by Shelley Cass
“Easy does it,” I whispered as the twelve largest birds swooped their way down to join me, each gingerly carrying their dangerous rock burdens.
I crouched amongst them and peered at the sky above the canopy. It was awash in coral pink and orange colours, and every time the sea of leaves moved in a breeze, a billion slivers of colour from the sunset above made the Forest a mass of glittering lights.
“It won’t be long,” I told them softly. “Before we ruin this serene evening.”
I reached behind myself to take hold of some of the rope-like vines that spilled over my ledge like a curtain, and all except one of the twelve birds nestled themselves into the foliage behind me too.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” I asked the only bird not taking shelter. It was a broad winged Forest hawk, and it seemed to dip its head in acknowledgment. Then it took a careful grip on its rock.
“Aim for a border fire. Fly away as soon as the rock leaves your talons,” I whispered as the leaves around the ledge stirred at the beating of the hawk’s strong wings.
The noise of the massed men below echoed uninhibited up the cliff as we watched our tawny comrade swoop down towards them. They did not suspect anything as the hawk lightly flew overhead, and dropped its burden directly into the chosen flames.
It took a few moments, for the rock and its encasing mixture to heat.
But then my breath was taken away and I felt my lips blister as an explosion of air and light shook the Forest.
The shock waves rolled over us endlessly, the heat and roaring voice of the fire breaking loose like a storm. I squinted at the blinding, blazing light that swelled before fading, leaving a hellish imprint of anguish filled images and contorting bodies across my vision as I blinked.
The Forest continued to creak and moan as the force of the detonation swept outward from the clearing, but it took a few moments for the soldiers below to begin their screaming.
I hoped to the Gods I hadn’t harmed them all, and frantically scanned the camp to make sure I had been right – that the one prisoner tent was being kept too far from the fires to have been accidentally impacted. Relief flooded me when I saw that, while the tents looked a little saggy on their frames, they all stood firm. And the prisoner tent was definitely out of range enough to remain relatively untouched from now on.
The vines covering the ledge rustled as my unlikely renegades surfaced from beside me with ruffled feathers and glinting, exhilarated little eyes.
The tiny figure of my original bird – a scurrytail no bigger than my palm – flitted down to skip about where I crouched. It cocked its brown head to the side and fluffed its feathers in anticipation for the next blast soon to come.
“This is exciting,” it chirruped.
“And perilous,” I whispered back to all of them, trying once more to subdue the flutter of sensation in my stomach as they comprehended me. “It’s going to be a big night. And it has already been quite the surprising day.”
“It’s true. Whoever thought there would still be a biggun who could speak Fairy?”
Chapter Seventy
Those two Awyalknian boys had been caught by bad men. Worse than bugs in a web.
Granx had seen their beautiful heads get cracked by nasty, nasty sabres.
And not in the delicious way that a good egg can be sneaked from a nest and cracked for breakfast.
She was running for help as fast as pretty spider legs could carry her. So fast.
She had lost the Three of them so many times across their journey, but this time she had kept all of her eyes on them, and had seen the trap, had seen them carried off like juicy flies for crunching.
Thick black hairs stood up along her back. Her beautiful blonde Awyalknian boy – in trouble! Along with his friends.
But … strange. As she got further from the Three, she knew it would be harder to find them again. Strange, lulling, lovely magic seemed to hide them.
Tricky tricky tricky.
Lady –not Gloria – must hear of this.
Awful Sorcerer-blinded people were making the Forest reek. And had taken her blonde boy.
Trouble was growing, like a poison filled bite.
Not acceptable.
Run, run, run!
Chapter Seventy One
Kiana
The first explosion had been very successful.
I gazed down at the groaning mass below, rolling unsteadily to their feet and staggering around with hands groping at heads and eyes. Most of them would have a little headache, and those who had been looking directly at the blast would be seeing only white.
The sentry nearest to the explosion was out cold, while others appeared to have been hit with surface wounds from the stone shrapnel.
The canvas doors to the tents for superior officers had burst aggressively open and I had been relieved to at last glimpse the leader of this force, and to see that it was not Angra Mainyu. He immediately began barking orders, and the least effected soldiers stumbled to their feet and fell into a tactical formation.
The General was built much the same as every man of Krall, with compact, thick legs, muscular arms, massive chest and broad shoulders – and as soon as he had entered the arena, the frenzy had dulled.
“Report!” he bellowed.
Straight away the soldiers began calling out from one to one hundred and ten, giving a number rather than a name, and most who didn’t answer were accounted for. Even the hidden sentries on the same lofty level of the Forest as myself called out their numbers from where they hid in the dense trees at the edge of the cliff top.
The General accepted when all but one person had been accounted for. Probably my friend with the bumped head and punctured chest in the trees. But one man missing obviously didn’t seem like enough of a problem.
“Change positions!” the General bellowed, referring to the cliff top sentries who had just given their stations away.
