“I’d be delighted to join!” Kestrel said enthusiastically. “Let me notify the imps to start looking for the supply dump locations,” he said.
“Of course we can do that,” Killcen replied when Kestrel explained the request. “And we can create a diversion too, so that the forces in the woods look in the wrong direction.”
“Excellent suggestion,” Casimo said approvingly.
“Something is happening,” one of the imps said, pointing to the left. He immediately launched himself into the air to investigate.
There was movement evident on the ground in the direction of the earlier fire. As they watched, they saw that several elves were carrying a pair of large flat platforms, big enough for a dozen elves to stand on. Others were behind them carrying barrels.
“What do you make of that?” Kestrel asked.
“Those barrels, they feel…unusual,” Medeina spoke softly to Kestrel, her lips close to his ear. “Use your senses to feel them,” she placed a hand on his shoulder once again, and intertwined her powers with his, then extended their joint senses out into the world.
Feel the discord? she asked.
Kestrel closed his eyes, and focused on a sense of awareness that was not quite like any of the usual senses. There was an uneasiness, something that seemed delicately balanced between multiple forms of discord.
What is it? he asked.
I cannot say, but I do not think it is good, she replied. Be prepared.
“What’s happening?” Putienne asked. “Your eyes are closed. Are you okay?”
Kestrel opened his eyes, and saw Putienne looking at him, her eyes flicking back and forth from his eyes to Medeina’s familiarly-lodged hand on his shoulder. There was a look of mild annoyance on her face.
“I’m not sure what’s happening,” Kestrel answered. “Let’s watch to see what they do.”
The observers saw the column of bearers reach the edge of the forest, while a large group of soldiers filled the space behind them. Those carrying the large wooden boards wrestled them into position so that the two were side by side, held atop the raised arms of their bearers. The elves carrying the barrels filed forward and gathered together beneath the wooden platforms, and then the whole procession started forward.
“The flat pieces are shields,” Casimo declared. “We can’t hit them with arrows now,” he said as the slow-moving group approached the town wall.
“Why should we?” Lim asked. “They aren’t doing anything, except carrying barrels.”
“Why would they do that?” Putienne asked.
“Maybe it’s a gift?” Hampus suggested. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he discounted his own idea.
The Center Trunk forces approached, and a couple of archers atop the wall futilely shot arrows at them, but the shafts did no harm, and the arrows quickly ceased.
When they reached the walls, the platforms pressed up against the structures, and remained in place.
“What are they doing?” Medeina asked softly.
The Firheng observers heard a few muffled noises from below, as if the barrels were being stacked, and then moments later they saw a puff of smoke arise from beneath the wooden shields. The two flat shields suddenly departed from their position against the wall, rushing back towards the forest, away from the city.
The elves atop the walls watched the flight of the barrel carriers, then looked down and observed that a long string atop the barrels was burning brightly.
“Kestrel,” Medeina said urgently, “that is a bad thing. Something bad is going to happen.”
“What? What should I do?” Kestrel asked, feeling both anxious and skeptical. He focused inward, and took the initial steps to grasp his energy, if it should come to be needed.
As he did the burning string grew shorter and shorter, then reached its end, and disappeared, leaving all the elves atop the wall with nothing to stare at – for a pair of seconds only – before a tremendous eruption suddenly began to take place, blinding and deafening all. The wall shook violently, throwing Kestrel and his party from their feet, before it began to collapse beneath the terrified group.
Kestrel threw his power out blindly, creating a protective bubble large enough to surround and protect all of his friends, as the wall dissolved beneath them and a gout of stones and timbers went flying in the air all around them. They all lay in scrambled positions, suspended in the air by Kestrel’s enclosure, as the wall structure collapsed beneath them. There was smoke and dust billowing wildly from the destructive explosion, so that Kestrel could see nothing beyond his immediate surroundings as he propped himself up on his elbows, relying on the glowing floor of power that was now the only thing supporting him.
There was a sudden sound, a pair of cracking contacts, as arrows appeared out of the smoke and struck his shield, imprinting small green damaged spots where they struck and bounced off. More such impacts followed, and then Kestrel faintly heard shouts and cries of pain from others outside of the protected bubble.
“Put us down, Kestrel,” he faintly heard Medeina. He turned and saw that she had crawled over next to him. She reached out and grabbed his arm.
Put us down, her voice sounded clearly in his soul. Set us down gently. Can you?
He looked around, still wild-eyed, then focused on making his cocoon softly settle down atop the rubble of the destroyed wall, as arrows continued to strike his shield.
They reached the unlevel crown of the pile, and settled down, as the ruins of the wall shifted under the new weight he deposited.
Now, make your shield spread out left and right, higher, just on the side the arrows are coming from, Medeina instructed him, and he felt and comprehended the concept, as she fed instructions to him.
Kestrel obediently followed her directions, and the glowing blue protection morphed from a bubble into a wide, high wall, whose edges disappeared in the thinning clouds of the dust in the air.
