by Lee Hayton
“Look at those two getting close. I’ll wager she’ll have added him into the harem by tomorrow morn.”
“It’s certainly how she got the last few.” The guard looked miffed, perhaps that he hadn’t been chosen. “If she hadn’t been so careless with the last group, I might’ve thought of applying for that position myself.”
His friend looked him up and down, then burst out laughing. “Sure. If you grew half a head in height and turned that belly fat into muscle.”
The man looked highly indignant, an expression that soon softened into an accepting smile. “You never know. Her tastes in men might change like the seasons.”
“You’d do better to join another woman’s harem, then have her challenge Wella. She’d scoop you up right quick, then.”
“What’s that?” Shandra butted into the middle of their conversation, bored with the day and exhausted from the changeable emotions running through her, jealousy chasing anger chasing affection, then the whole lot curdling into envy.
“Her last harem,” the first man said as though it would explain everything. “Wella didn’t win most of them for herself from the general public. No. There was a woman lived up near the Thurgus Peaks who sought the council’s ear with an eye on making a play for overlord. She must’ve had thirty strong men in her harem. Wella bedded them and claimed them, then ordered them to tear the woman to shreds.”
“She did what?” Shandra gasped with shock. Although it was up to the men who they picked as their mistress, to turn on someone you’d bonded with previously was a step into depravity.
“Wella never liked playing by the rules. I don’t know if she bewitched those men somehow, or she’s just that good between the sheets, but they were willing to do her bidding. At the last minute, she gave the woman a reprieve so long as she never entered into the district again.”
Shandra’s heart settled back into something approaching its usual beat. “So, she didn’t kill her.”
“Not unless the woman died en route to other accommodation.”
“Was she weak? The first woman?”
Both guards turned to look at her, eyebrows raised as they appraised her. “No,” the first one responded. “Not weak. She’d built up a strong harem fair and square. She was also something of a warrior herself. A dragon shifter, I’ve heard, although that might be a bit of urban legend making it into the tale.”
“And all of her men turned against her?” Shandra stared at Baile’s back. Was his ignoring her still part of an act, or was he falling under Wella’s spell?
“The ones that didn’t, Wella slaughtered. If I was one of them, I’d have opted for the old fake it until you make it routine, but I guess a few had more loyalty than good sense.”
Shandra dropped back, eyes glued to Baile as she wondered exactly what venom Wella was dripping into his ear.
Chapter Seven
The party arrived at the base of the far Davemiotas mountain range early the next morning, leaving them all day to make their way up its steep sides. As Wella pulled her horse onto the main track, Baile reached out a hand to restrain her. He talked to her in an urgent whisper while the group behind waited.
“Come around,” Wella called out after a few minutes of intense discussion.
The forty or so members of the party moved in closer, dismounting from their horses to crowd near.
“The floor is yours,” she continued, waving Baile forward.
He stood, a sheepish grin on his face that Shandra knew well. It meant he had a terrible joke pressing up against his lips and she prayed he wouldn’t give it life. This wasn’t the time nor the place, but common sense didn’t always stop the man when the muse was upon him.
Luckily, this time, his cooler head prevailed. “I want to try a different path up the mountain,” he called out, staring for a moment at Shandra as his eyes found her in the group. “Every time our army has ventured up the sides of the peaks, we’ve used these same tracks. The path narrows down, so we can at most travel two abreast and the dwarves expect us to use them. They’ll be able to see us coming from miles away and prepare.”
Around Shandra, the men and women who’d already been in battle nodded. Elgerry looked solemn with a tiny flash of surprise in his eyes.
“This time, I’d like us to try another path. One the dwarves won’t be able to defend against so easily.” Baile looked around the group, seeing the nods of agreement. With a stronger voice, he called out, “We might still fail. The path is as unknown to us as it is unexpected to the dwarves. There’s still a chance we’ll be stopped in our tracks and not make it to our target. If that happens, I hope every man and woman has a knife handy. If you have to depart this world, take at least one of them with you.”
It was an old battle cry and it found the usual reception. A roar of approval from the crowd, then Baile was waving his hands, calling for quiet again.
“We need to find a way into the mountain, rather than up. I want volunteers to help me look for an appropriate path. Do I have them?”
Another cheer came from the assembly and various men and women stepped forward, their arms waving frantically in the air. Baile could take his pick and he did so, selecting the strongest and leanest—in case they needed to slip into a slim crack.
“And you,” Baile said, pointing straight at Shandra. She inclined her head, relief filtering into her bloodstream and loosening the stranglehold on her heart. “Each of the selected, pair up and we’ll head in different directions. Any paths through to the center of the mountain will be well-hidden but I have faith that with keen eyes and strong minds, we’ll uncover a suitable route.”
“How do you even know a way inside exists?” a man not chosen for the task grumbled. “Who takes the time to drill a path into a cliff-face?”
“I know because there are rumors of the pathway into the mountain from olden times. They didn’t get to be passed down for that many generations without being based in fact.”
Elgerry suddenly tugged on Shandra’s arm and she turned around with her eyebrows raised, puzzled. “What is it?”
