Through the Black Veil

by Steve Vera

  An explosion of crimson fire detonated so close to one of the upper windows of the tower that it exploded inward, raining shards of glass on scrambling Olympians. A moment later the amber, burning eyes of a Flyborne glared down, snarling. Ladom’er’s hand blurred and a long, graceful arrow shot out of his six-foot blue and silver longbow. A blink later, the multi-colored fletching of his shaft protruded from the Drynn’s growling maw. The creature crumpled forward in a gurgling, snarling scream that trailed off as it fell. With the heavy plunk of tenderized meat and the sound of snapping sticks, it crashed to the stone floor. Every person and race inside the Hall of Olympians laid eyes on their very first Drynn, which continued to writhe and thrash on the marble floor, despite the arrow sticking out of its mouth and the hundred-foot tumble onto solid rock. The bastards just didn’t like to die.

  Donovan pulled out an old-fashioned carbon steel Marine KA-BAR fighting and utility knife from a sheath in his fatigues, walked over to the dying creature and in one quick jerk, sliced its throat, batting aside its weak lunges of its talons. The thick, purplish blood squirted across the carpet and across the armor of some of the riders. Donovan wiped off its blood on its own twitching body and took off his shades.

  “The one who kills the most Drynn,” he said and passed his smoldering red-eyes across every face in the room, “wins.”

  “Autien!” the room thundered—hell, even Skip yelled out.

  “You men,” he said to the fifty-two heavily armored Olympian Jousters, assembled in full plate armor, “mount your steeds and go to the stables. When the time comes, run them down and leave no survivors. Eyes, throat, mouth.”

  “Autien,” they called out, lances in hand, crests streaming down surcoats and capes representing their houses and clans and schools of war. Olympian Knights. The best in the world.

  “No mercy,” he told them as they tromped downstairs to the stables.

  There was an electricity in the room. Skip could feel it surge through his veins, heighten his senses. He loosened up his shoulders and moved side to side just like he used to do back in boxing. Just like he used to do before a hot drop. Hoo-ya, bitches, let’s do this... A sudden breeze sighed through the room, carrying the scent of fire and the screams of death. Skip put his hand on Amanda’s cold fingers. She was standing with the rest of them.

  “Amanda,” Donovan said. She looked at him. Her chest was moving up and down like a hunted rabbit’s. “What the hell are you waiting for? Cock that thing.”

  She swallowed with a nod and then in a motion she’d obviously practiced many times, pulled back the knob-lever like a bolt-action rifle. There was more than one “ah” as a golden quarrel formed on the deck of her weapon. In the dim light of the Olympian Hall, the golden runes carved into the stock glimmered like spider light.

  Donovan nodded and turned to Skip. “Are you as good with that thing as you say?”

  “Better.”

  “Then let’s go. Dwensolt, stay with Amanda.”

  “Aye, dark warrior,” the Druid said in the exact same amused tone Ladom’er had used, as if a parent were obeying the wisdom of a child.

  “And Amanda,” Donovan said.

  “Yes?” she said in tight, low voice.

  “There are two types of people in the world. Which are you?”

  Skip had no idea why it meant so much to her, but Amanda gave a little gasp, blinked rapidly as if to stave off tears and then pulled her shoulders back. “I’m a protector,” she said in a low, steady voice.

  Donovan nodded and kept his attention on her just slightly past comfortable when a blinding flash ripped through the city, followed by a deafening thunderclap that hammered his eardrums like the concussion of a daisy-cutter. And then the sound of something gigantic and metal falling to the stone ground gonged through the city.

  It sounded like a falling gate.

  * * *

  Well, guess that’s it for the cavalry. It wasn’t Tarsidion’s own voice that floated through his head, but Jack’s. His oldest friend.

  This battle was lost. Not a single Cataphractii had survived, and all that remained of the Northern Wall defenses was the eight of them and a pitiful band of three Nu’romian archers guarded by two Legionnaires. Everybody else was dead, carried off, incinerated or lying with their bones and flesh exposed from Drynnian scourges.

  There were just too many of them.

