by J. L. Smith
“Ah,” Balen said, stretching out his hands, as the seers glided onto the balcony. I could almost imagine them to be holy men, their red robes swaying in the light breeze, their great red hoods shadowing their faces and the wounds Rayder had inflicted. “Our sacred ones are here.”
“Aria,” Rayder whispered in my ear, causing me to start, for my attention had been so fully gripped by the drama about to unfold on the balcony. I looked at him expectantly. He smiled and shrugged, his hand touching mine slightly, “I love you.” My eyes widened and he added, sounding amused, “Not the best timing, but it had to be said. In case, you know.” I did know. It had to be said in case we did not live to see another day.
I smiled, for a moment forgetting completely where I was and seeing only him. “I love you back.”
He squeezed my hand quickly, looking at my lips as if he wished to kiss me and then directed his attention towards the balcony once more. I did the same, but my heart felt lighter, even as I knew the worst was yet to come.
Chapter 20
Balen had finished introducing the three seers by the time I turned my attention back to the balcony. They took their places in the center of the structure, their large hoods shadowing their eyes, giving them an air of mystery which I was sure they took great care to maintain. The chief seer raised his hands and the crowd fell silent, hundreds of people waiting in expectation. Even the bottles being passed to and fro, full of every kind of liquor, ceased their frantic movement from hand to hand.
“Oh, wondrous Mother Nature,” the seer proclaimed, his face lifting up to the heavens, “today we come before you, lowly as we are, and ask for your blessing.”
My heart dropped. He was not going to do it. He was surely going to continue with the blessing, despite Rayder’s threat and the suicide pill sitting malevolently beneath his collarbone.
“Oh, wondrous Mother,” the seer continued, but stopped abruptly, his head starting to shake haphazardly, as he gazed up at the sky.
Just then, the other seers, whose heads had until now been quietly bowed, raised their hooded faces up to the sky and mimicked the chief seer’s actions. They tossed their heads about from side to side in swift jerky movements, as if in some sort of trance. Hope soared within me, as I found myself thinking they could actually come through for us. I did not dare risk a glance at Rayder. I did look at Balen, though, positioned next to Bea and Grigor on the side of the balcony. The expression on his face spoke of some confusion and perhaps annoyance at the delay in the proceedings, but there was no suspicion there. Yet.
A faint buzz rose amongst the crowd, as we waited for the seers to return to us from their supposed trance. People began to whisper, no doubt hazarding guesses as to what the seers were seeing. It could not have lasted more than thirty seconds, but the effect was profound, the suspense palpable as the head seer seemed to return to himself, following which his sidekicks did the same.
He bowed his head, as if in dejection for a moment, his shoulders sagging. Then, with what looked to be great physical strain, he lifted his arms once more and said slowly, “Oh, wondrous Mother Nature, you have spoken and your servant hears. You have told us of the future and we, your servants, will obey your instructions and tell your people.” He raised his voice and, with confidence, said, “Hear me, today, you, oh people of the desert. Hear the future. This harvest is henceforth cursed.” There was an audible collective gasp from the crowd below me. I did not bother to look down. I was too transfixed by the words coming from the seer’s mouth. If I did not know any better, I would think he really had communed with Mother Nature somehow. He seemed so sincere, so desperate in his attempts to convey his urgent message. “No more will the fruits of your labor be blessed. From this day forth, the harvest will dry up. It will wither away until nothing but dust remains. Just as those who remain in service to the harvest will amount to dust. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. You will perish, just as your harvest will. Be warned, people of the desert, Mother Nature will not take kindly to those who don’t heed these words. Run from this cursed thing and never look back.”
Just then, Balen strode onto the balcony, his face a controlled mask, but, close as we were to him, I could see the rage in his eyes. As Rayder had predicted, he would not dare raise a finger to the so-called chosen ones before the crowd. I had no doubt, however, that he was already planning their demise, probably plotting how he could turn their words around once they had perished.
“Sacred ones,” he said, his voice seemingly calm, “surely Mother Nature will…”
But, we would never get to hear what Balen was going to say, for just then Neal pressed the buttons to activate his series of bombs. And the outcome far exceeded what we had hoped. Blasts went off in quick succession, first the underground tunnel exploding, shooting up rocky debris into the air above. Eruptions swept through the fortress like a runaway fire, taking off roofs and spilling through walls. Bricks fell. Tiles shattered. Statues tumbled. I stood watching it all, stunned, still, while around me people were starting to move.
Panic swiftly set in below us, some were screaming, some were running. I could not quite believe Neal had managed to pull it off. The fortress had seemed so impenetrable, yet slight, unobtrusive Neal had deposited his bombs into every corner he had visited, some with us and more, it seemed, while we were intimidating the seers. The screams below me grew louder, as a short series of bombs exploded in a hallway beside the courtyard, sending some in the crowd sprawling to their feet from the force of it.
“Get moving,” I heard a man shout, only realizing when several guards came running past me that it had been Balen who had issued the instruction.
Their feet pounded on the stone floor as they made their way towards the chaos below. And, just as we had hoped, it was then that all hell truly broke loose.
