“I’m sure the Blood Barons can keep us safe.” Naomi pressed her fingertips to her temples and closed her eyes. “Scorio. Do you really want to be part of this attempt to find the Blood Ox?” She fixed him with her burning stare. “What help could we be?”
“Well,” he began, but she cut him off with a groan.
“Helping Sol against Imogen has ruined you for life. You think you’ll provide some crucial last-second aid to the Charnel Duke and distract the Blood Ox? Scorio, not everyone in a position of power knew you in a past life.”
“True. But look out there, Naomi. Where else are we going to go?”
Noami looked mutely out across the Bone Plains where thousands of fiends were streaming north.
“Damnit,” she hissed, clutched at her head and dropped into a tight crouch, brow resting on her knees. “Damnit, damnit, damnit.”
“Hey.” Scorio crouched beside her, arm across her shoulders. But what could he say? Tens of thousands of fiends were migrating toward the war camp to utterly eradicate it. Some three hundred Great Souls had been slaughtered almost simultaneously. And now they were going to set out on the trail of a True Fiend in the hopes of arresting it and its Gold-ranked servants just long enough for Imperators to maybe show up to contest it for supremacy.
Scorio squeezed her shoulder. Nothing came to mind. No words of encouragement. No uplifting bon mots. So, helpless, he simply pressed his brow to her own and closed his eyes.
After a moment she shifted her head so that her brow slid down to rest against his shoulder, and they remained thus for a spell, the distant cacophony of the passing fiends a constant backdrop.
“Alright, listen up!” Plassus’ bark cut through the din of the passing army. “This moment of respite is drawing to a close. We’ve been joined by a pair of lovely Blood Barons and a handful of Pyre Lords, and are going to cross the Wall to search for the Blood Ox. Why cross the Wall, I hear you wail? Because it’s our hare-brained guess that the Blood Ox would have remained with his army if he was marching up the Bone Plains. Seeing as there’s been no sign of him, we’re guessing he’s cut them adrift as a distraction as he makes his way across the Telurian Band proper. Could we be wrong? You bet your bounteous asses we might be, but it’s time to roll the dice. So gird your loins, because crossing the Wall’s an ever-loving delight, and it’ll probably be the best part of what’s coming next. Ready? Then form up by the ramp. We’re going to hit the desert floor and race for the rocks.”
Plassus looked around the crowd. “You fall behind, you get left behind. We’re moving fast and we’re not stopping till we reach the Blood Ox. So if you’ve any growing up left to do, now’s the time to do it. There’s no room for whining children in this merry band.”
A ragged cheer went up, half-defiant, half-mad.
Kelona stepped up, her hands bunched into fists, and Naomi gave her a measured nod. Himiko also approached, slender and frowning, her gaze narrowed as she glanced at Scorio in a questioning manner.
“Want to run with us?” he asked.
She raised her chin. “Why not?”
“Good.” Scorio extended his hand. “Our chances of surviving just jumped.”
Himiko nodded and clasped his forearm. “You should talk. I still don’t understand how your Heart just keeps burning forever.”
“It’s not due to his common sense,” said Naomi, and Kelona laughed then covered her mouth quickly.
“Form up!” Plassus moved to stand beside Taron, who yet remained at the top of the ramp. Charoth stood to one side, Aezryna on the other. Eorox and the other Blood Baron, Iresha, came in just behind. Pyre Lords crowded behind them, a half-dozen strong, and Scorio was surprised to see Jova move to stand amongst them. Surely she wasn’t…?
Everyone else stepped in tight.
Plassus raised his fist. “On my mark, we move. Stay close! My power gathers those who remain by my side, and if you fall behind, you’ll see nothing but traces of dust and blood to mark our passage. Are you ready, you bloody bastards? Are you ready to show hell what a hundred crazed Great Souls can do to the massed fiends of perdition? Well, it doesn’t matter if you are. Because here we go!”
And Plassus dropped his arm and broke into a run, descending the ramp in a sprint as a scream tore itself from every throat and the remaining forces of their army pounded down after.
Chapter 41
Some hundred Great Souls screamed their defiance and charged down the slope. Scorio was in the center of the pack, and the urge to leap up and fly was extreme. He held tight, however, Kelona to his side, the Nightmare Lady on the other, the Pyre Lords and Blood Barons just before them.
Instead, he rose into his scaled form and fought to pace himself. Below, the fiends who’d been trying to scale the ramp bunched up and howled and hissed their defiance, ready to receive the charge.
That’s when Charoth changed.
Already broad-shouldered and powerful, he grew in size, adding another foot in height as his body became supple and heavily muscled. But it wasn’t the musculature of a brute, but of an apex predator; his skin became richly furred in orange striped with black, and his head became that of a great feline, ears tufted black, face patterned in orange and white with black stripes flaring dramatically around his burning eyes and brow.
Over seven feet tall, tail lashing behind him, he leaped ahead of their pack, a malevolent aura brutalizing his prey, causing Okozs and Tokalauths to falter and fall back moments before he fell upon them.
And the carnage he wrought was incredible.
He tore through the fiends as if they were made of mist, faster than the eye could track, his reflexes peerless, his fury without bounds. Fiends were sent flying, their forms shredded, and they barely had time to react before he was upon them, talons raking, huge jaws clamping down, at times rearing up on his legs, at others darting forward on all fours.
The violence drew the attention of the rivers of fiends flowing by; hundreds peeled away from the migration to focus on them, and these immediately started slipping on Taron’s frictionless sands as Aezryna blasted them with shards of ice. Nyrix loosed bolt after glowing bolt from his crossbow, but compared to the damage the Blood Baroness was doing it was akin to hurling pebbles after an avalanche.
Jova raised an arm and boulders tore themselves free of their mesa with ear-splitting cracks. Mid-stride she spun in a circle as if working up momentum and then she flung out both arms. The four boulders, each the size of a carriage, flew as if from trebuchets to slam down into the oncoming fiends and carve bloody furrows some fifty yards deep through their numbers.
Then they were off the ramp and curving hard toward the Wall that loomed a half-mile away. The sand was giving underfoot, and still Scorio conserved his strength, focusing instead on snatching whatever shreds of Bronze yet lingered in the air.
But everywhere about them floated the vortices of the Great Souls ranked Pyre Lord or higher. These formed a great hemisphere about them, invisible to the eye but drinking in all the ambient mana with which to feed the more powerful.
The scraps of Bronze were hard to come by.
Plassus’ power seized them and they surged toward the Wall. More and more fiends came at them, closing around their small group like a fist. Aezryna worked her blizzard around them, and flung out another hand to the south and there caused a flood of ice to wash over the dunes, encasing them in glittering azure from which hundreds of spikes extended, angled toward the oncoming fiends.
Charoth’s roars and snarls came from ahead, but Scorio couldn’t track the Blood Baron; his fury and power seemed unbounded, and he tore through the intervening fiends with savage prowess, opening the way for their group to run. Fyrona unleashed carefully calibrated blasts at any flying fiends that sought to swoop down, but Taron and Aezryna had them protected. A cloud of rocks trailed after Jova, ammunition no doubt while they crossed the sands, but other than flinging the occasional rock at a fiend that slipped through the ice field, even Jova found no need to exert herself.