by Mark Albany
“I just think that if we were doing something concrete to take Cyron on, I might feel…better,” I said, not quite sure what I was trying to say. “Is there something we can do? Could I at least go into the city with you on your scouting missions?”
There was a moment shared between them as they quickly and silently conferred on the subject. It wasn’t like I couldn’t handle myself if it came down to a fight, but we were in a situation where anything we did had risks, which meant the risks we actually took had to be kept to a minimum, no matter what I felt. I shook my head, knowing they were going to discard the idea, which I knew was the right decision.
“Actually,” Norel said, breaking the silence. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to do ever since that first trip we took into the city. Remember, Braire?”
The beastmaster tilted her head thoughtfully but nodded, her curiosity growing.
“When we got close to the Lancers’ fortress, we felt the kind of power Cyron was using,” Norel continued, putting the piece of pheasant down. “It was coming free from the fortress somehow. I’ve been thinking about that. Knowing the kinds of wards that were built into that place, and the ones Cyron added… They should have been keeping it isolated. We shouldn’t have felt anything coming from it, and yet we did.”
“And it was strong too,” Braire recalled, shuddering as she did. “Like something was coming out. Trying to get out, even.”
“There are underground rivers running through the entirety of that place,” Norel said. “Hundreds. They draw a lot of power from deep inside the earth—it’s why that dungeon was built there.”
“So, what are you saying?” I asked. “What do you propose we do, precisely?”
She gritted her teeth, blinking quickly. She had started to plan this, but it hadn’t been thoroughly thought out.
“If that breach is somewhere near the fortress,” Braire said, thinking out loud, “someone could theoretically reach into it, find out what Cyron is doing, and sabotage it without him knowing. It would be a delicate process, but technically, it is possible.”
“And the downsides to this plan?” I asked. I knew there would be catches. Nothing was going to be easy regarding what we were trying to do here.
“For starters, I would be leaving myself vulnerable to the powers Cyron is drawing from,” Norel said. “Vulnerable to Cyron himself, if he detected me. If I were the one performing the spell, anyway.”
I nodded. That was one hell of a risk, but I had a feeling more were coming.
“Second, she would need to be closer to the fortress than we should ever feel comfortable being,” Braire said.
“You were both that close before, weren’t you?” I asked, noticing that Aliana was staying silent during this whole conversation.
“For very short periods of time, yes,” Braire said. “What we intend would have us there for a good while longer.”
I looked at Aliana, who was staring into the fire. As silence ensued, she realized that she was the cause and shook her head, picking up a twig from the ground and tossing it into the fire, watching as the flames quickly licked up around the thin stick.
“We’re not ready,” she finally said, looking at her sisters first and then at me. “We rushed in to fight Cyron once before when we weren’t prepared, and we almost got ourselves killed. We almost got Frarris killed, who then had to save us all, and even then, Oro died and Abarat was released into the world. What is it you think we would be able to do against that now?”
“We wouldn’t be unprepared this time,” Norel said softly. “We know what we are facing, or have a better idea of it, anyway. And we wouldn’t be charging at Cyron head-on this time. We’re using subterfuge and deceit to weaken our enemy before we face him in battle.”
I looked over at Aliana, who still looked divided about what we were suggesting. I needed to say something, to give her more time to think about it.
“If we do this,” I said, picking up the conversation. “We have to minimize the risks of what Norel would be attempting. I assume you’ll be performing the spell, yes?”
Norel nodded in response.
“To reduce the risk, we need to make sure Cyron is engaged elsewhere,” I continued. “If he were there, doing whatever the fuck he’s doing, chances are he’d realize Norel was trying to sabotage his work, and she would be vulnerable, yes? So, we’d need to distract him.”
“So,” Aliana interjected, shaking her head. “We’ve gone from subterfuge and sabotage to jumping into the mouth of the beast and banging on pots and pans to keep him distracted.”
“While Norel is up to her pretty pointed ears in subterfuge and sabotage,” Braire said with a nod as a small grin touched her lips.
“It’s an idiotic plan,” Aliana said. “There’s no kind of logical reason why we should expect it to work, and yet we’d all be risking our lives to make it happen.”
“Our lives are at risk if we let Cyron finish whatever he’s planning,” Norel replied. “At least this way, we’re taking the fight to him on our terms.”
A lull in the conversation filled our little camp in the ruins of the old city as Aliana paused, rubbing her temples. From the way her horns were glowing, I knew she was conflicted about this. She wanted to attack Cyron as much as we did, but she also knew we couldn’t afford to risk everything at this point.
“This isn’t a majority vote, Ali,” I said softly, reaching over to squeeze her shoulder. “If you decide against it, we won’t do it. We’ll need your help it in it anyway, so if you feel the risks outweigh the benefits, we won’t do it.”
I looked at the other two and got a confirmation from each that they agreed. We were a team—if we were going to do something like this, we would do it together or not at all.
Aliana sighed deeply, shaking her head, and for a moment I felt my heart drop to my stomach.
Then she spoke. “It’s a good plan. Well, better than any other plan we might have come up with. there I just wish we had something a bit more solid before we actually head into the thick of it.”
