With nothing else to do, Tatsu left Ral kneeling next to Alesh in the healing hut and made his way to the edge of the camp where the Dar-Itusk Basin began. Whatever Tatsu had thought the landmark was, he’d been wrong. The true sight of the sprawling gorge carved into the land was overwhelming, stretching far to the horizon in both directions. The sides, first smooth and then jagged, were littered with small, rocky outcroppings. The entirety of the hole was made of a sheer sort of rock that was first an orange tint like the clay huts and then darker, until there was nothing but blackness as far down as Tatsu could see. It was a scar, gouged into bedrock and the land’s bones, gaping and sighing up at the souls that perched along the top of it.
Tatsu stumbled as he stared down into the abyss that was terrifyingly close to the Rist-walker camp, and his boots kicked over a small pebble. It bounced against the sides on its way down, until Tatsu could hear the ping of its contact with the rock but no longer follow its arc. Ten seconds later, after he had nearly given up on hearing its final strike, the sound of stone hitting stone reverberated in rippling echoes up through the cavern. The basin around the noise seemed to shift, yawning, and Tatsu stared down, wondering what manner of beasts could lurk at the furthest reaches of the sunlight.
“I never thought I’d see this,” came Yudai’s voice from behind him, and Tatsu jerked forward in surprise towards the ledge again. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
Yudai sounded reverent, but Tatsu’s arms were covered in gooseflesh. There was something eerie about looking down into the nothingness―even staring out at the siphon-drained mountains past his woods hadn’t been quite this off-putting. Tatsu couldn’t imagine living there on the edge of the world, day in and day out.
He said as much to Yudai, who looked amused. “I didn’t figure you to be scared by a hole in the ground.”
“It’s not just a hole,” Tatsu said. “It’s as if the land has teeth.”
“A natural sinkhole.” Yudai leaned in dangerously close to the precipice, seemingly unconcerned by the drop down. After a moment, he pulled back and glanced at Tatsu with a wide grin. “What do you think is at the bottom?”
“Nothing good,” Tatsu said as he tried to suppress the shivers threatening to take control of both his arms, even with the lingering numbness in his left fingers.
They stood side by side for a while as the winds caught in the hooked land curving over the basin’s entrance and whipped up past them, threatening to take their linen coverings with it. It felt good to stand beneath the sun without fearing the repercussions of the sweltering heat, and for a moment, when he closed his eyes, Tatsu understood why the Rist-walkers had chosen to establish their base there. Then he pried his eyelids apart once more to see the desert’s gaping mouth lying in wait at his feet and shook his head.
“The sooner we get away from this place, the happier I’ll be,” he said.
“I have bad news for you, then.” Yudai’s eyes crinkled in just enough sympathy to be noticeable. “Jotin says we’re to follow the ridgeline of the Dar-Itusk Basin until we reach the farthest edge of it, where the corners meet. The ruins are there among the shallower depths.”
“That figures,” Tatsu mumbled. He took two steps away from the side of the sheer downturn and immediately felt his chest loosen. The abyss was rumbling beneath his boots, and he watched several loose rocks rattle against the ground at his feet before he found his breath again. He half-expected something monstrous to jump out of the blackness, with teeth and claws. When nothing did, he clutched at his shirt with his good hand, struggling to determine the cause of the shaking.
“What―” he began, and that was when he realized that the vibrations were not coming from the basin at all, but from behind them near the Rist-walker camp. He whirled to see a cloud of dust approaching the clay structures, particles held aloft by the pounding of hooves.
Hooves. Riders.
“No,” Yudai said, as if his will alone could push the riders away. “How?”
“They followed us,” Tatsu said. His stomach turned on itself. “They followed us here.”
Within the camp, shouts rose as the walkers undoubtedly came to the same conclusion. Yudai grabbed at Tatsu’s bad arm, yanking Tatsu towards him, and hissed in warning. “Ral!”
“Alesh,” Tatsu echoed, heart dropping like a stone down to his boots.
