Blades of the Banished - Robert Ryan Page 0,13

like an outthrust jaw. Below it, the light blazed brighter. They saw the shape of a tower, tall, dark and grim. With a final flare the light flickered out and the world fell into dark again. The night now seemed doubly black, and then a slow boom lurched over the stony slopes toward them. Dust rose in the air. Small rocks fell from the sides of the road and clattered down the steep banks. The horses grew skittish.

“That was the sorcerer’s citadel,” Erlissa said. “Aranloth still holds off the enemy. He yet lives.”

They continued without another word. The lòhren was alive, that much was clear. It would take more than a few elùgroths to kill him. Then again, there were more than a few surrounding him, otherwise he would not be trapped.

The tracks of elùgroths were all about them now. The road, wherever sand covered it, showed them by the dozen. It had the desired effect, for the three slanting lines, formed by iron bars fixed to their heels, sent a shiver running up his spine.

And now it was not only on the road. The sign was carved into the very rock of the cliff when they turned a corner. Some sort of ocher half-filled the deep grooves. It gleamed eerily in the dark, and no stronger warning could be given to stay away from this place.

Lanrik did not doubt that neither elugs nor Azan ever came this way. This was a forbidden place. It had been so for a long time. The carving on the rock was old and weathered, made smooth in part by wind and blowing sand, but mostly by rain. And in these mountains, that would take centuries.

The horses trudged onward into the night. The stars glinted in the great dark above. Lanrik noticed Halathgar, the constellation of the Lost Huntress. It at least was the same here as it was at home, if nothing else in this strange land was familiar to him.

At length, dawn came. So too the end of their long journey. The sun was a crimson ball that rose, slowly but surely, above the rim of the mountains. Peak after peak kindled red, as though they were formed of iron and heated in a furnace. Light danced like fire, running from ridge to ridge, from rock face to rock face, and the dark sky eased from black to blue. It would not last long. Soon the heat would begin, and the blue would transform into a blasting white-gold haze, full of harsh light that drained color.

Perhaps a quarter of a mile below them, on a slope of the mountain and still in the morning shadow of the peak, Lanrik saw the tower.

“You described it well,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.”

“Even I can sense the evil that lurks there, or at least was once the lifeblood of the land.”

Erlissa nodded. “It reeks of Assurah.”

He gave the tower a final glance. “We’d better get under cover. The light grows by the second and there are elùgroths there.”

They moved off the track and dismounted behind a group of boulders. He was not overly worried about someone coming up behind them on the trail. He doubted it was used by anybody save elùgroths, and they were already down below.

They left the horses and crawled out to the side of the boulders, looking down across the slope toward the tower. The road traversed the higher parts of a ridge, and then dropped down at a steep angle to run to the tower’s base. Elsewhere, the slope was covered in broken rocks.

The tower stood alone. There were no other buildings, or trees, or even any bushes. There was nothing but the column of dark stone and the black-clad elùgroths below it.

The sorcerers, probably a dozen of them, gathered not far from its base. Some stood. Others sat in a wedge, facing the tower. Their wych-wood staffs all pointed toward the tower’s base. No doubt they continued to work their elùgai. Of Aranloth, there was no sign, yet Lanrik knew he was there.

“I feel him,” Erlissa said.

Lanrik did not reply. A sense of hopelessness settled over him. He had known there would be elùgroths. He had known they could not challenge them directly. But as he looked at the tower and the bare rock and ground that surrounded it, he knew it was impossible to get to their friend unseen.

“We cannot reach him,” he said. “The whole place is better guarded than Seven Devil Peak.”

Erlissa turned to him. Her face