Keri pushed off his back foot and thrust his spear forward at full extension, taking the ahmatti in the shoulder. The mana beast was maddened by not only the turbulent mana of the eruption, but also the oily thorns that grew out of its shoulder and back. Rather than stopping, the ahmatti threw itself forward, pushing the shaft of the Næv’bel deeper and deeper as it growled and spit and tried to get within clawing distance of Keri.

Even under normal circumstances, an ahmatti could be a fearsome opponent. They could grow to the size of a large dog, and had a reputation for not only fighting larger predators, but winning – mostly through sheer ferocity. They were also known to greedily gorge themselves on their kills, stuffing their bellies voraciously.

Linnea dashed in from Keri’s left, taking advantage of how Keri was limiting the ahmatti’s mobility, and the dark haired warrior drove a hunting spear into the beast’s eye and straight through to its brain. It twitched for a moment, then collapsed heavily to the ground. Behind it, Airis’ men set to work repairing the breach in the palisade, and carrying off the bodies of the warriors the ahmatti had slain.

Keri set his boot against the dark fur of the monster’s back and yanked. His spear came out in a gout of blood, and he kept watch for a moment while Linnea extracted her own weapon. “Olavi?” he asked, taking a moment to sip from the wineskin he kept at his belt.

“Still watching Airis’ back,” she assured him.

“Good,” Keri said. While Airis ka Reimis had proven himself a capable man in Varuna, Keri had never lost sight of the fact that he was primarily a merchant, not a warrior. He gave the older man credit: when the Garden of Thorns had erupted, Airis had shown not a moment’s hesitation, rallying a sizable force to cull the rift.

“Go with him and keep him alive,” Valtteri ka Auris had quietly told Keri a week before. “Al’Fenthia is our point of supply and reinforcement. We can’t afford the disruption that would come from Airis being wounded or killed. I’ll hold the bridge.”

It had made sense at the time, and in all honesty, it still did. Valtteri had a knack for being able to see a situation clearly, and discern what was truly important. Keri envied that, a bit. At the moment, he envied the other man more for perhaps having had a chance to lie down and get a bit of sleep. The culling team had been run ragged, and the eruption showed no sign of letting up.

Leaving the ahmatti where it lay, Keri and Linnea walked along the palisade to the center of the gap, where Airis had set his command post. They’d ditched and raised a palisade at the narrowest point of the gap, where it was barely a mile across. The fortifications had gone up quickly, chiefly due to the word of power most common in the city, which allowed Airis and his warriors to grow a line of stout saplings from a cache of seeds. Thorny vines had been woven together to hold the palisade and ward off mana beasts, leaving only carving points onto the saplings and the ditch digging to be done by hand.

They passed groups of Eld from all over the north manning the wall – for while Keri and the others had been sailing across the ocean to Varuna, and then hacking their way through the jungle to secure a foothold, warriors from every house had gathered at Al’Fenthia. The attacks on first Soltheris, and then the Hall of Ancestors, had sent young men and women of Keri’s generation streaming to the trading city, awaiting their passage to Varuna.

There, on Keri’s left, was a knot of blue-haired descendants of House Däivi, and manning the defenses just past them was a contingent with the telltale violet blush of the blood of Asuris. He saw warriors from Soltheris, as well, and every other part of the north, fighting together against the wave of mana beasts that rushed up out of the valley.

“Seven days, and it doesn’t stop,” Airis ka Remis grumbled, as Keri came within earshot of his command post and ducked under a low-hanging bough. “In all our records, this rift has never erupted for so long.” He’d grown a sort of shelter when they’d first arrived, five short thread maples from a handful of seeds, which created a canopy over a sort of secluded, private place. There, the merchant sat with his legs crossed, eating soup from a bowl. Keri had long since stopped being amazed by the variety of seeds that the other man carried, each kind of plant chosen for a different purpose.

Keri collapsed down on the bare earth and set his back against the trunk of one of the maples. “The ahmatti is dealt with,” he said, taking a moment to rest his eyes. Sleep threatened to drag him down, and he had just enough awareness of it to shake himself awake again.

“Have something to eat,” Linnea suggested, from where she’d taken up position at Olavi’s side.

Keri couldn’t think of a reason to refuse, so he inclined his head, and a moment later she’d fetched him a bowl that matched Airis’. It occurred to him, not for the first time, how much he had come to rely on the two of them. The first spoonful helped him to wake up, at least, and he found himself scraping the bottom of the bowl only moments later. When was the last time he had a meal? He couldn’t recall.

“We need to do something differently,” Keri finally said, when he’d gathered his thoughts. His mind felt foggy, soft at the edges, and slow. “If it was going to end on its own, it would have already.”

