Lonen's War

by Jeffe Kennedy

  Lights also flared into life on the city walls, moving in a progressive wave, voices carrying through the thin desert air. This time there would be no retreat. They’d committed utterly. King Archimago had left some forces in reserve, to send after the refugees on the Trail of New Hope should this attempt fail, but otherwise he’d bring the remainder of the army up behind them with the intent of slaughtering first the golems then the hopefully incapacitated battle mages.

  If they all died, they’d do it knowing they’d given everything to the effort.

  Lonen and his men reached the shadow of the wall after a long slog through the soft, still-hot sand dunes massed against it. Destrye scouts had noted during the previous disastrous battle that various gates studded the walls. A large main gate faced the road, big enough to admit wagons and other conveyances. As it had in the previous battle, that gate opened, vomiting out a torrent of battle mages on wagons pulled by golems, the sorcerers’ golden masks shining as brightly as the torches they reflected as they moved into position. No going that route.

  Though that had never been the plan. Instead Lonen and his squad ran for the smaller gates. The first they came to was, of course, tightly closed and barred. That was fine. They didn’t intend to go through it. Lonen would use it as a platform to lever up. Gripping his knife between his teeth, his axe secured to his back, he clambered along the bars of the gate. He reached the lintel above, hauling himself up.

  Pausing there, he set a spike between the stones, pounding it in with a hammer from his belt and looping a rope through it. He dropped the free end, waiting for Alby’s tug to confirm he’d grasped it.

  Then Lonen climbed.

  The towering wall wasn’t the trees and cliffs of home, but it offered a similar set of chinks and handholds. Back in the deep shadow cast by the wall, Lonen felt his way, the old habits from boyhood kicking in. The adage advised not to look down, but really, for climbing like this, it was often better not to look at all.

  Fix the feet. Reach, fingers smoothing along the stones. Seek. Find. Grasp.

  Then set another spike, connect the rope, wait for the tug. Repeat.

  Fix. Reach. Seek. Find. Grasp.

  Fix. Reach. Seek. Find. Grasp.

  His world narrowed to only that. No thinking about the explosions, the spike of lightning and roar of thunder, the rumble of earth and the harrowing screams of men. All that dimmed as the trancelike focus on the climb took over. Later he’d notice the trembling muscle fatigue, the scraped hands and broken skin bearing testimony to the all-consuming attention to survival, to gaining the victory of the summit. But in this moment he might be in the forest, bark rough against his cheek, the rustle of green leaves above and the chortle of the creek below.

  He was suspended there, peaceful again. Carefree.

  Fix. Reach. Seek. Find. Grasp.

  Fix. Reach. Seek. Find. Grasp.

  Fix. Reach. See—

  His scrambling hand hit something wrong, bright bruising pain in his knuckles. A limb? No, no—the parapet overhang at the top of the wall. He’d made it.

  Inching up his footholds, he gathered himself into a crouch. The next bit would have to go fast. He found a grip with one hand, then another as high as he dared. It felt like it could be the flat surface of the top, but who could be sure? Tensing his thighs, he sprang, praying he wouldn’t launch himself directly into a swarm of the enemy.

  His hands caught, held.

  Slipped.

  And he fell in a sickening arc, hands flailing for purchase. The rope around his waist grabbed hard, catching all his weight, vising the air out of his lungs, and slamming him into the wall with a brain-rattling thud.

  At least the knife between his teeth helped silence his grunt of pain.

  “Prince Lonen!” Alby hissed from several lengths below. “Are you all right?”

  They’d climbed together enough times for Alby to know to stay back. Lonen waited to be sure the spike would hold, then tugged the rope below three times in their all-clear signal.

  Resolute, he made himself climb again, forcing himself to go as slowly as before. Don’t assume the handholds will be the same. That made for careless mistakes.

  He didn’t count the fall as a mistake—it had let him glimpse the top of the parapet. Plus, he hadn’t been spotted. The flat top had been a false perception. Next time he needed to reach higher and deeper. Now that he had it in his head, he could do it.

