smoking or on fire, falling in agony or flying, broken and smoking, into the wet air. Sudden, intense panic poured from the outer formations toward the centre in mere moments. Jek himself forgot the riders, turning around wildly, trying desperately to understand why his army was...what?

             
They were simply doing what mad things do...going with the fury.

             
Of course they're mad... we all are.

             
A mage blasted fire from his eyes at some enemy that Jek could not see, but the fire hit...nothing.

             
No...it hit the air?

             
Then the fire returned ten-fold.

             
The mage was a smoking ruin. His charred corpse twirled, sank to the ground, curled in on itself like a baby and continued to burn.

             
We're in a battle with...ourselves? Our madness manifest?

             
But then Jek looked again at the patch of air and saw it...shimmer.

             
It is like looking through impure glass. As though there is a disturbance there, or...something hiding...

             
Jek was insane, yes, but wily. He always had been, and perhaps in he alone that core remained. Even a madman could not have held the position of Speculate for long without some inner strength.

             
He searched through the growing, rolling clouds of smoke, through the stench, and saw more of those telling, shimmering spots, bold against the landscape now that he knew to look. There were places where the smoke parted, or a sense of blurring at the edge of vision.

             
Magic won't work against them,
he thought. Perhaps these strange, invisible attackers were under some kind of shield? Magic, for sure. He understood, now - the magic amplified their own attacks and were sending back fire and lightning with terrible effect on the Protectorate army.

             
Jek wore only a simple black robe, but wore a short sword at his hip, which he drew now. He broke into a run toward the nearest anomaly, surprisingly fast for a man who rarely exerted himself. He had no sense that the thing even registered his approach.

             
With a slashing strike, his blade hit...something.

             
But Jek was mad and angry and confused and forgot that such things as this creature, this armour, existed.

             
History is often forgotten, even by those who study in.

             
As the blade struck the ethereal figure in the smoke, the fury and rage of the strike simply rebounded onto the attacker. Jek fell to the floor, dumbly staring at his own dark blood pouring into the sand at his knees.

             
When did I end up on my knees?

             
The figure became solid when struck, though. A terrifying figure - taller than Jek (himself large for a Protocrate), thinner, encased entirely in some bright metal that shifted and flowed around the creature. Within the armour, Jek saw the faces of slain, bound warriors screaming and snarling inside the metal itself.

             
Such things are...legend...

             
Only the Hierarchs ever had sentinel armour. But the Hierarchy was no more. They were dead...asleep...nothing.

             
'You were supposed to be dead!' Jek shouted. 'You're not real! Nothing!'

             
He felt like he shouted. In his head, his voice sounded angry and he roared. But he did not. Air burbled through his ravaged throat and his head hit the sand with a thud. The Hierarch stamped on Jek Yrie's prone skull, just to make sure, and strode into the fray with its sentinel armour already craving more blood.

*

Gurt and Perr suddenly found themselves riding hard toward a battle they didn't understand and sure death at the hands of the shifting, awful warriors laying waste in moments to most of the greatest army either of the seasoned warrior had ever seen.

             
Unspoken agreement, even, was not needed. Their futile charge ended with both men hauling hard on their reins. Dusty sand clouded the air around them, their horses hot and ready to work.

             
'Maybe not today,' said Perr, voicing what Gurt was thinking.

             
One thing to go down hard, riding to your death at the end of a blade. But this...was...

             
Pointless.              

             
These new warriors, these things in their mystic armour? They were beyond Gurt's limited understand...beyond anyone's, maybe.

             
The rain was abating and the ground already dry. Screams and smoke and fire, lightning, the clash of sword and blood. Dust around their horses was already settling back to the ground. The smoke of burning bodies was drifting, obscuring the battlefield. Again and again there were flashes of lightning, gouts of fire. Pain and screeching, high and inhuman, from within the smog.

             
Gurt shook his head. Whatever these things were, they were hard and cold and blood-mad as the Protectorate, but they'd come garbed for war, and the bastards were full of magic Gurt didn't even begin to understand.

             
'Look,' said Perr. Gurt craned his head to the sky, where Perr pointed.

             
It seemed the red light in the sky that looked so much to his eyes like some angry storm was...excited...becoming darker and harder until it was no longer day, or night, but everything was red and hot like fire and blood.

             
'The light...the light's getting...don't know...but the battle's doing something to the light.'

             
Those awful warriors were now visible, in the midst of the huge army, striding around, untouchable. They carved bodies or burned them, cleaved heads from shoulders with dread swords, send cracking light blasting through the Protectorate ranks.

