Shield and Crocus

by Michael R. Underwood

We reached the entrance without incident. The sky above us was black on black, blocking out the stars. The outer walls were manned by three guards, easily dispatched, their keys turned against their master’s use.

  But from there, we had to cross the fields lit by flood lights and patrolled by bound spirits. The spectral sentries floated in unreadable paths across the grassed field between the fence and the pens themselves. That’s where they let the Freithin walk, stretch their legs, see the sky, or whatever of it they could with that smoke cloud overhead.

  I wondered if some of the Freithin had ever even seen the stars. Would a race born into captivity below smog have myths of the starry sky?

  Aegis led us across the fields, finding a way between the moving fields of light. The spirits were limited to their field of illumination. As long as we stayed in the dark, we were safe. And with the shimmercrab goggles, we had no need to fear the dark.

  Halfway across the field, I saw Medai Omez’s guards. The first, a Pronai, was leaning on a spear barely taller than she, the other a Qava at attention. Both were dressed in the wrapped scarves and robes of Omez’s western homeland. Aegis signaled me forward, along with Red Vixen. She wanted those two taken out quietly, or she would have called Forked Lightning and Ghost Hands.

  I pulled two throwing blades from my belt, took aim as Red Vixen dropped to all fours and began stalking up towards the light of the lanterns above the guards’ heads.

  Red Vixen crept to the edge, where her eyes would catch in the light. I threw the blades and the lazy Pronai was caught unawares. My knives landed in her collarbone and solar plexus, and she slumped to the ground.

  The Qava guard’s voice filled our minds. [intruders!] I trusted Ghost Hands’ telepathy might to be able to mute the guard’s telepathic projection before it could reach the others. Red Vixen jumped the Qava, claws and fangs tearing at his cloak.

  Stumbling back, the guard knocked Red Vixen off her feet with a telekinetic blast. As I saw her flying back, I charged forward, knives out and flashing in the lantern light. I dodged left just before thrusting in on him. I’d guessed well, only feeling the next blast on my right half. I yielded to the pressure, spinning like a top. With the force, I planted my knife in the Qava’s neck.

  Both guards down, we gathered for a moment at the door before heading in.

  I looked to Aegis, who nodded and gave the orders. “We can’t be certain how many of Omez’s guards heard that, so from now on, we assume that we’ve been spotted. But don’t go tromping around just because. When we get to the main chamber, we split like I said. We can’t do this halfway, not something this big.”

  “Ready?” It was as if she were asking herself as well as the rest of us.

  We nodded, and then Aegis opened the door.

  Down a long hallway was another guard station. Two rows of double beds and a sitting area, and a half-dozen guards were already on their feet. Forked Lightning took point, clapping his bared hands together. The room filled with thunder, the lightning forking as it crackled out. The goggles only showed shades of red, but I could have sworn it came through pure white.

  Half the guards were on the ground when my vision returned. Another quarter were flailing and trying to put themselves out, shedding layer after layer of wraps, Omez’s required uniform becoming a restrictive burden. The other four Shields entered the room and dispatched the group quickly. If the rest hadn’t heard us by then, Forked Lightning’s display did it.

  We fought through two more groups on the way to the main chamber, taking two sets of stairs up to the guard overlook, where they could observe the Freithin pens.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell. Omez kept more than three thousand Freithin in these pens, and he apparently saw no reason to give them any help in keeping things clean. Sweat, feces, and the stench of sickened bodies suffused the room. I couldn’t imagine how they could stand it, other than to realize that the lung-choking soot of the factories was no better.

  The room was the size of a city block, the pens stacked four stories high at the center of the room, surrounded by guard outposts at the cardinal directions, one per level.

  Narrow bridges at each corner led out to the pens. The bridges, clearly made for the guards’ use, were barely wide enough for a grown Freithin to walk without turning to the side. The larger Freithin would be forced to inch sideways until they came to the wider landings.

