Shranree hadn’t missed it. ‘The worst is over,’ she said. ‘We are victorious. Now we flush these rats out of their holes and snuff the life from them. Spare no one.’
The senior sister turned and launched a ball of flame at a nearby cabin, where it exploded in a storm of fire. Screams echoed from within and then slowly died. Shranree clapped her hands together again and waddled off in search of more targets. The other sorceresses followed her for a time before breaking away to hunt their own prey.
Yllandris looked around. There, over near the walclass="underline" a small hut with a faint wisp of smoke curling from its roof. Someone had been foolish enough to forget to extinguish their hearth. Foolish… or so desperate for warmth they kept the fire going even with a murderous army on their doorstep.
The young sorceress felt increasingly uneasy. Highlanders followed the Code, a set of rules meant to uphold the martial tradition that had made the warriors of the High Fangs feared throughout the known world. That way of life had existed for centuries. And then the Shaman had come, and though he had created the Brethren to defend them and ensured their freedom from the tyranny of other Magelords, he had altered the Code.
The Shaman had decreed that strength was the only true virtue. By its nature, weakness invited the imposition of will from the strong. The weak deserved neither sympathy nor mercy, as their very existence was akin to that of a deer providing sustenance for the hunter. The weak became strong or they perished. That was the natural order of things.
Yllandris was strong. She had refused to be weak, had broken the insidious shackles of a troubled childhood to achieve true greatness. Was she not a living demonstration of the Shaman’s ideology? She smiled to herself. One day I will be the Shaman’s ultimate lesson. The last he ever learns. I wonder if he will appreciate the irony.
Her power burgeoned, the magic sufficiently recovered from her earlier exertions. Blue flame flickered around her hands as she approached the hut. Let Shranree and the others deal death from afar. Yllandris would deliver this particular lesson personally.
She struck the door with such power that it tore away from its hinges. Then she stepped inside the hovel and raised her glowing fists.
She lowered them again when she saw the terrified eyes staring up at her. There were three of them: two girls and a boy, none older than eight winters.
Their mother lay next to the hearth. The woman knew she was there, but she was too weak even to raise her head. The entire family looked near starved. The children shrank away from Yllandris to huddle closer to their dying mother as if she could protect them. The boy was too afraid even to look at her.
The ultimate lesson…
Yllandris felt her body begin to tremble. She turned away and stumbled out of the hut. A warrior emerged from the home opposite, his sword bloody and a wide grin on his gap-toothed face.
‘More in there?’ he asked jovially. ‘I’ll deal with them.’ He nodded respectfully and made to walk past her into the building.
Her force-shove sent him flying forty feet through the air to crash into the side of the town wall. Bones cracked. His lifeless body slid to the ground.
Yllandris pulled her cloak tighter about her and before she knew it she was running, tears streaming down her face and turning to ice on her cheeks. She reached the gates, ducked outside them and then sank down onto the snow, silent sobs racking her body while inside the city blood continued to flow and fire consumed everything it touched.
Sudden motion caught her attention far above, and she looked up with wet eyes to catch the dark shadow of something huge and inhuman. It circled once, moving at terrifying speed, and then whirled away eastwards.
Its passing left her shivering uncontrollably, and not from the numbing cold.
More Haste, Less Speed
The sun was at its zenith by the time the small band finally approached the Tombstone. The massive column of basalt jutted out from the small outcrop of hills surrounding them, and was visible from a good few leagues away once a gap in the ridge line finally opened up.
To the west, a day’s ride on horseback would carry them back to Dorminia. The city was too far away to be seen from this distance, but the dark line of the Demonfire Hills was visible even to Brodar Kayne’s ageing eyes. Small villages and towns dotted the ancient road that ran all the way from the city to terminate just below the mine ahead of them. He and Jerek had followed the same road only a month past. The last stretch of their epic journey had turned out to be fairly pleasant, all things considered. For one thing, no one had tried to kill them.
He couldn’t say the same for the Badlands a couple of days’ ride to the north. A vast, treacherous stretch of country filled with hidden gullies, the Badlands were haunted by gangs of bandits that preyed on the Free Cities of the Unclaimed Lands to the east — and, when they could get away with it, those settlements in the small hinterland that swore allegiance to the Grey City. The bandit tribes that pursued a life of lawlessness in the Badlands had to choose their targets carefully if they wished to avoid deadly retribution.
‘Carefully’ had not included a pair of ragged Highlanders passing through, at least not at first. Kayne and Jerek had left a trail of bodies in their wake as they fought their way south through the Badlands to the Trine. That particular part of their trek had taken many weeks.
North beyond the Badlands, many days’ travel further still, and through places he would as soon forget, the land began to rise. The temperature dropped, becoming cold and then bitter, and slowly the High Fangs emerged, marking the place where the very world ended. It was an enormous country of sheer ridges and plunging valleys, fast-flowing streams cold enough to freeze a man to his bones and forests of snow-capped pines so tall they towered over anything built by the hands of men. It seemed like another lifetime away.
Or at least it had, until Borun appeared like a ghost from his past.
What were they doing this far south?
He supposed he ought to have asked before the encounter had taken its inevitable turn for the worse. The fact was, a meeting between him and Borun was only ever going to end one way.
Jerek strode beside him in silence. The Wolf looked almost content, which wasn’t something you could say about him often. Nearby, Sasha struggled along with Vicard, who had been whining ever since Kayne had taken his pouch away from him. Isaac ambled along at the rear of the band, whistling a jaunty tune. He’s an odd one and no mistake, the old barbarian thought. There was something troubling about the man, but nothing he could quite put his finger on.
Sasha stopped suddenly, flicking sweat-matted hair away from her face. ‘The Rift is just ahead,’ she said.
From his current vantage point, Kayne could just about see the top of a wooden tower protruding from the yawning pit that opened before the Tombstone. Dark smoke and noxious fumes rose above the pit, staining the sky above a murky grey. A huge pile of earthen waste dominated the eastern side of the chasm.
‘According to the brief Garrett provided, almost a hundred men work the Rift,’ said Sasha. ‘The Augmentors could return at any time, so we’ll need to make this quick.’
‘What about the Watch?’ asked Vicard. ‘There’s sure to be a few soldiers around.’
Sasha’s eyes narrowed as she searched for any sign of movement around the edge of the chasm. ‘I don’t doubt it.’