Maelys

Dustin sighed, deeply. “Look, Maelys. However good you think you are, no auldling in the world can take on a trained Auld, especially if all you can do is move a little stone. These guys are probably low-ranked Aulds, which are the most dangerous kind. They’re the people who can kill by blowing up a blood vessel or liquefying a brain and not even feel a headache afterwards. Saw plenty of them in the war. They’ve probably been here since the slaughter, trailing back and forth, trying to pick up anyone who might have made it out of the mountains alive. The fact that they’re still there means they’ve been successful so far.”

As Maelys watched the procession move on, understanding dawned upon her. “So they’ve been killing people trying to get back to the Spyre,” she said, glaring at the figures on the hill.

“That’d be my guess,” the drake agreed.

“So they’re trying to draw me out.” Maelys was ready to give them what they asked for.

Dustin snorted. “It’s the Ganlins they want. Just one Ganlin reaching the Citadel—assuming it’s not already fallen—and the Auldhunds will paint the Spyre walls with the blood of the Vethyles and Norfelds. Why would they care about you? Rockfarmers are harmless.” He frowned as if in memory and said, “Stubborn, but harmless. Hell, you’re the first one I’ve ever heard of that had any veoh whatsoever.” Turning back to the men on the hill, he said, “If anything, it’s me they’re after. Much bigger prize than a Rockfarmer.”

She peered at him. “I thought you said the Aulds didn’t want to kill you.”

“Those were the Ganlins,” Dustin said. “And I don’t think that whoever killed the Ganlins is too worried about some ancient scrolls and the fall of the Spyre.” He shrugged. “Besides. There’s better ways to use a drake then to kill him. Some of the best war machines of ancient times were powered by the soul of a drake. Hell, I know of a desert city in Etro whose whole core is kept cool by the power of a single ice drake they keep in confinement, underground.” His face had sobered. “Gods what I wouldn’t do to get rid of these damned cuffs!” He shook them again in frustration.

“I won’t let anyone turn you into a war machine,” Maelys said.

The drake gave her a patronizing smile. “I appreciate the gesture, but like I said, Rockfarmers are pretty harmless compared to some of the stuff that will be hunting me.”

“I’m not harmless,” Maelys said. “I’m going to bring down the Spyre. Right on top of them.”

The drake opened his mouth to argue, then looked at the rock squishing between her fingers where she pressed her palm to the bedrock and shut it again. “Okay, maybe you’re not as harmless as you look,” he said, “but they’re definitely after survivors, which means they know you’re out there, which means they have a plan on how to kill you.”

Maelys considered, then stood. “We’ll see.” She started moving towards them.

She hadn’t gone two steps before Dustin hissed and caught her shoulder, then quickly yanked his hand away before it could singe her shirt. “Maelys.” He pointed to the ridge above the climbers. “Look at that.”

He did have good eyes. Maelys frowned, barely able to make out the hooded form darting from rock to rock, staying above the group. She opened her mind to the stone there, a little irritated that the mountain hadn’t warned her of the fourth person.

The stone answered her query with a confused hush. No, it agreed, there was no one on the mountainside. She was seeing things.

Well, I can see him, she assured the granite under her fingertips.

There’s nothing there, was the thought sent back to her.

Maelys jerked her hand away, frustratedly breaking contact. “The stone says there’s nothing there.”

“Not unusual. Aulds have made a profession of finding ways to trick other Aulds, and you’re not even trained yet. But there’s always something they can’t bespell…” The drake lifted his nose and took a deep sniff of the air.

“What are you doing?” Maelys asked, watching him curiously as his chest puffed out with the depths of his breaths.

“Wind’s coming down through the pass in our direction. I’m seeing if I can catch their scent. It’s one of the things they never think of when they’re casting their illusions.” He took another deep breath through his flared nostrils, then huffed like a dog that had gotten a whiff of something foul. His brow creased. “There’s another one. Look.”

It took Maelys over a minute to notice the second robed figure, this one much further down the mountainside. It, too, was moving from rock to rock, staying out of sight as it followed the three on the path. When she asked the stone about it, however, she received the same response. The mountain is empty there. “Okay,” she said, “what do they smell like? Vethyles or Ganlins?”

“Neither…” Dustin said, sounding confused. “The only smell I’m getting is…” He hesitated, frowning as he took another sniff. For long moments, the drake scanned the mountainside with a confused look. Then he tensed. “Ice my toes. That’s what they were doing with the damned Pillar!”

“What?” Maelys asked.

He tugged her to the ground, quickly releasing her shirt once she dropped with him. From their vantage, prone upon the mountainside, he said, “Maelys, those aren’t Vethyles. We need to get out of here.”

