Chapter Sixteen Choices #3
Sudden as a flash of lightning, he felt another life spring into being in the direction they had gone.
He jerked back, shocked. There had been nothing, and now there was a growing life energy focused on a single point at the top of the mountain.
At first the Prince thought he was seeing things, but the life continued to grow—to grow? How was that possible?
Understanding hit him, cold and hard, and numbed him with terrible fear.
Only one thing left that kind of signature. And they were riding straight toward it.
He looked down the right-hand fork, down toward the distant road. The path duty would lead him to. He looked back up, the way Tomaz and Leah had gone, and sensed again the growing, malevolent life.
In panic, he looked behind him and felt the enormous multitude of men combing through the forest, making sure he wouldn’t slip through their net this time.
There were thousands of them, and they were moving quickly.
He wouldn’t have time to come back this way if he didn’t take the trail down the mountain now.
“Shadows and light!” he growled.
What does it matter? he thought. They’re only Exiles. They chose this life.
But anger struck him like a bolt of lightning and cleared his mind. It consumed his well-thought-out arguments and plans, and in that instant he knew where he belonged.
He kicked his boots into the sides of his horse and was rocketed up the mountainside. He could feel the energy of the new life still growing and he knew it wasn’t over yet. Thunder sounded in the sky above him and he saw black clouds forming over the mountain summit.
Too fast—he wouldn’t reach them in time.
He urged all of the speed he could out of his mount, climbing higher and higher, leaving the road to Roarke far behind, racing against the building clouds. If it started to rain, the process would be complete, and the monster would become corporeal.
Trees flew past him as he tracked both the life energy of the Exiles and kept a check on the life of the creature.
The trail was leading him well up into the mountains, high enough that the wind whipping past him cut straight through his layers of clothing.
His horse was frothing at the mouth, but he continued to push it mercilessly.
Faster! he urged it. The Exiles were close. He looked up and saw the clouds converging on a spot not too far ahead of them. His horse came to a small clearing in the midst of a grove of trees, and there they were, moving at a steady trot twenty yards in front of him.
“STOP!”
The Exiles turned in their saddles to look back, barely slowing as they did. When they saw that it was him, though, they reined in their horses. Tomaz roared at the Prince over the rising wind.
“What in the name of the seven hells are you doing here?!”
“There’s a Daemon right in front of you!” the Prince yelled back.
They both stared at him blankly, keeping a tight rein on their horses as they tried to keep them calm against the force of the rising wind.
“A what?!” Tomaz shouted back.
“A DAEMON!” the Prince roared. “AN ELEMENTAL! WE NEED TO LEAVE!”
“We’re not leaving!” Leah shouted back, clearly having heard almost nothing he’d said. “Run before you can’t!”
“NO, LEAH, STOP!”
Lightning and thunder broke through the clouds and momentarily blinded the Prince and left his ears ringing. Rain began to fall, and he looked up at the sky, heart pounding.
The clouds began to circle in on each other, and lightning and thunder rocked the world once more. The black clouds parted, and an enormous shape plummeted toward them.
The Storm Daemon crashed into the ground in front of them, lightning shooting across the ground in sheets.
The Prince dove behind a tree, and the raw energy shot past him, leaving his muscles limp and jerky.
He forced himself back up, looking around frantically for Leah and Tomaz, hoping that they had found cover across the clearing.
The Prince turned and looked at the creature before him.
It was nearly twenty feet tall and made of a blinding white substance that the Prince knew to be the essence of the storm itself.
It wore a white helm shaped like a crown, made of razor-sharp shards of ice and flickering pulses of lightning, around a skeletal head, out of which glared eyes that were pockets of ice.
It was clothed in blue-and-white armor and a cloak that flowed like storm clouds, gray and misty.
Hands like claws, each of the fingers as long as one of the Prince’s arms, held a staff as long as it was tall, one side a pointed, wicked looking saber blade, the other end a cruel spear point.
The entire length crackled with raw lightning.
The Daemon drew a deep breath, and the air in the clearing rushed toward it, a mighty wind that tore at the Prince’s clothes.
