“Oh lord!” Wren spoke peeking into the cell. “It truly is our god!”
“Which of my friends is this?” Morph asked Kestrel.
“This is my cousin, Wren, the daughter of my mother’s sister,” Kestrel replied.
“I see some resemblance,” Morph observed. “You are a most lovely subject.”
“Morph – focus!” Krusima snapped. “The boy is right; we’ll have to confront Ashcrayss. If we don’t, he’ll still have our powers, and our world will crumble and die, as will we.”
Kestrel started to move towards Wren, and out into the larger chamber.
“Where are you going?” Morph asked.
“My partners are out there. We need to discuss our plans with them,” Kestrel answered.
“Discuss?” Krusima asked in a chilly tone.
“Their lives are at stake, and this was not their quest in the beginning, but they have been faithful and helpful throughout the challenges we have faced,” Kestrel tried to keep his voice humble. “They deserve to know what their future may hold.”
“Listen to the boy,” Morph told the human god.
Wren stepped back out of the way as Kestrel came through the jagged door opening in the cell, and he saw that all the others in the party were staring in astonishment.
“Kestrel friend, Wren dear tells that the elf-god is your father; is this truth?” Stillwater asked as he floated down next to Kestrel.
“It is truth, Stillwater hero,” Kestrel confirmed.
The three living humans suddenly fell to their knees as the two deities appeared.
“Tell them to get up,” Woven growled. “Deities that get put in prison are hardly worth worshipping. Corrant would never fall victim to anything like this.”
“We are going to help our gods fight against the Viathins’ god, and then they will help us return to our own land,” Kestrel soothed his companion.
“My subjects, thank you for coming on this long journey to rescue us,” Krusima told the humans. “Your way here has not been easy, I’m told, and it will not get easier yet, until we make our way to the temple where Ashcrayss receives the sacrifices and listens to the worship that restores his strength.
“We will have a perilous journey to reach the temple, but it will not take more than half a day,” he told the assembled group. “What weapons do you bring?” he asked.
“My lord, we brought Kestrel,” Lark said. “He has been our greatest weapon. But these two stout warriors have used swords, and the elven girl has used her arrows and staff, and the gnome has thrown stones that were as deadly as arrows. Even the imp has been an important warrior. It was he who killed all of these dead Viathins,” she praised the imp.
“That is truly an extraordinary claim for one of the little ones, who seldom do more than cause mischief and mayhem,” Krusima replied skeptically.
“Stillwater is a fierce and faithful warrior,” Kestrel agreed with Lark. “The girl tells the truth when she says he was the one who saved us from the trap laid for us down here.”
“Even the unexpected can contribute,” Morph said. “We must be prepared to look for and accept assistance from any unusual source. And we may have to make sacrifices that we do not expect, painful though they seem, for the good of all.
“Now, tell us of the way out, Krusima,” Morph said. “I was brought here directly, as soon as I passed into this land and was caught by Ashcrayss. I do not know any ways but the path to the cell,” he gestured towards the prison cells they had just been freed from.
There was a sudden, alarmingly loud clattering noise, a din that filled the prison chamber with sharp, staccato knocks and clacks, as a number of Skyes suddenly came tumbling down the stairs and into the room.
That’s the alarm!” Stuart said, grabbing a spear away from one of the dead Viathin guards. “We’re trapped down here.”
“Kestrel can provide an escape,” Krusima said confidently.
“I can?” Kestrel asked, startled by the god’s assertion.
“I’m not totally stripped of abilities, you know,” Krusima snapped. “I can sense that there is another portion of the dungeon behind that wall over there,” he pointed across the chamber. “I suggest you open a way for us to pass through it and then I’ll lead our way out.”
Kestrel turned and stumbled over a Viathin corpse. He was prevented from falling on his face by a timely catch made by Gates, whose strong arms grabbed Kestrel’s to keep him upright.
“Thank you,” Kestrel grinned.
