Stained Glass Monsters (10 page)

Sebastian ducked his head, then looked
sideways at his sister's escort. Not wholly oblivious after all.
Hauling herself over the balcony less showily, Kendall hoped the
climb would excuse her burning face. She was glad to see one of the
Sentene was Lieutenant Danress, but the other was Captain
Faille.

"Hello again," said Rennyn, smiling at
Kendall. "I was wondering where you'd ended up." To Kendall's
dismay she then turned to the silent figure on her left. "And do
the Kellian regard Queen Solace as a god, Captain? That's not a
theory I've heard before."

With half his face hidden by the
uniform, and the midday sun transforming his eyes to gold disks,
Kendall couldn't decipher any kind of reaction in the grim Captain.
"The Kellian were created without voices," he said, just when
Kendall had decided he wasn't going to respond. "Their purpose was
to be tools in the hands of their Master, no more. A hammer does
not worship the smith."

Rennyn Montjuste-Surclere stared up at
him, then inclined her head, as if he'd done her a courtesy. "And
it is the Phoenix who wields you now. Well enough." She turned back
to her brother. "I brought you clothes and a fresh journal, Seb.
Given the library here, I think you'll be well supplied with study
material. Now, can you walk if I help you?"

Balancing with help of the balustrade,
Sebastian made a doubtful movement and began to teeter, recovering
with another surge of magic. His sister gave a gesture of
permission, and he steadied and began floating again. The little
group headed off, Sebastian glancing back and waving at Kendall
when his sister did.

Kendall watched them go, then bent to
pick up a pebble.

Rennyn took the time to reassure Seb,
then narrowly avoided an audience with the Queen. Another reason to
stay away from the palace as much as possible. She'd been neither
pleased nor surprised to hear her name on every street of Asentyr,
and could only appreciate the magnitude of her failure. Three
hundred years of secrecy, smashed to ruins.

The Sentene were keen to reach the next
site before sunset, and she found herself being very efficiently
bundled into a coach, part of a small cavalcade. The dark,
over-quilted interior made her sleepy, so she curled up on the seat
and dreamed confusedly of being shaken until she was woken by a
light hand on her shoulder. The red-headed Lieutenant, Danress,
standing in the doorway of the coach.

"You haven't really recovered, have
you?" the woman said. "Will you be able to do what you need
here?"

"It's nothing difficult," Rennyn
replied, running her fingers through her hair, the bandages
catching at strands. She'd be able to rid herself of them soon, but
it was true that sleep hadn't balanced the physical toll.

Peering past the Sentene mage, she saw
they'd stopped in a well-established encampment. The group she'd
been travelling with had joined up with an equal number who'd gone
ahead to the rough location she'd named. "How solid is this plan to
build a shield to contain the Eferum-Get?"

"With time to prepare a properly
constructed circle it seems workable. Just because we usually build
them to keep things out rather than in doesn't mean the principle
alters. And we have plans to create something rather special here –
it should hold even another Azrenel. The incursion is due at dawn,
yes? How long before you're able to pinpoint the exact
location?"

"I'll do that now."

They were a few hours east of Asentyr,
on a road trailing over gorse-studded hills notable only for sheep
and a cold wind. It wouldn't be long before the sun set. Rennyn
climbed out of the coach and glanced over the encampment, ignoring
the expectant interest directed back at her. Ten pair of Sentene,
five members of the Hand, and an impressive number of Ferumguard.
Captain Illuma had called this a war, and Rennyn found herself with
troops, not quite at her command, but following her lead.

Absurd to resent it. But she recognised
that feeling as a gloss over underlying worry. She didn't want to
work with the Sentene, and certainly not the Kellian. Not because
she feared they would run her through, but because they seemed so
dutiful. Loyal servants of the kingdom, ready to spend their lives
for its protection.

Unhappy with her thoughts, Rennyn took
one of her bags from the coach and slid the ring attached to
Solace's focus over her finger. Already the pull was there, so she
followed it, trailed at a discreet distance by an escort of five.
Up the hill, not all the way to the crest, but a long walk. When
she stopped she stood on a patch of grass like all the grass about
it.

