it while drier grasses were knocked flat.
Asgaroth, Iome realized. He is blowing the fog away.
There was a shout from the river, and Iome saw that the wind had shoved the boat against the far bank, and now it was stuck there, lodged between two rocks.
Iome looked back upstream, saw dark figures racing through the trees along the bank. She dropped to her belly and eeled through a patch of tall meadow grass toward the boat, then lay concealed behind a fallen log.
Get Asgaroth, she told herself, and the rest will flee. He’s all that matters.
12
I would like to believe that with careful planning, hard work, and adequate resolve, I can create my own destiny. But other men with evil resolve makeme doubt it.
Fallion woke as the boat thudded against the shore, the wind screaming all around.
He grabbed his dagger and leapt up, his hand still aching from his wound, and climbed out of the shelter. Borenson and Myrrima were poling the boat away from the rocks, but the wind was so fierce that their efforts did little good. Fallion looked around, realized that Hadissa and his mother were gone.
“What’s going on?” Fallion cried, and in a moment Jaz was there at his back.
Borenson turned, his face red from effort, and shouted, “Get back inside!”
“Can I help?” Fallion called.
“No!” Borenson shouted, and he turned and peered upriver, his face stark with alarm.
Fallion followed his gaze. A black wind was driving bullets of rain into his face. On the banks, running between trees, dozens of enemy troops rushed toward them.
“Are we going to die?” Jaz asked.
“Get in the shelter,” Borenson shouted, pushing Fallion and Jaz away. The tarp roof of their shelter flapped like a drumhead, thrumming from the wind. Fallion got in the shelter, but scrambled to the back so that he could peer upstream through cracks between the crates.
Something-a strange cloud-was rolling toward them-a ball of night with shadows dancing inside, strengi- saats seemingly carried in a maelstrom.
Lightning flashed overhead and thunder rumbled, troubling the waters. And all around that ball of shadow warriors swarmed toward the boat, moving so swiftly by reason of endowments that Fallion’s eyes could not follow them.
Ahead of the maelstrom, one warrior in the dark tunic of an assassin sprinted toward the boat-Hadissa!
Borenson raced to the door of their little fortress, blocking it with his bulk, and stood guard.
“Hide!” he warned the children. “Find the safest corner.”
Fallion gripped his own dagger. Though he was only nine, he had trained with weaponry for as long as he could remember, and calluses from blade practice had grown thick on his palm and along the inside of his thumb.
Suddenly from the black storm that came rushing toward them came a howl, deep and almost wolflike, but ululating rapidly-like cries of glee with words in them. At first Fallion thought it might be the hunting cries of strengi-saats.
Then he wondered if it might be the wind, howling like some beast. Fallion listened closely.
The ball of wind rolled toward Hadissa, who shouted a battle cry as he turned in one last desperate attempt to meet the enemy.
The wind screamed, and Fallion saw a dark knot of straw suddenly rise up out of the grass and shoot toward Hadissa, hurtling like bolts from a ballista.
The assassin leapt and tried to dodge as he spun in midair. The pieces of straw lanced toward him, and Fallion thought that they had missed, for when Hadissa landed, he stood on the balls of his feet.
But the wind was buffeting him, propping him up like a marionette. It lifted him in the air slowly, letting him spin, so that Fallion could see the ruin of his face.
The straw had pierced his right eye socket, burrowed through his brain, and left a gaping hole out the back of his head. A small tornado whirled through the hole still, sending more bits of straw through his socket, expanding the hole, so that brain matter and flecks of blood hurtled from the back of the wound.
The wind worked Hadissa’s mouth as if he jabbered inanely. Then the wind tossed him high into the air.
Fallion gasped in shock.
Hadissa had always seemed to be a fixture in Fallion’s life, a monolith. Now he was dead.
The maelstrom of dark wind boiled toward the boat.
A ball of lightning hurtled from the blackness and shot toward them. Fallion whirled, placing his back to a box for protection, turning away from the attack.
He peered up at Borenson. The ball lightning sizzled just overhead so that Fallion felt his hair stand on end. There was a crackling sound, a grunt and a cry, and for half a second, Borenson’s chest lit up so brightly that Fallion could see the red of blood and veins in it, the gray shadows of ribs. The blast hurtled him into the air, knocking him overboard.
Fallion let out a startled cry.
Suddenly he was plunged into utter darkness. Then Fallion’s eyes began to readjust.
Myrrima let out a shrill cry and grabbed her bow. Though the wind raged all around, the wizardess seemed calm, collected.
She drew her steel bow to its full and shouted, “Come no farther. You cannot have these children.”
The wind howled and raged. Fallion heard it keen over the boat, ripping trees from the bank by their roots.
Suddenly everything went quiet. For half a second, he just crouched, listening. It was as if the wind had disappeared.
He heard a dull thud, and Fallion felt as if he were at the heart of a storm. He could hear wind swirling around in the distance. Darkness had so enveloped the boat that he could hardly make out Myrrima’s shadow, though she was no more than a dozen feet away.
The enemy was out there, waiting.
Fallion peered through the crack. Around him the rest of the children huddled, trembling from fear.
From out of the darkness strode a man, all in black. At first, Fallion thought that it was a stranger. But then he saw that it was Hadissa, and he was not striding. Instead, he moved in little hops as the wind picked him up a bit, then let him bounce back down, his feet barely touching the ground.
Behind him, grim warriors strode through the shadows, and dark strengisaats floated through the air, borne like kites, appearing briefly and then disappearing again. Myrrima let an arrow fly, and one strengi-saat dropped like a wounded dove.
A fierce light shone, ball lightning spewing around Hadissa’s head, as if the wind wanted Fallion to see this.
Hadissa drew near, a pale marionette, perhaps a hundred paces across the river; his dead mouth flapped like a scrap of cloth in the wind. His one good eye was fixed and growing cloudy, but it was the ragged hole where the other eye should have been that seemed to focus on Fallion. Wind surged through it, into the dead man’s skull, and issued out through his windpipe, causing the ragged flesh to tremble as he spoke.
“Come with me, child,” the wind insisted in a strange, rasping voice. “Long have I waited. You are a lord of the living, but I can make you King of the Dead.”
