‘Why make the second attack? All they have to do is hold us outside the river pass, keep us some distance back, and eventually that sphere is going to encompass this area and they can strike out in any direction. More to the point, why go to the trouble of creating all that slaughter in the first place? Why not just keep expanding the sphere?’
Alenburga ran his hand over his face. ‘My eyes feel like I’ve got a desert’s worth of grit in them.’ He looked at Erik first, then Kaspar. ‘There are a lot of questions I have no answers to.’ He paused, then said, ‘How did the Kingdom defeat the Tsurani in the first place, is one.’
Erik said, ‘I’ve studied every record of that war, and the best answer I can come up with is, because the Tsurani weren’t serious about it.’
‘A twelve-year war and they weren’t serious?’
‘Seems it was merely a side ploy in some big political game they were playing here.’
‘I’d hate to see what would have happened if they had been serious,’ said Kaspar.
‘We’d all be speaking Tsurani from birth, I think,’ observed Alenburga. He took a deep breath. ‘But none of the descendants of the Tsurani will be left to speak Dasati if we don’t prevail.’
‘What next?’ asked Kaspar.
‘We wait.’ The General looked around for a likely place to sit and found a large rock where he could lean back. He sat down and said, ‘The really bad thing is that I have no idea what to expect next from those monsters in the dome. The good thing is that come early morning tomorrow, we’ll have three times the soldiers to throw at them.’
‘Something tells me,’ said Erik, sitting down nearby, ‘we’ll need them.’
Kaspar remained standing and looked towards the sphere as if he could somehow see it in the dark. Softly he asked, ‘But will that be enough?’
Joachim of Ran was nervous. He was nervous every time it was his turn to watch the ten thousand motionless Talnoy. He was also nervous because the only other magician from Sorcerer’s Isle who was on duty was no older than he was – barely twenty-six years of age – and he had even less experience as a magician, and was sound asleep outside.
The Conclave had been taking care of these… things, for some time now, Joachim assumed. He didn’t really know much beyond his instructions, which were to watch them in shifts with other magicians who came and went from Sorcerer’s Isle, do nothing, but make sure someone knew if anything untoward occurred in this vast cavern.
Joachim was not entirely sure what ‘untoward’ meant exactly, but he was entirely sure he wouldn’t like it if he knew. He couldn’t help how he felt; these motionless things in the vast cavern below were unnerving, standing row upon row like monstrous toy warriors, each in identical armour, each as unmoving as the rocks surrounding—
He blinked. Did one of them move? He felt his heart pound and his skin puckered with gooseflesh. He looked hard, but he could see no sign. It must have been some trick of the night, a game of the mind, he decided, yet still his heart raced.
Should he call Milton, the other magician? Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Joachim thought he would only be mocked if he did. He applied himself to needlessly adjusting the single torch stuck in the make-shift sconce above him, and decided it was the flickering of the light that had caused the illusion. No wonder the mind played tricks. He was once more astonished at how far the illumination carried in this otherwise pitch-black hole in the ground. He took another deep, calming breath, and turned his attention back to the tome in his lap. After his first stint of guard duty here he had decided to at least keep current on his studies. He was not the finest scholar in the Conclave and needed to refresh his memory on the more convoluted cantrips, and he had particular trouble with the ones written in Keshian, as he was not a very good student of languages.
He turned his attention to the page and after a while became lost in trying to master an especially odd phrasing. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw another flicker of movement and his head jerked up. In the front row of the long line of Talnoy…
He had to get hold of his imagination. Everything was exactly as it had been moments before… or was it? Heart thumping, unsure of what to do, Joachim waited, watching for any other movement.
The first of the TeKarana’s guards to spot Valko’s forces died before his mind could register what it was he saw. Pug had decided against subtlety at this point and simply used a very basic spell of physical control to throw the man as hard as he could against a distant stone wall. It had the same impact as if he had fallen five hundred feet onto hard rock. The sound of it, certainly, was bound to alert others down the hallway to the fact that something was amiss. The splatter of orange blood covered yards in every direction.