Nuhmudira’s daughter Xunidira was slightly taller than her, but the resemblance was unmistakable, although her robe bore no gold in deference to her mother’s rank.

  Notably, neither of them wore any trace of the red and black of the Raven Hand cultists who were keeping a careful distance behind the Hea.

  Nuhmudira did pause amid the press of the Hea, smiling without mirth. “Are you going to claim that Oswald is not one of yours, Your Majesty?” she asked bitingly, flinging out her hand.

  A figure in dark greens, along with three others in forester’s leathers and cloaks, wavered into sight atop the roof of a neighboring lodge, making all the Hea there swear in alarm as the Isparians appeared out of nowhere, perched and in a very good position to snipe all of the Hea leadership.

  “Are you going to claim he takes orders from me?” King Borelean just sighed back.

  Cold dark eyes studied him, then the foresters perched on the roof of the lodge, who were blithely ignoring all the arrows pointed their way. Her eyes met the piercing green eyes of the master assassin, whose own smile directed her way was equally pitiless.

  Then the four wavered like illusions and were gone from sight again, leaving the Hea looking around wildly for them.

  “Perhaps not, but it seems he has at least partial respect for your neutrality. Guilty consciences for past crimes?” she hazarded wickedly, clearly believing she had scored a point.

  “Not something that bothers you in the past or present, I am aware,” Borelean replied dryly, glancing at his mother, and then pointedly at Nuhmudira’s unspeaking bodyguards.

  She ignored his words with studied indifference. “Finally willing to speak with an enemy on terms, Borelean? It took long enough for your lessons to sink in, I see. What have you come to speak about? An alliance? Accommodations? An exchange of knowledge or favors?” She seemed to be relishing the fact that he was stooping to dealing with something he’d rather not.

  His reply was to glance at Hea Rheaga and step back, startling the older woman.

  The Prodigal Tumerok’s hands came together in a meditative pose. “King Borelean is here at my request, Blood Witch of the Void. If the Isparians had come of their own accord, there would now be blood on the ground and you would have long fled, abandoning your associates to their fates at the hands of those about me.” His reproof made her flinch, but before she could respond, he turned to the Overlord. “No, this is a matter of the tonks, and those who would wish to what their people are meant to be, and not what they have been twisted into.

  “I am here to show them that any alliance with this Blood Witch and her cabal of fools serving the Shadow in the Void is the end of too long a time spent enslaved to the virindi, and no warrior of the tonk would make a similar mistake.”

  Arantah bridled at the insult, his own eyes glowing and sparking, although nothing like Hea Rheaga. “You give up your pride to grovel before the Isparian rulers, and you dare condemn us for speaking with those fighting against such?!” he spat.

  “I do. After all, this is all about power, and the Blood Witch does not have the power you seek. The paltry secrets she has shared with you have done nothing but darken the hearts of your soldiers and turn their thoughts to serving her. Have they truly done anything for your battles with Wharu? Did she manage to replicate any of the old magicks that kept Wharu within their many hives and off the surface? Magicks the Elders have known for countless years, the right and heritage of all the tonk, and not mad secrets bargained for souls from an uncaring thing of nightmares of death and flame?”

  His voice was only chiding, but no less cutting for the absoluteness in every syllable. It wasn’t Truth, but everything he said resonated with the unknown things he had seen in the Aether and Aestral since his transformations, underscoring every word he spoke. The Hea were shuddering at the truth in it.

  “Does she have the power to Summon an Aetheric Tide Ravager?” he asked reasonably, and the illusion of the beast from the Singularity Caul, a thing more monstrous than any creature the Hea had ever beheld, wove in the air and came at them. They had agents near the Withered Beach who had naturally seen the beast, and its corpse, even if their reports were only half-believed.

  Seeing it rising over the Summons of the Withered Beach and the very hills there as if they were little more than stepping stones made the experienced Hea blanch and falter back as its jaws opened wide enough to sweep up and devour them all!

  “If she cannot, then she is not as strong as Aerbax, and thus not strong enough to defy the virindi.”

  Nuhmudira’s mouth turned down into a great scowl. She was going to interrupt, but Hea Rheaga went on, unperturbed.

  “And could she call on something mighty enough to kill this monstrosity from undreamt realms? No?”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  A very accurate rendition of that Note blew through the air like thunder. They’d all heard it, even hundreds of miles away.

  They watched the illusion of the Aetheric Tide Ravager being snatched away in not one, but TWO sets of jaws, and the size, the size of them-!

  The singsong Thunder was only just dissipating when Hea Rheaga stepped aside to show me standing there, staring at the two women, Shamira’s old treacherous teacher and her even more despised mother.

  “Do not let her-!” Nuhmudira began to shout in alarm, but could not be heard in the Thunder of the Leviathan Song.

  “TRUTH!”

  The Sublime Chord THUNDERED. The sky was the sea, the clouds were currents, and infinity gaped about everyone there.

