“Probably.” Endrance admitted. “So what work am I supposed to do here?”
“I need you to examine the curse Valeria put on me before it spreads any farther. If I can’t treat it soon, I’ll be dead and of no use to you.” Jalyin stated.
“And if I refuse? You’re in no position to force me to do it.” Endrance replied.
Jalyin paused in rummaging through her pack. “If you refuse, I will die. You will eventually escape from here, but knowing nothing more about what she has planned for you.”
Endrance clenched his hands into fists as he struggled to think clearly. She had valuable information that could save him in the long run, should he encounter Valeria. But already, he was overburdened with information. She was dead, but wasn’t. Litches were very dangerous to begin with, but he couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of power that an Archmage-turned-litch would have at her disposal.
In fact, it seemed a bit too impossible. Endrance turned from Jalyin and lightly bumped his forehead against the stone wall of the chamber. Jalyin watched him with a puzzled expression on her face.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“You said you managed to escape her?” Endrance asked, his eyes narrowing as he turned back to her. “How?”
“What do you mean?” Jalyin asked, her hands flat on the table. “I evaded her spells, but she managed to clip me with one. I was able to injure her enough to distract her and escape. However, I was not able to prevent her from getting a sample of my blood and she used it to curse me as I fled.”
“That’s what I’ve been having a problem with, Jalyin.” Endrance replied. “If she is who I think she is, there is no way that you, even as experienced as you are, could have escaped. Not when she was planning on eliminating you when you returned anyway. A wizard is an unstoppable force when given time to prepare, and she had years to be prepared for that moment.”
Jalyin’s eyes narrowed at him, but she didn’t move. “What are you trying to say?” she asked.
Endrance touched a hand to his dagger as he spoke. “Either you’re still working for her, and this is all a façade. Or she let you escape knowing exactly where you would go.”
For the first time ever, Endrance saw Jalyin’s face pale.
Chapter 13
The resistance was light as they battled down the ramps to the bowl’s ground level. As they fought, Selene would survey the bowl as it was spread out before them from their height advantage, trying to spot some sign of her love or some clue of his location. Joven and Bridget were too focused on the fighting and didn’t search like she did.
Selene flicked her wrist as she twirled and the dagger end of her chain blade whirled in a tight arc around her. The deceptively strong, thin chain sang as it shifted. She released the grip of her other hand at the right instant and several feet of bound up chain expended their tension, shooting the dagger head forward two yards to catch a wolfman in the open mouth, the point of the blade erupting out of the back of its head. She yanked the chain as she took another twirling step forward, and the blade slid free, gobbets of clotted blood clinging to the dagger as she guided it into the head of a wolfman about to disembowel one of the breaching warriors that fought with them.
Above, the men were securing the area in front of the gates and positioning men along the edges of the cliff. They were firing arrows down into the invading forces as the breaching team moved forward. Behind the group of thirty warriors including Joven, Bridget, and Selene, were ranks of sword and shield bearing warriors. If the breaching team started to get overwhelmed, the shield men would assist their withdrawal behind their ranks and keep the wolfmen at bay while they regrouped and reinforced.
The tactic worked very effectively and, thus far, they had only suffered the loss of two warriors during their fight. One had been torn apart by three wolfmen who got under his greatsword, and the other died when a charging wolfman carried him over the side of the ramp, dropping him over sixty feet to the next ramp below.
Selene’s fighting style required others to give her wide berth, so she remained in the front lines the whole time. After the second man fell to his death, she took up the front near the cliff side. At least she could stay away from the edge and still engage enemies. In a worst case scenario, if she was high enough from the ramp below she could grow wings to catch her fall. Not that she’d want to, but it was an option.
At first she had been embarrassed, fighting through the monstrous invaders wearing nothing but pretty clothes and a cloak, but as she started to realize how easy it was, she started to feel more confident in herself. The demon’s blood in her veins started burning and she realized by the time they were nearly to ground level, that she was starting to enjoy herself.
Once they had cleared the landing and immediate surroundings of wolfmen, Selene had to calm herself down. She was actually aroused and excited by the fighting, and part of her wanted nothing more than to find the nearest handsome warrior, tear his armor off and-
Selene shook her head, reining in her other side. She still had problems with those impulses, which she struggled with every day since her demonic half had awakened. She looked up and noticed several of the soldiers staring at her. She blinked at them and turned to Joven as he approached.
“What?” she asked.
Joven raised an eyebrow. “You’re smoking.”
Selene looked down at herself. Steam, thin amounts of it, were leaking from her pores and trailing up into the sky before vanishing. The smell of fresh rain wafted along with the steam.
“Am I?” she stated, smiling. “Oh well.”
“You’re not about to…” Joven gestured awkwardly with his hands. “Fwoosh, are you?”
“Fwoosh?” Selene replied.
“You know, burst into flames? I’ve seen it happen before.” Joven explained.
Selene laughed and shook her head, tossing her curly hair. “No! I’m fine. I just… got a little hot, that’s all.”
“Does that usually happen?” Joven asked.
