Air

by Rosie Scott

  The energy did not discriminate and also fell upon the dwarves, relieving some of their fatigue. Since our foes did not deal in magic, however, that was their only benefit. The spell aided our own soldiers in more ways than one, and the air that had grown quieter with slowing magic use now crackled once more with the elements.

  Two dwarves hoisted a thick wooden weapon on the ship after pulling it up a ladder. It looked like a mini ballista, sitting just two feet high. In a way, it reminded me a lot of Jakan's crossbow, because it had what looked like an extended clip attached to it. Instead of sitting above the flight groove like Jakan's, the long attachment was beneath the bow. The weapon was much too big to be wielded in open combat so I couldn't begin to understand its use.

  Then, one of the dwarves pulled the large weapon up with a grunt, settling most of its weight on his ample gut. His friend came up beside him, grabbing on to a metal crank which sat on the exterior of the wooden clip. Pointing the weapon toward our group of soldiers, the friend started cranking.

  Schew-schew-schew-schew...!

  Crossbow bolts shot through the crowd of our allies far quicker than I'd ever thought possible, splattering through armor and splitting skulls. In seconds, we'd lost a dozen soldiers to direct fatal hits. Even more than that fell to the decks, at the mercy of severe wounds. I heard Nyx cry out in pain, and my heart shattered against my chest, remembering her previous concerns. I pushed through the crowd of allies and enemies, looking for her with Azazel on my heels.

  Crrk! Cyrus shot an ice shard across the deck toward the huge weapon, but the spell shattered into pieces against a large, rectangular shield made of iron. Two other dwarves had moved the guards before each side of the weapon, protecting its wielders.

  Schew-schew-schew-schew...!

  My shield flickered as it was pummeled with bolts. A mage beside me was shot through the eardrum and spun from the momentum of the hit before falling to the deck at my feet, causing me to trip over her. I collided with the quarterdeck. Beneath my right hand was something hot and mushy, and only as I picked myself up did I realize it was an ally's brain matter.

  I swallowed hard, looking through the legs of fighting men and women, finally seeing Nyx. She was propped up against the back railing of the ship, grimacing and breathing hard as Cerin tended to her.

  CRACK!

  A lightning bolt sliced out of the sky nearby. It must have been close since the world flashed in bright white. I didn't know who the spell belonged to, but I only cared that the rattling of the massive weapon had come to a stop.

  Azazel pulled me up to a stand with a hand on my arm, and we continued forward. I only stopped when I heard Azazel come to battle with a foe. I turned to help him, leeching from the dwarf to kill her as quickly as possible.

  I finally made it to Nyx and Cerin, and my best friend glanced up at me with a look of pain. Cerin's hands were over her right breast, white life magic sinking into a break of her armor. A bloody crossbow bolt sat beside my lover's left knee. Another bolt stuck out of her left breast. I hoped to the gods it hadn't reached her heart.

  “Both...” Nyx trailed off, grimacing again. “The fuckers hit both of my greatest assets, Kai.”

  I couldn't believe she would joke at a time like this. Nonetheless, I collapsed by her other side, jerking the bolt out of her left breast and immediately moving to heal her. As Cerin and I worked, Azazel defended our backs.

  “Where was your shield?” I asked her, watching as blood pooled out of the break in her armor as the wound started to close.

  “Lost it. Mages were outta energy,” she breathed. “Your rains helped, but you and Cerin were too far.”

  I inwardly cursed at myself for being so far from her but said nothing as I continued to force energy into her body.

  “Curse me, Kai. Tell me to be more careful,” Nyx joked tiredly.

  “Damn it, Nyx, be more careful,” I murmured, to which she chuckled.

  “Feeling better already,” she mused.

  “I'm glad you got here before I did,” I told Cerin.

  “I was closer,” he murmured, giving Nyx energy to help her fatigue when the wound was healed. “Anto was hit as well. His wounds simply weren't as severe.”

  “All these dwarven inventions would be fucking wicked if they didn't hurt so damn bad,” Nyx muttered. When the wound beneath my hands was healed, I stood up beside her and helped her up.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I asked her.

