Again, the crowd burst into cheers, women held their children up to see their lords, and men wept openly at the thought of a unified realm.
Beck squinted. He could have sworn there had been only three people on the balcony a moment ago. But now, two more men dressed in the livery of the Honor Guard slipped behind the three Eastern lords. Silently, one man stepped behind Jaiden Zeer and the other behind Arva Vatana.
Beck raised a gauntleted hand and called out, but his words were drowned in the din of the crowd’s cheers. In one smooth motion, a dagger appeared in each man’s hand. Crimson red blossomed from Jaiden’s cut throat and Arva Vatana struggled violently as the second assassin tried to kill him as well. The cheers of the crowd turned to gasps.
After slaying Jaiden, the unencumbered assassin charged Arva with his knife. The lord of Pa’laer, still wrestling with his original assailant, turned at the last moment and avoided the man’s blade. Before the assassin could strike again, Arva grabbed the man’s wrist. With one flush movement, the horse lord threw his original assailant over his shoulder with a hip check, while still deftly grasping the second assassin’s arm.
Mehail, still facing the crowd and knowing nothing of the commotion behind him, heard a voice boom out through the square. Imitating the voice of the Chair of the High Council of Adhira, it cut through the hushed gasps of the crowd.
“For with the deaths of these charlatans, we of Mindra’s Haven, the true Eastern rulers, will reclaim our rightful place of power and dominion over all of Devdan!” The temple then stopped projecting the sound from the balcony and Mehail turned in astonishment. He saw one of his own guards trying to force a dagger into Arva’s heart and another man lying broken at the horse lord’s feet.
On the platform below, Beck shouted out as each legion fell into its respective battle stance. “Hold, men, there is some confusion! This is not what it seems. Our lords have declared peace!” Each nation’s soldiers eyed one another fiercely, but none moved. Beyond the platform, the crowd stood frozen in shock, breaths held in a collective gasp.
High above on the balcony, Arva twisted the blade from the assassin’s hand. Before Mehail could move to help, Arva drove it into the assassin’s neck. Blood squirted over Arva’s clothes, and the large man eyed Mehail with a vicious glare. As the assassin’s now-limp body slumped to the ground, Mehail looked back into the foyer and heard the violent clash of blades.
“I knew you were incapable of sharing power!” Arva shouted as he gripped the assassin’s knife with white knuckles. “This was all a ruse. Asura was right about you!”
“You cannot believe that this is my man,” Mehail said, raising his hands numbly. “This peace treaty has been my life’s greatest achievement! You must see it; this has to have been Asura’s plan all along, that you—”
“Lies!” Arva shouted.
Without another word, Arva charged and drove his knife into Mehail’s stomach. The force of the blow thrust the two men against the hip-high railing. Arva looked deep into Mehail’s eyes as the councilor reached for something around his neck that wasn’t there.
Feeling the long blade slide deep into his gut and scrape past his spine, Mehail closed his eyes and whispered, “Guardians, please protect our people.”
“Your death,” Arva shouted as he lifted Mehail up into the air, “will set them free!”
Arva then heaved Mehail’s body over the balcony railing and sent him hurtling to the flagstones of the pavilion below.
In his last instant, Mehail felt himself falling through the air with the sound of the Eastern wind rushing in his ear. A silent tear sheared from his face and then his body hit the ground with a wet smack.
Numbness enveloped Beck as he stared at the broken body of his lord lying mere paces away. For a moment, silence held the square with the tight grip of disbelief. The only sound Beck could hear was the drip, drip, drip from Arva’s blood-soaked dagger. It seemed to echo throughout the entire pavilion with a callous countdown to inevitability.
Then chaos erupted in Mindra’s Square.
CHAPTER IX
“Avenge our fallen lord, Jaiden Zeer!” The call came from the Farden general and his shout cut through the screams of the fleeing crowd. It was answered with a torrent of throwing knives aimed at Beck’s legion of soldiers. While most of the warriors of Adhira were well protected from such an assault in their plate mail, some had yet to don their helms. The sound of whistling sharp steel thunking into several of Devdan’s less fortunate warriors gave Beck the fleeting childhood memory of throwing daggers at melons with his father on the beach of their ocean-side estate. Pushing the memory away, Beck continued to stare down at the mangled body of Mehail Bander as another salvo of knives whizzed by.
