“Rain? What is it?” Ellysetta took a step closer to him, unafraid of the aggression coiling within him.
«Get in the saddle,» he commanded. «Now.» He didn’t wait for her to spin the weave. Instead, he spun it himself, whisking her off her feet on a gust of forceful Air and depositing her in the saddle strapped to the juncture of his neck and shoulders. «Steli-chakai… » He started to sing his discovery in tairen song, but there was no need.
The white tairen was growling with as much menace as he. Her fur was ruffled, her venomous tail spikes fully extended. «Steli smells the poison on the wind, Rainier-Eras.»
“What is it, Rain?” Ellysetta asked again. “What poison?”
«From Eld.» The autumn winds had shifted westward, and they carried the tang of smoke and the distinctive odor of sel’dor—the foul black metal of the Eld—being smelted in white-hot fires.
He gave a roar and spewed a jet of fire into the sky. His hind legs bent as he crouched, energy gathering in the great ropes of powerful muscle. With a scream of fury, he launched himself into the air. His wings snapped taut, extending forward and drawing back in mighty, sweeping strokes that propelled him high into the now-cloudless blue autumn sky.
Behind him, with a roar and a blast of her own fire, Steli followed. Together, they cleared the mountaintops and soared higher, speeding east, towards the borders of Eld.
As the tairen disappeared over the mountains, still silence fell once more over the basin of Crystal Lake. In one of the narrow passes leading between the surrounding mountains, a small party cautiously rose from the cover of the rocks. Following the gestured commands of their leader, the men made their way down the narrow path to the shores of the lake.
They walked single file, each careful to place his feet in the steps of the man before him, and their boots, wrapped in thick swaths of wool, made no sound even on the loose shale and rock of the shore. They skirted the north end of the lake and continued westward into the Feyls, the formidable volcanic range that formed the Fading Lands’ northern border. A gust of wind made the edges of their thick gray and brown woolen coats flutter against the dull, black sheen of sel’dor armor.
CHAPTER THREE
Rhakis Mountains, near Eld
Less than a hundred miles of mountainous terrain separated Crystal Lake from Eld. Rain and Steli flew it in a single bell. As they neared the final row of ragged peaks that gave way to the deep, dense, forested land of his enemies, Rain’s heart sank.
All of Eld lay under a blanket of fog too thick to be the country’s natural autumn cloud cover. The Mages had enhanced the mist—no doubt to prevent Fey and Celierian scouts from detecting what Rain could now see: dark haze on the northern horizon, like a shadowy veil hanging over the countryside.
He was still too far away to see the glow of the foul, ancient forges, but he didn’t need to. The bubbling cauldron of black smoke that cast its sooty shadow across the sky was proof enough.
«Rain?» Ellysetta’s voice sounded in his mind. «Talk to me. What do you see?»
«Koderas.» Even in Spirit, the word was all but spat from him. «The fires of Koderas are lit.»
«What does that mean?»
«It means we haven’t yet faced anything close to the worst this new High Mage of Eld has to offer.» He dipped a wing and banked, circling at the edge of the Rhakis, peering east through the haze of smoke. «Koderas is the location of the great sel’dor foundries of Eld. That much smoke means all the fires are lit, and that hasn’t happened since the Mage Wars. The Eld have just been buying time and testing our defenses these last weeks while they amass a much larger army.»
The news couldn’t be worse. The initial attacks on Teleon and Orest had dealt the Fey and Lord Teleos’s forces a brutal blow. If the Eld struck again with an army large enough to require all of Koderas to equip…well…«We must get back to Orest and send word to Dorian and the Fading Lands. We’re going to need a great many more warriors.»
He roared a command to Steli. They both wheeled sharply in the sky and shot southwards, hugging the mountains as they raced back towards Celieria.
Eld ~ Koderas
Clad in the purple robes of his office, Vadim Maur, the High Mage of Eld, walked along the sel’dor-railed observation balcony that circled the perimeters of the deep, fiery pits of Koderas. His robe’s deep cowl shrouded his face, and supple leather gloves, dyed purple to match his robes, covered his hands. He grasped the metal railing, and the rings of power decorating each of his fingers and thumbs glinted in the red-orange glow of the furnaces below.
