Blood drizzled through the man’s clenched fingers, pooling on the ground below him. Burned flesh—stinging and dripping with boiled moisture—pushed painfully against the ornate, black-painted breastplate as the man pushed himself up from the dirt. Had it worked? Had he escaped? The man’s blood-webbed gaze flicked around him. This was not the debris-decorated town square of the Isle now.
Before the man and his scratched, stained armour, was the pointed wood-log wall and the closed gate of a small city. The guards were shouting to one another and pointing at him—his guards, at least in some sense.
In the man’s blood-clenched fist was clutched the stained, white rope for which he had paid so dearly.
As the sentries approached the newcomer with warily-held spears, the man called out, voice-breaking, “Don’t you know who I am?”
“You—you’re the great commander,” they replied, with voices full of wonder.
The man nodded, and with the nod, he regained a shred of his composure. Rattar should not have been there. It had cost Tarro dearly. He lifted his head from the nod and asked, “The grove?”
“Th—they are waiting—for you,” one of the guards stammered. He pointed down the grassy slope that descended from the city into the surrounding woodland. A clearly marked trail led down into the bush.
Tarro staggered a few steps toward the forest path before he paused and turned back. “What’s the date?”
When they told him, Tarro let out a curse in a language no one even spoke anymore. Eight months, he thought, mind reeling from more than his injuries. Had his armies been crushed? Had his lands been claimed? He was trying to build a house during a hurricane….
The woodland trail led down into a low dale. He saw the camp up ahead—those few whom he had told where he might end up, should he flee from that damnable Isle. This was Fargrove, though so many had forgotten that powerful, powerful place that was its namesake.
Too late, Tarro realized that his allies no longer camped at the end of the trail. He approached the first pavilion ignorantly, and found himself knocked bodily from his feet. Rolling in the mud, the sorcerer let a torrent of air blast from all sides. The tents were upended, the fires flickered out, and his assailants staggered back. When Tarro reclaimed his feet—muscles screaming hatefully, wounds ripping asunder—he found himself face-to-face with a recently dead face. The slack mouth closed, opened, again, and advanced closer to Tarro’s own.
It was easy enough to kick the reanimated warrior back, but another soon approached from Tarro’s flank. By instinct, Tarro unleashed the flask at his hip—he pushed poison out into the air with his will. But, of course, madness and paranoia could not be wrought in the spoiled brains of the undead. Only their muscles were compelled by magic, and Tarro’s drugs could work no mayhem in their muscles.
He ripped the arm from the next warrior that approached him, then yanked the sword free from the flailing limb. It was a quick, but exhausting, labour to hew his way through the resurrected corpses of his own allies. He only had to make it to the grove, just beyond the fringe of the camp.
Terror was rising up Tarro’s back and crawling along his scalp—was it him? Was eight months enough time for him to come for Tarro?
Then the battered warlord emerged from the camp ambush and found himself greeted by three robed men. One wore a crown made of bones and a fiery-red mantle, while the other two wore the muted colours of subordinates. None of them were the man Tarro dreaded most.
“He did not flee,” intoned the subordinate on the left.
The one on the right nodded. “He is determined.”
“I am tired,” Tarro muttered. He eyed the surviving reanimated, but the automatons did not move against him anymore.
“Relinquish your burden,” the crowned man said. He held out his wrinkly hand.
“Yarik?” Tarro asked, incredulously. He started to laugh—he wasn’t sure if it was truly humorous or brought on by blood-loss and delirium. “Of all my enemies, Yarik came for me? For this?” He held up the coiled white artifact that now soaked with his own blood.
“Relinquish your burden and we will spare you,” the necromancer of Yarik repeated.
Tarro lowered his head. He had fought for Bal’nored’s favour, then he had fought to find the spell to stop his aging. Then, watching his own years slip away into middle age, he had fought to preserve his life with that awful magic. He had fought for his sanity in the years to come, and he had fought for his home when it was set ablaze. These past few years he had fought for survival, to build a wall of kingdoms and allies around himself…. “I’m tired of fighting,” he told the necromancers. “Let me take this through the grove. They will need the truth in the years to come.”
“We have need of it,” the crowned man declared. He waved his hand back toward the shadows of the magical glade. “A mundane rope is of no use.”
Focus, Tarro thought, trying to steady his mind. Perhaps he could just Journey away once more and return to Fargrove with allies. He had planned on this to be his retreat.
The necromancers saw his plan as clear as day and came at him with tendrils of blood. Tarro used the power of the wind to keep them away, turning his concentration once more back to the now-advancing undead. Their blood arts bore all manner of disease and poison—Calath’s ilk had perfected a truly terrible magic—but Tarro could fend off liquid as easily as breathing. The reanimated corpses of his soldiers presented a more serious threat to his physical well-being. Tarro set to work rending them limb from limb.
One of the sorcerers threw a spear of sapling at him, accelerating it with its own weight. Tarro knocked it aside with the sword he had peeled from that first undead. He charged the spellcasters with a furious shout—pushing through the air and force they threw at him. Years in a wind chamber had taught him how to keep himself centered in the face of a hurricane. Step-after-striving-step brought him face to face with one of the desperate casters—and Tarro cut the man’s throat with a swift swing.
Something pierced his side with a dull thump. “Gods!” he screeched. It had gone deep. He turned at the waist to find another spar of wood transfixed between his armour plates. He yanked it out—blood pouring forth—and took a shaky step toward the man with the bone crown.
The other subordinate caster hurried into Tarro’s way, eager to protect his master.
“Enough,” Tarro begged. Rattar had already boiled the warlord inside his armour, and the mages on the Isle had gashed him a dozen times with their weapons and projectiles. He could not take much more.
The subordinate held out a torch and blasted Tarro with flame. Tarro felt his skin bubbling even as he deflected the heat with his own gale. He managed to knock the man from his feet with the torrential blast, but then fell to one knee.
The man with the bone crown advanced on Tarro as soon as his protector had been knocked out of the way. He drove a serpentine knife down into the space between Tarro’s breastplate and his neck. “Give me the Tether,” the man urged, twisting the knife.
Roaring in agony, Tarro snapped his elbow down against his belt and held out his fingers up—the vapours released from the now broken flask puffed up into the necromancer’s face. The man with the bone crown started coughing and hacking, and released the hilt of the horrid weapon in Tarro’s shoulder.
Tarro rose to his feet and shoved the man with the crown down to the dirt in his own place. The bone trinket rolled away, across the bloody ground, as Tarro wrapped the white cord around the man’s neck. The madness that now claimed the sorcerer’s mind—like the miasma that had once protected Kiaraka—prevented him from reaching the rational decision of Journeying to safety until it was too late. Tarro cinched the rope tight and tighter. The necromancer wheezed for breath…and lost it.
The surviving subordinate winked away without a word, seeking safety in another place and time.
Tarro collapsed next to the suffocated sorcerer, trying to breathe as blood bubbled up his hoarse throat. He fell from his knees to his back. The cloudy sky above was starting to drip rain down on the bloodstained forest floor.
“You’re such a fool,” he whispered, turning his head to look at the dead and de-crowned man.
The man’s slack jaw did not give him a response.
As the rain picked up, Tarro’s breath grew more uneven. Blood leaked from a dozen wounds and soon he found he could only inhale. He tried coughing but it didn’t accomplish anything except paining him. Instead, he chose to lay still until his eyes glazed over and his lungs breathed no more. A jungle rainstorm washed the blood away.
The next morning, the renegade magician rose from the mud and saw his mission through.