by Steve Vera
“And why are you at the front, Magi?” Penrod demanded in a growl.
Gavin put his hand on his Quaranai, drew it from his hip and gave the Vambracian lord a dark look. “Efil,” he said at the same time as his brethren, and four pale blades shot up in unison, exploding into coronas of pale-blue light with a steely ring that poured over their silver blades like billowing vapors. Four cold whispers of Death’s-Breath filled the air around them. “Because we’ve done this before. Warriors of the Second Army of Light!” he bellowed back at his army. A torrent of adrenaline surged through his arteries, rolling his eyes back into his skull momentarily. “The past no longer exists, the future is but a dark roadway, for there is only this moment, a single heartbeat in the pulse of time where songs will be sung of the moment Men looked hell in the eyes and struck it down!”
Backs straightened. Chests expanded.
“Autien!” he roared at the top of his lungs.
“Autien!” For just a moment their responding war cry filled the plain, gryphons included. Gavin raised his Quaranai over his head. “Charge!”
And then the Second Army of Light charged the Underworld.
Chapter 47
He knew they were there even before they knocked.
“Come,” he called out before knuckles touched wood. There was a pause, and then the dual gold knobs to his mahogany double doors twisted and in walked the three musketeers.
“’Sup, Satan?”
“Walkins,” Donovan said, not bothering to look up from the scroll he’d been studying for the past sixteen minutes. There was a pile of them by his desk. In two days he’d taught himself the fundamentals to the High Common language; he was well on his way to being able to read it.
“So this is how Olympian gods spend their down time, huh?”
“I presume there is a meaning for this intrusion?” Donovan said and finally looked up. As always the Druid was doing his best to scrutinize him, his feigned madness methodical in its assessment.
“Three more days and it’s gladiator time,” Walkins said.
“You figured that out all by yourself?”
“And charming as ever,” Walkins said. “We’d like to talk to you a moment, mind if we have a seat?”
Their auras told him that indeed they had something to say. He flicked his hand vaguely in the direction of the ornate and luxurious settees, canapés and fainting couches that comprised that section of the penthouse.
“What?”
“We’ve come to warn you,” Amanda said. The outer bands of her soul were swirling with conflicting colors of both resentment and...concern? How touching.
“About.”
“Ladom’er the Merciless.”
“And?”
“You know who he is?” Amanda asked. A flare of surprise-turquoise.
“I always know my enemies, Amanda, have you learned so little?” Donovan tightened his lips and wrangled his irritation back into its pen. He preferred not being irritated.
The Druid spoke. “Ladom’er the Merciless has struck down and beheaded every Olympian ever to stand against him for the past two and a half centuries.” Dwensolt tightened his knuckles around his staff. “He cannot be beaten.”
“Is there anything else?” Donovan asked.
The Druid shrugged with his unruly brows and split the focus of his eyes, roaming through Donovan’s quarters. His gaze settled on Donovan’s two swords—The Osafune Mitsutada Katana and Osafune Mitsutada Wakizashi, across from Donovan’s third and newest addition—the Necromancer’s. Long, deadly and sinuous, it sat apart from its elegant Japanese counterparts like a black widow. They didn’t get along.
“Guess so,” Walkins said.
“Then you may leave.”
They stared.
“Anybody ever call you a dick?” Walkins asked as he stood.
“Never to my face.”
“Holy shit, your eyes just changed from blue to orange.”
“That would be our cue,” Amanda muttered and stood as well.
And then the door clicked behind them.
He stared at the door for several seconds after they’d left and then went back to work.
There were things to be done.
Chapter 48
There was music within the thunder of a hundred galloping horses running in stride. The purple and silver pennants of the Nu’romian cavalry fluttered to the left, while the scarlet and gold banners of Vambrace whipped on the right, snapping in the wind as they charged directly toward the abyss.
The darkness above the mountains clawed out, filling the sky like black mist. Above them, the two gryphons, normally awesome in their majesty, seemed dwarfed by the armada of Flyborne racing toward them. They were waiting for their land-bound kin to catch up, which meant only one thing. They were organized. And that was bad news.
The gap narrowed.
“Lower lances!” Gavin yelled.
A hundred and four lances lowered, two glimmering with the gold light of Shardsteele.
“Knock arrows!”
Thirty-three bows pulled back atop charging steeds. Not only had Aluvion picked himself out a new, legendary bow from Almitra’s Pass, his ammunition was something special as well. A white-wood arrow tipped with Shardsteele and fletched with Gryphon feathers pointed at the sky.
“Draw swords!”
The Warmages drew their blades, long, double-edged swords that gleamed in pale scarlet light.
The horizon in front of them writhed as thousands of snarling and growling Horde rushed toward them. There was no particular order to their charge; they were an army of a thousand tornadoes. He tried not to think about the numbers. A hundred would have been too many.
How had so many gotten out? How many were there?