He turned back towards the camp and launched himself forward with all the strength he still had left, just as there was a thundering, terrible splintering noise from the far side of the settlement. A wave of sand and dust barreled towards them, and Tatsu threw his good arm over his face to shield himself from the sting of it.
There were more shouts and several screams, the kind that curdled his blood within his veins. As the ring of steel pierced the air and shrieked against his ears, he knew they’d led the mercenaries and their mounts straight to the Rist-walker campsite. All the carnage following would fall squarely on their shoulders.
Still fighting the blast of sand that clogged his nose and throat, Tatsu fell forward and smacked his head against something that had not been there only moments earlier: the broken pieces of the wooden animal pen, a cage circling around them to keep them contained.
Twelve
“No.” Tatsu spun in a circle to take in the entirety of the wood surrounding them both. “No!”
He slammed his good shoulder against the broken boards separating him from continuing towards the camp, and the enclosure didn’t budge, held aloft by magic more powerful than anything he had inside him. Outside their cage was a cacophony of shouts, screams, and the clanging of swords, all muted beneath the thundering roar of the mercenaries’ desert mounts. He and Yudai were sitting ducks, and he could do nothing to reach the others still within the huts.
Ral was in one of those structures, and Alesh, too sick to fight. Tatsu threw his weight against the wall again. “Ral! No!”
A throbbing pain in his shoulder was all he had to show for his efforts. He banged the splintered boards with his palm as he tried to find a weakness in them. “Jotin! Leil!”
Where was Leil? She was the only one who would be able to counter the magic holding them prisoners, unless she’d already been incapacitated. She would have been an easy mark with her deep blue Chaydese court robes. He had no hope of identifying her voice among the other shrieks blurred together, nor Ral’s—
“No, no!” Tatsu shouted, and the panic was rising up in his throat in hot bile. He took a step back to try ramming the cage again, before Yudai grabbed his wrist to stop him.
“Together!” Yudai exclaimed. “On three!”
At the end of the count, they both threw their weight against the boards, but only ended up falling backwards and over each other in the center of the cage. With the wood blocking them in, Tatsu couldn’t see anything happening outside. He couldn’t identify the mage keeping them encaged nor the siege upon the Rist-walker camp, but every scream that was cut off by a gurgling moan seized upon Tatsu’s heart and squeezed it with fiery regret.
They were imprisoned within the magically-held field because the mercenaries knew—they knew that if they attacked Yudai directly, they would trigger his magic, and they knew that without such an event, he wouldn’t be able to combat them. Their enemy had learned of the explosion in the Raydrau and what caused it, and had adjusted accordingly, as—
“Cowards!” Tatsu cried, ramming his shoulder into the cage once again, even though he knew it wouldn’t do him any good. An exclamation of pain sounded very near to their location, and Tatsu smacked his palm against the nearest board hovering by his head.
“Tatsu!” Yudai yelled, and when Tatsu whirled on him, his features were hard and set. “You have to hit me!”
Yudai had followed the same thought process that Tatsu had only moments earlier. Tatsu opened his mouth to protest and never got the chance.
“It’s the only way!” Yudai said. “You know it’s the only way!”
“I can’t—”
But
Yudai stilled in the center of the makeshift cage with his hands clenched into fists at his sides, his eyes tightly shut. “You have to mean it; it’s the only way it’ll work!”
The pounding hooves were nearing their location, and Tatsu could only assume that once the Rist-walkers were dealt with, that it would be their turn. Ral, and Alesh, vulnerable in the camp, and Jotin and Leil—
“Tatsu!” Yudai urged with his eyes still closed. His body was braced for impact.
There were a thousand things Tatsu wanted to say, a thousand words that lay dormant on the tip of his tongue, waiting to be awoken, but he couldn’t get any of them out. With a shaky breath, he tucked the fingers of his good hand into a ball. He’d be useless if he splintered the thumb in his only working arm.
If he aimed for Yudai’s cheek, he was unlikely to break any bones, but would it be enough?
“I’m so sorry,” he said and swung his fist forward with all the power he could muster.
