Gaze of Fire

by Melissa Kellogg

  Karena shut the door behind her, and knelt down in front of Hadrian. She was careful not to step on Evelyn’s feathers.

  “Did you save him?” Hadrian asked. Dark circles weighed below his eyes.

  “I did, barely. I think I managed to trap the mimecat and nargoths in the underground tunnels beneath the keep.”

  “Hopefully, they stay there until we can leave.”

  “I agree. How did you and Evelyn fair?”

  “Those nargoths were more interested in the mimecat than us. I don’t know why. Their sonic pings destroyed the ice igloo you made, so I carried Evelyn away to somewhere safer and left a trail for you to find.”

  She nodded and then said, “When I pulled Asher out, I told him to warn the others about the vampire presence in Archelm City.”

  “Good. But I would hate to see the mockery that he’s going to get.”

  “He’ll find a way to expose them.”

  Hadrian yawned. “Your shoulder, it’s bleeding. I should take a look at it,” he said.

  “There’s nothing any one of us can do about it until we get back to the airship,” Karena said. It did hurt, more than she wanted to admit, but at least one of Garth’s crewmembers was a healer. Though he was a novice healer, skill wasn’t needed when it came to several non-life-threatening, puncture wounds.

  “Evelyn, how are you doing?” Karena asked.

  “Fine,” she murmured, “I’m healing.” Her blonde hair looked brown now due to all of the mud and dirt in it.

  “It looks like you have the best napping spot in all of the Markhan Territory,” Karena said.

  Evelyn opened one eye and bit down on her lower lip, fighting back a knowing and guilty smile.

  “We need to make it back to the ship,” Hadrian said and yawned again.

  Because it was contagious, Karena yawned too. She said, “We will in the morning.”

  Karena stood up and inspected the shed. She froze the spiders in the corners and whatever insects she found. She iced over the open windows and the space around the door to keep them sealed in and away from the biting insects outside.

  “Who should take the first watch?” Hadrian asked. From how his eyelids drooped and his head nodded, he was fading fast.

  “I will,” Karena said. “Get some sleep.” But she knew that she wouldn’t be able to stay awake. She was just as fatigued.

  Hadrian’s head rested to one side as sleep took hold. Karena sat down opposite of him, crossed her arms, and leaned her head against the stone wall. They had achieved the impossible. She hoped that Garth and his crew were doing okay. Now they had the task of getting home ahead of them. Would it be arduous and long, or quick and easy? She could only hope it was the latter.

  She dozed off.

  Chapter 25

  “Karena, wake up!” Evelyn’s voice said, piercing through Karena’s dreaming state.

  Karena startled awake. Orange sunlight blazed through the yellow window panels. Evelyn was tugging on Hadrian in a futile effort to get him onto his feet. He didn’t want to wake up. Karena listened, hearing distant boom-boom-BOOM sounds. She stood up, wrenched the door open, and walked out onto the keep’s roof. She looked towards the west where the sounds were coming from. On the horizon was a bizarre sight, but a delightful one.

  “Garth’s ship! He repaired it,” Karena said to Evelyn. She jumped and clapped, but then stopped; her body was too sore and worn-out for that.

  Behind them, Hadrian stumbled out of the shed. “What’s going on?” he mumbled.

  “Look after him,” Evelyn said. “He might walk right off the roof because he’s so tired.”

  Karena suppressed a snappy comment. Evelyn was telling her, Hadrian’s best friend, to take care of him as though she had no sense of responsibility for him.

  “Always,” Karena said.

  Evelyn stretched out her wings. They had completely healed and new feathers were growing in. She sprinted forward, leapt over one of the battlement ridges, and disappeared. She reappeared in the sky as she gained altitude. She flew over to meet the airship. A horn sounded, startling whatever remaining birds that hadn’t already taken off from the trees below. Garth was certainly making his presence known in the area. He was trying to find them and hadn’t spotted Evelyn yet.

