Brotherhood of the Wolf (44 page)

Myrrima looked about the bailey. She'd seen Iome riding toward the keep only minutes before. But Iome's mare had vanished.

Suddenly she spotted it, impaled on the merlons of the Dedicate's Tower, eighty feet in the air. She pointed at the charger and shouted, “But Iome was in the keep! You sealed them in together!”

She staggered back in rising horror.

“No!” Binnesman cried.

And with that, the hill of stone and rubble that had been the keep surged upward. Rocks were pitched aside.

A whirlwind of fire swirled above the gaping hole, and once again darkness saturated the sky, more complete and blacker than ever before.

Binnesman shouted in terror. Myrrima could think of nothing to do but follow the counsel of the Earth King. She raced under the portcullis and put her back to the wall, quivering.

Winds rose and screamed through the portcullis, battered the castle. The stone wall at Myrrima's back shuddered under an icy blast, but Binnesman stood in that storm, and drew runes on the ground with the tip of his staff, shouting words that the gale tore from his lips and carried away.

Yet Myrrima saw something amazing: Though the wind blasted around him, it did not touch him. It did not so much as lift the hem of his robe.

Lightning streaked from the darkness and blasted at his feet, but Binnesman's spells of protection were powerful enough that no bolt could pierce him. Green light glowed steadily from his staff, and Binnesman gazed on in determination.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out the opal. It suddenly blazed in his hand.

Myrrima thought at first that it was sending out light, as it had done in the darkened storage room of the Boar's Hoard. But she realized that something else was happening instead. The stone now drew light. The tornado of fire that the Darkling Glory pulled from the skies suddenly twisted, and now that light funneled into the stone. Light began to fill it as water fills a sponge.

The gloom softened, and the raging storm that ripped through the castle suddenly weakened, becoming only a stiff gale. The shadows lifted, so that the sky above seemed only to be as dark as evening.

From the deeper shadows surrounding the ruins of the King's Keep, Myrrima heard laughter—a deep, inhuman voice.

“You think to steal my power, little wizard? Your stone is too small to hold it all!”

Myrrima trembled. She clutched her bow tightly. Her arrow had come loose, and she nocked it.

She drew the arrow now to her ear, felt the sting on her fingers where practice over the past two days had rubbed the skin off.

She took a deep breath and ran to the mouth of the portcullis, wheeled.

Ahead in the deep shadows stood the Darkling Glory. He was eight or nine feet tall, looked like a tall man covered with dark hair. Vast wings rose at his back. Cold white flames licked his naked flesh, and he regarded her with contempt.

She did not try for a fancy shot. The brute stood roughly sixty yards away, and she could not hope to hit anything other than his midsection, if even that.

She took quick aim and loosed an arrow. The wind around her suddenly howled as the Darkling Glory swept his wings.

A bolt of lightning surged from the monster's palm and crashed into the stone archway above her head. Splinters of rock rained down upon her neck.

Her arrow flew high of its mark, and looked as if it would race above the monster's head.

But the Darkling Glory's wings had lifted him a foot in the air, and the arrow struck home, piercing the creature's shoulder.

The Darkling Glory's head snapped back, and he convulsed. He fell to the cobblestone pavement of the bailey and writhed, wounded, trying to cover himself with his wings, trying to shelter himself. He screamed in pain and terror.

Myrrima grabbed another arrow and raced toward him, the blood lust pounding in her veins. Light still funneled from the skies into Binnesman's opal.

Now Gaborn's shout roared in her mind, and his command
came with such force that she could not fight it. “Strike! Strike now!”

Myrrima raced to the Darkling Glory. The creature hissed at her like a snake. He peered up at her in horror and contempt from behind the folds of a wing.

She drew her shaft full and let it fly, taking the beast in the eye.

Full daylight came streaming from the skies, and Myrrima stood over the Darkling Glory, panting.

She suddenly realized that she was screaming at the thing, had been shouting all along: “Damn you, foul thing! Damn you, I'll kill you!”

She raced up and began to kick his still-convulsing form. The monster seemed to reach for her with a hairy three-fingered claw. She danced back a step and found herself still yelling, crying out in terror and relief and pain.

