The Warlord's Legacy (45 page)

From the horizon’s edge, the first of Imphallion’s southern hills—
true
hills, these, not the rocky lumps through which they’d been riding—drew ever nearer, ships of stone on a sea of cracked earth. From within those hills, barely visible, crimson-clad soldiers rose and lifted longbows toward the sky. Unprepared as they were for the unnatural speeds at which their enemies pounded toward them, the distant horns of their scouts had warned them to stand ready.

Arrows arced up and out, graceful as a flock of raptors, and plunged earthward in a rain of wood and steel.

And Corvis, his body a tangled knot of agonized strands, his head heavy with exhaustion, lifted Sunder from his side and drank from the power of the Kholben Shiar.

Still he did not unleash the
full
might of the demon-forged blade; he never had, and he hoped, swore, even prayed he never would. But he delved now as deep as he ever had, and his mind cringed from the weapon’s lustful, sadistic howl. He felt the surging of infernal magics flow through him, until he thought he must scream as the blood threatened to boil within him. A veil of fire shrouded his senses, so that he could see only a handful of yards—but within that distance, his sight was that of the gods. To him, every pebble that lay upon the earth, every blade of grass, even the currents of the wind, were painfully clear. In his ears, he heard the hoofbeats of the horses, not as a constant rumble but as separate and distinct sounds, the steady beat of a slow drum.

When the arrows fell around him, they fell not as a rapid rain but as the light drifting of snow. He rose in his stirrups and it was nothing to
him, nothing at all, to reach out with Sunder and sever them from the sky before they could draw so much as a drop of blood.

Without pause they were gone, past the slack-jawed archers and deep into the shallow, winding gorges of the stone-faced hills.

Corvis dropped from his horse and advanced along a narrow pathway, casting about for any sort of hollow, cave, overhang,
any
entrance into the rocky depths. Internally he wrestled with the power flowing through him, struggling to shove it back into the weapon in his fist. Like a slow tide it receded, leaving burns across his soul.

He had just enough time, as his body yielded to the searing pain and he felt himself crumple limply to the earth, to hope that the others would have better luck finding shelter than he had.

C
ONSCIOUSNESS AND VISION RETURNED
as one, and Corvis discovered a cat in his face.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Sweet merciful gods aplenty, Seilloah, what the
hell
have you been
eating
?”

The cat nodded and turned away, leaving Corvis to his gagging. “He’s all right!” she called out.

A set of footsteps—Irrial’s, of course—drew near, and Corvis took a moment to orient himself. He was lying atop his blanket at the rear of what, so far as he could see in the dim light, was a remarkably shallow cave, little more than an impression in the stone sort of like a sideways bowl. He was naked from the waist up, unless one counted Seilloah sitting on his chest. He shifted his weight, and discovered that the blanket beneath him was soaked with sweat.

That realization brought a sudden awareness of a bone-deep ache that covered his body like a shroud, and he couldn’t quite repress a groan. “Maybe not
entirely
all right,” he admitted to Seilloah through pale, chapped lips.

“You were clinging to life by a single fingertip, Corvis. That damn thing burned you out from the inside. You’re lucky I managed to heal you even
this
much.”

“I’ve been lucky to have you do a lot of things for me, Seilloah. Thank you.”

The cat smiled—rather a disturbing image in its own right—and then Irrial was kneeling beside them. He craned his head and discovered that the faint light he’d noted earlier was the result of a tiny campfire, barely more than two crossed torches, in the midst of the cave.

“I’ve never seen anyone move like that,” she said, pressing a wet rag to his forehead. “Was that the same spell you used on the horses?”

“No.” He waved a finger at Sunder, lying some few feet beside him. “
That.
” Then, blinking, “Where
are
the horses?”

“Gone,” Seilloah told him. “They were dying. We pushed them too far under your spell. I thought it best to walk them some ways before they keeled over, lay down some false trail.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. Your plan better work.”

‘
We’re reliant on
your
plan? Well, shit. I’m not even
real,
and even
I’m
buggered.
’

Corvis struggled to sit up. “We don’t have much time before they find us. This cave’s not that deep, and …” His eyes widened as he realized the implications of the fire.

“Relax, Corvis. From the outside, the cave looks just like any other span of rock.” She lifted a paw, licked it and ran it over her head. “I
taught
you some of your best illusion spells, remember?”

He smiled and allowed himself to lie back once more. “How long do we …?”

“Long enough. You need to be rested for what’s to come. I’ll wake you if I think time’s getting short.”

Corvis’s smile widened further, but he was asleep before he could sculpt his gratitude into words.

F
EELING A LOT MORE RESTED
, but only a bit better overall, Corvis moved about the cavern on hands and knees, alternating between scrawling strange sigils on the rock with a lump of charcoal and complaining about what the stooped posture was doing to his back. He
was once again fully dressed, and everything the travelers owned was packed and ready to go. “When we move,” he’d warned, “we may have to move quickly.”

Every now and again Seilloah would rise up from a puddle of fur, totter awkwardly and in obvious pain across the floor, and point out a spot where Corvis had misaligned a design or muddled a rune. (At which point, of course, the echo of Khanda in his mind would mock him unmercifully.) Irrial, still not entirely certain what was going on and a bit put out that they’d not deigned to explain, hovered to one side and occasionally fed another stick into the meager fire.

