The Essence Gate War: Book 01 - Adept

by Michael Arnquist

  Amric and Valkarr gave ground in the initial rush, slipping like phantoms away from snapping fangs and raking claws. Steel flickered in the blaze of the Essence Fount, and the charge faltered as the eager howls mixed with shrieks of pain and anger. The front rank of Wyrgens slumped to the stone, and as the next ranks made to hurdle over their fallen fellows, the warriors plunged forward as one to press the attack.

  Amric fought like a man possessed, teeth bared in fury, cutting a scarlet swath through his foes. Hulking forms fell back from him on all sides, but more clambered over the heaped corpses to hurl themselves at him. Valkarr was beside him, a whirlwind of cutting steel, and they drove like a fearsome wedge into the horde.

  Then Amric’s fear came to pass. Even as the bulk of the host hurled itself into the teeth of their onslaught, some of the creatures began to slip around them on the outside edge of the stairway. The warriors were forced to spread out more to prevent the mass from flowing around and surrounding them, or racing past to the viewing chamber. As they did so, however, several of the Wyrgens thrust themselves between them, isolating and encircling them for a perilous moment. They leapt back up the stairs, fending off the press of bodies as the charge threatened to overwhelm them.

  Amric cursed. The two of them could not hold these stairs any longer, and the glass wall had still not begun to close.

  A sudden gale of wind erupted at his side. Claws rasped on stone as the attackers in the front line staggered back, and the creatures threw up hairy arms to shield their squinting eyes as the wind ripped at them. Syth slid to a halt beside Amric, and flashed him a fierce grin.

  “What is this, thief?” Amric said. “I had the impression that you were not much for a losing cause.”

  “I am not,” Syth admitted. “But you are out here making valor look so good that my common sense has been overwhelmed for a time. Besides, I would not see this mangy pack of dogs cheat the storytellers of the epic fight that you and I will yet have.”

  With a scream of fury, Syth dove forward into the mass. One metallic black fist slammed into a furry torso with a resounding crack, while another swung in an open-handed blade to shatter an outstretched arm. Dropping into a low spin, he swept the legs from under several Wyrgens and exploded upward into a tremendous uppercut that catapulted one of the creatures into the air to land atop his fellows. Syth barked out short bursts of maniacal laughter as he moved among the creatures like a devastating whirlwind. Taken aback by the sheer ferocity of his attack, the Wyrgens shrank from him for a moment, screaming in frustration. Amric and Valkarr took advantage of the confusion to press the attack, and the three warriors spread out to cover the stairs.

  For a long moment, the scene stood thus, like a persistent wave crashing against the stubborn rocks of shore. The charge was repelled, and neither side gave ground. But the enraged Wyrgens kept coming, sometimes hurling the lifeless bodies of their own kind from the stairs in their eagerness to reach the intruders. Blood flew from sword and gauntlet, but glowing talons inevitably found their marks as well, tearing through cloth and armor to sear the flesh beneath with foul energies. The creatures pressed forward with renewed fervor, sensing that their foe teetered on the edge of being overwhelmed. The first strike that did more than graze the agile warriors would end the stalemate.

  It happened in an instant.

  Bolstered by his battle fury, Amric had managed to put aside the strange illness caused by the Essence Fount through sheer force of will, and he anchored the center of their defensive line behind an impassable wall of steel. Over the heaving sea of Wyrgens, he saw the Fount pulse and swell, its light flaring to a sudden crescendo of brilliance like some impossibly massive stroke of lightning within the amphitheater. Amric staggered, his head swimming and the strength draining from his limbs, and a moment’s weakness was all it took.

  Grasping claws pulled at his mail shirt, throwing him off balance, and huge hairy fists slammed into him, knocking the breath from him. Jaws gaped at him from a wolfish visage, and he slapped away a clutching arm and lashed out with a return stroke that drew a yelping scream. His vision dimmed and he stumbled back, making weak cuts at the forest of claws that raked at him. Then he fell back on the cold stone steps, the wave crashed over him, and all went black.

