The Ogre Apprentice (46 page)

Her roar was just the distraction Justan needed, Vahn turned his head slightly to look back at them and Justan kicked out with his foot, knocking the nightbeast’s knee inward. Vahn didn’t fall, but it put him just off balance enough that Justan was able to get Peace under his guard and stab him through the belly.

The moment his blade pierced the nightbeast’s flesh, Justan saw into his mind. Vahn was desperate. He had assassinated hundreds of people without a single mistake, but his last two assassinations in a row had been failures. He had been imprisoned for centuries and this was his first contract since gaining his freedom. That freedom had come with a price, but it had also come with a-.

“
NO,
” said a voice deep and terrible.

Vahn’s flesh had closed around Peace’s blade. The voice startled Justan so much, that he was unable to react as the nightbeast spun and twisted, tearing the sword from Justan’s hand.

Gwyrtha roared again as one of the basilisks stabbed into her back. She reached back and grabbed it with her teeth, tossing it to the ground and slashing at it with her claws. The second basilisk was slashing at her belly, but she had somehow managed to harden her scales enough that it did little damage.

“Nice trick,” Vahn said, tearing the sword free and throwing it to the ground. He shivered. Having his emotion sucked away had been a disturbing experience. “But you’re powerless, now.”

Justan backed away from the nightbeast, trying to decide what to do. His body’s pains had rushed back in on him. There was no way he could put up much of a fight. He could run, but in his current state, Vahn would catch him easily.

His hands trembling, Justan pulled Ma’am off of his shoulder and pointed her at the nightbeast. “Stay back.”

“Your bow?” Vahn laughed and approached him steadily. “If you were a Roo-Tan warrior, maybe that would be a threat, but I have watched you with it. You can barely get it to speed up an arrow.”

Justan backed up another step, slowing time as far as he could. “You’re wrong.”

Vahn sneered and lunged towards him, leading with his sword. Justan sidestepped the attack and made a lunge of his own. As he did so, he willed Ma’am to drop her bowstring and straighten, forming a spear-like tip.

The Jharro wood penetrated Vahn’s flesh at the top of his torso and split, forming a cage-like network of roots that surrounded the nightbeast’s core. It was right in the place he liked to keep it, just below the base of his neck. This was another thing that Justan had learned when his sword had pierced the beast.

“I have had three weeks to practice with my bow since the last time you saw me,” Justan said.

Vahn’s eyes bulged. His body started to transform, forming weapons.

“Don’t move!” Justan warned. “No matter how fast you think you are, all it will take is a single thought for me to crush your core.”

“Then why don’t you? I killed the elf. I killed your friend.”

“I want to know who sent you,” Justan said. “If it wasn’t Mellinda, then who?”

The nightbeast sneered. “If I tell you, then what? You’ll let me go?”

“If you promise to leave me alone,” Justan lied. Of course there was no way he was letting him go.

Vahn laughed bitterly. “Fine. He might even find it amusing. Switch to spirit sight and I’ll show you.” Vahn lifted his left arm and black spirit magic swirled across the back of his hand, forming a naming rune. It was on the opposite hand from a warrior rune. Vahn had been named at the Dark Bowl. “Do you understand now? You heard his voice earlier.”

Justan swallowed. “The Dark Prophet sent you? How?”

“Your previous information was only partially right. The Troll Queen did ensnare me.” Vahn snarled at the memory. “Made me her toy. When she tired of me, she had one more bit of fun. She commanded me to go and kill her old lover. The Dark Prophet.

“I got close. Far closer than any being in history. As a reward he sealed me away.” He smiled evilly. “Until a few months ago. When Vriil was killed and Mellinda destroyed, he wakened me. You were the first target on his mind.”

“Why?” Justan said. “Why would he send a resource as valuable as you just to kill me?”

“That rune on your chest. He fears it,” Vahn said, then grimaced suddenly. “Ah! Went too far with that one. Ouch, that made him mad. Time to stop playing.”

There was a snapping sound and Justan felt the Jharro wood jerk in his hand. Justan looked down and saw that Vahn had formed a razor sharp beak around the wood. It had snapped shut, biting through the bow. Justan jumped back, narrowly avoiding the piercing lunge of a claw that had grown from the nightbeast’s side.

“You should have killed me right away,” Vahn said. “Now your last trick is used up.”

Justan folded his arms even though it hurt to do so. “Not really. I have one left.”

Vahn’s form rippled. His eyes turned red, his teeth became needles, his skin blackened, and his voice a screech. “How can you be so confident?”

