Lightning Strikes Twice (Unweaving Chronicles Book 2)

by Sarah K. L. Wilson

  “Maybe we could just lock the doors and stay inside.”

  “Not an option,” Rusk said, as he tugged hard on the storage door. It was horizontal since we were standing on the right-side wall, and it had buckled in the crash. A final tug pulled it free. “With the damage, the Tooth won’t stand a chance. They’ll get in here quicker than you can believe and then they’ll butcher us here. Did you see what they were doing to the people down there? They don’t take captives. If we want any chance of survival, we’ll have to go out where we can maneuver and fight our way clear.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Minutes. We crashed a little way from the front lines, but I don’t know how fast those beasts run.” He finished strapping his sword and leather armor over top of his jumpsuit and then grabbed the ancient weapons- ancient to us, but far beyond our capacity to create. They looked like massive leg-sized candles with dripped wax on every side. He threw one to me. “Here.”

  I caught it, feeling the strangeness of it in my hands. “I wouldn’t know how to use it. Besides, I have my own weapons.”

  “I know,” he said, with a wry smile. “We wouldn’t be in this place if you didn’t. But I need you to hold a spare for me.”

  “Can you figure out how to use it?”

  “I think so.”

  “And do we have a plan?” I shifted in place as he grabbed two backpacks, glanced in one and then closed it and tossed it to me.

  “Put it on your back. I think it’s emergency supplies.” He was already slinging one on his own back.

  I shrugged into mine, handling the ancient weapon awkwardly. My head was spinning. Were these my last minutes? When we opened that door would they be waiting to drag us out and cut us to pieces? “When we get out, do we have a plan?”

  “Try not to die,” he muttered, but then he looked up at me with lips parted and eyes wide. He hadn’t meant to say that. “We’ll make for the door. Stick close and try to watch my back. I’ll carve a path.”

  I bit my lip. This wasn’t fighting Amandera. These people wouldn’t go easy on me. They didn’t know who I was. “Have you ever done anything like this before Rusk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me we’ll survive.”

  He looked up at me with haunted eyes. “I…I…I love you.”

  Would I have felt better if he had lied? Probably not. I grabbed his hand and pulled him in for a searing kiss. My sharp tears mingling with the taste of his lips. I’d never tasted anything so sweet.

  We broke apart and he smiled sadly, before turning to the hatch and wrenching it open. The metal screeched and I swallowed hard. Were they waiting? Rusk climbed up and out of the hatch, pulled himself over the lip and then reached down. I reached up as far as I could and his strong hand seized mine and pulled as I clambered up, made awkward by the pack and weapon.

  We slid to the ground and my hand touched the white snow. I gasped, pulling back from the sting of it on my fingers. The cold was a physical force tightening around me, it filled the air, kept the warmth of the sun at bay and burned my lungs. My head hurt, my nose felt strange and my eyes watered, leaving me shivering.

  “There it is.” Rusk pointed upwards. The door stood out clearly against the skyline, but between us and our goal was the rocky side of a huge hill, and to our right the archers in the mountain station were already pointing at us.

  Screams and the clash of weapons filled the air. I turned to the sound. Were any of them near? There! Racing towards us were men on foot dressed in iron armor and long, flowing black cloth. At a sharp angle, another group was moving to intercept us. They were further out, but they rode their massive beasts hard, churning up clouds of snow that obscured everything except snapping jaws and glimpses of feathers. The pit of my stomach fell to my knees.

  “Run!” I yelled, spinning towards the hills and then slipping across the frozen ground. Rusk caught my elbow, using the momentum of my skid to propel me towards our escape. We ran as fast as we could over the rocky terrain, stumbling and slipping as we fled. Our breath swirled around us in airy clouds. I entered Ra’shara, being careful to stay focused on my running at the same time.

  “An’alepp?”

  Where was the old woman when you needed her? There was something off about Ra’shara. No time to figure out what that was. Could I feel the Common in this new world? Yes. Here it was. I would not be defenseless.

