“Hot damn!” Turock shouted.
The beasts surrounding Rachida’s pack began to thin out, when another fireball, slightly smaller this time, soared overhead, setting even more of the beasts aflame. The former elves stared at the flames, their deep-set eyes wide with fear. “Now!” Rachida ordered. With Quester in the lead, they shoved their way through those who remained. Men still died, but more of the beasts did now. A ray of lightning as thick as Rachida’s body struck those off to the right, making their bodies shake and smoke and finally explode, sending more of the twisted elves over the cliff.
Finally, the beasts fell away from them. Rachida turned and ran toward the line where Turock stood with his sixteen spellcasters. The looks on each of their faces were of pure glee, Turock’s in particular. The strange, red-haired man hooted as he began launching fireballs with each hand, one after the other, killing beasts and shoving the rest back.
The survivors dashed past the spellcasters and huffed their way to the other side, away from the cliff where the narrow and flat grassland spread out. Rachida glanced up. The last few winged horses descended to the peak of the new hillock and lifted off mere seconds later, a pair of elves on each of their backs. She watched them glide south, out over the ocean, and spin around, sailing back over their heads as they flew northeast. She then brought her attention to Turock. The spellcaster and his students seemed to be running out of strength, their magical attacks weaker and weaker. Not that it mattered much. Only a handful of twisted elves remained. The rest had fled around the other side of the hillock and disappeared into the forest.
When it was over, Rachida gathered her remaining men into ranks and took a rough count. Barely half of the eight hundred who had made their way south from Drake remained.
“We lost so many,” she said, to which Talon dipped his head in respect.
“Fewer men, fewer greedy hands grasping for my gold,” said a gleeful Quester Billings. The Crimson Sword winked at her. Rachida scowled but said nothing. A sellsword was a sellsword. He was simply living in a world Karak had built, owning the ideals Karak believed in. There would be no changing that.
She approached the spellcasters last. The group of them was gathered in a tight circle, talking enthusiastically among themselves. Rachida tapped Turock on the shoulder, and the man spun around, his eyes wild with excitement.
“Did you see that?” he exclaimed as he followed her away from his apprentices. “Did you fucking see that?”
Rachida nodded. “But how? I thought you said your magic was limited?”
“I know, and it was. By Karak’s wilted prick, I thought I’d used up all I had fighting the demon! But it was a good thing I was spent, because had I not. . ” He trailed off.
“The fireball would have been much bigger?” Rachida asked.
“Indeed. And then who knows how many of your people would’ve died.” The odd man laughed. “Hell, I might have blown up that mound and freed the beast again if that had happened!”
“Somehow, I do not think that likely,” said Rachida.
“Probably not. However, this changes things entirely.”
“How so?”
The man grinned. “Why else would magic be suddenly rendered powerful where once it was weak? My teacher, Errdroth Plentos, told me once that all magic lost potency once the brother gods came to Dezrel. So if now that magic has returned. . ”
“Then the gods no longer walk the land,” she finished for him. For Rachida, the thought was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Be careful what you pray for and all. “How do you think it happened, if it did?”
“Who knows?” Turock said with a shrug. He then pointed at his fellow spellcasters. “And I don’t rightly care. Just think on this, Rachida, my wonderful slice of the heavens. Let’s say the gods are gone. How many men and women do you know, in Neldar and beyond, who are practiced in the art of magic?”
She shrugged. “You, I suppose. And your students.”
“Exactly,” the man said with a wink as he proffered his pointed cap. “And some of the elves, of course. Which, if my grasp of numbers doesn’t fail me, will make me a very, very sought-after man.”
“I suppose it does.”
“You just remember to save some of that gold your men keep talking about for me. I think you owe me that much.”
Rachida frowned and walked away while Turock laughed, not liking that statement one bit.
An hour later, the cavalcade began the long march north. Rachida lingered behind, staring from a distance at the new hillock, the smoking divots in the earth, and the litany of corpses heaped on the ground. It was a quiet moment. She closed her eyes to pray for the souls of the dead, but suddenly realized that she didn’t know to whom to pray.
“Is the great Rachida Gemcroft feeling introspective?” she heard Quester ask.
Her eyes opened. The young sellsword was beside her, the blood in his forked beard now dried. It flaked off as he ran his hand through it. The handsome man smiled deviously at her.
“Should you not be watching over my charges?” she asked him.
“I handed the reins to Blackwolfe. The man’s eager. Has potential. Could make a good sellsword one day.”
“Perhaps.”
“Anyway, what happens with grimy Talon doesn’t truly concern me. What I would really like to know is where we go from here.” He laughed. “Do you wish to remain in Paradise and build a new life for yourself?”
She chuckled. “Fuck Paradise. I do not think I like it here.”
That elicited a laugh from Quester as well.
“As a matter of fact,” said Rachida, “I have a sudden, burning desire to march back to Neldar. Hopefully, I have someone there waiting for me, someone I haven’t seen in far too long.”
Moira’s image flashed in her mind, her icy blue eyes, her silver hair, her slender body. Rachida felt warmth spread through her.
Quester nodded. “So we find a way around the river and head east, then?”
“No. We ride back to Conch and sail back to the Isles of Gold.” She looked at her last remaining Twin, its cutting edge stained brown. “I miss my son, and I have a very special gift for my husband too.”
“That, and you still need to give us our gold.”
“Yes, that too.”
They laughed together and turned their horses about, heading toward the rear of the convoy as it plodded over the hills.
CHAPTER 53
In the aftermath of the gods’ disappearance and the deaths of the twisted elves, the people stood in shocked silence. It seemed even the dying chose to still their tongues. Laurel felt a sort of deflating in the air, as if the souls of every living being who remained on what had once been a battlefield had been stripped of their wills. Soldiers of Karak and Ashhur, Sisters of the Cloth, Wardens from the west-all simply gawked at everything around them, confused as to what they should do next.
Laurel approached the battlefield from behind, walking slowly alongside the wreckage of what had been Karak’s most glorious creation. The Castle of the Lion’s three towers were a heap of rubble that filled up nearly the entire courtyard. The stables to the rear of the castle were buried under a mound of gray stone. The ground had fractured, and heavy stones had begun to slide down into the earth, collapsing into the dungeons and tunnels below the castle. The thirty-foot wall was in pieces as well; only three short sections remained standing.
As Laurel placed one foot in front of the other, she scanned the ruins. Shredded bits of tapestry, pinned below the chunks of stone, flapped in the breeze. There were iron cookware and brass candleholders strewn about, crushed and useless. In places, blood seeped from below the jagged boulders-all that remained of those who had hid within the castle during the battle. Laurel hoped Zebediah and Marius, the betraying members of the Council of Twelve, were among them.