CHAPTER
32

Flames erupted from the Gatekeeper seal, just ahead of Elestrissa’s charge. The Mosswood Warden stumbled as though an arrow had hit her, and Rienne’s first impulse was to scan for the archer. Then the flames raced along the lines of the seal, forming a wall of terrible fire encircling the battlefield, burning in every color and no color at all, and Rienne understood. The seal was broken, the battle lost, just as victory came within their grasp.

“We are undone,” Elestrissa said, her pace faltering.

“Keep going,” Rienne said. “We might still defeat the Blasphemer, keep him from breaking the next seal.”

“It is not to be. Your dream—”

“Damn my dream! I’m writing my own destiny today.”

Elestrissa seemed to take heart, but she couldn’t match her earlier pace, and Rienne surged ahead. Maelstrom was a whirlwind of steel surrounding her, cutting a path through a fresh wall of barbarian resistance.

Then she heard the voice.

It was a high keening, like a woman mourning or the call of a falcon, and it seemed to sing in her mind as much as in her ears. Beneath it was the merest hint, beyond hearing, of a thousand unearthly voices babbling, which reminded her of the inhuman sounds of the Soul Reaver’s hordes at Starcrag Plain. The voices were drawing nearer, like a dragon eel slowly surfacing in dark water.

One challenge at a time, she told herself. First the Blasphemer, and after that—if there is an after—I can deal with whatever is coming through the seal.

Barbarians fell away from her like water before the prow of a ship. Elestrissa, at least, was still behind her. If others survived, they were straggling farther behind, caught in the mire of the barbarian hordes.

She saw the Blasphemer, silhouetted against a wall of dragonfire, and her dream sprang to life around her. He was a towering figure in blood-spattered plate armor, twisting horns rising above his fiendish visage. A long tail snaked out behind him as he strode toward her, behind the last remnants of his personal defenders.

He spoke, and his voice rang in her ears above the din of battle. “So here is the one they are calling Dragonslayer, the bearer of Barak Radaam.” He pointed his own curved sword at her, and she felt a twinge of fear. “Destroy her!” he shouted, and the barbarians around him roared in fury as they surged ahead.

Maelstrom sprang back into motion, parrying every blow that came at her, killing in a ruthless rhythm. Maelstrom whirled and Rienne danced, her body and the steel blade in perfect coordination—a step, a parry, a jab, a jump. Then the Blasphemer began a strange chant, words she didn’t recognize, words that couldn’t possibly be words in any mortal tongue, and pain stabbed through her ears. Her feet faltered, nearly sending her onto the point of a barbarian’s sword, but Maelstrom accommodated, dashing the other sword aside and whirling around to take off its wielder’s head.

Maelstrom wanted to get to the Blasphemer.

It was a strange realization. Rienne had never been inclined to personify her blade, as strongly attached to it as she was. It was precious to her, but it was steel, a weapon—not a person. It was an extension of her body and her will—she had never imagined it had a will of its own.

Perhaps it was merely that she had never before been this close to what Maelstrom apparently wanted. Or perhaps it had concealed its desire from her, all the while impelling her to follow the course that had brought her here. Had Maelstrom planted the idea in her head, when Jordhan rescued her from the Thaliost jail, to fly westward into the Reaches? Had it convinced her not to pursue Gaven when she saw his storms in the south? Was she the tool in Maelstrom’s hand, the extension of its will, rather than the other way around?

Whether its influence had been absent or merely subtle in the past, there was no denying it now. When one barbarian fell, the blade led her into the open space left behind, drawing her closer to the Blasphemer. Every step away from him felt heavy, every step toward him easy and light. He was a force of gravity, drawing her in through her sword.

Why? she wondered.

As Maelstrom brought her closer to the Blasphemer, his maddening chant grew louder and her pain intensified with it. The words assaulted her, and blood began to trickle from her ringing ears. Suddenly, she understood the title he bore in the Prophecy—his words were a blasphemy, an utter denial of existence and meaning.

But the Blasphemer’s end lies in the void, in the maelstrom that pulls him down to darkness.

The words of her dream renewed her courage. They also seemed to give her respite from the pain, so she tried speaking them aloud. “Dragons fly before the Blasphemer’s legions, scouring the earth of his righteous foes.” She could barely hear her own voice, but the pain in her ears faded—and she realized she couldn’t hear the Blasphemer while she spoke, as though the words of the Prophecy negated his blasphemous chant. “Carnage rises in the wake of his passing, purging all life from those who oppose him.”

He grinned as if he’d heard her, sharp white teeth gleaming in his red devil’s face. She was almost to him now, close enough to see the sweat on his brow and feel the searing heat of the wall of flames behind him.

“Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones—”

The earth beneath her interrupted, rumbling, then shaking so violently that the barbarians surrounding her staggered into each other or fell on the ground. She rode the bucking earth, hopping lightly as she felled more of her enemies, drawing ever closer to the Blasphemer. But she expected to see the ground split open at any moment and release its brood of chaos, as it had at Starcrag Plain.

Instead, it erupted. Huge boulders streamed up from the ground and hurtled into the sky. Rienne watched in horror as a jagged shard flew skyward and crashed into Jordhan’s airship. Wood splinters flew out from the ship in every direction, then the fiery elemental ring burst loose, turning the ship into a tiny sun, a blinding flash of light. Then the light and the ship were gone.

Rienne went numb. Maelstrom was a dead weight in her hand, and she couldn’t feel the ground beneath her feet. If her heart still beat, she couldn’t feel it—just the vise grip of dread clutching her chest. Jordhan was gone.