“General! What are your orders?”
Broken from his trance, Beck slammed his helm onto his head. “Unit defensive formations! All men, repel the attackers.”
At the order, the five legions of Adhira moved as one. They drew their swords and created five tight-knit formations, each poised to strike at their aggressors. As his soldiers moved, Beck called out to the Farden general over the shrieks of the escaping throng of citizens.
“General Tora!” Beck pleaded. “We need not fight. End this now and peace is still within our grasp. This disastrous tragedy is a mistake!”
In response, the foreign general threw a dagger at Beck’s head. Beck dodged and the dagger whirred by, then embedded itself into a captain of the Pa’laer army behind him. The general of the Eastnorth raised a leather-banded hand, commanding his men to draw bow as he shouted to the balcony above.
“Lord Arva Vatana, what is your command?”
Arva leaned over the balcony with the bloody dagger still held tight in his fist. “Kill them! Kill them all!” Arva then threw the knife into the crowd of citizens below. “Even the women and children! Burn Mindra’s Haven to the ground!”
“You heard Lord Vatana,” the Pa’laer general shouted, raising and then dropping his hand. “Fire at will! Sack this traitorous city.”
At his command, many hundreds of bows released in a violent twang, sending a dark flurry of arrows into civilian and soldier alike. The crowd surged in pandemonium. Looking for any way to escape, men and women trampled each other underfoot, and it was impossible to discern if more died by their fellows’ boot heels than by enemy blade or bow.
Arva turned from the balcony and stalked toward the tower’s terrace veranda. As he entered the gracefully decorated foyer, he was met with bodies strewn about the floor. The fallen were guards hailing from each of the three Eastern nations, yet their blood was indistinguishable as it soaked through the elegant carpets of the temple. Standing above the corpses was a group of similarly dressed men with swords drawn. At first glance they, too, seemed to hail from differing Eastern nations, yet despite their uniforms, they had obviously worked together to cut down those who were now strewn about their feet.
Confused, Arva addressed the man at the head of the group. The soldier was missing his left ear and wearing the uniform of a Pa’laer guard. “What is happening here? Who are you?”
Upon seeing Arva, the soldier smiled and wiped the blood from his sword. Slowly walking toward Arva, he spoke to a High Council Honor Guard beside him. “After the explosion, take the rest of the men and find General Beck. Make sure he is dead. I will deal with this one and then we burn this city.”
Far below, Beck scanned the sea of fallen Eastern citizens and raised his sword high. “In the name of Mindra, full advance! We fight now to protect our families, our homes, and our nation. Purge this faithless filth from our walls!”
In response, there came the deafening crash of gauntlets on breastplates, followed by guttural roars as Devdan’s legion rallied. “Legions five and three, engage the soldiers of Farden!” Beck shouted. “Legions four and two, engage the men of Pa’laer! And legion one, with me!”
At their general’s command, the heavily armored legions of Adhira split rank and charged at either
side, crashing into their opposing forces with the devastating fury of their two-handed blades. Their swords deftly hewed the warriors in their path, cleaving first through their leather armor and then flesh and bone. In one fell surge, all but the Farden men dressed in their heavy chain mail were easily overwhelmed and the legions of Devdan were able to push the foreign forces off both sides of the raised platform.
Suddenly, there was a blinding light beneath the men’s feet and a thunderous explosion tore through Beck’s ranks.
Beck felt himself flung high and hurtled through the air from the blast. Finally, he landed hard with a crash of splintered wood and heavy armor. Battered by the fall, he could not see and it took him a moment to shake his mind free of the shock.
Orienting himself, Beck could feel that his beaten body was lodged in what seemed to be broken wood and ripped cloth. Beck groaned as he removed a whipcord sheet that was stuck on his helm.
