“I think your aim is a bigger problem at this point. Tam’s a better shot when he’s drunk.”
Jason laughed. The comment wasn’t even particularly funny, but for some reason right now it seemed downright hilarious. All he wanted to do was lie down and sleep for a week or two or six…
“I’m glad you came, you know,” he whispered, placing a hand on her leg. “At least we get to do this together—”
“Oh, for the love of Asgard,” Sarina grunted. “You must be really tired if you’re getting sappy already.”
“Pretty much. I just wanted to…wait, what the hell is that?”
A low rumble thundered in the distance, and at first Jason thought they were about to be run down by a herd of stampeding groll. But then he recognized the familiar clomping of heavy cavalry in mid charge, and a few seconds later five Alliance cavalry thundered around the corner in a perfect triangle. Their leader, a puffy-cheeked young man with a silver-blue tabard, lowered a glimmering Aetheric shield in front of his mount. Soon the barrier widened until it was protecting all the riders behind him, and the Crell arrows and energy bolts splattered harmlessly aside.
Sarina knew an opportunity when she saw one, and she vaulted over their cover once more and fired. Sucking in a deep breath, Jason leaned up to join her assault…and then a warning tingle abruptly shot down his spine. He sensed a cold mind lurking somewhere off to their left, but his eyes couldn’t pick out anything. He concentrated harder, feeling around with his telepathy to try and latch onto a target…
And then Jason whirled around and unleashed an arcing bolt of lightning towards one of the nearby columns. The stone ruptured beneath the assault, and the Crell soldier who had been slinking around behind it barely managed a startled yelp before a thousand pounds of rock crushed him into a bloody pulp.
“Much better,” Sarina said, tossing him a wry grin. “Talroy and his cavalry can take care of this mess. We need to find Elade.”
Jason nodded. “She has to be nearby somewhere…”
“She is.”
Sarina pointed off to her left. Masked behind the smoking pillars of what used to be a house, her tattered armor soaked in blood and her left arm dangling limply, Elade knelt helplessly on the ground before a towering Crell soldier.
***
Elade’s sabre sliced through the soldier’s breastplate, piercing his heart in a single, crisp thrust. His corpse collapsed atop a growing pile of bodies, and she twirled her bloody blade about to deter the Crell Breaker before he could make another charging sweep. After what felt like an eternity of hit-and-fade strikes, she had finally eliminated the rest of his unit. She just wasn’t sure she had anything left for the big man himself.
“You don’t fight like a paladin,” the Breaker commented as he hurled another sphere of flame in her direction. Elade sheathed her weapon in a protective barrier and easily batted aside the miniature fireball. “And you certainly don’t fight like any elf I’ve ever seen.”
“You fight exactly like plenty of other Crell,” Elade replied. “Maybe you just need to get out more.”
“Kroll was right about you,” the man went on, ignoring her. “You could be so much more than another lackey of the weak, but instead you shackle yourself to the empty platitudes of false gods.”
“It doesn’t take divine inspiration to realize that your so-called mistress is insane. You and your ilk might not be Bound, but you’re still slaves to her will.”
He smiled. “We are slaves to nothing and to no one. We are the children of the Aether itself, born to save this world from the parasites infesting it.”
“Right,” Elade murmured, shifting another step to her left. Off in the distance, she heard the familiar thunder of a cavalry charge, and she mentally confirmed that Squire Talroy had successfully organized the Alliance soldiers. Slowly but surely, the battle was turning in their favor. “Do yourself a favor and surrender before it’s too late. Save as many of your soldiers as you can.”
“Their lives are irrelevant,” the Breaker said with a shrug. “This war is already over—surely even you can see that.”
“Then you might as well put down your sword and stop fighting.”
He chuckled and shifted to a two-handed grip on his serrated broadsword. The weapon wasn’t particularly well-balanced or graceful, but Elade had no doubt that it could cut through virtually anything. Judging from the man’s bulk and stance, he clearly wasn’t big on fighting defensively anyway. He was as tall as Tevek with the power of a man in his prime.
