The Vaetra Chronicles: Book 01 - Vaetra Unveiled (28 page)

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Now that we had Kefer on our side, we were faced with the true difficulty of getting to Lord Thoron and freeing the villagers.

"Under the cover of the amulets, getting close to Lord Thoron shouldn't be too difficult. He's usually deep into the process of creating another amulet in the afternoon, but that will be over soon," I said.

Ebnik looked thoughtful. "Tell me more about his amulet process."

I described what I had seen the prior day and that morning. How Lord Thoron drained a village woman of her vaetra in the morning and spent the afternoon constructing an amulet, drawing on the additional power he had acquired. As I spoke, Ebnik's face went white and then red.

"He drains the women to the point of unconsciousness?" he asked with measured words and a glowering stare.

"Yes. He used a device of some kind to drain her, and then one of us would have to carry her back to her hut a while later."

Ebnik and Sulana looked at each other, anger and frustration clear on their faces. "That bastard!" Sulana spit out.

"Why, what's wrong?" I asked, looking back and forth between them.

Ebnik waved his arms around as he explained. "He knows how dangerous it is to drain someone to the point of exhaustion! It can cause long term damage! He's probably shortened the life of every woman in that village by now. This is the same kind of thing that got him expelled from the Archives in the first place."

Sulana calmed herself and placed her hand on Ebnik's arm. "Paeter never did believe the claims of long-term damage. And we had no direct proof to offer him. Just legends from times past."

Ebnik took a deep breath and shook his head. "Yes, and Paeter is a short-term thinker. He always takes the quickest path to his goal."

"At least he has one redeeming quality," mumbled Barek.

Sulana glared at him, and he had the good sense to look away.

Ebnik's anger abated, and he started pacing back and forth, rubbing his chin. "I think we now know why he chose to set up shop in this particular village. That ice house is probably sitting on top of a rock shelf or underground boulder. The stone blocks sit on top of that and give him a huge vaetra well to work from. Creating implements requires a tremendous amount of vaetra, and draining the village women makes it possible to work much faster." He glanced over at me as he paced. "You said he could create an amulet per day?"

"I think so."

"He created one every day I was there," confirmed Kefer.

Ebnik shook his head. "Amazing. The man is as resourceful as he is unscrupulous."

"When you said the stone blocks are a vaetra 'well,' what did you mean?" I asked Ebnik.

"Minerals and living flesh store vaetra. We refer to anything that stores vaetra as a 'well,' and just as the name implies, vaetra can be drawn back out by an accomplished sorcerer. Paeter is using the ice house you described as a giant well. It gives him the ability to apply far more vaetra to his work than would be possible using just what he carries within himself."

Talon interrupted with a quickly raised hand. "Hold," he said quietly, and everyone fell silent. He was staring down the road toward the curve.

"What?" Sulana whispered.

"I saw movement down at the corner," he whispered back.

Alarmed, everyone turned to look down the road. I saw nothing but a few branches waving in the breeze. Is that what Talon had seen? Or was someone spying on us?

"We're wasting time here," Barek growled. "Surprise requires speed."

Sulana gave him a curt nod in agreement. "Surprise also requires a plan or both sides get surprised. But you're right. Let's get on with this."

We quickly debated and discarded a few options for approaching the village. In the end, everyone agreed that we first needed to take Lord Thoron out of the fight. Our best bet for doing that was to get Ebnik close to Lord Thoron without alerting him. I felt confident I could handle Peltor myself, but we needed to get Ebnik into the village without him being recognized as an outsider. He could wear an amulet, but Peltor would realize he was a stranger even if none of the villagers noticed. To the villagers, we had all been strangers, and none of them had cared as long as we wore an amulet.

Ebnik had a solution for that problem. "I can hide us with a Veil and follow you into the village. As long as no one has physical contact with me, they won't see me. I'll have to drop it before I try to immobilize Paeter, however."

"I can distract Peltor and prevent him from interfering when you drop the Veil," I assured him. "But bring an amulet with you so you can wear it when we leave."

Sulana gave us a tight smile. "Sounds workable. Let's do it. We can figure out how to free the villagers once we have Paeter under control."

I enabled my amulet and Ebnik cast his Veil. Interestingly, I could hear the spell operating, but I couldn't locate the source of the sound. Likewise, even though I knew Ebnik was there, I could no longer see him.

A hand gripped my arm, and suddenly Ebnik appeared at my side. I tried to focus on him, but it seemed like my eyes were crossing. His appearance wavered as if he were underwater and I was looking down at him from above the rippling surface. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were coming to me through a tunnel. "I'll follow about twenty paces behind you. That will give you time to distract Peltor while I get into position."

I nodded in response. He let go of me, and it was a relief when he disappeared once again.

We all headed toward the curve in the road. The others held back while I rounded the curve. Presumably, Ebnik was right behind me.

Before I got within sight of the village, I noticed something unusual about my awareness of the villagers. They were all bunched together for some reason. Also, tendrils of fog were floating down the road from the direction of the village. Fog wasn't particularly unusual this time of year, but it was unusual at this time of day with a bright sun still well above the horizon.

When I got all the way around the curve, the fog was so thick ahead of me that I couldn't see the village. However, my awareness of the villagers told me they all stood at the end of the road. My steps faltered to an uncertain stop.

I closed my eyes and searched through the impressions given off by the Guardian amulets. Nowhere could I feel the strong presence I was used to associating with Lord Thoron, but if he remained in the ice house, he could still be out of range. The villagers were so close together that it was hard to distinguish them. I couldn't tell exactly how many of them had gathered.

So much for our plan to sneak Ebnik into the village undetected.

