Embrace of the Medusi (The Overlords Trilogy Book 2)

by Toby Andersen

  He slashed at her again, catching and ripping through the sleeve of her outer robe. He only had to connect the once and she would die a screaming wretch, begging for the end. There was possibly poison on her sleeve. Over the bed now, Faibryn lunged again, this time for her face. It wouldn’t matter where the blade landed, she wouldn’t have to live with a disfigurement, the Iruki venom would see to that.

  Aurelia ducked the thrust, catching his wrist in her hand. She reacted fast to her momentary advantage, slamming his hand into the empty doorframe, scratching at his face with her other hand. Faibryn yelped in pain, but with his free hand he punched her in the jaw. Aurelia gasped as she fell back, letting go of him.

  She’d had fights before, just not ones where the slightest cut was the end. This truly was like taking first blood in a duel.

  Faibryn feinted left, and as Aurelia tried to avoid a blow that wasn’t coming, he stabbed her in the chest. The short sharp blade pierced her thin battle armour and her skin, slamming up to the hilt just under her ribcage. She folded up around his hand, clawing and biting at him. Faibryn ducked back, suddenly fearful of the cornered wounded creature. He pushed her backward, out through the doorway onto the terrace, wrenching the blade out as she went. Aurelia staggered, fell to the ground.

  The cut hadn’t hurt in the first instant, but as she lay on the ground, she could feel the burning fire catching alight all around the wound. She looked up at Faibryn, standing over her. She couldn’t see his face for the silhouette he cast, but his hand and the knife were both coated in blood. Her blood.

  This was the moment Cassandra always described, a faceless figure standing over her corpse. Her sister’s premonition was coming true.

  Faibryn watched her writhing with the burgeoning pain in her abdomen. He grinned, triumphant. ‘I won’t force you to suffer,’ he said, twisting the knife in his hand. He was coming to finish her before the venom did. Aurelia felt stupidly grateful; at least it would be quick.

  Before she could close her eyes and await the killing blow, an apparition flashed across the patch of sky she was gazing into; Chrysaora, covered head to foot in the slime of a hundred Medusi, ripping a two-handed broadsword straight through Faibryn’s neck. His head flew upward with the momentum of the swing, like it was suddenly free of its restraints, and bounced across the terrace with a sickly crunch. Aurelia watched in fascinated wonder, as his headless body collapsed, falling away just to her side. It was enough to make her forget the pain, just for a moment.

  A moment all too fleeting. The nerve-shredding pain was cutting her again and again now, like a hundred more knifes stabbing her stomach and breasts. Her skin felt like it was burning. She wanted to rip her ribcage open. She screamed, tears filling her eyes and making her vision swim.

  Chrysaora was there at her side. ‘Come now, Empress, its just a shallow stab. Let’s get you cleaned up and-’

  ‘No!’ shrieked Aurelia, pushing her away. She tried to explain between gasps of pain, and the burning travelling up her neck. ‘The blade…was coated…with venom. Iruki venom.’

  Chrysaora, to her credit, didn’t panic. She simply laid her hand on Aurelia’s stomach, and breathed deeply.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’ Aurelia snapped.

  ‘Hold her.’ Chrysaora said. Who is she speaking to? Aurelia looked around frantically, shrieking in fright as another set of hands came down on her, each one like a white-hot brand. Nepheli knelt beside her, trying to hold her arms. Nepheli was alive.

  Aurelia sobbed. ‘This is the way…my father died. There is no antidote. This is it…for me.’

  ‘Oh, hush now, darling,’ said Nepheli in her noble parlance.

  Aurelia grabbed Chrysaora’s wrist. ‘Chrys, promise me you’ll lead the people away from here.’ She bucked as the pain racked her. Her arms and legs were starting to burn. ‘You have to…be the one…to do it now.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Chrysaora. ‘You’re delirious, I'm no leader. You will lead your people.’

  ‘I’ll be a gibbering…a gibbering wretch in a few minutes, begging for sweet death.’

