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  The thing spoke with a sound somewhere between a growl and a purr. “Blade, welcome to my lair. I am Kaleal.”

  Arn cursed himself. Not only had he failed in his attempt to contact Carol, he had stripped himself of the weapon that could have shielded him from the Lord of the Third Deep that Carol had warned him of. Despite the agony in his hands and feet, Arn knew this experience was about to get far worse.

  Kaleal knelt beside him and reached out a clawed hand, raking a nail down Arn’s arm, peeling away flesh as if filleting a fish. Although Arn did not cry out, sweat oozed from his skin. With a grunt of focused effort, he allowed Blade to take over, to transform the pain into a searing rage. Like Carol, he had his own ways of centering, his own methods of hanging on to sanity.

  40

  Glacier Mountains

  YOR 414, Early Winter

  The darkness around Carol’s center was complete. She modified the shield, reducing it to near nothingness as her visualization expanded into the void around her. Having tried the safer approach, it was now time to gamble. If only she could have recognized any of the terrain around her numerous leapfrog transitions. But that was not to be.

  So she relied on her remaining option. The disturbances in the void grew in number as she moved outward from her center. They washed in upon her, impinging on her shield so that she could selectively look at each one. Already the globe glowed with bright colors as many sources impacted its surface, one bleeding into the next as she strove to examine each.

  The protective sphere took on a reddish glow that changed to purple, then white, but she was still unable to fully examine any of the thousands of sensations that cascaded across her. Carol weakened the shield ever so slightly, and then, deciding she still couldn’t recognize any thoughts or feelings, she diluted it yet again.

  Immediately a storm of feelings almost swept her away. Anger, lust, fear, longing, and hunger were mixed together with a host of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and pains. She concentrated, keeping the shield at this level. She endured the cacophony, searching. And as she searched, she tired.

  Suddenly she heard, felt, smelled, tasted, saw the one she loved. Arn was there in the void, distant, but calling to her.

  Then, as relief flooded over her, otherworldly pain racked her lover. His mind seemed as if it would burst, but he did not cry out as something swept him away. Carol modulated her shield, blocking all other sources, accepting Arn’s pain, establishing a link to the source of that agony. Kaleal was here, and he was very close to the destruction of her betrothed’s mind.

  Carol’s mental shield went white-hot as she jammed it into place, trapping the primordial inside with her and Arn. She shifted her focus, linking firmly to Kaleal. He groped for her, and she lashed out with all the anger and fear that the thought of losing Arn to this thing conjured up. She slammed into Kaleal with her psychic energies, pinning him to the inside of the shield with such force that his snarls turned to screams of agony. The primordial released his hold on Arn to address the new attack. Carol’s mind lashed out again, pummeling Kaleal and forcing him to throw up a shield of his own.

  Against this elemental barrier her mental attacks raged, an ethereal battering ram.

  Suddenly she created a small hole in her own shielding against which she had pinned Kaleal, thrusting him outward into the void with such force that great ripples of red light cascaded away from his tumbling form. She shifted her attention, snapping the shield around herself and Arn back into place.

  Arn’s consciousness was faint, but it was there, and pressed up against him, she could sense her own body. The transition back to full consciousness left her gasping. Sensing that Kaleal had breached her magical wards, she reestablished and strengthened them.

  Carol moved Arn’s limp body off her and climbed to her feet. Then she rolled him onto the blanket that had been wrapped around her shoulders and, with considerable exertion, dragged him back over to their fireplace just under the ledge.

  His chest rose and fell steadily, but his body had begun to shiver violently. She placed a hand on his forehead. It felt cold.

  After covering him with blankets, she grabbed a pile of sticks and threw them onto the fireplace. Steeling herself against the memory of the mark of fire with which the elemental had branded her arm, Carol ensnared Jaa’dra, forcing him to light the blaze. Then she stripped off Arn’s clothes and her own and slipped into the pile of covers with Arn, lending her body heat to that of the fire as she worked to warm him.