“Get back!” Binnesman shouted. He raced up behind her.

At that moment, the Darkling Glory arched his back, spread his wings wide, and raised a claw to the air. A sound came from his mouth, a dry hissing rattle, nothing at all like the death rattle of an animal.

A black wind tore from his throat, raising an inhuman cry. The force of that magnificent wind drove the beast hard into the ground, and Myrrima struggled to backpedal, to lift her legs and flee.

Numb, she realized that she had killed the Darkling Glory's body, but had not reckoned with the elemental trapped within.

A great roiling fist of wind slammed into her, driving her back several paces and knocking the breath out of her. Her ribs ached as if she'd been hammered with a truncheon. She lost her footing, and the wind took her, sent her skittering back along the paving stones. It screamed about her with a thousand voices, like the wails of disembodied spirits.

The blast howled through the bailey, transformed itself into a tornado, carrying the body of the Darkling Glory up and up. The base of the tornado tore the cobblestones from
the pavement, swirled them up into the mix with a sound like an earthquake. Lightning flashed at the tornado's crown, arcing into the heavens. The roiling mass of air whirled violently once and then slammed to the north. The walls of the Dedicates' Keep rumbled and shattered. Huge boulders heaved into the air.

Three bolts of lightning struck beside Myrrima in rapid succession. The tornado veered toward her. She felt fingers of air tug at her, inviting her into the heart of the maelstrom. Binnesman was shouting, and Myrrima twisted and scrabbled to grab some paving stones.

The wind lifted her off the ground, held her for a heartbeat as if pondering what best to do with her.

And then Myrrima saw Binnesman. The old wizard struggled through the wind, as it ripped at his hair and pummeled his robes. He thrust the end of his staff toward her, and frantically Myrrima grabbed it, felt its gnarled and polished wood in her grasp. A great boulder came bouncing down from the Dedicates' Keep, two tons of stone rolling toward them as if hurled with unerring precision.

Binnesman raised his hand, warding it away, and the boulder's course suddenly shifted left, narrowly missing them.

“I claim you for the Earth! Live now, live for the Earth.” Binnesman shouted.

The wind ripped at Myrrima with powerful fingers, tried to pull her away, and Myrrima clung to the staff with all her might.

Binnesman hurled a handful of leaves from his pocket, sent them scattering. The wind took them, sent them whirling. “Begone, fiend!” Binnesman shouted. “She is mine!”

Suddenly the wind stilled nearby, and the great tornado roared. It ripped stones from the ruined Dedicate's Keep, sent them roaring into the air, then let them rain down uselessly all around Binnesman and Myrrima.

A dozen bolts of lightning slashed the air nearby, leaving Myrrima blinded by the light.

Then the elemental was gone, screaming north through
the King's tombs, uprooting cherry trees that had stood for a hundred years. It leapt down cliffs to the north, and raced then among the fields, meandering almost aimlessly as it knocked down cottages, smashed carts, ripped apart haycocks, tore through fences, and gouged a black scar in the earth.

For long minutes, bits of hay and dust still hung heavy in the air. But what was left of the Darkling Glory had departed.

Myrrima sat on the ground, quivering, mortified. Her ribs ached. Dozens of small abrasions covered her legs and hands where bits of stone had pummeled her.

She felt astonished to even be alive.

Binnesman held her, drawing her close, seeking to comfort her.

She began trembling uncontrollably as the terror and blood lust left her Her heart pounded in her ears so hard, she could hardly hear, couldn't quite make sense of Binnesman's words.

“That, milady, should not have been possible!” he said in astonishment. “No common mortal could slay a Glory! And then to live—to live through it?”

“What? What do you mean?” she asked.

But he merely held her for a moment longer and said in a tone of infinite wonder, “You're wet. You're wet, every bit of you!”

She leaned against him for support. Tears filled her eyes. She stared over his shoulder at the pile of stones where the King's Keep had fallen. There was a huge rent there now, a crevasse from which the Darkling Glory had escaped.

Iome will be down there, Myrrima realized. I should look for her body, give it a proper burial.

But even as the thought lodged in her mind, she saw movement at the edge of the pit.

