by Amy Little
Annika froze with terror. She held the gold dagger in front of her, but was unable to shake off her fright. She expected the death-bearing thrust to come any moment. But it didn’t – the snake seemed as terrified of the dagger in her hand as she of it.
That moment of hesitation cost the snake its life. With a whoosh, Zak’s sword came around, shearing the snake’s head cleanly at the neck and then looping around to cut the sword hand, before swinging back to meet the snake’s brethren in one fluid and unbroken move, all accompanied by the growing rumble.
Still reeling from the encounter, Annika gazed down the street where they were heading. Something moved there, in the dark, large and voluminous and seemingly made out of a number of separate shapes. A few seconds later, she saw more clearly, and what she saw made her mouth hang open in surprise.
A herd of Memory Beasts was running towards them from the bottom of the hill. The roll of hooves on the ground grew louder. It sounded as though a hundred drums were beating at once.
Behind her, the clang of steel slowed and then stopped. Annika guessed that the snakes and Zak had also saw the Memory Beasts. But not even the fear of the snakes could force her to tear herself away from the sight.
In the herd there was at least a dozen animals. They ran silently, their heads low to the ground and swaying from side to side, their sharp horns shining in the moonlight. At the front, ran the majestic white Memory Beast that Annika saw at the market. Even though they were now less than three meters away, the beasts did not slow.
“They will crush us!” she exclaimed and grabbed Zak’s hand.
He squeezed her hand.
Then the Memory Beasts were upon them. They ran by, their hairy sides warm and soft and buffeting Annika as though she was submerged in a fast-flowing, warm current. One of them sidestepped Thiel’s unconscious form, and landing clumsily, bumped into Annika.
With a shriek, Annika sprawled to the ground under the beasts. She shut her eyes, too scared to even breathe. She was certain she’ll die. After a few seconds, she opened them again.
The beasts had broken their flow. They hopped over her, side-stepped as adroitly as though they were performing an intricate dance, in one case leaped up in the air and landed on its comrade. Not one of them stepped on her, or Thiel, or Zak. Not so for the snakes.
The hisses she had heard before were from the snakes. The Memory Beasts trampled the snakes underfoot, gored them with their horns, lashed them with their long, hard tails.
Annika sat on the ground unable to tear her eyes away from the gory sight, until Zak roughly pulled her up. “Let’s go.”
She was picking up her dagger and the satchel when she saw four hooves stop before her. She looked up.
The white Memory Beast was standing in front of her. The snakes have all been stamped into dark green puddles. Bits of black fabric and green slime clung to the beast’s horns. Although its fellow creatures have run on ahead, it stood before Annika calmly and examined her with large, solemn eyes.
She extended her hand towards it. “Thank you,” she whispered.
It nuzzled her hand, turned, and faster than she could have thought possible for such a large creature raced after the herd.
“What just happened?” she asked Zak.
“The snakes are their eternal enemies,” said Zak.
“He seemed to want to say something to me.”
“There’s much we don’t know about these creatures,” said Zak thoughtfully, before lifting Thiel up on his shoulders again.
Annika found herself hopping from stone to stone as they walked, for the long street that led down the hill was, in places, awash in snake blood. Annika guessed that that was where the Memory Beasts encountered their enemies. The street continued for what seemed like forever. Her body hurt.
At the bottom of the hill, where the street branched in three, they found the shortest route to the castle blocked by a barricade. The castle rose over the tops of the rooves ahead, about a kilometer in the distance.
But the street immediately before them was blocked off by loose stones, tree branches, and odd furniture collected from nearby houses.
A group of grim men stood behind the barricade. Three hefted rusty halberds that must have dated from before the Empire, and one of them held a bow and arrow that he drew on seeing them.
“Let’s backtrack,” said Annika to Zak.
“This is the fastest route,” Zak replied.
“What brings you here?” a man with a steel helmet shouted.
“Turn back!” a man with a halberd and a red beard yelled.
“Move out of the way, I can’t aim,” said the archer. “I’ll skewer these snakes!”
Annika disregarded Zak’s attempt to grab her arm and stepped forward. “We seek passage to castle of the House of the Tiger.”
“Why?” asked the archer, suspiciously narrowing his eyes.
“We are no friends of the snake people!” said Zak.
“Step aside,” repeated the archer to his comrades, his eyes like hairline cracks in his weathered face.
“A noblewoman and nobleman,” said the man with the red beard. His words sounded mocking.
“Nobles,” said the man in the helmet. “Nobles are out for themselves.”
“No friends of ours,” the red beard concurred.
“Nobles made a deal with the snake men,” said the archer.
“Some say nobles are snake people themselves,” said the man in the helmet.
“I’ll skewer them!” yelled the archer insistently.
“Let’s go,” said Zak, backing away. “They hate us almost as much as the snakes.”
The men watched them retreat with mocking laughter and jeers. The archer’s threats to skewer them followed Annika and Zak until they were out of sight.
