Rise of The Mortokai

by D G Palmer

  There was one problem with Trinity becoming the bear. Sure, she was strong and powerful like an unstoppable force, but she didn’t have nearly the same sense of smell as the bloodhound, and she ended up blindly running this way and that, until she found herself at a dead end. Daniel and Nyriel climbed down as Trinity transformed back. Fighting their way out was now inevitable.

  ANJU GRIPPED THE STRAP of the satchel as the alarm gong continued to ring out. The sounds had woken Ch’tan from his trance and he stood up to face Anju.

  ‘Your duties are at an end, Shadow Dancer. You were meant to bring the book to me, now I have it, your services are no longer needed.’

  ‘That is good,’ Anju said as she stood up right and placed the strap over her head. ‘The owner of this bag wishes to have it back. I intend to give it to him. There is something else that you should know. The Shadow Dancers never work for free. You never paid for our services. You made a very bad mistake in poisoning us into doing your bidding. Now your life is forfeit as payment for that slight.’

  ‘Is that so? Well you should know that I won’t be holding back this time, like I did in Almedia.’

  ‘And now that my mind is not clouded by your poison, I shall be at my best.’

  They circled each other. Each waiting for an opening to strike. He was the bodyguard of the Undany royal family. She was a chapter head of the Shadow Dancers. Though their training had been very different they were both experts in the art of fighting. Clear cut openings would be few and far between. In situations like this, you needed to make your own.

  Ch’tan feigned a wild charge. Anju instinctively went for a low kick to the bigger man’s leg but he hooked his arm under her knee, lifted her up and slammed her back against the wall before tossing her across the room.

  ‘I’ve wrestled bigger and stronger animals than you, little one,’ laughed Ch’tan.

  ‘I am not surprised since big dumb animals tend to fight other big dumb animals,’ smiled Anju.

  The elf assassin was in no rush to get to her feet, intending to lure her assailant closer. And he duly complied. One, two steps then she kicked the door in his face before he could take a third. So much force was used in the attack that the door was left swinging on only one hinge, whilst Ch’tan was sent reeling back, clutching his face.

  Anju pressed her attack and leapt to her feet. With lightning quickness, she sprung onto his shoulders and delivered several vicious elbow strikes to the bridge of his nose. Although Undany had denser flesh, to protect against the cold of the deep, so precise were each of her blows that the cumulative effect of her blows eventually broke his nose, splaying green blood across Ch’tan’s face.

  The bodyguard groaned in pain, his vision blurred and he held onto the pesky little elf and ran at the opposite wall. He slammed her into it, but she held on fast. Like an irritating gnat he tried to swat Anju away. He swung her into what was left of the door, freeing it from its last remaining hinge, then against the door frame, still the tenacious elf held on and continued to rain down blows on the head of the Undany.

  Then Ch’tan had an idea. If he couldn’t get her to release him, then he’d just drown her. He held onto Anju and jumped into the hot spring intent on letting his Undany physiology do what his brute strength couldn’t, and kill the elf.

  IT FELT GOOD TO BE fighting side by side with Trinity again, Daniel thought. Just as they had done, briefly, in the Druid Glade. Nyriel couldn’t be as involved as she really wanted to be since her Unzany magic needed water to start. But that didn’t mean that she was completely ineffectual. She had been taught the ways of the sword from a youngster and, although she preferred not fight it didn’t mean that she couldn’t.

  As the trio forced back the marauding Shadow Dancers and they finally came out of the dead end they’d been holed up in, the princess picked up a sword from one of the fallen elves. ‘So which way is the way out?’ Nyriel asked now that they had a little breathing room.

  Trinity shrugged and shook her head as they found themselves at a crossroad. ‘I really can’t tell. One passage looks just as likely as another.’

  ‘Maybe you should change to the dog again,’ Daniel suggested.

  ‘I could, but I’ll have to boost my Essence a bit so I have enough for combat. I want to be able to help you out when I switch forms.’ Trinity had been so preoccupied with keeping an eye on their surroundings that she hadn’t noticed Daniel staring at her. ‘What’s wrong? What’s with that goofy smile?’ she simpered.