  “It'll take more than that to kill me,” Nyx replied, grasping one dagger in her hand and looking for the other, which must have fallen when she did. A moment later, Azazel pulled it over the deck between the clutter of soldiers with his telekinesis. Nyx grinned at him as she retrieved the weapon from the hardwood.

  “I'll get Anto, Kai,” Cerin offered, nodding toward the other deck, where dwarves were still pulling themselves up from ladders and ropes. “Go kick ass.”

  Azazel and I made our way to the other deck, where I immediately raised the dead to boost our numbers. The enraged dwarves noticed this, nearly tripping over one another to get to me.

  “Ah, if it ain't the devil herself!” One of the dwarves snarled at me. The man had a hammer in one hand and a large tower shield in the other, which he used to block both an ice shard that I shot and multiple hits of Azazel's karambits as the archer tried to defend me.

  “Call me whatever you wish. Your last words are up to you,” I retorted, refreshing my shield as he bashed into the protection with his own.

  “Is it true ya loved Bjorn Berg like a father?” The man grunted, swinging his hammer until it crashed into the white magic.

  Bjorn's name on an enemy's voice nearly distracted me enough to lose my focus. This man was fighting me. Surely he wasn't reconsidering his loyalties.

  “Bjorn was my father,” I retorted, taking a moment to charm the dwarf beside the one I spoke to. He immediately clashed with his friend, sword scraping along the claw of a hammer.

  “This world ain't big enough to hold the immense disappointment he'd have for ya,” the dwarf seethed, before spitting toward my boots.

  “Fuck you,” I hissed.

  Azazel was pulling at the foe's shield with his alteration magic, but the guard was barely budging. The man's arm must have been attached to it via straps on the back because the dwarf only grunted as he attempted to fight the tug of magic. His words angered me, so I didn't leech from him. Instead, I wanted his death to be painful.

  As Azazel struggled to pull the shield from his grasp, I took the distraction to move around to the dwarf's vulnerable side. He swept his hammer at me and succeeded in clashing it into my forearm only when it broke through the life shield. The protection had prevented the hit from causing anything more than a bruise. I held one hand out toward the man's face.

  Tranferra la agua ti friz. The energy between us was clear, but it worked nonetheless. The spell sought water, finding it in the man's skin, eyes, and brain, and quickly turning it into ice. The dwarf stilled, moaning in intense pain as his own body parts expanded and crystallized, his skull swelling with the expansion of his brain.

  Pop! His cranium split into two, his expanding brain bloating out of the break, sizzling as ice crystals built over it from its moisture. The man's eyes broke open on their own, parts of the organs hanging from both sockets as crystals formed in and around them. Hot blood poured from both of the damaged organs as the dwarf finally fell in a mess of gore.

  “You're a monster! A fuckin' monster!” A comrade of the deceased rushed toward me dual-wielding two axes, her eyes full of mourning and turmoil. I reached out to her, leeching from her life. In mid-run, the woman fell over both axes, sliding over the deck a few inches from her momentum.

  Some of the dwarves were angry at me for my display. Others simply feared, hesitantly approaching me with weapons and shields. As I neared them along the battleship's railing, Azazel went to work cutting through thick rope ladders with his karambits, leaving the tools to fall to the o
cean below, taking climbing dwarves with them.

  Psssh!

  A jet of water surged forward from my right, clashing into the sides of the nearing dwarves and forcing two of them overboard. I glanced over to see Cyrus coming to my defense, a katar ready in one hand and the water rushing forth from the other. He dispelled the magic, grabbing his second katar and rushing forward, punching the blade through the throat of his nearest foe while blocking a hit with the other.

  The Sentinel was bleeding from the left arm and without a shield, so I immediately protected him with life magic, though I waited to heal him until he was still. I leeched from enemies while he fought them and Azazel followed us, cutting through the dwarven entry points. Together, the remaining dwarves stood little chance. They were no longer reinforced, and our soldiers and undead were dealing with the rest. Before long, our allies were alone on both decks, breathing hard from the intense fight.

