Embers of an Age (Blood War Trilogy) (12 page)

He was yanked forward and sent tumbling into the trees. As he flew, he spied the massive fist of the Hull crash into the ground
where he’d just
been
.
Arrin
felt its impact as he landed.

Arrin stared at the woman warrior as she faced down the Hull. He had only an instant to recognize she was covered in O’hra before she slipped between the legs of the giant Hull and drove her black blade up into its groin.
It sunk to the hilt.
The creature stiffened and tumbled forward, the earth jumping beneath Arrin as it crashed into the ground face first. The warrior wasted no time, spinning about and scrambling over its back. At its head, she thrust her swords into the back of its skull multiple times before looking to the second Hull.

She leapt from the fallen creature’s back and flew through the air toward the closing
monstrosity
. It raised its arms to stop her but was too slow. She sailed between its stony fingers and shoved the point of her blue sword into the shadows of its eye. It reared back and stumbled as she used the leverage of her blade to direct her momentum and
spin
around to land on its shoulders. She
snarled
and Arrin saw the tip of her blackened blade burst from the face of the Hull. It collapsed without another sound.

Arrin
struggled
to his feet as the woman retrieved her swords from the
stony corpse
. “Thank you,” he told her
, before turning to follow after Cael and Kirah.

“Your friends are fine,” she said, stopping Arrin with her words.

As if they’d heard her and rushed to prove her true, Jerul stormed into the clearing, his face carved with lines of fury. His gaze settled on the scene before him and relief swept the anger from his features.
His wounds were already healing
.
Kirah and Cael arrived behind him, both mirroring
the Yvir’s
surprise and relief.
The boy still held the golden rod in his hands. He
darted to Arrin’s side and set the relic against the flesh of his wounded arm
.
Its magic went to work almost instantly, warmth and relief flooding his veins.

Kirah ran to Arrin and embraced him. He grunted at her enthusiasm
, and handed her sword over
. “I’d thought you lost,” she told him.

“As did I.”

“We stumbled into another Hull, and she killed it before it could reach us
,
”
Cael said.

He looked to the warrior woman. “Thank you again, for that.”

The woman nodded. Steel gray eyes peered from her scarred face.
She sheathed her swords and
pointed to the north
.
“
We need to
h
urry.
There is
little time.”

“Time?”
he asked as he went and retrieved his own sword from the body of the Ruhr.

“There are an army of these creatures roaming the forest.”

Despite the pleasant surges of magic that flowed over him, Arrin’s shoulders slumped.

“An army?” Cael asked
as he stuffed the relic into its pouch
. He looked to the dead Ruhr and shook his head. Defeat marred his features.

“I
was traveling north
for home
and came across
hundreds
of the larger c
reatures massed in a clearing. Hundreds m
ore of their kind
crawled from the earth
as I watched
.” She gestured to the font. “I managed to slip past them but there were more of them filling the woods;
thousands
,
easily
.”

“
Thousands
of the Hull?” Kirah’s ears sank against her skull. The woman nodded in answer.

“Thank you for the information…”
Arrin
paused for a name.

“Braelyn,” she answered
. “There are many of the smaller
stone
creatures lurking about, as well. The mass of them seem to be traveling in a southeasterly direction
, but they appear to be leaving many behind to guard their flanks
.”

Jerul’s eyes went wide as he scanned the trees in the direction she mentioned. “They march on Y’Vel.” He reached for his swords, growling as he realized he no longer had them. “We must go to my people.” Jerul started off.

“Wait,” Arrin told him, moving to block his path. Jerul shifted to step past, but Arrin set his hand on the warrior’s chest. “The Hull are slow and we can
likely
beat them to your land, if that is where they are headed, but we must not rush off like fools. We have but
two
sword
s
between us.”

Jerul drew in a deep breath. He stared at Arrin a moment and let loose a tired sigh. “What would you have us do?”
His feet shifted in the dirt.

Kirah came alongside him and laid a hand on
the Yvir’s
pale shoulder.

Arrin glanced at the ground, which seemed to vibrate beneath his feet. He looked off into the trees a moment before turning back to Jerul. “There are far too many to fight, even for your kind. We must gather your people and push east into Ah Uto Ree.
The Sha’ree promised to provide us with O’hra. The Yvir
can be
our army to drive these creatures from your land
.
”

Jerul nodded without hesitation. “My people would be honored.”

The tremors in the earth grew steadily as they talked, drawing their eyes to the north.

“The Hull grow closer.”
Arrin turned to Braelyn. “You said you traveled
north
for hom
e
?” He pointed toward the approaching army of stone, saying nothing of his confusion at Braelyn’s words. There was no time to challenge her sense of direction. “What would you do now?”

She shrugged. “
M
y choices
, it would appear,
are
becoming
limited.”

“W
ill
you come with us?”

