by Frank Morin
“I’ll be right there,” she promised. Then she hugged Connor fiercely.
He held her close and assured her, “You did everything you could for him.”
She leaned back to look him in the eye, fresh tears making her beautiful blue eyes even more mesmerizing than ever. She shook her head slowly and her voice cracked with sorrow. “No, Connor. I did too much. I knew Harley could deflect my hornets, but I fired again anyway. She used them to destroy Dierk’s windrider. I helped her take him.”
He read anguish and self hatred in her gaze. He gripped her shoulders and said strongly, “It’s not your fault that Dierk hesitated. It’s not your fault that Harley took advantage of the moment. Blame Harley and Harley alone.”
Verena nodded and sniffled loudly. “You’re right, Connor. Promise me we’ll kill her.”
Usually Connor tried to avoid killing, but he did not hesitate now. “We will kill Harley today, Verena. No matter what.”
She kissed him fiercely, but as she turned to go, Kilian hissed, “Connor, she’s unleashed the hounds.”
Ilse frowned. “Her summoned monsters?”
Kilian nodded. “A little earlier than I expected.”
“Has she discovered Rory?” Verena asked, her voice thick with worry.
“I don’t think so. They’re coming fast, straight up the road.”
Ilse said sharply, “Lukas, call up the Crushers. I need to get down to the ground. Lord Mattias, will you join us?”
“Of course.” Mattias looked grateful for a chance to look useful. He and Lukas hurried off, but Kilian held Ilse back for a moment.
“Harley obviously wants us distracted. Just as obviously, we have to deal with the threat.”
“So what’s she distracting us from?” Verena asked.
“I’ll tell you as soon as we stop her hounds and figure it out. Get into the air, Verena. Watch yourself and do not allow your anger to cloud your judgment. Harley is a master at rattling her opponents into making stupid blunders. She rarely offers a chance to make a second mistake.”
Connor watched her go, full of conflicting emotions. He loved her strength and determination, but sometimes in the grip of battle fury she made reckless decisions, like her strafing dive against Harley’s army. He worried what she might do when she spotted Harley again.
Kilian clapped him on the shoulder, his expression eager. “Let’s bring out Justice and his friends.”
83
Justice’s League Would Have Been a Better Name
Connor embraced his growing battle excitement, using it as a shield against his worry for Verena and his fear that his tertiary affinities would fail him again at a critical moment. Determined not to falter, he focused on the slender thread of thought still connecting him to his summoned creatures. The links blossomed in strength, filling his mind with an image of the scores of monsters awaiting his command, crouched in the dark warehouse.
Connor tugged on them.
“You forgot to send one to open the door,” Kilian commented as a tide of ferocious elemental creatures shattered the wide sliding door and bounded up the street, led by Mouth and Justice. Terrified townsfolk and startled soldiers scattered out of their path.
Connor didn’t want anyone hurt, and he didn’t want to damage the city walls yet, so as the tide of summoned creatures swarmed toward the gates, he tapped pumice and then managed a decent connection to inner-focused quartzite. He applied it to his voice and shouted, “Open the Army Gate and get out of the way!”
Soldiers scrambled to obey, and they moved a lot faster when they caught sight of the tide of terrifying creatures bearing down on them. Connor pushed the thought to his monsters to slow to give the gate a little more time.
He switched to soapstone, and thankfully Water appeared in his mind, looking regal and stable. Her hair billowed around her beautiful face like deep blue tides, while her red and green cape fluttered behind her sea-foam white gown. She gave Connor an approving smile and stepped close to embrace him.
The connection felt stronger than any time since his ascdension. He took that as a good sign. He waited a couple of heartbeats until after the next wave of green energy swept across her cape. It barely shook the connection. So he swept his soapstone senses south, across the landscape. With snow piled on the land and still falling in heavy sheets, he could see everything mapped clearly to his water senses.