  Chrysaora replaced her hand over the wound again. ‘Your father may have died of this, but he was missing something you have.’

  ‘What?’ Aurelia couldn’t even look at her anymore, her eyes were so tight shut.

  ‘He didn’t have a real bona fide Healer with him.’

  Aurelia gasped not just in pain but realisation. She wasn’t just holding the wound to staunch the blood. Chrysaora was a thralled Healer, proficient in ancient magic. A Medusi hovered just above her, giving her power.

  ‘Now let me work,’ she said, shutting her eyes.

  Aurelia tried hard not to buck and move as she watched her friend’s bowed head. She looked to Nepheli, tears running down her face. She stroked Aurelia’s sweat covered brow. ‘You’re going to be fine.’

  Then she could feel it, a tingling sensation that crept all through her body, disparate from the burning of the spreading venom. It was somehow exquisitely peaceful and excruciatingly painful. Another new and incredible layer was added to the pain. Chrysaora was working inside her, her magic flowing into the same arteries as the venom, following it, chasing it down and overtaking, squeezing veins shut so that the venom didn’t reach the heart. She wrung out each and every vessel, forcing the venom back along the hundreds of tributaries at once, back towards the wound itself.

  Aurelia felt herself black out for a moment, felt the tainted blood flow from her, forced back out of the open lesion. She felt the burning subside, but Chrysaora’s ministrations carried a pain all their own. She glanced down, saw the blackened foul blood pouring from her ribs.

  She could feel the effects of losing all that blood; her head felt light, ready to float away like a Medusi, her mind sluggish and dull. Soon the lack of blood took its heavy toll, and she welcomed the coming blackness, embracing the dark dream she’d been torn from so many times before.

  Chapter Forty Three

  Totelun

  Totelun felt a trepidation he hadn’t felt for some time, as he stepped up to Cassandra’s door in the small residence where she was recuperating. Not since he had been about to meet her for the very first time, creeping up the Theris river with Naus. He went to knock, but then realised she wouldn’t hear him.

  Inside, he found Cassandra wasn’t alone. The kindly hunchbacked wife of the Nepenth keeper was there fussing over her, cleaning and clearing and generally bustling about the room, clucking to herself. She froze as she caught sight of Totelun, then smiled with some warmth. Not everyone in Reunalis was like the Matriarchs. With no words needed, she left the room silently.

  Cassandra looked radiant, her grey skin somehow flushed and new. She smiled at him as she stood, sucked on a lip. She bent down and rummaged in a bag near the foot of a reclining seat. Their packs had been brought here; Cassandra threw his jacket on the arm of the nearest chair for him, found his piton daggers and held them out. Totelun took them gratefully. It felt right to have them with him again, to snap them onto his wrists and tighten the straps. He put his jacket on over the top.

  When Cassandra had found what she was looking for – paper and fine charcoal from Cane – she beckoned him over to the glass-fronted end of the room. The chamber was one of the strange pods they had seen on their approach to Reunalis; a perfectly spherical home at least three stories high with multiple rooms built inside. The side facing out from the cliff was a transparent hemisphere covering a good third of the whole sphere. It was like standing inside a robust bubble, stretching across all three floors and letting as much light as possible flood in. Totelun could see the daylight outside fading slowly to darkness.

  A comfortable futon sat facing the window and he and Cassandra sat. They watched the waterfall outside for a time, listening to the rush of water, the sounds of the sphere owners clanging about in the kitchen below. A constant spray of droplets trickled over the dome.

  Totelun turned to her and noticed what she was wearing for
the first time. Some was new – given to her by the woman – but not all. Though she could lipread well now, he didn’t want to be the only one speaking into a silent room. He took the papers gently and wrote, [You’re still wearing your mountain skins.] The sturdy trousers he’d made for her were free of acid bile and had been cleaned, but they were spoiled, dissolved and matted in places.

  [They gave me new clothes, but I insisted on these.]

  [But why? They’re acid damaged and old, and they can’t be comfortable.]

