As her unnatural body thrived and the tendrils of her forest conquered the barren territory, her mind unlocked more of what it remembered, revealing esoteric and deadly magic that she could use.
The wizard Nathan and the sorceress Nicci had searched for a way to destroy the Lifedrinker, and she had no doubt they were applying themselves with as much determination to eliminate her—and Victoria would not stand for it. She felt the power of life, the power of the Creator, and knew she was stronger than any magic those two adversaries could hurl against her.
Even so, she did not underestimate their abilities.
Although Nicci claimed credit for killing the evil Lifedrinker, Victoria knew that the Eldertree acorn was truly responsible for that triumph. The sorceress was undeniably powerful, nevertheless, and Victoria did not want to be hindered in her sacred work. She already knew that Nicci was a nuisance, interfering where she was not wanted.
Although Nathan Rahl’s ability to use magic was minimal, perhaps even imaginary, he was a man with great knowledge and experience, and thus a threat to her as well. There was something about the man, and Victoria did not wish to be sanguine about him, either.
They both must be stopped.
In the thriving thickets, trees, vines, and mushrooms swelled around her like a bubbling life spring. The buzz of swarming flies, bees, and beetles hummed an intense lullaby. As her wisdom and power expanded, Victoria recalled forgotten methods and incantations that the ancient wizards had sealed behind the camouflage shroud, preserved for millennia among the memmers.
With that knowledge, Victoria understood how to create a weapon to eradicate both Nicci and Nathan, perhaps a weapon strong enough to tear down Cliffwall, stone by stone. To activate the magic, Victoria didn’t even need to move, because she was the forest, all the stirrings within, all the leaves and branches, the wings of insects, the flutter of birds. Everything belonged to her, was part of her.
She released the magic to create her emissary, an assassin, a manifestation of the jungle’s primeval power: a shaksis. A shaksis was a creature molded entirely of debris, the detritus of the forest.
With her mind and her magic, Victoria gathered up fallen branches and gnarled twigs to serve as the bones and framework for the shaksis. She wove them together, building a wooden skeleton around which, with whiplike speed, she wound grass blades and dry leaves, forest mulch, and thorny twigs. Fungi inflated to fill out the muscles.
Victoria summoned an army of worms, beetles, maggots, and other crawling creatures to expand the creature’s body. By the time the magical construct extended its arms and took tentative steps, its entire form boiled with a thousand points of life.
Two iridescent beetles, each as large as a fist, scuttled along the forest floor and crawled up the thing’s body framework. Its rounded head was woven of bent twigs and supple willow, skinned with bark, thatched with dry grasses. Two hollows formed in what should have been its face, and the beetles crawled up the construct’s head and nestled into the sockets to serve as surrogate eyes. A splintered branch across its lower face made a gash of a mouth. It clacked and chewed, broken spikes grinding together.
Pale green vines looped around its legs, winding and weaving into its flesh, like blood vessels filled with sap. The shaksis creaked as it stepped forward. It folded and unfolded its sharp branchlet fingers, while the two beetles inside its eye sockets stared out with a faceted, malevolent gaze.
Made of the jungle itself, the shaksis was Victoria’s puppet, her surrogate, her killer, a soulless thing that was merely an extension of the primeval forest.
Victoria flashed it a warm and welcoming smile, a maternal smile. She stroked the uneven chest, feeling the life she had deposited there, a new child she had created. Into its hollow mind, she placed the details of its mission—images of the blond sorceress and the pompous old wizard with straight white hair.
“Find them and kill them,” Victoria said. “Go with my blessing.”
The animated construct turned and, with a rustle of brittle limbs, stalked out of the forest toward Cliffwall.
CHAPTER 64
As he scouted through the gathering darkness, Bannon felt brave and important. After all his ordeals, he no longer hid from his past, no longer pretended that those dark memories didn’t exist. He was not just Bannon, the son of a man who drank himself into blind violence and abused his family, a bitter man who drowned helpless kittens and beat his own wife to death. No, Bannon was no longer defined by his father.
Standing tall, he marched into the moonlit night on his scouting mission, wending his way through the still-dead foothills. Though the grasses and scrub trees were dry and brittle, he no longer felt the Lifedrinker’s poison oozing from the hillsides. This was more like a normal landscape after a long winter: not dead but dormant, waiting to reawaken with spring. Now that the evil wizard was defeated, seeds would germinate, shoots would arise, meadows and forests would creep back.
But Victoria had been too impatient for that natural process. With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, Bannon considered the harm she had done with her explosive fecundity spell. Rather than letting the Scar awaken of its own accord, Victoria had effectively dashed icy water into the face of a deeply ill person.
