The Grand Crusade (19 page)

“This is not good.”

Kerrigan shook his head. “No, but there could be another way.”

Arimtara strode over quickly. “The agreement was that her form would be left undisturbed.”

“I know, I know.” Kerrigan set the pot down carefully. “You said she loved this place. Seeing what little I did, I did gain some impressions of her. I think I could use them. I’d have to cast the spell here to make it work.”

Rym’s face oriented toward Arimtara. “Would that be acceptable?”

“Yes, but be quick about it.” Her expression darkened. “There have been incidents nearby and I do not want to linger here.”

“I’ll work as fast as I can.” Kerrigan lowered himself to his knees, then sat. He slowed his breathing and did what he could to order his mind. He let the plink of water into a puddle become his focus, then he used the dracomagick to push into the room and peel time back. Layers evaporated as he went, the centuries eroding, until he found himself watching the day the magnificent yellow-gold dragon entered the cave. The entrance had been much larger then, but with the flick of a talon she cast a spell that shrank it to its present tight dimensions. She settled herself. Her scaled flesh rippled with muscular tremors, then she laid her head down and appeared, for all intents and purposes, to go to sleep.

Kerrigan latched on to the sense of peace she exuded and began his weaving. He used knowledge of the spell he’d cast on the DragonCrown fragment to embroider that peace. The intent of the spell certainly contrasted with it, but the two elements still wound round each other with an almost playful ease.

Then he turned his attention to Bok and cast a diagnostic spell. In the blink of an eye he got all the information about Bok he could possibly use. Some he discarded as extraneous, like age, but other bits he selected and twined around his previous work. He used Bok’s threads to tighten everything down into a roiling ball of blue, with gold and black counterpoints pulsing through it.

That ball was his model for Chytrine, and with it in hand, he prepared to cast his search spell in a wide arc. He heard a pounding in his head, but banished what he assumed would be a terrible headache. He pushed past it and dipped into the grand river of magick. He teased a trickle into his spell matrix and quickly the spell took on a life of its own.

Locating Chytrine would be no easy task. Kerrigan supposed she would be in Aurolan, but Bok had mentioned her appearing in Alcida to destroy a town called Porasena. Facing northeast, Kerrigan swung his open palms as wide as he could, releasing the spell over an angled line running west-northwest from Vael, and again south-southeast. If she were anywhere from Yslin to Okrannel, the spell would betray her presence.

The spell expanded out and away, leaving his flesh tingling. He shook his head and heard the pounding renewed. “What’s happening?”

Arimtara snarled at him. “Cast more quickly, manling. They know we’re here.”

“Who does?” Kerrigan rocked and tried to get to his feet. “I’m done with the casting.”

The female dragon pointed them back toward the entrance. “Thenmovel”

Rymramoch came on in a clatter of wooden limbs, then Bok grabbed the puppet and slung it onto his back. Kerrigan started to move after the urZrethi, and Arimtara shoved him roughly in the back. “Hurry.”

The thralls had already headed toward the entrance. The one nearest it screamed and reeled back. To Kerrigan it looked as if he had suddenly grown a grey beard. The thrall tore at the thing biting at his throat, ripping it free, and smashing it against a stalagmite. Blood ran down his chest, but already two more of the small creatures had attached themselves to his thigh and belly.

More poured through the entrance in a grey flood. They looked nothing like any beast Kerrigan had ever seen. They hopped like rabbits, but had a bristling mane over their shoulders and skull. Needle-sharp teeth filled their jutting muzzles and the forearms, which appeared spindly, sprouted talons. The tail reminded him of a rat’s tail, save that it had a whip’s suppleness and ended in a round brush of fur with the same sort of stiff quills in it as the mane.

“Gvakra!” Arimtara pointed past Kerrigan. “They’ll make a meal of your soft flesh in seconds, and these are the small ones.”

Thralls pulled back, their hands full of quills, their flesh scratched and torn. The gvakra snarled and yipped as they came on, darting and leaping. Some made grazing attacks, opening little wounds, while others went for the kill. The thralls ripped them free, crushed them, and pitched them aside; but always more came, and they began to get larger. The smallest had been sent through to open the hole, and the bigger ones—the size of a large dog or small pony—‘tsqueezed through.

