The Book of Deacon: Book 03 - The Battle of Verril (41 page)

“Do you see this, my king?” he asked, holding
the delicate glass apparatus to his face.

There was barely a sprinkle of sand left in
the top bulb, and it slipped through, grain by grain.

“This is your world, your majesty. Those are
the final moments of your people drifting away. When the last grain
of sand falls, a gateway will open, and through it will flow
my
people. This world will be ours. Were I you, oh mighty
king, I would busy myself with the task of proving why we shouldn't
crush your people in their entirety. North, South, Tresson,
Alliance. You will
all
fall before us, and there is
nothing
that can be done,” Bagu explained with grim
steadiness. “You can kill me. You can kill the other generals. It
won't matter. The end is here.”

Bagu placed the glass on the ground before
the throne and stalked back into his sanctum. The king collapsed
into the throne, his eyes fixed on the silvery sand that remained.
He'd known throughout his life that he had no real power, that his
whole purpose was to give his people some comfort and hope. In his
years on the throne he'd heard many whispers, collected much
information on these men that had ruled in place of the crown. He
knew they were not human. He knew the men they commanded were
little more than shells. Somehow, he had managed to convince
himself that it was as it must be. That the way things were now was
the best he could hope for, and that they would not change so long
as he allowed the generals to continue. He had assumed that control
of the Northern Alliance was all that they sought. Never had he
imagined that through his inaction he had doomed his kingdom and
all others. For a few moments his anger and resistance persisted,
but the weight of hopelessness could only be heaved aside for so
long. He hadn't the strength to resist, nor did his people. The
D'karon had seen to that expertly. All that was left was to wait
for the end, and pray it was a swift one.

#

The cold gray noon shined dimly down upon a
small ragged group marching north. In the sky was the unmistakable
look of a blizzard. Deacon looked nervously at his new allies. The
night before, there had seemed to be quite a few more soldiers.
Indeed, there had been, but with the rising sun most had scattered
in all directions carrying messages to be passed on to the others,
and in search of others bearing messages. What remained were
perhaps a dozen of the sturdier troops, an assemblage of men
slightly past their prime, boys who had yet to reach their prime, a
pair of women, and Deacon himself.

“We usually traveled at night, when I was
with the others. To avoid being seen,” Deacon explained anxiously
as he watched riders on a road at the far end of the field pause to
watch them pass.

“Too many of our own runners looking for us.
If we hide, they won't find us,” Tus stated.

“Tus is right. What we need most right now is
information. The Undermine is not the most sizable force, and it is
spread
very
thin. We can't afford to waste the time of our
messengers by staying out of sight if we want to be able to
coordinate. Besides, you said yourself, the generals aren't paying
attention to us. 'Bout time to change that, I'd say,” Caya said
with a grin. “Let 'em know who they
ought
to be afraid
of.”

The comment met with a roar of approval that
startled Deacon. He looked to the sky. He couldn't see anything,
but he could feel it. Ether. She'd never made an attempt to hide
herself before, and she certainly hadn't started. Even the most
novice wizard would feel her presence from days away in any
direction, and those they faced were no novices. The others were
more subdued, requiring a skilled mind and a bit of luck to spot.
He could not be sure, but they seemed to be traveling just slightly
behind the shape shifter. It wouldn't be long until they'd reached
the mountain in the distance, the place from which Lain's soul
suddenly began to shine like a beacon just hours ago.

“Have you ever fought any of the generals?
They are formidable,” Deacon reminded.

“As are we. We've got soldiers and a wizard.
That makes us a match for anything that they can throw at us,” Caya
said.

“Except more soldiers and more wizards,”
Deacon corrected.

“What happened to your courage, man? Don't
tell me you are afraid to die for this cause!” Caya said, slapping
him on the back.

“I don't mind dying for a cause. I just don't
want to die beforehand,” he said.

