The Hammer and the Blade

CHAPTER TEN

Nix awoke before the dawn, as was his wont when he wasn't otherwise knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. The eunuch still stood his station, and Nix assumed he had not moved through the night.

"Does the man piss in place?" Nix muttered through a dry mouth that tasted peppery. He sat up, prodded the embers to life, and put two logs on the fire to get it going.

The camp stirred as dawn turned the sky gray. Men coughed, spit, pissed, pulled on mail and weapons, yoked horses.

At Rakon's call, the eunuch carried Rusilla and Merelda back to the carriage in turn. Nix did not dare interfere, despite his impulse to do so.

Egil soon emerged from his tent, yawning, the ruff of his hair sticking out in all directions. He offered a brief prayer to his dead god and came to Nix's side.

"You feel all right?" the priest asked. "You look like shite."

Nix made a helpless gesture. "Bad dreams."

Egil turned and looked at the carriage. "The sisters, you think? Or this place?"

"Maybe both," Nix said.

Egil rubbed his palm over his head briskly, as if shaking the eye of Ebenor to wakefulness. "I slept poorly as well. But hopefully we'll not have too much of this. I make us only three days from Afirion."

"Aye."

Egil leaned in close and whispered, "I don't have the stomach to fight the worm today. I still ache from yesterday. I think we just surrender to the compulsion and get the damned horn. Then we get clear."

Egil's choice of the word "surrender" caused Nix to recall his disquieting dream, the screams, the blood, the sense of hopelessness he'd felt, a hopelessness so profound that surrender seemed the only option.

"I dislike surrender," Nix said.

"Aye," Egil agreed with a nod. "But what else can we do?"

To that, Nix said nothing, and he, Egil, and the guards ate on the move as they worked breaking camp, the guards tearing things down as efficiently as they had set them up. Within the hour, they were moving again, following the enspelled road through the cut. The clouds returned and dull, filtered light leaked down from a gray sky. They traveled for leagues through the cut, walled by the blood-colored cliffs, the skeletal trees atop the cliff walls rattling in the wind.

Around midday the driver of the supply wagon spotted something ahead and pulled the horses to a halt.

"What is it?" Baras asked, and Rakon's head emerged from the carriage and repeated the question.

"Something on the side of the road," the driver said, pointing. He was the oldest of the men, his hair going to gray and his body paunchy. "There."

Half the guards readied crossbows, and the others, including Baras and Jyme, drew blades. Nix and Egil came to the front of the wagon train, their own weapons drawn, and saw the thing to which the driver was pointing, a broken form lying just off the side of the road about thirty paces ahead.

"Probably an animal," Baras said, and pointed at his men. "The five of you stay with the wagons. Jyme, you're with me." To Rakon, he said, "My lord, we'll just have a look."

"Be quick," Rakon said.

Egil and Nix fell in beside Baras and Jyme. Nix kept his eyes on the cliffs as they approached, sniffing for an ambush, but none was forthcoming.

"What is that?" Jyme asked as they neared the form.

A body lay on the side of the road, the limbs twisted as if from a fall. Scales the color of sand covered the creature's wiry form, or what remained of its form. Its thin limbs were all sinew and muscle. Each of its five long fingers ended in black claws. The hairless head was a thin oval, vaguely humanlike, and thrown back as if in pain. Fangs filled the overlarge, open mouth. Two vertical slits in the center of its face must have been its nostrils. Many small cuts and bite marks covered the flesh, scores of them. Scavengers had been at the remains. Tatters of dried, leathery skin flapped in the breeze, a drawn curtain revealing ribs and spine.

"It's a demon," Jyme whispered.

Nix could not disagree. He'd never seen anything like it.

"Fell from the top, I'd wager," Egil said, looking up at the valley walls.

Baras looked back at the caravan, at the creature. "Whatever it is, it's dead. We need to keep moving." He waved the wagon and carriage forward.

Eyes lingered on the dead creature's form as they passed. The guards made the protective sign of Orella. Rakon stared at the remains with hooded eyes as his carriage rolled past.

As they traveled, they passed seven more carcasses. All of them were dead many days, perhaps weeks, and appeared broken from a fall. Bites and scratches covered the scaled flesh, and all had been torn open.

The men gave the bodies a wide berth. Twice after passing bodies Baras consulted with Rakon, but he never shared the subject of the conversations with Nix.

The valley seemed neverending and they continued on for hours, walled in by the cliffs, walking an inexplicable thoroughfare littered with the corpses of demons.

