The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [50]
On the ground, the swordwraith’s blade flashed out to strike an unwary Kithri, who was striking flint over another torch—but with a clang, Keverel flung out his mace at the last moment, deflecting the blow. His protective blessing wavered and the swordwraith turned on him, slashing open his mail shirt and the flesh underneath.
Her torch lit, Kithri swung it around and swept it through the denser shadow of the swordwraith’s head. The flame bloomed up and down its body and its screech pierced the night, spurred to a higher pitch when a leaping Paelias landed next to the prone Keverel and dispatched it with a stroke of his sword.
All of them looked up at Biri-Daar then, as she drew a deep breath and put her beaked mouth to the blackroot treant’s ear.
She did not want to use fire. She did not want to burn the forest or destroy the spirits that lived therein. But she did very much want this blackroot treant to find death, to return to the soil that had given it life. All of that time spent with elves and rangers had made her too sensitive, no doubt—but whatever the cause, when Biri-Daar unleashed her dragonbreath into the knothole at the side of the blackroot’s head, she did so with more pity than anger.
Flames flared out through the great rotting holes of its eyes and mouth, roaring along with the agonized roar the blackroot made. Blindly it grasped at Biri-Daar, found her, flung her away into the trees—but too late, as the flames caught the dead leaves of its crown and exploded into a great mushroom of fire. The roots holding Remy spasmed, twisted, and fell limp. Kithri sawed them away from his legs with a knife. “Lucan! Paelias! Find Biri-Daar!” she yelled over the sound of the flames.
In the last moments of its undeath, the blackroot staggered back toward the forest where its roots had first found sustenance. Then, Remy saw, it caught itself, jerking back from the edge of the forest in a shower of embers. Turning, losing its balance as the life burned out of its long-dead heartwood, the blackroot took one great step—over him, over the moaning Keverel, over Kithri—onto the Crow Road. And when it had gotten both feet on the road, it fell, its roots and branches dying by inches, curling and blackening as the flames found every inch of what centuries before had been one of the noblest beings of the world.
“Did you see that?” Lucan said wonderingly. “It moved out of the trees.”
Kneeling over Keverel, Kithri said, “Lucan, don’t be an idiot. It was undead. It didn’t know where it was going.”
“You believe what you believe,” Lucan said. He looked over at Paelias, whose chiseled face bore the same expression of disbelief as his own. Both of them looked at Remy.
“I think I saw it too,” Remy said. “It stopped and turned around, didn’t it?”
“Go find Biri-Daar!” Kithri screamed. “Go!”
They went, not wanting to argue, even though they were fairly sure that Biri-Daar was all right. She had survived far worse than a short flight through tree branches.
And they were very sure that they had seen that night something that none of them might ever see again: an undead creature remembering, at the moment of its death, something of its long-gone living self.
Neither Lucan nor Paelias said anything about this as Biri-Daar limped out of the darkness before they had gotten a hundred paces away from the road. They fell into step with her, waiting to see if she needed help. She waved them away. “Sore is all,” she said. “I am tempted to believe that the other trees … treants, perhaps, but perhaps just trees … I am tempted to believe that they looked after me a little.”
“I believe it,” Lucan said. “After what I saw that blackroot do, I can believe anything.”
That night they were able to sleep a little, in the lee of a grassy knoll far enough from the road that the crows wouldn’t follow them all the way. “How much farther are we on this road?