by Mark Albany
Or something else entirely.
“I’ll be honest with you,” I said, my voice soft as I took a step closer to her. “I didn’t know that it would be a trap, but I did suspect. Abarat is many things, but he’s not careless. He’s been planning this for centuries, and he wouldn’t let a prisoner just slip his bonds, not even in spirit to warn us of them. Besides, the timing was a little suspect. Drawing us away with a promise of exactly what we were looking for just as the battle lines were starting to be drawn?”
She narrowed her eyes. “If you knew that it was a trap, why did you come here? The emperor clearly needs his lackeys at his side for the deadliest fight of his life.”
“Well, knowing that it was a trap, we assumed that you would be coming here to shut the trap yourself,” I explained, turning to the others. They hadn’t known of my intentions and suspicions, but there was no point in taking all the credit to myself. “Or Abarat himself. Or both. He would not entrust the duty of catching the five of us to two monsters. He would need someone he could trust to be here, to ensure that the job was done.”
“I’m afraid I still don’t understand,” she said, stepping closer.
“We came here for you, Ali,” I whispered, trying to keep myself focused on the job at hand, and not be distracted by the urge to wrap her up in a warm embrace.
She paused, blinking as if trying to process what I’d just said. Like she didn’t understand it.
“I’m afraid that the woman you came to find is not the one who came to find you,” she pointed out. “Your efforts, while valiant, have been in vain. Now put your sword down and I’ll give you a quick death.”
I shook my head, looking down at the blade in my hand, and against every instinct in me, I let it slip through my fingers, clattering loudly to the warm stone floor.
“You saved my life,” I replied. “Not once, not twice. I’ve lost count how many times to be honest, but that doesn’t change the fact that I owe you my survival over our time together. Despite the pain that we all felt over losing you, I didn’t regret knowing you, not for a second. And all I can hope is that I can somehow return the favor.”
“This isn’t going to end well for you,” Aliana said, smiling that odd, vicious smile that I knew and feared so well.
I couldn’t help but take a step back, remembering the violence that had come from it, but I steeled myself, calming my thudding heart and standing my ground once more.
“When does it ever?” I asked.
She flickered forward, faster than I could see, her fist lashing out and catching me across the jaw. There was enough power behind the blow to send me to the ground. Before I had a chance to recover, Aliana was on me again, her foot hammering into my gut.
The kick was strong enough to send me across the ground to hammer my back into one of the stalagmites, knocking the breath out of my lungs.
I remained where I was, trying to breathe for a few moments before pushing myself back to my feet, brushing the dust and dirt from my clothes. The sword was still lighting the cave up enough that there wasn’t total darkness, but it was difficult to see.
What I couldn’t miss, of course, were those glowing eyes and horns, that grew more intense as Aliana approached me again.
“Fight,” she snarled, picking my sword up and throwing it at me.
Honed reflexes had my hand moving before I could think, picking the blade out of the air in mid-spin, feeling the edge cut lightly into my palm.
A quick flick of the blade had the handle in my hand once more, and there was too much need in me to grip it tighter, to start fighting.
But no. My mind was calm, focused, and the sword clattered to the ground once more.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re going to have to kill me without my egging you on. I think the term for that is execution.”
So be it,” she said, a portal opening in front of her.
Aliana stepped through, and the crackle of power could be heard from behind me a moment before I felt her blow to the back of my head, sending me stumbling to the ground again.
I’d asked for that, painful though it was, and it took me a moment to drag myself to my feet.
“My question is,” I said, feeling a trickle of blood coming down from where she struck me, “why you haven’t just killed me already? Abarat had no use for me, and you... well, you clearly don’t care. Why drag this out?”
“Have you considered that I might just enjoy making you suffer?” she asked, her eyes widening, stepping in closer and grabbing me by the collar, dragging me forward to crash my head into her horns.
I could feel my nose breaking and a sense of nausea filling my body as I collapsed to the ground again, spluttering and spitting my own blood onto the ground.
The hiss and chattering of the monsters when they smelled my blood was less than encouraging, but Aliana appeared to have them well under control as I fought the wave of unpleasantness rising up from my stomach.
“Fight me!” she screamed, picking me back up from the ground, holding me up with one hand as her fist crashed into my face, my ribs and my stomach, seemingly all at once in a flurry of blows before she finally let me drop back down to the ground.
She kicked me again, knocking the breath out of my body again, and leaving me to collect myself, curled up on the ground, clutching at my torso, trying to fight back the pain and the need to retaliate.
“No, I won’t, Aliana,” I mumbled through my bleeding lips, shaking my head. “I won’t.”
She screamed again, dragging me up from the ground and pinning me to the walls. I could feel the webbing there holding and latching onto me, keeping me upright as she flicked her wrist, making one of her daggers appear from thin air.
“Do you want to die?” she screamed, pressing the knife to my neck forcefully. “Is that it?”
“No,” I whispered, trying to pull away from the knife, but stopped by the stone wall behind me. “But you gave your life to save mine. Seems only fair... that I return the favor.”