“No, thank you, my lord, for your work,” the guard told him in return.
Kestrel nodded as he straightened, then hurried to the designated wall. He circled his fingers to create the loop with the small gap, then placed his fingers by the wall, and generated the flow of power that produced the powerful arc whose energy sliced into the rocky wall. Kestrel had no doubt that he would quickly find the chambers beyond, as promised by Krusima.
“Stillwater,” he called, “bring your water skin over here,” he told the imp. “When this opens up, I don’t know what will be on the other side. If you see any Viathins, spray them at once,” he ordered, as his finger continued to create the brilliant spark that cut away the stone.
There were shouts on the stairs, and Kestrel heard Wren calling the Skyes to come join the retreat as he finished his cut. Krusima pressed Kestrel aside and pressed against the cutout stone, so that it toppled inward, revealing darkness within.
Stillwater sprayed his water into the new opening, and after a moment without reaction from any potential ambush beyond, he flew into the new chamber.
“There appears to be no one within,” he announced, poking his head back out to address the others. “And there is a staircase leading up.”
“Morph, take the lead,” Krusima ordered, and there was a momentary flash of speed as the elven god exercised his strength and bounded across the room and through the new door that Kestrel had created. “My people, go next,” Krusima motioned to the humans, who came hurrying across the room. Lark gave Kestrel a piercing stare as she passed him, but said nothing as she followed Gates, with Stuart right behind her.
The Skyes were rushing across the room towards the door, as Krusima looked at them with a dismissive expression.
“Will they be able to slow the Viathins down at all?” he asked.
“They won’t have to,” Wren said stoutly. “They’re coming with us. They’ve done a great deal to get us here to save you.” She said something to the Skyes in their own language, and they all moved more quickly.
“The enemy comes, Kestrel,” Woven said from his post by the door to the stairs.
“Are all the Skyes out?” Kestrel asked.
“The last one just made it,” the gnome announced.
Kestrel waved, and a blue shield appeared across the doorway, making Woven jump back with its sudden appearance.
“That will hold them temporarily,” Kestrel said. “Now come and join us,” he told the gnome.
The Skyes were climbing up and over the low lip of wall that Kestrel had not cut free, and he reminded himself he would have to be sure to remember to cut to the floor next time, if there was a next time.
Krusima stepped through, interrupting the Skyes, and Wren followed. Woven went too, and Kestrel saw Viathins arrive at his glowing gateway. They stopped, glanced in through the transparent energy shield to see his new escape route, and a pair of them started running up the steps to spread the warning that the direction of the chase had changed.
The chamber was empty, except for those Viathins that had descended the stairs and not gone back up. A small mob of the creatures stood outside Kestrel’s glowing blue shield, watching, shouting and bellowing angrily. Kestrel started to back out of the chamber, placing one foot through the passageway, watching the stymied Viathins, when a sudden thought, a possible tactical advantage struck him, and he stopped.
Kestrel stepped back fully into the chamber, back towards the Viathins. His friends were making their es
cape, and he would have to catch up to them, but first he wanted to reduce and delay the Viathin pursuit. The stymied guards grew more agitated at the sight of Kestrel coming towards them, and he let his shield slide slightly towards him, giving the Viathins the chance to inch closer, and to believe that his power was weakening, as indeed it truly was – though not as much as he wanted the Viathins to believe.
Kestrel stepped back towards the escape route again. And as he did, he released his grasp of his energy, letting the protective shield completely disappear, and allowing the bottled-up mob to explode forth, rushing towards him with complete disregard for anything but the opportunity to seize him. As the score of large creatures rushed towards him, Kestrel re-established his energy shield directly in front of his own position, then extended the side walls in a curving, stretching form that grew into a circular cage which entrapped the squad of Viathins.
