Wulf Rome was shouting orders. Soldiers ran into the ballroom, weapons drawn. He pulled two of their number and sent them to escort his wife and daughter to safety. Then he ran out of the room, the rest of the soldiers following.
The liquid in the glasses and bowls had subsided. The oppressive heat and dizziness were gone. The appearance of the hunter had been enough to shock Aislin out her agitated state. She was once again in control of her power.
“Come on, Aislin,” Netra said, standing and pulling on her arm. “We have to get out of here.”
But Aislin had felt the taint of chaos power coming off the hunter, and she realized that this attack had a deeper purpose. “No, Mama. I can’t. Not yet.”
She jerked her arm out of her mother’s grasp and ran to the tall windows that overlooked the gardens, her mother close behind. Outside was chaos. The wall around the tower had a huge hole in it. Broken stones lay everywhere. Bizarre creatures seethed around the base of the tower and surged toward the breach in the wall. More were emerging from the tower’s windows and streaming down the sides.
A handful of soldiers carrying swords and axes, wearing helmets and light chain mail, had formed up before the breach in the wall, trying to stem the tide. There were less than a score of them, and they were led by a captain in a black surcoat who shouted orders that could only dimly be heard through the closed windows.
Running hunched over, using their hands to help propel them, two ape-like creatures with yellow eyes and long, curved teeth burst through the breach and charged the soldiers. The captain stabbed the first one in the chest, but the creature’s charge didn’t slow. It kept coming, the sword passing all the way through it and out its back. It grabbed the captain’s neck with one huge hand, jerked him close and bit half his face away. The soldiers to either side closed on it, hacking at it.
The other ape-like creature jumped into the air as it drew close to the soldiers, a mighty leap that landed it square in their ranks. The soldiers tried to react, but it was a tactic they were unprepared for, and most of their attacks struck their own comrades rather than the creature. It tore the arm off one and began using the limb as a club, beating down two more soldiers before the rest swarmed it and hacked it to death.
A low-slung, scaled creature with a segmented body and dozens of legs scurried through the breach after the ape-like things, followed quickly by another. The first one closed on the soldiers, its long, gray, barbed tongue flicking out. The tongue wrapped around a soldier’s neck. The soldier was jerked off his feet, blood spraying from his neck. The creature’s jaws opened, triangular teeth flashed, and his head was bitten off.
The second one’s tongue wrapped around a soldier’s legs. The man screamed as he was lifted into the air. He was dangled upside down over the creature’s open mouth, his head bitten off. The corpse was thrown into the remaining soldiers, further battering their unraveling ranks.
Then, something new. Out of the vine encasing the tower flying insects began to emerge, huge wasps the size of a man’s head with fat, yellow bodies and orange, translucent wings.
A soldier managed to knock the first of the wasps out of the air with his sword. It went to the ground, wings buzzing madly. He reversed his blade quickly and stabbed through its body, pinning it to the ground. It writhed and died.
The soldier next to him wasn’t so lucky. A wasp darted around his swing and stung him in the face. He screamed, dropped his weapon and reeled backwards. Almost instantly his face turned a dark red color and swelled up so that his eyes were only visible as sunken holes. His screaming stopped as the swelling continued downward and sound could no longer make it out of his mouth. Blood and a viscous, yellow fluid began to leak from his face. More wasps found their targets, and more soldiers went down, the venom swiftly eliminating them from the fight.
After them came things that looked like mosquitos—with spindly legs, bloated bodies covered in stiff black hairs, and long, thread-thin proboscises—except they were the size of sparrows. A cloud of them dove straight at the few remaining beleaguered soldiers, who were still trying to counter the attacks of the segmented creatures and the wasps. A mosquito landed on a soldier’s head. The soldier flailed wildly at it, but instead of knocking it loose, all he managed to do was knock off his own helmet. The mosquito’s head snapped forward, its proboscis jammed through his eye, and it began to feed. Two more found prey, one landing on a soldier’s back, the other on the side of a man’s neck.