* * *
The lights went out. Drums and monk chanting grew from all around Donovan. A second later, a thousand sconces attached to the marble columns that surrounded the interior of the arena burst to life with red, purple and golden spheres of illumination. Above them, the open canopy of the colosseum began to swirl with ethereal glimmers, and a portal to another galaxy formed. As the stars got brighter, the drums got louder. Slowly the sky took the shape of some otherworldly place, ringed moons and comets streaming slowly across the sky. The chanting and drums matched the increasing luminance of the celestial bodies until suddenly a jagged spear of lighting split the air and thunder-clapped right into the colosseum itself.
The doors blew open like a hammer on some cosmic anvil, and the crowd went wild. Mist seeped out from within and then a shadow emerged—Ladom’er the Merciless. He strode out into the arena like a god come to collect a sacrifice. It was the first time in all of his life that Donovan faced another being as symmetrically perfect as him. Even though Ladom’er’s face was completely covered in tattoo-like glyphs, his splendor was overwhelming, even at a distance. Long, straight, jet hair swayed gently with each of the champion’s strides. He had supreme balance and poise and seemed to float like a haunt over the ground.
The crowd detonated. Beams of light fired down from separate suns above them, a purple one on Ladom’er, a crimson one on Donovan.
Donovan waited calmly in the center, dressed as he always was—black military fatigues, jungleboots and the black wife-beater he wore beneath his tactical shirt and jacket. Nothing else was necessary.
He carried his daisho—the traditional pair of long and short sword worn by the samurai—blade up. Kenjutsu and Iaotsu were among Donovan’s his favorite arts—the sword’s version of one shot, one kill.
At twenty feet, the arena around them shimmered and transformed into a heavenly garden surrounded by clouds and distant jagged peaks poking through the floor of the sky.
Mount Olympus. The realm of gods. I approve.
&nb
sp; Surrounding them were giant statues of past champions-turned-god towering around them, forming a circle. The two met in the middle.
Donovan couldn’t figure out what was more striking about Ladom’er, his aura or his features. Large, almond, silver-flecked eyes gleamed out from an angular face covered in black and silver tattoos that disappeared under a smart, robe-like jacket one cousin removed from a Japanese keoko-gi—elegant and practical. As for the tattoos, they were not merely art but symbolized his martial culture and specifically...how many heads he’d taken. Donovan had spent a great deal of time studying not only him, but his whole race, the Elverai.
“So you’re the one,” Ladom’er said in a pleasant, almost musical voice. “You’re the Offlander.”
Donovan had studied enough to understand his words. In fact, he had a thing or two he’d prepared. “I’ve come for your head.”
The Dark Elf gave him a patronizing smile, humorless but tinged with intrigue. “Do you know how many blank before me and blank the same words?”
“Three hundred and twenty-one,” Donovan answered as if he were fluent. Numbers he knew up to a million.
A touch of amusement cracked into his expression. His features were flawless, a template for geometrical perfection.
The din of the crowd plummeted as they strained to hear the exchange between the two titans. According to recent Olympian lore, the Offlander was the first real contender to challenge Ladom’er in over fifty years. Longer than many in the audience had been alive. The Dark Elf’s eyes lingered on Donovan’s daisho.
“You’ll see them soon enough,” Donovan said and then dismissed him, turned on his heel and went back to his starting place. When he turned around Ladom’er was still standing, that cryptic, amused smile twisting his lips. His aura was almost impossible to read, unlike anything Donovan had ever seen, even different from the Magi. A storm of light within a corona within an aura.
For the first time in his life, the outcome of a contest was uncertain.
It was like a drug.
* * *
The collision was catastrophic. Lances shattered against breastbones and swords cleaved skulls. Those Drynn impaled properly through the head thrashed and writhed on the ground, while those merely hit in the chest sprang back up and pulled down the nearest victim.
“Fire!” Gavin screamed, and the air above them lit up like the skies over England during the Battle of Britain. Fusillades of light darts, tendrils of lightning and balls of red flame shrieked up and cut a swath of screaming carnage from the first flight of the Flyborne. Drynnian bodies dropped from the sky, some crashing into the ground with a sound like snapping sticks, and others, many others, pulled up from their dives and leveled off, smoking and bleeding but still flying, eyes alight and ready to attack with the weapons of all the Flyborne...the dreaded scourges.
Gavin was a multi-tasker. He sent up his own spray of arcane death while lopping the top a Drynnian head from its bottom jaw. Like an armor-piercing incendiary round, the Shardyn and Southern Knights cut deep into the Drynnian ranks, laying waste to any Drynn who leaped up at them.
“The wings! Hit their wings!” Tarsidion bellowed.
Unlike Asmodeous, once through the Pale Gate the Drynn’s skin crackled to black so that they could take the rays of the sun, which without Deos’s portal would burn them to cinders before they took a single breath. They were all black. The Pale Gate was everything.
The Warmages defended, dare Gavin say, valiantly against the flights of the Flyborne that attacked them and the Sagittarii. Both the Warmage’s crimson blades and javelins of light thunked into chests and winged membranes as the Shardyn wreaked carnage into the center of the ground forces. Behind the Warmages, the Sagittarii fired flight after flight of arrows that would burst into flame midflight like machine gun tracers. More Drynn fell.
But not enough.