  When Evelyn landed on the airship, Garth stopped using the horn. As the airship approached the keep, Karena noticed that chunks of wood were missing from its hull. One of its booms had snapped. Though it had taken a beating when it had landed, it was still able to fly.

  When it came to hover above them, a rope ladder was uncurled.

  “You first,” Karena said to Hadrian.

  Hadrian took one of the rungs of the ladder and opened his mouth to say something, but she shook her head. It was the natural order. She was a Chaos elemental, he wasn’t, and therefore, it was her duty to be the last to leave a dangerous area and the first to enter an unknown situation. Hadrian scurried up the ladder, and she followed. Arms lifted her aboard.

  “All three of you are alive. It’s a miracle,” Garth said, hugging each of them. His clothes were streaked in grease.

  Hadrian said, “You got it working.”

  “Don’t sound too amazed,” Garth said, and smiled. He began shouting orders.

  After he had finished barking at his crew, Karena asked, “Are the repairs enough? Will they hold?”

  “We shall see. I don’t know if they’ll hold. If we can, we’ll try to make it to Archelm City, so that you can get your message out about there being vampires to everyone as quickly as possible and to unload the corpses that we brought aboard. You will need evidence to back up your claim.”

  “We’ll make quite the entrance. I hope they welcome us back,” Hadrian muttered.

  “How many corpses did you retrieve?” Karena said. Beside her, Evelyn shuddered.

  “About five of them,” Garth said. He stepped up onto the captain’s platform to take the wheel.

  Karena listened to the sounds of the engines. They huffed and rattled, seeming spent. It would be a miracle if they could get even a hundred miles, but it would be better than crossing that distance on foot. They had to get out of the Markhan Territory and fast.

  She looked below at the keep’s roof, which was beginning to diminish in size as they ascended higher into the air. From her perspective, the entire Cattail fortress looked like a jumbled assortment of rock and overgrown jungle vegetation. She was glad that she was no longer down there. Even in the morning light, it reminded her of an unkempt cemetery.

  Garth turned the airship around and cruised back to the Ranarra River in order to use it as a guide home. She could barely see the broken road that she, Hadrian, and Evelyn had taken to the keep. Last night had been the most brutal race and fight for survival that she had ever experienced in her life. A part of her was still in disbelief that she had rescued Asher. It had seemed so impossible.

  They began their journey west. She was called down time after time to cool down the boilers and coils. They were overheating far quicker than when they had made their journey to the Cattail fortress. During one of her breaks from below deck, she stood near the bow of the airship. Storm clouds gathered in the skies, but didn’t follow them. They rolled together into mounds of grey above the land in the northeast.

  When the airship drifted over another village situated by the banks of the river, she looked down at the small clearing and their meager living conditions. Those by the water who were doing laundry and cleaning dishes looked up. Though she could see them pointing and running to alert the fighters of the village, she couldn’t see their expressions. They were too high up for that.

  Off to the side by the starboard railing, Evelyn and Hadrian intimately conversed. They stayed out of the way of the crewmembers and any possible interruptions. This time, Evelyn was much more talkative. It intrigued Karena how expressive her wings could be while she talked. At times, they fluffed, moved side to side, stretched, or one of them pointed. It was similar to hand
gesturing. Someone called her, and she left to go back down into the hull.

  Every hour on the airship felt like an eternity, but somehow they continued on without incident or engine failure. The miles crept by. Garth and the crew seemed to be holding their breath. The western side of the Markhan Territory was far more populated than the heart of it because of the cryptid infestation that was pouring from the east and pushing everyone to resettle to the west. Villages dotted the land. The buildings and homes of these villages clustered in clearings, huddled together on little ridges, and gathered in shallow valleys. They were home to hundreds of people. If they crashed close to a village, it would be like stepping on a hornet’s nest.

  Feeling unnerved, Karena went below deck to sit in the middle of the floor to meditate. Her mind homed in on the excessively warm cables, coils, fuse boxes, and boilers, and gently frosted them. She tuned out the crewmembers who were obsessively checking and rechecking the equipment.

