The White Tower (The Aldoran Chronicles: Book 1)

by Michael Wisehart

  “We can’t hold them for long!” Barl bellowed from the front as the chairs were being pushed back by the overwhelming onslaught. Ty jumped back into place as another of the spiders started squeezing through the far left side of the barricade. He swung and caught the first leg, but it didn’t cut all the way through. He tried yanking his short sword free from where it had lodged in the bone, but was immediately struck by a second leg and knocked to the floor.

  Breen jerked Ty to his feet. “Go protect Adarra!” He grabbed Ty’s sword and tossed it at him before chopping the creature’s leg off with an axe he had managed to salvage from one of the fallen Northmen.

  Ty took the sword and scooted back to where Adarra was busy working on Aiden and the two lancers. Ty could tell his brother was trying to politely let him know that he was getting in the way. He had never taken to combat like Breen had. His father had been a good teacher, but Ty had always found it all a bit grueling. Now, he wished he had paid better attention. He was determined that if the Creator saw fit to allow them to survive all of this, he was going to learn.

  He felt an arm wrap around his shoulders. “He just wants to make sure you’re protected.” His mother always knew exactly what to say to calm his spirits. Ty kept his sword at the ready as he waited for the first sign that he was needed.

  His father roared as he cut the legs out from another spider in mid-lunge. He had been forced all the way back to the mouth of the hallway, which was allowing him more range of motion to swing. His father was the bravest man Ty had ever known, and the strongest. He was proud to have been his son.

  Lyessa was momentarily knocked down, but was quickly back on her feet and, with a long dagger in hand, she stabbed a smaller spider trying to squeeze its way underneath the table. It quickly retreated.

  On the right side, where the barricade was the weakest, the first of the larger arachnobes finally gained a foothold. Lyessa’s back was turned and she didn’t see the deadly spider behind her. Lord Barl dove in front of his daughter and thrust his sword into its lower abdomen. The eight-legged monster reeled and hissed in rage before leaking the last of its life across the sofa table Ty’s father’s had made from the leftovers of an old poplar that had fallen on the barn some years back.

  Unfortunately, the creature’s dead weight rolled in the overlord’s direction and knocked him from his feet, leaving him unable to stop the next spider from crawling inside and latching onto his leg. Barl shouted his loathing for the creature as the spider stabbed the end of its spear-like leg into his calf.

  Lyessa weaved her way around its legs with amazing speed, working to get to her father. Breen held the others at bay while she did. With a scream of anger, she finally leapt on top of the creature’s back and drove her dagger to the hilt through the top of its head. It flinched once and went still, its leg retracting far enough for her father to work free.

  Ty rushed forward and hacked off another leg before it had a chance of stabbing Lyessa in the back. He helped her drag her father out from under the dead creature and back toward the others his sister and mother were busy nursing. Without waiting to see how her father was doing, Lyessa grabbed her sword and rushed back to the front to help Breen. With Barl down, Ty didn’t hesitate. He lifted his sword and retook his spot on the left end. He hacked and stabbed and sliced away until it felt as though his arms would give out, and then he hacked and stabbed and sliced some more.

  Behind him, there was a loud clatter near the rear of the kitchen, followed by the sound of clanging pots and pans and broken dishes where his mother was fighting to guard the back door. Ty glanced over his shoulder. The top half of the door had been ripped open and a single spider was trying to push its way inside, but it was met with his mother’s cold iron skillet. The impact sounded like the gonging of the Sidaran Senate’s bell. With the creature still dazed, his mother plunged a meat cleaver into its thick sinew. And then she plunged it in again and again until even the leftover spasms had ceased.

  “You alright?” his father called from the front hall.

  “I will be,” she said, as she shoved the spider’s corpse back outside and maneuvered a nearby cabinet into place.

  Ty turned and plunged his sword deep into the mouth of the next spider. There was no end to them. He would kill one and two more would take its place.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Ty could see Lyessa’s father trying to hobble back to the front. The overlord had one sword to hold him up and another to kill anything that poked through the barricade.

