CHAPTER
30
Someone shouted her name. Rienne looked up from the blood-soaked ground and saw Kyaphar at the edge of the clearing, beckoning to her.
“The Mosswood Warden calls us to battle!” he cried. “Come!”
It’s too late, Rienne thought. The battle is over.
The healer’s spirit bear shifted nervously on its feet, punctuating its whimpers with an occasional quiet roar. The healer herself seemed lost in a trance, one hand planted on the ground, grave concern written on her face. The Blasphemer had already started to break the seal, and the battle was lost.
“We can still drive him back!” Kyaphar shouted. “We can limit the damage he does! Come!”
Rienne forced herself into a run. Kyaphar was probably wrong—this final charge had little chance of success, and was most likely just a headlong rush into destruction. But she had to try. She had committed her sword to the defense of this site, and she would not back down.
“This way,” Kyaphar said.
Rienne shot past him, unhindered by armor and empowered by the energy coiled in her soul. She heard him laugh behind her—grimly cheerful on this day of doom—and then his laugh turned into a growl. He loped beside her in the shape of a shaggy black wolf, easily keeping pace with her light steps.
They charged together through the woods, bounding over fallen trees and scrambling beneath low branches. It was exhilarating. The leaves and twigs that brushed her as she passed seemed to gift her with some of their life, as if the forest was fortifying its defender. Kyaphar must have felt it as well, for his bestial form raced with increasing vigor, keeping pace with her as she sped up.
He barked and jerked his head to the side, and they altered course. A moment later, they emerged from the grove onto the slope of a hill overlooking the battlefield, and Rienne slowed her pace, then stopped. The sky was a black dome of smoke, neither day nor night but a ruddy twilight of fire and shadow. From her higher ground, she saw the barbarians arrayed in a wide arc, with a wall of flames at their back, driving them forward at their fiendish leader’s urging. The Eldeen defenders were a ragged ring, unable to hold the barbarians back. Dragons flew here and there above the fray, occasionally loosing blasts of fire or frost, bolts of lightning or sprays of acid down onto the soldiers below.
Rienne couldn’t see any sign of the seal breaking, but she could feel it—a sense of wrongness radiating up from the violated land. It reminded her of Starcrag Plain, the feeling she’d had as wave after wave of monstrosities, the hordes of the Soul Reaver, spilled out of the earth and washed over her.
Elestrissa stood a few paces away, surrounded by a clump of warriors, mystics, and rangers. The men and women gathered around the Mosswood Warden wore superior armor and carried weapons that shone with magic, clearly setting them apart from the rank and file soldiery. A few of them, like her, bore the signs of their own struggles against the Blasphemer’s dragons. These, she guessed, were the greatest heroes of the Eldeen Reaches, gathered from across the lands that the Blasphemer had already devastated—a half-dozen humans, about as many shifters, a few elves and half-elves. Two dwarves covered in thick hide armor stood beside a goliath who towered over them; its leather armor left much of the patterned markings and rocklike protrusions on his stone-gray skin exposed.
“Ah! Kyaphar,” Elestrissa said, gesturing toward them. Rienne turned to look at the Sky Warden, and saw the tall, proud man once more where the wolf had been a moment before. “And Lady Alastra Dragonslayer. Good! We have precious little time.”
Elestrissa turned back to face the battlefield, and Rienne stepped forward to join the others at her side.
“There he is,” the Mosswood Warden said, pointing toward the center of the arc of flame. “The Blasphemer, the opener of the seal. He has spread his forces thin, because he knows that our defense is thinner still. That means there aren’t many soldiers between us and him. Our plan is as simple as it is desperate: We charge straight for the Blasphemer. The greater our speed, the less chance he will have to put more of his forces in our way. If we’re fast enough, we’ll cut right through his lines and get to him. One man cannot stand for long against twenty of us. And when he is dead, our hope—our only, desperate hope—is that his sundering will cease. Perhaps none of us will survive this day, but if we succeed, the world can rest tonight free from fear.”
Elestrissa turned and let her eyes range over the men and women gathered around her. Rienne watched emotions flit across her face as she met the gaze of each individual—it was clear that Elestrissa knew all of these people personally and held them in the highest respect. Rienne felt sadly out of place.
“Sky Warden Kyaphar,” Elestrissa said as her eyes fell on him, “your place is not at my side this day. I want you with the Lyrandar airship.”
Jordhan! Rienne couldn’t believe that she had all but forgotten him in the press of the battle. She searched the sky, and saw the airship drifting over the glade behind her, as if it had followed her from the healer’s clearing. Elestrissa must have held it in reserve for this moment, knowing that revealing it too soon would make it a target for the dragons.
