by T J Marquis
He scanned the ground, knowing he’d been foolish to think he could travel with his eyes off the road ahead. He might have seen his foes if he’d been attentive. But how had they known where he would be?
Jon caught sight of his shooter in a foxhole dug into the scrubby flats below, just as another round was fired. He dove down through the air to dodge and close the distance. Before he landed, the shooter launched a flare and scrambled to flee from his compromised cover. Jon hit the ground and drew his sword, infusing its blade with white light. In moments he’d shifted from careless traveler to agitated predator. The shooter was right to be afraid.
It turned out to be a human, clothed in a poorly crafted ghillie suit. Its gait was uneven, its flight painfully slow. Jon sheathed his sword, caught up to the shooter, and spun it around. It was a man with a malnourished face, skin that hung from misshapen features, one eye drooping slightly. Jon’s anger faded. The man’s mouth was scarred at the corners, and he was trying to say something, but all that came out was, “Muh. Muh.” He dropped his rifle and held up his hands in a warding gesture.
“Who sent you?” Jon asked firmly.
The man understood him, and cupped his hands over his eyes, casting them into shadow.
“The dark man,” Jon said. The shooter turned his head to one side and spat. “How did he know where I was?”
The shooter put his hands to his temples and shook his head. He didn’t know. He reached around to the hilt of Jon’s sword and tapped it once before Jon danced away defensively. The man tapped his chest and adopted a pleading expression, he made the motion of driving a dagger between his ribs, then pointed to Jon.
“You want to die?” Jon asked, and the man nodded excitedly, mouth an ‘O’ of desperation. “I can’t,” Jon shook his head. The man groaned.
But why couldn’t he? He’d already killed hundreds in battle, and this man would have harmed him if not for the armor of light. Yet clearly his service to the dark man was not voluntary, or else he might still possess his tongue. Would it be a mercy? It was vaguely tempting, possibly heroic in some twisted way, but Jon just couldn’t get there.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Aaafffah,” the man attempted to say. Afar? Athar? Jon chose the second.
“Are there more snipers, Athar?”
The man nodded, drew an arc in the air toward the northeast. However the dark man had known Jon’s whereabouts, he’d also surmised Jon’s destination. He shouldn’t be surprised. Where else in these parts would a wizard be headed in a time of war. The dark man had been here for millennia, few strategies would surprise him.
Freeing this man would probably be a death sentence at this point, whether for his failure to harm Jon or through the slow means of slavery, but it was the lesser of the evils as far as Jon could see. He confiscated Athar’s rifle and sliced it in half with a blade of light. He pointed west, toward Katal. It was a long walk, but the man’s pack was full. Perhaps he’d make it, and the Nulians would not bother to find him. Either way, Jon couldn’t stick around to see the outcome, so he took flight again, now fixing his eyes intently on the way ahead.
The next ambush was inevitable but surprising. This time an upward rain of bullets streaked by, just missing him. It took Jon several moments to locate the men firing from cover. In that short span he had the time to think that mercy might not be an option this time. He could try to speed past, but if there were another nest of snipers ahead or to either side, he’d just put himself in more danger. He knew from his friends’ accounts that he had taken a huge amount of direct fire when engaged with the Nulian vanguard, but then he’d been in a blind rage of power fueled by the light’s proximity to the evil undead. He wasn’t sure how much he could handle while having to focus on survival consciously.
Jon dropped swiftly to the ground and into a crouch, behind a low rise in the land. Sun-baked brush and tall golden grass helped to obscure his position. A light wind ruffled the brush, and his foes made no sound. He could imagine their feelings, at least if these were also humans. Surely no single Nulian fighter or slave had any real desire to be thrown into combat with a wizard. Could he use that to his advantage?
“I have come to free you!” he yelled over the quiet flats, and waited. It was true, he would free them if he could, if anything were just that easy. “The reign of the Nulian god is over! Come back to Enkann! Come back to your home.”
There was no response.