Along one section of the great pit, slave-powered conveyor belts leading from the nearby mines fed raw ore and magus, the black powder that gave sel’dor its strength and enhanced its magical properties, into six great smelting furnaces. Two of the furnaces pumped out glowing rods of hot sel’dor ready for forging. A dozen workers wielding sharp pincers cut off lengths of the hot metal and passed them on to the hundreds of smiths who pounded, shaped, and forged the sel’dor into swords and armor for the High Mage’s Black Guard and the other elite troops of his Elden armies. The remaining four furnaces poured continuous streams of liquid sel’dor into casting molds for mass-produced armaments. Cast sel’dor wasn’t as strong as forged, but the frontline troops for whom the weaker armaments were intended wouldn’t live long enough to appreciate the difference. There was no sense in wasting quality to outfit a corpse.
“You will have what I need by the end of the month?” Vadim asked Primage Grule, the Mage responsible for managing all activity in Koderas.
“I will, Most High.”
“And the rest?”
“Coming along exactly as planned, Most High. I think you will be pleased.”
Grule gestured for the High Mage to precede him, but before Vadim could continue with his inspection of Koderas, hurried footsteps beat a rapid tattoo down the walkway. The High Mage turned his shrouded head to see a green-robed novice, his pale face flushed with exertion, running towards them.
“Master.” The novice bowed to the Primage. “Most High.” He bowed again, much more deeply, to the High Mage. “You asked to be notified, Great One, if there was news.”
One purple-gloved hand shot out, gripping the side of the young man’s face, fingers pressing against his temple. “Tell me,” the High Mage commanded, and the flood of information in the novice’s brain poured forth.
Scouts in the Rhakis had spotted two tairen in the skies west of Koderas. The small team heading into the Feyls had confirmed it: the Tairen Soul, his mate, and the white tairen had spent the day at Crystal Lake before flying east, towards Eld and Koderas. They most certainly had seen the smoke, and the Tairen Soul would remember what it meant.
In the shadow of his hood, the seeping flesh that was Vadim’s mouth pressed flat. “It seems our secret is out.”
Celieria ~ Orest
By the time Rain, Ellysetta, and Steli neared Orest, night had fallen. Pinpoints of flickering light from campfires burning beneath the trees dotted the southwest corner of Eld, and the nightly mortar barrage had already begun. Fiery mortars exploded against the great gray walls of Lower Orest and split the darkness like flashes of lightning. Flames spat from the gaping jaws of tairen diving to scorch the siege weapons, but a rain of black arrows and bowcannon bolts kept the tairen at bay and the Eld trebuchet firing.
Catapults on the walls of Orest sent answering volleys—great, fiery blobs of burning pitch that exploded on impact and stuck like fiery glue to what ever they hit. The added height of the wall-mounted siege gave the Celierian weapons greater distance, and the audible screams of Eld soldiers wreathed in flames and running in wild circles mingled with Celierian cheers when a direct hit toppled one of the Eld trebuchets and sent it up in flames.
Rain flew well out of reach of the missile attacks, and Ellysetta kept the invisibility weave wrapped securely about them until he and Steli dove down into the large, scooped-out hollow that housed Veil Lake and Upper Orest.
&nb
sp; Ellysetta’s booted feet hit the ground running while Rain Changed and landed only a few steps behind her. Together, they jogged the short distance to the edge of the plaza where Great Lord Devron Teleos and the five warriors of Ellysetta’s bloodsworn quintet were waiting to greet them.
“Koderas is lit.” Rain delivered the news without preamble. “Every furnace, by the look of it.”
Dev’s Fey eyes flared with a sudden surge of latent magic. Though he was Celierian born and bred, Lord Teleos’s bright eyes and the silvery luminescence of his skin betrayed the strong Fey heritage of his family’s House. Long before King Dorian I had wed his Fey bride ten centuries ago, the lords of House Teleos had intermarried with the Fey and guarded the gateways to the Fading Lands—first at the Garreval, and more recently here in Orest as well.
“I suppose I should feel more surprised,” Dev said, “but I’ve been waiting for that blade to drop for months now.”
