Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (57 page)

Except… 

The demons raced past her, as if she were not there.  They
flew whisper close past the knights, past the makeshift shelter and the other
trappings of the camp, not slowing at all and not touching anything.  The
demons did not swerve or weave.  They merely ran straight lines that managed
not to cross anything in the camp.  Their eyes never wavered.  They saw
nothing.

“Thank you, Dith,” Renda breathed.

The fog thinned and swirled around them in the demons’ wake,
and through it, she tried to gauge their numbers as they passed.  It looked so
far to be about as large a force as that which they had faced at the Lacework,
but even so, she was fairly certain this was not the same army.  They were too
many and too fresh, and to her small relief she saw no mages among them, at
least not yet.  Small relief, indeed.  That they had now met two armies of
these creatures before they’d even made landfall on Byrandia proper only fed
her fears that the land was overrun.

She stood as if in a dream, strangely motionless, while the
demons continued to swarm past her, just a sweep of light and shadow and wind
across her face.  The fog thinned and swirled in the demons’ wake, giving her
brief glimpses of the other knights, the camp, and the horses, most of whom had
gone instantly to silence upon scenting the demons.  She had no sense of the
passage of time as the creatures went by except for a dull ache in her arm.  She
still had her sword raised.

Was this force of demons making its way to Syon?  She
doubted it.  They were not provisioned, and the landbridge had no game for them
to hunt.  They were equipped to fight an enemy near at hand, most likely the
knights.  But thanks to Dith’s protections, she and the others had only to stay
still and let them pass.  They would likely return when they realized they had
passed their quarry by, but at the very least, the confusion should buy the
knights some time.  Time was what they needed more than anything else.

At last, their numbers seemed to be thinning.  In only a
moment more, they would be gone.  Only a few remained––from the look of their
lumbering shadows in the fog, the stragglers, those who could not keep up. 

All they had to do was stay still and let them pass.

Let them pass.

Cold, dark. Something badly out of place…
 

She tried to shake off the feeling off, refusing to let it
overwhelm her, refusing to acknowledge it because if she was forced to
acknowledge it, she would be forced to believe it.  Please, B’radik, not again…

Suddenly Gikka pulled her down to the ground and bade her be
silent.

In the distance, lumbering closer behind the last of the
demons, she heard heavy foot falls and muttering, grunting, as of someone
talking to himself.  She knew this sound.  This sound filled her nightmares.  It
was a sound she’d hoped never to hear again.

“Kadak,” she whispered.

“It cannot be,” hissed Gikka.  “Kadak is dead, you saw to it
yourself.”

“It could be no other!”

Her mind went to Vonn’s strange attack on Qorlin and the odd
glow in his eyes that Kerrick and Amara had described.  She shuddered.  She had
known.  She supposed Gikka had guessed, as well.  But rather than give voice to
her fears, even in her own thoughts, she had driven the notion out of her mind
as impossible.  She had told herself that Kadak was gone, and that no other
such creature could possibly live.

Still, even as Amara had said the words, she had known.

From the deep fog, a shape took form just as she feared it
would, the shape which had haunted her dreams for years.  Lumbering forward on
great clawed feet, its tail sweeping behind it for balance, she saw the
silhouette resolve through the fog.

The huge creature bore Kadak’s general form, the strange
shape of his head, the odd split jaws.  But there, the similarity ended.  The
pattern of his skin, whether its actual color or some sort of battle paint, was
different. The shape of his armoring scales was different, and they seemed
shinier, almost metallic, compared to Kadak’s, reflecting the light from the
camp’s fires.  His tail was broader, and where Kadak had been soft from having
spent too long lurking in his stronghold, this creature was all of muscle and
sinew beneath the thick demon skin.

She felt more than she saw the movement to her left and
turned.  Such another of the Kadak-like creatures half lumbered and half
slithered southwestward, unaware of her.  Just past it, she saw another making
its way.  She unconsciously lowered herself even deeper into the thinning
clumps of grass and tried to catch her breath.  Beyond this one, she saw
another.  And beyond that one, she made out the silhouette of yet another.  She
stopped moving, stopped breathing, dared not lift her eyes to look at them
directly. 