  “I can’t hold them off much longer!” his father said as he cut half a leg off the next spider coming over the pile and with a lunging thrust, drove his blade through its open maw.

  Ty didn’t know how much longer they were going to be able to keep going. To his right, Barl shouted as he pushed back to avoid being grabbed by one spider and stumbled over the severed legs of another. He reached out on instinct and grabbed the nearest object available—his daughter. But instead of hindering his fall, he merely pulled her down on top of him, giving the spiders a clear opening of attack.

  Two more creatures attempted to force their way through the barricade. Seeing Barl and Lyessa on the ground spurred their efforts even more as they broke through and went straight at them.

  “Hey! Over here!” Ty hollered, waving his free arm in hopes of steering the spider’s attention away from them, while at the same time holding off one of his own. He killed the beast with a single hack to the head but not before acquiring a couple large gashes down the side of his arm and one small puncture to his upper shoulder in the process. Pulling his sword free, Ty turned to make a run at the two spiders on top of Lyessa and her father, but Adarra beat him to it as she raced across the room. Her sickle was raised over her head, the curved end pointing directly at the largest spider.

  She screamed in rage as she brought the farming instrument around in a wide arc. The blade passed through its outer hide as easily as a stalk of sun-kissed wheat. She pulled the blade out and hit it again. The beast hissed and collapsed. Adarra was thoroughly covered in spider yuck by the time Lyessa had managed to pull her father to safety.

  Ty turned around to see how his mother and father were doing and his heart stopped.

  “Father!”

  Kellen spun around.

  Ty pointed to the kitchen.

  Two spiders had somehow managed to not only force their way past the kitchen shelving, but were now standing over his fallen mother. One of them was ripping away at her open flesh.

  “Nooo!” Kellen left the spiders in the hall and ran for the kitchen.

  “Ty! Hold the front!” Breen hollered as he ran to take his father’s place at the hall and keep the creatures from overrunning them. Ty turned back to the crumbling barricade, raised his sword, and stabbed the next spider through. His arms were stained with their greenish blood and his nose burned from the acidic content.

  “Move back, Ty! We’ve got this!” Barl said as he once again hobbled his way back to the font and began fighting. Lyessa was there offering him every support. The man just didn’t know how to quit.

  Ty could hear his father fighting the two spiders behind him. He raised his sword and ran to help. His father swung and chopped one of the front legs off the first. It hissed in pain. He kicked it to the side as he lunged at the second. The second spider reared and hit him in the arm, cutting a deep gash. Ty could see the blood. His father never even flinched.

  Ty swung at the first creature. It leaped, but he dodged to the right and landed a solid cut to its side. The creature hissed and swept Ty’s legs out from under him. He landed on his face. The floor was slick with the spider’s goo, making it hard to gain his footing. He barely had time to turn over before the spider was on top of him. It was even uglier underneath. Its mandibles clicked open and shut as they sought to latch onto his neck. Using his legs, he kicked upwards and flipped the creature up and over.

  On the other side of the kitchen, his father blocked the spider’s legs
and then with a powerful over-swing, he literally cut the arachnobe in half. His blade hit the narrow section dividing its lower and upper abdomen.

  Ty spun around and rolled over to get back to his feet. He was halfway there when a sharp pain in his left shoulder brought him back down. At first, he thought it was his magic, but then he remembered that was his right shoulder. He turned his head. It was the arachnobe. The spider had sunk its fangs into the top of his arm.

  A scream was all he could manage. He had barely turned around to try swinging his blade when his father’s sword flew past and buried itself inside the creature’s head. Its mouth opened, releasing his arm. Ty crawled to where his father was cradling his mother’s head in his lap.

  He glanced down at her ravaged body and cried. Blood seeped from the corners of her mouth but she kept her eyes open, staring into his. Ty held her gaze. He was speechless. He couldn’t imagine how she had managed to survive this long. Why had she not cried out? Why had he not turned around sooner? This was his fault. He prayed their venom had paralyzed her enough to take away the pain of what they had done to her.