Harley’s horde of monsters was pounding up the road in a dark tide of enlivened earth. Connor suddenly worried that maybe he should have made Mouth twice as big. Most of Harley’s creatures were the size of horses, and they all moved with deadly speed. He sensed mostly predator shapes, like pedras and nualls, and decided to think of them collectively as her hounds.
But he hated the icy fear that slid down his spine as he considered her larger army of creatures. Then Ivor’s parting words came to mind and he allowed a fierce grin.
Ivor was right. Connor needed to embrace the same unpredictable state he’d sought at the Carraig. He’d faced far stronger armies and won because he thought creatively and found ways to enjoy the journey, despite the risk.
He couldn’t refer to those monsters as Harley’s hounds. He needed something simpler, something that poked a mocking finger at her tyrannical power. So instead of Harley’s Hounds, he’d call them Hahos. Except that sounded a bit juvenile. Hayhos. That was it.
Connor’s creatures poured through the still-opening gate, with Kilian’s mixed in among them. The Hayhos were charging up the road on a wide front. The deep snow did nothing to hinder them.
He twisted his mini-hub. “Ivor, are you sensing this? Harley sent her summoned creatures. When we engage, feel free to take any that wander too close to the river.”
“Sculpted scone.”
Ilse frowned at Connor. “Who came up with that ridiculous codeword?”
“Verena, I think.”
“That girl’s been spending far too much time with you lot,” Kilian said.
Connor smiled to himself as he spread his creatures out and sent out the order, Destroy everything on the road south.
He decided he also needed a name for his little army. Too many of the ideas he considered based on Mouth made him want to snicker, so he decided to use Justice, which raced beside Mouth at the vanguard of the host.
He was tempted to call it Justice’s League, but that didn’t feel right. So he settled on the Freakishly-Awesome-Monsters-Connor-And-Kilian-Each-Summoned. Famcakes sounded right. Giving them a name definitely helped cut through the fear that threatened to rob him of his ability to think clearly.
The Famcakes sprang forward with remarkable speed, racing to meet the Hayhos. There might be almost twice as many Hayhos than Famcakes, but Connor felt optimistic they could tear her summoned army apart. He couldn’t fathom how she alone had produced so many.
“Kilian, are you reading the counts?”
Both of Kilian’s eyes were filled with blue flames that transformed his face into an intimidating mask. His fierce grin added to the aura of danger suddenly surrounding him. “She’ll try cheating. Ilse, are you ready to play catch-the-devil with her again?”
“It will be my pleasure.” Ilse rushed for the stairs, leaving Connor and Kilian alone atop the tower.
“Connor, you’ll have to support Ilse’s efforts this time. Harley won’t be holding back.”
“How deep do you think she’ll risk drawing?”
“Not too deep at first, but she’ll hit harder than yesterday.”
“I’ll deal with it. She won’t squash our Famcakes.”
“Our what?”
“Never mind. I’ll deal with the earth,” he promised.
Ilse was far craftier, but if he could secure a solid connection, he could sling earth around with more strength. He wished they hadn’t used up his slate sculpted stone. It might have offered him a tremendous advantage against Harley.
“Ivor and I will push with soapstone and marble,” Kilian continued. “She’s a lot closer now and
her army is almost as far from the hounds as we are. She has to know the situation isn’t ideal.”
Connor was tempted to ask Kilian to refer to her hounds as Hayhos, but it was better to fight from two very different mental states.
Kilian added, “Whatever she hopes to gain from attacking so far out, let’s crush her hounds and stop her. This might be the break we need.”
The Famcakes crashed into the Hayhos, and the fierce, brutal struggle that erupted a mile from Merkland totally captured Connor’s attention.
The two lines of monsters tore into each other with terrifying intensity. They held nothing back, were not limited by pain or fear of getting hurt or killed. They launched themselves at each other with single-minded intensity.
Connor caught flashes of images from his Famcakes. One tore out the throat of a bearlike creature with two heads, and air erupted out the breach, shrieking a high-pitched death wail. The dying monster’s second head ripped its attacker’s foreleg off in turn with a spray of fiery blood.
