by Amy Little
The curly-haired man tried to pick himself up but then fell again with a dazed look.
Annika helped Zak lift the man from the ground.
Zak threw Thiel over his left shoulder as lightly as though he were a child. The man’s face was sweaty from the pain and he looked even younger now, no more than a boy. When he opened his eyes intermittently, strange black specks that Annika hadn’t noticed there before swum in them. There was something disconcerting about those specks. It was as though that they emanated something evil.
Annika shuddered, but she did not have time to examine the specks further. “Where will you take him?” she asked.
“Him and you both. To the Tiger castle,” he replied.
Annika shook her head. “I won’t go.”
“You won’t help me?” asked Zak.
Annika pressed her lips. She gathered her power, to try and scan them both for wounds.
Zak turned to look at her. “Don’t. Don’t use your power now.”
“You can feel it?” said Annika, surprised.
“They can.” He did not have to explain who “they” were.
“I want to help you.”
“Then get Thiel’s sword. He will want it… if he is ever to wield a sword again.”
They backtracked along the lane, then exited onto the main thoroughfare. It was quieter now than before. Although it was just after midday, when the streets should have been filled with bustle, the windows were shuttered for the length of the street. The few passers-by gave them wary looks and hurried away. The only creatures out in force seemed to be the rats. They scurried along the streets in multitudes that Annika had never seen before. In places, it looked as though the paving stones were covered in an undulating grey carpet.
Annika held the heavy sword with two hands and tried not to shriek as yet another rat broke off from the teeming multitude and ran towards her.
“They’re as afraid of you as you are of them,” said Zak. He was puffing a little under the weight of the man on his shoulders.
“That’s hardly possible. I find them terrifying.”
“They’re here because of the snakes.”
“Are they helping the snakes?” asked Annika. She tried to use the sword to swipe away a rat near her but she was too slow.
The rat shrieked and moved on.
“They’re running from the snakes.”
True enough, there were clangs of steel and shouts of dying men ahead. They veered off in a different alley, then another, in a dizzying sequence of turns, so that Annika had to periodically glance up at the seven suns to work out in what direction they were heading.
Zak’s shoulders and chest were covered in Thiel’s blood. Thiel looked almost lifeless.
Annika doubted she looked any better and despite the seriousness of the occasion a part of her hoped that Zak would not turn around to look at her and see her in such awful state.
Just at that moment Zak stopped to appraise her. He looked her up and down.
She stared at him defiantly, her arms aching from the sword that now felt as though it may have belonged to a giant, and her breaths ragged from the pace.
Zak seemed to like what he saw. He nodded with approval. “A smaller sword and a few weeks practice and you could almost stand up for yourself in a street brawl.”
She wasn’t sure if he was humoring her. She tossed hair out of her eyes and glared back defiantly, “I can stand up for myself now, thank you!”
Zak didn’t dispute her claim. “Armguard,” he said. “Put it on.”
Annika balked at the gruffness of his voice, but then realizing that they had no time to waste, put the guard on. By the time she had finished, Zak was already midway up an alleyway that angled up a hill, and Annika with a louder yelp than she would have liked to acknowledge hurried after him.
Shouts and screams came from up ahead just as they came into an open courtyard. The combatants were wearing the colors of the House of the Wolf, and an almost equal number wore the colors of the Vulture. The fight was jumbled, with the confusion compounded by the shouts from three small boys who had opened one of the shuttered windows and were throwing rocks at the men below.
When Annika looked up a few seconds later, the boys were no longer there, and she caught a glimpse of a woman’s arm slamming the shutters closed.
Zak quickly took them down narrow laneways again, hurrying around the combatants who did not seem to recognize them.
“What’s happening,” Annika asked, when they were in the comparative safety of the next street. She tried to stay closer to Zak now.
“Could be another coup,” he said, without stopping.
“They were wearing your colors.”
“I didn’t know those men.”
“Did you know about any coup?”
“Wouldn’t I have told you if I did?” Zak replied, testily.
“Would you?”
“I knew nothing about this,” said Zak. He spoke through gritted teeth.
Annika did not know if she believed him.
He had stopped to wipe the sweat from his forehead, even though the day was unusually cold, and was now looking up at the seven suns.
Annika followed his gaze.
The suns were already low on the horizon.
“I didn’t think it was that late,” said Annika, softly.
“It isn’t. It should be another few hours to sun set. This is magic. Dark, powerful, magic,” said Zak.
Annika thought Zak looked rattled. She had never seen him like this. She shivered.
He looked at her. “Have you felt any magic around you?”
She shook her head. Truth be told, she was too tired and scared to reach out to her power. Now that Zak had mentioned it, she tried to be more mindful as they continued to climb the hill, but it was difficult.
Her thoughts kept returning to Cara and her father. If this was a coup, were they safe? Her place was beside them, she said to herself. She felt her remaining reluctance to return to the Tiger castle ebb.
