He shifted his weight to his other foot and dove on top of me, slamming the back of my head against the cold stone.
Time slowed to a standstill.
I blinked twice, realizing the man was just about to move his hands to my neck, my eyes falling onto the dark seal on the front of his uniform.
A snow lion.
The thought that Sona had arrived nearly broke me from my spell.
Yet time continued to remain at its epically slow pace, the man’s hands barely moving an inch toward my neck, an expression of fury appearing on his masked face.
He would never see the knee that I sunk into his groin, time rushing back to its normal pace, the man suddenly barreled over as I pushed him off.
I grabbed my Flaming Thunderbolt of Wisdom and drove it into his back. He shrieked in pain as I pulled the blade out, the wound already cauterized.
I finished the job.
His head bounced on the floor and his body ignited.
A terrible cry from the hallway, the crackle of fire, a noise that sounded like a bookshelf had been knocked over—we were definitely under attack.
I charged out of the room, managing to tighten my robes with one arm as I moved. A few of the candles already extinguished, I skidded to a halt when I came upon a darkened hallway full of ninjas waiting for me.
“Shit,” I said under my breath, my flaming sword at the ready.
The first ninja came and I hacked his foot off at the ankle.
I narrowly brought my blade up in time to meet the next man, who had a katana.
Our weapons clinked together, the fire from my Flaming Thunderbolt spreading down to his blade and up his arm. I turned back to the now foot-less man and punched him so hard that blood sprayed out of the back of his head.
Two came at me at once, both circling around the guy who was now on fire and trying to put himself out. The first went for a roundhouse kick while the other slipped to the side.
With a deep breath in, I willed time to slow down, failing miserably.
A knee came into the small of my back, bringing me to the ground. I rolled just in time to avoid a flurry of kicks. I managed to grab one of the legs and whip the ninja to the ground.
I blindly waved my sword in front of me, connecting with a leg, an arm, the side of someone’s back as they tried to get out of the way, more bodies igniting. I got up to one knee, delivering a fist to the chest of the ninja who was already down, the man’s lungs collapsing.
One of the ninjas was just about to advance on me when a huge fireball took down one of the walls, Tashi’s body sailing through it.
There was even more commotion outside, and as Tashi scrambled back to his feet, the fire spirit looked to me, panic in his blazing eyes.
Another fire spirit swarmed into the room, smashing into Tashi and sending a couple ninjas to their knees.
Using this distraction to my advantage, I tackled one of the ninjas and beat him to a bloody pulp with the hilt of my sword. Another came at me and lost an arm for his effort, the man still fighting until I managed to bring my sword through his gut.
I feared for Altan, Lhandon, and Baatar, and just as the thought left my mind, time slowed to a standstill.
A ninja with a club ran in slow-motion at me now, the tip of his weapon on fire, the man balanced on one foot.
I charged forward and delivered a punch to his stomach that sent a ripple tearing out of his back followed by a corona of blood and viscera, time speeding up just as the ceiling gave way in front of me.
Backpedaling, I was just about to move forward again when…
Whack!
Something cracked me in the back of the head, my brain exploding into a barrage of colors.
I was out cold.
Things started to spin back into existence, reality muddy, barely stitched together.
I winced, tasting blood at the back of my mouth, blinking rapidly as I tried to come to grips with what I saw. “Glad you could join us,” came a woman’s voice.
Sona stepped in front of me, the woman with the long dark hair in her magical armor, her blade rimmed in purple energy at her side.
Baring her teeth, she drove her sword into my chest.
I let out a grunt, the pain boiling through me, something about her and her enchanted sword causing my skin to boil.
She pulled her blade out, the wound sizzling.
“You knew this was coming,” Sona said as things started to blur again. She pulled my head back and spit in my face.
“Nick!” Lhandon shouted.
I looked to my left to see that he was crouched in front of me. One of Sona’s elite guards stood behind him, a sword at his back.
Altan was to his right, in a similar position with his hands behind his head, a sword pointed to his back as well.
Finally, there was Baatar, who lay on his side, the old man’s eyes twitching, a pool of blood forming around his head.
A terrible inferno was reflected in all three of their faces, the monastery behind me on fire, the warmth suddenly reaching my back.
“How…?” Altan asked, a wild look on his face.
The woman standing behind him pressed the tip of her sword into his back. Altan cried out, realizing that she would press it all the way through if he squirmed.
“That’s a good question,” Sona said, taking a step away from me. “I figured you would have a patrol of some sort, some way to know if we were going to approach, so we sent part of our group on the most visible path as a decoy.” She motioned toward the field we had come through the other day. “But none of that matters now. You will pay for what you did to Madame Mabel’s lotus.”
I looked at her curiously for a moment. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?” she asked, turning back to me.
I placed my hand over the wound just beneath my sternum, wheezing as I sucked another breath in. I lifted my other hand, recalling the rune for my healing ability. It was well after midnight, and I could only use it once a day, but I hadn’t tested it to the point that I knew when the power reset.
