by Mark Albany
I just assumed that he was pointing at Lyth, as my attention was drawn back to the group of armored and armed men that were just ordered to kill me and the rest of my comrades. I lowered my sword, resisting the urge to attack all out, taking a step forward as one of the Lancers rushed forward, shouting a war cry that I didn’t understand as he kept his shield up, swinging is sword at me.
I took a step back, and then to the side, deftly parrying the strike and slamming in a precise riposte, opening the man’s neck. His armor and shield were meant to withstand most magical attacks, but they weren’t any more effective at defending the man inside them than regular armor, which still left a small gap between the shoulder plates and the helmet only covered by padded leather that was smoothly cut through by the razor-sharp sword that I had in hand, opening up the neck underneath.
The man dropped back, clutching at his neck as blood started to seep out between his fingers, and I quickly turned my attention back to the pair that were charging at me.
One was forced to stop in his tracks and raise his shield as a blast of power came from my sword. It was powerful enough to drop him back a step as the second man charged forward, not thinking that he was suddenly lacking any protection with his flank as I stepped around his shield, pressing my left hand under the man’s helmet, into his face, and pushing power until the runes in my palm, feeling a splat of blood as he dropped away, half of his face missing as I turned back around, slashing out the unprotected hamstrings, and slashing his head off with a powerful cut, watching as it bounced away before turning back to the group of Lancers that were charging in at me.
They paused as a gigantic wolf jumped in their way, powerful jaws crunching down on one of the men’s skull as the rest were suddenly knocked off their feet as a sinuous snake came in from behind them.
“Well, damn, I never thought that I would be so happy to see you two again,” I said with a chuckle as the wolf, who was the only one that appeared to hear me, showed off a bloody grin before turning on the rest of the Lancers who appeared to be trying to retreat and regroup as they were being attacked from all sides.
I could see the Emperor charging his horse over to where Lyth was waiting for him, seemingly ignoring all the others that were closing in around him until it was too late. Norel called down a powerful strike of lightning that hit just close enough to the horse to spook it into a rear. Aliana jumped forward, grabbing the emperor by his long red cloak and dragging him clear of the beast that was suddenly terrified of the two women standing before it. Norel rushed in quickly to try and help Aliana to hold the man down, but he recovered quickly, landing smoothly on his feet and powering a blast into Aliana’s chest. The djinn was quick enough to deflect it, but she was sent stumbling back a few before dropping to the ground. Norel quickly stepped in to keep him from pressing any kind of advantage, but she was out of her depth as the man swung his blade for her, forcing her to take a step back.
I looked around at most of the Lancers, who were either dead or being corralled by Braire and her beasts. I looked over to Faye, who had a few splotches of blood on her blade, on fire again. She nodded her head over to where Aliana, Norel and Lyth were struggling to keep the man contained, and I nodded. We had the Lancers well in hand.
I turned around to where the advisors seemed to be huddled against the door. One of them, wearing a heavy cloak, was different from the others, watching the battle curiously, seeming to be shielding the rest of the men from any attacks that might glace their way.
“You should stand back,” I warned. “No blood will be shed by those that wish no violence on themselves or others in this room.”
“Don’t be foolish, boy,” the cloaked man said with a chuckle. “You have no way of hurting me.”
The voice was familiar, and it dawned on me as I saw his face. The elevated cheekbones, the pale skin and crystalline eyes. I knew that there were pointed ears too, even though they were hidden by the man’s cloak.
“Oh… shit,” I growled, watching the man’s hands raise and a bolt of lightning jump easily from them. I already had my sword up for protection, but I still felt the jolt that knocked me onto my back.
I rolled quickly, coming back onto my knees as I slid back a few more feet over the smooth marble floor before I captured my momentum, and then drawing myself back to my feet as Abarat pulled his cloak off, showing himself to be long robes of purple and red, with a velvet and silver crown sitting delicately on his head.
