Song of the Dragon Page 23

  Tendrils running through the grass wound their way up Phang’s legs, but it was Qinsei’s dead face that fixed Phang’s vision. The vines in her lifeless muscles contracted and forced the dead Codexia’s features to smile.

  The winding course of the stream had cut down into the sloping plain, leaving banks on either side of its curves sometimes as low as three feet, occasionally rising as high as twenty. Soen envied Phang and Qinsei; they were making good time across the open ground, paralleling the river, while the Inquisitor was forced to make his way along the meandering streambed with the sulking Jukung at his side. He could not afford the luxury of speed, for he was closing on his prey and dared not lose their track should they for any reason decide to defy his expectations and leave the watercourse. Still, he took satisfaction that with each twist of the River Galaran, his two Codexia were getting farther ahead, better positioning themselves to spring their trap on the bolters.

  Jukung had crossed the river at a shallow ford nearly half a league downstream and remained on the opposite side. It was just as well, Soen mused. The young Assesia had been something of a concern early on, but Soen was convinced now that Jukung was only a pawn of the Keeper, a much easier problem than Soen had thought he was facing. The Inquisitor had been concerned that Jukung was working for one of the myriad other Orders, Houses or lords who were constantly scheming against the Iblisi, but the youth’s actions had dispelled most of Soen’s apprehensions. The youth was still dangerous—both to the Inquisitor and to himself—but apparently not with any darker purpose than his own aggrandizement.

  A power-hungry youth was something Soen could manage.

  They moved quickly, their Matei staffs held either across their bodies or parallel to the ground in their hands. Their soft boots pushed them soundlessly up the crooked path of the riverbed. He knew their tracks by heart, having followed them across the Hyperian plain when few others could have made out their mark. Now, fresh and deep, he had no trouble making them out even in the predawn light: two sets heavy and wide of the manticores, one lighter and longer of the chimerian, the heavy footfalls of a dwarf, and the three humans—two females and the male. One of the female tracks wandered slightly along the river’s edge.

  Soen smiled, baring his sharp teeth. The woman is tired. She slows them down.

  The banks of the river were steep now and tall, vertical precipices on either side. Just above their edge, Soen could see the tops of trees.

  The Inquisitor continued his silent run, but he was troubled. They should have caught up to the bolters by now—or at least the Codexia should have stopped them before they reached the sanctuary of the woods. There were foul things lurking in those trees, for it was the realm of Murialis, Queen of the Woodland Nymphs and Dryads. All elves hated the woods but especially the forbidding trees of the dryad realm.

  Soen was about to quicken his pace when he heard them: voices arguing around the turn of the gully.

  The elf slowed his pace and saw what he had been looking for high on the riverbank. The twisted branch pinned back against the trunk of the tree. Qinsei and Phang had marked the spot as just around the bend in the river.

  The prey were already in the trap.

  Soen signaled to Jukung with his Matei staff to stop. The young Assesia obeyed at once from the opposite side of the river, his black eyes narrowing as he strained to look beyond the angled slope.

  Soen crept forward, his Matei staff held firmly across him with both his long hands. He slid with gliding step behind a large boulder that had, in some age long past, tumbled down the slope just, he fancied, to provide him cover right now.

  Such was the way of the gods.

  Soen peered around the edge of the stone.

  The steep “V” of the gully opened just a few yards beyond onto the wide oval of a pool. The waters of the river cascaded down a rock face into the pool on the far side. Soen could see the tree line of the woods running just atop the crest of the rise at the other side of the pool.

  Soen frowned. Qinsei and Phang seemed to be cutting this a bit close. The location was ideal for their ambush, but there were several other locations farther downstream that would have served just as well. His concerns, however, were drowned out almost at once by the arguing voices on the left side of the pool.

  “. . . just leave him here!” one of the manticores was saying. “If he’s so upset by these woods, then he doesn’t have to enter them!”

