by K L Reinhart
The three barge-like Ixcht craft were faster than the Lady, and their dull green hulls were soon scooping through the air past the galleon’s sailcloth. Terak saw small figures leaping from the barges. More Ixcht warriors like the one in front of him, their dragonfly flight harnesses whirring and flashing as they spun through the air to board their foe.
Terak was so shocked by what was happening all around him, he had spent too long looking upward instead of at the danger that lay before him.
The Ixcht warrior leapt forward on feet containing three long, prehensile claws, bringing both scimitars down in a flashing overhead strike.
Terak dove out of the way, hitting the hardened rock of the mountain slope and rolling. He ignored the flurry of aches and pains that awoke up and down his back as he flipped to his feet once again, spinning around.
“Tsss!” The Ixcht had leapt again, following him. His slightly longer legs allowed him to spring high and fast, in what was clearly the creature’s favored attack.
The elf was on the run. He dove to one side, rolling again as the Ixcht warrior landed where he had been. The beetle-man chittered in triumph.
My body is tired. My hand is still wounded. I don’t understand this enemy, Terak’s Enclave-trained thoughts raced. But he didn’t have any other of the implements or tools that he had been trained to use.
I have to get a weapon! Terak flipped out of his diving roll and leapt away toward the nearest tattered shapes of the bodies that he had recently run past. He could hear the Ixcht chittering and bounding after him, but if Terak had one thing in his favor—he was quick.
But is an elf quicker than an Ixcht? His mind panicked.
There, he saw the handle of a Brecha halberd sticking from a mound—Terak didn’t want to know of what. He flung himself toward it, his wounded hand closing around the wooden pole and wrenching the sharp blade from the ground as he skidded and stumbled.
“Tsss!” There was a heavy thump from behind him as the insect-man landed. Terak pivoted and swung the halberd around himself in a wide arc.
A loud clash sounded as the creature’s steel met Terak’s, flinging the halberd wide of its mark, but also knocking the insect-man’s arm wide.
Terak hadn’t received much in the way of polearm training from the Chief Martial, but what he did know was this: there are two strengths to use a polearm, range and lunge. Terak reversed his forward grip on the halberd and instead of sweeping back in another wild arc, he lanced ahead in a straight lunge.
The weapon’s blade should have skewered the insect-man, and perhaps if Terak were facing a human, it would have.
But the elf learned that the Ixcht were as fast as elves, if not faster.
The Ixcht warrior spun, raising both arms as the halberd shot past his heavy leather belt. Chittering dementedly, he swung both scimitars down.
Ixcht! Terak swore—there wasn’t time for him to register the irony in using that common Midhara curse-word—and managed to raise the polearm in time to catch the scimitar blades along its length, using it like a quarterstaff. But he could feel the judder of the thing’s blows race up his already aching shoulders. Despite the thin limbs and hardened nodules for joints, the insect man was surprisingly strong.
For a brief second, the insect warrior and the elf stood like that, caught in a struggle as each attempted to push their weapon home.
He’s too strong! Terak knew. That meant that he had only one choice. He had to use the creature’s strength against him. Terak gave one last push outwards, giving the impression that he was still trying to overpower the taller, stronger warrior—
“Tssrk-k-k!” Terak didn’t understand Ixcht, but he was sure that the creature was laughing at him.
Well, we’ll see about that! Abruptly, the elf pulled his halberd back toward him as he jumped backward, and the insect-warriors arms shot down toward the ground.
Terak slid backward on something—he didn’t want to know what—and, in that same breath, threw himself forward, straightening the halberd to use it as a spear.
“Urk!” The insect warrior shuddered and convulsed as the heavy halberd speared straight through his chest.
But grotesquely, the thing refused to die. He was stuck on the end of Terak’s weapon, still shaking and shuddering as he flailed his long arms about himself.
