Crown of Steel (Chaos Awakens)

by Heath Pfaff

  "Even if I can't find a rope you'll only have to climb half as far if I can open one of those windows." Haley pointed up the house about three stories to where the windows were slightly larger. "And you won't have to climb out and over the balcony."

  "I'm not going to let you wander around through this place without me." Kassa insisted stubbornly.

  "Instead you're going to get me killed when I have to defend you while you catch your breath?" Haley wasn't letting this go. She might not be as experienced as Kassa, but even she knew that dragging someone up a wall just to have them completely spent and useless when they needed to be battle ready was a bad idea. Kassa was the better fighter, and they needed her ready to do what she did best. "Climbing is one of the things I do really well. Let's not be stupid about this just because you think you need to protect me all the time."

  Kassa sighed in exasperation. "I think it's a bad idea. We don't even know if you can get through the wards up there yet. What if you blow it and alert everyone to your presence?"

  "Then I guess I'll need to move really quickly, something you wouldn't be able to do if you were gasping for breath and standing around with your arms hanging limp at your sides." With that, Haley turned and took her first hand hold on the house.

  "Damn it, Haley!" Kassa called quietly. Haley looked over her shoulder. "Just be careful, will you promise me that?"

  Haley smiled. "I'm always careful." With that she leapt for her next hand hold. The front of the house was easy enough to climb, though the good grips were further apart than the ones on the exterior wall. It was really only the distance that made it a challenge. By the time Haley had reached the floor with the larger windows even her well trained arms were getting a little tired. She tried the window quickly from the outside, but the shutters were barred from the other side. She couldn't even see in, though she could tell there were no lights on beyond the closed window. At least she probably wouldn't have to sneak around too much once she was inside. She steadied her current hold and launched herself upward again.

  Above her the light of the balcony was like a beacon towards which she was being drawn. Every small nook and hold brought her another few inches closer to her goal. Haley had no doubt that Xan would have already made the balcony if he were making the ascent, but she knew she was doing well enough. Her pace was steady and her arms were holding out, so it seemed the months of tree climbing were really paying off. At least the wood and tile of the house wasn't as cold to climb as the pure stone of the exterior wall.

  With a final lunge she got her hands over the lip of the balcony rail and pulled herself up just far enough so that she could see over it. She let her weight drop back down immediately. There was a man in robes sitting in a chair playing some kind of game at a table. Obviously he was supposed to be standing watch just beyond the wards that surrounded the entryway into the house. He was doing a poor job of it. Still, she hadn't anticipated they would both have a ward as well as somebody keeping watch. For a few moments she just allowed herself to hang and think. She didn't have a choice. She'd have to kill him. Haley had killed before, but this would be the first time she'd ever killed someone who hadn't attacked first. In a way, this would be the first time she'd ever taken a life of her own volition.

  As carefully and quietly as she could manage she circled around the rail of the balcony until she was directly behind the sitting man. She took a deep breath and pulled herself up to the top of the railing, moving as slowly and carefully as she could make herself. Every brush of her clothes rubbing together and the barest rustle of her boots hitting the railing sounded like strikes of thunder to her ears. She couldn't believe the man hadn't turned yet. She reached for her weapon, her hand brushing over her axe before going to her knife. Her axe wasn't the right weapon for this, even though it had been her first instinct to grab that one. She drew her blade and winced at the sound it made as it cleared the leather. She slipped down from the banister and landed with a whisper of her boots on the stone of the balcony. Again the man didn't notice, but it had seemed ever so loud to Haley. She stood and took a quiet step towards the mage's back as she watched the lines of his shoulders beneath his robes looking for the spot that she knew would allow her knife to slip quickly into his vitals. She raised the knife, taking a stance that would allow her to put her full force into the blow.

  A bead of sweat dripped down her brow, not from the wall climbing excursion. She looked at the tip of her blade and saw it shaking slightly. This is it. This is how we become like Xan. Her voice spoke confidently from within, but somehow she didn't feel the confidence. She took another deep, steadying breath. We need to do this. Strike fast, strike true. Haley took another step forward and the man's head turned as though he'd felt the eyes penetrating his back in the exact place where Haley intended to slip in the knife. His eyes widened in terror above the top of his mask as he caught sight of Haley behind the facade of the fox.

  Haley sprang forward and her knife slammed into the man's shoulder as he opened his mouth to shriek. Haley's fist smashed into his face, stifling his scream, and then she was slashing with her knife again. She couldn't let him call out for help. She tore a gouge in the side of his neck but missed his carotid artery by a wide margin. This time a strangled scream slipped between his lips and ruptured into the night like the sound of a bell clattering from the top of a tower all the way to the ground. A shiver of terror went down Haley's spine and she struck with her knife again, driving it through the side of the man's temple and into his head. His body gave a massive spasm and his throat rattled with a final exertion of breath as he died. The balcony was covered in blood. Haley was covered in blood. The body was still twitching beneath her. Haley staggered backwards and chewed back the urge to empty her stomach. That hadn't gone at all like she'd imagined it would.

