Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (32 page)

He ran now across the field of tamped footprints, heedlessly
adding his own and hoping against every rational thought in his mind that
Galorin might somehow still be in the keep, might somehow still be alive
somewhere in those ruins.

But something was wrong.  Not three paces from where he had
started, a great swell of fear and the heat of power suddenly surged through
his body, and he paused, confused, suddenly under attack again, naked and alone
and in the thick of a war again, but against whom?  The ones who had attacked
Galorin?  Tornado winds whirled around him carrying sharp obsidian shards and
chunks of heavy volcanic rock toward him at amazing speed.  At the same time,
the footprints beneath his feet began to liquefy, to melt away, and the ground
began to suck at his feet to pull him down.  Worse still, his chest felt
painfully tight.

High on the crater’s rim, Hallin had seen Dith start his
panicked run for the keep, and his eyes widened.  Why did he run unless—Dith
knew somehow that they were there, and he was making a dash for Galorin!  But
Dith knew they were there.  Whatever defenses he had readied, Hallin could not
stop now; he would never get another chance.  Even if Dith was expecting an
attack, he might be able to hold off one, perhaps even two, but he could not
hope to stand against three.  No mage had ever withstood all three.

So Hallin had let loose the tremendous bundles of power he
had laid by. His body surged forward, and he had grunted with the effort to
control the flow of his energy into the wind and stones, the ground, Dith’s very
heart.  The veins stood out at his temples and in both forearms where his robe
sleeves had fallen back, and sweat dripped to the ground until at last,
strength spent, his arms dropped to his sides.  He was too exhausted to look up
and see the result of his efforts.

But Tawn had been watching Dith, had seen him stumble in the
sand and raise his hand back toward them in what seemed no more than a weak
gesture of surrender, a plea for them to desist.  As distorted ripples of power
hurtled toward them through the still air of the crater, and as the huge rocks
and boulders below them seemed to flicker and run like mud, seemed to become
trees and underbrush for only a moment before they rumbled and fell away,
Tawn’s eyes grew wide and a gasp hung soundless on his lips.  He jerked Hallin
up by the arm and dragged him away at a dead run, shouting for Geretous and
Haan to follow.  A few moments later, the searing heat and concussion knocked
him senseless to the ground.

Dith sank gasping against the trunk of the nearest tree, his
heart still pounding furiously but no longer about to burst in his chest.  He
drew a deep breath and held it, listening, watching.  Above him, through the
sounds of landslides and falling trees, he heard no movement, none of the
sounds that an army might make moving through the trees, not so much as the
sound of a single man.

Ahead, between where he sat and the now completely crumbled
towers of the keep, the ground had hardened again, though the footprints of the
strange army of mages were gone, and the ground lay covered by the rain of
obsidian shrapnel that Dith’s latent defenses had so readily hurled away from
him.

Defenses.  He worked to catch his breath and glanced back
over his shoulder through the trees, to where he could begin to make out a
great bare swath of land through the falling dust and smoke.  High on the newly
formed cliffs, at either side, trees teetered and fell into the new canyon, and
the unstable soil and rock at the sides sloughed away into the steam and heat
below to broaden the cut he had made.  He pursed his lips and sighed.

It could have been worse.

His reaction had been no more than reflex, no more than his
own instinct for self-preservation crawling from the scaly underbelly of his
brain to rip away every shred of self-control and discipline he had built over
the last several months.  And if it had not, he told himself, he might have
been killed.

Where were they, why were they waiting?  Surely he had not
destroyed a whole army at a single blow.  Or was this the last remnant of
Galorin’s great defenses?

He listened again to the forest above, to the cries of the
birds circling over the fallen land and to the echoes returning from the far
side of the valley.  Nowhere did he hear the faintest sound of men.  No
footfalls, no treelimbs moving aside, nothing.  Yet they were there; they must
still be there.  What were they doing?

Slowly, he rose to his feet.

Hallin flattened himself against a large rock and cradled
his wrist against his chest.  Blood dripped into his eyes from a cut on his
forehead, and he shook it away angrily.  Above him, high on the edge of the
rim, Geretous lay crushed beneath the rocks, and Haan was nowhere to be found. 
He had just disappeared, carried down with the first great tumbling rush of
rock and trees.  But for Hallin’s own defenses and Tawn’s reflexes, he and Tawn
might have been killed as well; he could not be bothered with a bit of blood in
his eyes. 

