The Dreaming Hunt (77 page)

A quick, short swing by Will, and he clipped the changeling hard in the side of the head. The wolverine staggered back to shake his head and clear it. A low growl started in the wolverine's throat once more as he prepared to charge. Will took a step back, pointing one end of his staff at the changeling. Magic built along its length, dancing like lightning.

“Stop!” Goldeneye yelled. He jumped in front of Will, but facing the wolverine. “Look at me, Zerrik!”

The wolverine charged, and Raina gasped. He attacked his own leader? Goldeneye ducked under the claws and came up grappling with his lieutenant. Goldeneye wrestled with the wolverine, all the while staring furiously into his man's eyes.

Of a sudden, the fight went out of the furred changeling. Goldeneye loosed him cautiously and took a step back. “You will not attack any Dominion warriors or their allies in this fight. You will not rage again, and you will target only elementals in this battle. Understood?”

“Yes, my leader.”

“Go.” Goldeneye waved the wolverine away. He turned to Will and said tersely, “I could not let you kill my war leader. Such a blood debt would have to be paid in kind.”

Will nodded. It was probably as close to an apology as the cobra changeling ever ventured.

Goldeneye continued, “Zerrik Flay was enraged by something or someone. Let us discover who dares do this to my second-in-command.” He strode angrily toward the middle of the space and the smaller ring of stones standing there. But a badger changeling stepped bravely in front of the cobra changeling, blocking his way. “Everyone who goes near the gate has become uncontrollably enraged. They attack everything in sight. The inner circle is littered with the dead and dying.”

Raina flinched. “I must go heal them.”

The badger shook his head at her. “As soon as you draw near the gate, you will fall into battle madness.”

Goldeneye bit out, “If what you say is true about your casting capability, we don't need you going insane.”

“You do not understand. It is my duty. I am sworn to defend life. If there are dying people in there, I am obligated to help them.”

“And if you go mad, understand that I will kill you,” he declared.

A horde of elementals burst around one of the standing stones, and the conversation ended abruptly as Goldeneye, the badger, and Raina's friends mowed them down.

“They just keep coming,” the badger changeling panted. “Every one of my men who tries to close the gate comes back out and attacks us instead—if the claviger does not throw him through the portal.”

“Hence the chaos out here,” Goldeneye responded in disgust. “We must close the gate.”

“The claviger holds the gate open. He, too, is not in his right mind. We cannot get to him to wake him from whatever trance he's in. He is defended by a group of particularly large elementals.”

“What's a claviger?” Will muttered.

Rynn muttered back, “The keeper of a gate leading to other planes. He or she wields the key to a tympan, which is an arrangement of magical stones that align the gate with the various planes at different times.”

Goldeneye ordered everyone within earshot, “Those who can resist mental attacks, come to me!”

Rynn, Will, and Rosana stepped forward. Panic rushed through Raina, along with certainty that, if she did not go with them, all three of them would die.

“Enslave me,” Raina blurted. Everyone turned to stare at her, and she, in turn, stared at Goldeneye. “Make me immune to the rage so I can do my job.”

“You volunteer to be my slave?” Goldeneye challenged her.

“My duty is to defend life at all costs,” she bit out. “We're losing time, and another wave of these creatures is about due—”

As if on command, a new group of elementals rushed around a nearby stone.

“What do they want?” Rynn grunted while kicking and spinning and flailing.

“Let one live,” Raina called out to Goldeneye. “Follow it. See where it goes.”

“Do it,” Goldeneye ordered, blocking his badger changeling's sword with his own. The last elemental standing, a fire creature, was allowed to run away, with the badger changeling trailing it closely, ordering away all who would have killed it.

She heard some kind of shouted order from across the expansive circle to form up and charge. Dozens of snarling, growling voices yelled like soldiers rushing into battle.

Goldeneye cursed. “The jukara quartered in the caves. Someone has sent in a pack of them to attack the gate.”

