15: WOLF WHO RULES WIND
The storm was upon Wolf. It whipped up the red-hot cinders of the forest that True Flame had burned. It made the trees still standing thrash and creak. Here and there damaged trees gave up the fight and came crashing down with a long cracking sound. They struck the ground with loud booms. The sewage smell of the camp and the stench of blood and burnt meat came and went in the shifting winds. Lightning struck all around them, hitting the tops of the towering ironwood trees. Thunder clapped deafeningly loud and rumbled into the distance.
Their path decided, Wolf stood on the stone outcrop overlooking the nearby marsh with those who would fight beside him. Everyone else rushed to carry out his plan.
Wolf cast a scry, wishing he had access to one from the Stone Clan. The Stone esva was weak in attack spells but made up for it in superior shields and better information gathering spells. He picked up Darkness’s gossamer hovering over the nearby marsh as it dropped mooring ropes. Once moored, it would ferry away the wounded. All around Wolf, the updraft of the burning forest stirred the air. To the immediate south, he sensed a small number of troops—what he could only assume to be Sunder’s people—nearing the outer edge of the defense perimeter set up by the royal marines. Far off but moving toward him, was the massive oni army.
Most importantly he could feel the potential for lightning all around him. He had never cast call-lightning during a storm before. Normally he’d have to prime the wind and ready the ground. Tonight, he would need only to establish link points to create lightning. Control was going to be difficult, as any connection he made between sky and earth could propagate much farther than he intended. He wouldn’t be able to shield his people since the spell used both hands. While the oni were at range, he could use the storm, but once they closed, he would be forced to change attacks.
Red Knife had sent all but True Flame’s First and Second Hands to get the wounded up to the gossamer and lead the royal marines out of the forest on foot. This included the still unconscious True Flame. It surprised Wolf that Red Knife decided to stay behind with him rather than to go with his domou. Wolf was not sure if this was a show of trust or belief that the Wind Clan could not hold.
He took a deep breath. With the Stone Clan in camp, the battlefield was clear of allies. He could start his attack.
Wolf suddenly felt Tinker tap the Fire Spell Stones again and again. It surprised him with the speed she cast the spell that she’d never been formally taught. The teachers that he’d sent for were responding with the normal speed of people who had lived for thousands of years. Glaciers moved faster. It was, however, the only spell she was casting of the Fire and Wind esva.
Wraith Arrow noticed his focus to the west. “What is it?”
“My domi is fighting something. She is doing flame strike as fast as she can call the spell. The oni must have unleashed horrors in the city.”
Wraith Arrow grunted and shook his head. He’d questioned the wisdom of transforming Tinker. If it had not been for the presence of the oni in Pittsburgh, he would have forbidden it. Still, he didn’t fully approve of her transformation. Tinker, however, wouldn’t have survived the summer without being domana.
“I do not feel her holding a shield,” Wolf spoke his fear. “I am afraid she has forgotten to be careful in her anger.”
“Wood sprites are deadly when cornered.” Sunder came limping out of the darkness. “They are as cautious as they are clever. She would not forget such a simple thing. I suspect she is holding a Stone Clan shield but I cannot be sure. I have lost all connection to the Spell Stones.”
Despite the rain and ash and soot, there was still something oddly ethereal about the warlord who was neither female nor male. It could be the white face paint with the narrow strip of black across hir eyes, or the spell orb that orbited hir or the cloak that drifted about hir like a living thing.
“Sunder,” Wolf acknowledged hir arrival as senior domana. Wolf scanned the warriors behind Sunder. Wolf’s laedin were in hir ranks, returning safely. That was good news. Ruin with all of Darkness’s Hands were also present. That might be bad news. Sunder might attempt to take command from Wolf. The Stone Clan had seniority and hir forces outnumbered his but by hir own admission, Sunder could no longer protect their people. The royal marines would be fodder to the horrors if Sunder failed to stop them. It was Wolf’s city that would suffer if the oni army reached it.
