by RG Long
Darrion's armor-breaker pierced cleanly through the flat of their simple sheet-mail. Rosha's spear smashed bluntly into the face of a bandit, knocking him over. Aladorn's daggers found a shallow hold in a man's chest, and then he lost his grip as the body fell away from him.
"Come on," Kell called. She ran for the small room, a weather room where servants wiped their feet and dried themselves off from the rain and otherwise were meant to stay unseen until they were prepared and properly ready to serve. Even as a distant outpost, it was built for eventual use, and those who would take to it would bring a castle's worth of people to aid their stay.
The bandits had used it as a storeroom for all sorts of things they didn't need, which cluttered up the space with broken boxes and busted shoes. Once the party was inside, Darrion tried toppling a stack of broken stools and chairs to the side to block the doorway. Kell left first, out into the side yard between the keep's inner wall and the face of the cliff behind it. The bandits tried to follow but were forced to kick away a mound of debris first, just as Darrion slipped from sight.
"We're losing them," Darrion exclaimed. "Just one more passage until we're out of the walls."
"Yes," Aladorn said.
"Where is it?"
"Uh, it's," he traced his hands around and paused.
He took the map back out and looked it over, then craned his head up with his eyes lightly shut and a pained expression slowly growing on his face.
"Where?" Kell asked.
"The storehouse," Aladorn said as he quietly stored the map once again. "The nearest besides that is the main gate."
The group was left somewhat demoralized. Rosha fell into the wall and leaned against it for safety. Kell tapped her foot and stared at Darrion. He saw her glaring and tried to look away. He got them all into the mess and had no way out.
"They may still be looking for us," Darrion said. "Only one found us going through the servant exit, but most of them are inside."
"Yes," Aladorn said. "A veritable band of men, all armed and killing-ready, are storming an ancient fortress and closing in on us fast."
"So let's just," Darrion began, hoping not to sound dumb, "leave through the front. If they're all inside by now...."
"Sure," Aladorn said, throwing his hands up. "Sure! It's only a few steps between us and veritable doom. We might as well! Let's go!"
"Keep running," Kell instructed.
They all ran together, with Rosha lagging a bit behind. The fire from the storehouse made the deep night darkness seem to disappear. The courtyard was all orange and yellow, like an early sunrise, and it was empty save for the ruins of the tent encampments left out in the open.
"The gatehouse," Darrion said.
He pointed to the door in the wall next to the massive double-doored swinging gate.
"We can find a way to climb out faster than they can open the door and run into the woods."
"Fair plan," Aladorn admitted.
They all kept running, with no mind to the keep behind them, focused only one what was in front. They ran past and ignored the many tents and shoddy gathered items across the yard.
They didn't see Edrich the Boulder emerging from under a tarp, arms out and legs pumping forward until he was screaming and upon them. He caught all four of them in his plow-like motion and knocked them down in a heap. Rosha tumbled the furthest away and rolled with her spear. Aladorn, Kell, and Darrion all fell together, and the scepter was dislodged from its holster onto the floor.
Edrich stood over them, hollering and barking like some great beast with his arms out and flexing. Kell stood up first and prepared to lunge, but he reached up and held her by the head. She tried to swing her blades into his arms, but they barely cut past his skin.
"If only you'd listened," he growled as he lifted her. "If only you'd stuck to the plan."
He squeezed on her skull until she dropped the knives and screamed out in pain.
"You left the wrong half of the job done."
Darrion sprung up quickly with his armor breaker drawn and lunged forward, the way he saw Kell do before in a deep squat to a horizontal jump. Edrich caught the blade. It went clean through his hand up to the hilt. He looked down at it with rage in his eyes. Anger had replaced pain.
"What's a boy doing here?" he asked mockingly.
Then, another scream. Rosha came with her spear charging, blade forward. Edric threw Kell at her with an underhand toss. Rosha hopped to the side to avoid her, and she landed off behind them all. Edrich prepared himself to roar with battle fury and swung his mighty arms together to grab her spear with ram-like force.
Rosha dove. It looked like she tripped, but her move was intentional. She got the blade under and behind him, between his legs. Then, she jerked her body up suddenly, balancing on the front of her hips, and yanked the spear back with all she had. It caught on something and turned the huge bandit's attention downward.
"Sorry about this!" Darrion shouted.
He jumped up and yanked the spear up further. The flanges of the blade raked into his inner thigh. The move landed and worked. Edrich looked horrified for just a second, then dropped to his knees with his elbows buckling inward.
Rosha and Darrion twisted and forced the spear out and fell over from the force of their pull. They sat up and saw the huge man clutching his hands at his wound as it bled a great stain of red into his pants. He looked up with a mix of dread and anger but couldn't move.
He let out a yell of blind rage at the four youths who had taken everything from him. All his plans. His aspirations. All in one night of flames and blood.
"For what?" he yelled.
"For the scepter," Darrion said. "There will be no war, no tricks no...no strange games of war played on the footstep of our lands. We are its guards, its future, and we are enough to fell even a band of this strength together."
"No," he spat. "You helped her."
