Shadows Return - Lynn Flewelling [164]
It didn’t even slow down. Leaping into the air, it came down on them like a storm, knocking Micum and Thero backward down the gully. As Thero threw up his arms, trying to ward off the fetid darkness closing in around him, he caught a flash of white against the sky overhead, and suddenly the air was filled with a single crystal note. It made his skull throb and his teeth ache, but he hardly noticed as he watched the monster halt, then throw back its hideous head and dissolve in a cloud of stench and flies.
Micum was on his feet again, bleeding from several wounds and shouting something that Thero could not hear over the continuous deafening sound. He was pointing up at the edge of the gully.
Seregil and Alec lay sprawled halfway down the slope, bodies tumbled together by the force of the monster’s charge. But Sebrahn stood facing the enemy for them, singing that one clear note as his silver-white hair coiled wildly about his head.
Micum grabbed Thero by the shoulder and together they scrambled up to help the others. The rhekaro’s song ended just as they reached Seregil and silence covered them like snow.
Micum dropped to his knees beside their comrades, but Thero took Alec’s fallen dagger and climbed up to see what Sebrahn had done.
Every man lay dead, and foremost among them was the necromancer. Thero approached him slowly to make sure.
The man lay on his back, wide-open eyes reflecting the vultures that were already heading this way. Blood had burst from his ears, nose, eyes, and mouth, just as Micum had described. Thero nudged him with his foot, but the body was limp and empty, its power gone.
Satisfied, he went back to the others. Seregil was leaning against Micum’s shoulder. Alec sat holding the rhekaro. It lay limply in his arms with its eyes shut. Its skin had gone from pale to grey, and it had a frail, starved look about it. Its closed eyes were deeply sunk in their sockets, and its arms and legs looked thinner than ever. Thero could hardly see the aura that had been so strong before.
“He used himself up.” Alec pricked his finger and let a few drops fall between the rhekaro’s lips, then gave Seregil a worried look when it didn’t respond.
“Is he dead?” asked Micum.
“Hard to tell,” Seregil murmured.
“It’s not,” Thero said. The little edge of light around the rhekaro grew brighter as it fed on Alec’s blood.
Seregil turned and surveyed the scattered dead. “They didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“What Sebrahn can do. Not any of them. Yhakobin would never have charged blindly at us the way he did if he’d suspected what might happen, or this necromancer, either. They knew we had him, but they didn’t fear him.”
Alec let out a small sigh of relief as Sebrahn stirred. “Yhakobin kept saying the ones he made were failures.”
“There are others?” asked Thero.
“One, and he destroyed it, trying to figure it out. He was looking for something else. Ilar said something about a poison, but he was probably lying.”
And there was that name again. “What else did he say, about it being wrong?” asked Thero.
Alec though a moment, stroking Sebrahn’s wan cheek with his thumb as the thing continued to feed. “When the first one was made, Yhakobin was concerned that it didn’t have wings.”
“Wings?”
“Never mind that,” said Seregil. “Two groups have found us, so there’s no reason to think there won’t be others. We need to get to that boat of yours, and fast.”
“I can ride,” said Alec, though he was still the weaker of the two.
Thero looked back at the fallen soldiers again, then down at the exhausted creature curled in Alec’s lap. “We couldn’t hold off another attack like that one.”
“Then come on!” Seregil struggled up to his feet and clutched at Micum’s shoulder to steady himself. “Someone tie me onto a horse.”
CHAPTER 47
Sanctuary
THEY WAITED UNTIL nightfall to leave the gully. A cold half-moon silvered the scudding clouds and made the frosty ground sparkle.
Seregil hadn’t been joking