“This here be Balen’s doing!” I heard a man shout from the courtyard. “We be cursed, I tells you!” he added, breaking the neck off the bottle of liquor in his hand by striking it against the hard floor. Just then, a bullet hit him in the chest, before his weapon could be put to use. He fell to the ground, blood seeping across his threadbare brown shirt, the green bottle in his hand catching the afternoon sunlight almost serenely.
“Stay back,” the guard responsible yelled, a sniper positioned on a balcony above him to add weight to his words.
But, it was too late. The crowd was already a seething, angry thing. Another succession of bombs went off higher up in the fortress then and I thought it might be Balen’s chambers, although I could not be sure. My attention was on the crowd beneath me. Bottles were being smashed. Enraged, drunken men and women advanced on the guards, some of them falling as bullets struck them, but many more getting at their targets. Faces were cut. Throats were slashed. The screams of the dying competed with the shouts of the guards moving towards the crowd from the staircases surrounding the courtyard. Bullets rained down, as the snipers fired at people at random. Some fell to the ground, the red of their blood mixing with the red of the rose petals littering the floor. Some ran, desperate to escape the carnage of the courtyard. Some tried to hide under the dead and dying. Some turned on each other, as fist fights broke out and illicit knives appeared to add yet more colour to the sea of red below.
“Grigor, move!” It was Balen again, this time quite close to me.
It was only then that I noticed the seers, just beside the balcony and out of the view of the crowd. Their throats had been slit, leaving their heads lolling back so that I thought they might snap right off, as they lay facing the ceiling above. Grigor held a knife in his hand, gleaming with bright blood, some of which was smeared across his sweaty cheek.
“Yes, sir,” Grigor responded, militant, wiping the knife against his pants.
Balen, Bea and Grigor proceeded to rush past us, making their way down the hallway and up a staircase at the very end of it. They barely looked at us, almost having forgotten that we were there. It seemed they were out to save themselves
, leaving their people and their guards to die beneath them. Even the actors had been left behind in the ruckus, their arms and legs still chained together, so that they could not go far.
“Get into the seers’ room,” Rayder yelled at them across the balcony. Pointing in the direction of the room he meant, Rayder continued, “Fourth one on the left down that way. Bar the door however you can.”
“Better come back for us,” Aidan responded, lifting his arms so that the heavy chains clanged together, reminding us of how little they could do without us. “Balen’s head on a stick.”
Rayder nodded, before signaling to us that we needed to follow him down the hallway, in the direction of Balen. I took one last look at Aidan and the rest of the actors and followed Rayder.
We raced down the hallway, stumbling as we struggled to peel our knives from the soles of our shoes as we went. We were almost at the staircase where Balen had disappeared, when we were met by Saffron and Neal coming up a flight of stairs from the floor beneath, both of them armed with a heap of automatic weapons. Faces glistening with sweat, Saffron grinned when she saw us, tossing a gun from her pile towards Rayder.
“Compliments of those guards not doing their jobs properly,” she said, falling into step with us.
“Nice,” Rayder replied, as they handed out guns to all of us. It had been Saffron’s task to secure the arms we would need to take out Balen. I had always known she would come through for us. “And Neal,” he called over his shoulder, as he started jogging up the stairs, “impressive.”
Neal beamed, swiping at the perspiration trickling into his eyes.
“Plan of action?” Susie asked, as we followed Rayder up the dark winding staircase, which was taking us further and further into the cold heart of the fortress.
“Find Balen and his sidekicks,” Rayder responded.
“And kill them any way we can,” Saffron ended off for him.
“Right,” Susie said, “gotcha. No big deal.” She turned to look down at me momentarily as we climbed, winking. But, I could see the tension written on her face, the nervous throbbing of her pulse in her neck.
I winked back at her, “We’ve got this.”
She nodded briefly, smiling, before focusing her attention on her feet once more. It had to have been at least several hundred steps before we got into the open again, all of us huffing from the exertion. We came out onto a balcony in the shadow of a great stone turret, connected to a series of smaller turrets which zigzagged to the very back of the fortress. Each balcony, and its accompanying turret, was joined to the next by a simple walkway, held together only by ropes and rickety-looking wooden planks. At that distance from the ground, the wind rushed through crevices in the stonework all too fast, whistling eerily and reminding me just how high we were.
“Grigor up ahead,” Rayder said quietly. “Beyond the second bridge.”
I looked ahead and there he was, perhaps one hundred yards away, his back turned to us. He had not seen us yet, but it was only a matter of time. Balen and Bea were nowhere in sight and so it seemed that Grigor was keeping guard. If we shot at him from this distance, we risked not only missing the kill, but also alerting Balen to our presence. But, it could not be long before Grigor saw us.
“Let’s move,” Rayder said, making his way towards the first walkway, swaying precariously in the wind. It groaned as it took his weight and Rayder turned, adding, “One at a time.”