Kadak, the creature they had so proudly defeated, the
ultimate villain of the Five Hundred Years’ War, on whom they had lost half a
millennium and millions of lives, had not been, as they had assumed, the father
of all demons. She felt a scream of hysteria rising in her throat and fought to
quell it.

“By my count, five,” Gikka breathed.

“Aye.”

Only a few yards from her, one of the beasts slowed.  Its
great head turned to one side and then another, sniffing the air suspiciously. 
It was so close, and she dared not move.

Had they caught a scent or heard a whisper, she wondered, or
were they searching for something in particular? 

Then, as she feared they might, as always in the depths of
her darkest dreams, the monster stopped, planting its great birdlike talon in
the grass beside her.  Behind it, the rest also drew to a stop.

Her hand shook where she flexed it around the sword. 
Knowing what it had been to fight Kadak, she found the idea of fighting such
another, to say nothing of the fighting five of them, even more terrifying. 
She had to focus her mind against the fear.  What could they want?  What could
they be looking for?

“Gikka,” she whispered, easing her second sword clear of its
scabbard and handing it to her, “look to the duke’s safety.  No matter what
happens here, he must survive, or all is lost.  Do what you must.”

She felt a hand squeeze her shoulder, and then she was
alone. 

So far, neither the creature before her nor the others had
seen them.  She had to hope it would lose patience and continue on its way. 
Then they would be in position to retreat forward, as it were, into the town
ahead and away from the creatures.  At least in the town, they could find cover. 
Out here they were vulnerable.

Renda gripped her sword and backed slowly away from the
creature as low in the grass as she could.  Soon, seeing nothing, the creatures
would lose interest.  They had only to wait, she told herself.

Gikka met Damerien as he emerged from the lean-to and
unceremoniously threw her cloak over him.  “Come along, my Lord Trocu,” she
said.  “Jath and Chul already have horses waiting, and Nestor awaits your
pleasure.”

“I’ll stay.”  Damerien looked out through the swirling
darkness at his knights.  He reached down to pick up his sword belt.  “My place
is with them,” he said.

“Aye, my Lord,” she replied, taking his sword belt from him
and strapping it round his hip, “but not just now.”

“Of course now!” he bellowed, and she felt an electric
tingle on her spine.  “I am not a child!”

“No, no child are you, and I’ll thank you to keep your voice
low for the knights’ sake,” she said quietly, nodding toward the knights, “but
my Dith tells me you are the target of their attentions, and my Lady charged me
to see you to safety.”

“Impossible.  They cannot know I am here.”

“They do.”

“Impossible.”

“Enough!”  Gikka stared into his gold eyes, unflinching. 
“Two years and a lifetime ago, it was your very life, right here in my hands,
do you remember it?  Do you?”  She pinched the Bremondine cloak she’d thrown
over him.  “This cloak you gave me in remembrance.  ‘Trust and gratitude,’
those were your words.  Well, your worthy cousin bids you now, trust me just
once more and hie you hence under my wing.  I’ll brook no argument, if I have
to knock you on the head to see it done, so help me.”

“I am still Duke of Syon!”

“Aye, Your Grace, you are still the duke.  But I’m still
Gikka.  And we
will
away.”

They glared at each other.

“Very well,” he replied at last, “but we need not go at
once.  We’ve time yet.  Fetch Nestor to me.  And Jath.  Please.”

She cocked her head.  “I’m not liking the sound of this.”

“Gikka, sweet,” Trocu said gently, brushing a stray lock of
her loose brown hair out of her face just the way Brada had done long ago, before
she’d met Dith.  She felt the sting of tears in her eyes as she touched his
hand, letting herself miss him at last, letting herself remember the secret
loss she’d felt when Brada had died that she had not shared with anyone, not
even Renda.  “You bade me trust you, and rightly so.  I ask you now to trust
me.  I give you my word as Duke of Syon, I will go with you when the time
comes.”

“Your word.”

“My word as Damerien, for all who have borne that name.”  He
looked into her eyes.  “Only let me help them.”

