by C. K. Rieke
She looked down at her left hand, bandaged and bloody, as she felt the Sanzoral flow down from her mind, then to her chest, down her arm, and it coursed through her fingers and the violet wisps the color of orchids flowed from them. The Sanzoral was hers once again, and as it was what the Reevin wanted most— Lilaci expected to give it to him.
Standing up straight, with her shoulders back, and her hair whipping behind her, she left the protection of the rock and stood squarely before the Reevin and the six men high up on the cliff. The Reevin spotted her immediately and began to circle his staff towards the ground before him, his staff illuminated in a toxic green haze. Lilaci took long strides up the cliff, her strong legs leaping from ledge to ledge. Then the assassins noticed her and began to yell. Then the arrows flew.
A storm of arrows flew, with a methodical precision. Each flew true, ready to strike Lilaci in any number of organs, but the purple flame in her hand began to glow in a bright blaze. She reached down and gripped the unlimited sand that draped itself on the wet rock. The sand had come to Lilaci’s aid once again, and as she ran towards their group, it welled into a dense barrier just before her. Her sandshield appeared before her once more, knocking each arrow away harmlessly.
“Hari Bothumtha!” One of the assassins yelled out. “Hari Berova!” Three of the men began to shoot arrows quickly at her, and the other three dropped their bows and produced thick broadswords of a copper-tinted metal. The Reevin continued twirling his staff in slow circles towards the ground in a wicked, green glow.
Lilaci was within thirty yards of the pack, moving up the rocks quickly, carefully maneuvering her way up the wet rock. Arrows broke and fumbled to the rocks from striking her dense shield of hard sand. She was growing closer, and as she one last leap to reach the high rock they were perched upon, she saw what the Reevin was conjuring . . . A pack of hundreds of large, mangy, devilish rats with wet, black fur and hollow black eyes. In unison, they all looked over at her, and began to squeak and squeal. They ran at her in a massive pack, covering nearly all of the flat rock at the Reevin’s feet. They were eager to strip her flesh from her bones.
“You come after me?” Lilaci yelled, running forward. “You come for what I have? Let me show you the power of the Sanzoral!” The Reevin’s eyes shot up at her. Reaching out with her injured hand, whipping with violet flames, she gripped the surrounding sands. Lifting her hand up above her, she brought out a swath of sand, nearly blocking out the sun as it swirled in the air above them. The assassins looked up in the astonishing sandstorm as if it were some sort of witchcraft.
“Harum Totuni!” an assassin yelled. “Botha Tuturum! Botha Tuturum!” They dropped their bows, and all six of them ran at Lilaci with their swords drawn, running with the pack of endless rats, squeaking and hissing. “Botha Tuturum!”
She knew she’d only have one shot at it. “One . . .” She began. “Two . . .” She forced the twirling sands above increase its speed. “Three!” With an explosion of power like a hurricane, she sent the scattered collection down onto the men and rats like a billowing storm. The men were so caught off guard, two were thrown from the cliff’s face, screaming and clawing at the air as they plummeted down. The others clawed at the wet rock in a fervent desperation. The rats slowed but didn’t stop. As dozens . . . even hundreds of rats at the front were blown from the cliff, there remained thousands more, their black, hollow eyes fixated on Lilaci as they ran forth.
One assassin lost his grip and was blown from the cliff. Screaming and cursing. Lilaci continued to berate the men with the sand as it poured into their nostrils and stung their eyes. Two more succumbed to the force, their fingers unable to fight the sandstorm, and they were swept from the face of the rock, tumbling down through the air. One remained, with his arm hooked around a jutting rock, as he yelled, straining to hold on.
The endless pack of rats chattered and hissed as they were almost upon her. The Reevin needs to die. Who knows what these rats can do if even one of them sinks their teeth into me. The rushing winds began to stall, not twirling like a tornado, but levitating in the air. Lilaci snapped her fingers into a strong fist, and the loose sand shot into several platforms next to her, resembling a long staircase before her, and she leapt to the first one. Then the second, then the third upwards. As the rats jumped to follow her up the first square ledge of sand, they fell through, falling back to the rockface. As Lilaci ran up the platforms, each dissolved to loose sand behind her.
