Adept (The Essence Gate War, Book 1) - By Michael Arnquist Page 0,135
“These symptoms do not match those of the forest, where life is maddened and twisted but not drained like this.”
“I must concur,” Bellimar said. “The magic in the region is rising out of control, strengthening magical effects and causing chaos through the agitation of all things that are linked to Essence. This would seem to represent the opposite. It does not match the pattern.”
Valkarr grunted, frowning down from the saddle at the barren ground beneath his mount’s hooves. “The earth dies,” he said. “Just as it did beneath the flesh of the black things we fought in the forest.”
Amric felt a chill, recalling how the flora had wilted and died wherever even a severed piece of the creatures came to rest for any length of time. It strained coincidence to believe that there was no connection between nearing the source of the foul creatures and encountering this widespread effect.
Syth was scanning the bleak horizon with a look of dismay upon his face. “Even if the flesh of these creatures is toxic, could they have done all this merely by walking around?” he asked in a dubious tone.
Bellimar shook his head. “I do not see how, unless there are unimaginably vast multitudes of them. To cause devastation at this level by tread alone would take more than seems possible, more than could be concealed. But we still do not know their source yet, and I think that might yield the answer.”
Thalya sat her restive mare with a drawn expression, her green eyes roving from Bellimar to the seemingly boundless wasteland ahead. Amric tried to guess at her thoughts, but her stony expression yielded no hints. He swung into the saddle of his bay gelding and wheeled it about to face the group.
“Either way, we must be getting close. We continue south.”
They rode on into the wasteland with the somber afternoon sky turning slowly above them. The terrain grew even more bleak, the remaining signs of plant and animal life becoming rarer with each passing hour. Stark outcroppings of sun-bleached rock knuckled their way through the sweeping dunes, and the ground around them seemed to peel back in aversion. The southern road became an ephemeral thing, a tentative strand of hard-packed earth winding through the parched land; it would come and go in glimpses, swept under by the wind-blown sands as often as not. Amric had begun to believe they would see no other creature in this desolate sea when they crested a ridge and caught the first distant signs of motion. At first he thought the shimmering waves of heat clinging to the ground were playing tricks upon his vision, but the more he stared, the more he realized what he was seeing. He brought the column of riders to a halt and pointed.
A group of a dozen or so dark figures was running over a faraway swell of sand, moving together with tireless purpose. As they watched, a second group of tiny, indistinct figures appeared over another hill, and then a third. The creatures were all headed north, toward them. Amric turned and led the way back behind the ridgeline. They left the remains of the highway and rode west for a time. As they threaded along the hills, the terrain offered occasional views of the progress of those they sought to avoid. The creatures did not appear to have noticed them over the yawning distance, as they continued on their respective paths to the north as if on a shared mission. Amric turned the group and headed south once again, deeper into the wasteland.
Over the next several hours, they were forced to change course many more times. Each time they reached a summit, they were greeted by the sight of more and larger packs of the black creatures skittering across the hills. It became an increasing challenge to avoid them, requiring the riders to weave back and forth in an ever more erratic pattern. On several occasions, the creatures passed close enough to the riders that Amric, lying flat upon the hill separating them, could pick out details of their ebon flesh and the tattered cloth wrappings dangling from their limbs. As with the ones they had faced before, these seemed to be modeled after various races, like animate statues cast of some lightless material in the mold of the peoples from far-flung lands. He saw the forms of humans and slender Elvaren, stout Duergen and heavyset beast-men, the bird-beaked men from some deep southern clime whose nation he