“Because I’m not just a solo fighter,” Justan said. “
Base of the neck
.”

Vahn’s eyes widened as he tried to move his brain, but the end of Justan’s bow still surrounded it like a cage. Deathclaw’s sword stabbed into Vahn’s body from behind, striking where Justan directed, piercing through the Jharro cage inside him, destroying the nightbeast’s brain.

“I’m a bonding wizard,” Justan finished as the nightbeast’s unbelieving face turned to stone.

“I told you I would kill him,” Deathclaw said and jerked his sword free to go and help Gwyrtha.

The rogue horse had torn one of the basilisks completely apart, finding its core in the process. The other one had proved more problematic, climbing onto her back and managing to stay out of the reach of her teeth.  Deathclaw solved this problem by climbing her body and tackling the thing. His teeth and claws were tearing into it before they hit the ground.

“Justan!” Jhonate said, cresting the hill. She rushed toward him, breathing heavily. She looked at Vahn’s statue and frowned. “I am sorry. Deathclaw was faster than me.”

“He’s faster than most people,” Justan said with a wince. His whole body hurt now. “Can you . . . hand me my sword? It’s on the ground right there.”

Jhonate picked Peace up and handed it to him, doing her best not to react to its magic. “You look like you are in a lot of pain.”

Justan sighed as his hand closed around Peace’s handle and the pain was swept away. “It’s going to take me awhile to recover from this,” he admitted.

He walked over and picked up his other sword just in time to see Deathclaw tear the remaining basilisk’s core from its torso. The raptoid screeched in triumph. Both he and Gwyrtha were covered in wounds again.

“I’m going to have to heal them,” Justan said, turning back to Jhonate. “But first . . .”  

He walked back to Vahn’s petrified body and swung Rage, blasting the statue to pieces. Justan bent and retrieved the piece of Ma’am that had been severed, Vahn’s pierced core still clutched in the end. He showed Jhonate the bitten-off end of his Jharro bow. “Can you teach me how to put this back together?”

“Justan could be fighting the nightbeast right now.” Fist said unhappily, leading the way as he trudged through snow thigh deep. “There’s nothing I can do to help. All I can do is spend another day climbing this stupid mountain.”

I would kill it
, Squirrel said confidently from the ogre’s shoulder.

“I doubt honstule seeds would work on a nightbeast, Squirrel,” Fist replied.

“Stop worrying about your bonding wizard,” Maryanne said from behind him. The gnome was staying in the furrow he left behind. “There’s nothing you can do about it. If he does die, you’ll pass out and we’ll know.”

“That’s not a nice way to say it,” Fist grumbled.

Both of them were out of sorts this morning. Not only had Fist gotten very little sleep the night before, but these mountain trails were getting even harder to find than before. The path they were on now had led them into a narrow canyon that was partially blocked by snow. They had been traveling within its confining walls for hours now.

Fist led the way, forging a path, but the wind blew in from behind them, chilling the gnome warrior to the bone. To make things worse, they had eaten the last pieces of Maryanne’s trail rations the night before and they hadn’t seen any game they could kill.

“I hope there is a demon army coming to the Stranger’s door,” Maryanne muttered, shivering despite her attempts to stay in Fist’s tracks and out of the snow. The gnome warrior had not been happy about Justan’s revelations regarding the Stranger. There had been so much about the story she hadn’t known. “I hope they cut off his head and parade it through Alberri on a pike!”

Fist found that statement a bit harsh. “He is still one of the prophets. Even if he did make mistakes.”

“Oh? He’s one of the prophets is he? Don’t be an idiot, Fist! Barldag was one of the prophets too,” the gnome griped. Fist winced and he felt her hand on his back. “I’m sorry. This whole thing has just made me so mad and I don’t think you understand. The Stranger is like the Barldag for the blood magic races. They tell tales to scare the women saying, ‘if you don’t stay in line, the Stranger will come and make you barren’.”

“I guess I didn’t think of it like that,” Fist replied.

She sighed. “Let’s just get out of this canyon and I’ll feel better.”

A few minutes latter, the wind changed, rushing toward them from the far end of the canyon. The air was warm and moist and carried a foul stench as if the canyon were clogged with rotting corpses.

“Ugh! Blast my nose, what’s that smell?” Maryanne said.

Stinks
! Squirrel exclaimed.

Fist suddenly felt very uneasy about what was on the far side of this canyon. “It’s the evil.”

