Steelfated, page 14
When the six of them, including Caulder’s pair of guards, burst from the door of the tower in a rush a moment later. Radyn had already disappeared from the group.
Horses screamed in a panic, and only a few feet from the door, a large heavy wagon, not too different from the wheelhouse her father had sent her across the Long City in so recently, lay on its side. It was far less ornate, but it would have been extremely heavy. What would it have taken to flip such a wagon that way?
“Inside the wheelhouse, quick. You are not yet prepared, or required, to face this threat.” Caulder ordered. “Gwen, keep your head and watch her.”
To Morgain’s surprise, her uncle simply picked the pair of them up, one in each hand, as if they were children, not adults.
As Caulder lifted them, a voice shouted in the distance.
“DOWN!”
A sudden and ferocious roar rent the air about them, causing Caulder to drop her and Gwen both unceremoniously as something ripped him from his feet.
She crashed to the opposite door of the wheelhouse in a tangle of cushions, curtains and clothing.
The wind only lasted for about twenty seconds, but it seemed to last much longer. The roaring of the wind interspersed with the cracks and snaps of trees, twisting and falling over around them.
A musty smell, reminiscent of a wet dog, combined with cold soupy mud, and things that had died long before and were thawing, permeated the surrounding air.
“What is that smell?” Morgain asked as she kicked her foot free of the curtains. Outside of the wheelhouse, horses screamed and there was a snarl and the noise of ripping flesh. A pair of shouts were choked off- Morgain’s mind immediately went to her uncle and brother.
“Mistbourne.” Gwen said gravely. The smaller woman dusted herself off and stood easily within the confines of the wheelhouse. Morgain slowly rose back to her feet, and her head brushed the soft velvet of the top door before she had straightened fully. She at least would have to stoop if she rose to her feet.
Morgain’s blood ran cold when the snarls turned to a wet slurping sound outside of the door. She quickly found the latch and slowly pushed the door open.
She could only see a few paces in any direction on the outside- a thick, roiling fog hung heavy in the air. Somehow it was the wrong color- as if it were the shadow cast by true fog- obscured everything further. Where had that come from? A hulking shape moved in the mist just at the edge of her sight.
The thing, whatever it was, seemed to move unnaturally, almost like it was out of phase with time. It stood up on its back legs, then dropped back to a stooping crouch, dragging its knuckles along the ground as it moved. It seemed about seven feet tall, and about half as broad. Despite its bulk, the only sound it made when it moved was a faint hiss, like the sound of a horse’s tail swishing at flies.
She gasped, and the thing turned its head towards her, and she nearly lost control of her bowels. To her credit, and Gwen’s good fortune, she did not. It was, nonetheless, a close call. The thing had no eyes and no nose. There were three large ears on its head, each pointed in a different direction. The thing snarled, revealing a mouth filled with jagged crooked fangs that looked more like knapped obsidian arrowheads than teeth. It started towards the wheelhouse in a broken out of time run that covered the ground far faster than it should have.
Fool, she had no time to cast a spell, hadn’t even thought to gather in energy from the Tapestry before she peeked outside. She reached for the small knife at her belt, not knowing what else to do, but determined not to die without a fight.
A flicker of silver flashed through the air an inch from the end of her nose, for the second time that night, and the creature let out a disturbingly discordant bellow as the knife buried itself in the center of its central ear and stuck there, quivering.
Out of sync with time or not, the creature collapsed, nerveless, and slid into the side of the overturned wheelhouse. Morgain expected another crash, or at least a jolt. All there was a puff of air, and clattering like loose gravel dropped on stone, followed by the unmistakable clatter of steel on stone. Morgain pulled herself back up and looked out.
The thing had vanished, but on the ground by the side of the wheelhouse lay a scattering of knapped obsidian, and a throwing knife with a blade that seemed too short by more than half. She looked more closely and realized that it was the hilt of a throwing knife, and about an inch of blade. The blade looked to have melted where it ended.
She heard a faint scrabble of stone and looked up.