Looking around with eyes clouded in blood, Beck saw that the explosion had thrown him into a tent stall and his body was wedged inside of a large wheelbarrow filled with pelts of textile. The wheelbarrow had broken his fall and likely saved his life. Beck saw the tent was one of many in a long row of what must have been one of the festival’s countless thoroughfares. Only several moments ago, it no doubt had been filled with hawkers and merchants alike. But now, instead of their ruckus calls, Beck heard only the screams of civilians and the steely crashes of battle coming from the makeshift streets around him.
Trying to move, Beck let out another moan as sharp anguish shot through his rib cage. He raised a gauntleted hand to his chest plate and felt a severely deep dent over his left breast. Fighting through the pain, Beck lifted his head. All about him, people were running through the tent-lined lanes in terror. And off in the distance at the base of Mindra’s Temple, Beck could see orange-tipped tongues of flame coming from the wreckage of the raised platform.
As he dislodged himself from the debris of the tent, Beck saw countless mangled bodies strewn about him on the flagstones. In addition to slain citizens, there also were soldiers who had been caught in the brisance of the blast yet had not been as lucky as he. Sadly, the majority affected were Adhira’s own. While most had been crushed by their armor, many were also burning inside their mail, filling the air with the scent of charred flesh.
Beck lifted himself up over the lip of the wheelbarrow. Fighting past the strain of broken bones, he collapsed over the cart’s side and sprawled out of the tent and into the flagstones with a metallic clatter. Lifting his head, Beck then saw one of his men lying prone several tents away. The soldier was still alive. Catching Beck’s eye, the man raised his gauntleted hand and let out a raspy moan.
Abruptly, a Pa’laer captain appeared over the soldier. Firmly placing his foot on the man’s neck, the captain then plunged his sword through a kink in the soldier’s armor. The man let out a throaty death rattle as the captain twisted the blade.
Turning, the captain removed his sword from the fallen and a sheen of blood ran from its tip. As Beck fought through his pain and tried to roll over and sit up, the Eastnorthern captain called out to his three-man unit. “It’s Beck Al’Beth! Take his head and we will dine with Lord Asura himself!” The captain let out a wordless scream and, raising his sword high over his head, rushed at Beck.
The captain closed the gap between them in a blaze. As the man’s sword came down through the air, Beck raised his gauntlet in defense. The captain’s sword landed hard, embedding itself in Beck’s forearm bracer with a hollow thud. Beck felt the sharp, steely bite of the sword through his armor, and his gauntlet instantly pooled with the warmth of fresh blood.
Beck grabbed the man’s blade, still stuck in the plate mail, with his other gauntleted hand and pulled his attacker off balance. The captain, still holding on to his sword, fell forward toward Beck. With tremendous force despite his wounds, Beck heaved both of his armored boots up, striking his attacker in the gut. The Eastnorthern captain let out a deep grunt as he was knocked back several paces and fell to the ground.
Wheezing, the captain clambered to his feet. His three other unit members then came up beside him, falling into formation. Beck gritted his teeth and grabbed the hilt of the sword. He pulled it free from his bracer with a groan. The blade came away slick with blood. Unable to stand, Beck pointed the sword’s tip at the captain’s face and spat.
Regaining his breath and balance, the captain smiled wickedly as he drew a long curved knife from his belt. Before Beck could act, however, a flash of movement cut across his vision faster than his eyes could follow. A man in a sleeveless cloak slammed the captain’s blade back into its sheath and struck an explosive blow centered on the captain’s solar plexus. Its force dropped the captain to his knees, causing him to gasp for breath.
As the captain hit the ground, the second soldier in formation barely had time to respond before the hooded man was on him next. The Pa’laer soldier thrust his sword in an attempt to impale his hooded attacker. Without slowing, the man stepped aside so that the blade pierced only air. Then, with a flick of his knuckle, the hooded man hit the soldier in the throat. The warrior fell to his side, wheezing as he clutched his broken windpipe.
The hooded man turned to face the third soldier. The soldier was midcharge, his blade aloft and poised to strike. The soldier brought his blade down with immense force but struck nothing as the hooded man stepped sideways. Moving closer, he then drew back his cloak to expose a sheathed blade of his own.
