“Alaqotim,” Raki said at Aeden’s shoulder. The Croagh almost jumped. Raki had become very good at sneaking around.
“What?”
“Some of the words, ones I can just barely make out, sound like Alaqotim, but different, too. Nani taught me some of the language of power along with Dantogyptain. She always wanted me to be a scholar.”
Aeden closed his eyes and strained his ears. He did recognize a few words, ones he had learned to cast his clan magic. He didn’t know what most of them meant, but he could hear them faintly when one voice or another became louder than those around it.
“I think you’re right, Raki,” he said. “I assumed their chattering was like what animals do, not a real language. I should have figured they had some intelligence from what we’ve seen, especially from those two leaders. Do you think you could understand them enough for it to be to our advantage?”
“Maybe,” the boy said. “I’m not very good with it, but I’ll do my best. I wish I had paid more attention to my lessons. Nani would never let me hear the end of it if I told her that.” He made a nervous chuckle.
The two came away from the window and stepped into the interior room where the others were gathered. It wasn’t very cold this time of year, barely into summer, for which Aeden was thankful. They could not build a fire because even though the light could be hidden, the smell of smoke could not. So they sat there in the dark, eating their dinner cold, silent for the most part.
When Aeden volunteered what he and Raki had learned about the animaru language, Tere Chizzit nodded.
“Yes. Thinking back, I can recall a few words here and there I understood. I don’t think it is Alaqotim, but probably closely related. The other times we were near the creatures, I was too preoccupied with battle to listen. I know a bit of the old language. I’ll keep my ears open for anything important as we go. Good job, Raki. That is a valuable bit of information.”
Raki blushed and studied his boots, not meeting anyone’s eyes. Aeden patted his shoulder. It was a good discovery. Hopefully it would give them an edge.
Early the next morning, just after dawn, the party gathered their weapons. They left their packs and supplies in the guard post building. If they survived the battle to come, they would return for them. If not, they would have no need of any of it.
Aeden reached over and impulsively pulled Fahtin into a hug. “Be safe, okay.”
“You too,” she said, holding him for several seconds before letting go.
They each hugged Raki, too. The three of them had been together since the beginning. Aeden worried about them, but with all they had been through, he knew they were competent combatants.
“What, no hug for me?” Aila said, noticing the exchange. Raki lunged toward her with such speed, Aeden almost drew his swords. The small woman hugged Raki, then Fahtin, and looked at Aeden, arms wide. He sighed, put his arms around her, and squeezed.
“You be safe, too, Aila,” he said. “I know you can take care of yourself. Make sure you do.”
“Yes sir,” she said, reaching around and slapping his backside and then releasing him. Aeden sighed again. Better not to react.
For Tere and Urun, Aeden had a firm handshake and his thanks for coming with him.
“Are we ready, then?” he asked his friends. They all nodded. “Then let’s end this thing. For my clan, for my adopted family, for all those these dark creatures have killed or displaced. Let’s show them this is our world, and they are not entitled to it.”
With a last look at their packs lying on the floor of the room, they left the watchtower and headed toward the main fortress.
56
The outer walls of the fortress were crumbled in places, but Aeden could imagine them when they were whole. They were at least thirty feet high and ten feet thick. He marveled at them as they passed through a breach in the wall. How must this place have been when it was whole and in use? The towers on each junction of the wall provided good visibility and coverage to fire missiles at any approaching enemies. He couldn’t help but to glance up at those towers, wondering if an alarm would be sounded.
None was.
Where were all the animaru? Aeden knew they were here. Somewhere. He had heard them the night before. How many were there?
“Do you think maybe they’re just letting us enter before they bottle us up in an ambush and surround us?” Urun said.
“Just full of confidence and positive thoughts, you are,” Tere Chizzit said to the priest.
“Sorry. It just seems too easy. If we walk right up to the main fortress tower and find none of the creatures here, what then?”
“There are some here,” Aeden said. “We heard them last night. Keep your eyes open for traps.”
Urun didn’t answer, but kept walking with the rest of them, head swiveling.
The buildings were laid out in a relatively simple design. Inside the walls and towers, a courtyard separated them from squat, square buildings. These were attached to each other either by a shared wall or short stone tunnels. The outer buildings led into interior halls and rooms, the center of which was the stairs to the upper floors of the spire itself.
Tere Chizzit had told them that it was a common design for fortresses built more than a thousand years ago. All they had to do was enter the outer buildings and work their way to where the pinnacle’s stairs were in the middle. Easy enough.
They saw their first group of animaru just as they were about to enter the buildings on the outer ring. It was a group of no more than twenty, and they were moving around the building when they caught sight of the humans. Aeden imbued the weapons with magic before all of the creatures had even turned toward them.
Four of them went down immediately with Tere’s arrows in their eyes. The last one had not even fallen yet when Aeden reached the group, slashing with both swords and felling another four. It seemed only seconds after they had spotted the black creatures until they were all lying on the ground, some with projectiles in vital areas, some missing important parts, like their heads.
