Quintessential Tales: A Magic of Solendrea Anthology (13 page)

Faxon didn't stop running. As his foot touched the thick rail that ran the length of the deck, he had just enough time to hope that Raff was true to his word. He jumped. Nothingness. Then he landed hard in the lifeboat. Raff's men, swords in hand, slashed the lines to the davits. For one glorious moment, they were weightless, floating in the serene spring night. Then they hit the water and it felt as if they'd been thrown into a wall.

Spray washed over them, and Faxon hunched over to protect the papers he'd risked life and limb for. Raff and his men laid into the oars, driving them away from the ship. Arrows and bullets splashed into the water around them, but the movement and the dark night made it difficult for their attackers to see their target. They made their way up one of the many inlets that fed into the river. They dragged the lifeboat up onto the riverbank,
and then collapsed in the dewy grass, exhausted from the daring escape.

"We should keep moving," Faxon said. "Tionne will likely give chase."

Raff chuckled. "Not likely. We were busy while you were below deck. We cut the davit ropes and the rudder lines. They're going to be going downriver for a spell, whether they like it or not."

Faxon laughed. Then he thought about it, and laughed harder. Tionne would not be happy at all. Gunther, however, would find the entire story hysterical. He pushed himself to his feet, allowing the enchantment to fall away. Raff raised an eyebrow.

"Honest work, eh?"

"Well,
” Faxon said with a shrug, “honesty is what you make of it. Come on."

With the six of them working the oars, the trip back to the dock in Overwatch was much easier than their escape had been. Even working against the current of the river seemed like a vacation after their escape from Tionne's ship.

True to his word, Faxon introduced Raff and his men to Gunther, who was recovering under the expert care of a healer that Furia had hired from the Upper City. When Faxon boarded the ship for Dragonfell, the dwarf was boasting of plans to open a second warehouse, or even a shipping company, with the newfound manpower. Faxon just smiled and shook his head. It was nice that some things never changed.

Faxon kept an eye out for Tionne's ship as they sailed down the river and into the
Diamond Sea. He saw no sign of it, but he knew she was out there. Waiting. Biding her time.

He had no doubt they'd meet again.

Note from the Author:
Please be aware that this story contains spoilers if you haven’t read the Swordmage Trilogy, particularly The Pegasus’s Lament. If you haven’t, I highly recommend that you read the original trilogy before reading All Souls.

“
Mama! Mama, come quick! There’s a monster in the pumpkin patch!”

Kellni looked up from the washbasin as the door from the front porch banged open. Selma tripped over the threshold, sprawling across the rough plank floor and crashing into the table in the center of the common room. The table, which served as a place to dine, a desk, and a workbench, wobbled on unsteady legs
, and for a moment Kellni thought it would crash down on her youngest daughter, taking the lit lantern with it.

At five, Selma was still young enough to cry when she skinned her palms and knees, so when the girl didn’t react to the fall with the slightest yelp of pain, Kellni knew something was afoot. Instead, the child scrambled to her feet and ran to her mother, burying her face in Kellni’s work dress. She had to pry Selma off her leg just to get a good look at her.

“Monster in the pumpkin patch indeed!” she scolded, taking a damp rag from her dress pocket and attacking the dirt on the youngster’s face. “Of all the foolishness. Why were you out there after dark anyhow? You know you’re not supposed to be past the south fence after sundown.”

Selma had the decency to look abashed, but her eyes were wide and bright. Whatever had scared the child hadn’t given her enough of a fright to make her behave any
better than usual. The bigger concern in Kellni’s mind was where Demitra was. Her eldest daughter was supposed to have been watching the youngsters while their father was in the field. If she’d gone sneaking off with that boy from the village again…

“Mama! You have to come quick! Demitra went to chase the monster off. Then she screamed and didn’t come back.”

What Kellni had been ready to dismiss as childish tomfoolery now took on a much more sinister aspect. She grabbed the lantern from the table and glanced around the room for something to use as a weapon. There was no time to call for a guard or the militia. This was something she’d need to look into herself. Her eyes fell on a long-bladed butcher knife. That would have to do. She snatched it off the counter and was out the door, Selma two steps behind her.

They dashed around the house and down the packed earth path that led past the south field and to the pumpkin patch. Though the path wasn’t that long, the urgency of the moment made it seem as if they were traveling from one end of the Imperium to the other. After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the split rail fence that surrounded the south pasture. The gate was standing open. Luka, her husband, would never have allowed that.

Kellni’s hope that this was all some sort of elaborate All Souls Eve prank was growing more distant by the minute. Demi was nowhere to be seen, and Selma’s sisters, the twins, were gone. A cold hand of panic squeezed her stomach. Kellni spun in a slow circle, holding the lantern as high as her arm would allow.