The monsters howled even more loudly, if possible, in response to their entrapment. Kestrel casually circled around their cage to the door they had entered through, and used his waning supply of energy to collapse the ceiling of the doorway. Despite having the efficient new method Krusima had taught him, Kestrel found the job to be difficult as he tried to both maintain the cage and collapse the ceiling at the same time.
He walked around to the passage way he would depart through, and collapsed it as well, once he had stepped into the next room. He gasped in tired satisfaction then, as he released his hold on the power that had caged the Viathins in place, and he leaned against the wall of the dark chamber.
“Kestrel, are you abandoning us?” a voice suddenly sounded, and then a small light flared up, revealing Morph standing at the foot of a staircase on the far side of the dungeon room.
“We went quite a ways upwards before anyone knew you hadn’t come with us,” the elven god said. “I thought I was the natural choice to zip down here to find you.”
“I just trapped twenty Viathins in the chamber behind us,” Kestrel answered. “I thought that would help reduce the pursuit later.”
“Well played,” Morph told Kestrel. “Your cousin, Wren, she does remind me of your mother. She has the same elven cheekbones within that otherwise human face. I’m sure that Wren can smile in happier times, but I’m just as sure she could never have a smile as sweet and pure as your mother’s was.
“That’s what drew me to her, that infectious smile she shared in her happiest times,” Morph said. “We’d spend time together and she’d want to race me – me!” the god grinned gently at the recollection. “She knew she couldn’t win, but she would make me race her anyway; I’d run backwards – not so that I could show her up – but so that I could watch her laugh while she ran, her hair streaming out in the wind, glimmers of wind tears emerging from the corners of her eyes, and always that smile!”
Morph was silent for a moment, and Kestrel was too, torn by the narrative. He felt some part of him object to the god discussing his mother, but a greater part of him reveled in the intimate portrait, of both his mother and his father, a trove of details that exposed them to him for the first time.
“She wanted to raise you as an elf, she told me firmly,” Morph went on, “A normal, regular elf, and she asked me to stay away.” His face lost the gentle happiness that had radiated from it when he has spoken about Kestrel’s mother. “And I complied. This has happened a time or two before, and I agreed that you would be better off not knowing of your unique parentage, especially since there was no way to know whether or not you would inherit abilities or not.
“But your poor mother couldn’t truly raise you as a ‘regular’ elf, since she had not been raised that way herself, and with her human heritage and yours, there was not going to be any opportunity to be ‘regular’ in the Eastern Forest society,” the god went on. “She had been raised by her own elven mother and human father, up in the borderlands between the Forest and Estone, about where Wren was brought up.
“So I have watched you and admired you, and I’ve gone about my own life and duties too, of course,” his father said.
“But there’s no doubt that all you’ve achieved, all you’ve demonstrated, and most importantly the way, the way you’ve lived your life, show that if anything, you’re growing up very well; you’d make a better god than I would, young Kestrel,” Morph laughed. “Your mother was a good influence on you.
“Now, let’s go catch up with the others,” Morph said. “Here, take my hand and you’ll have my speed.”
Kestrel stepped over, his mind swirling with reactions to the many things Morph had revealed, but those things drained away from his mind the second Morph grabbed his hand and the two of them started sprinting up the stairs. Their speed was extraordinary; Kestrel had been jealous of the full-blooded elves in the Eastern Forest in the past, who had been able to sprint in an all-out state that had always beaten him in any race. When he had managed to endure the long race from Oaktown to Center Trunk with Captain Lim, he had been inordinately proud of himself, though that had been a distance run, not a sprint.
Now though, as Morph took him and pulled him along, Kestrel felt an energy unlike any before. It coursed through his legs, making them thrust and push and rise at a rate vastly in excess of anything he had ever experienced, far faster than he knew any living elf had ever run. They bounded up the stairway in what seemed to Kestrel to only be a dozen steps, then entered a long corridor in which it seemed the tips of Kestrel’s toes barely touched the floor before he was twenty feet further down the dark hall.
