by Evan Currie
“Then I’ll try again!”
“Don’t snap at me, girl,” Brokkr snarled back at her.
Elan was about to do just that when a whooshing roar and a flash of orange light caused her to flinch away from the window as a rush of heat blew in. Sindri pushed her aside in a moment and ran over to it, sheltering his face with an arm as he looked out.
“What in the circles is going on out there?” Brokkr demanded.
“I don’t know,” Sindri said. “One hell of a fire, for sure.”
The short man pushed away from the window and headed for the barricaded door. “You all stay here. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”
Elan started to move to follow him, only for Sindri to pin her with a glare and a jabbing gesture of his right arm. “I said stay.”
She hesitated, and with that admonition, the short man vanished through the door and jammed it well shut behind him. Elan sighed, slumping down in the seat she’d woken in, idly pulling at the remnants of her armor still hanging from her neck and the back of her head.
“I can’t believe she did all this with her bare hands,” Elan mumbled as she removed the pieces and examined them.
She suspected it was a total loss. Even if she had any idea how to fix it, there were so many pieces missing that she couldn’t imagine any of it still working. A hand over her shoulder, plucking the remnants of the helmet and neck seal from her hands, surprised her.
“Hmm, been a while since I’ve seen this,” Brokkr mused as he looked over the pieces. “Good design, though. Your people did good work in their day.”
Elan didn’t really know what to say to that, so she just kept quiet and watched.
“Primary display is gone, of course,” Brokkr said, “but the secondaries are intact. She’d have had to poke your eyes out to get them. Looks like the pathways are all torn to shreds. Herself has a way with machines, I’ll say that much . . . She knows how to turn ’em off, at least.”
“I know it’s ruined,” Elan said glumly, looking at the gear with disappointment.
“Well, the armor is,” Brokkr told her, surprisingly gently. “The pathways can be replaced, though. Here; watch.”
Elan did just that as Brokkr pulled a tool of some sort from his pocket and began etching on the armor piece. When it was done, there were complicated scratches in the metal, then he went and did the same to another section. When he was all done, he handed it back to her, gesturing for her to put it on.
The shattered armor was a far cry from comfortable, bent sections poking into her skull and neck, but Elan did as she was told, and her eyes widened as she found the display was functional again.
“How?” She blinked.
Elan didn’t know much, or anything really, about repairing the equipment Merlin had gifted her . . . but she knew you didn’t do it by scratching patterns into it.
“Rune work,” Brokkr answered. “A simple similarity rune in this case, connecting the armor to the display again. You don’t need to wear the armor now, just the display. It’ll connect at any distance.”
“Similarity?” Elan asked, confused.
“Like affects like,” Brokkr told her. “The two runes are linked so when something affects one, it will also affect the other. They’re entangled across space and time, one of the more useful minor rune sets to learn.”
A brief flash in her mind’s eye staggered her briefly, but she caught herself before Brokkr was forced to and blinked away the brief pain before she nodded.
“I see,” Elan said, and shockingly . . . she actually did.
What’s happening to me? she wondered, not sure she liked the changes but finding them both useful and . . . well, terrifyingly beyond her control.
Not liking that train of thought, Elan focused on the display she was still wearing and found that it was still linked to the city’s systems. She quickly called up what she could and looked around.
“Wow,” she breathed out.
“What?” Brokkr asked.
“There’s fighting,” she said, “fighting everywhere. I think . . . I don’t know.”
“Fighting?” Brokkr asked, frowning. “That’s doesn’t make sense. The city is solidly under demon control . . .”
“It was,” came a voice.
Both of them turned, seeing a slightly smoky Sindri slipping back in the door.
“Was?” Brokkr asked.
“The slaves are in full revolt,” Sindri said, slightly awed at what he was saying. “I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”
“I don’t believe it’s possible,” Brokkr growled. “Those beaten-down forners don’t have the sacs to fight. They’re slaves to the core.”
“Slaves love freedom more than any freeman,” Sindri said. “For them it is a dream and a mistress just tantalizingly out of reach. The freeman takes his love for granted. Do not underestimate the heart of the slave, brother. Deep down, it always beats free.”
“Pah,” Brokkr spat, “they should have fought when it mattered, not now when the war is over.”
Sindri sighed, knowing that his brother had deep issues left over from the war. They both did. He wouldn’t let his prejudices blind him to reality, though, and he’d seen it with his own eyes.
“Whatever you must think, brother,” Sindri said, “but I know what I saw.”
“If they’re fighting, we can’t leave them,” Elan said, shaking her head. “I won’t leave them.”
“Don’t be stupid, girl,” Brokkr snapped. “You’re one little slip of a human child! You can’t save everyone.”
“I can try.”
Brokkr threw up his arms, disgusted, but Sindri eyed her for a long, quiet moment.
“Alright,” he said.
Brokkr turned on him, shocked. “What?”
“She’s not wrong,” Sindri told his brother with a shrug. “If they want to fight, then they’re worth saving.”
“We’re three people!”
“Four.”
