by David Hair
‘Secrecy was required,’ Molmar replied, stepping forward and bowing. ‘This is Elena Anborn.’
Damn it, Molmar, free us!
The newcomer’s eyes widened. He yanked on her hair to force her to look at him. ‘I am Scriptualist Tahir,’ he said in stilted Rondian. ‘So, you are the famous Elena Anborn?’
She averted her eyes and the man, still gripping her hair, slapped her hard, making her eyes water and her scalp burn. ‘Speak when you are spoken to, whore!’
Molmar . . . I trusted you . . . Please . . . do it!
‘My Lord Tahir, have a care,’ Molmar reminded them all. ‘She is with child: it is a unique situation!’
‘How so?’
‘It is the child of a Souldrinker.’
Elena exhaled in relief. Molmar was sticking to the story. But if he’s really with us, why isn’t Kaz free already? She winced as Tahir pulled her hair again; she could feel his eyes boring into her.
‘Whose Chain-rune is on her?’ the Scriptualist asked. ‘I don’t recognise the touch.’
You wouldn’t . . . it’s Kazim’s . . .
Tahir released her hair and tried again to break the spell, then pulled back, puzzled. ‘It is damnably strong. Whose Chain is it?’
‘Rashid himself,’ Molmar lied. He stepped away and bowed again, casually laying a hand on Kazim’s arm.
He really is with us . . . Elena braced herself to move.
Molmar waited until Tahir looked back at Elena, then a gentle glow suffused Kazim’s aura – dissipating one’s own spell took none of the time and energy needed to dispel something done by another mage. As the three Hadishah magi stared, puzzled by the light, the Chain-rune vanished. The moment Molmar freed him, Kazim was in motion, rising in one flowing moment and grabbing the wrist of one of the soldiers, spinning him with brutal force to smash into the other. There was a sickening crunch as he burned his bonds away and slammed kinetic force at Tahir.
The Scriptualist flew backwards through his own double doors while Kazim roared his war cry and splayed his hands, smashing the two men holding Elena off their feet. Then his counter-spell knifed through her chest, breaking his own Chain-rune – it was a lost second, a necessary one, but it meant Molmar had to face Sadikh, Yimat and Gulbahar on his own.
Molmar spun, his shields kindling, then he was hammered by three instantaneous flashes of blue light; the first was deflected, but the second two, from Sadikh and Gulbahar, blazed into him at once. His shield coalesced against Sadikh’s bolt, but Gulbahar’s struck his chest and smashed him over backwards. The smell of charred meat filled the air.
Even before the Chain binding her vanished, Elena was in motion; breaking her bonds as she evaded a mage-bolt from Gulbahar and as her own gnosis re-engaged she hurled mage-fire back, then launched herself forward, using kinesis to pull her own blade from the scabbard at Molmar’s waist, dodging a bolt from Sadikh before ramming her shortsword at his chest. He was shielding, but blocking a handheld weapon with just shields was hard; he managed to cover his chest, but her other blow, a brutal kick to his right ankle, passed through effortlessly. She heard the crack of breaking bones and he collapsed to the tiled floor.
She barrelled straight on, knocking Yimat’s arm sideways with her forearm as she passed him, and drove her shortsword straight into Gulbahar’s breast. The Keshi woman gaped down at the steel, then fell backwards, the blade sliding free with a sucking sound. Yimat threw a kinetic shove at Elena, but her shields absorbed it and she spun, catlike, as he drew his scimitar.
Sadikh was sitting up, kindling fire in his hands, and other doors were opening along the corridor. Kazim had followed Tahir back into the room at the end of the corridor and Molmar was down.
Elena didn’t have time to wonder whether they’d gotten in over their heads this time.
*
Kekropius felt rather than saw his people slithering into place. The slopes above the compound were rough, studded with boulders and rockfalls, clear signs of neglectful security. Finding and moving under cover was easy for the lamiae, practised hunters, and they got to within sixty yards of the walls undetected, and settled in to wait. As the twilight deepened and Molmar’s skiff landed, they began to fret, anxious to be on the move.
