by Rosie Scott
My nostrils flared. “Calder, don't make me rearrange this army. You have wrestled with self-doubt for too long. Use what I have taught you. Let Koby's necklace help you find your head. You are an intelligent man. If you fail in this, you will be letting your past rule your future.”
The words were somewhat harsh of me to say, but I felt he needed to hear them. If being harsh was needed to help him, it was what I would do. I somewhat expected Calder to get angry with me for giving him advice that he could have felt was unwarranted. Instead, the look in his eyes only became resolute.
“So I will not fail,” he said.
I patted him on the shoulder. “Good.”
“Kai...” Calder trailed off, two thin eyebrows dipping toward one another. “At the end of this, if I don't make it through, I trust you to lead this underground in my place, or find someone who will.” His red eyes flicked over to the side, where Azazel stood out of hearing distance. “I think you already have ideas of who you would pick for the job.”
“What job?” I retorted. “We are taking the underground for you, and you just told me you wouldn't fail.”
“There are different ways one can fail, and different ways to victory.” Calder reached to my forehead, tapping me with his pointer finger teasingly. “You are a strategist, Kai. You know this. Besides, I thought you prided yourself on being a realist.”
That I did. Annoyed by his fantastic memory, I did not reply.
He finally chuckled at my stubbornness. “Goodbye, love.” He started backing away toward Nyx and the others, his boots clunking over uneven rock. “We will meet again, side-by-side, in battle.”
I led my army to the southeastern tunnel, while Calder led his to the north. I felt sick with the pain of leaving my friends, particularly because such goodbyes had become permanent before. But I could not let it discourage me. I pushed away all of the negative and emotional thoughts, focusing instead on something positive.
Quellden will be ours.
Thirty-four
36th of Red Moon, 420
How I wished I had Azazel.
The southeastern tunnel dead-ended straight into a barricade of stone. The Alderi who had fled from our battle in Hazarmaveth had clearly warned Quellden of our arrival, along with the possible threat we posed to their capital city. In the weeks since being warned, they'd moved huge blocks of stone into our entrance to the city. They knew we would come. They knew we were here. We had no option of surprise. If they'd built a barricade in this tunnel, surely Calder and the others would have the same problem to the north.
Between the ceiling of the tunnel and the highest block, multiple defensive archers awaited. If Azazel had been here, it was possible he could have taken them out from our current location, but the superb archer was in the north. I lifted up a palm, using a spell he had taught me. Red energy was everywhere. The archers weren't the only ones waiting for us. On either side of the tunnel's opening into Quellden, hundreds waited. I lifted up my palm, seeking for life vertically. I remembered Nyx telling me how tall everything was in Quellden. Sure enough, on either side of the walls beside the tunnel, red specks waited high above its opening.
Were there towers here? Just tall buildings? Which kinds of units waited for us? I knew none of this, and mostly because I couldn't see past the barricade. My mind racked through thoughts for a strategy. I had archers, but sending them through first was suicide. I would be funneling them straight into the target range of Quellden's defenders. And even before that, I had the barricade to worry about.
“Remember Thanati?” Jakan whispered beside me. I looked over to him in confusion. “Water flows so nicely through tunnels, does it not?” He asked rhetorically.
I understood his reference. I could send a tidal wave through in the hopes of flushing most of them out. The barricade could stop people, but water could slip through even the tiniest of cracks. Besides, once we arrived at the wall, I had magic which could remove it as an obstacle quite easily. That left the crowds of assassins in wait just outside the tunnel. A memory of my tornado in Hazarmaveth popped to mind.
I turned to those behind me. “Healers. Shield as many as you can. Start now. Refresh them in battle as often as you can. Necromancers: leech, leech, leech. Wait to raise the dead until we have a significant number to raise. Do not waste your energy. Build your energy. You will need it. This battle will last much longer than a few days. Archers, focus on those above us. Soldiers lie in wait above our entrance on all sides.” I stopped talking for a moment, waiting for the murmur of orders to be passed along to the soldiers far behind me. Then, I turned my attention to Vallen. “I want you and your beastmen to start transforming as soon as I start my attack. Do not charge until I give the order. In the city, I want you to focus on fighting in the streets. We will leave clearing out the buildings to the warriors.”
“We should wait to charge as well?” Anto asked. Weeks ago, I'd put the orc in charge of the warriors, and Jakan in charge of the stealth-oriented soldiers and illusionists who could free the slaves.
“Yes. Everyone wait to charge until I give the signal,” I replied. “I will start this battle.” My eyes watched over the lines of soldiers behind me, stretching back through the tunnel as far as my enhanced eyes could see. White energy shields bubbled around hundreds of men and women as the healers followed my earlier request. Cerin and I gave those around us shields and wards.
“You and I will need to focus on giving soldiers energy,” Cerin murmured. “Quellden is enormous. We cannot hope to reach its center for weeks yet.”
“The two of us cannot hope to endlessly refuel thousands of soldiers,” I told him. “We will have to secure sections of the city so our soldiers can rest. We can take the time to have our illusionists free slaves. Our necromancers will need to be our main defense. With their dead and their leeching, they won't need to rest.” I looked to Jakan and Anto. “Your main focus will be securing the area.”