Then he immediately called for every man able to stand to join the few still able to see on the border to watch. Incapacitated soldiers were carried away, and throughout this process, a select few soldiers were taken off watch to search the immediate area around the clearing, and another group of ten were sent to climb to my level of the Forest to scour the top of the cliff as well.
The slanting slope I’d avoided earlier served the ten soldiers as a rough trail to climb from the camp, up to the cliff top. But I didn’t feel worried by them, even though I was now sharing the cliff with twenty enemies intent on spotting me, as my winged watchers would alert me if an opponent got too close.
The next bird set to fly, a black crow, was already perched calmly near the explosive rocks so that it could perform its duty too.
I silently thanked the Gods for what could only be their divine blessing upon me and the Forest animals, and when enough time had elapsed for the camp to have settled into wariness rather than uproar, I nodded grimly to the crow, which at once seized one of the eleven remaining rocks and flew for the border fires of the camp – this time on the opposite side to the last attack.
The other birds took shelter once more, but I tightened my grip around the vines and watched the rock drop unnoticed into the flames.
First, a whirring sound began to invade the oblivious camp as the air around that fire was sucked inward, as if a breath was being taken. The sound grew faintly at first, and was accompanied by the swelling of the light.
Soldiers everywhere were turning their heads nervously, trying to discern the source of the sound, then backing away from it when the whirring and hissing of the rushing air grew louder.
Then the heated rock and its encasing had reached their peak, and at the last moment I tightly squeezed my eyes closed, as heat radiated outward and the whirring sound reached an ear splitting shriek. The rock got to bursting point and the shrill sound was abruptly replaced by a booming explosion and a surging wave of wind.
I could see the incredible light from beneath my eyelids, and it was only slightly less
intense when I opened them to blink against the rippling force of the rushing air still assaulting the cliff and the trees at our backs.
The trees on the higher level of ground behind me shuddered and the earth rumbled, my own ledge creaking and groaning while the cluster of birds around me toppled backward until the pressure swept past us and faded.
My ears rang and I heard the camp echo with howls and moans of pain. But I felt my face set grimly while the Krall men again scrambled to find their attacker and reorder themselves.
Once again the uproar settled into confusion before I lightly rubbed the next bird’s silken feathers with my fingertips. Then, without a rustle, it had launched away and was soaring easily below the dark canopy, swirling purposefully and watching for its target. This one was to land its rock inside the borders, as if the camp had been breached.
I held my breath when I saw the crow stop circling to drop the third rock.
The Forest around us and the birds at my feet tensed.
“Close your eyes,” I whispered a reminder to the birds around me, but didn’t close my own yet, until another spectacular blast gripped the night.
After that one, I laid on my stomach to peer over the ledge as the General stormed about his shaken camp, agitated as less of his men responded to their number call.
Anyone who was able now moved about below in a gratifying frenzy, holding their weapons nervously, and I was only distracted from sending the fourth explosion when an angry cheeping sounded from the undergrowth above my jutting ledge.
It was a warning that one of the ten soldiers sent up to search the cliff top now approached.
“Wait only a little while between each blast, and move further into the camp as you go,” I whispered to the rest of my winged soldiers. “I need them to feel like they must have me in their camp, alive, to explain all of this,” I said, before rising to climb the short distance back up from my ledge to the cliff top.
The angry cheeping had stopped, so the soldier had likely passed by thinking he had stepped too close to a nest. I thanked the cluster of birds in the foliage quietly and then turned to hunt the nearby soldier out.
He was much more obedient than the first soldier I had thumped on the head, falling silently unconscious at once when I came from behind to crack the hilt of my dagger into the back of his skull.
“Good boy,” I muttered as he toppled, his spiked armour only making a faint clinking when he landed upon the grass.
I heard noises of foreboding from below as the General made his roll call and found that my recent victim was unaccounted for – not even being one of those collapsed from the stunning explosions.
And I proceeded to ghost my way around the cliff top as time passed and explosions erupted from below at random intervals.
By the end of the eighth explosion I had picked off the ten soldiers sweeping the cliff top in search of me, and as fewer and fewer of the search responded to the General from above, those below became more spooked.
I began picking off the sentries that had been hidden on the cliff all day as well, eliciting greater desperation from those below.
I was sliding back down onto the ledge as the final explosion echoed around the camp, and following that, I saw that only forty men were standing watch now while the others laid in groaning heaps.
A chunk of my ledge had also broken away in the force of the explosions, and rivers of dirt drifted silently down from the edge when I landed.
The pale, warm light of morning sun was touching the sky and I became sure that my invitation into the camp would come soon.
And, just as I was beginning to worry that I’d been wrong, the General came back out into the clearing.
He stood tall and straight and outwardly unruffled while two of his soldiers stood behind him, gripping their sabres to the throats of the two people who had come to mean everything to me.
“Come out now or your friends will die!”
The last three words of his sentence echoed heavily and boldly around the rocky walls, up to me.
Without any misgivings I rose from where I had been hiding, and held my hands up in surrender.
Chapter Seventy Two
Dalin
I became aware of harsh, rumbling voices and the sound of many people moving nearby. My head was throbbing and I swallowed thickly, my tongue feeling heavy in the dry confines of my mouth.
