Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 156907 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 785(@200wpm)___ 628(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156907 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 785(@200wpm)___ 628(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
There was Golden Thomas, and Fenn, and nine others had come with Thom, to join the eleven with Fenn.
Tedrey had to manage to escape them all and get to Birchlire, which was closest, and warn King True.
Unless he could somehow find a loft and get ravens dispatched, not having a single coin to pay an aviast to send them.
But to save this land and all others, he had to leave the women behind.
He had to leave them to this fate.
And he had to ignore the burn in his gut at the fury he had to swallow at what had befallen the pile at his back, what would befall the terrified at his side, what he had seen that he knew he could never erase from his brain, what had been lost by all of them for this maniacal crusade.
He felt the rope at his wrists loosening and took heart, only to stop when he felt something else.
The beginnings of a quake was coming from under them, the loose dirt about him shimmying.
And then he braced, for it started slow, but it came fast and strong.
“He rises!” one of the men shouted jubilantly.
“It’s working! Quick, release her and discard the body. Bring another,” Fenn demanded.
“She is not drained yet,” another man said.
“Do what I say!” Fenn ordered zealously.
The quake shuddered to a halt, and as they went about their business much more enthusiastically, Tedrey dismissed the turn in his stomach and took advantage of their diverted attention, picking with great care at the knot at his wrists.
When a woman was selected, they divested her of her gag, thus her screams rent the air, and the men fed on them as this time, Tedrey forced himself to watch.
Forced himself to study them each in turn. Forced his focus to them to make certain they were tuned to what they were doing, and none of them turned to Tedrey.
Forced his memory to carve their visages in his brain, for he hoped one day to find them all again and make them pay for this desecration.
It took some time, the clouds covering the dawning sun, before the rains came.
Tedrey worked at his wrists.
The men brutalized.
The knot slipped free. His hands fell free. And Tedrey almost did not catch his cry of joy before the next quake came.
Thus, Tedrey did not move a muscle.
For this one felt different.
It felt unlike the other, which had been a powerful shudder. Like the earth below them seemed to be speaking and very much wished those who walked it to listen to its message.
This had another meaning.
A sinister one.
And as the men before him ambled about excitedly, the man at work on the miserable girl tethered to the dirt cried out his release, right before, suddenly, he cried out for a different reason as the earth underneath them broke open.
The man was tossed one way.
She rolled the other.
And Tedrey stared as it seemed beings were forming from the mud.
With the stakes she’d been tied to no longer stuck in the ground, the woman who had been being used struggled to her feet and raced into the forest with ropes and rods dangling from wrists and ankles.
No one paid her mind at what seemed to be happening in the clearing.
The women at his side started scuffling on their behinds to get away, as the men who had wrought this catastrophe milled about with wonder and jubilation, watching the breaking of the earth with zealotry awash on their faces.
And then Tedrey saw two men and a number of women form from the sludge as if erupting from a swell at the center of the earth.
The rain pelted them as they stood in the mire, gazing about.
And as the rain cleaned the mud from them, Thom cried joyously, “Jell!”
Thom rushed forward.
“No!” the man wearing filthy robes of what Tedrey thought was a Go’Doan priest cried. “He is my—!”
“Kill him!” the woman, standing closest to the man between her and the priest, a priest that was G’Jell, shrieked.
But that man was already moving.
And then there was naught in that clearing but the sound of the driving rain as all went immobile when the man took Thom’s head in his two hands, and with a terrible crunching noise, crushed it in an explosion of gore with no apparent effort.
Tedrey blinked against the rain as the man released Thom, and he fell lifeless to the muck.
Good gods.
“You were saying?” the woman asked Jell.
“But Thom was my—” Jell began.
“Release those girls,” the woman commanded.
The man who had killed Thom did not move.
“And do not let them flee!” she shouted, and the other women scurried after Fenn and the retreating Rising priests. “I said, release those girls,” she repeated her order.
And as the man who killed Thom looked side to side, carefully, Tedrey moved the hands that he’d left held behind him, forgotten in the spectacle, to his ankles, where, trying to mask his movements, he worked on the ropes at his feet.