Glyphbinder (17 page)

Aryn let her help him because he wanted Sera to live. They walked, together. “Why did you sacrifice yourself?”

“What?”

“Scribe that glyph. Give your soul to the Mavoureen. You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you?”

Jyllith grimaced as the gnarls fell into step around them, as they walked away from Sera. “I do.”

“Then why do it?”

“To make sure no other family dies like mine.”

Evidently, her oath didn’t include the people of Taven’s Hamlet. Aryn pondered reminding Jyllith that the Mynt hadn’t sacked Talos, but he knew she wouldn’t believe him. Whatever delusions had claimed her mind simply wouldn’t allow it.

“Well,” Aryn said, as they moved up a shallow rise. “I suppose I’ll be seeing you soon, won’t I? In the Underside. In the fire pits.”

She shuddered against him. “I suppose you will.”

They stopped at the top of the rise. Aryn saw a shadow waiting below, a tall man in a long robe. He remembered the elder who had gripped his arms and glyphed hatred on his soul, back in Solyr.

That man was staring at him now, and in a moment, he would toss Aryn into a world of darkness and pain.

And Aryn was going to let him do it.

STALKS CRUNCHED BENEATH Kara's boots as she pushed through the waist-high grass. Behind her Jair’s wagon rumbled over a ridge, leading the rest of their horses behind it. Byn led them on, hunched over with his arms out.

His eyes were feral, and he kept his nose close to the ground. He tracked the gnarls that had taken the others by smell alone, though Kara could make out signs of their passage. A broken stalk here. A big muddy footprint there.

Watching Byn move and hunt impressed her. Though he walked on two legs, he might as well have walked on all four. Sera’s absence was a knife in Kara’s gut. She should have scribed Sera’s eyes back to green herself, but there had been no time with the gnarls.

They headed downhill until they emerged on open plains thick with sleeping wildflowers and shorter, scratchy grass. Kara’s heart sank. Open land stretched in all directions, and she saw no sign of the gnarls who had taken Sera. No sign at all.

Kara searched the map inside her head and realized they had left the Azamoth Plains. They now moved into the largely unpopulated western edge of Mynt, the Valerun: a patchwork of rocky sprawls and open grassland. There were few settlements here that did not belong to outlaws. As they walked, a faint thought entered her mind.

“Kara?”

Kara gasped and halted. “Sera?”

Byn turned and rushed back to her. “You hear her?”

“Sera, I’m here,”
Kara thought as loudly as she could manage. “
Is Aryn there with you? Where are you?”

“I’ll keep thinking,”
Sera thought weakly.
“Follow it.”

Kara let Sera’s urgent thoughts guide her. “Byn. Go.”

“I feel her.” Byn turned. “She’s close. Hurry!”

He broke into a loping run. Kara ran to keep up and Trell ran right beside her. They rushed across the grassy plain and quickly outdistanced Jair’s wagon. He would catch up when he could.

Kara’s breaths burned in her throat as her chest heaved with exertion. She realized the ground was sloping up. The sheer size of these open, grassy fields hid their slight peaks. That swell in the earth might be just enough to hide a gnarl. To hide Sera.

As they sprinted across the flowering plain tall stalks of grass gave way to scrub brush and hard rock. Sera had to be close. She was
alive
, and that meant Aryn might be as well.

“Kara,” Trell shouted as they ran. “Expect an ambush! They must know we’re coming!”

“Sera?”
Kara thought urgently.
“Are you alone?”

“They left me. I was asleep.”
Sera’s mindspeak echoed oddly, a sign of exhaustion.
“They took Aryn. They’re going to kill him!”

By the time they found a cluster of granite peaks settled in a small, barren depression, Kara felt ready to drop. She caught herself on her knees, huffing and wheezing, and then rushed into the depression. She found Sera so quickly she almost stumbled over her in the dark. The gnarls had left her beside a jagged gray rock.

Byn swept Sera’s limp form into his arms. “Are you hurt?”

A shadow dropped into the depression with claws extended and red eyes wide. Kara caught a vague impression of long claws, black skin, and sharp yellow teeth, and then it leapt at them. Snarling.

Trell caught the shadow on the tip of his sword, grunted as he fell backward, and forced it over himself by bringing his sword back and up. The shadow flipped over him and grunted as Trell’s boot slammed into its gut. It smashed into the ground headfirst.