Deacon tried to calm himself. He was
unaccustomed to fear. It had never occurred to him to be afraid of
something before. Things were not to be feared, they were to be
understood. We were to learn from them. Now anxiety burned in his
chest. He was not fearful for himself, or even for Myranda. He was
fearful for the world. In the time since his escape he'd felt a
rhythm in the air. A barely detectable frequency at first, but as
time passed it grew. Now it buzzed in his head, like the whole of
the world was resonating with it. It was a power he couldn't
identify, and it was massive.

The first flakes of the blizzard began to
fall and the group shifted its path to a nearby town. A figure
standing at the city gates disappeared inside and reappeared a
moment later, on horseback. He galloped toward them, slowing only
when, at a word from Caya, bows were drawn and angled at him. He
sat silently and sized up the group before him as Caya returned his
calculating stare. He was dressed oddly, in that the ubiquitous
gray cloak that served as the national garment was conspicuously
replaced with a long rider's coat accompanied by a scarf wrapped
about his face. His horse was not a farm animal but a beast of rare
breeding. Everything about him screamed wealth and privilege, save
for the fact that he was in the middle of a field in a quickly
mounting blizzard. His steed was weighed down with a number of
cloth wrapped bundles.

“Undermine!” the rider said, raising a hand
in a peculiar sign, evidently to signal his allegiance.

“Are you now?” Caya said with irritable
familiarity. “I don't remember accepting you.”

“I know that voice,” Deacon said, raising his
crystal. “That is Desmeres. He is a traitor.”

“Impossible, Desmeres can't be a traitor. A
traitor has to have some sort of loyalties to betray, or at least
some principles. I’ve dealt with him before, he has nothing of the
sort,” Caya said, motioning for the bows to be lowered.

“No, you don't understand, he is the one who
helped the D'karon capture us,” Deacon said frantically.

“D'karon?” Tus questioned.

“Err, the worst of the Alliance Army,”
clarified Deacon.

Caya took on a stern look and motioned for
the weapons to be readied again.

“That association is over, I am afraid,”
Desmeres remarked casually, hopping to the ground. “And I will have
you know that I am a man of very strong loyalties. It just so
happens those loyalties are to myself. As for principles, I am
about to betray them all.”

“Oh?” Caya said.

Desmeres released one of the bundles and,
slowly so as to avoid triggering a salvo of arrows from the
soldiers, undid its bindings and unrolled it. There, seeming to
gleam with their own light, were blades of every shape and size.
Short swords, long swords, hatchets, axes, daggers, knives, and
shapes too unique to name. Each was a masterpiece, emblazoned with
careful mystic engravings meaningless to all but Deacon and
Desmeres.

“Take them,” he said in a pained tone.

“These are your own creations. As I
understand it, there are only two beings in the world you've deemed
worthy to hold them,” Caya said, looking over the weapons with
hunger in her eyes.

“Yes, and the Alliance has seen fit to
destroy one such being. I offer them to you to see to it that the
other worthy party is not similarly destroyed. And to taste a bit
of this vengeance that seems so popular these days,” Desmeres
replied. “So take. One each and there should be enough for all of
you. The balance will be off, I designed them for the Red
Shadow.”

Caya snapped up the weapon nearest in size
and shape to her own.

“I don't know what you mean. They seem
perfect to me,” she said with glee, experimentally slicing the
weapon through the air and beaming a wide smile at the satisfying
ring it produced.

“Compared to the relics you've had to use I'm
sure they seem that way,” he replied.

The others clambered for the weapons
greedily. As they did, Desmeres pulled Deacon aside.

“You might buy
them
with weapons, but
I
am slower to . . . “ Deacon began.

“Yes, yes. Healthy suspicion. Commendable. I
don't have time for it though,” Desmeres said, thrusting a
deceptively heavy bundle under Deacon's arm. “Don't open it until
you find them all.
All of the Chosen
, understood? And here.
I know you'd have little use for anything I might have had time to
make, but I managed to liberate these. I think you might be able to
get some use out of them. You may read them at your leisure.”

A thick leather messenger bag was pushed into
his hands. Desmeres turned back to find the mat of weapons picked
clean. He gathered it back up and mounted his steed once more.

