Khallayne stepped forward. Lyrralt was at her elbow. Bakrell, also, seemed to have appeared from nowhere, clutching a bloody weapon, as his sister had.
Toning his words with respect, Jyrbian said, “Now is the time to speak of the future. We’ve been running. Now you want us to run again, this time from a pack of puny humans. We could have vanquished them, made slaves of them! Built a new place here.”
There was only a minimum of mumbled agreement and much shaking of heads from those around him, but none spoke out. They waited for Igraine to respond.
Everlyn, her face flushed, eyes narrowed, said hotly, “You’ve learned nothing! Slavery is an evil thing! We can never build-”
Igraine hushed her with a glance. “We must find our own place,” he said, softly, then he repeated it in a louder voice for those at the back of the crowd. “And we must build it ourselves. Of our own sweat, not on the misery of others.”
‘“You mean, no slaves?” Lyrralt stared at Igraine in disbelief. The preaching of kindness and generosity in order to increase production from slaves had seemed bad enough. But this…!
“Lyrralt. It’s wrong to take a person from his home, from his family. It’s wrong to lock a man away, take away his freedom.” Everlyn touched his arm, as compassionately as she’d touched the human.
Jyrbian’s expression changed into one of jealousy and desire.
Lyrralt stared at her as he had stared at Igraine, as if he’d discovered someone, or something, he’d never seen before.
Igraine’s persuasive words filled the silence. “If we don’t change our ways, we’re doomed. Did you-all of you!-not see it in Takar?” He swept his arms wide.
There was murmured assent. “Did you not feel the hopelessness, the uselessness in your lives?” Jyrbian looked around at the crowd, saw the eager faces, the fevered eyes.
Igraine’s voice took on a compelling, urgent quality. “Can you not see what our kind will become if we continue on that misbegotten path? Have you ever felt more alive, living as we have these past few weeks, than in all of your miserable lives before?”
He had them now, their hearts and minds. The surge of joy, of faith from his followers, was almost tangible to behold. “We will leave in the morning,” he said. “We will find a place of our own, where we can be safe and happy.”
The crowd sighed. The Ogres, arms around their loved ones, began to drift away.
Everlyn went with her father, without a glance for Jyrbian, who would have followed her had Lyrralt not caught his arm and pulled him back.
“Is this heresy what he has been preaching all along, about not having slaves?” Lyrralt accused his brother, his glance taking in Khallayne, too.
Jyrbian shrugged, watching Everlyn’s disappearing back. “I’ve been too busy to sit around Igraine’s feet like a doting child.” He turned away.
The others also walked away, leaving only Khallayne and Bakrell to hear Lyrralt’s horrified voice. “This is madness! It was bad enough when he was talking about ‘choosing for yourself’ Now he wants you to live as humans live, digging in the dirt for food, building miserable clay huts with your own hands! Don’t you even care?”
“Do you? Care, I mean?” Bakrell peered closely into Lyrralt’s eyes as if to gauge the sincerity of his answer.
“Well, I don’t care,” Khallayne said, before Lyrralt could answer.
“You don’t care as long as you can practice your heretical magic!”
She met his angry gaze with an expression of equal determination. How long since she’d thought of her magic as a thing to be hidden away? As a wrongness? Any philosophy, heretical or not, was worth the peace and joy and sense of belonging of the past weeks. She shrugged, looking eerily like Jyr-bian a moment earlier. “You’re right. I don’t much care about his philosophy, one way or the other.”
She turned and walked away, leaving Lyrralt alone with a renewed conviction that he must act soon, whether a good opportunity presented itself or not. He had been looking for a safe moment to kill Igraine, one that would allow him to escape before his deed was discovered. Perhaps he would have to die in the act.
The runes hummed approvingly on his skin.
Fear. The face was there, and it was her own. But it wasn’t. The pale sea-green complexion, which had always drawn men to her like bees to honey, was mottled, as splotchy and knotted as tree bark. The black eyes were dull and stupid and humorless. But they were hers.
Screaming woke her. The sound so nearly matched the images of her nightmare that for long moments, Khallayne lay, twisted in her blanket, wrapped in screams that seemed to be her own, except…
The screaming went on and on, growing louder then ending abruptly in a silence more terrible than all the noise.
Thinking, at last, that the voice crying out in terror had been Jelindra’s and not her own, Khallayne leapt to her feet, stumbling as her blanket caught around her ankles.
Across the campfire Tenaj and Lyrralt each fought free of their blankets, too. Nearer the tent where Igraine slept, Jyrbian tossed off his blankets with a curse that woke more people. “‘What in the name of Sargonnas is happening now?”
Before anyone could answer, a new scream ripped through the air. Without hesitation, Jyrbian drew his sword and wheeled in the direction of the disturbance. But his sword would be of no use against the thing that had sprung into the air, conjured out of nothing. Or maybe there was more than one. Khallayne wasn’t sure.
As Jyrbian charged, slashing with his sword, the cloud that rose into the sky might have been one or twenty creatures. The faces of it changed rapidly. The monster was catlike, snakelike, fanged, black-mawed, a rock, mere mist. There were two, then one, then a mass of them, writhing like snakes streaming from their winter cave into the spring sun.
Jyrbian’s sword sank into flesh and mist. An appendage, flickering between long, slithery tentacle and claw-tipped, gnarled horror, reached out and threw Jyrbian backward twenty feet. He landed in a heap and was still.
Khallayne started toward him, and Tenaj grabbed her, hauling her back. “Forget him!”
The creature was smaller now, more solid, more deadly, but still moving slowly, dreamlike, almost loving in its gestures, as it grasped a female Ogre around the neck with its impossibly long fingers.
She tried to scream, but all that came out was gurgling, then abruptly no sound at all.
The cloud creature had gained in substance while the living being had become a flimsy husk, lifeless, no more substantial than paper.
There were new cries from about the camp as more Ogres awakened to find their view of the stars blotted out by the gruesome creature. Lords and ladies who had, weeks before, known a dagger only as a jeweled object to decorate a belt, took up their ceremonial swords and their crude pikes and prepared to fight.
Khallayne knew their courage would do them no good. Hadn’t Jyrbian just proved that? She could sense Tenaj collecting her power, could hear the murmured words of a spell forming on the other Ogre’s lips. Tenaj was still only learning things Khallayne had practiced as a child, still tentative about the power inside her. Khallayne realized she had to help.
The cloud creature turned on them. Its features were two, three, a dozen frightening faces, shifting until they were one, multiplying again, then melting into something ugly and monstrous and monolithic.
Khallayne tried to close her eyes, tried to concentrate and bring up her own power. She couldn’t. She couldn’t move a muscle. Even her eyelids refused to budge, to blot out the dreamlike movement, the painfully slow change of features, from one to many. Chameleonlike. Dreamlike.