  The shouts were getting closer as we reached the jagged rocks of the hill. They towered above us, unbroken and slick-sided. How would we get up? There was no way I could climb that! Rusk paused ahead of me, the rock face blocking his path, and then spun around to face our enemies. Were we going to have to fight with our backs against a wall?

  I scanned the rock around me intently. Was that a...? Yes! A tiny path between the slick rocks. It looked almost as if it were a carved set of steps.

  “I see a path!”

  A clash of steel was Rusk’s only reply and then a scream sounded and I whipped around. The first of our attackers was skewered on Rusk’s blade. His skin was ghastly pale.

  “We’re being attacked by ghosts!” What could make a man lose all his color?

  “They bleed like men,” Rusk called back.

  Behind the first attacker a flood of black washed towards us. Furiously, I seized the threads of the common between them, pulling wildly at the threads as Rusk shoved his first enemy off his sword and braced himself in fighting stance for the next attacker. The attacks would have been overwhelming enough, but the strange way that everyone’s motions seemed a little too fast one moment and a little too slow the next made it dizzying. Was this world real? It felt as other-worldly as Ra’shara.

  I pulled at the thread I’d been unravelling, tugging it loose, and the lightnings came to my call, spreading outward from my palms like a fiery white spider’s web. At least that part still worked right. They flashed through the army, striking and killing. Screams echoed through the ranks.

  Rusk fought with the speed of the Gods, dancing from one stance of death to the next as his attackers came in a wall of fury. He slid his blade into one man, and as he withdrew it he plunged it fast-as-blinking into another. Each of our opponents wore segmented black armour so that it would be impossible to tell one from the next, but an arm’s length over each of their heads, a ghostly pale blue symbol floated, as if it were their name written by the Gods and set above their heads to identify them.

  I could only watch with half an eye as I picked at threads, unravelling and sending forth my lightnings. The ghost army fought with wide eyes and high pitched screams, their eyes locked onto my lightning with looks almost more worshipful than horrified, and yet they fought on. How would we stop a sea of men intent upon our deaths? We were only two people! The sheer numbers of them were forcing us back. Rusk fought hard, but with so many men on every side and me tucked in behind him, he was running out of space. He moved left to stab a man only to find his right side filled with another.

  Furiously he swung the strange weapon we found in the Tooth around, his hand fitting into a slot that seemed molded for this very purpose and then he held it outward like an extension on his arm. The weapon spat short blue lightning bolts outwards, like a child flinging handfuls of gravel. It coughed along the line of soldiers, cutting them down one after another as my lightings continued to rage.

  Why didn’t they stop coming? For every one that fell, two more took his place. The ground was lined with slick blood and armored corpses, their ghastly blue insignia fading away with their lives.

  We backed up to the stair path and then up the steps, fighting as we went. We could do this. If we could just keep up this pace we could make it up the stairway to the door.

  The weapon stopped spitting lightning and Rusk flung it aside. I shoved the second weapon into his waiting hand, but in the moment of distraction my lightings faltered. I was looking in Rusk’s eyes when they widened and he fell to the ground.

  Chapter Three: Escalation

&n
bsp; PAIN FILLED THE BALL in the back of my mind that held a sense of his well-being.

  “Rusk!” I cried, but I couldn’t stop to check on him. It was up to me to hold back the rushing onslaught. The men in black pushed into the narrow gap of the stairs, packed in so tightly that they could hardly maneuver. I seized the threads of their swords, tugging and yanking hard before letting them unweave and explode into lightnings. As they fell, they were trampled by their fellows, desperate to get to us.

  “I’m not badly hurt,” Rusk said, pulling himself to his feet. Blood streamed from his leg despite his words. I never should have brought him here. But what choice did I have?

  “We need to get some distance and height,” I said, still unweaving quickly enough to slay the waves of enemies before they planted a sword in me. The scent of burned flesh filled the air. Had we descended into hell when we went through that door? “Maybe if I can see more of them at once I can spread my lightnings farther.”

  Rusk lifted his second weapon as I spoke. “Climb as quickly as you can without disengaging. We can’t afford to give them an opening.”