“Jukara?” Will asked.

Rynn answered for the cobra changeling, “Dominion's strongest warriors, mostly badger and wolverine changelings. Ferocious, skilled, and deadly to the last one.”

“Great,” Will muttered under his breath. “And they're all about to go crazy.”

“White Heart, look at me,” Goldeneye ordered tersely.

She looked into his eyes and was fascinated by the metallic golden shimmer in them. It was like a molten pool that she could lose herself in. She felt herself falling, falling …

“At all costs, you will not rage. Understood?” Goldeneye bit out.

The words resonated within her, sinking into her bones as incontrovertible truth. “Yes,” she breathed.

“Jann, spread word throughout the city to send in only fighters with mental resistance or enslaved to me. The rest need to stay outside the outer stones. Find Vedara Sylk, my mate. She should be able to resist this and can rally the troops I need.”

Eben nodded and took off with Sha'Li and Tarryn on his heels to fetch reinforcements for them. Reinforcements they would sorely need before this was all said and done if Raina did not miss her guess.

Goldeneye started toward the inner circle of stones. It was not so much that they were smaller than the outer ring of stones, but rather that this place was so massive in scale that they just looked small at first. Her friends on the left flank and Goldeneye's lieutenants on the right, they advanced.

Raina gasped when they neared the inner stones. Dead and dying changelings were strewn all over the place. When Dominion troops brawled, they apparently pulled none of their punches.

The jukara approaching from the cliff side of the Ringstones had charged straight into the inner circle, and the damage was done. They fought among themselves, and some had peeled off to attack the few sane Dominion soldiers in the area, who were trying futilely to contain the catastrophe without murdering their brethren.

Goldeneye's line approached the huge nullstones, towering easily three times Raina's height, and she felt a wave of rage press down upon her mind, pure bloodlust urging her to kill. Then, from deep inside her, Goldeneye's command rose up to push back the frenzy. At all costs, she must not rage. Resist the blood fury. The two commands fought within her for control of her mind while she watched on, a bystander in her own fate.

Another group of elementals, jann, and elementally aligned elves emerged from behind one of the inner stones. Gradually, Raina won the mental battle and remembered why she was here. She looked around, assessing where to begin healing first.

As she moved among the fallen, dodging pockets of fighting, she took note of what stood in the very center of the Ringstones. There was one last stone in the exact center of the inner ring, about the size of a table, low and flat. Upon it sat a circle of carved stones linked together into a single great disk. That must be the tympan Rynn had mentioned. In the center of the disk was some sort of opening down into the table rock. An object that looked like a large key stuck up out of the opening.

She glimpsed a figure moving on the far side of the table. The claviger. Mostly she saw his hands. They wove in an intricate pattern, leaving a momentary trail of faintly glowing lines in the air behind them. He was weaving a magical sign. And given its complex form, she would wager it was powerful magic he shaped. The claviger must have bent down for he disappeared from sight. Her next glimpse between fighters was a dark figure grabbing a large animal changeling off the ground as if he weighed no more than a child and tossing the changeling between two of the inner stones, and the body blinked out of sight.

A portal
.

Open. And its master was tossing everyone he could get his hands on through it. A half dozen large elementals clustered close to the claviger, obviously tasked with protecting and defending him.

As she looked on, a streaming mass of elementals poured out from the nothingness between the two stones and into existence.
And this time they did not stop coming
.

They poured forth, more and more of them, boiling out into the circle. The maddened jukara were overtaken by the horde, and chaos exploded as the crazed Dominion changelings were overrun.

Goldeneye jumped forward, leading those with him into the battle. Raina was torn between trying to heal wounded warriors still up and fighting and trying to heal changelings already down on the ground.

The problem with healing those who'd already fallen was that first she had to determine whether or not they were dead, and if dead, were they still within the first few minutes of death when a life spell would still work? Life spells took a lot of magic, and today was not the day she wanted to test the limits of her healing capacity or run out of healing altogether.

