As her unnatural body thrived and the tendrils of her forest conquered the barren territory, her mind unlocked more of what it remembered, revealing esoteric and deadly magic that she could use.
The wizard Nathan and the sorceress Nicci had searched for a way to destroy the Lifedrinker, and she had no doubt they were applying themselves with as much determination to eliminate her—and Victoria would not stand for it. She felt the power of life, the power of the Creator, and knew she was stronger than any magic those two adversaries could hurl against her.
Even so, she did not underestimate their abilities.
Although Nicci claimed credit for killing the evil Lifedrinker, Victoria knew that the Eldertree acorn was truly responsible for that triumph. The sorceress was undeniably powerful, nevertheless, and Victoria did not want to be hindered in her sacred work. She already knew that Nicci was a nuisance, interfering where she was not wanted.
Although Nathan Rahl’s ability to use magic was minimal, perhaps even imaginary, he was a man with great knowledge and experience, and thus a threat to her as well. There was something about the man, and Victoria did not wish to be sanguine about him, either.
They both must be stopped.
In the thriving thickets, trees, vines, and mushrooms swelled around her like a bubbling life spring. The buzz of swarming flies, bees, and beetles hummed an intense lullaby. As her wisdom and power expanded, Victoria recalled forgotten methods and incantations that the ancient wizards had sealed behind the camouflage shroud, preserved for millennia among the memmers.
With that knowledge, Victoria understood how to create a weapon to eradicate both Nicci and Nathan, perhaps a weapon strong enough to tear down Cliffwall, stone by stone. To activate the magic, Victoria didn’t even need to move, because she was the forest, all the stirrings within, all the leaves and branches, the wings of insects, the flutter of birds. Everything belonged to her, was part of her.
She released the magic to create her emissary, an assassin, a manifestation of the jungle’s primeval power: a shaksis. A shaksis was a creature molded entirely of debris, the detritus of the forest.
With her mind and her magic, Victoria gathered up fallen branches and gnarled twigs to serve as the bones and framework for the shaksis. She wove them together, building a wooden skeleton around which, with whiplike speed, she wound grass blades and dry leaves, forest mulch, and thorny twigs. Fungi inflated to fill out the muscles.
Victoria summoned an army of worms, beetles, maggots, and other crawling creatures to expand the creature’s body. By the time the magical construct extended its arms and took tentative steps, its entire form boiled with a thousand points of life.
Two iridescent beetles, each as large as a fist, scuttled along the forest floor and crawled up the thing’s body framework. Its rounded head was woven of bent twigs and supple willow, skinned with bark, thatched with dry grasses. Two hollows formed in what should have been its face, and the beetles crawled up the construct’s head and nestled into the sockets to serve as surrogate eyes. A splintered branch across its lower face made a gash of a mouth. It clacked and chewed, broken spikes grinding together.
Pale green vines looped around its legs, winding and weaving into its flesh, like blood vessels filled with sap. The shaksis creaked as it stepped forward. It folded and unfolded its sharp branchlet fingers, while the two beetles inside its eye sockets stared out with a faceted, malevolent gaze.
Made of the jungle itself, the shaksis was Victoria’s puppet, her surrogate, her killer, a soulless thing that was merely an extension of the primeval forest.
Victoria flashed it a warm and welcoming smile, a maternal smile. She stroked the uneven chest, feeling the life she had deposited there, a new child she had created. Into its hollow mind, she placed the details of its mission—images of the blond sorceress and the pompous old wizard with straight white hair.
“Find them and kill them,” Victoria said. “Go with my blessing.”
The animated construct turned and, with a rustle of brittle limbs, stalked out of the forest toward Cliffwall.
CHAPTER 64
As he scouted through the gathering darkness, Bannon felt brave and important. After all his ordeals, he no longer hid from his past, no longer pretended that those dark memories didn’t exist. He was not just Bannon, the son of a man who drank himself into blind violence and abused his family, a bitter man who drowned helpless kittens and beat his own wife to death. No, Bannon was no longer defined by his father.