             
In return, power poured from the Protocrats at the armoured warriors and simply...bounced back.

             
'They're invincible.'

             
'I think...I think this is what they want...' said Gurt, his voice hard and hoarse with sorrow and the smoke of a thousand burning warriors. 'I think this is it. Gods, Perr...I think this is the end of the world...'

             
Maybe he was right. Death, pain, agony; all reached some kind of peak, almost like it was a tangible thing, a golem made of base emotions that reached a great hand up to the sky. And the red light...it felt it, too. The light leached downward from the skies and joined with the armoured warrior with a terrible, rending screech that could be heard for hundreds of miles.

             
Gurt and Perr were blown from their horses. They flew backward, through the air. Gurt didn't see anything after that.

             
In a mere instant, he felt his bones crack and his old, yellow teeth shatter. He hit the sand, and the sand was hard as rock, and then, thankfully, his vision turned black.

*

Chapter Twenty-Five

Being down in the dark didn't bother Renir. He'd known darkness before.

             
No more than a day, he figured, since he'd been taken from his room to this one, deep below the city...if he was even beneath the city any longer. The room was dark enough that his eyes hadn't adjusted at all. There was not even the tiniest sliver of light to help.

             
There was a bed, of sorts, though he dare not let himself sleep on it. The blackness here was so absolute he imagined never waking, or if he did, that he would find something crawling over him, on worse, in him.

             
When he roamed from his careful perch on the edge of the musty bed, he found very little. He skinned his knee on a piece of furniture, low down. The wood had been cold, with a hint of damp, but not rotted.

             
All in all, he had the sense that this was a room that had not been used in a long, long time...and that it was somewhere low and deep. No sense of warmth, no breeze, and utterly dark as though the sun had never been here. That, and the fact that he had been carried ever downward.

             
But was this black cage any worse than his room in the castle? What difference did it make where he was held prisoner? Was one gaol worse than another?

             
I sincerely hope not,
he thought, but from the sound of the footsteps coming closer, it seemed he was about to find out.

*

Renir had no idea how Roskel Farinder achieved his capture. One moment, he'd been reaching for Haertjuge, ready to kill. Next he knew, the man had him over his shoulder, and was striding down a long, long flight of stairs. Renir didn't understand how he could not leave the room, yet this Farinder tossed him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and just went wherever the hell he wanted.

             
Renir shouted, at first, shouted for the Sard, his keepers or gaolers (he hadn't decided which) but the thief merely told him to shush. The thief had not panicked. Nor did the man sound breathless, as you would imagine someone might, carrying a grown man on their shoulder while heading down a long flight of steps.

             
The steps must have been in my room,
though Renir.
Could've got out all along, had I but known...

             
Stupidly, Renir struggled for some minutes. The man didn't flinch, didn't slow, just...ignored Renir. Maybe held him a little tighter, but only to stop Renir falling...more like he was concerned Renir would do damage to his own person, rather than the thief being concerned for his own health. At one point Renir managed to grab at the thief's eye, but he simply slapped Renir's hand away and made a noise in the back of his throat, like he was disappointed. 'Tsk,' or some approximation.

             
Renir felt...emasculated. It wasn't like the thief was particularly muscular, even. The man was all bone. The worst discomfort, Renir realised after he'd ceased struggling, was the man's bony shoulder digging into his midriff.

             
Eventually, Renir resigned himself to being carted down to the basement of the castle, to find out what new twist fate had stored down there among the wine barrels and mouldering vegetables.

             
But he was, yet again, wrong.

             
Farinder wasn't taking him to the lower castle. Not to the stores, or the dungeons, but...deeper.

             
How deep?

             
Renir couldn't imagine. They journeyed down an endless succession of steps. A sense, later, of pure dark. The thief knew his way well, it seemed. Never lit a torch, but carried on for what might have been hours, even, with the dead weight of Renir on his bones like he wore no more than maybe a thick winter coat. Renir began to sweat, at one point, though Farinder did not. Then, he became cold, and frightened, and at one point Renir was ashamed to find that he'd actually fallen asleep.

             
He tried talking to the man, but perhaps his hood upon his head was enchanted in some way, for the thief gave no indication that he heard anything other than his own footsteps...and so thinking, Renir realised that he couldn't actually hear the man's footsteps. The feel of impact in his middle, right up through the thief's shoulder (which now, after so long, was beginning to hurt him) but no sound of footfalls.

             
Then, without warning, the thief Farinder swung Renir down, onto his feet, and whipped away the hood from his head.

