She set her feet apart and readied her blade as the Wellbeasts loped and scuttled and galloped towards her. There was no brandishing of spears or knives, for these monsters were animal in origin. Keren shuddered to recall some of the twisted and formerly human horrors they had encountered since crossing into Prekine.
The fear and elation of battle alertness gripped her as the beasts came on. When they were just yards away she dived to one side, right to the stream's edge. A couple of the creatures swerved towards her in their blundering rush, and the nearest, a grotesque amalgam of dog and crow, howled as it leaped at her. In the next instant it fell screaming and writhing, innards spilling from its cloven underside. Keren uttered a snarl of satisfaction as she wheeled to face the other attacker, a cadaverous wolf from whose shoulders sprang the upper torso of a wildcat. Spitting and shrieking, it charged. Keren twisted away, meaning to behead the wolf-thing, but lost her balance as her boots slid over wet stones in the stream. She staggered back and the beast would have been upon her if it too had not slipped. As it struggled to regain its feet, Keren moved in closer with one lightning fast slash to its throat and it collapsed in quickly fading convulsions, its blood mingling with the waters.
Chest heaving she turned to see Orgraaleshenoth in human form, tall and robed to the ankles, mouth wearing a savage grin as he fended off half a dozen attackers with another handful lying dead at his feet. The beasts swarmed about him, snapping and caterwauling, then fell back as the Daemonkind prince made a wide and deadly sweep with his blade, a long straight two-handed sword. Keren hacked at one, a boar with snake heads sprouting from its back, and when it went down in a ghastly welter of blood and brains the others recoiled in panic.
A bloodlust came over her and she found herself laughing and shouting as she slashed at the retreating creatures. She cut one down with a single disembowelling thrust, hacked the legs from under another and was about to dash after the rest when suddenly she was gasping for breath. The grip around her throat tightened, her vision grew hazy, her lungs cried out for air. She fell to her knees, mouthing silent pleas.
"Self-control, child of earth," came the Daemonkind's voice. He was standing over her, wiping gore from his longsword with a handful of grass. "Even in the heat of battle, your obedience to me must be total. Indiscipline does not serve my purpose."
Then the terrible grip eased and blessed air surged in. Tears sprang to her eyes as she coughed and choked on a rawness in her throat. Deep rough breaths shuddered through her and she swallowed to make saliva in her mouth. Aware of Orgraaleshenoth walking away, she angrily wiped the wetness from her eyes then lurched to her feet, snatched up her fallen blade and followed.
Under a murky afternoon sky, they trod the path as it twisted deeper into Prekine. Rain fell in furious bursts that lashed and buffeted them then passed, leaving a bitter odour in the air. Once, they sheltered beneath an overgrown spiraleaf tree and while waiting for the deluge to ease off Keren spotted a nest among the foliage. It held two eggs, both smashed, and a dead chick, and it was then that she realised that she had not heard a single birdcall for two, maybe three days. But then, perhaps she had been too engulfed by despair to notice.
The hills steepened around them, slopes smothered in gorse and thorny vines. Ahead, their destination grew ever nearer, the Oshang Dahkal, a rough semicircle of peaks and ridges rising from low, rounded hills in the north to a cluster of crags and jagged heights in the south. It was there nearly two thousand years ago that Orosiada had ordered the founding of the communities and academies which became the mage stronghold of Trevada. Keren had visited it only once at the age of twelve, accompanying her parents on a pilgrimage, and her memories were coloured by impressions of jostling crowds and a long road which curved all the way up to the spires and courts of the High Basilica.
But those were memories from a time of gladness and joy, of brightness and innocence. As she trudged along behind Orgraaleshenoth in the shadows between these empty hills it was as if all the darkness was becoming part of her, seeping into her soul and allowing not a glimmer of hope. She wanted to weep but would not let herself.
Stay alive. Show no weakness. Survive
.
It was not until the dusk was settling like a veil across the land that she noticed how cold it was becoming. She donned another tunic over the one she already wore and pulled on a second pair of breeks, and still was shivering. Orgraaleshenoth seemed to show not a hint of discomfort, but her breath was now a visible plume of vapour and she could feel an unnatural iciness nipping at her toes and fingers. She thought of the rumours and warnings she had heard about Prekine in recent years, some of which she had already verified with her own eyes. Some tales spoke of dread spells of ice laid upon the earth, or dense, impenetrable tangles of talonvine which choked the dales and hills and encircled Trevada itself. She would have asked the Daemonkind but feared his response.