Standing tall, he marched into the moonlit night on his scouting mission, wending his way through the still-dead foothills. Though the grasses and scrub trees were dry and brittle, he no longer felt the Lifedrinker’s poison oozing from the hillsides. This was more like a normal landscape after a long winter: not dead but dormant, waiting to reawaken with spring. Now that the evil wizard was defeated, seeds would germinate, shoots would arise, meadows and forests would creep back.
But Victoria had been too impatient for that natural process. With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, Bannon considered the harm she had done with her explosive fecundity spell. Rather than letting the Scar awaken of its own accord, Victoria had effectively dashed icy water into the face of a deeply ill person.
He gritted his teeth as he trudged into the night, making his way toward the expanding jungle boundary. He paused to rest near a moonlit boulder and took out his waterskin to drink while he listened to the vast starlit darkness. He could sense the vibrating power of the proliferating forest and could hear the inevitable sounds of cracking, straining branches, growing trunks, writhing vines, stirring leaves. Combined, it sounded like evil laughter.
A sad shiver ran down his spine. He knew that Audrey, Laurel, and Sage were there in that mass of wild growth, corrupted by Victoria’s out-of-control magic. His heart ached for them. He remembered their touch, their kisses, their laughter. He smiled to think of their warm breath in his ears, how he had loved to stroke their hair, touch their bodies. They couldn’t be gone now! They were beautiful, wonderful, loving.
Then he fought back a wave of nausea as he recalled what they had done to Simon. If the scholar-archivist had not shoved him out of the way in his eagerness to go forward, Bannon would have been the one ripped into ribbons of meat, his blood spilled onto the soil to spawn more of their awful magic.
He pressed his knuckles hard into his eyes, wanting that memory to be just a dream, a nightmare … but it was real, in exactly the way his mother’s murder had been real, the way he had abandoned Ian to the slavers. It was not a memory he could pretend would ever go away.
Feeling the hairs tingle on the back of his neck, he stepped away from the boulder, alert, sniffing the air. He whirled and looked above him to see Mrra crouched on the rock outcropping, her feline form sandy gold in the moonlight. The big cat let out a growling purr, but Bannon did not feel threatened. The sand panther knew who he was, possibly even understood that he was the one who had begged Nicci to heal her wounds, rather than kill her.
Mrra just sat there watching the night. As Bannon studied the powerful tawny form and the ugly symbols branded onto her hide, he was no longer reminded of the helpless drowned kittens. He was glad he had saved her, and in a sense, he had saved part of himself as well. Those limp, dead kittens had been a symbol of grief and guilt. The Adjudicator had found that agonizing experience inside him and dragged it to the front of Bannon’s mind as his damnation.
Running away from Chiriya Island, he had sought a life for himself, not just for adventure but for self-preservation. Since then, he had found all he could have hoped for by joining Nathan and Nicci. He had discovered not just exciting adventures, but friendship, acceptance, and inner strength.
He realized that he had been fooling himself with the illusion of a perfect life, but the things he had discovered since venturing out into the world were so much more. More than anything, he remembered the look of respect and appreciation that Nicci had given him after he helped her kil
l the Lifedrinker. He had risked his life, given his all, and they had been victorious together. He didn’t think his life could get better than that moment. Such thoughts eased his heavy memories of the bad things that had happened to him.
With a swish of her tail, Mrra vanished like a moon shadow into the night. After taking another swig of water, Bannon made his way onward, still hoping against hope that he could save the young acolytes who had so captured his heart, although he feared it might be too late.
* * *
The moon had set, and the night held its breath while waiting for the dawn. When Bannon finally reached the edge of the ever-spreading jungle, the demarcation was abrupt, with desolation on one side and a madness of foliage on the other. He could smell the leaves and the resinous wood, the potent aromas of wild vegetation.
