David Farland - Chaosbound

“What would you have of me, great lord of the dead!” the woman cried. Her name was Endemeer, and she had once been a vaunted scholar.

“What has happened to my world?”

“A great sorcerer has come,” Endemeer said. “He has bound two worlds into one, two worlds that were but shadows of the one true world that existed at the beginning of time.

“He has bound flesh to flesh in those who live; and he has bound spirit to spirit among the dead. . . .”

Immediately Crull-maldor knew that the scholar spoke correctly. This world that she had said once existed, Crull-maldor had heard of it from some of the greater spirits she had tortured.

But until now, Crull-maldor had not believed in it. She had suspected that it was a place found only in one’s imagination.

It explained everything so simply, yet it had tremendous ramifications.

Crull-maldor had not yet revealed to the emperor her news about the humans in her land. She knew now that she could not hide the news. This great change impacted entire continents.

Humans are abroad in the land once again, Crull-maldor thought, and where there is conflict, there is also opportunity.

Crull-maldor immediately sent an alarm, a flash of thought to the emperor Zul-torac. Our wyrmling scouts have found humans in the Northern Wastes. They came with a great change that has twisted the earth.

The emperor sent back a terse reply, and she felt his thoughts crawling through her mind, seeking to infiltrate it. She set a barrier against them, so that he could not read her mind, and he replied. I know, fool! Deal with them.

His thoughts fled, dismissing her.

Crull-maldor grinned. As she had hoped, he had not had the foresight to tell her how to deal with them.

The scholar Endemeer whimpered and tried to escape Crull-maldor’s grasp. The lich lord merely held her, eager to wring more information from her.

“Tell me about the humans’ new magic, the glyph magic.”

Crull-maldor sent her own tendrils of light plunging deep into those of her captive. Each tendril of light was like a strand of human brain. It stored wisdom and memories. As Crull-maldor brushed against Endemeer, she glimpsed the memories stored upon Endemeer’s tendrils.

Grasping the ones that she wanted, Crull-maldor ripped the tendrils free. It was like tearing apart a human brain. The tendrils’ light immediately began to dim, so Crull-maldor shoved them into her own central bundle, transplanting the memories. By doing so she stole the spirit’s knowledge. It was a violation as reprehensible as rape, a type of murder.

So Crull-maldor hunched over her prey, ripping light from Endemeer and in the City of the Dead the lich lord discovered the deepest secrets of the runelords.

War horns rent the air; Myrrima startled awake, heart pounding.

She cocked an ear, alert for sounds of danger, and heard the screams of horses dying in battle, along with some warlord shouting, “Man the breach! Man the breach, damn you!”

A drum pounded and sent a snarl rolling over the hills like the crack of thunder. Deep voices roared in challenge in some strange tongue, voices unlike any that Myrrima had ever heard.

Blinking the sleep from her eyes, Myrrima climbed from her bed there in the lee of the rocks, the warm ferns crushed from her weight, and peered out in alarm in the cool morning mist, trying to find the source of danger.

But there were no armies clashing in the distance, and as she woke it seemed to her that the sounds faded, as if they could be heard only in dream.

She stood panting, trying to catch her breath, clear her head. She blinked, looking around. Erin’s body still lay there on the grass not a hundred yards off, her face pale, her lips going blue. Sage was sleeping soundly in the ferns.

Nearby, the Walkin clan was still sleeping, too. Myrrima was the only one who had wakened.

Her heart ceased to hammer so hard; she stood for a moment, thinking.

It was only a dream. It was only a dream. All of Borenson’s talk last night stirred up evil memories of battles long past. Or perhaps her vision of Erin that she’d had not more than a couple of hours ago had conjured an evil dream.

What ever the cause, the sounds of battle had faded. Myrrima sat in a daze, wondering.

“What is it, Mother?” Sage asked, stirring from her sleep.

“Nothing,” Myrrima whispered. She searched about camp. Borenson and Draken were still gone.

Yet as she sat in the early dawn, she heard the sound of water tinkling in the streamlet nearby, the discreet cheeping of small birds in a thicket.

Other than that, the morning was utterly still. The sun was just rising in the far hills, painting the dawn in shades of peach and rose. It was that time of morning when everything is still, even the wind.

Yet there she heard it again—the deep call of a war horn in the distance, and the sound of men clashing in battle.

She strode toward it with a start and cocked her ear. The sound seemed to be coming from the far side of the old river channel.

Straining to hear, she crept over to the cliff, her feet rustling dry grasses, and stood for a moment. The sound had faded again, but she could hear it now—a deep rumbling in the ground, as if horses were charging into battle, the blare of horns. She could almost smell blood in the air.

She peered across the channel. Its waters were dark and muddy, filled with filth and jetsam. Mists rising off of it made the far shore nearly impossible to make out. Could there be a battle over there? But who would be fighting?

Yet as she stood at the edge of the cliff, peering about, there was no sign of troops in the distance, and the sound seemed now to be coming from below her, from the still waters in the channel.

Myrrima clambered carefully down the steep slope a hundred feet, until she stopped at the water’s edge.

The sounds of war came distant now, so distant. She wondered if she was listening to the remnant of a dream.

Suddenly, out in the water a body floated to the surface not forty feet from shore, a woman with wide hips, someone who would have made her home in the village of Sweetgrass. Thankfully, Myrrima could not see her face, only her stringy gray hair.

The corpse bobbed for a moment, and then the sounds of battle suddenly blasted in Myrrima’s ears.

“Internook! Internook!” a barbarian cried. “Hail to the Bearers of the Orb!” Men cheered fiercely all around her, and she heard them running, mail ringing and jangling.

She peered off in the mist, and let her eyes go out of focus, and then she saw it: a castle a hundred miles north of the Courts of Tide, its battlements all lit by fire. It was dark there, and she could not see the enemy— except for a mass of great beasts out beyond the walls, giants with white skin and startling white eyes, wearing armor carved from bone.

“To battle!” some warlord cheered. “To battle!”

And then just as suddenly as it had come, the vision ended, as if a portcullis gate had slammed down, holding the vision at bay.

Is this a vision of the future? Myrrima wondered. But a certainty filled her.

No, it is a battle happening now, far across the ocean. Dawn had come to her home here in Landesfallen, but night still reigned on the far side of the world. As Borenson had warned, the wyrmlings were greeting their new neighbors.

The vision, the sounds, both seemed to be coming from the water, and that is when Myrrima knew.

She had wondered whether to follow Borenson across the ocean into his mad battle.