“Your first instinct was the right one, boy,” Abarat said, his voice calm and soothing as he started walking toward me. “Stand down. As amusing as this little skirmish has been, I feel that it has gone on long enough.”
I could feel a knot forming in my stomach as I stared into the man’s eyes, a lump in my throat as every instinct in my body told me that I needed to run.
It was all I could do to stand my ground, watching the elf advance on me in slow yet steady steps. “Not… going to happen,” I hissed through clenched teeth.
“Curious,” Abarat replied with a small smile. “I had thought that true courage was a trait long extinguished from your mongrel kind. I have not felt it in quite some time.”
I had a feeling that he wasn’t lying. There was no courage in attacking someone that you could beat without breaking a sweat. There was some, mixed in stupidity, in standing your ground in a fight that you knew you would lose.
I needed to buy them time. I could hear Lyth starting the incantation. It appeared that her and Faye joining their forces was enough of a boost to keep the man subdued. They just needed some time. I could buy them that time. Braire could stay on the Lancers. I just needed to hold him off for a few minutes.
That could have been extended by a lifetime for all the difference that it would make. I still knew that I had to try.
Abarat smiled again, his hands raising, and I knew what was coming this time, quickly diving out of the way as a pair of lightning bolts rushed toward me faster than I could blink. The clap of thunder inside the throne room was deafening, but the lack of searing pain and smell of smoking flesh told me that I had avoided being torched. Barely.
I landed on my shoulder and came back up to my feet smoothly just in time to see Abarat jumping at me, his hands closed together as he did. I saw something gleaming in his hands. I couldn’t tell if it was glass, or if it was just magic made to look like glass, but that didn’t change the fact that it was sharp, and it was being swung at me like a sword. I raised my blade to block.
There was an impossible amount of power behind the swing. I was forced down to one knee, sparks flying as his weapon connected with my sword. I gritted my teeth, using all the power I had to keep the weapon away from my skin, but, with seemingly no effort, Abarat forced it down a few more inches. The blade pushed down into my shoulder and a shocking amount of pain bolted through my body.
Despite it all, I still held my sword up.
Suddenly the pressure was gone, and I lurched forward, trying to understand what had just happened as the same lancing, hot pain rushed across my back. I screamed, falling forward to the ground and rolling away, trying to get anywhere that wasn’t near to what was hurting me.
“Did I say you were brave?” Abarat asked, chuckling softly, taking a moment to look over to where the spell was being performed on the Emperor, and apparently judging that he still had enough time to stop it after finishing me off. “I meant stupid. I would have thought that you were going to try some of the evasion that you’re so skilled at, like you did the last time. You at least put up a battle of attrition in that case.”
I growled, shoving the pain to the back of my mind as I slowly pushed myself back up to my feet.
“Call me stupid all you like,” I whispered, sucking in a deep breath. “So long as there are people like you, there will be people like me making the stupid choice of standing their ground when they’ve had enough of being pushed around.”
Abarat smiled, and I hated just how condescending and yet sincere
the expression was. “I stand again corrected. That doesn’t happen often. I almost feel bad for depriving my sweet sisters of your company. Good-bye, Grant.”
He came at me again with impossible speed. My left shoulder was wounded, meaning that I wasn’t going to be swinging any weapons with it, but there were still the runes in my hand. I blasted a shot at him, which caught him on the left side of his face, and had no effect. I raised my sword to block his swing. More sparks flew as Abarat swung his fist into my stomach, knocking the breath out of me and lifting me up off the ground to crash into a nearby pillar.
I tried to breathe, but nothing was coming in. Through my teared up eyes, I could see Abarat still coming for me, rushing at my position while still looking like he had all the time in the world. His weapon came up again, swinging down for my head, and I raised my sword up, more out of instinct than anything else, seeing the sparks fly as the impact almost dislocated my right shoulder. A low growl of annoyance and he swung again, and this time, as more sparks flew, my sword was shorn in two about five inches up from the hilt. The runes in the blade faded as it clattered away. I reached for it and missed. I wasn’t sure what I could have done if I’d caught it.
