by Rosie Scott
Alchemy? I wondered fruitlessly, before the powder billowed up into plumes of smoke. As I ran through it, the oxygen was ripped from my lungs, and my eyes started to burn so badly tears poured from my eyes. Even when I was out of the smoke and onto the safety of the street, I was disoriented. It felt as if I'd just barely escaped a house fire.
Anaxarete. I found her dashing south, intent on passing up the battle. She most likely wanted to flee Thanati altogether, and we were closest to its southern exit. I started to run after her, but my lungs felt tiny and useless. I can't let her go.
That is when I caught a glimpse of Ricco in the midst of battle, tearing through an assassin's body with his rodent incisors as if it were made of paper. If anyone deserved to have his revenge, it was he.
“Ricco!” I screamed, my lungs fighting each step I took.
The rat turned his head, dropping his current victim to the ground in a puddle of blood. Two beady black eyes found me from over the skirmish.
I pointed down the street, toward Anaxarete's retreating back. The rat's gaze followed my finger, finally finding its target, recognition flashing through black eyes.
Ricco screamed. I hadn't been aware rats could make such a noise until I heard it, the rodent's voice scratchy and strained before it trailed off in a sputtering hiss. He rampaged toward Anaxarete, pushing assassin and shapeshifter alike out of his way. His thick, patchy gray fur was matted and soaked with blood. If he hadn't been on our side, I would have been terrified of him.
Anaxarete saw the rat lumbering toward her, and shrieked as she darted as quickly as she could to the exit. Ricco collided with her in a rush of fur and teeth, knocking the woman from her feet. She skidded along the rock as if it were ice, screaming as he caught up to her, holding her arms defensively over her face.
Ricco ignored the move, gnashing his incisors over her left thigh. Her screams rose in intensity and pain as teeth tore through flesh again and again, whittling her leg down to the bone. I thought of all of the brutalized and dead men in her torture chamber, and found it hard to sympathize with her in the slightest. Anaxarete built green energy in a palm, before the spell fizzled away. In her trauma, she was becoming disoriented.
The rat chewed through her leg until it was just the bone, before ripping his head from side to side, finally succeeding in breaking the femur. Anaxarete's screams had faded into a mixture of wails and sobs. It was amazing how much she hated pain when it was done to herself. Ricco threw his head to the side, tossing the limb away from her body. Next, he bit down over the torturer's torso, picking the woman up and bringing her back toward me, outside of the range of the battle.
I was confused at first, since I thought he was coming to me. Anaxarete was still alive, moaning as the rat carried her in his jaw. Then, Ricco turned down a side street with her. As I slowly caught up to it, I looked down the street.
This section of Thanati was not as well lit as the main road, but there was one object that served as a light. It was a huge vat, sitting between two buildings, its wide, circular opening glowing a greenish-yellow. Even from the corner of the street, I could hear its contents bubbling and popping.
The crawler acid vat, I thought, connecting the image to the story Ricco had told us back in the tunnels. It was where they threw the bodies to dissolve. The only difference was that this body was still alive.
I watched with morbid curiosity as Ricco carried Anaxarete up the steps of the vat. As they ascended, the torturer must have figured out where she was, because she started pleading and panicking. Not one word of it was heard by the man she'd tortured for years. The rat held Anaxarete's body over the vat, a sickly toxic glow cast over them both.
Anaxarete turned her head, and screeched at the sign of the acid. “Wait! No! Please!” Her fists pounded at the rat's snout futilely. “Wait!”
It was as if Ricco was waiting, if only to savor this moment. After all, one could only kill a person once.
Then, the rat's jaw opened, letting Anaxarete's body tumble out between his incisors. She screamed as she fell into the vat, out of sight. Her body splashed into the acid, and her screams gurgled beneath the liquid.
