Embers of a Broken Throne (8 page)

C
hapter 11

A
s before, the hunt came with three portents. Sight. Sense. Smell.

The signs sent an icy prickle down Ancel’s neck. He cast his senses out to encompass the white blanket below.

Normally the essences were colorful, definitive patterns, swirling in the air or making up every surface. With the first sign they manifested as a chaotic, undecipherable jumble. As an accomplished Matus, he understood each essence at his disposal and their corresponding element. He could control them at will. They were a part of him, belonged to him, and him to them. Each followed a certain order, pebbles dropped into a still pond, the ripples travelling outward.

All but shade and sela essences.

Those two were chaos. The first black and unfathomable; the second mired in grays, supposedly representative of death and life. Nothing about sela seemed as if it belonged to the living. Sela felt dead, dirty, and proved useless in Forges. He’d tried. In every attempt it slipped his grasp like a man trying to prevent water from leaking between his fingers. Knowing he ingested it naturally to replenish his power and keep his sanity did little to make him feel clean or comfortable.

Something was off about the essence. About all the essences. Of that he was certain. He clung to what he knew. Certainty kept men alive. Doubt killed.

Deep in the Eye with his emotions roiling outside, he allowed his Matersense to roam. He ignored the voices murmuring in his head. They had no hold over him, nor would he give them one, but for the task at hand he required the connection to their power.

The second warning arrived moments later. This one was a sense of danger. Wrongness. The threat lingered in the air, thick, cloying, like the aftertaste of a foul dish.

A choked human cry and an animal snarl reached him.

Closing his eyes he searched out the echo, the break in the rainbow tapestry the essences drew in the air, the disruption that marked where the threat had crossed the Planes.

Back the way we came
.

A gust carried the third portent. Blood. Rot. Death.

Rather than accept the power the voices of Mater offered, he gathered light through the Etchings that covered his body in sporadic areas, populating the entirety of his sword arm and chest on the right side before they branched out to the rest of him. Each Etching reminded him of an intricate tattoo, displaying various scenes, animals, celestial bodies, every one a representation of the essences of light. With their power he Shimmered to the location that had drawn him, disappearing from where he’d stood upon the ledge overlooking his people to appear near the pass they’d used to enter this valley in the Cogal Drin Mountains. Shimmering felt as if he was ripped from one spot and transported to another instantaneously.

Below him, near the cabin they passed earlier, four grogs were making a mess of the hunters that had directed him and his people to the pass. The shadelings were much the same as the first time he encountered them at the town a month ago, black and snake-like, skittering on legs like a spider.

He made to leap down among the creatures but drew up short at a sudden chill. A chill he shouldn’t feel as much, not since gaining the full Etchings of light. Something moved in his periphery, a distortion, an indistinct, towering shape. Ever since Aldazhar, he’d seen the recurring haze, and he’d concluded it originated from the corrupted shade. Now it seemed to be more.

Squinting, he peered from left to right, but saw nothing. The wind gusted, kicking up snow. An odd sensation niggled at him, a prickle along his skin that said he was being watched. For what seemed an eternity he continued to stare at the spot. Still nothing. He remained motionless, holding his breath. The feeling dwindled. A grog’s screech snapped his attention to the scene below.

He frowned. One of the hunters was missing. Their young leader, Kester.

The sound of beating hooves drew Ancel’s attention. Farther down the mountainside, along the path they’d used to ascend, Kester was racing through the snow, his horse’s hooves churning. Another grog chased him. It was steadily catching up.

The surrounding crags and cliffs that rose next to the fleeing man and his assailant cast a pattern of shade and sunlight. Head down, legs flailing against his horse’s flanks, Kester dipped through shadow, and then into a shaft of light as the sun penetrated through cracks in the rocky formations. The process repeated as the hunter fled.

Ancel waited until the grog sprang through one such sunlit window, its legs elongating, the clawed tips poised to strike. He called that sunbeam to him. Its luminance and that from his Etchings were one, interconnected. In his mind he pushed himself to it. For a person with eyes trained enough to follow, he leapt from one point to the next at a dizzying speed.