  From the plans, I knew the landings to lead out to caged-in tunnels that led to the factories, with sentry ways above. The Freithin were monitored at every point, and always caged in, kept at a disadvantage. But the guard towers at the four corners had minimal visibility to one another. The pens had become too large, and Omez was too cheap to double up on staff. His greed became their opportunity.

  “Get these people out, we’ll take care of the Blue Heart,” Aegis said, looking to Red Vixen and me.

  I nodded. “Go quickly. Moving them will be hard with the heart still active.”

  The Blue Heart was created to control the Freithin, to turn their inborn empathy into a leash. Designed for hard labor, Medai Omez and his team of alchemists created the Freithin race sixty years ago in the alchemical vats of Sa-Yungash, across the deserts to the west. Omez brought the vats here to Audec-Hal, and used Freithin as the backbone of his industry, creating laborers who could work harder and longer than anyone else.

  But without the Blue Heart, they would be free to choose their own paths. Just as the City Mother’s power had been turned by Yema to subdue the citizens of Audec-Hal, the Blue Heart kept the Freithin obedient, answering only to Medai Omez.

  I watched Aegis, Ghost Hands, and Forked Lightning head for the far corner. A three-story-tall tower stood in the center of the room, with open glass walls allowing them to survey the Freithin at three hundred and sixty degrees. In addition, there were corner stations on each floor, outside along the walls.

  I turned to Red Vixen. “We’re going to take these outposts one by one, make sure they’re all cleared before we start moving the people. Hopefully, Aegis and the rest of them can destroy the Blue Heart before we need to move to the center.”

  She nodded. “I hear you. Evacuating a mass of homicidal Freithin is near the bottom of my list of things to do.”

  “Mine too. This way first.”

  As we circled around the room, I noticed that none of the Freithin were looking at us. They were all looking in at one another, as if ignoring their observers. If you knew you were being observed your whole life, I suppose there was no need to be reminded of it every time you opened your eyes.

  We were relying on the guards to only ever look in, not at the other stations. If they alerted one another and descended on us all at once, we’d be sorely pressed.

  Three stations fell like clockwork. Attacking one station at a time, we only had to deal with groups of three. It was easy enough to bait one out to subdue and then go two-on-two. The close-quarters fighting favored Red Vixen’s natural weaponry and my dagger-and-fist infighting over the guards’ massive twohanded clubs, which were designed to subdue the Freithin. And Omez’s rank-and-file was no match for trained warriors.

  We’d cleared the top floor and were heading down the stairs when we were exposed. Four silk-wrapped guards, staying close enough to cover one another, gathered around the landing between floors.

  Red Vixen looked to me for commands, but I simply reached into my pouch and tossed down a smoke pellet. To their credit, the guards didn’t panic, just held their ground. Fortunately, that allowed Red Vixen to crawl down between them and hamstring two before the others couldreact.

  Seeing clearly thanks to the shimmercrab goggles, I jumped off the top floor landing, sprung off the near wall and then the parallel wall to clear the guard’s defenses, and delivered a kick that knocked one of Omez’s still-standing men into another.

  We cleaned up that group in time for another. And another. Twenty guards later, we were on the ground level with a growing collection of bruises and my left
hand numb due to a direct shot from a sap. With numbers and a constrained battlefield, no one was good enough to go unscathed. Maybe the first Aegis, but he was long buried, the first to be laid to rest in the Hall of Broken Shields.

  “How many of these bastards are there?” Red Vixen asked when the last group went down.

  “Enough to make Omez confident housing thousands of Freithin.”

  “Five thousand guards won’t be enough when Aegis is done with the Blue Heart,” she said, grinning like she’d just found a plump chicken.

  With a quick chuckle, we kept going. I only noticed the smell when I wasn’t thinking about anything else. My eyes slid to the pens, pulled by something out of place.

  One of them was looking at me—a woman with skin a dull shade of sapphire, standing proud despite the tattered grey sack that strained to cover her body. Her eyes were narrowed, face pressed against the edge of her cell. I stopped, as if I were a schoolboy again, caught raiding the supply cabinets at school.

  “What?” asked Red Vixen, tugging at my coat. “Come on.”

