War of the Fathers

by Dan Decker

  Chapter 31

  Adar gripped his blaster as he watched the street below fill with Hunwei. It could have been five minutes or it could have been two hours since Tere had jumped out the window. Adar didn't know. The anger was at bay now. He would hunt down Tere and kill him, but he wouldn't be a mad man running amok. No, he'd be careful. He would search out Tere and take him when he was off his guard. The man didn't deserve the honor of a fair fight.

  There was the roar of a ship flying overhead as Adar focused on the alley where Tere had disappeared. The Hunwei had continued to come, gathering with their prisoners, and sorting them into groups.

  Was that a human face peering out of a Hunwei helmet? When Adar looked back trying to find the face, he didn’t see it again, and wrote it off as his imagination.

  It was too late to run. Hunwei surrounded the building and the tower was armed. Adar wasn’t sure how long they had left, but if he was going to be responsible for the deaths of all these people, as least he would face what he’d done. He ran out of the archives, made his way down the stairs, to the now unrecognizable and rubble strewn meeting hall. The town hall was empty now and he made good time.

  The meeting hall ceiling had mostly caved in but it was still passable. The mural was gone. When Adar crossed through the meeting hall, he made sure of his steps to avoid as much noise as possible. When he got to the town hall entrance, he noticed that the guards they had overcome earlier were gone. He hoped that they had made it away, but suspected that they had been rounded up by the Hunwei. The door was no longer on its hinges and the table the guards had used for gambling had been broken in half. The room smelled of alcohol and he noticed a broken wine bottle underneath the table.

  Adar slid up against the wall by the door and peered out. More than a dozen ships had landed in the field between the town hall and what used to be the governor’s palace. The governor’s palace had once been was much less impressive than the town hall. Whereas the town hall was still standing, the palace was a pile of rubble. In several places, there were still standing walls, but the grand structure was beyond repair. Had the Hunwei known the difference between the palace and the town hall and known it was the seat of power for the city?

  Adar hoped not. The Hunwei already had a superior enough advantage with their ships and overwhelming weapons. He hoped it was happenstance that they'd focused on the true seat of power, instead of the largest building.

  From his vantage point, he could make out women and children being loaded aboard while men were separated into another group. It was all he could do not to make a one-man suicide mission to try to save them. Instead, he focused on the smaller version of the Vigorock tower. It didn’t look any different since he’d armed it and tried to gauge how long it had been. He came up blank. The fight with Tere was still fresh on his mind, and had warped his sense of time.

  Maybe it had all been for nothing. Could he really expect that the weapon would still work more than a thousand years later? He couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. He was torn between wanting to deal a severe blow to the Hunwei and not wanting innocent people to die in the process.

  Adar was disturbed from his thoughts by a sound from behind. Cursing, he turned. He had picked a fine time to get lost in thought. Two Hunwei had just walked in from the meeting hall. Adar aimed his blaster at the first Hunwei, which was the taller of the two, and his shot ripped into the chest of the Hunwei.

  Before he could turn his blaster to the second, the other had ripped Adar's blaster away. The next thing he knew he was looking into the muzzle of a blaster with a very angry Hunwei on the other end.

  Adar ducked and grabbed for the blaster, but the Hunwei was prepared and kicked Adar's legs out from underneath him. Adar rolled, and was charging into the legs of the Hunwei, when an arrow exploded out of the Hunwei’s neck. Blue blood dribbled down the neck of the Hunwei as he and the Hunwei fell to the ground. When he recognized a black tipped arrow point, he felt a flutter of hope. It was a match for the black tipped dagger the Ou Qui had given to him.

  Adar grabbed the dead Hunwei’s blaster and fired a shot into another Hunwei that had just appeared in the doorway of the meeting hall. It wasn’t until after he’d fired that he realized there was already an arrow protruding out of the Hunwei’s neck.

  Turning back to the door that looked outside, Adar took a deep breath and ran towards the tower. A thought had just occurred to him and he kicked himself for not seeing it earlier. Perhaps now that the tower was activated he could use his thumb to get in.

  As Adar ran out into the open, he tried not to think about what he was doing. It was quite possibly the stupidest thing he had ever done. There was movement all around him as the Hunwei took notice of his idiotic run. Several blasts came his way, but thankfully, they missed. One of the blasts in particular had come close to robbing him of a hand. It would have been a hard loss to deal with but at least he would have been alive.

  When he was less than ten feet away from the tower, he noticed that it was glowing. There wasn't time to examine it more closely because he heard footsteps coming from behind. He turned, bringing up his blaster, but he was too late. A Hunwei barreled into him, slamming him into the tower and pushing a blaster up against his neck. Adar fired into the Hunwei’s feet at the same time an arrow ripped through the Hunwei’s throat.

