by Ren Cummins
Cousins reached into a pocket and slipped a few cards into Favo’s hands. “These should help speed along her repairs,” he said loudly enough to be heard over the wind whistling past their ears. “I need to go help Rom,” he said.
Yu drew his wings into an almost vertical position; the three passengers would have certainly been thrown off if he hadn’t also raised his dark blue-maned head to cushion them. Kari and Favo jumped down and ran to the ship, and Yu flicked down his wings once they were clear. Cousins slipped on his glasses and made a slight adjustment to one of the lenses, and smiled to himself.
“Perfect!” he said, drawing a pistol and aiming towards the two sandmen almost directly ahead of them. “Dust!” he shot out. The barely-visible distortion field somehow flawlessly accounted for the momentum of the two sandmen as well as the flying Yu, catching the two undead soldiers in its explosion. Yu and Cousins flew through a rapidly expanding cloud of sand as they closed the gap to assist Rom.
Rom swung her sword in a relatively clumsy semi-circle – on account of its weight and size, accuracy wasn’t as essential as momentum – and applied the emphasis of strength on the sandmen more closely aligned with the cerulean blur of Yu and Cousins behind their range of vision. Yu allowed his angle of descent to curve slightly, knocking another three or four of the Whitehold agents scattering with the force of the impact.
Cousins jumped off, dispatching two more with a pair of direct hits by his spellshot, missed with the third shot and decided to hold the last cartridge for later, holstering it in his vest pouch. One of the nearby sandmen reached out to him, but the young blonde-haired teen leaned just out of range, letting the creature pass harmlessly by. He drew the bladeless hilt from its hidden compartment of his jacket, and positioned himself as to prevent any of their opponents from flanking him.
The nearest took a look at Cousins’ seemingly useless weapon – it was only half again the width of his hand – and cackled with a voice of grit and gravel. Cousins smirked, and thumbed a lever hidden by the ornate design of the hilt. In a moment, the haft extended to a staff half again as tall as Cousins, a blade forming into the business end of a halberd. Cousins adjusted his grip on the weapon, twisting his hands and drawing the blade down and across the throat of one of his enemies in a clean strike that resolved it into so much dust.
“No longer quite as amused, I see?” the lad taunted. Two others responded by moving quickly to engage him – but though they were fast, Cousins was the faster. Using the polearm, he continually positioned and re-positioned them so that one of them was always between himself and the other opponent. Eventually, they were so entangled by one another that Rom was able to cut them both down without their realizing it until it was too late.
Between them both, they dispatched the entire group of the sandmen and stood back to back, surveying the area around them before relaxing even the slightest.
“These are easier than the ones we fought before,” Rom said. “Or else we’re getting better at this.”
Cousins shook his head, pointed up to the sky. “I think daylight is bad for them. All it takes is a tear in their robes, and they fall apart.”
They saw four more running up the road that led towards them from the canyon entrance, and realized that the airship lay almost perfectly halfway between them. Rom looked quickly over her shoulder, back inside the courtyard and saw the opened door into the main hall. “Yu, take Mully and check out the inside. If there’s more than five of them in there, come back and get me.”
Yu regarded her with a flash of disbelief. “Romany, I can surely handle more than five.”
“I know, but I want you to be careful,” she insisted, waving them both off as she began to move in the opposite direction. “Once we finish these, I’ll come back and help clean up the temple. Now, go!”
Mulligan paused a moment, held aloft by a gentle flapping of his leathern wings, and because Rom had already broken out into a run, she did not see a brief expression of concern cross his feline features. In the end, however, he turned and caught up with Yu, who was already preparing to slip inside the great metal doorway.
As she ran, Rom stayed apace with Cousins, regarding him curiously. “How did you learn to fight so well?” she asked. “You’re fast, sure, but not faster than they are. How come they didn’t hit you?”