Another nuall-shaped Famcake landed on the back of an enormous doglike beast and ripped out its spine in a spray of dirt, then leaped away toward the next attacker.
Connor couldn’t sense the earth well enough from up there. He hesitated just long enough to ensure a strong connection with marble, then threw himself off the tower with a burst of fire. He shot high over a row of long barracks and a wide, paved yard full of soldiers. He planned to drag the flames along with him to form a fiery net to break his fall, but his connection wavered, Fire gave him a jaunty wave, and the flames winked out.
Luckily, he had already absorbed granite. He max-tapped it just before plowing into the ground near Ilse. He blasted through a foot of snow and bounced off the frozen ground. The brutal impact rattled him, but he forced himself to roll over and press his hand against the ground, seeking a connection with earth.
“Don’t get sloppy, Connor,” Ilse warned from where she stood nearby atop a squat Sapper tower, hands embedded into earthen rails.
He decided it was better she think him nervous rather than realize how unstable his tertiary affinities still were. Mattias, Lukas, and a dozen Crushers were spread out to either side in four-man squads. They included a Water Moccasin and a Flameweaver, and the falling snow parted around them, leaving them in pockets of calm.
Luckily, Earth rose out of the ground in front of him and gripped Connor’s shoulder, his solemn expression encouraging. Harley and Ilse were already clashing under the raging battlefield a mile to the south. Earth bubbled and rippled beneath the battling creatures, who all ignored the threat. Where Harley gained advantage, Famcakes died, sucked into the earth or impaled and ripped apart by vicious, grasping fingers of earth.
But Ilse refused to surrender easily. For every two Famcakes that Harley destroyed, Ilse shattered the life out of one of her Hayhos.
Not good odds.
Connor hesitated to throw himself into that fight, though. The two women were interlinked under the area, their wills twisting and weaving around each other in an intricate pattern as they tried to block each other’s moves while gaining advantage for themselves. The delicate balance moved remarkably little earth. Neither of them had yet abandoned caution and risked drawing deep enough that they might trigger catastrophic disaster.
No, if Connor threw himself into that mess, he might hinder Ilse as much as help her. So he jumped on top, just like when his younger brothers were squabbling in their loft bedroom.
Connor thrust his earth senses down the road, limiting himself to the top two inches of dirt. He didn’t push into the area in a single wide sheet of influence, like sliding a mattress across a floor. Instead he focused his will like the prongs of a really long pitchfork and punched through the weave of the women’s battle.
The next wave of green power swept across Earth’s cloak, shaking his connection, but not quite severing it. Connor cursed softly, hating the limitation. He felt like the second threshold had lied to him.
He forced himself to think. Kilian always said how one applied force was more important than how much force they brought to bear. So as his connection solidified between waves of green magic, he plunged his narrow bands of influence into the battlefield. Everywhere his earth senses touched one the Hayhos, he grabbed at whatever part was touching the ground and sheared it off.
That helped a little by distracting the creatures or knocking them down for a Famcake to destroy, but it wasn’t enough. Connor sprayed earth into the air to better sense the battlefield and began focusing on individual contests. One Hayho had knocked down a Famcake and was snapping in for the kill. Connor grabbed its jaws with slender fingers of earth and wrenched it off. That gave the Famcake the chance to lunge back in and rip out its throat.
With each wave of the green-frequency magic, his connection wavered, but he threw himself back into the fray as soon as it stabilized again. His limited approach didn’t give Harley enough time to counter him well, and Connor grinned.
Kilian joined the fray with his usual flair. Fire swept across the battlefield like a bowl of spaghetti thrown into a hurricane. The long, thin tendrils of fire whipped around the hounds, driving into eyes and ears and throats, disabling, distracting, and piercing from the inside.
Ivor struck with a cresting wave of water that snatched everything fighting within ten yards of the Macantact, Hayhos and Famcakes alike. A second later, the dark, cold waters spit the Famcakes back out, but none of the Hayhos ever surfaced.