The men remained tense and alert, keeping weapons to hand. Nix watched the sky, the tree-fringed top of the cut, the walls, but nothing occurred, and by nightfall the men seemed to have shed much of their nervousness.

"Three more days," Nix said to Egil, as they assisted the guards in setting up camp.

"Hmmph," Egil grunted, hammering tent stakes into the red earth.

"What?" Nix asked.

"Notice the sun?" Egil said.

"That blazing orange circle in the sky? It's called the sun? I hadn't noticed it before."

Egil didn't smile. "I mean did you notice its position."

"We're surrounded by rock walls and it's cloudy. How would I notice its position?"

Egil nodded. "You didn't pay attention. In any event, we're not headed due east anymore."

"What? Shite. What direction are we headed? Are we lost?"

Egil looked Nix in the face. "We're headed northeast. Rakon seem lost to you?"

He didn't. "Maybe he just wants to stick on the road. Keep the wagons and carriage as long as possible before de-yoking the horses."

"Maybe," Egil said.

"You doubt it?"

"I trust nothing about him," the priest said. "I think he aims for something other than a direct route to Afirion's deserts. But why, I can't say. And I think he knows more about those bodies we saw than he's telling. Did you see his face when we passed them?"

Nix considered, and made up his mind. "Then let's see what we can see." He hustled over to Baras's side.

"What is it, Nix?" The guardsman wiped his brow of sweat.

Nix kept his voice low. "Afirion is due east and we're not headed due east. Why?"

Baras's expression twisted up as he tried to find a suitable lie.

"The truth, Baras."

"The Lord Adjunct knows we're not headed due east. He wants to stay on the road."

"Why? We could lose the wagons, divide the supplies between the men and horses, and head east overland."

"I just follow orders, Nix."

Nix looked to the carriage. "He's looking for something in the Wastes, isn't he? What is it?"

If he had an answer, Baras didn't offer it.

"You're in deep water here, yeah?" Nix asked.

"I do what I'm told. You do the same."

Nix rubbed his nose. "That doesn't work well for me as a philosophical matter."

"Make it work," Baras said. "Meals in a half-hour."

With that, he walked away. As always, they started a meager fire, just large enough to heat coffee and warm bodies. Rakon repeated his warning to them to keep the flames low, but he needn't have. The bodies they'd seen on the road had taught all of them caution.

They ate as night came on. Afterward, Baras set double watches and the men sat near the fire and speculated about the bodies they'd seen. Egil went to his prayers early and Nix lingered near the flames, fearing sleep and dreams. He waited for the eunuch to remove Rusilla and Merelda to their tents, but he never did. The sisters remained in the carriage, as did Rakon. Nix recalled the small vial he'd seen in Rakon's hands when he'd broken into the carriage. At the time he'd assumed it was medicine, but now thought otherwise. He suspected it was a drug, designed to keep the sisters from practicing their witchcraft, or mindmagery, or whatever it was they did. Perhaps that explained why he hadn't had an ache behind his eyes or a head full of foreign thoughts. For that, he was thankful.

Expecting a peaceful sleep, he dozed off near the fire. The dreams came anyway.

Once more, Nix found himself standing in the long hall. Doors lined the hall, hiding horrors. The large, respiring door was directly before him. Again he wore a tattered dress with a torn bodice.

Grunts and screams filled his ears. The handle on the respiring door started to turn and he lunged for it, grabbed the handle. He was sweating and his hands slipped. The door unlatched, opened a crack. He screamed in terror, slammed his shoulder into it to close it, and took the latch in both hands. A terrible force tried to wrench it into a turn.

"No, no!" he said, his voice fearful and high-pitched.

An impact against the other side of the door nearly dislodged him, but he held on. The door pulsed against him, sickening and warm.

"Go away!" he screamed. "Leave me alone."

More screams from behind the other doors in the hallway, more grunting, a desperate wail. He could smell the coppery stink of fresh blood, imagined it flowing under the doors and into the hall. He was shaking, unnerved, surrounded by horror.

"Let me in!" said a voice from the other side, a woman's voice, intense, insistent. "You must see!"

"I don't want to see!" he screamed. "Leave me alone!"

Another powerful thud against the pulsing door. He leaned against it and held it closed.

"See it this way, then," said the woman's voice, her tone as final as a dirge.