Grinning, Cousins tapped the strap that affixed the Looking Glasses firmly over his eyes. “I’ve turned the lenses that see what will happen just a few seconds ahead. That way, I know where they’re going to be long enough in advance for me to get there first, or even to be somewhere else. I got the idea when I had to fight them before, but didn’t have an opportunity to test it until now.”
Rom nodded approvingly, pointed towards the airship as they passed. “Help them; I’ll take care of these four.”
Cousins was already moving in their direction. He could see by the gradually filling baffles that his closure cards had helped seal them up from whatever damage the sandmen had applied. Terenaa bounded along beside Rom, and Cousins marveled – not for the first time – how easily his mind had embraced the idea that his friend fought alongside spiritually maintained souls from deceased creatures. It defied reason, and his admittedly limited understanding of things scientific or artistic. But Rom had explained to him that they remained until their spiritual debt had been repaid for whatever ill deeds committed during their lives. He wondered for a moment if the same might apply to people. Shivering at the dark thought, he shifted the lenses on his glasses and scanned over the vessel, looking for any areas of bright colors that might identify a leak of the heated gases within the large billowing balloons.
Terenaa, slightly more nimble than Rom, dove across the stride of two of the sandmen, sending them sprawling. Before they had a chance to recover, she had already torn one of their protective hoods free, the sunlight blackening their skin to soot while she wrestled with the other’s mask. Rom summoned her great sword back in mid-swing, the heavy blade appearing only moments before slicing through the protective clothing of the third sandman. She allowed the momentum of its motion to carry her up and over the remaining sandman before sending it back into the unknown ether from whence the bracelet’s black gem summoned it. She caught one boot on the side of her opponent’s jaw and added additional force to the kick, causing her to spin over his head. As she did so, Rom tightened her spin and, twisting in the air, brought both boots heavily against the back of his skull with a crushing blow. Fabric and matter virtually exploded through the slits of his mask, and his magically animated yet lifeless body crumbled into the dirt. Rom was grinning as she continued her somersault, arms extended in a playful curtsey.
She clapped her hands against her leggings and the black ruffles of her dress. “They aren’t so hard, now that we know how to take care of them,” she said, amused.
Terenaa held one of the masks in her jaws, but spat it out when the dust from its former owner got up her nose and made her sneeze. Rom chuckled again, picking up the mask from her feet and examining it idly before tossing it away. “Artifice must have a lot of these around; she’s just wasting them, now.”
The scales across Terenaa’s back ruffled, cascading from her neck down to her tail, and she pawed the ground. Her eyes looked past Rom to the canyon opening, and she froze in place.
“Romany,” she said. Her voice was flat, emotionless, and sent a shiver along Rom’s spine.
She followed Terenaa’s eyes behind her and saw the great serpent they had passed the previous day, making his way cautiously into the clearing. Now that he was unobstructed by the dense forests, she could now see a series of short legs that lined the length of his gigantic frame and carried him along fluidly. He wasn’t a snake at all, even in spite of his size. Sunlight reflected off countless small scales, and a triangular-shaped head yawned wide to reveal rows of pointed teeth, each one nearly the height of Rom.
The Matrons of the orphanage had once read them the old legends of the species which report
edly had once populated this land, the Xanos. Terrible and swift death were they for conceivably anything that crossed their paths – singular-minded but clever, it was inferred that the first Machines had been created simply to deal with the sort of danger they represented, and to keep the people of Aesirium safe. But if they had ever lived, their extinction had been assured long before Rom’s birth. The children had collectively come to see that these stories of the impossibly terrifying creatures were just tales to frighten them against wandering out beyond the relative protection of Oldtown.
But clearly, whatever this creature was, it was taller than the clock tower in Oldtown and definitely terrifying. If it wasn’t an actual xanos in fact, it would do until one arrived.
It paused, blinking in the blazing sun that had broken through the clouds, its yellowed eyes shifting and crossing the clearing to at last settle upon the largest moving object it saw – the airship. With a deafening shriek, it nearly crushed Rom and Terenaa as it swiftly charged past them. The smaller Terenaa leapt up one of its legs and began to make her way up its back. Rom took only a moment to re-summon her crook before jumping up in pursuit. With a pair of quick, leaping strides, she managed to keep apace of the xanos, closing in as the beast approached the airship and her friends.