Arimtara growled deeply enough that a thrum sent icy echoes through Kerrigan as he watched the thralls begin to fall. “I have to kill their lead—”

Her comment ended abruptly. Kerrigan whirled. A giant gvakra, ghost white, had entered the cavern from some entrance lost beyond Sarealnya’s body. Twenty feet tall if an inch, it had wrapped one hand over Arimtara’s head and lifted her bodily in the air. Her hands clawed at its wrists, tearing out bloody clots of fur, but even as she hurt it, the gvakra’s forearm muscles bunched.

It’ll crush her skull!

Panic flashed through Kerrigan, jolting him and puckering his flesh. Thralls screaming and the high-pitched yips of dying gvakra pounded at him. Off to his left the wave of small creatures had reached Bok. Several had already torn Rymramoch off him while the urZrethi shifted his skin into spiked armor and his hands into short chopping blades.

Kerrigan wanted to wail, “Not again!” but the words never left his mouth. His fear was for his friends and allies, not himself. That core of courage rose through the anxious ocean roiling inside him and became an island of strength.Not again, if I act!

His right hand came up in a gesture, casting a spell he knew very well. The spell hit the titan in the right shoulder and elbow, twisting its body around. Kerrigan smashed the monster’s elbow against the stone dragon’s snout. The joint shattered and, better yet, bone shards severed nerves, numbing the arm and robbing it of power.

Then the first of the gvakra reached him and chomped hard on his left arm. The dragonbone armor rose and protected him, then remained in place as the creature kept worrying him. Another bit his right knee and another tried to take a mouthful of the roll of fat beneath his right shoulder blade. They shredded his robe as they attacked. Their snarls rose in a buzzing cacophony and the sheer weight of them staggered him back against a stalagmite.

He could feel the bites, but they were no more than the pins and needles of a sleeping limb returning to wakefulness. Realizing the creatures couldn’t hurt him, Kerrigan shoved away from the stone and began to run to the cave entrance. As he moved, more and more of the beasts came after him. They tried to get a piece of him, but often bit another of their own kind. The pair or a trio would drop away in a cannibalistic ball.

Kerrigan reached the entrance and spun as best he could, then wedged himself into the opening. Crushed gvakra squealed, and larger ones seeking entrance clawed at him, but to no avail. The magicker reached up to pull one creature off his face, and cried out as quills punctured his hand. For a heartbeat he thought the magick might have failed, but it would only protect him from the evil intent of others. His pulling on the gvakra was not protected.

It occurred to him, as the writhing carpet of gvakra covered him like windblown snow on a tree trunk, that he might exhaust himself with the magick and become vulnerable. He reached out and began to draw power from the river. He knew that if he wanted to, he could fill himself with it and modify the dragonbone armor. Little needles would sprout from his skin and inject poison into the gvakra. They would swell and die of asphyxiation, twitching and hoarsely gasping at his feet.

Other things came to him, wonderful and wicked things. He could use the power to heat the very air around him to the point the beasts would combust. Or he could draw away all heat, so they would freeze so completely that to touch one would be to shatter it. The possibilities that came to him were infinite, as would be the power he could use to wield them.

Kerrigan almost embraced that idea, and imagined the river flooding into him, but he recalled Rymramoch’s warning. To do that, to let the river rush into him, would wear him down and destroy him. He shivered and refused to do it, but he did draw a little more energy and cast a diagnostic spell.

Gvakra, as far as magick was concerned, were not very complex creatures— and closer to rabbits in anatomy than Kerrigan would have ever guessed. Once he had their measure, he triggered yet another spell. Starting with those gvakra around him, and slowly spreading out in a sphere, the feral creatures went to sleep. They dropped off his body with soft plops, save for a couple whose jaws would not loosen.

The larger, wolfish ones did not fall asleep instantly, but became sluggish. Their attacks slowed enough that the beleaguered thralls had time to react. One thrall’s clawed swipe ripped a gvakra head off, while another left its tormentor in thrashing pieces. Bok stabbed both bladed hands through the chest of the one nearest him, then shook and flung off those that had been impaled on his spikes.

