by Scott Duff
I jumped to the gate to let them out. They filed out singly without a word. As I closed the gate, Florian turned and said to me quietly, “Should you win against St. Croix, someone will be at the gates of the battlefield to escort you directly to your mother. She’s alive, but that’s all Cahill can tell us. I’m sorry, Seth, but please believe me when I say we did not know about him. I hope you do well against that monster.” And with that, he hurried after MacNamara. I watched them until they disappeared into another box along the narrow aisle of the Arena.
I sighed and sat back down. The field was almost cleared again. A few minutes more and it would be reset.
“You know what disturbs me most about this?” I asked as I slumped back in the chair to wait.
“That you’re good at it?” said Ethan.
“That it’s barbaric and still exciting,” said Peter. “Yeah, I don’t think this is something I’ll be trying to experience again too quickly, either.”
“That’s a very good philosophy to take. Make this a unique experience,” agreed Kieran. “That way, you’re alive on the other side. Come on, Ethan, let’s go get changed. The elves will have more complex magic you should see.”
“All right, let me try my hand at this. Who looks good to you?” Peter asked, briskly rubbing his hands together and smiling grimly at the field. The next set of eighty was taking the field. One guy in particular caught Peter’s attention so I zeroed in on him. A redheaded guy, just shy of six feet tall, solidly built. Black leather pants and jacket over a black tee shirt, he was trying too hard to look like a hoodlum, but he was evenly schooled. His energy flow was too structured to be a street fighter’s, too thick and evenly tuned to his body to be anything but meditative. At the same time, he had a few scars already and he was holding a few blades in easy reach. This wasn’t his first time at the rodeo.
His opponent was one I recognized from the restaurant the previous day. No one special, but he was there. He wore green paramilitary attire and his pockets were crammed full of stuff that couldn’t possibly be useful now. He had a lot of passive magic written onto his skin that made him creepy to look at because it crawled and writhed slowly when he stopped moving. I wondered if he had met the guy at the front of the warehouse. He might rethink the tattoo idea if he had. He had a few knives stashed for quick retrieval, too, and some of the ink was designed to deflect physical attacks.
I sized them up as they faced each other and the walls started rising. “Red’s got a chance if he can get around the inked defenses,” I said to Peter.
The first bell tolled. Inky already decided he was going to win and had laid out his plan of attack, snarling at Red as he took his attack position. Red was only slightly tentative but had a similar confidence as he mirrored his opponent’s stance. The second bell tolled and the massive influx of energy on the field occurred. On the third bell, Red latched on to his opponent’s shields and battered him against the walls of the pen, using Inky’s own defenses against him. It winded and shocked the man immensely. Then Red tossed him backward to the pen wall and shot a ball of magefire through the floor of his shields. The man was toast before even throwing a punch.
Peter barked out a laugh. “I think we just learned a lesson about fixed shields there,” he said with admiration.
“Is he okay?” I asked. The magefire I’d seen had eaten a man into a grease spot.
“It didn’t look lethal,” said Peter, still chuckling.
There was still a body on the ground. There wasn’t one in the cases I’d seen so I guess that was a good sign. The walls started coming down again.
“Anything interesting happen?” Ethan asked, coming out onto the balcony, shoes in hand, his long-sleeved shirt draped over his shoulders.
“Yeah,” Peter said. “We learned that if you strap a shield to your arm somebody will grab the shield and beat you with your own arm.”
“That must have been amusing,” said Ethan looking up at Peter as he put his shoes on.
“What was amusing?” Kieran asked, entering the balcony fully dressed, his still damp hair only slightly darker than the emblem embossed on his chest. I’d have to ask the brownies whose idea this uniform was. It looked good.
“One of our many-tattoo friends used a shield built into his tattoos and got beaten with his own arms,” I answered.
“A danger in rigid defenses,” he said softly, chuckling a little. “Learning anything?”
“I’m getting better at reading people,” I said, “but that’s about it. I still don’t know how to do what they’re doing out there. I’m pretty sure I can avoid getting hurt by what they’re doing but I don’t think I can do anything back to them.”
“That is why you have tools,” said Kieran. “And apparently they know how to be used to their best effect. I just don’t know how good that is.”
The field had cleared again and started to refill. There wasn’t a full eighty this time, so this was obviously the last round. No one in particular stood out here, but I picked out one couple and watched it play out, almost exactly to what I expected. Two tattooed men fought against each other and it was brutal and bloody and steel was involved. I don’t think the loser would be walking for a while afterward.
Once the field was cleared, the referees walked the perimeter once, then spread out over the field chanting softly. They exerted light touches on the energy of the field, leveling spikes and dips leftover from previous battles. The chanting, though, had nothing to do with leveling the playing field. It was all about lowering the power level on the playing field.
“Kieran, why are they doing that?” I asked. “I mean, the Pact says their grammar is horrible, but what they’re doing will eventually lower the available power levels. Why would they do that?”
“That is a good question,” Kieran said. “I don’t know. But since we are forewarned, let’s be prepared for the point when we’re the mouse in front of the cat.”
“Peter, have you tried charging that battery I gave you?” I asked him.