“As have I.” Rain had suspected the truth even before the first attack on Orest. “If you’ll ready a rider, I’ll write a letter to the king. Dorian needs to start calling in favors from his allies immediately. If this Mage attacks with even half of what we faced in the Mage Wars, every man, woman, and child in Celieria could stand before the Eld and still be overrun.”
“The last three couriers never made it to their destination.”
Rain processed the news without blinking. “Then I’ll have a Spirit master send the weave.”
“Only if he can send it on a private weave. The Warriors’ Path has been compromised.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we had some unexpected visitors while you were gone.” The flash of an illumination mortar lit up the plaza bright as day. “There’s news you need to hear, but let’s get inside first. No sense giving the Eld a clear target while we talk.”
«Steli… » Rain turned to the white tairen, who had padded to the edge of Veil Lake to slake her thirst.
The white tairen lifted her regal head. «Go with the Fey-kin, Rainier-Eras. Steli will join the pride and scorch the Eld.» She crouched on her hind legs and leapt into the sky with a roar. «Time to run, foolish Eld-prey,» she sang. «Steli-chakai is here, and she is hungry.»
Leaving Steli and the pride to subdue the Eld, Rain and Dev flanked Ellysetta, and her quintet ringed protectively around the three of them as they made their way off the plaza.
“So what’s this about the Warriors’ Path being compromised?” Rain asked as they walked down the torchlit brick path. The mist off the waterfalls of Kiyera’s Veil and Maiden’s Gate hung in the air, dampening their hair and making small halos of rainbow-kissed light around each of the torches. “What happened while we were away?”
“We intercepted a raiding party shortly after nightfall.” The tall trees lining the walk gave way to neatly trimmed shrubs, topiaries, and flower boxes edging the pearl gray buildings of Upper Orest. “They made it through the outer gates undetected. If not for the wards on the inner walls, we never would have discovered them.” Dev pushed open the leaded glass door of the conservatory that served as his command post. “Three Mages, twenty Black Guard…and six dahl’reisen.”
Rain stopped in his tracks and turned to Gaelen. “Yours?” The infamous former dahl’reisen had spent most of the last thousand years leading a band of banished Fey he called the Brotherhood of Shadows. He’d be leading them still if Ellysetta hadn’t restored his soul.
Faint color bloomed in Gaelen’s cheeks, but he held Rain’s hard stare without wavering. “Four of them were at one time,” he admitted. “They disappeared on reconnaissance missions into Eld. The other two weren’t familiar to me.”
Instinct pushed Rain closer to Ellysetta. The thought of dahl’reisen coming within ten miles of her made his hands ache for the weight of his steel. “So it seems not all in your Brotherhood are as committed to protecting the Fading Lands as you thought them to be.”
«Rain,» Ellysetta chided softly. Her fingers brushed the back of his wrist.
Gaelen’s ice blue gaze flickered briefly as he noted the gesture. “Nei, kem’falla, it’s all right. The Feyreisen is right to doubt.” He lifted his chin, and his eyes narrowed. “Those in the Brotherhood are committed, Tairen Soul, but they are still dahl’reisen. Even when I was one of them, I never forgot that.”
“Meaning you can’t trust them.” That remark came from Tajik vel Sibboreh, the red-haired former general of the eastern Fey armies who now served as the Water master of Ellysetta’s bloodsworn quintet. Tajik had survived a millennium as a rasa, one of the haunted, soul-burdened Fey on the cusp of turning dahl’reisen, tormented by the lives he’d taken but desperately clinging to honor by a thread, refusing to take that last step that would tip his soul into Shadow. Because of that, Tajik had little liking or sympathy for Gaelen—he certainly didn’t trust him—and he rarely missed an opportunity to get in a dig.
“Meaning trust, but not blindly,” Gaelen countered. “I knew when I formed the Brotherhood that some would go astray, but I thought it better to save nineteen and lose one than see the full score slip down the Dark Path.”
“So were these dahl’reisen Mage-claimed, or were they serving the Eld willingly?” Rain asked. Tightness crept over Gaelen’s features, and Rain had his answer. “I see—”
“Not every dahl’reisen who joins us chooses to stay. And before you ask, nei, we don’t open our doors to every dishonored blade cast out of the Fading Lands. Dahl’reisen we may be, but warriors truly bereft of honor were never welcome in our company.”