  Halthak was helping to lift Grelthus to his feet when he saw Amric fall beneath the corrupted Wyrgens on the stairs. He froze in horror, his breath caught in his throat. Bellimar released Grelthus’s other arm and took a rapid step toward the stairway.

  With an incoherent cry, Valkarr leapt to his fallen friend’s defense. Heedless of his own safety, he burst among them like a demon, cleaving through the creatures with a berserk ferocity. A snarling, grizzled head tumbled down the stairs, freed of its body. Another hulking form staggered and fell back, cloven nearly in twain. Syth joined him an instant later in a blast of biting wind, hammering powerful blows into spine and skull until the beasts over Amric retreated or were still. Shoulder to shoulder they fought, driving back the Wyrgens for precious seconds.

  “Healer!” Valkarr bellowed. “Pull him free!”

  Halthak turned to Grelthus, who was now recuperated enough to stand. “Be ready with that wall!” he ordered as he shoved the Wyrgen toward the panel nestled on the side wall of stone.

  Darting out of the chamber and onto the broad stairway, he knelt by Amric. The warrior was unconscious and bleeding from countless minor wounds, but was still breathing. He slid his hands under Amric’s arms and heaved, dragging him from beneath the panting combatants. Wicked talons reached for him from amid the press, and Halthak flinched away without relinquishing his grip. They never landed, however, and when the healer looked again the severed arm was rolling on the flagstones nearby, still twitching. With a surge of effort, the Half-Ork pulled the man free and started up the stairs.

  Behind him, the vibrating rumble of ponderous machinery began, and the enormous glass wall began its slow descent.

  Too early, Halthak thought as panic rose like ice in his chest. After all it had taken to revive the stricken Wyrgen, he had now triggered the wall at the worst possible time. He threw a glance over his shoulder to see Grelthus leaning against the side wall, watching the battle on the stairs with an unreadable expression. Bellimar was behind the lowering portal, standing poised and rigid like he meant to throw himself into the fray. The Half-Ork looked up to the clear sheet of diamond-hard material, several feet thick, rumbling its way downward to the floor. His gut twisted as he realized he was not going to make it. The wall would come down before he could reach the safety of the chamber, burdened as he was, and it would either seal them without or crush them under its weight.

  “Hold the wall!” he cried.

  Grelthus tore his eyes from the battle to meet the healer’s gaze.

  A slow, malevolent smile spread across the savage countenance, and the wall continued to descend.

  Halthak shouted a warning to Syth and Valkarr, but the warriors were locked in battle and could not turn away to help or even to escape themselves. He gritted his teeth and heaved with all his might, dragging the limp form of the swordsman up the steps. Certain death awaited them out here. He had no choice but to beat the descending wall. He resolved not to look back again, but instead to pull for all he was worth, and he and Amric would either live or die together. He reached the top of the stairs and lunged backward, grunting with the effort. His head struck the edge of the glass wall. He ducked under it and tightened his fists in Amric’s chain shirt, sinking his claws into the link to retain his grip. He wrenched back, pulling desperately at the warrior, sick with the knowledge that he had not been fast enough, but unwilling to abandon their only chance.

  With a squealing groan of protest, the wall’s descent came to a sudden stop.

  Halthak’s mouth fell open in disbelief, and he turned wide eyes upward. Bellimar stood above him, eyes glowing red like searing pinpoints of flame, pale hands straining under the edge of the wall. The old man’s back was bowed and his frame s
hook with the effort, but somehow, impossibly, he was holding up the titanic weight of the wall.

  “This may look easy, healer,” Bellimar gasped through clenched teeth. “But I pray you will hurry, nonetheless.”

  Halthak scrambled into the chamber, dragging his charge behind him. Amric groaned and began to stir. The Half-Ork looked under the wall to where Valkarr and Syth were still locked in combat with the Wyrgens, and he shouted to them, beckoning them on with repeated, frantic gestures.

  He saw Valkarr risk a look back and then shout to Syth, “I will turn them back one last time while you run for the wall!”

  “I’ll not leave you to die in my stead,” Syth snarled back, his gauntleted fist smashing out with a cracking report to cave in a grizzled skull.