“No, hadn’t thought about it,” said Peter.
“Start trying while there’s plenty of energy floating around,” I said. “I’ll see if I can’t collect enough for a fourth.”
“How did the Pact tell you what they were doing?” Kieran asked.
“Not really sure, but it only translated what they were saying. It gives me a sense of it,” I told him. “It seems to be the fifth or sixth dialect off the third Elven tongue.”
The referees filed off the field in a chain, chanting until the last member left the field. Then elves filed out from either side of the Arena, Unseelie from one side, Seelie from the other. There was a definite difference in their looks as well as the feel of their power. The Summer elves were lighter in every way from their Winter counterparts, from hair colors down to their choices in clothing. It wasn’t a shocking difference, but definitely an obvious one. What was shocking was the animosity they felt for each other—that was huge and long-term, older than these elves had been alive.
Unlike with the human face-offs where forty groups paired off in enclosed spaces, forty members from each side squared off in a line and the field itself was used as one big enclosure as the walls started rising out of the ground only at the sidelines but higher than before. Much higher.
The first bell tolled and both lines readied for their first attacks on their opposite opponent. The second bell tolled and the pull of power was enormous, almost emptying the Arena’s floor of energy and immediately warping the work the referees had done earlier in leveling the field. On the third bell, havoc broke loose at an amazing speed. The elves used their power in a much different method than the humans did. They used it to power their bodies and weapons and they used their weapons with deadly proficiency. In an unimaginable flurry of activity as Summer caused plants, thrown as seeds, to grow in the chests of their opponents, while Winter froze it solid to crash down on Summer to kill three or four of Summer’s knights, then used shards of the frozen plants as
weapons again. Swords simply cut down others, some even while in the act of cutting down another. It was a gruesome event. Within minutes, the field was cut down to only ten, six Winter and four Summer, and the walls receded into the ground to show the devastation more clearly. The battle lasted less than four minutes.
“That was… nasty,” said Peter.
“Master McClure?” A warden stood at the gate, calling to Kieran.
“Yes, warden,” answered Kieran.
“I am your escort to the battlefield. We should leave by the end of the first level of combat, sir,” the warden said.
Kieran sighed heavily and stood. “I think we’ve seen enough.”
We filed out the gate and followed the warden.
Chapter 20
The warden offered to stop at an armory but Peter declined and he was the only one without weaponry. I’d seen both Ethan and Kieran pull swords out of the ether before and Kieran’s was pretty awesome. Shrank had stayed at the apartment apparently, which was good. I wouldn’t want to have to watch out for such a little guy even though I was pretty sure he could have kept himself fairly safe. He just kept a low profile here for some reason and I didn’t see any reason to argue about it.
When we disappeared into the stadium, I glanced back at the sun. We still had a little over an hour before noon, assuming time matched up and noon would be when the sun was dead overhead. The warden led us to a large room down narrow but tall hallways on the west side of the square Arena. Glancing through the doorways we passed, ours was a very small group. Most teams looked to have at least ten members of various sizes, mostly big. Really big. The army of “You-and-what-army” big. Each doorway had a warden posted at the door and there was at least one door closed. Farther down the hall, I could see other wardens standing idle in doorways.
“Are you sure you don’t want to visit the armory?” I asked Peter, after seeing some of those men. “Maybe for some kevlar?”
“You saw how the red-headed guy beat that man up,” Peter said. “I’ll stick to flexible energy shielding, thank you.”
“You’re implying you have flexible energy shielding,” I said with more than a little sarcasm.
“It does sound that way, doesn’t it?” he asked, lilting slightly.
The warden stopped at our door and opened it before I could press him on it. The room was big enough for thirty of us, and he took position outside in the hall, just as other wardens had done. The room had lockers with benches along one wall. Another wall was lined with mats and exercise equipment. The other two walls were covered in scorched marks and long scores into the rock below. Near the door, there was a small table with a large urn of water and food high in carbohydrates and proteins: meats, cheeses, breads, and some of the nasty purple fruit Shrank pushed on me.
Picking up a ceramic cup and filling it with water, I asked Kieran, “Do you know how the Loa are going to fight?”
“No,” he answered, “I don’t know that much about them. They tend to stay away from us, or so we thought. Your point earlier was fairly valid. If we can’t see them that well, they could be hiding just about anywhere.”
“How do you want to approach this, then?”
“Separating them from their hosts would seem to be the best solution,” he said, turning to Ethan for confirmation.
“That would be best,” Ethan agreed. “The energy flow from St. Croix was very one way from the Loa to him. Even the dimensional rift he created when he delivered your mother to Cahill came from energy from the Loa, not from the human body.”
“So you were able to look directly at the Loa and see more than the flickering?” I asked.
“Yes, but I won’t know if it’s just to that particular Loa or all of them until I can see more,” Ethan said. “He straddled more than one dimension simultaneously, his and ours and possibly others, I couldn’t tell.”
“Our best defense then is what we’ve taught you already,” said Kieran. “While it is similar to some forms that elves use, it has not been used before by humans and it will throw them off.”
