Blight
“C ut it down and burn it,” Rider Dale Littlepage ordered.
As a pair of soldiers set to with their crosscut saw, Dale turned around.
In the near distance gaped the breach in the D’Yer Wall.
It looked as if a giant had knocked out a section of the wall, which rose to either side, seemingly infinitely to the heavens, an alchemy of stonecraft and magic.
The repair work consisting of mundane stone and masonry filled the bottom of the breach.
No giant, however, had broken the wall, but a single Eletian using magic to weaken a section that had already languished due to centuries of neglect.
She glanced over her shoulder at the soldiers rhythmically sawing into the great pine, and decided she’d best remove herself from the area before it was felled. As she did so, the encampment’s chief mender, Leese, headed her way, and she sighed.
“Corporal,” Dale called to one of the soldiers nearby, “make sure everyone stays clear of that tree coming down, and get a crew together to hack it up and burn it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I thought you were going to take a rest day,” Leese said when she intercepted Dale.
Dale snorted. “There’s no time for that.”
Leese hurried to keep up. “You can’t keep going like this. When was the last time you had a full night’s sleep?”
Dale had no idea. She didn’t want to rest or sleep because that gave her time to think about...She swallowed hard, then halted. Leese stumbled to a stop beside her.
“Look, I didn’t ask to be put in charge,” Dale said, “and with the way things have been?” She shrugged. At least there hadn’t been any new incursions from Blackveil, except for the blight.
“When does Captain Wallace’s...” Leese cleared her throat. “I mean, do you know when the permanent commander is due to arrive?”
Captain Wallace’s replacement. That was what Leese had almost said.
Dale closed her eyes, took a deep breath.
She and Wallace had been in love. At first, they’d just enjoyed one another’s friendship and company, but it had grown into more.
It had grown enough that they’d actually broached the subject of marriage.
“Dale?” Leese said. “Dale, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...It came out wrong.”
The night the dark Eletians had stormed into the encampment by Tower of the Heavens, she’d witnessed her love torn apart by unstoppable enemies. Memory of being unable to reach him through the battle tormented her both in her dreams and waking hours, as though his loss was her fault.
She took another deep breath. “Captain Wallace’s replacement will likely arrive within the next few days.”
Many of their troops had been savagely killed or injured, and with Alton D’Yer hovering between life and death, they’d looked to her for leadership.
After hostilities ended with Second Empire elsewhere, a few different officers had rotated through on a temporary basis to oversee the presence at the wall, then pulled out as the king and his generals reorganized.
More troops had joined them, but their officers deferred to her because of her time and experience there, and because of Alton’s wishes.
“The captain was a good man,” Leese said quietly. “A good leader. He wouldn’t want to see you driving yourself so hard.”
“Please...” Dale blinked away the tears, fought the grief she had choked back for so long. It had been three months and it still ambushed her at odd moments. She had to lead the soldiers. She couldn’t break down in front of them.
“You’ve exhausted yourself,” Leese persisted. “What would Alton say?”
“He’d be doing the same if he were here.”
“Perhaps,” Leese mused, “he was not the best example for me to use.”
“He entrusted me to take care of things the way I saw fit.”
“And when he returns, what? You collapse? He’ll need you then, too.”
Alton was convalescing in Woodhaven, the seat of Lord-Governor Quentin D’Yer, his father. Dale did not discount Leese’s mending skills, but he could have died from the terrible wound inflicted on him by the dark Eletian. In fact, he had died briefly, but somehow pulled through.
“I don’t—” Dale protested.
She was interrupted by a strange feeling, an upwelling vibrating beneath her feet. A wind thick with the stench of rotting vegetation gushed through the breach. Creatures cried and howled from the other side of the wall.
Her brooch pinched her chest and she could almost hear or feel a calling, but could not make out the words.
Leese grabbed her arm and pointed. A winged creature, huge and oily black, with a long, snakelike neck and terrible talons, emerged from the mist that blanketed Blackveil Forest and swooped over them, every wingstroke beating a fetid stench down on them and churning the softly falling snow into chaotic swirls. The Eletians called them antesheys.
A scream stuck in Dale’s throat and she could not move. She could not hear Leese yelling at her. Dale had once almost been carried off by such a creature near this very spot, and she still bore the deep scars of its talons in her shoulder.
Leese was shaking her now, but Dale’s gaze was transfixed on the avian as it positioned itself overhead to stoop into a dive, with her and Leese as its target.
A blur of fur streaked from the woods, a bobcat. He snarled and leaped, seamlessly transforming into a gryphon, wings sprouting from his back, his snout growing into a powerful raptor’s beak.
“Bob!” Leese cried.
The anteshey backwinged as Bob arrowed straight for it. This time when Leese pulled, Dale stumbled after her.
When they neared the shelter of a cabin, they looked back.
Gryphon and anteshey had locked talons, wings beating frantically.
Bob dug in with his front claws, as well, and clamped his beak on the avian’s neck.
The anteshey, however, was able to reach down with its own beak and snap at Bob’s spine.
Dale clenched and unclenched her hands as she watched, fearful for Bob.