  Afternoon turned into evening without her awareness until someone shook her shoulder.

  “Archelm City is on fire,” Hadrian’s voice cut through her meditative state.

  She pulled out of her meditation, and snapped back into the present moment. “On fire?” she asked.

  “Yes. The worst has happened. Evelyn says that it’s the Fire and Air district that are burning.”

  She jumped to her feet, and ran up onto the deck. In the distance, smoke billowed from a sprawling carpet of lights.

  The deck shuddered under her feet, and the ship tilted.

  “Tie down the sails! These winds are too violent. Tie them down before we list or capsize!” Garth shouted from the steering wheel.

  Evelyn came over. “It’s the vampires, isn’t it?” she said.

  “It has to be,” Karena said. She wrung her hands in distress. The smoke alarmed her, just like it did to everyone else.

  “How do you know? What if it’s just the feud?” Hadrian asked.

  Karena shook her head. “When we left, there was no indication that there would be an escalation in violence. Think about it, what are the greatest elemental enemies of the vampires?”

  “Fire elementals,” Hadrian said.

  “And the Airs would naturally help them fight if they were under attack,” Evelyn said.

  Karena said, “Exactly. As you can see in the distance, they’re fighting something, and I don’t think it’s the Waters or Earths. The vampires would’ve wanted a quiet takeover because they aren’t confrontational by nature; they prefer underhanded ways. I think it’s safe to say that Asher succeeded in warning everyone.”

  “I’m just being devil’s advocate here, but that’s a lot to assume,” Hadrian said, testing her opinion, but not her patience.

  “Given that we know that vampires are amongst us now?”

  Hadrian didn’t have an answer for that.

  “How many could there be?” Evelyn asked, referring to the vampires.

  Karena shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. It would be impossible to know, even when they got down onto the ground to help.

  “We have to get the Earths and Waters to come to their aid,” Hadrian said. “The Fires and Airs won’t be able to fight them off on their own.” He flashed her anxious eyes.

  Hadrian was right and she shared his same desire, but making the Water and Earth districts come to the Fires’ and Airs’ aid on their own would be an almost unachievable feat. However, there was a way.

  “What’s that sound? It sounds like drums and flutes,” Evelyn asked, interrupting Karena’s thought processes.

  Karena cocked her head and listened. She could barely hear it, but she knew what it was from. It came from something that she had been about to contemplate.

  She said, “It’s Archelm’s defense system. It was built long ago, just after the Vampire Regime ended.”

  “So that’s the sound we’re hearing?” Evelyn asked. Behind them they heard Garth shouting to increase their speed. Karena hoped that the engines could handle that.

  Karena explained, “That sound comes from various statues that were placed all across the city. The main statues can only be activated by an elemental who is aligned with that element. So a Water elemental can only activate a Water statue, and so on.”

  Once the feud had started, the statues had been moved so that all of the statues were in their respective districts. It might make it more difficult to locate the main ones since they were in different spots now.

  Evelyn replied, “How strange. I would’ve thought that the defense system would’ve involved something like terracotta soldiers or pulling up some ancient artifact from an underground bunker.”

  “Eh, those stories about the East are great and all, but that’s not what is happening here.”

  “Those stories probably do have truth in them. Okay, so they activate a statue and then it emits a sound. It doesn’t sound intimidating.”

  “Let me explain. If a Fire statue gets activated, all of the other statues get activated and will send out a signal, which is the drum. It’s their primary call for help. The Airs have the flutes. When all of the statues join from the other two districts, then a second sound fires off to create one harmonized war cry.”

  “Is there something special about the sounds?”