“I have been told you cannot be broken,” the Breaker said. “Perhaps I can find a way.”
Elade sighed. Tevek had once told her that the best part of the Last Dawn’s reputation was how often it cowed men into submission before they threw away their lives. Evidently this new generation of Crell hadn’t received the missive.
The Breaker attacked. He was faster than he looked, if still a bit awkward. He used wide, arcing slashes, any of which would have easily been enough to cleave her in two had she not flipped out of the way. Elade slipped beneath his defenses several times, but even her Dawn-forged blade had trouble piercing his thick armor without a direct hit. He wouldn’t go down easily.
Where Kroll had been a sadistic ball of tightly-focused rage, this man was a cunning, disciplined warrior. He was still arrogant, however, and before her plummet from dragonback and subsequent collision with the tower, Elade had no doubt she could have taken him down without too much trouble. But between battle fatigue and a useless arm, she was barely able to hold her ground. Soon enough he would connect with one of his fearsome swings, and then it would all be over.
Which meant it was time for her to change the rules.
“Kroll really wanted me to join you,” Elade commented between breaths, retreating backwards and channeling as subtly as she could manage. “I can see why—you could all use some practice with your swordplay.”
“You should have listened to him,” the Breaker said. “Now you get to die along with these worthless vorhang.”
“He wasn’t very persuasive,” she replied with a shrug. “But he did teach me one thing.”
“And what is that?”
Grinning, Elade pounced forward. The maneuver was quick and unexpected, and she caught him completely flat-footed. But her sabre deflected harmlessly off his breastplate, and the recoil knocked her dangerously off balance. She was in too close for him to strike with his sword, so he reacted purely with brawn instead—he punched her with his gauntlet and flattened her to the ground. Without her protective Aetheric mantle, he would have broken her jaw and knocked out most of her teeth; even with it, the blow still hurt like hell. Blood filled her mouth, and it took all her remaining strength to drag herself to her knees in front of him.
The Breaker loomed over her, sword in hand, wanting desperately to finish her—but his muscles twitched uncontrollably in response to the electricity coursing through them.
“Don’t feel bad,” Elade murmured. “That trick worked on me too.”
With a final exhausted grunt, she slashed her sabre across his body and severed his arm at the elbow. The Breaker crumpled to his knees and gasped in horror at the fountain of blood, and with the last of her strength Elade drove her sword through the visor of his helmet. He toppled backwards onto the pile of rubble, and she collapsed in the opposite direction.
Elade was vaguely aware of someone rushing over towards her, but she couldn’t even summon the energy to stand. Soon a familiar face looked down upon her, and she smiled.
“Sol’s mercy,” Jason gasped, panting as he placed a hand on her cheek. “Are you all right?”
“I’m great, thanks for asking,” Elade muttered. “I thought I told you to cover me.”
“We got pinned down,” Sarina explained. “Besides, you looked like you had everything under control.”
Jason grunted. “The Alliance cavalry showed up and finished them off. It looks like they’ve driven the Crell back at the front gate and are
spreading out cleaning up the groll in the rest of the city.”
“Good. What about Selvhara and the others?”
He glanced off into the distance and wiped the thick layer of grime from his brow. “I’m not sure. They went to try and protect the northwestern wall, but I lost contact with Sel a few minutes ago. She could be unconscious or…”
Elade clenched her jaw and sat up, and she tried her best to ignore the sickening taste of blood in her mouth. “Help me up,” she said with a cough. “And let’s get moving.”
***
Selvhara hacked and coughed as she swept the dust out of her eyes. The sunlight burned brightly on her face, and sweat and soot plastered strands of silver hair to her skin. Rocks jabbed into her back, and she struggled to roll away and figure out where she was.
