All around them, pines and undergrowth were catching fire from the devil’s spines. Growls and snarls sounded from all sides out in the woods. Once again Vasen felt the peculiar sensitivity to the shifting shadows around him. He felt their distance from him, their taste and texture. He felt them in much the same way he had come to feel his faith after he’d been called by Amaunator.
His god allowed him to draw on his faith, turn it into energy, and with it, serve the light. The shadows, too, were tools, and his blood allowed him to draw on them, use them, too, didn’t it? Hadn’t his father commanded the shadows?
He looked at his hands, saw the shadows leaking from his flesh, wrapping around Weaveshear. He felt the connection between the darkness in his flesh, the shadow he cast behind him from the light of his shield and the shadows all around them. Light and shadow were one, merged in him. He could move through them, if he wished. He knew he could.
“Vasen,” Orsin said. “Vasen, we must go.”
Vasen nodded.
“Too late,” Gerak said, and started planting arrows in the ground near him, within easy reach. “They’re all around. There’s nowhere to go.”
The woods blazed around them, the fires jumping from pine to pine. The air grew hotter with each moment. The scrub and beds of pine needles caught flame like tinder. Soon the entire wood would be ablaze. The devils slunk among the flames, a half-dozen maybe, the silhouettes of their fiendish forms moving among the trees and flames unharmed by the heat, their eyes glowing red in the flames. They moved with the slow certainty of predators, wolves who’d finally ringed their prey and brought it to heel.
“Then we fight here,” Orsin said, and dragged his staff on the ground, tracing a circle around him, delineating his own personal arena. “You get your stand, after all, Gerak. There’ll be other lives after this one, my friends. I hope we all meet again in one of them.”
Vasen glanced back at the abbey but couldn’t see it. It was lost to the smoke, fire, and the trees. With the Oracle dead and the abbey abandoned, the valley didn’t belong to the light anymore. It belonged to the shadows.
To the shadows.
His perception narrowed down to a single thing-the vein of shadow spun out for him by Weaveshear, a dark line drawn across reality, reaching back to the abbey, stretching forward through the flames, past the devils, and out farther into the woods, a tether between past and present, with this moment standing at the intersection. The blade was the line that connected him to his father and his father’s abilities.
He felt the tendril in his mind, felt its path as it wove through the woods, felt its end point.
He knew where it was leading them.
Gerak fired into the trees. Out in the dark, a devil screamed, but the rest continued to close. They were preparing for a rush. Orsin held his staff before him in both hands, his face serene, calm. The crash of a large form moving through the woods sounded from the direction of the abbey. The bone devil was coming. The gleeful shrieks and whines of the spined devils heralded the larger fiend’s arrival.
The heat from the fire was increasing as the flames spread. The sky glowed orange. Clouds of smoke poured into the air.
“Look!” Gerak said.
Above the space where the abbey would be, a glowing green line formed in the sky and widened until it formed a large rectangle in the air. A portal. Dark forms moved on the other side of it, growing larger, larger, until they burst forth through a magical door.
“Shadovar,” Gerak said. He took aim but it was too far for a shot.
A score of veserab-mounted Shadovar flew through the portal. The great, winged worms reared up when they materialized in the air, their wings beating rapidly. The riders tried to steady them. One of the Shadovar, backlit by the glowing portal, wore no armor and rode the largest of the veserabs. He looked down on the abbey, on the woods, his glowing eyes the color of polished steel.
Without warning a shower of flaming spines flew at the companions from all directions, dozens of them, a rain of fire. Most got caught up in the nearby trees and set them ablaze, but a score fell among the comrades. Vasen blocked most with his shield and the rest bounced off his armor, but Orsin and Gerak had no such protection, and both grunted with pain as spines pierced clothing and flesh.
“They’re coming,” Orsin said, plucking a flaming spine from his arms.
The devils were coming in a final rush. Their shrieks and growls reached a crescendo, and in the glow of the fire Vasen could see them bounding through the underbrush and trees toward them. From the direction of the abbey he saw the looming shadow of the bone devil, striding like a colossus through the pines.
“Stand next to me,” Vasen said. “Now. No questions.”
Above them, the veserabs keened as the huge beasts winged over the flames. Vasen heard the Shadovar shouting to one another, pointing down at the devils, at the comrades. The steel-eyed Shadovar in the long robes swooped toward them. He extended a hand, and energy gathered in his palm.
Vasen reached out for the shadows as Gerak and Orsin came to his side.
“What are you doing?” Gerak asked.
Orsin must have known. “What he was born to do.”
When Vasen felt his mind take hold of the shadows, he drew them closer, deeper, darker. They swirled around him and his companions.
Vasen felt comfortable in the darkness, at home. The shadows dimmed the light of the world, but not the light of his faith. He could embrace both the heritage of his blood and the fact of his faith. He did not have to choose one or the other. He could have both.
The devils broke through the flaming trees. The Shadovar above discharged a black bolt of energy from his hand. Vasen touched each of his friends, stepped through the shadows, and took them from that place.
Frustration made Brennus white-knuckle the reins on his veserab. Ovith had led him to believe the son of Cale could not call upon any such powers. He cursed.
“Scour the woods!” he said to the riders who’d accompanied him. He spoke in a normal tone, but a spell put his voice in each of their ears. “Find them! Now!”
The heat and smoke rising from the burning forest made visibility poor. He wheeled his veserab over the woods, the river, the abbey. His riders did the same. Cale’s son would not be able to walk the shadows far. Not even a true shade could take them far.
“You see them?” he called.
“No, my lord!”
“No, Lord Brennus!”
He felt an itch on his flesh, the touch of a powerful divination, and immediately knew from where it came: Rivalen. He cursed again. His brother would be coming.
Below, a handful of spined devils prowled the blazing woods, bounding through the inferno. A bone devil strode among them. He looked back to the abbey, which sat dark and apparently abandoned, more like a mausoleum than a sanctuary of Amaunator that had evaded Shadovar detection for a century.
“What changed?” Brennus asked himself.
“No one home,” said one of the homunculi perched on his shoulder. “But why? Why now?”
Holding the rose of Amaunator by the few remaining links of its lanyard, Brennus intoned the words to another divination, focusing the magic around the son of Erevis Cale. When he finished the spell, he felt it latch onto its target. The rose symbol lifted from his palm and flew toward the east, pulling against the lanyard.
He did not bother to alert his men. Eager, he spurred his veserab to the east. The huge creature veered, beat its wings, and flew like a shot quarrel through the air.