  Melyah, those Ou Qui were deadly accurate with their bows. Adar hoped never to be on the receiving end of one. Despite his anxious state, he noticed the surprised and painful look in the Hunwei’s eyes as he pushed the dying Hunwei away from him.

  When Adar looked back at the town hall, he was surprised to see that it was surrounded by Ou Qui. At first glance, Adar thought there was only several hundred, but then he surveyed everywhere else and saw that there were several thousand.

  The Ou Qui were fighting the Hunwei.

  It looked like a battle between monsters because the Ou Qui looked strange with their odd but very effective camouflage. Adar had found himself wishing for such a disguise several times during the last several weeks.

  When he saw an Ou Qui jump off the roof of the town hall, he was taken aback. A moment later, another followed. Surely, they couldn't survive the four-story fall? The two Ou Qui landed and took off at a run.

  Adar couldn't believe what he was seeing. The Hunwei must have been surprised as well because many of the Hunwei converged to fire on the Ou Qui at once. When the blasts hit them, the Ou Qui were unfazed, even though some of their camouflage was blasted away revealing metal underneath.

  Adar stared. Those weren't Ou Qui.

  Metalmen. Another legend come to life? he thought, as he recognized the Ou Qui bows and arrows in the hands of the metalmen.

  Adar turned back to the tower hoping there was a way to disarm it from the inside and found that he had to shield his eyes because it was now glowing bright yellow. A red mist had formed around the tower, giving it the appearance of being on fire, and a low rumbling whine sung out from the structure.

  The mist began to spin around the tower, slowly gaining momentum as air was sucked towards it. The red mist was growing, and rather fast at that. When Adar realized he was in the middle of it, he broke from his trance and ran.

  Several Hunwei were nearby, staring frozen at the tower, fear covering their faces. Despite his imminent death, Adar was happy to see that the Hunwei too could feel fear. All around him the air started tingling; he ran faster but found that he wasn't outrunning the sensation.

  When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw that the red mist had taken on a more solid appearance. Without warning, it burst with a thunderous explosion, showering twisting balls of lighting into the air. The sound was deafening and a mighty wind rushed out from it, knocking Adar to the ground. Once it had passed, he heard the others screaming as he lay waiting to die. That was when he realized that he didn’t feel any different.

  He wasn’t dying.

  The wind continued to rush over
him, keeping him from sitting up. He looked for the Hunwei nearest him. They too had been knocked to the ground and the screams he'd heard were coming from them. Adar crawled over to the nearest and stopped several feet away, not able to get any closer. The Hunwei armor was glowing red and it was too hot from this distance—even with the wind—to approach. Smoke billowed out of it and was carried away by the wind.

  After several minutes, the wind ceased. Adar got to his feet and even though he still couldn’t get any closer, he could now see inside the armor. The flesh of the Hunwei had burned away, leaving behind the charred skull. All the Hunwei that he could see were dead in a similar fashion. Adar ran to a nearby ship and found women and children cowering in the corners of the large compartment. It took some urging but he was able to get them to move out. He went from ship to ship, yelling that it was safe to come out.

  The weapon had worked. It was hard to suppress his elation. Despite all odds, they had found something that could be used to fight the Hunwei.

  Adar had just convinced the occupants of another ship hold to flee when he remembered Tere. He had to get to the arch. It was likely that Tere hadn't stuck around to see what had happened after Adar had armed the tower. The tablet had been communicating with the ancient dialect of the fathers. Had Tere even understood it? Adar racked his brain trying to remember if Tere spoke the language.

  He came up with nothing. If Tere knew what it could do, he wouldn't wait for the others. He'd run back to Abel. Adar had foolishly shown them all the arch that led to Rarbon. It would have been better if Adar had only shown Jorad. Well, there was no helping that now. He'd go after Tere and get the tablet back.

  As Adar walked out of the loading bay of the ship, he saw several Hunwei moving towards another ship. Cursing, Adar looked around for a blaster, but there wasn’t a Hunwei corpse nearby. He’d been careless and should have picked up a blaster immediately.

  As the Hunwei boarded a ship, one looked back and Adar was surprised to see a human face peering out from inside the Hunwei armor. Only then did he realize that they were too small to be Hunwei because they stood several feet shorter. They disappeared into the ship and the ship took off.

  Adar hadn’t been imagining things after all; the Hunwei had humans working with them. He felt a cold chill creep into his heart as he watched the ship disappear north.