Even in her exhausted state, the incident shook Annika. She had believed what she had learnt in her lessons as a young girl, that the nobles ruled for the benefit of the commoners, who sustained them. The hate that she saw in the men’s eyes was just as disturbing, if in a different way, as the placid coldness in the eyes of the snake men.
They backtracked around a silent quarter, where all lights were off and windows shuttered, and toward the castle walls that now loomed within reach. They could no longer see the fire, but rather a persistent glow as though the castle were a giant ember. Smoke permeated the air.
Annika followed Zak grimly. Despite the fog of exhaustion, she could not stop thinking about Cara and her father. She thought about Zak. She thought about Karrum and the people in it and the Memory Beasts and the snakes. She put one foot in front of the other and tried to chase away the more alarming thoughts. When she next lifted her tired eyes from the paving stones, they were passing through the castle’s gates.
A score of hard-faced men nodded to Zak and waved them through.
Inside, it was chaos. In the large courtyard clumped together scared household staff, merchants with their families and wagons laden with their goods that they hoped to protect inside their lord’s castle, groups of armed men. Charred buildings and whiff of smoke spoke of the recent devastation, as did the mount of bodies off on one side of the courtyard. Here and there were splotches of green snake blood.
Annika looked at the corpses with horror. Among them, she thought she saw the body of two of the guards that had stopped her from exiting the castle. Although she had seen many awful things in one night, the scale of the devastation was bewildering.
The strange green and black birds that Annika once saw in the city plucked at the dead. The birds had placid, yellow eyes, and a fixed tilt to their heads. They only seemed to become animated when they tore and swallowed flesh, and seemed unconcerned by the people rushing by.
Annika stared at them in terrified fascination. There was something reptilian about these birds, and also something familiar, that she could not quite pinpoint.
She didn’t have a long respite. Zak had stopped to exchange a few words with a group of soldiers and
then disappeared through the entrance to the stables.
Inside was an improvised hospital, the entrance to which was guarded by a large group of soldiers with minor wounds. In the adjoining stables, animals neighed, while inside the building rows of wounded and dying lay on the floor. Some groaned, some screamed, others lay silently midway between this and the next world. Zak deposited Thiel at the end of a row on bloody, clumped straw.
“Stay here,” he said to Annika.
“Cara? My father?”
“I don’t know where they are. It’s too dangerous yet for you to go looking for them.”
“It’s no safer for me to stay here!”
“The infirmary is guarded. We still don’t know how many snakes breached the castle. We don’t know how many of them are left inside the perimeter. This is the safest spot.” He kissed her on the lips and left.
Despite her exhaustion, the kiss registered intensely and left her craving more.
Annika sat next to Thiel. The man was still unconscious. He had a fever. She brushed locks of his hair off his forehead and offered him a drink of water from her canteen. The water ran down his bluish lips. His eyes, when he opened them, seemed to filled with black specks swirling like wriggling worms. He seemed to be slipping away, sliding deeper and deeper into a void from which there can be no return.
This was a critical moment for Thiel, Annika realized. He needed her help now. Annika put the canteen away, placed her hands on Thiel’s and closed her eyes for a few minutes.
The fog of tiredness slowly cleared. She sought to center herself and then drew down on the power as much as she could dare in her state, and then channeled the healing flows to Thiel, grinding her teeth in terror as she worked around the evil that seeped in to his body from the wound, blocking the evil, seeking to overpower it with the goodness that she could feel rise up through the earth and flow in to her from the air and the sky. She did not know how long this lasted, other than that once she had exhausted her strength she tied off the flows the best that she could and broke contact.
She blinked a few times trying to stay awake but the task proved beyond her.
When she woke from an exhausted slumber, she was sitting on the floor, next to Thiel, the man’s hand still in hers. She did not know how long she had slept. It did not seem like that long but the infirmary was busier yet, with every spot on the floor covered with the wounded. The household maids who were bringing water and bandages to the wounded carefully picked their steps, pushing the patients out of the way. Next to Annika lay three bloodied women, with gashes across their arms and chests.
Annika felt Thiel’s forehead. It was cooler now. His breathing had regained an even rhythm and the deep bags under his eyes seemed to have lost their deathly hue. She lifted his eyelids. The black specks had greatly reduced in number, and those that remained seemed motionless. He had turned the corner, Annika thought, as she brushed his hand with hers and stood up.
She wandered around the courtyard, then into the great hall, which was now largely abandoned, and into the kitchen.
The staff there were still working, covered in sweat and their eyes filled with fear.
Annika wondered up the stairs to her father’s study, but it was locked. She did not see any armed men who would have accompanied her father at a time like this, so she assumed that she was not there.
She returned to the castle foreyard, here and there inside the corridors hopping over the green slime leftovers of snake men, human bodies, and puddles of blood.
There was a new sense of bustling urgency in the courtyard that wasn’t there half an hour earlier. Groups of armed men rushed by in agitation. Some groups of armed men were under the banner of the House of the Tiger, others had no visible insignia, but followed Tiger officers.
