Chapter 144: The Emissary

Merrick and Perrin came in on either side, shields locked. A boar charged them. Merrick took it on the rim and was shoved back two full steps, boots ploughing furrows in the moss. Perrin drove a spear into its flank. The boar screamed and swung its head, and the tusk hooked Perrin’s greave and tore the strap loose. He cursed and jabbed again.

"Joss, left!"

Joss turned his horse. A pale thing dropped out of the canopy on a thread, all legs and mandibles, and landed on the horse’s neck. The animal screamed and bucked. Joss threw himself sideways, rolled, and came up with his axe. The spider-thing leapt. He caught it in mid-air with the flat of the blade and slammed it against a trunk. Something cracked. It twitched and was still.

"Behind you!"

Brennan shouted it, voice high and breaking. Halvard spun just as a wolf’s jaws closed on his forearm guard. He roared, swung his shield, and smashed the animal’s skull against a rock.

Oswin’s horse went down with a boar’s tusks in its belly. He rolled clear and came up with a short sword in each hand.

The clearing’s edge was a snarling tangle of steel and fur.

Emeric ran.

He cut across the slope at an angle, away from the fighting, toward the stake nearest the north. The frost was at the edge of the grass here, a line of white on green. He stopped a pace short of it.

Cold rolled off the clearing like the breath of an open cellar.

IRON WILL (C)

[Mental Resistance: Active.]

[The paralysis field is strong. You will feel it from the first step. Do not stand in it longer than you must.]

Yeah, he didn’t have to be told twice.

He almost nodded in response as he drew a breath and stepped over the line.

The cold hit his boots first. It climbed his calves like water. His knees stiffened. He took another step and his thighs started to lock. Sweat froze on his neck.

Keep moving.

He forced the next step. His leg answered, slowly, as if lifted through mud. Another. He could see the stake clearly now, ten paces away, humming against the bone bands. A thin pulse of light ran up it every second.

The cold reached his waist. His fingers started to curl.

Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

POISON RESISTANCE (C)

[Partial counter.]

Paralysis is a magica status ailment but it drew some of its functions from toxins. The mechanism was pretty similar.

[You have perhaps ten more steps before this wins].

Eight paces. Seven. His right hand refused to open. He pulled it up and shoved it forward, and the fingers cracked and uncurled.

Six. Five.

The cold reached his chest. His breath came in short, shallow pulls. His vision narrowed. Somewhere behind him, Gaius was shouting, and he could not make out the words.

Four.

He called the Void.

It came up cold from behind his sternum, but this was a different cold. A hollow one. The frozen weight pressing on his body hit it and, for a second, simply slid off, like water sheeting off oiled stone.

His legs worked again.

He lunged the last four paces and slapped a palm against the bone.

"Take it."

The Void answered. A circle of absolute black opened under his hand, a pocket in the world with no edges, and the stake folded into it. The bone bands crumpled. The humming stopped. For a heartbeat there was a hole in the air where it had been.

Then the hole closed, and the stake was gone.

[TOTEM 1 OF 4: DESTROYED]

[Paralysis field: Weakened, Northern Quadrant.]

That was not a standard use of Void. It was better.

The cold dropped off Emeric’s chest like a coat. He gasped, and air went into him in a rush.

One.

Across the clearing, the orc’s head turned. His eyes found Emeric through the frozen men, wide and bloodshot and disbelieving.

Then the grass behind Emeric rippled.

"Impressive," said a voice.

Emeric turned.

The mage stood at the western edge of the clearing. He had come out of the trees without a sound, as tall and thin and unhurried as he had been the day before, hood up, staff in hand. The bone totem at the top swayed on its cords.

"I felt one go," the man said. "It is a strange sensation. Like a tooth being pulled. I came to see what had done it."

"Step away from them," Emeric said.

"Or what?"

"Or I’ll do it to the rest."

"Will you?" The hooded head tilted. "It is curious. You walked into my field, and you walked out. No one has done that before. May I ask how?"

"No."

"A pity." The staff came up. "Then I will find out the hard way."

The bone totem flared, and a bolt of white frost leapt across the clearing.

Emeric threw himself sideways. The bolt hit the grass where he had been standing and froze it in a burst of brittle crystal. He rolled, came up on one knee, and the mage lifted the staff again. A second bolt. A third. Emeric ran, zigzagging, boots skidding on frozen turf. The bolts tore up the ground behind him in an angry line.

He was thirty paces away. Twenty.

The mage tapped the staff on the earth. Ice erupted in a ring around him, a wall of jagged spikes as tall as a man’s waist.

Emeric didn’t slow.

WARRIOR’S FLOW (B)

[Combat Rhythm: Engaged.]

Duck. Now.

He ducked. A shard of ice screamed past his ear. He leapt the spike wall in a flat, low vault, hit the ground on the other side in a roll, and came up inside the ring with his sword already swinging.

The mage got the staff up. Steel rang on bone. The impact jolted up Emeric’s arm. He cut again, low, and the mage danced back. A third cut. A fourth. The mage parried each one with the staff’s shaft, neat and economical, the movements of a man who had fought with a stave for decades.