“Why?” Maelys demanded.

“Remember those things I said were hunting me?” he said softly, sounding really unnerved, now. “There’s a couple of them, right there. And if they’re anything like the last one I fought, they’re fast. Just get us out of here. I’ll explain later.”

“They don’t look so fast,” Maelys observed.

“The physical realm doesn’t apply to them,” Dustin insisted. “Just believe me. We need to go, and we need to go now.”

Maelys chewed her lip, watching the two figures dance along the rocks behind the trio of Aulds. Knowing the stone didn’t sense them, she felt anxious. Even bespelled, the stone should have felt their footsteps. And if there were two, who was to say there couldn’t be more? She started scanning their own mountainside, the drake’s anxiety infectious.

She froze, holding her breath, when she saw the figure standing on the slope above them. “Dustin,” she whispered, as quietly as she could. He glanced at her and she pointed.

Five hundred feet above, on the very mountain where they crouched, a lone figure in jet black robes stood in the wind on the goat path, holding something to his eyes, watching the travelers on the other side of the valley.

Dustin frowned, then took another big sniff of air. His eyes widened suddenly and it seemed as if every muscle in his body tightened at once as he threw an arm over her back and held her in place on the ground. “Maelys, get us away from here as quickly as you can. Now.”

She frowned at him. “I’m not your little horse and buggy. Besides. You burn me every time I touch you.” She started wriggling, trying to get out from under his too-hot arm.

“Maelys,” he whispered. “Just get us out of here. And don’t talk so loud.”

“He’s all the way up the mountain,” she said, but the fear in the drake’s eyes was beginning to disturb her. “Who is he, anyway?”

“Please,” Dustin said, “Do it.”

Maelys thought about enfolding herself in stone for the second time and grimaced. “We’ll just wait for him to leave.”

Dustin looked like he wanted to say more, but the man on the mountain turned toward them and he froze.

It lasted only a moment. Then the man turned and began to trudge along the goat path, paralleling the climbers on the other mountain. Dustin, however, remained absolutely motionless, like a rabbit that had been caught in the gaze of a wolf, holding Maelys in place with the bar of his arm hovering over her back, all but searing her skin.

Above them on the hill, the man paused and scanned the mountain behind him again.

“Don’t,” Dustin said, utterly frozen in place, “move.”

And something about the fear in the drake’s words made Maelys do as she was told.

Dustin kept them on the ground much longer than Maelys thought necessary, until hours had passed and she could hear nothing but the muffled howl of the mountain breeze and saw the lichen-covered pebbles under her nose even when she closed her eyes.

When he finally did let her stand up, Dustin just glared at her. “If you had any idea who that man was, you’d have just pissed yourself, Maelys.”

“So who was he?” she demanded.

“Thibault Saelin, the Auldheist of Nefyti.”

“Never heard of him,” Maelys said, totally unimpressed.

Dustin just shook his head in disgust. “That’s because the Rockfarmers stayed out of the war. Let’s just get out of here before he comes back.” Dustin said the last with eyes fixed to the slope where the figure had disappeared. “South. As fast as we can go. Maybe we can get into Glesche before he kills everyone this time.” He started back the way they had come.

“Wait!” Maelys cried. “But the Vethyles—”

The drake rounded on her so quickly she bit off her words with a start.

“Thibault uses souls like Auld use sparks,” Dustin said. “If he caught us, he would have put me to powering a fire colossus, and would have put you to enchanting somebody’s armor.”

Maelys laughed. “That’s not possi—”

Dustin’s sharp look told her that, indeed, it was very possible.

Maelys straightened. “I don’t care who he is. I’m going to avenge Nirin.”

“Then you’re going to die.” He kept walking.

Maelys hesitated, glancing at the drake’s retreating back, then the opposite mountainside where the Vethyles had disappeared. Biting her lip, she followed the drake.

That night, Maelys laid awake to the sound of the drake snoring. He was stretched out on the stone platform beside her, hot enough to be a bonfire, but it wasn’t the cold that bothered her; it was the three hooded figures from the mountain.

The ones that the mountain hadn’t told her were there. What kind of Auld could trick the stone? Stone was usually the strength behind an Auld’s spells, its anchor. An Auld couldn’t simply make the stone believe he wasn’t there…

She was pondering this, in the middle of tossing over to get a more comfortable position in her bed of stone, when her eyes met with the black-clad stranger’s from the goat path.

He was sitting on a rock, studying them both.

She gasped, sitting up.

He noticed the movement and his bearded face cocked at her. “You’re the child the Ganlin boy cowed Laelia into giving back to him, aren’t you?” The man’s voice was rough, like a man who’d been punched in the throat.

