he barely saw it. He cried out and flinched as it hit, but it did not cut him in half, as it would have had he been unprotected. The circle he had made around himself stood firm, the unearthly blade rebounding from the unseen barrier with the screech of a nail drawn across an anvil, magnified a thousand times.
“A sorcerer?” whispered a voice high in the air, somewhere in that bank of fog.
A little girl’s voice, clear and sweet.
“It bears no ring,” answered another voice, seemingly from beneath the earth just beyond Colrean’s circle.
This voice was male, and old, and crotchety.
“It has no staff,” muttered yet another voice from somewhere in the fog.
A deep-voiced woman. A high-pitched man. An adolescent, the voice shifting, changing with every word.
“The circle is well wrought, and adamant,” announced another male voice. “Yet, three strikes shall see it split asunder, or so I judge.”
“Unless it be renewed.”
“Renewed? No ring, no staff. It is mortal. Such a meager vessel; it must have spent its force.”
“Why do we hold back? Strike again, strike again!”
“It smiles. It has a secret. A true wizard comes, we must not tarry.”
“Strike or go, strike or—”
The blade shot out again, and once more every muscle in Colrean’s body tensed, expecting sudden, awful pain and then the perhaps welcome relief of death. But again the circle held with the scream of iron, and the blade whisked back.
Before the Grannoch could strike again, Colrean hurled himself down and sideways out of the circle, breaking its protection himself even as the third strike split the air above him. Like a cockroach he scuttled away, circling behind the rowan, but the fog rolled closer, and the blade came too swiftly for him to fully escape, the very tip of it slicing the heel off Colrean’s left boot and the sole beneath, leaving an agonizing, four-inch-long wound along his foot.
Stifling a sob, Colrean clutched the trunk of the rowan and drew his legs up, hands scrabbling at the chain around his neck. But before he could draw out what was hidden there, the terrible sword came out of the fog once again. Colrean had a split second to know this was the death blow. He shut his eyes and let out the scream that he had been holding back the entire time.
Three seconds later he was still screaming, but he wasn’t dead, and there was no new pain to add to the white-hot burn in his foot.
Colrean opened his eyes, the scream fading in his throat. The sword hung above him, wrapped and roped and entangled in rowan branches, and more branches ran outward to grip a great, grotesque arm of smoking, chancred charcoal hide. Through the suddenly broken and dissipated fog Colrean saw the hideous misshapen body of the Grannoch, the “many-in-one.” Worst of all, he saw its lumpen head, adorned with all those it had taken over centuries, dozens of mostly human faces crammed too tightly together. All eyes dull and lifeless, but the many mouths writhing, emitting cries and curses as the monster tried to free itself from the grip of the ancient rowan.
Colrean resisted the temptation to shut his eyes again, or to look away and vomit. Instead he drew out the chain, his shaking hand closing on the pendant object. But before he could use whatever he held, the Grannoch tore itself out of the grasp of the rowan with the crack of snapping branches and the rasp of shredding bark. But it did not attack again, instead staggering back, great arms reaching to fend off the rowan’s whipping branches, the monster’s many mouths no longer shouting or screaming but exhaling thick streams of fog as it tried to shroud itself again.
Colrean put on the ring of wreathed gold and electrum that he usually kept hidden on the chain, and called forth its power. Muttering memory-hooks, he directed his magic this way and that, lines of force reaching deep into the ground around the Grannoch. Then with one wrenching effort of will, the magic opened a great chasm in the ground, the earth breaking apart with a thunderous blare.
Now the Grannoch reached for the rowan branches, rather than trying to fend them off. But it was too slow, the opening of the ground too deep, too sudden and unexpected. The monster fell into the ravine, spouting streams of fog and curses, the rowan’s branches snapping back to let it go.
Colrean called upon the last reserves in the ring and shut the chasm with a clap of his hands. The electrum wreath crumbled to dust. The gold band shivered, but remained, though it was now powerless and empty.
Even so, it was clearly a sorcerer’s ring, worn on the third finger of Colrean’s right hand, and the sight of it would have settled many bets in the three villages.
For a minute or two the ground groaned and rumbled beneath the sorcerer, as if the very earth might choose to spit the Grannoch out, but eventually it stilled. Colrean, his hands trembling with hurt and shock and only slowly ebbing terror, painfully stripped the boot from his left foot and inspected the wound. It was not deep, but ugly, and even as he half laughed and half sobbed at the irony that it had to be his left foot the Grannoch’s blade had struck, the mage carefully summoned a fraction of the remaining power he held ready in himself. Calling a cauterizing flame to his hand, he used it to cleanse and seal the angry wound.
When he was finished, he tore the tail from his linen shirt and bound it around his foot. That done, he rested his forehead against the rowan’s trunk and gave thanks in a quiet whisper. He had hoped it was an ancient guardian of the kind that reviled such things as the Grannoch, but he had not been sure.
When he lifted his forehead from the tree, the rowan’s branches shivered, and a single leaf fell into his hand, a leaf more silver in the moonlight than any normal rowan’s. Colrean carefully put it inside his jerkin.
“I thank the rowan,” he said formally, gingerly hopping up onto his right foot. He almost fell over, and would have done if he hadn’t caught himself, both hands against the rowan’s trunk. “For all.”
He stood there for some time, supported by the tree. Listening, letting his otherworldly senses stretch outward, fearing that the ground might burst open to reveal the Grannoch was not crushed and dead far below, as he truly hoped.
But everything seemed once again returned to the normal business of the night. There was no fog, no silence, just the soft velvet darkness lightened by moon and stars, and the usual small sounds of life and death.
After a time that felt long but he knew was well short of an hour, Colrean began to hold some hope that he might now survive until the dawn. If he made it that far, he should survive the day beyond, as he had some expectation that help would come before the next night. An oath-bound, trustworthy wizard would likely come from Ferraul or Achelliston, as both cities were within a day’s hard riding. Less, using post-horses and a little magic to draw away fatigue and renew tired muscles.
He had even begun to imagine just such a wizard, when he both heard and felt the approach of something that, while it sounded rather like a horse, he knew from his mage-sense was not. Once again, the natural creatures about knew it too, and all around the owls were fleeing, the field mice diving into holes, the very crickets digging under the barley stalks, all hoping like Colrean to stay alive until the dawn.
There was nowhere for Colrean to hide, and he could not flee. Instead he drew himself up, only one hand resting against the rowan’s trunk. He looked across at the stone, and the staff thrust into it. Again he wondered who had put it there, a