“Come with me,” he said, his voice so low she could barely hear him, though he stood less than two feet away.
With a worried look around the crowd, Shandra gave a jerk of her chin to Baile before following along behind Elgerry. Hopefully, he understood what she meant and wouldn’t follow her.
Another woman, the same blonde with tangled hair who’d been directly behind Shandra the day before, stepped forward. She peered in all directions, curling in her shoulders as though to appear smaller. “We found something,” she whispered. “Hiding in the bushes over there.”
With a quick finger point, the blonde stepped back, looking as though she expected to be punished for her part in the short speech. Shandra followed the direction she’d indicated and moved forward in small steps. When she grew close to the edge of the thicket, she turned back to see Elgerry and the blonde waving her farther forward, their expressions eager.
Shandra overrode her misgivings and pressed into the thicket. After parting some bushes and being poked by numerous twigs, a rustling sound caught her attention.
“Who’s there?” she called out, pressing one hand up against her throat while the other felt for the hilt of the knife at her hip.
“Oh, thank goodness.” A man thrust forward, pushing past some thick branches to fall into her arms.
“Zen!”
Shandra returned his hug with enthusiasm before pushing him back to look into his face. “What are you doing here? You and your men should be long gone by now.” She looked over her shoulder, barely able to make out Elgerry’s shape through the thick bushes. “Wella is right outside. She’ll kill you if she finds you hiding around here.”
“I had to stay.” Zen pulled at her arm, tugging her over some bracken. He ducked beneath a low tree branch, before leading her into a small clearing. “Wella is planning on using a weapon. If she can get her hands on the source of a mineral hidden inside the mine
s of this mountain, then she’ll be able to create something to make her unstoppable.”
“How do you know about that?” Shandra’s hands wrung together as she studied her elder brother’s face. “It’s meant to be a secret.”
A secret that Baile had got out of Wella over the course of one night with a few glasses of wine. Also, one that Elgerry was somehow privy to. Perhaps keeping things close to her chest was another area Wella wasn’t good at.
But Zen soon put paid to those musings.
“I’m the one who developed the weapon. She got hold of the plans when we had to leave the campsite so quickly. I thought I’d packed away all of the drawings and my notebooks but one of them went missing. Either I left it behind or dropped it somewhere along the way.” He looked downcast and exhausted as he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter how in the end. The point is, Wella got hold of them and realized how to put the minerals inside this mountain to terrible use.”
“Well”—Shandra frowned as she tried to read her brother’s face—“how bad can it possibly be? Baile said it exploded or something. We’ve had dynamite for long enough, I’m sure it won’t take long for other groups to work out a defense.”
“No, its…” Zen trailed off, running a hand through his hair and puffing out a breath. “I can’t explain it in too much detail, but it doesn’t explode like dynamite. Its blast radius isn’t concentrated like that. The mineral helps it spread through the air and expand out. Once it explodes, it drives the material farther out, then it explodes again, and so on, and so on.”
“Like a really big blast?”
“Bigger than anything you’ve ever seen. If you imagine what a tornado is like compared to a gentle breeze, that’s what this stuff is like, compared to gunpowder or a standard explosive.”
“But—” Shandra broke off, her mind spinning through the different scenarios at a rate of knots. “How big do you mean? The size of a house? A field?”
Zen looked as though he were about to cry. “Maybe half the district?”
Shandra stared at her elder brother, scanning his face for signs this was a joke. There were none. He either told the truth or believed he did.
This was a disaster.
“How can that even be?”
“The mineral is powerful. More powerful than a lot of stuff we’ve seen.”
“Not that.” Shandra waved her hand at the suggestion. “I mean, how could you build something like that? Why would you give those plans to Wella?”
“I didn’t give them to her.” Zen’s face screwed up in annoyance. “If you hadn’t led her straight into the middle of our camp, we wouldn’t have needed to get out of there in such a hurry. It’s only because we were scrambling to get everything packed up that the plans were left behind or dropped.”
“Don’t blame me for your design of a death machine falling into the wrong hands.” Shandra turned to survey the dense brush behind her, thinking for the first time it obscured her ability to see if there was anyone close by, listening, just as well as it hid the two of them from sight. She pulled Zen farther into the undergrowth.
“When you realized what your weapon could do, why didn’t you destroy the plans then? Surely, you never wanted someone to build such a thing?”
Zen shrugged. “No.”
She continued to stare into his face, trying to read the subtlety of his expression. Under the intent gaze, he sighed and shook his head. “Maybe I did. It was something that came out of my head and it’s powerful. Of course, there’s a part of me that wanted to build it and take it for a spin to see what it could do.”
A rustle in the branches near them had Shandra backing up another few feet. Her voice dropped into an even softer whisper. “Do you know how to fight back against the weapon if Wella does build it?”
At that, Zen looked more miserable than he had so far. “No. I don’t think we could ever fight it, not without building the same damned thing ourselves.”