The last assassin stood up quickly, and with his sword firmly in hand, and ran at her. He swiped wildly at her legs as she ran overhead, jumping from platform to platform, towards the Reevin. She looked ahead to see the Reevin was covered in the swarming rats up to his chest and shoulders. His black eyes fixed on her, and he pulled a long, curved dagger from his cloak.
Lilaci leapt from the final platform, her sword held above her head, ready to plunge into evil wizard. This is it. You’ve only got one chance. Make it count. Do it for Kera. You can’t let him enter into a fight with you. The rats will overtake me. Make this one shot count.
As the Reevin held up his dagger to block her strike, Lilaci lowered her injured hand to her back. With the rats covering the Reevin’s body, Lilaci knew better than to try to cut through them to get that one killing blow on him. As she floated down towards him, and with many of the rats hissing up at her, with their long, yellow teeth showing— Lilaci dipped her injured hand down behind her back.
The Reevin readied his dagger before him, and as Lilaci came down with the force of a boulder, her sword knocked into his dagger. His sturdy block was enough to knock her sword back with a clang, and as she fell, her feet were about to touch back down onto the wet rock when the Reevin’s eyes shot open in surprise and shock. His dark eyes slowly moved down to the right side of his neck to see Lilaci’s hand, glowing in purple flame, holding the hilt of a black dagger. One of their own daggers, stuck in his neck. The rats began to twitch and shake, falling to the ground as if the thousand of them were each possessed by a demon. They convulsed and shook as the Reevin’s eyes, showing hatred and disdain in their lifelessness, rolled back, and he slumped back, falling from the black dagger in Lilaci’s hand. She watched as the thousands of rats began to glow with a dull green light, and then they blew away in the breeze like the flame of a candle being blown out.
He’s dead. It’s over, time to find Kera and Fewn . . . Wait— The assassin! She quickly remembered, and she ducked below his sharp broadsword as it swooshed over her head from behind. A heavy boot kicked her in the back, nearly knocking the wind from her lungs, pressing her forward onto her knees. She rolled away and turned to meet him, his eyes were enraged, and screamed for murder.
He quickly laid down heavy blows towards her, overhead strikes and side to side swipes, eagerly trying to let his blade find any piece of her. Lilaci moved with great speed back and forth, evading each attack carefully, as he was much stronger than her, and surprisingly quick and agile. The attack was so brutal and fast, she didn’t have time or focus to re-summon the Sanzoral. Instinct had crept in. She was in a sword fight, like she was back in Sorock, and a strange feeling of enjoyment came to her. She was in her most natural state then.
There was one flaw in the assassins attack that Lilaci noticed— he tended to open up a spot on his shoulder when he attacked from the right. Lilaci knew if he tried it again, she’d shoot for that spot. But then, the assassin attacked with an unusually position, slightly awkward and unbalanced, but it caused him to dart in with a greater force than she anticipated, and the flat of his sword struck her in the wrist, right where the arrow had pierced her. She wanted to yell out in agony, but she held it in. She tried to parry back, he the man knocked it away easily. Lilaci was in much more pain than she cared to admit to herself, and as the man shifted to his other side, Lilaci soon found a firm fist slammed into her stomach.
She fell back, stunned and gasping for breath. As quickly as she fell to the rock, she found a boot shoot down onto her hand that held her swo
rd, pressing it against the rock. A wide smile grew on his face, and his eyes were wide with pleasure. His free hand grasped her throat, squeezing her windpipe. Lilaci couldn’t breathe, and with his boot pinning her sword arm to the ground, she tried to reach for her dagger behind her back with her other hand, but he quickly laid his knee on her stomach. Lilaci couldn’t use either of her weapons, and things were beginning to grow foggy as she was strangled.