Casimo was standing, he saw, and shouting wildly, though Kestrel could not hear his words.
Here, Medeina said, and she raised her own hand with a flourish. Suddenly Kestrel was bombarded with noises. He heard shouts and cries; he heard a steady hail of arrows striking his shield, as he felt the stress of their damage to the shield; he heard Casimo’s shouted orders for men to defend the breach; and, he heard the cracking, groaning noise of the wall debris still settling into place.
Putienne was injured he saw. He broke free from Medeina’s grip and stumbled over to where she lay bleeding.
“Putty, are you alright?” he asked as he reached her and took one of her hands in his.
“I’m okay – I’m just a little bumped,” she answered, as she raised her free hand to the cut on her forehead.
The cacophonous sound of the arrows striking his shield suddenly ceased.
“They’re coming to attack!” Casimo shouted. The dust and smoke were thinner now, and Kestrel could see a wide wave of elven bodies emerging from the forest, and running towards the destroyed defensive wall of the city.
Angered, by the sight of Putienne’s injury, Kestrel focused his will on the shield he was maintaining, and he pressed it outward, away from the city. The blue wall swept forward like a fast-moving broom, and as it stuck the oncoming attackers, it knocked them to the ground, or threw them backwards.
There were shouts and screams from the elves who had unexpectedly been switched from attackers to victims, but Kestrel ignored the shouts, and forced his wall against the front of the forest, snapping off branches, uprooting trees, and causing more havoc among the Center Trunk army.
“That’s enough, Kestrel,” Medeina gripped his shoulder firmly. “Don’t hurt the forest needlessly,” she said sternly, and Kestrel felt his connection to his energy severed instantly, making the deadly blue shield evaporate.
“Thank you, my lord,” Casimo shouted gratefully. “You’ve turned them back.”
“This time, and I’ll do it again if they try that again,” Kestrel growled.
“What w
as that? Do they have some sorcerer or strange demigod of their own?” he turned to ask Medeina.
“It is not a power drawn from the gods, I can tell you that,” Medeina told him. “It is different; it felt limited. It is something that those elves have made for themselves.”
“It didn’t feel limited!” Kestrel exclaimed. “That explosion shook the whole city! I felt the ground tremble beneath my feet!”
“Kestrel friend,” Odare came dropping down from the hazy sky. “Acanthus and Killcen were injured in that eruption. Pieces of the wall flew up and struck them.”
“Where are they now?” Kestrel asked. “Are they badly hurt?”
“Their injuries are not great; they are resting atop that building,” Odare motioned into the city. “We were unprepared for the great explosion the other elves created.”
“So were we,” Kestrel confessed.
“They will try to do something like that again,” Odare said on a matter-of-fact-tone. “We’ll know what to expect next time.”
“You think they can do that again?” Medeina asked alertly.
“They have many more of those barrels stored at one of their supply depots,” the imp answered.
“Could you lead us to it?” Kestrel asked.
“Capture one of the barrels so that I may study it,” Medeina told him.
“I’ll plan to capture them all,” he answered.
“No!” Medeina spoke sharply.
Kestrel stared at her, taken aback by her commanding voice, and unwilling to forego the chance to seize the explosive barrels and use them for his own purposes.
“When you reach them, take one, and explode all the others right where you find them. Destroy them,” she told him.
He exhaled noisily, and capitulated.
“As you wish,” he agreed.
“I want to study one to see what it is, and then you shall destroy it as well,” she assured him.
Casimo had stumbled over to join them. “If you’re going to raid their supplies, can you plunder some supplies to help us as well?” he asked.
“Let’s go make plans for a raid,” Kestrel suggested. “Do Killcen and Acanthus need any help?” he asked Odare.
“Can some elves carry them to an infirmary?” Odare asked. “They will not like that, but they will not fly right while they are unsteady. They will be fine after they rest for a bit.
“Oh, how I wish we could go to the healing spring!” she said mournfully.
“As do I,” agreed Kestrel, as he watched Remy scramble up the debris pile to reach Putienne’s side. Kestrel felt a sense of relief when he saw the boy comfort the lovely girl with an arm around her shoulders.
The group climbed downward, after Casimo shouted orders for extra archers and watchmen to be placed on both sides of the opening in the city walls, to protect against any further attempts to exploit the breach, though such an effort seemed unlikely following Kestrel’s decisive rout of the previous attempt.
They gathered in Casimo’s office, several minutes later. A number of officers were invited to the meeting to plan the sortie out against the Center Trunk forces. Odare provided directions to the location of the mysterious exploding barrels and other supplies, and a midnight departure was agreed to. Kestrel was to lead the group of three dozen elves onto the woods.
The Center Trunk forces outside the city seemed stunned by the unexpected use of magical power against them, and their spirit seemed broken by having such a clear victory snatched away and turned into defeat so quickly and thoroughly. The Firheng forces made no effort to fire at the Center Trunk soldiers who spent the afternoon recovering the dead and injured from the field of battle.
Kestrel sat and ruminated on the destruction he had so quickly inflicted upon the Center Trunk forces while he was angry over the injury to Putienne.
