by HDA Roberts
I walked out. Cassandra followed me after a moment (it wasn't like the Vampires could go anywhere, even if the only one with legs wasn't in a coma).
"Funny thing, I've never heard of the Half-born, either," she said once we were clear of the smell.
I gave her a sly smile and she thumped my shoulder, though affectionately.
"Clever Shadowborn. How long have you had that fish-story ready for?"
"Oh, a couple of years. I figured I'd need something like it eventually."
She shook her head. "Disgraceful."
I just kept smiling, earning me another soft thump.
It was a bit of a wait until that poor SCA man turned up along with three Magical paramedics (who had the unpleasant job of manoeuvring those shattered bodies onto gurneys for transit to a secure rehab centre).
The agent was one of the SCA’s senior operatives (they wouldn't risk annoying an Archon with a rookie), by the name of Pascoe. He was a Wizard that looked to be about fifty, which likely put him in his late hundreds. He had blond hair streaked with iron-grey and wore the 'government-issue' dark grey suit, dark tie and black shoes like just about every other SCA agent I'd met.
He took my statement without wasting time and then left without comment or even too many questions, which I appreciated. I’d had enough for one day.
"Well... that was a morning," Cassandra said once we were alone again.
I nodded tiredly.
I would have liked to go to my second class, but it turned out that a shooting on campus made the University nervous enough to shut down for the day. I tried to explain to the administration (over the phone) that they were only trying to kill me, but that didn't seem to help. Nobody was left to resume teaching anyway; even the Chancellor was being driven away as quickly as his late-model Mercedes could take him (he was already over the border into Wales with no sign of stopping).
I felt a little bad about the whole thing, but in the end there was nothing for it but to go home and wait for them to inform me that classes were back on. It was funny; they never bothered to cancel classes at Windward when someone tried to kill me.
Chapter 9
By the time Cassandra and I got home, neither of us was in an especially good mood. At the best of times, she did not enjoy surprises, much less the ones involving gunfire. Having to wait around afterwards, surrounded by the smell of rotting Vampire bits, hadn’t helped.
For my part, I was concerned about what today meant for the future. I didn’t know that the entirety of House Aurelia was gunning for me, but I had to assume that they were, and plan accordingly. I wasn’t going to risk being caught on the back foot... again.
As soon as Cassandra was sure that I wasn’t going to drop into a heap from delayed shock, she left me alone and went in search the hottest bath she could run.
I went looking for Tethys. She was furious. Mostly, I think, because it had been luck as much as skill or preparedness that had saved me from death (a revelation that did my intestinal fortitude no good, let me tell you). It took a while for her to calm down and start plotting properly.
Eventually, we were joined by a damp, but clean, Cassandra and the three of us talked for hours about what the Aurelia might do next and how we might go about countering them.
Cassandra was all for telling the other Archons and letting them deal with it. That was certainly an option. All I’d have to do is tell Kron or Killian what was going on and poof, no more Aurelia.
But I didn’t want that.
Even assuming I could talk the other Archons out of something that would look an awful lot like a small nuclear strike, any action they took would still be very bloody and likely include massive amounts of collateral damage. Certainly, the Elders were a bad lot, but most of the Aurelia were like Crystal. They may have had their vicious streaks, but most of them were just people, living their lives. They didn’t deserve to be annihilated because of a familiar connection.
Besides, for all we knew, this was simply an isolated incident, nothing more to see here, all over and done with.
Yeah... like I’ve ever been that lucky.
I knew in my bones that there was more trouble to come, and if I didn’t want hundreds or even thousands to die, then I would have to come up with one hell of a good plan.
Thankfully, I’d been given something of a head-start.
Over the last year, as I became more of a public figure, Killian and Kron had taken me aside and started teaching me about strategy, as they had for Palmyra and Hopkins once upon a time. Archons (First Shadows, especially) attracted trouble, and they knew that I was eventually going to come upon a problem that was larger in scope than a few Magicians with a grudge. They wanted me ready, and made sure that I understood how to go about beating anything up to a small country if I had to.
Their tutorials, covered a wide range of topics: logistics, economics, history and psychology, even some Spells designed to cause truly horrific damage to a population centre if I was so inclined. Some of that stuff still terrifies me.
I hadn't learned enough to make me a master, or anything close, but I was clever, mean-spirited, and I had vast resources at my disposal; I could hold my own. If the Aurelia really wanted to go to war with me, that was just fine. We'd see who cried first.
Tethys, Cassandra and I sketched out the bare bones of a plan that we could put into effect quite quickly if the Vampires decided to escalate. We weren’t assuming that they would, but we’d be ready if they did.
It was late when I finally made it to bed, yawning widely as I settled down for a well-earned rest. I was actually feeling a bit hopeful. Even if things went all the way wrong with the Vampires, we should be fine (and with any luck I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my life scrubbing imaginary bloody from my hands, Lady Macbeth style).
I went to sleep feeling secure and safe...
And fell straight into a nightmare.