“How large of an area are we talking about?” Anto questioned.
“As large as it needs to be to allow our soldiers rest. They can sleep on the floors, if need be.”
“How long can we possibly stay in this area of the city without being slaughtered?” Jakan inquired. “We'll be sitting ducks.”
I shook my head. “No, we'll be amassing power. Gaining freed slaves and corpses. We will continue to be attacked, and we will lose people. But we can't rampage forward with forty-five hundred soldiers and expect to make it to the center unscathed in a city of hundreds of thousands. We will hold a defensive position until we can gain power and move forward. Chip away at the city from its exterior. The better job we do here, the quicker we can make it to the center. Remember, Quellden is huge. The entire populace cannot attack us at once. We have made such good time in getting here, that most of the city to the east probably doesn't even know it's being attacked.”
Cerin appeared contemplative beside me. “I really hope the others have thought of a similar strategy.”
“It is a defensive strategy,” I replied. “Azazel will use it. He and I talked it through before the split.” I exhaled carefully. “The others will already have breached the city by now. The defenders here are smart. They have left people to defend this entrance even though the other is breached.”
“How do you know Nyx and the others are already here?” Jakan asked.
“Because their army is slightly smaller, and the tunnel was shorter,” I replied, simply. “Our trek was a fortnight longer to take. Calder and the others should already have secured a part of the north.” I hesitated. “If they succeeded.”
“Well, let's give them the support they need,” Vallen replied behind me.
I nodded. “Yes, let's.” I took one last look at my friends. “Any questions?” When no further questions were asked, I stood from my crouched position, and walked toward the barricade, taking the time to enhance my vision once more with illusion when the previous spell's effects faded. Without the spell, I wouldn't have been able
to see the barricade at all.
The army was silent as death behind me. In both hands, I built water energy, letting the spells amass power as I took the last few steps toward the barricade.
One of the archers noticed me in the darkness, her superior eyesight catching my movement. Immediately, an arrow was loosed, and even before it bounced off my magical shield, the defender was screaming warnings of our arrival.
I unleashed the tidal wave. Thousands of gallons of rushing water roared from my hands and through the tunnel with many times the force of a stampede, crashing into the side of the barricade with an impact that caused some of the higher stone blocks to fall from their temporary wall. The archers were engulfed and swept forward, and though I could not see through the lower barricade, I knew the water was rushing into the streets of the city beyond. The more stone blocks fell from the wall, the more I could see and hear of Quellden. What little I could see of it from here was surprisingly well lit.
The wave of water was seeping through the cracks of the barricade, but not as fast as I was providing it. I dispelled the water magic and switched to earth, wading through the remnants of water just before the wall, and turning stone into sand, rendering the defense useless. As the wall fell and the last of the water rushed through the sands and down the decline into Quellden, I was barraged with arrows, and I regenerated my shield. Roars of the transforming beastmen bounced to my ears from the tunnel walls around me, informing me that they were following my direction.
Only yards remained between me and the end of the tunnel. A city street lay wide ahead, Alderi archers shooting at me defensively from corners of buildings and rooftops. I could not risk walking out into the open, because I would be hit with so many arrows that I would not be able to regenerate my shield quickly enough. Instead, I built air magic in both hands, letting it have so much energy that it began to drain my life, ensuring the effects would be massive.
Standing just inside of the tunnel entrance, I released the tornado. It spun outward from my fingertips, building in size so quickly that as it broke open into the city, bits and pieces of the ceiling at the edges of the tunnel broke off and collapsed. My hair whipped back from my face so violently that it felt like the strands were stabbing me along my face, and I backed slowly away from the entrance. An arrow lodged itself into my shoulder, alerting me that my shield had broken. I regenerated it, watching as the twister spun violently through the edges of Quellden, ripping the archers around the tunnels violently from their posts, and throwing them off over buildings and streets alike.
Each second the tornado spun, the larger it got. I'd forced so much energy into it that I'd weakened myself, but the more damage I did here, the safer my army would be during their initial charge. I continued backing up into the tunnel, in fear of my own spell as the storm grew so large that I could no longer see the city. Nothing but thick gray howling winds rushed ahead. Throughout the cyclone, I glimpsed broken bodies and pieces of architecture, and the tunnel shook around me as buildings crumbled out of my sight.
I felt the arrow from my shoulder get pulled out, and found Cerin had rushed up to heal me. I couldn't hear him over the storm. My eyes were on the spell, waiting for it to make its way into the city. The twister could kill my own soldiers just as easily as the enemy; I could not send them in yet.
When Cerin finished healing my wound, he transferred energy to me. He must have known I'd over-exerted myself. I mentally thanked him for it, watching as the tornado slowly tore a path down the street, leaving broken buildings and bodies in its wake. The streets ahead were shattered and lifeless. That would soon change. I held a palm up before me, finding only specks of life in the distance. Everything near us was dead.
I turned toward my army, and screamed, “Charge!”