A piercing pain in his groin, as if he'd been stabbed, elicited a prolonged scream and doubled him over. He looked down to see blood pouring from between his legs, soaking his dress, pattering the floor in a flood of crimson.

He shrieked in sickened horror and the sound of his own fear startled him awake.

Wakefulness did not end the shrieking.

He opened his eyes to see a cloud of keening creatures descending toward the campsite like a thunderhead, blotting out moons and stars. It was the flock of creatures they'd seen the day before, dropping on the camp in a cloud of fangs, scales, and beating wings. He could not easily distinguish individual creatures among the multitude.

Men were shouting all around him, horses whinnying. Egil shouted his name. He had time enough only to curse, leap to his feet, and put hand to blade hilt before the creatures were upon him. Chaos followed, a mad churn of sound: men screaming, the creatures shrieking and growling, the beat of wings, the snap of fangs.

Nix ducked low, eschewed his falchion, and put a dagger in each hand. He slashed and stabbed at anything within reach. In rough form, the creatures were about the size and shape of a goose. Leathery skin covered their bodies, and four overlapping membranous wings sprouted from their backs. Their necks ended in sleek heads. Small, red eyes perched over mouths lined with tiny fangs. Their taloned claws looked like those of a raptor. They shrieked, growled, and hissed as they swarmed.

A creature tore at Nix's arm, a claw scratched his hand and cheek, and another creature landed on his back and sank its teeth into his scalp. He shouted with pain, reached back, grabbed it, and threw its fluttering form to the earth. He stomped it to death as he slashed another of the creatures hovering before him and snapping at his face. The fiends were everywhere, shrieking, biting, tearing exposed flesh.

One landed on his legs, talons sinking into flesh, biting at his thigh. Another one appeared, diving for his face, clawed feet and toothy mouth snapping at his eyes and nose. He reeled backward, ducking, stumbling through several more, slashing as he went, severed wings and legs and throats. But for every creature he killed, another took its place, another. Teeth sank into his ear; claws dug into his scalp. He roared and twirled, stabbing and slashing wildly.

Egil did the same five paces from him, the priest's shouts like the bellows of an angry bull. His hammers spun through the air so fast they hummed, pulping the creatures three and four at a swing. All around the campsite, the other guards were shrieking, bleeding. Blood dripped into Nix's eyes from his wounded scalp. Already his arms were tiring. Panic fogged the air along with the screams.

The horses, unyoked from the wagons for the night but tethered to outcroppings of rock, whinnied and stomped, trapped by their tethers. Dozens of the creatures landed on the poor animals and tore at their flesh. The horses bucked, bellowed, pulled at their reins, heads shaking, muscles straining.

"Save the horses!" Baras shouted, and several of his guards ran for the animals through the cloud of creatures. They chopped wildly with their blades as they ran.

One of the guards, separated from the others, went down. Nix ran for him, but more than a dozen of the creatures swarmed him. Teeth snapped before his eyes, sank into his hands, causing him to curse and drop a dagger. He drew another as he recoiled from the creatures, slashing and stabbing those he could reach.

"Help! Get them off!" the downed guard called.

The creatures squawked and swarmed the guard until he was covered in a blanket of their scaled bodies. He dropped his weapon, his arms flailing wildly, desperately, screaming in terror and pain.

Baras and Egil roared and charged toward the fallen man from opposite directions, but before they could get to him, the creatures had sunk their talons into his flesh and clothes and lifted him into the air. He hung limp in their collective grasp, perhaps already dead, arms and legs dangling like a doll's. Egil leaped for him but the man was already out of reach.

Baras cursed and, shielding his head and face, ran to help his men in protecting the horses. Egil fell in with him. The draft animals were panicked, kicking and whinnying, and Baras went down trying to dodge a kick from one of them. Egil grabbed him by the collar and pulled him away, and together with the other guards they beat back a furious attack from scores of the flying creatures.

"Everyone here!" Egil called. "We need to fight together! Nix!"

Nix slashed a creature tearing at his arm, stomped another on the ground, cleared the air before him with a furious series of slashes. The creatures formed a cloud around him, an endless flutter of wings, snapping teeth, and slashing talons. Bleeding and fatigued, Nix made a run for the horses, slashing furiously as he ran. Blood ran into his eyes, blinded him, and he stumbled on rock, fell.

