Crown of Stars (Page 183)

Two: the WiseMothers, who were born out of that ancient conflagration and who had spread the nests of their children across the northern lands. But when he sought the spirit of their slow minds in the aether, he could not find them.

It falls to me to do what is right. That is reward enough in the eyes of God.

When he came to the forest’s edge high above the fields, the lines of battle had already been drawn and overrun, but soldiers on all sides stood in an uncanny stillness, frozen by the guivre’s stare. He stood on the edge of a steep hillside torn by an avalanche. It was loose with debris, too dangerous to cross or descend.

He called. The guivre swept a wide circle and came back to him. He grabbed the hounds by their collars and led them along a tree trunk that had fallen out into the open space to make a precarious ledge. The log slipped sideways under their weight. The hounds yelped in panic. The guivre swooped low as the log gave way and rolled out from under Alain’s feet. Its claws fastened on his shoulders, and the startled hounds were silenced as they, too, were yanked upward with the collars biting into their vulnerable throats. Their weight seemed likely to pop his shoulders out of joint, but the guivre plunged with dizzying speed down along the barren slope and over its desolation of splintered and jumbled trunks, snapped and shredded branches, and scraps of vegetation marked by clusters of blooming cowslip and vine-pinks that had taken root since last autumn’s tempest.

The lay of the ground—the steep slope dropping precipitously into a hollow backed up into a trio of low hills—had protected the walls of Kassel from destruction. Here the mass of debris had piled up into a fresh berm. The guivre skimmed low along the north and east flanks of the town. Soldiers were fixed at attention along the walls. No one pointed, and if any screamed, all Alain heard was the whistling of wind and a distant mutter as of humankind trying to find a voice.

Made mute and frozen by the guivre’s roving gaze, every creature there stood helpless.

Ahead lay the scene of the worst slaughter: a line of siege works overtaken by a charge, men fallen every which way and horses broken down with wounds and shattered limbs. Cavalry had fixed in their tracks along the road—from the height he discerned the paving slabs and graded foundation of the old roadbed, strung so straight and turning at such precise angles that it could easily be seen to be the work of the old Dariyan Empire.

A ramp bridged the bluff that separated the valley from the higher forest to the east. Many soldiers stood paralyzed on the road and within the trees. Along the hills, Eika corpses lay strewn in horrifying numbers, and among them gleamed white bone remains of human soldiers, their bodies consumed by the passing galla.

A score of galla poured down along the ramp. The timbre of their bell voices rang both despair and pain.

He kicked as the guivre dropped low over the high end of the ramp. He and the hounds tumbled to earth, and because he released their collars they bounded away, barking as they found themselves free.

At the base of the ramp lay a wrecked wagon fallen on its side. The bodies of the two horses and the driver were wrapped in the tangle of harness. The cart held a tiny house built over its bed, which remained mostly intact, but the axles had splintered and the wheels shattered into a dozen spars and slivers. A single body sprawled in the middle of the road.

Not one soul moved except the galla. They had crossed into this world through a rent in the fabric of the universe; the guivre’s stare could not hold them. They flooded down the ramp and churned in a whirlpool about the wagon and that one isolated figure.

He heard them call: Sanglant.

But they could not find Sanglant—they could not find his essence, the substance that caused him to be alive.

Alain approached along the road while, in a mirror of his own movement, a single mounted soldier drew close to face him from the other side of the picket of circling galla. The iron heat that roiled from them forced him to stop well back. That taste of the forge burned his skin and coated his tongue with a sour flavor. But the black pillars—each a void—eddied around the body fallen in the road. They did not approach or retreat; they seemed caught between purpose and confusion.

“He served me well for many long years, dealing death but never suffering death,” said the Lady of Battles. “I wondered if any hand could stop him while his mother’s curse protected him, but I think that now he is truly gone.”

Sanglant had gone under the wheels and been besides pierced through his abdomen by a jagged spoke flung hard away in the wagon’s crash. His mangled body was slack. The strap on his dragon’s helm had been severed and the fanciful helmet itself had tumbled an arm’s length from the man. A single griffin’s feather had come to rest across his body, and possibly it was this guardian that held off the galla.