The winding streets seemed well built for defense, and here and there they came across armed men that peered at behind them from barricades improvised from chairs, tables, rocks, and anything else the locals could find. The barricades protected courtyards for groups of houses, and the men who guarded the barricades with clubs and knives let them pass by undisturbed.
Zak walked with purpose. He seemed to know the direction.
She did not know the streets they passed. She lost count of the number of times they turned, and which way, drooping as she was from exhaustion, when she suddenly felt something rasp unpleasantly at the edges of her awareness. She looked around.
The street they were on was empty save for two women with a man who hurried by on the opposite side of the street. The magic did not come from them. Further ahead, from the top of the hill that was still some distance away, and surrounding by buildings, came a thick column of smoke. But the magic did no come from there either. The dread grew closer, intensified.
Annika, at a loss, opened herself wider to the power, which trickled in, seeming to gain strength from the armguard, and then slowed. Annika gasped.
Thick, suffocating folds of what felt like a tentacle slithered along the street. It was suffused with murlock. It seemed to be seeking something out. It seemed to be seeing with every bit of its dark, filthy being. It passed by Annika, then stopped, and something began to draw her consciousness towards it.
Annika fought with all her strength, but the trickle of the power that she felt was not enough. She raised her hands up before her as though trying to ward off the unseen evil. She was only barely aware of the sword falling from her hands and clanging on the pavement. But then suddenly when her right hand touched the armguard on her left forearm, the tentacle recoiled and the suffocating pressure that Annika felt dropped.
The tentacle slowly receded.
When she came to, Zak was standing before her. Thiel was lying on his side on the ground, also looking u
p at her with blood-shot eyes. Zak asked, “What happened?”
“A tentacle… murlock…,” Annika blinked the vision from her eyes. “Did you see anything?”
“I saw no tentacle. I saw you stop and then sway as though you were sucked into an opening. You dropped the sword and put your arms up. I came to help you, but you then came to. What was it?”
“Something dark,” she said. “Something that was seeking out others with the power and consuming them.” She shuddered
“Can you go on,” asked Zak, placing his hands on her shoulders.
She nodded, looking down at her arms. “This armguard…. It stopped the evil. What is it?”
Zak looked at the guard on her forearm with surprise. “The armorer did say it protects not only against men’s weapons but also against the dark arts. I thought it was just his sales pitch.”
“It helped me,” she said. And Zak helped her by getting it for her, she also thought, but she would not say that out loud.
“Once all this is over, I will return to the shop and pay the armorer ten-fold,” Zak said. “Even that would not be a fair price.”
Yet Cara would not have such an armguard, Annika thought to herself. What if the tentacles were to find her sister? The urgency that Annika felt overcame her exhaustion. She picked up the sword, which seemed even heavier now.
Zak lifted Thiel to his shoulders. The man was losing a lot of blood and slipping in and out of consciousness but Annika did not think there was anything she could have done for him just then, weakened as she was.
The streets were dark. The street lamps had not been lit. The moon was lost in the black sky. If it were not for the occasional flicker of light from the windows of the surrounding houses, the streets would have been impenetrable. That, and the splotches of red at the top of the hill, where something burned.
Zak stumbled and she steadied him, while Thiel cried out, and then sank back into stupor.
They rounded the corner of the street that led to the top of the hill, beyond which they could hear shouts and smell the thick smoke.
At the top of the hill was an open plaza. At one end of the plaza was a low, wooden chapel, that looked like a barn. In the middle of the plaza was a large bonfire that was surrounded by a crowd of chanting and wildly dancing penitents.
Annika shut her eyes momentarily when she saw what was burning in the fire.
On six stakes, wriggled black-coated snake men, being consumed by the flames. On contact with the snakes, the fire took on a greenish tint. The smoke that rose up was acrid, and the penitent coughed and spluttered if the wind blew it in their direction.
There was also a tingle of murlock in the air, like thin, wispy tendrils, that drifted around the fire and the chapel.
Annika found herself holding her breath, even though she knew that that would not help her if the tendrils found her there.
Zak risked dropping his load to grab Annika by the arm. “Don’t linger!”
Annika realized that she had been standing rooted to the one spot for some time. She moved away from there as quickly as she could, following the path laid by Zak through the crowd, which paid them no attention.
The contrast between the rowdy scenes just moments earlier and the empty, dark side street was startling.
Annika stopped to catch her breath in a dark passageway. She blinked a few times, as though to try to erase the memory of the scaly creatures writhing in the flames from her mind. “How did they capture the snakes?” she asked Zak, who also stopped next to her, seemingly grateful for the respite.
“The priests have a crude sort of magic,” said Zak. “It must be growing stronger. They’ll find out just how strong – the snakes are bound to seek revenge for that burning, and soon.”
“Will they help us against the snakes?”
“They’re madmen. Better to have no allies, than madmen as allies.”
“Yet is not some help against evil better than no help at all?” she persisted.
Zak shook his head. “Just because one side is evil does not mean that the other isn’t,” he said. “There are alternative sources of evil in this world. Priests and snakes are more alike than you’d think.”
