The battleground had become a charnel house, and the dead were piling up all around him. The Corrax were down to less than a hundred men, and those who remained alive were reduced to fighting for their lives individually or in small groups. A few even fell to their knees in abject surrender, begging. They were not spared. The wounded cried out for mercy. They were ignored.
One by one, they fell—the entirety of the Corrax attack force, all five hundred. Parfend battled on because he knew no other way, watching in dismay and fury as his warriors succumbed. All of his efforts at saving them, at rallying them, at turning the tide, failed. They were battling ghosts. They were fighting spirits of the air.
Parfend watched it all until one of those horrific eight-foot spears was driven through his body, and the strength went out of him. He fell to his knees, his great ax falling from his fingers, his arms limp at his sides. He looked up in time to see a vision approaching—a slender, cloaked form all in white, a broadsword gripped in two gloved hands. In a dream, he watched the sword lift and fall in a mighty swing.
Then his head fell from his shoulders.
FIVE
North of Arborlon at the borders of the Elven nation, a new day had begun in the village of Emberen. In skies somewhat grayer and less friendly than those of the previous night, clouds massed on the western horizon, suggesting the approach of another storm. There was a metallic taste to the air and a smell of dampness that warned of what was coming. Winds had begun to gust, and the leaves of trees surrounding the village had begun to shiver with expectation.
Drisker Arc paid no attention to any of it. Instead, he continued to read his book, sitting on the porch of his cottage, absorbed in a study of shape-shifting. He had been up since dawn, an early riser, his breakfast consumed and his ablutions completed hours ago. His was a mostly solitary life, a life of study, contemplation, and practice with magic. Sometimes more experimentation than practice, but both always led to the same thing—an acquired or improved skill. His cottage was a mile removed from Emberen proper and surrounded by heavy forest, which allowed him to carry out his work undisturbed. His nearest neighbor was far enough away that even shouting was unlikely to attract any attention. Drisker preferred it this way. He valued his privacy more than the company of others. He always had—and now more than ever, since he had almost nothing else. He lived alone. No one came to visit. No one came to seek his advice. Traders and vendors passed him by. The past was past, and that was the way he liked it.
Although on mornings such as this one, he wished that, for a single day, he could go back in time and gain temporary access to Paranor and the Druids. There was trouble afoot, and it was the kind of trouble that the Druids should know about and investigate. Probably, at some point, they would. Some, at least, would think it worth doing. Some would manage to put aside their petty squabbles and constant bickering and look to the north. Some would find a way to ignore the politics and game playing that the others engaged in on a daily basis and realize that more important things were at stake than gaining a momentary advantage over their fellows by raising their status in the Druid pecking order.
Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe no one would do anything. He hadn’t been able to change this attitude when he was there.
And he had been the order’s High Druid.
He sighed, put aside his book, and stared off into the trees. It was hard even to think about it now. So much infighting. So many attempts by members of the order to advance their own causes. So little tolerance for the opinions of others. So little willingness to engage in reasonable discussion and compromise. How had it gotten so bad? Even now, looking back on it, remembering all the little details that had brought it about, he wasn’t sure. It had happened slowly, if inexorably. Perhaps choices of who to admit as Druids in training had hastened the degeneration of the order’s smooth operation. Perhaps the increase in size had weakened the earlier stability that he and a handful of others had enjoyed and been better able to control. There had always been periods of turmoil over the years, deaths and departures, changes in the structure of the order, periodic attacks from within and without. But the Druids had survived the worst of it, emerging stronger each time, ready to continue their work. They had put the past behind them and continued to seek out foreign magic, collecting or neutralizing the more dangerous forms, determining the sources of power that showed on the scrye waters, and housing those artifacts that needed watching over so that they could not be misused.
A struggle, to be sure. A work in progress that had no discernible end and might never be finished. In the world of the Four Lands, magic was everywhere and much of it was unstable. Science had failed in the Old World and been abandoned. Magic had filled the void, and for many years now had been the dominant power in the reborn world of the Races. But always there had been the threat that magic, like science, might be misused, might be left untended, might break free on its own, or might give birth to new ills and sicknesses that would match those that marked the time of science. That had happened, sometimes with devastating consequences. But each time the magic had been brought under control and turned back before growing too dark to contain.
It was always the Druids who made this possible. It was the Druids who shepherded and bound close wild magic, standing against the worst of it and mastering the best.
Now the world was changing once more, and the Druids were changing with it. Wasn’t that why he was here instead of at Paranor? New science was emerging, mostly from the Federation, forms unknown in the Old World that had come alive in the new. Forms that relied to a substantial extent on diapson crystals and the power that could be unleashed through skilled faceting and a harnessing of sunlight. There were airships and ground vehicles that utilized both. There were flash rips and thunderbolts, railguns and shredder slings all capable of releasing power that could shred and destroy enemies and their weapons. There were new communications devices that allowed conversations and visuals between people who were hundreds of miles away from each other. There were machines that could affect the weather, machines that could generate storms to provide rain for farmland. There were transports of such size they could carry entire armies. So much changing, but the Druids weren’t changing with it.
The magic was all they needed, they kept saying.
The magic was the only power that mattered.
It wasn’t necessary to employ these new sciences. They didn’t need to embrace a future others claimed to own.
They held the balance of power among the nations, and they would continue to do so forever.
Drisker Arc pursed his lips. Not if you tear yourselves and your order to pieces from within first.
He rose and stretched. He was a big man—enormously strong, broad-shouldered, and muscular. Of all the Druids since the time of Allanon, he was physically the most impressive. At almost seven feet, he wore his hair long and braided. He was not a young man, his dark skin lined by weather and the demands of magic’s use, but neither was he old. He had not slept the Druid Sleep while High Druid, so his aging was a natural process. His eyes were bright and alert and a curious pale blue that suggested an unexpected gentleness. His smile was warm when offered, but his gaze was piercing enough that most would look away rather than meet it.
He was a mass of contradictions.
He adhered to order and ethic, as did few others, yet he was forgiving of those who could not match his discipline. Magic and its uses were his life’s passion but he understood those who did not share his feelings or even thought them foolish and dangerous. He was famously mercurial, his temperament going from calm and steady to borderline out-of-control—in spite of the warmth reflected in his eyes. He sounded the same when he was patient and when he was not; his moods were often hard to determine.