Page 71 of Siege of Stone (Sister of Darkness: The Nicci Chronicles 3)

Amber stared across the ice field and pointed upward. “Start with that section up there, near the edge. When the cornice comes down, the rest of the glacier wall should fall behind it.”

“Then let’s not waste time,” Renn said. He gestured with his hands, closed his eyes, and released his powerful gift with a sizzle in the air.

Below in the hanging valley, Verna could hear the loud voices of enemy soldiers as they prepared to move out. She extended her gift into the piles of packed snow and ice and let her magic go into the widening cracks in the blue ice. She released her heat, felt the water melt.

The Cliffwall scholars did the same. The Sisters of the Light pushed, releasing waves of warmth that crisscrossed the glacier field like hot knives. Pockets of steam boiled up, expanding weak voids. Puffs of white vapor coughed out of softer pockets in the snow.

Like a shattering tree creaking and cracking, the glacier wall spread apart. Beneath it, warm water mixed with boulders and glacial debris to form a soup of mud and melted snow.

Verna felt a thrill of excitement. Nearby, Renn clenched his left hand into a fist and gestured in the air, as if the motion helped him hurl his magic with greater force. With a booming crack, the piled cornice of snow on the high cliff shuddered free and slid down the rock face.

That was just the beginning.

Mists of steam curled from the sliding glacier. Sheets of ice shifted and slid forward to crash into the next section of ice, knocking it loose. The Sisters and their trainees concentrated on the front wall, heating the dark boulders trapped inside the ice so that they, too, created pockets of steam, melting more ice.

In the bowl beneath the glacier, thousands of enemy soldiers saw the frozen mountainside shifting and sliding toward them like a living thing. Their outcry echoed into the air as loud as the avalanche.

Verna continued to release her gift, melting more sections of the ice underneath, and soon the entire glacier shoved itself forward, picking up momentum as it rumbled down the mountain with a catastrophic roar.

Beside her, Amber squeezed her eyes shut, clenched her hands, and rhythmically pounded the ground, trying to melt more and more of the snow. Verna touched her wrist, stopped her. “That’s enough, child. We’ve done it.”

Amber opened her eyes and turned to watch as the nightmare of snow blocks and ice slabs brought half the mountain down with it. The roar was deafening. Steam and snow spray poured up like a thunderstorm into the air.

The stone army was trapped in the hanging valley, and the glacier buried them in an avalanche that was centuries in the making.

* * *

Long after the expeditionary army had been inundated, Verna sat back, shaking, not from exertion, but from the realization of what she had done.

Renn seemed delighted. “Oh, that was magnificent! Exactly what a wizard of Ildakar should do.”

Verna watched as the snow and ice continued to settle, as rocks pattered down from the now-naked patch of cliff. The invasion force was entirely buried. “It was what we needed to do,” she said.

CHAPTER 54

As the most powerful sorceress in Lord Rahl’s army, Nicci was feared and respected. She had once murdered a wizard and stolen his abilities, had learned the Subtractive side of magic through her dark service to the Keeper, and she had become known as Death’s Mistress.

Thus, when she presented her warning about Utros and his vast army, the D’Haran garrison believed her. General Linden brought in military scribes to take down her report in detail, and within hours copies were dispatched by two separate riders racing north to the People’s Palace. Nicci could crush petty dictators and slave masters, but defeating hundreds of thousands of warriors went beyond what she could deal with alone.

But she didn’t have to do everything alone. It had taken her a long time to realize that.

General Linden gathered a succession of his line officers, foot soldiers, cavalry riders, and scouts, so she could show them the terrifying images preserved in Elsa’s glass. “I want them all to know,” Linden said. “The more our army understands the scope of this threat, the better prepared they’ll be to face it.”

Nicci walked slowly along the lines of soldiers gathered inside the garrison walls, showing them the images, and she saw that she had struck fear—not gibbering terror, but a genuine respect. By nightfall she had accomplished what she needed to do and decided it was time to return to Ildakar.

She had to make sure the walled city was still safe against the siege. If so, Nicci would travel through the sliph to other large cities along the coast and continue spreading her warning.

Because it was already after dark, Nicci would not enter the dense and trackless Hagen Woods in the hope of finding the isolated sliph well. Instead, she informed Linden, “I will sleep in the barracks and leave at dawn.”

“It must be a long journey to Ildakar,” Linden said. “Do you need supplies? A military escort?”

“I have other means of travel.”

He found her a private room in the officers’ quarters, which were redolent of fresh sawdust and green pine. The sweet wood fragrance contrasted with the fishy-smelling kraken-oil lantern that burned on the writing desk. Nicci opened the window shutters to let the cool night breeze drift in. With a flick of her fingers, she snuffed out the lantern from the other side of the room and settled back on the straw mattress. She needed no further comforts. As Nicci drifted off, she cleared her thoughts of strategy, concerns about Ildakar’s defenses against General Utros, and the loss of Bannon Farmer. She would sleep.

When she descended into resistant dreams, she felt an animal presence waiting there, a feline awareness that was bound to her. Mrra. Though Tanimura was far on the other side of the Old World, the sand panther remembered Nicci in her dreams.

They ran together. Her wiry muscles pulled her along as she bounded with her hind legs to land on her wide front paws, feeling the curved claws dig into the turf. Nicci felt the joy of being part of the big cat’s fine, muscular body. She was exerting herself to her wild limits, fiercely running.

She quickly realized that Mrra was not hunting, and the cat’s pounding heart was more than just the joy of racing free. She was terrified.

Monstrous predators were pursuing the sand panther. Mrra ran along the hills, each leap a desperate attempt t

o escape. Her long tail thrashed, her claws tore up the dirt. She leaped over a fallen tree as she raced along the black fringe of the burned grass. Her sharp ears heard panting and slavering behind her, like the bellows in a blacksmith shop.

Two huge creatures ran after her, each as large as a small horse, dripping saliva from yellow fangs. They were ferocious and intent on tearing her apart. Mrra ran with all her might. Behind her, the creatures thundered along, their jaws and fangs ready to rip her flank, tear out her throat.

Mrra glanced back, and her golden eyes saw the pursuers, huge wolflike beasts with rounded ears, long heads, and tan fur that made them hard to see among the dry grasses. They snarled, springing forward. Mrra put on another burst of speed, and Nicci offered her own energy, driving the panther faster. But Mrra was exhausted, nearly ready to collapse.

Nicci could only guess what those beasts might be. She’d heard Richard describe heart hounds, vicious creatures that guarded the misty boundaries and the veil to the underworld. The more Nicci recalled his stories, the more convinced she became that these were heart hounds. Had they somehow slipped through the veil? But Richard had sealed it! The walls of the underworld should never have allowed such monsters to return.

Mrra dashed into a thicket of scrub oak. She clattered through fallen branches and leaped over a lichen-mottled boulder. The heart hounds rushed into the thicket after her and kept drawing closer.

Nicci knew Mrra couldn’t elude them, whether in the forests or in the grassy hills. Heart hounds had senses so acute they could hear a victim’s heartbeat even from a distance. Richard had also said the monsters would tear out the heart of their prey and devour it first as a bloody prize.

Nicci rode inside Mrra, pushed her, helped her, but she was in far-off Tanimura, and she couldn’t extend her gift through the big cat. She could only use the big panther’s body.

Running would not be enough.

There was no place to hide in the grassy hills, even in the darkness.

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