Phoenix Unbound

by Grace Draven

  Azarion spoke over his shoulder. “Agacin,” he said. “If you have fire, now’s the time to use it.”

  The creature kept coming, limbs rippling like the thrashing of a worm as it crossed the avenue and clambered up the temple steps. Azarion’s skin crawled as the thing’s head ratcheted from one side to the other in spasmodic jerks. Whatever it was, it didn’t belong in this world.

  Azarion stepped farther back in the protective circle, careful not to scrape away the charcoal’s flimsy barrier. Spidery fingers reached for him. Blue sparks crackled off its hands when the otherworldly predator touched some invisible wall. It recoiled, emitting a shrieking buzz like that of a disturbed hornet’s nest. Azarion glanced down at the circle’s drawn barrier, noting it now glowed a hot yellow.

  The thing paced back and forth, agitated fury in every line of its misshapen body. Azarion was reminded of the caged cats the Empire imported for fighting in the Pit. Given a choice, he’d rather fight a clowder of those than one of these monsters.

  It hurled itself against the invisible obstruction created by the charcoal and the Savatar incantations. A shower of sparks lit the darkness once more, followed by the angry buzzing. Gnarled fingers clawed at the resistant magic, the creature desperate to grasp the prey it could so clearly see but couldn’t reach.

  Azarion spared a quick glance for his companion. She had gained her feet, and her wide eyes glittered with terror. “I’ll kill us both before I let that thing take us, Agacin.”

  She turned even paler, thin fingers clutching the blanket as if it were a shield. “No,” she whispered, gaze darting back and forth between him and the monster. “Please. No one should have to die inside Midrigar.”

  Her obvious horror made him pause. She was right. His own soul cringed at the idea of joining the imprisoned dead.

  The creature suddenly halted its frenzied attempts to breach the spell wall. Its head slowly swiveled on its spindly neck. The featureless visage split apart in the space where a mouth might have been, creating a lesion from which a fleshy tongue, red as pulped meat, unfurled to taste the air.

  “What’s it doing?” the agacin whispered.

  Azarion studied it. Even without a face, its body language revealed much. Something had drawn its attention, and like a serpent, it tested the air for the scent of other prey.

  Midrigar’s unnatural silence clung to its walls and buildings, but beyond it, the living world still spoke and whispered, hooted and chirped, rustled and fluttered. And howled.

  For all that the creature attacking the spell wall to reach them made Azarion’s skin crawl, it didn’t twist his gut into knots the same way as the baying of hounds.

  The sound carried on the night, growing louder and more frenzied as the tracking party closed in on the city. Azarion flicked another glance at his captive. Her eyes had narrowed as she, too, heard the dogs’ approach, accompanied by the thunder of horses’ hooves.

  Starshine cast an otherworldly glow on the monster’s pallid skin, highlighting the rippling movement of flesh over skeleton as it dropped into a crouch. Its faceless skull continued to turn, the long, thick tongue tasting. Tasting.

  Voices joined the chorus of barking dogs and galloping horses. The barking changed to reluctant whines, some escalating to pained yelps following the crack of a whip and a rider’s angry shout.

  Equine whinnies and snorts mimicked the dogs’ wordless protests. The ruckus originated from a place on the other side of Midrigar’s north gate. Azarion imagined the chaos, a mob of dogs, horses, and trackers facing the cursed city, the animals showing more sense than their human masters by refusing to go any farther.

  The creature continued its odd swaying back and forth as if deciding whether to take the hunt to the new, unwary prey or stay with the ones it had cornered but couldn’t yet reach.

  A telltale soft inhalation made Azarion spin around, yank Gilene in his arms, and clap a hand across her mouth. “Don’t,” he ordered.

  She glared at him over the edge of his palm. Against his callused skin, her warning cry came out as nothing more than vibration and heat. She remained undeterred, drawing in another breath through her nostrils to try again.

  Azarion shook her, disrupting the breath so that she coughed into his hand instead, wetting it with a spray of spittle. He lowered his head until his nose almost touched hers. “Those men and their dogs are here to capture me, not rescue you. Do you understand the difference?”