The sizzling of the acid as it ate through her body was nearly deafening. Her screams became heightened, and then slowed, distorted, as the acid made its way to her internal organs. I watched Ricco's eyes. Within them, the yellowish-green glow was marred by a speck of black as the woman fought for survival, despite it being no use. The speck got smaller and smaller in the reflection of his eyes, before it disappeared altogether, leaving nothing but the acid's glow and the constant sizzling from the vat. A few seconds later, and even the noises stopped.
Ricco came down from the vat moments later. The rat noticed me watching him. Perhaps he had also noticed where I had come from earlier, and knew what I'd witnessed in the torture chamber. As he neared me, I decided to tell him what I'd found.
“Kyrin is alive,” I said to him. He couldn't respond in his blood-kin form, but he glanced toward the torture chamber down the street. “I have healed him and told him you were leading the charge here. He is free.”
Ricco could say nothing, but he decided to give me a response anyway. The rat took a step to me, before rubbing the side of his head against the armor at my hip. I refrained from petting him, because as much as I loved animals, I had to remind myself that this was a man. Sometimes it was hard to remember that with the beastmen. I patted him on the head instead, my hand becoming moist with blood.
Ricco and I headed back to battle. The pain in my lungs from Anaxarete's powder had started to fade, so I found myself finally keeping up. Given Ricco's anti-social personality, I doubted this was the beginning of a new friendship. Even so, perhaps I had given him a reason to stay with us past Thanati. Ricco had spent his life being tortured and neglected, and this assault had allowed him his vengeance.
His awful story was but one in a long list of men who'd suffered at the hands of injustice. The Alderi's archaic culture was making it quite simple to build an army here.
Twenty-five
The battle for Thanati had gone on for so long, I lost all concept of time. This was the longest battle I'd ever fought, and my only saving grace was necromancy. Without death magic, such a battle would have been impossible. All of our soldiers would have dropped from exhaustion. Instead, Cerin and I kept regenerating the energy of our soldiers, and raising the recent dead. Elsewhere on the streets of Thanati, the beastmen we had taught death magic to during our trek through the wildlands did the same.
Thanati was the smallest city we would try to take over, yes, but if my venture into the underground had taught me anything, it was that even the smallest of settlements were larger down here than anything on the surface. After all, when comparing our world map to that of the underground, this city alone was as large as a good chunk of the wildlands.
Many hours had passed since Ricco and I had separated, and now, a saving grace appeared in the south. The rocky ceilings and walls narrowed into the southern tunnel, signaling the end of the city. We were almost to our victory. And with the assassins depleting quickly and starting to tire themselves against our hordes of shapeshifters and undead, it was only a matter of time.
Anto spun into a group of assassins to my left, his arm blades shredding through the flesh of multiple victims. To my right, Cerin paralyzed an enemy with a scythe swipe through to the spine. Nyx was dashing through enemies while invisible, causing cuts and slices to appear randomly over Alderi flesh. Jakan followed through with the same idea, cutting through assassins with his scimitar before they knew he was there. At a short distance, Jayce snapped her two crocodile jaws over an assassin's torso, cracking the woman's spine. Vallen was disemboweling a foe with his bear fangs. Calder was in the midst of mauling another.
I walked past them all, toward the tunnel. What few enemies were left around me were quickly being defeated, and the remaining assassins were dead-set on fleeing the city. I didn't want any of them making it to Quell
den to warn their sisters of our arrival.
Creatius la wava a tyda. Water energy built within a magical barrier over one palm. I repeated the spell, doubling its effect by wielding it with both hands. I reached forward, releasing a tidal wave of water into the tunnel. The water gushed forward as if it had been pent up for lifetimes, roaring like a beast as it rushed through the walls of stone. I forced the energy from my hands until the wave engulfed the assassins nearest me, before it continued on its path of destruction. Then, dispelling the spell, I built up another.
Tranferra la agua ti friz. The water energy in my hands was clear, prepared to transform the water before me. I directed the energy to the last remnants of the tidal wave. The water immediately began to thicken and harden, crackling as it rapidly froze through the tunnel, hardening the entire river of water into solid ice. All of the fleeing assassins were now frozen in its grasp. The women which had been engulfed by the wave were now frozen within it, suffocating. The others which were farthest when the spell hit were only kept stuck to the ground by the ice which covered their legs to their torsos. Some of the women screamed as bare skin was burned against the solid ice.
