The Five Elements (39 page)

"We have to stop!" Serena said, eyes open the moment Ensel Rhe had broken contact with her.

Aaron, looking back but not knowing what had happened, shook his head. "No! We have to keep going!"

"But your friend!"

Aaron heard the words, but he did not answer. He returned his gaze to the storm's center, where a great incandescence was coming into view. They had to press on.

But the wagon had had enough. Momentarily bereft of Serena's stabilizing magic, it shook and shuddered. Serena reapplied herself to the task, but without Ensel Rhe's supporting energy, she had little to supplement her own failing strength. She held the wagon together for ten minutes, then fifteen, focusing on only those most crucial pieces: the wheels, axle, and harness. Then, it was too much, and the wagon gave way.

The seat collapsed first, hurling Aaron back so that he and Serena grasped one another at the wagon's floorboards. Beneath them, they felt one of the rear wheels shatter. The wagon’s aft sagged, then the spokes of the other rear wheel came loose, causing the wagon's backend to slam to the ground. The dogs reveled in the pandemonium, running all the faster before the shock undid the harness securing half of them. The harness had been a hodgepodge of leather and rope from the start, held together only by Serena's magic. When it gave way it fell apart all at once. The lead pair of hounds bounded free. The others followed. The wagon's forward momentum did not last long. The rough terrain, muddy in many places, turned the wagon one way and then another, until one wheel caught against a protruding rock. The wagon turned sideways and began to flip. It hung precariously, but finally settled on its side. Aaron and Serena, still clinging to one another, slid down onto the sodden ground.

"Are you alright?" Aaron asked. Serena did not reply right away, though Aaron knew she was conscious by the way she held onto him. It took some reassuring before she would release her grip. Finally, she did.

"We have to keep moving."

Aaron picked the both of them up before looking in the direction of the city to gauge their distance. They were close. He said as much to Serena, who managed only a sigh. Then they advanced deeper into the maelstrom.

* * *

Eslar and sitheri hit the ground, tumbling one over the other until up and down blurred and the world became fleeting glimpses of a sky on fire and a blinding spatter of rainwater, mud, and ash. Ensel Rhe heaved with both arms, trying to dislodge himself from the thing holding him, but its claws, curved and wicked, refused to give. Serrated teeth snapped inches from his face, swampy breath blew into his face, and the claws tangled in his coat squeezed down until they pierced flesh. Ensel Rhe managed to bring his knee up between them, then he kicked out. His coat tore and then they were separated, spinning off in different directions. Though Ensel Rhe struggled to regain his bearings, he never stopped moving.

The tip end of a spear plunged for his face, but he jerked his head to one side just before the weapon's point sank into the sodden ground. Water and mud blinded him as he set himself spinning away. A hiss behind foretold of the spear tip again coming for him. Ensel Rhe dove forward, forcing himself into a somersault despite the pain setting his injuries on fire. His momentum carried him to his feet. Dizzy and weak, instinct took over as he drew his khatesh in a flash and spun around just in time as the sitheri jabbed at him again.

Ensel Rhe let the spearhead slide past him as he took one step forward and, raising his sword above his head, brought the blade down on the shaft of the sitheri's weapon. The sword sliced the spearhead from the haft, reducing the weapon to something akin to a long, bludgeoning staff. The sitheri wasted no time using it as such. Ensel Rhe ducked beneath the first swing, then countered those that followed, backing away while he struggled to clear his head and regain his center.

He’d barely done so when a flying machine much like the one Erlek had flown in on screamed into view. Riding it was a second sitheri. This one aimed the gyro at Ensel Rhe right before it leaped from the machine with scimitar held high. The gyro, unmanned, went astray, which left only the sitheri with descending scimitar to concern Ensel Rhe, who ducked beneath an attack from the other’s blunted spear right before lunging and rolling beneath the assault of the sword. When he came up, he was clear of both of them. Ensel Rhe had time only to turn and draw his small sword from the arsenal at his belt before the sitheri were on him again. The one tossed aside its headless spear in favor of its own scimitar. When they were positioned to either side of their prey, just out of reach of Ensel Rhe's khatesh, they stopped.