This might have started as a brawl, but it had blown up into something worse. Much worse. The way that horde of elemental creatures was streaming through the portal, this looked like a full-scale invasion.

She spied a changeling bleeding profusely and sent a blast of life magic into his body. He sat up, took one look around, and surged upward, tackling the warrior nearest him and commencing wrestling violently for control of the second man's sword.

She swore under her breath. The enraging effect lasted even after a person lost consciousness or died, apparently. The best she would be able to do was stabilize everyone she could so they wouldn't die. If and when that cursed gate was closed, then she could go back and actually heal the wounded.

The force of elemental beings pouring through the gate had grown large enough in number to fill most of the inner circle of stones, and her friends and Goldeneye's forces were vastly outnumbered. She dived toward her companions, narrowly missing being skewered or beheaded outright several times before she reached them. Goldeneye was forming his small force into a ring, and she barely slipped inside it before claws and blades closed into a solid defensive wall.

She turned round and round, responding to shouts for healing from her friends as fast as she could. The Dominion warriors figured it out quickly and started shouting for first aid as well.

The number of elementals being slaughtered was staggering. When one died, another took his place, and when that one died, a third one stepped over the corpses of the other two.

They had to shut down the source of these endless waves of elementals, or the limited Dominion forces who could resist the rage would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of creatures.

Some of the elementals were starting to charge the outer ring of Dominion warriors frantic to join the fight but under orders to stay beyond the outer ring of stones. Thank the stars for that small blessing.

She craned to see over, around, or between the fighters to the center stone. Between the elementals' hulking forms, she finally got her first good look at the claviger. Her blood ran cold.

Dressed in dark blue robes, his exposed skin covered in familiar runes, she recognized a Mage of Alchizzadon. The claviger was one of the mages who'd tried to force her into bearing children with one of their own against her will? What on the Lady's great green Urth was one of
those
doing
here
? The fellow was hunched over the center table protectively, as if using his body to shield the tympan and key. Whatever he was doing with them was bound to be the source of this mayhem.

She made her way through the chaos toward Goldeneye. A maddened equine changeling burst through the defensive ring and swung at her with something arm length and blunt. She threw up her arm, but too late. Her head exploded in pain, and the ground came flying up at her, knocking the breath and most of the remaining consciousness out of her.

Somewhere in a detached corner of her mind, the healer in her ticked off injuries. Concussion. Possible skull fracture. Dislocated shoulder. A couple of cracked ribs. Grave danger of accumulating trampling injuries—

Something hot and intensely painful rushed through her.
Healing
. Oww, that hurt.

A glittering crystal bracer appeared under her nose. She took Rynn's hand, and he dragged her to her feet, spinning away into the fight again as quickly as he'd appeared before she could catch the breath that had been knocked out of her to thank him.

Getting her bearings, she looked around in time to see a pair of big fire elementals charge Goldeneye from each side. Miraculously, he held them off swinging both swords so fast she could barely keep up with each blade. Still. The elementals were nicking him up here and there. Which meant they'd gotten through whatever armor or natural defenses he had.

She jumped forward and took a wild guess at how much magical energy it would take to bring him back to full health. She shot the bolt of healing energy into him and then leaped back as one of the beings took a swing at her. A singed stripe blossomed on her tabard. Stars, she was terrible at this combat stuff! If only she'd paid more attention to the manor lads when her father had taught them the rudiments of armed combat.

She yelled over Goldeneye's shoulder, “We need to get to the mage in the middle! He's the key to closing the gate!”

The cobra didn't respond as he was still beset by the two elementals. Two more of his men rolled in on his right flank, however, and with one more round of healing from her and a hard fight, both elementals went down.

“To the tympan and key!” Goldeneye bellowed. His men ran forward with him, but Rynn, Will, and Rosana were in danger of being left behind, which would get them surrounded and cut off from the sane Dominion warriors. They would all die!