Without drawing his sword, the hooded man grasped his scabbard and thrust the hilt of his weapon up, slamming it under the soldier’s chin. There was the loud crack of steel on bone and a deep grunt of pain as the now-unconscious soldier went down with a stream of blood and teeth oozing from his shattered jaw. The hooded man then turned to gaze at the last remaining warrior. The ensuing silence was broken as the soldier turned and ran, leaving only the captain, who was still doubled over in pain.
Beck gaped in astonishment as the cloaked man threw back his hood. This was not a man at all, but the youth from the Guardian’s Flame! Beck guessed he was in his midteens at best, and certainly younger than any of those under Beck’s command—and yet at the center of the youth’s cloudless green eyes swam the cold strength of a deadly warrior.
Staggering to his feet, the Eastnorthern captain drew his knife and charged at Aleksi’s back. Beck called out but the youth stood motionless, watching the incoming attack over his shoulder. At the last second, Aleksi spun, stepped aside, and deftly grabbed his opponent’s hand as the knife stabbed air.
The captain threw himself against Aleksi, desperately trying to gain advantage with his greater weight. Taking another step to the side, Aleksi twisted the captain’s wrist past the breaking point, forcing the captain’s hand back on itself with a loud snap. In response, the captain’s other hand shot out like a claw, seeking to rip out the youth’s eyes. Aleksi instinctively twisted away and rammed the captain’s own knife into his throat.
The captain fell to his knees, gagged once, and then collapsed backward into a dark-burgundy pool. The man’s eyes were locked on the azure sky as blood flowed from his gurgling neck. As the captain’s heart stopped, the stream subsided and Aleksi looked down at the man’s body as if surprised by its lack of life.
Runic pain suddenly surged through Aleksi’s bandaged hand. It dug deeply into the bone of his arm, causing the youth to clutch his throbbing fist close to his body. Despite his agony, Aleksi bowed to the fallen and then turned his eyes to Beck. The general saw that what had been a gaze of cold strength was now filled with anxious doubt.
Grimacing, Beck hoisted himself up onto his elbow and looked Aleksi in the eye. “You have my deepest gratitude.”
“There is no need,” Aleksi responded, bending to kneel over the general. “Your people love you. That love is not a thing Terra can afford to lose. Now we must—” The youth’s words were cut short as Beck coughed and blood splattered across his breastplate.
&n
bsp; “Don’t move.” Aleksi reached under Beck’s deeply dented chest cuirass and undid the armor’s buckles. Beck let out a ghastly moan as Aleksi slowly removed the chest plate.
“I think this is it, son,” Beck wheezed, laying his head on the ground. “I feel the Guardians’ call . . . If only the Vashyrie still came for our people . . .”
“No, Lord. With a wound like this, you should be dead already.” Aleksi gently lifted the armor off Beck’s body. “Whatever is keeping you alive needs . . .”
Aleksi’s words trailed off as he peeled away Beck’s cuirass and saw his ghastly wound. Under the dented plate, Beck wore only a sodden cloth undershirt that clung to a deep indentation that once had been his left breast. This truly was a thing no man could survive naturally. At the center of Beck’s battered chest, however, a dim glow shone under his shirt.
“Son,” Beck said roughly, as a series of screams cut through the square, “tell my wife . . . tell her . . .”
Aleksi didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled a dagger from Beck’s belt and cut open the general’s clammy shirt. Peeling the cloth away revealed a glowing amulet bound to a silver chain. The amulet, with a circular latticework of ethereal Runes dimly radiating from its gossamer surface, lay fixed to the center of Beck’s crushed chest.
“Where did you get this?”
Glowing with each pulse of Beck’s heartbeat, the amulet’s light suddenly weakened. “Mehail,” Beck whispered roughly. “He . . .”
“No, don’t speak. You must—”
But it was too late. The light of the amulet faded into darkness and Beck’s eyes grew dim with its passing. Beck’s chest then let out a great sigh and did not rise again.
Rune of the Apprentice (The Rune Chronicles) Page 14