Beside her, the drake continued to snore.

Maelys licked her lips, considered lying, then realized it was probably an empty gesture. “Yes.”

He gave a brief nod. “I liked the boy. He had heart.”

Maelys flinched at ‘had.’ “You killed him,” she whispered.

The stranger glanced at the sky. “Perhaps.”

“Then you helped kill the Ganlins,” Maelys said, her fingers sinking into the stone beneath her hand, making a fist.

“Oh yes,” the man said, a smile coming over his face. “And the five that came before them.” He cocked his head at her. “Did you know that there were originally nine?”

Maelys remembered a lot more dead Ganlins than just nine. Her whole body shaking with adrenaline, she pushed her consciousness into the stone and demanded that the rock he sat on swallow him. The rock, however, simply gave her the same confused reply it had given her before. There’s nobody there.

Just swallow him, dammit, her mind screamed. Soften, open up, eat him!

The man continued to sit on the boulder, watching her. “Your talents won’t work on me, child.”

Shaking, Maelys pulled her hand from the stone. “I hate you.”

“Many do.”

“I hate you more,” she snapped.

He chuckled and touched a huge fly in amber he kept on a metal chain around his throat. “I doubt that.” Seeing the fly gave Maelys an eerie chill, like goosebumps on her bones. She swallowed.

With a grunt, the robed man shoved himself off the boulder and walked toward her. Maelys jumped to her feet, glaring.

The man stopped at the edge of their stone platform and glanced down at the drake. “That one always was a lucky bastard. Cheats at chits.”

“I know,” Maelys said, despite herself.

“Looks like his luck finally ran out, though,” the man commented, drawing closer.

Maelys eyed him nervously, “Why doesn’t the stone see you?”

He laughed, then slapped her.

His hand passed through her face.

Still, she felt the blow to her very core. Maelys reeled, stumbling over the drake, who grunted awake with a snort. He looked up, saw her standing, saw their visitor, and immediately stiffened.

“Maelys. Run.”

Maelys started to argue, to tell him she wasn’t a little girl to be told what to do, then she saw the fear in his eyes.

Dustin reached out and shoved her behind him, for once ignoring the way his hands singed her clothes.

The drake was slowly standing to face the visitor, putting his body between them. Maelys bit her lip. Her face was afire from where the man had slapped her—a growing pain that seemed to throb at her very essence, making the bones and teeth in her jaw hurt. And if Dustin was afraid of him…

“Hello, Dustin,” the man said. He cocked his head, smiling. “Remind me…how many times have you killed me, now? Six?”

“Five,” Dustin said. He was shaking, Maelys saw, his hands balled into fists, the ensorcelled cuffs near-black as they ate his inner fire.

The robed man tisked. “Dustin. You keep running, but you know what lies at the end of the road. You should’ve just let me finish it centuries ago, save yourself the angst. Now I’m going to have to make it hurt.” He reached out for Dustin’s face with a hand, and Dustin seemed too tense to back away. He whimpered.

Steeling herself, Maelys set her jaw, grabbed the drake’s ankle, and pulled him into the mountainside with her.

Three hours and three mountainsides later, the stone finally released them. Once Maelys had surrendered them to its bosom, the mountain had swiftly and firmly taken control, ignoring her protests to take her further toward the Spyre, instead dragging them deep underground and dumping them many miles to the south, a taste of panic in its essence.

For some reason, now it believed her.

Then Maelys realized her face still hurt, three hours later. The stone, all around her, could feel it as well. The very mountain was afraid.

It’s unnatural, was the thought whispered to her. Never meant to be.

Dustin took a deep, whooping breath as they crawled from a crevice in the rock. Immediately, they were both doused by the wet trickle of a cold mountain stream, cascading down between the cracks in the stone. Unlike Maelys, however, a hot rush of steam rose in a column around the drake where the water hit, leaving him comfortably dry while she was damp to the core.

And burned again.

She nursed her hand, grimacing. “Can’t you not burn someone when they’re helping you?”

The drake knelt on his hands and knees beside her, hands in the grass in front of him, head down, shaking. For once, he wasn’t complaining.

“Dustin.” Maelys waved her burned hand under his face. “You burned me again.”

It was like trying to get a reaction from a statue. For a second, Maelys wondered if he was somehow dead, but his eyes were open and he was staring at the grass between his fingers.

“Thank you,” he said, finally. “Thibault’s been waiting for that for centuries. It was prophecized…and you saved me.”

“I thought you said Aulds couldn’t kill you,” Maelys said.

Dustin looked up and there was fear in his eyes. “I didn’t say he was going to kill me.”