  As Cassandra wrote a reply, Totelun remembered making them. They were a necessity for surviving the mountain, but he hadn’t expected her to keep them when she had the chance to change. Why would a princess, used to the finest materials, want to continue to wear stiff wolf skin garments? [Because you made them,] she wrote. [I could never give them up. They are too special.] Totelun had never really realised how much she had valued those clothes. They meant something indefinable to her.

  [Are you okay?] he wrote. [What was it like in the Nepenth?] He spelled out the name.

  [I am alive,] wrote Cassandra. [I was only inside for a few hours and it takes a lunar cycle to digest a person. I avoided the acid mostly, kept my feet out. It started to work on the edges of my clothes.]

  It hurt Totelun to read this. If only I’d been faster.

  [Entering and exiting were the worst,] she wrote. [I felt like I had been swallowed, and then without much warning, I was vomited back out. The smell was awful.]

  She was staring at him when he finished reading and handed him another note. [How did you get me out? I knew you would, but how?]

  Totelun laughed to himself.

  [I went over the endless waterfall,] he wrote, referencing her vision of his latest death.

  She scowled and scrawled, [What? Why?]

  Totelun wrote a long explanation that Cassandra read over twice, her eyes growing wider and wider as she went. How his own execution had involved a Thunwing challenge, his desperate and prolonged fall into the abyss, coming to an understanding of trust with the creature, and then shooting back to up into the sky on its back. How he’d crashed into the forum shell and demanded her release from the Matriarchs. Opal’s disgrace.

  The dappled light outside was slowly failing, shading darker with every passing minute.

  Her response wasn’t what he expected. [A Thunwing! You got a Thunwing. I have to see it.]

  [Of course, you will.]

  [Let’s go now.] She threw down the note and began to pull on some shoes.

  Totelun smiled to himself, wrote her a short note and when she eventually looked at him again, handed it to her. [Where are you going? He’s right here.] Cassandra looked confused.

  Totelun put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly.

  There was a bashing sound above them, then suddenly a flame-bellied Thunwing’s head appeared at the top on the hemisphere. Cassandra’s hands jumped to her mouth. Totelun beckoned the Thunwing down and they watched as the large winged slug slid down the surface of the dome watching them in turn. His red belly was on full display, his wings – all three sets – flopped against the translucent coral. His strange rubbery lips drew a large smear, as he seemed to try to talk to them. Maybe he’s making faces? Totelun thought.

  Totelun could see Cassandra wasn’t surprised or scared, she was covering her silent laugh. His Thunwing was making her laugh.

  [He’s amazing,] she wrote. [Such a fine beast.]

  [His name is,] Totelun tried to puzzle out the symbols for the name he’d chosen, [Chu-shenkhi-chal-thaim.]

  Cassandra read it over multiple times. [That’s a mouthful.]

  [But just Shenkhi for short.]

  [A wonderful name, for such a wonderful creature,] she agreed.

  Shenkhi eventually got bored not being able to get inside, peeled away from the curved window and took flight, circling back up and over them to roost above. There was barely any sunlight outside any longer.

  [I need to tell you something,] Totelun wrote. [When I breached the chasm on his back, I saw something. There was a great storm approaching.]

  Cassandra glanced up. [We know what that means.]

  Totelun nodded. [Abrax is coming here. I have done it again, just like in Theris. I have brought destruction down on the city I'm in. It’s me he’s after, me that he tracks. I need to leave, take Shenkhi and you and leave now.]

  He thought she’d jump up, put the second boot on and leave with him, but Cassandra wrote instead, shaking her head. [You told me on the mountain that you would never be forced to cower before this creature again, that you would fight him.]

  [And a lot of good that did. He almost killed me. I can’t fight him, I need to stop kidding myself.]

  She huffed. [If you don't stop him, he will continue to kill and thrall across the world. He is Noctiluca's greatest weapon. You cannot give up.] She handed him that, but continued writing on another sheet.

  Doesn’t she understand running away is our only choice? If he took Cassandra and left now, he could stay ahead of the storm, draw Abrax away from the city. They could fly back up to the Floating Islands right now.

