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The wyre attacked before the rearguard of rangers gained the flat shoulder. They sped across the grass and exposed sandstone. Two shifted completely, two were half-shifted. The others yelled.
And viscid green sorcery suddenly rimed them. Three more shifted to wolf form.
Five wolfen. Two in partial shift, long claws magically elongated. Only four unshifted, screaming like frenzied fanatics. The wyre plunged into the resting knights. The men hadn’t time to draw their swords.
Dropping the stave, Desora yanked two spheres, teeming with Earth power. She flung them at the half-shifted wyre. The spheres exploded over them, ripping away the twisted sorcery that powered their shift. Without the wyre bulk, without claws and fangs, they were unarmed, defenseless against the silver-tipped arrows that the rangers shot, aiming while still running.
She couldn’t fling such power into the wolfen tearing into the men. She didn’t know what elemental power would do to them.
Sword drawn, Brax ran past her, Challoch on his heels. Then Morcain and other riders rushed after them. The rangers nocked the black-fletched arrows intended for wyre. Like Desora, though, the melée in the broad flat kept them from shooting.
She seized her stave and headed for the fighters.
A sickly green miasma poured around the Arch. The monster.
Groaning, she shifted to face the greater threat. She should have anticipated it would join this fight. They’d tracked it for days.
She turned to the rangers and shouted over the droning hum from the Arch. “Switch arrows. Cover them in dirt.”
The four men gaped at each other. Four only, now, their numbers dwindling with each battle. Then one pointed at the vapor gathering into a dense cloud at the base of the Wind Arch.
Brax and the others had waded into the melée. Steel cut into the slaughter. These wyre, though, knew how to fight steel.
She needed the monster to solidify, to ground himself.
The apiary swirled past, a dense sparkling cloud. They darted like arrows into the melée and fastened on wyre. Yowls joined the shouts.
Behind the monster’s miasma were sparkling lights. Not sprites. The sorcerer stood there, doing something at the Arch. Wind tore past, carrying leaves and bracken and grit, sucked to the Arch and his spell.
Her hair and clothes streamed toward the Arch—the gate. A vacuum sucked the air from around them. Gate. Portal. A passage between worlds. The sorcerer’s spell didn’t matter; the result did. He tried to bring another monster into this world, an ally against the Wizard Enclave and the Fae who stood against Frost Clime.
Yet the sorcerer didn’t have complete control of the monster—or he never would have sent him against what Horst deemed his, awakening the Kygry’s wrath against him. Horst might have delayed after the wyre killed a few riders. That delay would have given the sorcerer the upper hand once he had another monster in this world.
It entered, full-grown and hungry, the queen had said.
A second monster would enter the same way. The sorcerer didn’t care what he unleashed on the world. He cared only that Frost Clime won, that dragons could leave exile.
He was a fanatic, dangerous for his devotion to his mission, uncaring of the lasting consequences to the non-magical, people and animals.
She didn’t have time to deal with the monster. She needed to stop the sorcerer.
“Shoot,” she ordered the rangers.
“It’s not grounded. Our arrows will go through the vapor and hit nothing.”
“Shoot. Give it a target. Give it something to fight.”
“It can just suck the life from us,” Dunstan muttered.
She dared the risk. The sorcerer focused on the gate. The wyre fought the swordsmen. The monster traveled in the vaporous cloud—but was that because of sorcery? Rip the sorcery away. Could it feed? Would it take material form?
She didn’t have time to speculate.
The rock-filled sphere hadn’t hurt the ogre. In the battle at Horst’s forest palace, it had hurt the monster. No helmet—so obsidian cut its grey flesh. Granite fell onto its armor, denting, crushing.
“One of you shoot. The center of the cloud. While the sorcerer is distracted.”
“You think—.”
“Shoot,” she yelled. She didn’t want to examine that idea. “The only way to prove it is to try.”
Serre never missed. He aimed and shot in a single breath.
The arrow flew straight to the center. It vanished into the vapor—and struck metal.
“All of you,” Desora ordered.
Serre swiftly nocked another arrow. He shot seconds before the others. All struck metal.
The vapor began tearing away.
“More dirt on the arrowheads.” When they lifted their bows to aim, she cast life potential over the metal tips.
The arrows ripped vast holes in the vapor—or the magic that created the vapor dissipated because the sorcerer wasn’t re-charging it.
The steady hum never faltered. The sandstone Arch shimmered as sorcery whorled inside the formation. The sparks had increased, and the sickly green light glowed, radiant as sunlight.
Two riders ran from the melée to attack the monster. They plunged into the cloud, a dimmer version of the Arch’s bright glow. Steel rang on metal.
The monster had grounded.