“No idea.” Selene said uncomfortably. “I would guess only when I’m really… excited.”
Joven looked at her skeptically for several seconds before turning. “Okay. I’m going to just pretend its normal.”
They managed to clear the area for several hundred feet around the bottom of the ramps. Shortly, dozens of fully prepared warriors poured into the first bowl, spreading out into squads of eight men. Well-armed regulars of Balator’s military, these men had fought plenty of skirmishes against wolfmen in the past. They were able to enter the first few houses and eliminate the feral wolfmen with brutal efficiency.
It had only been a few hours since the attack began, but they had already begun to push the wolfmen back. They had numbers, but because of the actions of a mage they hoped was Endrance, a huge bulk of the forces the wolfmen had inside the bowl had been decimated, leaving the trickle of wolfmen who were swarming into the area in the wake of their missing assault group.
Selene looked up at the orb of ice and shook her head. The thing hung suspended in the air, turning slowly like a glass bead on an invisible string. Occasionally an arc of electricity would dance across the surface, illuminating the hundreds of black wolfish silhouettes within. She shuddered and turned her attention back to the next onrushing wolfman. The rest of the barbarians had been quite effectively ignoring it, instead taking pleasure in the fight they had before them. She should too.
Bridget slid into her view, swinging with her newly crafted blade. The hardened edge cut clean through the forearm of the wolfman who had been swinging at her and impacted its head just beside the muzzle. Her weapon wrenched free as she whirled to take down another wolfman with an equally efficient and powerful strike. Selene arced the chain dagger past Bridget, striking a wolfman as it came up behind her. Her fellow Draugnoa winked, panting, before turning with glee to end another wolfman’s existence.
Selene fell into a steady rhythm of battle, the sounds of the warriors around her gruntin
g with exertion, cries of pain from the living, and the sound of her chain singing became as music to her. She danced to the tune, getting fully into the motion, her body swaying with the sounds as she whirled and worked the chain blade with a precision she had not ever allowed herself to get into before.
Before the day she had fought Jalyin and Kalenden up atop the mountain, she had never used her chain dagger to kill. She had trained with it for years, the only one who had incidentally been able to learn through the many cuts she suffered from her mistakes. She could hit a target from twenty feet, or spear a melon from a sister’s hands without risking cutting them. However that had all been training and practice under controlled conditions. The Ergkinoa were not required to fight in the military despite their training, and she had never pitted her skills against another warrior before she fought Jalyin.
It had been clear that her skills were not enough to cross the gap between her and the assassin. In case she returned, Selene had been training every day she could steal away. She had been trying harder and harder challenges. She was confident she could hit a target twice as far away if her weapon had the length; or spear an apple from someone’s hand without coming close to cutting them.
Now, in the heat of battle, and able to fully unleash her skills, she found the wolfmen surprisingly easy. Their movements almost seemed in slow motion, and her eyes caught every motion they made as she fought. The chain wrapped and unwrapped in rapid succession around her body and arms. Like an intimate dancer, she worked with her blade; striking down enemies before they even had a chance to react to her coming within range.
Selene had struck down yet another wolfman when she finally realized that the sounds of the men around her had faded. Glancing back, the rest of the breaching team had fallen over a dozen yards behind her. Between them, a trail of bloody corpses was left in her wake. Countless wolfmen lay scattered around her path, both dead and some still twitching.
Selene took off at a run, moving back towards the group as they finished off the remaining wolfmen they were engaged with. As she approached, Joven looked past her and whistled appreciatively.
“Gods…” he muttered. “What have you been doing for practice? You’ve torn through as many wolfmen today as the rest of us together!”
Selene blushed. Bridget, her chest heaving as she caught her breath, laughed. “Selene was always the scariest of the Ergkinoa, Joven. She just doesn’t like to show it.”
“She would scare me if I had to fight her.” Joven admitted, scratching the back of his head. “I heard you were good, but damn.”
Selene checked over her weapon for damage. “I didn’t think I had gotten this good.”
“Could it be, you know, the other half helping?” Joven asked. He pulled a hand axe from his belt and casually hurled it off to the side, catching a lone wolfman in the head as it charged at them.
Selene shook her head. She was good, but she still had a long way to go to be as casually lethal as Joven just was. He could be sitting at home having pleasant conversation, for how much constant battling seemed to affect him. “I don’t know. Maybe. Endrance said that my mother was a type of demon that didn’t prefer to fight, but that didn’t mean they weren’t capable.”
Bridget shook her head, hefting her weapon again. “It’s always the quiet ones, you know?” she said, smiling as she walked past Selene. “Now, c’mon. We’ve got twenty seven stunned men behind us and gods know how many more wolfmen between us and the front gates. I want to make this a one day victory!”
Selene watched her move ahead as the remaining warriors hustled to catch up. Joven leaned down and plucked his hand axe from the dead wolfman’s head. “She seems to have adjusted well.” He observed, wiping the clotted mess off on the wolfman’s hide before slipping it back onto his belt.
“I think a big battle like this is what she needed.” Selene replied, wrapping the chain across her palm and elbow of one arm as she prepared it for re-entering combat. “She can feel like she’s not useless, and she can get out some of those pent up feelings she’s had.”