And then she jumped so violently she nearly swallowed her own eyes as Corvis, in a single swift motion, rose to his feet and drove Sunder into the nearest wall. The crunch reverberated vacantly throughout the cave, but it was the subsequent screech as he worked the enchanted blade from the stone that
really
set hair and teeth on edge, gnawing on the fringes of mind and soul like a maddened beaver.

“Buggering hell, Rebaine! What in the gods’ names are you
doing
?”

Corvis froze in mid-swing. “Why, Lady Irrial, wherever did you learn such language?”

“Probably from spending—” She paused, wincing, at the second crash, and then the third. “—spending too much godsdamn time with you!” Another crash, a second wince. “Would you
stop that!
”

He glanced at the small chunk he’d carved from the stone, then down at the powdered rock at his feet. “Sure, that’s probably enough. I—ow!”

For several moments he hopped on one foot, waiting for the pain to ebb from the other. “What was
that
for?”

Seilloah spat out a few strips of leather. “For not warning me. These ears are
sensitive.
”

“Fine! Fine, I’m sorry. I should’ve told you it was coming.”

“I believe I just said that.” And, simultaneously, ‘
I believe she just said that.
’

This was not, Corvis knew without even taking the time to ponder it, an argument he was likely to win. “Irrial,” he said instead, “I need a gem.”

“What?”

“A gem. Diamond, emerald, doesn’t matter, though more valuable is better.”

“I don’t—”

“I know you took a
few
bits of jewelry from Rahariem.”

The baroness frowned. “And you think you’re just entitled to them?”

“Consider it fair price for escaping here alive. Unless you don’t think it’s worth the cost? You’re welcome to take your business elsewhere …”

Muttering a few more of those words that she must have learned from Corvis, Irrial slipped a glinting blue ring from her finger and handed it over. He took it, flipped it over a time or two, and then snapped the sapphire from its setting and handed the silver band back to her.

“Your change, m’lady.”

“Thanks ever so,” she grumbled.

He took a few more moments, gathering rocks from around the cave into a circle, for reasons that neither Irrial nor even Seilloah initially understood. Only when he placed the tiny sapphire in the midst of it and raised his axe high overhead did they comprehend: He wanted to ensure the shards and powdered gem didn’t get lost throughout the cave.

And it was a good thing he did, too, as he first struck the tiny target only obliquely, sending it skittering across the floor, bouncing and rolling until it fetched up against the edge of his work space. His entire posture daring either of the women to comment, he stomped over to it, put it back in place, and tried once more.

This time it shattered cleanly beneath the Kholben Shiar. Again bending over, and again struggling with the pain in his back, Corvis scooped up the dust and splinters into one palm and sprinkled them into the pile of rock dust he’d already gathered. Then, using an eating knife rather than Sunder, he drew a thin line down the palm of his left hand and squeezed exactly nine drops of blood into the mixture, adding water from a leather skin until the whole thing was a gritty paste.

“What—?” Irrial began, only to have Seilloah look up and shush her.

Corvis moved about the symbols he’d sketched, chanting an atonal, discordant litany as he went, daubing the gunk at various points across
the runes. When he was done, he sat cross-legged in the center of it all and, pausing just long enough to draw breath, raised his voice to a shout. Sounds and syllables that were not words echoed across the cave—and then, though Corvis never wavered and his chant continued, those echoes
stopped
, sucked away by the stone.

A minute passed, then two. And then they were
there
, appearing through the shadows and even the rock wall as though stepping between the curtains on a stage.

There were five, or rather there
seemed
to be five; it was impossible to say for certain. They were half Rebaine’s height, but there was nothing remotely child-like about them. Filthy, maggot-pale skin covered long and gangly limbs that hung at improper angles and bent in unnatural directions. They did not walk so much as convulse, each twitch carrying them the distance of a single pace. Pink, irritated eyes sat, uneven and far too close together, above a jagged, tooth-rimmed slash.

Corvis thought no less of Irrial when she whimpered and retreated as far as the cave’s walls would allow; he’d dealt with the foul things before, but it was all he could do to hold his ground.

He spoke as firmly as a voice made hoarse by his prior incantations would allow. “I offer greetings to the gnomes, true and rightful lords of the earth’s inner flesh. I am—”

“He knows.” It was the foremost gnome, indistinguishable from any of the others, who interrupted in a voice of grinding stone. They came to a halt, all as one, and the speaker tilted its head to a perfect right angle. “He knows who has come, yes, has climbed into, under, the skin of the earth.” He reached an impossibly long arm, sensuously caressed the cave wall with a cluster of irregular fingers. “Who dares again to call, yes, to spit the mountain’s voice through flopping human lips. He knows the Rebaine, yes. He never forgets,
none
of him forgets the Rebaine.”

“Nor has the Rebaine forgotten him,” Corvis replied gravely.

“What …?” Irrial whispered.

“They call themselves ‘he,’ ” Seilloah explained quietly. “I don’t know if it’s their language, or something about how they think, but they all do it.”

“So how do they know which one of them’s being addressed?”

“No idea, but they always do.”

“… call to him now?” the gnome was saying. “He has nothing left to say, no, to tell the Rebaine. It risks its life, yes, its flesh, to come here, to his home beneath, below.”