Apparently, Talon had not been imagining things after all. Someone had alerted Lord Thoron that three of his Guardians were conversing with a group of strangers. That someone (and I was betting on Peltor) may have also been close enough to tell that we were outsiders again.

I turned on my heel and started walking back the way I came. "I assume you can hear me, Ebnik. Something's wrong. The villagers are gathered at the end of the road."

I had only taken a couple of steps when Ebnik suddenly appeared in front of me. His casting orb was still in his hand, and he looked down the road into the fog. "This is not natural fog," he observed. "Paeter must have raised it to slow us down."

I nodded in agreement and looked back over my shoulder. "He knows we're coming, and he told the villagers to stop us."

Ebnik looked pensive. "Paeter won't go quietly. He can make this very difficult, even with two sorcerers against him," he glanced at me, "or make that two-and-a-half. We may be in for a fight after all."

I snorted and said, "Barek will be thrilled. We need to warn the others." I walked around Ebnik, who nodded absently and continued to stare into the fog.

As I started walking, a light gust of wind flowed past me and down the road. I took a few more steps before Ebnik started speaking an incantation. I turned around to see what he was doing and looked up in time to see an arrow arcing through the breeze-thinned fog, aimed straight for my chest.

I
've had a few intense moments in my life where I thought to myself, "It's the end of the trail. I'm done." This was one of those moments. I had no time to defend myself and no time for regrets.

My eyes had just locked onto the arrow and that fleeting thought of finality had sparked across my mind when the arrow stopped suddenly in midair and shattered as if it had struck stone. I stood frozen for a moment trying to make sense of what my eyes had just witnessed.

"Run, Jaylan!" Ebnik shouted at me, and then he began another incantation.

I looked down the road and saw that the breeze had thinned the fog enough for us to make out the villagers faintly. They could see us as well. One of them had a bow and was nocking another arrow. I turned and ran before the archer could get off another shot, just as Ebnik cast another Veil and disappeared again.

I sprinted down the road realizing that Ebnik must have put up a vaetric shield of some kind to stop that first arrow. I already owed my life to the man, and we'd only just met.

I rounded the corner just as a second arrow thudded into a tree to my right. The archer was pretty good. Maybe I should tell him to speak to Borlan about mercenary work if he ever got tired of fishing for a living.

When I came running around the corner, the rest of the team stopped what they were doing and stared at me for a moment. They then burst into action. Swords and daggers were drawn in a chorus of hissing steel. Sulana stepped forward as I approached. "There's a bank of fog covering the village. The villagers are gathered to defend it," I panted in explanation.

Sulana looked around me and down the road. "Where's Ebnik?"

"He's still behind me somewhere," I answered.

She asked me how the villagers were armed. I told her I couldn't tell, but that there was at least one archer. I explained how Ebnik had shielded me from an arrow before disappearing again. She placed a hand on my shoulder and mumbled thanks to him for his quick thinking. Then she grimaced and warned me that an archer was too dangerous to be left standing. She told Daven to ready his bow. He nodded and his face went grim as he complied.

Right then, a shout came from behind me.

"There they are! Outsiders!" The villagers came around the curve in the road and charged.

The village archer held back and readied a shot, and Daven did the same, taking aim at the other bowman. But as the villager raised his bow to fire, his arms suddenly went slack and the partially-drawn arrow released uselessly into the ground at his feet. The bow fell from his hands and he stood with his arms at his sides. Daven aborted his shot as well and tossed his bow to the roadside before pulling his sword.

I scanned the forest edge along the road at the corner and spotted Ebnik between the trees. He stepped toward the bowman, but that was all I had time to see before the other villagers were upon us.

Our numbers were even, but our skills and equipment were not. Jake the wagon driver was armed with a short sword, and Sati's husband Edanos led the charge with a pitchfork. The rest of the villagers were armed with fish knives. I would have laughed if it weren't for the way they ran toward us. A screaming mob with weapons gripped tightly in their hands isn't amusing.

Barek stood at the leading edge of our group, and Edanos went straight for him with the pitchfork. Barek let him come, turned sideways, and drove the pitchfork into the ground with a powerful downward stroke of his sword. On the return swing of his arm, he stepped into Edanos and drove his elbow into the man's face. Barek's blow knocked the smaller man senseless. Edanos dropped the pitchfork as he fell backward, crashed to the ground, and lay still. Barek leaned over Edanos and harrumphed.

The other villagers streamed into our midst.

Sati went straight for Sulana with a feral scream. Her knife was raised high in her fist as she ran toward us, her eyes blazing with fury. Although Sati had a height and weight advantage over the smaller woman, her attack was uncontrolled and she didn't have years of training to hone her reactions. With a sweep of her forearm, Sulana knocked aside Sati's knife arm as it came down, and tripped Sati as the larger woman's momentum carried her forward. Sati hit the ground and rolled over quickly, only to find Sulana's sword tip at her throat.

Jake came after me. I easily deflected his first swing and the return stroke he aimed at my legs. We exchanged blows a few more times, getting a feel for each other. He was a better fighter than I would expect for a wagon driver, but no match for someone with my experience. Suddenly his eyes narrowed and he hesitated as he looked at my amulet. I had forgotten that the Member enchantment of my amulet was still active. I took advantage of his confusion to knock aside his sword and drive a kick hard into his chest. He went down on his back and I stepped on his sword arm, placing the tip of my sword against his sternum.

His amulet was right there in front of me, lying on top of his shirt. I reached down and grabbed it. He started to struggle as I did so, but I looked into his eyes and increased the pressure of my sword point. He glared up at me and bared his teeth, but he dropped his head back to the ground in surrender. I focused briefly on the amulet and disabled it, as I had Meldon's. It was far easier to do the second time, particularly since I wasn't struggling for every breath.