Though they kept to deep shadow, shallow valley and tree or scrub where they could find it, they ran a constant risk of encountering Lysternan or Dordovan patrols. It made the walk mentally as well as physically draining, the wild weather conditions merely compounding the problems they faced.
The first ClawBound found them after perhaps an hour. It might have been more, Hirad couldn’t be certain. The rain was driving head-on into them, the wind forcing their movement back to little more than a shuffle. He was leading, the blood loss from his chest making him light-headed, with pain spearing his lungs every time he breathed. The Unknown was at his side, one arm around Darrick’s waist. The general was in trouble, his hip having stiffened, sending an ache up the entire side of his body and into his neck and face, his blood loss from beneath makeshift bandages a cause for real concern.
Behind them, Thraun’s huge arms enveloped Erienne, keeping the worst from her, while beside her, Denser shivered with the cold and mental fatigue, his cloak wrapped around his wife. Sian’erei walked with them too, cutting a lone hunched figure, lost in dread thoughts about the death of Julatsan magic.
The panther had approached from downwind, appearing from the dark and wiping a wet flank along Thraun’s undamaged leg. Another had immediately run out of low cover to their right and not long after, came their unmistakable elven partners. Tall, long-fingered, impossibly graceful, their white-and-black painted faces unspoiled by the rain.
Hirad had felt a relief that surprised him, while The Raven were happy to have their direction changed, edging them south-east. One of the pairs walked with them, the other well ahead, scouting the terrain for cover and any sign of allied patrols. The pair with them didn’t stray from Erienne. The panther walked easily by Thraun, the elf on his other side. Normally impassive, the elf’s face wore a frown and he rarely took his eyes from her. As if he could sense the turmoil within her.
Hirad relaxed. Not just because the ClawBound would give early warning of any attack, but because he had to. He couldn’t fight his weariness any longer. His chest was freezing and a riot of pain, his whole upper body felt like he’d taken a beating with iron bars and his legs were leaden and sluggish. The only way to keep himself going was to retreat inside himself and concentrate on just putting one foot in front of the other.
Even so, by the time they had walked for over two hours, he was forcing himself to continue by sheer effort of will. He could sense The Unknown struggling too, though he had the considerable burden of Darrick to weigh him down. The general could hardly walk at all, but they would not stop, and nothing would stop them. Not the wind throwing dirt and leaves in their faces, nor the rain tearing at their clothes and chilling their skin.
‘Can you ride a horse?’ asked The Unknown suddenly, his words just carrying over the gale.
‘I would kiss anyone who presented me with one, kiss the horse and leap on its back in a single bound,’ said Hirad.
‘I look forward to it.’
Hirad raised his head. Incredibly, The Unknown was smiling. The big man nodded forward, Hirad followed the gesture. There in the path ahead, hidden from plain view by a bank of trees on the down-slope of a shallow valley, was a group of elves. Each one had a horse by its reins, the animals grazing quietly or looking about them vacantly. Actually, they weren’t all elves. One was bigger and broader; he was standing next to Rebraal.
‘Blackthorne,’ said Hirad.
‘I’ve heard that beards rub the skin of the face,’ said The Unknown. ‘Pucker up.’
Hirad laughed. It was brief, the pain flared across his chest. The elves and Blackthorne were walking the horses towards them. The barbarian stopped and looked behind him. He felt like sagging to the ground but knew he’d never get up again. Relief was stamped across Thraun’s face and Denser’s had softened just a little.
‘You boys need a ride?’ asked Blackthorne as he reached them.
‘Now you mention it,’ said Hirad.
Blackthorne’s dark eyes sparkled but his expression was grim when he took them all in.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s not waste time. You need help, all of you.’
Hirad nodded. ‘I’ll kiss you later.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Never mind,’ said The Unknown. He clasped Blackthorne’s arm. ‘We won’t forget this.’
It was a long time before Erienne even recognised that the world she knew was gone. It was a long time before she recognised anything at all. Awareness was not something she could take for granted, she thought. Or did she? This could be a dream, in which case, she was not necessarily aware. She had no sensation of breathing, movement or life. None of her external senses revealed anything to her. She might well even be dead.
In fact, the more she thought about it, the more likely that outcome became. Her memories were fragmented. Not those of her past; they were as clear as they had always been. But there had been a transition. And somewhere between Myriell’s shattering cry and the restart of her thought processes, the memories had been broken, scattered.
Parts of it were still there. Dimly-heard shouts. A pain like she had never experienced before, splintering through her mind. Voices in the darkness. A curious odour like paint burning. An enveloping of her consciousness in a strangling mesh. Contracting, contracting.
It was this she had woken to, with the thought that she must fight. With no idea of the passage of time, she was unaware how long her mind had been under attack. And it was an attack, she was sure. Like it had been waiting for a slip, the One entity inside her had reacted instantly to Myriell’s death and the removal of the suppression of its potential.
Now she could recall it burgeoning within her with a power far too strong to control or even deflect. It had used her mind as a focus and gorged itself on the elements around it. But it had not been allowed to give unfettered vent to itself. Something had blocked it from the outside. Denser. It had to be. Only he understood. Only he among those she had been standing with was capable.
For the first time in what felt like an age, she experienced warmth in her mind. She reached out and probed gently for Cleress but the Al-Drechar was not there. She might be dead too. Probably was. That meant that she, Erienne, was alone to fight the One. Not to defeat it, but to bend it to her will. She imagined it like a spider, the great mound of its body resting on her conscious mind, its eight legs gripping her and squeezing. She couldn’t hope to push the body away, not with her limited experience. But she had to stop the constriction. So, in her mind’s eye, she had to keep on prising away one of the legs, or maybe two. Keep it occupied, keep it off balance.
The question, of course, was how.
What had Myriell and Cleress told her? She struggled to remember. Her mind was clouded, the One all around her, trying to feed off her, drag her mind’s energy, leach it away and use it. It came to her. The One was not sentient and it was dangerous to think of it as such. That was what they had said. In fact, it was little more than a channeller for elemental forces as much as her mind was a focus for those same forces.
This was where she had had difficulty understanding them. It was not sentient but in one sense it had to be an entity or how had they managed to transfer it from her dying daughter to her? The point was, she had been told, that it was an unguarded channeller. Her mind had to be both guardian and focus. And it was the guardian-ship that was hardest learned, the suppression of the ability of the One to suck in energy and use it destructively.
That was what the Al-Drechar had been doing. Closing off its access to the elements. And this was what made it different from any magical power. Mana was naturally chaotic and unfocused, harmless in its natural state. So were earth, air, fire and water harmless. The One entity, though, gave them direction. And the mind of the mage in which it rested gave them focus, gave them outlet.