Guild Wars_ Edge of Destiny - J. Robert King [2]
“Yes,” Caithe said gently.
Faolain laughed. “Oh, you’re cruel.”
“They came from underground,” he muttered. “They scrambled up. Roaches. Black, with bodies of fire—”
“Destroyers,” Faolain said.
“We’ll get you to a chirurgeon.”
“Chirurgeon?” Faolain gripped Caithe’s arm and grinned. “You’re doing this for me, aren’t you?”
“What? No! It’s for him.”
“He’s dead already. You’re only tormenting him for my sake.”
“No! I’m not.”
Faolain’s eyes blazed. “You want me to feel for him. You want me to feel empathy.”
“No!” Caithe said. “I mean, yes, of course.”
“Help me!” the man sputtered, his lip splitting.
“I will,” Caithe said.
Faolain’s eyes slid closed, and her jaw clenched. “You can’t win me back.”
“I’m not trying to win you back.”
“Come with me, Caithe. Join the Nightmare Court.”
“I’m saving him!” Caithe yelled, reaching beneath the blackened figure and hoisting him from the floor. Caithe strode toward the barn doors.
But Faolain rose in her path and set her hand on Caithe’s chest. The touch of her palm blazed like fire. Then a different sort of heat bloomed across Caithe’s chest. She pulled back to see the farmer’s throat fountaining, severed by Faolain’s dagger.
“What?” Caithe cried, staggering back and falling to her knees. “You killed him?”
“I released him. Come with me.”
“I will never turn to Nightmare.”
Faolain’s eyes flashed. “My touch—and the sacrifice of this man—have awakened darkness in you.” She turned away. “You will be mine again soon.”
PART I
GATHERING HEROES
FOOLS AND FOLLOWERS
Don’t move!”
The huge wolf snapped his head upright, eyes blazing.
“Stay exactly like that.”
No one else in the world could order Garm to sit still. He was, after all, a dire wolf—five feet tall at the shoulder and twenty stone, with jet-black hackles and fire-red eyes. He was made to lope and chase and drag down. Not to sit still. Not to listen. But he did.
For Eir Stegalkin, he did.
Garm flicked a glance toward the norn warrior. She was tall, too, her hand rising to the rafters twelve feet up and snagging a mallet that hung there and bringing the thing down in her brawny grip. Her eyes darted toward Garm, who glanced forward again and tried to look fierce.
It wasn’t that he feared this woman and her big hammer, which she swung just then with terrific force, pounding a massive chisel and striking a wedge of granite from a huge block. Garm hazarded a look at that block, amorphous and pitted from chisel strokes. Soon, it would be a statue. A statue of him. But that wasn’t why he sat still.
He sat still because she was the alpha.
The mallet fell again, the chisel bit, the block calved. More chunks of stone crashed to the floor, first in wedges and then shards and chips and finally a shower of grit.
Garm’s figure was taking shape.
Eir stepped back from the sculpture and dragged an arm over her sweating brow. Her face was statuesque, her eyes moss green. She had drawn her mane of red hair back out of the way, bound by a leather thong. The leather work-apron she wore freed her arms but protected her chest and legs against stone shards. An intense look grew on her face, eyes etching out the shape in the stone. “This could be my masterpiece.”
Garm looked around the log-hewn workshop at her other sculptures—a rearing ice-bear, a great elk with sixteen-foot antlers, a coiling snow serpent that stretched from floor to rafters, and of course her army of norn warriors captured in stone and wood. They hadn’t started out as an army, but individuals who had come to be immortalized before going off to fight the Dragonspawn—the champion of the Elder Dragon Jormag.
Now only their statues remained.
“Hail, house of Stegalkin!” came a shout at the door. A norn warrior thrust his head in—long hair like a horse’s tail and a face like what might be beneath. “By the Bear, the place is packed!”
Someone behind the man hissed, thumping his shoulder, “Them’s statues!”
The warrior in the lead nodded, his hair flicking as if to shoo flies. “Course they are. Statues. That’s why we’re here.” He paused to hiccup.