“Know what?” she asked again, and in that moment I noticed a towering fire spirit lift from the ground, his head crowned in golden flames.
It wasn’t Tashi.
I also noticed a person I hadn’t seen before, one wearing monk’s robes.
His hood was pressed back and he had a reptilian face. A cylinder of energy slowly moved around his hand, and as he raised it in Baatar’s direction, the hermit cringed in pain, coughing up more blood.
“So you’re going to kill us all?” I asked, my eyes darting left and right as I tried to come up with a plan.
A pair of the ninjas I’d seen earlier came forward, one of them holding my Flaming Thunderbolt of Wisdom by its hilt, the blade sheathed. He dropped it on the ground, the other one placing Baatar’s large bag next to it.
“No, I’m going to bring you back to Nagchu and let Madame Mabel have the honors,” Sona said, her scarf covering the wicked smile on her face. “I can hear your screams now. It is going to be a long and excruciating experience, Nick.”
I looked to Lhandon, whose eyes were wide, his cheeks puffed out.
I wished one of us was telepathic; it was clear that the portly monk wanted to tell me something.
“You’re going to be in for a surprise,” I said, hoping that Lhandon needed me to prolong our dialogue, that he had a plan, a rune, anything that would help us.
“Speak,” Sona said, placing her sword under my chin.
I could smell my own burning flesh now, my skin sizzling as she slowly lifted my head, forcing me to maintain eye contact with her.
“It is over,” she said softly.
And as the words left her lips, Lhandon exhaled deeply, Gansukh blasting out of his mouth, the ice spirit careening toward Sona.
The guard behind Lhandon shoved her sword deep into his back, pressing it out the front of his chest. The guard behind Altan did the same, both of them slumping forward.
/> “No!” I screamed, trying to pull myself to my feet and failing.
Gansukh’s arm morphed into a large blade of ice. The ice spirit took a swing at Sona, the woman meeting it with her sword.
Her armor started to ripple down her body, thickening to protect her from the subzero temperatures radiating off Gansukh’s flesh as their blades met again.
More guards charged us, Lhandon throwing his hand at them and a boulder forming.
It took me a second to realize that it wasn’t a boulder; it was a prayer bead, one of the weapons that Baatar had given him which Lhandon had never used before.
As the prayer bead tore through our enemies, a circular wall of flames erupted around us, Tashi crying out as he pulled more fire from the ground than I’d ever seen him conjure before.
The fire spirit had come out of nowhere, surging through a line of Sona’s elite guards. He met the other fire spirit head-on, the two lashing at each other.
Clank! Clank!
Gansukh and Sona’s blades cracked against one another.
Ram horns grew from the ice spirit’s skull as it butted its head forward, Sona shoved outside the wall of fire.
“Run!” Tashi shouted, pulling more flames from the ground, the terrible inferno tinged with blue and purple. “Run!”
Not knowing if it would work or not, I traced up the rune for Healing Hand and felt the energy come to me, letting out a sigh of relief.
I then gasped as I realized the predicament Sona had put me in.
As if he were reading my mind, Baatar shouted for us to go, looking intently at Lhandon as the monk stumbled over toward him. The heavyset monk fell and came back up again, his hand covered in his own blood.
He looked up to me, horror on his face.
I started to drag myself toward him, the fire blazing all around us.
“You have to heal yourself, Nick,” Lhandon said as I reached him.
“But I can only heal three…”
“You must!” Lhandon said, a finality in his voice that I’d rarely heard from the man.
I pressed my hand against the wound on my chest, healing it up instantly.
“Now, Altan…” Lhandon said as he inched closer to Baatar. “Do it, Nick!”
The hermit whispered something into Lhandon’s ear as I healed Altan, the monk nodding, a pained expression on his face like he wanted to both scream and cry at the same time.
“We can bring him with us,” I told Lhandon, nearing the two of them again, feeling instantly rejuvenated due to my healing power.
“No…” Baatar said, blood bubbling down his lips. “I’m ready… to pass. Heal him, now!”
I moved my hand over Lhandon’s wound, instantly feeling regret that I wasn’t able to do something to help the hermit.
Lhandon gasped as his skin stitched back together, his internal organs mending, the bruises on his face instantly disappearing, the light returning to his eyes. He grabbed onto my arm. “Nick, we have to go now.”
“Your sword,” Altan said, handing me my sheathed blade, Baatar’s bag already flung over his shoulder.
“We can fight them,” I started to say.
Lhandon shook his head. “We must go!”
“All right, all right,” I said as a plume of fire lifted on my left.
Altan and I took off, Lhandon lagging behind. The fire rose higher into the air as we continued to the right of the monastery, embers everywhere, walls collapsing into each other.
We came to the long line of steps that led up to the monastery, some of the blue prayer flags on the side already covered in flames.
“Shit,” I said, preparing to take each step at the same time.
Gansukh spiraled over us and collided with the steps of the monastery, creating a flat plane of ice that led all the way to the bottom.
“No way…” I started to say.
