Surrounded by suffocating red light, Nathan braced himself to fight the skeletons. A thunder of pounding feet came up the tower stairs. He struggled to find the magic within him, ready to release his recalcitrant gift, whether or not it caused a disaster. He was all alone here. Even if a backlash from using magic caused terrible damage and leveled this entire watchtower, at least he wouldn’t hurt Nicci or young Bannon. He might, however, destroy these spectral soldiers.
One of the reanimated soldiers clattered toward him, bony hands outstretched as if the skeleton thought Nathan himself was an invader. The wizard swung his sword and sliced through the neck vertebrae. The skull toppled off and rolled across the wooden floor, its jaws still clacking. The fleshless hands and arms flailed, clawing at him. He smashed them, splintering the wickerwork of bones. Then he spun to dismember another skeleton, this one wearing tatters of armor. He kicked out with a boot to knock apart the loose bones of a third rattling opponent.
Then the greater threat arrived. Armored spectral warriors with flame-emblazoned shields and wide swords pushed through the door to the tower chamber, two abreast. They shimmered in the deep red light.
Nathan backed toward a wall, hoping to find some protection with his back to the stone blocks. He had no place to hide.
A flood of long-dead soldiers flowed through the door, as if they meant to take over the sentinel tower and simply drown anyone there with their sheer numbers.
The wizard faced them, mustering all his strength. “Come at me, then!” He slashed his blade across the air, surrendering the hope that he could find the ragged thread of magic within him again. The flow of Han wouldn’t come to him now. He would have to make do with his sword.
Oddly, he wished Bannon were here. He and the young man could have slain dozens before they fell. “I’ll just have to do it myself!” His straight white hair flew as he hurled himself at the ancient attackers.
Crimson light from the bloodglass throbbed around him, and he felt as if he were in a trance. He swung his sword at one of the ancient warriors, bracing himself for the hard impact against scaled armor, flesh, bone. But his sword passed through, and the enemy collapsed. Nathan didn’t slow, but slashed at another, cleaving through misty armor.
He felt a sharp pain in his ankle. One of the clawed skeleton hands had grasped his boot like a vise. With a vicious kick, he flung it aside, then ducked as another ancient warrior charged at him. He realized he was yelling. He could barely see through the thick, almost palpable light around him.
Nathan lost track of his movements. He was in a wild fighting fury. Something about the magic of the bloodglass, the violence and the slaughter that permeated the history of this place, possessed him. He had no choice but to fight, to kill as many of these enemies as possible before his own blood stained the floorboards, before his own body lay here among the ancient dead, until he slowly became a skeleton just like them.
He charged across the platform, seeing enemies that were no more than crimson shadows, and he heard a shattering of glass like a crystalline scream. He whirled and attacked and slashed, but he couldn’t see the result. He struck and shattered, struck and shattered. His blood and his sword seemed to know what to do.
The hard clang and sharp shock of his steel against stone jarred him enough to dissipate the red glare around his vision. His trance was broken. The enemy was gone.
Exhausted, Nathan heaved great breaths. His arms trembled. The blood from his cut hand ran down the hilt and onto the blade—but that was the only blood he saw. When he blinked, the air cleared to reveal bright yellow sunlight again and open air. The bloodglass was gone.
In his fury, Nathan had shattered the remaining panes. The red windows no longer looked out onto visions of slaughter and murder, only onto an open landscape in the slanted afternoon light. The spectral army and the remnants from centuries-old wars had faded, and the spell from the bloodglass was destroyed.
He had been fighting against illusions. The skeletons lay broken and strewn about, and he couldn’t say if they had actually been reanimated, or if he had just been doing battle with his own nightmares.
He stood for a long time, catching his breath, shaking with weariness. Then he forced a smile. “That was an adventure. Quite exciting.” With his wounded hand he wiped sweat from his forehead, not caring that it left a smear of blood across his face.
He was alone in the tower, and the wind whispering through the broken glass sounded like the distant scream of ghosts.
CHAPTER 31
Leaving the abandoned and disturbing farmstead, Nicci and Bannon continued down the weed-overgrown road past houses and farms. The lonely goats followed them for a time, but eventually gave up and wandered off into a wild cornfield that was more tempting than the prospect of Bannon scratching their ears.
Most of the dwellings they found were empty, and some also displayed more unsettling, anguished statues in the yards. Why would the people feel a need to own such decorations of misery? Nicci led the way toward the main town, growing more tense, fearing what she would find ahead. Though the land seemed fertile and the weather hospitable, these homes had clearly been vacant for years. “It makes no sense. Where did everyone go?”
Nicci paused in front of a large home with unruly flowerbeds, a scraggly garden patch, and drooping apple trees with half-rotted fruit ravaged by birds. Two more statues stood there: a boy and girl no more than nine years old, both on their knees, expressions full of despair, weeping stone tears.
While Bannon stared at the unsettling figures, Nicci was angry that some mad sculptor would revel in displaying such pain, and that these villagers had willingly displayed them. Nicci had felt no deep emotions when Emperor Jagang commissioned such sculptures, because she knew what a ruthless, twisted man he was. Only Nicci, with her heart of black ice, had been his match.
But this isolated village, far from the reach of the Imperial Order, had for some reason decided to depict a very similar misery. Nicci found it deeply disturbing.
They came upon a stream flowing down the wooded hillside, where a miller’s waterwheel caught the current and turned. Water sluiced over the paddles to rotate a grinding stone, but after years without maintenance, the wheel wobbled off center and made a loud scraping sound. Some of the wooden planks in the walls of the mill had fallen in.
She and Bannon reached the town itself, a hundred homes around a main square and marketplace. Most dwellings had been built for single families, but others were two stories tall, constructed with wood from the hillsides and stones from a nearby quarry. The entire town was simply deserted.