Sword raised, Bannon faced the primeval forest, hoping he would not have to go inside. The twitching branches and gnarled, spasming vines unsettled him, but he shored up his courage. Drawing a deep breath, he called out, “I’ve come for you!” He meant to shout, but it came out as no more than a whisper. His voice cracked.
The vegetation snaked and curled. In the starlight, as his pupils dilated with fear, he spotted more movement, heard a stirring that was more than frenetically growing plants. They had heard him.
Beautiful feminine forms glided between the trunks, branches, and undulating vines. Even with the camouflage of their mottled skin, he could make out the beautiful bodies that were so familiar to him.
He said, “I came to save you.”
Though the young women were fundamentally transformed, he still recognized Audrey, Laurel, and Sage. His breath was hot in his mouth, and his pulse raced. He had seen what these forest women could do, and he knew they were monsters … yet still he wanted them. Their enhanced scent was thick in the air, making him dizzy.
“Come with me,” he begged. “We can go back to Cliffwall. We’ll find a spell to make you normal again. Don’t you want to be with me?”
They laughed in unison, a musical sound that made all the branches stir. “Don’t be silly,” said the thing that had been Sage. “We are so much more now. Why don’t you come with us? Think of how we could pleasure you with all of our new skills.”
Bannon could barely breathe. His vision blurred. They seemed more intensely lovely than he remembered them, more than anyone he’d ever seen, any woman he could imagine. Something about their scent …
Flowers suddenly sprang up all around them, a spray of intense violet-and-crimson blossoms that he recognized with a shudder. The deathrise flower! The smell made him dizzy, and in the back of his mind he knew that Nicci must have been wrong about these blossoms, because surely this was the most beautiful, exquisite poison in the world!
Unbidden, he took a step forward. The three young women extended their emerald arms, exuding a mist of attracting chemicals. The lovely, but deadly, flowers bloomed around them.
Tears filled Bannon’s eyes, because he wanted them so much. He remembered how wonderful they were, how sweet and caring, how innocent, and yet how skilled when they had made love to him.
“We can be together,” he said, “if only you’ll just—”
Laurel interrupted him. “Yes, we can be together. Always.”
“We want you now more than ever,” said Audrey. “We are more fertile, more filled with desire.”
“We can be everything you want,” Sage added. “And you will give us everything we need.”
They spread their arms, and their breasts beckoned him. Their dark green nipples looked like flower buds. Bannon yearned for them. He had meant to come and argue, to fight to take them back. The sword felt slick in his hand. Even with its leather grip, his palms were so sweaty, he could barely hold on.
“Come to us, Bannon,” said Laurel.
The other two echoed the invitation.
He could not resist. He succumbed, gliding toward the edge of the jungle.
With a great blow, a growling, furred form crashed into him. The full weight of a sand panther knocked him off his feet and tumbled him out of the reach of the vicious forest girls.
The beautiful apparitions snarled, their mouths opening to reveal long woody fangs. Their arms stretched out, coiled with vines, corded muscles, and tendons. Their fingers reached out for him, tipped with hooked thorns. The smooth, perfect green skin on their arms became studded with deadly barbs that dripped with milky venom.
Gasping, Bannon rolled over and tried to catch his breath. The spell was broken. Mrra bounded away, then circled back, snarling. The forest women reached out with a thorn-studded embrace, trying to catch Bannon before he got out of reach.
He instinctively slashed with Sturdy, lopping off one of Audrey’s arms. It dropped to the ground, and its severed stump twitched, extended, and grew roots, digging deep into the ground while the arm continued to grope upward for him.
Howling, Audrey raised the stump of her arm, and a new limb grew from the severed end, a tangle of vines, muscles, and blood vessels reemerging to restore her.
Bannon hacked at them, swinging his sword sideways, then up, then back down, splintering the female forms. They did not bleed red, but spilled oozing green sap.
“I wanted to save you,” he cried.
The three just laughed as they regrew into contorted new forms with additional branchlike arms that sprang from their shoulders and torsos. Their hair became a wild, marshy tangle of strands.
