by Rosie Scott
Azazel nodded. “So our plan is set then, correct? Perhaps we should relay the order.”
“Right. How about you move your best archers to the towers and call Nyx over? I'll inform the others.”
Our strategies were relayed to friend and soldier alike. Between the two armies, we had tens of thousands of the dead, all casualties of the battle thus far. Most of the corpses were a sight for sore eyes, because they'd been called to attention time after time, and had been defeated just as many times. Many of them were little more than shredded pieces of armor and flesh, and were unrecognizable from the people they once were. Decomposition had set in long ago for those who had died during our breaches, and the stench would have been overbearing if I weren't already used to the smell.
Azazel sent two groups of archers to the guard towers, with orders for five to be guarding at any one time for when the others needed rest. We couldn't be sure how long we would be pursuing the queen.
Most of the beastmen would stay outside with the necromancers. Many of the freed slaves would be joining us in the tower, as well as the few warriors and illusionists we had left from our initial army. Cerin and I would be the only necromancers going with the group up the castle, so we would need to use our dead wisely. With any luck, most of the corpses would be royalty.
As the various companies of our army moved into their respective positions, Nyx finally ran up to me, grabbing me into a hug and nearly sweeping me off my feet. When she pulled away, there was a huge smile on her face, the whites of her teeth nearly blinding when compared to the deep blackish-purple skin of her face.
“We have been together non-stop for...what, nearly four years now?” She twisted her lips to the side. “How in the hell could I have missed you so much? I should be tired of your bullshit.”
“Don't worry, we're all still tired of yours,” I replied with a smile. Nyx went on to hug Jakan and Vallen.
“I'll tell you what, between you and Azazel, we'll be able to take on anything,” Nyx commented, watching as the archer walked back to us from giving orders. “Under Azazel's orders, our army tripled in size in the span of two days, counting casualties and all. And you guys all made it through just fine. You're late, though. I'm quite bored of staring at mommy's tower without being able to kill her.”
Cerin huffed in humor beside me.
“That's my mother,” Nyx went on, pointing to a large statue of an Alderi woman standing in the intersection of main streets where our army was still defending. The woman was shapely, with wide hips and a large chest, and she protected very little with armor if the art of her was any indication. She appeared young, with no wrinkles or signs of aging, though I couldn't tell when the statue had been placed or if it was even accurate. One perfectly shaped eyebrow was raised in a judgmental expression. The woman had both arms raised above her head, crossed at the wrists. In each hand was a dagger. “Ugly, isn't she?”
I couldn't help but smile. Nyx's mother wasn't physically ugly by any means, but I could only imagine how her personality could get one to change their opinion of her in a heartbeat.
“Hideous,” Vallen placated her.
“You've been continually attacked here?” I questioned. From where we stood near the gate, we could hear battles still happening near the split of the rivers slightly north. From the south, few attackers came, probably due to the fact that the slaves my army had freed were still moving through the city all their own.
“Less and less over time,” Nyx replied. “When we first got here, it was a bloodbath. There were lots of defenders at the gates. The longer time went on, the fewer reinforcements. My sisters don't communicate worth a damn. Thankfully,” she added, after a thoughtful moment.
Azazel finally reached us. Behind him were hundreds of recently freed slaves. They listened with intrigue as the archer introduced us all.
“If Kai gives you an order, follow it,” he told them, nodding toward me. Azazel then looked to the gate. “Now, our first concern should be getting through this gate.” He pointed to its center, where the two steel doors met without any means of opening them from the outside. We had no dwarven siege weapons.
I stared at the gate, thinking of the blockade back in the tunnels. “Anto,” I called.
“Yes, Kai?” The orc replied from behind me.
“What percentage of steel is metal?”
“Mm...I'd say ninety-six to ninety-nine percent. Iron, mostly,” Anto replied.
“Thank you.”
“Why?” Cerin asked behind me.
“Surely, you remember back in school when we were taught to create our own spells,” I told my lover. “I have an idea.”