Cousins stepped out from the relative cover of the ship to face the rapidly closing monster, drawing out one of his two decks and thumbing a set of five cards quickly into the palm of his hand. “I’ll keep it busy,” he called over his shoulder. “Just hurry up!” He took another breath, hoping he was as brave as he’d tried to sound, and surrendered to the effects of adrenaline and his many hours of practice, ignoring the trembling in his knees and fingers.
Kari continued to issue instructions to Favo as they performed a variety of system checks on the ship. Cousins raised his chin and held two of the five cards high over his head. With his right hand, he flicked the remaining three cards out towards the ground, where they stuck and snapped in three identical puffs of smoke.
The xanos’ head inclined backwards slightly, gearing up for a strike with its fangs bared. Cousins noted distantly that each of those teeth were at least twice his own height, but discarded this observation as irrelevant to the task at hand. Instead, he shot one of the remaining cards into the ground nearly halfway between himself and the first three cards – as it snapped, a thin, opaque shimmer appeared in the air forming a smooth bubble that encased himself, Favo and Kari, plus the entire airship. As soon as it solidified, he threw the last card directly into the magical field, which changed its color from a pale white to a shimmering blue.
Favo turned, noticing the blue tint that covered them. He spun back to Cousins. “Is that a fire wall?” he asked.
At that moment, the xanos stepped into range of the first three cards, which set off an enormous burst of flame, momentarily concealing the xanos from view. The flames completely filled the gap between them until it reached the blue magical dome, then spat out away with a loud hiss as if it had been doused in water.
Cousins clapped his hands and extended them both in a gesture of pride. “Fire wall,” he chuckled. He jumped back with a start as a pair of the curled and clawed paws of the xanos slammed against the wall, but were similarly redirected with a loud boom.
“Fire wall, plus impact wall,” he amended.
Meanwhile, timing her jumps with the creature’s motion, Rom had nearly arrived at the head when the flames erupted around them. She flattened herself as best she could, but the heat nearly took her breath away while the xanos bucked and reared itself onto its back feet out of fear of the fire. Holding tightly to one of the spine ridges which jutted upwards, Rom lost her grip on her staff as the xanos jumped from the eldritch fire onto safer ground, only barely managing to catch the curved head of the crook over her forearm as it slid past. Above her, Terenaa clung just behind the massive skull, holding tenaciously to one of the larger spikes emerging from the xanos’ head. But as she watched, the xanos jerked its neck sharply, causing Rom’s small friend to lose her grip and sail back over Rom’s shoulder.
Holding to the scales with only one hand, she twisted her wrist around the staff, flipping the base end upwards to catch awkwardly beneath one of Terenaa’s legs, giving her just enough of an anchor to drop back onto the xanos’ back. Another pair of quick hops brought the little creature back up onto the head of the xanos. Looking around quickly, she could find only one vulnerable point on the enormous beast, and lunged for the nearest eye. Unfortunately, she met the resistance of an unseen pair of membranes – two transparent eyelids beneath the larger, scale-coated ones – and was nearly deflected back away from the monster. Her small but tenacious jaws remained open in hopes of catching on something else, and found purchase on the lower main eyelid. Although the outer surface was heavily protected, clearly the underside was not, and the xanos’ response of pain was immediate.
The next thing Rom knew, she was sailing through the air, her vision blurred by flashes of blue and green as she spun dizzyingly from the xanos. Her hands were empty. She instinctively reached to tap the gem of her bracelet to recall the staff, but changed her mind, waiting to summon it back to her hand until she figured out if this was going to be a landing or a crash.