  And he would be ready to take out the crimson-robed sorcerer standing a short distance down the wall, golden mask facing the tumult in the distance. That priest had been still, no upraised arms spewing battle magic, so perhaps he channeled it from whatever foul source they tapped.

  Lonen found his final spike again, checked its stability, then reached for the top once more. Not there. Just past it. There.

  He sprang. Caught. Slipped. Held.

  With a mighty kick, he launched himself over the top. The priest turned in surprise and Lonen knew his gazed fixed on him even though the golden mask had no eyeholes. No time for the shudder of revulsion, the instinctive fear. Every moment he hesitated the priest could raise his hands and end Lonen’s life, along with the hopes of all the Destrye.

  No time to pull his axe. Yanking the knife from his teeth, he charged, fast and silent as a golem.

  The blade sank deep into the priest’s heart, the slight body falling back, a woman’s gasp of shock rattling from behind the smooth metal. Her hood fell away and her hair, a mass of blond silk, spilled over his hands along with the hot blood pumping from her rent chest. He pulled the knife away and lowered her body to the walkway below the parapet. Putting her out of easy sight of her people, yes, but also…

  He’d never killed a woman before.

  Lucky for him and the Destrye, he hadn’t known before he dealt the lethal blow, as he might have hesitated. The woman gasped, lungs frantic for air that would do her no good, with her life’s blood pooling around her, but he found and cut the ribbons holding the mask on her face anyway. Dull eyes in a once lovely face, already going slack with death.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. The words echoed in his memory. Back to the forest of his youth and a doe he’d brought down with his bow. The arrow had been enough to drop her, but fell short of a clean kill. He’d found her in the soft leaves, glistening eyes dimming exactly like this as her life soaked into the forest loam, instead of pooling on hard rock, running in black streams in the cracks of the stones. “I’m sorry,” he said again, as he had then.

  And cut her throat to finish it.

  “Their women fight?” Alby breathed next to him, a world of astonished horror in his voice.

  “I don’t know, but they’re complicit.” Lonen pointed his blade at another crimson-robed priest stationed farther down, also facing the battle. Still and rapt, unaware of them as if focused out of her body. “Kill as many as you can.”

  “I can’t kill a woman,” Alby said, horrified gaze still fixed on the dead woman’s face.

  Deliberately callous, Lonen wiped his blade on the priestess’s robes. “They came after us and have killed our women, our children, even our hound dogs and house cats. Forget your sympathy. They’re the monsters. This is a sorceress, not a woman. Pass the word to the men who reach the top. Kill as many as they can find who focus on the battle, then get back.”

  Alby swallowed back a retort, one that gave him a look of quiet agony as it went down, then went to obey.

  Lonen steeled his gut and went to kill more sorceresses.

  ~ 5 ~

  “Oria, wake up.”

  “Hmm?” Oria stretched, then frowned up at the flickering shadows playing over the high ceiling. The city walls must be ablaze with torches. Was it that early in the night still? No, because she’d gone to sleep well after they’d been doused to night levels. She’d sat out in the terrace garden to savor the fragrance of the night-blooming flowers and the sight of the white bats that came in like ghosts to drink from them.

  “Wake u
p. Bára is under attack.”

  Chuffta peered at her from beside her pillow, eyes catching the orange gleam of flame, turning the calm green mad.

  “The Destrye?” She sat up, threw off the down comforter, and shivered at the sudden chill. Yanking off her sleeping gown, she pulled on underthings and a casual gown of sturdy cotton. “Where’s Alva?”

  “On the walls. All the high-level sorceresses are on the walls.”

  Chuffta’s mind-voice dripped with sorrow and an unusual blankness behind which something else wailed with grief.

  Oh no. Mother.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she demanded, striding out to the terrace and the balcony overlooking the city. The walls blazed, as did the plain beyond. Thunder boomed through the sky as lightning forked through it, her father’s magic, alive and well, which meant her mother should be also. One of Nat’s fireballs raced out, then fizzled into shivers of descending flame that quickly winked out.