“You see him?” he called.

Below him, Tawn moved awkwardly between the strange
boulders, stumbling over broken rock and gravel.  His left leg was swollen at
the knee, and his back was flayed and raw beneath the torn woolen cloth of his
cloak and his tunic.  His face, when he turned back to Hallin, was bruised and
caked with blood.  “He can’t have gone far, Hallin.”

The hunter did not answer, but moved down over the rocks,
catching himself on his shoulder or his elbow rather than his hand, until he
was beside Tawn.  “There,” he spoke darkly, pointing with his good hand down
toward the same place where Dith had emerged before.  Even as he spoke, he saw
a flicker of gold move at the edge of the rocks.

Hallin smiled grimly and raised his hands.

The rocks above where Hallin had pointed, above where Tawn
saw the edge of a gold sleeve, seemed to swell, almost to throb with the energy
Hallin poured into them, until all at once they blasted apart to thunder down
in a great heap.  Once the dust settled Tawn cried out in victory and thumped
Hallin on the back, for beneath their new heap of rock, he could see the winter
sun glimmering off a spot of seamless gold cloth.

But Hallin’s face was pale, and he clutched his broken wrist
in agony.  The flesh of his forearm was blistered and burned just below his
wrist where his power had eddied behind the shattered bone.  Tawn tore away
strips of his own jerkin and rubbed them with the greasy dried beef he carried
in his pack before he wrapped them around Hallin’s arm, the better to keep the
cloth from sticking in the burned flesh.  The mage would survive it, though
Tawn doubted the hand would be worth saving by the time they reached Montor,
but if such was the price paid to see this Dith dead, so be it.

“Hallin,” he whispered, casting a glance back toward the
gold cloth beneath the stones, “you’ve done it.  You’ve destroyed him.”

Hallin was barely conscious, but he nodded.

“Come, we must fetch his head,” huffed the Hadrian, setting
his shoulder under Hallin’s good arm, “and then it’ll be time we went our
ways.”  He put his back into lifting the mage to his feet and stumbled under
the man’s weight.

“Hallin, is it?”

“Aye, Hallin of Graeme,” sighed the wounded mage in defeat. 
He took his own weight from Tawn’s shoulders and stood unsteadily.  “Dith, I
presume.” He looked around himself half-heartedly, as if he did not really expect
to see anyone standing nearby.  When he heard no answer, he spoke up
impatiently.  “Dith, also called the Merciless, the Impenitent—”  He coughed.

“The same.”  The voice seemed to come from somewhere to the
right now.  “I see you’ve heard of me.”

“Aye.”  Hallin tried to step forward but stumbled.  He would
have fallen except that Tawn caught him.  It was no use.  He did not have the
strength to face Dith, not now.  One arm was burned and useless, and he had
already spent almost every bit of energy he had.  After years of hunting mages,
of planning and plotting and driving them into traps, of forcing them to waste
their power, now this one had finally drawn him out, trapped him here exhausted
and injured, and now, this one would destroy him.  Hallin cleared his throat. 
“Tracked you through the Range, I have, by order of the mayor of Montor.”  He
raised his good arm unsteadily toward Dith’s voice, not readying an attack but
merely in defense.  “I’m sent to fetch your head.”

Dith made no sound, no motion.  A bounty hunter.  Just
another bounty hunter.  He almost laughed.  The thought struck him as
ludicrous, standing here within clear view of the greatest treasure any mage
had ever found.  Standing here above the ruins of Galorin’s Keep.  Above the
footprints of an army.  Was this bounty hunter blind or just terribly
shortsighted?

“I see,” he murmured at last, letting a slight note of
amused disappointment into his voice.  “Forgive me; I mistook you for a mage.”

Hallin snarled at the insult and flexed his one good hand,
and a ripple of heat split the air.  His intended victim had already moved well
away, and Hallin watched the rock wall absorb this last flare of his energy
without buckling and melting away as it should have, as it would have if he had
been any less exhausted.  If he could have used both his hands to direct the
power.  He completed the gesture with a dismissive wave. 

