Foundations Broken and Built

by Jeffrey Quyle

  In the afternoon, Silas passed through another of the larger settlements along the road, one that was so large that it could almost be called a city. There were many buildings constructed with stone construction and third or fourth stories along the main street, which was even paved with bricks for several blocks in the center of the city. Silas again made a small purchase in a small food vendor, where he regrettably caused a young man to pass out when he saw the purple and golden eyes across the counter from him.

  Silas continued on, then found a small farm’s barn around sunset, and settled into the hayloft for the evening. When he awoke the next morning and returned to the road, he discerned a smudge of smoke on the horizon; it was evidence that the city of Ivaric was coming into sight. His destiny was drawing near.

  Chapter 26

  Silas felt confident that he had gotten the attention of the evil center of power in Ivaric. He hoped that his efforts were straddling a fine line – enough to draw opposition away from the invading fleets, but not pressing so many soldiers to the eastern side of the city that Silas would be unable to penetrate the city and press his own attack.

  Silas hoped that misdirection would also serve his purposes in a different way when it came time to fight L’Anvien, when Silas would look to attack from beneath, as Krusima had directed him to, while his evil demigod target would expect an attack from the sky.

  The dark smudge of air on the horizon grew higher and more prominent as the day went be and Silas drew closer to the city. It was something he noticed, until it wasn’t anymore. And that anymore happened to come when Silas caught sight of several units of the Ivaric army drawn up in positions that stretched in a line from north to south just a few miles outside the city.

  They were the defenders he had lured out of the city. Now that they were where he wanted them, they were in his way, and he needed to avoid them. The line of soldiers seemed to stretch out of sight both north and south; if he wanted to try to get around them, he needed to pick a direction and start walking, so that he could find the end of the defensive line and double around it.

  He decided to go north, for no particular reason, and he turned up a farm lane that cut a narrow line between the stone walls of two farm fields. The lane went straight north, until it ended by emptying out into a field full of green shoots that were arising from the soil. Silas proceeded to pick his way across the furrowed earth of the field and into the next field, one that perhaps had a different farm lane running alongside its own stone fence. Silas angled across the field and found a lane that mostly went north, but sometimes back east, so he resolutely marched along the lane until it crossed a country road.

  The road offered a path westward, towards the city once more, though the line of soldiers was still visible in front of it. But the end of the defensive line was visible to the north as well, giving Silas hope that he could turn the corner. His cross-country jaunt had already eaten away much of the afternoon, and Silas realized that he would only be able to reach the city after nightfall if he had to continue his slow trudge through the uneven fields.

  Silas wanted to enter the city quickly; he wanted to scout around and examine where he could find the best opportunities to fight a battle on terms that he preferred. He wanted to find where the temple to L’Anvien stood, so that he could explore and consider options for destroying the temple.

  “Silas, this is Preeanne, calling to you to let you know that our fleet is approaching the shoreline of Ivaric,” a voice rang suddenly in his ears. “We are bringing you the chance you need, we will distract the leaders of Ivaric so that you can launch your attack.

  “We have joined forces with the fleet from Amenozume, and we are a formidable challenge to Ivaric.

  “Silas, I wish you the best of luck. This is Preeanne of Faralag, bidding farewell.”

  Suddenly, there was no time to lose. Silas began to run west along the road, aiming to enter the city as quickly as possible. The details of the line of defenders became easier to see, and he saw that the defenders were in ranks of soldiers who stood four deep. The four lines of eyes all watched with mild curiosity as a single man on the road ran towards them.

  Silas approached closer and closer to the line. Details began to reveal themselves – patches of color on the dark uniforms, hairlines and facial features, differences in height. And as he approached the soldiers, the details of his appearance began to define themselves to the Ivaric guards, who went from curious to surprised to nervous as he ran, and finally they began to panic as the members of the defense recognized that his eyes were too dark to be ordinary.

  At that point Silas seized his energy, and launched himself into a low, flat, fast leap over the lines, doing little more than hurdle the standing men in a blur, so that he was past them, and then took another fast, enhanced step. He outsped the arrows that the soldiers belatedly fired at him, and he continued to fling himself towards the city as fast as he could, desperate to reach the city and begin his battle to defeat the ruling family and their evil god, a battle to save his friends who were sailing into battle on his behalf.

  The army forces that were behind him would have no chance to catch up to him, Silas knew. He only needed to enter the gates of the city and find his way to the palace, or L’Anvien’s temple if he could find it. From there he could begin his battle, a battle that had unexpectedly and urgently sprung from prospective to real.

  Silas ran with enhanced speed towards the gates of the city, and he sent a powerful blast of air in front of him, recklessly blowing away all obstacles and traffic at the gate. Silas ran into the city, and saw a wide boulevard stretching into the city center. He stopped to gather his breath, and to scan the area around him. People were screaming and fleeing, while no guards appeared present, other than those he had blown away from the gate, who huddled uncertainly in an alcove.

  “Which way to the palace?” Silas looked at them and asked, using his Speaker abilities.