  One battleship was dealt with, and so were dozens of dwarven reinforcements. We were all fatigued, and some of us were injured. One small battle was won, but it was just the beginning.

  Over the expanse of the watery battlefield, cannons were firing and elements were raining down from the skies. The dwarven defensive line was crumbling, but more ships were answering the call, sailing forward from the cove to take the place of the galleons sunk before them. Altan's warship was in the midst of being surrounded by two dwarven galleons, though one of the ships under his command pursued one of the foes to defend their leader. A dwarven galleon near Uriel's boat was halfway underwater, and its occupants were frantically trying to swim away from the wreckage and toward their allies to be saved.

  Directly before us, one of the galleons under our own command lost its shield. Because the life mages were depleted of energy, it did not reappear. The dwarven ship that pulled up beside it angled a scissor ballista to the bottom of its hull, before releasing the weapon. The blades shot immediately through the thick wood of the hull nearest the water. A few yells from the dwarves later, and the rope was jerked back with the strength of the siege weapon's internal machinery, ripping a considerable section of its hull out in an explosion of splinters. Eteri soldiers screamed as water pooled into the ship, preparing to sink it. One of the soldiers blew frantically through a war horn, begging for help. A galleon from Altan's navy that had lost its shield retreated from its own battle nearby, prepared to answer the call.

  I watched the scene play out before me for a few tense moments, my own inhales and exhales echoing through my head. This was the most massive battle I'd ever personally witnessed. Our takeover of Quellden had required dealing with thousands of foes, but that was spread over weeks. Here we were, a navy of ten thousand versus a seemingly unending navy of dwarves, all thirsty for blood at once. Thousands would die. If we were lucky, most of them would be our enemies. This was a battle for the history books, and I was a major player.

  I was filled with nothing but exhilaration.

  Twenty-seven

  As the healers tended to our injured, others went about moving our belongings from the battleship we'd arrived on to the other, since it was mostly unblemished. The directive flag was moved as well, immediately raising over our new ship in a rippling red. Some of the dwarven corpses were thrown overboard, but others were kept, giving us the ability to raise the dead in the next battle before causing any casualties. We'd lost nearly one hundred soldiers from our ship, and we'd started with four hundred. There were fewer casualties than we would have had without the additional support of the dead, but it was still too high of a number for my liking.

  By the time our ship sailed forth once again, two allied vessels were beneath the waves, and a few more were heavily damaged. Even so, three abandoned dwarven ships were floating aimlessly in the sea, their crews dead after a long deck battle. A handful of the dwarven vessels had been sunk. Our attack on Narangar had been mostly a surprise. The four ships which had retreated from Altan nearly a moon ago had only arrived shortly before we had, giving them little time with which to react to the news of the attack. It was clear Narangar had more ships than we did; after all, each galleon we sunk or took was quickly replaced, giving us just enough time to feel the relief of victory before requiring our attention on a different vessel.

  Yes, we were outnumbered, but the cove of Narangar and their lack of preparation made it feel like just the opposite. Our navies surrounded the cove in a half-circle formation, taking on galleon after galleon in their defensive line. If the dwarves wanted to use their cannons, they had to maneuver to face us with their broadsides, which meant that fewer ships could fit within the land as they floated nearly tip to tip. We focused on meeting each of these defensive ships with one of our own while supporting them from behind with other vessels waiting to give allies relief.

  Out of ten thousand allies, there were only four mages capable of wielding both life and death. Two of those were Cerin and I, of course, but we had each of the other two go onto the other Sentinel ships. That meant the vessels belonging to Altan and Uriel were able to stay in the fight at all times, their shields and energy reserves consistently replenished by the lives of their enemies. Thus, given that the two Sentinels had remained on the frontlines, their two ships were our greatest strengths. They took on ship after ship ad nauseam, their mages continually having a supply of energy. Soldiers were lost over time, of course, but allied ships only transferred more, continuing to give the two resources needed to hold the line.