“
It seems,
perhaps, that is my destiny
here in this strange land
.” She sighed. “
I crossed paths with a
nother
traveler, and he
,
too
,
was building an army to challenge
a force
of beasts
he said was armed with
these things you call
O’hra
.” She gestured to the ones she wore. “He asked for my help in exchange for his assistance
in
returning me to my homeland.
Would you honor that pact, as well?
”

“What did this traveler look like?” Arrin asked hurriedly
, ignoring her question
.

“He appeared strange. His flesh was pale green, with great pink eye
s. He—”

“Did he offer his name? Was it Uthul?”

She nodded. “That was the name he gave.
Of the
Sha’ree, he said.”

Arrin closed his eyes a moment and raised them to Kirah
with a quiet exhalation
. She smiled. “He lives. There is yet hope.” He turned back to Braelyn, doing his best to ignore the trembling earth beneath his feet. “
We would most certainly honor his bargain with you
, to the best of our ability
. It is to his homeland that we travel
to enlist the aid of his people
.”

“Will they help us free my uncle?” Cael asked. “And Zalee?”

Arrin nodded. “I suspect Uthul would unearth all of Ahreele in search of his daughter.” He went over and set a comforting hand on Cael’s arm. “We will rescue Domor. The Ruhr would not have taken him had they intended to kill him.”
The rumble in the earth grew more insistent
, setting their boots to dance
.
“
However, w
e must go.” He looked to Jerul. “Lead the way.”

Jerul ran off without a word. The others followed.
Arrin could hear the thunderous travel of the Hull at their back and wondered at their chances in the journey ahead. If Uthul was still alive, if he’d survived the crush of empowered Grol, then there was still a chance they might win out. But Uthul had known nothing about the Hull and Ruhr, or at the very least,
had
said nothing of their role in the battles to come. It was clearly no longer just the Grol that threatened Ahreele. Whatever had stirred the wolfen beasts from their hole had also drawn the great stone races into the conflict.
He knew nothing of what they stood to gain
, and it frightened him
.

As he ran toward Y’Vel, he worried
for those left behind; for Domor and Zalee, and for Malya and her family at Pathrale. The enemies grew thicker by the hour and seemed determined to overrun Ahreele. Would what the Sha’ree offered be enough to win out?

Th
at
was the thought that nagged at him as the droning
thump
of the Hull army sounded at their backs.

Domor’s eyes fluttered open. The pain set in immediately. He gasped and went to raise his hands to his head and found they were bound behind his back.
Panic took hold
, and h
e reached for the power of the O’hra, but he could not feel its energy. He twisted in an attempt to look behind him, but he could see nothing
in the darkness
.
His skull throbbed with the movement
as he dropped back to the floor
, a warm breeze fluttering against his cheeks.
He blinked away the
flickering dots
that blurred his visio
n and tried to pierce the gloom that settled around him.

The flash of a torch burned the darkness away and forced his eyes closed again to protect against its sudden radiance. After a moment, he eased his eyelids open and peered through the cracks. The dark gray of a hewn stone wall filled his sight. He lay on his side, his head aimed into the corner. The fetid breeze that warmed his cheeks was his own breath reflected back at him by the wall. Domor rolled away from it and looked for the light. He spied a torch set in a bronze sconce high on the wall
above
.

He let his eyes adjust a moment to the sputtering light and looked about once he could see clearly. He lay in a small room,
no more than a horse-
length
in either direction
. T
he stone roof loom
ed
over his head. Ignoring the throb of his
skull
, he pulled his knees beneath him and sat up. He saw Zalee
laying just a few feet away, behind him.

Her large eyes were closed, her cheeks swollen and black. Her lipless mouth hung open and dark blood was crusted in a line down her chin. She was naked, all of her clothes stripped from her to reveal the beating she’d taken at the hands of the Ruhr. Domor’s first instinct was to look away, guilt weighing down on him, but the strange lack of sexuality to Zalee’s form held his eyes.

Though female, she looked nothing like the
women
he had seen. Zalee’s breasts were small, round
bumps
,
with only the tiniest of points to mar
the smooth flesh. They were nothing more than little hills upon her
torso
,
in no way resembling the great, swaying orbs that swung from the chests of the Yviri women.
Domor’s gaze drifted down
to
her prone form
to see her sex was also smooth and hairless, though closer in design to those he’d seen
in the bathing Yviri women
.

The rumble of stone upon stone drew Domor’s eyes from Zalee and to the wall. It split where no seam had been before, a sliver of light filling the growing crack. A large part of the wall ahead peeled away as a door might swing, the ground vibrating beneath him as it did. The light of the doorway was blocked by a woman who stood only slightly less broad than the entrance.

She wore a thick leather tunic that offset the extreme paleness of her skin. Her face was square-jawed and thick, a reddish scar beneath
one of her milky pink eyes. The woman’s white hair was pulled back tight, strengthening the severity of her features. She came into the room with a slow, easy gate, muscles rippling beneath her tunic. A long leather apron hung to obscure most of her form, save for its massive width.

“You are awake,” she stated, not a question. Her voice was the sound of stones tumbling from a mountainside.