Then— something happened to Lilaci, the assassin seemed not to expect. Lilaci’s eyes erupted with a purple blaze, and the assassin adjusted his sword in his hand to send it down onto her head. The sands however, had other plans. They rose from the rock and covered his face and neck, and they seeped slowly down his mouth and nose. It made its way into eyes and shoved its rough way into his brain. He screamed and clawed at it, trying to get it off of him, and he stood up off of her, scratching and frantically trying to remove the ruthlessly burrowing sand. His yelling was muffled as he suffocated, unable to even let out another scream. The sands were beginning to flow in through his ears, his entire head was beginning to fill with sand.
Lilaci stood, ignoring her pain, and after a slow, sturdy couple of steps towards him, she lifted a boot, and after squarely lining it up with him, shoved him hard in the back, sending him tumbling through the air, down the cliff. He continued to claw at his face and tried to scream, but he landed on the jagged rocks with a thud and crack next to his dead comrades. Lilaci fell to the rocks, fatigued, battered, and gasping for air.
Chapter Forty-One
The crows had already begun to feed. Their loud caws echoed madness. She found herself in a maelstrom of blackbirds with no eyes circling them. She was back in the battle where the Iox was slashed to death by thousands of beaks and claws. That was the first time she saw a Reevin, his long scraggly blond beard with those dead eyes looming beneath his black hood. They were like the eyes of a snake, wanting to feed, wanting to squeeze the life from its prey.
She felt one of the birds shoot in and dive its beak into her arm, and she felt the stinging pain once again.
“No!” she cried, and jerked awake, sitting up abruptly. Her face was dry and covered with a thin layer of sand. Her throat was nearly closed from thirst, she didn’t remember where she was or how long she’d been out. Then she looked down at the crow’s feast. They began with the eyes and lips of the Reevin and the mercenary, and had drifted downward, ripping clothing away to get at the bloating flesh.
She wiped her face loosely of the sand, and stood up, aching and battered. She winced in pain from the hole in her arm, and looked to see the bandage covered in dried, dark blood. At least the bleeding stopped. She stumbled over to the corpse of the assassin, his face unrecognizable. The crow’s cawed at her and floated out of her way as she leaned over and pulled his watersack from his belt and popped the cork and drank feverishly from it. It’s warmth and wetness sliding down her cracked throat. As soon as she felt the liquid run into her stomach, worry came back to her. Kera. Where’s Kera? How long had I been out?
She ran over to the side of the cliff and looked down. There were only more crows and the bodies of the other assassins.
“Kera!” she yelled down in a breaking voice. She grabbed her sword from the rock and ran down to where Kera and Fewn had stayed. “Kera!” she yelled out into the distance. “Where are you?”
She looked up the mountain way and looked down back to the sands.
“Fewn? Fewn, where are you?”
Did something happen? Did I miss another force out there? Were they attacked while I was in battle with the others up on the cliff? What if something bad happened to Kera? I’ll never forgive myself— I’ve got to find her. I just have to. Then a sensation came back to her, something she hadn’t felt since she’d met Kera. The slithering of worms, wrapping around each other in a spherical motion. The amulet came into her mind, and she felt like a part of herself began to drift away. Then she saw him— Veranor. He stood tall and proud in the darkness before her. She saw his angry gray eyes, and the two crossing scars across his nose. She began to panic. She looked down to see her arm shaking, and she felt the tears roll down her cheeks.
“Kera,” she cried in a soft voice, falling back onto the tall, jutting rock where she’d last seen her. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I failed you. I shouldn’t have left you . . . I shouldn’t have left you.”
Her head sank into her sand-covered hands. “I promised you I’d never leave you, and I left you!” She felt the anger build up inside of her. “You said you were cursed, but you were wrong! I’m the cursed one! You should never have trusted me. I’m only a weapon, born and breed. I’m a killer, nothing more. I’ll never be anything more than a weapon of the gods. I can feel the mages spell coming back without you. I’m not even a person anymore. I’m just a shell. Their hands are the puppet strings that lead my path in this life. Oh, Kera. What have I done? What have I done?”