Lhandon launched himself down the ice slide with a grunt, Altan following after him, his hands tightly clutching Baatar’s bag.
Not knowing how this was going to turn out at the bottom, I sat down and pressed myself off, my body picking up momentum almost instantly.
I looked up to see Gansukh following above me, a determined look on the ice spirit’s face.
And just as I was about to reach the bottom of the steps, my body began to slow, the ice ramping up to decrease momentum.
“Oh my God,” I said as soon as I got off, watching as Tashi came down from the top, melting the ramp along his way, Sona’s fire spirit on his tail.
“How do we stop that thing?”
“The Flaming Thunderbolt!” Lhandon said, a splash of determination on his face.
I unsheathed my blade and lifted it into the air at the very last moment.
Tashi slammed into it, a plume of fire creating a mushroom cloud above me. The other fire spirit came to meet me just as the length of my sword quadrupled in size.
The enemy fire spirit surged forward.
I hacked him in half, my blade starting at his shoulder and tearing out the other side of his body.
The fire spirit fell to the ground, his form starting to shrivel.
“Finish him,” I heard Tashi say.
I approached the fire spirit and drove the blade into the golden flames licking off his skull.
The fire instantly petered out, smoke taking shape in the air all around him, the smell of brimstone meeting my nostrils.
It was over; the enemy fire spirit was now a black mark in the soil.
I looked to the others as Tashi slowly pulled away from my sword, reforming next to me.
“To the Darkhan Mountains,” Lhandon said. “Before they figure out a way down here.”
Chapter Five: Flight After Fight
We made our way through the woods, the branches whipping at my legs and my arms.
I couldn’t help but think of how things would have been different had I cast the rune that allowed me to absorb three strikes.
Maybe I never would have gotten knocked out, and if I had by some chance been knocked out, if that were even possible, Sona would not have been able to stab me in the chest with the Mummified Hand of Dolma.
Then I could have healed Baatar…
We had gone almost full blackout to prevent them from spotting us, Tashi now a floating teardrop of fire not unlike the flame at the tip of the candle.
Lhandon led the way, even though he was the slowest of all of us, the monk occasionally stopping, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath in.
Altan wasn’t far from him, Baatar’s bag flung over his shoulder.
The former slave carefully avoided some of the more ornery branches, light on his feet even though he was somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age.
I was glad the moon was out, adding a deep blue hue to some of the leaves and branches. As we moved deeper into the forest, I kept an eye on the trees, remembering that many of them could attack us as well, which would definitely blow our cover.
“Where are we going?” I asked Lhandon at some point, assuming we were now far enough away from the monastery to talk amongst ourselves.
“The book…” Lhandon said, out of breath. He stopped and placed his hands on his knees, gasping for air. “Sorry… Don’t usually move this fast. Just give me a minute.”
“Which book?” I asked after a long pause, letting the portly monk catch his breath.
“The book Baatar gave me is a priceless treasure…” Lhandon wiped his face with his sleeve. “The Book of the Immortals was in the library, which means it likely burned down with the rest of the monastery.” He bit his lip, a rare glimpse of anger coming across his face.
“Relax,” I started to tell the monk.
“So much knowledge lost to destruction and stupidity! Do they not realize the iniquity of burning a monastery to the ground? And to think we have an entire world like that,” he said, waving his arm out of the woods. “How many books and treatises have been lost in this manner? Can’t they at least preserve the books?”
Lhandon wiped his face again. Even if it was cold outside, he was still drenched in sweat from moving so quickly. “We need to find the book before we go to the Island Kingdom of Jonang in search of your friend and my predecessor. Baatar’s last words to me were ‘go to the Darkhan Mountains,’ which I took to mean that’s where he hid the book. I’m hoping that Gansukh will be able to help us in this endeavor…”
“Did someone say cave?” the ice spirit asked, looping back around, a few of the branches curling away as it moved past them. “Because that is my specialty.”
“Help us find the book, and you are free to go,” Lhandon said suddenly, a wild look in his eyes.
“You mean it?” the ice spirit asked, and while I couldn’t see the reflection of its face due to the darkness, I could tell by the tone of its voice that it was legitimately surprised. “You would free me?”
“It is absolutely imperative we find that book and…” Lhandon shook his head. “You have my word.”
“Thank you, Exalted One,” Gansukh said.
“Then what?” I asked. “What happens to that version if we get attacked again?”
“I have hand-copied a book before,” Lhandon said. “It is an arduous task, one that requires great concentration, yet one that creates good karma. I’m willing to do my best. We will make a copy as swiftly as we can and hide it somewhere. Perhaps we will make more copies. It is important for people to read this book.”
“I can help you as well,” Altan offered. “Not all the slaves in Nagchu can read and write, but I was able to teach myself at an early age.”
“How?” I asked him.
“When I was a boy, one of the slave masters would allow his children to play with us, mostly because his children got bored while he was working, and his wife was dead, so they came to work with him. The man’s children could all read and write, and I would bet them that I could spell a word or write a sentence, and subsequently learn from them.”
Divine Madness Page 4