* * * * *
“It’s coming back around!” Favo yelled, pointing back at the xanos. Even with one of Rom’s relatively tiny creatures clinging to its eyelid, the xanos seemed to focus its wrathful attention on their ship, ramming its head and clawed feet against Cousin’s shield. The impact seemed to have more of an effect on Cousins than on the shield directly. Favo understood why: whenever a practitioner employed the magical arts – whether directly or through a sustained talen like the cards Cousins utilized – the energy was tied directly to their life force. This level of counter pressure the xanos was throwing against the shield had nowhere to go but back into the body of the magician who had created it. If they didn’t get the xanos to stop pummeling the impact wall soon, it could shatter it, or Cousins himself.
He rested one hand comfortingly on Cousin’s shoulder, seeing the boy’s face pale and glistening with the sweat from his strained concentration. Favo called out to Kari, seeing her furiously adjusting the controls. “Explode or not, we need to move this! Now!”
Favo nearly threw Cousins over his shoulder and climbed into the back of the airship. “Take us up!” he ordered.
Kari pulled down the ignition control level, and the steam engine hissed into life. The compression tanks bucked under the sudden change in pressure and one of the restraining bolts sheared off and impaled itself in the trunk of a tree ten yards away with a low thunk. Favo sat a trembling Cousins down into one of the seats and reached forward to place a hand on Kari’s shoulder.
“When I give you the word, get this thing moving as fast as you can in that direction!” he shouted, pointing along the tree line towards the temple. To Cousins he instructed, “We’re going to have to time this to the xanos, but when I say so, drop the field so we can get out of here. You ready?”
Cousins nodded weakly; Favo noticed a small drop of blood forming at the edge of the young man’s left nostril. He’d seen this sort of thing before, in some of the earliest classes he took at the college; a practitioner would so fully invest themselves in a casting that it would begin to feed on their own health. Favo didn’t think he’d last much longer.
Favo looked up at the xanos looming above them. The enormous creature continued to throw itself against the bluish dome. Most of the shield’s blue glow was gone now, having expended itself against the fire that was, even now, dying down to embers. The gentleman criminal watched helplessly as the xanos reared back in pain or anger and flung Rom’s body far across the canyon’s clearing. The moment was horrific, but unfortunately, it was also their best chance of escape.
“Now!” he ordered both youths. The ship lurched forward, bobbing down-wards to scrape along the ground after the balloons failed to clear the fading edge of the dome. The xanos lum
bered forward and its tremendous tail swung down, shattering the remnants of the dome and lodging into the stone tiles upon which the airship had been resting only moments before.
The ship, sluggish and sputtering, simply could not match the lightning speed of the xanos. It pulled its tail free and swept it horizontally, smashing into the hull of the airship’s cabin. The gondola nearly burst into pieces, knocking Kari to the deck and throwing Cousins and Favo out of the ship, entirely. Favo fell almost straight to the ground, managing to roll so that his shoulder took the brunt of the impact, but Cousins was tossed further, collapsing into the relatively soft and grassy ground beyond the first row of trees.
Favo struggled to blink past the double vision to look under the canopy and check on Kari. She wore her gearwork gauntlets, and had lifted herself to her feet, presumably using the strength the mysterious powers of the gloves themselves. She glanced over to him, and smiled courageously, nodding to assure him she was fine. Kari reached back over to the ignition lever, and pulled it back into the “closed” status.
The large balloons already provided a partial shield from the sun, but the area around them grew suddenly, sharply more dark as the xanos’ form rose high between the ship and the sun. Favo opened his mouth, but the weight of the gargantuan beast exploded down upon the small craft before he had time to speak. The force of the balloons’ detonation threw Favo up and backwards, and he only distantly felt the bursting of tree limbs as he sped through them and landed gracelessly across the ground. A sharp heat rushed across his face, the world spun and threw him down into breathless shadows.
Chapter 29: One Soul Lost
The metal locker door slammed with a satisfyingly loud crash, echoing off the flat and undecorated walls of the drably painted room. A full-length mirror, old and badly distorted, hung from the far wall, clearly having been rescued some years before from a previous housing and looking much worse for the passage of time. Garish blues and reds blurred back at the man, eliciting yet another sigh of disgust and increasing frustration.