He leapt to his feet, sorry he did so as the world spun. He was so drained of energy, he had to stand still until he could be sure of his balance.
“We have to find her,” Aeden said. “She wasn’t cut down or anything, was she?”
“She was fighting beside us a little while ago,” Raki said. “I lost track of her just before all those monsters started running.”
“Same here,” Aila said.
“Split up,” Aeden told them. “Find her. She might be hurt. Urun, get ready to heal her. I know you’re probably tired, but if she is hurt seriously—”
“No need to worry,” Urun said. “She will be my priority.” He limped off into a direction the others hadn’t gone.
Aeden moved off in yet another direction, searching through the bodies for one in brightly-colored clothing, hoping against hope that he would not find one. He didn’t, but neither did he find Fahtin resting or injured. He walked to the furthest evidence of battle he could find, but didn’t see her. His stomach going sour with worry, he headed back to where the others were coming together again.
“Nothing,” Urun said.
“I didn’t find her, either,” Tere Chizzit told him.
Raki shook his head and turned his eyes toward the ground.
“I’m sure she’s all right, Aeden,” Aila said. “There has to be a good explanation for why she’s not here. At least we didn’t find her body.”
“They’ve taken her,” Tere said. “That big, hairy one, the one that uses magic, he’s gone too. He fled with the remaining troops. They must have taken her captive.”
“But how? Why?” Aeden said.
“As for the how, a handful of them could have overpowered her. And why? Isn’t it obvious? To lure us into another ambush when they meet up with more of their fellows.”
“Well, they’re right about that, then,” Aeden said. “We have to follow them.”
“We can’t do that,” Urun said. “We have—you have—a mission to complete. We’re talking about the fate of the world here, Aeden. You can’t sacrifice that for one person, no matter what she means to you…to us.”
Aeden gave him a level look. The priest kept eye contact for a moment and then averted his eyes. “I can and I will. You don’t have to come with me. I’ll go alone if need be. I’ll not leave her to those monsters.”
“I’ll go with you,” Raki said. “Fahtin would do the same for us.”
“I’m in,” Aila said. “Sounds exciting.” Aeden looked at her, not knowing what to say.
“I’m fond of the girl,” Tere Chizzit said. “I’d not like to see her come to harm. I’ll join you as well. Just let me retrieve what arrows I can salvage.” He headed off to do that, Raki going with him to collect his own thrown weapons.
Aeden went to gather his pack from where he had dropped it before the battle. He didn’t bother looking at Urun or asking what he would do.
“Let me at least heal everyone before we go,” the nature priest said. “We’re all in bad shape.”
“Before we go?” Aeden asked.
Urun Chinowa sighed. “Yes. I don’t agree with going, sacrificing the entire world for one person, no matter who they are, but I’ll stick with you. There is no use in me going to the Academy without you.”
“Good enough.”
Urun healed everyone’s wounds and prayed over his own. Aeden gave him a quizzical look. “I can’t heal myself with spells. It’s like trying to pick yourself up by your belt. I have to pray to receive healing directly from Osulin. She rarely says no, only when she thinks that I might learn a better lesson if I have to heal normally. She answered me this time, so my wounds are gone.”
Without further discussion, Tere Chizzit took the lead, tracking the mass of creatures that had fled. Aeden hoped they were not too late.
Chapter 50
Fahtin’s heart beat so hard in her chest that she could swear the necklace that nestled between her breasts bounced from the force of it. She had never seen so many creatures at one time. Would they survive the onslaught?
She looked over at Aeden. He seemed confident and unafraid. That made her feel better, at least. If he saw no need to worry, then maybe he knew they would be all right. When he looked over at her, she swallowed hard and forced a smile onto her face. He gave her one in return, though it seemed as fake as the one she gave him. The others seemed to be calm, too, even Raki. She wished she was braver, but she had to clench her legs to keep her knees from shaking.
The black creatures swarmed toward them, the highest concentration going toward Aeden. She formed a loose triangle with Raki and Aila and brought out the long knives Tere Chizzit had given her. Their weight felt strange compared to the knives she had always practiced with, but their length would be an advantage. At least these animaru didn’t use weapons. All except that pale one with the two swords. Aeden had said she was some kind of commander, so no doubt she would focus on him.
Not having to worry about blocking blades was a plus, but she had seen what those claws and teeth could do and was wary. Too soon, the first wave was in front of her, and then all thought of other things left her head. It was only combat, kill or be killed.
Fahtin recalled what Aeden had told her in all those training sessions. She had to remain calm. If she lost her head and panicked or got angry, she would get sloppy. She needed every ounce of her skill for this battle. She looked down at her knives. They were glowing faintly from the magic Aeden had placed on them. They could hurt these creatures now, as normal weapons couldn’t. It was time for her to start hurting them.
So many dashed at them, she would not be ignored as in some of the first encounters with the animaru. Only so many could crowd around Aeden, so some creatures had to attack the other humans. That made it more like a real battle, more dangerous.