  “I’ve got you, my love. I’ve got you,” Carol whispered as she wrapped herself around him.

  41

  Kragan’s War Camp—Eastern Tal

  YOR 414, Early Winter

  The force of Kaleal’s expulsion knocked Kragan across the room, sending him crashing into the far wall of the house he had turned into his headquarters, as the primordial returned to his body. Kragan crawled back to his feet, having difficulty lifting the massive form within which he was encased.

  His amazement at what had just happened shook him to the bone. Had Kaleal been knocked out? The concept of driving an immortal into an unconscious state was beyond the realm of imagination. And yet, here Kragan was, staggering around in the primordial’s body without any perceived help from his host.

  What had just occurred? Had Carol set a trap for them with Blade as the bait? That must have been it. The devious witch had come up with a plan to pull Kragan’s mind away from his body so that he could be assaulted on her terms. If he hadn’t given Blade over to Kaleal instead of taking the assassin for himself, the plan would have worked.

  Carol had not expected the primordial, and yet she had almost destroyed him. Kragan sank down onto the stone floor, his head swimming in pain as Kaleal roused himself.

  Fires sprang up around the room, spreading rapidly to the ceiling beams. The primordial was not happy.

  Fine. That made two of them.

  42

  Misty Hollow

  YOR 414, Early Winter

  The deep scarlet glow of the sun, which had just sunk beneath the foreshortened horizon, bled into the mists of their hollow like the breath of a lunger. As a child, Carol had hated the term upon first hearing it, even more so once her father had explained that it referred to a mortally wounded soldier whose rattling breath misted red.

  Arn’s unconscious body lay next to the fire, where he’d lain unmoving since she had dragged him up the small rise to their ledge. She would not leave him out in the meadow to care for him. No. She had needed to get him home, as she now thought of their shelter.

  In the moment when she had torn Arn’s mind free from Kaleal’s grasp, what she had seen, felt, and heard terrified her beyond reason.

  It was said that a moment of elemental possession caused time to stop, as if that moment were a hundred or even a thousand years of unspeakable suffering. That was not what terrified her. As she tore Kaleal from him, something had ripped open inside Arn’s mind. It had seemed like such a small injury, a bit of a tear in the fabric. Such a tiny thing.

  When she was eight years old, her father had given her an intricately woven sweater that had been her mother’s. Its unique pattern seemed to change with the lighting. A rosebush had snagged it, unraveling just a little spot. Such a tiny thing. She had tried so carefully to repair the sweater, but each move only made the damage worse until it seemed to fall apart before her very eyes. She rushed home, hoping Nana would do something to save the treasure.

  Nana had just shaken her head and said, “Oh dear child, if you had brought it right home, I probably could have fixed it. But now . . .”

  Carol had cried for days. Such a tiny thing.

  Lost in the memory, she had brought Arn right home. Now he lay wrapped in her arms beneath the blankets, with his head resting on a soft pad that served as a pillow.

  As she pulled him close, Carol gazed out at the lunger mist.

  She had not intended to fall asleep, hadn’t really thought about it at all when she had sl
ipped under the blanket with Arn and spooned up against him. His breathing sounded regular, and the strong beat of his heart felt as it always had, a slow but powerful thumping within his chest. He didn’t feel comatose, either, merely sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, something she had never heard of Arn succumbing to. It must have been while she listened to his breathing that the dark robes of sleep enfolded her, and as they did, her perspective shifted.

  A strangeness crept over her as she recognized the walls that formed the lower canyon defenses to Areana’s Vale. Arn moved along the top of the wall, and she moved with him, an invisible specter, seeing what he saw, hearing what he heard. The battlements were different, much farther along, although they showed signs of not yet being complete. Soldiers crammed the walls as their leaders passed behind them, shouting instructions that were lost in the din of battle. Arn looked out over the seething mass of the army of the protectors, jammed tight between the towering cliffs, struggling to carry the ladders forward along the narrow path beside the rapids.