  She was desperate, and desperate people did foolish things. His colossal mistake in choosing Midrigar as a sanctuary was testament to that.

  She stood rigid in his arms, and the breath from her nostrils gusted across the back of his hand, but her gaze turned thoughtful. Her eyes slid to the side where the creature continued to hover. It stretched out a misshapen arm to casually rake its talons across the spell wall, trailing sparks in its wake.

  “Do you understand?” Azarion repeated. She nodded slowly, and he eased his hand away. “If you lie . . .” He left the threat implied.

  “I won’t scream,” she assured him in a whisper.

  “You give your word?”

  “No, but I give you my understanding.”

  It would have to do for now and was the thing he wanted from her most.

  A voice rang clear in the chilly air, furious and frustrated. “What is wrong with those fucking mutts?”

  Another voice answered. “It’s Midrigar, Captain. “Theys knows it’s haunted. So do the horses. You’ll not get ’em past the gate neither.”

  “Then we go in without them. Load your crossbows. First sight of the gladiator, shoot to wound, not to kill. Herself wants him alive.”

  “No mercy in that,” another voice chimed in.

  “Not our problem,” the captain replied. “And if any of you lily-livered fucks refuse like the hounds and horses, I’ll shoot you myself, and it will be to kill. Now move!”

  More sounds from the north gate traveled to Azarion’s ears; the tramp of boots, curses, and prayers as the tracking party entered Midrigar on foot.

  The monster’s tongue writhed like a worm impaled on a hook as it slurped a path up its own skull as if in anticipation of a feast. It slapped the spell wall a final time—a wordless promise that it intended to return—before loping down the rubble-strewn avenue toward the invaders.

  Azarion watched it dwindle out of sight before releasing the agacin. She shuddered and tossed the blanket aside. Azarion kicked the packs out of the way. He didn’t need extra weight to slow him down. He was impaired enough by his own injuries as well as those the agacin suffered. He held on to the knife. A blade might not work on the otherworldly hunter, but it was effective against a human adversary.

  Listening for the chanting of ghosts or the monster’s distorted buzzing that signaled its approach, he heard nothing except the voices of the men drawing ever closer to their hiding spot.

  A strange popping bludgeoned his ears as he stepped across the charcoal circle. The agacin gaped at him when he held out a hand to her and gestured for her to follow him.

  “How did you do that?” She glanced down at the circle and back at him, befuddled.

  “It’s a simple ward. Protects us from demons and wights who try to get in and traps them if they try to get out. We’re neither, so we can move in or out of the ward as we please.” He crooked his fingers to signal her. “Come, we can’t linger.”

  “What if it comes back?” Her eyes darted toward the path the creature had taken.

  Guilt plagued him, along with the harsh lash of self-recrimination. He’d thought Midrigar a tragic example of the Empire’s worst brutality, a dead city populated by harmless ghosts. How wrong he was.

  The agacin had accused him of sheltering in a grave, and he had shrugged off her fear. He wasn’t afraid of ghosts. The Sky Below was dotted with numerous barrows in which his people sometimes took san
ctuary with their livestock during dangerous storms and kept company with the occasional lingering shade.

  Midrigar wasn’t a barrow or a necropolis; it was something much more. Something infinitely dark and malignant. Both prison and gateway, it trapped its dead and allowed things like the faceless hunter to cross over, find a different hunting ground from the one it stalked in some other, strange world.

  “Oh, it will come back,” he said softly.

  His declaration gave her feet wings. She flew past him, pausing briefly to shake her head when she crossed over the warding circle’s invisible barrier.

  Azarion caught up with her. “We run for the gate we entered. No stopping, no crying for help.” He suspected those pleas would come from the opposite direction at any moment.

  The trackers still called commands to each other, their voices fanning out in a widening arc as they searched for him. The monster had yet to attack, but it was only a matter of time.

  As if it heard his thoughts, a piercing scream rent the quiet accompanied by the eerie buzzing. The witch blanched, her eyes black and wide.

  Azarion gave her a none-too-gentle shove. “Run.”