The moment he hit the ground dozens of the creatures landed on him, ripping his clothes and flesh, tearing at his leather jack. One bit the back of his neck, his scalp again, tearing loose a clump of hair. Another bit his ear. He tried to roll over and bring his blades to bear, but before he could he felt the sickening, terrifying feeling of his body being lifted up. Two score of the creatures at least clutched him by his flesh and his clothes and were bearing him into the air. He watched in horror as the ground fell away beneath him. He flashed on an image of himself carried into one of the holes in the earth they'd seen earlier, his body reduced to bones, made part of a mound of the dead. Panic lent him strength. He kicked and squirmed frenetically, desperately.

"Egil! Egil!"

He tried to turn his body, slash with his blade, but only managed to writhe to no effect. A talon tore a furrow in his cheek, narrowly missing his eye. He twisted and squirmed wildly, fueled by fear and adrenaline. He managed to dislodge enough of the creatures that they lost some altitude, but they did not release him. Teeth sank into his legs, his arms. Blood dripped from his wounds, dotted the earth. He started to rise again.

"Shite! Egil!"

He glimpsed Egil a fraction of a second before the priest leaped high for him and tackled him back to earth. Nix felt the squirming, fluttering death throes of several of the creatures crushed between his body and the earth. He rolled to the side and climbed to his feet, swinging his blade at the hissing creatures attacking him from all sides. Egil did the same, his hammers reaping the creatures in twos and threes.

The priest grabbed Nix by the arm and propelled him along toward Baras and the horses, fending off the creatures as best he could with one hammer.

"I'm good," Nix said, shaking his arm free and stabbing a creature with his dagger.

"Maybe put on some weight though, eh?" Egil said, grinning, his face bloody and torn.

"We need to find cover!" Baras shouted, hacking at the creatures attacking him and the horses. The poor draft horses kicked and screamed piteously. Baras and his fellow guards stood in a cluster near the horses, fighting desperately against the swarm that seemed unending.

"There is no damned cover!" Egil shouted, and slammed his hammer through another two scaled bodies.

Rakon's shout from within the carriage cut through the tumult. "Get wood on the fire! Now, Baras! Right now!"

The creatures thronged the carriage too, coating it in their scaly, winged forms, but Rakon had pulled the wood slat windows closed except for a slit, and that appeared to have kept the creatures out.

"Now, Baras!" Rakon said.

Two of the creatures lunged for the slit, got their talons on either side of it, wings fluttering, and tried to pry it open and wriggle through. Their heads darted forward into the opening, teeth gnashing. Rakon cursed and slammed the slat shut on them, pinning their necks there, the creatures shrieking, flapping, and soon limp.

Baras ducked his head and ran for the fire pit. Nix, Egil, and Jyme followed, slashing, grabbing, stomping. The ground was crunchy with dead and wounded creatures, slick with blood. Nix stumbled as he ran, his arms and legs leaden. Before him, Jyme stumbled, fell, and the creatures landed on his back, tearing and biting. Nix stabbed three of them and pulled Jyme to his feet with a grunt. One landed on Nix's arm and bit him hard on his shoulder, but his jack turned it. Jyme ran it through with his blade.

Baras and Egil fought off the creatures as best they could while they tossed logs onto the embers. Egil crushed two with a swing of a log before he threw it on the flames. Sparks rose into the sky. The creatures shrieked in response to the spark shower, cleared away from the rising flames and smoke.

"More wood! They don't like the fire," said Jyme, and moved to throw another log on. Nix grabbed him by the arm.

"You'll smother it!"

In moments the wood Egil and Baras had thrown onto the pit crackled and burned. But still the creatures came on, and Nix, Jyme, and Egil plied their weapons and tried to stay on their feet.

When the flames rose high behind them the door to the carriage flew open and the eunuch lurched out, followed by Rakon. Immediately scores of the creatures attacked them. A dozen of the scaled, toothy creatures flapped around the eunuch, biting and scratching his face and bare arms, but he seemed barely to notice, instead methodically grabbing the creatures one after another and squeezing them in his hands until they burst in a shower of gore and blood.

"Stay near the carriage, eater!" Rakon said to the eunuch, and stumbled toward the fire, hood pulled up, waving his thin blade wildly as he went.

Baras and two of the guards left the fire to meet him, shielding him from the creatures' attacks. Egil, Nix, and Jyme awaited them near the fire, slashing, stabbing, and cursing.

A short break in the attacks gave Nix a moment to look up and assess the swarm. He could barely see the stars through the fog of them. There weren't hundreds — there were thousands, wheeling in a dark cloud above them, diving to attack by the score.

