‘What do you care?’ Inevera asked. ‘If she dies in the night or is killed for her disobedience, your problems are solved, are they not?’
‘I asked for divorce, not her death,’ Asome said.
‘You will get neither, my son,’ Inevera said. ‘No demon will touch her, and you do not know your father as well as you think. His first duty is to Sharak Ka. Ashia’s information may mean the difference between victory and defeat. He will thank her for her service and forget it until Waning is past, and then offer her a token reprimand, followed by a public honouring. No longer will Sharum’ting be confined to the Undercity on Wanings.’
‘Your goal all along,’ Asome said. There was no bitterness in his tone, but she sensed it nevertheless.
‘What is more important to you,’ Inevera asked, ‘winning Sharak Ka, or keeping your wife beneath your sandal? The heroism of your jiwah can boost your power, if you let it. I know you do not feel for her as you do Asukaji, but she is the sister of your lover, the mother of your son, and you made oaths to her before Everam. Those ties bind an honest man as tightly as love.’
Asome looked ready to argue the words, but then deflated, considering. Inevera reached out, touching his good arm. ‘A great man does not fear his wife will steal his glory, Asome. He uses her support to reach even higher.’
28
Early Harvest
333 AR AutumnWaning
The alagai massed outside the city walls in a horde that cut fear into even the bravest Sharum. Thousands of demons, field and flame, rock and wood. The night sky teemed with wind demons, shrieking as they circled.
One of the rocks stomped over to a tree, its footfalls shaking the very ground. It pulled the thirty-foot trunk out by the roots, effortlessly snapping away the excess branches. Club in hand, it strode towards the nearest wardpost, a full reap of field demons at its flanks. Stinger teams took aim and fired, but even at this range it took many of the giant bolts to bring down a single rock. They would not stop it before the demon smashed the post, and there were dozens of the mammoth demons.
Jardir raised his spear, drawing a heat ward in the air. The tree in the demon’s hands exploded in flames, and the creature dropped it in shock.
‘Lock shields and advance,’ Jardir shouted, using the power of his crown to magically enhance his voice. ‘Strike on my command. We will fight our way to the rocks and bring them down!’
A line of interlocked shields formed, their wards glowing with power as they forced the alagai back. ‘Strike!’ Jardir called when the demons were clustered too tightly for a single thrust to miss. The Sharum took a unified step back, opening their shields enough to thrust warded weapons into the press. There was a flash of magic and a spray of ichor to accompany each point, but the disciplined warriors did not pause to savour it, snapping their shields closed again, continuing to press forward until Jardir called the next strike. A second line of warriors finished off the demons trampled into the ground by the front line’s advance.
Their first real test came when a copse of wood demons approached, carrying huge clubs. While not the massive trees the rocks were carrying, the weapons were larger than men, and the simple wood did what alagai talons could not, smashing into the shields of his warriors and scattering them in wide swathes.
Jardir concentrated before the demons could take advantage of the breaches, extending the power of his crown out beyond his warriors and stopping the demons short. He raised his spear and drew heat wards in the air, incinerating the wood demons, and then charged forward, his magic throwing the lesser alagai aside until he came up to the nearest rock. He pulled the protective field in tight, letting him get close enough to leap ten feet into the air and thrust the Spear of Kaji into the demon’s chest. Magic refilled the spear’s well as it pulsed up his arm, suffusing him with energy.
He kicked off from the falling demon, landing in a clear spot twenty feet away. Demons leapt at him from all sides, but their attacks skittered off his warding field, even as he attacked with impunity. Several demons fell to thrusts of his spear, but as many were destroyed by wards he drew in the air. Flame demons shattered as he froze the firespit in their bellies, and wood demons ran about frantically, immolated in flame. Impact wards threw field demons aside by the half dozen.
Still they closed in, their numbers undiminished. Every demon on the field was focused on him now. He extended the crown’s power again, driving them back until he could rejoin his men, but that only made him a clearer target as a rock demon threw a heavy boulder his way.
Jardir leapt aside, but was struck even as he landed by another stone dropped from above. He rolled with the impact, keeping hold of his spear and drawing on its magic to heal himself. He was given no respite, as rocks the size of melons began to fall like rain around him.
But as fast as the stones fell, Jardir was faster, dodging them like lazily drifting bubbles of soap. Even as he dodged the barrage from above, the rock and wood demons on the ground continued to hurl whatever they could grasp in their talons at him: rocks, trees, even a few of his own men. Wind demons bounced off his warding field, falling from the sky where his men quickly dispatched them before they could recover and take off again. One wind demon pulled up short just outside the limit of his protection and roared at him, a bolt of lightning leaping from its long toothed beak.
With a thunderous boom, the energy pierced the warding, going right for him, but Jardir could see the power for what it was, and did not fear. He raised his spear crosswise, absorbing the energy. The weapon tingled and burned with the power, but he threw it right back at the creature, blasting it from the sky.
He felt suffused with power, unstoppable, and yet he saw he was being slowly cut off from his men and surrounded. Rock demons were hurling more and larger missiles at him, and sooner or later one would connect.
I have made a target of myself, he realized.
With that thought, he pulled his protective field in close, throwing up his hood and wrapping himself in Leesha’s Cloak of Unsight as he quickstepped several yards to the side. To his warriors nothing had changed, but he could see confusion in the auras of the alagai. To their senses, he had simply vanished.
Calmly, he walked back to the re-formed lines of the Sharum as the warriors took advantage of the demons’ confusion, striking hard as the alagai vainly searched for sign of him.
‘Uncle!’ a voice cried, and he saw Ashia running towards him. His niece was wrapped in her Sharum blacks, but in the darkness he recognized her aura more clearly than he ever might her face. A field demon leapt at her, but she turned to catch it on her shield, throwing it aside without slowing. A flame demon stopped in her path and hawked firespit, but she sidestepped smoothly as the creature closed its eyes to spew, skewering it.
Next, a pair of wood demons barred her path. Charged now with demon magic, Ashia only increased the speed of her advance, using the edge of her shield to stab at the joints of their long, spindly limbs, keeping them off balance and unable to attack. To an untrained eye, every move was as if practised by rote, but Jardir could see that she was in fact probing, applying dama’ting sharusahk as she searched for pressure points. At last she found one in a demon’s thigh, collapsing the limb with a relatively gentle blow. Only then did she plunge her spear in for the kill.
She spun to meet the next attack from the other wood demon, slapping it aside with a casual thrust of her shield’s edge into its spindly armpit as it lashed its talons at her. The demon stumbled back, and she advanced calmly. Her aura confirmed what he already knew: that she was utterly confident in her ability to kill it at will, and was using the opportunity to learn her enemy better.