Darrion was proud of that. He saw Edrich turn away, looking in Kell's direction, but she was gone. So was the scepter.
"She stole it for us," Edrich continued. "She had to take the fall to the Ravenmere House... for..."
"As expected then," Aladorn said as he recovered.
He saw what they did, only hearing up until then, and winced dramatically.
"At least she was honest once. About being a thief, that is."
"You were right," Darrion said. His voice was lost, even more than the dying Bandit Lord, who began laughing with his last wheezing breaths. He pointed to the gatehouse, up above.
"For that," he said. "It's already begun. A night of fires. It's so... it's such a pity."
"I don't like this," Aladorn said. "A dying man's laughter is a dreadful omen."
"Go and see," Edrich said.
He began laughing, all air and no voice as he slowly tipped over. His body went sideways as the blood pooled into a thick morass around his hips.
"Go up and see! A Red Night has fallen! The Red Knight has come!"
"Oh, Gods," Aladorn muttered.
He made the break first and hiked up the stairs. At the top, he saw a hatch open to the ramparts of the wall where Kell fled. He caught just a glimpse of her running with the bright gold scepter in her arms before his eyes wandered further up and across the great plains.
Past a plain, rounded hill of forests, far in the distance but far enough to be seen, was Oldrum. Behind them, in the fortress, was fire. Far away, in the foothills and the pastures and the towering keep of the Prince itself, was more. Darrion and Rosha joined and looked on in horror as they saw the fires of Oldrum.
Their home in flames and the scepter gone. With the Bandit Lord dead, their adventure had come to a horrible, early ending.
All that was left was to go back home.
Empty handed into the ashes.
Chapter 19
KELL RAN FULL SPEED through the woods away from the fort. The scepter was in her hands, and all the meaning behind it was left in the rising fires of the fort. The subterfuge, the pla
n, and her sacrifice were gone. She remained, and that's all that mattered. She had a long way to run to get out of the territory.
In her mind, she planned to head for Ravenmere nearby and make a course for Darkveil, but on foot, she'd surely succumb to either the bandits of the countryside or the pillaging forces her actions helped to rally. Before anything, she needed a steed, and by her own devilish luck, a group of them were stopped partway up the forest supply line path.
A covered wagon was stuck in the rough terrain of the forest. The driver and rider were trying to wrench it out and left their four-fold horses unattended. They were the supply runners for the base, already back with another shipment of goods, and seemed unaware that their destination was up in flames. Kell could barely see the glow ahead. The hills and the trees hid them well enough. The pillars of smoke all blended together in the dark night sky.
"C'mon!" a man grunted. "C'mon, push it hard!"
He and another man, both sturdy looking and strong for bandits, pushed down hard on a bar that was forced under the trapped wheel. The cart budged but didn't lift.
"This is ridiculous! We're using this path. We may as well just pave it, damn it all!"
"You think the horses could help?" the rider asked.
The cart driver looked at him hotly and shook his finger at him.
"Maybe," he said.
They went around to the front just as Kell cut loose the last horse from the cart to strand them. She mounted it up and looked ahead to where the fort was. From atop the horse, a small tint of orange appeared in the sky. Her eyes saw the glow in the night somberly. Her face, hidden under a tugged-up mask, fell into a confused despair.
"Hey!" the driver shouted. "Hey, get offa that horse!"
Kell took the reins from the horse's mouth and guided it to turn their way and buck. The men stepped back from the horse's kicking legs, and one fell over. When she saw him fall, she saw Darrion. Their first meeting was the same, with her nearly killing him on horseback back in the stables of Oldrum, and yet he still saved her.
"HYAH!" Kell shouted.
She held up the scepter and, through a hidden motion of willpower, summoned a bright flash of light. The other three horses fled toward the fort, up the hill along the rugged terrain while she sped off, down into the forest to reach the plains of Grannitewatch country.
"Hey!" the rider shouted back. "What's with you!? What kind of bandit steals from bandits!?"
The two bandits were left with only their supplies halfway down the long hill trail. The horses, meanwhile, fled in the direction toward the towering fortress in the distance. The light grew brighter as they approached it until the full glow of fire behind stone walls entered their vision, and they went around to the main entrance. The horses knew the way inside from there.
At the front gate, facing toward the burning lights that speckled Oldrum in the distance, Darrion fell down from a window in the gatehouse and started running down the pat.
"Hold on!" Aladorn called out. "You can't just run back!"
Darrion didn't stop to turn or reply. His hometown was burning, set upon by a grisly threat. He couldn't think of anything else. Not the betrayal. Not even his murder. Only the town.
"I have to get there," he half-shouted.
His breath started to outpace him. The adrenaline flowed in and out of him. Excitement surmounted his senses until it left him scrambling in the road on all fours and retching over the ground.
Aladorn slowly scaled down the wall and retreated away just as Rosha started her leave. First, she tossed the spear outside and let it clatter against the ground, then she lowered herself and slipped the short drop onto her back. Aladorn rushed to her side and hovered over her, uncertainly, as she sputtered.
"Are you okay?" he asked. "Is your back broken?"
"I'm fine," she said.
