“. . 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.
Jukung 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.