“Arghhh!” Terak pushed the halberd ahead of him as far as he could, avoiding the sweeps of the thing’s two scimitar blades. Luckily, the creature’s strikes were wild and uncoordinated. Terak could see thick green ichor spurting from the wound in his chest. Surely, he can’t live for long like this! the elf thought.
And then he saw something strange starting to happen to the creature. At the base of his neck—the place where on a human or elf the collarbones would meet—the softer scales pulsed with a pale green light.
“What under the First Moon . . .” Terak was tempted to drop the halberd altogether at this point, but then he would have to cross the rest of the battleground to the Eastern Gate without a weapon. Again.
The pale green light spread as the scales seemed to pulse, the thing’s entire neck starting to swell and pulsate.
Green light. The realization flashed through Terak’s mind. Green fire.
The explosion!
Terak reacted quickly, shoving the halberd with its impaled insect-man as hard as he could and turning to stagger, run, and leap—
PHOOOM! There was a bright green flash from behind him, and he was lifted off his feet as a wave of flame burst over his body.
Terak hit the ground, rolling over and over as he smelled singed hair and burning flesh. Luckily, none of the latter was his—but the former was.
The Ixcht can explode.
Terak groaned and pushed himself upright, as the incredible thought repeated itself in the elf’s mind. The Ixcht can explode.
“No wonder everyone is terrified of them,” Terak thought He appraised the battlefield. The battle was already almost over. The Ixcht had pushed the Brecha forces back to the encampment, and even now, Terak saw plumes of green fire as two more insect-men completed their task even after death.
And the slopes of the Tartaruk Mountains were still scattered with more of the surviving Ixcht warriors. There were only a handful, but more were coming, hitting the dirt with their gliding leaps, discarding their flight harnesses, and entering the fray.
Terak really swore this time. He was about to abandon the Eastern Gate altogether, aiming to stay low and loop around to the Cliffs of Mourn that the Black Keep sat atop of. He might still be strong enough to scale the Dead Man’s Ledge that led to one of the water-outlets at the base of the keep.
But before Terak could move, he saw the double doors of the Eastern Gate widen, and a blue radiance emerged. It looked like a bubble of shimmering blue light, expanding outwards from the people marching out of the Black Keep.
Even though their forms were hazy and indistinct behind the wall of force, their dark clothing indicated that they were Brothers and Sisters of the Enclave. The one who stalked in front of them, holding her arms out and directing the magical shield, wore a silver-blue robe without a hood over a bald head.
Magister Inedi! For one of the few times in his life, Terak the Null was deeply pleased to see the fearsome leader of the Enclave.
10
Battle Magic
“Force them back!” Terak heard the Magister bellow, using her booming, ice-goddess voice. If it was meant to spread fear in the hearts of the Ixcht warriors, it apparently had no effect. The elf watched their number turn and hiss their strange, clicking voices at the approaching complement of Brothers and Sisters.
Terak itched to join the fight, but his hand was starting to pulse with pain. When he looked at it, although it had stopped bleeding, the wound had congealed into a large, ruddy scab. He didn’t like how it looked.
Instead, the elf decided to crawl around the battle-site, heading for the Eastern Gate while the Magister and her forces would—obviously—win.
Terak ran in a hunkered crouch, endeavoring to stay out of sight from the Ixcht. He no longer had any weapons, and he still needed to find Father Jacques, somehow, in all this madness.
“Forward! March! March!” the Magister was shouting as she strode forward, holding both of her arms high and wide as she managed the glittering blue sphere. Terak paused in his progress as he heard the first outraged chittering of the insect warriors.
Looking, he saw that one of the leading Ixcht had launched himself at the approaching blue dome. The warrior leaped high, flinging himself above the normal height of an elf or man. With scimitars raised, he came slamming down against the dome.
The warrior shrieked when he hit the blue shield and fell backward into the disturbed earth.
“Forward! Now!” the Magister yelled. She ran forward, while at the same time the first wave of Brothers and Sisters passed her. In their hands, they held the short spears that they used on the walls. As they lunged, the elf saw how, through some act of the Magister’s magic, their weapons could pass out of the dome, but the Ixcht could not penetrate in.
