Chapter 25: Ambush

The difficult terrain forced them to dismount their horses and leave them behind, tied to a couple of old, dead trees in a sheltered spot where there was a little grass on the ground for the animals to nibble on. There were simply too many rocks to climb over, too many crevasses to descend, for riding to be feasible any farther.

It didn’t really matter, though. Within a few hours, or a day at most, they’d intercept their three targets, and the mission would be over. That, Relaila thought, was something to look forward to.

She had never minded touring the rustic villages of the countryside. There would always be an inn to stay in and good wine to drink. Well, maybe not always good wine, but there’d be wine, at least. But the kind of expedition the Emperor had sent them on here? Just rocks, bad food, and lots of walking. And no wine.

Even the conversations were barren, she mused, glancing at Sir Themur’s stoic, armored form. He was just about as much fun as an empty cask.

Fortunately, the lesser spirits that kept an eye on the kids had reported back that they had recently arrived outside Omanavar from the southeast. Dina, Sir Themur, and she, on the other hand, had arrived from the northwest. The spirits had then lost track of their targets just as they were about to enter the ruined city, but she still expected they would intercept them soon, somewhere inside Omanavar.

“In all your years of service, you must have seen some things,” she said to the Knight Eternal. “What can we expect inside the city?”

Sir Themur chuckled, or maybe grunted. It was hard to tell the difference from within his thick helmet. Just for fun, she decided to interpret the weird clucking sound as laughter.

“I’ve seen more than my share of strange things,” he explained. “But the times I’ve visited cities of the Old Ones can be counted on the fingers of one of my hands. These places are not inviting to travelers.”

Still, he had been to them, so he must know something, she thought.

He paused for a moment before continuing. “There are spirits here we need to be careful of. They stay among the ruins, getting drunk on the memories of agony lingering here. Some of them come and go, while others have remained here since the Fires. It’s the latter we need to be mindful of. They can’t be trusted.”

Relaila laughed, though it sounded more like a snort. “What spirit can be?”

“No, I mean the gods themselves don’t trust them. They don’t fall in line. Some haven’t had the chance to prey on the souls of men for a hundred lifespans. Their hunger makes them lose sight of the bigger picture. They act on impulse and sometimes do things that serve only themselves, not the gods of the world.”

Suddenly, she felt like a shock had gone through her mind. There it was again, the thought that wanted to surface into her conscious mind but kept slipping away.

No, she concluded, after thinking about it some more. It wasn’t the same idea as before. This was a new one. That meant it hadn’t been an isolated incident. But what did it mean? What were those thoughts that kept disappearing into the back of her mind, as if there was a hole there sucking them in? And why couldn’t she grasp them before they were lost?

For a moment, she worried she was beginning to come down with the Aged Mind, like old people did, when their memory started slipping. But she was just thirty-two and shouldn’t suffer from that yet.

Relaila shrugged, unable to recover the chain of thought she had begun, but which now had escaped into oblivion, like dust in the wind.

“So, will we be safe from them?” Dina asked. “Surely the gods will protect us.”

“I’m sure they will,” Sir Themur replied. But Relaila didn’t like the lack of confidence she heard in his voice.

“They’re all-knowing,” Relaila added. “So they already know if we will fail. Since our mission is so important to them, they wouldn’t send us here if they knew we wouldn’t succeed, right? From that, it follows that we’ll be fine.”

Sir Themur nodded. “Indeed. Well said, Blood Sister. There is no need to worry.”

Half an hour later, still weaving through the labyrinth of jagged stone, Relaila beckoned Dina closer. Together, they fell back a few men’s lengths and let Sir Themur take the lead. Sometimes, the Knight Eternal could be a little too rigid for her taste, and she wanted to talk to the Dark Flame without him overhearing.

The truth was, she actually liked the old man and respected his opinions. He was a knowledgeable scholar and an extremely competent fighter. Although he was sometimes brusque and even rude, he was never mean. And he was loyal to a fault.

But fun? That, he was not.

“Do you ever forget things?” she asked the healer. “Like little things.”

“Of course,” Dina replied. “Everyone does. It’s perfectly normal. Are you feeling alright?”

She doesn’t understand.

“Yeah, I’m good. Thank you. I was just wondering.”

