“Two of the bastards got away!” Anger blazed in her eyes as she flicked the blood from her blade.
Aisha resisted the urge to step back from the huge sword. It glowed blue-white, so bright it nearly hurt her eyes—more than a dozen spirits clung to its blade.
“Did you see which way they went?” Hykos demanded.
Issa nodded. “That way.” Her finger thrust in the direction of the Temple District. “I don’t know where they think they’ll hide among the temples, but—”
“No,” Aisha cut in. “Not the temples. The Keeper’s Crypts.”
Issa’s mouth snapped shut, and she turned to Aisha, eyes narrowed. “What? How do you know?”
“I went there.” She shot a glance at Kodyn and Hykos. “I was waiting outside of the temples, when…” She hesitated. If she told them the truth, that she’d followed the cries of the dead, they would call her insane. “…I saw some men slipping through the shadows,” she lied.
The time would come when she would have to explain, but not now. They had a good chance of putting an end to the Gatherers once and for all, with Issa, Hykos, and the others.
“I followed them into the Keeper’s Crypts, down the hill and deep into the mountain. Near a huge statue of a man with a scythe.”
Hykos, Issa, and the other Blade exchanged glances. “The Crucible of Fortune!”
The name meant nothing to Aisha, but she nodded. “I saw more than a hundred there, but someone—a thief, by the looks of him—brought them a message.” She shot Kodyn and Issa a meaningful look. “They are working with the Ybrazhe.”
Angry mutters echoed among the Indomitables. Aisha glanced at them and was surprised to find they were all young, none older than Hykos and one perhaps two or three years younger than Briana. They had to be trainees like Issa.
“Damn the Syndicate!” the other Keeper’s Blade growled. Her gauntleted fists formed into a tight ball as she heaped a string of curses onto the Ybrazhe.
“They’ll get what’s coming to them.” The determination in Issa’s voice matched her grim expression. “But right now, we’ve got a nest of Gatherers to root out. Hykos, you’re coming with me and—”
“Into the Crypts?” This came from one of the Indomitables behind Issa. “What about the living dead? The Stumblers who come to life after dark? I’d rather not face those, thank you!”
“Which is exactly why the Gatherers have remained hidden all this time.” Issa’s expression had grown pensive. “They’re hiding in the one place no one thought to look for them. Until now.” She turned to the third Blade. “Etai, you’re staying here to keep an eye on Briana.”
“What?” The Blade’s eyebrows shot up. “But you said Lady Callista—”
“Entrusted us with the mission of keeping Briana safe.” A meaningful look flashed in Issa’s eyes. Though the meaning was lost to Aisha, the girl, Etai, seemed to understand. “Hykos and I will take the Indomitables into the Crypts and see what we can do about the Gatherers.”
“There were more than a hundred. Maybe a hundred and fifty,” Aisha said, trying to remember how many she’d seen. “It looked like a base camp or hideout.”
“Good.” Issa nodded. “If the numbers are bad and we’re too outnumbered, we’ll hang back and keep an eye on things until we can get reinforcements. But right now, we’ve got their location, and I’ll be damned if I let them slip through our fingers again.”
“Agreed,” Hykos said. He turned to Etai. “Keep them safe until we return, and I will make personally certain that Lady Callista knows the part you played in tonight’s victory.”
That seemed to cheer up the young girl. “Yes, Archateros.” She saluted, then turned a smile on Issa. “Make the bastards pay!”
Issa’s expression grew fierce. “Damned right!” She turned her piercing eyes on Kodyn and Aisha. “When I return, we must get you to Lady Callista before noon.”
Kodyn arched an eyebrow. “Noon?”
Issa glanced at her Indomitables, Etai, and Hykos. After a moment of hesitation, she drew Aisha and Kodyn aside. “The Lady of Blades says that if we don’t make our move before the Councilor is anointed at high noon in the Hall of the Beyond, it will be too late.”
Aisha sucked in a breath. Too late? Likely that meant the Necroseti and the Keeper’s Council would use their power and the strength of their temple walls to shield Angrak.