The trio half turned, staring at Jolinr as the young man struggled to sit up.
“Lie back down before you hurt yourself, Jol,” Brokkr ordered, exasperated. “Bloody pups. You’re not immortal, remember?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Jol said, ignoring him. “She’s right. We have to do something. If they’re willing to fight, I’ll fight with them.”
“Those damn stones will be charged in short order!” Brokkr snarled. “Then everyone dies. Doesn’t matter if they’re fighting or not.”
“Then we take the stones out,” Elan asserted.
“With what?” Brokkr looked around the room, completely at a loss to understand any of them. “We don’t even have your little popgun, child. Our weapons won’t get through those wards, and even if they could, Herself will have the circle triple-guarded now. There’s nothing to be done.”
Elan shook her head, looking out the window at the fires she could only see via the reflected light.
“We’ll find a way,” she said firmly. “The city is full of weapons . . .” A flash of images struck her again, causing her to fall into the wall and brace herself against it with her forearm. Slowly, she nodded. “You two know that, don’t you?”
Sindri and Brokkr looked at one another, one smiling and the other reluctant.
Finally, it was Brokkr who broke the silence.
“Yes, we know. The city is full of weapons,” he said. “I just don’t know if they’ll be enough to penetrate those wards.”
Elan nodded thoughtfully. “You may be right. We need to find a core communication line.”
“What? Why?” Brokkr asked.
“My armor . . . Thank you for fixing what you could,” she said, tipping her head to him, “but it’s lost the connection I had back to . . . him. I want to see if he has any better ideas.”
“That’s fair,” Sindri said, considering. “Brokkr, you go with her. Jol and I will do what we can to help the humans live through the night.”
“I am doing this under protest,” Brokkr gru
mbled, but he got to his feet as Elan turned and started toward the door.
“Girl!” Sindri called, startling her.
Elan half turned, just in time to see a small object flying in her direction. She caught it reflexively and found herself holding a roughly foot-long metal cylinder with gleaming designs etched in its surface. “What’s this?”
“You’ll need a weapon. Take it,” Sindri told her.
“A weapon?” Elan asked, trying to determine if she was supposed to use the cylinder as an overly large fist weight or an extremely short stick. “This?”
Sindri just smiled, clapping Jol on the shoulder. “Brokkr will explain. Come on, Jol. We have a rebellion to back.”
Elan looked over to the other brother, still confused, but he just grunted and gestured to the door.
“Fine,” she huffed, preceding him out the door as the group left the room and then split up to see to their individual tasks.
Chapter 21
Caleb roared as he wrenched the sword from the demon’s chest, nearly bisecting the beast as it fell away from him. He could hear the yells and screams of others behind him as the Atlanteans broke cover and rushed the demons’ line.
He tried to stay ahead of them, keeping enough room around him so that he wouldn’t be a threat to his own side while he raged against the demons with all the strength he could muster in both his own body and the armor. That choice led to him attracting the most attention from the demons, but Caleb was perfectly fine with that.
Demons of all stripes seemed to come from the very ether to charge in and challenge him, and he gleefully met them without any hesitation. His iron sword bent and blunted but didn’t break as he cut down all comers while trying to keep some attention on the fight around him.
Despite being largely the focus, Caleb became aware of bundles of demonic resistance in other areas nearby, and the unarmored men and women he’d brought with him—unarmored by Avalon’s standard, at least—were not faring so well as him.
In the peripheral vision afforded him by the armor, Caleb spotted two men go down under a demonic onslaught, the event highlighted in red right before his eyes. He twisted, breaking from the fight he was in, and leapt across the field in a single bound. He led with his iron blade, slamming it point first into the back of the demon just as he struck home with the full weight of his body and drove the massive figure to the ground.
There was a moment of shock, both demons and humans staring, thunderstruck by the instant of devastation he’d caused. Caleb took full advantage of that moment, wrenching his blade loose and sweeping it up to the left to slash one demon to ribbons and then curled it around and down to the right to send another falling away with blood and ichor pouring from its wounds.
When the others hadn’t yet reacted, Caleb paused briefly to turn on the stunned humans.
“Fight now,” he ordered, “stare later!”
That seemed to startle them into action, and as he turned, Caleb was joined as he and the others fell upon the closest demons with a fury.
*****
Merlin observed the battle with almost all his focus, only little bits of his impressive mind split off to accomplish other tasks. Among those was searching for any sign of Elan in Lemuria, but as sophisticated as he was, there existed a part of him that found itself wasting energy in the very human pastime of wishing for things he simply did not have.
Just a single combat drone would be of inestimable value, but that was something he no longer had. The vast majority of anything military had long since been expended in the war. When factories fell, early in the war, production had been forced to shift to a distributed network. Unfortunately, since then, even most of the distributed nodes had fallen off the network or been entirely lost.
Avalon could produce many things, but some key resources were simply not to be had on the hidden base any longer.
So he was reduced to watching and providing what limited oversight was possible, with only a young man being capable of receiving his notifications in time for anything to be done.