  As the words left his mouth, his weapon spat into the massed crowd, and then we were scrambling backwards up the stairs, both of us firing as quickly as we could into the hordes of soldiers below.

  “There are too many of them,” Rusk said through ragged breaths. “If we had a flanking maneuver to distract them… or even just a few more people.”

  Was he giving up? Did he think he was fighting alone? I redoubled my efforts, smashing threads of reality like a sledgehammer on rocks. We would gain the top. We would find a way to safety. There had to be a way.

  We ascended the steps, piling bodies in our wake like fishermen laying out their stinking catch on the docks. My motions juddered and my head ached from trying to think through them. Nothing about this world seemed real except the possibility of our deaths.

  “If we can just get to the door.” I panted from my exertion.

  When had I started to pant? I had forgotten the cold, despite the fact that my breath still plumed around me. Steam rose from Rusk’s arms and back as well as his mouth. With a last stutter, his weapon stopped again. He stuffed it into the strap on his pack and freed his spatha, the long straight sword he wielded, ready to fight hand-to-hand.

  Once again, Rusk was a flurry, swooping into battle like a falcon, dancing and swirling as if his body were made of fluid rather than flesh and bone, and then swooping back out and to safety once more. How long could we keep this up? Had we fought for minutes or hours? My eyes burned as if I had been staring at the sun.

  We turned a corner on the staircase, and cleared the rocky walls on either side. There it was! The door! We were almost there! And oh, Sweet Penspray! There was the army we fought, still flooding the plain like an endless beach of black sand. Piercing through their ranks all the way to the stairs were the feathered beasts, like the sun cleaving through storm clouds. No time to think about them and what nature of creature they were. We needed to get to that door.

  “An’alepp!” I called into Ra’shara. “Show yourself ancestor. We need you now!”

  Nothing. I felt my hands tingle and my face felt as though all blood had rushed from it. It wasn’t like An’alepp to keep her nose out of the action. “Ancestor!”

  We reached the top of the stairs to the wide plateau that the door stood on. In a moment, we’d be on the plateau and closer to the door, but that would mean that our enemies would finally escape the bottleneck of the stairs. Would their numbers overwhelm us?

  “Tylira!” An’alepp appeared and I let out a sigh of relief. Too soon. There was something wrong with the ancestor. She swayed before visibly forcing herself to straighten. “I thought for sure we’d been hit by jammers to stall the Tooth. I was certain. What else could dampen the kinetic drive?”

  “There’s no time for that. We need to get out of here.”

  “That’s what I’m saying! Someone on this side brought your Tooth down. We weren’t prepared for this hostility.”

  I scrambled backwards to the stairs, Rusk keeping pace with me as he kept constant pressure on our foes.

  “Can you keep them back while I enter the code?” I asked.

  “Be quick, love. There are many of them and they want us as badly as the High Tazmin wants power.”

  I ran up the steps to the stairs, and located the usual keypad. It was icy in the howling wind; frosty leaf patterns were etched across the door frame and pad. “What password do I enter, An’alepp?”

  “There’s a military override code. Nine, five, five, three, one.”

  I tapped out the code. “Nothing’s happening.”

  Rusk grunted amid the clash of metal and screams of his foes.

  “Did you enter it correctly? Nine, five, five, three, one?” An’alepp sounded irritated.

  I tried again. “An’alepp, it’s not working!”

  I risked a glance behind me. Rusk was fighting five different men at once at the foot of the stairs to the door. One slipped around him. I unwove his sword with a snap, lightning branching out from his already-falling body and killing two others. One branch of the electricity came within inches of Rusk’s face. Frantically, I began to unweave again, watching Ra’shara with as much of my focus as I could spare. Where was An’alepp? “Did you bring me here to die, Ancestor? You could have just given me to Amandera and spared yourself the trouble!”

  In my anger, I cut a swath of men down with a multi-branched bolt of lightning as thick as a man was wide. An’alepp appeared out of nowhere, but she was not alone. A tall, black figure held her a foot off the ground by her neck.