The mosquitos were the final straw. Those soldiers still upright broke and ran. Behind them, dozens more creatures surged through the breach, some hopping, some slithering, some flying. A yellow and black striped snake, its body as big around as a man’s torso and dozens of paces long, caught one of the fleeing soldiers, fangs sinking into his leg. The soldier swung wildly at it with his sword, managing to open two cuts across its blunt head, but that was it as its mouth opened, and he disappeared into its gaping maw.
Just when it appeared that the castle would be overrun by the creatures, Rome appeared. He was still wearing his finery from the party, but there was a helmet clamped on his head, and he had a huge war axe in one fist. With him came fifty or so soldiers, and they followed without hesitation as he charged at the creatures.
“Macht Rome will take care of it,” Netra said. “We need to go. It’s not safe here.”
“But he doesn’t know what’s really happening,” Aislin insisted. “This isn’t important. The gromdin wants him distracted while it gets the key.”
“The gromdin is here? How do you know that?”
“I can feel him. He’s going down to the vault right now.”
“But there’s no way you can get to him. You can’t get through that,” Netra said, pointing at the mass of soldiers and creatures locked in mortal combat. The battle had spilled away from the area right before the breach, raging in the gardens and amongst the fruit trees.
“I could with Seaforce.”
“If you use that here, you’ll kill our people too. You’ll kill Rome.”
“Then I have to go another way.” Before her mother could stop her, Aislin pushed open one of the windows and jumped through.
“Aislin, no!” Netra jumped out of the window after her.
Aislin was headed for the wall on top of the cliffs, but before she made it more than a few steps some nearby bushes shook madly, and something hairless, with long, yellow teeth and red eyes, shot out at her.
Aislin reacted without thinking. She sensed the presence of a small amount of Seaforce nearby, and she grabbed at it, instantly shaping a glowing orb from it and flinging it at the thing.
The orb of Seaforce exploded in the creature’s face, tearing its lower jaw away and killing it instantly.
Aislin turned to her mother, proud of herself for how quickly she’d reacted. Then she frowned. Something was wrong. Her mother was leaning against the wall, her face pale and sickly looking.
“Mama, what’s wrong?”
“That Seaforce…you took it from me.” She was trembling, and there was sweat on her brow.
That was something Aislin had never even considered. She’d never thought that people had Seaforce inside them, but now that she thought about it she saw that it made sense. People had a lot of water inside them, and Seaforce lay within all water.
“Will you be okay?”
Netra nodded and tried a smile. “Only…don’t do that again. I don’t think I could take another one.”
Aislin looked around. Her sense of danger was increasing. The gromdin was closing in on the vault. She was sure of it.
“I have to go, Mama.”
“Aislin, wait…”
But Aislin was already moving. She ran for the wall and nimbly climbed the crates stacked up against it, crates she and Liv had climbed so many times to get on the wall. At the top, she stood there for a moment, looking back over her shoulder at her mother.
“Aislin! What are you doing?” Netra wobbled toward her.
“I�
��ll be okay. Don’t worry.”
Then she jumped.
“No!” Netra screamed. She gained the top of the wall moments later and looked over, fearing what she would see…
Far below Aislin was plummeting toward the sea at terrifying speed. Netra put her hands over her mouth, certain she was watching her daughter’s death but unable to do anything about it.
A wave rose up. But no ordinary wave. It was like a giant hand formed of water. It intercepted Aislin halfway through her fall. She dove into it with only the faintest splash.
Chapter Thirty
Quyloc knew as soon as he saw the hunter that it was there for him. He also knew that if he was going to have any chance of surviving, he had to move, and move now. He took off running.
During the war, he’d fought the hunter several times and lost every time. But his previous battles with the creature had taken place in the Pente Akka. This time the battle was on his turf. Hopefully this time would be different.