  “We can’t leave him here,” the human male shouted. Drakis, Soen realized with a shiver. “The Iblisi are on our heels. The gods alone can conceive of what they would do to him!”

  “All the more reason to leave him behind,” the manticore roared back. “If we toss them a morsel, then maybe the rest of us will have a chance. He’s not coming unless we hit him over the head with a rock, and he’s slowing us down more than that woman of yours.”

  Five separate voices erupted at once, arguing among themselves by the side of the idyllic pool without a thought of the black eyes watching them from the shadows.

  All too easy, Soen thought.

  He frowned again.

  It was too easy, he realized, and the hair at the back of his elongated skull stood on end. Something inside told him that there was something wrong with what he was seeing—that his eyes were being fooled in dangerous ways. It was a sense that he had, an unexplained inner knowledge that seldom failed him and that had saved his life more times than he cared to remember. It was never the danger you anticipated that bit you, he remembered, but always something you didn’t see coming and could not have anticipated.

  He glanced across the river. Jukung was moving forward, a vicious smile curling his lips back from his sharp teeth. His eyes were on the prey, the predator about to spring.

  His eyes were fixed on the prey.

  Soen’s eyes shifted around him. The walls of the gully they were in . . . the waters rushing past him . . . the stones of the riverbank.

  The Inquisitor’s black eyes widened.

  The stones under the water formed a pattern. Nature had not placed them there, rather the hand of design, thought, and intention. It was subtle and would have escaped the most casual glance, but now his mind was fixed on it. His eyes followed it up the near side of the river where it wound purposefully into the placement of the stones and boulders just in front of him. It wove its pattern up the embankment, disappearing over its crest. It was formed of stones, pebbles, roots, and dirt, but it was unmistakable. He turned quickly, his eyes following its line beneath the waters of the river to where it emerged on the other side among the boulders where Jukung was carefully moving forward.

  “No!” Soen whispered as loudly as he dared. “Jukung, stop!”

  Whether the Assesia heard him or not, Jukung continued forward, intent on garnering his prize and honor to his name. The Matei staff shifted in his hands. Jukung stopped just short of the line and pointed toward the crest of the ridge on the other side of the pool.

  Soen turned and gaped. Two robed figures—Qin and Phang—rose up along the crest on the far side of the pool and began moving toward the rock face, their own Matei staffs swinging unnaturally before them—as though they were marionettes whose strings were being badly pulled.

  “NO!” Soen shouted, springing out from behind the boulder, running toward Jukung.

  The bolters at the edge of the pool leaped back in alarm. The human woman screamed, her shrill voice echoing off the rocks of the cascade.

  Jukung leaped toward his prey, his Matei staff thrust in front of him, its crystal flaring with power. “By the Will of the Emperor, I command you to . . .”

  Jukung stepped across the line before Soen could reach him.

  The waters of the river exploded upward with a crashing like ocean waves, but the water did not fall back into the riverbed; instead, it shifted and broke into hands, arms, fingers, and bodies. Hair of froth cascaded off of heads of incredible beauty whose transparency gelled more solidly by the moment.

  Juk
ung stepped back, turning toward the monstrous multitude rising from the water at his side. The Matei stick flared, pulsing in waves at the onrushing tide of horror. The figures were battered by its force, twisted, wrenched, and shattered, only to re-form.

  Soen stopped at the edge of the patterned line, his own Matei staff held uselessly in front of him.

  The bolters backed away into the pool. They, too, could see the robes of the Codexia on either side of the waterfall’s crest. The human male held his sword at the ready, but even from here Soen could sense the panic of the surrounded and cornered prey.

  Soen opened his mouth and raged in anger, his howl tearing through the air around the pool. There was nothing he could do. Too late he had seen the faery line—the pattern in the ground demarking the unquestioned realm of the fae and their power. Murialis had been busy on the frontier and had claimed more land than the Emperor had taken notice of.