Kodyn frowned. “Then I’ll go now.” He patted his pocket. “I’ve got what we need to convict him. I can ask for an audience with Lady Ca—”
“No!” The forcefulness of Issa’s hiss surprised Aisha. The Keeper’s Blade glanced around, as if danger lurked in every shadow. “We can’t risk anyone leaking the information to the Necroseti before Lady Callista is ready to move. No one will question your presence if you’re with me, but alone, a foreigner, you’ll stick out like an ox in a pastry shop.”
Aisha grinned at the mental image of the broad-shouldered young man bumbling through stacks of delicate baked goods.
“Fine,” Kodyn said, half-growl, half-sigh. “But the minute you’re done with these Gatherers, you get back here so we can get the information to Lady Callista immediately.”
“I’ll be here.” With a nod, Issa turned on her heel to face her patrol. “Indomitables, fall in! To the Keeper’s Crypts, double-time!”
Aisha watched Issa, Hykos, and the Indomitables marching west, toward the Keeper’s Crypts. A part of her wanted to go with them—to be there when the Gatherers were brought down, to help the spirits find their vengeance—but she knew her place was here, with her friends.
Yet she couldn’t help feeling somehow…different. Something had changed tonight. She had controlled the spirits, had used their power consciously. Her Umoyahlebe gift had saved the lives of her friends once more and she had wielded the Kish’aa.
Hope surged within her. There was still so much she didn’t understand about being a Spirit Whisperer, but this, at least, she could manage. The spirits answered her call just as she answered theirs. Her true power lay in hearing their cries and convincing them to help her help them. A strange symbiosis, yet her father’s words made perfect sense.
“A Spirit Whisperer can gather the heat unto himself until he becomes the fire,” he’d told her. She had felt that fire tonight—had become that fire. And it had saved her friends.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Issa tensed at Nysin’s yelp from two ranks behind her. She, too, had seen the two shambling figures lurching between the tombstones, but the young Mahjuri man was clearly far more superstitious than her.
“No, Nysin,” she growled before he could complain, “they’re not the reanimated dead you’re so worried about. Just a pair of drunks or Deadeners that got lost in the Crypts.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Nysin mumbled, loud enough that she could hear.
“Oh, grow a pair, Nysin!” Enyera snapped, and Issa heard a clank like a mailed fist punching an armored shoulder. Not the sort of martial decorum she ought to expect from an Indomitable, but after what they’d just endured, she was willing to let it slide.
The tightness in her chest had steadily grown the deeper they went into the Keeper’s Crypts. Like most Earaqi, her Saba and Savta had raised her to revere and honor the dead. She lacked many of the other low-caste superstitions, but a part of her wondered where among all these gravestones, mausoleums, and sarcophagi she might find the names of her parents etched into stone.
Once again, her mind went to the Pharus’ words. “Strike first, strike true.” Her grandfather’s words, coming from the mouth of Shalandra’s ruler. There had to be a good story behind that—she just needed to find a time and place to pose the question to the Pharus.
Her eyes went to Hykos, marching along beside her. The Archateros might know how to find out about her parents if they had been Blades, as she suspected. Yet she pushed the thought aside. She could delve into the mystery of her past later—now, they had Gatherers to hunt.
She had s
een Gatherers moving near the tomb. Though she hadn’t recognized them as cultists at the time, she’d spotted men with those strange tattoos coming out of the Keeper’s Crypts.
I should have thought to look there! She cursed herself for not putting the pieces together after the attack on the Pharus. At least she could make up for it now. By morning light, the cultists would be no more. She, Hykos, and the Indomitables would deal with the Gatherers once and for all.
She held up a fist to stop her patrol and turned to Hykos. “On your lead, Archateros.” As her superior and the more experienced Blade, she expected he’d want to lead the raid.
Hykos fixed her with a musing look and, after a moment, shook his head. “Lady Callista entrusted you with this mission, so it is yours to command.” A wry grin tugged at his lips. “Consider this a part of your training.”
Issa saluted. “Yes, Archateros.” The tightness in her chest suddenly grew nearly suffocating, and a burden settled onto her shoulders. It was one thing to command a patrol of Indomitables to march down the street, but another thing entirely to lead them into battle. Not in a training yard, facing comrades armed with dulled blades, or in an ambush to catch poorly armed enemies unaware. The stakes of this battle were real; people she commanded could end up dead, and her along with them.