  He continued on, quickening his pace until he was practically swinging from the support railing as he moved around the soldiers struggling to hold the top of the wall. Immediately she saw his target: A group of vorgs backed by a robed priest had breached the wall, trapping her father and a handful of men against the southern cliff face. A ball of flame grew above the priest’s outstretched palm.

  “By the gods, hurry!” she screamed, although no sound came from her spectral mouth.

  The priest paused in the midst of his cast, his eyes wide with surprise as a new mouth opened in his throat. Arn’s arms worked like pistons, moving in and out with a rhythm that sounded like the beat of a drum as he carved his way toward Rafel.

  Confusion swept the ranks of the nearest vorgs, who were cut to ribbons by Rafel’s guard as they turned to see what was happening to their rear. In seconds the breach had been sealed. Rafel’s look, however, was one of horror as he stared in the direction from which Arn had come. A group of protectors who had hidden among the vorg warriors along the north wall called forth a mighty blast at its base, bringing the section atop which Alan and his men fought tumbling outward, flinging them all into the seething mass below.

  “No!” Rafel’s yell sounded above the din as the dream shifted.

  Again and again the battle replayed itself. Always, Arn was the anchor from which her specter observed the action, and each time he took a different course of action. Always his deeds made no difference in the outcome. Alan died, Rafel died, Carol died, Arn died, Ty died, John died, Kim died, everyone died. Over and over again, in a hundred different ways, the two lower fortresses fell, then the upper fortress fell, and then the vale itself fell to their enemies.

  Carol awoke with a start, her heart pounding. Wrapped in her arms, Arn slept on, dreaming his chaotic dream, his heart still beating with the same slow, steady rhythm.

  Reaching out to him, Carol caressed his face with her right hand. Gently she shook him, then more firmly. When he did not respond, she moved across the ledge, wet a rag in a pail of water, and placed the cold cloth upon his brow. Then she wet the rag again and rubbed it along his face and neck. Nothing. No response.

  Carol had a desperate need to wake him, feeling as though he needed something and that need had been communicated to her in a way she did not understand. As much as she had been lost, unable to find her way back to her body, she believed that Arn was now lost and needed her to help free him from a horrible bondage.

  But no matter what she tried, he would not awaken. Feeling for his thoughts with her mind, she could not find them. He seemed beyond her power.

  Beyond her power. Something about that thought tweaked her mind. Beyond magical power. Of course. Slaken. The one thing that had always helped protect him from magic. He had told her about the blade, how he had mingled his own blood into its runes, how no other could grab the weapon without being consumed.

  She ran to the spot where Arn had tossed Slaken aside. The thing lay there on the ground, the delicate runes in its ivory haft a dizzying sight. Slaken’s black blade seemed to lie in a world where light did not exist. How could she get the weapon to him without being consumed herself?

  She reached out with her mind, calling forth the elementals that would whirl the thing into the air, but although the air howled around her, the knife did not move. She strengthened her will so that the wind screamed.

  In the sky overhead, great thunderheads boiled up as she increased the power of her casting, the friction of the wind producing electrical discharges that crackled and crashed in the sky above. A hundred-year-old pine broke off, crashing to the earth with a sound even louder than the howling gusts and thunder of the storm.

  “By the deep,” Carol said, casting the elementals away in disgust. “How stupid can I be?”

  Grabbing her shawl, she tossed it over the knife, wrapped the cloth around the handle, and carried it back to where Arn lay. She set Slaken upon his chest and withdrew the shawl, then placed his right hand atop it. As she watched, his fingers twitched and grasped the magical weapon, though his eyes remained closed.

  Carol stepped back to stare down at the man she loved, struggling to control her dread.