“Did any of them get away?” Aeden asked Tere.
“No. A couple tried to run for it, but I got them.”
“Good, then we still have surprise on our side.”
The sound of pounding feet crashed and echoed in the courtyard like a thunderstorm.
“Yeah, well, maybe not,” Aila said as she spun her weapons back into her hands and turned toward another group of animaru coming around the edges of the building. This one was much larger than the first, maybe three or four times larger.
With a dozen seconds still until the leading creatures reached him, Aeden began the slow dance to cast his magic.
“You’re probably going to want to stand back a bit,” he said to the others. “I’m going to use Dawn’s Warning.”
They did as he asked, recognizing it as the spell he had used in the battle against the hundreds of animaru barely more than a week before. The enemies approaching didn’t seem to care one way or another. They came straight for him as if sensing who—or what—he was. He moved his feet precisely, hands exactly as he had choreographed. All the while, he spoke the words of power, punctuating each with emphatic gestures. As he came to the end of the casting, he slowed down, waiting for as many of the creatures to surround him as possible.
It was difficult to move slowly enough to postpone the completion of the spell while still evading or striking at his enemies. He would have to practice inserting motions between the gestures of the casting. His friends were no help in this, none but Tere Chizzit, who could shoot some of the creatures from afar. The others stayed back as he had asked them to do.
Finally, the bulk of the swarm surrounded Aeden. He finished off the spell, pronouncing the final word, “Ekosin!”
Light exploded around him, from him. As before, it utterly destroyed those animaru closest to him. Those further away from him were affected less, but still could not withstand the force of the magic.
When the light faded and
Aeden looked around him, only a handful of the creatures remained. They rushed him mindlessly, and his friends moved in to help. He hadn’t taken more than a handful of breaths before their black bodies littered the courtyard in front of him. He let out a breath and felt as if some of his energy left him with it.
Fahtin was there at his side, her hand on his shoulder. “Does it take a lot out of you, casting powerful spells like that?” she said as she looked into his eyes. A searching look, as if she was trying to see something wrong.
“A bit. It makes me a little tired, but not as much as if I killed them all with my swords one or two at a time.” He smiled and she grinned at him in return.
“Right,” Tere said as he replaced the undamaged arrows he had retrieved from the bodies in his quiver. “We better get moving. No telling how many more there are.” Raki handed Fahtin three of the knives she had thrown while stowing his own projectiles in their respective sheaths. Urun and Aila waited near the doorway they had been aiming for when the first creatures attacked.
“It would be better to be inside when we meet the next group,” Urun said. “Their numbers won’t count as much then.”
The heavy wooden door was still serviceable, obviously not the original. It was made of heavy boards banded with iron and swung easily on its hinges at Aeden’s push. Through the portal was a fair-sized room, twenty feet or so long and thirty wide. There were rough wood tables, arranged as if the chamber had been some kind of reception area. No living thing was present. Nor any un-living.
Aeden scanned the walls, tapestries crumbling on them, discolored parts of the wall indicating where others had hung. Even the tables and straight-backed wooden chairs in the room looked suspect. He kicked at a stool in front of one of the tables, and it cracked as it turned over.
“Which way?” he asked Tere. The tracker looked up sharply, having been studying the scene on one of the few still-comprehensible tapestries.
“My tracking ability is useless here,” the blind man said, “unless just to point toward where the highest concentration of magic is. There are so many trails crisscrossing everything, it confuses tracking.”
“Shouldn’t we go to where the magic is the strongest?” Urun asked. He spat. “Damn filthy creatures. I can taste the corruption they have brought from their foul world. It’s like manure in my mouth. The sooner we can destroy them, the better.”
“Yes,” Aeden said. “Where the magic is the strongest. That’s where we’ll find the leader.”
“This way, then,” Tere said, heading toward one of the two doors opposite the one they came in through.
In the next chamber, they surprised a group of a dozen animaru. They were dispatched quickly, with none escaping to warn others. Aeden hoped it would continue this way, encountering only handfuls of the creatures. There was no telling how many were in the fortress, but he would just as soon not have to fight them all at once.
So it went for the next two hours. As they made their way to the center spire—it looked like the magic was highest there, as they had figured—they encountered bunches of the creatures. Sometimes the groups were small, sometimes larger, but each time the humans defeated the monsters. Each of them received wounds, small scratches and slashes, but the only serious injury was when Raki had been surprised by seven animaru as he was skirting the edge of a battle and a door had swung open in front of him. The slashes he received would have been life-threatening if it wasn’t for Urun Chinowa’s healing magic being close at hand. The boy had been made whole again, but the priest seemed more fatigued than Aeden liked.
One particularly difficult battle ensued when the party inadvertently entered what had to be barracks. At least two hundred animaru lounged about, hiding from the daylight. Aeden had to tap his precious reserves of power to end the battle with his magic.
When the humans went through a door that opened into a covered courtyard, they stopped. Tere Chizzit looked up through an opening in the roof. Aeden tracked where the blind man had turned his attention. The spire, much larger than it had seemed when outside the buildings they had gone through, dominated his view.