I stood on the tallest tower of a colossal fortress, built into the top of some black cliffs. A dark sea boiled a thousand feet below me, crashing against jagged rocks where hundreds of ships fought for control of the water around a small port-town. Sleek galleys, made of black wood, propelled by black oars and blacker sails, fought it out with crude, wallowing carracks, their sails stitched from leather made from the skin of sentient beings. Many of those cruder vessels burned, and tiny figures leapt from them into the sea, only to be snatched away by terrible, tentacled monsters that swum just below the surface.
The air stank of ash and blood; it rang with the screams of the dying. As the details started to resolve themselves, I saw that the galleys were manned by Unseelie Sidhe. Queen Adriata’s people.
And that they were fighting the Hyde.
The Hyde were abominations against nature, the reanimated flesh of sentient creatures fused with animal or monster into an unholy amalgam more powerful than the sum of its parts. There were thousands of them down there, but made of Sidhe, not the human-based ones I’d encountered before. In addition to the pale skin of the Unseelie, I saw pieces of scaled beasts, chunks of ogre, leonine legs, the heads of bulls or tigers... a thousand different combinations, all doing their best to slaughter the Sidhe men and women trying to hold them back from the town.
I was no military tactician, but I could see that the Sidhe were not in a good position. They were horrifically outnumbered by an enemy that couldn’t feel pain, couldn’t get tired and wouldn’t break. The underwater creatures seemed to be helping the Unseelie, but every carrack sank was replaced in line by another; every Hyde monster dragged below the waves had another two or even three waiting to take its place.
Somehow, though, they appeared to be holding their own. Individually, the Sidhe were faster, stronger and more agile than the Hyde. They could move their sleek little ships in close, fire arrows, launch casks of burning pitch and then withdraw before the Hyde could close the range and board. They were even able to use their limited control over nature to help their ships move faster; turn harder.
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But they were so badly outnumbered, and the Hyde had ranged weapons, too. Crude crossbows, mostly, but with enough of them firing at once, they didn’t need to be all that accurate. For every Fae to fall, a dozen Hyde were destroyed, but the defenders were outnumbered twenty to one, and there were more leather sails on the horizon.
I shuddered, turning away from the bloody sea, towards the interior of the fortress.
I froze, and the breath caught in my throat as I saw someone I thought I’d never see again.
Evelina.
Princess of the Unseelie, heir to Adriata’s throne. She stood among a small crowd of her people, all of them wearing overlapping plates of form-hugging metal armour, dark purple and black, most of it scratched and dented. Evelina was as lovely as the last time I'd seen her; tall and straight-backed with perfect pale skin and deep, dark eyes. Physically, she looked the same, but there was a certain... gravity to her now that there hadn’t been before. Her eyes held a different depth, and there was pain there that hurt me to see. She looked tired and desperate and I wanted to help, but I instinctively knew that I was merely a spectator to this. I had no agency there.
Evelina was watching an army that was besieging her fortress from the landward side. I swallowed as I saw tens of thousands of Hyde in a broad arc around the approach, formed up in front of some sort of logging camp. They were chopping down a small forest to make what looked like the frameworks for ancient siege engines; trebuchets and mangonels, from what I could tell.
That drew my attention back to the fortress, and I was reassured. Nothing they could build out of twigs was getting through that thing’s walls. It was built of glittering, black stone, sitting on its own island of rock, a colossal, sheer-sided finger of black granite which stuck out of the cliffs like a branch from a tree. It was connected to the land by a drawbridge, now pulled up in front of a sturdy steel portcullis, itself built into a gatehouse large enough to be a castle in its own right. There were two curtain walls, both eighteen feet thick, the outer forty feet tall and the inner closer to sixty. The citadel was even more immense, six-sided with round towers a hundred feet tall, overlooking the other fortifications.
It was massive and imposing, even menacing.
But against so many...
Evelina turned away from the army and back to the sea, gazing down at the ships, taking in the battle with a dispassionate look in her eyes.
"How long?" she asked, her voice firm and commanding.
"If the enemy keep coming like this? The Fleet might hold another two days, but I doubt it, your highness," said a tall Unseelie man.
"Cruinn, what was the last report from the relief fleet?" she said to another.
"Four days at best. Weather off Nilin's Pass."
She smacked her armoured fist into the parapet, snarling.
"Evacuate the town into the fortress, use the escape tunnels, then collapse them. Once they’re clear, give the fleet the order to break out and link up with the reinforcements."
"Break out of that?" Cruinn said, waving at the carnage below.
"They can take the way through the shoals; our galleys can get past where their caravels can not."
Cruinn nodded, but looked conflicted, "If we take in the townspeople, that will be an extra three thousand mouths to feed, your Highness. That will stretch our supplies even further."
"How long would we have?"
"Two months, maybe three, if we ration."
"Then ration. Two thirds for now. The wyverns will hunt at night and supplement our stocks."
Oh, I hoped that meant game and not anything Hyde-related.