Two men materialized in the mists, one golden-haired, one dark, both whirling like cyclones. Radyn and Rodhlann. She could not see her uncle and brother through the mists.
The creatures swarmed them, at first a few, then five, then a dozen, but the two men never stopped moving. When Rodhlann would go left and high, like clockwork, Radyn would drop and go to the right. The way they moved implied that they had to have some sort of telepathic link- but she supposed that the two men had fought together long enough to move and react instinctively based on the situation AND what the other man was doing. It stunned her when Radyn suddenly threw his sword high, and his hands shot to his chest. Rodhlann’s sword suddenly shifted into a whirling figure eight of a defensive pattern, with the blade flashing behind him in the wide arcs, protecting Radyn’s sides. If they hadn’t been so perfectly in sync, he’d have taken Radyn’s arms off at the elbows with such a maneuver. As it was, Radyn’s wrists flipped three times each, following on the heels of Rodhlann’s sword sweeps, and with each flick, a streak of silver left his hand. When each streak of silver stopped, one creature fell dead with a knife buried in one of its ears. He caught his sword as it fell back to his waiting hand and fell back into rhythm with Rodhlann.
The pair never even missed a beat.
They were both incredibly skilled fighters, but it seemed to Morgain that Radyn was perhaps the more skilled of the two, or at least better at predicting where the things would be when they seemed to flicker out of phase.
“Are you going to help them, or are you just going to stand in my way, girl?” Gwen asked dryly, a bead of fire appearing in the air above her palm. The two men were surrounded now, and Morgain thought that Radyn was once again fighting with a weapon in each hand.
Gwen flicked her hand, one of the five containment crystals on her necklace dimming from a pale gold color to black. She had put quite a lot of power into that knot.
The Tapestry rippled around the bead of fire that rolled forth from her hand, as if it were a stone dropped in a pond as it crossed the distance to the far side of the pair. Radyn threw his left arm across his eyes when the bead of fire flashed past him. He got a nasty gash to the side as one creature shot its claws underneath his arm, taking advantage of the opening.
With a blinding flash and a whomp of decompressing air, the bead of fire erupted. It spread from the size of a bead to the size of the wheelhouse and beyond, to the size of a moderate hut, in an instant. It took at least a dozen of the creatures in its short-lived fury, but its light revealed a dozen more, including one that looked like a giant white centipede. One horse had broken its harness when the fireball exploded and it tried to gallop past the creature, its eyes rolling in terror. The creature shot its head, mandibles leading to the left. It seemed to move out of sync, just like the smaller creatures. It snapped the horse up in its jaws. When the creature had swallowed the horse, it hissed vilely and swung its head from side to side, as its pincers dripped with blood, and something else that sizzled as it hit the stone.
Another of the three eared things raced towards Morgain, and she stood watching it in awe. There was a sudden flash of brown next to her head and Morgain twisted. Terrence was standing there, face bloodied, and was holding the end of a spear.
“Hesitation will get you killed, sister, as sure as a noose will.” Terrence said, shuddering. Rodhlann suddenly moved and fired an arrow into the sky. It whistled sharply, and the beast turned to look at it. Where had he gotten a bow? Radyn had somehow gotten behind the creature. When it turned its head to look at the sharp whistling arrow, he leaped onto the beast’s back, holding a pair of daggers, and he drove them into the thin gaps between the chitinous plates that protected it. He had somehow gained a great oaken spear with a black iron point, nearly identical to the one Terrence held from somewhere. It hung across his back. He ran as fast as he could up the creature’s back, using the daggers as handles for foot and hand holds as much as for damaging the creature. The beast hissed and whirled and swayed, trying to get the man off its back. When he had reached the top by the beast’s head, he drew the spear from his back and went to plunge it into the creature’s skull.
The beast snapped its entire body like a whip. Morgain watched the rolling creature as it did, looking for all the world like a segmented wave, and the young man on the creature’s head was tossed into the air. The thing opened its mouth and caught the descending man, swallowing him whole. Rodhlann, still on the ground, drew another arrow and aimed it directly at the gigantic creature, yelling defiantly. It turned towards him and hissed once.
