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His head snapped up, and his eyes narrowed. The tide of combat had carried him and Walsharno steadily forward. There was so much Dark power abroad in the darkness that even his champion’s senses had been unable to cut through it and find its heart. But he was close enough now. His dying sword brothers had brought him close enough at last to sense the focus of the enormous, deadly tornado of twisted energy howling invisibly above the hilltop before him. He felt Walsharno beside him, and tasted the courser’s raging grief as Walsharno felt the agony and terror of the damned coursers trapped in Krahana’s power. And as they both recognized the heart and core of the vortex waiting to engulf them and all their companions, they knew what they had to do.
Bahzell took Walsharno’s fury at the fate of the Warm Springs coursers and melded it with his own grief for Gharnal and Brandark and everyone else who had perished this hideous night. He combined them, wrapped them about his Rage, and gave them back to himself and to Walsharno as determination harder than steel, not despair, and his great voice rose above the tumult.
“Tomanak!” he bellowed, and Walsharno charged.
Jerghar heard that world-shaking shout even from the top of his hill, and the terror he’d felt when Treharm was destroyed swept through him like a black, choking sea. Yet he fought it down—not with courage, but with desperation—and tightened his grip upon the power he had stolen.
Another Servant of Krahana, the once-man called Haliku, surged to his feet, bursting up from a the thi
The steadily accelerating courser thundered across the night-dark grasslands like a moving holocaust of brilliant blue. That crackling corona clung to him, blew behind him like streamers of lightning on the wind of his passage, and no shardohn could withstand him. They fled into the night, howling, their terror of Tomanak overpowering, however briefly, their older terror of their mistress.
Haliku looked back over his shoulder, green eyes glaring in the dark, and the shardohns’ terror was etched into his own distorted expression. He swerved, trying to break away from the direct line of Walsharno’s charge, and Bahzell leaned from the saddle. His left hand gripped the saddle horn, the sword in his right hand swept in a blinding arc, like sheet lightning, and the Servant had an instant to shriek in horrified denial before that deadly blade crunched entirely through his body.
A column of blue flame erupted from the grass, consuming what had been a Servant of Krahana, and then Walsharno was through the final fringes of the shardohn pack. His head went forward, his mighty muscles tightening and exploding as he thundered onward in a gallop only another courser could possibly have matched.
A meteor of green fire, glittering and loathsome with the all-consuming hunger of Krahana, arced up from the hilltop before him. It came screaming out of the night, but Bahzell raised his sword, holding it horizontally above his head, one hand on the hilt and the other wrapped around the blue-blazing blade.
“Tomanak!“ he cried, and an actinic flash flared outward from him and Walsharno. The expanding ring of light swept across the grass like a high wind, pounding the stalks flat, and the night rocked to a thunderous concussion as Jerghar’s bolt of flame struck Tomanak’s shield … and vanished.
Jerghar went to his knees, shuddering, as the backlash of his parried attack ripped through him. His control of the coursers’ souls wavered under the agony, but he hadn’t been chosen for this task because he was weak. He hammered them back, reforging his control, and raised his head.
His eyes burned like green fire, and desperation blazed deep within him. The shardohns and his subordinate Servants had killed at least a third of Bahzell’s companions, but now all of the other Servants had been destroyed and the shardohns were a broken force, fleeing and scattered in Bahzell’s wake. There was nothing between Tomanak’s champion and Jerghar—nothing except his final, i
Bahzell reeled in the saddle under the soul-shaking impact of Jerghar’s attack. But unlike Jerghar, Bahzell was not alone. He was supported by Tomanak, linked to Walsharno, and sustained by his own iron determination and his Rage.
He straightened, and his ears flattened and his lips drew back in a snarl as he sensed the final barrier, rising like a wall of invisible steel in the darkness before him.
“Now, Brother!” he called to Walsharno, and a voice answered deep within his own mind.
And Bahzell did. He reached deep, deep—deeper than he had dreamed even now that he could reach. He touched his own link to Tomanak, and to Walsharno, and Walsharno’s link to him and Tomanak alike, and then, in the fusion of hradani, courser, and deity, he touched a vast, seething sea of wildfire energy he had never before perceived. A sea, he knew instantly, which Wencit of Rum had tried to describe to him and Brandark on a snowy winter night long before.
He had no idea how to manipulate that energy. He was no wizard, and never would be. But he was a champion, and he reached out fearlessly to the lethal, crackling beauty. He laid his hand upon it, and was not consumed, and for just an instant Bahzell Bahnakson’s eyes blazed with the same eldritch, wild wizard’s fire that had replaced Wencit’s eyes so many endless centuries before.
He raised his empty hand, and crackling prominences of writhing fire—not simply the blue of Tomanak, but blue and silver and every color ever made, all intermingled—blazed about his fist as he clenched it.
“Tomanak!”
Jerghar’s eyes widened in stu
But his enemies were close enough now. His sense of the unseen was less acute, less keen, than Bahzell’s had become, but it was keen enough to scream belated warning as Bahzell and Walsharno charged suicidally towards his unbreachable wall of power.
Impossible, his brain repeated again. Impossible!
Not one champion, but two—two so deeply linked and fused that they were one!
Bahzell’s fist stabbed forward, thrusting at the barrier before him, and lightning crackled. A solid, forked cable of power erupted, reaching out before him and Walsharno like a lance of flame. It struck Jerghar’s wall and mushroomed out in a coruscating tornado of clashing energies. There was heat, this time, and the green, damp grass of spring flashed into fire, red tongues of flame and white spires of smoke rising in a billowing curtain.