The Dreaming Hunt (3 page)

The prow of the rowboat thudded against the dock jutting out into the lake. He stood, caught his balance, and jumped onto the dock. He snagged the rope one of his men tossed him and tied off the line efficiently as the first drops of rain began to splat against his face.

The soldiers secured the oars and prepared to disembark while he strode ashore, his boots breaking through the crust of wet sand and sinking heavily into the beach. Gads, it was dark tonight. No hint of moon or starlight alleviated the impenetrable blanket of black overhead. He turned around to tell his men to bring torches and was just in time to glimpse a pair of dark forms rising silently out of the lake on either side of the dinghy. They grabbed his men from behind—covering their mouths in the process—and dragged them over the side of the rowboat and into the water. So quickly and silently was the attack executed that he barely heard a splash as his men slipped below the surface of the lake.

Had he not been looking directly at the stealthy attack when it happened, he'd have had no idea where his men disappeared to. As it was, he lunged forward to the edge of the lake, drawing his sword as he went. A brief gout of bubbles was the only sign of his men's passage.

Frustrated, he pulled up at the edge of the lake. He was not skilled in underwater combat nor did he have a potion in his pouch for breathing underwater. Blind and unable to breathe, he would be less than useless at attempting a rescue of his men. Who had the ambushers been? And why had they taken his men?

“Show yourselves, cowards!” he bellowed in futile fury.

This time, four black shadows rose from the thigh-deep water. The texture of scaled skin caught his eye. Gills slanted on their necks. Burly bodies were silhouetted darkly.
Merr.
Gregor swore under his breath. What on Urth were the mostly water-dwelling humanoids doing attacking him and his men? There had never been any Merr in this lake. The local lizardman clan claimed this water, and the two races were bitter rivals.

The first rule of combat against water dwellers was to force them onto dry land. He backed up the shore toward the thick wall of trees and shrubs that hid the tower. If the Merr planned to kill him, they would have to do it on his turf.

He spotted two warriors with distinctive coral blades gleaming pale in the darkness. A third had the glowing hands of a caster, and the fourth was just stripping off a thin pair of gloves. A poisoner, then. Certain Merr developed skills in delivering alchemical poisons by touch, and he'd heard an entire school of dueling existed among Merr poisoners.

The caster opened up with a curse spell intended to make him more vulnerable to weapons damage. These Merr must have mistaken him for human. Gypsies who served the Empire were rare but not entirely unheard of. He had no great love for Maximillian, but his position within the Empire allowed him to look out for his fellow gypsies.

As the curse magic struck him, he called upon his gypsy blood to resist it. The flash of magic fizzled around him without ever touching him.

“Gah,” the caster growled. He called out something to his cronies in gurgling syllables.

Gregor turned and sprinted for the tower and its defenses. He leaped over a patch of warded ground and skidded to a halt on the far side facing his foes.

The two warriors charged after him, and the first one hit the glyph. An explosion of heat slammed into Gregor, but the Merr warrior fell to the ground, burned into a blackened husk. Nasty business, incineration glyphs.

The second Merr warrior roared a battle cry and charged past his fallen comrade, coral sword raised.

Ever an efficient man, Gregor wasted no time with fancy footwork. He merely dodged the first swing of the deadly blade by ducking low. As soon as the sword whooshed overhead, he lunged in low and fast with his off hand, burying his dagger in the creature's side. He'd expected the toughness of the scaled hide and put all his weight behind the blow. He threw up his sword and caught the coral blade on its downswing with his own steel, forcing both weapons high overhead as he twisted his dagger, gutting the Merr.

The coral blade fell away, and he slammed his sword down onto the back of the creature's neck. The scales there were as tough as armor, however, and his blade bounced ineffectually. He yanked his dagger free and jumped back. The Merr, staggering, brandished his sword chest high in an erratic weaving pattern.

Using an underhanded swing that bypassed the wavering coral blade, Gregor's sword gathered speed and force, culminating in a thrust to the throat with all his weight behind it. The tip of his sword sank through six inches of meat, stopping only when it fetched up hard against the creature's spine.