Iome, covered in dust, stuck her head up from the wreckage, gazing about curiously. The clubfooted boy poked his head out after her.

*   *   *

“We hid in your room,” Iome said as she related her tale to Binnesman. “The earth power was greatest there, and the Darkling Glory didn't want to draw near. When the keep collapsed, the boy and I got trapped in the corner, beneath some beams.”

“We was lucky,” the clubfooted boy shouted. He looked as if he'd play the fool in his cloth-of-gold coat. “The Queen has got luck!”

“No, it wasn't luck,” Iome said, shaking her head in warning. “I felt Gaborn warn me, telling me to hide. I pushed us toward that corner because it felt safe, and when the roof collapsed, the beams were strong enough to shelter us.”

“You can thank the King for your life, when next you see him,” Binnesman said.

Iome glanced off toward the valley, where the tornado wandered to the east. She shuddered before continuing. “Afterward, when the Darkling Glory broke out, we simply crawled through the rubble until we got free. The wind was howling so! I didn't dare climb up until I heard you and Myrrima talking, and knew it was safe.”

Myrrima looked at the pile of rubble where the Darkling Glory had been sealed beneath the earth. It seemed impossible for any human inside that building to have survived when it collapsed.

Binnesman let Myrrima go. She still trembled, but not so badly as before.

“I still don't understand.” Binnesman shook his head in wonder. “No common arrow should have been able to pierce that beast.”

He retrieved one of Myrrima's arrows from the ground, and examined it closely. He studied the narrow blade of cold iron at the bodkin's tip. He felt the white goose feathers on the arrow's fletching.

He cocked a brow at Myrrima. His voice was thick with suspicion. “It's wet.”

“I fell in the moat,” Myrrima explained.

Binnesman smiled as if perceiving something important.
“Of course. Air is an element of instability. But Water counters its unstable nature. Like Earth, Water can also be a counter to air. A shaft made of Earth alone could not pierce the Darkling Glory, but one of Earth
and
Water maybe.… And, of course, I was draining the Glory's power at the time.”

It sounded suspiciously to Myrrima as if the wizard were trying to take credit for her kill, when she felt quite certain that she was the one who had saved
his
life. Binnesman did not sound persuaded by his own conjecture as to the cause of the monster's death.

Moments later, Jureem came galloping up to the keep, leading Myrrima's mare. The horses' hooves clattered against the stone.

Her mount had a white burn on its rump where the lightning bolt had struck it. Myrrima was amazed the horse could even walk. But it was a force horse, she reminded herself, with endowments of stamina, and therefore could endure much more than a common mount.

Jureem leapt from his charger and set down the baskets of puppies. The dogs yelped with excitement, and one pup pushed its nose through the lid of the basket and leapt out, raced to Myrrima's side.

She reached down and petted it absently.

Jureem glanced from person to person, as if making sure everyone had survived.

Iome laughed nervously and said to Myrrima, “Your husband slew a reaver mage and brought home its head yesterday, and today you must best him. What trophy will you gather next?”

“I can think of only one better,” Myrrima said. “Raj Ahten's head.”

In point of fact, Myrrima could not feel easy about her kill. The air around them hung heavy and smelled of a storm. There was no corpse to the Darkling Glory, nothing that could prove she'd killed him.

She felt almost as if he were still here, hovering close, hanging on her every word.

Binnesman himself was glancing about furtively, gauging the air. It smelled thick with dust and lightning.

“He is dead, isn't he?” Myrrima asked. “It is over?”

Binnesman gazed at her, held his tongue as he considered his answer. “A Glory is not killed so easily,” he warned. “He is disembodied now, diminished. But he is not dead, and he is still capable of much evil.”

Myrrima looked out over the valley, to where the tornado now whirled and seethed two miles off. “But… he can't touch us now, can he?”

Binnesman answered warily. “I've driven him away.”

Iome stared off into the distance, breathing hard. “So he will lose form, the way that a flameweaver's elemental does?”

Binnesman gripped his staff, stared thoughtfully at the heaving maelstrom. The tornado moved erratically, striking in one direction, turning in another. Like a child in the throes of a tantrum.