The monster before her was shaped like some sort of great ape, covered in dark black scales and snorting steam. Its huge forearms sported claws as long as her feet and its wide, open mouth showed long yellow teeth. This demon should not exist. It was forbidden.

Sera screamed its name first. “Davenger!”

Kara took the dream world and scribed a glyph of Osis, thinking to paralyze the demon, but the carrow root remained thick in her blood. Osis managed one weak strike and broke apart with a hiss. Nausea hit her like a thunderclap and tossed her to her knees.

The demon charged again. Trell intercepted it before it could gore anyone, stabbing and spinning so fast that his blade seemed to be in four places at once. Kara had never seen a man move so fast. The davenger raised its arms and stumbled back at the flurry of blows, black scales crumbling to the earth. Its red eyes went wide.

Byn growled and barreled forward. He swung his quarterstaff around like an oar and cracked it against the demon’s thick skull. The blow staggered the davenger as Kara unslung her staff and dropped into a low guard. Glyphs weren’t all she could do!

The davenger skittered sideways, and one claw lashed out. Kara dove under it and went for the demon’s knees, but her swing went wide and then she slipped on a patch of scree. She went down hard as the demon loomed over her. Its claws came down like scythes.

A burst of air slammed into the demon, knocking it back on its heels. Kara scrambled up to find Sera standing just behind her, fingers bleeding and hair disheveled. As she watched, Sera scribed another Hand of Breath with her eyes tightly closed. She had fought through the carrow root, somehow. She had always been so strong.

They were together in this. A dyn. Kara let her training take over and let the dyn disc that united her, Byn, and Sera tell her what was needed and when. She could feel their thoughts. She knew when they would move and when they would strike.

The davenger blocked Byn’s swing and then took Kara’s staff right in the teeth. It snapped at her, furious, as another blast of air hit it from behind. It tumbled onto Trell’s whirling sword and he got in a few good swings. Scales and blood splattered the rocks.

Byn’s next strike came down so hard he almost broke his staff across the back of the demon’s head, and still the monster kept fighting. Only Hands of Heat could kill these things, and Kara was fresh out. How were they going to survive this?

Wooden wheels rumbled as Jair’s wagon thundered into the divide, his thoughts urgent and clear. It might work. Byn dove away as Kara grabbed Trell, throwing both of them aside.

Two large Solyr packhorses thundered over the davenger, trampling it into the rocks. The wagon’s thick wheels pummeled its body, bouncing the wagon as it smashed skin and crushed bone. Nothing could survive such a brutal impact.

The mangled demon stumbled to its feet. One backward arm spun about and snapped into place. A divot in its skull popped out as new scales grew across the wound. It rolled its gruesome head around on its neck and snorted at them.

Trell closed with his sword raised. “Demon. Look at me.”

The davenger hissed at Trell as Byn and Sera circled it, waiting for their chance to strike. Kara stared at Trell and felt her jaw fall open. She recognized the empty look in his eyes, the same look that had been in his eyes in the Lorilan Forest. A dead man’s stare.

“Trell?” Kara whispered. She took the dream world and found it, just as before — turgid green energy all around Trell’s dream form. Souls surrounded Trell. He breathed death.

The demon launched itself at Trell faster than Kara could think. Scales crunched like leaves as Trell met its charge with Solyr steel, slicing clean through its chest and out the other side. He had just cleaved it in half, and Kara could not imagine how.

The davenger’s legs kept running even as its torso slid away. Its scream sounded like a mill saw splitting a log, so loud it hurt her ears. Black blood splattered Trell, but he didn’t notice. His eyes were still empty, still staring at something none of them could see.

The demon’s halves writhed as scales bubbled away. When the bubbling finished, two desiccated halves of a naked, twisted corpse were all that remained. Kara
urked
and fought it. She could not lose the meager food she had kept down. Food was precious now.

That body couldn’t be Aryn. She prayed it wasn’t Aryn, but she really couldn’t tell. It had no real skin to speak of. She watched Trell as he lowered his blade and closed his eyes. He then opened them and gasped, staring at the corpse.

“What just happened?” he asked quietly.

“Kara!” Sera slammed into her. “We have to save Aryn!”

“He’s not dead?” So she hadn’t failed him. Not yet.

“No,” Sera said. “But he’ll soon be far worse.”