Airis shook his head. “When the rift erupts, we hold the gap,” he said, as Keri had heard over and over again, day after day. “This is what my father did, and what my grandfather did, and it has never once failed us.”

A man with the violet-tinged flush of House Asuris, their purple eyes and the white hair that they shared with House Syvä, ducked beneath the branches and into the sheltered grove. “Wildcats,” he gasped. “There is an entire pack of wildcats hitting the southern flank.”

Keri rolled onto his feet, and lurched upright, but the motion left him swaying unsteadily on his feet.

“No,” Airis said. “You need to rest. Let me handle this one.” He followed the Asurian warrior back out, and Keri caught Olavi’s eye. With a nod, the other man hurried after, leaving Keri to sit back down again.

“He isn’t a warrior,” Linnea said, once they were alone.

“No. He’s a merchant.” Keri’s eyes fluttered, but he forced them to remain open for a moment longer. “He’s done a good job here, for all that. But he can’t imagine doing anything differently. If it’s worked before, it will work again. I’m afraid that he’s going to let everyone here be ground up against endless waves of mana beasts.”

He could hear the rustle of cloth and the scrape of armor as Linnea settled down a few paces away. When had his eyes closed? “Every day we’re here is a day we aren’t reinforcing the waystone in Varuna,” she pointed out. “We’re stalled out, instead of heading west. And we don’t have the slightest idea what Ractia is doing in the meanwhile.”

“I know,” Keri said. “We need to do something to end this. But Al’Fenthia isn’t our home. I can’t simply tell him what to do.”

“We could request to go before the council of elders,” Linnea suggested.

Keri shook his head. “They’d never undermine him like that,” he muttered. “I don’t see a solution, unless we can change his mind.”

Whatever Linnea said next, Keri didn’t hear it, because exhaustion finally claimed him.

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☙

It wasn’t the screams that woke Keri, but the crack of a maple trunk breaking, and Linnea rolling him out of the way as the grove came down around them. Keri snatched his spear from where he’d set it down on the ground, with one outstretched arm, and then they scrambled out together as the enormous, dark shape of a bear ripped a second tree entirely out of the ground, roots and all.

The sun was setting – must have been setting for some time, as it painted the gap in shades of deep, blood red, burning orange, and purple. At a glance, Keri saw that the center of the palisade had been broken. Dismembered corpses were thrown to either side where the bear had come through, making straight for the place where Airis had set up his command station.

Keri didn’t know where the other man was, or even if he was still alive, and he didn’t have time to think about it now. The bear had to be stopped, and the line reinforced, before a flood of mana beasts poured through the gap and west to the city itself.

As he got to his feet, Keri saw a young woman with sparkling green eyes charge the monster with a sword. She might have been a member of House Iravata; he didn’t know her name, and couldn’t say. A few of them had come to Al’Fenthia to redeem themselves for the treason of their cousins. Whatever the woman had thought she would do in Varuna, however, ended here: the bear sunk its claws into her chest and pulled her ribcage open, throwing snapped bones to either side as it dipped its muzzle into her chest cavity and began to eat.

Like the ahmatti, and many of the animals he’d faced over the past week, Keri saw that wicked looking thorns grew out of the bear’s back and shoulders, forming a kind of defense against attacks from the rear. The thorns glistened with a dark oil that he knew was poisonous, because he’d watched good men and women die from mere scratches after hours of agony.

“Savelet Aiveh Fleia o’Mae!” Keri shouted, punching his left hand toward the bear, and a bar of blinding white light connected the space between his fist and the mana beast’s body. The smell of burning fur filled the air, and the bear roared. When the brightness faded and he could see again, Keri took a step backwards in shock.

The bear was smoking, but the same spell that had cut the traitor Calevis in half had hardly given this monster pause at all. In fact, as Keri watched, he felt a pulse of mana roll out from the bear. Its immense form bulged, its bones cracked, and in the space of only moments the monster swelled to half again its previous size.

“How?” Keri could not help but exclaim, and then the creature wheeled on him and charged. Linnea caught him by the shoulder, dragging him back, and Keri turned to scramble after her. There was no point in trying to set spears against something that large.

There was a roar, not of fury, but of pain behind them, and Keri risked a glance back. Ropes of thorny vines had snaked out from the palisade and wrapped the bear up completely. Dark blood flowed out of a dozen wounds.

“I won’t be able to hold it for long,” Airis ka Reimis shouted over the din of battle. Keri didn’t know where the man had come from, but now he stood between them and the bear, hands raised, as he worked his magic. “You need to finish it for me.”

“It shrugged off my word,” Keri called back.

“Then put a spear through its heart!”