  The skies had been thinned considerably by the combined efforts of the vaunted Gryphriders, Sorcerers, archers and the Knights of the Shard, but at too great an expense. Of the sixty Gryphriders who comprised the four wall squadrons, Tarsidion counted only three still flying. All of the ramparts, including the South Wall, had been cleared and laid to waste, with the exception of them. In the near distance, within the blackness that hung over the Northern Plain, drums pounded the air, drums Tarsidion knew were stretched taut with human-skins. Which could mean only one thing.

  The Soldiers were coming. He could smell their scent interwoven with that of iron, steel and leather. None of the other castes had such a stink.

  “Stavengre?” Tarsidion asked. There was no need to elaborate. They’d fought so many times together that the mere inflection in a syllable conveyed chapters.

  Stavengre turned to Taksony and his men. “Rally at the Hall of Olympians. Should it fall, head southeast toward the wild forests of the west, toward the kingdoms of the Elves.”

  Tarsidion watched Stavengre glance down at the last of the Legions still standing in formation below them. Even from up here they could feel their hopelessness. Like the fumes of the gases seeping from a corpse. “Shall we see what sort of mischief we can wreak upon the Drynn?” he asked.

  Taksony protested, “I will not abandon—”

  “That is an order, Captain Taksony of Macabru’s Lost Army,” Stavengre said in a gentle but firm voice. “You have shown your valor yet again, Cavaliers of the south. You have honored your ancestors. Now go back and protect our brethren and loved ones—no matter what happens this night, we must live to fight another day. The world is depending on us.”

  All three of them breathed out, their exhales heavy with misgivings but in the end...they obeyed. “Aye, Sur Stavengre,” Taksony finally said with a heavy voice. He then grasped Stavengre by the shoulder. Stavengre reciprocated. “It has been an honor to fight beside you, Sur Stavengre Kul Annototh, Knight of the Shard. Whatever happens this day, you will always have friends in the Southern March.”

  We need to go...

  “The honor is mine,” Stavengre responded. “But let this not be the last time we see each other. Godspeed.”

  The golden knight nodded, as did his Serjeant, or rather Sir Arnaut and Sir Aluvion.

  Cirena and Noah gave hasty but genuine salutes.

  “Come, Stavengre, let’s go,” Tarsidion said.

  A quartet of Flyborne passed over them but kept their distance, continuing on to easier prey. Tarsidion tracked them with his fingers but conserved what little magic he had left in his Wellspring. He knew soon enough that it would be dry.

  They were alone now. Just the four of them and the wind and the smell of terror and ash. With a nod Cirena, Noah, Tarsidion and Stavengre dropped off the wall and plummeted toward the Legions.

  * * *

  Uthelio’s wounds were beginning to take their toll. His head slumped and his wing thrusts were weak. As long as they rode high on the night’s currents, he wouldn’t have to work too hard to stay out of range of those arrows, which were by far the biggest Rashauk had ever seen. He led a V-shaped formation of two other riders. On his right, a Sorcerer not from any of the Wall Squadrons but the late Senator Merevus’s Sorcerer, Roland Arkeides, and on his left, a rider from the 4th Flight, East Wall Squadron.

  The three of them were all that remained.

  Out over the Northern Plain they were ac
tually behind enemy lines; all of the Flyborne were in the city now, gutting it. Rashauk had watched the cavalry make two impressive charges, sixty on each wing, before disintegrating under the snarling Horde. Now the only thing between the Underworld’s jaws and the heart of the Eternal City were the five thousand, two hundred and forty brave warriors of the 2nd Legion of Nu’rome. Not as many as there should have been, since the men of the 1st Legion, 3rd and 5th were scattered in two different campaigns three days away.

  If they could somehow hold out until then...

  With a quick sequence of his hands, the last three Gryphriders of Nu’rome banked left and soared down to assist their kin.

  * * *

  Gavin couldn’t tell which he hated more, leaping into a firefight or having to wait for one. In this case, the four of them hadn’t been down on the ground fifteen seconds before a Centurion barking orders suddenly got catapulted off his horse as a javelin as thick as a man’s arm punched through his breastplate and speared him seven feet off his horse before he was impaled into the ground. A geyser of bloody froth spurted out of his mouth on impact. He didn’t move again.