Magic crackled against Gregor's back, but he recognized the vibration of curse magic and resisted it yet again.

The impaled Merr went limp, abruptly reduced to dead meat upon his blade.

Another blast of magic slammed into Gregor's back, this time high-level curse magic designed to cause debilitating pain and render him unable to defend himself. He resisted the spell once more, but he could not resist the caster's magic indefinitely. He turned and called magic of his own to hand. In quick blasts, he threw three silencing spells at the caster in case the creature had active shields of his own against magic.

The caster appeared silenced for the moment, but Gregor suspected his foe would remedy that momentarily. The poisoner was moving off to one side, flanking Gregor. Perfect. Gregor slid left, forcing the poisoner even farther to the right. One more step.…

Poof.

A glyph exploded that would trap the poisoner's foot in place, preventing him from further movement, which would give Gregor the breathing space he needed to deal with the blasted caster. He started to turn toward the magic user when, out of the corner of his eye, he spied the poisoner pulling out a small wooden box and withdrawing a vial. Gregor hesitated. Mayhap he should jump the poisoner first while the caster was silenced.

The poisoner pulled some sort of spiny quill from his belt and dipped it in the vial. He took a step with his one free foot to throw the quill and sprang the second half of the trap. A wooden framework dropped down from its hiding place in the tree branches above, dozens of razor-sharp blades lashed to it. The weight of the frame and the razors would slice anyone beneath them into tiny strips, killing him or her instantly.

Gregor gaped as the poisoner, in his last, desperate instant of life, launched the quill at him. It was an innocuous little thing, barely longer than his hand and not even a finger's width in diameter. It grazed his neck, barely scratching it.

But then the poison coating it struck with the force of a great hammer. He gasped at the power of it, even as he recognized the curse-based flavor of it. He threw everything he had into resisting the poison as he staggered backward, his equilibrium wrecked. The trees spun around him and the island tilted beneath his feet. He stumbled and fetched up hard against something cold. Stone.

Dying. He was dying.

Fight the poison.

Slipping.

The door beneath his cheek felt cool. Soothing. As if the White Tower stroked his skin gently.

He exhaled with one last dying rattle of life expelled.

In that suspended instant between life and death, the tower door gave way, opening of its own volition, and he tumbled forward. Into blackness. Into nothing.

*   *   *

Rosana watched fearfully as Lenora doggedly erected the fifth and final ritual circle, this one created of nature magics. For an instant, a separate dome of green magic formed just over the green rope on the floor, and then its energy flowed into the larger shell, blending with the whole.

Rosana started to breathe a sigh of relief, but it turned into a gasp of pain as a spot over her left collarbone suddenly felt as if it had been stabbed. The ritual circle, now showing hints of green, stabilized overhead. But Lenora had no sooner mopped the sweat off her brow, and Raina had no sooner thrown a relieved glance in Will's direction than faint streaks of dark red began to run through the magic, almost like … veins.

She'd
known
this ritual was a bad idea, no matter how dangerous Anton might be and no matter how badly they needed Will and her at full strength before they headed out again on their quest.

“What is it?” Will asked urgently, staring fearfully at the encroaching streaks. Not what but who, and whoever they were, her blood sang darkly in recognition of them.

Lenora was staring at Rosana as if she had grown a second head.

And that was when she noticed that the streaks of red in the circle's magic were starting to align. And they formed a starburst pattern with every streak pointing directly at her gypsy heart.

“No, no, no,” Lenora muttered. “More energy, Raina. Those … things … are eating the circle.”

As Raina complied, the red streaks thickened and turned a brighter shade of red. If anything, adding magic to the ritual seemed to empower the invading veins of old magic even more.

Aurelius jumped to his feet, his entire body glowing as if he prepared to perform some great magic.

“No, Aurelius,” Lenora bit out. “Do not try to absorb it.”

“What is it?” the solinari demanded.

Lenora responded slowly, her voice questioning, “Rosana? Do you know?”

