Springwar (71 page)

“You killed Olrix,” Elvix said bitterly. “And … Eddyn?”

All at once she hurled herself at Merryn, who simply reached out and grabbed her forearms, while a larger man from War-Hold moved to restrain her. “Not now,” Merryn spat. “I didn’t recognize you and I’m sorry, and I’ll make it up to you however I can. But not now. If you’re deserters, grab a sword. If not, we’ll have to take you prisoner. You have two breaths to give us whichever proof you can.”

“Where’s Kraxxi?” Tozri coughed instead.

“Not here,” Merryn growled, with an uncertain look that gave Avall pause indeed.

“Nor with us, either,” Elvix gritted, still acting like two souls possessed her—one with sense, the other bent on vengeance. “There was the night the lightning came down and destroyed our prison. The night it leapt from door to door.”

“That was me,” Merryn chuckled, not bothering to explain. “He was already gone then.”

Tozri eyed the battlefield. “He could be anywhere. Barrax would have brought him along so he could gloat.”

“Maybe,” Elvix snorted. “Or he could be rotting beside a road somewhere. Gods, but I wish we still had our rings.”

Avall started to reply, but a second explosion split the air. Even there, a shot away, stone rained down. Avall felt something wrench at his mind, and sat down abruptly. It was as though something had been there and was no longer.

“The King,” Strynn managed, scooting back to lean against the rampart. “He’s …”

“Not dead, yet not alive,” Avall managed. “I’d better get back there. I—”

His comment was cut short by the most terrible sound he could imagine.

A long, honking, screeching cry—the cry that haunted the sleep of many an Eronese boy or girl for eighths after they first heard it. Avall shivered as it was repeated, then doubled, and redoubled, to comprise a cacophony of dread.

Geens!

His hair prickled. Chills that had nothing to do with place-jumping danced across his body.

Scrabbling sounds joined those cries, as they became nearer and clearer—almost on top of them. And with those cries, now, came fleeting bits of sensations, instincts, and emotions, slashing across his mind like whips.

… us free us free us free us free …

Geen thought.

Not unlike birkit thought, actually, but rawer and less disciplined.

But clearly with intent behind it … and, buried deeper, desire.

More shrieks—

Then the impossible.

Avall could do nothing but stand and gape as dark shapes appeared atop the ridge above the escarpment where the wall ended—paused there briefly, cut out against the sky …

And leapt down.

Ten spans.

Into snow.

Legs like steel springs took that impact, while feet with dagger claws spread more force upon the ground.

And suddenly the Ixtian army found itself at war not with a kingdom’s worth of scholar-artisans, but with the rawest forces of ravening nature itself.

Arrows flew, and crossbow bolts, but few struck anything. Those that did caught leathery flesh and lodged—which only provoked wilder anger.

A pair of claws flicked out. Blood spurted as a man’s head snapped back with no throat to support it. Another geen leapt straight up and kicked out with both hind feet, sending soldiers sprawling—from force or desire to escape. A second leaping kick followed, and this time its talons trailed something shiny and bluish that Avall recognized as human entrails tangled with the gleam of mail.

But where had these things come from?

For that matter, was there any reason to assume they wouldn’t turn on the Eronese?

And even if they did not, would this number, large as it was, be sufficient?

The beasts were taking wounds now, and one was down. The air stank of blood and fear, viscera and voided bowels. But the Ixtians were falling back in disorder. Few dared to fire their crossbows lest they hit their own comrades. Never mind that the geens moved too fast to make good targets. Nor was there room for the kind of maneuvering needed to fell the beasts.

Avall watched with Merryn to one side and Strynn to the other. He’d forgotten the rest of the battle. Forgotten the King and Rann and the war and the stolen gems.

And then he forgot in truth as, from nowhere, lightning hit the air. A burst of stark white followed—a white so pure
it was almost without color; yet so strong it well-nigh burned out his eyes. Directly atop it came thunder.

It was like the cry of all those below, but redoubled and powered by the strongest gale, the most impossible winter hurricane. It shook the earth, and it shook the sky, and it shook that very tower.