The smell of ozone suddenly overwhelmed me and the hairs on the back of my head stood up as, impossibly, I thought, a portal opened up between Abarat and me, and Aliana stepped through it, blocking Abarat’s killing blow and knocking him back a handful of steps.
“I’m sorry Grant,” she whispered. I wasn’t sure how I could hear her, but I did, and still didn’t understand. Until I saw something dark, a black, inky smoke starting to circle around her. Her horns started to glow a sickening red. I remembered seeing this before. Well, not the process itself, but the end result. The djinn that we’d fought what felt like decades ago. A darkness involving her. Aliana had explained it to me. There was a dark nature that was fighting for the control of the soul of a djinn that she had been holding back for so long. Something powerful yet twisted that she had been keeping at bay for all this time.
It was out. She smiled back at me, and I could see the change in her. Feel the change in her as she rushed toward Abarat, who looked confused for the first time since I’d seen him. He didn’t notice as another portal opened up behind him and Aliana caught him around the waist with her shoulder and tackled him into the portal, twisting them both into it in the blink of an eye.
And the portal closed.
19
The change in me was as sudden as it was shocking. I was already in a great deal of pain from the beating that Abarat had laid down on me, and yet what I was suddenly feeling… not more painful, I thought, but deeper. Something inside me had been forcibly torn away, ripping into me and pulling something out. In my current state, I still needed to a moment to process it, trying to understand what had just happened.
Aliana had just saved my life. I didn’t know why. I was buying them the time they needed to break the emperor free. What was she doing?
And then I realized. The bond that I felt between myself, Braire, Norel, and Faye no longer included her. There was a pain there that I was struggling to comprehend, and gap that had been left in me that wasn’t physical, and yet I could still feel it crushing through every muscle in my body.
There was a reason for the intensity, I realized. It was reverberating between all four of us, washing over us in wave after wave that felt like it would never end. The kind of pain that souls weren’t meant to feel, somehow intensified by how close we had all been to her.
Aliana was gone. I couldn’t feel her anymore. The bond was cut, severed. I didn’t even know how someone could do that. Had she died? It hadn’t felt like she had died. No, instead, it felt like she had cut the bond herself as she entered into that damn portal with Abarat in tow. She had intended not to come back from that.
I blinked, shaking my head and looking around. Braire had dropped to the ground, clutching at her chest, tears streaming down her cheeks. Norel had done the same, looking like she was about to pass out from the pain of losing her sister. Faye was in some pain as well, but she was only on her knees, looking like she was just as confused by Braire and Norel’s reactions as she was by the sudden ache inside her.
It made sense to me, I supposed. They had a much closer bond to their sister than either of us had. She had been a part of their lives for such a long time that the sudden removal of their bond to her was a feeling akin to having a piece of their hearts torn out.
I was feeling the same, I supposed, but it was to a lesser degree, and even less for Faye, who still looked like she couldn’t fight anymore.
Leaving Lyth alone, face to face with the Emperor, a man slowly rising to his feet as the three that had been holding him down suddenly stopped. Lyth was backing away slowly, gripping her sword with both hand as she anticipated a fight.
The man himself looked somewhat dazed on recovering his feet, but there was a sudden surge of anger in his face as he recovered quickly, picking his sword up from where it had fallen down next Faye. A sinister smile crossed his lips, looking so out of place on such a heroically handsome face.
“You’re going to regret doing that, Kaelyfth,” he growled, twirling the sword about at an impossible speed. I could almost see the power rising in him as Lyth kept retreating.