  She held my gaze for another moment, then the sound of a bolt whizzing by my face snapped me out of the trance and back into the moment.

  The bolt came from a group of guards on the far wall, ten at least, with more pouring out from the door. Another volley of bolts arced towards us, and we hit the iron grates of the walkway.

  The walkway shook with the rhythmic pounding of boots advancing. Red Vixen looked to me over her shoulder as another volley of bolts pierced the air just above the handrails. “What now?”

  “Now, we crawl. Come up when the others are between us and the bolts. Keep your head down, fight low.”

  We started to crawl. It only took a few moments before the guards came back into sight, rounding the corner. I tossed out another smoke pellet, but one of the guards managed to kick it as it exploded, spreading the smoke off to the side. They passed by and left me to draw my knives.

  Red Vixen and I came up to a crouch, waiting for them to close.

  These guards were smarter than most. Instead of swinging the clubs at us, they pulled out knives and closed, trying to use their numbers to bury us.

  I rolled around on the walkway with three guards wrapped around me, vying for position to bury their curved knives into my heart. I took shots to the shoulder, thigh, and the back of my still-numb left hand, but kept going on panic-driven adrenaline. I stabbed one in the kidneys, slit the throat of another, and got to my knees to pommel-strike the third into unconsciousness.

  Red Vixen was pulling herself from a slick pile of dispatched foes, the silver walkway approaching a mottled brown from the mixed blood of the various guards.

  “Keep going,” I said as I limped over the bodies, trying to stay low to escape the crossbows.

  “When will they be done with that heart?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. Just keep going.” I tried not to show the pain, but I could see blood had mottled patches of her fur as well.

  I saw the crossbows first, then pulled out of sight, holding Red Vixen back.

  “Close your eyes.” I pulled a flash stone from my belt, calculated the angles, and tossed it at the wall. The stone bounced off towards the guards, and I closed my eyes. The flash went off and I rose up, left arm on the guardrail to guide my way as the light dissipated.

  I leapt feet-first into the guards, knocking two of them over as they clawed at their eyes. One of the guards kept her calm, shouting, “Draw your knives, they’re here!”

  She was the first to go, as I scrambled forward over the two downed guards to shut her up. Either she was the officer, and would have the keys, or should have been, and needed to be silenced anyway.

  I shoved a tall gangly guard into the rails to clear space. He caught a hand on the rail as he flipped over the side. Good enough. I feinted a straight thrust, provoking her to dodge left, and then twisted the thrust into a cut that caught her across the shoulder, blade slicing through layers of scarves and loose-fit clothes. I twisted the blade to slide it in below her collarbone. She slumped to the floor and I removed my knife.

  Around me, Red Vixen tore apart the other guards in a captivatingly brutal dance. She took a club-blow to the back and kept going. The Millrej was favoring her right side by then, from the earlier wounds.

  The gangly guard that I’d written off tried to pull himself back over the side. I gave him a helping hand, right into the far wall, then slammed him to the ground. He had wisdom enough to pass out, or at least fake it.

  I looked around, checked for other guard stations. They were all empty. I scanned the pens, and the same woman caught my eye again, looking expectantly.

  Ghost Hands’ voice filled my mind, relief heavy in her words. [The heart is gone. We’re coming to you.]

  “That’s our signal.” I reached down and pulled another set of keys from the belt of the female leader, adding it to those I’d liberated from the other guards. “Now let’s hope we can get them out without too much of a riot.”

  It started with an unrestrained shout, like someone out in the open after having been shut up inside for too long. Then others joined it. Shouted curses, cries of surprise, disbelief.

  The leash had been cut. I strode down the walkway leading to the cages, holding up the keys and cupped my other hand to my face, extending my voice as far as I could.

  “I am First Sentinel, Shield of Audec-Hal and sworn enemy of Medai Omez, the man who made you to be slaves. He used the Blue Heart because he knew you were too strong to be controlled otherwise. We are here to help you, to free you from this monstrous captivity.”