“Let’s get ready then,” I said, gesturing to Peter. We moved to the mats and started moving through the defensive forms Ethan and Kieran had taught us the day before, warming up and stretching. We moved at an easy pace, stepping through each motion and gathering the power in the room and releasing it in the correct manner so that it flowed back over without touching us. Just what you wanted in defense, for your opponents’ power to not touch you. Ethan joined us on the second rotation. Kieran stretched during this and joined on the third rotation.
We stopped after the third when the warden came into the room. “Gentlemen, it is time,” he said simply. The anxiety was rampant in the hallway as the warden led us to the field. Another team followed a few yards behind us and clanked metal against metal as they walked. I couldn’t tell how many men were on the team as the first man took most of the narrow hallway, glowering at me when I looked back. By the noise, I’d estimate fifty, but I was sure that was nerves on my part.
When we broke into the sunlight, the crowd roared approval. The adrenaline rush disturbed me a little, but I pushed that out of my head. I was about to be in a fight for my mother’s life, for my life, and I needed to concentrate. The field was split into eight equal parts now and the warden led us to the sideline of the western most quarter of the visible side and passed us on to a referee. I’m not sure why I considered them referees since they didn’t decide anything, but they controlled the field and I didn’t have a better word for their job. The team that was behind us ended up having eleven members, not the fifty I originally imagined, but I didn’t get a good look at the teams behind them.
Kieran took a position slightly forward and left of center and had Ethan take a similar position on the right. He had Peter take a position much farther back and a little to his left. I was in between him and Ethan as far back as Peter, but I knew that wouldn’t last. He was trying to keep me in a protected hole. Sweet, but that just wasn’t going to work. St. Croix wasn’t going to let it.
The back wall started rising as the front started falling. When it was halfway down, the first bell tolled. This was the face off. I pushed my awareness out onto the energy plane as tightly as I could, feeling for the flicker that defined the Loa within my grandfather and was shocked to feel so many on the other side of the wall as it slid into the ground. St. Croix had fielded twenty men, all loaded with Loa behind them, powerful Loa, strong. More Loa than the twenty men could account for. None of the twenty men were particularly threatening physically. Half of them even looked emaciated, withered skin hanging loosely on their frames, gaunt faces barely showing recognition of where they were.
I took the first defensive stance and zeroed in on St. Croix and he fixed his attention on me. He set most of his men on attacking Kieran, five of them in a group. Three were slightly behind them. Five more stood between Ethan and Kieran, eyeing them both and another four stood ready in front of Ethan. St. Croix stood in the center with two zombie-like men in front of him.
The second bell tolled. I felt like a super-hero from a movie as I called the weapons forward: I armored up! Before the bell even stopped ringing, the field changed immensely as the Loa changed their mounts into more battle-ready creatures. We were definitely not expecting that. They were not exactly clear cut transformations either, but strange bastardizations of various creatures. St. Croix was the only one to remain human. The two in front of him were somewhat reminiscent of goats but bigger and with really long and straight horns. The group that I assumed as targeting Peter changed into bird-like creatures. Their feet changed into talons and their necks and heads elongated and stretched, forming sharp beaks. Their arms turned into short leathery wings with claws at the ends. The main forces changed into an odd mixture of lizards and animals I didn’t even want to consider. It was worse than any nightmare I’d ever had. St. Croix’s cackling was audible even through the third bell.
I fired the Crossbow in rapid succession
, twenty times, before anyone could move, scoring hits right between the eyes on each and every one. Day was in my right hand as I ran forward, watching St. Croix scowling and removing the Bolt from his head. Others weren’t as quick to recover, but only two stayed dead. The Loa had amazing recuperative abilities, apparently.
Kieran and Ethan took advantage of their delayed recovery. Almost in unison, they spoke a short stutter of words that made the ground shake and the air tremble around me. A circle of flames leapt into being on the ground around the two groups of five facing both of them, then rose higher and higher with each passing instant. Inside the circle, the creatures started to burn as the walls around them got hotter and hotter. The Loa inside shrieked audibly for help and rushed the walls trying to push out, only to crash back, seared and blackened by the increasingly hot wall of heat. The swarming Loa outside the circle clamored inside to add their power and aid their kin, slipping insubstantially through the firewall. The regeneration of flesh and bone increased in speed inside the newly created ovens, but the ten mounts and the furious swarm of uncounted Loa remained trapped inside.
Kieran and Ethan moved to their left, circling around their firepits to get to the rest of the men. As long as the fires held, we had more than half of the enemy down, twelve in all. Kieran moved toward the center when two large, blackened, and smoking figures jumped at him. As I ran after him, he twisted his movement into one of the forms we knew and pushed on their magic, changing the beasts’ momentum. It was a subtle move that looked as though it merely pushed them off of him and in line to attack Peter instead, but Kieran’s energy was wrong. His stance and position were in the wrong place for that.
The bird-creatures shrieked at the realization of missing Kieran, but targeted Peter now. They shrieked again in anger when Kieran pushed his final attack on them then ran forward between the oven circles, forgetting about them. The push was a kinetic force, a wall of air that hit them as hard as stone that batted them straight at me and away from Peter. If this was baseball, it would have been a foul tip into the stands.