“Your beloved is what we all could have been if we had not been so afraid of each other.” Sunder plucked the spell orb out of its orbit about hir. “We learned the wrong lessons from the Rebellion. We have always been stronger when we stand together. We should have learned that hard truth on the Blood Plains but we let our petty fears divide us first into caste and then into clans. ‘You are not like me, so I will fear you.’ It is a shameful thing we have become. And the worst of it, we cannot move past it. As we grow old, we grow fixed in place. We cling to the vain illusion that we are the superior to the others. We teach it to the young, refusing to allow them to break free of our shackles.”
Wolf realized that hir was not speaking to him but of the Stone Clan sekasha about hir.
“I am upright but only just,” Sunder said. “I do not have the strength to swing a sword. I would be only a hinderance. I will loan you what strength I can and lend my wisdom to the retreat of the royal marines.”
The Stone Clan sekasha were staying behind with him? As he glanced toward Ruin and Sunder’s First, both males nodded. Yes, he would stay in command with the Stone Clan acting as support.
Sunder held out hir spell orb. “This will cast a shield if needed. It charges up while it is in orbit about you. The area will be quite large but the duration is short—ten minutes at most. It is a last resort.”
Jewel Tear had such devices and he always thought them annoyances. Hers had cooled the air around her and scented it with perfume. Since his strongest attack took both hands, though, an orb that could cast a shield could be a lifesaver.
“Thank you,” Wolf said, giving a bow.
Sunder explained how to activate the orb. Wolf set it whizzing above his head.
“May the gods bless you.” Sunder bowed and headed north to guide the royal marines to safety.
Wolf set up his link to the Wind Clan Spell Stones. He felt the magic gathering to him in a wash of heat. The wind shifted from the west, bringing the smell of wood smoke and the rich earthy scent of wet forest floor. The clouds were already primed—he only needed to seize hold of them with his right hand. The hairs on his arms lifted as he took control of the ground with his left hand. The critical point already existed. He brought his hands together, aiming the channel at the heart of the oni army. The faint leader flashed downward, out of the dark sky, barely visible. The brilliant return stroke leapt from within the oncoming warriors, meeting the leader with a deafening clap of thunder. The channel open, the lightning struck again and again, dancing between cloud and ground. It flashed the night to a white haze, illuminating the entire battlefield.
The oni army was marching through the forest leveled by True Flame. Shoulder to shoulder. Thousands of them. Hundreds of wargs mixed into their ranks. In the back, large cages on wheeled carts. The horrors.
He could not let them past him and attack the retreating royal marines. He couldn’t leave them alive to go on and attack Pittsburgh.
Wolf brought his hands together again and again, connecting sky to ground, creating channels that the lightning could follow. The night flashed white again and again as the lightning flickered down, blasting everything it touched. He focused on the cages in the back, hitting them with every strike. The oni, even with their great numbers, were a nuisance compared to the horrors if they were enlarged.
“They are charging,” Wraith Arrow said calmly as the sekasha picked off the wargs with spell arrows. The shields of the sekasha could deal with the crude weapons that the oni carried en masse. Their protective spell, however, could not block powerful magic effects like frost, fire, and lightning.
“They have been told enough about their enemy to know that call-lightning cannot be used at short range,” Ruin said.
It couldn’t be used for short range because Wolf wasn’t able to cast a shield to protect himself nor the sekasha while doing the spell. The call-lightning had the widest area of effect. It was his strongest attack—which made it most dangerous to his own people. He had Sunder’s spell orb whizzing around his head but its protection was short lived.
The flickering lightning made the image of the advancing oni jerk as if still pictures were being used to show the enemies’ charge. Each picture they shuttered closer and closer. The holy warriors activated their shields, slid their bows into their back scabbards, and pulled their ejae. The oni collided with the wall of sekasha with shouts, roars, and growls. The smell of blood became mixed with the heavy wood smoke.