Kerrigan looked to see what had become of Arimtara. He hoped his spell had had enough effect to slow the monster she fought. In the dimness he saw her rising and gasped.

He gasped because she rose from a basin that had been the giant’s belly. A thick rope of bloody intestine slid off her left shoulder, but caught on a spike sprouting from her elbow. Her shoulders remained hunched forward and more powerful than before. She’d grown a long tail and her fingers ended in hooked talons.

She turned with the beast’s blood pouring off her in rivulets. Beyond her, in ever-decreasing spurts, blood fountained up from a rent heart. Arimtara looked around at the handful of surviving thralls, Kerrigan, Bok, and the puppet. “My thanks for your efforts, Kerrigan Reese. Effective, but why didn’t you slay them?”

He shrugged uneasily. “I just didn’t.” He didn’t want to admit that it never occurred to him to kill the things, save in the power fantasies he entertained. “I think we can go now.”

She shifted her shape back to the more slender one she’d worn when leading them there, though now naked since her clothes had not survived transformation and combat. “You don’t have to be here when your spell finds her?”

“No.” Kerrigan fingered his shredded robes. “I’d like to be somewhere else, really. With fresh clothes and hot food.”

She spat. “Yes, something to get this taste out. I will take you back.” She waved Bok toward the entrance, then lifted the puppet and tossed it to the urZrethi. Arimtara turned to the thralls and hissed a command to them.

In response, they stooped, found stones, and began to dash out the brains of the sleeping gvakra.

She glanced at Kerrigan. “You may not see the need to kill them, but I do. There will be more. There always are. And, alas, this will always be so.”

In the two days since Resolute’s address to the Council, things had progressed with a bit more speed, but not nearly enough to satisfy Alexia. It had been agreed that senior military advisors and staff would form a planning group to address the needs of the Saporician war. They were to have political oversight which, thankfully, did not include King Scrainwood. Erlestoke took his place.

Alexia had hoped she would be enough to occupy the place of the Okrans delegation, but Tatyana pointed out that since Alexia would be the supreme commander, she rose above her national status, so someone had to be there to represent the Okrans’ point of view. The crowns had agreed, and Alexia suspected it was more to get Tatyana away from them than it was to help plan the invasion.

The political element rendered nothing simple. It was agreed, for example, that accurate maps and suitable tables would be vital for planning. Wrangling then started over whose cartographers would do the best work, and who should have access to whose charts. Some minor Saporician lords seemed to be of the opinion that if their holdings were listed as “impassable wastelands” on a map, the war would just pass them by.

There was similar confusion and obfuscation in the lists concerning personnel and equipment. On parchment, every unit in Saporicia or on its way was stuffed full of elite fighters who, bearing only a knife and an evil glint in their eyes, could win the war single-handedly. Alexia knew this was patent nonsense, but it was a matter of pride that each nation’s contribution be seen as the equal of any other nations, and politicians lobbied hard for their soldiers to be the first into battle. They expected that would mean they would be the first to glory. When Alexia pointed out that it would mean they would likely be the first todie, her words did not change the politicians’ opinions at all.

Alexia dispatched Peri, Crow, and Dranae to make covert inspections of the troops gathering. They assessed the units based on morale, experience, training, equipment, and leadership. Those units that had noble leaders of little experience were considered far less reliable than, say, the Alcidese units whose leaders were career soldiers. At Crow’s suggestion, they also kept track of supplies and the prices of commodities in the markets, since shortages of staples would kill an army more quickly than any enemy force.

Alexia also wanted Sayce to help, but news of Will’s death had crushed her Alyx felt torn between needing to plan and wanting to care for Sayce. She despaired of being able to help her friend. Then, at Crow’s suggestion, Nay came and visited Sayce. He presented her with the amulet that contained the last bit of Temmer. He hung it around her neck on a stout bit of silver chain and almost immediately Sayce’s melancholy lifted.

She came to Alyx and fingered the tiny dagger. “He told me that this was meant for me and for my child. He said it was part of the Norrington legacy.” Alarmed that Nay knew of her condition, Alyx questioned Crow, but he denied telling Nay anything. Alyx reluctantly accepted the idea that the fragments of Temmer communicated a lot of information to the man who had shaped them anew, and Sayce’s revival told her that was a very good thing.