Another lightning strike hit the woods, but this time it was at least two miles away, and the accompanying thunderclap wasn’t quite so loud. I knew now that the Warlock couldn’t see us at all, and was just taking stabs in the dark.
We raced onward, zigzagging between trees, leaping over streams and gullies, scrambling up steep slopes and skidding down rock banks. All the while lightning bolts crashed down every few seconds, some miles away, others smashing into the forest a mere fifty yards from us.
After an hour, the lightning strikes died down in frequency. The Warlock was not all-powerful. The slight reprieve was soon replaced with a new danger, though. The forest was already thick with the smell of smoke, and all around us we saw the distant orange glows of fires. The various fires started by the lightning strikes were spreading rapidly through the dry forest. The blazes were joining together to create a hellish inferno. Soon, we would be trapped between the advancing walls of fire.
I could hear the Warlock’s triumphant laughter on the smoky, ember-carrying wind. He had me trapped, and he knew it.
“Our safest bet is to travel upstream in a river!” I yelled over my shoulder to Yumo. “Do you know which one flows from the mountains we came from?”
“In this darkness, I don’t even know where we are right now,” she yelled back, the rushing wind of our speed muffling her voice. “I’m sorry, Vance, but I’m as much use as a lost sheep right now.”
“That doesn’t matter, just tell me if there is a river.”
“There is, yes, but I have no idea where it is in relation to our current position.”
“Okay, I think I know how to find it. Everyone hang on, keep your speed up!”
They didn’t need to be told twice; two huge walls of flame, each fifty feet high, were rushing through the forest to devour us, driven on by the Warlock’s howling wind. I veered away from them, silently commanding the other undead panthers to follow. While alive, the panthers’ senses were among the sharpest of any animal. Using their fine-tuned sense of smell, I was able to note the presence of a small river a mile to the east.
I made for the river, racing at full tilt, but when I reached the running water, I skidded to a halt and commanded everyone else to stop as well.
“Why are we stopping?!” Layna screamed, almost hysterical. The Arachne were afraid of few things, but fire was one of them.
“Hold on a second,” I said as I jumped off the panther’s back.
I knelt down next to the water, stuck my hand in, and closed my eyes. The villages where the Warlock’s monstrous reptiles had been on the rampage would have had hundreds of people killed, and surely some of their bodies would have ended up in whatever rivers flowed through those areas. And if there were any human corpses floating in this stream, however far upstream they might be, even if it was hundreds of miles away, I’d be able to sense them.
My Death senses raced upstream. Sure enough I began to pick up traces of human dead in the water, and lots of them. They had only recently been killed.
“Up this river, this is our way out!” I said as I concluded that these corpses had been killed by the Warlock’s lizards.
My party members didn’t have to be told twice. The towering wall of flame was racing toward us, and the odd lightning strike was still crashing down from the storm clouds above. The panthers plunged into the icy water. The current was strong, but not powerful enough that any would be swept away. The water was deep, coming right up to the beasts’ shoulders, but they weren’t alive, so they didn’t need to breathe and couldn’t drown.
We raced up the river, and while our progress was slowed by the flowing current, it was by no means halted. Living mounts might have been exhausted by fighting against both the cold and the current, but my undead panthers lacked these weaknesses and pushed on tirelessly. The forest was burning all around us and the air was thick with smoke, but we were relatively safe in the river, even though we could feel waves of intense heat rushing through the air.
We pushed on through the night, pursued by pillars of fire and lightning strikes. As the hours passed, the Warlock’s power waned, and his storm weakened. Soon the gale-force winds that had been driving the conflagration with such speed through the woods died down. The pace of the flaming walls slowed, and the smoke started to clear from the air. The trees began to thin out as well, and the gradient of the terrain grew steeper. We were leaving the forest and entering the foothills of the mountains. Every member of my party was cold and soaked to the bone from our river journey, but as the distant sky started to turn from black to gray with the coming dawn, I saw the jagged outlines of mountain peaks on the horizon.
“We’re almost there!” I said.
The sight of the mountains silhouetted against the sky gave the members of my party hope and fresh strength. In the gray light of dawn, I saw a path leading up out of the trees and noticed the signs of a human settlement nearby. I also sensed the presence of a great number of human corpses, many of them fresh.
“I know where we are now,” Yumo said. “My parents’ village is only five or six miles away, that way!”
“Where’s this cave in the mountains they’re hiding in?” I asked. “How far away is that?”
“I’m sure it’s the cave Rami and I used to go exploring in when we were kids,” she said. “She and I always used to hide