The doorway opened onto a dim, narrow servants’ hallway. A dozen paces on, it made a sharp turn. As he rounded the corner, he heard the clawed feet of the hunter on the stone floor behind him. It wasn’t closing on him as fast as he’d expected. Had something slowed it?
Or was it not as fast here as it was in its own domain?
If the latter was true, then he had hope. He might survive this yet.
Past the corner was an open doorway, a serving woman emerging from it carrying a large crystal bowl of punch. Quyloc shoved her hard backwards through the doorway. The bowl flew from her hands and shattered into a thousand pieces, and she fell onto the floor.
“Stay down!” he yelled as he ran by her. “It’s right behind me!”
He skidded on spilled punch, regained his footing, and burst through a partially-open door into one of the palace kitchens. Servants were everywhere, moving about their tasks purposefully under the watchful eye of the head cook. Quyloc paused to slam the door behind him, dropping the bar into place. A large barrel stood beside the doorway, and he pushed it in front of the door. The servants stopped what they were doing, staring at him as if he’d gone mad. The cook spluttered.
“Get back!” he yelled as he ran through them for the doorway on the far side of the room. “It will kill you if you get in its way!”
The door groaned as the hunter hit it hard. Chopping sounds came from the other side as the creature hacked at it. Seeing it through the quickly-widening hole in the door, the servants screamed and scattered.
The hunter passed through them like smoke, one of its blades flashing as it cut down a servant who stood gaping in its path, frozen to the spot.
Quyloc gained the far doorway, passed through, and found himself in a storeroom filled with crates and kegs of all sizes. Cured meats hung from hooks on the ceiling, and fat bags of flour bulged on the shelves. As he ran through the store room, Quyloc knocked over kegs and stacks of crates, anything he could easily throw into the hunter’s path. He got lucky when the creature missed one of the smaller kegs in the dim light and stepped on it. It rolled under the hunter’s foot, and it lost its footing. Quyloc gained a precious moment.
Stone stairs led upward on the other side of the next door, stairs that Quyloc was very relieved to see. He hadn’t been through here in years, and he hadn’t been positive that his memory was accurate. If this had been a dead-end…
He heard the hunter’s clawed feet getting dangerously close as he reached the top of the stairs and slammed the door at the top behind him. The hunter hit the door a heartbeat later, and it shuddered dangerously.
Quyloc snatched up a chair sitting against the wall and jammed it under the door handle as the hunter slammed into the door again. A long, vertical crack appeared in the door, and one of the hinges bent.
Quyloc had left the servants’ passages and was in one of the main halls now, thick carpeting on the floor, arched ceiling, doors opening off to the sides. When he first fled the ballroom, he was only running. But along the way a plan had begun to crystallize in his mind. It might even work, but he would have to make it to his quarters on the next floor up for that to happen.
He took off down the hall at a dead run as the blocked door gave another loud crack. One of the doors opened as he approached it. A young, tipsy, well-dressed couple emerged, the woman giggling, the man fussing with his belt.
“Get back inside!” Quyloc yelled as he ran by.
The man stared after him in confusion. The door splintered the rest of the way. When she saw what was coming through, the woman grabbed the man and yanked him back into the room as the shadowy hunter came charging at them.
Quyloc took the stairs at the end of the hall three at a time. Because of the thick carpeting, he couldn’t hear the demon chasing him, but he could feel it. Its red gaze seemed to burn into his back. He passed a suit of armor on the landing, complete with a poleaxe, and considered taking the weapon and throwing it at the creature but gave the idea up almost immediately. It was unlikely to work and would only slow him down.
He reached the next floor. His rooms were close now, but they were at the far end of the hall, and in his gut he knew even in a dead sprint the hunter would catch him before he reached the door.