The team of Wall Brothers and Sisters hit the Ixcht as he struggled to his feet, and Terak saw how their weapons found the creature easily, lancing in and out of his body before the Magister was shouting once again.
“Back! Back! Back!” Magister Inedi commanded, and the Wall Brothers and Sisters jumped out of the way as the wounded Ixcht on the far side shuddered. Its neck once again started to change color, glowing with a sickly green light, and swell—
The Brothers and Sisters of the Enclave clustered around the Magister, who hadn’t moved from her forward stance, but the elf saw her slowly lower her arms down toward the trembling body in front of them. The shimmering haze of the blue shield seemed to intensify, becoming a thick cerulean wall of fog in the moments before the Ixcht exploded.
Some kind of chemical reaction. Terak kept his gaze on the bizarre death ritual of the insect warrior for as long as he could. The green glow had spread all across the upper body, swelling the thing’s carapace of scales as it did so. Then the body burst with a bright light that made Terak see after-images of a rising green ball.
When he managed to blink away the dazzling glare from his eyes, he saw that the Magister’s magic was not so strong as he had hoped it to be. The blue dome had shrunk radically toward her, and it had lost some of its intensity of color.
Terak growled, wishing that he had at least completed some of the theoretical lessons in magic before the Chief Arcanum had tested the acolytes and found him to be a null. He had no idea of how this battle might unfold. Would Magister Inedi’s magic withstand many more great explosions? Was it like fighting, where with every thrust and dodge and attack you expended energy? Or was the magic that was everywhere—inherent in everything, and free—enough for the Magister to merely keep on going until all of the enemy were dead?
Concentrate on the Path ahead of you. He recalled a little bit of Enclave advice. He followed the Book of Corrections, after all—the Path of Pain.
This is the whole of the Book: that there is always one path ahead that is correct, and one that is not, he reminded himself. Third Maxim.
And right now, his path meant getting Thorogood’s message safely to the ears of the Chief External, and nothing else. Terak checked to see that no Ixcht had spotted him, then he moved, running between bodies and boulders as the battle between the Enclave and the Ixcht raged on.
The warriors seemed unafraid of death entirely, Terak realized, as more of the insect-men that were scattered in front of the Black Keep leaped and charged at the Magister’s blue shield.
As well they might, the thought flashed through his mind. If their very physiology allowed them to immolate on their demise, what result would that have for the way that they fought, lived, or thought?
The answer appeared to be that they were just as willing to use their deaths to defeat the enemy as they were their blades.
PHOOOM! Terak saw more of the green plumes of chemical fire bursting against the Magister’s defensive circle, hitting it like the cannon shot of an air galleon.
The Lady! The elf had almost circumnavigated the blue dome, shuddering and lit by green explosions, when the thought hit him. The Magister might be able to defend against a handful of insect-men warriors, but how would the air galleon of the Lord General’s ship fare against aerial attacks?
Terak looked up. She was faring badly, it seemed.
The Lady of the North was involved in a wide swooping arc over the Black Keep, with two of the Ixcht dragonfly-craft still harrying her. Further down the slopes of the Tartaruk, the ruined body of the third Ixcht craft lay blackened and smoking where the Lady had shot her down.
But the air galleon was in bad shape. She was on fire in several places, with sheets of flame consuming two of her large sails and the underside of one of her hulls. As Terak watched in morbid fascination, he saw another small Ixcht figure leap from the edge of the canoe, the flight harness on his back whirring. The creature shot across the gap between the two craft, dashing against the sides of the Lady in a sudden explosion of green fire.
Terak felt sick. What sort of creature would so gladly give their life for nothing but chaos and murder?
But although the Lady of the North might be in a bad way, she was by no means out-gunned. As Terak watched, the air galleon performed a slow turn so that one entire side was facing the attacking air canoe.