The one who'd dragged him from the wagon let the point of its sword drop almost to the ground. With its free hand, it broke something off from the band it kept looped over one shoulder. Ensel Rhe knew it for what it was—a scalp. But not just any scalp. It was his son's.

The sitheri dangled it from one claw, letting the eslar take in its every aspect. There was no mistaking that it was Hannu's. The copper hair, lush and thick once, like his mother's, but now dried out and stringy. The skin visible beneath was blackened and wrinkled, its blue-black, distinctly eslar sheen long faded from some four years' time hanging on a sitheri scalp band. The sitheri who held the scalp—who'd worn it across his scaled chest—did so because it was the one who'd murdered Hannu. This sitheri standing before him had murdered his son.

Rage seized Ensel Rhe. With no regard for the other, he launched himself at the snake-warrior. The sitheri dropped the scalp and met his charge. If the odds had been even, Ensel Rhe might have slain his foe right there, for his swords wove a tapestry of steel the sitheri's single scimitar could not match. But the moment Ensel Rhe had thrown himself at the one, the other closed. A slash was only narrowly avoided as the eslar, consumed but not suicidal, dove away. Turning about, Ensel Rhe found himself once more confronted by both snakemen. This time, their attack was unrelenting. They came at him hard, forcing him to take a defensive tact lest he find himself suddenly relieved of an extremity or cut in half. He was forced back, through the mud and beneath a sky whose crimson clouds wept fire. Ensel Rhe used his anger, letting it fuel muscles long past their endurance level. Still, what remained faded fast. The sitheri were quick and strong, where Ensel Rhe's movements slowed with each passing moment. Not even his rage was enough as his body, deprived of sleep for so long, battered and bruised by one foe after another, and drained directly so that Aaron's plan might reach fruition, betrayed him. The sitheri sensed, if not outright saw, the change. Much to Ensel Rhe's surprise, they did not press the advantage and kill him right away. Instead, when his ripostes came so slow they could have easily ended him, they hit his weapons hard enough to knock them from his hands. One of the snakemen—Ensel Rhe wasn't sure which one—backhanded him across the face. The blow knocked him from his feet. Water splashed all around him. Rain pounded into his face, blinding him. He felt a clawed hand at his shirt and another at his scalp. He imagined the blade hovering there, ready to slice into him. Instead, he was lifted up and held from behind. He blinked his eyes, clearing his vision just in time to see the sitheri's clawed fist launch at his torso like a battering ram. Pure agony gripped him as the blow landed very near his badly bruised ribs. He thought he heard the crack of one or more of them, but his hearing was reduced to the dull pounding of his heart and nothing else. The blows continued, most to his gut, until he was finally released. He slid to the ground, conscious, but in agony and unable to move. Then he felt a clawed hand grab hold of his hair, half-lifting his head from the mud. This time he knew the scalping knife was there, and, just beyond it, unblinking serpentine eyes that held no mercy.

But in the next moment, the knife was withdrawn and the grip on him released. Ensel Rhe's head slumped into the mud. It did not stay there. Forcing his eyes to focus, he craned his neck to peer through the rain and the dark as the sitheri took cautious steps away from him. Struggling to see through the gloom, he saw nothing at first. Then he saw the eyes, burning like hell coals, and the butcher's blade. Next, he saw the houndmaster himself step out from the blazing mist.

Houndmaster no longer, the Lord of Vengeance had come.

* * *

As Aaron and Serena entered the outermost area of Norwynne's ruins, the wind and rain lessened, then faded altogether. They stumbled through a field of cut, rectangular stones, some broken into pieces, others whole, and all having come from Regrok's leveling. Once, the wall had encircled the entire keep. No longer. In some places it still reached to its full height, though more often than not it was marked by breaches where only the foundation stones remained. Aaron had not fully witnessed the extent of the keep's destruction until now. As they climbed over and through an opening in the once proud wall, he looked on what remained of his home. His breath caught in his chest. No structure remained undisturbed. Nothing remained whole. Standing atop a pile of Regrok's rubble, Aaron tried to form a picture in his mind of what it had once looked like, but the destruction laid out before him was so complete it overwhelmed his senses, rendering such imaginings impossible to conjure. Still, once he had established his bearings, bits and pieces came back to him. He remembered apartments where folk had lived. The great arches marking entryway into the Underkeep. The merchant's bazaar with its magnificent, gaily-colored tents. The main street lined with the best shops in Norwynne. It was all gone now. Caved-in, smashed, or toppled. Though most of the floodwaters had receded or at least drained away into the Underkeep, puddles as deep as their knees were scattered at irregular intervals and the bare earth, where exposed, was soft. Even the cobbled avenues, whose care Norwynne's street wardens had always taken great pride in, were marked by ruts, cracks, and, in some places, great gaping holes. Such obstacles, many of which remained unseen despite the crimson luminosity bathing the city, made the going slow. It was with careful steps that they passed through the city and into the inner keep.