  “I think some of the Destrye have climbed the walls and are killing the sorceresses.” Chuffta gave it to her fast.

  “But why would—” She cut off her own foolish question. Somehow they knew. The Destrye had discovered the battle magics would sputter and die without the priestesses feeding it to the men. Even now the mages were exhausting themselves, only her father’s storm magic still going strong. Because her mother would be somewhere near Oria, and not on the walls.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find my mother. She must be nearby.”

  “The city is in chaos. People dying and grieving the dead. You cannot go down there—it will be too much for you.”

  No news there—her head already pounded with the overload, even this high up, from the miasma of emotion rising like heat off the desert floor. It would be worse lower down, among them. But not worse than being slaughtered by the cruel Destrye on the walls of their own home. Why wouldn’t they just go back where they came from and leave Bára alone?

  “I can’t stay up here while my people, my own family, are suffering and dying.”

  “What can you do that others cannot?”

  She flinched at the sting of his caustic, but accurate point. “Maybe nothing, but if I stay here then I’m certainly contributing nothing. It’s bad enough that I can’t fight. Don’t ask me to be more helpless and useless than I am.” Due to her own failure to learn. If she’d exercised some simple self-discipline, she might not have been slumbering in peace while others died.

  “You can’t blame yourself. And if you’d been on the walls with the others, you might be dead as well.”

  A harrowing thought. She didn’t argue with Chuffta, simply held out her forearm for him. With a sigh that sliced disapprovingly through her mind, he flew to her and dug in his talons. They pierced through the padding to her skin, demonstrating the displeasure that seeped from him. Deserved, no doubt, and yet…

  “Don’t punish me,” she gritted through her teeth. “I can’t bear for you to be angry with me on top of all the other emotion.”

  “I apologize, Princess.” His mental tone layered contrition over the cuts he’d made, soothing and steadying. He hopped up to her shoulder and rubbed his soft-scaled cheek against hers. “I am upset also.”

  “The great guru Chuffta, ever placid and master of all things hwil?” She ran down the steps, only then realizing she’d forgotten to put on shoes. She so rarely wore them, only donning slippers for the few court occasions and city celebrations she all-too-briefly attended. As she passed each window on the spiraling downward journey, she looked out, searching for signs of priestesses on the walls and battle magic in the sky.

  “Watch your step or you’ll break both our necks,” Chuffta chided, spreading his wings for balance, catching one in her hair.

  “Like you couldn’t simply take wing instead of tumbling.” But she slowed and kept her eyes on the stairs. She couldn’t see much through the windows, regardless.

  “I’d never abandon you to save myself.”

  She nearly threw some of his oft-repeated advice back at him, not to make promises he couldn’t keep, but the possibility of separation from him loomed too close, edged too sharp with blood-drenched Destrye blades. Pausing on a landing to catch her breath—had she ever run so fast for so long?—she stroked the long tail he’d wrapped around her waist for extra stability. “Promise me you will. If the Destrye get to me, you must fly away and warn the other cities, the other temples. Tell them what happened here. That the enemy knows to kill our priestesses to disable the mages. That Bára is in enemy hands.”

  “I pledged my loyalty to you and—”

  “Exactly,” she interrupted him. Something that surprised them both, as she never had done so before. “Consider this a last service to me. If I fall, fly away. Warn them or not, but save yourself.”

  With an unhappy mental mutter he agreed and she continued down the endless stairs, going more slowly to stave off at least physical exhaustion. Outside, the night had gone quiet. No more rumble of the earth or crash of thunder. Silence had never been so ominous.

  She reached the ground floor without encountering any of the usual guardsmen. They’d all been called away, apparently. Good that they’d gone to help, but daunting to contemplate that if the Destrye made it to her tower, there’d be no one to stop them from killing her. Or worse. The history books held tales both dire and vague of what happened to women who fell into enemy hands. She’d gone through a phase in adolescence of gruesome fascination with those sorts of tales. None related exactly what befell the women, only that they suffered terribly and it had to do with sex; sorceresses tormented by intimate flesh-to-flesh contact with men not only incompatible, but entirely without magical sensitivity.