“Luka!” she called, her voice breaking. “Demi? Are you out there?”

Beyond the pale butter-yellow circle of soft light the lantern cast, the night was dark and still. Kellni strained her eyes and ears, but found nothing that might indicate where her husband or other daughters might have gone.

“Stay here,” she whispered to Selma, giving the girl a little shake when it looked as if she might balk at the command. Selma nodded, though she looked with uncertain eyes at the darkness beyond the gate. It was almost as if she could see something that Kellni couldn’t. The thought sent a shiver up her spine.

Kellni took a step toward the open gate and stopped. Another step. Then another. Her grip on the butcher knife tightened until her knuckles shown pale white in the lantern light. Another step and another. She was nearly to the open gate when she saw something on the ground that flashed and sparkled. She knelt to get a closer look. It was the fine silver chain that usually hung around Demitra’s neck. They’d given it to her for her sixteenth name day. She never took it off.

Her hand hovered over it and Kellni had almost decided on picking it up when something else caught her eye. There was a darker smudge on the tall grass just outside the gate, at the very extremity of the light thrown off by her meager lantern. Holding the knife out in front of her like a lance, Kellni half crouched, half walked toward the stain on the grass. She passed through the open gate. It felt very vulnerable, as if being inside the fence offered her some sort of protection from the outside world.

When she lifted her lantern over the stain on the grass, any lingering doubt she might have had about this being a lighthearted All Souls Eve prank vanished like morning fog at sunrise. It was blood and it was everywhere. A large splash of blood led off through the high grass as if painted by a man-sized brush. There was so much of it. It dripped off the individual blades of grass in silky ribbons.

Before Kellni could process the full horror of what she was seeing, there was a sound behind her. She whirled, both lantern and knife held at the ready. There was nothing there. Except there was. She could hear it. There were shuffling footsteps coming toward her through the grass.

Still, the lantern showed her nothing.

“Selma, RUN!” she yelled, as the thing behind her screamed.

It was a scream unlike anything she had ever heard. Whatever was behind her in the pumpkin patch wasn’t human. Its high-pitched cry sounded like a pig being slaughtered, mingled with the throaty call of some massive beast of war. The sound alone was enough to convince Kellni that she didn’t want to hear it, much less see it. She pelted back toward the gate as fast as her feet would carry her.

Selma had, for once in her young life, listened without question. The child was racing up the path toward the house, the back of her dress a pale smudge in the darkness. Kellni was thankful for that. At least she might be able to save her daughter, even if she couldn’t save herself.

Saving herself seemed to be growing less and less of a possibility. Kellni could feel the thing in pursuit of her. Its footfalls pounded the earth behind her, and she dared not look over her shoulder to see how close it was. She knew that it was gaining on her. She could feel the air it moved swirling around her like a sudden winter storm. It was cold. Cold enough that she was able to see her breath as she gasped for air.

The thing behind her screamed again. It was almost on top of her. Something slammed into Kellni’s shoulder, sending her tumbling head over heels. The lantern went one way, its glass globe shattering as it hit the ground. The knife went the other, leaving her defenseless.

“Run, Selma, RUN!” she managed to cry, before something cold and slimy wrapped around her ankles.

It flipped her over with ease. Somewhere off to her side, the lantern had caught fire to a stack of hay bales. Light blossomed in the night. Kellni would have been happier dying in the dark. As the flames licked higher around the stack of dried fodder, she got a good look at the thing that was dragging her into its salivating, bloodstained maw.

Eight feet tall, its body was a mass of black tentacles, wrapped around each other. The tentacles formed a trunk, on which the thing’s bulbous head perched. Kellni uttered a bark of hysterical laughter. It looked like a giant pumpkin, but pumpkins didn’t have mouths filled with jagged teeth as long as a man’s fingers. She was still laughing when its powerful limbs pulled her toward those teeth. The laughter stopped when its jaws clamped down on her, tearing through flesh and bone.

Nightwind plodded forward, his head down and his nose pointed toward the frost-gilded ground. It wasn’t the first time that Tiadaria had thought that her faithful companion might be more attuned to the vagaries of her mood than any other horse would have been. She leaned forward in the saddle and gave him an affectionate slap on the neck.

“We should be there within the hour,” Adamon said from atop his mount. The dappled gray pony that lumbered alongside Nightwind was as non-descript and boring as the man who sat astride it.