  Night fell and blackness descended upon Chairel, but our surroundings flashed with light. The creamy glow of Meir shone at our backs in the west in the last days of its semi-annual trek. The large second moon was our only constant source of light. The rest of it came from flashes of purple-white as lightning from the air mages struck down from the heavens, and the glow of fire and ice as it streaked across the air between ships. Sometimes, I swore I could even see the glint of metal as earth mages shot solid projectiles into the enemy forces.

  The cove of Narangar appeared to be well-lit, but we could only tell by the residual glow that bled out from the curve of the land. The lights of the harbor and its path to the city were mostly hidden from us otherwise. The rest of the land was cast in shadow, including the grasslands to our direct right where the small homes and fishing shacks had been. All of the people who lived there had fled.

  We battled through the night, our battleship at the far right of our navy, just at the edge of the entrance to the cove. We didn't bother to turn our ship to use its cannons since the maneuverability of it was no good this close to land. Our mages were fatigued by the time the sun rose above the Golden Peaks before us since our energy had only been replenished once during the night by a wave of dwarves that tried to board our vessel. By the time the sun shone once more overhead, the battling had come to a stop.

  Our navies were at a standstill. Though we'd lost more allied ships overnight, we still had just over twenty lying in wait beyond the cove. But the dwarves had stopped sending ships to fill in the gaps of their defensive line, and the back corner of the inlet was empty. It beckoned to us sweetly, encouraging us to take a chance on the harbor being clear just out of sight.

  There were two problems with that. For one thing, we knew it was a trap. The dwarves were encouraging us to cut down our already injured navy to fight them one-on-one, and given the harbor was packed full of defenses, we would be quickly demolished. They knew this. We knew this. Which brought us to the second problem: I wanted that harbor destroyed, and I wasn't willing to leave the shores of Chairel until it was.

  Our navy took hours in the early morning to rest and regroup. The crew on many of the ships were working hard at repairing what they could. Altan's ship spent some time beside Uriel's before it sailed over to ours, its red flag switched out for blue. Minutes after it came to a stop beside us, the first Sentinel pulled himself on deck. Given that both his expensive armor and his bronzed skin were stained with an absurd amount of blood, it was easy to tell he'd been one of f
ew to be in a fight all night. His already muscled arms appeared thicker with recent use.

  Altan greeted the crew and us rather enthusiastically for a man who hadn't seen sleep in over a day, though I assumed his life and death dual caster had been refueling him. None of us had spoken to him since we'd shared dinner that night near Makani other than to yell updates and directions across the water, so we were all happy to see him. I was a little disappointed Uriel hadn't come with him, though it was a good idea for the Sentinel to stay with his men on the other side of the cove. We couldn't know when the dwarves would act.

  “So,” Altan huffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “What the hell are we gonna do?”

  “We need to scout the cove,” Cyrus replied, looking over the blue waters that were eerily calm within it.

  “How are we gonna scout the cove?” Altan retorted. “Send one ship, watch it get blown to pieces, send another? And that's even if we could get past the wreckage.”

  Cyrus leaned over the railing of the bow, staring down toward the water. A moment later, he lifted binoculars to his eyes. “Well, shit. It's hard to see that in shadow.”

  “What?” I questioned, following his gaze. The waters at the cove's entrance were as open and blue as they'd always looked.

  “We sunk so many damned ships that they're cluttering the water, Kai,” Altan replied, pointing one bronzed finger to where the dwarven defensive line had been. After Cyrus handed me the binoculars, I checked it out for myself. Sure enough, the shadows of the Golden Peaks were dulling the sharp lines of sunken vessels just beneath the water.

  “Those ships are so much prettier underwater,” I commented, handing the binoculars to Cyrus.

  Altan couldn't help but laugh at the joke. “Sure are! Kind of a blockade, though.”

  “It'd be nice to have a griffon about now,” Nyx mused. “Be easy to scout then.”

  “Yeah, well, let's focus on what we got,” Altan replied.

  “Did Uriel have any ideas?” Cyrus inquired.