“Says the dahl’reisen who slaughtered every man, woman, and child in an entire Eld clan,” Tajik muttered.
“As if you would not have done the same had you seen your sister slain before your eyes. Oh, but I forgot. When your sister disappeared in the Wars, you did nothing.”
Color flamed in Tajik’s face. “You grot-jaffing, krekk-eating rultshart.” He lunged for Gaelen, and only Rijonn and Gil—the Earth and Air masters of the quintet—managed to hold him back. Bel and Rain caught Gaelen’s arms.
“Stop it. Both of you.” Ellysetta stepped between the two warriors. “What is wrong with you? The enemy is out there.” She pointed northward, towards Eld. “Save your anger for them.”
Gaelen tugged free of Bel’s and Rain’s grip. “Sieks’ta. I know better than to give in to vel Sibboreh’s taunting…and I shouldn’t have pricked him about his sister. Sieks’ta, Tajik.” He held out his right hand in a gesture of peace, but Tajik only glared, yanked himself out of Rijonn and Gil’s tight hold, and stalked to the glass wall overlooking the river. The fingers of Gaelen’s extended hand curled in a loose fist, and raw emotion shone from his eyes for an instant before a shutter fell over his face.
He smoothed the bunched creases in his black leather tunic and swept the ruffled strands of ebony hair back out of his face. “As I was saying, Tairen Soul, not all dahl’reisen join the Brotherhood. Nor do all who join the Brotherhood stay. Many do, but when hope fades, the call of the Dark Path is hard to resist.”
“So now the dahl’reisen—at least some of them—are in league with the Eld,” Rain summarized. “Which means the Warriors’ Path and every nonprivate Spirit weave are compromised.”
“And the dahl’reisen from the Brotherhood are spinning Gaelen’s invisibility weave on behalf of the Eld,” Bel added. The black-haired, cobalt-eyed Spirit master of Ellysetta’s quintet made the announcement with none of the implied accusation that had been in Tajik’s voice earlier. Bel had been the first warrior to welcome Gaelen back into the fold, and he was still the only Fey Gaelen truly considered a friend. “It won’t take the Eld long to figure out how to penetrate it, if they haven’t already.”
Some found it odd that Bel, a warrior widely regarded in the Fading Lands as the living essence of Fey honor, could befriend the dahl’reisen whose infamous deeds were legend and whose name had become synonymous with the Dark Lord’s, but Rain knew that Bel’s unswerving sense of honor was exceeded
only by the greatness of his heart. Belliard vel Jelani was a warrior who embodied the best of the Fey. He could plan the systematic and merciless destruction of an enemy army, kill with breathtaking skill, and make decisions that would break lesser men—but even when he’d clung to the pained, gray existence of the rasa, he never abandoned either honor or compassion. That nobility of spirit, an intrinsic goodness that suffused his every action and yet never blinded him to the harsh realities and demands of a Fey warrior’s life, was one of the qualities Rain admired—and envied—most about his oldest and most trusted friend.
It was in part because Bel found Gaelen a worthy friend that Rain had abandoned the old prejudices that still kept Tajik and vel Serranis at odds.
“You say you discovered the Eld before they could make it past the inner gates. Was there any indication of what their mission was?”
“I can think of any number of reasons a general would send such a small party into an enemy fortress, and even more reasons why the Eld would do so.” Bel glanced at Ellysetta.
“There’s more,” Lord Teleos said. “The dahl’reisen and the Black Guard are dead, but we managed to take one of the Primages alive. The others killed themselves so they couldn’t be questioned, but we’re keeping this one unconscious and restrained by a twenty-five-fold weave. If we can Truthspeak him before he has time to invoke his death spell, we might learn something.”
Rain frowned. “The shei’dalins haven’t already done so?” It was rare to capture a Mage alive, even rarer to keep him that way for any length of time.
“Once they sensed dahl’reisen in the city, their quintets insisted on taking them through the Mists. They won’t be back until morning at the earliest.”
“What about the wounded?” Ellysetta asked.