Tiadaria didn’t trust herself to reply. It seemed like every time she opened her mouth on the trip from Dragonfell to Havenhedge, she and Adamon had ended up in a heated argument about something. Their conflict covered a wide range of topics, from the construction of the new ether gate in Dragonfell to the estimated severity of the coming winter. It seemed like whatever she said, Adamon took delight from standing on the opposite side of the issue, just to vex her. If she had said the sky was blue, he would tell her that it was more of a sea foam green.

They crested a gentle ridge and there, below them, Havenhedge lay nestled in the foothills of the Dragonback Mountains. Tiadaria fought down the urge to point out that Adamon’s timing was off. There was no point in stooping to his level. The town seemed sleepy and still, not the kind of place to have sent an urgent dispatch to the capital begging for
immediate military assistance. The runner had been in bad shape when she’d arrived. The young woman had come very near to running herself into an early grave, but the healers and clerics at the hospitals had patched her up with their considerable skill. She might not ever run again, but at least she’d come out of the ordeal with her life.

Something about the scene below didn’t seem right to her, but Tiadaria shrugged it off as an overactive imagination. It hadn’t been that long since the conflict with Nerillia and Tionne at Dragonfell. She was still a little jumpy. She noticed Adamon’s hand hovering over his belt and felt a little better. Few people knew about the rare and powerful weapon he kept in the holster on his hip.

Since the events in Dragonfell, Adamon had eschewed the traditional garb of the Quintessentialists. He no longer wore the long off-white robes of the Order of the Ivory Flame.

Instead, he opted for a black travel cloak, a simple tunic, breeches
, and boots. Tiadaria wondered, but would never ask, how much his choice of weapon influenced the change in his appearance. The dwarven hand-cannon he carried would have been unwieldy in a robe. With that much loose cloth, there were too many spurs and ridges to get caught on. The simple leather holster under his cloak was far easier to handle in combat.

Tiadaria spurred Nightwind toward the town. The sooner they were there, the sooner they would know what was going on. Adamon’s mount
had just fallen in step with hers when suddenly both of them reared back with a terrified whinny. Tiadaria grabbed for the saddle horn, only just avoiding being bucked off the plunging horse. Nightwind was normally a stolid beast, well used to the hazards of battle. It had to be something very out of the ordinary to spook him into such a reaction.

She managed to get her steed calmed and pointed in the right direction down the road. The horse took a few reluctant steps and then Tiadaria understood what had made the beasts panic so. It was as if they’d crossed an invisible line in the road. On one side was a sunny autumnal afternoon. On the other, the air was cold and pregnant with a strong sense of foreboding. Turning Nightwind to face back the way she’d come, she watched Adamon move toward the invisible division between Havenhedge and the rest of the Imperium.

As Adamon crossed the point, his features twisted into a grimace, which he then schooled into a scowl. He glanced at Tiadaria, then over his shoulder. He, too, turned his mount to look back the way they had come. There was a shimmer in the air over the road, like the waves of heat you could see over the Western Dessert during high summer. It certainly wasn’t obvious. If it wasn’t your intention to find something abnormal, odds are you’d never have seen it.

“Well then,” Adamon said in his slow drawl. “What do we have here?”

“Whatever it is, the horses hate it.” Tiadaria leaned forward, patting Nightwind in a way she hoped conveyed reassurance. The horse nickered and tossed his head. “I think they’re probably right about it.”

“Animals can be very attenuated to changes in the Quintessential Sphere. I suspect that whatever we find in Havenhedge will be related to this phenomenon. However, we won’t know what’s going on here until we discover what’s going on there.”

Adamon pointed to the town, which, on this side of the disturbance, had taken on a more sinister countenance. From above and farther away, it looked as if it might just be a lazy afternoon without many people in the fields on roads. From where they stood, the town looked abandoned. No one was in the fields, on the roads, or manning the guard post that stood just outside the outlying town buildings.

A cold knot tightened in the pit of her stomach. Her hands dropped to the hilts of her scimitars. She felt, and was reassured by, the familiar lance of pain that shot from her palms up into the center of her chest. That deep burning was reassuring. It reminded her of her connection to the Quintessential Sphere and that she wasn’t just another fighter stumbling into the unknown. She was the Swordmage and Captain of the Grand Army of the Imperium. There were very few threats she couldn’t face. Fewer still she couldn’t stare down with the assistance of a powerful mage by her side.

Adamon might have liked to challenge her at every turn, but when it came to combat, there were few people Tiadaria would want by her side more. Unlike Faxon’s boyish, almost reckless, combat style, Adamon was more restrained. He was concerned with outcomes, advantages, and tactics. It was a welcome counterbalance to what Tiadaria had to admit were her own impulsive, reactionary ways. No matter how much they annoyed each other, they worked well together in combat, and Tiadaria was thankful for that.