  ‘Nothing,’ Daniel replied as he stepped closer and kissed her lips before she had a chance to do anything. ‘It’s just that we haven’t had a proper kiss since reuniting and now seemed as good a time as any, considering we might be lost down here forever,’ he grinned.

  ‘Ahem!’ Even in a life and death situation Nyriel still held on to her princessly manners. ‘Perhaps you two could continue that at a later date. We have company.’

  More Krez elves were running towards them and Daniel instinctively grabbed Trinity’s hand an action which wasn’t lost on the young druid. He knew that she could handle herself and yet subconsciously he still wanted to protect her. ‘This way looks as good as any,’ Daniel called out to his two companions before setting off.

  They made lefts and rights as they ran. A few times, Trinity, blocked the passage behind them with thorns. The three of them could have stood and fought but as discretion is the better part of valour, they had decided to conserve their strength and Essence for the times when they had no choice but to fight.

  They took another right and Daniel immediately regretted it.

  Trinity ran into him as he came to an abrupt stop. ‘What is it, Daniel? Oh.’

  ‘Well, I have to say that I wasn’t expecting to be reacquainted with this place any time soon,’ a deflated Nyriel added.

  With all the twists and turns they had made; they had ended up right back where they had started. Ahead of them were the prison cells. And the guards that had sounded the alarm were still there.

  ‘Just wait until I tell Eamon Wolff that I knocked off some Shadow Dancers,’ Finn shouted at Tristan. She followed the Krez elves that had been freed from the mind control and fired off her guns taking down one assassin after another.

  ‘I thought you said that you were leaving the Thieves Guild?’ Tristan replied swinging his sword this way and that.

  ‘I am! Weeding out the competition can be considered my parting gift to him. To sweeten the deal so to speak.’

  Tristan laughed at his companion. He was enjoying the chance of exercising his sword arm in anger and not just practice. Watching the Shadow Dancers move, he could really see the difference between the ones who were still under control and those that weren’t. It made him thing about the one he had stopped in Almedia and he realised that she wouldn’t have been at her best then and yet she had still been a handful.

  ‘Have seen any sign of the others yet?’ Finn asked one of the Krez as a scout came back to regroup.

  ‘Not of them,’ he replied, ‘but there were signs of a skirmish, thorns and ice.’

  ‘Daniel and Trinity, it has to be,’ Finn excitedly said. ‘Let’s go! Maybe we can catch them up.’

  They carried on down another passage and soon they could hear fighting. As they rounded the corner, further down they could make out the figures of Anjunel Lynsu’unara and Ch’tan in vicious violent combat.

  Finn and Tristan paused and wondered what was going. Ch’tan had been missing, and they all believed that he had been kidnapped along with Daniel, and here he was. But why was he fighting one of the people that had been sent to rescue them. Sure, he wouldn’t have known that she was realised from the control, but surely Trinity would have told him. And where was she and Daniel?

  The Krez elves had such thoughts going through their mind. One their own was being drowned and as they approached the hot spring, their distraction was enough. As Ch’tan looked up, in one fluid motion, Anju took hold of his right arm, grabbed his left shou
lder with her left hand, forcing her arm under his chin. She then swung under him and placing her legs over his head, forced him onto his back and cinched in her arm-bar. He was strong, very strong, but when your elbow starts bending the wrong way, even the strongest are quick to fold.

  She couldn’t apply the hold for long since she was still under water, but it was more than long enough to be effective. He was quick to get away from the elf as she released him and Ch’tan almost leapt out of the spring, and grabbed the bag that had dropped, his right arm dangling uselessly beside him.

  The Undany royal bodyguard barged his way past the Shadow Dancers, manipulating the water from the spring to slam them against the wall. Then he was confronted by Tristan.

  ‘What’s going on, Ch’tan? She’s with us. She’s no longer under the mind-control,’ explained Tristan.

