The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) (27 page)

It didn’t go up a moment too soon, for as soon as the caustic had seen the flash she sent a storm of wyrd at them. Lightning flashed and rebounded off their shield. Joya tensed visibly and creased her eyebrow.

“Hold it,” Uthia told her sternly, and Joya held it up. In the haste with which she had built it the shield was not as complete as it could have been. A little bit of the lightning didn’t ricochet off into the forest, splitting trees as it went, but instead leaked through. Because of the curve of the shield it slanted up and out the top of the protective wyrding.

“Do you think that you can do any attacking while holding the shield?” the Germinant Gob asked.

“I don’t think so,” Joya admitted, now holding her hands up, visibly shaken by the constant lightning attack.

“Then pass the wyrding to me,” Gob said. “I can hold your wyrding, but can’t attack like you can. You might want to get in touch with that medallion there.”

From the look on her face Joya hadn’t thought about that. “How do I pass it to you?” she asked.

“Let it fall when I tell you, not a moment before. I will take control of it just as you let it crumble.”

There was a moment of silence within the shield as the torrent of wyrd happened outside. Angelica and Jovian watched the shuck pacing back and forth, no longer coming for them due to the wyrd. Angelica imagined that a creature as Chaotic as the shuck couldn’t enter the protective boundaries.

“Now!” they heard the Germinant Gob say, and there was a slight translucency that came to the milky light at the edge of their vision before it glowed back to life once more.

The light slowly changed from a milky pink to a greenish brown that matched the Germinant Gob’s wyrd.

“That’s all well and good, but we are trapped here,” Jovian commented when the black shuck sat down and glared at them, its coarse hair ruffling as it puffed out its agitation. The caustic seemed to realize that her attack was not working, and instead began pacing much like the black shuck.

“I can hold this shield for a while,” the Gob said.

“Yes, but we have places to be. If you remember, we have a psychotic sorceress after us, unless you are truly working for your gnomes and wish to use us as bait for her.”

“Joya might be able to vanquish your problem,” Uthia said. “But the only way that caustic is dying is by removing her head.”

“Is there any way that you can split this shield between the five of us?” Angelica asked.

“I don’t know if I would be able to support five separate shields at once,” the Germinant Gob confessed. “We can try it, but be prepared if they fail.”

“Please try,” Joya said.

The black shuck could obviously feel the disturbance in the wyrd, and it sat forward, coming to its hooves in a fluid motion that told Jovian and Angelica that it would be difficult to fight.

“I’m going to have to drop the one to set up the individual ones,” the gnome king told them.

“Be ready,” Jovian told Angelica as the shuck paced closer to them, waiting for what he could feel, and that was the shields to vanish.

She merely nodded, and when the shields dropped the black shuck was on them. Jovian dodged to the side just as the shuck came down where he had previously been standing. Angelica dove in, swinging her mace, but with a liquidity that the beast’s physical body belied, he shifted out of the way. Her mace thudded harmlessly into the ground, and Jovian barely pulled her out of the way as the shuck clawed at her. The pointed hooves barely scratched her, but she felt as though they had been a red hot iron burning her skin where he touched.

Behind them they heard the air concuss and a woman scream.

When the shields dropped the caustic also renewed her attack, though this time not with lightning. She struck out at them with mere force, compacting the air around Uthia as the dryad ran for her, intent on attack.

The caustic conjured fire in her hand, and pulled back her fist to make good the attack.

Joya knew without a doubt that the fireball the old woman was eager to throw would be the undoing of Uthia, and even as she tried to make contact with her aunt in the medallion, she struck out.

The air hardened around the caustic, and then battered at her, thrashing her here and there, slamming into her as if the air were alive with fists, and they wanted nothing more than to beat the life out of her. The fireball went out, and Uthia slackened as the air resumed its normal state around her.

The air sizzled as Joya threw a pink bolt of lightning at the caustic. It tore into the old woman, and she screamed. Joya was not content with that, and lifted the woman off the ground with the force of the bolt, throwing her through the air to slam heavily into a tree.

Uthia was running with her Cataresh at the ready even as the air slackened around her.

Meanwhile the black shuck seemed to dodge every attack Angelica and Jovian made. One time Jovian thought he had made an attack, but somehow it had missed the dalua as it glided around his blade like a current of air.

Does it even have bones?
Angelica asked Jovian mentally, and Jovian sent back an uncertain response.

Behind them the air was alive with wyrd, and the black shuck seemed to feed off the Chaos within the caustic’s wyrd. He gained a lot of ground on them, and all Angelica and Jovian could do was retreat.

The creature came at them, tusks trying to gore them, hooves slashing at them. The fact that the beast was the size of a pony didn’t make fighting it easy, either, for it seemed all muscle and taut, Chaotic fury.