It wasn’t really that she had been forgetting things. Like Dina had said, everyone did that. Her real concern was that it was thoughts she was losing, not memories. And worse, that it seemed to be happening more frequently these days.

But if the Dark Flame didn’t understand what she was talking about, there was no point in asking about it further.

“You were really good back at Castle Agamor. I could see you knew what you were doing,” she told Dina, switching subjects.

The other woman nodded. “It’s not like I haven’t done it before.”

“I could tell. How can you stay so calm? What you do is so personal. You’re there, right in their faces. It’s not like when I burn people. That’s much more distant, and the flames cover them so I don’t have to look.”

“You know how it is,” Dina explained. “You put yourself into sort of a mental bubble. The job has to be done. The gods of the world have commanded it. You can’t not do it. They’re the gods, after all.”

“I wonder…” Relaila began to say, but almost immediately she had to stop herself. Once again, the line of thought she had begun slipped away.

“I’m sorry,” she continued. “I forgot what I was about to say.”

“I’m sure you’ll remember it again if the gods thought it was important,” Dina said with a smile.

That’s right, Relaila thought. If it was important, she should be able to remember it. And it sure had felt important. In fact, it had been important enough that she had begun asking Dina about it. And yet, the thought was now gone.

She really should try to remember it, whatever it had been, this time. The idea was still there. She could feel it, hovering somewhere at the back of her mind, just out of reach.

If she could just…

But no matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn’t get a grip on the slippery thought.

No. No, it’s mine, and I get to keep it!

Suddenly, it was as if something snapped in her mind. It felt as if two people had been in a tug of war, and the opponent had just released the rope, making her fall backward—all in her head, of course.

But in her mind’s eye, she still held the rope.

And for the first time, she could see who had been holding the other end of it, suppressing her thoughts. Who her adversary had been this whole time.

Remura. The god of leisure.

And of betrayal.

“I wonder,” she said quickly, before she forgot it again, shocked by the realization, “what would happen if we didn’t do what they commanded?”

There. It was out in the open, and not even the gods could rewind time.

Or maybe they could. They were almighty, after all. But she’d never heard anyone say they could.

Dina just laughed at her question. No wonder. It was truly a ridiculous thing to ask. Like the Dark Flame had said, the gods were gods. Their servants had no choice but to obey.

“Well, they’d smite you, of course. Strike you down where you stand. It’s not like they could let you live if you broke your oath.”

Relaila mulled that over. There was still a piece missing, she felt.

“Have you ever seen a god do that? Strike someone down?” she asked.

Dina’s answer came immediately, almost automatically.

“Of course,” she said, “You hear about it all the time.”

“Yes, you hear about it. I have, too. But have you ever seen it? With your own eyes?”

Relaila paused for a moment, before she continued. “I haven’t.”

But Dina was adamant. “No, but you’re a loyal servant of Remura. Of course, she wouldn’t smite people around you.”

That, Relaila thought, did not quite make sense.

“But I have actually seen it,” the healer continued with a heavy sigh. “Well, almost. Tila struck down my sister.”

Uh-oh. How do I remove my foot from that swamp?

“I’m so sorry,” she told the other girl. “I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to…”

Dina interrupted her. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve made peace with it. It was the gods’ will.”

Something in the other’s voice made Relaila doubt that was the full truth.

“Kari went out to pray to Tila in the woods. She often did, wanting the god to help her find the right one for her. Some of the young men in our village saw Tila appear and strike her down. They rushed back to the village to tell us. We never found her body.”

Relaila looked at her companion, not saying a word. The girl wasn’t stupid. She could see in Dina’s eyes that she knew perfectly well what had really happened to her sister. The other woman simply couldn’t live with that knowledge, and it was probably easier to go on pretending her sister had somehow offended the gods than to face the dark reality of her murder.

But it shouldn’t have to be like that, Relaila thought, for the moment completely oblivious to the blasphemous nature of her reasoning. Why should the gods of the world get away with things men were judged for?

Relaila put her arm around the Dark Flame’s shoulders. None of them said anything.

But silently, she added Dina’s home village to her mental list of places she’d have to entertain when this was all over.

* * *

“Stand back!”

He held up his closed fist, signaling the two women to take cover.

Themur slowly raised his long sword, holding it defensively in front of him. Whatever had made the sound he’d heard from the ruins up ahead wasn’t a spirit. That meant it could be killed.