  ‘Get away from me you, surfacer scum! You will all be bending the knee to me soon enough. With my ally at my side Murias City will no longer be dragged into the wars of the surface dwellers of Ariest and then tossed aside and abandoned! Murias City will be the capital of Ariest!’

  ‘I don’t much care what you say or do,’ Finn stated, ‘but I know that bag doesn’t belong to you.’

  ‘Then why don’t you come take it,’ Ch’tan replied with a snarl.

  Finn levelled a gun at him. ‘Why don’t I just shot you and then take it?’

  Ch’tan charged the cocky scoundrel before she could get a shot off. And they briefly wrestled before he tossed Finn aside and headed off down a passageway. She stood up and dusted herself off before picking up the spellbooks she had pickpocketed from the satchel.

  ‘Impressive,’ Anju nodded. ‘I said that you had talent and I was right.’

  Finn grinned at the compliment. She had no trouble accepting them, in fact she wished she had more. Something red and gold was caught in between the two books she recognised it to be the purple and gold hand wraps from Kay Haitch, the swordmaster.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ she said beaming. She was about to unleash a beating on anyone that happened to get in her way.

  DANIEL, TRINITY AND Nyriel weren’t too impressive with being back at the prison cells. And they were less than happy to have run into the party of guards that were there. Daniel could hear the Krez that were behind them catching up so they decided to leave by the only way left open to them. The north passageway brought them to a whole new area, somewhere they hadn’t been to before and somewhere they couldn’t really stay for too long, for Nyriel’s sake.

  The cavern that the passage led to was simply huge. It compared to nothing Daniel had seen in his travels of Ariest. It seemed as if it had been roughly carved out of the underground rock and Daniel couldn’t help but wonder if giants like Skelmin with his Mephisto Worms, that Finn told him about, might have been responsible.

  He felt like he was looking down into the core of the faerie world itself. The passage they entered from and two others from the west led into unsupported bridges. They ran around the cave, passed through the rock at intervals as they spiralled down to a large circular columned platform which rose out of the depths. There was an orange hue coming from the deeps but the bottom was so far down that Daniel couldn’t tell if it was created by fire or lava, either way Nyriel was going to be feeling the effects soon enough.

  ‘This place is unbelievable,’ said Daniel as he looked around in awe.

  ‘Totally,’ agreed Trinity.

  ‘This is more than unbelievable,’ Nyriel said as she excitedly examined the rock. ‘When I was first brought here, I deduced that it was once the habitat of gnomes or, more likely, dwarfs. But this is something else completely. Like most archaeology on Ariest, the deeper you go, the further back in history you go.’

  ‘So, I imagine, judging by the depth of this cavern you’re going back millennia?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Oh, definitely!’ She enthused. ‘This is the work of giants, no doubt about it! Who knows how many more structures like this lay hidden beneath Ariest?’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt the presentation,’ Trinity said, ‘but we better keep moving.’

  ‘Perhaps we can go down and come up one of those other passages,’ Daniel suggested.

  ‘My thoughts exactly!’ Trinity was already making her way down. The stairs and the bridges were a free-standing structure with nothing underneath and no safety barriers on either side. It would be a basophobe’s nightmare, but then, anybody without a head for heights would suffer from a fear of falling if they stepped on this gravity defying structure.

  That would have been Daniel once, but since his experiences with falling from great heights, in particular over Almedia when he took the cloak of flying off and again when he was falling down the seemingly endless cavern of vaults beneath the Imperial City bank, he had garnered a strength against. That didn’t mean he wanted to flaunt it and take unnecessary risks, so he made sure that he stuck to the middle of the staircase, just to be on the safe side.

  They made it down to the bridge, it was barely one and half metres in width, and as the three of them walked along, they saw a familiar person run out of one of the other passages, looking over his shoulder as he quickly descended the stairs.

  Daniel squinted as he watched the person from distance. ‘Isn’t that...?’