She needed that monster gone. The sorcerer’s spell was the greater danger. She had to stop the foul magic opening the gate. Rock spheres had damaged the monster—but spheres would take too long. Would acid—? No, that might melt the monster’s armor—or not. Damage it, and she would fight it another day. But that would give her this day to fight the sorcerer. What else could she do? What else could elemental Earth do? The answer blazed in her mind.
What could elemental Earth do? Anything that the land itself did.
“Get them out of there.”
Three rangers hesitated. Imre didn’t. He raced across the flat shoulder, ignoring the carnage of the ended melée. Desora cast one glance, enough to see Brax on his feet.
Imre plunged into the fading vapor. They saw his shape, a dark silhouette. He collided with another silhouette. That man emerged from the vapor with whitened features. Imre found the other rider and towed him out. They ran—then an arm reached out, grew longer and thinner and reached further—and seized the rider. He screamed and died in a gout of blood.
The vapor faded as the monster reached.
Imre had gawked when the man was seized. The rider’s sudden death shocked the ranger out of stillness. The monster caught him on his third step. He died as the rider had.
Without the vapor to capture and suspend the blood, it gushed onto the grass.
The living rider sprinted to them.
The monster took a jarring step toward them.
“Nock arrows,” Ferroc ordered.
“Wait.”
She had the rock-filled sphere. Desora flung it.
The sphere struck square on its blood-spattered chest. The weight of the rocks staggered it a step. The unhelmeted head turned toward Desora.
In the High Meadow, at Horst’s forest palace, she hadn’t really seen the monster. Its armor, its shape, its size—those, aye, but not the eyes square, the grey armor, the triangular opening that served a mouth, the lack of nose or ears. Sloped shoulders, a square chest, long arms that extended. Everything square, head and hands and boots. Colorless grey, armor and skin, while sickly green filled the eyes.
She stepped for the edge.
It kept turning to keep her directly before it.
“Five steps,” she told it.
The riders shouted, trying to draw its attention away from her. The head turned, examined the men brandishing their swords, taunting it with threats it likely couldn’t understand.
The hum from the shimmering Arch increased. The sorcery yellowed, intensified. Centered under the crown, a faint purple glow enlarged.
The monster took a step back to the men.
Desora evoked another sphere, forming it above her hand. She filled it with the greeny vines of life potential.
It jerked back to her.
“Remember this?” She flung the sphere.
The monster tried to bat it away, but the orb exploded on its armored hand. Green Earth bound up its fingers, wrapped around its hand, twined around its arm, reached for its shoulder. A high-pitched moan came from it. When it tried to yank away the powered woodbine, its fingers tangled and caught. Yet three jerks freed its hand.
And it stepped toward Desora, crossing more ground than she’d anticipated.
She stepped closer to the edge. On the periphery of her vision was the long steep drop, down and down the mountain. She grasped the stave and lifted it over her head. Elemental Earth shuddered through her body, strong, eager for use. She thrust the power into the stave as the monster took another ponderous step—followed by a rapid one.
Desora swung the stave down, knotted end striking the ground. Earth blasted out.
The power didn’t create a trench. This time, the elemental force shuddered across ten feet, under the soil, spreading wide, racing to the monster.
The mountain’s edge collapsed. Soil crumpled, pushing plants before it, hauling rock and boulders after it.
The fracture reached the monster. As the ground quaked beneath it, it flailed for balance. Then no Earth remained under it. It screamed as it fell, high and shrill and terrified.
It tumbled with the rocks and boulders, with the trees and plants.
When the slide ended, trickles of loosened dirt still runneling downslope like water, Desora remembered Ivhart and the horses and hoped they weren’t below.
Brax appeared beside her. He towed her back from the edge.
“I have to get to the portal.”
He didn’t question or delay. The slide had created a yawning half-circle. A narrow strip ran to the base of the Arch. The shelf around it hadn’t changed. He started with her toward it.
“No, Brax, no. You can’t come with me. I don’t know what the sorcerer will do.” Then she got a clear look at him, the blood splattering his face, smeared on the leather over his mail. The stark distance in his dark eyes. “What happened?”
“Mannon is dead.”
Three words, but an ocean of grief backed them.
And she didn’t have time to help him as he grieved. “All honors due him.”
“Let’s finish this,” he growled.
Morcain stopped them. “Where are you going? The monster is dead.”
“The sorcerer lives,” Brax countered.
Desora hurried to add, “He brings another monster through the Wind Arch.”
Thunder clapped. No cloud had entered the blue, blue sky. It came from the Arch.
Desora tore free and ran to the pier support. She sped around the base, her feet slipping on the shelf.
First she saw the sorcerer, arms uplifted as he poured power into his spell. Four shifted wyre crouched behind him, placed at the cardinal points. In a pale beam, they funneled their innate magic into his spell.
Then she saw what was in the Wind Arch. In the portal. Solidifying into existence.
Two monsters, crowded close to fit through the Arch’s space.