Whenever I'd wanted to transform the earth, I had always used the spell tranferra la terra ti, which translated to transform earth into. The spell worked regardless of the type of earth; I'd transformed sand into stone, and stone into sand using those words. However, I'd tried the same on metal before, in attempts to disarm foes, and it hadn't worked. But metal was considered a type of earth in elemental magic. Perhaps the spell was simply finicky. The language of magic was usually adamant about its usage. Perhaps due to the combination of ingredients within most types of metals, the word terra simply wouldn't work if the material was contaminated.
I raised my palms. “Tranferra la meta ti granula.” Satisfaction swelled in my chest when swirling clear magic rushed through the barriers. I directed the spells forward, one at each door.
Sssss... The steel of the doors slowly broke down before my eyes, dissolving into granules of silver which trailed down the doors into piles below. Among the silver sand were black granules of the steel's nonmetallic contaminants. The gates continued to leak, until holes appeared in each one, giving us a glimpse of the wide black steps leading to the front doors of the tower. From through a stained glass window, I saw a woman watching the doors corrode, before her face disappeared from view.
I backed up a few steps, waiting for the spells to break down the remainders of the doors. Turning to my friends, I said teasingly, “I knew that would work.”
“Uh-huh,” Jakan replied with playful disbelief.
“Now prepare for battle,” I warned, thinking of the Alderi woman in the window. “They know we are here.”
Shields and wards were prepared. Weapons were unsheathed. Vallen waited to turn into his blood-kin, but Calder hadn't ever transformed back to his regular body. He was thin enough in his lizard form that he would probably be able to maneuver inside the tower just fine.
As the steel continued to degrade into enlarging piles of sand, we heard doors opening on the other side of the gate. None of them came from the queen's tower, but she had many heirs living in the high-rises within the wall of the royal sector. They planned on quarreling with us before we could reach their precious queen.
That's fine, I thought, my muscles twitching in anticipation as the top section of the left door fell, no longer supported by the weakening metal below. Let them come.
I did not fear. I'd been fighting non-stop for weeks and knew the worst of the battle was behind us. The city was crumbling under the weight of its own rebellion. It would be ours no matter how long we took to kill its queen, but we wouldn't dally. We would not relent.
Crash! The left door fell, a victim of magic and gravity. As I yelled through the air with a lust for battle, I rushed through the gate first.
The front doors to the queen's tower were directly ahead and up the steps, but I focused on clearing the heirs rushing toward us from the right first. These women were loyal to their queen and had little hope of rebelling. I would show them no mercy.
Shing! A throwing dagger hit my shield, before falling harmlessly to the stone below. The first of the queen's heirs came in a mass, piling out of the nearby high-rises like water from a bad leak, pooling in the center of the incline toward us. In my blood lust, I'd left a break between me and the next attacker, so I hurried forward, thrusting chain lightning into the group of them.
The heirs we
re all beautiful women with anger creasing otherwise perfectly symmetrical faces, no doubt picked for their above average looks along with their hive mind mentality and combat skills. When faced with lightning, however, they all burned the same as any others. I forced the lightning through the first responders of the bunch, watching as smooth periwinkle skin was etched with scars before they fell. I continued walking through the first group, dropping the women like worshipers at my feet as I killed them as quickly as I reached them. I dispelled the lightning at the end of the first group, taking a moment to regenerate my ward. Nyx and the others rushed past me, eager to purge the filth of royalty.
“Traitor!” One of the heirs screamed at Nyx, as the two engaged each other in melee. As they fought, the heir took notice of the slaves and rebellious Alderi women following us through the gate. “All of you! Fucking traitors!”
The woman dodged Nyx's first few attempted hits, facing my best friend with spitting anger. “You would deny your heritage? You would erase our history?” The heir lashed out with her daggers, slicing across Nyx's shield, causing it to flicker with the hits.