Wolf channeled the lightning over and over, until the sky stayed static white with the falling rain and brilliance of the lightning. The clap and rumble of thunder merged into one continuous tumult. He wanted to do a scry, to see if the things within the cages were surviving his attack, but he didn’t dare let up the onslaught.
One of the cages suddenly shattered as something big and glowing expanded up out of it. It took form as a gleaming stag that blazed white hot in the rainy dark. It was bigger than even the phoenix scorpion had been. It stood at least sixty feet tall from dark hooves to a majestic set of shining antlers. Despite its deerlike appearance, it had sharp tusks on either side of its boarlike snout.
“What is that?” someone called out.
Wolf was glad that someone else had no idea what the creature was. He didn’t recognize the voice, so it was not one of his three Hands.
“It is a storm hart!” Ruin—the oldest and most experienced of the sekasha—shouted. “Wolf, put up a shield! Quick!”
Wolf dropped the call-lightning and put up the largest shield that he could cast to protect all the sekasha standing with him.
There was a moment of muffled peace as his shield blocked the attack of the oni warriors and the dying rumble of thunder. The night was suddenly dark except for the lone gleaming figure at the back of the battlefield. The oni army fell back, at first leery of Wolf’s attack. Then, as they glanced behind them and realized that the horror had gotten loose, panic swept through them and they started to scatter.
“I thought storm harts were mythical,” Wolf said into the sudden quiet.
“They are.” Ruin was the only one old enough to maybe know the truth. The world’s early history had been erased by the Skin Clan as they subjugated the original nomadic tribes that predated the Clans. “All horrors are creatures that never naturally existed. They were pieced together by the Skin Clan to resemble legendary monsters. They wanted to use our own myths against us. Luckily this made them too unnatural to procreate. The phoenix scorpion you fought today was a pale shadow of those we faced during the Rebellion.”
Wraith Arrow nodded to this.
“This creature is more of the same.” Ruin pointed at the storm hart. “It’s some piecemeal monster put into the fake skin of a beast that never existed beyond the spell runes on a puppet’s skin.”
“Oh, I see.” Wolf understood what Ruin was saying. The outer shell of the horrors that they were fighting was a solid illusion, projected by a spell written on the smaller true animal. “There is no reason for the illusion to look identical to the creature within.”
Ruin nodded. “All that matters is the creature has some instinct to use the abilities that the Skin Clan bred into it.”
“You’ve seen these puppet things before?” Wraith Arrow asked Ruin.
Ruin waved his hand, indicating that the truth was too gray for him to comfortably speak. “The wood sprites created the concept as part of their escape from the Skin Clan. They were just small children; they needed strong allies to succeed. They had a handful of small pets that they gifted with powerful abilities by writing spells directly onto them. We did not like the practice—it felt too much like lying. We asked the wood sprites to not use it to make things be what they were not. The concept, however, was the precursor to the sekasha shields.”
“Someone perfected it after the wood sprites abandoned the concept,” Wolf guessed.
“Yes,” Ruin said. “We thought we sterilized that rat’s nest after the Rebellion but apparently one of the rats skittered away to Onihida to perfect the concept.”
“Any guess what this can do?” Wolf figured that Ruin had some idea if he had Wolf put up his shield.
“It reasons that our enemy tailor-made the horrors within the camp against you and Prince True Flame,” Ruin said, “as the oni could not be sure if the Stone Clan would cooperate with the Wind Clan in this battle.”
Lightning flickered—naturally generated out of the storm—and hit the storm hart. The horror glowed brighter, electricity arcing up its massive antlers. There was a pulse of magic, like what the phoenix scorpion had cast to pinpoint Wolf. It washed over him like a static-filled fire scry.
“It just targeted me,” Wolf said. “Does it throw lightning?”
“That is my guess,” Ruin said.
