Redemption of Thieves (Book 4) (11 page)

When Terrac reached the top of the steps, I managed to catch his gaze for an instant. He smiled weakly as he was hauled past me but I could see by the paleness of his face and the way he sagged between his captors that he was in pain. He had the look of one fighting to remain on this side of consciousness as he was taken directly to the stone altar at the heart of the dais.

“What’s going to happen to him?” I repeated, sweat breaking out on my upper lip. I would have grabbed the old shaman’s arm and forced him to answer me if my arms hadn’t been pinned firmly behind me.

When the old one turned to face me, I detected a gleam of triumph in his eyes.

He said, “Your friend attempted to escape, I am told, and was then doubly foolish in returning with the hope of freeing the rest of you. For that mistake he has earned the honor of beginning the blood rites.”

My stomach lurched but I summoned what defiance I could. “No. Let it be me,” I said. “What is the need of killing any of these others? Surely the bearer of the bow is a great enough sacrifice?”

The shaman bared sharp, yellow teeth. “I think not. Maybe when you see your friends die you will have a change of heart concerning our offer.”

I knew he was toying with me. He knew full well what it would do to me to watch this particular prisoner die. It was not by accident Terrac had been chosen to go first. I cursed whatever foul magic let the savage see into my heart and mind. But I held my tongue. If only I could buy a little time, just a few minutes to form a plan…

But that opportunity wasn’t given to me. As I stood heartsick and frozen to the spot, Terrac was tied across the altar.

The old shaman said to me, “Do not stand back. I think you will wish to miss nothing of what is to come.”

He motioned my guards and I found myself dragged forward to stand directly before the altar. I looked down on Terrac lying bound and helpless across the stone, already stained dark with the blood of a thousand past sacrifices. His face was taut with pain but he betrayed none of the fear he must have felt. His captors had removed his armor, exposing a bright patch of red spreading across his shoulder and the tear of a jagged wound beneath his ripped shirt.

The shamans ringed the six-sided altar and each produced a long, jagged dagger. The old one raised his hands to the night sky and shrilled a short speech I couldn’t understand. The audience answered with enthusiasm, the night erupting into the noise of stamping feet and animal-like screams that echoed around the clearing.

When the head shaman made a sharp cutting motion the crowd instantly stilled. The old one threw back his head and began a bone-chilling chant, that same chant we had first heard back in the cages. When he paused, the younger shaman next to him took up the song and was followed by a third, until the singing passed around the entire circle. Then silence descended. I felt the audience holding their breaths and realized I was holding mine.

The head shaman towered over Terrac but his attention was on me, a question in his eyes.

If I intended to stop this, it must be now. I opened my mouth to speak the words that would stay his hand, to give away the bow. But then my gaze found Terrac’s, and he looked at me as if there was no audience around us and no knife hovering over him.

Don’t give them what they want. Hold firm
.

I could almost hear his voice in my head. He didn’t want me to give our enemies the means to destroy the province, not even if I could save his life by doing it.

So I swallowed my protest and pressed my lips tight.

The shaman hesitated no longer. His knife flashed, severing fingers from his victim’s hand. Terrac screamed in pain and I squeezed my eyes closed.

I tried to shut out everything around me. Clenching my jaw, I saw Terrac and I swimming together in Dancing Creek and climbing the rocks near Boulder’s Cradle. Terrac sitting on the grass helping me learn to write my letters. Terrac hunting alongside me and Brig. I summoned my magic to blot out the pain and impending death, even as I drew to mind another ordinary scene—the old campsite at RedRock, where Terrac and I had spent so much of our youth. I was atop a rock over the cave, looking down. For an instant I saw the familiar green clearing and campfire. Then, suddenly, I was soaring impossibly high and it was no longer Dimmingwood spread out far below but a dark forest of strange, towering trees. At the heart of that black forest, I saw a clearing where a scene from a nightmare unfolded before my eyes.