He made solid contact. The force of it rattled all the way up through his shoulder, and for a second, all he could focus on was the tremor of it in his bones. Then Yudai’s magic exploded with so much intensity that Tatsu was thrown backwards through the broken corral posts held aloft around them. He hit the ground rolling and landed on one of the pieces, twisting his knee in a sharp jerk of pain, but the pressure in his chest was the worst of it. He couldn’t breathe—the impact had knocked the air out of his lungs, and he gasped, desperate to find it again.
He clawed at the sand and dirt as he struggled to stay conscious. Without air, his vision wavered and darkened at the edges. He couldn’t see, couldn’t get his eyes to remain on anything, and his mind went blank. Around him, there was a dull clamor of noises he couldn’t distinguish and shouts he couldn’t understand. It wasn’t until he rolled back over on his back, coughing up grains of sand and clumps of dirt, that he managed to gasp in a painful, trembling breath. He repeated the action again and again, until the color of the world surged back into being.
He flipped over, wincing as his bad shoulder throbbed beneath his weight, and pushed himself up with his good hand and his bad elbow. His vision might have returned to normal speed, but his ears still weren’t able to register any specifics. It took severe squinting to see Yudai barreling towards the encampment with the wind on his heels, leaving a trail of red in his wake.
Tatsu crawled towards the closest pool of it, which had only partially soaked down into the earth. Two eyes stared back at him—a severed head, lips still parted in surprise, with the body nowhere near enough to see.
“Yudai,” Tatsu whispered to the unseeing features already still and ashy gray. Then he pushed himself up to his knees with all the shaking power he had left, stumbling once and only narrowly avoiding falling into the spread of blood. “Yudai!”
He’d lost precious seconds knocked loopy from the blast. Yudai had moved out of sight behind several of the clay buildings; the screams, however, were easy to track. Tatsu surged towards them just in time to see one of the mercenaries flying backwards out of the inky shadows into Tatsu’s line of vision. There was a fence post wedged deep into the man’s chest, and when his body hit the ground, face first, the rest of the stump pushed through with a blood-curdling snap.
Lying against the reddening sand, the mercenary was a warning, a testament to the power they’d just declared war against.
Tatsu stumbled, heady and still dazed, until he rounded the nearest structure to find two Rist-walkers standing with wooden spears held ready. Both men were stained with blood and dirt, but still on their feet, and in front of them, Yudai was hovering above the sand. Yudai threw his hand out towards one of the remaining mercenary riders, and a splintered post caught the man through the stomach, protruding out through his back as he fell off his horse and collapsed onto the ground.
A second later, another mercenary ducked out from behind the shadows of one of the huts, aiming for the Rist-walkers rather than Yudai. Both walkers turned a fraction too slow, and Tatsu hadn’t the time to yell out a warning. The mercenary had almost completed the length of his jump before the force of Yudai’s power threw him backward. The stolen spear, spiraling in midair, impaled him cleanly.
He was dead by the time his body hit the dirt.
“Yudai!” Tatsu cried.
Yudai spun to face him and then reached, his palm out and fingers wide. Tatsu scarcely had time to register the movement before the magic rushed past him. When he looked to his left, the surprise at seeing another mercenary so close to him, blade on its downward arc, propelled his feet back unconsciously. Just stopping the man’s sword thrust would have been enough—
—but the magic control twisted the man’s head all the way around in a sickening crunch of bone, and his listless body slumped down onto the dirt.
Tatsu slapped a hand over his mouth, and he honestly wasn’t sure if it was to stop his scream or his stomach’s terrified revolt.
In the horrified moments that followed, he tracked his eyes around his location, taking in the bodies littering the ground. At least ten, probably more, and that was just what he could see. To his left, a man was sprawled with his own reins knotted around his throat, and past that, a figure lay splayed with both arms ripped clean. There was nowhere to look that didn’t bear the remnants of the fight—though it hadn’t been a fight, at least not after Yudai’s control had been activated. There were a few Rist-walkers lying among the wreckage, but the majority of the bodies were garbed in black, faces and heads covered with the dark cloth.