I nodded, leaning in to kiss her forehead. “I’ll tell you what. We’ll sleep on it and see if it’s still a good idea in the morning. If it is, that means we’ll have come up with a way to make it less risky.”
Aliana tried to maintain her stony exterior for a little while longer before leaning into me, sighing softly. As the fire started to burn down to embers, I found myself in one of the beds with her. Norel joined us soon afterwards. Braire did as well, but she pointedly made it known that she was reluctant about the whole situation. Before long, we were all drifting off while tangled in each other’s arms.
8
We hadn’t come up with a better plan than the one we’d thought of last night. Aliana still thought it was a bad idea, and in all honesty, I had started to come around to her way of seeing things. Distracting Cyron was one thing, but the fact remained that he wasn’t the only powerful mage involved in this. So far, we all more or less knew what Cyron was after, but there had been no sign of what Abarat was planning—if he was planning anything. The elf had just come out of a tomb he’d been trapped in for centuries. The man either had hundreds of plans or none at all.
And yet, despite all that and not knowing exactly what we’d be doing to distract Cyron and hopefully Abarat, we still planned to draw them away from their plans long enough for Norel to find out what it was they were doing and try to sabotage it. I shifted my sword in place to make it fit better on my back as we all moved into the square in front of the Lancers’ former fortress. We’d managed to avoid the golems so far, since they’d apparently noticed their enemies were gathering in the forest and had started to move out toward the edges of the city in anticipation of a fight.
Which left the center, where the fortress was, completely defenseless.
It just seemed too easy. It was making me uncomfortable. I looked around the empty city, unable to shake the chilling sense of emptiness. I gritted my teeth, trying to steel my ne
rves as we approached the fortress. The closer we got, the more I understood what Braire and Norel had been talking about.
The air seemed thick, somehow. Like walking through porridge. Breathing required an effort that was soon going to become tiresome. No, that wasn’t quite it. Something out there was draining my will to keep moving forward. It wasn’t fear, but it was sapping the mental strength I needed to walk up to that fortress and make what might be the biggest mistake ever in a shorter-than-intended life. I gripped the sword, feeling it fueling me somehow, and kept pushing forward.
Norel had disappeared right after we’d left the portal, heading deeper into the city to find a spot where she could perform her spell. Aliana had gone with her at first, and would find Braire and I at the square when Norel was ready to get started. There was no sense in getting Cyron out and fighting earlier than was required.
“So,” I said as we found a hiding spot inside one of the nearby buildings. “Would you care to talk about what happened yesterday?”
She looked at me. “Yes, I was impressed with how quickly you’ve taken to controlling and focusing the power inside you. Now we just have to see how that training translates into actual combat.”
“I didn’t think so,” I replied, peeking out into the window, trying to see if Aliana had arrived yet. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, you know. From what I could gather, you were curious, and once we were finished it was satisfied.”
Braire sighed, rolling her eyes, clearly not thinking this was the time or place to discuss this, but I was in desperate need of something to distract me from what we were about to do.
“Ugh, fine,” Braire said, taking in a deep breath. “For one thing, I never engage in sex with someone for the mere purpose of indulging curiosity. Yes, there was a hint of that as well, but there was a tension between us, if you will, and our sex did wonders for dissipating it. For the moment, anyway. There was satisfaction, considering that I…ah…well.”
“You don’t need to say it,” I grumbled under my breath.
“Well, I’d spent the past few centuries stuck in the underworld with only an elf trapped in a coffin for company, so of course, it had been a while,” Braire said, ignoring me. “And I hope you don’t mind my saying that I thought my first time after so long would be disappointing, but thankfully, you more than lived up to what Aliana and Norel have told me about you.”
Moving right past that, I mused.
“Of course, I don’t mind,” I said. “Why, is it some kind of elf thing that men should be ashamed of or modest about their sexual prowess?”
“Nothing quite like that, no,” Braire said with a shrug. “I just thought it was forward of me to say.”
“At this point, I don’t think there’s anything that’s too forward, if I’m honest,” I said with a cheeky smile.
“Fair enough, but even so, some boundaries…” Braire started to say, but interrupted herself to quickly peek out the window. I felt the all-too-familiar power spike associated with Aliana’s portals a moment after. Sure enough, there she was, standing in the morning sunlight, wings and horns on proud display.
“Time to die,” I said, pulling my sword clear as Braire and I stepped out into plain view as well. Part of me hoped we wouldn’t need to get too close to the closed gates before Cyron noticed us and we could start running.
No such luck. The three of us standing there wasn’t going to attract the attention we needed.
“Fuck,” I said under my breath. We needed to do something. Norel had to be starting her work by now, so we needed Cyron distracted. I gripped my sword tighter and started walking toward the tall, forbidding portcullis, whispering a spell under my breath.
“Grant,” Aliana said, stepping forward to try and take my arm. “What are you doing?”
“Something.” I paused my chant as I avoided her hand. She was trying to stop me, and it was taking all the courage I had left to put one foot in front of another. I gripped the blade with both hands, feeling some of the power that was still in me from the day before flooding into it, lighting the runes with a pale glow.