A noise too huge for human ears to encompass.

The geens on the ground screamed challenge. Avall felt a mix of recognition and raw terror flash through his consciousness. And though still half-blind, he had sense enough to realize that the lightning had come not from the cloudless sky, but from somewhere closer and to the right. The west. From whence the geens had come.

He looked up, then down, then up again, not believing.

A man stood atop the escarpment, legs braced wide, arms outstretched, cut out against the heavens.

A man bearing stolen weapons, and wearing stolen armor. And even as Avall watched, that man raised his sword, then brought it down again.

And with it brought the lightning.

“Eight!” Strynn breathed beside him.

Avall fumbled for her hand, but dared not stop watching as the figure once more raised the sword. But this time he did not lower it, this time he flung himself flat on his back atop the cliff face and pointed the sword at the sky.

The wind changed directions, as if confused. Clouds rode in with it to ring the sky in darkness. And then came lightning indeed.

Something reached out and slammed into Avall’s mind like a gust of dire wind—save that it struck his thoughts, not his body. He reeled, fought for consciousness as impossible powers flicked out at him.
Gem power
, he realized, as he fought to retain control of his thoughts in the face of emotions assailing him from everywhere.

Nonhuman ones. Blood and kill and revenge.

And with them, one that
was
human—or had been. One who drank the power of the gems, and—as best he could tell—likewise drank the power of earth and sky themselves.

“Avall …” Merryn began.

He opened his eyes, not knowing when he’d closed them—and wished he hadn’t, for that skewed time sense was haunting him, though he no longer held his gem. And with that,
he felt
the earth beneath him, though it was not his flesh that touched it. And he felt the sky respond, as something that lay between continued to call down lightning into Ixti’s army. Over and over. Endlessly, carving the world into quick-flashed images of black and white.

Which was impossible.

Avall swallowed hard, fumbling for his gem—for anything with which to regain some sense of focus.

It burned him, yet at the same time it sent a pulse of recognition flashing through him with so much force he fell. And stayed where he was: crouched in the angle between the parapet’s western and southern walls.

He closed his eyes to shut out one set of impressions, for he was seeing with more eyes than his own. Something had got hold of him, like being too near a fire and being swept up in it, or a piece of metal too near a bell, chiming in sympathy. Desperate, he tried to find himself, reached out and took Strynn’s hand, and forced a bond with her through the gems they both were wearing.

She resisted at first, evidently under as much assault as he, then dared to welcome him. Clarity returned, but not that feeling of being more than one person more than one place, with geens’ thoughts gibbering around his mind, the same way their cries gibbered in his ears.

Nor did it help that the earth likewise spoke there. And the heavens. And maybe, it seemed, the one who commanded them.

Even without looking, he saw the man on the cliff.

The lightning warrior.

Saw him raise the sword again, and call down more lightning, and send it marching through Ixti’s ranks, burning men where they stood, or slamming them to the earth with flaming weapons.

More lightning, and stronger, and the air was hot with the stuff, as bolts stabbed down like arrows. And then it was more like a dance, for a series of bolts hit raised spears and
arched between them, leaping from spear to sword to helmet in an ever-widening reel of heavenly fire.

Never mind the geens that, half-mad with fear and rage, and ecstatic with bloodlust and unholy glee, still cut their own swath through Ixti’s levies.

There was no rain, save one of blood—from fangs and claws and talons.

And one of fire from the heavens.

Yet all the while arrows flew—and spears—and crossbow bolts. But one could not shoot a storm. Nor could anyone target the nameless figure sprawled atop the ridge, because no one on the ground could
see
him. Yet still the lightning danced, in a widening sweep centered on the escarpment, but never once hitting inside Gynn’s citadel.

Ixti was turning, too. They had no choice. No one could stand against the wind and the earth and the sky. A few threw down their weapons and ran for Eron’s walls, crying out “surrender,” demanding that ladders be lowered. A few responded. A few climbed. One was knocked away in transit by a bolt that scoured the battlements.

The black mass was moving, though—in utter rout.

And the soldiers farther down had noticed it, too, as the lightning storm moved onward, bearing down on the gate.