She sat there sobbing for what felt like hours. The tears flowed down her sand-blown face as she hadn’t known grief like that is so many years. She felt like she’d lost the only important thing left in her life. Which she had. She’d disobeyed the mage’s spell, Veranor, the king and queen, and even the gods themselves. It crossed her mind then that the mages may have her head back to the castle of Erodoran of her own free will somehow. Surely to face unspeakable torture or, if merciful, a quick beheading or hanging.
“I can’t live this life without you, Kera, you were the only family I’ve had since I was just a girl. I was supposed to care for you. It was supposed to be me that protected you. I’ve failed you. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”
The tears eventually ran dry, and she wiped away the mucus beneath her nose. She drank another gulp of water, and tore the bandage from her arm, it ripped at the dried scab formed on the front and back of it. She looked around the landscape, inspecting anything that would be of use. She eventually made her way down to the fallen assassins below the cliff, their bodies were half-covered in the sand she’d used to sweep them off. She sifted through their belongings, taking the nicer of the bows, made of a dark ebony wood, and collected all of their arrows and put them in a quarrel across her back. She found a white powder in a sack of one of the men, it looked like cooking flour, but more granular.
She held a pinch between her fingers and sniffed it . . . No scent. Then she placed a small taste of it on her tongue, it crossed her mind that it might be poison, but she’d built up a tolerance over the years in Sorock. Tastes of tarlily bark. Excellent.
She went to wash the wound with water from one of the other watersacks and pressed the white powder into her wound on both sides, and rewrapped it in a clean, white linen. Tarlily bark was a common medicine used to fight off infection and aid in healing. She felt lucky that the assassins were smart enough to bring some along, although it was ironic the one that killed them would be the one who benefited from it.
After gathering supplies, and with the sun shedding its last light on the rocks, fatigue set in again on her. Her whole body ached, and her mind began to cloud with a layer of fog. Kera not only brought with her a bond of love and family, but she freed her mind of the cobwebs. Now that Kera was gone, Lilaci began to revert back to the slave she’d been not so long ago. If she tried to remember her past, the headaches set in again. Kera was her only escape from the pain Veranor created in her.
She wanted to make a fire but found no strength to do so. She laid on her side and curled up into a ball on a set of sheets she’d collected. She put her head on her pack, and threw a last, thick cloth over her. As her eyes forced themselves shut, and she drifted off into the world of dreams, she whispered, “I will find you Kera. I will find you.”
Chapter Forty-Two
The rains had washed away any tracks that may have led her in a specific direction. Now, she was left to her instinct. To find Kera and Fewn would she travel further into the mountains, or back out onto the sands? It was the early morning then, and
the further she waited, the further away they’d be. However, if she picked the wrong direction, she’d have little chance of finding them again, if they were alive.
Well, I know it wasn’t a Reevin that took them, as I’d surely be dead. Any Reevin would have ended me in my vulnerable state back in the storm. So, unless they were attacked by some random party, which is unlikely— she must have been taken by someone working for Voru. Possibly they sent out another group of Scaethers— but so quickly? How would they have caught up with us? We easily had a week on them. Think, Lilaci, think! My mind feels so full, yet empty. Perhaps the closer I get to her, the more my mind will be free of this hold they have on me. To the mountains or back into the desert? Fewn would have fought off random attackers, but she wouldn’t hold up against a group of male Scaethers alone. That has to be the only option. There’s only one place they’d take her.
Lilaci began to leap down the cliffs with soft footing down the mountainside. Once she reached the jagged foothills she began to run. There was nothing, no one in sight, once the sands fell once again under her feet. She stood stoically, peering out into the empty wasteland. The sun burned brightly, and she covered her eyes with the thin hood just above her eyes. Not a single object in sight, and no footprints. She knew there was almost no chance to find footprints from a day before, but she hoped.
She could still turn back, there might be time, but it made the most sense that someone was taking her back to Voru, back to the Great Oasis of Noruz. There they’d enslave her and hand her to the gods, who would do whatever they pleased to the young girl they found to be the biggest threat to their existence. Even though she seemed impervious to their magic, she couldn’t stop the edge of a knife, or the will of strong hands.
“I won’t let them touch you,” she grimaced. “I won’t let them hurt you.”