“Dear Lord …”
The smee was still telling tawdry tales when Max reined their horse to a halt. Madam Petra and Katarina had dismounted up ahead and were standing where the forest opened onto a broad valley dotted with little lakes. The sun was already setting, flooding the west with brilliant bands of pink and orange. But in the east, the sky was strangely, unnaturally dark. There, above the distant hills and river valleys, an amoebic mass was floating like some vast cloud of volcanic ash. It might have been fifty miles away and still it dwarfed the landscape, a roiling storm that flickered with glimmers of heat lightning as dust clouds and debris swirled beneath. A sound carried to them on the wind, a faint but unmistakable moaning.
The storm was Yuga.
~ 10 ~
Knife, Spear, and Storm
The demon filled the eastern sky, so massive it seemed that one could touch her or trail their fingers through her nimbus of black vapors. Despite the fact that she was airborne, there was something uncannily dense and ponderous about the demon’s form and the slow-moving tendrils that protruded here and there like the hungry, searching arms of an anemone. Max wondered if the inky nebulae were the demon’s basic essence or if they shrouded something else within. It was a horrifying and alien creature whose amorphous shape and blind hunger reminded Max of the grylmhoch he’d encountered in the Arena. But the similarities ended there; millions of grylmhochs would not have equaled her appalling size. Yuga eclipsed anything Max had ever seen by such a stupefying margin that a mountain would have seemed infinitesimal by comparison. The demon was bigger than a small country, forever moaning as she devoured all life and energy in the lands beneath her. She was entropy itself.
Max glanced at Madam Petra and her daughter. Holding hands, they simply gaped at the far-off demon. There was not even fear stamped upon their faces, but rather a blank, uncomprehending emptiness. The mere spectacle of Yuga had overwhelmed their senses.
“D-dear God, what a monster!” stammered Toby, peering out from Max’s hood.
“Don’t look at her,” said Max gently. “Yuga’s far, far away yet.”
“Can she see us?” whispered Madam Petra, retreating back into the wood.
“I don’t think so,” replied Max, projecting a calm that he did not feel. “She is still very far from us, Petra. Miles and miles and miles. The sooner we go on, the sooner we find David’s tunnel and get away from her. Katarina?”
The girl only responded on the third call, tearing her attention away from the demon.
“Katarina, have you ever stared at an eclipse?”
The girl blinked. “No,” she muttered. “It would hurt my eyes.”
“That’s right,” said Max. “There’s something in the eastern sky right now that’s like an eclipse. It’s far away and it can’t hurt you unless you stare at it. You look at your mother instead, okay?”
When the girl nodded, Max turned to Petra. “Do you have any idea where we are relative to Bholevna?”
She scanned the land ahead, the fields and farms that had been trampled by Aamon’s armies. There were no landmarks, nothing but a few burned-out and abandoned farmhouses.
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “Bholevna may be farther north or perhaps east. I can’t say for certain.”
“Toby,” called Max. “How’s that ‘latissimus nub’ feeling? Could you become another bird?”
“A small one, perhaps,” replied the smee, wriggling like a grub. “Let’s see, let’s see.”
Seconds later, a sparrow hopped out of Max’s hood and tentatively fluttered its wings.
“Perfect,” said Max. “Can you fly up and have a look around for a landmark, a river, a road—anything that might give us a better sense of where we are?”
The smee zoomed from Max’s shoulder, spiraling up into the winter sky until he was almost lost from view. Once Toby was gone, Max checked on David.
His roommate was asleep, his cheeks flushed with fever, but his condition did not appear to be deteriorating. Peering beneath the bandage, Max saw that Katarina had done a good job cleaning the wounds, which were already mending.
“Can you hear me?” said Max, reapplying the bandage. “David?”
The sorcerer’s brow furrowed with irritation. He grunted.
“You can sleep again in a minute,” Max assured him. “Is the tunnel in Bholevna itself?”
The reply was so faint, it was little more than an exhale.
“East,” whispered David wearily. “A mile. Farmhouse … stream.”
“The tunnel is a mile east of Bholevna in a farmhouse by a stream?”
David nodded.
“Good,” said Max, patting his friend. “That’s good. We can’t be too far away.”
Toby returned a few minutes later, swooping down into the forest to settle onto Max’s shoulder.
“There’s a brayma’s palace perhaps ten miles to the north beyond that strip of forest,” he reported, gesturing with his wing. “Magnificent, really—reminds me of St. Basil’s Cathedral—but it looks like it’s been sacked. All the surrounding farms have been burned. It appears that Aamon’s armies have already been through this land.”
“I know that palace,” said Madam Petra. “It belongs to Baron Hart—Katarina and I attended a hunt there last spring. Bholevna’s just another ten miles or so northeast of there.”
“Let’s make for the palace,” Max decided. “If the horses aren’t spent and we feel up to it, we can push on to Bholevna tonight. If not, we can take shelter and see if there’s any food about. Agreed?”
The Kosas nodded, and even David managed a weary grunt. Reminding them not to look east, Max swung back up into the saddle, checked to see that the pinlegs was secure, and led the ride north.
The moon had risen high by the time they neared the palace. The journey had been slow going, for the horses were exhausted and the land grew rough and rocky in places, requiring them to pick their way carefully amid the trees and outcroppings. To the west, Max heard the faint blare of war horns. Periodically, there was a flash in the western sky as though lightning rippled through the clouds.
But it was Yuga that occupied Max’s attention.
He had said nothing to the others and hoped they had not noticed, but the hollow moaning was growing louder. The demon was so enormous that it was difficult to gauge her direction or speed—her motions seemed as slow and deliberate as the Earth’s rotation. But she was moving, and it sounded as though she was moving west, drawn perhaps to the warring armies and the vast feast they represented. Despite the darkness, she was still visible—a gargantuan void among the stars as though a huge, ragged patch had been torn from the night sky. Max wondered if Bram, or even Astaroth, could destroy such an abomination.
The dismal truth was that they were caught between terrible forces. He prayed that David’s tunnel still existed. If not, they would have to flee north to the Baltic and rely on Ormenheid to carry them home.
“These horses will keel over if we don’t rest them,” panted Madam Petra, shivering in the cold. “And I’m falling asleep in my saddle. Do you think it’s safe in the palace? We can water the horses and see if there’s food. Just an hour or two of sleep,” she pleaded.
Toby flew off to scout. When he returned and pronounced the palace abandoned, they led their weary mounts across its trampled fields and orchards.
The smee had been correct; the place really did resemble St. Basil’s Cathedral with its painted towers and voluptuous domes glinting beneath the moon. Before its fall, it must have been a wonder. But much of the palace was damaged, its gatehouse a charred ruin while several of the towers had collapsed into the inner bailey, obliterating a handful of smaller buildings in the process.