She swallowed the surge of anxiety. “Slow and quiet,” she told her Indomitables in the most confident voice she could muster. “There are two paths that approach the Crucible of Fortune. Nysin, Enyera, Rilith, Viddan, Ket, you’re with me on the southeast path. The rest of you, accompany the Archateros to block off the north.”
Hykos nodded, signaling agreement and encouragement in his eyes.
“If there are too many of them, we watch and wait,” Issa continued. “I’ll send runners to find the nearest patrol, and Enyera, I want you to get up to the Defender’s Tier and alert Sentinel Imale to the situation. Get as many Indomitables as we need down here, then get to the Citadel of Stone and make sure Lady Callista gets word as well.”
Enyera had proven herself the fastest of their lot, and a competent fighter. Issa trusted her to reach the Indomitables’ superior officer with all haste and get reinforcements.
“We’ve a chance to stop the Gatherers here, now, once and for all.” Issa raised a clenched fist. “The future of Shalandra rests on our shoulders tonight.” Her grandfather’s words—echoed by the Pharus—flashed through her mind. “Strike first, strike true.”
Hykos smiled. “Well said.” With a nod, he turned and slipped west, leading half of Issa’s ten-man patrol into the darkness of the Keeper’s Crypts.
Issa glanced at the remaining five: Nysin the complainer, Enyera and Rilith her two fleet-footed Earaqi, Viddan the stoic fighter, and Ket the…well, the young Kabili trainee hadn’t done much to stand out. All five of them bore bruises and cuts from their battle beside her in the Blades’ training yard, yet their expression revealed confidence. Not only in their skills, but in her command. The burden grew a bit heavier at that realization.
“Let’s do this,” she said in a quiet voice.
She led them through the Keeper’s Crypts as quietly as they could manage in their half-plate mail. On the Artisan’s Tier, the graves of the intellectual Zadii and industrial Intaji revealed craftsmanship that every low-caste Shalandran would envy. The tombs of the Venerated, the priests that served what the Necroseti called the “lesser gods of Einan”—all of the Thirteen aside from the Long Keeper, god of death—were shaped into lavish resting places that reflected their service to their particular deity. Intaji stonemasons labored on the mausoleums and obelisks of their deceased with an artisan’s attention to detail.
But as they descended the mountain, the tombs soon grew simpler—sarcophagi and coffins carved from plain stone, free of costly adornments. Her eyes roamed over the simple engravings and names etched into the gravestones, as if somehow her parents’ graves would suddenly appear before her. It was with effort that she pushed aside thoughts of the father and mother she’d never known to focus on the mission at hand.
According to Aisha, the Gatherers had chosen the Crucible of Fortune as their base of operations. A good choice, given the sheer size of the statue. It would provide ample cover for their fires and lanterns, and lay far enough into the depths of the Crypts that the Indomitable patrols never passed that way.
The sixty-foot statue had been erected in honor of Enwan, the hero of the Battle of Fortune’s Pass. Fortune’s Pass was a narrow gap between Zahiran and Dalmisa, the mountains to the east and north of Alshuruq. Fourteen centuries earlier, during the Red Rebellion, the Zahirani clans had come dangerously close to defeating the Shalandran forces guarding the entrances to the shalanite mines on the northern slopes of Alshuruq. An army of two hundred Indomitables had faced more than twenty thousand tribesmen, with the nearest reinforcements days away.
Enwan, an Earaqi laborer working the mines, had watched the Zahirani clans whittling down the Indomitables until only twenty of the original two hundred remained. He had been the first to join the defense of Fortune’s Pass, and his actions led the rest of the miners to do likewise. Though Enwan fell in the bloody battle that ensued, the miners and remaining Indomitables held the pass long enough to receive reinforcements. Nearly one-third of the Zahirani tribesmen fell in that battle and the Red Rebellion ended a week later.
