Under the Wall

At the edge of the clearing, Maeril dropped behind a tree and braced one hand in the damp earth. Rishi stopped beside her, both hands on his staff.

The clearing flashed. Another tree disappeared, leaving ash to drift through the place where its trunk had stood.

Maeril lifted her hand from the mud and began the spell. Her fingers closed around the air, and the space surrounding Rishi folded until it could no longer admit he was there. Staff, ochre cloth, red cords, pale skin—all of him vanished. Leaves shifted when he moved away, but even that disturbance soon became hard to follow.

Maeril slid into the drainage ditch that curved around the near edge of the clearing. Farther along it, workers huddled beneath the bank. Her healed leg objected to the slope. Her blind side objected to everything. She ignored both and called her hawk down from the canopy.

The half-spectral bird landed on a low branch. Through it she could see the full length of the ditch and the orc with the strange bow beyond the workers, still drawing the creature away from them. Across the camp, wooded ground climbed toward a ruined watchtower.

She pointed toward him. “Show him where I am.”

The hawk flew.

Rishi stepped across the ditch and entered the clearing as a pressure in the ash.

Three workers crawled through the ditch on hands and knees. A fourth had frozen, face turned toward the beast’s red eyes as light gathered in them.

Rishi crossed the last stretch before the beam could form. His staff struck the outside of the creature’s foreleg. The impact did not break bone, but it turned the beast’s head and sent the red glare through a stack of timber instead of the ditch. Cut beams, rope, and iron spikes collapsed into a straight plume of ash.

The workers began crawling again.

He went beneath the beast’s shoulder, sweeping the staff across the inside of one clawed limb and up beneath the jaw. He struck the thick hinge where tusk met skull as its weight shifted toward him.

The beast opened its mouth to howl.

Rishi drove the staff between its teeth.

The steel-capped length jammed against the back of its throat. Its jaws strained around the invisible obstruction. The half-born howl collapsed into a choking rumble, and the red in its eyes scattered.

For one heartbeat, the creature locked in place. Claws dug into the earth. Its neck bowed around the point of pressure.

Rishi pulled his staff free and stepped away. Blood and broken black fragments flew from the creature’s mouth as it shook itself. Its gaze snapped toward the mud sinking beneath his feet.

It can find me, Rishi thought.

One claw swept through the space above the ditch.

Rishi ducked. The tip caught his staff and drove it into his shoulder. Pain ran down his arm, but he turned with the blow and kept the claws from his throat.

The beast snapped its head toward the resistance. A tusk came low and fast.

There was no room to stop it. Rishi planted the staff, used it to turn his center, and stole a hand’s breadth from the strike.

The tusk hit his flank.

His feet left the ground. White pain emptied his lungs and reduced the world to one point beneath his ribs. The staff caught in the torn earth and bent under his weight. His hands obeyed before thought returned, swinging him around it instead of letting him land beneath the beast.

He came down badly but upright. Blood filled his mouth. His hands were still invisible on the staff. A gouge opened in the mud as he dragged it back beneath him.

The beast turned toward him.

An arrow struck behind its shoulder.

The shaft sank deep. The beast screamed and swung toward the far end of the ditch.

The orc stood there with his bow raised.

Off the ground, Rishi told himself.

Radiant wings opened at Rishi’s back. Maeril’s spell hid their light with the rest of him, but he felt the first downstroke pull at his wounded flank. His feet cleared the ground. He climbed toward the branches over the edge of the clearing.

Through her hawk, Maeril watched the orc retreat along the exposed bank toward her end of the ditch. He glanced after the bird toward her hiding place, then vaulted a trunk as claws struck the ground behind him.

“Under the bank. Stay down!” the orc shouted.

His thumb moved a catch on the bow. He turned with a shorter draw and shot into the open mouth. The arrow broke against a tusk. His next step slipped from a buried stone.

Maeril released the hawk’s sight and scrambled along the ditch to meet him, keeping below the bank.

“Erik. It’s coming for you!” a worker shouted.

A claw struck beside the orc. The impact threw him sideways into the creature’s shoulder, and the shoulder hurled him against a rock. Blood struck the stone. His bow spun into the mud.

Maeril reached the rock and climbed out of the ditch as the beast turned back toward him. Erik was reaching for the lost weapon, his fingers scraping empty soil.

She caught his cloak. “Leave it.”

Three words opened the space beside them. Claws descended as she dragged him through.

For one crushing instant there was neither forest nor tower, only cold distance and the certainty that her body had been folded in a direction it did not possess. Then stone struck her boots.

They landed in the upper chamber of the abandoned watchtower, five hundred feet uphill from the clearing. Windblown leaves lay among old straw and fox droppings. A broken stair climbed along the inside of the wall facing the camp. Beside it, missing floors left the stairwell open to the ground.

Erik fell onto one shoulder and spat more blood.

Maeril kept hold of his cloak until he moved. “Still alive?”

“Working on it.”

