Adrien went after Garrick through two corridors and out into the cold, and by the time they hit the yard he could already see it.
The lower holdings sat about a kilometre down the slope, past the walls, where the ground flattened out enough to farm. From up here it looked like somebody had kicked over an ant nest. People running one way, men in Clairmont green and yellow running the other, and the dark shapes moving between the fences that were doing neither.
The house had already emptied. Knights with mana crawling up their blades. Two men with spears holding a gate between them. Somebody on the barn roof with a bow, loosing and stepping and loosing again.
They went down the track at a run.
"Is this normal?" Adrien got the words out between strides. "Do we get attacks like this often?"
"No, my lord." Garrick was not built for running and was doing it anyway. "Or near enough to no. One or two a year, in winter, and we handle them pretty fine. With your father here it was quick work and most of the house slept through it."
"And this isn’t the one or two you mean. I’m guessing."
"This isn’t a hard winter either." Garrick spat off to the side. "Something’s put them out. When that many move at once it’s because they’re getting away from something worse behind them."
’So they aren’t attacking. They’re fleeing, and we’re in the way.’
"Right." Adrien caught it. "We’ll worry about what’s behind them later. Let’s fix the part that’s happening now."
"Yes."
Garrick lifted his right hand as he ran, and mana came apart around it.
It gathered out of the air in specks, hundreds of them, and folded inward, and inside two seconds there was a sword in his fist. Full length, plain, with a grey shine down the flat of it that was not steel.
Adrien nearly lost his footing watching it happen.
’He’s carrying his weapon somewhere that isn’t a scabbard. Honestly this is sick as fuck. Just phaw, and boom a weapon from nothing, like a videogame.’
The borrowed memories filled the rest in on the way down the hill. Manifested arms cost mana to bring out and mana to keep out, every second they existed. The better the weapon, the heavier the drain, and the longer it took to shape. A knight who held his blade out too long in a bad fight ended it on his knees with nothing in his hands.
Which meant every man on that field was running a clock.
’And I’m not.’
’Bottomless Core. Of the three, that’s the one. The other two are extraordinary. But that one really changes what I’m allowed to do and by a big margin.’
Then they were through the lower gate, and Adrien got his first proper look at what had come down off the mountain.
Wolves.
They were the size of ponies and had been starving for a while, all rib and hip under grey hide gone thin in patches. Their heads were too long, too heavy at the jaw, and the eyes sat further forward than an animal’s eyes have any business sitting.
And every third one carried a weapon in its mouth.
A rusted sword, a spear shaft broken off at the head, a farming hook. They held them the way a dog holds a stick and they used them like tools, swinging their whole heads to bring the metal across, and one of them had a blade wedged so far back in its jaw that the flesh had grown around it.
’Where does a wolf get a sword?’
’Somewhere with a lot of dead people in it, that’s where.’
"Line!" Garrick was already shouting. "Hold the fence line, do not go past the fence line! Marek, get those people up the track!"
The knights closed up. Two of them were older men who had done this before and moved like it, taking a wolf between them, one drawing the head and the other coming in under the shoulder. A younger one got greedy, stepped past the fence, and was on his back with a mouthful of hook coming down at him before anyone could shout.
Ariane got there first.
[Ice Wall]
The ground in front of the boy went up in a slab of blue-white as thick as a door, and the hook came off it with a bang and took the wolf’s head sideways. She was already moving before the wall finished forming, sliding around it with her hand out.
And in the corner of Adrien’s vision, a window opened.
[New Spell Observed: Ice Wall | 2 Stars]
[Absolute Comprehension active]
[Comprehension: 5%]
’Five.’
He got that filed in about half a second, because half a second was all he had.
’Frost Lance was One Star and I had the whole thing off a single look. This is a Two Stars, and I caught it side-on while I was busy, and it gives me five percent.’
’So the rank sets the price and the looking sets the rate. Watch it enough times and it will be mine. Pretty OP.’
[Frost Lance]
[Frost Lance]
[Frost Lance]
Ariane put three of them out one after another without a pause between, each one going into a different animal and each one going through.
’She’s fast.’
Adrien watched two seconds longer than he should have, because it was worth watching. His sister moved on that field like somebody who had rehearsed it, which she probably had, in a cold yard, alone, for four years.
Then a wolf came around the end of the fence at him and he stopped watching.
[Frost Lance]
It went wide by a foot.
[Frost Lance]
Wide again, and closer, and the thing was eating the distance between them at a speed that made his stomach drop.
’Stop aiming at it.’
He dropped his hand four inches and threw the third one at the patch of dirt where its front legs were going to be.
The lance took it through the shoulder on the plant and put it into the ground, and it got up, because they got up, so he put a fourth through the neck and it stopped getting up.
[Frost Lance | 1 Star | Novice 2%]
The window flicked and his head answered it with a dull spike behind the eyes.
’Novice. Which means there’s a rung above it.’
The memories had that one ready. Four grades to any spell a person carried. Novice, Practised, Refined, Sovereign. You climbed by casting and practising, and most mages died before getting to the last one.
