Lyrralt stared at her as he had stared at Igraine, as if he’d discovered someone, or something, he’d never seen before.
Igraine’s persuasive words filled the silence. “If we don’t change our ways, we’re doomed. Did you-all of you! — not see it in Takar?” He swept his arms wide.
There was murmured assent. “Did you not feel the hopelessness, the uselessness in your lives?” Jyrbian looked around at the crowd, saw the eager faces, the fevered eyes.
Igraine’s voice took on a compelling, urgent quality. “Can you not see what our kind will become if we continue on that misbegotten path? Have you ever felt more alive, living as we have these past few weeks, than in all of your miserable lives before?”
He had them now, their hearts and minds. The surge of joy, of faith from his followers, was almost tangible to behold. “We will leave in the morning,” he said. “We will find a place of our own, where we can be safe and happy.”
The crowd sighed. The Ogres, arms around their loved ones, began to drift away.
Everlyn went with her father, without a glance for Jyrbian, who would have followed her had Lyrralt not caught his arm and pulled him back.
“Is this heresy what he has been preaching all along, about not having slaves?” Lyrralt accused his brother, his glance taking in Khallayne, too.
Jyrbian shrugged, watching Everlyn’s disappearing back. “I’ve been too busy to sit around Igraine’s feet like a doting child.” He turned away.
The others also walked away, leaving only Khallayne and Bakrell to hear Lyrralt’s horrified voice. “This is madness! It was bad enough when he was talking about ‘choosing for yourself’ Now he wants you to live as humans live, digging in the dirt for food, building miserable clay huts with your own hands! Don’t you even care?”
“Do you? Care, I mean?” Bakrell peered closely into Lyrralt’s eyes as if to gauge the sincerity of his answer.
“Well, I don’t care,” Khallayne said, before Lyrralt could answer.
“You don’t care as long as you can practice your heretical magic!”
She met his angry gaze with an expression of equal determination. How long since she’d thought of her magic as a thing to be hidden away? As a wrongness? Any philosophy, heretical or not, was worth the peace and joy and sense of belonging of the past weeks. She shrugged, looking eerily like Jyr-bian a moment earlier. “You’re right. I don’t much care about his philosophy, one way or the other.”
She turned and walked away, leaving Lyrralt alone with a renewed conviction that he must act soon, whether a good opportunity presented itself or not. He had been looking for a safe moment to kill Igraine, one that would allow him to escape before his deed was discovered. Perhaps he would have to die in the act.
The runes hummed approvingly on his skin.
Fear. The face was there, and it was her own. But it wasn’t. The pale sea-green complexion, which had always drawn men to her like bees to honey, was mottled, as splotchy and knotted as tree bark. The black eyes were dull and stupid and humorless. But they were hers.
Screaming woke her. The sound so nearly matched the images of her nightmare that for long moments, Khallayne lay, twisted in her blanket, wrapped in screams that seemed to be her own, except…
The screaming went on and on, growing louder then ending abruptly in a silence more terrible than all the noise.
Thinking, at last, that the voice crying out in terror had been Jelindra’s and not her own, Khallayne leapt to her feet, stumbling as her blanket caught around her ankles.
Across the campfire Tenaj and Lyrralt each fought free of their blankets, too. Nearer the tent where Igraine slept, Jyrbian tossed off his blankets with a curse that woke more people. “‘What in the name of Sargonnas is happening now?”
Before anyone could answer, a new scream ripped through the air. Without hesitation, Jyrbian drew his sword and wheeled in the direction of the disturbance. But his sword would be of no use against the thing that had sprung into the air, conjured out of nothing. Or maybe there was more than one. Khallayne wasn’t sure.
As Jyrbian charged, slashing with his sword, the cloud that rose into the sky might have been one or twenty creatures. The faces of it changed rapidly. The monster was catlike, snakelike, fanged, black-mawed, a rock, mere mist. There were two, then one, then a mass of them, writhing like snakes streaming from their winter cave into the spring sun.
Jyrbian’s sword sank into flesh and mist. An appendage, flickering between long, slithery tentacle and claw- tipped, gnarled horror, reached out and threw Jyrbian backward twenty feet. He landed in a heap and was still.
Khallayne started toward him, and Tenaj grabbed her, hauling her back. “Forget him!”
The creature was smaller now, more solid, more deadly, but still moving slowly, dreamlike, almost loving in its gestures, as it grasped a female Ogre around the neck with its impossibly long fingers.
She tried to scream, but all that came out was gurgling, then abruptly no sound at all.
The cloud creature had gained in substance while the living being had become a flimsy husk, lifeless, no more substantial than paper.
There were new cries from about the camp as more Ogres awakened to find their view of the stars blotted out by the gruesome creature. Lords and ladies who had, weeks before, known a dagger only as a jeweled object to decorate a belt, took up their ceremonial swords and their crude pikes and prepared to fight.
Khallayne knew their courage would do them no good. Hadn’t Jyrbian just proved that? She could sense Tenaj collecting her power, could hear the murmured words of a spell forming on the other Ogre’s lips. Tenaj was still only learning things Khallayne had practiced as a child, still tentative about the power inside her. Khallayne realized she had to help.
The cloud creature turned on them. Its features were two, three, a dozen frightening faces, shifting until they were one, multiplying again, then melting into something ugly and monstrous and monolithic.
Khallayne tried to close her eyes, tried to concentrate and bring up her own power. She couldn’t. She couldn’t move a muscle. Even her eyelids refused to budge, to blot out the dreamlike movement, the painfully slow change of features, from one to many. Chameleonlike. Dreamlike.
Tenaj finished her spell, the words to a “banishing” spell hurled at the creature with all the neophyte force she could muster.
The thing wavered in the air, then reared and moved in their direction, all teeth and roaring maw.
It leapt at them, like a snake coiling and striking.
In the instant before it struck, Khallayne perceived its true nature. Fifty feet away, maybe seventy, the tenuous, smokelike tail that tethered the cloud creature to the earth was connected to a sleeping form. In the center of pandemonium, in the middle of the attack, Jelindra slept. The creature issued from her. And it was Jelindra’s voice that had wakened Khallayne…
Tenaj fell, struck by one of the writhing tentacles. She tried to regain her footing, but was dazed by the blow. She slipped. Her arms refused to support her weight as she tried to push herself back up.
The horrible, half-melted, half-monster face leered at Khallayne. The stench of filth and corruption filled her nostrils. The nearness of the thing freed her tightened muscles.
She flung up her hands, forming a shield to protect herself and Tenaj.
“Do something!” Lyrralt materialized at her side, mace clutched in his fingers. He helped Tenaj to her feet, his tall, strong body bracing her, then grabbed Khallayne’s shoulder. “Stop the thing!”
Khallayne tried to tear herself from his steely grasp. The tips of each of his fingers pressed bruises into her flesh. The thing lunged at them again and rebounded off her shield. It struck again and was repelled again. It reared up into the night and screamed, a roar of fury and frustration. It turned on the warriors surrounding it, on Ogres who hadn’t the power to shield themselves. It grabbed a young boy and lifted him, screaming and kicking, into the air.
Lyrralt shook Khallayne. “Khallayne! Do something!”
“Jelindra-” she managed to gasp. “Jelindra’s nightmare. Wake her.” She pointed to the sleeping form, barely visible through the crowd.
At last comprehending, Lyrralt went into action. He leapt campfires, dodged confused, shouting Ogres, made it across the camp, and grabbed the sleeping Jelindra.
