Samual (21 page)

He also had some limited ability with nature magic. He could use it to call and sometimes command creatures, or to make them feel friendlier towards him. Sometimes it helped him to see into a person's soul or to spot deception and malice. But that was as far as he'd ever got with it. Still, this seemed like the perfect time to find out all it could do. If nothing else, if the enemy came at him on horseback he could make the horses disobey their masters. Horses were quite easy to command. Did demons ride horses?

In time he added the last string to his magical arsenal, as he reached out for the life force of whatever creatures were nearby, though there were precious few. Deep in the soil he could feel the worms and a few insects going about their business. Further up in the sky he could feel small birds soaring, while a few more slept in trees some leagues away. But no larger creatures were nearby. Nevertheless, he let the song of life merge with the rest of the music pouring through him until finally he felt complete. Complete and strong.

That he knew, was as much as he could do. Others could also bend the will of water and air, and they had powerful weapons in them, but he had no affinity for those elements. To him they had no soul. Nor did he have the magic of the mind that illusionists seemed to live with. And though it would have been wondrous in this place, light was not his to command either. Still, what he did have was enough to make him a dangerous enemy to anything that dared approach, and for a while he could almost make himself believe that that would be enough. Enough to get him out of this strange place. That feeling however, didn't last long as the darkness and feeling of isolation of the place began to wear him down.

Knowing he was as ready as he could be, Sam decided it was time for him to leave this place. Though where he would be going to was unclear. He had no idea where he was, no idea of which direction to travel, and he couldn't sense any other place within this dark, threatening land. But neither could he stay in this one spot forever.

He decided to keep travelling in the same direction he had already started in when he had approached the first torch, and mentally he plotted out a course from one torch to the next. It was almost a straight line. Cautiously, he took his first step along the path he had set out for himself, and soon was heading towards the unknown.

The next torch he reached proved to be no different to the first. A single fire brand, it stood as high as his head from the ground, and burned brightly in the gloom. At its base he found more skulls, bleached bones and white powder mixed in with the dirt. Turning around briefly, he could see his footsteps in the dust, a sign of the fifty odd paces he'd walked in this strange place. But other than that there was no sign of anything different in front of him or behind. He had the horrible feeling that no matter how far he walked there might never be.

Carrying on he walked to the next torch and then on to the next one and the next, finding still more bones as he went. He found the sight of so many bones disturbing. It kept making him wonder just how many people had perished in this dark world. More he suspected, than he could count. He also found himself wondering about other things as he walked.

For instance who looked after the torches? It would take an army just to maintain them. There were surely hundreds if not thousands of torches surrounding him on all sides. And where were the stars? If it were truly night then surely he should be able to see the stars? Or was he inside some sort of gigantic cavern as he'd feared? If he was then it was a cavern large enough to contain a desert – and that didn't seem possible. And was this even part of his own world? Or had he somehow been sent directly to the underworld? Even though he had no memory of dying, he still couldn't shake that idea.

A full half hour of wandering went by like that as he kept trying to answer impossible questions, without any sign of change. He was almost becoming bored by this place. Suddenly a scream pierced the darkness. A woman's scream. It came from somewhere ahead of him, and without thinking he ran towards it, knowing only one thing; that he wasn't alone in this nightmare after all, but that if he didn't hurry he soon might be.

“Hanor!” Having run at least three hundred yards toward where he had heard the scream coming from, Sam still could not see the woman. Nor could he see an enemy. In fact he couldn't really see anything much past each torch, and he began to despair that he had run past the woman, or in the wrong direction.

Another scream though told him he was heading in the right direction after all, and the woman was still alive, whoever she was. Four more torches came and went, until Sam could suddenly hear other noises. Strange noises. He could hear the rustling of wings. They sounded a bit like bat wings, though if they were then they were very large. He could also hear a sound like the squeaks that rats made when they were excited. Again though it sounded very loud. No rat ever born could have the lung power needed to make these squeaks. And then there was the sound of the air parting rapidly as things flew through it, diving and swooping. Very large things.

“Fire bright.”

Realising that before he could do anything at all he needed to be able to see what he was facing, Sam uttered the childhood incantation he had been taught so many years before. On cue the entire area around him for hundreds of yards became brightly lit by the torches, their glow no longer yellow and orange, but white as they burnt so much hotter. What it revealed though, almost made him wish he had remained in the dark.

A woman was running towards him. She was a proper woman as his father would have described her. A lady perhaps. Well dressed, attractive, and obviously a lady of means. Just then though she was dishevelled, her dress ripped and torn, and blood leaked from a dozen or more cuts to her arms and face. Razor sharp slashes. That was bad enough, but behind her was what had caused the slashes, and they were far more worrying.

Imps was his first thought, because they looked like some of the artists' paintings of them in Fall Keep. But imps he had always thought of as small and ungainly. Not a true threat. These on the other hand looked deadly. Their leathery wings seemed to have some sort of serrated bones along the front, and their talons were covered with blood as they weaved and dived their way down onto the woman and ripped another piece out of her skin. But even worse than their appearance was their number. There had to be hundreds of the flying devils flitting through the sky.