She reached up, and he strained himself to pull her up to her feet.
"You can't seriously plan to run all the way back," Aladorn said. "It's - it's hours from here on foot, at least! At high speed at most, you might make it when the fires are all burned out, and the raid has moved on."
"What he said," Rosha began. She caught her breath and turned to Aladorn with serious eyes. "Did you hear what he said? About a Red Knight?"
"I'm afraid I did," Aladorn said. "If he's at all telling the truth, you may as well run in any direction but there. It's safer back inside this place than it is toward your home!"
"Then we have to get back," she said. "My family is there. Everyone we know is there."
"My dear," Aladorn said, with a hint of a charmful presence he'd never tried to put up before then, "if the Red Knight is there, all those people are gone."
Rosha protested with her eyes and pushed him away. She raced to grab her spear and turned to give Aladorn one last hot look of contempt but spotted something behind him first. She saw it before him, and when he saw her expression, he turned to look and was face to mouth with an unbound horse. Two more trotted up and faced the closed gate in confusion. They stomped their hooves and whinnied, balking at the situation.
Rosha immediately took to one of the horses and offered it her hand. It nuzzled its nose against her palm and snorted on it. She looked in its eyes and remembered her family and the stable. There was still so much waiting for her at home, and when she saw the glow of fire behind the walls and the destruction just their actions alone had caused, she knew she could not wait.
"Can you ride?" she asked. Aladorn looked at the horse with timidity and shied away from it.
"I can," he said. "With a saddle and stirrups, and someone to follow."
"I can give you the one," Rosha said.
She pulled herself up onto the horse's back and kept her spear close to her lap. She steered the horse with just her hands rubbing against its neck and turned it around to face down the hill. Aladorn got up on the horse with reins still in its mouth that dangled loosely around its underbite muzzle.
"Go!" Rosha commanded.
Her horse started trotting forward, and the other two followed. Aladorn braced himself flat against the horse's back as it bucked and wobbled. They gradually picked up speed into a light gallop.
Darrion looked up and saw them coming. Without needing to ask, he started running down the hill close to the side of the unmounted horse. When it was close enough, he crouched down and jumped up high enough to grab its moving shoulders and hauled himself onto its back.
In that moment, he was glad his best friend was a stable hand with whom he had spent many days attempting such feats with far less at stake.
"The path!" Darrion shouted. "Down below! It could still be closed!"
"We can go around it," Rosha said. "Just try to keep me in sight. The horses will run together!"
"Can you make them run softer?" Aladorn asked as his body endured the bounding of the horse's bareback.
They raced down the widened path until it was taken over by forest grass and underbrush. Rosha slowed the lead horse back down to a trot and navigated the tree line ahead to find the passage out into the plains again.
Once they hit the open plains, they assembled behind Rosha's horse and paused as the horses started grazing in the night. Rosha patted her horse lightly to goad it on its way while the other two stopped behind it.
"Rosha," Darrion called. "We have to go!"
"I know!" she cried back. She leaned down and whispered to the horse, "Please, please go. Please?"
"I thought you were a stable hand?" Aladorn asked, still prone on the back of his steed without balance or training.
"Horses have their own minds," Rosha said. "Discipline only goes....so far...."
She turned to Darrion. The words she spoke, words she learned from her upbringing, taught by her parents, felt truer to them both than to the horses. Darrion saw her fret and met it with determination.
"They also run if they get scared," he said. "Aladorn, can you make a loud sound, like blasting powder, with the effort you have left?"
&n
bsp; "Funny thing about effort," Aladorn said.
He sat himself up and fished around in the satchel pocket at his side for his draught of arcane liquid.
"Wizards always talk about effort, to overcome the bad humors of the spirits they channel. And yet they hand these out freely."
He sipped some down and capped the draught back up before turning his open palm behind them all.
"A good wizard doesn't solve his inner problems," he said, "he just hides them."
A cluster of bright fiery orbs scattered out from his hand a good distance away, then popped in bright, loud explosions behind them, barely strong enough to make the grass move but loud enough to spook the horses all into a sprint. Aladorn nearly fell off but managed to reach up and hold tight onto the grit of the horse's fur around its shoulders. In no time, they rounded the great hill that blocked their sight in the distance, still many lengths from Oldrum.
But from the plains between the hills in the rolling valleys of the western reaches of Grannitewatch, they could still see the inferno building as Oldrum succumbed to the flames.
Chapter 20
OLDRUM BURNED. FROM the small hamlet farm on the outskirts up the main and only road, splitting down the path to the castle, there was nothing but fire. What wasn't on fire had burned out and collapsed, leaving broken ruins. The castle stood unsigned, but heavily defended from within. The lights of incoming ruin spread throughout the halls in the palace and over the ramparts as the invading force reached the royal bulwark defending the throne within.
Knights in dark armor, dull and without luster, wielding heavy blades made for chopping through mail of all kinds, fought with the royal guards whose numbers dwindled and the remaining militia who evacuated their families to the stronghold past the walls. The gates were burned down. The entire hill they once called their home was a sea of red and orange like an evil sunrise that broke the quiet night hours before any such light should come.