The tower she and Tam had been using for cover had been obliterated, and apparently she’d managed to deflect enough of the debris to save her life. Lifting her hands to her forehead, she channeled healing magic into her wounds and confirmed that nothing was broken. A moment later, she heard Tam groan next to her.
“Tam?” she asked, diving over to him. Given the size of the gash on his forehead, he was lucky to be alive, let alone conscious. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he croaked. After a few seconds his eyes abruptly widened in horror. “Oh, shit!”
“What? What’s wrong?”
He swallowed heavily and focused his eyes on her. “I can’t move my legs.”
“I know,” Selvhara said, smiling. “They’re buried, you dimwit.”
He glanced down to the pile of small rocks covering the lower half of his body. “Oh.”
Shaking her head, she stabilized the worst of his wounds before helping him to his feet. Miraculously, the wall they’d come here to guard was still standing. Solarian archers had reinforced their position, and the once-encroaching Crell infantry were now in full retreat.
“I wondered when you’d get up,” a familiar voice said from behind them. A heartbeat later, a set of feline claws wrapped around the lip of the battlements, and Gor hoisted himself up over the rubble next to them.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” Selvhara told him. “But there are stairs on the other side of the tower, you know.”
“The stairs were annihilated. I assumed I was the only one who could get up here to dig you out.”
“Aw, I knew you cared, big guy” Tam said with a cough.
Gor snorted. “I figured you kept the key to your stash in your jacket somewhere. I wanted to make sure I got here before the other scavengers.”
Selvhara smiled and glanced back over the wall. “The Crell are in full retreat.”
“Yes, once they realized they weren’t going to breach the wall, they pulled back.” The chagari flashed a toothy smile of his own. “We held.”
Selvhara glanced back over her shoulder. Almost every building on this side of the city had been at least partially destroyed. Bodies littered the fortress, the Command Tower had collapsed, and they still didn’t know precisely what had happened with the Solarian priests. They might have held Garos, but somehow this didn’t feel much like a victory.
And the war, she knew, had only just begun.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“The future is merely an echo of the past.”
—Inscribed outside the Elerian Historical Archive
An armored limb jutted out from the pile of rubble that had once been the Garos Command Tower, and Elade grimaced as she frantically hurled aside another chunk of stone. The arm wasn’t moving, which made it disturbingly identical to the other four she had found so far.
“There’s another one about two yards in,” she called back over her shoulder.
Gor leaned down to help her hoist a larger slab out of the way, though at this point the chagari was probably doing four-fifths of the work. Every few minutes one of the Solarian griffons would swoop by and carry off one of the larger pieces to a central pile, and the remaining field commanders had organized their troops to pitch in wherever they could. It was going to be a long, grim night digging up and identifying the dead en masse, but if they managed to save anyone it would all be worth it. Right now, of course, Elade was hoping to save a very particular person.
The previous four bodies—mostly Darius’s various adjutants—had been badly mangled. Some had been crushed to a pulp outright, while others had been burned so grievously they were barely recognizable. Elade’s memories flashed back to all her years serving as a shadow knight in the grand army of Maz’Belar. She had counted more dead in her life than she cared to admit, but it didn’t make this task any easier. Perhaps that was for the best—sifting through corpses should never be a thoughtless chore for anyone.
Finally Gor lifted the last massive chunk of stone away, and Elade leaned in to check the body. The armor and tabard definitely belonged to an officer, but his head was still buried. Fearing the worst, she reached in her hand and touched the man’s skin. It was cold and lifeless, and she didn’t need the Aether to know that this man was dead. Sighing, she continued digging out the smaller stones concealing the rest of the body. She was halfway done when she heard a cough and froze.
“Can you hear me?”