“Don’t punish yourself,” Medeina told him.
“I shouldn’t have hurt so many elves,” Kestrel said. “I didn’t have to; we would have been safe with much less damage done, but I was too angry to be reasonable,” he said.
“Don’t stew over it. Just learn from it, and don’t make the same mistake again,” she comforted him. “You’re a good being Kestrel and you’ll learn to do better.”
Chapter 9
That night, Casimo launched a small raiding party of imps to draw the attention of the Center Trunk forces on the west side of Firheng, then sent the imps out again to noisily do the same thing on the south side of the city. Soon after that, Kestrel’s force slipped out the east side of the city, and ran at full speed towards the west of Firheng.
They ran through the swath of forest that Kestrel had cleared earlier in the day, following the directions that Odare had provided. His force slipped in among the trees and separated into two different groups. Each group slowed their pace, and walked through the enemy encampment as though they were at home, and drew no attention until they reached the supply depot that was their target.
“Are you ready for the shift change?” one of Kestrel’s companions approached the guards on duty at the storage site and deceptively asked.
“But we’re only half way through our shift,” one of the guards protested.
His companion elbowed him into silence.
“Because of the battle today, the shift rotation got changed,” the elf from Firheng explained.
And with that, the duped Center Trunk guards happily left the supplies and returned to their tents for what they expected to be a good night’s sleep.
Once the guards were gone, the second set of elves from Firheng filtered into the supply depot, one at a time. They selected the supplies they wanted to steal, and one by one, they took bags of goods out of the storage piles, then wandered away, in the direction of the walls of Firheng.
The last group to come was a pair of guards, who grunted as they lifted one of the barrels that Medeina wished to examine.
“Is this safe to carry?” they asked Kestrel as they lugged it past him in the shadows, where he stayed and watched the pilfering of the supplies.
“As long as you don’t let it catch on fire,” he assured them. “Just take it close to the city, and we’ll get it inside the walls after all the excitement gets underway,” he dismissed them, then went and dismissed the two elves who had posed as guards during the robbery.
That done, he stood and stared at the pile of barrels that remained, more than twice as many as had blown up the section of the city wall. Medeina had directed him on how to ignite the barrels, but he knew he had to put a considerable distance between them and himself. As close as he stood to them while he considered them, he knew he would be obliterated by the explosion. He continued to stand nonetheless, struck by the perception he had as he was close to the presence of the contents of the barrels.
The material within the barrels wasn’t truly evil, and yet somehow it was. He could not resolve the uneasiness he felt from the juxtaposition of the sensations that the barrels emitted.
“You there – who are you?” a voice called from the darkness around in the quiet camp.
Kestrel turned his head, and saw a pair of elves on patrol. They had come up behind him, surprising him.
“I’m just walking around; I couldn’t sleep,” he tried to assure them. He didn’t want to start a confrontation yet; the other Firheng elves needed more time to make their journeys to the rendezvous location, so that they’d all be in position to return to the city once chaos broke loose, after Kestrel exploded the cache of barrels around him.
“I’ll go back to my tent now,” he added, and started to walk away.
“Stop,” one voice said, and there was a whispered conversation. “His ears,” Kestrel heard the words uttered softly.
“What’s your name?” one of the guards asked.
“Halibue,” Kestrel uttered the first thing that came to mind.
“What kind of a name is that?” one of them asked. There was a rustle, and then a twang, and Kestrel knew an arrow was speeding towards him. He th
rew up his hands and created his blue shield. It provided the protection he needed, just in time, as half the arrow was already within his space – the shaft of the arrow was sliced in half by the creation of the blue sphere of energy, and the head tumbled forward, striking Kestrel but not piercing him.
But the creation of the shield, while it saved him from the arrow, created a greater problem, and Kestrel recognized it as it began to develop before his eyes, and all around him.
The energy shield touched several of the barrels he was not supposed to explode until after he had gotten far away from them. His energy though, created multiple combustions, and Kestrel experienced multiple impacts from the beginning of a huge conflagration. He saw blinding flashes, and heard the beginning of the greatest explosive sound ever known in the Eastern Forest. His body felt the first wave of death starting to expand from the terrible explosions.
I need help, a part of his soul though in a split fraction of a second before he was totally consumed by the fireball that was forming. His body began to absorb fatal damages from the forces and flying debris that were all around him. He lapsed into immediate unconsciousness as he was overwhelmed with pain and damage.
A few fragments of thoughts drifted through his soul – he needed Alicia’s comforting hands, tending the wounds that were embedding themselves on all sides of his body; he needed a soft kiss on the cheek from Lark.
He needed to escape. He needed to go to the healing spring.
And with that his powers suddenly carried out an extraordinary action, as they grabbed him and transported him, giving him the gift of the imps, the sprites, and the gods, letting him jump between places and dimensions, to carry him to the healing spring, where he was unconsciously deposited in his customary spot among the submerged rocks that were covered with the warm waters of the spring.
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