The beastmen roared with excitement and lust for battle, and charged first, rushing by in blurs of feathers and fur. They stampeded into the city at the front of the pack, followed by Anto and his warriors, and Jakan and the illusionists. The battlemages were last, all wielding a combination of weapons and magic. Cerin and I rushed along with the mages, with the undead giant spiders from the split beside us, finally reaching Quellden after over a year of planning to attack it.
I'd heard over and over again how massive Quellden was, but nothing could have prepared me for my first glimpse of it. When I was finally in its streets, I found myself frozen in awe, much like I'd been during the Battle of the Dead when the giant tortoise had arisen. How was it possible to be underground? The cavern's ceiling was so high, I only knew it was there via the spots of bioluminescent light which dotted its surface. To my left and in the distance, I could see the royal district standing tall over everything else. I knew what it was, because Nyx had said the queen lived in the tallest tower of the city, and the tower somehow reached the ceiling. I couldn't quite wrap my head around that; I could see our destination, but I was weeks away from reaching it. It had to have had hundreds of floors. Quellden was as tall as Sera, if not taller, and my home city was built on the side of a mountain.
The city's edges were cluttered with tenements, each building so close to the next that the alleyways could only fit those who were anemic. Nyx had told me that the capital city was once the only place that housed the Alderi, and that Hazarmaveth and the other cities were built out of a necessity for expansion. That was obvious when I saw its architecture; they'd done their best to cram as many people into as little space as possible, because they could not have expanded the city itself without collapsing the land above it.
The streets around me were well lit, both from fungi and lights made of magic and fire. Quellden was so well ventilated that the option for using fire was available to them. The buildings before me were ever increasing in size. There were many towers here, many of them as tall as the inclining ceilings to help support the cavern. Through tiny windows of the high-rises, I could see lights within personal apartments dozens and dozens of stories high in the air.
Nyx had said Quellden housed hundreds of thousands of people. I no longer viewed that as impossible.
The tornado had lessened in size, but it still tore through buildings like it was shredding parchment. I promised myself not to use such a spell here again; since many of the high-rises helped to support the city, I couldn't risk collapsing them.
The shapeshifters were down the street, clashing with assassins who had swarmed the area after the tornado had left it. A wyvern-kin flew above demolished buildings, unleashing fire into the streets below. When I heard a steel door bash against a stone wall, my eyes followed the noise, finding Anto leading warriors into a building two blocks to my right.
Because the beastmen had charged first, they were far ahead, and the assassins who came to reinforce the defenders at the tunnel came from either side of us, clashing with the warriors who were attempting to clear out tenements. The undead spiders scuttered over to them first, though the insects were more of a distraction than a defense. In the weeks since they were living, decomposition had settled in, and their exoskeletons were fragile and mostly hollow. They put up enough of a fight that the mages could hurry to confront the reinforcements, however.
As I rushed to the left to clash with the foes, I found undead Alderi running alongside me, blood still leaking from limbs which were broken and shattered from my tornado. Cerin or one of the other necromancers had raised the dead. Already, we were reinforced.
The side street before me trembled with dozens and dozens of footsteps as a group of assassins rushed to battle. I prepared air magic in both hands, before screaming at the warriors in front of me, “Get back! Defend the others! Get back!”
The soldiers listened, screeching to a halt before diverting to the right to battle with those coming through the other avenues. I hurried forward, alone but unafraid.
Chain lightning bolted out of my fingertips a moment later, scalding hot white-blue veins of energy snapping out into fresh bodies before bouncing to the next. Assassins shuddered and jerked in plac
e before collapsing in smoking piles of flesh. Some of the undead at my side were also hit unintentionally, but I could always raise them again. Before me, dozens upon dozens of women fell dead as I cleared out the street, only stopping when my ward flickered with weakness from being hit with my own spell.
I quickly regenerated the ward, unwilling to become a victim of the Alderi's favorite mind-altering magics. I dropped my palms to my sides, raising the recent smoking corpses. The assassins still charging faltered in speed and enthusiasm as they started to brawl with their own sisters. I fought alongside the dead, leeching both through and around them. The death magic did not hurt them, for they did not exude their own energies.
Crash! A few streets away, I heard stone rise violently upward as one of our earth mages used the element so entrenched in our environment against their foes. It gave me an idea, and I turned to the building beside me, my arms spread as wide as I could make them go.
Summun te golum. I repeated the spell in the other palm. The wall of the tenement began to crumble on its own will as the stone supporting the structure built two creatures of its own pieces. The golems pulled themselves out of the wall with sounds of cracking and groaning, leaving huge rectangular holes in the building which allowed me visibility into its rooms. A few frightened Alderi were inside, attempting to hide from the fight. Both men and women.
“Join us in our fight for the city, and you will be spared,” I shouted to them, encasing the stone golems before me in flames before they rushed into battle.
“Why would we join you?” One of the women spat, retrieving two daggers from her belt.
“I am fighting for equality of the sexes,” I retorted. “We will kill Queen Achlys and her royal heirs. If you—”
The woman burst into cruel laughter. “Equality? With men? Please!”
I reached past the broken wall of the building, death energy crackling from my palm as I stole the woman's life straight out of her body. She had just enough time to look panicked and confused before she fell before the others, dead. The two male slaves within the visible rooms went from looking scared to intrigued.