He pulled a vial from his coat, worked the stopper free with his teeth, and drank. With one palm pressed to the stone, he murmured a second working. Maeril recognized the field magic in it. Color returned beneath his dark green skin, and the worst tremor left his arms.

She braced herself on her staff while he got to one knee. The transit had driven a deep ache into her bad leg and left her heart beating out of time.

Erik reached for the bow no longer at his shoulder. His hand closed on nothing.

“It is in the clearing,” Maeril said.

His jaw tightened.

Erik looked toward the broken stair. “Take the stair to the roof.”

He climbed. Maeril followed with her blind side toward the inner wall. Above the last landing, an old bow and a round shield hung beneath dust and webs.

Half the roof had fallen. A strip remained along the wall facing the camp, with the parapet on one side and the open stairwell on the other. Maeril stopped at the top of the stair. Far below, a heavy timber spanned the doorway at the foot of that same wall; a crack ran up through the masonry above it.

Erik went to the parapet. The clearing lay exposed through the wounds burned across the forest. The people crawling beneath the bank were small enough to lose among the timber stacks.

The beast wheeled where Maeril and Erik had vanished.

At the edge of the clearing, branches and leaves bent around an invisible body moving through the canopy.

Maeril gripped the broken wall. “Do not be a fool.”

Erik followed her gaze. “What did you leave down there?”

“A monk.”

The beast stopped searching the clearing. It turned its head toward the road.

Erik saw the change first. “It’s going after the travelers.”

He pulled a horn-and-brass whistle and a signal mirror from his satchel. One hard note lifted the beast’s head; three flashes of dying sunlight caught close to its eyes.

Maeril stared at him. “I was concerned we might survive intact.”

“It needed another target.”

“It has one.” Maeril sent her hawk down from above the clearing. It swept close to the beast’s skull and climbed toward the tower with a defiant cry.

The beast turned from the road. Its roar at the hawk broke as something struck the back of its head.

Rishi drew his staff clear of the beast’s skull and pulled out of his dive from the trees.

He beat his wings clear of the reaching claws. The climb pulled at his wounded flank. Red gathered in the eyes below him.

The beam passed beneath his feet and cut through trees, abandoned tools, and the edge of a timber sledge. Ash rose in a long sheet as the beast’s gaze returned to the watchtower.

The mirror flashed again. The beast charged toward it.

Rishi flew after it, high enough to clear the trees. He was still above the camp; Maeril and the orc had crossed the whole distance in an instant. The tower rose far beyond the beast’s pounding back.

He shifted the staff into his left hand and threw two knives in quick succession. One buried itself behind the neck, the other above the shoulder. The creature faltered beneath him, then surged forward.

Space tore around it.

Its next stride landed farther up the slope, beyond a stand of trees Rishi still had to cross. He flew over the place it had vanished from as trees broke around its shoulders ahead. Then it was gone again, taking its speed through the rupture without slowing.

Maeril. It is coming, Rishi thought.

Rishi drove his wings harder. Pain locked his side halfway through the downstroke. He lost height, branches rising around him until leaves hid the tower.

He held his staff across his chest and flew between the upper branches. Shorter wingbeats kept him aloft as he picked a path uphill toward the tower.

From the parapet, Maeril saw the beast burst out of empty air halfway between the camp and the tower. It struck the wooded slope running, smashing through undergrowth. A last belt of trees still separated it from the open ground beneath their wall.

“Of course you teleport,” Maeril said.

Erik set the mirror on the parapet and pointed down the stairwell to the timber over the doorway. “The timber over the door. Break it and this wall comes down.”

“I can weaken it. Fire will have to finish it.”

“Wait until it is under us.”

He pulled the old bow and shield from their hooks while she stepped down to the last landing. The shield scraped against stone above her. A bowstring creaked into tension.

Maeril leaned over the open stairwell, drew a warding curve in reverse, and broke it with two sharp motions. Pale mist poured from her mouth down to the timber. Its grain darkened and bubbled beneath the acid, filling the tower with the smell of vinegar and wet rot. Another tree broke on the slope, much nearer now.

“Back up here. It’s through the trees!” Erik shouted.

She climbed back to the parapet on Erik’s left, with the top step at her heels. His arrow was already flying toward the open slope between the trees and the tower when the beast tore into view there. The shaft drove in behind its shoulder and turned one leg under it. It plowed a furrow; his second arrow passed through the space it vanished from.

Maeril braced her staff against the broken parapet. The doorway and the exposed beam lay beneath her, with open ground beyond. She gathered fire into her free hand.

Closer. Under the wall, Maeril urged it silently.

The creature broke into view at the foot of the tower. She sent the bead of fire down to meet it beside the doorway.

The explosion swallowed its head and shoulders. Fire rolled through the opening and struck the weakened timber; the floor jumped under Maeril’s boots. She caught herself against the parapet as smoke rushed up the stairwell.

The beam blackened. It did not break.