homes and hovels. She saw a small face peek out from behind the door of one and then dart back inside.
Shranree hadn’t missed it. ‘The worst is over,’ she said. ‘We are victorious. Now we flush these rats out of their holes and snuff the life from them. Spare no one.’
The senior sister turned and launched a ball of flame at a nearby cabin, where it exploded in a storm of fire. Screams echoed from within and then slowly died. Shranree clapped her hands together again and waddled off in search of more targets. The other sorceresses followed her for a time before breaking away to hunt their own prey.
Yllandris looked around. There, over near the wall: a small hut with a faint wisp of smoke curling from its roof. Someone had been foolish enough to forget to extinguish their hearth. Foolish… or so desperate for warmth they kept the fire going even with a murderous army on their doorstep.
The young sorceress felt increasingly uneasy. Highlanders followed the Code, a set of rules meant to uphold the martial tradition that had made the warriors of the High Fangs feared throughout the known world. That way of life had existed for centuries. And then the Shaman had come, and though he had created the Brethren to defend them and ensured their freedom from the tyranny of other Magelords, he had altered the Code.
The Shaman had decreed that strength was the only true virtue. By its nature, weakness invited the imposition of will from the strong. The weak deserved neither sympathy nor mercy, as their very existence was akin to that of a deer providing sustenance for the hunter. The weak became strong or they perished. That was the natural order of things.
Yllandris was strong. She had refused to be weak, had broken the insidious shackles of a troubled childhood to achieve true greatness. Was she not a living demonstration of the Shaman’s ideology? She smiled to herself. One day I will be the Shaman’s ultimate lesson. The last he ever learns. I wonder if he will appreciate the irony.
Her power burgeoned, the magic sufficiently recovered from her earlier exertions. Blue flame flickered around her hands as she approached the hut. Let Shranree and the others deal death from afar. Yllandris would deliver this particular lesson personally.
She struck the door with such power that it tore away from its hinges. Then she stepped inside the hovel and raised her glowing fists.
She lowered them again when she saw the terrified eyes staring up at her. There were three of them: two girls and a boy, none older than eight winters.
Their mother lay next to the hearth. The woman knew she was there, but she was too weak even to raise her head. The entire family looked near starved. The children shrank away from Yllandris to huddle closer to their dying mother as if she could protect them. The boy was too afraid even to look at her.
The ultimate lesson…
Yllandris felt her body begin to tremble. She turned away and stumbled out of the hut. A warrior emerged from the home opposite, his sword bloody and a wide grin on his gap-toothed face.
‘More in there?’ he asked jovially. ‘I’ll deal with them.’ He nodded respectfully and made to walk past her into the building.
Her force-shove sent him flying forty feet through the air to crash into the side of the town wall. Bones cracked. His lifeless body slid to the ground.
Yllandris pulled her cloak tighter about her and before she knew it she was running, tears streaming down her face and turning to ice on her cheeks. She reached the gates, ducked outside them and then sank down onto the snow, silent sobs racking her body while inside the city blood continued to flow and fire consumed everything it touched.
Sudden motion caught her attention far above, and she looked up with wet eyes to catch the dark shadow of something huge and inhuman. It circled once, moving at terrifying speed, and then whirled away eastwards.
Its passing left her shivering uncontrollably, and not from the numbing cold.
More Haste, Less Speed
The sun was at its zenith by the time the small band finally approached the Tombstone. The massive column of basalt jutted out from the small outcrop of hills surrounding them, and was visible from a good few leagues away once a gap in the ridge line finally opened up.
To the west, a day’s ride on horseback would carry them back to Dorminia. The city was