And then she fired an entire broadside, the sound almost deafening. Terak’s quick elven eyes saw flashes of muzzle-light, and then plumes of smoke as all along one side of her hull, just under her main deck, gun ports fired cannons at the canoe. This was matched by more attacks—flights of arrows from one of the top decks from the Brecha air guard, as well as more colorful, scintillating darts of crimson red or orange. Several of the Brecha forces clearly had some combat magic expertise.
The conflagration hit the long Ixcht craft. Its rear, giant dragonfly wings were broke and spun through the air, at the same time as the entire vessel shuddered and rolled backward, spilling wood and canvas and more of the insect-men from her decks.
Multiple green explosions erupted along and inside the Ixcht vessel, and the entire shape start to lose integrity and spiral in an awful slowness out of the sky—
Toward the Black Keep.
“No!” Terak froze. The Ixcht craft wasn’t large enough to destroy the Keep—it was perhaps the size of the Eyrie Tower alone—but the multiple explosions of its impact would surely create a firestorm.
Good people will die, Terak thought. People like Reticula, his fellow human novitiate . . .
But there was nothing the elf could do as the dragonfly-like canoe spiraled faster and faster, shedding bits of wood, barrels, and Ixcht warriors as it spun toward the Black Keep.
Suddenly, it was caught and held, as if by a massive hand.
What the . . .
This was the first time that Terak had seen the full display of powers and battle magic that the Enclave had to call upon. He had read about the Sorcerers’ Wars, of course, when the humans and the dwarvish republic had stood up against his own people, the Elvish Sorcerer Kings of old, and the same ones who had created the gates between the Three Worlds.
Terak had read how mountains had been cast down, and rivers diverted. Forests had been called to march on the foes of one side or another.
But perhaps a part of the elf—being a null, with no training or feeling of the magic that coursed through the currents of the world—had never truly believed it.
Now, however, he saw an act of battle-magic worthy of the sagas of the Sorcerers’ Wars.
The air shimmered in a haze around the Ixcht craft, and the elf saw that it did look like a hand of sorts—a vast, godly hand with too many digits, each of which hazed and diffused around their edges.
The monstrous hand held the craft fifty feet or so above the roof of the Black Keep. Then, as the digits of hazy
fog thickened, it suddenly surged forward, away from the Black Keep and straight into the rock walls of the Tartaruk Mountains, where the giant hand burst like water-spray, and the craft exploded in green flames.
Who could have performed such an act of sorcery? Terak’s eyes swept down to where Magister Inedi was still fighting. But she appeared to be distracted, sweeping her outstretched hands to either side of her, reinforcing the defensive blue shield which had shrunk to encapsulate the Wall Brothers and Sisters.
Not her, the elf thought. There were only a few of the Ixcht left on the ground now, but it appeared to Terak that it would only take a few explosions to overcome the Magister’s shield.
“I have to do something . . .”
He started to rise from his crouch and was greeted by an insect-like hiss from behind him.
Ixcht, the elf swore silently.
11
A Strange Sort of Ally
Terak didn’t bother turning to see his opponent bearing down on him, his finely-honed instincts knew that to do that would only waste time. Instead, he threw himself into a jumping roll.
“Tsrk!” an outraged hiss. There was a thump on the hardened ground where Terak had been.
The elf had already bounced up from his roll and back to his feet. Without any hope of retrieving a weapon, he decided to just run. The Eastern Gate was in front of him now. He could make it . . . couldn’t he?
“Hsss!” The chittering, hissing sound of the creature followed him, growing louder as he took great, bounding leaps toward Terak.
The Eastern Gate was ahead, and the Wall Brothers and Sisters had left it open a crack. Surely guards were there on look-out, right? They would be able to see his desperate plight.
“Trk!” A grunt of effort was followed by a thump and a flash of pain that shot through Terak’s shoulder. The blow was so strong that it sent him bowling head over foot, landing on the hardened rock and shale of the Tartaruk slope.