Firehurler (Twinborn Trilogy) (17 page)

Of all the arrows fired in the initial volley, there
were only three men picked out and targeted: Brannis, Iridan, and Rashan.
Brannis felt the arrows pound the breastplate of his armor and deflect off,
thankful for the excellent, runed armor his family was able to afford. He
wished he had made Iridan wear the conscript’s armor he had been issued. The
sorcerer stood out enough already without drawing more attention to himself,
and was a sitting duck.

Instinct took over as Brannis and the soldiers
scrambled back down the pass as quickly and as low to the ground as they could.
Brannis had the presence of mind, as well as the foolhardiness, to hang back
and cover his men’s retreat, trusting that his armor would turn aside any
arrows that struck the enchanted metal. Trying not to think of all the areas
his armor did not fully cover and what an arrow in them might feel like, he
nevertheless spared a glance back toward Iridan, ready to go back if he showed
any sign of having survived the barrage. What he saw made his blood go suddenly
cold.

Standing slightly in front of Iridan was the hermit,
Rashan. His arms were outstretched to one side, as if he had reacted to block
the arrows aimed at the sorcerer. In fact, arrows had pierced Rashan’s hands
and one arm, apparently leaving Iridan unharmed. Both men still stood. As
Iridan came to his senses and headed for safety down the pass, Rashan simply
stood there, bringing his hands in front of him. As he turned a bit, Brannis
saw several arrows sticking out of his chest and stomach. It seemed as if what
had just happened somehow failed to register in his head and had not told him
to fall dead.

Instead he clenched both fists and swatted an arm
across his front, shattering arrow shafts. A somewhat confused and less
organized volley of arrows followed from the fortress, as the archers slowly
started to realize that something was very wrong. Six or eight arrows ought to
have been enough to fell a slightly built young man, the brighter ones surely
reasoned. The more slow-witted of the archers rapidly caught up with those
forward thinkers when their second volley of arrows hung briefly in midair,
then dropped harmlessly into the chasm.

Not everyone in the fortress that day had been
assigned to the wall with a bow and arrows, so not everyone had been privy to
the sight of the unkillable hermit and his arrow-stopping magic. So those uninformed
individuals were unaware as to what was befalling their captured fortress until
the screaming started.

Brannis and his men stood there mutely, unsure whether
to be confused, relieved, or horrified; most of them went with all three.
Someone may at some point have uttered something to the effect of “What in the
name of all that is holy is going on in there?” but it went unanswered.

After shrugging off several mortal-looking arrow
wounds and halting a second volley mid-flight, the hermit had leapt across the
chasm and landed on top of the wall, then disappeared from view into the
fortress. It looked so simple, but Brannis had not heard any magic being used,
and there was no hand-waving or finger-waggling that he would have recognized
as proper spellcasting. Rashan simply shot across the gap as if fired from a
ballista.

Shortly after Rashan crossed, sounds could be heard
from inside the keep. It began with confused shouting and yelling, and
progressed through clatters of metal on stone, wet crunching noises, and
roaring flames. Throughout most of it, there was a lot of screaming—not battle
cries or screams of fear, though some of those may have been drowned out in the
din—but the screams of men dying less than quick deaths. The horrible
fascination and surrealism of it made it seem like an eternity, but in quite
short order, the sounds of battle ended, replaced by the rhythmic clanking of
the hoisting mechanism for the drawbridge being released. There was no one
standing on the far side to greet them when it finished opening.

No one moved. No one spoke. The silence coming from
the open drawbridge was distinctly asking “Well, are you coming or not?” but no
one seemed to want to be the first to cross.

Finally Brannis decided to assert his command and
announced, “Well then, we cannot very well stand here all day,” and then
stepped onto the drawbridge.

As he got halfway across, Iridan got up his courage
and ventured onto it himself. One by one, the rest of the troops followed suit.