“We’re that close to it?” she asked.

“I guess so,” Fist said, pulling a corner of his robe around his face and trying not to breathe it in. “I didn’t expect it to be this close to the Thunder People territory.”

They trudged on, the smell growing fouler as they went. Fist saw something strange ahead. The snow looked gray. When they got closer, Fist saw what it was. Flies. Thousands of dead flies intermixed with the powdery snow.

Yuck
, said Squirrel

“That is disgusting,” Maryanne said, the dead insects piling around her feet as Fist pushed through them.

“Yeah,” Fist said, thinking about what Locksher had said. The winter was the only thing holding this evil back.

The sound of a roar echoed down the canyon walls, the vibration of it shaking more snow loose from above. Fist sighed. “We are definitely getting close.”

The canyon opened up ahead, and the path disappeared. Fist couldn’t see where it went. When the ogre reached the end, he stopped, his stomach sinking. He stood on the edge of a precipice. Fifty feet below him, boxed on three sides by cliff walls, was the black lake. It gave off a dull heat, filling the air with a hazy mist.

Maryanne moved up next to him and stared down upon it. Her face paled. “That’s much bigger than I expected.”

“It’s just like in my dream,” Fist said numbly. He hadn’t expected the dreams to be so accurate. When he was falling from up above, there was always a point where the lake rushed up to meet him and this was the scene he had seen. The lake hugged the cliff face below and stretched off to a single shoreline in the distance. The few rocky spires and skeletal treetops poking up out of the blackness told them just how deep it was. There was something else about the place that tickled his mind, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“That’s the thing you’re supposed to destroy, huh?” Maryanne asked.

“I am not going to be able to do this myself. We might need the whole Mage School.” He took a few steps backward. The lake seemed like it was beckoning to him. The ground under his feet seemed unstable. Was it just his imagination, or was the ledge sloped towards the lake? “We should go back the way we came. Find another way to the territory.”

“But why?” Maryanne asked. “The trail continues along the ledge.”

She pointed and Fist saw that she was right. The trail narrowed, but it hugged the cliff face to the left and the warm air here had kept it free of snow and ice. The ledge curved along the wall for perhaps a hundred feet before widening and climbing up towards the top of the canyon wall.

“It’s not that far, Fist,” Maryanne said, looking at him. Her brow furrowed in concern. “Are you alright?”

Okay, Fist
? Squirrel asked.

Fist swallowed, realizing that he had backed up against the canyon wall. Why did he feel so fearful? He was certain it wasn’t the influence of the maggots below. They were still too far away and the bond would have told him if he were under attack.

“We shouldn’t go that way,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. We need to head back the way we came.”

“But that took us hours,” she replied. A look of comprehension dawned on her face. “If you’re afraid of how high up we are, don’t worry. It’s a short trip. Just don’t look down. If you want, you can keep your eyes closed and I can guide you-.”

“No!” Fist said. Going across that ledge with his eyes closed was a horrible idea. “I’m from these mountains. I’m not afraid of being up high. It’s . . . It’s my dream! It’s been telling me the future.” Understanding came to him as he spoke. “I’ve been doing like Mistress Sarine said and trying to take control of the dream. Every night, when I get to a certain part of the dream, I have a choice. Either fall in the lake or walk along the shore. If we go along that ledge, I know I will fall in.”

She looked out at the lake and pointed to the shoreline far below. “The shore is way out there. There’s not a way down there from here.”

“There has to be,” Fist insisted. “This is what my dream was telling me. I’m sure about it.”

“But that ledge is so easy,” Maryanne said, her face pained.

Easy
, Squirrel agreed.

“Easy for a gnome warrior, maybe. But I’m wider than you and there are places where the wall bulges out. Also, look.” He pointed along the cliff ledge where hundreds of little black specks clung. “See those black dots? Those are flies. They will try to make us fall.”

“The bond will protect us, though,” she pressed.

“If we go that way, I will fall,” Fist repeated. “I have seen it. I will land in the lake and the worms will get inside me and I will attack my friends. I’ve seen it. Please, Maryanne,” Fist grasped her shoulders and looked into her eyes, pleading. “Believe me. There is another way.”

The hesitation fell from her face and she smiled. “Okay, big guy. Lead on.”

The moment she said that, another roar echoed through the canyon and Fist looked out towards the shoreline. A large winged figure walked into view. It was partially obscured by the mist, but it looked like a dragon.

“Are you still sure about this?” Maryanne said.