“Wait!” Caya called. “How is it that you
found us? And how is it that you knew that Deacon would be with
us?”

“Our networks of informants have a good deal
of overlap,” he explained, turning his horse to the open field.
“Oh, and do not get comfortable with those weapons. I'll be getting
them back when you are through.”

“Over my dead body,” Tus grinned, holding the
bulkiest weapon, a battle ax. It looked like a toy in his
hands.

“If it comes to that,” he replied, casting a
final glance at his weapons as a mother might when her children
leave the nest.

With that he was off. Deacon pulled open his
satchel and slid the large bundle inside, eagerly pulling open the
messenger bag once both hands were free. He'd only managed to pull
the first page out when Caya put her hand on it.

“What was that?” she asked.

“What? The page?” Deacon asked in
confusion.

“Where did you just put that big bundle
Desmeres gave you?” she asked. “It couldn’t have fit into that
little bag.”

“It is a localized distortion of dimensional
. . . it is bigger inside than out,” he explained.

Caya nodded. “I see. Well, I'd say we find
someplace out of the wind until this storm blows over. Once . . .
“

“No. No, there is no time for that!” Deacon
objected.

“Look here, wizard. Dedication is one thing,
but we've got to reach them in one . . . “ Caya began.

Deacon pulled his crystal free and released
it. The gem floated up slightly and took on a bright glow. The wind
around them slowed to a slight breeze, the snow sprinkling gently
down. All around the group the wind whipped and raged, but among
them it was gentle as a lamb.

“Right . . . well then, we continue,” Caya
said, leaning over to Tus to add. “We should have gotten a wizard a
long time ago.”

#

Above the clouds, the others flew until the
sun neared the opposite horizon. Then, suddenly, Ether dove through
the clouds, her windy body boring a tunnel through the icy mist.
Myn dove after her. The clouds were thicker and denser than they
had been that morning, and they had taken on an ominous darkness.
Fat crystals of ice pelted them mercilessly as they made their way
through, soon emerging into a swirling tempest of falling snow.
There was no hint of the blizzard from above, but now it raged all
around them. The wind whipped Myn side to side and threatened to
tear her riders from her back.

Ether was lost among the swirling flakes, but
Myranda managed to guide Myn. What little light made it through the
clouds served only to turn the world around them into a blur of
gray and white. When the ground came, it seemed to leap out at them
from nowhere. Myn landed as softly as she could, dislodging an
unprepared Ivy in the process. Myranda climbed down and helped her
to her feet.

“Where are we?” she screamed over the howling
wind.

“The Eastern Mountains, about midway between
Entwell and where I found you, but deeper among them,” Myranda
explained.

“What's that smell?” Ivy asked, covering her
nose.

Myranda ventured a sniff of the freezing air.
Even among the snow and bitter cold she could detect something. It
was a hot, acrid smell that clutched at the nose.

“Brimstone,” she replied.

“This way! Quickly,” came Ether's voice
through the gales.

They set off toward the sound and soon found
her in her stone form, making her way steadily along the
mountainside.

“He is inside. We need to find a way in,”
Ether stated.

“A way inside a mountain? I didn't know there
were places to
be
inside a mountain. I thought there was
just more mountain,” Ivy said in confusion.

“This mountain is different. It is that rare
sort that is alive inside. Molten and vital, like the land when it
was young. A fire mountain,” Ether said, purposefully stalking
along a steep bit of slope, crouched low and running her fingers
along the rocky ground.

Slowly she paced until she seemed to find
what she was looking for. Clasping her hands together she hammered
at the mountainside. Blow after blow rained down, seemingly with no
result. Finally she shifted to air and launched skyward. Moments
later her stone form came crashing down with earthshaking force.
Cracks began to radiate outward from her crater, and the rumbling
sound of stone giving way managed to momentarily surpass the din of
the storm around them. With an earsplitting crash a whole section
of the mountainside slumped inward, crumbling to boulder sized
stones and exhaling a scalding hot breath of sulfurous fumes. The
dust and snow settled around it to reveal a jagged, pitch black
tunnel leading into the heart of the mountain.