I could understand why Cruinn was worried, but I could also see what Evelina had; that the port wasn’t going to last very much longer. They could probably hold for quite a while against the army, there was only one slim approach, and that was a winding path down from the cliffs, but if the fleet couldn’t hold the seas (and they couldn’t, apparently), then the town would be attacked from two directions, quickly overwhelmed and everyone there would die. Evelina might have tried to tough it out, and hold the town a bit longer, but why bother? The port was clearly of no use with an enemy armada down there, and perhaps her fleet might make the difference if added to the ships on their way?
Still, it was a disaster. And how was all this possible? How did the Hyde even get to Unseelie? Queen Adriata, in conjunction with Queen Elora, her counterpart in Seelie, had blocked off both their realms nearly ten months earlier, was this why?
But that didn’t make too much sense, either. Blocking off the Realms would almost have to block the Fairy version of Portal Magic (the fact that Evelina was stuck in a siege rather backed up this theory). That would greatly restrict their mobility, which was the Fairy peoples’ greatest weapon, especially on their own ground. I couldn’t imagine why they’d do that if an army of monsters showed up, that would be like shooting themselves in the foot.
Notice I wasn’t even trying to deny that any of this was actually happening. It was too vivid to be fake, and I could feel a certain... firmness to it, if that makes sense.
"Highness! Above!" a Sidhe woman snapped, pointing at the sky, in the direction of the besieging army.
It took me a moment to spot them, dozens of shapes, maybe a hundred, flying towards us. All had wings, some bat-like, some feathered, those wings attached to slim, patchwork bodies with just enough muscle to flap... and enough arm strength to grip other creatures as they flew.
"Carriers," Evelina hissed.
She gestured, and the lilac sky filled with black clouds before red lighting slashed into the flock of monsters. They started falling in clumps as the electricity forked from one to another, blowing rotting flesh apart and throwing more than a third of them out of the air.
Evelina sagged, but the Sidhe woman caught the princess before she could fall.
That was... really impressive!
Sidhe weren't built for throwing Magic around like that. Their powers were far more subtle, more... sneaky. They were experts of Illusion, Stealth, Enchantment, Nature and Portal Magic. Direct Magical Combat wasn't really their thing; their powers generally only worked in harmony with their environment.
Hurling lightning was definitely not in harmony.
"Damn," Evelina said, visibly sweating. She turned to the other Sidhe, "I can't do that too many more times. Order the other Powers and the Artillery to focus on the flyers."
Before the order could be relayed, something big stomped its out of the forest beyond the army, toppling two tall trees as it emerged. It was huge and scaly, its flesh rotten and sunken. It looked almost like a snake with limbs, including several additional pairs of huge wings attached to the once sinuous body, now slimy and jerking with rot.
It took me a minute to recognise it, and when I did, I cursed, because, unless I was very much mistaken, the Hyde had found the corpse of a dragon, and... weaponised it. The once magnificent creature stared dully at the fortress, as if it had all the time in the world, and then it started to flap its great wings. Dozens of the smaller Hyde scrambled up its flank, grabbing onto ropes and nets attached to hooks sunk directly into its flesh.
The flapping intensified, and the beast slowly started gaining altitude until it had enough momentum to start an almost lazy flight towards the fortress.
I looked at Evelina one more time. She closed her eyes and took a breath, her shoulders slumping. I reached for her, forgetting that I was nothing more than a spectator...
And then I woke up.
I was sweating buckets and breathing hard.
And I was surrounded by Fae.
The three Pixies, Melody, Jewel and Meadow were hovering in the air above me, the Centaur Lunson stood next to my bed, staff in hand, tail swishing in agitation. The Warp Cat, Grommit, (who should have been with my parents in case there were problems) was perched on Burglar's back (he should have alerted me to new people in my room; worst guard dog ever). There was even an Elf in the corner, a bow on his back, a quiver o
n his hip and an otter (Bayano) on his shoulder.
"I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you all saw that as well?" I said a little groggily.
Nods.
"We're very worried," Jewel said, flitting around and around before landing on my shoulder.
"Very worried," Meadow agreed, doing much the same thing.
"What can we do? What if they're in Seelie as well?" Melody asked, her voice trembling.
There was a long, silent pause; the Fae stared at me as if I had the answers.
"We will find a way to help," I said as calmly as I could. “It’ll be alright.”
Of course, I didn’t have the first idea about how to go about breaking through an impossibly powerful dimensional barrier, or even where I could start looking for the solution... but I would find a way through to her.
I had to.
No other outcome was acceptable.
The Fae visibly relaxed at my words. Lunson even smiled. They trusted me to do what had to be done.
I just wish I had their confidence.
Thanks to various time differences, I didn’t have to wait until morning before asking for help and advice, for all the good it did me.
You can probably imagine the various responses I got to the idea of forcing my way into Unseelie; one of the top-ten places least hospitable to human beings.
They varied from a firm "No idea," from Palmyra all the way down to, "No way in hell! Are you insane?!" from Kron.
In other words, even if they could think of a way to get me through the barrier, they weren’t going to tell me about it. There were actually good reasons for that, not the least of which was the simple fact that my brother and sister Archons considered me to be a walking ball of chaos just waiting for someone to be inflicted on, which was not a good thing to add to an already complicated situation.