  “Each one stirs up ancient memories in our DNA. Even if people don’t want to help, those primary sounds will tug on their heart strings and increase their empathetic capacities, and make them feel like wanting to help, but it can be ignored. The secondary sound is the war sound, which mobilizes people to come and fight, and can’t be ignored so easily,” Karena answered

  Ever since her dad had been appointed district leader a year ago, he had talked a lot about the statues and other things pertaining to the secrets of the city. Most people were unaware of the significance of some of the statues in the city. Karena figured that activating the statues in the Water and Earth district would be the only way to rally everyone together and get them to come to the Fire and Air district to fight, but that would require convincing a district leader to activate one or show her where one of the main statues were.

  “So we just have to find one of the statues. That shouldn’t be too hard to do,” Evelyn said. She clasped her hands together, and seemed unaware of how monumental of a task that would be to accomplish.

  “Only district leaders know where the main statues are,” Hadrian said.

  “My dad is one. He would know,” Karena said.

  Hadrian laughed. He said, “I can imagine how that conversation will go. I’ll rescue you from your childhood room if I don’t see you again in a few days.”

  She elbowed him.

  Hadrian said, “I can take Evelyn with me, and go into the Earth district. I’ll try to find a district leader, but I doubt they’ll do anything, that is, unless the Water district answers the Fires’ and Airs’ distress call first. Then they might reconsider.”

  Karena knew that he was right. If the Water district answered the call, and made it known that they were coming to the Fire and Air districts’ aid, then the Earth district would have no choice but to do the same.

  What they were hearing, which was a distress call, pleaded to their better emotions. Obviously, that wasn’t enough. She wasn’t hearing the erhu or ocarina war cry from the Water district, nor the lokh horn or panpipes from the Earth district. Just like the cello and drum of the Fire district, and the flute and harp of the Air district, the Water and Earth instruments had come from the gods long ago.

  If she managed to get one of the main statues activated, the Water statue would pound out a warring tune with both the erhu and the ocarina. It would raise everyone’s adrenaline and motivate them to help their fellow brethren in the other districts. It had a siren-like quality to it that came from the time of the gods. The tune that would be unleashed was a mysterious one and no one could explain why it had such an effect on people, especially those with elemental blood in their veins, except that its notes and how they we
re arranged came from more primitive beginnings. It could make people push aside their animosity for each other, pick up their weapons to fight as one united group, and give their feet that itch to march or fly. It had a hypnotic quality to it. All of the statues had the same capacity with their own instruments, but only when they were all activated.

  The Phantom’s Cloud approached, and crossed the outskirts of Archelm City. Time was precious. People were being slaughtered and fighting a battle that they could lose at any second over in the Fire and Air district. Judging from the sparks lighting up the sky and fire tornadoes, the battle was mostly in the Fire district. If the Fire district was destroyed, none of the other districts would stand a chance against the vampires. They had to unite as one.

  Garth dipped his airship down from where it had been skimming below the clouds. The wind tossed them, but he didn’t lessen his speed. She left the bow of the ship to stand at his side.

  She pointed to the southwestern part of the city, which was the Water district. “The sky-watching tower is the highest building,” she said to him.

  “Right-o,” he said. Now that they had rid themselves of the Markhan Territory, he was more at ease.

  He headed for the tower from the left, and then banked hard. He threw on the brakes. The airship skidded to a stop, listing horribly, but still staying upright. The rope ladder was thrown over the railing.

  “Best of luck,” Hadrian said. He put his hand around her waist to help steady her as she walked over to the railing.

  Karena hugged him. “You too,” she said.

  “If I don’t see you, I’ll assume the worst, and free you from your parents’ house.”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” she said, but it was a big worry of hers.

  Persuading her dad wasn’t going to be pleasant. She didn’t have a plan or an idea about how to tell her dad the facts. Everyone was thoroughly convinced that the Fires and Airs were murderers, thieves, and the scum of the earth. Her dad was one of the biggest advocators of those beliefs because of the death of his brother years ago. He would most likely feel as though karma had finally caught up to them. Little did he or anyone know that their turn would be next, and that it had nothing to do with fate or karma, but a parasitic race that they had been brainwashed by to think had gone extinct from their lands.