  She backed away from the body and tucked herself into one of the few dark corners of the balcony to wait for someone to come. Certainly the entire house must have heard what she'd done. It had all seemed too loud. She waited, quietly shaking in the corner of the balcony, forcing herself to breathe slower and to count the seconds as they passed. She needed to keep track of time. When things went wrong it was easy to let her sense of time become distorted, and that could cause her to make mistakes. Haley needed to center herself and allow for a reasonable passing of time before she moved on again.

  She waited for nearly ten minutes before she broke off from the dark and moved towards the corpse she'd created. She couldn't believe that no one had come to investigate all the sounds, but everything was just as silent and still as before. The corpse had finally stopped moving, but she couldn't bring herself to look at it. She cleaned her dagger blade on the dead man's robes and put it back in its scabbard. This was what it meant to be like Xan. Death was the job. You did fine. You'll get better.

  She passed the body and walked to the open double doors leading into the house. The shimmer of magic was still present at the window, so obviously the man on the balcony hadn't been the one creating the ward. That meant she still had to deal with the ward, but how? Where could she find life to power her own magic? Had she been thinking she might have been able to tap the man at the table for his life, but that option was now quite gone. Haley forced her mind to calm and reached out with her senses, looking for someone within range. In a moment she found herself tracing the threads of the ward itself and following the path of the spell back to a woman sitting in a kitchen sipping at a glass of wine and eating a loaf of bread. She was on the bottom floor of the building, running her ward easily from a distance. The conduit of her own magic put her within Haley's range of reach, but what would she do if Haley tried to tap her power? Would she know? There was really no way to be certain, but Haley didn't have a lot of other options.

  She reached for the magic and grasped at it cautiously to start, not entirely certain what she was doing. As she touched it she could sense the intricate seals that had been put in place to form the ward at the door in front of her. Haley
wasn't certain what each symbol meant or what it was doing exactly, but she could feel the balance and ebb of the magic as it flowed through the seals. Each symbol was like a letter spelling out a group of words that gave the spell purpose. "Protect, pain, resist, warn." This was more than just a simple warning seal. This was designed to debilitate any who were foolish enough to try and cross it.

  Haley gently worried her lower lip as she considered what to do next. The field had to come down for her to cross it. She took a deep breath and grabbed at the remote woman's magic with all of her strength, unsure of how the distance would affect her attempt. Immediately the young assassin could feel energy surging through her body as the magic flooded her with the need for a release. It was too much. Below her the female mage crumpled to the ground suddenly drained of years of life and possibly even dead.

  "Shit, shit, shit." Haley cursed quietly as blistering power formed in her body, threatening to rip her apart from inside. She needed to create an outlet for the magic before it consumed her, but she only knew a few different seals. Which would accept the most amount of power without breaking? She raced through her limited armament in her head and finally settled on the one she'd used the least. Heat. Fire. She held her hand up pointed at the sky and focused her mind on the necessary seal.

  The result was far more grandiose than she'd intended. A pillar of molten, purple flame burst from her palm and roared into the sky, ripping the air from the world to fuel its rage and leaving Haley gasping for breath as the gargantuan light tore through the gray sky. It burned off the cloud cover in a surge of volcanic heat. When the rush of the flame flickered out there was a circle of undamaged area directly around Haley, but everything else on the balcony had been swallowed by the fire. Even the stone was partially melted in the immediate vicinity of the blast. The corpse of her first intended kill was little more than a blackened skeleton with its grinning face staring up at her in smoldering accusation. For a moment the world seemed too quiet, and then suddenly Haley could hear a high pitched whine. A moment later the sounds of hundreds of calls to alarm reached her. So much for sneaking.

  Haley charged through the now open doorway into the building. The room that had been on the other side of the doorway was mostly destroyed. The burned wreckage resembled what might have been a sitting room. Haley didn't use much time to take in her surroundings. People would be coming. There was no way they wouldn't know where to start looking, and she needed to get down another three floors to open a window without being detected. Haley moved quickly down the hall as if she knew where she was going. From somewhere down the hall behind her someone else emerged from a doorway and called out to her.

  "Did you see that? What they hell happened over there?"

  Haley shrugged but didn't answer, keeping herself moving forward.

  "Hey, who are you?" The voice called. "Hey!" He called again as he realized Haley wasn’t stopping. She broke into a run and dove into the next available door, which brought her masked face to masked face with two other mages who had just gotten out of bed and were quickly getting dressed. Both the men stopped and looked at her in shock.

  "Stairs?" Haley asked, hoping that giving less information would be best.

  One of the men pointed in the direction further down the hallway. "Five doors down the hall."

  Haley nodded and popped back into the hall, pulling the door shut at her back with a sigh. Her relief was short lived though because the mage from earlier was running down the hallway in her direction.

  "You, what are you doing up here? Are you the one who set off that explosion?" He called out as he came into close range. He had his hands up and his fingers were starting to twitch. Haley reacted on instinct. She lunged forward, her axe rolling into her hand in the same instant she moved. The blade of her weapon took the mage in the wrist and his hand fell away and struck the ground as a blood-curdling scream erupted from his lips. Things were not going exactly according to plan. Haley stepped forward again and her next blow parted the man from his head. Her heart was hammering in her chest now. She turned and ran back down the hall in the direction of the stairs. She hit the first step at the exact same moment a large group of mages were rounding the landing half a floor below. She still had her bloody axe in one hand and she wasn't dressed anything like a mage.