As Gavin had seen happen so many times before, some knights ended their battle with their foes, turning too early to the next enemy before the Drynn was properly vanquished. He saw one particularly gory scene of a Drynn bleeding profusely through a three-quarter severed neck. Its purple blood spurted through its talons and yet from the ground it ripped out the horse’s throat and pounced on the knight that tumbled from his saddle in a clang of crashing armor. Both the wounded Drynn and its horned, hulking twin converged and fed right there and then on the screaming knight, peeling his armor away to get to his flesh.
Gavin flung a trio of light darts into the neck and temple of the unhorned while Lord Penrod wheeled his horse and charged the horned, swinging his long sword and with a single sing—took its head.
“They’re surrounding us, Stavengre,” Noah said breathlessly from his right. Cirena was on his left, blood-smeared and fire-eyed, and Tarsidion was behind her. The Southern Boys had done pretty well themselves, adding their numbers to the carnage.
“They are demons from the hells!” Taksony yelled.
They certainly looked the part. Their bodies were monstrous and humanoid, with long, sloped heads, bestial eyes, maws filled with shark-like teeth and powerfully muscular arms that ended in claws. Their growls were as deep as chasms.
“The troops are cracking,” Tarsidion said. He was right. Noah was right. They were being surrounded and it was getting darker, to the point that it was hard to see anything at all.
The first trickle of panic began to flutter down Gavin’s intestines. Nightmares long suppressed sprayed through his memories—fighting the Drynn in pitch darkness, the flaps of their wings, their hungry, guttural growls, not being able to see them.
The dry rasps of his breaths swelled in his ears, drowning the soul-cringing screams of the dying and the howls of the hungry, each boom of his heart like a grenade behind his ribs...they’d just hit the Drynn right in the mouth and the Pale Gate wasn’t even visible yet.
There weren’t enough of them. They needed an army twenty times their size to have had a chance.
All this was for nothing. He was going to die on this field and for what?
Why couldn’t I have been wrong?
* * *
Time for death.
The kick-off of their event began when a red globe of light floated precisely between the two Olympians. Around them was dark like a movie theatre, a hundred thousand breaths held as the globe hovered between them.
And then it burst, and the invisible crowd went wild. Donovan strode out from his position with his fingers on the hilt of his sword...undrawn. Ladom’er matched his pace, head stationary on his shoulder from his silken gait. He, too, walked with an undrawn blade. When they met in the middle, they locked stares and as one detonated in motion. Using the ancient art of iaijutsu—the act of both drawing and striking in one movement—Donovan’s katana arced from its scabbard in an arc as fluid as water, right for Ladom’er’s neck.
The Dark Elf met the strike with his own sword, a long, sinuous masterpiece, single-bladed and as graceful as Ladom’er himself. A smile of appreciation twisted the Dark Elf’s pale lips up. “You are fast,” he said. “The fastest yet.”
The invisible crowd went nuts. Though his face was covered with tattoos of different colors and design, his actual skin was paler than Cirena’s, like blue-tinged alabaster, as if he’d drowned at one time. The two withdrew blades and Donovan circled the Dark Elf with his sword in the high guard of Kenjutsu, sword raised above his head, blade up, elbows out.
“It has been so long since I have stood against one worthy of my presence,” Ladom’er said as they circled each other. His voice was both dulcet and resonant, musical.
Donovan struck again, a flawless overhead strike at a two o’clock angle that would have cut Ladom’er’s head off diagonally had it been there, but even with his adrenaline-enhanced speed, the Dark Elf parried and smiled again, his silver-flecked eyes as vast as deep space, full of knowing
and memory. The kind of eyes that had already seen the future.
Ladom’er was as fast as Donovan.
* * *
They weren’t going to make it. Wasn’t even going to be close. For the first couple of minutes they’d held their ground; Gavin had even entertained thoughts of victory but only briefly. Everything he’d feared, all the memories he’d tried to bury came to life in a living nightmare.
The Drynn had come.
Over half of the forces of the Second Army of Light were gone. Although initially the combined might of so many powerful warriors inflicted mass casualties among the Horde and Flyborne, the real forces were only now arriving—the Soldiers and the Warlocks.
Of the four castes of Drynn, the Warlocks were by far the most dreaded. They had the size and ferocity of the Horde, had wings and the ability to fly like the Flyborne, the cunning and strength to wield weapons like the Soldiers, but worst of all...the ability to wield magic.
Gavin thanked everything he held sacred and holy that there were so few of them. Only by the heart and brain of the most powerful of the Surface Races could they be created—magic-users and Elverai, and most of all, the Magi.
The first meteors of fire rained down from the huge, unmistakable silhouette of a Warlock hovering as it pumped its great, bat-like wings. In reflex, Gavin and his brethren evoked their cocoons, overlapping so that they covered Taksony and his men, the Centurion Tremar as well as...the Wizard De’mond.
Others, however, were not so lucky. Horses, knights, Warmages and Sagittarii were incinerated as the streaks of fiery rock rained down on them all like the end of Sodom and Gomorrah. Gavin blocked out their screams as sheets of fire hissed around them, combusting those warriors and brothers in arms not fortunate to be within the ten-foot range of each Shardyn cocoon.