David Farland - Sons of the Oak

“It’s all right,” Myrrima whispered as she saw his agitation. “We’re almost free.”

But Jaz peered at her as if she had slapped him, and screamed in his loudest voice, “Help! Shadoath, help me!”

Myrrima drew a hand over his mouth, but it was too late. The cry was out.

In shock, she realized that Jaz wanted to stay with Shadoath.

From somewhere on the palace grounds, Myrrima heard an echoing report, “Murder! Murder in the palace!”

She heard the clank of steel boots, the ringing sounds of chain mail, the palace doors being thrown open.

Cries and screams rose from the prisoners, and they began to stampede. One front-runner was the golath with the amputated foot. It hopped about painfully. Someone pushed it from behind, and half a dozen people fell.

Myrrima urged Shadoath’s daughter to hurry. “We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got rangits tied to a tree just down the road. Only a little ways.”

But a warhorn sounded up by the palace, deep and brutish, like the grunt of some great beast. In a moment the whole camp would rise up, hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

And now they had a fifth rider to slow them, Shadoath’s daughter. Myrrima hadn’t planned on that. She hadn’t stolen enough rangits.

“Hurry!” Myrrima said, even as Jaz began to fight, trying to get out of her arms, get back to the palace.

The palace doors flew open, and Shadoath stood there on the porch, peering out into the fog, limned by the light. She held a wicked sword with a wavy blade.

A pair of guards rushed out behind her.

The old flameweaver peered at Myrrima, eyes glowing ominously, as if embers had lodged in them, and said softly, “You go. I guard your back.”

Smoker saw the danger. He knew that the prisoners would never get free unless he bought them some time.

“Are you sure?” Myrrima said, backing away. She’d seen flameweavers in battle, and she did not want to get too close.

Smoker nodded.

He had been carrying Fallion, but now he carefully handed the boy to one of the prisoners, leaving his charge with another, and stood at the mouth of the tunnel with his pipe glowing in his hand. He raised it overhead and the contents of the bowl burst into flame. He whirled the pipe in a circle, creating a glowing afterimage, a circle of light, and as he did, the prisoners raced past him, pushing, bumping.

Shadoath heard the sounds of scuffing feet and came rushing toward them, running at perhaps six times the speed of a normal mortal, guards sprinting at her back.

Myrrima carried Jaz in her arms, still struggling, and raced down through the tunnel. At the far end, she turned and glanced back.

Smoker stood in the tunnel, waving his pipe in the air, as Shadoath charged toward him.

He raised a dagger and lunged forward a step to do battle.

Shadoath raced toward the tunnel. An old man with skin as white as a sheet barred her way. He had a long-stemmed pipe in his hand, and he swung it slowly in a great arc as he peered into the fog and darkness. He held a long knife in his off-hand. From his stance, she could see that he was no warrior.

She lunged out of the darkness with six times the speed of a normal human, swinging her sword so fast that it blurred. She felt the blade catch slightly as it slid through his guts and met his backbone, but with her great strength, Shadoath merely forced the blade on past.

For half an instant she slowed, wanting to savor the terror in his expression as he realized that he was going to die.

But instead, he merely grabbed for her with one hand, clutching her cloak for all that he was worth, and instead of fear or horror or surprise, she looked in his face and saw… a victorious smile.

She expected to be washed in his blood. Instead, a shower of flames roiled out of the wound, scorching her, boiling her flesh instantly, sending a scent of charred flesh and cooking meat into the air, searing her eyes and face.

Shadoath wailed and threw up her hands for protection as burning flames washed over her. She whirled, trying to run, but the old man grabbed at her, as if to hold her in death’s embrace.

She pulled away, hot pain embroiling her, as a powerful elemental of flame began to rise from the old man’s corpse. It sent fingers of fire rippling through the air; one slammed into her back.

Her robes were aflame!

The guards that had been racing toward her stopped, recognizing the danger. They turned to run, even as fiery arms seared them, boiling their guts instantly.

Groaning in agony, Shadoath lunged away, weaving this way and that in an attempt to elude the elemental’s attacks. Lances of fire whipped past her shoulder.

She made the palace doors and raced inside, screaming in pain, and hurried out the back door, placing the palace between her and her attacker.

Her right eye was blind. Her left eye seemed cloudy. She could barely see. She ran to her private garden where a reflecting pool lay, and threw herself in.

Myrrima had seen fiery elementals escape from flameweavers like Smoker before. She knew enough to run.

The inferno came. A rush of hot air roared through the tunnel. Some of the slower prisoners were caught in the wash, screaming in pain and terror as they died.

The heat was so great that it smote the tunnel walls, melting the stone, fusing it into molten glass.

The heat of it blasted Myrrima, singed her hair, scalded the back of her legs.

Myrrima could hear Shadoath wailing in pain, her powerful voice, amplified by the reason of many endowments, keening through the night.

Shadoath’s daughter led Jaz, and now she turned and peered toward the inferno, her eyes wide with terror.

Myrrima saw the elemental reflected in her eyes. It rose up on the far side of the wall, forty feet tall. For half a second it still held the form of Smoker, but then it morphed into something more hideous, more brutal, and went stalking toward Shadoath’s palace, slaughtering guards and palace workers with every stride.

No one would be safe, Myrrima knew. The elemental was almost mindless now. It would no longer be guided by Smoker’s intellect. It existed only to consume.

Reeling from pain, Shadoath threw herself into the reflecting pool and rolled, extinguishing the flames.

She had never imagined such torment.

She raised her searing right hand to survey the damage. Her two smallest fingers had burned off completely. Much of her palm was blackened. She hoped that it would heal, but even as she watched, a ragged scab of flesh dropped away, exposing bones.

Her whole torso ached where the fire had ripped into it. She reached down to her right breast, touching it experimentally, and felt nothing at all.

Burned. The flesh was destroyed.

The elemental on the far side of the palace was doing its damage. It lit up the night sky, and by that light, Shadoath knelt on all fours in the reflecting pool and peered at her ruined face.

Her right eye was a milky white orb, nestled in a swollen socket of bloody meat. Her left eye was cloudy at the center. Her right ear was burned away, along with most of her hair.

The flesh of both of her hands was cooked.

But none of that mattered.

For at the moment she was mindless with agony. Gone were all thoughts of revenge or escape or of rescuing her daughter.

Shadoath wished for the release offered by death, but with hundreds of endowments of stamina, death would not come.

Myrrima rushed toward the rangits. One escaped prisoner, a man whose back was lashed and shredded, had found their rangits tied to a tree, and now he struggled to untie one.

“Sir,” Myrrima said, “those are for the children.”

The fellow leapt up at the sound of her voice, terrified, and for a moment Myrrima feared that she would have to fight him for a mount, but he looked at her, at the children, and nodded his head stupidly, then ran toward the woods.