“I would remake it,” Nyx spat back, launching forward with both daggers. The two blades stabbed through the heir's royal armor at the belly button, before Nyx ripped both arms to the sides. Thick blood leaked slowly out between the broken armor before Nyx pulled the daggers down through the remaining leather, tearing off that which supported the heir's stomach. The woman fell to her knees, her intestines escaping the wound amongst splatters of blood. The organs hit the ground first, still attached, before the body fell over them.
Black tendrils swept across the ground, burying themselves in dead royalty as Cerin summoned their aid. The dead women picked themselves up off of stone, rushing into buildings to chase after their sisters. Screams of rage and terror echoed out of open doorways as the heirs fought the brutalized corpses of the recent dead.
An heir which ran to meet Cerin in battle collapsed from one of Azazel's arrows through the eye, leaving the necromancer free to separate another woman's spine from her pelvis. The body fell in two bleeding pieces as the woman sputtered a few last breaths, before going still.
Movement alerted me to a doorway on my right, where a woman rushed out, trying to catch me off guard. My shield rejected her first hit, and I summoned death energy, leeching her life. I walked toward the high-rise, arms outstretched, taking life after life as the heirs attempted to come outside.
Shing! Shing! I spun to face whoever was hitting my shield from the back, coming face-to-face with a foe who had managed to sneak up behind me. A flash of blue flew through my vision as Calder leapt to my defense, rows of sharp teeth sinking into the woman's face as he latched onto her torso with hands and feet, claws slicing deep through armor and flesh. She scratched and punched at the lizard as she fell backward to the stone with the weight of him. Calder thrashed the woman's face, leaving it unrecognizable and noseless.
When he stood back up from his kill, he gave me a look from two red eyes I felt I understood. Thinking he wanted me to follow him, I hurried after him as he lurched forward and into the high-rise beside us. With Calder attacking with brute force, I supported my friend with magic as we fought through floor after floor of enemies, each containing one lavish apartment. When we'd gone through a dozen or so of them, Calder raised one scaled hand, holding it up to the ceiling. I supposed it was his detect life spell, because when no energy glowed above his scales, he dropped the hand and motioned for me to follow him out of the building.
We made our way back outside, where the bodies of royalty were scattered amongst pools of blood. Some of our soldiers had been killed as well, at the mercy of the superior skills of the heirs once their shields had taken too many hits. I fought among the recently freed slaves, refreshing shields and healing wounds between leeching from our foes.
The battle with the heirs alone lasted for many hours, as we made sure to clear out each high-rise before the Queen Achlys's castle. We couldn't risk being attacked from behind. When all finally became quiet save for the echoes of battle from our army outside the gates, Azazel used his alteration magic to search for foes. All was clear, save for the queen's tower and a section just behind it to the east, where hundreds of red dots were waiting.
Azazel began walking to the castle, and we followed. As we moved around the high-rises and our final destination was the only thing before us, we saw that a tall stone wall stretched from the side of the queen's lair almost to the next stretch of river, where it curled back around to the other side of the tower, as if it was a giant arena. As the archer began looking for a way to breach the wall, Nyx hurried up from behind.
“Leave it, Azazel,” she warned. “That is the crawler pit. You don't want to go in there.”
The crawler pit. I'd nearly forgotten it existed. The other two cities had only used the crawler acid when it was harvested and in vats, and I'd heard all of the acid came from the creatures here. If it hadn't been for Azazel's magic, I wouldn't have known anything was over there. It was deathly silent.
“How would you even enter it?” The archer questioned, noting the lack of gates from our view.
“If you're lucky enough to insult mommy dearest?” Nyx pointed up to the castle, where ledges must have been that we couldn't see from our angle. “You're thrown in. Rendered broken and paralyzed, so you can't run when they eat you.”
I stared at the walls, horrified by what was within. I thought back to Nyx's story of Jemia'h and the Reaping. The poor man had been thrown in the pit simply because she had shown him affection. Nyx had spoken of the event like it happened regularly, like the queen had found some sort of twisted pleasure in it. Thinking of it now, I didn't doubt that was true. Queen Achlys had been in power for years, perhaps centuries. It was possible she grew bored and found ways to amuse herself through the pain of others.