  Totelun wrote his own message. [We should leave now. Even if he does attack the city we don’t owe them anything. They’ve only hurt us since we’ve been here.] He wrote it, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. All he really knew for certain was that he felt guilty again, bringing danger down, not on Reunalis, but on Cassandra. He had to find some way to keep her safe.

  Cassandra read his note, but threw it down and continued her own.

  Eventually she handed it to him.

  [Do you remember I said I had news from Naus before they put me in the Nepenth? He spoke to me through Crescen, which angered Noctiluca so much she forced Crescen to severe the connection. The only way was to kill himself.] Totelun had little sympathy for a thralled boy working against Naus, but her first words caught him. Naus had spoken to them, to Cassandra. He was jealous and excited at once. He wanted more than anything else at that moment to hear the old man’s voice again, even if it was just to sarcastically call him out over his immature behaviour. He felt so alone sometimes since Naus had left. It somehow didn’t matter that Cassandra was right there, he still felt alone. He’d lost his family and then his newfound ‘father’ too quickly. He couldn’t bare to lose anyone else, he didn’t think he’d survive it.

  He blinked back tears as he continued to read. [Naus’ message was for you, Totelun, and you need to read it now. He said the Overlords are dead, completely dead. But their magic still survives in others. Like Abrax. That is why the prophecy said they still lived. Abrax and Noctiluca have some of the Overlords power now. But Abrax can be killed, just like the other Overlords before him. It is possible, you have to believe you can do it.

  [He said he wasn’t sure he’d ever see you again. He said, ‘Know that I believe in you. I know you will do the right thing. I love you like the son I lost.’]

  There was a flash that lit the pod. Thunder boomed in the chasm beyond a few moments later. The storm was getting close.

  The paper felt suddenly heavy, and he let his arm fall. He felt like he’d heard the words in Naus’ gruff voice. They sounded so unnatural to have come from Naus – the man was not one for showing his emotions – but they also felt genuine. There was no way Cassandra had made it up.

  I love you like the son I lost. That was just too much, and Totelun felt the tears come freely then. Cassandra knelt on the futon and embraced him. When she released him, he angrily dried his eyes on his sleeve. He wasn’t sure even his own father had ever actually said that to him.

  I believe in you. I know you will do the right thing. Why did Cassandra have to wait until now to tell him this? What was the right thing? How would he know? How was Naus so confident that he understood him, when Totelun wasn’t even sure if he understood himself?

  Naus’ idea of the right thing was definitely not abandoning the quest. He wouldn’t abandon the people of Reunalis however badly they h
ad treated Cassandra. Totelun knew, if he ran now he would be safe, but he would have to keep running. He could even give up the crystal, the homing beacon that brought Abrax across the sea, but it wouldn’t be enough. He would still be running forever, even if he wasn’t so easy to track.

  He had to stand up to him.

  He had to end this once and for all.

  Naus thought it was possible now as well. The Overlords who had wielded such power were dead. Eleutheria had killed them. So it could be done. And he had to prove it. He looked at the crystal again.

  He’d proved a Celestial could be killed once before. This one just had a small angry human attached.

  If Abrax could be killed, then maybe the prophecy could be achieved.

  Not only that but maybe he didn’t have to fight alone.

  [We can’t leave,] he wrote. [You are right. Naus is right. We have to fight Abrax. And this time it has to end.] Totelun continued to write after letting Cassandra read his decision. [Taming Shenkhi and showing them the crystal heart convinced the Matriarchs I was some kind of legendary hero, the one they have waited on to take them home.]

  [You say it like it was a lie. But maybe you really are,] she wrote back. [If one prophecy is true, why not others?]

  [I can’t fight Abrax on my own. I need to convince them to fight with me. But how? They accused us of bringing Medusi here, and they’re right. Now I’ve brought the biggest one of all.]

  [You must be honest. Pure of intention, like you were when you tamed Shenkhi. They value that above all else. Use the position they have given you. But I don’t think you will need to lie to convince them.]