He hurried across it, a distance of not more than ten yards, all the while aiming his gun at Grigor, waiting for the man to spot us. As Rayder reached the other side, Saffron darted over the walkway, stepping lightly on the planks that seemed a little sturdier. She was almost at the other side when Grigor turned, finally noticing us creeping towards him. Rayder was making his way across the balcony encircling the next turret when Grigor opened fire. Rayder flew behind the wall of the turret, taking shelter on the side closest to us, while Grigor scattered bullets in our direction. Diving to the ground, I lay on my stomach, as Kieran fired his gun beside me. I was not the best shot in the group and so wasting my ammunition would hardly be sensible. Rayder and Saffron were firing their weapons too, causing Grigor to hide behind the central wall of the turret where he was positioned.
We could not see him anymore and for all we knew, Balen and Bea had joined him. Regardless, Rayder and Saffron surged ahead, Rayder taking the lead as he crossed the next walkway, closing in on Grigor. Kieran simultaneously rushed ahead on the first walkway, all but running across the planks, following which Stef and then Susie made their way across. I was next to cross, by which stage the shooting up ahead had started again. Taking my first step on the creaking planks beneath me, I refused to look down to the ground so far below. Instead, I fixed my eyes on Rayder and Saffron, crouched on the balcony surrounding the turret where we had last seen Grigor stationed. They were firing their weapons, retreating and then attacking, but I still could not see their target.
All at once, my boot slipped through a piece of rotten wood and I almost lost my balance, my hands cutting into the rope which held me up there in blind panic. My heart thudding dangerously in my chest, I dared to look down, yanking my boot through the broken wood beneath me. The ground below was an impossible fall, the planks seeming far too insubstantial a thing to keep me balanced in mid-air. Just as my stomach churned at the thought, another bullet rung out, grabbing my attention once more. Then, it went silent and, for a moment, it was only my hard breathing and the sound of the wind that I heard.
“Ray got him,” Kieran called to those of us who were lagging behind. “He’s dead.”
My breathing came a little easier then and I dashed across the planks, this time watching where I placed my boots. Rayder and Saffron were waiting for us at the third turret, meaning we all had to get across another walkway to regroup. They were sitting with their backs against the cool stones of the turret wall and it was then that I noticed the pair of boots lying on the floor, poking out from around the curve of the turret. I could make out the beginnings of two legs, but the shape of the circular structure cut off the rest of him, obscuring our view of Grigor’s lifeless body. He must have taken a risk, getting so close to his shooters. In the end, the risk had cost him his life. Rayder seldom missed a shot.
When Neal, the last to join, arrived, Rayder said, “Balen and Bea are probably at the end. That last tower is a lot bigger than these ones and there’s some sort of garden on the balcony underneath it.”
“Lots of places to hide,” added Saffron, wiping the sweat from her forehead.
“There’s probably an escape route down from there that’ll get them out of the fortress,” Rayder continued. “But, they’ll be waiting for things to calm down before they get out of here.”
“They’ll be expecting us,” said Neal, breathless from the activity.
“Yeah,” responded Rayder, “so we’ve got to split up. If we go across in a group, they could take us all down.”
“Then there’s no one left to kill Balen,” said Saffron.
“Right,” replied Rayder, “and that’s why we’re here. So, we go one at a time, like we’ve been doing, then we split up at that last tower. Kieran, I want you to find and man the escape route, so they don’t get away.” Kieran nodded in response and Rayder then looked at each one of us briefly, “You see Balen, you shoot. No questions asked. The same goes for Bea.”
I nodded, only then noticing that I was biting my nails nervously.
There was a moment of hesitation before Susie said, “See you on the other side.”
“Yeah,” Kieran said, “let’s get this done.”
We made our way across the unsteady walkways, all seven of them, and it was almost disquietingly easy. It was not so much that with each plank I became more accustomed to being that high up in the sky, but more that I kept expecting someone to start shooting at us. Below us, there was still intermittent gunfire in the fortress, but it was slowing and I imagined that those in the c
rowd were either dead or had managed to escape. Yet, up where we were, it remained ominously quiet, save for the sound of our boots scraping against the planks and the wind finding its way through cracks and crevices.
It felt forever before we reached the final turret, far taller than all the rest with a huge balcony encircling it. Unlike the stagnant stonework I had seen so far, this was an oasis in the desert, a garden of twirling vines and potted flowering plants of bright reds and oranges. There were statues everywhere I looked, carvings of nude, provocative women and men, which seemed a little too lifelike. Yet, they all gazed lifelessly ahead, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. There was something almost frightening about them, reminding me too much of the sordid goings-on that had taken place in that fortress.
Up ahead, Rayder inclined his head at us, signaling that it was time to split up. I did so reluctantly, watching him disappear behind a potted tree and a statue of a naked woman with an apple in her hand and a snake wound around her neck. I set off in the middle of the pack, choosing the opposite direction from Rayder. Of everyone, I trusted him to keep us safe, but I did not quite trust myself to make the right decisions should he be in any danger. It would be too easy to make decisions with my heart instead of my head.
Darting between statues, creepers and plants, all of them taller than me, and in the shadows of the huge turret above us, I kept my gun at the ready. My pulse raced as I crept past each statue, expecting at every moment that someone would jump out at me. It was still too silent, made even worse as I now had no idea where my friends were. Together, we seemed invincible. Alone, I felt very fragile.