The rock had erupted near the center of the seal, and the largest boulders were falling back down in that area. Rienne thought of the healer who had tended her, the faithful elders and children who, unable to fight, had sought to sustain the seal with their devoted prayers. They were certainly lost, caught in either the erupting stone or its return.

A hail of smaller stones, shattered from the great boulders, fell around her even as the ground kept roiling under her feet. She lost her balance, crashing into a barbarian. The collision sent the man’s club flying, but he clutched at her, pinning her sword arm against her side.

“I have her!” the barbarian shouted. “Hit her!”

An axe swept toward her face, but she planted her feet on the ground, shifted her weight low, and swung the man holding her into the weapon’s path. He lost his grip on her as the axe cut his spine, and Rienne shrugged him off before whirling to kill the axe wielder.

She found her balance and looked for the Blasphemer. With the eruption of the ground, chaos had seized the battlefield—any hint of formation or lines of engagement had vanished. She couldn’t see the Blasphemer, and Elestrissa’s towering form was nowhere in sight. Barbarians and Eldeen defenders alike scattered, running with their arms thrown over their heads to shield themselves from the falling stones. She heard no horns sounding a retreat, saw no banners marking a rallying point for either side. The only sounds were the rumble of the earth and the clatter of stones falling against shields and helmets and bodies. Soldiers and farmers, the barbarians of the Carrion Tribes and the wild folk of the western Reaches all ran headlong in every direction, barely bothering to swing their weapons at each other.

“Reachers!” she shouted over the tumult. “To me! For the Wood!”

Too much noise, too much confusion—

She held Maelstrom high and repeated her call. More boulders, smaller fragments of the shattering earth, flew into the air and crashed to the ground, more gravel pounded from the sky.

She searched the ground—someone in Elestrissa’s charge had carried a standard, the emerald oak symbol of the Reaches. She couldn’t see it. She started running back the way they had come, against the tide of people fleeing from the erupting stone.

She spotted a flash of green, all but trampled into the dirt, and made for it. A shifter swung a clumsy blow toward her head, but she ducked it and gutted her foe, and then pulled the standard from the sod and gore. She hoisted it over her head and cried out once more, “For the Reaches! For the Wood!”

Holding the standard high, she started back away from the center of the seal—not in the direction of Elestrissa’s charge, but off to the side, away from where she’d seen the Blasphemer, away from the wall of dragonfire. “For the Wood!” she cried again, and a few of the fleeing Eldeen defenders veered toward her.

Jordhan is dead, she thought. Elestrissa is fallen and her charge failed. The Gatekeepers’ seal is broken and Sovereigns know what’s emerging through it. But I can’t let these people scatter like sheep before wolves.

A ragged band formed around her, mostly farmers drafted to the militia who had managed to survive the onslaught of barbarians and dragons—most likely by running away. A few battle-worn soldiers fell in alongside her, and some rangers and hunters. Some shifters joined the band who might have been part of the Blasphemer’s forces for all she knew, but they took up the cry—“For the Reaches! For the Wood!”—and walked as comrades with the other Reachers, so she let them come.

One of the first to join the group was a human girl—Rienne couldn’t help but think of her as a girl, since she couldn’t have been older than twenty—armored in a suit of worked leather far too large for her slight frame. Her spear and armor both looked fresh from the artisan’s hands. She didn’t say a word, just drifted closer and closer to Rienne as more and more of the remnants of the Eldeen forces gathered around the standard.

“For the Reaches!” Rienne shouted for the hundredth time, lifting the banner as high as her arms could manage. The weight was too much for her fatigued body, and she stumbled off balance. The farmer girl caught her by the arm and took the standard from her hands.

“For the Wood!” the girl screamed.

Rienne smiled, and the girl smiled bashfully back.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m Rienne.”

“Oh, I know who you are!” the girl said, beaming. “Everyone’s been talking about the Dragonslayer.”

“Have they?” The thought saddened her.

“I’m Cressa,” the girl offered.

“Where are you from, Cressa?”

“I grew up near Riverweep. It’s a little village on the river.”

Rienne smiled at the suggestion that Cressa—this girl one-third her age—was done growing up. “But now?”

Cressa’s smile faded and her eyes grew weary, and she suddenly looked older than Rienne had first thought. “I had just moved to Varna when the storm came.”

The storm. Rienne remembered watching it from the deck of Jordhan’s ship, as it formed in the Blackcaps and then swept across Lake Galifar to wash over Varna. She wondered again what part Gaven had played in that devastating tempest, but she no longer questioned whether she had made a mistake by not turning south to look for him.

“Lady?” Cressa said.

Rienne put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m glad you escaped the city,” she said. “Did you fight the Aundairians there?”

Cressa snorted. “I fled the storm. I didn’t join the militia until after, thinking I’d get back at them.”

“But instead you faced the Blasphemer’s horde.”

“And fled again.” Cressa’s shoulders slumped. “I’m no warrior.”

“There are other parts to be played.”

Cressa brightened. “Do you think so?”

“Of course.” She thought of Jordhan, bravely but ineffectually clutching an axe and running to her side as she fought the black dragon. He’d been a pilot, never a warrior, and he met his end as a pilot.

The ground bucked beneath them again, sending farmers and rangers tumbling into each other all around her. Rienne kept her feet, and she noticed with approval that Cressa did as well—keeping her feet planted wide, her weight low, and her arms out for balance.

More shards of stone flew into the air, followed by columns of strange yellow fire roaring into the sky. Several people in Rienne’s little band cried out in fear. Cressa’s knuckles were white as she clutched the standard, but she shouted, “For the Reaches!” with such conviction that even Rienne felt stirred by her passion.

“For the Wood!” Rienne yelled with the rest of the survivors. “And for the world,” she added under her breath.