I stopped chanting, having gathered enough power to perform the spell I had in mind. I took a deep breath, taking up a ready stance as I started going through a series of motions. I couldn’t focus while looking at the imposing gates in front of me, so I closed my eyes as I went through the motions I’d practiced hundreds of times with Aliana, letting my consciousness flood the air around me. It gave me a good view of the area as I flowed from stance to stance, pushing forward until I was ten paces away from the gates. I could hear movement on the other side, but it wasn’t going to come in time. I pulled the blade over my head and with a powerful swing, pushed only as much power as was needed into it with a low roar. My eyes opened just in time to see what I was attacking.
The massive black gates towered in front of me, but I couldn’t falter now. Focus, dammit, focus. The power pulsed from the blade at the apex of the swing and a blast of white light exploded from it, rushing toward the portcullis in a wave, growing larger and larger.
It crashed into the metal and wood frame with a thunderous boom, splintering the wood and warping the metal, violently bending it inward to the point of tearing into the wooden gate behind, leaving a gaping hole as the white power disappeared.
“Knock, knock,” I called, inhaling deeply. Thanks to the intensive training, it was easier to use precisely the amount of power needed and no more. A week ago, I would have used all the power I had and it would have torn through the gate and then into the building as well.
As a couple of golems came through the gate swinging spiked clubs, I wondered if maybe leveling the fortress with all the power I had wouldn’t have been the worst idea. Well, at least this way I had enough power left that I didn’t need to worry about tiring out in the middle of the upcoming battle.
I took a couple steps back as I watched Briare toss her pebble forward. The summoning spell called in her three darlings, who waited instead of charging into the fray as five more golems pushed their way through the gate, completing the semicircle that Braire, Aliana and I were forming outside.
“I’m having so many second thoughts about this,” I said softly, spinning the blade around a few more times as I took another step forward to make sure I didn’t accidentally hit anyone. Aliana and Braire pulled their daggers as the golems started to charge. If these seven were all that were in there, this would be an easier fight than I thought.
I looked into the sky when I heard the low, rolling sound of thunder. The feeling of dread in the air intensified to the point where I actively resisted the need to run away as quickly as I could.
“Something’s wrong,” Aliana said softly.
“We’re committed, now,” I reminded her. “We have no way to go but through them.”
I pushed forward, sending off a series of strikes of white light in quick succession, hoping that attacking would drag my attention away from the sinking feeling starting to fill me.
My first strike cut into one of the creatures in the chest, slicing upward through the head and knocking it to the ground with a heavy thud we could feel halfway across the courtyard. The rest of the strikes flew into the air, some hitting the golems, others careening off harmlessly into the walls behind them.
It wasn’t enough. I still needed to hone my powers when it came to this, I realized, steeling myself as one of the golems quickly closed on me, bringing the spiked club that was actually its arm into the air and with a low, vibrating roar, slammed it on the ground, crunching easily into the cobbles I had been standing on not half a moment before.
I jumped to the right to avoid it, almost knocked off my feet when the ground shook from the strike, but still managed to pivot on the balls of my feet and bring my sword down on the creature’s arm. If it had been an ordinary sword I knew it would have bounced clean off, leaving the golem with nothing but a dent in its mud and rock body.
Thankfully, the sword was made of something more
, the runes gleaming with power as I chopped right through the creature’s arm. I raised my hand, feeling the runes in my hands burning as I launched a blast toward the creature, hitting it full in the face and blasting its head clean off.
There was something satisfying about watching the golem crumble into a hundred different pieces, like it had been put together meticulously and in a second all that work had been undone.
Hells, for all I knew, that might just be what happened, since I didn’t know a damned thing about how golems were made.
I raised my blade again, feeling icy wind whipping around me as lightning flashed across the sky. The thunder boomed painfully less than a second later and I closed my eyes, the flash of light making it too bright to see for a moment.
There was someone standing in front of us. A man, not a golem. It took me a moment to recognize him. There were hundreds of runes carved into his skin. They looked like they had been etched with a knife—crude and badly made, some still bleeding. They were glowing with a sickly green light. There were even two of them etched into the man’s eyes, making him look all the more deranged and terrifying.
It was Cyron. It had to be. No other man would be willing to do that to himself. I shuddered to think about what the man was even planning if he was power-mad enough to deface his own skin like that.
“Fools,” Cyron said, and in that one word, I could feel the growing storm around us calming almost instantly. The dark clouds remained as well as the lightning and thunder, but the wind died down, giving the whole square a sense of eerie calm. “You seek to control the power of the dark elf, but failed to realize that his power is bound to my will. He is mine! And no other’s!”
I took a step forward, trying to force courage I wasn’t sure I felt. “I wouldn’t come between a man and his elf even if I could, but I think you and I have something to discuss regarding what you’ve done to my home.”
“Your home?” Cyron asked, tilting his head. The runes in his eyes flickered and went out, leaving just the sight of his clear blue eyes. It seemed that he was seeing me for the first time. “It has been my home for longer than there has been an Emperor, Grant. For longer than there has been an Empire, almost. I thought you understood this.”