"Keep them off me," Rakon said to them.

"Aye," Baras answered.

While Baras, Egil, Nix, and Jyme did their best to keep the onslaught of creatures at bay, Rakon stood over the fire incanting. The syllables he uttered hurt Nix's ears and seemed to excite the flames, which roared and danced in answer to Rakon's words. In moments the flames swelled to a bonfire and still Rakon incanted, his hands weaving in the air before the flames.

Nix stabbed a creature, slashed another, another. The heat from the fire grew uncomfortable. The crea tures squawked and squeaked, withdrew from the growing flames and smoke.

Rakon's cadence grew more rapid, louder, reached a climax. He threw his hands over his head and the fire erupted upward in a searing column that blossomed into a disc of flame, exploding outward in all direction, for a few moments roofing the campsite in fire. Nix turned away, blinking, his eyebrows and hair singed, as a collective shriek went up from the creatures and the stink of charred flesh perfumed the night.

Thuds sounded around them, the bodies of the creatures raining from the sky, scores of them, hundreds, maybe a thousand. Nix looked up and against Minnear's green light saw what was left of the flock fleeing into the distance.

"Gods," Jyme breathed. He put the point of his blade in the ground and leaned on it. Dead creatures lay all around them.

Nix could only nod. The men stared at one another, hands on their knees, gasping, bleeding. Baras cleared his throat, wiped the blood from his face.

"We have to go after Lormel," he said.

Nix presumed he meant the guard who'd been carried off by the creatures. "Baras…"

"He's dead by now," Rakon said, lowering his hood to reveal his own face scratched by a claw. "Or will be before we can get there."

"My lord-"

"He's dead, Baras. There's nothing to be done for him. We have to break camp and get moving."

"Moving?" Baras said. "My lord, the men are wounded, exhausted."

"Truth," Nix added, sagging to the ground.

"And the horses…" Baras continued.

Rakon looked past Baras to the darkness outside the firelight.

"Do as I say, Baras. The Vwynn will be coming. If they didn't see the light from the flames, they'll smell the sorcery. We must hurry or we'll all die." He looked over to the horses. Two were down and bloody. The other two bled from many small wounds, but at least still stood.

"Yoke the two still standing to the carriage. Put the other two down. Divide the supplies from the wagon amongst the men and leave the wagon behind. I have poultices for the wounded men. Quickly now, Baras."

Baras stared for a long moment, then said, "Yes, my lord."

"The bodies we saw on the road," Nix said to Rakon. "Those are the Vwynn?"

Rakon looked up at the moon, at the high walls of the cut that hemmed them in. "Yes. The demons of the Wastes. Debased descendants of the people who once ruled these lands."

Egil took a step toward Rakon, but the thoughts implied by his angry expression triggered the spellworm. He doubled over with a groan and Rakon sneered.

Nix gave voice to what he assumed to be Egil's thoughts.

"You knew about these Vwynn the whole time and see fit to tell us only now?"

"I'd hoped to avoid them altogether," Rakon said. "Now do as I've said. We must hurry."

"Hurry to where?" Egil said, teeth gritted against nausea. "The Wastes are two days in every direction. If these Vwynn are coming…"

"If they're coming, they'll catch us," Nix said. "This is a decent place to defend. I didn't see wings on those corpses, so they'll have to come at us on the ground. With these walls, they can approach from only two-"

"No," Rakon said.

"We're vulnerable if we get caught in the open," Egil said.

"There's a… refuge ahead, not far out of the cut. The Vwynn will not enter it. If we can reach it, we'll find safety there."

"Safety for how long?" Egil asked.

"And how do you know about this refuge?" Nix asked. "And that the Vwynn won't enter it? Why not mention it before?"

"I know many things about which you are ignorant, Nix Fall, and mentioning all of them to you would occupy all of my days."

"Now he's a wit," Nix said to Egil.

"Assist my men in breaking camp," Rakon said. "Then we'll see to the wounded. We leave as soon as it's done."

Rakon returned to his carriage and soon provided Baras with several large pouches of herbal poultice. Baras mixed it with a small amount of beer, turning it into a lumpy yellow paste flecked with bits of leaves, and the men smeared it on their cuts. All except Egil.

"The only magic I trust comes from your gewgaws," he said to Nix. "And those only half the time."

Scratches and a few oozing bites marred the priest's face, scalp, and arms. He daubed at them with bits of burlap cut from an unused sack. Of course, Nix had seen Egil endure far worse wounds without slowing and without complaint.