He gritted his teeth as he trudged into the night, making his way toward the expanding jungle boundary. He paused to rest near a moonlit boulder and took out his waterskin to drink while he listened to the vast starlit darkness. He could sense the vibrating power of the proliferating forest and could hear the inevitable sounds of cracking, straining branches, growing trunks, writhing vines, stirring leaves. Combined, it sounded like evil laughter.
A sad shiver ran down his spine. He knew that Audrey, Laurel, and Sage were there in that mass of wild growth, corrupted by Victoria’s out-of-control magic. His heart ached for them. He remembered their touch, their kisses, their laughter. He smiled to think of their warm breath in his ears, how he had loved to stroke their hair, touch their bodies. They couldn’t be gone now! They were beautiful, wonderful, loving.
Then he fought back a wave of nausea as he recalled what they had done to Simon. If the scholar-archivist had not shoved him out of the way in his eagerness to go forward, Bannon would have been the one ripped into ribbons of meat, his blood spilled onto the soil to spawn more of their awful magic.
He pressed his knuckles hard into his eyes, wanting that memory to be just a dream, a nightmare … but it was real, in exactly the way his mother’s murder had been real, the way he had abandoned Ian to the slavers. It was not a memory he could pretend would ever go away.
Feeling the hairs tingle on the back of his neck, he stepped away from the boulder, alert, sniffing the air. He whirled and looked above him to see Mrra crouched on the rock outcropping, her feline form sandy gold in the moonlight. The big cat let out a growling purr, but Bannon did not feel threatened. The sand panther knew who he was, possibly even understood that he was the one who had begged Nicci to heal her wounds, rather than kill her.
Mrra just sat there watching the night. As Bannon studied the powerful tawny form and the ugly symbols branded onto her hide, he was no longer reminded of the helpless drowned kittens. He was glad he had saved her, and in a sense, he had saved part of himself as well. Those limp, dead kittens had been a symbol of grief and guilt. The Adjudicator had found that agonizing experience inside him and dragged it to the front of Bannon’s mind as his damnation.
Running away from Chiriya Island, he had sought a life for himself, not just for adventure but for self-preservation. Since then, he had found all he could have hoped for by joining Nathan and Nicci. He had discovered not just exciting adventures, but friendship, acceptance, and inner strength.
He realized that he had been fooling himself with the illusion of a perfect life, but the things he had discovered since venturing out into the world were so much more. More than anything, he remembered the look of respect and appreciation that Nicci had given him after he helped her kil
l the Lifedrinker. He had risked his life, given his all, and they had been victorious together. He didn’t think his life could get better than that moment. Such thoughts eased his heavy memories of the bad things that had happened to him.
With a swish of her tail, Mrra vanished like a moon shadow into the night. After taking another swig of water, Bannon made his way onward, still hoping against hope that he could save the young acolytes who had so captured his heart, although he feared it might be too late.
* * *
The moon had set, and the night held its breath while waiting for the dawn. When Bannon finally reached the edge of the ever-spreading jungle, the demarcation was abrupt, with desolation on one side and a madness of foliage on the other. He could smell the leaves and the resinous wood, the potent aromas of wild vegetation.
Sword raised, Bannon faced the primeval forest, hoping he would not have to go inside. The twitching branches and gnarled, spasming vines unsettled him, but he shored up his courage. Drawing a deep breath, he called out, “I’ve come for you!” He meant to shout, but it came out as no more than a whisper. His voice cracked.
The vegetation snaked and curled. In the starlight, as his pupils dilated with fear, he spotted more movement, heard a stirring that was more than frenetically growing plants. They had heard him.
Beautiful feminine forms glided between the trunks, branches, and undulating vines. Even with the camouflage of their mottled skin, he could make out the beautiful bodies that were so familiar to him.
He said, “I came to save you.”
Though the young women were fundamentally transformed, he still recognized Audrey, Laurel, and Sage. His breath was hot in his mouth, and his pulse raced. He had seen what these forest women could do, and he knew they were monsters … yet still he wanted them. Their enhanced scent was thick in the air, making him dizzy.
“Come with me,” he begged. “We can go back to Cliffwall. We’ll find a spell to make you normal again. Don’t you want to be with me?”
They laughed in unison, a musical sound that made all the branches stir. “Don’t be silly,” said the thing that had been Sage. “We are so much more now. Why don’t you come with us? Think of how we could pleasure you with all of our new skills.”
Bannon could barely breathe. His vision blurred. They seemed more intensely lovely than he remembered them, more than anyone he’d ever seen, any woman he could imagine. Something about their scent …
Flowers suddenly sprang up all around them, a spray of intense violet-and-crimson blossoms that he recognized with a shudder. The deathrise flower! The smell made him dizzy, and in the back of his mind he knew that Nicci must have been wrong about these blossoms, because surely this was the most beautiful, exquisite poison in the world!