Nearby, archers assembled and stood ready should he fail.
He broke off and she immediately saw why.
More gryphons appeared and flew directly toward the anteshey with an eager meep or two.
The gryphlings, all five of them, had arrived from Tower of the Heavens, followed by their parents, Mister Whiskers and Midnight.
Whiskers and Midnight flew almost casually behind, holding back as the gryphlings cut through the snow and honed in on the anteshey.
They were growing up quickly, no longer the roly-poly balls of fluff and feather, but lean and quick adolescents, and they were savage in their attack. The anteshey hadn’t a chance.
“This is going to get messy,” Leese said. “I wish they wouldn’t disembowel prey in midair.”
Dale closely watched as the gryphlings shredded the anteshey, feathers and entrails showering down, and something lightened inside of her to see that huge, menacing creature utterly destroyed.
She rubbed her shoulder and smiled, but her smile faltered as she recalled the vibration she had felt in the earth just before the anteshey had arrived. The calling.
“What is it?” Leese asked.
“Did you feel, or hear, anything just before the avian came over the breach?”
“There was a gust of wind.”
“Anything else?”
“No, not really. What’s wrong?”
“Something else came through,” Dale said. “I’m sure of it, and it flushed that anteshey out of Blackveil.” She hastened to the pickets where her horse, Plover, awaited her.
· · ·
Tower of the Heavens was one of ten towers located along the expanse of the D’Yer Wall.
The towers had been constructed to allow guards to maintain a watch on Blackveil Forest and the wall itself, but centuries ago, that watch had failed.
Within each tower, except one, remained the spiritlike visages of great mages who had assisted in that watch.
They’d remained for a millennium, enduring even after death, something of their life essences preserved in lumps of tourmaline.
Dale eased through the stone wall of the tower.
It had no door but permitted Green Riders to magically pass through solid stone.
Once inside, she was hit by the acrid stench of cat.
They’d made progress in training the gryphling brood to do their business outside, but the odor lingered.
At least they hadn’t dumped a moose carcass inside of late.
As usual, she found the tower’s mage, Merdigen, arguing with his son, Duncan, also a mage.
“You can’t make me,” Duncan was saying. “I’d never agree.”
Merdigen tugged on his long ivory whiskers. “You are being selfish as always. I thought maybe you had changed, but I guess I was wrong. What will you do? Hide in the eyrie of the eagles for another thousand years?”
Duncan looked about to make a heated retort.
Dale stopped him short by clearing her throat.
“Oh, my dear lady, hello.” He gave her a flamboyant bow.
While Merdigen looked the part of a wise old mage, Duncan maintained the appearance of a youthful and handsome man, his hair coiffed just so, and his shirt open to reveal his chest. Dale wondered if he had actually appeared thus when alive, or had made enhancements to his projected self.
“How pleasant for you to visit us. You are looking radiant as ever.”
He was a terrible flirt.
“Right,” she said. “I was down at the breach, and something came through.”
The two mages glanced at one another, then vanished. She sighed and pulled out a chair, checking it first to make sure it was not covered in furballs or dismembered prey, and sat to wait. It did not take long before the two reappeared.
“Yes, something did come through,” Merdigen said, “and the wall guardians are extremely upset.”
He meant the spirits of magic users who had been sacrificed to create the magical strength of the wall. They existed within stone and mortar and held it together with song.
“Did they say what it was?” she asked.
“They do not speak in coherent speech patterns like you and me,” Merdigen said, “and when they are upset, it is hard to get much out of them.”
“Sort of like you,” Duncan muttered.
“Now, you listen here, boy—”
“Stop.” Dale’s patience had eroded greatly over the past few months. “What got through?”
Merdigen seemed to shrink in despair. “A calling of some sort. A calling from the heart of Blackveil, from Mornhavon the Black himself.”
This did not sound good. Not good at all. “To who, or what?”
“Whom, my lady,” Duncan replied. Before she could snap at him, he explained, “Based on what we have heard of events that occurred a few years ago, of a similar call going out, Mornhavon has summoned his remaining two lieutenants.”
“A few years ago? Lieutenants?”
“Sacor Clan chiefs who turned to Arcosia’s side and were rewarded with power and status by Mornhavon,” Merdigen said. “According to the accounts, he successfully roused Varadgrim, ancient lord of the north, and Mirdhwell, lord of the west. This time he’s after Lichant and Terrandon, we believe.”
Dale remembered the names of Varadgrim and Mirdhwell.
The raising of Varadgrim had cost the lives of many in a delegation on its way to make contact with the Eletians.
The two undead wraiths had also attacked castle grounds, and Mara, now the lieutenant of the Green Riders, had used her ability with fire to stop one of them as it searched the old Rider barracks for Karigan G’ladheon.
Varadgrim had eventually been defeated only when Karigan, inhabited by the spirit of the First Rider, slew him.
Dale scrubbed her face and felt, suddenly, a hundred years old. “Will he—will Mornhavon be successful in awakening these wraiths?”
“Hard to say for sure,” Duncan replied, “but if he is, they are no doubt already free of their prisons and have reentered the world.”