  Her back arched away from him. Whether from his touch or her response to his command, he didn’t know, but she bolted down the steps and into the street, toward the gate. Azarion loped beside her, looking back every few paces to see if they were followed.

  More screaming threaded the wind, human made inhuman by an indescribable torture. In the distance, the dogs had gone silent.

  They passed in front of the broken temple’s grand entrance with its impenetrable darkness. A final prolonged shriek rose and fell in hideous rhythm before abruptly dying. Azarion lengthened his strides, grabbing the witch’s hand and nearly lifting her off her feet as they ran.

  The buzzing returned, a wetter, more saturated sound that came from their left. The hunter now hunted them. Azarion forgot the pain of his cracked ribs and the way his lungs burned with every panting breath.

  The gate. The gate was so close and the creature eating the distance between them even closer. He gripped the knife in the hand not holding on to the agacin. There might well be armed survivors outside this gate, waiting with their arrows and their dogs. His chances of winning a fight against such odds were nonexistent, and the witch’s fate grim, but better that than death by Midrigar’s monster.

  That wet, gurgling buzz filled his ears. The agacin’s hair whipped behind her like a flag as they hurtled through the gate and whatever new threat awaited them in the shadowed tree line. The creature emitted its own shrieking fury behind them but didn’t follow. Azarion didn’t stop to look back but continued to run with the witch toward the forest.

  A figure suddenly emerged from a clump of shadows cast by the trees. A Kraelian tracker, his bloodless features twisted in horror, raised his crossbow and aimed at Azarion. The witch gasped and wrenched herself free of Azarion’s grip.

  He didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate, and flung the knife. The blade caught the man in the chest, hard enough to make him stumble back a step before falling to the ground. The loaded bow landed in the grass beside him.

  Azarion slowed and skirted the fallen tracker before retracing his steps. The dead man stared at the forest canopy above him with sightless eyes. Azarion jerked the knife free and wiped the blade on the grass before resheathing it. He retrieved the bow, along with the quiver of quarrels beside the tracker, and gave a quick reconnoiter of the tree line, looking for another Kraelian tracker to materialize. None did so, and he turned his attention to the agacin.

  She hadn’t run far on her own. He spotted her on her knees, leaning against the trunk of a sapling, her eyes closed.

  The abomination behind Midrigar’s walls had ceased its screeching, and Azarion gave silent thanks to whatever deity listened that it was trapped there like the dead who had summoned it.

  He limped toward the witch. With their race over and their safety assured, at least for now, the pain in his side nearly took his breath away.

  The agacin opened her eyes when he crouched in front of her, dark pools reflecting moonlight and fever. She ran her tongue across her lower lip, and her graceful throat flexed when she swallowed. “What if I had fallen or couldn’t keep up?”

  He glided a fingertip along a valley made by the folds of her skirt. “I would have carried you.”

  She continued to stare at him, saying nothing, until her eyes closed again and she sagged against the tree. Azarion caught her before she hit the ground. He lowered her gently to her side before taking a seat beside her. Sweat dripped into his eyes, steam rising off his skin in the cold air. He wiped his face with the hem of his tunic and pressed a hand to his side to ease the stabbing pain there.

  Safety was a fleeting and a variable thing, but for now, they were safe from the horrors lurking in Midrigar and not far from where he had tied the horse. Azarion checked the witch and left her where she lay. He had no choice. If he tried to lift her, he’d collapse. He prayed to Agna for protection of her handmaiden and set off to retrieve his mount.

  Misfortune still held him in its grip. The horse was gone, leaving behind a pair of broken reins hanging from a tree branch like stripped strands of ivy. Sometime during their deadly stay in Midrigar, the animal had spooked and freed itself by breaking its tethers. A trampling of grass and hoofprints created a half-moon around the base of the tree. Azarion suspected the otherworldly creature’s hideous screeching, along with the screams of murdered men, had carried far into the wood, frightening the horse so much it managed to snap the reins and escape.

  Without the satchels he’d left behind in the city and the horse, they lacked transportation and supplies, and somewhere on the other side of Midrigar, a pack of hunting hounds likely still lingered, waiting for their masters to return.

