Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
Braiden’s heart raced as he sprinted toward the closest dust devil.
He barely made it several feet before he stumbled over a rock, only just catching himself before he took a spill onto the ruined ground.
How was he supposed to coordinate a rescue of the othergoats when he couldn’t even coordinate his own two feet?
Oh, gods. Maybe they shouldn’t have gone on their own after all. But what did Warren and Bones, people who lived in underground civilizations, know about how to handle othergoats?
And how could Elyssandra — an actual elven princess — help in this situation? At least Craghammer would have been able to carry one, maybe even two of these goats under his arms or over his shoulders, provided anyone would be able to actually touch the things without burning their hands.
Braiden chose the quickest solution that came to mind — oddly enough, something he’d considered for the possibility of fighting fire elementals in the Weathervale dungeon, similar to what he’d used against the infernal messenger in the form of a brass cube.
Wouldn’t a heavy weave of fabric, like a thick blanket, be enough to smother one of these dust devils? He couldn’t even ascertain whether these spinning columns of air were actual miniature elementals or simply manifestations of elemental essence sent by this strange and still unseen attacker.
Forcing the magic out through his fingers, Braiden conjured his fabric — warp against weft — launching a blanket to cover the closest dust devil.
It was as thick a weave of conjured yarn as Braiden could muster, something good enough to make an extremely heavy blanket, a weighted one meant for swaddling and calming the nerves.
The blanket fell upon the dust devil, which offered no resistance, the tiny tornado immediately dissipating as soon as it was trapped between fabric and earth. Braiden pumped his fist. Finally, something was going his way.
He scanned the valley for the other dust devils still spinning and spitting out their nuisance sprays of jagged debris and dirt.
The othergoats were still panicked, but at least now they seemed to be viewing Braiden with less suspicion.
Well and good. He still needed to make an effort to keep his distance, just in case one of them exploded again.
As he rushed toward the next dust devil, he finally noted that one among the goats wasn’t nearly as panicked as the others. In fact, it looked completely unconcerned by all the chaos. It fixed Braiden with a pair of eyes like shards of onyx. Unblinking, unmoving. A shiver ran down his spine.
But the sensation vanished as another explosion shattered the air and rattled his teeth. Gods, he needed to finish this before more of these poor creatures went off. How many times could they explode before they burnt themselves out?
Another enormous sheet of fabric erupted from his hands, and once again, the dust devil vanished beneath the conjured weight. He shook his fingers, already feeling a strange soreness in his hands, the familiar stinging sickness of magical overexertion.
He groaned as he bent over, dragging his conjured blanket with him to the next dust devil, huffing and puffing the entire way. Better sore muscles than burning himself out and falling unconscious right here on the battlefield.
Far above him, Augustin didn’t seem to be faring much better, still yelping each time a powerful gust blew him off course.
The winds came with a telltale howl and high-pitched whistle, their source shifting constantly along the ridge.
Multiple elementals, perhaps, or one moving too quickly to track.
But only one dust devil remained. With a final heaving grunt, he hurled his blanket over the elemental spout, shouting triumphantly when it too disappeared under the weight of the conjured fabric.
Only problem was that the othergoats were still running about willy-nilly. They seemed to be calming, though, gathering into a herd. Now that the dust devils were gone, they were gravitating toward that same statue-still othergoat.
Very creepy, that thing with its unblinking eyes, but at least the goats were huddled together. Safety in numbers, right?
And then horror struck Braiden’s heart. All it would take was another strong gust of wind to knock these goats over like a game of lawn bowls. And when the goats bounced and slammed into each other, over a dozen of them with such force —
Furious wind rushed down from the ridge, exactly as Braiden had feared.
He threw his arms out, meaning to conjure another sheet of cloth.
But what was he thinking? The very hubris of him to believe he could create something as big as a sail, something to swallow up this enormous gale still barreling toward the clustered goats.
He fell to his knees, wincing at the attempt to manifest such a grand and impossible conjuration. He had no way to cast a spell that big when there wasn’t much left in his reservoir.
The wind shredded at his hair and clothing as it rushed past. Braiden turned his head to follow its invisible passage, watching in open-eyed terror as the frontmost goats slammed backward.
He covered his ears. Three, five, seven goats bumped into each other, triggering a cacophonous chain of explosions.
The crater from before was nothing compared to the gouge in the earth left by this series of blasts.
The air thickened with dirt, grass, and bits of black wool falling all across the valley.
Braiden coughed as he backed away from the great brown cloud. Bloody elemental. Good enough to cause all this chaos, but nowhere near polite enough to blow the noxious cloud away.
He retreated, coughing harder, clearing his lungs, only slightly relieved when he heard the resumed bleating of goats from within the crater. Only there were fewer voices this time. Had some collapsed out of exhaustion — or worse?
Somewhere up on the ridge, between the bleating of the surviving goats and Augustin’s angered shouts, Braiden was sure he heard chortling laughter, what he imagined an air elemental’s malicious glee might sound like.
Augustin had told him time and again that elementals could not experience emotion, could not adhere to a moral or ethical compass. Then how come this thing seemed so malevolent, taking delight in destruction?