But this was his turf, and he knew it well. The apartment to his right consisted of several connecting rooms, all well-furnished. The shutters in the apartment would be closed against the sea air, and it would be dark in there, dark enough that the furniture would be difficult to see. His advantage was that he knew where all of it was. He might be able to stay ahead of the hunter in there.
He prayed the thing couldn’t see in the dark.
All this went through his head in a split second as he dashed for the closest door. He passed through into a sitting room furnished with large, heavy chairs and long couches, a long table laden with bottles of liquor along one wall. As he’d expected, the windows were shuttered, the heavy drapes drawn, making the room so dark the furniture were only dim outlines.
The next room over was the same, but even darker, since the window was smaller. As he slammed the door behind him, the hunter burst into the sitting room and charged at him. This room had several tables surrounded by chairs and large cabinets against the walls. He leapt over one table and ran to the door on the far side.
The hunter burst in as he was going through the next door, and Quyloc felt a surge of triumph as the creature barreled straight into the table he’d jumped over and went down with a crash of breaking wood.
The time he gained allowed him to make it through the next room, a bedroom, before the hunter could get after him again. The final room was a dressing room, and Quyloc tipped the heavy dresser over in front of the door a heartbeat before the hunter struck it. He spun and ran through a door and back into the hall.
His own rooms were right across the hall now. He ran through the door into his office, cut across it, then into his bedroom. In a rack against the wall were several spears. Quyloc snatched one up as he ran by, heading for the door that led out onto the balcony.
The balcony which overlooked the huge cliffs.
That was why he had come here. In a toe-to-toe fight he knew he could never defeat the hunter. But he might be able to get one shot in…
Once on the balcony, he jumped to the side and pressed his back to the wall. Now he could only wait with pounding heart and hope his crazy plan would actually work. If the hunter became suspicious and slowed, he was dead. If he wasn’t fast enough with the spear, he was dead. There were a litany of things that could go wrong. He tried to shut them out of his mind and focus on the task at hand.
He didn’t have to wait long. Mere moments after he pressed up against the wall, his spear held tight up against his chest, the hunter came running out onto the balcony. It ran to the railing and stopped, momentarily confused at the disappearance of its prey.
In that moment, Quyloc acted.
He stepped forward in one fluid motion, stabbing with the spear as he did so, a practiced moti
on honed over decades of practice with the weapon.
The hunter heard him or sensed him and turned as he was partway through his strike. It tried to parry, but it was too slow.
The bladed tip of his spear punched into its chest, all of Quyloc’s weight behind it.
The creature clawed wildly at the air as it started to overbalance backward, but it could find nothing to get hold of.
In the last moment, as it was starting to go over the railing, it switched tactics, cutting through the wooden shaft of the spear with one of its blades.
But Quyloc was ready for it. With what was left of the shaft he jabbed the hunter hard in the chest.
Over and down the hunter went. One blade rang off the stone railing as it flailed. It twisted in mid-air, the blades retracting into its arms as it tried desperately to catch hold of the wall on the edge of the cliff as it went by. But it was moving too fast by then, and though its claws scored the stone, it couldn’t hang on.
Then it was falling and falling, like a giant raven with broken wings. Quyloc leaned over the railing and watched it go.
“This is my world,” he said, tossing the severed spear shaft after it. “How do you like it?”
The hunter struck one of the jagged rocks that jutted from the foaming sea. Quyloc could see it lying there, broken, then the next wave lifted it and the hungry sea took it away to gnaw on.
Chapter Thirty-one
Driven by her will, the wave which had caught Aislin carried her around the base of the cliffs and up to the cave entrance. As she went, she gathered Seaforce, and by the time she was at the base of the stone steps, she had a large, brightly-glowing orb of it floating in front of her.
She didn’t let the wave go but used it to carry her up the rocky stairs, covering the distance far faster than she could have managed on her own two feet.
To this point she’d been acting on instinct, following an innate sense. The key was in danger, and she must protect it. In light of that, nothing else mattered.
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