"I can't predict the width," she
said.

"It is enough to have a starting point,"
said the senior representative of the Hand, a man she vaguely
recalled being named Barton or Martin. He stepped forward, gazing
eagerly at the ground. "A priceless opportunity, not only for our
defence but to study a breach in formation. Katznien, have this
space cleared and flattened while it's still light."

The Ferumguard accompanying him
signalled, and the camp below stirred. Battle lines would be
drawn.

"They'll have prepared a meal, if you're
hungry," said Lieutenant Danress, who appeared to have been
assigned the particular duty of ushering Rennyn about.

Rennyn shook her head and walked a short
way up the hill. "I'll go in now," she said, finding a jutting rock
which was suitable for her purposes. "I'm trying to gauge how much
she's grown in power." She gestured, shearing off the top of the
rock so she had a flat surface to work with, then began marking out
her circle with swift strokes.

"Can I ask you a question?" Lieutenant
Danress asked, when Rennyn had finished and was checking for
errors. The woman had opened the front of her cloak so that Rennyn
could see her face, and her apologetic smile. "We've been
instructed not to antagonise you with constant interrogation, to
simply observe as much as possible, but I'm too curious not to ask.
Ignore me if you don't want to answer."

"You'd need to ask either way," Rennyn
said, amused by the idea of them being ordered not to irritate
her.

"Why is your focus
black
? I've
never seen or heard of anything like it. And, well, it's smaller
than mine, but I'm nowhere near as...as obscenely powerful as
you."

"How many times have you summoned?"

Danress lifted her focus on its chain.
"Twice." There was a hint of pride in her voice, understandable
because the stone was large for only two summonings. Rennyn drew
her own focus free of her collar and considered it. Certainly
smaller.

"Two hundred and eighty-five," she
said.

There was a clatter from further down
the slope. One of the Sentene had dropped an iron bar which was
apparently part of the plan for a shield. "Kellian have such sharp
hearing," Rennyn murmured wryly. The one called Faille had been
sitting outside the infirmary window listening to Seb chat to the
girl from Falk. Not that Seb was likely to say anything too
revealing. And every one of the Kellian at the breach site had
looked up when she'd answered Danress' question.

"It was an experiment in summoning," she
explained. "I was following the debate on what the dark layer
separating multiple focuses is. The layer always appears, no matter
how much power you succeed in summoning. I decided to build it up
by tiny degrees, rather like a pearl. It's certainly slower, but
less dangerous. I would say the result is purer."

"Quality over quantity." Danress looked
thoroughly disconcerted. "Have you truly been in the Eferum that
many times?"

"Every morning for six months, at one
time." Rennyn was still watching the reaction of the Kellian, who
were now gazing up at her, openly listening. "My father made me
stop summoning more than once a month because it does things to
you, the Eferum. Like not being able to go out in the sun, or eat
cooked things."

Satisfied that her sigils were correctly
drawn, Rennyn moved to the centre of her circle and poured power
into the sigils until they took her away from her audience. The
chill quickly sapped any annoyance she felt at the transparency of
Danress' ingenuous approach, and she turned her attention to her
appearance, checking that her presence was properly cloaked.

This very basic precaution had become
less of a rote exercise, though she could see no unusual activity
nearby. The Eferum was vast and black and very quiet. Not wasting
any time, she slipped free one sheet of paper from the small pile
she'd brought with her, a casting which would measure the force of
any movement of the Efera. Like most paper-wrought castings, the
power she put into it burned the sheet to ash.

The shield the Sentene were constructing
was very visible, blazing with such power it blotted out the moving
motes around it. Rennyn shook her head, and closed her hand around
Solace's focus. Hard to guess how the Eferum-Get would react to
that, but if they broke away from the breach then she was at risk,
for she would need to drop the cloak during the attunement. Usually
not such a dangerous thing, but if such a mass of Eferum-Get were
loose in the vicinity, the chance of an encounter was much
higher.