His people were uniformly young: even he, an Elder, was barely twenty; most of the young warriors, with the exception of a pair of nineteen-year-old females who were too old to breed, were in their mid-teens and unused to patience. The Animagi who had made the lamiae had created them to die young, to avoid them ever becoming a problem.
But we became a problem anyway. You wanted warriors, Emperor Constant, and that is what we are.
The war-party broke cover, slithering faster than a running man towards the walls. Someone must have been paying attention, for the alarm went up almost immediately, with panicked shouts and ringing bells. Arrows flew, but the lamiae were moving fast and erratically, and none were hit. They reached the walls and began targeting defenders with their own gnosis, sending boulders smashing through the battlements and bringing down whole sections. Then mage-fire flashed and they started swatting aside the guards with kinesis.
Kekropius went through the breach he’d smashed with a gigantic boulder, moving at a sprinter’s pace. His spear caught the first guard he saw and skewered him. Arrows bounced off his shields – and then the defenders saw their enemy: not men but monsters. The resistance wavered, then those who could, ran.
He almost didn’t see the vivid blast of blue light from above; it slammed into his shields and hurled him backwards, tearing the breath from his lungs. He was semi-stunned and still gasping for air when someone grabbed him from behind and pulled him backwards into cover. Simou. As he recovered he glimpsed a man on a balcony above. His head filled with the cries of alarm from his kin, then someone shouted
It took him a few seconds to realise that the one who’d shouted was him.
*
Kazim realised he was in trouble half a second after he burst through the doors and into the most opulent room he had ever seen. It was positively dripping with luxury, from the smallest trinket on the elaborate marquetry table to the largest marble statue, a representation of a naked woman preening at her own magnificence. Not a traditional Amteh work, he thought, shielding as the current of energy between him and Elena flowed again, full of power and information. She was fighting in the corridor, outnumbered and under pressure.
I have to finish this, fast.
Tahir had taken up position to the left of the statue; he had dropped to one knee, with his scimitar drawn. As the Scriptualist blazed at Kazim with gnostic-fire, his shields went critical and Kazim realised, He’s a pure-blood! He concentrated on his shielding, and pretended to falter. Come and get me, Scriptualist. But Tahir was no fool; Kazim could hear him calling silently for help.
I’ve got to stop him warning the rest . . . He jumped towards Tahir with a kinetic-empowered leap, his blade sweeping towards the man’s neck – but the Hadishah wasn’t there; he’d whisked himself backwards and sideways, putting the marble statue between them, then he hurled it at Kazim with a kinetic push. Kazim caught the statue and sent it back, three times as hard, and the Scriptualist bellowed in alarm, barely wrenching himself aside in time to avoid the massive marble figure, which went through the wall with a crash, bricks tumbling after. The ceiling in that corner, no longer supported, wobbled, and began to come down.
Kazim didn’t let up; he kept attacking with blade and gnosis. Steel belled on steel, and then Tahir was gone again, leaping to the
far side of the bed. Kazim jumped over it too and their blades locked. They shoved each other, momentarily matched, until Tahir gave ground, panting.
‘You are Kazim Makani?’ he gasped. ‘Why do you fight us?’
Kazim ignored his question, driving him back with another flurry of blows, scouring his shields and almost breaking through. Tahir defended well, with scimitar and gnosis, but he was being beaten and he knew it. He shouted for help again, and this time Kazim heard responses. Then Elena cried out, and his heart almost froze.
Kazim could see Tahir take heart as someone burst into the room behind him; he counter-attacked, trying to drive Kazim back onto the newcomer’s blade.
*
Elena drove Yimat backwards, feinted high and went low, driving her shortsword into his groin and pulling it out in a great spray of blood. The mage folded over and slumped to his knees, but as she jumped free she moved into the lee of a door that was flying open. A black-clad young man came out and saw Sadikh writhing in agony on the floor, not just because of a badly broken ankle, but the dagger buried to the hilt in his back. Molmar’s dagger. The skiff-pilot was back on his feet, burned and moving too slow; he looked up at the young newcomer and saw death coming.