  She opened her mouth to speak. It was barely audible. “My brave little boy.”

  Unable to speak himself, Ty’s father offered his wife the only thing he could. He laid his hand on her cheek and smiled. Ty hoped that somehow, in the agony of what she must be suffering, it would bring her some measure of peace. “Hold on, my love,” his father said. “I’m here. Everything’s going to be alright.” She smiled at him, then her eyes went blank and her head fell to the side.

  At that moment, Ty didn’t care if he lived or died. He didn’t care if the spiders ate them all. He leaned back and screamed.

  Chapter 90 | Ty

  TY FELT DEAD INSIDE, as though all hope had been stolen from him.

  He stood from his place beside his mother’s broken body and lifted his sword, the edges slick with green blood. He only had one reason left to live: vengeance. If it was the last thing he did, he was going to cut that witch’s head off. And anything that stood in his way would have to face his unrelenting wrath.

  Deep inside, Ty could feel something stirring, something dark and powerful. He felt strangely numb. The pain from his earlier wounds was gone. He felt nothing. It was his magic reviving at last. His fingers tightened around the grip. It had come to give him the strength he needed to accomplish his task.

  His face was dark and deadly. He took two steps into the main room, raised his blade, and collapsed. He watched as the floor leaped into the air and hit him in the face. Or did his face hit the floor? He wasn’t quite sure. Something didn’t feel right. He couldn’t move his legs.

  “Ty! What happened?” He felt his father’s arms lift him to his knees.

  He felt dizzy. The room was beginning to spin. “I . . . I don’t know.” He looked down at his lower half. “I can’t feel my legs.”

  His father winced as he pulled back the top of Ty’s overcoat where the spider had latched on to his arm. It was a noise that was typically indicative of his father’s displeasure. “This doesn’t look good. We need to see if Adarra can do anything for it.” His father’s face didn’t portray any optimism.

  Ty retched and the room finally stopped spinning. He couldn’t seem to hold it in. He felt himself being dragged to the far wall. On the adjacent side of the room, his brother fought to hold back the spiders trying to breach the narrow hallway. To his left, more spiders were pushing their way through the front barricade. Lyessa and her father were being forced further back into the room. Adarra was swinging her sickle, cutting off legs as fast as she could but there were just too many of them.

  Ty knew it was over. They had lost, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had proven to be too weak to make a difference, and they were all going to suffer his mother’s fate. Some savior he turned out to be.

  From somewhere outside, there was a loud explosion that rocked the whole house. The spiders halted their incursion and one by one retreated out through the toppled blockade. Those in the hallway pulled back as well, withdrawing through the bedroom windows. Something was diverting their attention, something more pressing than their little band of half-dead fighters.

  Again, there was a loud noise. The entire house shook as if lightning had struck it. With the creatures having temporarily evacuated the premises, the rest of their group ran to the barricade to see if they could catch a glimpse of what was happening.

  “Help me up,” Ty said as he anxiously raised one arm. Kellen started to lift one side, but Ty grunted and quickly changed his mind. “I can’t. I’m too weak.” He poked his stomach. “I can’t feel anything below my chest.”

  Outside the house, the spiders were hissing. It was the same kind of sounds they made when injured or dying.

  “What is it, milord?” Kellen asked, not willing to leave Ty’s side to look for himself.

  “It appears to be some kind of battle.”

  “Battle?”

  “Is it the wielder council,” Ty asked, his face growing hopeful, “come to save us?”

  “I doubt it. From what that witch said, they have their own set of troubles to deal with.”

  “Well, who else could be powerful enough to take on a witch and an entire army of giant spiders?”

  His father’s head slowly turned back around toward the front barricade. “There’s only one person I know.”

  “I changed my mind. Help me over there.”

  “Are you sure?” his father asked.

  Ty nodded. “I want to see.”