  One of the guards looked at Silas with saucer-sized eyes, and wordlessly pointed down the boulevard.

  “L’Anvien’s temple too?” Silas asked him in normal tones.

  The man’s head gave a mechanical nod. “Near the harbor,” the guard whispered.

  “Thank you,” Silas muttered without thinking, then started stalking forward, ready to face the ultimate challenge in the battle against his sworn enemies.

  As he headed down the boulevard, he heard shouts of warning spreading ahead of him, and he saw pedestrians scrambling off the walks, while wagons and carts pulled sharply to the sides – onto adjoining streets if they could – to avoid his passage. But there were a few scattered words of a different nature as well.

  “Set us free, Abomination!” one voice called, hidden in the shadows of an open window somewhere along his route.

  “Bring back the old gods to worship,” another brave soul shouted, and a few similar calls found his ears as he walked forward.

  He heard noises behind him after he had walked for several minutes. When he glanced back over his shoulder, he saw that the ranks of guards from outside the city walls were pouring into the city, trying to catch up with him. He had a head start and expected to reach either the palace or the temple before the guards caught up to him. And he didn’t think they would play a decisive role anyway – the battle that would matter would be one of inhuman energies – strength against strength, power against power.

  A sudden darkness appeared over the city, and Silas watched a dark cloud appear and expand, then broaden and deepen. The cloud was ahead of his path, but as Silas watched, the cloud dropped a pair of funnel clouds down. The black clouds made a muted roar in the city, but Silas looked in horror as both clouds changed colors within moments of contacting the ground; the clouds began to appear bluish, and Silas realized that they had become waterspouts, sitting atop the harbor waters and pulling the waters upward.

  They would be doing considerable damage to the fleets that had invaded the harbor, Silas thought with fear. The water spout
s were evidence that the fleets had apparently done their task of engaging the attention of L’Anvien, just as Silas’s Wind Word boasting the day before had engaged the attention of Derith and led to the deployment of the army outside the city walls.

  Silas stopped in his tracks, and focused his energy, then exercised his power and sought to seize control of the waterspouts. He reached out and aimed to wrench away the tops of the spouts, and the dark clouds above, catching L’Anvien by surprise as he succeeded. Silas pulled on the cloud tops with a dramatic heave, pulling the powerful storm off of the harbor waters and into the city itself, though Silas was still too far from the site to see exactly where the storms were wreaking havoc.

  The nature of the storms changed, as they dramatically switched from being waterspouts to becoming tornadoes, and the contents of the funnels changed from water to building materials being picked up and flung upward.

  L’Anvien released his touch on the clouds, taking away the source of energy that had pulled the storm into existence, and it began to immediately lose intensity.

  Silas responded by releasing his control of the storm as well. Deprived of its supernatural energy, the storm immediately began to dissipate. The tails of the funnels lifted upward, off the surface and towards the sky, ending their destructive path. The clouds overhead began to disperse and grow lighter, as the atmosphere sought to return to its native state of placid breezes.

  The battle had been short, but intense. Silas felt the impact of the struggle to protect the invading fleets. He hoped he had done enough to allow a substantial portion of the ships to find safety in the harbor, and to reach piers or shorelines or anchorages that allowed them to disgorge their battle-ready soldiers into Ivaric. With so many of the city’s forces struggling to rush back into the city through the confining gate, the invaders would find ample opportunity to succeed as they initiated their struggle to fight Derith.

  Silas turned around as he thought about the army that was outside the walls, all massed together as they tried to come back inside. He could see down the length of the boulevard, to where the gate in the tall city walls was letting more guards enter every moment.

  “Collapse!” he sent the single word command to the wall, and watched the structure slump downward a moment later, accompanied by screams and a rising cloud of dust and powder. The defenders of the city would have to run around the outside perimeter of the wall to the next set of gates to enter, delaying their arrival at the site of the invasion. Silas had bought even more time for the fleet’s army to disembark.

  But Silas felt another slight weakening of his capacity from the use if his energy again, before he had even begun the critical battle he was about to face with L’Anvien.

  He began to walk along the boulevard once more, on his way towards the battleground. He walked slowly, to give himself time to recover, while his eyes scanned the horizon and the skies overhead for any signs of L’Anvien exercising his powers once more.

  Minutes later, Silas reached the palace. The structure remained just as he vaguely remembered it from his previous, frightful escape from the building. It was foreboding – built with tall, featureless walls of gray stone, turning visitors away rather than inviting them inside. No palace Silas had seen in any other land was so closed away from its city and subjects.

  He paused in front of the palace and looked towards the direction of the harbor. There was no obvious road, no single way to travel in the direction of the harbor, though Silas could hear faint noises of conflict coming from there, evidence that the Faralag and Amenozume invasion was afoot in the city.

  Silas felt a sense of frantic tension well up through his spirit, tensing his body. The battle was now at hand. He’d traveled along the empty boulevard into the heart of the city that was ruled and plagued by evil forces, but now he’d plunge into the warren of narrow streets that stood between him and the battle scene.