A flash of darkness to her left caused her to turn her head just in time to see the airborne creature coming at her. She ducked under the flying body—this one thin and covered in wiry black hair—and sliced at it as it flew by. The blood that came out of the thing, almost a brown color, splashed onto her face, warm and sticky, and she started to gag at the thought. But there was no time to be sick. Other enemies were coming.
Fahtin worked well with the two others near her, especially Raki. They had trained together so much it almost seemed like practice. Except that one mistake could cost her life.
It seemed to her that it was like when she had observed bees in a hive. At the hive itself, the bees swarmed and swirled and moved. A foot or two away from their home, they still circled, but there were far fewer and they seemed to move about aimlessly. In this case, Aeden was the hive, and all the activity centered on him while the lesser number of animaru attacked her and the others. It was obvious that their top priority was to kill Aeden.
As she dodged and slashed at her foes, she wondered at that. Aeden was so important that a whole race of creatures, the entire population of another world, was concerned primarily with his death. Who was he? What was he? It was surreal.
No. What was surreal was that he met their charge, and he survived it. It was amazing to see it. There had to be hundreds of the monsters against him, maybe thousands, and yet he whirled and fought, going headtohead with their leader and still withstanding them. So far. It was awe-inspiring.
Aila slashed with her strange weapons and saved Fahtin from a thick, squat animaru that had been preparing to rip her throat out from behind. The Gypta nodded her thanks to the shorter woman, and Aila smiled back as she spun the weighted cord attached to the weapon in her other hand. It wrapped around the other creature’s forearm, and when she jerked it forcefully, it separated the lower part of its arm from the upper. Fahtin needed to stop thinking and start paying attention to the fight. It wasa good thing she had her friends there with her.
She dispatched another beast, this one with four arms, but got a gash on her arm. Glancing over at Aeden, she saw that he was hard-pressed with fighting the pale-skinned leader and all the other
creatures coming at him at the same time. He seemed to have landed a shallow slash to his female foe, but the supply of the animaru seemed endless.
What was that he was doing? He was trying to incorporate his choreography for the spells into his combat, but it cost him his normal smooth, efficient movement. She bit her lower lip as he received a cut on his forearm. She took a step toward him, ignoring the two animaru moving in to attack her. They sprang arrows from their eyes, almost as the same time.
“Don’t you dare, girl,” Tere Chizzit yelled at her over the din of battle. “You’ll affect his focus and get yourself killed. All we can do is try to whittle down these others while he takes on the commander. Get your head straight. I might not be here to save you next time.”
She clenched her jaw, gripped her knives, and got back into the battle, attacking one of the three creatures going after Raki.
There was a sudden flash and Fahtin found herself several feet away and picking herself up off the ground. She wasn’t alone in this. Raki was coming up also, and Aila was on one knee with her left hand holding her up. Tere Chizzit, ten feet farther than them from the apparent source of the blast, stumbled to a stop.
The animaru were worse off. The ones nearest Aeden simply were not there any longer. Those farther out looked to be damaged severely. All of them had been thrown back from the force of what could only have been Aeden’s magic. The ground in a ten-foot circle around him was clear. The commander had been blasted back, too, but didn’t seem to be seriously injured. He had to have destroyed more than a hundred of their enemies with that single spell. Could he do it again? Would he?
The fighting continued, Fahtin engaging the creatures where she could, helping her friends and them helping her. Aeden cast the spell again and, being further from him, she kept her feet. Still, it pushed her away from him and her friends. She fought on.
The world devolved into claws and teeth and the slashing of her knives. They grew heavy in her hands, and her movements grew slower. She lost track of how many times Aeden had used the magic to thin the numbers of the creatures. Her breathing became ragged and her vision dimmed. She didn’t even notice that her friends were not around her.
She whirled around to try to find them, but they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, dozens of the black creatures surrounded her. Closed in on her. Disoriented, feeling like she was trying to control her body from afar, Fahtin brought her long knives up and prepared to take as many of the animaru with her as possible.
A deep voice with the ring of command said something in a language she didn’t understand, and the monsters kept just out of the range of her weapons. The big, hairy creature that had been fighting with Urun, the other commander, stepped up in front of her, babbling something in that strange language. She didn’t understand a word of it.
Too late, she realized she shouldn’t have been giving all her attention to the leader. Strong, rough hands grabbed her from behind and the sides as something struck her head, stunning her. Another blow from the other side of her head, and everything went black.
The dark world was slowly replaced with one of dim light, as if dawn was breaking. Fahtin’s head felt like rocks had been battling within it. Opening her eyes caused spears of pain to shoot through the already considerable torment. She groaned and tried to sit up.
She couldn’t.
She lay on the ground, hands and legs tied. She worked the dryness from her mouth and moved her head gingerly around to loosen her neck. At least they hadn’t put a gag on her mouth. They must not care if she screamed or made noises. Somewhere in her muddled mind, she took that as a bad sign.
When she was finally able to focus, she took in the scene. She seemed to be in the center of several hundred animaru. They were among thicker and taller trees than she’d seen for at least two days. The sun appeared ready to set, but she had no idea which way they were traveling. The big, hairy commander was issuing orders, by the sound of it. He noticed she was awake and came over to her.