In one moment Sera filled their minds with everything that had transpired after a vicious gnarl pulled a sack off her head. The images and words that came with Sera’s vision — a flurry of detailed memories only those skilled in mindspeak could convey clearly to others — left Kara feeling faint.

An unknown elder and his soldiers were burning towns in Rain and Tellvan, inciting war by disguising themselves as Mynt soldiers. If they started a war between Tellvan and Mynt, her province could be overwhelmed. Tarna could fall, and that wasn’t the worst of it.

These people weren’t just murdering anyone they came across. They were slaughtering whole villages, scribing demon glyphs, sending souls to the Underside. Summoning the Mavoureen.

Kara now remembered the woman who had tried to turn Sera into a davenger, a clear memory of a woman with hateful gray eyes and red hair. Jyllith. Never in Kara’s life had she wanted to kill someone. She wanted that now.

“We have to go,” Sera said. “If we find him quickly—”

A demon howl split the night, louder than thunder. It was the davenger’s sawmill howl magnified a hundred fold. It made the ground tremble and tore at Kara’s ears like sharpened fingers. The night sky tinted blood red.

Kara dropped. She knew the others were screaming, the horses with them, but she couldn’t seem to care. She writhed upon hard stone. The sound was killing her. Soon, it ended.

A terrible silence fell over the Valerun.

“No,” Sera whispered. “No, Aryn! No!”

Kara felt Aryn’s soul drop off her dyn disc, sliding away as his soul went somewhere
else
. Somewhere dark. All Kara could think about was what she would tell his family. Elder Halde. How could she explain this or justify it?

Aryn wasn’t simply dead. His soul was in the Underside, and the Mavoureen had him now. They would tear his soul apart, a hundred times over, before they even began to torture him.

Kara would live her life knowing she had let that happen to Aryn, but hers was a kind fate by comparison. A few dozen nightmares, a few decades of guilt. Her pain would end. Not Aryn’s. Not ever.

She would not cry about it. She would not scream. There really wasn’t any point.

KARA SIGHTED HIGHRIDGE KEEP in early afternoon, built into the ridgeline that jutted off the outermost peaks of the Ranarok Mountains. Its hard stone walls were the same mottled gray as the rock from which they had been quarried. Behind the keep, the lightning-filled sky above the Unsettled Lands crackled ominously.

Deadly storms of rainbow color plagued that sky, a curse summoned by Torn, High Protector, to ensure no human ever walked its lands again. That curse had slaughtered everyone remaining in Metla Tassau and forbidden anyone from returning. Walking into those lands today was a death sentence … for humans.

Trell rode Chesa ahead while Byn’s horse, Pacer, followed a lead tied to the wagon. Kara had dozed fitfully in Charger’s saddle as they drove hard all day through rocky, rugged country, but she was awake now. The sight of the garrison filled her with adrenaline.

“Kara!” Trell shouted from Chesa. “Do we approach?”

“That’s where we’re headed!” Kara hurried Charger forward, closer to Trell’s mare. “The Sentinels will help us. I’m sure of it.” She didn’t mention the way Trell had halved a davenger with unglyphed magesteel. She didn’t know how to talk about that.

“And we will be safe there?”

“As safe as we will be anywhere. The Sentinels are charged with protecting our borders from the denizens of the Unsettled Lands, gnarls and worse.” Kara shuddered as she remembered that davenger lunging at her face. “Far worse.”

She had contacted Elder Halde often during the night, on the echo stone. He had not responded, but that didn’t matter now. The map inside her head had served them well. They had made it to Highridge Keep alive.

Some of them, anyway.

Aryn’s death didn’t feel real. Every time Kara looked back she knew she would see him on his horse. He would grin at Sera, toss some veiled insult at Byn, wink at her and boil her blood.

Yet he was never there. Dreams had plagued her each time she slept during the ride, and she had seen Aryn’s face in them. Laughing. Sneering. Screaming.

If this is what it felt like to lose someone you
didn’t
like, a pain inside you that opened a hole in your stomach, the thought of losing Byn or Sera made it hard to breathe. How could she survive that?

They rode through the ruins of Highridge Fortress, a massive garrison destroyed during the All Province War. The bones of the fortress stood even now, crumbling towers of black stone and fallen pieces of wall laid bare before the newer Highridge Keep. Kara and the wagon followed Trell through the wreckage. They had just emerged when he reined in Chesa and held out his arm.