Boot steps echoed against the tunnel walls behind me. I turned to see Jakan, no longer invisible, walking up beside me. He lifted his crossbow, aiming it across the ice to the assassins.
Schew! A bolt arced through the air, cracking through a skull, and leaving the whitish-blue ice below splattered with hot blood. Jakan fired again and again, only stopping to reload, putting the grounded assassins out of their misery for good.
I turned back to Thanati, finding our army and other friends mostly silent and still. The sounds of war had ceased.
Hell. We've done it.
Jakan and I walked back to the city, in a bit of a daze at what we'd just accomplished. The air felt ripe with energy and victory, but most of us were too worn out to vocalize it. Amongst the crowd, Cerin dispelled the dead. Hundreds of corpses fell to the ground. The dead had proved extremely helpful in this fight.
Calder was the first to start morphing back into his normal form. As soon as he made the move, the other shapeshifters followed. Cries and howls of pain echoed throughout the stone walls of Thanati as hundreds of beastmen transformed. Many of our new Alderi recruits watched the process, transfixed by it, for none of them had seen it before.
All of us were filthy and dripping with blood. Many needed healing. Now that the beastmen had reverted back to their original forms, I also realized we needed to send people back into the tunnels to retrieve the supplies we'd left hidden in a nook of the tunnel. Until then, many of our soldiers were naked.
Calder walked straight up to me once he was fully Alderi again. Cuts, bruises, and abrasions were everywhere over his skin, so I figured he wanted to be healed, and I prepared a life spell. Instead, he grabbed me into a hug, squeezing me tight against him desperately.
“We did it,” he murmured, his voice tired but relieved. “Thank you.”
I patted him on the back before deciding against it when my fingers felt an open wound. “Don't be thanking me, Cal. We all had a part in this. Besides, we have two cities left to take.”
“This is true, but do not downplay your importance here,” he replied.
“All right, fine. Now put that thing away,” I teased.
Calder backed up from me, chuckling at the unexpected joke as he glanced down at his nudity. “I'm surprised I was even able to get close enough to hug you,” he mused, with a wiggle of his eyebrows.
The Battle of Thanati had lasted two days and nights, confirming my suspicion that time had slipped away from us. Underground, it was so hard to tell the passage of time. Nyx taught me during our battle clean-up that time meant very little here. The Alderi lived as they pleased, mostly separated from the schedules and engagements the surface dwellers concerned themselves with. Other than the fulfillment of assassination contracts, there was little reason for the Alderi to care.
The best method of telling the time of day underground, Nyx told me, was to find a ventilation shaft, and look up beneath it. The shafts were holes which stretched vertically from the ceilings of the underground cities and tunnels to the surface of the Arrayis, which kept the air circulating and helped to stabilize the temperature in some of the more extreme areas of the depths. These were the things I would have never thought about until my attention was called to them. Everything worked so differently here.
Our plan was to stay and rest in Thanati for at least a fortnight. We needed to go through the city slowly to look for any hidden enemies and slaves we had somehow missed in the initial battle. On top of that, our troops required healing, and time to go through the dead. Enemies needed to be looted, and our casualties would be found, identified, and counted. Anto and a few Alderi skilled at blacksmithing were tasked with using the supplies in Thanati's storage to make weapons and armor for those who were without.
In our search of Thanati, we found hundreds more slaves. Sometimes they were kept in cells, and other times they were simply chained in homes and apartments. There were so many of them. Of course, if it weren't for the fact that the males were mistreated and often killed, they would have made up about half the population. To our pleasant surprise, we also found many Alderi women who sympathized with the male plight and simply hid in their homes during our takeover. Some of them rebelled from their culture only in thought, while others had actively used what power they did have to help males escape.
