The Council of Beasts (The Orion Trilogy Book 3) by Darius Hinks

Author:Darius Hinks [Hinks, Darius]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Atolmis rode hard, thundering through the shadows, his spear extended before him. When the forest began to die, Naieth had joined them, bringing dark prophecies and fresh, powerful steeds – piebald stags, with amber runes blazing between their eyes and antlers that spiralled around their proud, equine faces. The prophecies had not been much help, but the stags made Atolmis’s heart sing.

There was a dull crunch as his spear tore through the chest of a daemon. He kept riding and slammed his prey against the bole of a tree. The tree was as rotten as everything else and it collapsed, spraying splinters and maggots through the air.

The horned priest rode on with the daemon struggling on his spear. It was a grinning, humanoid creature with russet, wrinkled skin and a single, yellow tusk jutting up from its forehead.

His face remained expressionless as the thing began hauling its rotten body down the length of the spear towards him. The stag knew, without any signal from Atolmis, to break from the grove of rotten trees and make for the shoulder of a nearby hill. They reached the summit and, just as the daemon was about to grasp Atolmis’s arm, the stag came to a halt, digging its hooves into the ground and hurling the daemon from the brow of the hill.

It grinned as it fell, tumbling into a deep crevasse. After a few seconds, it clipped the edge of the gulley and its skull exploded, spraying bone and black blood. Atolmis could still see the daemon’s expression for a few more minutes as it fell into the darkness below. He noticed that, even as its body was torn apart by the rocks, it never stopped smiling.

‘Blood, bark and bone,’ he muttered, attempting to calm himself by repeating the mantra, but the smile stayed with him.

He turned the stag around and looked back down the slope. His fellow priests were finishing off the last of the daemons. The valley was almost clear and they were less than a mile from the Crowfoot Falls – their destination and the setting for all of Naieth’s recent dreams.

He looked around for the witch and felt a moment’s fear as he failed to locate her. It occurred to him that, in all the long centuries they had served Ariel and Orion, he had never really considered how much she meant to him. With no king or queen to follow, and no clear hope of seeing them again, Naieth’s obscure visions were all he had to follow. Everything he trusted had been overturned. His life was guided by ritual and rite, but his rituals were now meaningless – they were tied to Orion and the changing of the seasons. Now there was no Orion – nor any seasons. He was lost in his own forest. Naieth was all he had.

He glimpsed her copper tangle of hair through the branches and relaxed. She was moving from tree to tree, examining each rotten husk for signs of life.

Atolmis rode the stag back down the slope and dismounted, stepping back beneath the drooping boughs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.