But the young man hadn’t seen Elena. She darted in, ramming her sword into his side and kindling enough energy to blast through shields – but he wasn’t a mage and instead that energy exploded in his torso. The wound was lit from within, charring the inside of his ribcage and breaking his spine; his consciousness extinguished as he fell.
She was long past recoiling in horror at such things. She dashed into the room he’d emerged from, lifted a hand and blazed away at the first thing that moved: a Keshi girl cowering beside a large bed where a plump white man was chained, naked and faintly ridiculous. Her mage-bolt hit the girl in the face, blasting it to unrecognisable blackened bone – she hadn’t been a mage either. But the man on the bed most certainly was: he was Lord Rene Cardien, of the Ordo Costruo.
There was no time to free him; a pure-blood would have Chained him and she’d take far too long breaking it. ‘Don’t go away,’ she shouted and returned to the corridor in time to see Molmar cornered by two Hadishah. She blasted a mage-bolt into the back of the nearest, encountering shields, but at least it made the man spin round to face her, leaving Molmar fighting painfully against the other. Her link to Kazim told her that he too was hard-pressed, pulling at her gnostic resources.
She sent three blasts, almost too fast to separate, at her target, and the third breached his shield, leaving him unconscious on the ground.
‘Hey, you—’ she rasped, breaking her shape with Illusion as she flowed forward to help Molmar. The pilot-mage’s foe was momentarily bewildered to see two Rondian women coming at him – then his gnostic sight engaged and he saw her truly, just as she struck out with blade and gnosis. He managed to anchor his feet with Earth-gnosis and countered, parrying her blows desperately, while behind him Molmar slid ungracefully to the ground.
She pretended to give ground, drawing him away from the prostrate pilot-mage, until the Hadishah man bellowed triumphantly and lunged.
Kids! Do they teach them nothing? She dropped under his blow and hacked through the frayed edge of his shielding at his knee, feeling her blade bite into the joint. The young man cried out in pain and couldn’t stop himself lurching sideways; as she realigned her weapon. She lunged, straight-armed, the sword pierced his belly and she wrenched it sideways viciously. He collapsed forward with a wailing shriek and fell next to his fellow mage.
A swish of silk caught her attention as the door opened between her and the room where Tahir and Kazim were still fighting. A majestic woman of mixed race emerged; she was dressed in a shimmering ivory gown, her hands cradling her swollen belly protectively. Her skin was almost black, but her hair was blonde and piled up on her head. She was festooned with jewellery, looking as if she was just going to a ball, but her expression was filled with hope.
For a moment Elena froze at the sight, until the pregnant woman was suddenly wrenched back into the room from which she’d come and a man with a crossbow emerged, firing at Molmar. He was barely six feet away – but the woman grabbed the crossbowman’s arm and the bolt punctured the opposite wall instead of Molmar. Before he could react, Elena launched herself at him, shoving the woman aside with kinesis and hurling a mage-bolt at the Hadishah. He shielded, dropping the crossbow and drawing his scimitar in one fluid motion; he caught Elena’s blow with a smooth parry then slapped at her with powerful kinesis, battering her backwards. His scimitar crackling with energy, his style all power and ferocity, he came after her and now it was Elena parrying frantically, forced to give ground and finding herself being driven back step by step until she was trapped against a wall.
She didn’t dare take her eyes from his darting blade. Rukka, he’s good!
Then the Keshi coughed, his whole body convulsing as the head of a crossbow bolt burst from the middle of his chest. He staggered towards her, then fell onto his face.
Behind him the pregnant woman – possibly the most beautiful woman Elena had ever seen, and that was even before she’d saved her life – was holding the emptied crossbow with a satisfied smirk on her face.
‘Darling,’ she said to Elena in Rondian, ‘if you’re here to rescue us, I am your blood-sister for ever.’
*
In the half-second Kazim calculated he had, he twisted and saw three identical young women coming at him, their blades virtually invisible. Gnostic sight showed the true image and he ignored the rest, catching her up in a kinetic hold and throwing her at Tahir, who was midway through some kind of Fire-spell involving the braziers. The girl fell into the middle of it and was immolated, screaming in agony and terror as she was torched. To his credit, Tahir went pale and immediately tried to douse the flames, but the girl had stopped screaming already . . .
