Sorcerer Rising (A Virgil McDane Novel) (22 page)

Broken…

A surge of pain traveled up my scalp, crawling down to my ears and spine. I shook my head.

I couldn’t remember what I had been thinking.

“Then we’ll do it,” I said.

I cocked the lever of the rifle, loading in several cartridges. I knew Wizards who could make weapons that didn’t need bullets but I had never been able to convince myself that a gun, even one that was a figment of my imagination, didn’t need bullets. I cocked the lever again, sliding a .45 caliber slug into the chamber.

“Let’s go.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The three of us
stood at the front of the keep, right at the edge of the southern wall. I shifted my weight nervously. It’s funny how seeing what you look like on the inside can scare you. I had been to countless worlds, seen things of beauty and horror that wanted to kill me or control me or impregnate me and everything in between.

But I had never been as scared as when I left my keep. Even before the
Brand and its curse.

“Ya’ll ready?” I asked.

Al secured his goggles over his eyes and gave me a thumbs up. “Ready when you are.”

Tiffany had the shotgun slung over one shoulder. “Ready.”

I took a deep breath and held out my hand, gently running my fingertips over the dirty stone.

The partition, as much as it looked like a castle, did not have a gate. I would never endanger my mind with such a design flaw when it wasn’t required. But that’s the great thing about your own mind. If you have the talent and knowhow, you dictate how things work. My keep didn’t have a gate.

It didn’t need one.

I knocked three times.

The wall shuddered. Ash rained down from the stone as the structure shook, the air filling with the groan of a thousand stones lurching into motion. I stepped back and slowly the wall picked itself up, rearranging and shifting itself like a hive of ants. The stones rippled through the wall, sliding away from the center like the ocean before Moses, forming a long tunnel.

I waited for it to settle before stepping through the arch. The walls were forty feet thick, a hundred feet tall. It took us a solid couple of minutes to walk all the way through it. When we had made it through, the wall settled back down behind us, the stones falling back into place with eerie precision.

I ignored it, focusing on the scene before me. The keep had been built on a rocky hill, one of the largest in the region. It gave me a view that spanned for miles.

Miles and miles of ashen, barren wasteland.

It wasn’t empty and dry like Sarah’s had been. I’d meant what I said, that I’d never seen anything like that. This was just ruined, devastated.

Ash filled the air, a thick blizzard of grey dust that blotted out the sun. The land was hilly, with cliffs and small mountains peppering the landscape. In the distance, I could make out a forest, their skeletal limbs reaching toward the
silent, grey thunderclouds that filled the sky.

I heard Tiffany gasp beside me.

“Is there any life?” I asked. “Anything that hasn’t been ruined?”

“There is,” Al said. “You’d be dead if there weren’t. But it’s tough out here. There are more predators than prey and everything has developed a mean streak. You have bunny rabbits in your mind that the hawks are afraid to catch, grass that the rabbits are afraid to eat.”

I tried not to think about what that said about me. You couldn’t take everything literally, even in your own mind. Your subconscious played all sorts of tricks and there were intricacies that had yet to be understood by even the greatest of Wizards.

It still bothered me though. It did not bode well that the bunny rabbits of my soul were mean.

I shook myself, scattering ash off the brim of my hat. It was coming down thick, a dusty blizzard that threatened to bury us if we didn’t keep moving. I buttoned my coat and drew up the collar.

I took my first step toward Blackthorn.
             

No road stretched out from the partition. Only unmarked earth and ash as far as the eye could see. The keep was always easy to find, it shone like a beacon everywhere in my mind, but everything else was lost.

Luckily, and at the same time, unfortunately, Blackthorn always left a path to find.             

We moved toward the woods I had seen from the top of the hill. They would be just the kind of place I expected Blackthorn to be. We would be able to find his path, then his lair. After that, well, I decided we would burn that bridge when we crossed it.

The woods were a haunting sight. The trees were huge, ten feet thick at their base and a hundred feet tall at least. Great, leafless branches filled the sky, swaying in the wind. They were all of them black and burnt, their bark crumbling off.

I cut into the wood of one of the trees. The heartwood was still alive, if not flourishing. I patted the tree. The forest was alive, if ugly as sin. That gave me hope.

There was other life in the woods besides the trees, though we saw nothing. Only quick, furtive movements in the shadows, scurrying in the dark.

We didn’t talk as we traveled. We knew what we were seeing, knew what it meant. Even Al, who I normally couldn’t shut up, didn’t feel the need to speak.

It didn’t take long for us to detect the change in the woods. As the trees thickened, their branches becoming denser, the woods grew silent. We were deep into the forest now. Here the ash had piled thick in the branches, creating an ashen ceiling that no light could penetrate.

That wouldn’t do at all.

I touched the barrel of the rifle, whispering nonsense over the metal. With a sharp flick, the barrel flared to life, forcing back the darkness with bright crimson light.

Al frowned. He tapped his goggles and the lenses flickered with green luminescence. “You have to think into the future, lest you become the past.” It would have sounded wise had he not been grinning like an idiot.

“I hope you realize that you have no peripheral vision with those things.”

He wiggled his eyes brows. “But I look like a badass.”

Tiffany snorted. She motioned with one hand and a single firefly, larger than the ones she had summoned in the Walter Cloud, formed from the mist. She frowned, her forehead strained in concentration as the spell hung in between thought and reality. Finally it solidified, perching on her shoulder.

She let out a deep breath. “That’s about all I’ll be able to do as far as spellwork in here.”