It was nightfall when they happened upon a village tucked away in a hollow between two hills, next to a small, marshy lake. In the dimness, the lake was a flat stretch of blackness, the cottages and barns no more than a cluster of silhouettes. There were no signs of life, no lamplight or voices, no crying of babes or sounds of barnyard animals. As they approached, Orgraaleshenoth held out his sword and made a gesture over it. A pale blue radiance brightened around it and he advanced towards the door, pushing it open.
Within, the air was so bitterly cold that Keren's teeth ached with every breath and a deep shivering seized her. The ensorcelled blade sent a feeble light into the single large room where still forms lay huddled together under blankets before a dead hearth. The body of a man lay curled up on the floor next to that of a dog, and another sat at a crude table, head resting on one arm with the other hand outstretched and grasping a dagger. Frost lay over them all and everything else in the room, a glittering, preserving mantle. Death was tangible here, and Keren backed away to the door's threshold, watching Orgraaleshenoth bend to examine the bodies, brushing frost from this face or that hand, pressing or prodding the frozen flesh. And Keren remembered the healer tents at Alvergost and how the Daemonkind prince had tended to the sick and the wounded, and wondered at the reason for such a meticulously impersonal scrutiny.
The scene was repeated in several other cottages, Keren standing in the doorway, blowing on her hands while Orgraaleshenoth moved among the dead. Her own vaporous breath floated around her in the still air like a grey aura, while the Daemonkind's exhalations came in long, heavy plumes. On their return from the spectral domain of Kekrahan, Ograaleshenoth had resumed the human form Keren had known as Raal Haidar but now that outward appearance was like an ill-fitting costume, strained at the seams by the brute force of what lay beneath.
According to the sagas and the prayer songs, the Daemonkind were the Lord of Twilight's oldest and most powerful servants, creatures which emerged from the Great Lake of the Night in the wake of the birth of the world. The Lord of Twilight caught sight of them despite the engulfing darkness, perceived their potential and offered them a place at his side in exchange for a deep oath of eternal loyalty. Each and every one of them swore the oath, binding themselves and their descendants blood and bone, body and soul into the service of the Lord of Twilight. Keren imagined that dark spirit, that dread god waiting somewhere while its servants and thralls wrought havoc and evil all across the great continent of Toluveraz. And she shuddered as Orgraaleshenoth's words came back to her - "
I had thought to make use of you all in my plans...but on closer inspection I see that this one will be enough
."
Yet if the Daemonkind were the Lord of Twilight's servants, why was Orgraaleshenoth attempting to secretly enter the citadel of the Acolytes who owed fealty to the same master?
She clenched her hands, trying to force some warmth into them, then noticed the Daemonkind Prince straightening, his stance alert, his features intense and distracted.
"What is the - " she began.
He halted her with a gesture and for a moment or two there was nothing but the faint sound of their breathing. Then, imperceptibly at first, Keren felt the dead silence begin to deepen, a creeping engulfment of her senses. The surroundings faded into hazy outlines and to Keren it was as if they stood on the abyssal floor of a vast ocean, intruders in depths of glimmering grey. She also noticed a dark thread linking her neck to Orgraaleshenoth who was a shadowy figure standing with his back to her as he stared off at something in the murk.
Then she saw them. Spectral people, dozens of people of all ages, men, women, children, sitting together, talking, eating, arguing, playing, walking, running, laughing, weeping. Was she seeing the ghosts of those who had lived in this house down the years, and their friends and relatives? They rushed about, passing through each other, a bustling weave of vitality and life, all oblivious to her, looking past her at someone else. Like the young man in robes who was staring straight at her with a wondering smile on his lips...
A blaze of light blotted out everything and at the centre of it she glimpsed a scene which made her catch her breath - it was Tauric, his right arm a thing of metal wreathed in hot white flame which lashed out at unseen adversaries. It only lasted an instant but she saw a raw confusion of emotions in his stare and was filled with dread for him. Then it all vanished, like a door closing, plunging her back into the cold dimness of the cottage.
