Olgya sounded grim and impatient. “No time for mourning any one person. Countless people have been lost, and we have suffered. Think of my son Brock, Oron’s son Jed, the thousands of fighters. They all mattered to someone.”
Renn glowered at her. “It still hurts.”
“It still hurts, my friend,” Nathan agreed, thinking of Elsa and what she had begun to mean to him. “And we need to hurt the enemy.”
Sudden shouts came from the forest nearby, and Nathan lurched to his feet, reaching for the sword at his side. General Zimmer’s soldiers in the scattered camp grabbed their weapons and formed ranks for mutual defense. Figures sprinted out of the forest.
“Get ready! Here they come!” Zimmer’s voice held a hard edge of anticipation.
Three people burst through the underbrush, running at full speed. Oliver and Peretta, two young scholars from Cliffwall, dashed forward, along with Amber, a novice Sister of the Light. “They’re right behind us!”
“We brought them here,” Peretta called to her startled companions. “Now it’s your turn!” Despite the flush on her narrow face, mischief sparkled in her eyes.
More crashing sounds echoed through the sparse forest, followed by gruff shouts. Lured onward by the trio of runners, twenty enemy soldiers blundered into the camp, hacking branches out of the way. They wore ancient-styled leather armor bearing the distinctive flame symbol of Emperor Kurgan. Oliver, Peretta, and Amber scampered ahead, taunting their pursuers into the trap.
One of the enemy soldiers bellowed, “There’s more of them!” He held up a curved sword. “Wipe them out.”
In a blur, two fierce women rushed in from opposite sides, letting out high-pitched yells. They had been waiting to strike. Each morazeth wore a black leather band around her chest and waist, and their skin was mottled with branded symbols.
“We will let you kill a few of them,” Thorn called out to Nathan and the others. “But not every one.” She held a short sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. She plunged her sword into the stomach of the nearest soldier and laughed as he crumpled. “That’s one!”
Not to be outdone, her companion Lyesse snapped a barbed whip, which wrapped around an opponent’s thick neck. She yanked it hard, ripping open his throat. “And one for me!”
Thrusting out his hand, Nathan threw a burst of wizard’s fire that struck an enemy in the chest. The man’s leather and plate armor was like paper against the deadly fire that burned through his torso.
Howling a war cry, Zimmer’s soldiers threw themselves into the fight. The enemy scouts clashed with the D’Haran soldiers in a clatter of blades, grunts of pain, and shouts of anger.
With the fighters milling together, Nathan could not risk more wizard’s fire. Prelate Verna used her gift to dislodge a heavy bough from the trees above and dropped it directly onto a soldier. Oron, Olgya, Leo, and Renn summoned a raging wind to slam more armored men into tree trunks.
Finding themselves in a real fight, the enemy soldiers fell back on their rigid military training. The pair of wild morazeth attacked as if they themselves were an army, and the D’Haran soldiers tried to keep up with the women, kill for kill.
As the enemies fell bleeding, Nathan noticed something he had not expected. Previously, General Utros’s soldiers had been partially stone, their skin hard and chalky, but now they were real flesh again! He caught his breath. And if the enemy was fully human again, that would make them easier to kill. The D’Haran steel cut through the armor, hacked skin and bone, and the ancient enemies now died like normal men.
The gifted fighters Leo and Perri used magic to knock soldiers off their feet, impaling them on sharp branches. Even the slave Rendell jumped in with a knife, pulling off the helmet of a stunned soldier and slitting his throat. Nathan spotted an outlying man and used wizard’s fire to burn his head entirely off his shoulders like a grisly lantern.
In short order, all twenty of the ancient scouts lay dead in the underbrush. Thorn and Lyesse stood grinning, their bronzed skin covered with blood. “Three!” said Lyesse.
“Three for me as well,” Thorn responded.
“And that’s twenty more dead,” Nathan said. “Twenty fighters erased from the enemy forces.”
“The army will not even notice those losses,” Verna said. “Alas.”
“General Utros hasn’t finished counting his dead from our last attack,” said Oron.
“Dead men are dead men,” Renn said with grim satisfaction.
The D’Haran soldiers wiped bloodstains from their swords and armor. Zimmer nodded to each man, complimenting them. “Until we have a better plan, we will cut that army down little by little.”
“If that’s the way it must be,” Lady Olgya said.
Nathan sheathed his sword, which he had not needed after all. He still reveled in using magic after being without his gift for so long. “At least it’s a start.”
CHAPTER 2
The empty city towered around Nicci, silent and mysterious. She turned to get her bearings and assessed the dark buildings, the imposing stone walls, the thick pillars and ornate carvings … the utter bleakness. This was not Ildakar, not at all.
The moon spilled silver light over the ruins, but she saw no cheerful lanterns or torches lighting any of the stone structures. All the windows and doors were black and vacant, like the eyes of dead men. The thin air held an underlying chill. She could see the silhouettes of black crags that ringed the city, and she realized she must be high in the mountains.
Nicci stepped away from the sliph well, angry and confused. Her body ached, as if the abortive journey had wrung her like a washrag. “Sliph!” she shouted, but the quiet was so deep and intense that it buzzed in her ears.
The spiteful silver creature had dumped her here and abandoned her.
In the middle of a central plaza, a waist-high stone barrier surrounded the enigmatic well. The sliph had simply retreated down into the depths after lashing out at Nicci, leaving her alone. She had no idea where she was.
As Nicci caught her breath and her balance, she felt uncharacteristically weak, disconnected. She had never felt like this when traveling in the sliph before. She called to the deep, empty well. “Come back! This is not my destination. I wish to travel.”
Her words resonated in the deep black gullet and whispered back at her from the high stone buildings, but no other sound came. The silvery creature refused to respond. This particular sliph, a determined adherent of Emperor Sulachan’s long-lost cause, had finally realized that Nicci did not, in fact, serve the same master. When Nicci had revealed that Sulachan was dead, defeated not once but twice, the silvery woman had broken her bonds of duty and stranded Nicci in this forsaken place.
“Sliph! Where am I?” Nicci’s voice vanished into infinity below. She could do nothing to help fight General Utros if she was trapped … here.
As her head rang and throbbed, Nicci wondered how much damage she had suffered in the dangerous passage. She remembered that the sliph had said one other intriguing thing before leaving: “Ildakar is gone. Ildakar is no more. I cannot take you there.” Clearly, the sliph had also been damaged when she tried to reach her destination, and failed.
How could Ildakar be “no more”? Maybe the sliph well in the lower levels of the legendary city had been destroyed or sealed somehow. What else could prevent the sliph from traveling there?
Then Nicci recalled something else. Before she’d killed Kor, the Norukai captain, he revealed that King Grieve had launched a massive attack against Ildakar. How could the great city defend itself against the invincible army of General Utros as well as a second threat from the Norukai? Was it possible that the wizards’ duma had raised the shroud of eternity as their only recourse? Would they have left the rest of the world to face the scourge alone? Yes, the wizards of Ildakar would have done exactly that.