  The heavy bar on the door gave her some trouble, Chuffta regretfully unable to help. While he could grasp things well enough with his prehensile tail and feet, being aloft gave him no leverage to help lift something that weighty. On his somewhat helpful advice, Oria bent her knees and wedged a shoulder under the bar, pushing up with her legs as Chuffta flew circles over her head, admonishing her to try harder.

  Apparently, now that he’d agreed to this plan, he was all in.

  The bar lifted out of the slats by slow degrees, then tilted and fell with an alarming clatter, Oria barely scooting her bare toes out of the way in time. At the noise, the door flew open and Renzo, one of her usual guards, crashed through, sword drawn and eyes wild. At least they hadn’t left her entirely alone.

  “Princess Oria!” He pulled back several feet, visibly calming himself, which she greatly appreciated as his battle-ready aggression, anxiety and frustration swamped her with a wave of frenetic energy. Chuffta landed again on her shoulder, touching her skin with his, which helped dampen the overload considerably. “What are you doing down here?” Renzo demanded, all normal protocol discarded. “It’s not safe. You don’t know—”

  “I do know,” she snapped, and his eyes widened at her brusque tone. Normally Oria remained subdued and quietly withdrawn when he escorted her. On those occasions she’d been working on her balanced calm, not soaking in the bristling emotions of a city under attack. “Do you know where Queen Rhianna is?”

  “Ah…” He shook his head, then nodded. “Yes, Princess.”

  “Take me to her.”

  At least he adjusted to the changed reality quickly, saluting smartly and taking the lead—sword still drawn, eyes scanning the shadows—to guide her through the echoing empty hallways of the palace.

  “Have the Destrye penetrated inside the city, do you know?”

  Renzo shook his head, light brown curls shifting with the vigorous movement. “I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. The enemy attacked an hour after midnight. The king called for the princes, emptied the temple of the most powerful priests and priestesses, and mustered every guard who could be spared. The priestesses took to the walls and the rest went to meet the Destrye. Only the queen and her personal guard remained behind—and me, to guard your
tower.”

  And they hadn’t even bothered to wake her. The only person in all of Bára who’d slept through it all.

  “Not all of it,” Chuffta reminded her.

  She sent him an affectionate thought, envisioning a hug that was impractical in reality, in gratitude that he’d awakened her, but didn’t speak it aloud. The nonmagical tended to be disconcerted by her one-sided conversations with her Familiar. They did much better in her presence if they all pretended Chuffta was a pet, nothing more. No one else in Bára had an ivory-scaled winged lizard for a pet, though derkesthai populated Báran children’s tales. Amazing what the ordinary person would accept in order to cope with the existence of magical gifts they didn’t possess.

  They reached her mother’s favored salon quickly, as it lay not far from Oria’s tower. The queen’s guards bristled, then gave way as they recognized Renzo and snapped to attention at the sight of Oria. They didn’t attempt to stop her, but opened the doors for Renzo to pass through first, speaking to the guards inside the doors. Renzo’s tall frame blocked the narrow opening and Oria chafed to push him aside, craning to see past him. Chuffta simply took off and flew over his head.

  “She is in a deep trance,” he reported. “She does not look well.”

  Renzo and the queen’s guards were arguing about whether Queen Rhianna could be disturbed, the discord jangling through Oria’s skull, all that much worse without Chuffta’s buffering contact. She balled her fists by her sides, reaching for some measure of calm, and failed worse than usual.

  “Enough!” she screeched, the sound grating to her own ears. The men all fell silent, Renzo spinning to gape at her. In his astonishment he allowed the door to swing wide, so Oria plowed through them all, slamming through the interior door before any of them recovered enough to prevent her.