  Kellen leaned over and picked him up. Carefully, they maneuvered in and around the dead carcasses lining the floor as they made their way toward a small section of collapsed debris near the front door. The oak table had all but toppled, leaving a pretty open view of the front yard through the stacks of chairs. By the time they reached the others and took a look for themselves, Ty quickly realized why everyone had been standing there in such bizarre silence.

  Outside the walls of their family cottage the horde of massive blood-thirsty arachnobes were being corralled by a wall of golden fire, or at least Ty thought it was fire. There was something strange about it. It didn’t quite move like fire, more like some kind of golden liquid.

  “Suethian Duwanite!”

  Standing on their side of the golden barricade was an old man hollering in some unknown tongue. Long, white hair swirled around his head as he wielded what appeared to be a sword of pure golden flame. It was the most incredible weapon Ty had ever seen. With each swing, the white-haired man cut down any spider not shut off by the fiery barricade.

  “This isn’t over, wizard!” Mangora shouted over the cacophony of her eight-legged army. She sent a spear of flame in the old man’s direction, but he merely waved it aside as she had done to Breen’s arrows earlier that day. He didn’t seem at all concerned.

  “Be gone, witch! Crawl back to your master. The boy is under my protection.”

  Mangora shrilled in fury, but seeing she was clearly outmatched, she crawled up on the alpha arachnobe and disappeared into the woods, taking her spider army with her.

  “Tares’ayden!” The old man lowered his hands and the golden barricade lowered into the ground, vanishing from view. He waited for the last of the spiders to finish their retreat before turning around. “You can come out now. They won’t be back.” His magical blade softened and then dissipated altogether, leaving nothing more than the hilt as he tucked it into one of the folds of his robe and waited for them to comply.

  Breen was the first one out the door, his axe raised, no doubt wanting to protect the others in case it was some sort of trap.

  “Here, Breen, take your brother.” His father handed Ty over to his older brother as he limped out to meet the old man.

  “You said you would return.”

  “I told you I would.”

  His father glanced back at the house. “I wish it had been sooner.” Ty knew what he meant. His father waved Breen and the others forward.
“This is Nyalis. He was the wizard who brought Ty to us sixteen years ago.” Adarra was the next out the door, followed closely by Lord Barl, who was still being propped up by Lyessa.

  As Breen neared the wizard, Ty could see the weathered look of age in the man’s face. He had clearly lived a hard life.

  “Ah, my young faeling, we meet again.” He rubbed a hand through Ty’s hair. “The white suits you, I think.” His smile was warm, almost fatherly; the sound of his voice was calming.

  “He needs help,” Breen said as he held Ty out to the wizard. Nyalis pulled back the torn material and sniffed Ty’s arm.

  His nose wrinkled. “Oh dear. That does smell bad, doesn’t it?”

  “Can you heal him? You are a wizard?”

  “The last wizard,” Nyalis said with a wave of his arm, “at least for now.” He glanced over Breen’s shoulder at Adarra with a cheeky grin. “But as I was saying, yes, I can heal him, but not here.”

  “Why not?” Adarra asked, taking a step closer to inspect the wound herself.

  “Because, my dear, the …”

  Nyalis was interrupted by the sound of approaching horses.

  Everyone turned and quickly raised their weapons. If Ty could have found the energy to laugh, he would have. What next?

  Chapter 91 | Ty

  A BAND OF RAGGED, half-dead riders rounded the trees on the far side of the narrow lane leading back to their homestead. They looked to be in no better shape than Ty, barely holding on to their horses.

  Veldon was in the lead, one hand fiddling with the flint hanging from his neck while the other directed his mount. Orlyn rode just behind the portmaster with his large staff laying across his lap. It was glowing. Miss Reloria rode double with Feoldor. He looked about as cheerful as ever.

  Ty found himself involuntarily moving forward. Breen had obviously seen Fraya because they were heading in the general direction of her horse. She was holding onto Gilly as he bounced in front of her. The dwarf looked like a large child and having just about as much fun.