Finally Angelica dove in, ignoring the hooves, and swung her mace down. She had enough of retreating, and Jovian knew that once Angelica’s bloodlust had flared there would be no stopping her. She matched the beast fury for fury, her mace swinging, often missing, but at times landing a solid blow that seemed to do little to the creature.

Finally it reared its head and made to gore her, but as it brought its tusks up she slammed her mace down, and the tip of the tusk met the weight of her mace, driving the creature to the ground as the tusk shattered.

The black shuck stumbled in a daze, but by the time Jovian charged in with his shin-buto raised the beast had regained some sense, and bucked at Jovian, catching him in the midsection and throwing him back a few yards. Jovian was so afraid that he was going to break something upon impact with the ground that when he landed on a spongy mushroom he was surprised. The mushroom rebounded him and he entered the melee on staggering back on his feet.

Angelica was again giving ground to the snarling beast and its bloody maw. One side of its jaw was limp, apparently crushed when Angelica broke the tusk. Jovian dove in, stabbing with the sword, but the black shuck turned on him then, and a great spout of flame shout out of its mouth.

Jovian barely had time to bring the shin-buto up and fully expected the flames to overcome him, but the blade consumed the fire, taking it into itself. Jovian felt the pommel grow warm, and the strange, alien wyrd flowing through him from the sword, up his passive arm, and across his shoulders where it mingled with a bit of his latent wyrd. The fire blasted back down his dominant arm, and he quickly removed his hand from the sword and pointed it palm-out at the beast. His palm was on fire, and he screamed with the pain in his hand, for the flames were spewing out of the stigmata that marked him as one from the Holy Realm. It felt like acid burned the white dot as the fire blistered his palm and then bubbled out into a great jettison.

The red flames that shot out were relentless and all-consuming. They tore into the black shuck with a fury, and Jovian thought he was going to go numb with the pain, not sure how much longer he was able to persist with this attack. The black shuck howled as the red fire consumed his hair, crackling his flesh.

Angelica saw an opening, and brought the mace down on the center of the beast’s back, snapping it in two. The beast shuddered on the ground, pulling itself with its front hooves, its back legs dragging behind it, and though it was being burned, its flesh melting away, and it wasn’t able to use its legs, the creature still dragged itself ever onward toward Jovian.

It met its end on the point of Jovian’s sword as he stabbed it down through the head.

With all the action the group was in, the Germinant Gob was not having any luck bringing up the shields around his companions. When he nearly had it in place they would either move, destroying the fixed point he had, or some type of wyrd would penetrate the delicate membrane of the early part of the shield.

“I can’t do it!” he warned. “You aren’t shielded, so be careful.” He gave up and decided to help Uthia. He was short, so there wasn’t much he could do, but as he popped out of visibility, traveling the earth to the caustic, he figured he could at least distract her.

He popped up behind the old woman and kicked her in the back of the knee as she was releasing a fireball at Uthia. He wasn’t able to stop the fireball, but a gout of water sprang from Joya and deflected the fire, snuffing it at once.

The caustic turned on him, but Gob waved at her as she gathered her wyrd and snapped back out of visibility, dancing through the earth to the other side of her. Thus his attack went, skittering around her, not causing much harm at all but being a bother all the same, drawing her attention until finally Uthia bore down on her with a savage grace.

The Cataresh slid through the skin, tendons, and bones of the caustic’s neck. As her head came off, her body fell woodenly to the ground. Gore and blood spread across the ground and the Germinant Gob disappeared once more so as not to get dirty.

When Joya saw the caustic slump to the ground she severed communication with the medallion, and felt her aunt’s consciousness leave her like a cold hand slipping out of her body. She took a deep breath and noticed how everything seemed more vivid to her after touching her wyrd. The air seemed to actually be alive.

The wyrd she had used was like a drug, and she felt her blood pounding with its sweet seduction. She found that she had to sit on one of the large mushrooms, inhaling its musty scent and enjoying the sights around her.

The wyrd brought with it a heightened sense that intoxicated her. In fact Joya didn’t realize that this same sense made her different than others, different from those that could not use wyrd. If she had been more in herself she would have realized the danger the wyrd was trying to alert her to.

Instead she rode the feeling of wyrd washing through her like a sparkling, warm tide. She moaned and smiled.

“Well done, children.” Joya opened her eyes and saw the writhing blue tattooed face of Porillon manifesting in the center of their battle. “Well done indeed.”

Silver-blue lightning flared out of Porillon in every direction, arching toward each person as if she were but the thunderhead and they were all lightning rods. Her ground-length silver hair flew out behind her as if caught in a powerful gale, and it shimmered with electricity. Her blue tattoos glowed and writhed with her wyrd.

The thunder concussed the air, throwing leaves and needles around in a torrent. The trees themselves vibrated with her power moments before the lightning found its marks.