Page 66 of The Sorcerer's Alpha

Nothing else in the hills nearby was of interest. He drew his focus back into his body and sat there for a while, watching the activity in the camp below. In the distance, a few pronghorns grazed on the new spring grass. He noticed things like that now after spending so many months with Marut’s watchful eyes. Marut saw every bird and every speck of anything on the horizon. From him, Sycamore had learned that even this seemingly bleak patch of earth breathed with hot-blooded life.

“Marut,” he whispered, and let the air carry Marut’s name away from him.

CHAPTER24

As the lieutenant general had said, Sycamore heard the screaming.

He woke with a start in the small room he had been given, narrow and windowless along a corridor—a repurposed storage room, was his guess. He called light into his hand and dressed in its glow, his eyes watering at the sudden brightness. None of the terror he had felt in White Valley came to him now. He didn’t truly know what he was capable of, but he could feel the earth even through the rough floorboards, dreaming but alert, and magic flowed through him like blood. He didn’t believe he would die here.

The corridors were filled with officers fastening their sword belts as they rushed toward the exits. Sycamore fell in line with them as they poured out into the night, lit with watch fires and torches and loud with shouting. These troops weren’t taken off guard as they had been in White Valley; they expected this attack and quickly fell into defensive formations at the base of the hills, with cavalry at the front and infantry behind.

Sycamore had been given strict instructions to stay out of combat. He hung back, crouching against an outer wall of the fort as horses stamped and men nocked their arrows. For a moment, all was silent. Then a shrill scream sounded from the hills, the same inhuman scream he remembered from White Valley.

Ah: there was the fear.

Marut had told him that bravery was acting even in the face of fear, so very well, he would act and call himself brave enough to face this moment.

The Skopoy came boiling over the hills, skirting the defenses above the mines and falling upon the gathered Chedoy troops. Arrows whipped through the night sky as men screamed and fell. A horse screamed, a horrible sound, and the construct screamed again, and then Sycamore saw it: a deformed thing bounding ahead of the Skopoy cavalry, running on four limbs like a dog, only two of its limbs were arms, with hands at the ends like a person’s hands. Its skin was the color of dry soil, and its eyes, when it paused and raised its head, were the flat white color of mare’s milk. Slaver dripped from its tusks. It tossed its head and gored three horses, and then two more just like it came into sight, sprinting across the flat land at the bottom of the hills.

The Chedoy troops didn’t break or flee, even as the creatures ripped through the front lines as they would through wet paper. Sycamore slapped both palms onto the ground beside him and hauled everything he could from the earth. It was more than he could hold, and the excess poured from him in a great wave that seethed toward the clashing troops and shoved the Skopoy back, pushing them in their dark clothing backward up the slope, into the forest of stakes where some of them stumbled, fell, and were pierced through.

Sycamore sucked in a lungful of air. The rocks had woken to his call and were erupting with power, transmitting it through him with the force of a raging spring flood. He felt that he was clinging to the back of a wild horse, not at all in control and using all of his might simply to hold on.

The earth saw the constructs as abominations: living but not alive, made of mud but shaped into an unnatural form. It wanted them gone, and it was pleased to use Sycamore for its purposes. The full fury of the hills poured through him, surge after surge buffeting the oncoming Skopoy as they fell back and back again, retreating as the Chedoy advanced.

Sycamore pulled himself to his feet, struggling against the magic using him as a conduit. The earth was driving the creatures away, yes, and the Skopoy soldiers with them, but Sycamore didn’t want them beaten back to regroup, he wanted themgone, he wanted the constructs turned back into mud and whatever spirit was animating them banished to its next life. He strained against the grip the earth had on him, pulling and pulling against its hold, and at last managed to break free.

The Skopoy immediately pressed forward again, but the Chedoy had momentum now and met them with vigor. Sycamore stood where he was for a moment, trying to make sense of the roiling clash before him. The fighting had moved to the south, away from the buildings and the hillside defenses above the mines. Sycamore turned and ran in that direction. What would he do? Something foolish, no doubt, but there was no time to make any deliberate plan.