  More rustling, shouts from above and all around. I reached the corner of the cages, opened the door, and walked into the narrow passageway between the pens, where the guards led the Freithin to and from their work. I handed over a batch of keys to Red Vixen and began to open cells, shouting all the while.

  “We neither expect nor demand anything of you. As of this moment, each one of you is as free as my companions or me.”

  An older Freithin man met me at the door, two thin threads connecting with my heart—white hope and yellow fear. I wouldn’t know what to think of me, had I been in his place. I unlocked the cell and moved on.

  “But while the tyrants still hold the reins of power, no one in Audec-Hal is truly free. Medai Omez’s factories, COBALT-2’s sick experiments, the Smiling King’s Spark-touched, Magister Yema’s Warlock Guard, and Nevri’s economic stranglehold. Each of the five tyrants tries to make slaves of the people of the city, but we will not let them. That is not how the history of this city will be written. One day, the children of this city will learn of this time as a dark moment that was swept away by righteous people of Audec-Hal.”

  I opened more gates, watched shaking young men pacing in their cages, seething with anger, older Freithin hunched in their cells with scars crisscrossing their backs like a dense woven net. I saw the threads in the room shifting, bright colors of hope and anger flourishing while those of fear and obedience faded.

  “The Shields of Audec-Hal are working towards a future that will have no tyrants, no slaves. Instead, we will return to being a city of equals, governed by peers who make choices in the best interests of the city as a whole. We wish to see the Senate reborn, and for Audec-Hal to shake itself from this decades-long nightmare.”

  In another cage, there was a mother and a suckling babe. The mother stood back from the door as I opened it. I swung the door inward and extended a hand.

  “Come with us and we will help you get out of this building, find safe haven to hide from Medai Omez while he rages over his loss. If we could, we would lead an uprising right now to storm Medai’s castle and cast him down, but we would need your help.” The mother held her baby away from me, but walked towards the door as I moved on to the next cell.

  “If you come with us, we can feed and shelter you, let you gather your strength to strike back later. The choices are yours; we are only here to help, to give back th
e power that is rightly yours. Each of you who join will bring the reign of the tyrants that much closer to an end.”

  I looked inside the next cell. It was her. The one among the Freithin who had watched me before the Blue Heart was destroyed.

  “Medai made you to be slaves, but you don’t have to be. I’ve seen great courage in the eyes of Freithin, wisdom and strength. I do not accept their claim over you. Your destiny is in your hands now.”

  She nodded, walking toward the door as I opened it. She extended a massive hand, and we shook.

  “Thank you, First Sentinel,” she said. “I am Rova Remembers, and I would fight alongside you and your Shields.”

  I’d heard a little about Freithin naming conventions. Not allowed to take family names the way others races did—those who did were publicly beaten—the Freithin had created a tradition of taking role-names, Remembers, Watches, Protects, and so on.

  “Thank you, Rova Remembers.” I returned the handshake and felt like a boy again, my small hand dwarfed by hers. “I would be honored if you would join the Shield-bearers, our invaluable group of supporters.”

  “I will bear your shield, and become one myself. I’ve looked after others since I was old enough to guard my little brother. And I have a debt to settle with Omez.”

  From the energy I saw in her eyes and the strong shine of her threads—emerald and brass and white, I was fairly sure that Rova would become a full Shield, not just a Shield-bearer. A full-grown Freithin as a Shield of Audec-Hal. My mind reeled at the possibilities, already planning.

  “Find me once we’re out of the area, away from Omez’s guards, and we can talk more.”

  Aegis and the others arrived in the room; I distributed the rest of the keys. We opened the cages, Red Vixen and Ghost Hands on watch for the rest of the guards. I kept moving to make sure I didn’t collapse. Medai’s alarms brought wave after wave of guards, but we weren’t five Shields anymore. We were five amidst a sea of Freithin, their red threads lashing out for anyone bearing Medai’s colors or badge.

  Dozens more guards flooded the room, seeking to stem the tide of blue bodies, but we could not be stopped that night. There was no charge to Medai’s palace, as much as it saddened me. Aegis had the right of it when she told us, “One victory is enough for the night, especially a victory this monumental.”