  “And who might you be, little girl?” he asked. His black arms were marked with thousands of tiny golden tattoos — like a book had been written upon them. Around his neck, a heavy heartstone crackled with lightning as if it were a twin of my own. “I found your ancestor wandering where she did not belong. Are you the fox my dogs have harried up that hill?”

  With a gasp, I fell out of Ra’shara and to the ground, tumbling down the stone steps to land at Rusk’s feet. My grip on Ra’shara was gone. Desperately I struggled to get it back, but there was nothing left where it once was. My breath was coming too quickly. I fought dark spots as they danced across my vision. It was over.

  My lightnings were gone. Our weapons were gone. The door was locked and An’alepp captured. Rusk stumbled, grunting in pain. He’d promised to stay with me to the end. He shouldn’t have to — not that the tether would allow anything else. He should be free to fly away with his birds. He was too glorious to be chopped down to feed the ravens.

  Tears stung my cheeks, hot and angry, and then I forced myself to stand. I would not die on the ground whimpering. They’d have to slay me standing, while I looked them in the eyes.

  A horn sounded, loud and deep, as our enemies closed in. Rusk’s reflexes were slowing. His last parry narrowly kept a sword from striking me. Any moment now he would lose his strength and we would be done.

  One of the soldiers leaned in past his guard, his blade flicking towards my belly. I braced myself for pain and death, but instead he screamed, flying into the air and soaring over our heads and over the side of the steep hill. His scream faded quickly away. Two more warriors spun away like boneless puppets and I found myself face to face with a feathered grey beast three times the size my favorite elephant, Alsoon, had been. Its pointed face ended in a beak almost as large as my body and its breath smelled fermented. I swallowed hard.

  Food? It inquired in my mind.

  Certainly not. I replied.

  It reared back. Was that something falling off its back? No! It was someone leaping. I glanced at Rusk, but he was just as dumbstruck as I was, his eyes glued on the new arrivals and his blade ready. A second great beast, this one a light brown, was peering around intently, but all the black-clad soldiers were either dead or had been flung aside.

  The grey beast shuffled back slightly and put its head low so that one gleaming ey
e regarded me while its rider ran forward. On the beast’s back, more than a dozen other people stood in the woven side-panniers, waving blades and foreign objects in my direction.

  What would I say when the man arrived? Every word would count if we were to survive. Was it a good sign that he had come to face us? Would we negotiate peace? Or was this some honor fight? Was he required to kill us on foot?

  I reached out and took Rusk’s hand. He gripped mine hard with his rough palm. Wind swirled around us, searingly cold as the tiny particles of frost created rainbow colors across my vision, far too bright on this magical planet. I couldn’t have picked a stranger place to die.

  The newcomer kept his distance, but he planted his feet wide apart as if he expected us to attack. Across his back, was a wide blade and three feathers almost as tall as I was — they clearly came from the grey beast. Were they decorative, or did they serve a purpose? The furs edging his leather armor made a lot more sense. I needed some like that. Anything to block the icy daggers of cold. And above him, floating in the air like the sign of a blessing, a glowing light-blue sigil hovered.

  When his words came, they were thickly accented, but understandable. What had An’alepp called our original language? English? “I am Kjexx, son of Axrun the Bold. Since Graxx seems to like you,” he motioned to the great beast, “we won’t kill you yet.”

  Chapter Four: Kjexx

  “I AM RUSK HAWKWING, Prince of Hawks. San’lelion to Tazminera Tylira Nyota, Ninth daughter to the High Tazmin of Canderabai.”

  The brown beast— Graxx? — swung around as they spoke, swiping at something on its flanks. I used to think that riding an elephant into battle was a fearsome thing. What would it be like to ride one of these great, feathered creatures?

  “Did you kill with lightning, Prince of Hawks?” Kjexx sank into a wary stance, his sword held at the ready. He was young — our own age at most, although it was hard to tell with the blue tattoos that whorled across the bridge of his nose. His hair was a pale gold, cropped short. “You have the bearing of a war-leader.”