“What is it?” Dina asked in a low voice, clearly afraid to alert whatever was out there.

Themur gazed around them. “I don’t know. Men of some kind, I think.”

He barely had time to finish the sentence when the first figure appeared on top of the rocks to their right. In the distance, it did look like a man, though its movements seemed strangely jerky and strained.

Men walking with that kind of slow limp, he thought. It could be the work of a Carrion Shepherd.

“Who goes there?” Themur shouted toward the heights above. “Glory be to the gods!”

Hoping for a declaration of loyalty in return, he waited for long seconds, but the man on top of the large boulder only growled at him.

He risked a glance back at his companions. “Dina, get behind us. Relaila, be ready.”

The Blood Sister stepped forward, her lips moving in silent prayer. Ahead of them, the first man was joined by two more, then five. Eventually, a dozen or more of the figures stood there, snarling at them.

Then, the group of strange, human-like beings began to descend the stones, some climbing almost like spiders down them, while others jumped. One of them took a bad fall, and judging by the odd angle of his left leg afterward, it was now broken. Yet, the pain did not seem to bother him, as he continued to advance toward the three agents, albeit at a slower pace than before.

As the group approached, Themur could smell the sweat in the air, mixing with the stench of death from his own rotting flesh. His own decay could be a distraction when trying to determine if they were dealing with the undead, but the fact that these creatures perspired proved they were, despite appearances, alive.

The men and women in the group were dressed either in rags or were completely naked. They were dirty, bleeding, and their skin had a sickly, almost transparent appearance. Strands of hair hung from their mostly bald scalps, remnants of once full heads now gone. Though most of them didn’t carry anything in their hands, some of them held branches, rocks, or pieces of that strange metal the Old Ones had used that never seemed to rust.

Moments later, they rushed forward, screaming incoherently and clawing at the air.

Themur met them with his sword. Strengthened by Mardocar, he cleanly separated the head from the torso of the first man that came within his reach. It made a thumping sound as the skull hit the hard ground.

To his left, a fireball shot from Relaila’s hands, striking two of their assailants at once. Screaming as the flames engulfed them, they nevertheless still kept advancing, until their muscles seized from the heat and they collapsed in burning heaps on the ground.

But these were just the first wave. Behind them, there were still a dozen of the revolting creatures rushing toward them, and when Themur dared to raise his gaze for a moment, he could see even more appearing from above the rocks in front of them.

He kept swinging his sword and bouncing off attackers with his shield, but the enemy kept coming. Despite his and Relaila’s overwhelming power, it seemed to Themur as if two more arrived for every one they slaughtered.

Starting to fear this battle would be won not by strength, but by numbers, he reluctantly gave the order to retreat.

“Dina, run back the way we came from!” he shouted. “Relaila, follow me. Eyes on the targets, and back away as quickly as you can without risking stumbling. I’ll keep your pace.”

She nodded in response, still shooting streams of fire into the crowd in front of them.

“Got it. But if you need to choose, protect Dina.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, smiling to himself inside his helmet. Relaila chuckled at his sudden burst of dry humor, surprised despite herself.

Half a minute later, they had put enough distance between themselves and the advancing horde for Themur to dare ordering them to turn around and run—not that running was much faster than walking among the debris and rocks littering the ruins. Hoping their pursuers would eventually give up and leave them alone, the three ran until the two women almost fell over from exhaustion, but the enemy still kept coming.

Themur looked at his companions and assessed their situation.

They can’t take much more, he thought. He himself could literally keep running forever, sustained and refreshed by Mardocar’s dark power, but neither Patera nor Remura granted such gifts to their servants.

Realizing this was as far as they could go, he decided it was time to make a last stand and hope Relaila hadn’t been wrong about the gods not sending them here to die.

He swung his sword in wide half-circles, frantically trying to slow down the human flood flowing toward and around them, screaming and howling. At his side, Relaila’s fires roared like thunder in his ears, burning anyone coming too close.

The air smelled of blood and roasted flesh. Themur grunted as a large man slammed into his shield, seemingly trying to knock him off his feet. For a moment, he lost his balance, and his blade no longer struck true.

That’s when he heard it.

Relaila’s scream, filled with terror and pain, made his rotting blood freeze in his veins.

Author's Note

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