After about a sixty count, it lost its warmth. When Nix scraped it off he found that the shallowest of his cuts had vanished, the deepest reduced to pink lines that would heal in a day or two.
"The man knows his craft, I concede," Nix said to Egil.
"Don't get too fond of him," the priest answered. "It'll be awkward when we have to kill him."
Mention of violence against Rakon caused the spellworm to twist up Egil's guts, which he endured with a grimace.
"Fair point," Nix said, and his own violent thoughts triggered nausea and cramps that doubled him over.
There were several hours of night left, so the guards lit torches, Nix pulled forth his crystal eye, and the caravan got underway, traveling the high-walled cut under the lurid, nearly full eye of the Mages' Moon. The night sat heavy on them and they moved in near-silence, the only sound the low rumble of the carriage wheels on the road and the occasional whicker from the horses.
Only when dawn lightened the sky did they breathe easier. Yet still the cut — really a canyon, a long, deep gash in the earth — went on so long Nix feared it would never end, that it would just continue forever, condemning them all to a subterranean existence where sky and wind and sun were forever just out of reach. They watched the sky, the walls, fearing the return of the flying creatures, dreading the appearance of the Vwynn.
When the road at last began to rise, so too did their spirits. The walls of the canyon shrank around them and Nix could see the end of the cut ahead, the road gradually rising to elevate them out of the Hellish pit.
Several of the guards gasped when the group reached the top of the canyon and emerged into the unfiltered light of day. The leagues they'd traversed seemed to have transported them to another world.
Instead of boulders and scree and broken hills, they saw instead monumental ruins. Huge rectangular stone blocks jutted from the red landscape at odd angles. Faded script showed on some, the whorls and twists of the characters mostly lost to time and the weather. Looking too long at the script that had survived made Nix's eyes ache. Everyone stared about in awed silence. Baras made the protective sign of Orella.
"What do you make of them?" Egil asked, nodding at the blocks.
"I don't," Nix said, shaking his head.
"Man-made," Egil said, nodding at a huge stone sticking out of the earth, the bones of a lost civilization.
"Made," Nix agreed. "But I'm not sure it was by men. The size of them…"
In their day, the blocks must have been part of structures larger than anything in Dur Follin, larger than anything Nix had ever seen. He could not imagine the destructive force it must have taken to topple them. The mere passage of time seemed insufficient to the task.
"Norristru has a great interest, it seems," Egil said, nodding at the carriage.
Rakon had opened the carriage's window and stared out at the blocks, his eyes gleaming, his thin lips set in a straight line.
All day they traversed the gigantic architecture, the residuum of a people who constructed wonders and died — shattered domes, megaliths the size of small buildings, and pyramidal blocks, the sharp points of which stabbed at the earth and sky.
"How many do you suppose have seen this?" Egil said.
"Few," Nix said, and thumped the priest on the shoulder. "And now us among them. This is why we do it, yeah?"
"Aye," Egil said. "Though I'd prefer to be doing it of my own accord."
"Seconded."
The carriage set a brisk pace and the ruins grew denser as they traveled. Towering shapes loomed on the horizon ahead. At first Nix mistook them for hills and rock formations, but as they drew closer, he saw they, too, were ruins, great heaps of stone.
"Gods," Egil breathed.
All of the guards slowed in their steps, shared worried glances, and tightened their grips on sword hilts.
"It's all just ruins, men," Baras said, his tone false.
Rakon called out from the carriage. "We need to reach those ruins before nightfall, Baras."
"Is that the refuge you spoke of?" Nix called, but Rakon ignored him.
"You heard him," Baras said. "Leg it."
They picked up the pace, but the day wore on and still the high ruins seemed too distant.
"Faster," Rakon urged them. "We must go faster."
"Easily said by the man riding in the carriage," Nix said, jogging along with the rest. Sweat soaked his jack and shirt. Despite the pace they'd kept, they hadn't covered enough ground. The cloud-shrouded sun sank low in the west. Dread settled on the men. They watched the sky, the ruins around them.
"We press on until we reach the ruins," Baras said.
When night outvied day for rule of the sky, the Vwynn showed themselves.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nix caught motion in the dark crannies of the ruins that loomed around them.
"I saw something," Nix said, pointing with his sword at a pile of rectangular blocks that formed a makeshift post and lintel. "There."
"Keep moving," Rakon called. "Do not stop."
Nix spotted more movement, a lithe form dashing through the shadows.
"There!" he said.
"I saw it, too," said Derg.
"Faster!" Rakon shouted. "Everyone, faster!"
"Is it the Vwynn?" Baras asked. "Is it?"
Rakon didn't answer, the driver whipped the reins and the exhausted, wounded draft horses whinnied and picked up their pace. The men followed suit, almost running. There was no way they could keep it up for long.
Nix's eyes darted right and left, following motion, trying to discern the details of the creatures. A small stone fell from atop a megalith, disturbed by the motion of something. He saw more movement on the other side, a lot of it, a mass of forms. Over the sound of his own labored breathing, he heard growls, snarls, a growing chorus of them.
"We should find a defensible spot, Baras!" Egil said, rattling his dice in one hand, holding a hammer in the other. "We're going to get caught in the open!"
"No," Rakon countered from the carriage. "Faster. We must make the ruins."
"My lord has spoken," Baras said, breathing heavily, his mail jingling as he ran. "Move it!"
The sun shot its last, hopeless rays into a sky being overrun by night. As darkness stretched over the land, the Vwynn emerged from the shadows, hundreds of them.
"Here they come!" Nix said.
"Onto the carriage!" Egil ordered. "Now, now!"
"Wait," Baras said. "We should-"
"Go!" Egil said. "Now, Baras, or we're all dead."
The Vwynn charged out of the ruins, seething from all sides, the stonescape vomiting up their muscular, clawed forms.
"Onto the carriage," Baras said, echoing Egil. He bounded onto the driver's bench and took station beside the driver, already cocking his crossbow.
Egil, Nix, Jyme, and the rest of the guards leaped onto the step rail of the carriage and grabbed hold where they could. Rakon leaned halfway out the open window of the carriage and shouted at the driver.
"Go, man! Go!"
The driver shouted at the already straining horses, snapped the reins. The animals laid back their ears, snorted, and ran as best they could. They weren't chargers, and with the weight of the additional men to pull, they moved alarmingly slow.
"Faster!" Baras called, and the driver snapped the reins again and again. The draft horses snorted, lowered their heads, whinnied, pulled.
Behind them, before them, and to their left and right, Vwynn poured out of the night, loping over the ruined terrain on their long legs. They moved with an odd jerky stride, more leap than run, and their clawed feet threw up clods of earth behind them at every stride. Muscles rippled in their thin, scaled frames as they moved. Their claws flexed open and closed as they ran, as if in anticipation of rending flesh.