  Silas entered the mouth of a street, one that was narrow and dim, with buildings that rose four stories high on either side. The buildings fronted directly on the paving stones of the street, leaving no walking space dedicated to pedestrians, and the upper stories of some buildings even protruded outward with cantilevered upper floors, stealing visibility and light from the sky overhead.

  Like the boulevard, Silas found the narrow street empty of activity. The adjoining doors and windows were shut, and only an occasional person scampered along or across the street in front of him as he progressed towards the harbor. The street came to an abrupt end, teeing into another street of similar character, forcing Silas to choose to travel parallel to the harbor front until he found an alley that let him resume moving in a westerly direction, as best he could tell from the limited view of the sun and shadows.

  The sounds of the conflict grew clearer as Silas worked his way towards the battle, and smells of fires and smoke began to waft across his path as well. He turned a corner, and suddenly spotted a wide gap in the buildings along the next street he would travel. The gap crossed the street, a path of ruined buildings that stood in piles of debris, some of them smoldering or displaying flickering fires among the heaps of stone and wood and slate tiles. It was the path that the waterspouts-turned-tornadoes had cleaved through the city when Silas and L’Anvien had struggled to control the destructive forces.

  Silas was much closer to the struggle now, he saw, and climbed quickly up over the debris in the street to continue his journey.

  He took one more turn and jogged quickly forward, until the last empty city street he was on came to an end in an open plaza, one that stretched to the left and the right out of sight. It was the frontage of the harbor.

  Silas quickly scanned the tableau in front of him. He saw two sections of the waterfront where extensive battles were taking place, as the invading fleets had arrived and landed their forces. Neither battle seemed favorable for the invaders, as far more defended appeared to be in the city and fighting than Silas would have suspected.

  Out across the water, Silas saw several ships – some lying on their sides – their hulls showing above the water, the victims of the waterspouts that L’Anvien had dropped down upon the fleet.

  To one side stood a building that was built of black stone and wood. Its angular towers and crenellations were just as black, spiky and foreboding in appearance. It had to be the temple of L’Anvien, Silas was certain. He studied the temple, a massive building as big as a palace. He had Krusima’s advice in mind, to undermine the foundations of the temple to make it collapse. As large as the temple was, he would need to carry out a spectacularly large effort, one that required him to stand and study and speculate, even though he wanted to go down to the waterfront and join the battle, to assist the brave soldiers who were fighting on his behalf.

  His eyes stopped moving and examining, as they were caught by a chilling sight. In front of the battle closest to the temple, he spotted a dense cluster of men in dark robes and uniforms. Derith was there, and Jarvis, and a man whose face appeared so evil Silas had no doubt that he was a high priest of L’Anvien.

  Approaching the leaders of Ivaric, but heavily guarded and bound in ropes, Silas’s horrified eyes spotted Preeanne and Lumene, both appearing waterlogged, both held as captives by numerous guards. The whole group was surrounded by a ring of further guards who were armed with large axes that they held poised and ready to wield in battle.

  All of Silas’s considerations about the temple disappeared from his mind. He looked at Preeanne, still regal in appearance despite the circumstances, and Lumene, still as beautiful as before, a defiant expression on her face, not fear. He wasn’t concerned about the temple; he was concerned about the queen and the princess.

  He called upon his powers, driven by the same anger and rage that he had felt after Lexy’s death, and he burst forward, leaving the sheltered roadway where he stood. He raced forward with supernatural speed towards the gathering of the leaders, aiming to save, protect, and rescue his two allies.

  “Derith!” he sho
uted the name as he drew close, and then gathered his energy and released it, causing the stones beneath the evil ruler to suddenly jettison upward as a single block, throwing Derith fifty feet high into the air, as if a catapult had shot him free. The ruler of Ivaric screamed as he rose and continued to scream as he began to fall back downward.

  “You’re safe, my lord!” the L’Anvien priest shouted, turning and raising a hand that held a scepter of sorts. A stream of light flew from the scepter to the king and stopped his fall, then let him float gently to the ground.

  “So you’ve come at last?” the priest turned to face the approaching Silas. The axe-wielding guards around the perimeter of the leaders stood tense and ready to fight. Silas stalked forward and threw a ball of dense air ahead, striking a pair of the guards and knocking them off their feet. The priest responded by lifting his scepter and aiming a bolt of lightning at Silas, but Silas simply waved his hand, released his own power, and created a disk of air that grew shiny and reflective, bouncing the ray away and harmlessly up into the air.

  Silas threw another ball of air, and punched another gap in the defensive perimeter, as he walked closer, holding the makeshift mirror at the ready.

  “Please, great warrior, we are conscripts, made to fight though we do not want to,” one of the axe-holding guards pleaded. “Do not kill us.”

  Silas nodded his head ever so slightly, they threw another ball of air low to the ground, striking the legs of the guards as he knocked them away without fatal harm, before he sprung through the defensive line and closer to the core of leaders he wanted to fight, and captives he wanted to rescue.

  “Come no closer, or these two will die,” the priest threatened, pointing his scepter at Lumene, and Preeanne beyond her.