"You're sure?" Nix asked.

"Aye."

For his part, Nix was too wounded to be particular about the source of relief. He spread the paste over the many wounds on his arms, his legs, his scalp and face. The paste went on cold but grew warm as it did its work.

After about a sixty count, it lost its warmth. When Nix scraped it off he found that the shallowest of his cuts had vanished, the deepest reduced to pink lines that would heal in a day or two.

"The man knows his craft, I concede," Nix said to Egil.

"Don't get too fond of him," the priest answered. "It'll be awkward when we have to kill him."

Mention of violence against Rakon caused the spellworm to twist up Egil's guts, which he endured with a grimace.

"Fair point," Nix said, and his own violent thoughts triggered nausea and cramps that doubled him over.

There were several hours of night left, so the guards lit torches, Nix pulled forth his crystal eye, and the caravan got underway, traveling the high-walled cut under the lurid, nearly full eye of the Mages' Moon. The night sat heavy on them and they moved in near-silence, the only sound the low rumble of the carriage wheels on the road and the occasional whicker from the horses.

Only when dawn lightened the sky did they breathe easier. Yet still the cut — really a canyon, a long, deep gash in the earth — went on so long Nix feared it would never end, that it would just continue forever, condemning them all to a subterranean existence where sky and wind and sun were forever just out of reach. They watched the sky, the walls, fearing the return of the flying creatures, dreading the appearance of the Vwynn.

When the road at last began to rise, so too did their spirits. The walls of the canyon shrank around them and Nix could see the end of the cut ahead, the road gradually rising to elevate them out of the Hellish pit.

Several of the guards gasped when the group reached the top of the canyon and emerged into the unfiltered light of day. The leagues they'd traversed seemed to have transported them to another world.

Instead of boulders and scree and broken hills, they saw instead monumental ruins. Huge rectangular stone blocks jutted from the red landscape at odd angles. Faded script showed on some, the whorls and twists of the characters mostly lost to time and the weather. Looking too long at the script that had survived made Nix's eyes ache. Everyone stared about in awed silence. Baras made the protective sign of Orella.

"What do you make of them?" Egil asked, nodding at the blocks.

"I don't," Nix said, shaking his head.

"Man-made," Egil said, nodding at a huge stone sticking out of the earth, the bones of a lost civilization.

"Made," Nix agreed. "But I'm not sure it was by men. The size of them…"

In their day, the blocks must have been part of structures larger than anything in Dur Follin, larger than anything Nix had ever seen. He could not imagine the destructive force it must have taken to topple them. The mere passage of time seemed insufficient to the task.

"Norristru has a great interest, it seems," Egil said, nodding at the carriage.

Rakon had opened the carriage's window and stared out at the blocks, his eyes gleaming, his thin lips set in a straight line.

All day they traversed the gigantic architecture, the residuum of a people who constructed wonders and died — shattered domes, megaliths the size of small buildings, and pyramidal blocks, the sharp points of which stabbed at the earth and sky.

"How many do you suppose have seen this?" Egil said.

"Few," Nix said, and thumped the priest on the shoulder. "And now us among them. This is why we do it, yeah?"

"Aye," Egil said. "Though I'd prefer to be doing it of my own accord."

"Seconded."

The carriage set a brisk pace and the ruins grew denser as they traveled. Towering shapes loomed on the horizon ahead. At first Nix mistook them for hills and rock formations, but as they drew closer, he saw they, too, were ruins, great heaps of stone.

"Gods," Egil breathed.

All of the guards slowed in their steps, shared worried glances, and tightened their grips on sword hilts.

"It's all just ruins, men," Baras said, his tone false.

Rakon called out from the carriage. "We need to reach those ruins before nightfall, Baras."

"Is that the refuge you spoke of?" Nix called, but Rakon ignored him.

"You heard him," Baras said. "Leg it."

They picked up the pace, but the day wore on and still the high ruins seemed too distant.

"Faster," Rakon urged them. "We must go faster."

"Easily said by the man riding in the carriage," Nix said, jogging along with the rest. Sweat soaked his jack and shirt. Despite the pace they'd kept, they hadn't covered enough ground. The cloud-shrouded sun sank low in the west. Dread settled on the men. They watched the sky, the ruins around them.

"We press on until we reach the ruins," Baras said.

When night outvied day for rule of the sky, the Vwynn showed themselves.