  What were her pitiful little secrets of the Blood and Void to the grandeur of the living world, to the magic that swam through all living things, a magic that defied all that the Void wanted to bring upon us all?

  The Hea convulsed, spitting purple blood as they shuddered and fell, gaping up at the sky and the swelling, bursting in their chests as they looked at the heritage of their ancestors, how they’d spit upon it all, and just what they had given up, given away, for their fleeting glory!

  With a quiet poof, the Zharalim bodyguards of Nuhmudira gave her a final glance and burst into vivic fire. Clutching her mouth against the blood she’d vomited forth, the Milantean watched angrily as they Burned down, falling down to unwhite dust in mere seconds.

  “The allies I have chosen, the brothers I have discovered, and the friends I have made came together to help me take care of this problem you and this treacherous witch and her useless thralls cannot deal with.

  “We will deal with this problem for you,” Hea Rheaga declared with patient yet boundless confidence.

  “The price of this saving will be that you will be allowed to return to the grace of your ancestors, to be released from thralldom of the Singularity, and to return to what it means to be a true tonk, instead of the mockery forced upon you by the ghosts in metal.”

  “Such a good opportunity to kill you,” Kris purred into an old ear, and Nuhmudira stiffened as a Ruby Blade, humming with a terrible thirsting need to spill her blood, lifted her sharp chin up with inexorable strength, while the magic of the world around her became hard as adamant and she could barely touch the power at all.

  She’d no idea when the Imperial Princess had gotten so close. A glance to her side saw her daughter’s face had become a mask of terror, for there was a long-fingered hand spread across the top of her face, three-inch claws of hard Gold extending down across her face and ready to clench shut in a heartbeat.

  “It is so very, very unfortunate that my word is my bond,” Imperial Princess Kristie Rantha-Briggs whispered to both of them, her voice dripping regret. “I shall thus have to make it up to you.

  “I have your scents. I have felt your magic. I can feel the souls of those you’ve murdered squirming against your fates.

  “You cannot escape me. I can track you across the world, across time and space and to whatever distant realms you flee screaming to.

  “I am going to track you down and kill you, and as you both know very, very well at this time, in spite of it being the absolute best thing to kill you both right now, and oh, how I know it… you are going to run away from this with your joke of a cult right now, because I keep my word.

  “Then we are going to kill a great mutated Olthoi Matron Queen that you dare not confront lest you go mad from the touch of the hivemind. We will put her down, put her hive down, and do what you cannot do save in your deepest nightmares.

  “Because we can.

  “And when that is done, I’m going to go hunting. Hunting for two psychopathic bitches with the murders of friends, vassals, and lovers upon their spirits, the prices gladly paid for their power, and I am going to feed them to the Land.”

  Her casual backhands, strength neither of them could get even close to, tossed them back half a dozen yards like rag dolls, sprawling helplessly on the ground, sliced and bleeding by claws and Sword.

  “Run, witches. Master Oswald returns, and he’s not under contract with anyone but his own vendettas and a firm belief in paying back those who betrayed him.”

  They glared such poison at her backside, at the blood gleaming on Golden claws and along the edge of a Ruby Blade thirsting for unclean souls, and wished her dead with such venom the very air might have been curdling.

  “And I’m coming with her.”

  Briggs took one step forward, and the faces of the two women fell as the weight of the whole world seemed to turn against them. Kris turned around, and pale violet and pale green eyes locked on the two of them.

  Doom was coming from the horizon, rising and whelming for them, and no honeyed words or bandied secrets were going to stop it!

  Mother and daughter scrambled hastily to their feet, and equally hastily hurried away, already gesturing, preparing to Recall and get out of there as fast as possible.

  If they missed the faint shimmering in the air following them as their Recalls sent them to yet another hideaway, and a Trace Teleport locked that destination in, well, nobody was telling them that Master Oswald the Green Hunter hadn’t gone very far away at all.

  The eyes of the two of them fell upon Hea Arantah Overlord, purple blood dripping down from his nose and mouth as he stared at the two Forsaken, at Hea Rheaga, at me… at all of us, who were completely unaffected by the terrible Truth that had thundered over him and all of his followers.

  “Any faithful sons of the Hea who wish to help us are welcome to do so. We go now to the old menhirs, to raise them again and force submission upon Wharu while we deal with the Queen.

  “Strong arms will be needed to guard those when the virindi and wandering Wharu attempt to bring them down.

  “Which sons of the Hea will fight to see an end to Wharu, and to make this island a place of peace and plenty for the tonk at the last?”

  ---

  Hea Arantah watched the outlanders file back into their floating Wagons and move off towards the first and nearest of the old menhirs once used by teams of Aun Shamans in continuous ceremony to suppress Wharu.

  Following behind them were nearly two hundred Hea warriors and shamans, almost the entire force within Timaru.

  Hea Arantah, the Tumerok Overlord, clutching his great Sword, a thing of lightning made to kill Isparians and Lugians, not Wharu. As he stared after them, he wondered how much longer he would be called Overlord...

  ============================

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