  Professional, grizzled eyes widened in alarm and a moment later, thousands, tens of thousands of Soldier Drynn roared at the top of their guttural lungs, and the darkness of the plain peeled back.

  “Javelins!” Tarsidion bellowed, and four cocoons burst into life. As if they’d rehearsed it a hundred times before, each of the Shardyn blurred to the front of a separate cohort—there were ten, each consisting of four hundred and eighty men—in an attempt to balance their protection.

  A moment later, thousands of wooden-shafted javelins tipped with Drynnian spurs blasted through a Sorcerer’s cocoon like a soap bubble. The shields and armor behind it were skewered like aluminum cans, and in seconds an entire middle cohort disintegrated in a storm of wood and spurs.

  “Sorcerers!” Gavin yelled. “On my mark, raise your shields!” He locked eyes with Noah; they’d go on her word. Chaos raged, but she rode it like a wind.

  “Now.”

  “Shields!” he screamed and poured his own craft into the thin field of gossamer light that manifested at the front of the troops. Instead of obliteration there was a symphony of sparks and light as they were deflected.

  A ragged cheer went up from the men.

  “Again!” Gavin screamed. Soldier-Drynn always fired in pairs. As if on cue another wave hissed through the air but because there were so few Sorcerers and Magi to cover so much space, their shield collapsed in some places, shredding the men behind it.

  There was a pause. Distant screams and a howling wind.

  And then they came. An ocean of snarling, roaring Soldiers like a tidal wave.

  * * *

  The moment Skip stepped inside the Hectogram his body catapulted three hundred feet straight up, as if as if he were riding the top of an erupting geyser. Dwarfing any rollercoaster he’d ever been on, Skip’s observant, analytical, detective brain somehow managed to take note of the spiral staircase that corkscrewed up along the walls of the tower like the rifling of an artillery barrel, the various closed doors, branching corridors and lightless torches. Higher and faster his body rocketed up toward the stone ceiling. A moment before his body would splatter the ride slowed to a float and he was placed neatly on the parapet of the Hall of Olympians.

  Right into a hot LZ.

  Donovan was already firing. With every kick of his rifle a Flyborne tumbled from the sky. Right next to him was Ladom’er, an arrow knocked in his bow. The Dark Elf’s silver-flecked eyes were wide with a combination of awe, alarm and envy as he absorbed the contraption known as a German MSG 90 sniper system.

  There was something calming about the rifle’s report to Skip. Something Earthly. A moment later the Black Wizard with the moon cheeks appeared, followed by the two Gray Wizards and then the White Witch, each settling neatly on the rampart. Then came the Olympian archers, bows knocked, and like a fire team of SEALS they dashed to their positions and scanned for targets.

  “How many shots do you have left?” Donovan asked him.

  “Eight for the Bronto, twelve for the Python.”

  “Then I expect there to be eight fewer Warlocks in this battle. One shot, one kill. Don’t fuck it up and don’t waste time on the Flyborne. We’ll take care of them.”

  “Copy that, Satan,” Skip said and unfolded the bipod beneath the barrel of his Barrett .50. He set it atop one of the crenels of the rampart, clicked on his thermal imaging and did his own hunting.

  Isolated basketball-sized spheres of pale purple light floated through the city and offered scant illumination through the living darkness that continued to writhe over Nu’rome like the Angel of Death over Egypt.

  This would qualify for austere and non-permissive environments.

  They weren’t the only ones fighting by rooftop either. A couple of blocks over in the swanky Senatorial District, Skip saw a cluster of Legionnaires and archers doing their best to protect a trio of kids sporting simple brown robes on the cupola of a government building.

  With valor that would have done a PJ proud, the apprentices struggled to maintain a thin, fading gossamer shield surrounding them and their protectors while being pummeled relentlessly by bolts and streams of hellish lightning crackling from the taloned fingers of a monstrous Warlock. It hovered above them, laughing, leering while a flight of Flyborne circled eagerly, waiting for their shield to crumble.

  “Him,” Donovan ordered.