Jon called the light to life, wrapping extra layers of protection around his head, and peeked over the brush cautiously. No one fired. He could see the camouflaged mounds of a half-dozen foxholes fifty meters away, several rifles aimed in different directions. They didn’t know exactly where he was. Then a pair of eyes gleamed in the shadows of the nearest foxhole, the rifle retracted, and a man emerged, hands up in surrender, walking toward his position. Jon was about to speak to him, but shots rang out, and the man fell, riddled with the bullets of his comrades.
Athar’s rifle had been bolt-action. Jon would have a few seconds at most to close the gap as the men in cover worked their bolts. That was assuming no surprises. He didn’t think, but launched himself around to the left, racing along the ground as light infused his muscles. The foxholes traced an arc perhaps twenty meters across. Jon reached out with his mind and one hand, thinking, up, and the ground inside the arc erupted in a shower of dirt, rocks and fluttering blades of parched grass. The debris would obscure any line of sight to him.
Jon drew his sword as he ran, with a fleeting thought that he needed to move its sheath to his waist, and dove into the second foxhole. A sniper waited there but did not get off a shot before Jon bisected his rifle with his red blade, taking a few of the man’s fingers with it. The other snipers fired their next volley at Jon’s position, and he felt a few of the shots connect, while others pounded into the dirt. Jon burst out of the foxhole, his aura burning the net that had covered it, and used the moment to close with his next combatant.
The man’s rifle was trained on him, but Jon yanked it into the air before he could pull the trigger, willing it into his hand across the short distance. He tossed it on the ground and ruined it with a swipe of his blade. The remaining men did not fire again. In unspoken accord they abandoned their posts with their hands up, casting their guns on the ground in Jon’s direction. None of them looked to be in any better shape than the first shooter. Jon pointed his sword to the west and growled at them, and they fled in that direction, one of them stooping to retrieve his pack. The man whose rifle Jon had taken followed them, as did the one who’d lost a few fingers.
Now he was among the foxholes, Jon could see where the shooters had hidden a vehicle under a net of camouflage. It had huge fat tires and sat high on its suspension. It looked to be armored much like the Zansari’s black limousines but was painted brown. None of the shooters made a move to retrieve the transport.
Jon watched them go. When they were out of sight he sighed and leaned back against one of the mounds of earth, swinging his pack to the ground. He unfastened the sheath Dahm had made for him and moved it to his waist. Unsheathing the sword from behind his back was just too cumbersome. He took some time to eat and recover his wits.
Battling these pitiful slaves utterly lacked the thrill he’d felt when meting white-hot judgment out upon the Nulians’ undead drones. They weren’t here of their own free will, so the power in him sensed no evil to catalyze his rage.
If emplacements like this were to be the pattern along his route, there was no way he would make it back to Centrifuge before the siege began. Had he chosen wrong? Maybe he should turn back.
Or was this the dark man’s intent? To cause him doubt and turn him away from his goals. Or to slow him down enough to make him miss the siege? These questions revealed only that he needed to know his enemy better.
Perhaps he should just eradicate everything that challenged him. Applying maximum force would still eat up time and energy, but time was the greater commodity.
Anything that conserved that precious resource might be worthwhile.
He shook his head at himself. He couldn’t kill the slaves unless he’d been backed into a corner. He never could have imagined that he would wish to encounter something like a pack of mindless zombies in battle, but there it was.
This situation called for sharper wit.
Or maybe not… Maybe he just needed to push some other aspect of his power further. Speed. If he flew too fast for the snipers to track him, he wouldn’t have to bother with landing to defeat them. The enemy would probably shift tactics as well, but Jon would gain ground in the meantime.
When his hunger was sated, Jon took to the sky and thought back to his long freefall from the heights of the Keep. He stoked the light in his veins and muscles with energy ripped from the air around him and focused his mind on that sensation of terminal speed. Bootstrapping his own body with his mind immediately became less trivial than it had previously felt, and the air around him warmed as its mass yielded energy to his will. Sudden acceleration slammed his brain into the back of his skull, his stomach into his feet, and he launched off into the northeast with a momentary haze of grey at the edges of his vision.
