The sea of desiccated wood went on and on, and Clay shuddered to think what horrid things lurked beneath those gnarled eaves. At last the trees gave way to stony foothills; then a wall of imposing mountains—the Emperor’s Mantle—reared up like the battlements of some ghastly, snow-capped fortress. They were armoured in sheer ice, their hearts infested with monstrosities that thrived in the deepest, darkest places of the world. Clay caught a glimpse of something soaring among the mist-shrouded peaks. Long necked and leather winged, it dived behind a bluff and was gone.
A loud snap stole his gaze from the orb. Matrick had returned and was standing behind Gabriel, who was too intent upon the sphere to notice.
Beyond the mountains lay a plain of yellow grass, traced here and there by stone roads and dotted by small hamlets. Endland. Gabe’s vision swept along the course of a frothing river. They saw a herd of wild horses splashing through, and then, after a few fleeting seconds, the image in the orb came to rest on a village bisecting the river.
Something was wrong. It was a moment before Clay’s mind could reconcile what it was he was seeing. There were corpses in the water. Thousands of them. A mound of bloating bodies so huge it threatened to dam the river. He saw pale limbs and weeping red wounds, white-eyed faces frozen in horror and pain and madness.
“They’re polluting the water,” said Gabriel. “Poisoning the city with their own dead.”
“Focus!” snapped Moog, as a haze of purple mist began to overtake the scene. “Keep going.”
The view ambled on, but Gabriel’s sight seemed transfixed on the river below, choked by an oily morass of bloody gore. At last he managed to wrest his eyes from the fouled water, and Clay, who had taken a few steps closer to the orb without realizing he’d done so, felt his breath catch and his heart go cold.
Castia was a mighty city, or so he’d been told. It was the farthest outpost of human civilization, a testament to the indomitable spirit of those who had built the city of their dreams in a place beyond nightmares. But Clay couldn’t see it. Or rather, he couldn’t make himself look away from what surrounded it, on all sides, to the limit of every horizon.
He’d seen a few armies in his day. He’d seen a number of levied militias, and too many mobs (angry and otherwise) to count. He’d seen what a crowd of a hundred thousand could look like, when every band in Grandual gathered for the War Fair in the ruins of Kaladar. But he had never seen a Horde until now. His mind reeled at the sight. His mouth went dry. The hope he’d nursed of bringing Rose home safe drew the shutters, blew out the candles, and curled up under its bed.
Gabriel cried out as though he’d been struck. The image in the orb winked out, and for a long while no one moved. Matrick stood rooted to the spot. Moog covered his mouth with his hands. He was watching Gabe as if he expected the other man to explode before his very eyes.
Which was exactly what happened next.
Gabriel seized the crystal ball and lunged toward a knob of exposed rock.
“Gabe, wait!” Moog reached out, but made no move to stop him. The wizard knew better than that, at least.
With a sound that was part anguished scream, part bloodcurdling war cry, Gabriel raised the orb above his head and brought it violently down onto the stone. It clinked like silverware striking glass. Again, and again, he smashed it against the pitiless rock, until at last Clay heard it crack. With each successive blow the sound grew louder, until he feared the orb would shatter, and whatever magic it held would boil out and, well, he had no idea what to expect, really.
But now Gabriel was on his feet, running downhill through the trees, roaring like a Kaskar berserker toward the river below. A trail of purple smoke billowed behind him, issuing from within the fractured sphere. When he reached the riverbank Gabriel hurled the orb—which vanished with hardly a splash—and then, his fury spent, he sagged to his knees and wept by the water’s edge.
Moog was on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry,” he said to no one in particular. “I thought if maybe he could see her it might lift his spirits. Or if nothing happened … well, then at least we would know.”
“So she’s there, in Castia?” asked Clay. “She’s alive?”
The wizard blinked. “Well, yes, she’s alive, or we wouldn’t have seen anything at all. But …” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. Rose was alive, but no more so than an insect struggling in a web, while an uncountable legion of spiders closed in for the kill.
But you knew that already, didn’t you? Clay asked himself. And so did Gabriel. What they’d seen in the orb changed nothing. Going to Castia was a shitty idea, but no more so now than it had been the week before.
Shouldering his depleted pack, Clay called down to his friend. “Hey, Gabe, the boys and I are gonna go ahead and rescue your daughter. If you feel like doing that instead of crying down by the river, we’d love to have you along.” Saying that, he turned and trudged off eastward without bothering to look if the others were following.
But they were, he knew. Of course they were.
Chapter Sixteen
Snakes and Lions
Gabriel lagged well behind for several hours after the episode with the crystal ball, and shortly before evening they lost track of him entirely. Clay bid the others to stop and rest while he retraced their path. He found Gabe curled up among the tangled roots of a toppled maple, shaking and sobbing into his hands.
“She’s dead,” he moaned. “She’s dead, Clay. She’s dead.”
“No,” said Clay, willing a certitude he didn’t feel into his voice. He crouched, using one hand to steady himself when his knees protested. It had rained briefly this morning, and wet leaves plastered themselves to his knuckles. “Moog says she’s alive, or else we wouldn’t have seen …” His mind recoiled from the memory of what the orb had shown them. “She’s alive, Gabe. Right now. Your daughter is alive.”
Gabriel looked up, his eyes red-rimmed. “But you saw,” he said. There was an edge of accusation in his tone, as though he resented Clay’s persisting optimism. “You saw. Everyone in that city is dead. It’s only a matter of time. Even if the courts sent an army—which they won’t—it would be too late.”
“Which is why we need to keep moving,” Clay told him.
His friend began nodding, but his face crumpled as another wave of grief swept over the bulwark of his resolve. “But what can we do? Moog is dying of the rot! Matty couldn’t climb a flight of fucking stairs, and we expect him to walk a thousand miles? To cross the Heartwyld? To scale a mountain? Even if we do reach Castia … even if we somehow get there in time … what chance do we stand?”
The words none at all stood poised on Clay’s tongue like an actor ready to stride onstage, but he kept the curtain closed. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I really don’t, Gabe. But then again, I don’t know how we did half the stuff we’ve done.”
Gabriel wiped at his nose with a mud-soiled sleeve. “What do you mean? What stuff?”
“Coldfire Pass,” Clay said. “Hollow Hill. Castadar. How many hopeless battles have we fought?”
“A few …” Gabe admitted.
“And how many did we win?”
His friend considered that a moment. “All of them?”
“All of them,” Clay confirmed. “And yeah, sure, we’ve just been robbed by a gang of girls—”
“Twice,” said Gabriel.
“Twice, yes, well … we’re a bit rusty. Of course we are. But we’ve beaten the odds before, is what I’m trying to say. Remember Turnstone Keep? Three bands against five hundred bloodthirsty cannibals, and still we survived. We’ve killed how many gods-forsaken murlogs? How many orcs, and ogres, and shit-spawned warlocks bent on destroying the world? Frozen Hells, we killed a dragon once.”
Gabe frowned. “You mean Akatung? I thought—”
“Okay, we almost killed a dragon once. We definitely hurt him real bad. But he didn’t kill us, did he? We’re still here, still fighting. And Rose is fighting, too, but she’s desperate, and she needs our help. She needs you, Gabe. If you don’t save her from Lastleaf and his fucking Horde, no one will.” He could see hope kindling inside Gabriel, and so offered the last log at his disposal to the flame. “We were giants once, remember? Kings of the Wyld.”