  One step ahead of you, Donnie-boy, but before Skip could line him up, their fragile shield disintegrated and the tallest of the three dropped to the ground, screaming as if his legs had been chopped off. His two peers tried to drag him away from the Warlock who landed right on top of them, easily deflecting the exhausted, clumsy attack of one of the Legionnaires with his own weapon, a spiked scepter. The Warlock, with casual arrogance, lifted the onion-shaped head of his weapon with exaggerated slowness, cackling at their terror. The next moment his head exploded like an overripe watermelon as a tungsten carbide incendiary round caught him dead center of his face.

  And that’s how it’s done, son.

  Shocked and praying, the Legionnaires kicked the carcass off the roof and yelled in triumph as its body smashed into the street below. One of the Legionnaires raised his arms at them in victory. Skip pumped his arms back in response.

  If the whole damn universe hadn’t known where they had been before, they sure as hell did now. The formerly eager circling Flyborne scattered like a bunch of startled pigeons and banked toward them.

  “Took long enough,” Donovan said, changed languages and ordered the others to four different points on the rampart. A diamond. Black-robes took the back point. Nice-legs took the front and the two Grays took the sides. The dual ten-man archer teams posted up in the middle and took their positions. Arrows knocked.

  Above them, a whole damn air division came screaming down at them.

  “Incoming,” Skip said to himself and put his eye to his scope.

  Chapter 54

  They’d lost half their men. The only air support they had were three hopelessly outnumbered Gryphriders fighting for their lives against a hundred or more Flyborne.

  But the Legions of Nu’rome held.

  “It’s time!” Gavin yelled to his three brethren.

  One of the more advanced lessons they’d learned as Apprentices back at the Academy of the Shard was a tactic called spiritfighting. It was draining, dangerous and required far more concentration than ordinary attacks, but was positively lethal to tightly packed formations. Tailor made for it. They’d nicknamed it after Jack because he’d loved it so much. Jack-in-the-box.

  “Neesh,” each of them said, and four Quaranai slid back into their sheaths, much to the chagrin of a nearby Legionnaire. Together, the four donned their hoods and
disappeared into Spirit, slipping into the darkness like mirages at night. They weaved their way through the onslaught of snarling bodies right up into the unsuspecting right flank of a group of fresh Drynn just preparing to hurl their javelins.

  I don’t think so.

  “Surprise, fuckers!” Noah screamed in an uncanny rendition of Jack, materializing out of thin air to unleash dual torrents of fire from each hand like a gunslinger with a couple of flamethrowers.

  At the same instant, Cirena flung a handful of sapphire-sized jewels of light. The instant they left her hand, they streaked like heat-seeker missiles toward the nearest victim, burrowed into its flesh and expanded in a greasy sizzle. Those struck immediately dropped and thrashed, tearing at their own chests while their innards were devoured by flame.

  And then the Shardyn disappeared again, only to reappear fifty feet away at different coordinates, unleashed four pinpricks of light that arced slowed over the Soldiers before blossoming into supernovas of sizzling light-blades. Like a payload of cluster bombs a tempest of death rained down and skewered, peppered and blasted through the Drynnian ranks like shrapnel.

  And then they disappeared again, slurping into the darkness. Sharks feeding on seals.

  * * *

  A starburst pierced the heavy darkness above the city, and for a moment, the silhouettes of a dozen long-winged Drynn lit up against the sky.

  “Fire!” Donovan roared, and the twang of fifteen Olympic archers letting loose their missiles hissed through the night as the black wizard dropped his arm. In midflight each arrow burst into flames, streaked like shooting stars and thunked into Drynnian bodies. And then it was dark again.

  As promised, Walkins was fulfilling his end; he’d fired four times with his .50 and had killed four Warlocks.

  “Shields!” Donovan yelled, and immediately the three points of the diamond threw up their magic, encapsulating every one of them under the overlapping strength of their Olympian might. Point four seconds later a magenta inferno hissed around them, blackening the ramparts and outer walls of the Olympic Hall, but despite their efforts to topple it, the Drynn had failed. The Hall was impressively constructed, and the two Warlocks that had made the attempt had met their fates at the business end of Walkins’s sights.