“That’s strange,” Tere said. “I haven’t seen or heard of that design, separating the buildings from the main tower. I wonder why they did it that way.”
“No matter,” Aeden said. “We’re here. Finally.”
The familiar sound of crashing feet and claws on stone echoed in the covered walk. Aeden had expected it, but was sorry he had been correct.
The largest group of animaru they had seen that day poured from one of the massive portals in the tower itself. Twisted black bodies boiled forth, some screeching and some yelling in their strange language. In the center, a tall animaru drew their eyes. It moved like a snake and was even covered in fine scales like a reptile. Aeden had no doubt this was the leader of the group.
The animaru crashed upon them like a wave. Aeden had been focused on the leader, not preparing a spell, so he danced through the creatures with his swords spinning, dealing death and receiving the odd scratch here or there for his trouble. He made his way inexorably toward the leader, who was at the same time moving toward Aeden himself. They met in the middle of the chaos.
The snake thing moved as quickly as a striking serpent. It had a short knife in each hand, shaped remarkably like fangs. Aeden thought it a good possibility that they contained some kind of poison. It was only fitting to complete the analogy. He told himself to avoid being struck by the weapons. He soon realized it was easier to say that than to accomplish it.
Aeden spun to dodge a slash from one of the knives and narrowly avoided putting himself in the path of a pair of swiping claws from other animaru trying to get at him. He took a half step back, parried the snake’s other knife with the sword in his left hand, and jabbed the sword in his right into the eye of an animaru with a face disturbingly like a fox’s. As the fox creature fell, Aeden pulled his sword free and slashed behind him—without looking—to remove the tips of three fingers of a claw aimed at his neck.
Bending his knees and dropping beneath another knife slash, Aeden turned a block with his sword into an awkward slash that nevertheless found its mark and tore out the throat of another black figure.
The battle was too congested, too hectic, to be in it long without serious injury. Aeden started the choreography for a powerful spell, but each time his motions fell to pieces. It was too difficult to perform the complex gestures while fighting the snake and all the other animaru as well. After the third time starting—and failing—the spell, he felt like he might be in serious trouble.
Suddenly, Fahtin materialized by his side, slashing with those long knives, face grim and determined. She had a shallow cut across the left side of her forehead, and blood trickled down her cheek. “I’ll try to give you a chance to work your spell,” she said as she batted a claw away and slashed its owner’s abdomen.
Despite the help, Aeden still couldn’t find the opportunity to complete the powerful spell. With nothing else to do, he fell back on the simpler form, the clan magic he had learned when he was a boy. Without the complex movements, he should be able to work the magic.
He did. The light emanating from him was not nearly as strong as it had been earlier, but it was enough to force the animaru closest to him back ten feet and daze some of the weaker creatures close by. It hardly moved the snake, but it gave Aeden some room to breathe.
Fahtin had been joined by Aila, and the two of them covered Aeden’s flank as he fought the leader. The two women were a sight to behold, the taller and the shorter moving with the grace of skilled warriors, drawing in the animaru rushing forward after being pushed away by Aeden’s magic, dodging attacks and working as a team to distract and then deliver fatal blows to the monsters. He turned his full attention on the leader and attacked with a ferocious flurry that put the snake on full defense.
Aeden batted away the feeble attempts at counterstrikes from the snake’s knives and pressed the attack. He spun, generating momentum h
is opponent was hard-pressed to block with the smaller weapons. Slash after slash, one sword after another, Aeden struck relentlessly. It would only be seconds until he was overrun again with the other monsters. He had to finish his foe quickly.
A downward strike with his left sword forced the snake to block with both knives. As steel met steel, Aeden turned his wrist to angle the blade and trap the knives, pushing them down. As he did so, he rolled his right wrist, flicking the sword up with lightning speed, turning it to the perfect position for a thrust just above the trapped blades. His sword slid into the snake’s body, angled perfectly to go through the ribs and into the heart.
Aeden wasn’t sure if the anatomy of the animaru resembled humans’, but as the snake’s eyes widened, the slits of nostrils on its scaly face flared, and then its body went slack, he figured that they shared at least one thing: the heart was in the same place and was still a vital organ. Strange how the part of a human body that pumped the fluid of life was important to creatures of death as well.
57
Once the leader had been defeated, Aeden set about clearing the regular animaru troops. As he did, he saw Urun, hands and mouth moving, magic causing handfuls of creatures simply to drop unmoving to the ground around him. Tere, out of arrows, fought like a whirlwind with his long knives. Fahtin and Aila continued to cooperate and cover each other as they battled. Raki was a shadow, now visible, now disappeared. He struck from hiding, eliminating foe after foe and then retreating into the dark corners of the battlefield again.
The party regrouped after finishing off the last of the animaru. After Urun healed the last of them, he sat down hard and rested his elbows on his knees.
“Are you okay?” Fahtin asked the priest.
“Yes, just a little tired. Between the combat and the healing, I’m drained.”
Wanderer's Song Page 38