Sword pointed down, two hands on the hilt, he dropped onto the grog. The blade went through its head. Bone and bristle crunched. Decay rolled off the creature in waves.

A moment before he hit the ground Ancel used the swirling wind to cushion his fall. He rolled and came to a stop, gaze riveted on the spot where the grog’s form dissipated into ash, leaving a dark afterimage.

A screech issued from the other creatures, but Ancel wasted no time in waiting for them to come skittering to him. He Shimmered among them, landing as light as the drifting flurries, drawing his second sword from the scabbard on his back in the same motion. With a spin he knocked away their frenzied strikes, and then danced among them to the music of his battle energy, lopping off limbs, and severing heads. The grogs snarled and squealed, attempting to skewer him with their legs and claws, but he avoided them with deft side steps or swipes of his blade. With each killing stroke, the shadelings broke into ash, drifted to the ground, or scattered on the breeze. When he was done, black blood stained his cloak and furs.

A repeat of the earlier chill and a brush of wind on his neck from the wrong direction served as his only hint of ambush. He spun to a silvery glint hurtling down at him. By sheer instinct he raised both his swords crossed above his head. A weapon with a blade as wide and tall as a man crashed into his weapons. The impact sunk his feet deeper into the snow.

And then the attacker was gone.

Frantic, he spun in the opposite direction. Nothing.

From the corner of his eye came movement, the same distorted form he thought he’d seen earlier, as he’d noticed since Aldazhar. This time he leaped away and rolled. The giant blade slammed into the ground where he’d stood moments ago, kicking up snow and ice.

The distortion solidified. Clad in ebon steel, a creature towered over him, its body surrounded by wispy strands of shade. The blade that almost took his head was only half of the weapon. The sword was actually double-bladed, the hilt in the middle where the beast held it like a staff, twirling it as if the weapon weighed nothing.

Ancel drew on his Etchings. The beast showed its teeth in what appeared to be a grin and then faded from view.

He squinted, enabling him to pick out the distortion. Quick as thought, he relied on his ability to see auras and on his Matersense. The shadeling became visible once more, its aura a mass of corrupted shade. Before Ancel could strike, a slit appeared in the air, the creature stepped through, and the portal closed behind it.

Chest heaving, he scanned all around him to ensure no more surprises waited. Down the mountain, Kester was still fleeing, but at least he was safe.

After flicking blood from the blade, Ancel sheathed the shorter sword over his shoulder. Etching-covered-longsword in hand, he checked the hunters’ bodies. They were mangled beyond recognition, much of their sela—their life force—already devoured. He severed each head to make certain they would never rise again to plague anyone. With a wave of his hand, he ignited the corpses, and left them to burn.

He said a prayer for the death of another two innocents. Sighing, he slid his sword into the scabbard at his waist, the memory of the dead left in his wake weighing on him like the icy shoulders of the mountains at his back. At times like this he often considered what it would be like if he fled, at least for a little while. And every time he molded his spine into the bedrock that carried the burden of sediment and stone. On it stood the fear, the uncertainty, and future of his people. His mother would have been proud.

As a sense of longing for her presence threatened to overcome him, Ancel followed the sunset’s threads, Shimmering up the incline and from there onto the ridges above the pass where he could survey the land for miles. Below him, thousands of people trudged through the valley, heads down, bundled in clothing and fur coats. Wagons trundled ahead, filled with the elderly, infirm, or the children.

With winter behind them it wasn’t as freezing here in the Cogal Drin Mountains as it had been months before in the Sands of the Abandoned. It was colder than the Green Waste. The Waste had proved to be a test of fortitude. As fertile as the land there appeared to be, the expanse of grass and brush had been rife with poisonous plants and thorns, the animals a reflection of what they ate. Deformed things that would kill a man before it fed him.

A little better than a hundred thousand remained of the refugees, once at least triple that in number. They had gained quite a few followers on their trek: people who spoke of their coming, braving the Sands or the Waste because their legends stated the Setian would one day return and the world would be better for it. Some were from villages and hamlets, attacked by shadelings now able to cross the Kassite’s weakened barrier between the Planes.