The bear flexed its muscles, straining against the vines that trussed it up, and one of them gave way with an audible snap. There was no time for hesitation. Keri swung his spear around, set the tip in line with the bear’s torso, and ran forward. He came in low, and then thrust up with all his weight behind the attack, aiming to pierce the belly beneath the ribs and thrust upward into the heart.

It was a perfect movement, despite the weariness that had settled deep into Keri’s muscles over days of intermittent fighting. Perfectly on target, until the bear moved, thrashing its body about in an attempt to escape the binding vines and the digging thorns. Instead of taking it in the stomach, Keri’s spear scraped off bone and slid between two ribs, and he did not find the heart.

He yanked the Næv’bel back, trying to get the weapon out for another attack, but it stuck against the bones, and somehow the bear had gotten its arm free. With a mighty swipe, it sent Keri rolling and tumbling across the ground, until he finally fetched up against a corpse, eye to eye.

In an instant of pure revulsion, Keri scrambled back away from the dead body. He rolled back up onto his hands and knees, and saw the bear using the arm it had freed to pull the rest of the vines off, shredding them with its claws. The haft of his spear was still jutting out from its ribs, but he doubted that would last for long: as soon as it was free, the maddened beast would either rip the weapon out or snap it in half.

The corpse next to him was still clutching a sword.

Keri pried the hilt from dead fingers that were already stiffening, got to his feet, and gave it a practice swing. He knew how to use a sword, of course, and sparred with one occasionally just so that he wouldn’t get sloppy, but the spear had always felt more natural. Still, better to have a sword than to be unarmed in the face of an enemy.

He dashed forward through the twilight, while the mana beast was still distracted freeing itself. Keri caught a glimpse of Airis ka Reimis, now having fallen to his knees, hands still outstretched as he fought to contain the thing with only a few remaining vines. Linnea and Olavi stood between Airis and the monster, ready to give their own lives to keep the other man alive.

Keri leapt up into the air. His boot found the haft of his spear, and he kicked off it, until he was up above the monster’s head, the sword of a dead man raised high. He spun the sword around into a reversed grip in both hands, and as he began to fall, Keri stabbed the bear through the eye. The sword went in nearly to the hilt, in a meaty thunk, and then he released the hilt and hit the thing’s body.

When Keri landed, the dying monster wavered for a moment. Before it could fall, he seized his spear again and ripped it loose with a great heave, sending a gout of blood out with it that splashed onto his face. Then, he backed away, before the immense bulk of the monster could crush him.

Keri dragged himself back over to where Airis was catching his breath, under the guard of the two warriors of House Bælris. “Do you see what I mean?” he gasped, in exhaustion. “We can’t keep doing this. Let me hold here. Go back to the council, and tell them how bad this is. They’re going to have to do something.”

“No,” Airis said, shaking his head, and Keri wanted to scream in frustration. How was it the man still did not understand?

“No, I must remain here,” Airis continued. “I need to command the gap. It is my responsibility to hold the line. You have to go, Inkeris.”

It might have been how tired he was, but Keri merely blinked for a moment, uncomprehending. “Me?’

Airis nodded. “You can tell the council what is happening here as well as I can. Let my family know that I will hold the gap as long as I can, but -” he paused, looked over the defenses, and then continued. “A day or two, perhaps. We can’t last for much longer. We need reinforcements, or something, before then. Pull the troops from Varuna if you have to.

And if we do that, Keri realized, that will be the end of our foothold in Varuna. Ractia will have put us off for months - years. Rather than say that out loud, he merely nodded. “I will be back as soon as I can, with help,” he promised.

He turned west, picking up his pace as he set the stockade at his back. Olavi and Linnea fell in to either side of him without having to be ordered.

“There are horses a quarter mile back,” Olavi said. “With the field hospital.”

“Good.” Keri nodded. “We get three horses there, and ride directly for Al’Fenthia.”

“It will be full dark soon,” Linnea pointed out. “The ride will be more dangerous at night. It’s likely that a few mana beasts have gotten through the gap somehow.”

“We can’t afford to wait,” Keri said, shaking his head. “They may not last another day. We have barely enough time to go and get back, nevermind to talk to the council in between.”

It was impossible to get to the line where the horses had been tied up without seeing and hearing the wounded, and that drove home to Keri just how much they’d already lost. Hundreds of men and women who had been gathered to make war in Varuna were now lying on makeshift beds, bandaged and bleeding, moaning from the pain.

He shook his head. “She’s bleeding us dry before we ever even get to her,” Keri grumbled. When Olavi brought him a saddled horse, he swung up into the saddle, rested the butt of his spear on the toe of his boot, and together they set off for the city at a gallop.