Annika made a mental note to find out more about that later. Having caught her breath, she walked ahead. Her eyes were sharp, probably not as sharp as Zak’s, but he was nearing exhaustion with carrying Thiel on his back. Annika was pleased she could help him. She pointed out where the pavement was broken or where stones stuck out of the road, raising curbs, boulders that the locals used as street furniture. Although she herself stumbled and fell a few times, Zak managed to avoid them.
“Turn left,” Zak called out, and they came onto a down-sloping street that led in a straight path down the hill. The street was lined by three and four storied houses. Because of the narrowness of the street – no more than five men could have stood abreast in it – the houses blocked what little moon light there was.
Annika peered down the street.
Below, given the steep down slope, and behind the dimly shaded outlines of houses that continued down the hill like unevenly-hewn boxes, she saw the castle. In the distance, the castle looked small enough to hold in the palm of her hand. But even so, Annika could make out a dash of red in the forecourt of the castle. The dancing red reflected in the low-lying clouds above, casting an eerie glow over that part of the city.
It took Annika a few seconds to comprehend what she was seeing. “The Tiger castle’s on fire!” she cried out. She turned to look to Zak with mute plea to tell her she’s wrong.
Even Zak seemed ruffled. “The castle’s nigh on impenetrable,” he muttered. “Never mind. We’ll deal with it when we get there. We’ve more pressing problems now. The rats are overtaking us. There must be snakes behind.”
Annika, who was feverishly imagining her sister and father in the castle’s flames, was jolted back to the world around her by his words.
A stream of rats, squeaking and gnashing, ran down the street alongside them, scurrying into any open basement.
“Look for anywhere we can turn-off this road,” Zak grimly said.
They moved as quickly as they could, which wasn’t very quick at all. Zak was bent double by his load, with Thiel passed out on his back, and Annika was reduced to dragging the sword along the ground, which made a racket on paving stones. Drop it, Zak said to her a few times, but she refused.
Annika looked for any side-streets but there were none. A few times she turned back to see what was behind them, but other than the glowing, frantic rats’ eyes, she did not see anything. Even so, the rats’ terror was palpable. Annika found herself breaking into a cold sweat. Turning back again, she thought she saw something more clearly, and clearer yet when the clouds parted.
Behind them came a group of snake men. Despite the black robes and the hoods, Annika could see the elongated snouts and the oddly unmoving, hooded and unblinking eyes. There could be no doubt.
“They’re behind us,” Annika yelped.
Zak cursed. “How far?” he asked, adjusting Thiel on his back, turning, and trying to shake the hair out of his eyes.
“Thirty meters, no more,” she said.
At the lead of the group behind them came a giant of a snake man. He raised his long sword to point out Annika and Zak to his companions. The snake rose a full head above the others, and even in the distance his long forked tongue flicking out could be seen.
Trying to contain her shudder, Annika forced herself to count them. “Twelve!”
Zak came to a stop. He lowered Thiel to the ground and looked back, then carefully looked around them. All doors were shuttered. No side-streets or courts to hide could be seen ahead. He turned to Annika. He took her hands into his and looked her in the eyes.
Annika was startled by the calm in them. “Snakes!” she repeated, nearly in tears.
He took the sword from her hands. “Run ahead,” he said.
“And you?”
“I’ll hold them bac
k.”
“There are a dozen of them!”
“I’ve faced worse odds,” he said. He bent down to kiss her on the lips. Their lips lingered against one another. “We’ll meet again, Princess Annika.”
Opening her eyes again after the kiss ended was almost too painful. She looked past Zak. The snakes were no more than two dozen meters away.
“Run!” said Zak. He stepped forward a few steps to take a practice swing with Thiel’s longsword, then turned to her again. “I said run!”
She frantically searched her bag before pulling out her dagger. She dropped her bag to the ground. “No.”
Zak came up to her again and lowering his face to hers stared her in the eyes for what seemed like an eternity, though it could not have lasted for more than a second.
Annika thought that his was the calm of the bottomless sea. She drank it in, reaching out to take his face in her hands.
“Well then,” he said. He kissed her lips, her hands, and then turned to face the snakes. “Cover my back. We’ll dance well tonight, my princess.”
In a flash, the snake men were upon them. Their blades shone in the moonlight. Zak parried their thrusts, twisting from side to side to meet their onslaught, and trying to stop them from getting past him in the narrow street.
Annika struggled to keep up with him. She tried to keep her side to his back, holding the dagger in front of her with two hands. While she did not see clearly what Zak was doing, she could hear his loud grunts, the clash of steel, the hisses and the deathly gurgles of the snake men, and, somewhere in the distance but getting closer, a rumble.
It sounded like the rumble of an earthquake.
Green liquid trickled under foot.
She could sense Zak weaken.
A snake managed to get around Zak. It was stooped, and in the fight the hood had fallen off its head. The snake’s head was bare and covered in scales. It had no ears. The face, despite a broadly human appearance, had a markedly protruding snout, with the lips peeled back to expose two fangs behind which turned and probed the forked tongue. In its hand shone a rapier.