Shandra nodded. “So, our choices are to either stop Wella getting what she wants out of this mountain or grab enough to smuggle out of there and build another death machine.” She stared down at the hard ground beneath her feet, thinking of how Elgerry’s town had been wiped off the map and it hadn’t even needed such a weapon of destruction. “That would ruin the entire world.”
“We’d better make sure that option one works, then. Let me know what I can do?’
“Go back into the past and never invent such a thing?” Shandra smiled at her brother, the small joke earning an equally small chuckle back. She must be spending too much time hanging around Baile if she thought that was funny.
Baile.
He was busy rounding up the men to help Wella get exactly what she wanted. Shandra needed to go and tell him the change in plans.
“Stay here until you can slip out unnoticed.” Shandra turned and fought her way back through the bracken and low hanging branches. “Or until you sense it’s an opportune time to start a diversion. One of those.”
Chapter Eight
Baile was standing at the base of the mountain, not having moved far from where Shandra had last seen him. His face relaxed when he caught sight of her, while she stiffened her expression into one of distaste. They’d need to keep up the pretense of being upset with each other until they’d gotten away from Wella.
“Where’ve you been?”
“None of your business. Since you’ve made it clear you’re interested in someone else, why don’t you keep an eye on her instead?”
Shandra moved close, briefly touching Baile on the forearm before standing beside him and pretending to examine the rockface. “I found out more about Wella’s weapon,” she said in a low voice. Her eyes traveled back to where Elgerry and the blonde woman were standing. Hopefully, Zen had melted into the background from where he’d sprung. “We can’t let her get hold of the mineral she wants. She’ll be unstoppable.”
“That’s why I’m stood here, searching for another way into the mountain,” Baile said in a cheerful whisper. “I believe the official name is stalling my ass off.”
Despite her wish to keep a stern expression on her face, a giggle escaped before Shandra could contain it. “How’s that working out for you?”
“Pretty well. So far, we’ve discovered that the rock face of this mountain appears to be made out of solid rock.”
They shared a brief smile, then Shandra stood back and saluted. “Aren’t you meant to be ordering me around, since I’m part of your search party.”
Baile raised his eyebrows and wriggled his nose. “Such a delight. How many places can I order you before you drop the performance? Could I suggest you start the search in my trousers?”
“As far as I’ve seen, all I’d find down there is Wella’s fingerprints.” That triggered another horrid memory, of the two guards talking about a woman that their gracious overlord had drummed out of the district. “Be careful. I’ve heard your new girlfriend isn’t above killing off the competition.”
“As long as she’s got the support for it,” Baile said in a serious tone. “But if you look around here, how much do you think she can count on from these men and women?”
Shandra did look. Really looked for the first time since they’d set out. The band of soldiers was a motley collection. The dregs of a community where the best and strongest had already been leeched away. None of them appeared to show allegiance to anybody, least of all the woman who’d dragged them away from their chosen lifestyles.
“Fair enough. I’d prefer not to put it to the test though.”
“If you really want to make a start on scouring the mountain for a way inside”—Baile gave her a quick wink—“then you can look on the other side of the main trail. There’s a valley a mile past there, which might hold a secret path.”
As she started off, he pulled her back gently. “What were you doing in the undergrowth earlier?”
“I had an unexpected meeting with some family. Apparently, someone with freedom fighting spirit
is responsible for designing the damned machine Wella wants to build in the first place.”
Baile frowned and Shandra was about to head off again, when a man came running up to them, panting so heavily he couldn’t get his words out.
“Calm down and take a moment,” Shandra said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll still be here when you get your breath back.”
His companion wasn’t far behind, jogging along with a body quite obviously not built for that endeavor. The poor man’s belly fat jiggled up and down with every footfall, spilling out from under his top and above the belt of his trousers.
Shandra stepped back, alarmed, and squinted up the path the men had just run. She couldn’t see anything giving chase, but she’d been pursued by killing creatures invisible to her eye before. With her heart pounding stronger with every beat, she pulled her sword out and brandished it in front of her, searching for any displacement to indicate something was flying through the air.
“We’ve found a tunnel,” the first man managed. “In the rocks. We almost went straight past it, the thing’s so cleverly hidden. It leads straight into the mountain. Just what you were hoping for.”
With a smile containing a smidgeon of foolishness, Shandra slid the sword back into its sheath and stared at the men again. “How far away is it?”
“Two miles,” the first man said at the same time the second panted, “Ten.”
“Take a minute,” Baile told the two of them. “Then we’ll need you to show us the way. We’ll travel on horses to save your breath.”
A few minutes later, the pair led them away, and Shandra tried to ignore the feeling of helplessness that swept over her. Just because there was a tunnel into the hillside didn’t mean Wella would be laying her hands on the mineral she sought.
Still, it seemed the stars were aligning for someone, and it certainly wasn’t for Shandra.
The crevice leading into the mountain was indeed well-hidden. It had been carved out of the rock at such an angle that Shandra’s eyes insisted it was just a shadow, right up until the moment she stepped inside. With one hand trailing over the wall, she stared above her, marveling at the energy that had cracked the tunnel into the sheer rock. Although dwarves or men had lent their hands to the project, too, it was clear the original designer was mother nature herself.