Three more of the smaller three eared creatures were racing up behind him.
Morgain had time to react to this threat and help him.
She felt the hair on her arms stand again as she attempted to pull power from the earth. It resisted slightly. She growled and pulled the energy from one of Gwen’s still filled containment crystals instead. She rapidly tied the knots that would bring her particular talent to bear. A heartbeat later, a bright blue flash of light, a controlled burst of lightning that split into three forks, shot from her hands. The creatures disintegrated as the bolts struck them. If Morgain’s ears hadn’t already been ringing from the fireball, the crack that accompanied the flash of light would have been deafening. She caught a whiff of ozone. Rodhlann had apparently been grazed by the bolts and he dropped to one knee, the sleeve of his coat smoking. He scowled slightly at the unexpected help and shot a short glare at her. Morgain was suddenly certain that one of those bolts had hit him squarely. How was he still on his feet?
He recovered quickly to his credit, and drew another arrow, aiming it directly at the gigantic creature; it was the sole target left in the vicinity now.
The giant centipede stopped, made a strange gagging, wheezing cough. Rodhlann released the arrow, and the creature reeled backward, screeching. It shook its head, then made the noise again. It wheezed once more, then toppled over sideways, erupting blood and saliva as it did. Morgain and Gwen were not completely spared from the shower of fluid, but Rodhlann kept his bow trained at it, tilting his head slightly like a curious puppy.
The creature thrashed once, and a point of steel appeared out of the side of its neck. It moved back and forth in a saw-like motion for a moment, carving an opening into the soft flesh that made up the front of the creature’s throat. After a moment, a hand appeared. Then a head. Radyn frantically pulled himself out, gasping for air. Almost as soon as he had pulled himself free, the creature’s body dissipated into the mist. The dark-haired man looked at Rodhlann holding the bow, then cast a glance to Morgain and Gwen where they stood by the overturned wagon.
The ferocity of those blue-grey eyes nearly took her breath away.
Then, without warning, and without preamble, Radyn started ripping clothes off of himself, swearing foully enough to make a sailor blush as he did.
“For a moment there, I almost thought that was panic. Are you afraid of death, after all?” Rodhlann asked dryly. The half naked Mistwalker shot him a scowl.
“Not at all, but I don’t want my death to be something as stupid as getting stuck in a crawler’s throat when it dissolves. That’d be a fecking shite story.” He snapped as he flung his shirt to the ground by his feet.
As if to stress his point, the mist that the Crawler had dissolved into dissipated, leaving nothing behind, not even the spear which he had lodged in its throat. Smoke rose from his shirt where it lay in an unceremonious heap on the ground, in intricate curls.
Rodhlann laughed and sauntered over to Morgain and Gwen, giving them a courtly bow, before running his gaze over them.
“You will want to change your clothes as quickly as you can, m’ladies. That fluid is highly acidic and will burn through your clothes before too much longer.” he said coolly. Gwen gestured rudely at Rodhlann, and cut the right sleeve from her jerkin, then glanced down. She sighed and pulled her trousers and boots off as well. Standing there in the snow, barefoot and wearing nothing but a semi-sleeveless tunic and a pair of linen braies. Morgain looked over at the other man, who was now completely naked and dumping the waterskin over his head.
“I guess that explains that, then?” Morgain said, throwing her head towards him. Morgain turned her head to look, then looked back to Rodhlann quickly, blushing.
She suddenly felt foolish for being embarrassed by the nudity- for starters she wasn’t the one who was naked, and it was not as if she hadn’t just spent the bulk of the last three months in a large group of people who could have been considered… underclothed… at the least. It was at about that time that she discovered her feet were both cold and strangely warm. She glanced down at her boots and saw that the leather was bubbling up and smoking. She kicked them off hurriedly.
“Damn it, you could have helped me a bit more.” Radyn said, walking in front of them, completely naked, and trickling water from the skin all over himself as he scrubbed ferociously with his other hand.
“Well, I shot the creature-”
“I know you did. That arrow nearly killed me. The gods’ forsaken thing shook its head. What in the thirteen hells were you thinking?” he snapped.