I groggily opened my eyes to find Noal, already awake and staring glumly at his shackled wrists, and I found my own wrists shackled and chained to a loop that had been hammered into the dirt floor.
“You alright?” I croaked at Noal, trying to lick my lips with a parched tongue that left no moisture.
We were in some sort of tent with all of its canvas windows closed, but the sun’s brightness illuminated the space. It emanated through the thin brown material walls, and my stiffened back was warm from the sun radiating where I leaned.
“In one piece,” he whispered glumly, probably avoiding, as I was, thoughts of what Darziates and his men might do if they knew who Noal and I truly were.
There came a shuffling sound and a pitiful moan from a pile of rags at the other side of the large tent, and my heart leapt for a moment until Noal drew my attention again.
“While you were knocked out, I met Agrudek,” Noal told me quietly, trying not to draw attention from anyone outside. “He’s no danger to us.”
I tried to peer at the moaning pile of rags, which was actually a small figure bundled in an oversized robe, and I saw a bloodshot eye peering back at me.
“Hello friend,” I said kindly to the scrunched up person. “Are you a prisoner too?”
A muffled, tentative voice came from the pile: “Y–yes.” There was a sad gulp. “And she … burned off … my hand. The W … Wit … ch,” the small bundle whimpered sickly.
I looked to Noal. “His accent …?”
Noal nodded. “He’s from Krall. They harm their own too.”
I turned back to the poor, wretched creature. “We are with you now,” I said, trying to be comforting despite our own misfortune.
“I wish we could say Kiana was here too,” Noal admitted. “So we could know she was alright.”
“And because she always sees a way out of impossible situations,” I agreed. “But she wasn’t with us when we were caught, so she will have escaped.”
“There’ll be no escape,” came an accented grunt, and I couldn’t help but jump as the tent entrance was thrust aggressively aside and a colossal guard swept in to drop a lump of bread in the dirt at our feet.
Then the hulking soldier stepped across to tower over Agrudek’s wheezing, huddled form, and he pressed a steel covered war boot into the middle of Agrudek’s pile of robes. “Don’t you try anything either, traitor. Or I’ll twist your neck.” He sent Agrudek tumbling with a kick that rolled the little man into a pile of bags in the corner before he stalked back out.
“Agrudek? Are you harmed?” I asked the quivering bundle as he laid still in the growing shadows within the tent.
“N … no,” he lifted his head a little and I saw carrot coloured hair that stuck out at all odd ends and in tufts. “But … I … lost my family.”
I heard faint sobs as the middle of his swaddled shape rose and fell.
“I am so sorry, Agrudek,” Noal said, aghast. Neither of us knew how to comfort him.
“Can you move at all?” I asked Agrudek eventually. “Try to grab onto one of our bags near you, and then get as close as you can to us.”
The small man whimpered, but for the first time I saw him rise on his elbows shakily and drag himself forward with our pack. I noticed with relief that one of our flasks and a cloak had been thrust into that bag.
“There’s less chance of the General or anyone bothering to harm him if he’s wedged between the two of us,” I explained to Noal. So we both strained to get as close to Agrudek as our chains would allow, and when he was within reach, we pulled the feeble figure close so that he could shelter in
the middle of us, covered by the cloak.
Noal grabbed a flask of water and gave the little man a few drops.
“Thank … you,” coughed Agrudek, curling up in our fast darkening tent.
I was about to answer when I was distracted by a sudden increase in the brightness in the tent.
“What in the Gods’ names …?” Noal gaped as we heard a whizzing, whistling sound from outside.
It became so shrill that it hurt, until the sound wavered as my ears began to pop and ring.
Agrudek cowered in a ball while Noal and I stared with bulging eyes, our shackled hands clamping on our ears as the tent shook around us; the wind almost seeming to suck the tent from its frame.
Then, the growing light suddenly surged as the piercing whistling was replaced by a booming explosion that forced the tent, and us inside it, into a lean because of the pressure.
I saw the silhouettes of the guards outside as they were thrown back against the tent, and my teeth gritted with the immensity of it until, at last, the waves of pressurised air eased up and passed.
The camp was instantly swept into an uproar and a leader’s voice barked orders for a search.
“What the Frarshk just happened?” one of the guards outside our tent grunted.
“Sorcerer’s not here. So what in the Other Realm has such power?” asked another husky voice. “A demon?”
Noal and I just gaped at each other.
“What could wreak such destruction?” Noal whispered, his eyebrows raising.
“Kiana.” I agreed, and a grin spread across my own face. “She’s here.”
The explosions that continued to strike throughout the whole night rocked the camp to its very foundations, and we were rocked as the General entered our tent twice, demanding answers. But we heard the growing panic and silently cheered Kiana on in what could only be her brand of ingenuity.
“The frarshks are getting closer!” our guards kept up a stream of commentary as morning dawned. “What the Frarshk are we gonna do? Wait until they pick us all off?”