  "There is a madman running the halls with a broadsword!" She yelled, pointing back behind her with the dripping axe blade. The mages looked confused, but as one they suddenly surged up the steps past Haley. Haley let out an uneven breath and continued her run down the stairs. She'd probably only bought herself maybe half a minute. She counted the floors as she descended. When she reached the third floor she exited the stair case and ran back in the direction she hoped that Kassa was still waiting. She finally reached the position she thought was the correct one to find Kassa and she opened the door to what looked like a small study. She closed the door carefully behind her and then walked through the room to the window, which she hastily unlatched and opened. She peered out over the edge but she couldn't see Kassa below the window. Damn it. Unsure what to do next, she swung herself out and over the sill and made her way quickly down the front of the building. The courtyard was busy with activity, but it seemed to be people moving into the house and heading up the stairs to see what had happened on the balcony.

  "Kassa!" Haley called in a whisper. She hadn't come out directly under the balcony like she'd thought she had, but a few windows down. "Kassa!" She called again, moving further back in the direction of the balcony. She was just starting to panic when a voice answered.

  "Be quiet! The guards are everywhere. What are you doing back outside?" Kassa slunk quietly through the shadows at the base of the house.

  "I opened a window, but it's a little further along the wall. Follow me." Haley said, and turned to head back. Kassa fell in at her back.

  "What did you do up there? It looked like you lit the entire house on fire from the ground." Kassa whispered angrily.

  "Things haven't gone exactly as anticipated. I had to kill a few mages, and I may have messed up the disabling of the barrier. It didn't go like I thought it would. It's not like anyone ever taught me how to do that!" Haley explained without going into too much detail. She wasn't really proud of the way things had happened.

  "Are we still going to be able to sneak in and sneak out?" Kassa asked.

  Haley shrugged. "No, probably not. They seem pretty agitated in there. Maybe if we lay low for a little while?"

  Kassa didn't say anything, but Haley was pretty certain that she was angry.

  Haley located her window and started the climb back up. Kassa was quickly behind her, though not as quickly up the stretch of wall to the window. Haley leaned back out and helped her cover the last few feet. "They were all investigating the top floor when I came down, but by now they must know I was the intruder. They saw me when we passed on the stairs, but I told them there was some guy with a broadsword up on the sixth floor. Once they figure out I was lying, they'll come looking for me. "

  "Great." Kassa snapped. "This is why I shouldn't have let you go alone."

  "Actually, if you'd have gone with me I might have accidentally lit you on fire up there. So, really, things did work out for the best. I mean, we're both still alive. That's pretty good." Haley was trying to salvage the situation as best as possible.

  "Yes, assuming we can keep ourselves that way for a while, I'll be quite surprised. Finding Xan with this place on full alert is going to be a nightmare." Kassa didn't seem particularly amused. Kassa placed a hand on Haley's shoulder and gave her a penetrating look. "Are you alright?" It was clear what she was referring to. She was asking how Haley was handling the lives she'd taken. The side of Haley that wanted to show no weakness and be indestructible wanted to yell out that she was fine, and that it hadn't fazed her at all, but that wasn't exactly true.

  "It wasn't how I thought it would be. I knew what I had to do, but it was hard to do. The first one, he didn't even know anything w
as wrong. He was scared." Haley tried to explain. She could still see the shock in his eyes when he’d noticed her with her blade drawn and ready. He hadn't even had the time to think about using his magic. "I didn't do a very clean job."

  Kassa nodded. "It shouldn't be easy. If you ever kill someone and it's easy for you, you've lost the last of what makes you a good person."

  Haley shrugged, not sure how to reply. "Xan always made it look so easy. He was so fast and powerful, and he never wavered for a moment."

  "Xandrith was a killer, but don't think that meant he didn't feel anything for those he killed. I once made the mistake of implying that he didn't care about people because he was a murderer and I have never seen him more angry. Xandrith does what he has to, but he still lives with the guilt of every life he takes. If Xan was really a cold emotionless killer, then neither of us would be here trying to free him. We're here because we know that he's a good man who can do the things that need to be done, no matter how much that costs him. We need him." Kassa gave the younger woman's shoulder a strong squeeze before letting go. "Come on, let's find the bearded bastard."

  With that they slipped out into the dark house looking for their lost friend. Kassa led the way, passing from corridor to corridor and ducking into rooms when necessary to avoid groups of mages who were searching the inside of the house in parties of four. Haley's single-person siege had put everyone on high alert. Still, moving without being seen was second nature to Kassa now, and Haley was quite adept when there was someone to lead the way. Kassa was following standard security logic and moving downward through the house. Cells were usually kept in the foundation of such buildings because the walls were secure and below ground a lack of windows wouldn't seem out of place. She was still searching for a way down when she ran into an anomalous passageway. There was a corridor at the back of the house that ran towards the face of the mountain.