Pharus Nofre-kat the Bloody had wanted to erect a statue in his honor, but the Earaqi had refused. Instead, they took a collection of everyone on the Cultivator’s Tier to afford the monument. Pharus Nofre-kat ultimately established the law that Earaqi, Mahjuri, and Kabili could be chosen to join the Indomitables and Keeper’s Blades, thereby earning a higher rank for themselves and their families. All because of one brave miner willing to die for his country.
Once, long ago, her Saba and Savta brought her to see it on the annual Fortune Celebration, an Earaqi festivity commemorating Enwan. She’d been too young to know the letters etched into the statue’s metal plaque, but her Saba had read them to her. “In the crucible of Fortune’s Pass, one man’s courage changed the course of history.”
As with so many Earaqi, it had instilled in Issa the hope that she could one day escape the confines of her caste. The memory of that stern face and sharp pickaxe had driven her as she trained with Killian. In a way, Enwan had played a role in her being here this night.
Issa crouched in the shadows of a plain obelisk and studied the camp spread out around the base of the statue. Men and women clad in the same clothing as the assassins that had just attacked Briana’s house huddled around the fires and coal-burning braziers that dotted the cleared space on the western side of the Crucible of Fortune. Crude shelters of blankets strung between nearby headstones indicated that this truly was the Gatherer’s hideout.
But as Issa counted the enemies, her brow furrowed. So few? Aisha had spoken of hundreds, yet she could see no more than thirty. Added to the number that had fallen in the melee outside Briana’s house, that number was closer to seventy.
Did Aisha make a mistake? In her training to become a Keeper’s Blade, Issa had learned the rudiments of scouting and estimating the numbers of an enemy force. Elder Dyrkton had emphasized the importance of an accurate count, yet made it clear that even the most level-headed scout could make a mistake. Fear tended to inflate the size of one’s foes.
Whatever the case, Issa found herself faced with a new question: Do I attack or hold?
She’d prepared to sit tight and keep an eye on the Gatherer camp, but finding herself confronted with such odds, action seemed the better course.
We’ve found their hiding place, she thought, and if we can get our hands on a few of them, Lady Callista might be able to root out the rest. Better still, she may even get them to incriminate the Keeper’s Council in their actions.
An image flashed through her mind: Lady Callista beamed approval as they hauled the entire Council into the palace in chains to stand trial for their crimes against the Pharus, all because
of information obtained from the man she captured. When she’d told her Indomitables “The future of Shalandra rests on our shoulders tonight”, she might have been more right than she knew.
The right move is to act, she decided. Scoop up as many as we can and eliminate the rest.
She had less than ten hours to get the incriminating evidence to the palace, but that ought to be more than enough time to deal with this problem.
She retreated a few steps, leaving the shadows of the obelisk. Her five Indomitable trainees shot glances her way but remained at their stations to watch the Gatherers.
Slowly, careful not to let her blade rasp on steel, Issa drew her sword. The eyes of her trainees widened, but Issa met their questioning looks with a nod, then thrust a finger toward the Gatherers.
“We attack,” she mouthed and held up a finger. “Keep one alive.”
Five nods met her silent words, and five khopeshes slipped free of their sheaths.
Issa waited a few seconds longer, giving Hykos and his company time to get in place. Finally, she could delay no more.
She broke into a jog, her black, spiked plate mail silent as she ran. One step at a time, ever closer to the Gatherers huddled beneath the statue, gaining speed until she tore through the stony ranks of graves at a full sprint. Gone was the fatigue from the previous day of standing guard, the hours of training, and the fight on the alleys of the Artisan’s Tier. The Keeper’s blessing strengthened her muscles and filled her with a blazing energy.
The clanking of the Indomitables’ armor alerted the Gatherers to the threat. The dark-robed figures leapt to their feet, drawing swords and turning to face the shadows.
“For Shalandra!” The cry tore from Issa’s throat as she barreled toward the nearest and swung her huge two-handed blade. The Gatherer didn’t even have enough time to raise his short sword. Black steel hewed through his neck and the cultist slumped, severed head bouncing off among the headstones.
Crucible of Fortune: An Epic Fantasy Young Adult Adventure (Heirs of Destiny Book 2) Page 32