“I was thinking it had swallowed you and probably eaten you.” Rodhlann said, giving an unconcerned yawn.
“Well, of course I had been swallowed. That wasn’t exactly the plan, but when it wheezed, you should have known I was still alive and doing something. I got the spear underneath me and lodged it sideways in its gullet. Then you shot the damn thing again, and it shook and I fell off and had to catch the spear on my way down.” he grumbled. “Do you know what happens to anything that is inside of one of those things when it dies and disappears?? Because I don’t, and I am none too keen on finding out.”
“I think you should be more thankful to him.” Morgain snapped. The two men turned towards her. “I know I am. He saved my life.” Radyn waved her off with a vaguely rude gesture.
“Three to zero.” Radyn said darkly, pointing a finger in her direction, then turning from her to Gwen. “Sixteen to three.” He turned to Rodhlann. “Forty-seven, seventeen.”
“Eighteen.” Rodhlann laughed, shaking his head.
“Seventeen.” Radyn growled. He pulled three more water-skins from his belt and pulled the stoppers.
“Three?” Morgain said. Radyn turned and looked at her coolly.
“Twice tonight, once about five years ago. In the pine thickets just outside of Tier Bannon.” Morgain flushed.
“Eighteen.” Rodhlann said indignantly.
“Eighteen if you hadn’t shot it.” Radyn snapped in between dumping water skins over his head. Rodhlann just laughed again.
Still grumbling, the recently ingested man pulled a pair of breeches from his pack and pulled them on.
Once he was clothed to that point, Morgain felt comfortable looking at him again, and she let her eyes take his torso in.
Radyn was lean, and perfectly well-muscled, and seemingly half his skin was covered in scars. Though he seemed unaffected by it, he had taken a puncture wound to his left side and blood was running freely from it. It followed the lines of his muscles, moving down from just below his ribs, through the valleys of his abdomen and down to… Morgain stopped herself with a blink and a shake of her head. He didn’t seem to notice she’d been staring, and she finished that line of thinking with “and already staining the top of his breeches red.”
Why was she having that sort of thought about Radyn Halstraad, of all people? Every young woman in the Highlands had had those thoughts about Thoran, but Radyn? Not much was known about him beyond his reported skill with a blade, and his “early” death. She paused in thought. Something about Radyn seemed more real to her than his brother. Perhaps that was why she was staring.
He turned and stalked away, mumbling and swearing as he went. He threw his cloak on and pulled the cowl up. Rodhlann shook his head as he watched his companion walk away and waved a hand at his back dismissively.
“That was rather rude of him.” Morgain said. She turned and looked. “He should not be such an ingrate.” Rodhlann and Gwen both gave a laugh. Even Terrence chuckled slightly.
“Don’t get me wrong, he can be arrogant, quick-tempered, and royally ungrateful. He’s mad because he was frightened, though he would never admit it, and because that acid burns like hellfire.” Terrence said with a laugh.
The sound of approaching horse’s hooves in the direction that Radyn had stalked signaled that other Steelfated were coming.
Morgain slumped back against the overturned cart with a sigh and realized her hands were shaking almost uncontrollably.
9
Life and Death Among the Dead
(23rd Spring’s Bounty 674 3rd Era, by the Reckoning of Reysh’ar’ak, the Monitor of Times passing in Talys Rae)
It had not taken Morgain long to regret not listening to Isabien’s advice on relaxing and taking it easy for her three days of rest. She was rather surprised at the fact that they let her have the three days as promised, since the attack upon Ironlake had been so brutal and immediate after her arrival, but she had. She had spent her three days of freedom exploring the fortress and trying to avoid meeting any other members of her unit in the baths. The only person she hadn’t seen that she’d secretly wanted to, was Radyn Halstraad. Supposedly, he had been ordered south before dawn after the attack had ended.
By the end of her third day of duty, she had regretted ever having gotten out of her bed on those three blissful days of relaxation. By the end of her sixth day, she regretted her parents had ever met.