“What an awful way to die,” Vallen commented, his eyebrows dipped toward his nose with sympathy.
“Yeah.” Nyx stared over at the pit, her black eyes distant. “I guess I don't have to tell you guys to avoid the ledges.”
It was the first time Nyx had sobered over the upcoming fight. I stepped toward her, pulling my best friend toward me in a side hug meant to remind her she was not alone.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“Eh...” It was meant to sound flippant, but the word was dragged out for an abnormally long time. Nyx laughed softly, nervously. “No, not really. I beat the odds and left this place far behind me.” She waved a hand up toward the farthest reaches of her mother's castle. “But here it is.”
I squeezed her again. “If you'd rather stay here with the army, just say the word.”
“Pfft.” Nyx shook her head, downplaying her nervousness. “Not a chance. I told you I want to be the one to kill the bitch.”
“Then what are you worried about? Tell me how to help you.”
Normally, Nyx would have laughed and told me to stop worrying. Today, though, she only frowned as she stared at her mother's castle. “Achlys is almost four hundred years old, Kai. She is a good fighter. Practices on the slaves in this tower.” Her nostrils flared as she continued to stare at it. “I'm a good fighter, too. But I'm twenty-five. I stand no chance against her.”
“I'm three hundred and six,” Vallen pointed out. “Calder is two hundred and twenty.” He spun his finger around to the group of us, before motioning back to the others who would follow us into the castle. “Between all of us, we'll kick her ass.”
Nyx chuckled at the unexpected humor. “Well, but I want to kill her.”
Vallen shrugged. “We'll let you have the last hit.”
I gave my best friend another squeeze. “We will support you, Nyx. I'm not going to let you fight her alone.”
Nyx exhaled heavily. “All right. Fine. This is getting too sappy for me. Let's just go and get shit done.”
“Sounds good to me,” Jakan agreed.
Our group moved ever closer to the tower which had l
oomed in the distance over our battles the past few weeks, as if offering us one final challenge. I could only hope that when we came back out of the castle, we'd all be in one piece, and our takeover of the underground would be complete. Despite my confidence, I couldn't help but remember the times when all of the planning in the world could not prepare us for the tragedies which had taken place. All I could do was hope that today would be different.
Thirty-seven
Granules of silver and black pooled around my boots as the doors to the queen's castle dissolved. An arrow immediately shot through the opening hole, hitting my magic shield and bouncing off to the steps below, where the ammo clattered over stone. I reached through the widening openings, forcing lightning into the base of the tower. Many of the queen's heirs had planned on ambushing us on the first floor, and their close proximity to each other worked against them as their bodies provided fuel for the hot bolts of chained air magic. I fed the spell through the doors, before I was tugged back from behind, pulling me away from them.
I glanced behind me, seeing that both Cerin and Azazel had been the ones to grab me. A moment later, I understood why, as the doors to the castle fell in pieces, at the mercy of their crumbling infrastructure. In my rush to finish this fight, I nearly put myself in harm's way again. I tried to force my mind to clear. I could not allow myself to be reckless. I could not be the reason any of my friends were injured or killed today.
We rushed into the base of the tower, with the freed slaves and women sympathizers on our heels. The castle had looked so thin from a distance, but once we were inside, it opened up, engulfing us with its cruel size and beauty. Walls, floors, and ceilings alike were the shiny blackish-gray of stone. Glows of white, blue, lavender, green, and turquoise lit up the blackish surfaces in dozens of places. There were light fixtures on the walls, filled only with magical lights. Candelabras sat upon tables, and a chandelier hung low from the center of the ceiling, their flames feeding the energies of the magic. Pots of fungi brightened up the room in rainbows of colors, many of the mushrooms almost as tall as the ceiling itself, having been tended to meticulously.