Merlin spotted two of the demons holding back—one in charge and the other . . . the other was a weak, sickly-looking figure. Normally Merlin would associate that one with a demon who had just begun the infernal change that twisted people into monsters, but he had seen this one give orders even to the first.
Those two just watched the fighting, largely unconcerned, and that worried Merlin as he observed through the probes.
What are those two up to?
When the sickly one turned to the stones and began to move in an unhurried fashion back toward them, Merlin knew something was very wrong . . . or would soon be.
“Caleb, priority tasking,” he said without thinking.
*****
Caleb blinked, confused by the words he’d heard.
“What?” he blurted, almost stumbling over a demon that had fallen before him.
“Oh for . . .” Merlin sounded exasperated, which just confused Caleb even more. “Never mind. There’s a problem.”
“Why didn’t you say that? Where?”
“Look to the stones,” Merlin told him. “I’ve highlighted the issue.”
Caleb checked his immediate area but, finding no threats there, quickly looked up to where Merlin was guiding him. The instant he brought the demon into view, his armor suddenly seemed to make the target look larger, startling Caleb, who had to check and make sure that he hadn’t moved closer somehow. When he realized he hadn’t, he focused more closely.
“He looks weak,” Caleb said. “What’s the problem?”
“He is the one who wrote the runic inscriptions,” Merlin said. “I think it would not be a good thing if he were allowed to finish.”
“Got it.” Caleb nodded. “On my way.”
There were demons between him and his target, but for Caleb that was a bonus.
He had little time for the subtle skills he’d learned from Simone and others, and little need of them in the moment. He hacked wildly to either side as he ran through groups of the demons, trusting in power to see him through any lacking of skill, not even bothering to ensure that his targets of opportunity went down entirely, as his main focus was deeper in.
*****
Simone was startled when Caleb suddenly twisted and changed his apparent goal of fighting every possible demon single-handedly and shot off on a direct course for the standing stones. A course that put him deep inside the enemy line, and her with no chance or path to follow.
She waved on a couple of those closest to her to cover while she fell back and retrieved the communications gear that Merlin had gifted her.
“Merlin, what is Caleb doing?” she demanded. “He’s going to get himself killed that deep inside the enemy line without support!”
“Caleb is attempting to intercept the demon responsible for the runic etching before he can cause something . . . untoward to happen.”
“Untoward?” Simone spat. “What does that mean?”
“If I knew, I would inform you. All I am certain of, however,” Merlin answered, “is that anything that demon does will not be good for you or your people.”
Simone cursed, dropping the device back into her pouch without responding as she grabbed up her sword and stepped forward again.
“Everyone, form up, push them back!” she snarled, weighing into the fight with her blade flashing in the light.
*****
Caleb stayed on the move, never giving the enemy the chance to pile on.
He slid under one particularly large one, gutting it with his sword as he did so, skidding across the sand-covered rock on his path to the stones ahead. His approach had been noticed, he realized quickly, and the demons were converging on his position.
The armor was counting them as they closed on him, but the number kept going up faster than Caleb could process them, so he just ignored the information and focused on what was in front of him. The demons converging on him were big and slow, but there were a lot of them, a
nd that was posing a problem because he wasn’t aiming to just increase his kill count here.
Caleb knew that he had to get past them, his real target being on the other side. That didn’t mean he had to leave them intact in passing, however.
He could have gone over them easily enough—the suit had the strength for that—but Caleb met the horde straight on, with his blade out to the side in challenge. The dull metal barely glinted in the sun; whatever shine the iron blade might have had was dulled by blood and ichor.
Recognizing the implicit challenge, the biggest of the demons roared and broke from the group to run Caleb down with a thunderous charge. Caleb grinned under the helm and simply sidestepped at the last moment. He swung his blade like a scythe and bisected the demon as it passed.
Two parts hit the ground, several feet apart, and while the other demons were staring at that, Caleb decided it was time for a charge of his own.
He hit the demon line like a force of nature, parlaying leverage and the suit’s enhancing strength into lethal results. Two went down in the initial contact, sword swipes taking them apart with contemptuous ease. The rest made things more difficult as they crowded around, taking away a lot of Caleb’s mobility and leverage.
With pressure squeezing in on him from both sides, Caleb flipped his grip around on the iron sword and hefted it over his head, with the blade pointed down as he lunged forward and buried it three quarters to the hilt in the chest of the demon before him. Before the others could react, he let the blade go and kicked the demon hard enough to send it flying back as he charged through the gap he’d just made.
“Stop wasting time,” Merlin’s voice growled at him. “The runic specialist has begun his work.”
“I’m working here,” Caleb snapped back, pivoting to avoid a blow from a demon on his right, stepping into the attack and grabbing the demon by the upper and lower jaw as the massive beast roared at him. He strained, feeling it even through his armor, until the demon’s jaw broke, then casually tossed the beast aside.
“Work smarter,” Merlin replied. “Do your job; let others do theirs. Attempting to do everyone’s job will just ensure that no one’s gets done.”