His increased speed alone wouldn’t have tripped up an experienced sniper, but Jon also increased his altitude to make himself a smaller target. Within an hour of rushed flight, any snipers that might be hiding in the wilds below had stopped even trying to shoot him. He wondered what would come next.
Hesitantly he slowed, not wanting to use up more energy than was necessary. It was clear now that this would not be the simple journey he had foolishly expected. That knowledge only hardened his resolve. If the dark man feared a wizard’s visit to these two ancient landmarks, then Jon would see to it that fear was warranted.
He kept his senses trained on his surroundings, dipping closer to the ground every now and then to test the waters. There were no further attacks before he stopped for the day.
Jon made camp that night in a stand of trees on a lone hill above the savannah. He scolded himself inwardly for spending the last night so carelessly, giving no thought at all to security. But he needed rest, and there was no one to rotate watch duty with. If he were a real wizard like Rae or Dahm, there would probably be some spell or ward he could conjure up to act as a tripwire or other trap. He imagined that with training he could learn how such things should be constructed, but all he’d figured out for himself to this point was how to apply his power as force, with little finesse.
Now was not the time for magic practice. Was this a puzzle he could solve with brute force?
It came to him then, something he’d forgotten because he kept it hidden on purpose.
That twisted bloodlight, presumably fed or powered through some connection with Jon’s bloodshed. It wasn’t something he felt prepared to face, especially as he worked to reassess the journey before him, but it had protected him before.
Jon took a deep breath and called the bloodlight out of hiding. It appeared in the air before him as a single crimson orb that quickly blossomed into a dense net of nodes and streams. The writhing strands of red light were dripping almost grotesquely as if each was a rent in the flesh of the universe. The white light held no fear for Jon, but this bloodlight terrified him, and he had a feeling it would be growing soon.
At least it wasn’t entirely wild - it followed his orders. He spread the net out to form a dome over the crown of the hill and rooted dozens of orbs in the ground, where they scorched the grass and dirt. If his position were not currently known by his foes, this would give it away, but anything mortal that came near would soon regret their decision. Would this protect him from something like the Assassin?
But Jeremiah had restrained it. Jon had to trust the guardian would keep it at bay.
He laid out his bedroll under the canopy of red light and reclined, glad for this time to regroup. This wasn’t the journey he’d expected to take, but he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Who’d ever heard of a man saving an entire nation without facing resistance?
He calmed himself as much as he could, though the radiance and crackle of the bloodlight was far from comforting.
Enjoy the moment you’re in, he thought, and laughed at himself. Alone, in the midst of violent opposition, stealing the mass of the environment for sustenance, and with only the thrill of battle to pull him forward. Was that something a man should enjoy?
“Mmmm, I don’t know,” he said out loud, closing his eyes.
No more philosophizing. Get some sleep.
He dreamt that the bloodlight slew a gremlin that had crept too near to his hill, but when he awoke to another bright morning, there was no corpse to be found.
Another attack was to be expected today, and Jon had to assume the enemy would try a new tactic. He had to be ready for anything.
Cruising northeast toward Soulspeak again, Jon noted a sense of mounting pressure, causing a slight ache in his sinuses. Was it because of the changing altitude, or due to a shift in the weather?
Only when his vision began to tunnel, and his temples to ache, did he realize something else was happening. He’d never had a migraine before, but he’d been hungover plenty of times, and this felt similar, only without the accompanying grogginess. The further he pushed along his path, the more it felt like his eyes were being crushed in a vice. He realized he should probably land and take stock of the situation, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to take off again in this state.