Wolf felt the faint trace of a leader arcing toward him and, moments later, a massive bolt of lightning followed. His shield flared to blinding white. The sound of the clap and boom of the thunder was instantaneous and deafening loud.
The sekasha switched back to bow and a swarm of spell arrows streaked through the darkness.
The storm hart, though, had vanished even as the arrows left the bow.
“Stack!” Wraith Arrow shouted.
All the sekasha leapt toward Wolf, surrounding him tightly, ejae drawn.
The storm hart suddenly appeared within Wolf’s shield. It towered over them—sixty feet tall—gleaming brightly. It swiped its massive tusks at Wolf, flinging aside the sekasha who were protecting him. Their personal shields took the worst of the impact but flickered and failed even as the warriors were tossed aside with their wyvern chest armor sliced to shreds.
Wolf punched the hart backward with a force strike, knocking it beyond his shield.
All the warriors who had protected Wolf were battered and bleeding. Their weapons had done no damage to the beast. Worse, their chest armor would not protect them from a second hit.
“If it’s like the phoenix scorpion,” Wolf said, “we will not be able to harm it without killing the beast within that is guiding it!”
Wolf hit it with a flame strike, hoping to burn it to nothing. It didn’t absorb the power like the phoenix scorpion had but it seemed unharmed. He did a scry to probe further. “It has a shield as well as the illusion protecting the true beast.”
If the inner beast was small, it would be like coring an apple while it was hidden within a very mobile house.
“Spell arrows will bypass its shield,” Wraith Arrow said as the hart teleported across the battlefield. “But it needs to stay in one place for us to hit it!”
“Hold your arrows ready,” Wolf said. “The storm hart will teleport back inside my shield once it realizes that it can’t damage us from a distance. The conditions are right for a fog wall.”
Wraith Arrow understood Wolf’s plan. “If it cannot see us, it will not realize that we are lying in wait for its return.”
Red Knife agreed to the plan with a nod. “It is much taller than us. We can loose our arrows without fear of hitting each other.”
The Stone Clan nodded their agreement.
Holding his shield with his right hand, Wolf cast a fog wall with his left. Red Knife had insisted he learn the spell as a child. Wolf had thought at the time—wrongly—that with the Clan Wars over, there would be no need for him to fight in a battle like this. The spell rapidly chilled the air close to the ground where the moisture content was high. The night closed in as the fog thickened until the storm hart was just a gleaming smudge in the dark. The horror shifted place to place, randomly teleporting in a circle around them. It struck Wolf’s shield again and again with lightning. The earth shook beneath their feet with the strength of the blows. Even muffled by his shield, the sound was stunningly loud. Wolf’s Hands gathered close to him, acting as Shields. The rest of the sekasha stood ready, spell arrows nocked, tips pointed skyward.
The lightning stopped.
“It comes,” Wraith Arrow said softly.
Wolf activated Sunder’s spell orb. A second shield went up around him and his Hands.
Suddenly the storm hart was among them, towering overhead, already swinging its tusks toward the sekasha protecting Wolf. The massive tusks struck Sunder’s loaned shield again and again.
Spell arrows whistled skyward, turning into shafts of light. They riddled the storm hart. One hit the hidden beast within the puppet skin. It shrieked and stumbled. The sekasha fired again, releasing another gleaming swarm. Another true strike and the deer fell to the ground, panting hoarsely. The illusionary skin was accurate enough to show the animal’s panic in its eyes. The sekasha pressed their attack, shooting volley after volley of arrows into the massive body, hoping to hit the hidden beast.
The storm hart shuddered as a third arrow found its true heart, and went limp.
They stood a moment in the silence, gazing down at its still gleaming form.
“It is done,” Wraith Arrow said.
Wolf scanned the battlefield. The oni who survived the lightning had fled in all directions. They might regroup now that the horror was dead. “We will commence an orderly retreat, killing anything that follows us.”
“Yes, domou,” Wraith Arrow said.