  ‘The traitor, Ch’tan,’ finished Nyriel. The betrayal of her bodyguard was still a bitter pill for her to swallow. He had been a constant figure throughout her young life. She always knew that he hated her infatuation with surface dwellers and their history. But she never thought that he would take his separatist views to such extremes. It was like she never knew him at all. ‘Well, now he gets to pay for what he has done to me.’

  ‘Bad idea, princess,’ Trinity drew their attention to their passageway and saw several Krez elves standing there. ‘We wouldn’t want to be caught between them and him, especially not on this bridge. Come on!’ She was off.

  They sprinted in the opposite direction to Ch’tan, who had spotted them. ‘Get after them!’ He yelled at the Shadow Dancers just as faerie-dust propelled bullets whistled past him.

  Finn, Tristan, Anjunel and their Krez elves emerged from the same tunnel Ch’tan had. ‘There’s the little vekt!’ Finn shouted. ‘Hey! Look down there! It’s Daniel and the others!’

  ‘Good!’ Anjunel said. ‘They are headed down towards the platform. That will be our battleground where we will end this. Come, I have a short cut this way.’

  Finn being Finn couldn’t hide her exuberance at seeing Daniel again and she stood at the edge of the bridge. ‘Daniel!’ She shouted and waved when he looked up. ‘Hey, Daniel! See you down there!’ Then she followed Anjunel and the others.

  A smile crept on Daniel’s face. He was happy to see that Finn was ok. Which was more than could be said for Nyriel. The deeper they went to more she struggled with the rising heat.

  ‘I’ll be all right, Daniel. Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘Are you sure? Considering how long you were held captive; you weren’t submerged for that long.’

  ‘I’ll... be fine,’ she replied.

  ‘I’ll conjure up some rain once we get to the platform,’ Trinity told her.

  As she became weaker, Nyriel, became slower. Their pursuers were gaining. The knives they threw were getting closer to hitting home. Each time the trio passed a rock archway, Trinity would block it up with vines slowing down the Krez as they had to stop and hack their way through.

  Eventually, they reached the bridge that led to the central column. They discovered that it was partially hollow and they climbed the internal staircase which became an external one as it reached the platform at the top.

  There was very little protection atop the forty-metre diameter platform, as they found out when more knives began to rain down on them. Trinity daren’t stand still to cast the spell.

  Anju and the others came out of their hidden passageway, and directly into the platform’s column. They rushed up to the top to be reunited with their f
riends. The thrown knives attack continued unabated.

  Then a dog appeared at a passage entrance and ran towards the knife throwers. It changed into a bear and barged them off the bridge, sending them falling into the abyss. Then the bear jumped off of the bridge, transformed into a bird and glided to the platform where it changed once more into Archdruid Tavisum.

  No longer under attack, Trinity took the opportunity to cast the spell of Healing Rain. The magical drops of water were not only effective for Nyriel but also for the others that had suffered any injury. ‘You’re the last person I expected to see,’ she said to Tavisum.

  ‘I’m only here because of you,’ the Archdruid stated. ‘If you were my child, Gydion would not let you do this alone.’

  ‘Then you should know that you were wrong about Daniel. It wasn’t him that killed Cernounos and the divine tree, or who brought the Shadow Dancers to the Druid Glade,’ Trinity replied. ‘Just as I told you,’ she added.

  ‘That honour is all mine,’ Ch’tan said with an exuberant bow, as he and the rest of his mind-controlled assassin elves arrived atop the column.

  ‘Perhaps I was too steadfast and unwilling to listen to any other possibility,’ Tavisum admitted.

  ‘No one is infallible,’ Trinity said to her. ‘But you can make amends if you can release the other Krez elves.’

  ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have enough pellets for of them.’ Tavisum gave what she had to Anjunel. The forest elf and the cave elf looked at one another with tolerance and gratitude if not completely with respect.

  Anjunel had already seen Tessera among the elves behind Ch’tan and she kept one pellet for her friend and gave the rest to her Shadow Dancers to use on their comrades.

  The battle lines had been drawn. Friends had been reunited. Spellbooks returned. Swords drawn. Guns reloaded. Essence replenished. The final battle was about to begin.