  Still, the Empire hadn’t yet caught him, he had escaped a thing that had wiped out those who hunted him, and he had his knife, along with a crossbow and quarrels. A stream ran not far away for water, and the trade road nearby was bound, at some point, to yield a traveler on horseback. It was just a matter of patience and time before he could replace the mount he lost.

  For now he’d rest. Weariness had him seeing double, and pain made his stomach roil. The agacin lay unmoving next to him except for steady, shallow breaths. He wished he could stretch out beside her, but it hurt too much to lie down. Instead, he nudged her carefully into his lap and reclined against the sapling. His eyelids drooped. Every bruise and cut inflicted by the empress, and the fighter he killed for her entertainment, ached. The forest surrounding him turned fuzzy in his vision. He blinked hard to stay awake and finally surrendered to an exhausted sleep.

  Voices and a mule’s braying snapped him awake. Azarion straightened from a slouch and rubbed his eyes for a better look at his surroundings. Morning sunlight spilled through the trees’ newly leafed canopy, dappling the agacin’s sleeping features. High color dusted her cheekbones, and her lips were dry and cracked. Sure signs the fever still raged through her body.

  The voices grew louder, and the creak of wheels, clank of bells, and steady clop of hooves joined the mule’s racket. Travelers on the trade road, just as he expected, and from the sound of it, part of a caravan.

  He stayed where he was, hidden in the tree line until the caravan came into view. Seven wagons pulled by a mix of horses, oxen, and the single mule. The brightly painted wagons and garlands of bells strung on their sides marked the group as free traders. Unbound by the rules and laws set by the Trade Guild, they plied their trades along the offshoot roads of the Golden Serpent without Guild approval or protection. Most of the lower rungs of society and the towns perched at the edges of Krael’s hinterlands bought their goods from the free traders.

  The Guild barred them from working the more lucrative Golden Serpent, which wrapped around the borders of the Empire and stretched into the lands of Usepei and Ardin,
but it didn’t stop the wily traders from getting their hands on items as cheap and ubiquitous as clay pots or as rare and expensive as purple silk. Some things were obtained through means that didn’t always include the exchange of coins, but no one reported the traders to the garrisons that squatted in the remote regions, and if they did, the garrison commanders turned a blind eye, finding the benefits of trade with such people far outweighed the petty crimes they might commit to provide those benefits.

  The crew driving these wagons or walking beside them were a motley lot, a mix of men, women, and a few children. Every adult was heavily armed, and while their scruffy clothing marked them as not the most prosperous group, they looked well-fed and clean enough—something neither he nor the agacin could claim at the moment.

  She twitched in his lap, hotter than a bonfire. She needed succor he couldn’t give and was far too valuable to leave behind. And he owed her much. Revealing himself—and her—to the traders was his only choice.

  He carefully moved the witch off his lap and onto the grass before creaking to his feet. The crossbow and arrows would have to stay with her. Walking out of the trees with it in his arms guaranteed him a quick death. He kept his knife sheathed to show he meant no harm, stiffened his back, and stepped onto the road in front of the lead wagon.

  Before the wheels rolled to a halt, he found himself once again in the lethal sights of not one but six crossbows, their nocked arrows pointed at various spots on his body.

  “Help us,” he said and waited.

  A man garbed in mismatched layers of ragged wool and bits of expensive silk sauntered from behind the lead wagon and approached him, a short spear held casually in one hand. He wore his graying hair clubbed at the nape, and the gimcrack beads draped around his neck sparkled in the sun. His gray gaze, flat as unpolished steel and just as hard, settled on Azarion. “What happened to you?”

  The witch had named him a liar and a thief, and in this moment, Azarion hoped he lived up to the first insult by spinning the most convincing of tales, otherwise he’d be shot full of arrows before he could take a single running step. “Thieves set upon my wife and me,” he said. “We were traveling to the Silfer markets to sell our dyes and were attacked. They stole everything, including our horse.” Thank Agna the agacin sported green hands from dyeing the long nettle. That, more than any words from him, should convince them he spoke truthfully.