by Mark Albany
“Well, color me impressed,” I said, not a trace of sarcasm in my voice. The Lancers’ armor was made by the finest blacksmiths in the empire, with protection runes to keep from breaking and to make sure that arrows and crossbow bolts did not pierce. As such, they were very closely guarded by the men who wore it, since they would not suffer the touch of any other men on it.
“I do have a question, though,” I said, dropping into a crouch. “Assuming that this armor fits us—and with your horns and wings, I can assure you that it will not—what do you plan on us accomplishing, wearing these pieces?”
“I can make them fit,” Aliana said with a smile. “For one, the armor I picked out for myself is that of the scouts, which has a leather hood instead of a helmet and a bit more room between the plates for my wings. And for two, this is only to keep us from catching anyone’s attention. People do tend to look down and away when they see anyone wearing this armor, not wanting to catch the attention of the men who could send them to what they all assume is going to be their life’s greatest torment, so they do anything they can not to be noticed. Odd how people feel more afraid than comforted when met with the sight of the men who are supposed to keep them safe, is it not?”
I nodded. Then again, the Lancers weren’t around to keep them safe, but rather to serve the Emperor’s interests and keep him safe, making it a good deal more difficult to trust them.
We both dressed quickly. The armor was a lot lighter than it looked. A testament to its makers, I assumed. We walked out of the villa, with Aliana putting on a hood and cloak to cover her more distinguishing features. With her field of altered perception in place, almost nobody saw us. Those who did by coming inside the field, quickly looked away and stepped out, trying not to attract attention, as she had predicted.
My armor was a little too large around the shoulders and arms, making my movements awkward and nosier than I would have liked, but even so, nobody gave us a second glance. We were back in the nobler sections of the city before too long, and it was an even shorter walk to reach the area I remembered from looking into her globe. It was a smaller mansion, on the border section of the area where nobles lived. This was where more recent additions to the gentry set up their houses.
Which meant it hadn’t been that long since Norel had joined them.
I looked around, keeping my eyes on our surroundings as the rest of the Lancers started to move away from their posts and march off. None of them gave us a second glance either, all bound by oath or whatever it was that kept them on their path. I kept my eyes pointed forward the same as they were, trying not to draw attention. I wasn’t sure if there were any who might be able to see through this field of hers, and the fact that we were walking around in bright daylight was making me a lot more nervous about what we were doing.
We slipped into the building, avoiding the worried glances of the servants. They looked terrified to see us. I looked at Aliana, wondering what it was we were doing here, or what we were looking for.
We veered through the building, which was impossibly larger than it appeared from the outside and formed a maze that I just couldn’t understand.
“She loved mazes,” Aliana replied, reading where my mind was going as I was looking around. “We never understood how she made them, but they guided people the way she wanted them to go. Or did you think it was a coincidence that you found me in ruins that Cyron and your master needed a piece of magical parchment in order to navigate?”
I looked around. “Did she make those ruins for you?”
“No,” Aliana replied as she moved through the halls. “I just knew that she built them, and I needed a place to hide.”
I looked around the place, following her through it. “How come she isn’t guiding us to her?” I asked.
“Because she doesn’t know we’re here,” she replied, looking around, tugging me to the left, guiding me through a doorway into a room with a window that was illuminated by the soft touch of candlelight and the sun just starting to peek over the horizon.
There was a woman sitting at a desk. She had green hair, similar to Aliana’s, but she was relatively petite. She was dressed in silver and purple, with a silver tiara gracing her brow. This had to be Norel.
She looked up as we entered. She barely paid me a second glance, but her gaze lingered on Aliana. She rose from her seat. She was shorter than Aliana by a solid foot, yet she carried herself with a kind of grace that told me that she was used to looking down on people no matter how tall they were. More or less the way she’d barely looked at me.
“Ali?” Norel asked, the composed face she wore breaking a little. There was a single tear running down her cheek, a twitch of a smile of her lips, like there were a hundred different emotions rushing through her mind and she was having a hard time trying to get a grip on them.
“Norel!” Aliana said, rushing forward, pushing her hood down and reaching out to embrace her sister, but in the split second before contact, Norel took a step backward, her eyes widening like she had latched onto a single emotion, which was terror.
I looked around, gripping my fists, anticipating the sight of Lancers—real Lancers—to come rushing to carry us away to the tower for a very short lifetime of torture and pain.
“You’re dead,” Norel said softly. “He said you were dead.”
I tilted my head, seeing tears running down Aliana’s cheeks. She looked like she was trying to hold herself back from reaching out to hug her sister once more.
“Well, I’m not,” Aliana said, her voice cracking. “He lied to you. Was it Cyron? He lied, Nor, please, you have to believe me. Please…”
Norel blinked, all the different emotions still sorting through her head as she stared Aliana down. The terror was still dominant on her face, however.
“He lied to you, Nor. Please,” Aliana said, trying to fight back her sobs. “I’ve been stuck in a ring as a fucking djinn ever since that horrible night. He lied to us then, tried to use us, and he’s been lying to you ever since. Please… Nor…”
Another tear joined the first. Norel suddenly looked at me, almost shocked, like she’d forgotten I was there. I couldn’t really blame her, all things considered.