He’d always known what Yudai could do; after all, he’d witnessed it, in Dradela and then again in Moswar, but this… those times had been self-defense, a wished-for escape. This was an all-out assault. This was a massacre.
There were no mercenaries left to target with the magic wind, still whirling around their heads.
“Yudai,” Tatsu tried again and put his hands out, fingers spread to show their emptiness. “Yudai, it’s over. It’s fine, we’re all fine. You can stop.”
Yudai stared at him, and Tatsu was suddenly afraid that something else had taken control of him, something grim and unreachable. But then the winds disappeared, and Yudai’s soles hit the ground once more. Tatsu let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Part of him wanted to move towards Yudai, but another part of him, the part that ultimately won out, hesitated. Yudai knew it. He must have been able to sense it, because he stared at Tatsu and refused to look away, his eyes demanding all the answers Tatsu knew he wasn’t ready to give.
“Gods,” someone next to Tatsu moaned. “What was that?”
“Me,” Yudai answered and, still holding Tatsu’s gaze with a ferocity that bordered on taunting, stalked past them both to disappear in the shadows of the buildings. As much as Tatsu wanted to go after him immediately, there were more pressing matters.
He made his way quickly to the healing hut where they had dropped Alesh off, and his panic dissipated when he found her unharmed but still feverish. Next to her, Ral sat on her knees holding her sister’s fingers with one hand and her Oldirr necklace with the other.
“You’re not hurt?” Tatsu asked.
Ral shook her head, eyes wide. “Tatsu?”
“No, I’m fine,” he said.
“Yudai?”
Tatsu hesitated, his eyes pausing on the quick rise and fall of Alesh’s chest. “Yudai… took care of the mercenaries who were after us. They won’t bother us again. At least…”
He let his sentence trail off, uncomfortable with finishing it: at least these mercenaries won’t bother us again.
Ral seemed to understand. The lines of her face softened. “Not bad.”
“I know.” Tatsu pressed his good hand against the warm side of the structure. “He’s not bad. Stay here, alright? I’m going to find the others.”
He left the building and nearly ran into Leil, who was holding the side of her head like she was in pain.
“You’re alive,” she said, fingers gingerly press
ing at the side of her dark hood. “I wasn’t sure after—”
“You weren’t in the fight?” Tatsu asked.
She pulled her hand away from her head, inspecting it as if she expected to see blood on her fingers. “They hit me with something to knock me out. I’ll have a lump the size of a fist here tomorrow.”
“Have you seen Jotin?”
Leil shook her head. “I haven’t seen anyone. There’s blood everywhere—what happened?”
“Yudai,” Tatsu said, and there was a snag of guilt throbbing bitter on the back of his tongue.
“He killed all of them?”
“It was us or them.” Guilt tasted bitter on the back of his tongue and ached in his chest. He shouldn’t have let Yudai walk away. “He did what he had to do to keep us all alive. They came to kill him.”
“I know,” Leil agreed, and looked away, fingers still playing with the edge of her hood fabric. “It’s just… difficult to look at.”
“Then close your eyes,” Tatsu snapped, “and thank Yudai for allowing you the option.”
He walked away knowing full well that he’d crossed the line, and even though his conscience was urging him to go back and apologize, he kept walking. The disdain in her tone had only pulled up all the things he should have said to Yudai instead, and he winced as he wove through the huts. He needed to find Jotin, and then he needed to go after Yudai and make sure he was all right. With all the blood pooling around his boots, he didn’t have time to soothe Leil’s feelings.
And there was blood, everywhere, so much that Tatsu couldn’t pick his way around it to keep his soles clean. He didn’t dare look behind him to see the red tracks he was leaving on the packed dirt. In the stone-shimmering streets of Dradela, Yudai’s power had manifested as a shield rather than a sword. The difference in the tactics was strewn around his feet, and it was all he could do not to gag.
The Mage Heir Page 15