He knew of no way to defeat a Daemon that did not involve killing the Bloodmages who had created it, and as distance mattered little when there was a full circle of twelve summoning a Daemon, the Bloodmages could be halfway to the castle of Roarke for all he knew. All that they could do now was run.
The Prince saw the Exiles looking out from behind a tree not too far from him.
Hoping against hope that the Daemon wouldn’t notice him, he took off running as fast as he could in their direction.
There was a roar of surprise as the Daemon caught the motion.
The Prince dove behind the tree hiding Tomaz and Leah just as the creature brandished its staff, shooting a crackling bolt of lightning through the spot the Prince had just been.
The Prince ran headlong into Tomaz’s chest and stumbled back. Big arms shot out and steadied him.
“We need to run! Now!” he shouted over the rushing wind. Lightning and thunder crackled again, and the top of the tree was severed from the trunk and came crashing down nearly on top of them.
“We need valerium!” Leah called. She was peering around the edge of the tree as if planning to fight off the monster. The Prince grabbed her by the cloak and pulled her back, turning her around to shout in her face.
“What in the Empress’ name is valerium?!” he cried.
The answer was lost as the rest of the tree was uprooted when the Storm Daemon attacked again.
The Prince was suddenly airborne, thrown across the clearing.
He landed with a bone-rattling thud on a tree root that dug into his back and tore his breath away.
He choked and tried to push himself to his feet, but the Daemon was there, hurricane winds twisting around its head, as a clawed, blue-and-gray foot shot out and pinned him to the ground.
The Prince let out a cry of pain and struggled in vain to free himself, the heat already seeping from his blood as the cold bit deeply into his body. He looked up into the icy, enchanted eyes of the elemental, and knew there was nothing he could do to save himself.
The Daemon raised its staff, lightning crackling along its length, and brought it down. The Prince closed his eyes and waited for the end.
But it didn’t come—instead, there was a piercing cry of pain from above him, like that of lightning ripping open the fabric of the sky, and the Prince opened his eyes. The Daemon reared back and turned, a dazzling white dagger sticking out of its neck, just below the edge of its crown-shaped helm.
A figure burst from concealment, a sword like white flame held in one hand.
The Daemon charged the figure, roaring in rage and pain.
That alone was enough to stun the Prince—he had never seen a Daemon in pain before.
The figure dodged, and the sword lanced out, to the Prince’s continued amazement, in the complicated sword form of Wolf on the Mountain, flawlessly allowing the figure to dodge the Daemon while slicing through the blue-white armor.
Another flash of white caught the Prince’s eye, and he looked over and saw a second figure, nearly as large as Tomaz, wielding an enormous axe made of the same white metal.
The figure reared back, and then hurled the axe through the air; the axe swung through a large arc and lopped one of the Daemon’s arms clean off.
A terrible scream rent the air, a howling and tearing that resounded with the raw power of thunder and the piercing shriek of wind.
The Daemon swung its staff, lightning branching from the saber’s blade, but the figure dodged back and rolled to the side just as the flash of energy shot over its head, ripping into a pine tree and shattering it into a thousand flying bits of kindling.
The smaller figure took a running leap and threw its white sword through the air.
The sword flew completely straight, as if a force were pushing it directly through the intervening space, and, with a scraping, ear-splitting crack, it plunged into the creature’s neck, just below the crown-shaped helm.
As it sunk in, the white metal seemed to pulse, and the Daemon appeared to swell.
With a final heaving cry, the elemental exploded into a thousand shards of ice that went flying in as many directions.
The Prince, Leah, and Tomaz threw themselves to the ground in a heap, hands covering their heads. Lightning flashed and thunder roared; the Prince felt a searing force and an accompanying percussive boom rock through his body and explode in his ears.
Everything became still and deadly quiet. The Prince lifted the edge of his drape-over, which had blown up over his head, and looked to where the Daemon had been. Where the creature had stood was now a blasted heath, and in the sky the scattered clouds of a dying storm.
The Prince felt his head lift, almost involuntarily, as if it were metal drawn by a living lodestone, his eyes flying across the ground, trying to locate the two figures that had saved them—the two figures that had killed that which should have been immortal.
There!
“Davydd!”