Elestrissa was still addressing Kyaphar. “You may choose a few others to join you, and your task will be to rain the fury of wind and storm down upon our foes. If we succeed in destroying the Blasphemer, the survivors will need help getting back through his forces. Clear them a path.”
Kyaphar bowed. “As you command,” he said. He sounded pained, as though he wanted to be part of the ground assault—or else he was already grieving those who would surely fall.
Then Elestrissa stood before Rienne and looked solemnly down at her. “And you, Lady Dragonslayer. Do you still wish to stand with us in our foolhardy defense of this place?”
“But the Blasphemer’s end lies in the void, in the maelstrom that pulls him down to darkness.” Rienne’s dream flashed through her mind, and briefly she wondered whether she should flee—fall back to the river, join the Aundairian defenders there, and seek to bring about the Blasphemer’s end the way her dream suggested.
“What is the Prophecy?” she asked.
Elestrissa looked confused.
“Is the vision in my dream an immutable image of what will be, regardless of what I choose? If it is, then what I do now doesn’t matter—one way or another. I’m fated to end up facing the Blasphemer at the river. I can join your charge knowing that somehow I’ll survive, even if no one else does, because my destiny is to face the Blasphemer in two weeks, when he reaches the Wyr.”
“But we and the Eldeen Reaches are doomed,” Elestrissa said, scowling.
“Or perhaps my vision was just a glimpse of what could be, a foretaste of what might come to pass if I make the choices that lead me to that point. In that case, I’m free to choose a different path and perhaps arrive at a different destination. That would mean I could die in this foolhardy defense, or I could defeat the Blasphemer two weeks early.”
I wish Gaven were here, she added silently.
Elestrissa frowned. “Such questions are best discussed in the groves of the druids in times of peace,” she said. “Now is a time for action.” She took a deep breath, and seemed to swell with it, growing taller and broader. “Perhaps we all die here today, but perhaps our charge is necessary to weaken the Blasphemer so he can fall at the river.” Her skin, where her hide armor left it exposed, was transforming into thick bark, and leafy twigs appeared in her hair. “Perhaps you will live to see the Blasphemer fall, Lady Alastra.” Her voice rumbled and resounded like thunder over the noise of the battle, and her limbs became the mighty trunks and branches of an oak. “Then you can tell the tale of this day, and ensure that the story of the defenders of the Mosswood is told until the end of days!”
A cheer went up from the battle-worn heroes, and Rienne smiled. She would fight beside Elestrissa, and if fate allowed, she would destroy the Blasphemer before his fated day. Perhaps she would die without having seen Gaven again, but after all the times she had told Gaven that he was the author of his own destiny, she couldn’t do otherwise.
Elestrissa raised her war club over her head and roared, drawing another cheer from the heroes around her. She turned and began a lumbering stride in the direction of the barbarians.
Thoughts of Gaven filling her mind, Rienne drew Maelstrom from its sheath and looked down at the blade.
Gaven faced her in Jordhan’s cabin, Maelstrom’s gleaming blade between them. “The day you first touched that sword,” he said, “you set a course for a much greater destiny. It’s a sword of legend, Ree. Great things have been done with it, and more greatness will yet be accomplished. Can’t you feel that?”
She still felt it, and she had come to believe—to hope, at least, or maybe to fear—that the rest of Gaven’s words might be true, that she was the one fated to accomplish so much with it.
“You and Maelstrom are linked in destiny,” Gaven said, “as surely as you and I are.”
Tears streaming down her face, she lifted the blade above her head, gave a wordless shout, and joined the last charge of the defenders of the Mosswood.
The song of unmaking boomed from his throat, each note throbbing in dissonance with the protesting chords of the Gatekeepers’ seal. Slowly his song bent the druids’ harmonies, twisted their chords into terribly cacophony, and snapped the lines of the binding. The chorus of madness rose from deep below and echoed in his ears, giving strength to his voice. This was why the Blasphemer had come—the beginning of the unmaking of the world.
He crouched and cocked his head, listening. The mad chorus had been clear to his ears for hours now as the battle raged, but he was beginning to hear the high keening notes of a single voice raised above the others. Its song was at once a chant of war and a summons, drawing its kindred from across the depth and breadth of Khyber to come to the opening of the doorway.
I am here, Kathrik Mel sang in his wordless, tuneless song, and the door will soon be open.
The distant voice answered with a banshee’s wail, portending the death of the world.
* * * * *
The defenders of the Mosswood advanced in grim silence. Elestrissa strode forward like a walking oak imbued with the primal power of her woodland home. The goliath kept pace beside her, resting a greataxe on one broad shoulder. Rienne had never seen a goliath in person before, but she knew of them—the wild mountain-folk of the western Reaches, more at home on snow-capped peaks than in city streets.