She swore under her breath. Recognition vibrated deep in her bones, but she knew without a shadow of a doubt that she had never actually seen such a thing before. Why couldn't her life go back to boring and conventional like it had been before she was attacked by orcs and rescued by Will Cobb on a dark road last spring? She'd never wanted anything to do with strange magics and tree lords and sleeping kings in the first place. For all she knew, Will and Raina had hallucinated their whole encounter with the Sleeping King, anyway.

Waking the king was not her quest, and it should not be theirs, either. Let powerful people like Guildmaster Aurelius and High Matriarch Lenora chase after ancient hearth tales if they so choose. But she and Will had their entire lives in front of them. If he would but stop chasing the whole crazy idea of waking up some long-dead king, the two of them could settle down, handfast or even marry, and start a family.

One of the streaks separated itself from the dome of magic and slashed at her. She threw up her forearm and felt a searing cut across her arm. “Magic,” she gasped. “That felt like magic.”

“What kind of magic?” Lenora demanded urgently as more streaks began reaching down out of the arcing shell of the ritual circle toward her.
Only her
.

Will tried to jump in front of her as one of the tendrils whipped across her face, leaving a thin, burning line of pain behind. Reluctantly, she pushed him back and faced the waving ropes of magic herself. Like it or not, no one else in the circle had what it took to tame this attack.

She felt the power of the angry streaks pulsing through her veins like liquid fire. It was hot. Vibrant. Seductive. Without knowing why she did it, but unable to fight the compulsion, she fumbled at her belt for the small knife she used to trim herbs and cut lengths of bandage. Will lurched to stop her, but before he could grab her wrist, she slashed the inside of her forearm with the sharp little blade. She held her dripping arm over the red rope defining the curse circle on the floor and let her blood run onto the curse signs painted onto the circle. Her blood sizzled as it hit, evaporating instantly and unnaturally. If she was not mistaken, the streaks overhead retreated slightly.

“What are you doing?” Will demanded.

“I have to feed it; else it will grow until it consumes me,” she ground out painfully.

“Should all of us feed it?” Raina asked, reaching for the sleeve of her shirt.

“No!” Lenora cried. “Just her.”

The matriarch was right. Their blood was too tame. Too civilized. This blood magic needed primal energy. The dark energy of her people, amassed over generations of oppression and suffering.

“Old blood fuels old magic,” she muttered, her focus entirely on sending her blood onto the rope at her feet.

“I won't allow you to kill yourself for me,” Will declared forcefully.

She glanced up at him. “It's not really your choice, is it? If necessary, that is exactly what I will do.”

 

CHAPTER

3

Landsgrave Leland Hyland prowled the halls of his manor house restlessly as rain pounded outside. His ancestral seat felt empty tonight. Hollow. It had been thus ever since his only son, Kendrick, had been kidnapped by Kerryl Moonrunner, a powerful nature guardian. What was the world coming to?

Leland studied the map of Dupree, the Imperial Kothite colony clinging to a tiny corner of the great, largely unexplored continent, Haelos. He'd been carefully tracking his search for Kendrick upon it. Scouts and runners had initially been sent to the northeastern part of the colony in search of a clue to Kendrick's whereabouts. His son had been taken from a party of adventurers in the Forest of Thorns in search of the Sleeping King. At least the quest had been partially successful, but stars, the price of it. His son, gone. Taken …

He'd long searched in secret for the legendary king. Said to be an ancient ruler of these lands, prophecy foretold that the king would wake one day to lead his people to freedom. The people of Urth certainly needed freedom from the shackles of the mighty Kothite Empire that ruled almost the whole of Urth under its unyielding iron fist.

When Will Cobb, the son of his old friend Tiberius De'Vir, and the young arch-mage Raina of Tyrel had shown up on his doorstep, he hadn't hesitated to send his son to help them finish the quest that he and Tiberius had failed to complete. If only he had known how it would turn out. Would he still have sent his only heir, his boy? It was one thing to sacrifice his own life for the good of his people. But Kendrick, as well? It was more than his broken heart could bear.