  “There is no time to debate it!” the Sil’ath returned. “Go now, and I will be on your heels.”

  The warriors locked gazes for a split second, and Halthak witnessed some grim understanding pass between them. Then Valkarr plunged forward in a blinding whirlwind of steel, uttering a battle roar. The horde swayed back from the savagery of his assault.

  Syth lashed out to send another Wyrgen reeling, and then hesitated as he watched the swarm close around the frenzied Sil’ath. Then he wheeled and bolted up the stairs. He dove under the massive wall in a rush of air, rolling smoothly to his feet inside the chamber.

  The glass wall made a dull grinding sound and dropped another half a foot before Bellimar caught it with a grunt. A violent trembling rocked his slender frame, but the wall hung suspended once more. Syth and Halthak turned their anxious stares to the fight raging below on the stairs.

  Valkarr cut his way free in a bloody swath, and for a fleeting instant, he was clear. He leapt up the stairs, grim resolve written in every hard line of his face. A claw raked at his leg, leaving the flesh ragged and blackened in its wake, and he swept away the offending appendage with a terse stroke. A brutish Wyrgen bounded through the air to crash into his back, and he twisted, spinning into a sweeping cut that laid the creature open even as it was thrown from him. Talons caught at his leather baldric, slinging him to the side, and he crossed his arms to thrust behind him, impaling his assailant with both blades.

  Halthak’s mouth fell open, his breath caught in his throat. The effort was incredible, stunning in its display of swordsmanship and determination, but the speed and power and endless numbers of the corrupted Wyrgens made the conclusion inevitable. More and more claws snaked through to catch at the fleeing Sil’ath, slowing him, staggering him, tearing into his scaly flesh. He went to one knee, still hammering lethal blows all about him, and finally pitched forward beneath the weight as the swarm enveloped him.

  Within the chamber, Halthak watched aghast as Valkarr disappeared from sight beneath a surging mass of rending claws and fangs. Bellimar sagged forward, groaning in agony as his grip failed at last.

  The massive wall slammed to the ground with a shuddering boom of thunder.

  Amric blinked, trying to clear the haze from his vision. Everything swam before his eyes, blurred and washed out, as if he viewed the world through a swirling white mist. Several figures stood above him, their outlines muddled and indistinct, but he could see they were all facing away from him.

  He clenched his teeth in pain. His insides burned as if afire, and some dim part of him wondered if the Fount had corrupted him at last. Or perhaps the vicious Wyrgens had torn into him, and he was simply too obstinate to die.

  His hands remembered sword hilts, and he groped for them, but his fingers met only cold stone. Something unfamiliar clawed at his clouded awareness; he felt a rush of alien sensations thrust upon him, as if the conflicting emotions of some other being were somehow bursting inside him. It was mercurial, seeming at once insistent, fearful, eager, ashamed and restrained. It raged with fury and clamored for his attention, and then shrank from his scrutiny as he tried to focus upon it.

  He pushed himself up to one elbow and concentrated on the strident forms around him. They wavered into focus. Halthak, white-faced and rigid, pressed against the glass wall. Bellimar, slouching exhausted against the wall, one pale hand spread against its clear surface as if trying to touch someone or something on the other side. Syth, shouting and hammering his fist against the wall as his robes whipped violently about his taut frame. Amric squinted past them and through the glass wall, searching for the cause of their distress.

  He saw Valkarr, beyond the glass wall, thrashing on the ground beneath the mass of savage Wyrgens. He saw gleaming fangs flecked with crimson froth, and smoldering claws stained with blood as they raked repeatedly at the Sil’ath’s body. He saw the mindless fiends ravaging the body of his dying friend, and for Amric, in that instant, everything else ceased to exist.

  A scream of anguish was torn from his throat, and all the fire churning inside him rose with it. The thing within him came gibbering to the fore, flaring with power that scorched through his veins and threatened to burn him to ash. Amric sensed a kindred rage in the thing to match his own, and a wild desire to help. Beyond reason, he embraced it, and felt its fierce exultation even as he was filled with the rush of power. Then everything dissolved before his eyes in a blaze of white fire.