On the far side, Brannis began to take stock and
realize what must have gone on during the hermit’s vicious assault. Bodies were
flung against the walls like rag dolls, with limbs torn off and blood
everywhere. One soot-stained stairway seemed to contain three or four bodies,
but no one seemed to be of a mind to pick through the greasy mess of charred
remains to get a good count. Swords and shields lay scattered about, the former
being rather incongruously clean compared to most of the devastation around
them. From the looks of the uniforms and what he could make out from the
bodies, the men appeared to be from Megrenn.

Megrenn was a former part of the Kadrin Empire,
conquered over a century ago, and which had regained its independence when
Brannis was still just a small boy. There were a handful of regions like it,
conquered during periods of particularly fierce expansion of the Empire, left
to drift back to their old governments when a more peaceful emperor or more
frugal high commander let control slip back to the hands of the locals. The
Megrenn were a seafaring people from the northlands, and for a time, the bounty
of their whaling fleets was much prized by the nobles of Kadrin. As shrewd
Megrenn merchants took advantage of fads in kerosene lamps and scrimshaw
knickknacks, petulant nobles began to consider cheaper alternatives. The
cheapest they decided on was to annex the country. Of course, fads never lasted
forever, and kerosene lamps fell out of popularity in favor of good
old-fashioned aether, and scrimshaw gewgaws came to be viewed as cheap and
tawdry, and Kadrin natives never quite developed a taste for whale meat. So
when the Megrenn decided to revolt and oust the Kadrin garrison, they had
little trouble about it. The garrison had already been cut to a skeleton crew,
and the remaining forces were overwhelmed … and butchered.

The Megrenn were not amused by their time under
Imperial rule. They had not been content merely with liberation; they sought
reparations, and knowing that the Kadrins were not the type to go in for that
sort of nonsense, they went about taking by force what they felt they deserved.
Of course, their winters of subjugation had left them bereft of any real
military might, but they made a nuisance of themselves, sending sanctioned
bands of brigands on horseback, whom they referred to amongst themselves as the
“light cavalry,” to harry and obstruct Kadrin traders traveling abroad and in
the remote reaches of the Empire itself.

By all appearances, they had done quite well for
themselves in taking over the fortress guarding Two-Drake Chasm. There were no
signs of Kadrin remains among the fallen, so presumably they had been in
control of the garrison for at least a little while and had set themselves up
comfortably enough, with provisions and everything, as if it were actually
under Megrenn command. Brannis had not counted the bodies but guessed that
there were roughly two dozen men, all now dead, who had been stationed there.
Certainly they should have been able to slaughter a small, weary,
under-equipped command group, even one with a junior member of the Imperial
Circle to aid them. But they had not counted on some strange, secretive hermit
leaping the chasm and butchering them.

“Butchering … them …” Brannis murmured under his
breath.

He could feel his pulse pounding in his ears, and his
stomach went a bit queasy. He turned from his musings and set off down the
eastern side of the pass before his better judgment could dissuade him.

Brannis did not have far to go. The hermit was sitting
a short ways ahead, in the middle of the road. His knees were pulled up to his
chest as he stared into the distance, his back to Brannis as he approached. The
late-morning light streamed through the gap in the mountains, and Brannis
realized that he had never really gotten a look at Rashan in full daylight. The
forest canopy, the rain, the shadows of the mountains … but now brilliant, warm
light cast a clearer picture as the hermit turned, sensing Brannis’s approach.
His hair was not merely a platinum blond, it was snowy white, and the pale face
seemed like smooth-polished ivory.

“I have missed it, you know.”

“You are really him.” Brannis tried not to sound
accusing. “You are
the
Rashan. Warlock Rashan Solaran, who died a
hundred summers ago.”

“Brannis …” There was a long pause. “If you could be a
sorcerer, would you go back and try the Academy again? Iridan told me that you
were popular there as a child, that you were the best student, until they tried
you at real magic.”