The survivors agreed with our war and our goals, but not all of them offered to join us. This was actually ideal, since we needed like-minded Alderi to stay in the city after we left, to begin to rebuild under new rules, with new freedoms. There needed to be people here who could defend the entrances of Thanati from Alderi commuters.
All in all, we had lost almost two hundred beastmen. The Alderi survivors totaled over one thousand, including both slaves and women sympathizers. There had been more, but many of the slaves that had helped us fight had lost their lives. Of the survivors, almost eight hundred chose to join us in our journey to Hazarmaveth. Our army was now sixteen hundred strong, split evenly between Alderi and beastmen. Thanati would be left with over two hundred occupants, and many hundreds of bodies. Before we left en route to our next destination, I wanted to make sure that some of the people here knew necromancy, to help them defend the city in our absence. Thus, Cerin and I both spent much of our time in Thanati teaching elemental magic to anyone who wished to learn, both to aid us in our army and aid the city in its future defense.
Vallen took the time to write correspondence to be taken to the surface to Silvi and Tenesea, informing the cities of Thanati's takeover, and inviting anyone from the surface to come down and rebuild. I argued with myself over whether I should send another letter to Hasani. After all, it had only been just over a fortnight since the last letter had been sent with Jaecar. In the end, I decided to update him on our victory and send the letter with the others. Vallen was already sending a messenger to Silvi, and Thanati was as close to the surface as an underground city got. I wasn't going to get another chance like this until we were out of the underground.
We had stayed in Thanati for about a week before the first real trouble knocked at our doorstep. There had been a few stragglers here and there, commuting from one city to another, and we'd taken care of them all at the entrances to the city. This time, however, it must have been a group of them, because I heard signs of struggle as I was in the midst of teaching magic to a room full of eager pupils.
I left the makeshift classroom abruptly and ran out to the street, immediately moving my eyes to the northern entrance. Most of our soldiers remained in the north of Thanati, because that entrance was the greatest threat. It was only one day's walk from the surface tunnel exit, and half of a moon's walk from Hazarmaveth. The closest settlement to the southern entrance was Quellden, and it was three seasons away. Guarding the north doorway had always been our top priority.
And now, a swarm of Al
deri were coming from the tunnel. It wasn't an army of them, but it was a few dozen. Women and men, I noticed with curiosity. Thankfully, I could see the attackers clearly given the extra lights we'd set up around the town since the takeover, combined with the bioluminescence of the fungi brightening the area from the lake to my left.
The tunnel guards were doing a great job of picking off the women of the group, who all rampaged into the street like they had a death wish. The males stayed just inside the entrance, all using bows to defend the women. From across the road from my own classroom, Calder and Cerin rushed out of theirs.
Calder took note of the relatively few enemies, and decided not to transform. “Cerin, stay back!” He yelled behind him with a tilt of his face. The necromancer halted, though he looked as confused as I felt at the order. Over a dozen assassins were rushing him, but he had no weapons or shield.
A blue hand flipped out a moment later, and Calder's resist magic shield zipped around him, the clear energy swirling with opalescent edges. Next, he looked thoughtful a moment, waiting for the women to near. Emerald green energy built beneath both palms, hidden from the women's view.
Shik! An arrow from a slave archer flew by Calder's leg, before skimming over the stone. He paid it no mind, forcing the alteration energy to the ground when the assassins were finally in range. The energy shot to the ground, before rippling outward in a circle around him in a wave of sparkling green. As the edges of the wave passed by the feet of the charging women, each of them fell, paralyzed.
Ah. An area-of-effect paralyze spell.
Cerin and I rushed forward to finish the job. The necromancer heaved his scythe above him, bringing the heavy weapon down to decapitate our attackers one by one. I simply leeched from them, ending each life within mere seconds, and as painlessly as possible. Yards away, one of our soldiers finished the last female of the group.
The slave males against the wall appeared absolutely perplexed. We had killed their sisters, and yet refused to kill them. An Alderi male walked with authority toward them, and there were many near the entrance who weren't Alderi at all. If any of these men had been to Thanati before, they found it to be much different to visit now.