Inhospitable Paths

Every way home was closed. On the road they took, the dead were walking — and some of them had once been friends.

They set their ambush for the shamblers coming up from Drosven’s Gate: Draz back in the trees, Jamal trailing a group on You Bastard, Heyou hidden with Sylvie made invisible beside him. Sylvie saw them for what they were — Umbra-twisted, dead or will-broken — and among them Sarru, who had kept the pyre at Ulmira’s Step, and Savel, who had once gone down with them into the dark.

Savel began a working, and unseen bonds closed on Sylvie and Heyou; she slipped hers in the moonlight, and he broke his by the old craft in his own body. Then Sylvie threw a Fireball and took four of them at once. Jamal charged and Savel held him fast while Sarru tore at him; Sylvie answered Sarru with Hideous Retribution; and Heyou came in close and loosed his blades everywhere at once, and put Savel and Sarru down without killing them. A Fireball caught the tree Draz shot from and he moved to another. Jamal wrenched loose of the binding, came off the beast in a hard tumble, and brought his hammer down through the last of the horde; Sylvie drained the final one dry to mend herself; and the road went quiet. Draz bloomed a healing field over them, and spoke to the beast in the tongue of its kind, and learned that its own kin called it You Bastard, and that it wanted thistles. Heyou bound Savel and Sarru senseless and living, to carry.

They went back to the campsite where the Living Fortress stood inert with its Blessed Branch, and rested — and a dragon came down on them in the night, fire over the whole camp, all of them burned but Heyou, and took You Bastard up in its claws to carry off. Jamal leapt onto the beast and struck the dragon's wing and brought it down hard. Draz shot out one of its eyes, and then the other, and left it blind. Sylvie drew the life out of it and turned its breath aside, and at the last put a Fireball into it at arm's reach and killed it — and You Bastard bolted, past all holding. They cut scales and caustic sacs from the corpse and stowed them in the Living Fortress.

The road on toward Drosven’s Gate ran full of things that had never been men, and not a townsperson left in the open. They thought of setting the Blessed Branch to the town's dead Sacred Pyre, and had no priest to know the way of it, and so they skirted the place. Heyou put the Axe of Fortunus in Jamal's hands.

The Umbral Raven spoke in Sylvie's mind then, in a young man's voice — asking whether the ones she travelled with only held her back, and which of them would make the best apprentice, or the best patsy — and it named itself a part of her, and was gone. They came to the old dwarven trade-concourse, a hall hundreds of feet across where outsiders had once dealt with the deep, and camped halfway into it with the wall at their backs, the tree on the Living Fortress's shoulders their only green thing. Draz worked the dragon's scales into his armor. Sylvie sat a while with Jamal, whose dead were near in this place, on the threshold of his people's ruin — and below them waited Grithmaar Deep.