The place had changed. Broken rock, splintered roof timbers, and other debris littered the edges of its expanse. Pillars lining each side of the yard had been snapped like twigs, the arches they'd once supported crumbled into chunks of plaster, rock, and dust. The backdrop of the yard, the eastern wing of Lord Vuller's palace, with its high windows, wide balconies hanging over the square, and streaming draperies, was gone. Disparate clumps of rubble attested to its final fate. The centerpiece of this wasteland of destruction was something that had not been there a week ago and which had pushed the other wreckage aside: a great piling of dirt and rock and debris that rose into the sky like an earthen pyramid. At its top, Aaron knew he'd find Erlek's disciple.

Aaron exchanged glances with Serena before they started in. The soil they trod over was unsettled, as if a massive plow had been worked through it. They had to pick their way around or over great chunks of rock or smatterings of debris just to reach the edge of the great mountain. With no way of knowing if Erlek's apprentice had witnessed their approach, they began their ascent. Loose dirt and rocks threatened to send them sliding back down at every footfall. Working together, they fought for every step, crawling when necessary or setting feet and hauling the other up, only to have to switch places and repeat the exercise in order to continue ascending. At last, dripping with sweat and soiled with mud, they reached the top.

The first and only thing Aaron saw was Shanna.

It mattered not that she did not face them, for Aaron recognized instantly the curve of her figure, the slender shoulders, the darkness of her hair. An earthen brown robe that was soaked through clung to her body like a second skin and her hair, hanging wet and loose, caught the otherworldly sheen of the crimson sky as her head turned to stare over one shoulder. Her expression—narrowed brows, pursed lips, and a piercing stare that Aaron did not like at all—softened the moment she saw him. She whispered his name in disbelief. Turning around all the way, she asked, "What are you doing here?" The last word had barely escaped her lips when the softest whisper of rain began to fall.

Shanna stood higher than either Aaron or Serena, on a great slab of stone that was smooth at its top. Aaron could just see across its length. Something—a cupped depression—was at its center, just behind her. The depression had a golden glow emanating from it. Leaving Serena standing at the mountaintop's edge, Aaron scrambled onto the rock platform. Standing there, nearly face-to-face, he almost ran to her. But there was something in her bearing so unlike the Shanna of just a week ago that it gave Aaron pause. She stood taller and straighter, with an air about her that Aaron had never seen before. She'd always been cocky, confident, but this was different. Her face, aglow with the sky's eerie firelight, possessed a seriousness wholly uncharacteristic. Even the robe she wore was unlike anything he'd seen on her before. But for the color, it almost reminded Aaron of the robes of a sorcerer.

The disbelief and surprise at seeing her alive faded as words flooded Aaron's lips. So many he wasn't sure which ones to say first. But he found he didn't need to say anything at all. They'd known each other most of their lives. Looked out for one another. Shared adventures. Made vows to always be friends. Something unspoken passed between them. In that moment, Aaron saw it in her face and in her eyes. It was there in the turn of her head, in the way she reached up to smooth her wet hair behind her ears, and in the slight slouch that exemplified her defiance at anyone who dared to tell her how, where, or when she should do something. Here, at last, was the Shanna he knew so well.

Shanna flashed him a smirk. "You look like Hell."

Aaron glanced down, at the mud caked over torn pants, at his shirt, stained with grime and blood and shredded from thorns, scrapes, and a week in the wild, and at his hands and bare feet, for he'd lost his shoes a second time at Wildemoore. His hair was a mess, his lips blistered, he knew he stank, and, now that Shanna mentioned it, he felt like Hell, too. Still, Aaron returned a smile. "It's been a long week."