“How many this time?” With his sheathed greatsword held point down on the ground for support, Ryne squatted at the edge of the snow-encrusted rocks, peering at the refugees. The sun’s last rays highlighted the diagonal scars running from above his left eye down across his cheek.

“Five. You?”

“Four.”

“You remembered to limit your Forges, correct? Used only Prima? Avoided your bloodlust?” Ryne glanced at him askance.

“Yes.” Ancel felt his cheeks flush. A brief gust tugged at his cloak. Over the past month he’d let his emotions get the better of him on one occasion, when shadelings had took several children. He’d drawn on Mater rather than Prima. The release of power had served to draw more of the creatures. The drill was the same every time since then: ‘use Prima to make your Forges invisible to any human but another Eztezian.’

“But I almost had to do a bit more to save myself,” Ancel admitted.

“Why?” Ryne arched an eyebrow.

“There was something different ... a creature as big as a house in ebon steel armor. It used shade to hide itself and bore a double-bladed sword.”

“Gurangar,” Ryne said. “I was afraid of that when we saw the first grogs. Did you kill it?”

“No. It fled.”

“But I think it’s been following us since Aldazhar.” He told Ryne of the distortion he’d seen in the city.

“You should have mentioned it before.”

“I, I thought it was just part of the shade’s corruption.”

Ryne shook his head. “Since it escaped, we must push to reach Benez sooner rather than later.” Ryne stood, the seamless Etchings engulfing his armor and arms rippling with sunset’s flaming hues. “Although Irmina’s pet appears to be doing a good job of hiding our trail, a gurangar brings nothing but trouble. A pack of them and we could lose half our number before anyone realizes.”

The mention of his love made Ancel glance toward her location. Irmina’s connection with the massive, elongated silver creature hidden by the clouds was beyond his understanding. Not even Ryne could explain it. The zyphyl obeyed Irmina’s commands and suppressed the sense or ability for their enemies to accurately track their convoy. On a clear day its sinuous form melded with the sky, a vast impression the length of a field.

Off to one side loped Charra, keeping his distance from the closest refugees. Most shunned the daggerpaw since he grew to near twenty-six hands from front paws to the top of his withers, surpassing Ryne’s eight feet. Only the bravest children among the crowds dared play with him. The others burst into tears when Charra drew too close. Some of the adults either wrung their hands or grew still at the sight of the daggerpaw. A beacon on a dark night, Charra’s lack of an aura stood out. So did the other hundred and fifty men and women who displayed a similar trait.

“Do you think any of them belong to the Nine?” Ancel asked.

Ryne squinted, eyes shifting to take in the same hundred and fifty standouts. He’d been forced to leave an opening for Charra before completely sealing the Vallum against netherlings. “Possibly. But the ones that worry me the most are those able can maintain an aura.”

“Agreed,” Ancel admitted. After discovering a Skadwaz had imitated Mensa for years, that Charra was a netherling, albeit a seemingly good one, and worse yet, that the Nine had infiltrated the Exalted, he feared trusting anyone but his closest friends. Even Galiana, his lifelong mentor, had been revealed as someone else. His father also. And Jerem. He shook his head in disbelief.

“Foes hidden among friends and us none the wiser,” Ryne declared.

“Can’t we force them to show themselves?”

“The only way to do so would be to attack them. We’re not ready for that. Not without the others.”

Ancel grunted his frustration. “How long until we reach Benez?” He shifted his focus to the huddled masses, the cold they felt a foreign thing to him. They’d managed to make decent time by having the Matii use minimal power to clear paths or lift wagons and horses as necessary since entering the mountains. A good thing too. The children and the elderly would have died otherwise.

“Three days at this pace.”

With a shake of his head, Ancel said, “Although we’ve been left with little choice I can’t help my doubts lately. We’re going to a place many of us have never been before, a place we once considered an abomination. I’ve tried not to think on it but is this really the correct decision?” He’d harbored the thoughts for some time, particularly when he lost friends or people he knew to disease or shadelings or some other unfortunate occurrence. It often felt as if the world itself fought against them.