She squeezed his hand and went to find the Keepers.

The monster before her flexed its claws and edged its foot
forward indecisively.  Yes, she thought, as if it would hear her and obey.  There
is nothing here for you.  Go from this place.

Reluctantly, it moved ahead, and behind it, the others
followed suit.

She breathed out and let the tension out of her body.

But then, with a sick feeling in her gut, Renda watched the
rest of the creatures spread themselves and raise their hands in a gesture she
remembered seeing from Kadak in his stronghold, and she ducked into the grass.  Then,
as if to confirm her deepest fears, an explosion of white hot light flared and
burned away the fog from all around them at once.

At the edge of her vision, she saw Dith collapse to his
knees.  The powerful protections he had set over the camp had negated the
deadly white heat of the monsters’ attacks and saved their lives, but that was
all, and now those protections were gone.  Under the slowly fading blaze of
light that remained, the knights, the camp, the horses…everything was suddenly
visible and vulnerable to them.

Nothing moved, and time seemed to stop as the handful of
knights faced them.  Then at the edge of the light, she saw movement.  Lots of
movement.  The demons who had run past them into the night had returned, no
doubt summoned by their leaders, these greater demons, these demon generals. 
The Kadak-like creatures had not been indecisive at all.  They had been merely
waiting for their armies to return to them before they began their attack.

She saw the creatures peer through the bright light.  Then
from its strange split mandible, the one nearest her uttered a single word.

“Damerien.”

She breathed out, her blood pumping furiously through her
body. 

“Damerien!” the creature growled, bringing its huge head
down to the ground next to her, studying her.

Slowly, Renda rose from the grass, legs shaking, and raised
her sword.  “No.”

Dith thought to try to raise his protections over the
knights again, to perhaps bend the strange unnatural light around them and try
to hide them, but it was futile.  The creatures had already seen them and
scented them.  He would not have enough power to shield the knights under those
circumstances, not well enough to protect them from creatures like this.  His
protections, as powerful as they had been, had been barely enough to save their
lives, and in the process had depleted his strength.  He simply hadn’t enough
power left to him.

“I thought you were good at this.”

The flare of anger that went through Dith’s mind made
Galorin laugh.

“You have the power of a Guardian, boy, but you lack the
wisdom.  Well, you lack my wisdom, at any rate.  Must I spell it out for you? 
If you cannot bend the probability one way, you must bend it another. You must
find their weakness and exploit it, even with your power depleted.”

He shook his head.  What probability could he bend, the
accuracy of the arrows?  He could not do much against the creatures.  They
lacked the weakness even Kadak had shown.

“I am certain inspiration will come.”

She took care not to look into the demon general’s eye lest
it jump bodies as Kadak had done, but she held her ground while the creature
moved around her, studying her.  Let it study her, let it kill her, but the
more time the knights could buy for Gikka to get Damerien away, the safer he
would be.

“Damerien,” it murmured in almost bargaining tones, its
voice soft but menacing, its abattoir breath blowing over her face.  It lifted
one of its great claws, and the implication was clear.

She leveled her sword and bared her teeth.  “I said no.”

The creature let out a great roar of frustration, followed
by the others, a deafening sound that froze her marrow. 

Then she heard a human voice let out a furious battle cry
that was joined almost at once by several others.  She knew that voice.  She
had known it all her life.  It belonged to her father, and to her horror, he
was attacking.  Then from the knights nearby, she heard the clatter of weapons
and running feet.  One by one, the knights ran to join the battle.

“No!” she shouted.  “Do not engage them!”

The creature beside her laughed.

Then order dissolved into chaos, and the battle was joined. 

The main body of the demon army had swept in at once, and
the knights had been driven together to fight the front-most of the huge
monsters, the demon general that Daerwin had attacked, while holding off the
hordes coming in behind them.  Focused as they were on this single immediate
enemy, the demons were forced to close around them in a bunch, fouling their
movement on each other so that they had little room to swing their weapons,
which reduced how many the knights had to fight at a time.  Arrows flew
dangerously close to the embattled knights, most with their broad bladed heads
sticking harmlessly in the demons’ armored skin.