The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (46 page)

He felt the water elemental discorporate in agony, and moved on instinct to slap his hand on the wet boards.  His antlers snapped into being, and the broken wood and elemental-droplets sprang to him as if magnetized, meshing with his armor.  The cool substance of the elemental wormed down beneath his bark as he turned toward the soldiers.

Past the blue wards that hung around them, he saw a portal slide open into a white room full of white figures.  The ground went numb the moment they stepped through.

“Run,” he said, and stabbed the ground with the tectonic lever.  It punched deep, and he took a few long strides toward the enemy, dragging it along with him, then swept it up and out.

A massive wave of salt and sand rose up in echo of the lever's arc, to roar across the dunes and crash down on their blue barriers.  The ensuing haze of sparks and hanging dust obliterated the view, but still he felt them there.

He turned to find Fiora grabbing the last of her gear from the cart.  The others were already running, Ilshenrir and Arik flanking Lark while Dasira led the way.  Cob yanked at her arm, and she took one look at his face then turned and ran.

He followed after.

Chapter 11 – Division

Cob couldn't fall into the herd-cadence.  The barrenness of Riddian sapped the energy from his steps, the salt under his hooves like running on a mirror.  Thrown before him, his shadow became a dark reflection—a second self trapped below.

His friends suffered unequally.  Ilshenrir and Dasira ran with surety but Lark soon flagged, and Arik shifted to wolf-man form and scooped her and Rian up to make sure they did not fall behind.  Fiora steamed along with determination but she was not built for speed, and Cob had to resist the urge to throw her over his shoulder.

Behind them, the air crackled with blue lightning.  Tendrils of it crawled over the wards Ilshenrir kept tossing out, bathing them in a watery glow that reflected painfully from the salt.  Cob managed to fumble his eye-guard on before it could do worse than make him see spots.

Ahead, the land descended in fits and starts to a fume-hazed plain—the next step down toward Crystal Valley, still far distant.  Pillars of old stone crusted with salt pierced through the frozen dunes like fingers from the grave, grasping at nothing; oxidized mineral deposits made strange patterns of rust and verdigris on the bleached expanse, along with more pockmarked pools.  Free-standing salt-spires rose further in, thickening as they went.  Dasira veered north-northwest, trying to follow the lip of the first descent rather than go down, but another blue bolt shot across their left flank and blew a hole in the dunes just ahead of her.

The salt-layer cracked in all directions, the whole mass of sand below subsiding with a slithering, popping sound.  Dasira scrambled for firm salt but the panes under her disintegrated too fast, and with a yelp she was swept over the edge.

Arik and Ilshenrir tried to stop, but another blast shattered the salt beneath them, and the freed sand tore them away.

“Fiora!” Cob shouted, halting.  Glittering dust veiled the air, obscuring the view; all he could feel from where his friends had been was the sand still pouring from the wounded dunes, too chaotic to sieve through.  Fiora glanced at him but barely slowed, steps taking her around the broken area as if the loss meant nothing.

With a curse, he raised the tectonic lever.

A blast of white-hot agony took him in the back.

He staggered and the salt shattered beneath him, plunging him hooves-first into the rushing sand.  Faster than he could respond, it shoved him past the edge and he was tumbling, bouncing, sliding down an abrading incline of crystal growths, the tectonic lever spinning away.  Instinct made him scrabble at the wall like a climber trying to arrest a fall, but the salt crystals that would have torn his hands without the Guardian armor just broke away instead, useless.

Inspiration came then, and he pulled at the wave of sand.  It rose around and buoyed him, and as he coaxed it toward solidity, his descent slowed, until finally he gained his feet and looked around, hoping to spot someone.

Just in time for a Sapphire mage to shoot blue lightning at his face.

He ducked his head and let the electricity arc through his antlers then down his back to dissipate into the ground.  With a growl, he plunged his hands into the sand and felt upward for the mage's presence.

There.
  He grabbed for it, and the sand responded, raining sparks from a shattered ward as it clenched around the mage.  A burst of power scattered the hand, but as the mage stumbled back, Cob closed his eyes and lined up another strike in pursuit of the man's footsteps.