Almost without thinking Sam launched a fire ball at the ones nearest the strange woman, and then watched as half a dozen of the flying creatures turned into orange explosions as they crashed down on the dirt behind her. It was enough he figured, to get the woman to safety, or to the relative safety of him. But even as he was congratulating himself on having saved the woman, a sudden sound and a tearing made itself known and he felt something sharp slice through his right cheek. He didn't even need to turn around to realise there were more of them behind him. He also discovered that their talons were sharp.

Without thought he flung another fire shape over his head, this time a chained fire lightning spell that cast its fire from one creature to the next, and was immediately rewarded by the sound of imps screaming as their bodies dropped to the ground. That accounted for at least a dozen more of them. But there were still plenty remaining.

By then the woman had reached him, and automatically he erected a fire shield around them both. A dome that sheltered them from attack. He thought it should provide them with some reasonable protection, and if necessary he could hold it all day and all night.

“Are you all right?”

He bent down to the woman who had fallen to her knees, worried about her injuries. That worry grew when she collapsed the rest of the way to the ground in front of him, her strength seemingly gone. In truth it didn't surprise him, as he had already noted the extreme pallor of her face and the terrible amount of blood she had lost. It was only luck and determination that had kept her going this far. He also realised that if he didn't fight well, they might soon both be dead. They might soon become more bones in the sand.

Imps he remembered from his days studying under Master Smythe, had magic of their own. The magic of confounding. They could wear down any spell or enchantment over time, and that most definitely included his fire shield. It was pity really as the fire shield was one of his most useful defences. Now though it seemed that he couldn't afford to keep using it or any other defensive spell, as the effort involved in holding the spell active would sooner or later exhaust him, leaving the imps free to attack. His only option was to attack and destroy the imps before he ran out of strength.

Leaving the fire spell unattended – it would continue to hold for a while longer – he readied his attack, an ice crystal barrage. It was a good attacking spell for this particular enemy. Speaking the incantation to focus his thoughts he froze the water vapour in the air around him into thousands of tiny ice shards, and spun them crazily around his head as though he were the centre of a tornado. As time went by and the fire shield lasted longer than he expected even without his effort, he kept increasing the power of the ice crystal spell, adding ever more ice crystals to the rapidly spinning mix and increasing the speed with which they spun.

It was a heady feeling, shaping and holding the spell in the midst of his fire shield. Ice and fire were two sides of the same magic, but they always had to be kept separate. But it was no more difficult than many other spell combinations he'd tried. His only problem was the surprising amount of time the fire shield was holding. He could feel the imps' power as they eroded away the bonds of the shape and with hundreds of them working together in harmony he'd expected the spell to fail much earlier. Perhaps they weren't as strong as he'd thought, or maybe that was a sign of the advances he'd made in the previous weeks as his shapes had become more solid.

Finally though Sam felt the shield give way. It was the imp's cue to attack as one and they streaked toward him and the unconscious woman at his feet. But it was also his cue to attack. Even as the masses of imps began their charge he released the shape holding the spinning ice shards and watched as they shot out in all directions like arrows.

It worked perfectly. The imps and the ice shards met head on, and in the blink of an eye the imps were reduced to piles of bloodied meat as they fell lifeless to the ground. Not a single one escaped despite their ability to confound magic, because he'd used such a directionless spell. No matter how they tried to alter the trajectory of the ice shards with their magic, there were still too many, and at least one was always going to hit.

“Yes!” Sam pumped his fist in delight, as the light of the illumination spell revealed at least a hundred imp bodies surrounding him and the woman. He could still see bodies lying dead at a distance of seventy or eighty yards, and there were no live imps any further out. Not that he could see that far, but his magical senses told him that. He knew that he and the woman had passed the first barrier between them and freedom from this place, and he was more than happy. Better yet, he wasn't even tired. If need be he could repeat this attack all night long when he hoped the imps would leave as sunlight burned them. Then again, that was assuming this place had a morning, or a sun. Somehow he doubted it.

But perhaps he'd celebrated too soon? He realised that the moment he heard the sound of thunder in the distance and knew it was not the sign of a storm coming. Not when the thunder was in the ground. This was the thunder made by heavy feet. Hundreds of them marching out of step. And they were all marching in his direction. He knew they weren't friends.

Even as he wondered what new monster was coming, Sam saw the first of them coming into view, and tried not to cringe. Stone trolls. Where the hell had stone trolls come from? They lived in mountains not deserts, and they didn't like the dark or fire. But he didn't have time to wonder about the wrongness of it all. He had to prepare to fight, and to fight hard.

Stone trolls were tough opponents. Their rock skin absorbed almost all blows from weapons with ease and most magic attacks, particularly fire. Moreover they were stubborn, and once they attacked they wouldn't stop. Fortunately they were both slow and stupid. It was his only edge. Especially when he couldn't take advantage of their slowness to run away, because even if he didn't have the woman to carry off as well, they – like the imps before them – were coming from all sides. There was no direction to run in.

He quickly decided that the best weapon against them would be their own weight, and without even thinking about it he sent out a ripple of earth magic that liquefied the ground around. It still looked like dirt, but anything that tried to cross it would soon find itself swimming. And stone trolls to the best of his knowledge, couldn't swim.