She turned back to face Aliana. “Touch, please. I need to know that you don’t lie.” Her voice was soft, high-pitched, and yet still commanding in presence.
Aliana turned to me, grabbing my hand purposefully and dragging me closer to Norel, who took my other hand. Aliana and Norel each took the other’s remaining hand, completing the circle. I looked around at both of them, but I was clearly not the focus of whatever this was supposed to be.
Just a familiar, I thought, helping all this along.
Memories of the burning, torturous touch inside my head from Vis’ poking around, to Aliana’s warm and arousing style, turned my mind to the icy and clinical touch from Norel’s thoughts pressing into my mind. The invasion was faster, sharper. I almost didn’t feel it until she was already deep inside, pushing around, finding all my thoughts about Aliana and glancing over them. The thoughts of what happened in the tub, and again in the library, were looked into very briefly. The connection went both ways, like all the others, causing a stunned silence in the connection between Aliana and Norel. There wasn’t much embarrassment from Aliana. Norel moved past it without comment.
As quickly as she was in, she was out again. I could see a light sheen of sweat coating her skin as she pulled away, quickly arranging her features, wiping the sweat from her face to keep it from ruining her makeup.
“Well,” Norel gasped. It wasn’t just sweat on her face, I realized. There were tears. They had been streaming freely all throughout what we’d been doing.
“It’s really you.” Norel turned to Aliana, who was doing all she could not to break down. Norel stepped in before Aliana dropped to the ground, picking her up and holding her close. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”
16
“As much as I hate to interrupt this reunion,” I said,
“there is the matter of what Cyron might have planned.”
“Oh, right,” Aliana said, disentangling herself as the two sisters pulled apart. There were more than a few words that needed to be said between the two of them, and the tears they brought had been pouring for the past few minutes. I really did feel bad about parting them, but we did have a couple of more pressing matters that needed to be attended to first.
“Yes, I remember,” Norel said softly, nodding and quickly rearranging her hair. She did that a lot, I realized. Constantly caring for how she looked and how she appeared. I shook my head, bringing my mind back to the matter at hand.
“I take it you saw what we discovered during your rooting around in our minds?” I asked, looking at Norel.
She nodded and inhaled deeply. “Cyron has some intention of bringing him back to the surface.” She turned to Aliana. “Do you think he’s planning on trying that same spell again?”
“Well, he’s had you around,” I said, knowing I was by no means an expert in any of this, but still wanting my input out there. “He was looking for Aliana when I ran into her.”
“In more ways than one,” Norel said.
“And what’s that supposed to—” Aliana asked, looking at her sister, but I stepped in before the loving reunion could turn into fighting.
“Not important at the moment,” I said in a soft comforting voice as I placed my hand on Aliana’s shoulder, pulling her a step away from Norel. “I was their unwitting pawn in all that, and it ended up proving unprofitable for them to let me into it without actually telling me what was happening…”
“Stay on track, Grant,” Aliana chided, nudging me gently in the shoulder.
I nodded in response. “Right. So, considering that he was looking to gather all but one of the members of those who were there for the original spell, it just makes sense that he’s going to try it again. What was the purpose of the spell, anyways?”
Aliana looked at Norel, who looked away quickly.
“I don’t want to say,” Norel said softly. “It was a terrible time, and in the heat of war, you lose sight of what might be important regarding morals and character. You end up doing anything that needs to be done to win, and in the end, that was a defeat in and of itself.”
I took a deep breath, trying not to rush her. It was clearly a very emotional and dark moment in both their pasts, but as of right now, I had no judgement to pass. What the hell did I know about the choices that had to be made during wartime?
“It was a spell to open the underworld,” Norel said, sensing my impatience, looking over at Aliana. “The reason we attempted it was because there was a legend of a powerful army that could be summoned to fight for the elves in our ever more desperate battle for survival. Oh… You…” She looked over at Aliana. I shrugged.
“I already know that the two… er, three, of you were elves,” I said. Something just wasn’t right. It was early morning, and I remembered hearing the sounds of birds chirping and singing outside the window. They’d gone silent now. That, or it was no longer early morning and the birds had moved away. I wasn’t sure which was more likely, since I had no idea how long we’d been here.
“Well, then,” Aliana said, sensing my uncomfortableness as well as its source.
“What do we know about what he’s trying to do?” I asked.
“The spell has to happen during a solar eclipse,” Norel said, shaking her head. “The coalition of the two heavenly entities increases the amount of power to be reaped from one’s surroundings, making for the only time when such a spell would even be possible.”
I looked up to the window again, hearing a low… something. It wasn’t quite a growl. It sounded like one, or something like it.
“Get away from the window,” I said suddenly, tugging Aliana back a few steps. She looked at me, almost annoyed, but then both she and Norel sensed it too. They might even know what it was, but all I could feel was an impending sense of dread as the sound started to grow closer and louder. All three of us quickly backed away from the window, moving toward the door a second before the building collapsed around us as something truly massive crashed through the walls like they were made of hay.