Another cough. Elade continued digging even as she cursed at her enfeebled left arm. Selvhara’s healing magic had set the bone and numbed the pain, but she wasn’t going to be swinging anything for a week. A minute later, they cleared away enough of the rubble that she recognized the body as Colonel Ectar; two minutes after that, Gor finally pulled the corpse free. Her heart sank…but then she realized there was yet another body hidden inside. Buried beneath a last pile of debris was a a thirty-something blonde man covered in dust and smeared in blood. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing.
“Darius,” Elade breathed, knocking as much of the dust off of him as she could. “He’s alive!”
She placed her hands against him and channeled her strongest healing technique. He was badly hurt—he had a broken arm and leg, and several of his ribs had been severely bruised. But he was alive…and with proper care, he would be all right.
His eyes slowly fluttered open, and Elade rubbed the last bit of dust from his forehead. “Darius, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he gasped, pain darkening his face. “Wha…?”
“Don’t talk,” she soothed, keeping a hand on him while the others cleared off his body. “The Tower was destroyed with you inside. You’re buried but we’re getting you out. The battle is over.” He tried to speak again, but she placed her hands over his mouth. “I’ll explain later. Just relax and let us get you out of there, General.”
He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time, a faint smile on his lips. Elade clutched his hand and held on tightly.
***
Two hours later, the recovery effort was still going strong. The wounded had been carried or flown to a central infirmary, and between Selvhara and the surviving Solarian priests they had all been stabilized. Scouts had been dispatched into the nearby wilderness to search for any stragglers, and squads of griffon patrolled the skies just in case the Crell had more aerial reinforcements on the way.
For now, at least, the situation seemed reasonably under control, and Jason let out a deep breath and collapsed against the infirmary floor. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been this drained physically or mentally; he felt like he had just run a dozen laps around the university grounds while simultaneously reciting Gan’s entire treatise on the socio-political effects of hyper-nationalism.
All he wanted to do was sleep, but for the moment he was content to marvel that all of his friends had survived. He also couldn’t help but wonder about the fact his vision had come to pass after all. What did it mean for his future? Would he receive further guidance? Or was this just a lucky coincidence.
Amidst his reverie, Belek Talroy approached the group. His round face and pudgy nose had lost a lot of the youthfulness Jason had seen in it only a day before. The squire had been
trained in combat and probably even fought a few small battles, but he had almost certainly never seen death or chaos on this scale before. War was a brutal teacher, his father had always said, even for men who willingly chose to walk the path of death. Jason could still remember every detail of his first serious battle with perfect clarity.
“Any news from Celenest?” Jason asked.
Talroy visibly flinched. “Mostly that the Highlord isn’t very happy with me right now.”
“Well, he’s a fool. You fought bravely and saved a lot of lives.”
“Yes, you did,” Elade agreed. She slumped down next to Jason and peeled off the remaining bits of her armor.
“Thank you, but…” Talroy trailed off and sighed. “According to Lord Alric, Crell agents penetrated the King’s Tower and assassinated King Areekan. The guards killed the Crell before they could escape, but the damage was done.”
Jason closed his eyes and swore under his breath. “So it’s just as bad as we feared. Without an Ascendant, the Solarians can’t possibly hold the line for long.”
“If Areekan is dead, how are the priests here still able to channel?” Selvhara asked. “None of them have wanted to speak to me about it.”
“I don’t know for certain,” Talroy said, “but the rumor is that one of the king’s priestesses captured the essence of Sol and Ascended. Evidently she managed to maintain some of Areekan’s bonds.”
“That’s not possible,” Tam breathed. “Or is it?”
“I don’t think so,” Jason said. “But if it is, there’s only one person in Celenest who could pull it off.”
“Krystia,” Elade reasoned. “It was her, wasn’t it?”
Talroy shook his head. “I don’t know—no one will give me a straight answer.”
“If it is her, and the Council figures out that she’s Unbound…”
“The Alliance might tear itself apart without the Crell’s help,” Tam finished. “Well, this is just fantastic news, isn’t it?”
The Godswar Saga (Omnibus) Page 85