Both dwarves had shaggy boars by their sides, but one was a hazy spirit like the healer’s bear while the other was real flesh and bone. Some of the shifters walked upright, but others switched between a crouching run and scampering leaps, pausing frequently to sniff the air or just let the group catch up. Rienne saw humans and elves armed with bows and clad in leather, and others covered from head to toe in plates of metal armor, holding finely crafted swords and heavy metal shields. It was as motley a collection of warriors as she’d ever seen, all united under the Mosswood Warden’s banner to make a final stand against the Blasphemer.
Much like the Blasphemer’s forces themselves, she reminded herself. According to Kyaphar, the Blasphemer had united members of many different Carrion Tribes under his bone-white banners, leading them in a common cause to conquer the lands east of the Shadowcrag and Icehorn Mountains.
Elestrissa’s charge reached the bottom of the slope, and the sounds of the battle engulfed them—the clash of steel against steel or swords splintering wooden shields, the shouts of enraged warriors as they hacked into their foes, the roars of dragons and the great Eldeen bears, and the pitiful screams of the dying.
“For the Reaches!” someone near Rienne called out, and the rest of the charging warriors took up the call.
“For the Reaches!”
“For the Wood!”
Barbarians streamed toward them from both sides, having beaten past or broken away from the Eldeen soldiers that tried to hold the line. Several of the charging warriors slowed, readying to meet them, but Elestrissa urged them forward. “On to the Blasphemer!”
Lightning flashed in the sky, and Rienne looked up—half expecting to see a dragon breathing lightning down on them, half hoping to see Gaven’s dreadful storm. Instead she saw Jordhan’s airship skimming low over the battlefield, the fiery ring of its bound elemental bright against the smoke-blackened sky. As she looked, another bolt of lightning streaked down from a figure on the deck—Kyaphar or one of his druids, she supposed—and struck in the midst of a thick clump of barbarians, knocking them to the ground.
The barbarians closed around the heroes of Elestrissa’s charge like the jaws of a dragon, roaring and howling as they swung their mauls and axes. Rienne was sheltered from the initial assault, surrounded by allies who prevented Maelstrom from meeting her enemies. Inevitably, though, the warriors on the edge of their ragged formation slowed, and as Rienne continued to advance she found room to maneuver, and Maelstrom began its whirling dance of death.
A plague-scarred barbarian thrust his leering visage in her face as she dodged his hammer’s swing. His eyes went blank as Maelstrom bit through his flesh and found his heart. A shifter, his skin splotched with horrible burns, stumbled back, trying to dodge the flashing blade, but Maelstrom sliced through his throat and he fell on his back. A Carrion Tribe woman clanged two rough blades together in challenge, blocked Maelstrom’s first slash, whirled forward in answer, then stopped dead as Maelstrom severed a tendon in one arm, took off the other hand, and finally sank into the barbarian’s chest.
Elestrissa strode in front of Rienne, swinging her club back and forth in devastating arcs that sent barbarians flying away from her and crashing into each other, clearing a path to the Blasphemer. Rienne kept pace, but what had been a tight formation charging ahead started to thin as the warriors slowed to engage their enemies and some fell under the overwhelming tide of the barbarians. Maelstrom kept her moving forward even as it whirled and cut, jabbed and killed.
The elf just behind her, his two curved blades flashing in the firelight, stumbled as a barbarian’s club swung low at his legs, and Rienne hesitated.
“Keep going!” he screamed at her, then the barbarian’s club smashed his skull.
Maelstrom darted out and slit the Plaguebearer’s throat, and Rienne left him sprawled across the body of the hero he had slain, the elf whose name Rienne had never learned.
* * * * *
Dragonfire leaped and roared at Kathrik Mel’s back, adding its dissonant voice to the distant chorus down in Khyber. The howls of rage-filled warriors and the agonized screams of the dying sang his song of dissolution. The Gatekeepers’ seal itself, groaning as its bindings weakened and broke, added voices to the song, a crescendo of chaos building to the inevitable climax.
He stepped forward, and the tread of his armored foot turned a new circle of grass to ash, adding the tiny dying breaths of the leaves to the grand cacophony. He looked down and saw a line of the seal, flaring with purple light in protest as the song tore at it.
The Blasphemer spoke a word that was no word, and fire erupted beneath his feet. Like lightning, the flames coursed along the ground, tracing the lines of the seal and igniting them. Fire licked the sky, burning through all the colors of the spectrum until it burned black and terrible.
The flames died, their fuel extinguished. The seal was undone, and the chorus of madness swelled in triumph. The keening voice surged louder as its owner rose to pass through the open doorway.