Chapter Twenty The Pass of Cartuom #4
The cry was taken up and horns sounded. The Exiled Kindred began to disengage and retreat, leaving hundreds of the enemy dead behind littering the ground and hundreds more fleeing back up the ravine.
In the confusion, the Prince was jostled around and forced to kill two more or else be killed himself.
His body, weary and exhausted, was suddenly strong once more, allowing him to race ahead of the soldiers and catch up with Leah and Tomaz.
A cry came from the Imperial force as the men realized what was happening and regained enough presence of mind to give chase, but arrows from the waiting Kindred Scouts stationed high up on the mountain walls brought them down in droves with terrible accuracy.
“Let’s go!” roared Tomaz ahead of the Prince, Imperial arrows and broken blades sticking out from his armor in so many places that he looked like a monstrous porcupine.
Leah almost shot past him as well, but the Prince reached out and grabbed the Exile girl’s arm.
The other Rogues and Rangers continued on without a backward glance, covered by volley after volley of deadly rain from Captain Autmaran’s Scouts.
“The tracking spell is still in place!” the Prince roared in her ear. He saw her eyes light up with understanding: if they retreated now, they’d be followed straight to the Stand.
“How do you break the spell?” she asked.
“Normally,” the Prince began, “you’d need to use a –”
She drew her daggers.
“We can make that work!” he said.
They turned and ran back down the hill, the Prince unsheathing the valerium sword once more, the strength of the three soldiers making it light enough even for his exhausted limbs to wield with dexterity.
They passed fleeing Kindred soldiers, who all looked at them as if they were insane, but they didn’t notice; they were searching with all of their might for the blood drop insignia of the Bloodmages.
“There!” the Prince said, pointing off to their right.
It was a single banner, not very large, but located on the fringe of one of the groups still in disarray.
They doubled their speed, dodging through a thickening crowd of soldiers, mostly Kindred fighting to extricate themselves from the fray and retreat to the escape passes in the heights of the mountains.
Leah and the Prince were the only ones running toward the enemy troops.
“We’re going to die!” the Prince said.
“No we aren’t!” Leah shouted back.
Three men seemed to spring up from the ground directly in front of them. Before Leah and the Prince could even react, arrows flashed out of the mountains, and all three crumpled in heaps—leaving the path to the Bloodmages completely open.
They crossed the final twenty feet, and were suddenly in the midst of three men in hooded black robes, all of who were completely surprised to see two Exiles running at them, weapons drawn.
One of them wore a Soul Catcher that was shining with a bright, gold-and-blue light, very different from the usual blood-red.
The essence of lightning! He was in control of the Daemon!
“That one!” the Prince shouted, pointing.
They both shot toward the Bloodmage in the center, but the hooded men had recovered quickly, and they all drew long, straight daggers, tips blackened with poison, chanting words under their breath that cracked and hissed.
The Prince was confronted on the left, but his enhanced strength and the valerium sword made quick work of the dagger, and the hand holding it as well.
With a cry of pain, the man fell to his knees, blood blossoming on his robes.
The Prince turned to the Bloodmage with the blue Soul Catcher.
Leah had been engaged off to the right by the third Bloodmage and two other Imperial soldiers who had come to his aid.
The Prince saw her throw one of her daggers; it impaled itself in the first soldier, flew back into her hand—and then the Prince lost sight of her as he engaged the lead Bloodmage.
The hooded man attacked, feinting to the left and then stabbing at the Prince’s right. It was child’s play: the Prince, with the speed of three men, dodged the blow, wrapped an arm around the man’s elbows, and broke them with a sharp snap.
There was a wordless shriek of pain from within the hood, and the Prince knew that the Bloodmage’s mouth was pulled back in a snarling rictus of agony.
The valerium sword flashed up and slashed the Soul Catcher cleanly in two, breaking the spell, and destroying the force that bound the mage to life.
The air around them seemed to compress, and then it exploded outward with the sound of thunder. Lightning shot up into the sky, throwing the Prince backwards into a tree, forcing the breath out of his lungs. The Bloodmage let out a shriek of disbelief and despair, and then fell to the ground, dead.
A shape shot past the Prince’s blurred vision, pulling him along with it as it hurled up the mountain as fast as it could.
“Time to go, time to go, time to go!”
Breath still not flowing into his lungs quite properly, the Prince just managed to keep up with the girl as he shot a glance over his shoulder. What he saw made him lose any last hint of inhibition and run like a madman.
The second rank of the army had rounded the corner of the ravine and had been altered to the presence of the Prince and Leah by the destruction of the Bloodmage’s medallion.
It consisted of five columns of archers, and what looked like nearly a thousand bows were trained on the Prince and Leah as they ran up the mountainside.
The Prince looked up and saw the Kindred firing arrow after arrow from the ledge above them, but it was nowhere near enough.
A loud command and a sharp twang! came from behind them, followed by the sound of a thousand pointed needles of death whistling through the air, and then the arrows were falling among them as they ran, slashing through their cloaks, thudding into trees, ravaging bushes.
“RUN!” a voice roared at them. It was Tomaz, standing at the opening to the lowest of the escape passes through the mountain. He was barely fifty yards away, but that distance seemed as far away as the bottom of the sea.
Not knowing where they found the speed, Leah and the Prince shot for the pass, arrows still falling around them as the men reloaded, falling around them like a deadly rain… and then they were through.
They collapsed against the side of the rock wall just long enough for Tomaz to bodily hoist them both in his arms and begin to run, sprinting as fast as he could.
“NOW!” he roared in a voice so loud it left the Prince’s ears ringing.
Boulders crashed down from the sky above them, and the Prince thought for a brief moment that the world was ending. But the rocks landed behind them, and the rumbling soon stopped as the big man slowed and set them down on a small patch of dirt.
“What was that?” the Prince asked, lifting his head.
To his amazement, the pass they had just escaped through was now completely blocked by the remnants of a landslide.
He raised his eyes and saw that two groups of Kindred soldiers had scaled the rock walls, waited until the big man had brought them safely through the pass, and then brought a mountain of rubble down to seal it behind them.
There was a loud series of echoing crashes off to their right, followed by a final booming roar, loud enough to sound like thunder, which rippled through the earth beneath their feet.
“What was that?” the Prince repeated. It was very difficult to breath; he must be more winded than he’d first thought.
“The other passes,” Leah managed to say. “They’re all being blocked.”
“And if I’m not mistaken,” Tomaz added, “that last one was the castle itself.”
There were whoops and cheers from the Kindred soldiers standing on the mountainside, and the three of them looked up to see them motioning down over the sheer cliff side to the army trapped in the ravine below.
“They’re retreating! They’re turning back! Hah-hah!”
Leah and Tomaz let out whoops of joy.
“Well done, ashandel!” Leah cried.
“Are you well?” he asked, looking her over with a critical eye.
“Yes, amazingly,” she responded.
“Good—because now I’m going to kill you for being a stupid, foolhardy slip of a girl!” he growled ominously. She just beamed back at him. Slowly the grimace on the big face slid off and he let out a resigned sigh.
“You are far too much like your brother.”
She laughed, and then turned to the Prince and smiled tauntingly.
“What, princeling, going to sit there all night? A little exercise too much for you?”
He tried to respond, but all that came out was a choking gasp that surprised him as much as it did her.
Together, they looked down and saw a thick wooden shaft sticking out of the left side of his torso, under the armpit.
He coughed and felt something salty and metallic in his mouth; he spat it out and realized, dumbfounded, that it was blood.
The last thing he saw was Leah’s look of horror, as the world caved in around him and swirled into blackness.