“You mistook nothing, and have your head I will, if not
today...”  He coughed again and fell gasping against Tawn’s shoulder.

Dith said nothing and watched the white-hot flames climb the
bark of the old trees, crackling and popping in the green wood beneath it and
right next to Hallin’s head, yet the hunter seemed oblivious even to the smoke
and heat of it.  Limbs high above him burned hot, ready to fall on him, but he
did not move; neither did his Hadrian companion.  Fascinating.  Dith cast a
quick glance down toward the keep’s ruins, then a few hundred feet nearer,
toward where he had fallen back after Hallin’s attack.  The stump of the great
tree was still smoldering, and charred bits of wood scattered the ground. 
Beneath them, the tiny scrap of gold cloth he had torn from his robes and stuck
to a branch still glimmered.

He raised his hand a moment, a storm of frozen rain and ice
in his fingertips.  Then he looked at the two men, the one pale with pain and
depleted, the other struggling to support his weight, and he lowered his hand
again.  They would never survive the cold.  Instead, he turned away.

“Hallin,” he called a few moments later from a spot well
below them, and both men moved almost involuntarily toward his voice.  A second
later, a thick fiery limb fell where they had been standing, and the two men
looked back.  What they saw there, since they apparently did not see fire, Dith
could only guess.  “Hallin,” he called again, and slowed his words to be
certain the man understood, “the forest burns behind you.”  He expected to see
perhaps a quizzical or befuddled look on the man’s face, or possibly a look of
revelation.  Instead, he saw two expressions of shock, of sheer terror, of
frozen gasping fear, and not of the flames but of him, as if he had set the
invisible woods afire himself to block their escape.  Fools.  Meanwhile, the
fire spread above them on the mountain.  “Best you see to it,” he prompted
before he turned away.

At the charred stump that marked the forest edge, he heard a
hideous cry of pain from high on the rim, a scream of such agony that he
stopped, wondering whether Hallin and his companion had been swallowed by the
flames.  But the fire was gone to no more than steamy mist, and a moment later,
as if in quiet confirmation, a rush of cool damp air swept down toward him and
on toward the keep just below.

By the time he reached the ruined glassy towers of the keep,
he could make out the dusty gray of Hallin’s robes shambling off balance
through the trees high on the crater wall, and the Hadrian dragging him along,
supporting his weight.  Whether by Hallin’s decision or no, they were no longer
pursuing Dith, no longer even looking down into the valley after him, but were
instead making their way up toward the rim, and most probably, back to Montor. 
There, once Hallin’s arm had been tended, they might set out after Dith again,
but by that time he hoped to be well away from this place and with nothing left
behind him but a cold trail.

Dith shifted his rucksack to his other shoulder as he moved
past what remained of the high obsidian doorway and peered into the keep.  What
he had expected to see there, he could not say, but he was disappointed.

The keep had indeed been gutted. No charred bits of
tapestries hung from the walls, no banners, no burnt wood of chairs or tables. 
Nothing but collapsed obsidian stone.  He shrugged up the rucksack and stepped
a bit reluctantly into the keep, half expecting the rest of the walls to come
tumbling down around him.  But they did not.

He supposed his feet crunched over what remained of the roof
and the upper two floors; the ceiling above stood open to the sky, and what
remained of the towers had only just crumbled down into the stairways at the
four corners of the great hall.  Thus, in only a moment, he had surveyed the
whole of the ruins.

Any furnishings Galorin might have kept had been utterly
destroyed or taken as spoils, so that the walls were barren but for their
amazing weblike pattern of shattering, and of Galorin himself Dith found
nothing but a small bit of metal cloth: gold cloth, like that of his own robes,
and of an eerily perfect match with the strip he had torn away to fool Hallin.

In a few places, especially near the center of the great
hall, the smooth obsidian floor shone through beneath thick piles of rubble, a
flawless glassy floor that glowed a dark, distant blood red.  He bent to touch
it, to feel the comforting warmth that rose from it, and he understood why the
floor was still intact.  Far below, how many miles or leagues he could not
know, but the whole of the floor reached down to the heart of the volcano.