He gestured awkwardly with Sunder, first at the stony protrusions around them, then toward the southwest where, after some distance, the rocky hills grew substantially more common. "I was just wondering," he said, "if there's any possibility that these hills here are in any way connected."
"You're not serious!"
'Oh, he's serious. He's just mad as an inbred hatter.'
"If you've got another idea, Seilloah, now would be a great time. Actually, yesterday would be even better."
"Give me a few minutes," the cat growled. "I'll come up with something. What in Arhylla's name are you planning to offer them, anyway?"
"Whatever I have to," he told her, rising to his feet with a low groan.
"I'm so sorry to interrupt," Irrial said peevishly, "but would it be too much to ask that one of you tell me what the hell we're talking about?"
"We're talking," Corvis said, limping over to gather two of the horses, "about finding allies."
"Who very well might save us the trouble of fleeing the Cephirans by killing us themselves," Seilloah added darkly. EIGHT HOOVES pounded over what had petered out into little more than a game trail, sending twin plumes of dust into the air behind them. They moved with the rumble, not of thunder, but of an earthquake, a constant and unbroken roar-for they ran with a speed unseen in nature, spurred not by their riders' boot heels but by the prod of Corvis's enchantment. Corvis and Irrial hunkered down, squinting against the wind and the sting of the horses' manes in their faces, devoting their attentions entirely to holding on. On occasion, amid the deafening cacophony, Corvis thought he heard a plaintive, feline yowl from the depths of his leftmost saddlebag.
The scrub and dried grass along the road blurred into a thick carpet. The trees were a solid wall, until the riders moved far enough into the rocky terrain that there were none. The occasional battlefields of dead knights and infantry become tiny pools of metal hue, gone almost before they could reflect a single gleam at the passing travelers. More than once they shot past a Cephiran outrider who could only lift his horn and hope to warn his companions up ahead; the soldiers might as well have tried to slap a ballista bolt from the air as to impede the riders' headlong plunge.
From the horizon's edge, the first of Imphallion's southern hills-true hills, these, not the rocky lumps through which they'd been riding-drew ever nearer, ships of stone on a sea of cracked earth. From within those hills, barely visible, crimson-clad soldiers rose and lifted longbows toward the sky. Unprepared as they were for the unnatural speeds at which their enemies pounded toward them, the distant horns of their scouts had warned them to stand ready.
Arrows arced up and out, graceful as a flock of raptors, and plunged earthward in a rain of wood and steel.
And Corvis, his body a tangled knot of agonized strands, his head heavy with exhaustion, lifted Sunder from his side and drank from the power of the Kholben Shiar.
Still he did not unleash the full might of the demon-forged blade; he never had, and he hoped, swore, even prayed he never would. But he delved now as deep as he ever had, and his mind cringed from the weapon's lustful, sadistic howl. He felt the surging of infernal magics flow through him, until he thought he must scream as the blood threatened to boil within him. A veil of fire shrouded his senses, so that he could see only a handful of yards-but within that distance, his sight was that of the gods. To him, every pebble that lay upon the earth, every blade of grass, even the currents of the wind, were painfully clear. In his ears, he heard the hoofbeats of the horses, not as a constant rumble but as separate and distinct sounds, the steady beat of a slow drum.
When the arrows fell around him, they fell not as a rapid rain but as the light drifting of snow. He rose in his stirrups and it was nothing to him, nothing at all, to reach out with Sunder and sever them from the sky before they could draw so much as a drop of blood.
Without pause they were gone, past the slack-jawed archers and deep into the shallow, winding gorges of the stone-faced hills.
Corvis dropped from his horse and advanced along a narrow pathway, casting about for any sort of hollow, cave, overhang, any entrance into the rocky depths. Internally he wrestled with the power flowing through him, struggling to shove it back into the weapon in his fist. Like a slow tide it receded, leaving burns across his soul.
He had just enough time, as his body yielded to the searing pain and he felt himself crumple limply to the earth, to hope that the others would have better luck finding shelter than he had. CONSCIOUSNESS AND VISION RETURNED as one, and Corvis discovered a cat in his face.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Sweet merciful gods aplenty, Seilloah, what the hell have you been eating?"
The cat nodded and turned away, leaving Corvis to his gagging. "He's all right!" she called out.
A set of footsteps-Irrial's, of course-drew near, and Corvis took a moment to orient himself. He was lying atop his blanket at the rear of what, so far as he could see in the dim light, was a remarkably shallow cave, little more than an impression in the stone sort of like a sideways bowl. He was naked from the waist up, unless one counted Seilloah sitting on his chest. He shifted his weight, and discovered that the blanket beneath him was soaked with sweat.
That realization brought a sudden awareness of a bone-deep ache that covered his body like a shroud, and he couldn't quite repress a groan. "Maybe not entirely all right," he admitted to Seilloah through pale, chapped lips.
"You were clinging to life by a single fingertip, Corvis. That damn thing burned you out from the inside. You're lucky I managed to heal you even this much."
"I've been lucky to have you do a lot of things for me, Seilloah. Thank you."
The cat smiled-rather a disturbing image in its own right-and then Irrial was kneeling beside them. He craned his head and discovered that the faint light he'd noted earlier was the result of a tiny campfire, barely more than two crossed torches, in the midst of the cave.
"I've never seen anyone move like that," she said, pressing a wet rag to his forehead. "Was that the same spell you used on the horses?"
"No." He waved a finger at Sunder, lying some few feet beside him. "That." Then, blinking, "Where are the horses?"
"Gone," Seilloah told him. "They were dying. We pushed them too far under your spell. I thought it best to walk them some ways before they keeled over, lay down some false trail."
"Damn."
"Yeah. Your plan better work."
'We're reliant on your plan? Well, shit. I'm not even real, and even I'm buggered.'
Corvis struggled to sit up. "We don't have much time before they find us. This cave's not that deep, and…" His eyes widened as he realized the implications of the fire.
"Relax, Corvis. From the outside, the cave looks just like any other span of rock." She lifted a paw, licked it and ran it over her head. "I taught you some of your best illusion spells, remember?"
He smiled and allowed himself to lie back once more. "How long do we…?"
"Long enough. You need to be rested for what's to come. I'll wake you if I think time's getting short."
Corvis's smile widened further, but he was asleep before he could sculpt his gratitude into words. FEELING A LOT MORE RESTED, but only a bit better overall, Corvis moved about the cavern on hands and knees, alternating between scrawling strange sigils on the rock with a lump of charcoal and complaining about what the stooped posture was doing to his back. He was once again fully dressed, and everything the travelers owned was packed and ready to go. "When we move," he'd warned, "we may have to move quickly."