Morph moved with an unerring sense of direction, and began to slow down abruptly, still in the nearly complete darkness, just as Kestrel recognized that the slight glow ahead was Krusima providing a bare amount of illumination to the rest of their party. Kestrel felt his father’s finger loosen their grip on his hand, and a second later, as they separated, Morph was suddenly a dozen yards past him, as Kestrel momentarily stumbled upon the return to his own frame of traveling speed.
He hurried to catch up to the others, and found himself stepping carefully around the Skyes to catch up to the last person in the line, who was Wren.
“What was going on back there?” she asked as Kestrel arrived.
“There were several Viathins, and I trapped them in the prison chamber so that they won’t pursue us,” he answered. “And then Morph pulled me up here at his speed!”
“Almost my speed,” the god’s voice echoed back to them from his spot at the front of the line with Krusima. “Maybe when this is over and we’re back in the Eastern Forest and I have my full powers back we’ll see if you can handle my full speed.”
“Ssshh,” Krusima growled. “We’re sneaking through enemy territory.”
“Do you have any idea of where we’re going?” Kestrel asked Wren in a whisper.
“No, he hasn’t said anything, other than he told Morph to go get you; he said we were going to need you,” Wren answered just as quietly.
Her report made Kestrel feel uneasy.
“Where is Stillwater?” he asked.
“Krusima sent the imp up ahead to scout and report back,” Wren answered.
“I’m going to go find out more,” Kestrel told his cousin, and he started moving past the others to reach the front.
He heard the humans murmur something as he passed them, but he continued on, and reached Krusima and Morph, just as they came to a stop at a cavern crossroads, where three passages led away from the chamber they stopped in.
“Which way to go?” Krusima asked, seeming to speak to himself more than the others.
“We could ask the Skyes,” Kestrel suggested.
“The who? Oh the natives? Those bugs?” the human god said dismissively.
“Without their help, we never would have been able to find a way to rescue you,” Kestrel stood up for the strange race. He had been impressed by the steadiness they seemed to display, and he felt a loyalty to them after traveling with them on the trip.
“It can’t hurt to ask,” Morph pointed o
ut.
“Go see what they say,” Krusima growled his consent, and Kestrel went jogging back to Wren, to ask her to question the Skyes about their location and route.
Wren and Kestrel and one of the Skyes went forward to where Krusima waited.
“Where is it you wish to go, my lord?” Wren asked.
There is a high tower, which provides a view over a great distance,” the god explained. “From the chamber at the top of the tower, one can see a mighty temple, with a high steeple. There is a great canyon before the temple, and a long bridge that stretches to the temple.”
“Are there insects?” Stuart asked.
Krusima looked at him in surprise.
“My lord, one of our men was killed by a swarm of insects. We traveled by tunnel and cave to reach you in part to stay away from those murderous killers,” Stuart explained deferentially.
“You can surely have Kestrel do something about a few bugs,” Krusima brushed the issue aside.
“Not in the daylight, my lord,” Kestrel spoke up. Morph and Krusima both turned their heads to examine him following his unexpected comment.
“This land has a blue sun, with blue sunlight, and we think that it perhaps suppresses my powers. At night, and underground, I have some powers, but not so in the daylight here, at least not so far. Even at best I have less than I had at home,” Kestrel tried to explain.
“”It may not be daylight outside,” he added. “I might be able to do something. When we get to a window we can tell.”
The Skye clattered inquisitively.
“Do you still want directions from them, my lord?” Wren asked respectfully.
“I suppose we better find the way to a window, to see if our reluctant hero has sunlight or starlight awaiting him,” Krusima replied. “Find the nearest one.”
Wren and the Skye spoke quickly. “Go to the right, then up more stairs and through a door,” she reported.
They set out once again, following the directions, while Kestrel found increasing resistance to the use of his power to maintain his illumination from his glowing hand.
An Unexpected Deity (Book 7) Page 21