A great stone altar stood before a crowd of people so tiny they seemed like ants. I saw a suffering figure stretched across that altar and a handful of evil little men bent over him, tormenting him with small, shiny blades. Beyond them waited dozens of other frightened captives bound together and awaiting the moment when they too would be led up those stone steps and bound across the bloody rock.

And there at the center of it all stood one lone figure, straight backed and hard faced with a bow slung across her back. Somehow I knew she had the power to stop them all with a single word. But her mouth was shut tight and no plea or command escaped her lips. Within her she contained the strength to end this horror, but she was either too stupid or too uncaring to employ it, choosing instead to wait. To watch as they killed him and then another prisoner and another until finally it would be her own life taken.

Watching that stupid young woman, I was outraged at her refusal to act. Her stubbornness disgusted me. I wanted to sweep her up in my hand and crush her, to snatch her up from where she was and bring her here, where I could… I could…

I could snatch them all up.

The flash of clarity broke through my anger. I was experiencing one of those magical rifts Hadrian and I had talked about. Somehow I had created this rift, had willed my mind back to Dimmingwood. What if I could take myself there in body and the other prisoners with me? In theory it was possible, but I had never used my magic for anything so big before. Breathing deeply and refusing to think of the consequences of failure, I commanded my mind back into my body. I felt my awareness floating like a feather on the breeze, carried down, down…

The stone dais was beneath my feet again. The Skeltai guards still held me pinned in place. Terrac was before me and below I sensed the watching eyes of the other frightened prisoners. Mentally, I swept them all up in my arms. Terrac, myself, the Fists and the stolen villagers. Even the shaman who was bent over Terrac with a knife because I didn’t know how to separate what stood so close. I drew us all away from the torch-lit clearing, away from the heart of the Black Forest, and into a world of blasting wind and deep shadows.

There was a rushing sense of speed as we traveled through utter darkness. I didn’t try to understand where we were or how we passed through this space. If I relaxed my concentration even for a moment, relinquishing my hold on the others, I might never summon the strength to gather them again. There were so many of us. I felt the bounds of my magic shrinking around me and, panicking, I did what I’d never done before, strained my power to its limit. I drew on the well of magic until I thought it would go dry if it didn’t burn me out first.

But somehow I didn’t let go. I held on until I had that image of RedRock cave in Dimming firmly fixed in my mind again. I saw the cave and the little clearing with the cold stream dashing past. I breathed deeply and found the scent of pine in the air.

The ground beneath my feet grew solid. Not the solid of the stone platform in that other place, but the comforting and familiar feel of damp earth covered in leaves and twigs. The feel of home.

I was drained, utterly spent, and it was all I could do to remain on my feet, swaying slightly. Dizziness and nausea swept over me, the effects of overusing my magic. Looking around, I found myself surrounded by strange men, women and children. The woods villagers huddled together in groups, looking dazed and fearful. It hadn’t yet come home to them that they were safely returned to their world.

The Fists were here too. Disoriented, robbed of their weapons, and with their faces cut and bruised, they looked considerably less fierce than they used to. But they were quick to assess the change in their situation and already some were untying one another.

I had done it. I had brought us home. Murmurs of triumph and approval stirred at the back of my consciousness but I wasn’t ready to listen to them just yet. I was too exhausted to be swept away in the flood of relief and elation I should feel. It was a powerful thing to be facing certain death one moment and in the next to be snatched away and returned to safety. The woodsfolk weren’t the only ones uncertain how to react.

Above me, the leafy rooftop of Dimming swayed in the breeze and to the east the first orange and gold streaks of dawn were lighting up the sky. I looked at the encroaching forest and the shadow of RedRock cave looming out of the emerging grayness and realized I ought to be making plans for moving this body of frightened people back to the shelter of their villages. They had a terrible experience behind them and more hardship lay ahead. There were dead to be mourned and homes to be rebuilt. As for me, there was the Praetor to be informed of all that had happened. I had best get to work.

I would settle these folk here at RedRock to rest and recover from their ordeal and then I would go on to Selbius. Just thinking of the journey ahead made me heavy with weariness, but I forced my chin up and straightened my shoulders for the task. I would pick out a Fist or two to accompany me and leave the rest in charge of the rescued captives.

