Even as the first rain of corpses fell across the lower levels of the city, the ancient warriors wound back the catapult again. Carts came forward, loaded with even more bodies.
Nicci set her jaw. “General Utros is not in a mood to negotiate.”
She felt the coldness in her heart, the tingle of both Additive and Subtractive Magic. This fight was about more than just Ildakar. She knew what she had to do. “All of the Old World and the entire D’Haran Empire must know about this threat. I will make my preparations.” The breezes on top of the tower fluttered her close-cropped blond hair. “Tomorrow, I intend to use the sliph.”
That night, trying to rest before she departed on her swift journey, Nicci again traveled with Mrra on the outside of the giant camp. The darkness looked different through the eyes of the sand panther, but she could see the devastation, smell the acrid char of the burned hills as well as blood from the great battle. Mrra had emerged from hiding among the trees in a distant hollow, but now she approached the army of General Utros. The big cat knew the ancient soldiers had weak night vision, even worse than most humans’, and now she ventured even closer to the camp.
Nicci’s thoughts guided the panther as she herself lay restless and half asleep in the grand villa. She was still disturbed by so many losses from the night before.
As they recovered throughout the day, the people of Ildakar tried to assess how much damage their attack had really inflicted on the enemy, but the mutilated bodies hurled by the catapults had caused great shock and dismay. The people struggled to find a sense of victory, but they couldn’t help but count their own fallen, even though they couldn’t identify the mangled corpses. Nicci didn’t even know if Bannon’s body was among them.
Through the sand panther, though, Nicci could now see the true damage General Utros had suffered. Many of the blazing fires were not bright campfires, as the Ildakarans assumed. Mrra smelled burning flesh, saw the piles of bodies, the charred skin and blackened bones falling into greasy embers. These were funeral pyres. Though the ancient warriors were hardened from the remnants of the stone spell, they still bled and they still died. Now the corpses burned, although it took a great deal of firewood.
In her partial dream state, Nicci guessed that the number of enemy dead was at least three to five times as many as Ildakar had lost, but even so it was not a cause for celebration.
Mrra moved like a shadow in the faint moonlight, circling the troops and funeral pyres, seeing the blasted trenches and the damage done. As she crept close to the general’s headquarters, Nicci felt her senses heightened, all sounds and smells intensified tenfold. Mrra sniffed and discovered several large barrels that reeked of blood. Nicci didn’t know why General Utros would store casks of blood, and Mrra didn’t care. Blood did not frighten her.
Nicci memorized all the details as Mrra continued to move around the camp, observing even though the big cat didn’t comprehend human warfare. But she had gleaned enough understanding through her association with her sister panther that she noticed something odd, familiar smells that didn’t belong among the ancient army.
Though unable to approach closer due to the movement of ancient soldiers, Mrra spotted one wooden shack with no windows and a barred door. She heard stirring, low voices, smelled a different scent. Other humans were inside, not these dusty-smelling ones, but warm-blooded men. Captives, perhaps? Hostages that Utros would use as bargaining chips?
There was certainly no way to rescue them in the midst of the gigantic enemy camp.
Before she departed through the sliph the next morning, Nicci would report the news to the duma. Thanks to her feline spy, she had a great deal of new information to share.
CHAPTER 43
Many cities in the Old World had suffered under the Imperial Order, but the threat of General Utros’s army was something entirely different from what they had experienced previously. Now that parts of his army were clearly on the move, Nicci had to spread the warning far and wide. She would travel to Tanimura, Serrimundi, Larrikan Shores, maybe all the way up to Aydindril or the People’s Palace, if the sliph could take her that far. She would tell her story, sound the alarm, rally them in any way possible.
But she needed to have proof. They would not just accept her wild story.
The following morning, after Nicci had delivered her report to the duma of what Mrra had seen, and told them her plan to spread the alarm to other cities, Elsa joined her and Nathan outside the ruling tower. She wore clean purple robes, and she had pinned back her gray-shot hair.
The older woman smiled and nodded slowly. “I think I have just the proof you need, a way you can take the ancient army with you. You can show everyone how great a threat Utros is, and they won’t be able to deny it.” She held up a small pane of glass she had brought with her. “We can use transference magic.”
With the sharp point of a dagger, Elsa scratched runes in each corner of the glass rectangle, then inspected her work. “I can transfer the image of what we see and capture it within the pane. The picture will live inside the glass.”
While Nicci and Nathan watched, she lifted the rectangular glass and slowly turned it, holding it at arm’s length and gazing through it to see the countless soldiers, the burned hills, the numerous tents, the immensity of the siege army. Then she touched the scratched rune in the lower left corner and handed the small pane to Nicci. “That should convince anyone who looks.”
Nicci held the glass, amazed that it had captured the precise image of what they saw from the tower, an undeniable and frightening record of the great army gathered outside of Ildakar. “Yes, this will help a great deal.” She wrapped the glass pane in a cloth. “Now I have to go to the sliph.”
“And we are going along with you,” Nathan said. “In case you need help.”
Nicci flashed him a quick, skeptical glance but withheld her comment. As she walked purposefully down the steep streets with Nathan and Elsa following, she thought of the sliph. “Though I can travel great distances swiftly, I will not be able to bring any help back with me. Ildakar is still on its own.”
Elsa took Nathan’s arm. “We have been on our own for a very long time.” She looked confident, even majestic as she walked along. “During so many centuries beneath the shroud, I did dream of the outside world. I read the histories of other cities, mining towns in the mountains, trade centers by the ocean. They seemed like magical places, and very few people in Ildakar remembered ever seeing them. If I’d known about the sliph and how easy it is to travel, maybe I would have explored.” They descended through the merchants’ district and into crowded residential levels where the lower classes lived. “But I suppose even the sliph couldn’t pass through a bubble in time. Our shroud would have been impenetrable.”
Nicci kept walking at a brisk pace. “That would not have been your primary problem. The sliph can only be used by someone with both sides of the gift, Additive and Subtractive Magic. Millennia ago, many wizards could access that magic, but now very few can use the Subtractive side.”
“Then how are you going to use the sliph now?” Elsa asked.
“I was a Sister of the Dark, and I served the Keeper. I can use Subtractive Magic because of the terrible price I paid.” She thought of the destruction she had caused, the people she had hurt, how she had tried to destroy Richard. Though she had forsaken that darkness, the scars were still within her, as was that poisonous strength. “I will be able to travel.”