The next two minutes passed in a blur as Connor immersed himself in the effort of maintaining those brief, intense strikes against the Hayhos, and tried to block Harley’s attacks on the Famcakes. He even tried to think in confusing sentences to encourage a tighter bond with Earth, who seemed to approve. His affinity strengthened, the interference fading from the green-frequency magic. The ground under that section of road became one with him. Summoned creatures tore each other apart and he felt every claw, every stumble, every broken body.
Earth buckled, oozed, and churned under the creatures as Connor and Ilse fought Harley. Carefully. Fire and water ripped across the battle lines, tearing at Harley’s monsters.
Some of Harley’s other tertiary Petralists joined the fight against Kilian and Ivor, and their opposing wills shredded the air above the monsters, showering the land for a quarter mile in every direction with sprays of fire and glittering, icy shards of broken water.
Ivor and Kilian gained an early advantage, smashing down nearly three dozen Hayhos before Harley’s support solidified. After that, the elemental battle grew in intensity but faded in effectiveness as both sides spent the majority of their strength countering each other.
That gave the monsters time to rip each other apart.
Although the Famcakes fought with inspiring ferocity, the Hayhos outnumbered them and often exceeded them in sheer mass and power. Connor recognized the looming outcome thirty seconds before Justice and Mouth, the last of the Famcakes, both exploded under the combined onslaught of five Hayhos.
All of their creatures were dead, shattered into wet piles of broken clay, their elemental lifeblood sucked away by Petralists in the intense battle over their corpses. Nearly thirty Hayhos still remained, although several of them were badly damaged.
Harley’s thunder-chuckle echoed across the valley as her hounds began to retreat.
If only Connor could mix multiple elements, he could probably smash most of those remaining creatures before they could retreat, but he didn’t dare.
He did have friends handy, though.
“Kilian. Ivor. Help me. Mix your elements with mine and we can make a final strike.”
Without waiting for a reply, Connor flung a long rope of earth into the air above the battlefield. Many of the other Petralists seemed to be beginning to withdraw, so the move must have caught them by surprise. Ropes of crimson fire and black water shot across the battlefield and twined around his earth.
“All together!” Connor cried, and heaved on his piece
of the combined elemental weapon. Kilian and Ivor sensed the movement and reinforced it with their own.
Their twisted elements slammed down over the retreating lines of Hayhos, swatting them like a line of ants under a long boot. They caught a dozen of them in that strike, splattering their corpses across the road. The rest of the hounds galloped away while Harley and her Petralists surrounded them with heavy shielding.
Connor let them go. They’d accomplished what they needed. Harley now knew that she wasn’t the only one with tricks up her sleeve. He, Kilian, and Ivor released the elements, and Connor switched to quartzite.
Fickle Air appeared, flitting around his mind, hands outstretched, but spinning to make a connection difficult. Connor lunged and caught one hand. He laughed and unleashed his own thunder-chuckle.
Air wrenched her hand away and blew him a kiss as the valley boomed with what sounded like an enormous choking cough.
“Did you do that?” Ilse asked with a frown.
“Trying to keep them unbalanced.”
Mattias said, “It probably worked. I have no idea what that was supposed to be.”
Next time, he’d use serpentinite.
84
Ideas Wanted. Now.
Connor turned his mini-hub to Verena’s stone. “Are you in position?”
“What happened down there? I couldn’t make out specifics through that elemental storm.”
“We destroyed almost all of her Hayhos. Our Famcakes are gone.”
“What?”
“She’s got about twenty hounds left. Keep an eye out for them.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Sculpted Scones.”
Kilian landed nearby on a pillar of intertwined water and fire. “That went about as well as we could have hoped.”
“Any idea why she initiated that?” Ilse asked, then she frowned and said, “Connor!”
He tried tapping stale again, but this time, despite max-tapping pumice, the gateway simply refused to open. The interfering green magic seemed to bounce around in his head between waves, completely canceling out his ability to connect with earth.