Orgraaleshenoth was laughing, a soft, low sound of malice. "How deliciously futile! Orosiada's true heir is forced to use her power, but tries to make it seem that the false heir is responsible."
"I don't understand," Keren said. "Tauric's hand was on fire - "
"You saw?" The Daemonkind regarded her thoughtfully. "Interesting, but not unexpected. The soulbound often catch fragments of their masters' experiences. You saw the boy and nothing more?"
Keren nodded, and he gave her a heavy-lidded look of satisfaction. "The time will come when you will see more, much more." He laid his glowing sword on a trestle table and sat on a nearby bench. "Now you should rest, restore your strength as we shall be leaving at first light. Do not go far."
She found a lean-to at the back of the house and, wrapped in blankets taken from inside, she settled down. But despair choked her thoughts like a black fog drifting and writhing through her mind, and true sleep was hard to come by. Spells of drowse came and went, bringing dreamlike recollections of some of the ghostly figures from earlier.
She woke to the familiar tug at her neck and the pale radiance of an ashen dawn filtering into the lean-to. Outside, the abandoned village looked sad in the light of day, its few buildings surrounded by encroaching waves of undergrowth. Then Keren turned and found herself looking up at the heights of the Oshang Dakhal, and was astonished at how close they had come the previous night. She shook her head, yawned and stretched, then groaned at aching muscles in her back. She was about to do a few stretching exercises when Orgraaleshenoth appeared from the front of the house and beckoned her to follow as he set off. She sighed, retrieved her backpack from the lean-to and hurried after him, rubbing gritty tiredness from her eyes and trying to finger her hair into a semblance of neatness.
From the village onward, the way grew steep, the ground stoney and the green of growing things sparse and faded. A thin mist hazed the air. No breeze or creature intruded upon the cold calm of the path as it rose towards a ridge running between bare spurs of rock broken only by a hardy tree or clump of bushes. Occasionally the mist parted to reveal a long view of the lands below, a grey-green terrain made tiny by distance, still and undisturbed except by the gleam of a stream wandering among the foothills. Then either the mists would close up, or there would be a pressure at the neck to get her hurrying on.
Her thoughts kept returning to that glimpse of Tauric, his arm strangely whole yet giving off that sorcerous corona, and the look in his eyes, fear conflicting with fury, astonishment with glee. It was the look of someone who was in the grip of another's will, or being dragged along by some inexorable force, and she felt an sad sense of kinship with him for it. There had been several times in her life when she had surrendered herself to either personal impulse or to the will of others. Years past when she was just seventeen (a world, an age ago, it seemed), she had been travelling over a high pass in winter, returning to her parents' holding, when heavy snows forced her to take refuge in a mountain wayhut. Only there was a man already there, a mercenary by name of Ahamri. He gallantly offered her the only cot and bedded down on the stone floor.
And at some point in the middle of the night, some imp of need woke her and spoke to her with her own body. Ahamri was in his thirties, but fit and lean and not at all bad looking, and the imp of need made him utterly desirable. Careless of caution, she had flung the woolen blankets aside, crept across the floor and slipped beneath his own covers. He had opened his eyes in surprise, then a slow smile came over his lips, and after that she ceased to notice the cold.
Then later, after the Mogaun invasion, in the aftermath of the calamitous defeat at the Battle of Wolf's Gate, she had been with the remnants of the Earl of Malvur's battalion as they retreated. Leaderless and cut off from the south by the enemy's advance they had no choice but to head into the mountains of Prekine, and it was in one of the deep valleys that they chanced across a train of wagons, one of the Mogaun's supply convoys. In a fit of vengeful rage they had attacked the thinly guarded wagons and it was only afterwards that Keren discovered that they had held Mogaun females and children, who her fellow soldiers had slain without hesitation.
Sickened by this, she had saddled a horse the following night and galloped off into a rising storm, lashed by gale-driven rain as she rode further north, not thinking where she was headed. At some point in the early hours of the morning she had slowed to rest in a hollow on a mountain path facing east. The storm was at its height, and between two peaks she could make out the curve of crags and ridges that was the Oshang Dakhal. Faint clusters of lights were the only signs of the communities of Trevada and, as Keren watched, lightning stabbed down at Trevada's highest point again and again, dazzling nets and webs that seemed to tear at the rock itself.