“If magic is controlling them,” Umara said, “then perhaps that’s what it will take to chase them away. Everyone, keep watch while I try something.”
She pushed back her cowl to bare her shaven scalp and drew a long wand of some dark, mottled wood from a hidden sheath sewn in her robes. She took a long breath, then exploded into motion, whipping the rod through an intricate figure with tight, precise motions that would have done credit to a duelist. She finished by pointing it at the sky, whereupon she froze.
She remained silent and held the position long enough for Anton to wonder if she’d forgotten what came next. Then she started murmuring. The rhythmic lines didn’t repulse him the way Kymas’s incantations had, but they projected a noticeable pulse of energy that made him feel as though he was being prodded on each of the rhyming words.
Gradually, Umara’s voice crescendoed, and as it rose to a shout, she lowered the wand, held it outward, and turned in a circle.
Crackling yellow flame leaped up where she pointed. Thayans recoiled from the heat, and Stedd goggled at the spectacle. When the wizard finished, a ring of fire encircled her companions and herself. Like the blaze aboard the Iron Jest, it burned fiercely despite the rain and the wet.
Except, Anton suspected, not really. A moment later, Umara confirmed his guess: “Don’t worry. We’re in no danger of burning up. This is an illusion. But fire ought to scare off wild animals if anything can.”
She lashed the wand from left to right as though making a horizontal sword cut. With a roar, the ring of fire simultaneously leaped higher and rushed outward, seemingly setting brush and branches alight as it expanded.
Anton grinned. An onrushing threat like this should spook any beast, even if some warlock or demon was whispering in its ear.
But the fire had only traveled several paces outward when a thunderous roar reverberated through the forest. Reeling, all but deafened, Anton couldn’t tell if the ground was literally shaking or if the prodigious noise had simply overwhelmed his sense of equilibrium. He did see that it extinguished the illusory conflagration as suddenly and completely as a man’s breath could puff out a candle.
He staggered a step, caught his balance, then grabbed Stedd and steadied him as well. After that, he peered through the trees and the rain to find the power that had overmatched Umara’s.
His eyes were drawn to a dot of flickering blue light amid the grayness. It had an indefinable but undeniable wrongness to it that made him want to flinch in the same way that Kymas’s spells had made him want to cover his ears. He kept peering instead and determined that the glow appeared somehow attached to another quadrupedal and possibly leonine form. Then the enormous cat, if that was what it was, stalked into a stand of oaks and disappeared.
“What was that?” asked Stedd.
“The master of the pride,” Anton replied. “Above and beyond that, I don’t know.”
“The light is blue fire,” Umara said. “The chaotic force that maimed the world a hundred years ago. And if our enemy is bound to it, the thing is spellscarred or conceivably even plaguechanged.”
“Does that mean your magic is no use against it?” Anton asked.
The Red Wizard glowered. “I’ll kill it if I have to.” She took a breath. “But I confess, if it remains content to harry us by sending normal lions at us, I won’t complain.”
“Is it trying to catch me to give to Evendur Highcastle?” asked Stedd.
Umara shook her head. “Who knows? It may have sensed your power and craved it for itself.”
“Whatever it wants,” Anton said, “it’s not here to make friends.” He looked up at the sky, or what little he could see of it through the tree limbs, and attempted the always-frustrating task of gauging the position of the sun despite the cloud cover. “We need to move. We’ll want a better place to go to ground if the thing is still stalking us come nightfall.”
They pressed onward. In time, they heard another cough off to the left. Men jumped, then craned and turned, searching for the source of the noise. Until a growl from the right answered the first noise and made everyone lurch around in the other direction.
From that point forward, coughs, snarls, and the occasional roar sounded periodically. The lions were demonstrating there were several of them still alive and shadowing their prey.
Once in a while, someone caught a glimpse of a brown shape slipping from one bit of cover to the next. Then the Thayan men-at-arms hastily raised their bows and crossbows and shot. Umara started an incantation, then broke off partway through when her target disappeared. The power she’d been gathering to herself dissipated with a sizzling sound and a crimson shimmer.
Anton took a couple hurried shots of his own before he realized what was going on. Then he called, “Hold it! Stop shooting. The lions are showing themselves to provoke us into wasting our quarrels, and Lady Umara her spells.”
“May the Black Hand take it,” Ehmed growled, “you’re right. Everybody, do as the Turmishan says. Don’t shoot unless a lion is making a run at us.”
As the travelers resumed their trek, Umara came to tramp alongside Anton and Stedd. “I don’t like the way our enemy keeps trying new tricks,” she said. “Or anything else about this situation. We’d be better off taking our chances along the shore.”
Anton pushed an eye-level branch out of their way. “It’s a little late for that to qualify as a useful insight.”
She frowned. “I wasn’t finding fault.”
“I know.” He reached to touch her shoulder, hesitated for an instant, and then followed through. She didn’t protest the familiarity. “I just … anyway, if we think it the wiser course, we can head back to the strand and try dodging Mourmyd Jacerryl and those like him. But we won’t make it out of the forest before nightfall.”
“And traveling in the dark with the lions lurking to pick us off would be suicide. You mentioned finding a safe place to camp.”
Anton snorted. “Yes, being the master woodsman I am. I was thinking of high ground or a clearing. Something.”
Now it was her turn to give him a fleeting touch on the forearm. “Maybe we’ll still come to a spot like that before sunset.”
Instead, they passed one blighted tree and then more, with twisted, knobby, arthritic-looking limbs and chancrous patches in their bark. Though Anton noticed, at first, he didn’t care; he had more urgent matters to occupy him than the health of this particular part of the woods. But then, as the gray light filtering down through the canopy was growing even more anemic, he spotted a blue glow.
Thinking the lions’ master had worked its way around ahead of the company, he snatched his crossbow from its bag and drew breath to shout a warning. Then he realized the azure light was only one of a dozen such flames flickering on the ground, in the midst of thickets, or in treetops without setting anything else on fire.
A warning was still in order, but one of the marines shouted it before he could: “That’s plagueland!”
And so it was. A patch of earth where, a century later, the blue fire of the Spellplague still burned. Anton had never seen such a place before, but by all accounts, they were rife with peculiar dangers.
Umara glowered at the poisoned landscape. “Was the leader of the pride driving us here? Is it more powerful in plagueland?”
Anton shook his head. “If a Red Wizard doesn’t know, how should I? I’m just glad we didn’t blunder deeper into the area before realizing where we were. Look, we don’t have enough daylight left to find a way around it. We need to make camp. We can chop brush to make barricades, and we’ll want fires. Big ones, even if you have to spend some of your power to make wet wood burn like dry.”
The wizard’s lips quirked upward in a weary little smile. “I thought you weren’t a woodsman.”
“In my time, I’ve maneuvered around a port or two to attack by surprise from the landward side. Sadly, in this company, that makes me about as close to Gwaeron Windstrom as we’re likely to come.”