“Eh? What’s that?” said Vurgrim, scowling. “What else is going on?”
“It’s the signal to attack,” said Hweilan. She looked at Flet. “Count to two hundred, then loose it.”
Flet notched the strange arrow onto his bowstring, smiled, and said, “One …”
Hweilan crashed through the trees. No attempt at stealth. A scullion who’d never left the castle walls could have tracked her. But it didn’t matter. The warning call in her brain had intensified, no longer a steady beat so much as a constant vibration, a plucked harp string. When she shrugged out of her pack and hung it from a branch, she noticed that her hands were trembling.
She clenched her fists and closed her eyes. Every instinct in the human part of her brain told her to run away from the tide into which she was wading-that it meant not just death but something far worse. Something not meant for this world. A profanity against creation itself. However, another part of her, the part nourished by the blood of Nendawen and her own animal thirst for vengeance, spurred her on. Death lay before her, yes, but if she could die killing her enemy, she’d do it a thousand times.
It was growing, gaining strength daily as it fed upon the life of this world. Soon there would be no stopping it. No stopping him. Hweilan had to force herself to think of the foulness around her as Jagun Ghen. It was so other from anything in this world, so much more like a force of nature than a person. But no question. There was a will and a mind behind this hunger. A cunning intelligence, ancient and cruel.
He does not know mercy or pity or remorse. Strike him all you like, and you are only going to rile him … Ashiin’s words, spoken only a few days before she died.
And there was something else as well. Hweilan could feel it building under the warning hum in her mind. She could put no words to it, only feelings. It was like the scent of storm on the wind long before the clouds ran up the mountains. Different than the wrongness she felt coming out of Highwatch, but no less frightening.
“Enough,” she told herself, then stripped off every bit of equipment she didn’t need-cloak, belt, pouches. They would only slow her. She stood in the clothes Kesh Naan had given her, still missing the sleeve Kaad had torn off. Menduarthis’s knife was tucked in its sheath on her right boot, the red knife sacred to Nendawen at her waist. She slid back into her quiver, now too loose. She tightened the strap and adjusted it so the fletchings rode just behind her right shoulder. Within easy reach but not so close they’d gouge her neck if she had to move fast. She had crafted three leather loops on the strap that crossed her chest, and into these she tucked the sharpened stake carved with the hrayeh. She only had a score of arrows that would capture the baazuled spirits, and she had no idea how many were in Highwatch. Once the arrows ran out, she would have to use the stake. Eight other arrows, well-made but plain, rode in a separate section of the quiver.
She reached up to her hair. Still in a tight braid, some strands had come loose and were tickling her face in the breeze. She put a hand into the largest of the pouches and found what she was looking for. A red silk scarf, two hands wide, that Menduarthis had given to her in the realm of Kunin Gatar. She wound it atop her head, knotting it in a sort of cap to keep her hair out of her eyes.
She looked up. Any time now.
There! A purple spark climbed into the sky. Flet’s arrow reached the top of its flight and hung there. Then just before it began its descent, the jewel exploded. Thunder rolled down the mountain, as whips of violet lightning shot across the sky, spiraling and sizzling. No sooner had the sound died than in the distance Hweilan heard the sound of war horns.
Hweilan retrieved her bow, fitted the bone mask on her face, and took off, her wolf at her heels.
Hweilan slowed when she saw the bones. Catching her breath, she realized she had been here before, too, at the back of the fortress. The day Highwatch fell, she had escaped from Jatara and her Creel thug, and she’d come upon the bodies of those fleeing Highwatch. Ravens and wolves had gnawed on them before the scavengers themselves had fled the area, and now all that was left of her people were a few bits of browned bones and tattered cloth.
For a moment she forgot her fear and cold fury gripped her instead. These had been good people. Her people. They deserved better than this.
The rear walls of Highwatch rose before her. Uncle stood a few paces beyond Hweilan, tail low but ears erect. Shadows lay thick in the windows high on the wall, but she could sense none of the baazuled nearby.
She glanced over her shoulder, up the forested mountainside. Rhan, Vurgrim, and the others had had more than enough time to do as she’d told them. Only half of the sun still peeked above the western mountains. Very soon, the shadows would begin to lengthen. And the torchless passages inside the fortress would be lit only by dying light creeping in through the windows. When Selune rose full in the east, Hweilan had to be in place.
Uncle felt it first, just an instant before Hweilan. The wolf snapped at the air and whirled.
Hweilan’s mind screamed a warning, and she raised the bow, pulling the feathers to her cheek. The hrayeh carved along the arrow shaft lit a bright green.
At the edge of the tree line, four small cyclones appeared, and then blew apart, showering Hweilan and the wolf in dirt and pine needles. Standing where the air had split were four figures-three men and a woman. The men were obviously Nar by their features, and each of them had a symbol carved into his forehead that leaked a fiery light. Baazuled. So close, Hweilan could taste them on the air.
The woman, however, was still alive-no demon had seized control of her. She wore dark woolens, and her thick cloak swirled in the wind. She held a staff above her head, and the jewel set in its crown gave off a sickly light, like that of an oil lamp seen through dirty glass.
Hweilan looked down the shaft of her arrow and set her aim. The woman was only twenty paces away. The arrow would barely drop an inch before it hit her. Hweilan set the point in the middle of the woman’s left breast.
But she only lowered the staff and offered a mocking bow. “Haweelan, you are, yes?”
Her words were thick, and Hweilan did not recognize the accent, nor the odd cut of the woman’s clothes. But by the pale skin and round eyes she knew the strange woman was not Nar nor from any of the lands east. From the far west or south, then. It seemed that Jagun Ghen was now gathering vessels from abroad. How many poor fools had lost their lives while Hweilan lingered in the mountains?
Uncle flattened his ears and bared his teeth.
As the woman lowered her staff, a spark shot out to whip the air in front of her. “Your pet moves and I kill it.”
“You’re a little late on that score,” said Hweilan.
“What do you mean?” The woman adjusted the staff slightly. Her three companions had their gaze locked on the sacred arrow, but they had made no move to come nearer.
“I mean, he’s been killed once already and he’s still not quite over it.”
She watched the woman try to puzzle out the meaning of her words. But the woman shook her head, obviously giving up.
“We bring you this message from the Master,” she announced.
A raven cawed, just once, but very loudly, startling the newcomers. She glanced up, her eyes widening at the black bird on the branch above and behind her. It was huge, even for a mountain raven. Its beak was easily as long as Hweilan’s hand. The dead branch on which it sat creaked under its weight. More black eyes watched them from the deeper woods. Hweilan knew-as the four newcomers did as well, judging by their open jaws and frightened eyes-that the birds had not been there moments before. And in the high hills above the fortress, wolves howled.