  Jukung screamed. The water nymphs had reached him at last, tearing the Matei staff from his hands. They pulled him over the pool, clawing at his robes, his hair, his flesh. They twisted him back and forth as though he were being tossed upon the waves of some unseen storm at sea.

  The Assesia tumbled through the air. Tossed by the water nymphs, he slammed back-first against the ragged stones that formed the wall of the ravine. His body fell heavily to the ground. Jukung lay screaming incoherently just at the edge of the faery line.

  For a moment, Soen moved to stretch his own Matei staff in to where Jukung lay but, cursing, stopped himself. The faery line would almost certainly discharge his staff the moment he pushed it across the line just as it had rendered Jukung’s staff useless.

  Soen gazed down at the screaming Assesia. He could see terrible welts ballooning on Jukung’s tortured face: acid burns from the touch of the angered nymphs. Unchecked, it would literally melt the face from the Iblisi.

  Soen frantically looked about him and then saw it: a thick branch jutting out from the tree growing at the upper edge of the ravine. At once, he pointed his Matei staff upward and uttered the words. A column of brilliant light flared upward, severing the branch. It crashed downward, nearly knocking the Inquisitor off his feet.

  The nymphs had regrouped in the water and were surging again toward where Jukung lay.

  Soen wrapped his arms around the thick branch, thrusting it past the faery line as he yelled. “Jukung! Take it! Hold on!”

  The Assesia felt the hands of the nymphs wrap around his feet and ankles. His hands flailed in panic, falling on the branch and gripping it fiercely.

  Soen braced his feet where he squatted and then in a single motion used his legs to push away from the faery line, applying all the strength he had to pull Jukung free.

  The nymphs were not prepared. Their prey slipped from their grasp in a single lurch, tumbling back over the faery line and falling atop the now prone Inquisitor. Soen rolled the elf off of him, the cloying smell of sizzling flesh filling his nostrils. He quickly picked up his staff and pointed it at the Assesia.

  The agonized Iblisi fell with sudden silence into a deep and gratefully dreamless sleep.

  Soen lowered his staff and stood upright just short of the faery line, turning to stare at the man he knew was called Drakis.

  The human stared back at the elven Inquisitor as he crouched uncertainly with his sword in hand and a human woman behind him. He protects her, Soen observed. He has something to fight for.

  At the top of the falls, the bodies of Qinsei and Phang tumbled forward, rebounding off the stone face of the falls before falling among the wet rocks. Neither moved. Soen had no doubt that they had been dead since before he arrived at the pool.

  The manticore and the chimerian fled first up the far slope. The two women followed them, urged on at last by the dwarf as all disappeared among the dark trees of the Murialis Woods. Only the tall manticore remained, pulling at the human to follow.

  “Drakis,” Soen called as cold and still as death. “Wait.”

  The human stopped in shock and turned.

  Soen spoke in a calm voice that carried across the waters.

  “Do you still hear the song . . . the song in your mind?” the elf asked casually.

  Drakis blinked. “How did you know?”

  But then the tall manticore pulled forcefully at the human, and they both fled into the woods.

  Soen, standing at the edge of the faery realm, took in a deep breath under his dark glare, turned, and picked up the tortured form of the Assesia called Jukung and made his way back down the stream.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Glade

  RUUKAG SLID TO A STOP, his wide feet skidding across the rotting leaves that blanketed the forest floor. He fell at once into a crouch, his head swiveling quickly around as his wide eyes tried desperately to pierce the mist-laden spaces between the vertical tree trunks surrounding him like bars. The manticore could not take in enough air, could not rein in his fear. Panic circled around him like a predator that he could not see or smell but knew was waiting to pounce upon him if given the slightest opportunity.

  RuuKag bared his fangs, growling at his own panic even as he shivered. He wanted to go back; was desperate to go back to the blissfully forgetful life that had been his comfort and his redemption.

  Now he was alone, and he hated that more than anything. He had fled into the woods along with the others, but somehow they had all gotten separated in the mists. He knew that he should call out to them, find the reassuring sound of their voices regardless of who it was, and find some comfort in numbers, but he feared that the circling panic would hear his call and take him down under its terrible darkness.