Joven hefted the axe of his father and nodded. “Yep.” He replied. “Though the enemies are kind of pathetic, now that we know what we’re dealing with.”
Selene looked up at the scintillating orb of ice in the air above them. “I think that without Endrance, it would have been a much harder fight. We would have been up to our eyes in wolfmen every step of the way.”
“Yeah?”
“Look at what I’ve done. How many I’ve killed.”
“Yeah.”
“Now look up there, how many do you think he killed there?”
“…” Joven hesitated. “I can’t count that high.”
“Neither can I. All of those could have been down here, with us.”
“Damn it.” Joven grumbled good naturedly. “Even when we’re mounting a rescue operation, Endrance just has to make it easier for us.”
Selene giggled. “It wouldn’t be our Spengur if he didn’t have our people’s best interests at heart, even when he should be instead thinking of his own hide.”
The two moved forward, skirting the edge of the reservoir. The front gates were in sight, the armies of Balator were at their backs and she had managed to prove she was better than she was a month before. Things were already looking better.
Chapter 14
“So, what are you going to believe, mage?” Jalyin asked. “Do you trust me, or do you let me die?”
Endrance scowled as he already knew what he had to choose. “I’m going to save you,” Endrance started. “But understand that either method, whether you are here in earnest or out of manipulation, once we have helped each other, I do not want to see you again. Understand?”
Jalyin grinned. “Poor choice of words, mage.” She purred. “You almost never see me if I don’t want you to.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do?”
“Fine. I’m leaving.” He turned.
“Wait.” Jalyin interjected. “I accept.”
“That’s better.” Endrance replied, turning back to her. “Now, I need more power or else we’re out of luck either way.”
“I have just the thing you may want.” Jalyin replied. “When you fought me before, I realized that the bracer you wore was familiar. It can store power in it, yes?”
“Yes.”
“When I made my escape, I found that my employer still had its twin.” Jalyin said succinctly. “I liberated it, intending on using it as a bartering tool.”
Endrance’s back stiffened with tension. “Bartering?” he asked. “With who?”
Jalyin pulled a cloth wrapped bundle from her pack. The cloth was funeral linens, torn and spattered with dried blood. She set it down on the stone table and rolled it towards him. Endrance reached out and stopped the bundle before it fell to the floor. Unwrapping the cloth, he saw a familiar silver sheen looking back at him in the darkness.
“To barter with you. Power, in exchange for your help - and a promise.”
Endrance didn’t look away from the bracer as he reached out to touch it. His fingertips slid over the smooth silver surface without a hint of friction.
“What promise?” he asked.
“That you take what I’ve given you, what I will tell you, and use it to hurt her. I don’t appreciate betrayal, especially from employers.” Jalyin’s voice seemed almost hurt, vulnerable.
“If what I’ve already found out, and what has been hinted at in my memories are true,” Endrance stated. “I will be butting heads with her eventually anyway. I will make that promise.”
Jalyin nodded at him and gestured at the bracer. “It seems fully charged, you should be able to get your power back with that.”
Endrance opened the bracer’s clasps and flipped it open cautiously. A bit of dust caught between the seams drifted off of the bracer as he looked at the inside. He knew this one would fit perfectly on his right forearm. Endrance had never really questioned why he had put the first
bracer on his left arm; as they were designed, it was not possible to tell just from the design. It was almost as if he had just felt right, clasping it to his left arm.
He set his right forearm on the inside of the bracer so he could flip it closed over his arm. The metal was not cold; instead it felt as warm as his own skin. The bracer flipped closed before he could touch it, the clasp fastening instantly. An electric shock of panic ran through him: What if the bracer had been trapped?
The circles of script on both bracers lit up with golden light, making his eyes hurt and forcing him to lose concentration on the goblin’s dark vision and blinding him. All three circles of script lit up on both, and the gem on his right arm gleamed as the light flooded through him into the other gem. Endrance felt his aura replenish to full in seconds, the remaining energy spilling over into the empty gem.
As the two Crystalphage equalized their power, Endrance could feel the sensation of spellwork triggering. There had been a spell worked into the bracers that would only work when they were worn as a pair. He had been unprepared, and now it was running unstopped through his body.
Endrance dropped to his knees as the spell rifled through his memories. Moments in time flickered through his vision as it started with moments before and rewound time. Life was experienced in reverse at greatly accelerated speed. Days were experienced in seconds, and months in moments.
As the spell cycled his thoughts, Endrance could feel something in the spell change when it came to the point Endrance had captured Kalenden and then Anna’s imprints and power. It scrolled back faster and faster, and two more imprint moments were noted by the spell. It rolled back to the very beginning of his life, something Endrance had no ability to comprehend, much less sort through. The only thing that made sense was that at the point the spell reached the beginning of his life, it made another notation.
As the spell worked through his mind, scouring for every bit of imprinted memory, Endrance desperately sought to focus. He concentrated, bringing up the library of his mind. Painful seconds later, he finally found himself inside it.
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