He roared in rage at her, charging forward and swinging his sword. She brought hers up to block and clashing it back, launching a series of powerful bolts at him, which he smoothly deflected with his sword or absorbed into his armor as he chuckled, coming in again, swinging again, and I watched as something extended from the blade, lashing out at her like a whip. She ducked down just in time, coming up to her feet quickly as the lash cut into a nearby column, cutting a clean piece from it.
I gulped, slowly pushing myself back to my feet, looking down at the hilt that I was still clutching in my hand. I tossed it away, leaving my hand cramping in a way that wouldn’t let go anytime soon. There were still a few inches of sharp blade extending from it, though, I thought. Not completely useless. I would recover it later.
I pushed in forward, feeling the skin on my back and shoulder pull away from where they had been cut by Abarat, but still I pushed forward, feeling the whole of my body burning with effort. Lyth was standing on her own out there, and damned if I was going to let that happen, no matter what kind of pain I was in.
I watched as Lyth ducked and moved around the Emperor’s skilled strikes, blocking when she could, attacking when she could, but mostly only surviving by staying away from the strikes that were coming in faster than she could defend them. As I stepped in closer, I watched the Emperor feint to his right and come in to the left as Lyth tried to avoid it, knocking her feet out from under her with a smooth sweep of his own legs. She came down on the ground hard, and I could hear something cracking as she dropped, letting out a cry of pain as she did.
I could feel something new inside myself. It wasn’t quite a foreign sensation. I had felt it before, but never quite as intense. And it was growing with intensity with move made by the emperor as Lyth blocked one strike aimed down at her as she was on her back, quickly and desperately trying to roll away. Inch by inch, toward the thrones. She knew she wasn’t going to win, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her from trying.
Rage, I realized. Rage was building inside me like a white-hot flame, rising up in my stomach and flooding into my heart. My power that had been somewhat depleted in trying to hold Abarat back was suddenly filled again with something that wasn’t as white and pure as what I’d felt in that pool of mine before. It was red, inky, and roiling like an angry volcano, begging to erupt.
As I watched the Emperor finally knock Lyth’s sword away, it came to life, coursing painfully through my body, but suddenly pushing aside all thought of the pain in my shoulder, in my back, and in my body. It was fueled by the darker, deeper pain that I didn’t want to address.
Not yet. Not now. If I thought about what had just happened, I knew I would end up doubled over
like Braire and Norel.
As the Emperor raised his sword up for the final thrust to kill our hopes at trying to break him free, I came up from behind him, locking his right arm, the one with the sword in it, up and pulling it back.
The man fought back with what I felt was impossible strength, almost lifting me up off my feet, but his attention was suddenly pushed away from Lyth and toward me.
Hurray.
He lashed his elbow back, catching me on the side of the head, but I pushed the pain aside again, shoving my left hand into the small of his back, the only part unprotected by his armor, and flooding all the power I could into the runes in my palm.
The resulting blast was more powerful than I anticipated, seeding the padded armor underneath scorched away, his skin left red and blistered as all the strength I had came back to my right arm as I pulled the man that was almost a full foot taller than me up and away from Lyth to come crashing onto the ground.
He rolled away from me quickly, a rage like mine in his eyes as he tried to recover, but I launched myself at him, hammering my fist into his jaw. It hurt my hand like one of Norel’s bolts of lightning, but it hurt him more. He shook his head, trying to recover as I pushed myself up from the ground, butting my forehead into his nose with all the power that I had in me.
“Fuck!” he roared, falling back again, clutching at his bleeding and broken nose as I pushed myself up again. The rage in me was the murderous sort, but I knew that killing him wouldn’t get me Aliana back. Keeping him alive might do the trick though.
I wiped the blood from my face, looking over at Lyth as she recovered her weapon.
“Get this fucking spell done now!” I roared at her, and she snapped to, rushing over to join me as the Emperor pushed himself up from the ground. I clamped my hand down on his shoulders, pushing him back to his knees as he tried to stand, hammering another fist into his face as I reached down and pulled the sword out of his hand.