Merryn grabbed Avall to haul him up. He rose groggily. Reality spun, as he sought to see through two sets of eyes, even as he tried vainly to wrench his mind away from whatever had captured it.

Not a geen. Or more than a geen. Or something human that had briefly controlled the geens, until it had answered the stronger call of the land.

No!
There was too much chaos, too much jumble, too much that made no sense in his head.

Elvix, at least, was running—jogging as fast as she could along the wall-walk, following the geen’s track through Barrax’s shattering army, while the Eronese archers finally got sense enough to pepper men who’d forgotten they were there with arrows like a hailstorm of black-shafted pain. The dead lay everywhere. And the dying. And those who
wished they were dead and would not be that day, though they’d live sixty more years with missing limbs.

But where was the King? Surely he would’ve seen what transpired and issued some command. Surely now was the time for a sally: Rally the horse and the rest of the army and put Barrax’s invasion to flight.

But then Avall remembered the explosions. His heart flip-flopped. He—and Strynn, who was still at least half him—reached out to the King.

And couldn’t find him.

Not as an active mind.

They found something that could’ve
been
him. They found a memory of surprise, and a memory of fear, and a memory of pain. But they dared not go there. Even with what they faced, what they’d already seen, it was too terrifying.

Yet they were powerless to resist starting toward the gate, what with a third of Barrax’s army running in rank terror, a third unable to do anything at all, and a third involved with the battle at the rent in the wall. Even there confusion reigned, as soldiers tried to win through from fear as much as desire for conquest.

It was more than Avall could stand. Too many things too fast, and worse for him than for others, who had only to watch in awe and fear, and remember how to use their weapons and die like honest warriors.

Not be seeing everything as though one
was
all things, with the simplest sounds become like pipes and thunder, and the scent of burning a thing to be pondered for years. With half of one’s self wrenched away by someone who was certainly insane.

Avall fought it, tried to build a shell around himself, careful to bring Strynn with him, and Merryn, such as she could help. Or maybe that was Strynn building the shell. Or even Rann.

He didn’t exist. He was stretched too thin, like the rainless storm out there.

But that was diminishing. Or at least he sensed it less
clearly, as though a wind were dying down. It was losing its hold on him, too, and as it did, reality clarified.

Avall looked back at the man on the ridge.

He had risen now, but his sword no longer stabbed the heavens. Indeed, his stance looked shaky, as he let sword and shield slump to his side and gazed out across the valley. Dead men sprawled below him, in snow trampled to mush, amid which green grass showed in equal parts with black-clad bodies and crimson blood.

It was Strynn who named him, as the warrior who might have saved Eron toppled forward, touching nothing until his body slammed into the snow at the foot of the cliff—revealing the battered, bleeding, half-naked form of a man, clad in remnants of clothing, weaponry, and armor.

Rrath—with the sword and the shield and the helm.

“The King …” Avall said from reflex, though he dared continue neither word nor thought.

Strynn scowled. “If he’s not dead, he might as well be.”

Merryn glanced toward what passed for a battle at the ruptured wall. “It has to be you,” she said, far too matter-of-factly. “The tide’s turned in our favor. We dare not lose the advantage.”

“You’re the warrior,” Avall countered, glancing another way. Rrath wasn’t moving.

“You’re the master of the gems,” Strynn gave back. “You know more about them than I do. More than anyone. And they like you better.”

A pit of impossible fear yawned in Avall’s stomach. What she said made sense—if only it weren’t
he
that had to do it. “You saw what they did to Rrath.”

“I saw what they did to someone who was unprepared, who had no idea what he was doing, and who was probably half-mad anyway. Who, last I heard, was unconscious somewhere in Priest-Hold.”

“Obviously not,” Strynn snorted. “But you’re right.” She regarded Avall steadily. “It has to be you. And it has to be now.”

Avall returned that gaze, and knew that everything
they’d worked for and suffered for, fought for and worried for during the last few eighths all distilled down to this moment. And to him. “Let’s do it,” he said at last. And wondered if he’d thereby named his doom.