They weren’t, and the building soon collapsed around it, giving it pause. We moved away from the building for fear that it would collapse on us, too, but I could still see it moving through the rubble. Whatever it was, it was made some something shiny and black. Well, partly shiny, I realized as it moved out from under the rubble, and partly glowing. It’s skin, if that was what I could call it, was covered in magical runes, all much more complicated than anything I’d ever seen. That wasn’t really saying much, admittedly, but there was still some powerful magic radiating from this creature.
As it finally managed to untangle itself from the rubble, I could see that it was made in the shape of a massive hound. It even had short, pointed ears and powerful, muscular shoulders with lean hindquarters, giving it the look of a hunting dog. Except that it was the size of a horse and its eyes were glowing red.
“Fuck me in the ass,” I hissed, looking around for something like a weapon that I could use, but finding only a piece of wood from Norel’s desk. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was long enough that it could be used as a short polearm, and there was a sharp point on it. I looked back up as the creature started trying to track us down again.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked, looking over at Aliana. She had her dagger in hand and she was spinning it artfully between her fingers in the way she did when she was looking at a fight. Norel had no such weapons, but the lightning arcs I could see jumping from her fingers told me that she was far from unarmed in this fight.
Much better armed than I was, at any rate.
“That is an obsidian canine,” Norel said. “Haven’t seen one of those in a long time.”
“A hellhound,” Aliana said, explaining for my benefit. “Summoned from another realm.”
“Well, then,” I said, gripping my pointed stick tighter as the creature cocked its head, seemingly following the sound of our voices. “How do we kill it?”
“You can’t,” Norel said, rolling her neck. “There isn’t a metal on earth that can pierce its skin.”
“Doesn’t mean we won’t give it the old professional’s try, though,” Aliana said with a grin, her wings flapping lightly with excitement. “We trained for this, Grant. Remember what I taught you. Keep moving, stay aware of your surroundings and don’t lose your footing. Find a weak spot and more importantly, have fun.” She finished that sentence with a wide grin on her face as she started running to my left. Norel took off to my right, leaving me in the middle with nothing but a sharpened stick and ill-fitting armor.
“Why couldn’t she have found some weapons to go with the armor?” I grumbled to myself. The hound seemed to focus on me as an easier target and started advancing, picking up speed as it ran over the rubble of the house that it had almost fully destroyed in its lashing about. What was left of the house was crumbling as the creature’s weight made the ground shake with each step.
“Wow, you are a big motherfucker,” I said, waiting until the last moment before jumping to the side, making sure to avoid any of the fallen debris as I fell on my shoulder, struggling to regain my feet as the hound landed where I’d been less than a second earlier. It skidded across the ground as it tried to pull itself to a halt. That was what came with giving a creature obsidian skin, I mused. The traction had to be terrible.
That said, it twisted around quickly, finding me and charging again.
Suddenly, my ears were ringing as a lightning bolt arced across the sky, striking the hound’s head. The force of the strike knocked it onto its back, but as it quickly regained its feet, I realized that the strike that would have killed at least a dozen men had done little in the way of lasting damage, even as sparks continued to fly from the creature’s skin.
As it tried to recover, I saw Aliana jumping down from one of the pieces of building that was st
ill standing. While it didn’t seem like her wings helped her fly, they did perform the act of gliding rather well, I realized, as she cleared a fifteen-foot leap with the smooth, practiced grace of an acrobat. She sailed through the air to land on the creature’s shoulders, leaning down to hammer her blade into the creature’s neck.
It had no effect other than letting off a massive spray of sparks from the impact, but left no sign of a dent on the creature’s skin. The hound let out a surprisingly feline roar, trying to reach around to bite at Aliana. When that failed, it jumped into the air, trying to dislodge her.
It succeeded, but as it looked around for her, I realized she’d made use of her wings again and was sailing away to what was hopefully a safe distance. Another bolt of lightning struck the hellhound’s face, distracting it momentarily to allow Aliana to land safely, but it tracked her down quickly. Another lightning bolt from Norel failed to distract it again as it bounded heavily over to where Aliana was still trying to regain her feet. Massive teeth caught the light as it tried to bite her. Luckily, she threw up a hasty shield to block its attack, which disappeared in another shower of sparks as soon as the creature was pushed aside.
I looked around, feeling utterly useless as I held onto my pathetic piece of wood, looking around for something I could do. There had to be something, after all. Something I could do to help.
Look for a weakness.
I blinked. I could do that. It was distracted right now, with Aliana throwing her shields up in a desperate attempt to keep the biting creature at bay. I gripped my stick tighter, moving closer to it. For some reason, I was only now noticing the heat radiating off it, and that its low growling resembled the sound I’d heard before the building fell around it just minutes before.
A weakness. The only cracks appearing on its skin were the runes I assumed were keeping it alive. That was as close to an opening as I was going to get, I mused, leaning closer, putting all my weight behind the stick as I smashed it into the runes.