Another blow to my ribs, and this time I couldn’t do anything to protect myself, nothing to do but absorb the impact with the broken bones, screaming in pain.
Her eyes were changing. They weren’t glowing anymore, although her horns still illuminated the rest of her face, showing it to be contorted in an unhinged rage as she pressed the knife to my neck once more, hard enough that I could feel blood trickling down from where it was sharp enough to cut through my skin.
“Seems only fair,” I whispered again, struggling to stay conscious.
Something was happening. The blade wasn’t at my neck anymore, but this wasn’t how I imagined that dying would feel like. It was supposed to go from pain to less pain to nothingness, and then death.
But no. The webbing keeping me up against the wall gave way and I started falling forward until something - someone - caught me, wrapping me up and letting me back down to the ground gently.
“Oh gods,” Aliana gasped, lightly brushing her fingers across my cheek. “What have I done?”
I could feel tears dripping down on my cheeks, but they weren’t mine. I wanted to smile, but it hurt to do even that.
“Welcome back,” I whispered, feeling the world dropping away from me, as the darkness grew thicker.
16
It was hard to make out what was real or not. The pain was fairly constant, and I could therefore say that it was a part of my reality, but I could see flickers of vision. Aliana standing with me, but sometimes she had those glowing red eyes, that malicious smile that she had when she was letting that violent streak of hers run wild. And then I saw her eyes, full of tears, leaning over me.
The spider-like monsters were gone from sight too, and it wasn’t long before I could hear the other four talking around me as well. Norel was standing over me, but she had the glowing red eyes now. Lyth and Faye looked on, and Braire was talking with Aliana, saying something that I couldn’t overhear.
Odd as it was to try and make sense
of it all, I couldn’t tell what was happening. I was moving, and then I was still. Something was happening around me, movement, but then there was silence, and blackness.
The only constant in my life was pain, and a lot of it. My whole body was on fire, my face, my stomach, my ribs. A beating had been suffered, but the pain came from more than just that. I wasn’t sure what it was, but the ache came deeper. The pool of blackness that I was moving through was gripping me, holding on and keeping me in place while churning around me like a whirlpool.
Everything about me was confusion, crazed movement and impossible images, rushed together into an odd tapestry that made me lose all track and sense of time or space, leaving me just hoping for it all to end.
Which, when it did, happened as suddenly as it had started. The world stopped, the nausea filling me. The blackness remained, but it seemed less thick than before. I didn’t feel like I was swimming through it, but rather like it was there, but it would be possible to remove it without too much effort.
Air. That was the word for it.
I sucked in a deep lungful of it. It wasn’t warm anymore. In fact, it was even a little cool. Refreshing, washing over me and pushing some vigor into my leaden limbs.
Another deep breath, and I was finally able to pry my eyes open, and look up.
Well, it looked like up, felt like it too, but I couldn’t quite tell. It all looked the same as before.
I groaned softly, moving my arms to push myself up from my prone position. They appeared to fight the movement at first, but after a few moments, it grew easier to move, easier to push myself up. My eyes adjusted slowly to the blackness around me, letting me realize that there was some light in the world. Some movement out of the corner of my vision, and something to see in the dim light that was filling the cave that we were in.
It wasn’t the chamber where the monsters had been waiting for us, and there was no sign of the webbing along the walls. It felt like such a long time ago, but there wasn’t anything else that could be said but wonder where the hell I was.
We were still inside the mountain, and from what I could feel, further away from the area that had been warmed by the pools in the spiders’ chamber, but without any kind of notion for where that was, I was still lost. The mountain was vast enough that we could literally be anywhere.
And my memories weren’t as strong as I hoped they would be, with what happened and what had only been a dream mixed in with each other. As drowsy as I was, I couldn’t tell the one from the other, and that was going to have to be done away with quickly. I was fairly certain that a battle was awaiting us, and I would be no good to my friends if I was a drooling idiot.
“He’s awake,” Norel said from behind me, and I heard footsteps coming nearer, and a hand being placed on the nape of my neck as the elf dropped down to her knees beside me. “How are you feeling?”
I shook my head gently, raising my hand to rub some sleep from my eyes. “I’m not sure. I might be feeling a little better than I was before.”
“He might be?” Braire asked, approaching as well.
“It’s common... or not unusual, anyways,” Norel said, gently helping me lay down again. “You took a nasty blow to the head, and while I healed the damage as well I could, there might be some short-term issues with your memories. Some difficulty in remembering what happened. Possibly even thinking that what happened was a dream sometimes.”
“Well, since the alternative was that I was going mad, I’ll be happy to accept that,” I replied, looking up into Norel’s eyes. “Although I would argue that I took more than one nasty blow to the head, if my memory serves.”
“We weren’t able to see too much of what happened,” Lyth explained. “One moment, we were bound up in the webbing, and we could hear you and Aliana speaking. And then a scuffle, and then Aliana was cutting us free, with the monsters waiting up on the ceiling like they hadn’t just bound us up to be eaten.”
