Jukung stepped across the line before Soen could reach him.
The waters of the river exploded upward with a crashing like ocean waves, but the water did not fall back into the riverbed; instead, it shifted and broke into hands, arms, fingers, and bodies. Hair of froth cascaded off of heads of incredible beauty whose transparency gelled more solidly by the moment.
Jukung stepped back, turning toward the monstrous multitude rising from the water at his side. The Matei stick flared, pulsing in waves at the onrushing tide of horror. The figures were battered by its force, twisted, wrenched, and shattered, only to re-form.
Soen stopped at the edge of the patterned line, his own Matei staff held uselessly in front of him.
The bolters backed away into the pool. They, too, could see the robes of the Codexia on either side of the waterfall’s crest. The human male held his sword at the ready, but even from here Soen could sense the panic of the surrounded and cornered prey.
Soen opened his mouth and raged in anger, his howl tearing through the air around the pool. There was nothing he could do. Too late he had seen the faery line-the pattern in the ground demarking the unquestioned realm of the fae and their power. Murialis had been busy on the frontier and had claimed more land than the Emperor had taken notice of.
Jukung screamed. The water nymphs had reached him at last, tearing the Matei staff from his hands. They pulled him over the pool, clawing at his robes, his hair, his flesh. They twisted him back and forth as though he were being tossed upon the waves of some unseen storm at sea.
The Assesia tumbled through the air. Tossed by the water nymphs, he slammed back-first against the ragged stones that formed the wall of the ravine. His body fell heavily to the ground. Jukung lay screaming incoherently just at the edge of the faery line.
For a moment, Soen moved to stretch his own Matei staff in to where Jukung lay but, cursing, stopped himself. The faery line would almost certainly discharge his staff the moment he pushed it across the line just as it had rendered Jukung’s staff useless.
Soen gazed down at the screaming Assesia. He could see terrible welts ballooning on Jukung’s tortured face: acid burns from the touch of the angered nymphs. Unchecked, it would literally melt the face from the Iblisi.
Soen frantically looked about him and then saw it: a thick branch jutting out from the tree growing at the upper edge of the ravine. At once, he pointed his Matei staff upward and uttered the words. A column of brilliant light flared upward, severing the branch. It crashed downward, nearly knocking the Inquisitor off his feet.
The nymphs had regrouped in the water and were surging again toward where Jukung lay.
Soen wrapped his arms around the thick branch, thrusting it past the faery line as he yelled. “Jukung! Take it! Hold on!”
The Assesia felt the hands of the nymphs wrap around his feet and ankles. His hands flailed in panic, falling on the branch and gripping it fiercely.
Soen braced his feet where he squatted and then in a single motion used his legs to push away from the faery line, applying all the strength he had to pull Jukung free.
The nymphs were not prepared. Their prey slipped from their grasp in a single lurch, tumbling back over the faery line and falling atop the now prone Inquisitor. Soen rolled the elf off of him, the cloying smell of sizzling flesh filling his nostrils. He quickly picked up his staff and pointed it at the Assesia.
The agonized Iblisi fell with sudden silence into a deep and gratefully dreamless sleep.
Soen lowered his staff and stood upright just short of the faery line, turning to stare at the man he knew was called Drakis.
The human stared back at the elven Inquisitor as he crouched uncertainly with his sword in hand and a human woman behind him. He protects her, Soen observed. He has something to fight for.
At the top of the falls, the bodies of Qinsei and Phang tumbled forward, rebounding off the stone face of the falls before falling among the wet rocks. Neither moved. Soen had no doubt that they had been dead since before he arrived at the pool.
The manticore and the chimerian fled first up the far slope. The two women followed them, urged on at last by the dwarf as all disappeared among the dark trees of the Murialis Woods. Only the tall manticore remained, pulling at the human to follow.
“Drakis,” Soen called as cold and still as death. “Wait.”