  Bellimar’s hand slid down the glass wall and fell to his lap. He had revealed himself and worse, broken the strictures imposed upon him. He would pay dearly for it, he knew. Already the need worked at the edges of his will, and still it had not been enough. Perhaps if he had acted sooner, he thought; but nay, there were limits he could no longer ignore, no matter how grave the circumstances.

  A scream from Amric brought him sharply about. There was an unnatural quality in the timber of the swordsman’s voice that sent a chill coursing through him, and he had not thought anything in this world could still have that effect on him. The shout parted the air with a razor edge, beginning as a cry of grief and loss and becoming something else entirely, infused with rage and thrumming with intensity.

  Amric rose to his feet, blazing with power. His eyes radiated dazzling white fire like miniature suns, and that terrible gaze was fixed upon the grisly scene outside the chamber. He stretched out one hand toward the glass wall with fingers spread wide, and Bellimar’s hair lifted from his head as a strange pressure built there. Sudden instinct warned him to dive aside, and he shouted a warning to the others. Syth grabbed the gaping Halthak and yanked him out of the way.

  Seeming unaware of their presence, Amric strode forward. He clenched his hand into a fist, and the wall exploded outward with an ear-splitting report. Massive shards tore ragged swaths through the Wyrgens crowded without, sweeping scores from the terrace. Deafened and taken aback for a moment, the creatures crouched frozen as he approached. Their baleful, unblinking stares were fixed upon him, and their glowing eyes against the sea of hulking forms were like a constellation against a velvet midnight sky. Then they surged forward as one with a throaty roar, hurling themselves at their bold prey.

  Amric never broke stride. Crossing his arms before him, he then whipped them apart in a vicious cutting motion, as if he held his swords in both hands and was cleaving into a foe.

  The ripple of power tore at Bellimar’s robes, even behind the swordsman as he was, but it was nothing compared to the devastation before him. Scything forces swept through the Wyrgens, peeling them from the stairs and hurling them back by the hundreds. Twisting and clawing madly for purchase, the Wyrgens were scattered like dry leaves over the edge of the terrace, where the creatures tumbled through the empty air toward the amphitheater floor far below.

  In the blink of an eye, the broad steps before the viewing chamber were clear but for the broken figure of Valkarr, lying in a spreading pool of his own blood, untouched by the reaping forces that had cut through the Wyrgens.

  Amric knelt at Valkarr’s side, gathered him into his arms, and stood. Those flaming eyes swung back to the viewing chamber.

  “He still clings to life,” he said, his voice cracking with grief and yet carrying an eerie r
esonance at the same time. “Help him,” he pleaded.

  Behind him, in the cavernous amphitheater, one of the great columns burst with a crack of thunder, spewing granite fragments in every direction. Halthak swallowed, his gaze flitting between Amric and the burden he carried.

  “I––I do not know if I can heal injuries so severe,” he stammered. “I do not even know how he still draws breath. He––or he and I both––may not be strong enough to withstand the process.”

  Amric climbed the steps, carrying Valkarr. He strode through the shattered portal and into the chamber. Bellimar’s eyes narrowed. A faint nimbus of light surrounded both of them. Amric halted before the healer, and Halthak shrank before his fiery scrutiny, but the swordsman’s next words were solemn and surprisingly gentle.

  “All I ask is that you try, Halthak,” he said. “I think that you will find the strength here, in this place.” He laid Valkarr on the floor at the Half-Ork’s feet.

  “Come, Halthak,” Bellimar urged. “I have some medical knowledge, and I will assist you however I can. We have very little time, if we are to perform a miracle.”

  As the two bent over the ravaged form of the Sil’ath, the forgotten Grelthus found his voice from the corner of the viewing chamber.

  “What have you done?” he moaned, shuffling out onto the steps and casting his stricken gaze all about. “What have you done to my people?”

  He whirled toward Amric, hunching over and spreading his claws wide. Hatred and madness twisted his features as he spat his words through bared fangs. “You have slain them all, human!”

  “Not all, Grelthus,” Amric said. “Not yet.”

  The incensed Wyrgen dropped forward into a crouch, bristling and bunching to leap.