The demon screamed again, this time in a primal voice that scratched Rath’s inner ears like nails on flesh. The lovely face began to contort into something dark and hideous, with black eyes flashing hatred that was palpable. Smoke rose around her as the winds encircled her in an unbreakable cage and began to close in, pressing against her with the force of a cyclone. Rath inhaled deeply. The Thrall ritual had reached its climax. It was time to cut the net. He opened his mouth slightly wider, inhaling the air over all four of his throat openings, each holding a single, unwavering note. With a skill born of uncounted hunts, Rath clicked the glottis in the back of his throat.
A harsh fifth note sliced through the monotone of the other four. The winds screamed discordantly with the beast, tearing through the glade and causing the trees to shiver violently. Rath felt the threads of wind attached to his fingers go slack. Quickly he clicked his tongue, tying off the ends of the wind-cage and allowing his first net to dissipate. Then he clenched his thumb to snap the wind-thread taut against the flailing spirit. His heart thudded against his chest. Now that the beast was stationary, unable to escape, he began the final chant, the note that would build to a crescendo of such intense sound, aligned with the vibrations of their interlocked heartbeats, that die host body’s blood would reverse in its path and flood the brain until it exploded. All the air in the glen was sucked into the vortex of knotted wind swirling around the ancient monster. The rictus of fury twisted the woman’s face into a mask of even more hate. She grimaced in agony and tried to scream curses back, but her pupils were beginning to expand almost to the size of her irises, her forehead scored in deep furrows of pain.
Rath matched the intensity of her gaze. He could hear in the rising sound of imminent death the age-old calls of his Brethren, living and dead, joining him, unlimited by time and space, adding their voices to the chant. For all that the climax of the Thrall ritual left the hunter vulnerable, his heart in syn-chronicity with the essence of pure evil, there was a comfort in the solidarity of the cause that his race had sworn fealty to thousands of years ago. He was too in thrall himself to hear the cracking of the branches under the feet of someone entering the glade.
45
The moon gleamed silver on the open fields, lighting a path.
“Are you all right, Owen?” Ashe called to the elderly chamberlain as they left the horses at the roadway and made their way through the grass at the glade’s edge. “Yes, m’lord,” Gerald Owen replied between grunts. “I— still say that the wench is—probably hiding out in the— garrison, servicing the—”
“Desist.” The Lord Cymrian stopped long enough to examine a beech tree that had sustained a snapped branch, the sap still running fresh from the break. “She did nothing, Owen, nothing save remind me of things beyond my grasp. It was wrong to send her away in such a state; there will be blood enough on my hands in due course. I don’t wish to inaugurate this war with that of an innocent servant,”
“Her blood’s—on Tristan Steward’s—hands,” replied Owen, struggling to keep up. “He should have taken her—back when we moved to—Highmeadow. She wasn’t—needed—”
“With any luck, her blood will remain in her veins, if we can find her soon enough,” Ashe said. “Hurry, Owen—I have to return forthwith.”
“I know, m’lord, I know.” Owen doubled his pace and kept sight of the Lord Cymrian as he traveled through the glen by the metallic gleam of his hair, silvery red in the light of the bloody moon.
Ashe stopped in his tracks, the dragon in his blood en-flamed. In the near distance they could hear the sounds of strife, a hissing whine that thudded and scratched against the ear-drums like nails. Each man put a hand to his temple as the pressure inside his head began to rise, throbbing in a sudden sharp headache. A vortex of power, ancient and deadly, was sucking all the energy, all the lore, from the air in the vicinity. The Lord Cymrian drew his sword, flooding the woods with pulsing blue light, and ran for the glen. Rath did not see the shadow that loomed behind him until it had already blotted out the light of the moon pooling in the glen at his feet. He was barely aware of the sound of the chanting now. From all corners of the Earth, the voices of the Gaol were whispering in primal melodies, the fricative buzz of the common mind, adding their power to the ancient ritual. The world stopped spinning for a moment, it seemed to him, as it always did when one of the denizens of the Vault was about to be extinguished, leaving behind nothing to taint the earth. The beast before him was in its death throes; he could see the devouring darkness of its spirit locked in the struggle to escape the woman’s body it had been inhabiting for years before that body died. Even as it grappled with its looming demise, its hatred was as caustic as acid, hissing and gurgling in fury as it writhed on the ground, blood pouring from eyes locked on him in malicious fury. Smoke, acrid and sulfurous as the stench of the Vault, began to issue forth from the demon’s chest. Her eyes bulged as the blood swelled in her brain, her back arched rigidly as the pathways to it burst. The air went suddenly dry on the verge of cracking, rent with the heat of evil being violently torn from its earthly connection. The smoke that had emerged from Portia’s sundered chest swirled angrily, then dissipated, as the beast was re- turned to its vulnerable noncorporeal form, choking and shuddering in the grip of the Dhracian’s net of wind.
The body fell to the ground, limp and without life.
Rath felt the woman fall, felt the strangling and twitching in his hand and heart as the invisible threads that bound its heart to his tugged, growing weaker with each breath, like a fish fighting on a line. The beast would continue to struggle for a few moments longer, he knew; being from the Older Pantheon, Hrarfa had a good deal more strength than the demons he had most recently destroyed.
Each twist, each attempt to sustain itself, caused Rath’s heart to cramp. The unbreakable bonds of wind that tied them together were threaded through his arteries; every tug was like a knife in the chest. But Rath had sustained worse, and oddly, the pain cheered him, did his heart good. Each contraction was weaker than the one before, a sure sign that the spirit would shortly follow the body in death and into oblivion.
And so he was far too submerged in the thrall of the moment, in the import of the event, in the revel of a thousand years of searching finally coming to fruition to be aware that the glen had been entered. Until the blow that caught him in the back with the force of a lance at full charge, snapping half of his ribs, flinging him across the glen and headfirst into a beech tree. The shock kept him conscious, at least at first.
Faron stood still for a moment, watching the man in the robe he had just slapped away crumple to the ground like a pile of cloth.