Enough of this. Throwing all his strength into the blow, Kazim unleashed a kinetic push of barbaric simplicity and monumental strength: Ascendant’s strength. Tahir’s attention was far less on his shields than it had been, for his mouth was shaping the word ‘daughter’ . . .
A moment later he was a boneless pile of flesh and blood sliding down the cracked and broken wall. The concussion from the spell recoiled, and Kazim wobbled like a newborn colt, then fell to his knees. He crawled to the fallen Hadishah girl, but she was beyond help: her blackened skin was blistering and peeling before his eyes and her hair and her clothing were crumbling into ash. Her eyes were pools of yellow fluid. He could hear her mind screaming, a silent howl of agony that wouldn’t stop.
Killing her was a kindness.
He was pulling his dagger from her chest when Elena lurched in. ‘Kaz?’
He waved a hand in reassurance and clambered slowly to his feet. Then Kekropius slithered through the hole in the wall the statue had made, followed by his kin.
‘Kekro!’ Kazim gripped his hand in relief. ‘Glad you made it.’ He took a deep breath and looked back at Elena. His strength was regained, and his blood was up. ‘All right, who else do we need to kill around here?’
*
The pregnant beauty in the ivory-coloured gown named herself as Odessa D’Ark, a pure-blood mage from an original Ordo Costruo family, and the man she’d killed was Narukhan Mubarak, the younger brother of Rashid Mubarak al-Halli’kut, the Emir of Halli’kut. Narukhan was also the father of her unborn child. She was utterly unremorseful about his death.
‘They bid for me,’ she told Elena in her deep, fluid voice. Her dark eyes were examining both Elena and Kazim analytically. ‘What strange auras you have . . . ?’ Then she saw the lamia and her eyes bulged. ‘What in Hel—?’
‘Later,’ Elena said. ‘Right now we’ve much to do. But you’ll have the story . . .’
It took an hour to mop up the rest, and the lamiae did most of the fighting. All the senior Hadishah – Narukhan, Tahir, Sadikh and the others on this floor – were already dead, and without them the rest, low
-blooded and demoralised, either fled or surrendered. Kazim freed Rene Cardien from the Chain-rune – set by Narukhan himself, Odessa said – then the four of them went from room to room, freeing the rest of the prisoners.
After penning the remaining guards in the dungeons below – and remarkably clean and civilised dungeons they were, compared to Rondian ones, Elena thought – they turned their attention to the children’s compound. They weren’t greeted as liberators however, and the children clung to their Keshi mothers in terror, clearly convinced they’d be slaughtered. And even the Rondians were aghast at the snakemen.
Finally Elena, Kazim, Kekropius, Rene Cardien and Odessa D’Ark, with some of the released prisoners, convened in the central records office, on the ground floor, to take stock. Elena had already checked on Molmar, and set one of the Ordo Costruo women to look after him; he was in pain, but awake. They’d lost only two lamiae – the element of surprise combined with terror at the sight of the snakemen had been decisive and once the resistance broke, there had been little more fighting.
‘How many are you?’ Elena asked the freed Ordo Costruo, translating the Rondian to Kazim through their link.
Rene Cardien’s dignity and natural pomposity had flooded back now he was fully dressed. ‘We’ve freed fifty-three of our Order, Lady Anborn, as well as another fourteen magi.’
‘What are your loyalties?’ she asked, and he looked at her strangely.
‘To our Order,’ he declared, as if her question was ridiculous.
‘Though a few of us are rethinking our principles of neutrality,’ Odessa D’Ark glowered.
‘Some of us weren’t given silk and jewellery,’ growled one of her colleagues, a middle-aged grey-haired women also sporting a bulging stomach.
‘Narukhan dressed me this way, Clematia,’ Odessa snapped back. ‘He liked to fuck well-dressed women. Perhaps you’d prefer I was beaten instead?’
‘We were,’ a young blonde girl with a black eye scowled, then silently mouthed the word ‘slut’.
‘Enough,’ Elena said tersely. ‘What of the fourteen non-Ordo Costruo?’