It wasn’t until then that I realized Terrac wasn’t among the Fists or the villagers. My heart twisted in sudden panic even as I whipped around, scanning the clearing in the half light, praying to see his tall figure just beyond that group of villagers or standing there at the edge of the trees. But he wasn’t here. He was nowhere.

Had I left him behind in the Black Forest? Had I lost my grip on him in that dark place between this world and that? Was he floating alone out there somewhere, lost in nothingness, doomed to be trapped forever in an unknown plain of existence?

And then I saw him. He stood with his back to me at the edge of the stream. It was a scene that stirred up memories. I recalled as if it were just minutes rather than years ago the time I built a lean-to just there and nursed a dying priest boy back to health. I’d thought him annoyingly sanctimonious then but there was a stubbornness to him I had admired right away and a hidden core of strength below his surface. It had just taken me a long time to discover it.

It didn’t realize my feet carried me toward him until he turned at the sound of gravel crunching beneath my boots. He held his injured hand against him, blood from his missing fingers leaking onto his torn shirt. His face was pale and he swayed weakly. But he knew me. I could tell by the joy that leapt to his eyes as he forced a faint smile that seemed to say,
you did it, Ilan. I knew you could.

In that instant, several things happened at once. Something moved at the corner of my vision and I picked up an extra life sense. Inside my head, the bow shouted
danger
.

But I was too slow to move.

A Skeltai savage, the old shaman, was at the edge of the clearing. I remembered inadvertently transporting him here with us. A lethal weapon of magic hovered over his fingertips—a ball of heat and flame that would pierce flesh like a blade and burn through the vital organs with swift agony.

Terrac saw the same thing I did—the weapon aimed at me and me powerless to stop it. My magic was spent and even my body betrayed me, refusing to attempt a physical dodge from the death about to be hurled at me.

Terrac leapt into action, throwing himself between me and the shaman.

Something came over me then. I saw the shaman’s eye fall on Terrac, knew with certainty that in the next breath, the magic would be released that would drop my friend as surely as a bow shot. My world jerked to a halt, thought and reason abandoning me, as sheer instinct took over. I had always imagined that in such a defining moment, with everything on the line, some inner part of me would take over, that Ilan, the hound, and all the other pieces that made up me would fall away and I would simply do what I had been raised to do. Fight.

But instead, panic took over. I lunged forward even as I opened my mouth to scream a hopeless warning. If the words came out, I never heard them. My heartbeat filled my ears, joined by the heavy thrum of powerful strains of magic being released to vibrate through the air. In my fear I released a magical weapon of my own, although I had no idea what or how. It was as if some other presence was responsible for the action and not me at all. No time to wonder. Fear filled me with one aim, to protect Terrac. There was no why or how, only this thing that must be done at any cost.

The few feet between us might as well have been a chasm. I knew even as I dived toward Terrac that I couldn’t reach him in time. I saw him waver from an invisible blow just before I slammed into him, hurling us both to the ground. My immediate instinct was to shield my friend and so I blanketed him with my body, part of me knowing already it was too late.

Terrac lay limp in my arms as I curled over him. I closed my eyes, rested my forehead against his chest, and waited, uncaring, for the next volley of enemy magic that would destroy us both.

Only it didn’t come. I waited for death but it was denied me. Terrac grew heavier in my arms. Every moment I became more aware of how still he was, how lifeless and breathless. And still no merciful darkness came to banish my pain.

With trembling limbs, I shoved unsteadily to my feet, one thought pounding through my brain. For killing my Terrac, the shaman must die.

But when I looked for the magic wielder, I discovered I was to be denied my vengeance. He already sprawled upon the ground, victim to that mindless flash of raw magic I had instinctively hurled at him moments ago.

Eyes stinging, I swallowed the boulder that seemed to be jammed in my throat. I dropped to my knees and huddled beside my friend’s motionless body, waves of grief pulling me under. I gave in to the aching loss, weeping loudly until my throat was raw and there were no more tears left.