Her divination was reacting to changes
in the currents about her, so she gripped the focus tightly and,
forewarned, only pressed her lips together when a stream of moving
shadows rushed toward the breach. No possibility of coincidence:
they had to be working with Solace. Wasting no time, she made the
attunement at the first possible moment, then immediately stepped
back into the world.

It was a cold, wet dawn. The sun was a
hint on the horizon, a wan ghost compared to the light coruscating
around the shield. Inside was a tangle of claw and wing and dark
flanks, all pressed together in a writhing mass. Any touch of the
walls confining them produced a burning flash, and outside the
fiery glow of the shield were the scorch marks of a larger circle.
Slowly, it was compressing.

The stench was stomach-turning. Rennyn
stared for a long moment, then began walking at an angle down the
hill toward the camp below, keeping well away from that circle of
extinction. The faintest tread behind her warned her that she
wasn't alone. One of the Kellian, scarcely visible in the light,
and soon joined by Lieutenant Danress. Persistent irritants, though
they at least had the sense to keep silent. Few Eferum-Get had more
than an animal intelligence, and the vast majority were predators
that considered humans an excellent meal. But they were screaming,
these monsters. Screaming as they burned.

-oOo-

The northwest of Tyrland climbed into
mountains and forests and what was once the Duchy of Surclere. It
had a grand and lofty air, and a habit of producing waterfalls
unexpectedly around corners. The roads were fantastically bad.

Even with enchantments the jolting made
it very hard to read, and impossible to write, so Rennyn spent her
time staring out the coach window. It had taken more than a day and
a half to travel from the third incursion point to this far into
the mountains, and she was weary of the journey. She had long loved
this part of Tyrland, but today its isolation just felt
inconvenient.

They drew to a halt beside the worn
remnants of a wall, barely visible beneath a rampant mass of
morning glory. The tracery of a road danced down through a sunlit
valley, disappearing before it reached the tumble of stones forming
the outline of a building. A pair of spiralling birds were the only
sign of movement.

"Surclere Manor," said one of the
Ferumguard, as Rennyn climbed out of the coach. Her escort had been
reduced to six Ferumguard and the four Sentene whose primary task
was keeping her alive: Meniar, Faral, Faille and Danress. "We'll
not be getting the coaches down there. The horses should
manage."

"The road's fallen away completely in a
couple of places," Rennyn said, slipping the strap of her smaller
bag over her shoulder. "It's a nearly two hour walk."

"You've been here before, then?" Danress
asked.

"I summoned my first focus here." She
gazed across the valley. "I knew I'd need to know the place."

Lieutenant Faral, a female Kellian of
particularly willowy proportions, was examining the ground by the
wall. "No sign of recent tracks. But this is only the obvious
approach."

Captain Faille nodded, and with a brief
hand gesture assigned two of the Ferumguard to remain behind.
Rennyn had yet to see him even move without reason, let alone speak
unnecessarily. But, like all the Sentene, he got things done
quickly. She did not have to wait long while they prepared, and
they soon started down the ancient road.

It was wonderfully quiet. Wind, and the
occasional call of birds. The loudest thing was the crunch of their
boots. This area had never been precisely populous, but it had
withered after Surclere Manor had burned. The village further into
the mountains had faded altogether, and the one they'd passed on
the way had been less than prosperous. But the people owned a
remote pride, and had watched with heads held high as the Sentene
passed.

The walk helped clear her mind. There
were times when Rennyn found the plan too much, when her certainty
faltered and she doubted her resolution to end this. The screaming
of the Eferum-Get had unsettled her. They were monsters, and they
ate people. Their existence in Tyrland was an obvious wrong. But
they still felt pain.

Her greatest issue was the effectiveness
of the cage. If she had chosen to work with the Sentene from the
start, the disaster in Asentyr might have been completely
contained. Over a thousand people. She had always known that people
would very likely die, but with every passing day she wanted a new
solution, one which was safe, sure, and without cost.