             
'We're here. Sorry, not quite the introduction we'd hoped, but...times change.'

             
Renir blinked and blinked, but there was no light. He couldn't even tell where the man was, where his own hands were, for that matter. He could see absolutely nothing, so pitch the darkness he might well have been blind.

             
The thief was still talking. 'I'd prefer a warmer welcome. Maybe some light, eh? Wine, dancing girls...a bit of flair...but...times change.'

             
'Where am I?' said Renir.

             
'Where it all began, I think,' said Roskel Farinder, thoughtfully. 'As it should be.'

             
'What do you want with me?'

             
'She'll tell  you, soon enough. Make yourself comfortable. Won't be long.'

             
'Who? Who am I meeting?'

             
He asked again, but there was no one there. One moment, the thief had been before him, then...nothing.

             
He was left alone, blind, in the dark.

             
I didn't even hear him go. Did he go?

             
It took Renir maybe an hour, searching around the windowless room in the blackness, to be sure the man had really gone.

             
A man could go mad
, he thought. Wondered if he hadn't already.

*

Footsteps? Must be the woman Farinder was referring to...because he didn't make a sound, did he? What kind of man makes no sound...none at all...unless he wants to?

             
What kind of man needs no light?

             
The footsteps, soft, unhurried, came closer.

             
Not confident, though, Renir realised now that his hearing was his main sense. Pausing. Walking. Then moving on again, just a little way. The person was searching, struggling with the dark, just like him.

             
Someone out there in a corridor, probably. Corridors were usually outside rooms, right?

             
I'm not mad,
thought Renir.
Not at all.

             
He reminded himself that whatever came, whatever this woman was, he had to remember, she and the thief...they were not his friends. No matter how polite a jailer, a prison was the same wherever, and a captive no different in a King's quarters or in a musty, forgotten room below the dirt.

             
The footsteps came closer and closer, pausing, searching, and then a sound, like the grating of stone-on-stone, swiftly followed by instant blinding light.

             
I thought the light would be a relief,
he thought, pain lancing through his eyes and into his brain.

             
'Renir?' said someone outside the agony of the sudden light hitting his eyes.

             
I know that voice...

             
'Lady A'm Dralorn?'

             
Renir blinked and rubbed at his eyes. It took some moments before he could see, and there she was. Tirielle held a torch in her small fist. His eyes recovered. She was dusty and looked as tired as he probably did. But then she looked past him, to where the musty bed was, and Renir turned as saw what she looked at, too.

             
It took all of Renir's effort not to piss himself, for one instant, in the new light, he saw something terrible had been there in the dark with him all along, sitting up in bed like some awful cadaver. In the next instant, his eyes adjusted and the trick, the confusion, was gone.

             
The lady on the bed was simply stunning. The most beautiful creature he'd ever seen in his life.

             
How could I ever think...
he thought...but then he could not remember where that thought was going, because the woman on the bed spoke and her voice filled Renir's mind with clouds and cobwebs, but light things that were full of beauty.

             
'Renir Esyn, how kind of you to come. And Tirielle A'm Dralorn, too...you are a surprise. Don't worry, I haven't had my way with the young man,' said the vision on the bed. 'I waited for him on the bed, but he was such a gentleman.'

             
The woman slid from the bed (not musty, not at all...smooth, silky sheets, Renir saw now...
how could I ever have been mistaken?
) and with a simple gesture she lit a candle beside the bed.

             
The light from Tirielle's torch and the candle finally blew away the cobwebs from Renir's mind. The room was opulent. The woman who came from the bed to stand before him took his breath away. He couldn't help staring, but with the greatest effort he'd ever put into anything he managed to turn his gaze from her to the floor.

             
'Thank you...for the welcome?'

             
The woman laughed and the sound was like rain on a still, clear pond.

             
Tirielle, beside him, did not seem quite as enamoured as he.

             
'Are you a witch?' she said, simply. Renir's jaw dropped open, but the woman merely smiled.

             
'Tirielle A'm Dralorn...who could have guessed? You have the sight...and you heard me, did you?'

             
Tirielle nodded, watching the woman warily. 'I did...I...heard you. Above.'

             
'Then you are witch-kin, too.'

             
'Then you are? You really are a witch?'

             
The beautiful woman nodded, Renir closed his mouth lest he drool at the sight. Things moved about the woman (
she's barely wearing any clothes!
) that made a man a fool.

             
'I am Selana. And I'm not a witch, Lady A'm Dralorn. I'm
the
witch. '

*