He ran up the hill far enough to get a good view of the battle raging below. The constructs had broken through the Chedoy cavalry line and were now devastating the foot soldiers behind, tossing men aside with every swipe of their tusks, and slapping others away with their hands. Sycamore understood the lieutenant general’s blunt fatalism now; if they had suffered attacks of this nature all winter, he was amazed there were any Chedoy troops left to offer resistance.

He crouched to touch one hand to the earth, breathing hard from his run. He couldn’t sense the constructs through the ground. He would need to get closer, then, as he didn’t trust his aim.

He cut sideways across the hill and then down at an angle until he came out onto the flat ground behind the Skopoy line. No one seemed to notice him, one unarmed man on foot. He jogged around until he had a clear view of one of the constructs, then knelt to press his hands to the ground and pulled again.

This time he managed to hold fast and bend the earth’s will to his own. He channeled the power the earth fed him and aimed it at the construct, envisioning an arrow snapping away clean, soaring high, and plunging directly into the construct’s back.

The bolt hit its target. The construct didn’t scream or make any sound at all. It simply exploded into a shower of clay and dried mud, and fell to the ground where it was trampled underfoot by the heaving infantry.

Well: that had worked.

He saw a Skopoy on a brown horse wheel around and search the darkness. Sycamore was dressed in drab clothing and crouched low to the ground, but still the man saw him and turned to shout orders to those around him, gesturing in Sycamore’s direction with the curved blade of his sword.

Sycamore hadn’t planned for this turn of events. Back up the hill, then, only when he sprang to his feet he saw that several Skopoy horsemen had peeled away from the battle and were riding to block that route. He swore and turned the other way. Nearby was a narrow inlet into the hills, barely visible in the outer reaches of the watch fires. It was likely a dead end, but he could hold the entrance for a while and divert some of the Skopoy force away from the Chedoy troops, and maybe do something to diminish their numbers while he was at it. They wouldn’t kill him, probably. Almost certainly.

He had no time to come up with a better option. He bolted for the canyon, his tunic flapping, praying he would make it before the Skopoy horses could catch up to him. And he did, somehow, his lungs burning. The opening was even narrower than he had thought. He turned his back to the canyon, braced his hands against the walls, and readied himself to face the Skopoy.

They came at a gallop, maybe hoping to frighten him into breaking and fleeing. He shoved outward with magic, unleashing a wall of force that broke against the horses and knocked more than one rider from the saddle. Those horses reared and snorted, their eyes white around the edges, and ran off into the darkness. Most of the remaining horses stopped and milled around in confusion, resisting the efforts of their riders to get them to continue. But a few of the horses didn’t falter, and kept coming toward Sycamore at top speed; and behind them he saw one of the remaining constructs, bounding toward him, as big as a horse and with its white gaze fixed without wavering on his location.

He only had a moment to choose before they would be upon him. His instincts told him to address the horsemen so quickly bearing down on him. Instead he took aim at the construct and hit it dead on. It exploded into a rain of earth even as the Skopoy slid from their horses and seized him.

He fought them as hard as he could, lashing out with his magic so that they cried out and fell away. But there were too many of them, and more came as they heard the fighting. Sycamore had no practice at combat and lost focus as the soldiers grabbed at him, and his connection to the earth fell apart. Then he had only what inspiration he could hold inside his body; and when that was gone he had only his fists.

The Skopoy quickly subdued him after that. They bound his wrists together behind his back and held a heated conversation, presumably about what to do with him. He knew a little Skopoy, but not enough to follow what they were saying. He slumped against the canyon wall with his head lowered, aching everywhere from the searing flow of the earth’s power. He could hear the fighting continuing in the distance, but he could do nothing to help now.

One of the Skopoy said something to him, then again when he raised his head to squint at the man in confusion, and then finally, a third time, impatient but at last slow enough for Sycamore to understand: “Can you ride?”

“Yes,” Sycamore said in Skopoy, and so they retied his hands in front of him and tossed him onto a horse. He didn’t ask where they were going. They rode off into the night.