We continued on. The forest had gone completely silent now. That was bad. It wasn’t the silence or the darkness that scared us. Nor the tracks in the dirt, though there were way too many for anything with less than four legs. It wasn’t even the dried up husk of something neither of us could identify that we found at the base of a tree.

It was the great, ropy strings of spider web that hung in the branches.

“Did you know they had spread this far?” I asked through chattering teeth.

“They hadn’t the last time I was out here.” He nestled the great stock of his rifle against his shoulder. “Could have been that the woods shifted. Maybe its spread their territory?”

“Yeah,” I said, gripping the rifle harder, not believing that for an instant. I ignored the way I had begun to shake. “We should get through here as quick as possible.”

“You have Nidians?” Tiffany asked.

“Only a few,” I said. “The rest is just
contamination. What I did in Nidia…it had its consequences.”

We started to jog through the woods. I didn’t want to get caught here. It would
n’t go well if we did.

We didn’t make it far before a sharp chittering sound made us freeze. I stopped and listened. Had I imagined it? I listened, praying it was my imagination. I heard it again, echoing through the night.

I grimaced, and slowly continued forward, my rifle at the ready. It had not come from above us, at least there was that. There was light coming from the other side of the tree and it didn’t look like the glow from the clouds.

I eased around the tree and then quickly ducked back again. “Damn,” I whispered, gripping the rifle to my chest.

Al took a look for himself and jerked back just as quickly. “Damn,” he agreed.

Tiffany’s eyes were wide, the shotgun gripped firmly in her hands. I could only imagine what she was thinking. She was in a strange man’s mind, it was a wasteland, and she had no magic.

I held a finger over my lips, indicating for her to be quite. I eased back around the tree, shivering as I did so.

In the thicket of trees and bushes ahead of us crawled hundreds of baseball sized spiders. They were all fat and green with bulbous bodies and spindly legs. They were luminescent, dim green light emanating from their bulbous bodies, lighting up the whole of the glade.

Worse by far, woods were filled with a green, haunting glow as far as I could see. Light that moved and scurried and made my skin itch.

I seethed, watching the spiders scurry over my trees, watching as they built their webs in my branches, spreading like a cancer in my mind. Four years ago, I had torn down the walls of my partition to cast a curse, a bold, stupid move to say the least. I had left my keep, the essence of my being, open, and as a result Nidia had rubbed off on me. This was what happened when you let the Aether get a hold of you, influence you. I was carrying around a dozen or so of their citizens, and the contamination they brought was laid bare before me.

“What do you want to do?” Al asked.

At that moment, I would have burned down the whole damn forest. It was irrational and would mean destroying acres of healthy, living plant life that could mean the world to my psyche but I would have lit a match in a second.

“Virgil!”

“We go around,” I replied
, snapping out of it. “We go around until the forest doesn’t glow anymore. We can’t risk them seeing us.”

“We could just run through,” he said. “We’d probably make it.”

“I don’t like probably,” Tiffany whispered. Her teeth were chattering.

I rolled my eyes. These
were the type of ideas Al had when facing issues of mortality. It wasn’t a concept he seemed to grasp very well.

“As soon as they know we’re here, they’ll raise all hell. The last thing I want to do before facing Blackthorn is face an army of Nidians in a dark forest while-.”

“Why are you purring?” Al interrupted. “Did you always purr?”

I clenched my jaw and resisted the urge to beat up my imaginary friend. “What are you talking about?”

“Listen,” he replied.

I did. There was a quiet purring sound, like a kitten when you hold it up to your ear. It was above me. I broke out in a cold sweat as I looked up.

Into eight, glossy, unblinking eyes.

What’s furry and orange, the size of a football, and has eight legs? Don’t know? It was staring me right in the face about two feet above my head, perched on the side of the tree, its empty gaze never wavering. And God as my witness as the little bastard drooled green, sticky venom, he purred all the while.

Then he leapt at my head.

Have you ever had a jumping spider launch at you? It’s freaky. Your sense of
security, the boundary you had considered safe every other time you watched a spider from afar, is suddenly violated. You think the little asshole can’t get to you and then all of a sudden you’re screaming like a girl, swatting at yourself like you’re on fire.

This happened in much the same way. Except that it was, as I mentioned earlier, the size of a football and, as it sat perched on my head, trying to dig its quivering little fangs into my skull, it was still purring.

I am not ashamed to say that I did, in fact, scream in a decidedly unmanly fashion.

Then my scream was drowned out by the sound I can only describe as sundering. It was like a thousand cannons going off at once coupled by the grinding of the tectonic plates as they shifted. It certainly sundered the spider, as well as my hearing.

Al was grinning, that ridiculous rifle pointed in the air, smoke coiling around the barrel. “Familiar, one. Purring spider, zero.”

I only heard part of that. My left ear was bleeding. I picked up my hat and inspected it. Al was a good shot, it wasn’t damaged at all.

I placed it back on my head and picked up my rifle.

Suddenly, there was the sound of a thousand points contacting wood. I could actually feel the vibrations travelling down into the ground from the branches above.

“Time to go,” I said, and took off through the woods.

The time for subtlety had come and gone, had in fact been blown to pieces with the orange, purring spider. We ran through the spiders, stomping on anything green and moving

“How do you want to do this?” asked Al as we ran.

“Keep running,” I said. “And shoot anything with more legs than you.”

All around us the woods came alive with angry, sharp chattering and the sounds of thousands of legs moving to intercept us. The light of my rifle shown over the forest floor, showing me where to put my feet, but did little else. The ash was so thick in the canopy no light could pierce into the woods. I couldn’t even see the things in the treetops chasing us.