DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) Read Online Free PDF Page A

are not being baited,” Brother Francis remarked, an obvious fear given the ease of the rout.
    Pony, standing quietly next to him, staring hard at the opaque veil that had kept so much from her eyes, didn’t fear that possibility. She simply had a sense that it was not so, that Kalas and his Allheart knights had not gone off into great danger.
    Something about the whole battle hadn’t seemed … right.
    She thought about taking up a hematite then, and spirit-walking across the field, through the veil of mist to watch the Duke’s moves more closely. But she dismissed the notion with a shake of her head.
    “What is it?” the observant Brother Braumin asked.
    “Nothing at all,” Pony replied, running her hand through her damp mop of thick blond hair. She continued to stare out at the mist, continued to listen to the cries of battle and dying powries, continued to feel that something here was not quite right. “Nothing at all.”
    F rom a copse across the field, another set of eyes curiously watched the spectacle of battle. Bedraggled, wet, and miserable with a scraggly beard, his monk’s robes long ago tattered by inner demons, Marcalo De’Unnero could not understand how a substantial powrie force—and he figured any force that would go so boldly against Palmaris had to be substantial—had arrived on the field so suddenly without his noticing the approach. He had been here for several days, seeking food and shelter, trying to stay alive and stay sane. He had watched every movement of the few farmers who had dared to come back out from within the walls of their city, to sit buttoned down in their modest homes for the winter. He had spent long hours studying the graceful movements of the skittish animals.
    Mostly De’Unnero had watched the animals, his primary prey. He could sense their moods now, could see the world as they did, and he had noted no unusual smell of fear in the air that any approaching army, especially one dragging machines as large as catapults, would likely provoke.
    So where had the powries come from?
    De’Unnero made his way back into the copse and through the trees, at last sighting the catapult—just a single war engine—and its crew, its human crew, in a small lea amid the trees. The gunners, as far as he had discerned, had lobbed but a single shot and appeared in no hurry to load and fire another.
    “Clever Duke Kalas,” De’Unnero, the former brother justice, remarked, figuring out the ruse and the purpose behind it.
    He hushed immediately, hearing the snap of a twig not so far away. Close enough for him to smell the blood.
    “Yach, damned swordsman,” he heard a powrie grumble, then he spotted the bloody cap dwarf, trudging along a path.
    Then De’Unnero spotted the gash on the dwarf’s shoulder, a bright line of blood crystal clear to him despite the fog. Yes, he saw it and smelled it, the sweet fragrance filling his nostrils, permeating his senses.
    He felt the first convulsions of change an instant later, growled quietly against the sudden, sharp pains in his fingers and toes, and then in his jaw—the transformation of the jaw always hurt the most.
    De’Unnero’s shoulders lurched forward suddenly as his spine twisted. He fell to all fours, but that was a more comfortable position anyway, as his hips rotated.
    Now he was a cat, a great orange, black-striped tiger.
    “Damned,” the approaching powrie cursed. “Said ’e wouldn’t hit me so hard!”
    The last words vanished in the powrie’s throat as the dwarf came on guard, sensing suddenly that he was not alone. He started to turn back, but swung in a terrified rush as the brush rustled and the great cat leaped over him, bearing him to the ground with frightening speed and ease. The dwarf flailed wildly and tried to call out, but the cat paws were quicker and stronger, hooking leathery skin and forcing the powrie’s arms away. The powerful jaws clamped onto his throat.
    A moment later, De’Unnero began his morning