“They were never going to eat the four of you,” Aliana said. “Just... well, Grant. I know that doesn’t make it better. Never mind.”
I hadn’t been sure that Aliana was real for a moment. It had been difficult to make out, fuzzy-headed as I was, but hearing her voice seemed to bring everything back. Her darkness, her unhinged rage, and all that melting away while she was still pressing her dagger to my neck.
Not pleasant memories, by any means, but I was glad to have them. I pushed myself up from my prone position quickly, even with Norel trying to stop me.
“You need to rest,” Norel said softly, but I ignored her warnings for the moment.
I was on my feet after a few seconds, looking around the cave that we were waiting in. I could see her, backed against the wall, trying to remain hidden in the darkness, but there was no mistaking the dull glow of her horns or the shape of her wings, tucked into her back.
“Ali,” I whispered, almost not daring to believe it.
She moved away from the wall, stepping out of the shadows that she had been cast in, a small smile touching her lips as she approached me.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, reaching out to lightly brush her thumb over my neck, where her dagger had been pressed.
“It wasn’t you,” I said, placing my hand over hers.
“Still,” she replied, coming in closer, keeping her head down. “I’m glad that Norel was able to heal you up in time. I don’t think I would have been able to forgive myself. How... how did you know how to reach me?”
“You were always the one who told me that my greatest weapon wasn’t my power or my sword, but my mind,” I replied, leaning in closer to her. “And... well, fighting back would bring the dark side of you out. Taking the punishment while reminding you of how much you were, well, loved was to my mind the best way to appeal to the part of you that wouldn’t want to kill me. I spoke with Faye about being under Abarat’s control after the dream, and she told me that appealing to your lighter side would be the way to break you free from his influence.”
“In fairness, at the time, I didn’t think that it would involve you getting beat nearly to death,” Faye said.
“Neither did I,” I admitted, leaning in to place a light kiss to Aliana’s lips, feeling her fingers move up my chest and thread into my hair as she pulled me in closer.
“Fuck, I’ve missed you,” she gasped when she finally pulled away.
“I know,” I said, unable to keep myself from grinning.
The other four weren’t going to be left out of the reunion, and it wasn’t long before I found myself wrapped up in a group embrace that involved all six of us. Norel and Braire appeared to have gotten their reunion with Aliana already, but were more than willing to add some more to the mix and it was a little while before we finally pulled away from each other.
It was a moment that I never wanted to end, and yet, it would need to. I looked around to the five at my side, with Norel still clinging close to me, making sure that none of her healing work was undone. Her concern was well-received as even though I was feeling better now than I’d had in a long time, my knees still felt in need of some assistance to keep my body up.
“Wait,” I said, looking around. “Now that we have Aliana back with us, why is it that she’s not a part of the connection yet?”
“Well, Abarat did a good job of erasing the bond that I had with all of you,” Aliana said. “While the - well, ‘pathways’ isn’t quite the right word, but it’s close enough to use - are still there, the connection does still need to be re-established in the manner that it was made originally.”
I blinked, recalling how the connection had been forged initially. “Well, I think we should get to that as quickly as possible, don’t you?”
She nodded, leaning in to place a kiss to my cheek, which was still feeling sensitive from where Norel had laid her healing touch on it.
“But I’m afraid that we have larger concerns,” Braire interjected before we found ourselves off track.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She indicated for me to follow, and I did, along with the rest of our team as we headed through the tunnel, where I could already feel a hint of a draft.
“What happened to the beasts?” I asked. “The... spider-like creatures back in the chamber?”
“I was still able to control them, even while not in my darkened state,” Aliana explained. “But only barely. We managed to escape their reach before I lost them completely, but I’m thankful to know that they stayed behind.”
“Me too,” I said, shivering gently.
The air was cold outside, as we approached what looked like an entrance carved into the side of the mountain.
We were a great deal higher than I remembered, and as we reached the entrance, the whole of the view was breathtaking. Even at night, with the world washed in the moon and starlight, it was gorgeous to behold.
And yet, the glittering of red and yellow on the ground below told me of what Braire was speaking.
“The battle has begun,” I whispered under my breath.
“It looks like the human’s lines have been holding well enough,” Faye said softly. “But we don’t know how long that will last.”
I turned to Aliana. “It’s a lot to ask, but do you think you can get us down there?”
She nodded. “I believe I can. And do you one better, besides.”
Aliana pulled my sword from where she had been carrying it around her waist, placing it in my hands again.
“I completely forgot,” I whispered, handling the blade almost reverently.
“I didn’t,” she replied.
17
There were a great many things that I had missed about having Aliana with us. Well, I had missed nearly everything about her really. Her voice, her smile, the way her eyes glowed - figuratively, not literally - when she spoke. The taste of her lips, the feel of her body pressed against mine in that way that she did it. Always with a little sigh and wrapping herself around me, even with her wings coming around to pull me closer.