“Quis sas du? Tous so Gneisprumay?”
“I don’t understand you,” she croaked.
The creature chattered back at her in their strange language. When he realized she would not understand, he barked out more orders, and all his underlings got to their feet. A particularly large animaru, wide and tall and with skin that looked to be covered with some type of scales, picked her up easily and put her on its shoulder. Another command and they all started moving at a loping run. As Fahtin bounced on the thing’s shoulders, she noted the sun.
They were traveling southeast. Away from Sitor-Kanda, away from where the others were going.
Chapter 51
“We’re getting further behind with each hour,” Tere Chizzit told the others.
“How is that possible?” Urun fell rather than sat on a moss-covered fallen tree. The terrain had turned to thick forest again. “We’re very nearly running the entire way, sleeping only a few hours a night.”
“These creatures can move quickly,” the tracker said. “For all we know, they don’t sleep. Ever. All I can tell you is that they are covering more distance than us each day. Even if we ran until we were exhausted and didn’t sleep, we couldn’t catch them as things are.”
“What are you saying, then?” Aeden said, his voice taking on a dangerous tone.
“Calm yourself, boy. I’m not suggesting that we stop or turn aside. Don’t go getting all highland on me. I’m just presenting the facts as they are.” It seemed to mollify the red-haired young man. The muscles in his jaw relaxed and the hard edge on his eyes softened from diamond to good steel. The anger was still there, but it wasn’t directed at Tere any longer.
“Fine,” Aeden said.
“The way I see it,” Tere continued, “they have to be going somewhere. Eventually, they’ll get there, and then we’ll catch up.” Raki and Aila smiled at that. “But keep in mind, wherever they’re going probably has thousands more of their fellow creatures. A headquarters or nest or something, whatever it is they have.”
“It changes nothing,” Aeden said. “We’ve rested enough. Let’s get moving.”
Tere chuckled at that as he picked up his bow. These highland clansmen were all cut from the same cloth. It brought back memories, it surely did. As he put his tired legs into motion, all he could think was that he should have outgrown this decades ago.
He looked toward where their prey was heading. Well, maybe “looked” was not an accurate term. He was blind, as blind as if he’d been born with no eyes at all. That didn’t mean he couldn’t see, though. It merely meant that he had to perceive things in a different way. For all that people looked at him strangely because they thought he could not see it, his way of moving about in the world was probably superior.
Sure, he missed things like color and eye contact with other humans, but he could sense things around him equally well in the day or night. Light had nothing to do with how he formed images of his surroundings. A young man he had met once, just a few years back, had exclaimed that what he did was magic. The boy was not too far off.
Tere had always been able to read the auras of things, the way they affected the field of magic that surrounded them. It wasn’t so much that he read magic from people but that he interpreted how everything around them was affected.
It was like the entire world was covered in a thick fog, visible yet not obscuring vision. When anything moved through that fog, it swirled and parted in front of them, making it easy for an observer to see where they had gone. The thing was, that fog remained disturbed for days, sometimes weeks, and Tere Chizzit could read those “tracks” in the fog. It wasn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that he could follow the path of someone over solid stone a week or two after they had passed.
The gift had served him well all his life, but especially since he had lost his eyesight. The interesting thing was that since that had happened, his perception of the magic field had increased, as if his body took the extra attention from his eyesight and put it into
his talent. He came very close to precognition with individual movements. Intent, it seemed, began the swirling in the magic field even before the body moved. He could easily read where a strike or a projectile would come and simply move out of the way.
While this made him formidable in battle, it had practical uses, too. Hunting, he could aim for where the animal would be instead of where it was. He never missed with his bow. Never. Taken all in all, he thought that maybe he would choose to be sightless, given a choice. He’d been happy in his little forest home, away from others, biding his time until he died.
But what about the boy, and the mission? Why was he still here with them if his forest was so wonderful? You never did know when to say no to a cause, you old fool, he chided himself.
It was important, though. He had lived long enough to know that. It could be the most important thing he had ever done, and that was saying something. The man nodded to himself. Yes, he would stay with the group, see this thing through to the finish. He had taken himself from society, hidden in his forest, and pouted about the difficulties of life for long enough. Whether they knew it or not, this pack of would-be heroes needed him, needed his experience and his guidance. He would give it to them, freely, even to his death. If he was going to die anyway, he might as well do it as a hero and not in some ignominious way in the forest to no good end.
Tere Chizzit hitched his pack up and adjusted it on his shoulders. They had some traveling to do. A girl needed him—them—and he would not let her down. Not while he still had breath and a bit of magic left in his body. Casting his senses toward the horizon and seeing clearly where the creatures had taken Fahtin, he moved off, each step bringing him closer to heroic action or death. Either one was fine with him.
The world rushed by Fahtin in blurred motion as she was roughly carried along by animaru bodies. Greens, browns, the gray of stones, it was all hard to focus on as she bounced on the shoulder of the thing carrying her. She could only take a few minutes of it before she had to close her eyes or become sick. While it would be satisfying to empty her belly all over her captors, it wasn’t wise, especially since she had not been fed in the two days since they took her.
Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 141