Right on cue, grass, leaves, and dirt at Braiden’s feet swirled anew as a fresh batch of dust devils rose from the valley floor. He clenched his teeth and balled his fists. No. Not this again. And at least a dozen of them this time.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted up at Augustin.
“Join me on the ground! It’s too dangerous up there, and I have an idea.”
“Are you sure?” came Augustin’s hesitant reply, echoing across the valley.
“Just get down here, already!”
Augustin’s cape billowed behind him as he plunged into a steep dive, a pelican diving for a tasty fish — or in this case, to avoid almost certain death. He righted himself as he touched the ground, landing expertly on his feet.
“We should do something about these dust devils,” he breathed, winded from his flight, and likely from being batted around like a cat toy by a very unpleasant elemental.
Augustin clapped his hands sharply, sending a burst of air rushing across the valley floor, dissipating the dust devils in an instant.
Braiden threw his hands up. Sure, the wizard had been busy dealing with his own problems up in the air, but all that conjuring, all the dragging of those blankets?
Augustin was the one flying, but Braiden’s arms sure were tired.
“I hope you have something extremely clever in mind, weaver,” Augustin said.
“I don’t know about clever,” Braiden replied, “but it has to be better than you falling to your death or me getting exploded along with the othergoats. Get behind me.”
Augustin cocked an eyebrow. “I must say, I’m very flattered by your protective instincts, but this situation calls for the best of both our talents.”
Glowering, Braiden took several paces forward instead, planting himself squarely between the wizard and the ephemeral thing still howling, whistling, and chortling up on the ridge.
“When I say go, unleash the strongest wind spell you can muster. At least something as powerful as when you sent out all those flyers.”
Braiden didn’t wait for a response, extending his hand and calling on a smaller, simpler form of magic, something familiar and easy. As bits of confetti, ribbons, and streamers emanated from his fingers, Braiden gave the order.
“Now!”
Augustin clicked his fingers, a roaring gale all but pronouncing his worthiness to the title of Wizard of Weathervale.
Braiden tensed his muscles and dug his heels into the earth even as the wind yowled through his hair and threatened to throw him flat to the ground.
He watched with breathless hope as Augustin’s spell carried the burst of color all the way up to the valley’s ridge.
“I think I understand now,” Augustin shouted, making himself heard over his still-rushing wind.
Braiden said nothing, his mouth dry as the confetti and ribbons swirled up and up — and then suddenly stopped, whirling in place, sucked into an invisible vortex. Braiden threw his fist in the air, loosing a triumphant yelp.
“End your spell, Augustin,” he cried out. “It worked!”
Their curious collaboration had actually worked, though not in the way of distraction as Craghammer had suggested.
Where once the air elemental was completely invisible, it was now a swirl of confetti and color, having sucked Braiden’s rainbow of ribbon into its ever-spinning, ever-whirling body.
It almost made the challenge seem surmountable, seeing this pretty tornado up on the valley wall. Almost.
Because rendering the air elemental visible had also revealed the actual size of the thing.
Gargantuan, for a start, as big as a house, though mercifully not as towering as the giant ice elemental from the dungeon.
It was a bizarre sort of organism, like six tornados joined together at vaguely humanoid angles, four to serve as rapidly rotating limbs, a large one for its torso, and the last one for a head.
Also unlike the ice elemental, this thing had no face. But Braiden knew that unveiling its position had upset it. He could tell because the creature had finally stopped laughing.
Augustin clapped him firmly on the shoulder. “Excellent work. I thought I could hear the confounded thing up there, but you can’t fight fire with fire, as it were. At least we know it has a whistle stone.”
That explained the whistling, but now the elemental was making an entirely new sound as it rolled down the side of the valley: a furious roar.
Braiden gulped. “We can talk about whistle stones later. Right now, we still need to figure out how to stop this thing.”
The great air elemental descended in a cloud of pink and yellow and blue, angrily spitting out and hemorrhaging ribbons and bits of confetti as it hovered down to the valley floor, closer and closer.
Braiden tightened his fists, flipping through his mental repository of Granny Bethilda’s index cards. What in the world could he possibly craft to help stop this thing? Building a blanket big enough to smother it would kill him.
Something butted against his back. Braiden glared over his shoulder in irritation, but it wasn’t Augustin. Something butted against his butt. Braiden looked down.
“An othergoat?” he muttered.
And another one, then another, two, four, until six of them were flanking wizard and weaver, staring dead ahead at the oncoming elemental.
Gone was their frenetic panic, but now a new panic was mounting in Braiden’s chest, the most rational parts of him wondering what would happen if the elemental happened to set off a chain explosion with him and Augustin sandwiched between two rows of othergoats.
He looked back out at the valley, concerned that even more of the silly creatures were filing toward them.
But no. The rest of the herd had stayed put, the dust having settled over the point of the afternoon’s biggest explosion.
The strangest of the othergoats, the one from before, clambered over the edge of the crater, onyx eyes burning into the back of Braiden’s skull as it fixed him with its alien gaze.
The othergoat nodded. Braiden, by now certain that he was losing his mind, nodded back.
Well. That was different.