He pushed onward, covering dozens more miles than he’d thought possible, as the headache twisted into vertigo. Now it really was hard to fly, his vision dipping left and toward the ground as if his body wanted to bank in that direction. He couldn’t tell if that was a trick of the eyes or if he was actually doing it. Anxiety stole the blood from his brain, and nerves all throughout his skin joined in his body’s betrayal, with a cold, itching sensation like his skin was being transmuted into plastic. He felt the overwhelming urge to shake out his limbs, and his focus on flight began to deteriorate.
Though Jon strained valiantly against it, even sheathing his body in a thick envelope of white light, when a final net of vertigo was cast over him, he could stand it no longer and tumbled out of the air. He bounced and careened for several meters as he hit the ground, but the light kept his body from being torn and broken.
Jon struggled to his feet, wanting to curse but not finding the words. He could imagine no defense in this kind of battle. He had lost track of northeast, so he just stumbled forward in the direction he was already facing. He had just enough presence of mind to release the bloodlight, in case his opponents wished to use this opportunity to sneak up on him. It blossomed defiantly in the air at his back, flicking out randomly like a serpent’s tongue, daring an attack.
Now was a time for friends and comrades, someone to help him strategize, or possibly to flank the enemy while he bore the brunt of the attack. Bahabe would be able to sense the attacker’s emotions and have some sense of their whereabouts. Dahm would commune with the earth itself to locate his foes. Certainly one of Rae’s rings would sustain her, for who knew what abilities she possessed?
But I’m alone, Jon thought. And all he knew how to do so far was smash his way through obstacles. This would just have to be brute-forced as well.
He gazed about drunkenly, seeing his surroundings for the first moment since crashing down. He was on the lee side of a hill among ripples of its brethren. The hills were blanketed with tall grass, and trees were sparse. Vertigo threatened to drive him to his knees, so he absorbed the life of the grass around him to pump energy into his veins. The powers vying for supremacy in his body made his headache worse, and his stomach revolted, but at least he kept his feet. Jon trudged slowly to the top of a hill.
The white light had served to heighten his sense of vision, perhaps it would do the same for his hearing. The enemy might not know to keep silent - if they were close enough, even a little noise would give them away.
He listene
d closely, and the white noise of the wilderness grew to a roar in his ears. He kept his breathing as steady and slow as possible, rotating atop the hill until he heard something. Drums. A low, steady beat and voices chanting. What he’d begun to suspect was confirmed - this vertigo was some kind of arcane spell.
Jon made sure his senses were attuned in the right direction, then took a risk by dashing forward at terminal velocity, as he’d done the day before. His stomach might have lurched, and his vision may have greyed out, but the sensations of this unnatural vertigo superseded any others.
In a handful of seconds he reached his quarry - two spindly old gremlins, long white hair braided with rattles that shook as they did an odd dance. One beat his drum as the other chanted in a phlegmy-sounding language, shaking a tall staff covered in jingles. Jon dropped out of his dash before they knew he was coming, and they shrieked in response, turning to flee. The staff-wielding gremlin spat out a horrid word and a stream of green flame lashed out at Jon, breaking like water on his white aura.
Though the incantation had ceased, the vertigo had not. With a visible foe before him, however, Jon felt a surge of adrenaline push back against the debilitating spell.
He knew his teeth were bared as he drew his sword and advanced on the gremlins. Reaching out with his mind, he grasped their bare heels and pulled their legs out from under them. They fell hard, but the staff-wielder rolled back up to his feet in a practiced maneuver. It continued to cast green fire at Jon, but he was close now and severed the staff with a sweep of his sword. The gremlin looked shocked, and fell to its knees with a pitiful wail, holding the smoldering halves of its staff as its large, gunky eyes grew tearful. The drum-toting gremlin stayed down, on its back now and warding Jon off with long-fingered hands.
The vertigo had let up quite a bit, but Jon’s head still hurt, and he had a sense of continued pressure coming from multiple directions.
Jon raised his sword to strike the gremlins down and had a sudden thought. Why was he so willing to kill these odd little green men, when he’d spared the lives of the human slaves he’d come across yesterday? Did they not all believe Jon to be their enemy? These, too, had surrendered. He should let them live.