The sand panther retreated, growling to Bannon. He backed away onto the rocky, desolate ground where the forest avatars could not yet go. From their verdant refuge, they simply glared at him, and Bannon stared back, sobbing. Tears ran down his cheeks. “I thought I loved you.”
“We will have you again,” the women said in a single rasping voice like dry leaves crackling in a fire. “We will have you forever.”
CHAPTER 65
The broad grin on Nathan’s face made Nicci immediately suspicious. “I may just know where to find the answer, Sorceress!” The old wizard stopped her in the hallway as she made her way to her chambers, where Thistle was already asleep.
She allowed herself a moment of hope. “You are certain of this spell?”
Nathan’s smile faltered. “‘Certainty’ is an overused term, to be sure. I am confident, let us leave it at that. See here.” He set the thick volume on a bench in one of the corridors.
He opened the pages, drew his fingers down a line of archaic text. “It is just a clue, but the best clue we’ve had. You already gave me the incantation and the spell-form that the memmers think Victoria used, and that provided some excellent parameters for a counterspell or a weapon. We knew the essence of what we were fighting, but not how to do so.”
He tapped a stained page where tight handwriting had run together as the ink dissolved. “This gives us somewhere to look, a listing of other books that also shed more light about the Lifedrinker.”
“He is no longer a concern,” Nicci said. “I killed him.”
“Yes, yes, but think of how they are connected. Roland’s spell stole too much from the world, and now Victoria’s will restore too much. It is all a matter of control, finding a way to modulate the flow of hungry magic, the power of giving and taking.”
“Like a valve,” Nicci said, unconsciously biting her lower lip. “The Lifedrinker said he had opened up the magic with his spell, but the flow was too strong. He could not stop himself.”
“And neither can Victoria,” Nathan said. “Both Roland and Victoria were conduits for the magic. When you destroyed the Lifedrinker, you shut off his flow of death. Now we must destroy Victoria and stop the flow in the opposite direction.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Nicci said. She looked up as three scholars hurried past them, eager for their dinner. Another middle-aged man strolled by, holding an open book in his hands, reading as he walked. She continued, “I simply need to know how to do it.”
Nathan pointed at the stained pages again. “This listing identif
ies a volume we need to find, and I have reason to believe it is buried in the vault beneath the damaged tower, where those other scattered books were hidden. It is very late now, but we can try to excavate tomorrow.”
“And you know where to look?” Nicci asked, thinking of the unexplored maze of damaged rooms and passages underground. “Exactly?”
Nathan smiled. “Mia does.”
* * *
Though it had left the riotous fecundity of the primeval jungle behind, the shaksis could still feel the power of Life’s Mistress driving its mission. As the creature walked across the desolate ground on limbs made of twisted vines and leaves, motivated by swarms of worms, spiders, and insects, the shaksis kept drawing energy from a distance.
It continued across the desolate Scar through the night. Though parts broke off in the dry rocks and jagged uplifts, the shaksis replenished itself with plant matter once it reached the foothills and walked through scrub brush and tangled grasses. The dead vegetation came alive again, whipping around its body, strengthening its limbs, winding like armor around its body core.
Finally, in the darkest hour before dawn, the creature faced the sheer cliff of the plateau uplift. The shaksis knew that its two victims were inside the hidden enclave high above.
Because Victoria knew all about Cliffwall, the shaksis remembered how to ascend that sheer rock, using the hidden handholds and the faint trail that had isolated the great archive for millennia. The golem of reanimated twigs and vines turned its hollow head upward and stared at the cliff with living-beetle eyes.
An agile person could climb the path to reach the hooded overhang above, but the shaksis did not need agility; it had a different kind of power. It reached out with the splayed branches of its hands and touched the stone. With a surge of vibrant life, the fingers grew. Vine tendrils extended and worked their way into the rock, like the roots of a clinging windswept tree. The shaksis reached with a branchy arm, slapped its hand higher up, and fastened with root tendrils. Its bulging wooden muscles groaned. The vermin infesting its hollow body skittered around, adding energy, squirming.