“We don’t have to fight that thing,” the ogre replied, hoping he was telling the truth. “At least it wasn’t in my dream. We just need to find another way to the Thunder People territory.”

Fist turned around and led them back the way they had come. It went a lot faster this time since the path had already been cleared. In an hours time, they were back at the canyon’s end. They headed eastward, looking for an alternate path. As it turned out, they didn’t have far to go.

A half hour’s travel across the frozen mountainside led them to a second canyon-like pass, this one wider and with a downward slope. Though Fist didn’t recognize it at the time, he had been through this pass once before in the first few weeks after meeting Squirrel. They had made it through without incident, but this trail was used mainly by goblinoid tribes during their major hunts.

At the moment, it looked quite inviting. The blanket of snow over the trail was much thinner than in the previous pass, only calf deep on the ogre. Fist grew confident that this was the right way. This path would lead them down to the shoreline. The smell coming through the pass seemed to confirm that belief, though the air wasn’t warm like it had been in the higher pass.

“Something about this isn’t right,” Maryanne said as they made their way down the gentle sloping trail. “It seems too easy.”

“Why?” Fist asked, beginning to have a similar feeling, but not wanting to believe it. “Why does it need to be hard?”

She shook her head. “We’re heading right down to the source of the evil. If the trail was this easy, why haven’t monsters infested with those larvae just walked up and out of there and spread all over the mountainside?”

“That’s a good question,” Fist admitted as they came around a bend in the pass. “Maybe . . . oh.”

In front of them, reaching half way up the canyon wall, was a cave-in. A section of the cliff face had collapsed inward during the heaviest of the winter months, bringing tons of ice and snow down with it. Fist walked down to the base of it and looked up.

“Do you want to try climbing it?” he asked

Maryanne pursed her lips as she sized it up. “It’s fairly steep, but not worse than some of the other climbs we’ve made. The only question is how stable it is. Only some of this is rock. If we knock the wrong thing loose, we could collapse it on top of us.”

“We also don’t know what’s on the other side,” Fist added.

I will see
, said Squirrel excitedly.
I am a scout
.

“You’re volunteering to do this?” Fist asked. In the past, when wanting Squirrel to do something that required extra effort, he’d had to beg and plead.

I will see
, Squirrel repeated. He leapt from the ogre’s shoulder and began scampering up the blockage.

“Squirrel is going up to see,” he said to Maryanne with a shrug. In the meantime, Fist got down on one knee and plunged one large hand into the snow, placing his palm on the solid earth underneath.

He closed his eyes and sent his magic energies through, probing the rock. Darlan’s focus in her work with him had been war spells, but Fist had also taken classes with other earth magic students. One of the first things they had been taught was to look into the rock, see what useful elements were within.

In this case, Fist sent his magic under the cave-in and upward, traveling from rock to rock to see how stable it was. As far as he could tell the side of the blockage closest to the right wall was mostly boulders that had come down in the initial collapse. Everything to the left was snow and ice and on the far side . . .

Dead bodies
, Squirrel announced from his new perch far above. Fist grimaced and stood, having guessed much the same thing.

“What did you find?” Maryanne asked.

“We are on the right path,” Fist said trying to sound positive. “If we stay to the right, we can climb the cave-in safely.”

“Then why do you look like you just bit into a live snail?” she asked dubiously.

“The far side is packed with dead bodies,” he said with a sigh.

She squinted at him. “What do you mean packed?”

“I think it was like you said. A bunch of people infested with the worms-.”

Goblins and orcs
, Squirrel reported, still sitting atop the blockage, shelling a seed as he looked down.

“Mainly goblinoids,” Fist continued. “Tried to leave through the pass. It looks like they froze while trying to climb it.”

“So you’re saying we can climb to the top, but on the way down, we’ll be climbing over a bunch of dead goblinoids.” The gnome laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. “Sounds like a dream I had once. Let’s go.”

She began to climb, her nimble movements taking her halfway up the pile before Fist had climbed more than a few feet. Fist grit his teeth and climbed after her, much more careful with his movements since his six-hundred-pound frame was much more likely to pull the whole thing down on top of himself.

When he reached the apex, Maryanne was sitting next to Squirrel with her elbows on her knees as she looked onto the scene below. “I sure hope they are as frozen as they look.”

Leaning against the bottom of the pile, their arms reaching upwards, were dozens of the creatures, all frozen in some state of decay. Beyond them were many more that were simply lying on the ground, unmoving.