  A bush shook behind him. RuuKag spun about.

  Another manticore stood before him, his wide paws open and extended out to the side.

  RuuKag relaxed slightly.

  “I couldn’t find you,” Belag said, his voice a low rumble among the trees. “Are you injured?”

  “No . . . no thanks to that hoo-mani.” RuuKag shuddered and then stood upright. “Where has he led us now?”

  Belag raised his furry chin, his feline face looking slowly about. “The Murialis Woods . . . a magical forest and a dangerous one by all accounts. It is not wise for us to be alone. Follow me and I’ll take you to the others.”

  “We should leave them,” RuuKag sneered. “They are unworthy of us.”

  “You do not believe in the Drakis Prophecies?” Belag asked in a steady voice.

  “Stories told to cubs so that they might sleep at night,” RuuKag replied at once. “Lies perpetrated by the elders to keep themselves in power.”

  Belag accepted the remark casually then turned, making his way between the mist-shrouded trees. RuuKag followed a moment later, his own steps close on the heels of his brother manticore.

  “I was of the Khadush Clan,” Belag said as he pushed aside a thick fern in his path.

  They were descending a gentle slope. RuuKag could hear the murmur of a brook somewhere nearby.

  “Khadush?” RuuKag said. “I’m of Shakash Clan.”

  “Then we both are brothers in a greater cause,” Belag said in conversation, though he never turned his head from the path before them.

  The mists seemed to be thickening, making it difficult for RuuKag to see his companion. He quickened his steps to close the distance between them. “What greater cause?”

  Belag stepped around a moss-covered tree whose trunk stretched above them to vanish in the gloom. “We are both from clans in rebellion against the Manticas Assembly. We have broken with the Chaenandrian Lords to continue the war against the traitorous Rhonas elves.”

  RuuKag gave a single, derisive guffaw. “They called it a rebellion! Our elders fled the just decrees of the Assembly and dragged their women and children out onto the Northern Steppes. They filled our heads with songs and stories of the old days and promised us glorious futures of honor and strength . . . but we were nothing more than raiders and thieves.”

  “So how is it you k
now of the old days?” Belag asked, still walking ahead and not turning his head as he spoke. They were climbing again now, the obscuring mists growing thicker with each step up the densely wooded hillside.

  “Know of them? I was there,” RuuKag spat the vile words with distaste. “I stood at the front in the Battle of the Red Fields with the rest of the fools.”

  “You must have been young then,” Belag spoke in quiet, even tones.

  “Too young,” RuuKag said. He was finding it difficult to breathe again. His arms felt heavy, and his feet felt as though they were lifting stone weights. He followed Belag between a pair of trees and stopped.

  With breathtaking suddenness, they had come upon a forest glade of magnificent beauty. Light filtered down through an opening in the forest canopy, its dappled rays illuminating the clearing with soft light. Gentle grasses carpeted the soft soil on either side of a clear brook that cut through its center as it danced across the rounded stones of its bed. It was a place of peace and warmth in the midst of the gloom, and RuuKag longed to lay down on its verdant expanse.

  “Too young indeed,” Belag said as he stepped to the center of the glade and turned to face RuuKag. “I know the Battle of the Red Fields, RuuKag. The story has been carried far of the young manticore warriors—untrained children—who were shamed into joining the desperate battle. Even I have heard of the charge that day and the . . .”

  “Stop!” RuuKag said, stepping into the glade. The warm soil beneath his feet felt more luxurious than anything he had known before.

  Belag stooped down, scooping up some of the clear, cold water from the brook and tasting it. “It’s all right, RuuKag. I understand. It was a foolish, prideful order that called for the charge that day. Every manticore that heeded that command died that day, cut down by the Rhonas Legions and the terrible power of their Aether weapons. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, charging across the Northern Steppes, and none of them . . . not one survived to claim their honor or victory.”