  Far away at a ranger camp in the Great Forest, Ty staggered, stumbling to his knees as his blood boiled and pounded in his veins. Rolling onto his back, the Kanjari’s body contorted in spasms as every muscle cramped. The fit passed, allowing him to stagger back to his feet, great rivers of sweat dripping from his torso. He had felt the same when Slaken had fed on the blood of his and Arn’s beating hearts.

  Ty pulled himself to his full height and gazed off over the high canyon walls toward the mountains in the southeast. “Brother of my blood, where are you?”

  43

  Southern Coastal Range

  YOR 414, Early Winter

  Earl Coldain looked east across his winter camp on the Endarian Continent’s southwestern coast. The snowcapped peaks of the Coastal Range blocked his passage to the east until the spring thaw. He seethed with frustration at the constant delays that had confronted him and the army of Tal as he searched for High Lord Rafel and his legion. Coldain had wasted months blocked at Endar’s southeastern border by Queen Elan’s edict that barred his army from passage through her lands. She had sent thousands of Endarian soldiers to enforce her decision.

  Although her son and emissary, Galad, had been polite during the meetings in which Coldain argued that he would make sure his soldiers passed peacefully through her territory, the queen’s relayed responses had always been a terse no. Those answers had led the earl to suspect that Elan might be harboring the high lord within Endar. Three decades ago, at the beginning of the Vorg War, Rafel had been Tal’s emissary to the queen and had successfully negotiated an alliance between the two kingdoms. But in answer to Coldain’s query, Galad had assured him that Rafel was not within Endar nor had he been since long ago. The Endarian’s forthright manner had convinced Coldain of the truth of those words.

  So the earl had been forced to make the arduous journey around the southern tip of Endar and then westward to the Gauga River. There he had been confronted with a decision: journey south through the Endless Valley or continue west to the coast and then follow it south. Rather than force his footsore army to zigzag south and then possibly back to the north, Coldain had chosen the westward path. Due to the coast’s remoteness from Tal and access to the sea’s abundance, Coldain considered it to be Rafel’s most likely destination.

  Once again, he had been proven wrong.

  The stiff sea breeze ruffled Coldain’s hair, its temperature pleasantly contrasting to the ice he saw in the mountains. Come spring, he would march fresh troops across the Coastal Range and turn north, knowing that he would find Rafel somewhere along the Endless Valley. Only after he performed his unpleasant duty could he go home.

  Coldain tasted salt on the wind and turned his eyes back to the sea. All things considered, this was not a bad place to winter.


  44

  Misty Hollow

  YOR 414, Early Winter

  The squawking of two jays arguing over possession of the aspen nearest their porch ledge awakened Carol from a troubled sleep. The morning sun had already crested the eastern rim of the hollow, bringing with it a warmth she had not felt since early autumn. The sounds of the day carried a musical quality that she categorized as the symphony produced by numerous sources of dripping water. Faint drips and splats close at hand accompanied the sound of the nearby stream.

  All of this melting glory culminated in new veils of water that plunged from numerous cliffs high above, forming streams and rivulets that joined together only to disappear underground.

  A very large, fat fly buzzed around Carol’s head, dodging as she swatted. A fly so big and fat this late in the year was a mystery of nature. As it continued to annoy her, Carol reached out with a flick of her mind and crisped it, leaving a small, smoky trail marking its descent to the stone below. She immediately regretted so casually imposing her will on such a tiny being whose only sin was trying to survive. A second fly swooped down, as if in revenge, inflicting a painful bite on her forearm. She immediately fried this one, too, suffering no feelings of guilt.

  Arn sat up and groaned as he cradled his face in his hands.

  Carol moved to sit beside him and took one of his hands in hers.

  “I feel like I’ve been out drinking with Ty.” He squinted and tried for a smile that looked more like a grimace.

  She leaned over, wrapped him in her arms, and smothered his face with kisses.

  She sat there, holding him and being held until, at last, the rumblings of hunger brought the wielder to the realization that neither of them had eaten in over twenty-four hours.