Abruptly, those steps vanished.  Cob looked up, puzzled, and a white figure hurtled down the incline and body-checked him from his perch.

They tumbled together, grappling, Cob trying to get a handhold on the matte white armor while his opponent clutched at his face.  Every point of contact between them felt like nothing; Cob knew he must have found a grip somewhere but anything he closed his hand on just seemed like solid air, and he only knew the thing had him by the head when his vision went white.  He tried thrashing, but the blindness clung.

Another layer of salt crunched beneath them as they hit a lower step.  It was thicker, the sand solidly packed beneath, and Cob tried to roll up and pull away but the white thing still wouldn't come off.  It must have twisted out from under him because he heard impacts like feet on the salt, then suddenly he could no longer feel that area.

It was like fighting a manifestation of the Akarridi chancre.

He lurched sideways toward the spilling wall.  There was something between his teeth now, intangible, indifferent to his bite, and suddenly the hearing in his right ear went.  A weight dragged at his head, but he thrust his left arm into the sand and sensed its lattice—the sparkling network that underlay this whole land, thick with obstructive minerals and old bones and pulverized bedrock but still responsive.

There
was the tectonic lever.  And
there
were his friends, struggling dazed from their own separate drifts.  He gave Lark and Rian a push, sweeping the sand from them and steering them to solid ground, then found Fiora further ahead, having gone over the edge anyway.

Focusing, he pulled the lever to his hand, then slammed its chisel-end into the unfelt thing on top of him.

The white over his eyes snapped off, and he wrenched away to see the creature—soldier—thing—with the chisel-point embedded half an inch into its chest-plate.  It had to be a man, armored in a sleek-looking white material without joint or gap, every inch detailed in a flame motif.  The helm was a solid piece, eyeless, with a decorative white phoenix on the brow.

The soldier-thing gripped the tectonic lever and calmly yanked itself from the tip.  The narrow gash in its breastplate sealed like milk.

Cob took a step back, holding the lever like a spear, and glanced down at himself to make sure the Guardian armor was still there.  It was.  Not since he learned how to make it had he found anything he could not hit and hurt.  In fact, he was fairly sure he had harmed Enkhaelen more than this creature.

Just glad it doesn't have a—

White filaments unraveled from its arm, rearranging in its hand to become a long, wickedly thin sword.

Pike me.

On impulse, he stabbed the lever into the sand at his feet, then yanked.  The pane of salt beneath the soldier snapped and dislodged, taking a huge chunk of sand with it.  The thing skittered forward as if to leap, but Cob swept another wall up to block it.

It bounced off the barrier and tumbled away with the rush of sand, sword and all.

“That's right,” Cob muttered after it, then planted the lever to try to relocate his friends.  Just in time, he felt another blank spot skidding toward him.  He collapsed the sand in front of it and sealed it over, then did the same to the next one.

Blue light flared around his head, sending crackles of static down his scalp and over his shoulders.  He located the mage and dumped her into another sand-pit.

Down below, Lark was running across the stable but sloping surface of the valley, heading toward the salt spires.  Ilshenrir and Arik followed close on her heels, with Rian clinging to the wolf-man like a burr.  Fiora had made her way down the ledges to the northwest and seemed to be converging with them.  He barely felt Dasira, but spotted her by the ruddy light of her dagger as she danced with two white-armored creatures near the base of another destroyed ledge, each lash of the akarriden weapon drawing a constellation of blood.

Several Sapphire soldiers had taken the plunge off the top ledge and were half-climbing, half-wading their way down the broken dunes, followed by blue-robed mages who floated just above the sand.  Cob spotted five more white-armored figures slinging themselves along with abandon, and cursed.  He would have liked to bring the whole salt-ribbed descent down on them, but Dasira was too close to it, and—

Don't wish.  Just do.

He cupped his hand, and a wave-shaped barrier rose around and above her, like he had made for their shelter.  He pulled with the lever in the other, and felt the salt-cemented stability of the entire shelf go.

The sand crashed down upon the Sapphires, upon the mages, upon the white-armors and upon him.  He rolled with it like a feather on foam, tossed and dredged and spat and spun until finally he was skidding across the flat bottom of the valley, surrounded by slowing sand.  Planting the lever, he forced himself up and looked back to see Dasira in a dead sprint for him, the white figures struggling to dig free of the sand that had dashed them aside.  The only clear spot for half a mile below the broken ledge was that sheltered cup.