’Not now.’
He shoved it aside and got his back to the barn wall, because standing in the open was how the boy on the ground had ended up on the ground.
Two more came over the low wall at the corner. He caught the first in the air, which was luck, and missed the second twice before he stopped trying to hit the head and put one through its hip instead. A knight finished it with an axe and gave him a look on the way past that Adrien decided to interpret generously.
[Frost Lance | 1 Star | Novice 8%]
He worked it out standing there with frost coming off his knuckles, and it took him about four heartbeats, and it changed the rest of the morning.
Every single person on that field was rationing.
The knights were holding their blades in short bursts and letting them come apart between engagements. The man on the roof had gone to counting arrows out loud. Ariane had put out eleven spells and the gap between the eleventh and the twelfth was longer than the gap between the first and the second, and she was hiding it, and he could see her hiding it.
They were all fighting a clock and a wolf at the same time.
’Now I only have to fight the wolf.’
He came off the barn wall.
[Frost Lance]
[Frost Lance]
The flank of the barn was where the animals kept trying to get round the end of the line, and it had been Marek and one spearman and a lot of luck. Adrien took it.
He stopped throwing at bodies and started throwing at ground. A lance into the dirt in front of a running wolf turned the earth to a plate of ice, and a thing that size at that speed does not stop on ice; it goes over, and it slides, and it arrives on its side in front of a man with an axe.
The second one he put through a shoulder mid-tumble.
The third he did not bother to aim at all, because by then he had a rhythm going, and the rhythm was worth more than the aim.
[Frost Lance | 1 Star | Novice 12%]
"My lord, get back behind the fence!"
"I’m fine."
"You’ve been casting for..."
"I said I’m fine."
He was not fine really. His fingers had gone numb to the second knuckle and the ache behind his eyes had turned into something with a pulse. His shoulders were burning from holding his arm up.
The core under his sternum was exactly as full as it had been when he walked out of the house.
That was the part nobody around him could do, and by the fifteenth cast the men on that flank had stopped shouting at him and started working around him, which is a different thing and a better one.
Then the big one came.
It came up the outside of the barn where the ground was still churned, and it was a head taller than the rest of them, and the blade in its jaw was the one that had grown in. Old flesh had swelled up over the guard. Whatever that sword had belonged to, this animal had been carrying it long enough for its own body to accept it.
It went straight through the spearman’s guard and put him into the wall.
Adrien did not throw at it.
[Frost Lance]
He put the lance into the ground eight feet ahead of it, wide, on the side away from the barn, and the wolf did what anything does when the footing goes out from under one shoulder.
It turned.
[Frost Lance]
The second lance went into the same patch of ice and took its legs out entirely, and the thing came round hard into the barn wall with its whole weight behind the blade in its mouth. The sword went into the timber and stopped there.
It hung by its own jaw for about a second and a half, thrashing, unable to get its feet under it.
Adrien walked in to four paces and put the third one through the base of its skull.
[Frost Lance | 1 Star | Novice 15%]
The spearman was staring at him from the ground.
"Get up," Adrien said. "There’s more."
It broke about twenty minutes after it started, the way these things do, with no signal at all.
Four wolves turned at the same time and went back up the slope, and the rest went with them, and inside a minute the field held nothing upright except Clairmont men breathing hard.
Garrick let his sword come apart into specks and put both hands on his knees.
"Count!"
"Nine down, none dead!" somebody shouted back. "Petr’s arm is bad!"
"Fences?"
"Buggered."
"Then we’re having a good morning."
Adrien did not answer, because Adrien was looking at the treeline.
It sat there a kilometre up, dark and thick and going all the way to where the mountain started, and it was completely still. No birds off the top of it. Nothing moving in the low branches.
Whatever had been in those wolves when they came down that slope, it had not been hunger.
They had been getting away.
’They ran through a fenced holding with forty armed men in it because that was the better option.’
’So what’s the worse one?’
"My lord?"
Ariane had come up beside him with frost still going out of her sleeves. She was breathing hard and pretending not to be, and there was blood on her boot that was not hers.
"You were casting for twenty minutes," she said.
"Was I?"
"Don’t." She wiped her hands on her thighs. "I counted. I stopped counting at fourteen because I was busy, and you were still going after."
"Yes."
"How much have you got left?"
Adrien thought about the answer and decided the truth was going to come out eventually anyway.
"Pretty much almost all of it."
His sister looked at him for a long moment, and then went to help carry Petr, and did not say anything else about it.
Down the slope, they were laying the wounded out on the flat by the barn, and one of the farm women had started tearing sheets. The knights were pulling the bodies of the wolves into a heap for burning. Somebody was crying about a goat.
Nine hurt. Two fences flattened. Half a morning’s work to put right.
Adrien turned back to the trees.
’This shouldn’t be happening here—or at least, that’s what Garrick says. So, either everyone is mistaken about what lives up there, or something has arrived that wasn’t there last month.’
’Either way there’s a source.’
He looked at the dark line of the forest for a while longer.
’And I need to find out.’
...
AN: Add the novel to collections and send support if like it ;)