“What are you talking about?” Brannis was caught off
guard by the abrupt change from accusation to interrogation.

“Would you give up all you have now to go back and
take the life you thought you were going to have? Could you face all the people
who you left behind and act like nothing ever happened? If it turned out you
could do it, would you
want
to be accepted back in?”

“I am not sure, I guess. I do not see what this is
getting at, though. You are evading the question again.”

“Not really, this time. Yes, I am Rashan Solaran. I am
probably some great uncle of yours a handful of generations removed. I thought
the day would never come when I would return to the Empire. I am not even sure
what is left there for me anymore. I do not know whether I am a deserter, an
expatriate, a traitor, or merely returned from an unusually long sabbatical.
One hundred and two winters is a very long time.”

“But you were not a young man when they say you died,”
Brannis said as diplomatically as he could think of. “And you are still alive.
You must be nearly 250 by now.”

“Who is the oldest sorcerer ever known to have lived?”
Rashan asked.

“Umm …” Brannis searched back in his mind to academy
history lessons. “Gelverick Archon, was it not—212?” he ventured.

“Not bad, but it was 218.” Rashan seemed rather
pleased. “The text in third-rank history is off on the dates but a good
reference overall. They have it right in Colverge’s
Introductory Longevity
,
which I imagine you were not still around for in seventh-rank Practical Magic.”

Brannis’s mind was working in circles now. This was
not the conversation he had been expecting at all when he came to confront the
“hermit.”

“Come now,” Rashan said. “I taught for twenty winters
and more at the Academy and attended it too of course, when I was a boy. But
then, that was a
very
long time ago.”

Rashan fixed Brannis with a meaningful stare.

“All right, I will take your bait. What is the trick?
Is there some magic potion to take winters off a body, or a place where the
aether runs time backward, or are you just some sort of prodigy in
life-prolonging, using all your powers on keeping young?”

“Almost spot on with the last one, excepting of course
that it is hardly a drain on my Source to keep me vital. No, I am merely
immortal. My Source is closed; I do not bleed aether like mortal creatures do.
My own aether sustains me now.”

“But that is not possible,” Brannis said. “That is
basic magic. They teach it the first day at the Academy. It is the first thing
you teach small children about where magic comes from. The definition of a
living thing is that it gives off aether; anything else moving around that does
not is some sort of undead abomination or a—”

“—demon,” Rashan finished for him, nodding. “Yes, as
you understand it, I would be classified as a demon. The others find it casts
them in too harsh a light and prefer being referred to as immortals, but I do
not mind the term, really. It has a certain ancient authority about it,
referenced in mythology and legend, fearsome creatures of magic and rage,
eternal and mighty.”

“Others?” Brannis asked.

“Brannis, this is going to get long and complicated.
The Megrenn had plenty of horses for your men. I left them all alive, so we can
ride the rest of the way. It is only three days if we push ourselves a bit
early and late in the days.” Rashan sighed. “I cannot return now, so instead I
will go back. I shall answer what questions you might have as we ride.”

“Do you think you could stop talking in riddles? What
do you mean ‘cannot return … have to go back’?”

Brannis found himself talking to the warlock’s back,
as the little man—little demon?—strode past to where the horses were stabled.

“Probably not, but if you start listening in riddles,
you might find your answers quicker.”

*
* * * * * * *

“Well, you see, when something is immortal, the
population of them tends not to shrink much.”

Rashan rode along, his horse even with Brannis’s at
the front of the group. They were making good time, but without being able to
change horses, they carefully managed the beasts’ stamina.

“Even if there were only one to emerge every hundred
summers, you would still see the number of them grow. Mind you, demons can be
killed, but it is not so easy. All demons are comfortable with magic, our
bodies are sustained by aether, not reliant on flesh and blood to maintain
life. Most also take the time to reshape and refine their bodies, making them
stronger, or tougher, or more intimidating—whatever they wish. A smaller body
is weaker physically, but takes less aether to maintain.”