“Pike piking pikes!” Dasira shouted as she came within earshot.  He took that as a cue to keep running.

*****

High above, the watching hawk broke its circle and banked to follow the fleeing group.

*****

“Turn west, turn west!” he heard Dasira holler, but their friends ahead kept going straight, as if the pillars and whorls were drawing them in.  Those protrusions broke up the land into a kind of labyrinth, with the sun refracting wildly from bleached surfaces and drawing mirages in the haze.  A good place to lose pursuit—

If not for the vapors.  He tasted them in his lungs already, harsh and desiccating, and they only thickened further in.  This was not yet Crystal Valley, just a level where the bad salts had been exposed, but attempting to cross it would kill them as surely as the Sapphires.

He tried again to call up the herd-cadence and felt his friends just within his reach.  Bellowing for attention, he turned the way Dasira directed and began to run, pulling them toward him.  It was at a diagonal to the Sapphires and their white-armored allies but it was better than choking to death, and he felt his companions fall into the rhythm—first Dasira, then Arik and Rian, then Lark.  Last, Fiora.  Ilshenrir, whom he could not touch, pursued under his own power.

Just keep running
, Cob thought. 
They can't make portals on the fly, so eventually they'll have to fall back.  I have the water elemental and the Guardian.  I can keep us going.

But for how long?  All the way to the border?

He dared not look back.  He could feel the pounding steps of the Sapphires, the brief spots of nothingness from the white monsters, but he couldn't spare the concentration to trip them up.  The parched ground cracked under his hooves as he pulled past his friends, and even here at the fringe of the haze, the rasp of their breathing made him grimace.  If the fumes made him suffer, they had to be in torment.

“Ilshenrir, fresh air,” he snapped.

The wraith made a puzzled sound, then said, “Oh,” as if surprised.  A moment later, cold air hit Cob's face in a downdraft strong enough to sweep loose salt back from his feet.  He inhaled and found it clean, then blew out all the vapors that had settled in his lungs.  They still felt heavy, his throat and nose thick with mucus, but through him the act revitalized everyone.

“There is not much to access,” said the wraith.  “I can filter air for you more readily but I do not know the concentration you require during exertion—“

“Jus' do what you can.”

A shiver of energy washed past him, and Cob suppressed the urge to reach out and break it.  He focused on the path instead.  A long ledge of sand ran to their left, and he dimly felt more Sapphires atop it—not the thirty-plus on their tail but another group, no doubt trying to bar their way west.  He could either collapse that ledge and form his own path out, or continue north along the narrow band between it and the spears of salt.

Something glinted in the sky, and he squinted but it was too bright, too distant to discern.  Then came another, and another.

“My kin,” Ilshenrir answered.  “Perhaps they have been monitoring the Empire's communications.”

“What the pike do we do now?” spat Dasira.  “Portal?  Shadow?”

“No time,” rasped Lark.

“Then—“

Blue light rippled over them, filling the air with sparks as it reacted with the haze.  In its wake, Ilshenrir's filtering-ward shredded and the stinging vapors poured in.  Cob clamped his mouth shut but felt the others take bad breaths and cough, stumble, shudder.

The next bolt slammed into the wraith, flinging him into a salt-coated pillar with a sound like breaking glass.  At the same time, bright pinspots bloomed within the shining entities above.

Cob levered up a defensive arc of sand just in time to block the haelhenes' searing beams, but the action heaved vapor up as well and he saw Lark collapse, retching—saw Arik reel drunkenly and the goblin nearly slide off him.  Fiora dropped to one knee, and behind them—

Behind them, a trio of white-armored abominations approached from bare yards away, the leader bearing a familiar black blade.  A dozen more followed, with a troop of Sapphires hanging back in the distance.

Cob fixed his gaze on the black sword, and for the first time noticed the itch in his arm, strengthening with each pace the man took.  As he raised the tectonic lever, the coughs and groans of his companions raked at his heart. 
I brought them here.  It's my fault.