Mercenaries, Annika realized. Her father must have hired them in time. It was just like her father to have a backup plan. The thought made Annika feel a little more confident that her father would be all right. Cara, however…. Just as Annika was deciding what to do next, there was a great explosion of shouts and she was jostled by armed men pushing her out of the way.
A clang of steel on steel emerged from the buildings.
A group of armed men pushed by.
Annika fell, then as she was picking herself up she found herself jerked upright.
Zak stood before her.
“Where did you get to?” he asked, grasping her by the arm. “I looked in the infirmary. Did you learn how to make yourself invisible?”
“Clearly not.” Annika worked to disengage herself. “I was looking for Cara and father, but could find neither. Do you know what is going on?”
“They’re safe.”
“Where?”
“They’re outside the castle.” Zak looked at her carefully. “Don’t be alarmed. They were on their way back, returning from visiting the Emperor at his palace, when the attack happened.”
“Why?” Annika burst out.
“I don’t know. Whatever the reason, they were attacked en route, and at the same time so was the castle.”
“I want to go to them,” said Annika, heading to the gates.
Zak held her back. “Impossible. The gates are closed, the bridge raised. The captain of the guards is in charge. No one can pass in or out of the castle.”
Annika remembered the captain, who was the man who had accompanied her when she had returned to Karrum. It seemed like so long ago. “I want to see him,” she said.
They found the captain in the solar above the great hall. His face seemed bloodless, eyes red, and his long white hair matted. He wore full armor, and with a dagger tracing something on the map of the castle that lay on the table before him. He was attended by a group of armed men, the castellan, the castle’s physician, and other men whom Annika recalled seeing around her father. They all had grave faces.
“Princess,” said the captain when he saw her, and rushed towards her. “I heard from Prince Zak that you were safe. I am pleased to see you safely here.”
“My father? Cara?”
“They are at a baron’s castle midway between here and the Emperor’s palace.”
“Why are they there?”
“They were returning from the Emperor’s palace, Princess.”
“The Emperor’s hospitality is well known,” Zak darkly said. “I stated to your father he ought not go.”
The captain bowed his head. “I sadly have to concur with Prince Zak. I did not know the reason for their visit, but on security grounds I did advise against it. They left with seventy of our best men, and when the trouble started I despatched a company of one hundred. They can rely on the baron’s fortifications and hospitality. But this… no one could have predicted this.”
“What had happened?”
“Wave after wave of attack,” said the captain. He seemed shaken. “We’ve all heard the rumors but to see snake men… creatures out of story books…. And this night, that seems to go on forever….” He wiped his forehead.
“I wish to go to my father and sister,” said Annika.
The captain shook his head, sadly. “I cannot spare any men to escort you. Although there’s a brief respite, it’s still far too dangerous outside. I do not think the respite will continue.” He turned to Zak. “We could do with some of your men.”
Zak grunted. “My father will be holed up in his castle and will not spare anyone. As for the fighters I train, most of them belong to other Houses. And every House will have closed ranks. Only a handful are free agents like me, and they are here now.”
“Then may I ask you keep the Princess safe,” the captain said. He turned to Annika. “Your father was certain of Prince Zak’s loyalty.” The captain kissed Annika’s hand and returned to the group of men, who had been looking over the map and quietly murmuring to one another.
As they walked down the staircase from the solar, Zak told Annika all he had learned. “Snake men staged an attack. We don’t know how they came here, but hordes of them fell on the c
ity. They emerged in large groups, all over the city, but especially the old quarter.”
“Where the Houses have their homes,” she said.
He nodded.
“What did they want?”
“We do not know. But we need to find a place for you that is safer.”
“Safer than my father’s castle?” she asked.
“They somehow entered the castle, started a fire here. No quarter of this castle escaped combat.”
“Yet the fire is out and the wounded are being tended. I can help there.”
“In your state?” he asked, with concern. “The best we can do now is rest. Until the fighting resumes.”
Annika had to agree that after healing Thiel she would not have had the strength to heal a pigeon, let alone anyone who had been wounded by the snake men. They passed the charred walls of the inner courtyard, then looped around the residential wings and entered the dim corridors.
Ahead, all was dark. The torches that were lit every night at regular intervals were missing from the walls. Despite the darkness, Zak walked with sure steps.
Holding on to Zak in the dark, Annika had a moment to think through what she had seen and heard. “Why would anyone want to start a fire near the walls?” she asked. “It’s all stone.”
“Chaos and confusion,” explained Zak, as he walked. “Keeping your opponent on the wrong foot is important. Plus there would be the chance for the gates to be opened for water to be brought in or people to leave the castle.”
“The walls are impossible to scale. We don’t know how they entered the castle. Yet we’re going deeper inside it?” she asked.
“This is the safest place to be. As long as I find a candle on one of these walls.”
“How do you know the snakes are not already here?” she persisted.
“They won’t be where we are going.”
Annika thought for a moment. What was there in this castle that the snakes could fear?
In the corridors leading down to the entrance to the Dragon’s Mouth tunnels, they heard footsteps ahead of them. From an intersection of two tunnels came out two men dressed in the House of the Tiger livery. Each held a torch in hand.