by Nathan Long
I shook my spear at ’em. “Come on, you pussies! What are you afraid of?”
Fwump!
Somewhere above me, something made a sound like somebody opening an umbrella, and a shadow passed between me and the sun.
Lhan coughed. “Erm, ’tis most likely the skelshas they fear.”
I looked up. A coupla shapes like evil kites were circling overhead, grinning down at me out of their pointy Woody Woodpecker heads.
“Oh, goddamn it.”
Skelshas are Waar’s answer to pterodactyls—big-ass, leather-winged, flying lizards with mouths like a crocodile’s and a personality to match. The Oran navy uses ’em like fighter planes, with nut-job bird jockeys spurring them into loop-de-loops during air battles, but even fully tamed and trained they are ornery sons-of-bitches, and the two fuckers who were circling over us had never been anybody’s ride.
As we stared up at them, they both folded their wings and dropped at us like a couple of living darts. I woulda grabbed Lhan and jumped back inside the temple. Unfortunately, the door was filled with paladins lowering spears at us, with priests standing behind them, aiming crossbows.
Lhan and I hit the dirt as the two skelshas swept in inches above us, wings wide and claws out—and as big as fucking horses! I swiped my spear after them as we rolled back to our feet, and one veered off, shrieking, with a gash across its chest and one of the little steering wings it had tucked under its bigger wings hanging limp.
“Ha! Fucker! Take that!”
Unfortunately, the other one was just fine, and whipped into a tight circle to come back snapping for my head. I hauled Lhan back, and we ended up behind a pillar near the door as it banked away.
“Damn it! I need my sword! I coulda cut that fucker in half with—”
A crossbow bolt hit the pillar right over my head. The priests were angling shots at us from the door. We ducked around the other side of the pillar, out of sight of the priests, but right back in the open again. I looked across the street for another hiding place, but none of the buildings over there seemed to have roofs. We’d be just as exposed inside as out.
“There! Jae-En! The red building!”
Lhan was pointing down the street toward a skinny place at the next intersection that looked like it shoulda been a law firm. The upper windows had sunlight behind ’em, but the ones on the bottom were dark. Cover!
“Yes!”
I took his hand and we ran as the wounded skelsha swooped down at us again. We dodged and kept going, but there were three more up there now. And more shrieks were echoing from behind the buildings all around. Fucking hell! The first two had rung the dinner bell, and now everybody was coming to the party!
Two more came diving in, slashing with claws and wings. We ducked and swiped behind us, and somehow I connected, snapping my spear and opening one up neck to nuts. It crashed down nose first, clipping us with a wing and spilling its intestines all over the ground. We ate pavement as the second one looped up for another try. I felt like I’d been hit across the shoulders with a baseball bat.
Lhan was up first and pulled me up, then winced as he put weight on his left foot.
“Lhan! You’re hurt!”
“It is nothing. Now come—”
“Make way! Clear the door!”
We looked back at the shout and saw Ru-Sul charging out the temple door at the head of six paladins, every one of ’em mounted on a krae.
“Fuck!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SKELETONS!
I threw down my snapped spear and we ran again, half a dozen skelshas banking after us and Ru-Sul’s cavalry shaking the ground. It was bad. The red building was still a half a block away and Lhan was slowing, limping with every step. Then he shoved me ahead.
“Go on. Save yourself.”
“Come on, Lhan. I’m not gonna—”
The kraes were almost on top of us. Ru-Sul was out in front, his spear tucked under his arm like a lance, and it was aiming right at Lhan.
Without thinking, I scooped Lhan up and leapt sideways as Ru-Sul and his riders thundered past us.
“Mistress! Did I not say—!”
I kept leaping, too busy to listen. The skelshas were dropping out of the sky like Stukas with teeth, and I zigged and zagged and bounced all over the fucking street dodging ’em as I ran toward the red building.
Ru-Sul and his paladins were pulling up right in front of me, turning for another pass. I jumped right through the middle of ’em and kept going. The red building still had a front door, but the windows on the first floor were wide open. I kicked up and jumped through one into the interior—which was a lot more exterior than I hoped it would be. I’d thought it was covered, but it turned out it only had half a ceiling—not much more than an overhang, and plenty of room for the skelshas to come down and get us. I backed under it and looked around for something better.
“Mistress. Put me down.”
“Not now, Lhan. We gotta—”
“Put me down!”
I put him down. He stood, stiff as a board, and stared at me like I’d shit on his lawn.
“You promised not to carry me.”
My guts clenched like a fist. Fuck. I’d been so panicked, I hadn’t even thought about it.
“I—I’m sorry, Lhan. It was instinct. We weren’t gonna make it, and—”
Skelsha shadows rippled over the rubble in the uncovered half of the room. The bastards were floating over the wall and smiling down at us.
Lhan sniffed and started limping for a door at the back. “We will discuss it later. Now is not the time.”
Man, he coulda froze gasoline with that sniff. I shivered and followed, then shoved him forward as the skelshas started their dive.
“Faster, Lhan!”
We dove through the door inches ahead of a pair of ’em, and they crashed into the frame, cracking it, their wings too wide for the opening. Another one whumped down in the room in front of us—which had even less roof than the first—and started screeching and snapping. We split left and right, and a crossbow bolt whistled between us and punched the skelsha through the roof of its mouth. It screamed and flapped away. I looked back. Ru-Sul and his paladins were climbing into the first room, crossbows out.
We dodged through another archway and found some stairs going down. They were choked with rubble, and I thought it was a dead end, but Lhan pointed.
“A hole.”
He started down, skidding on loose stones, and I followed. There was a hole—a tight black throat down through the rubble that I couldn’t see the bottom of. It made me queasy just looking at it.
“Shit. Maybe we should find another—”
A skelsha shrieked right over head. The footsteps of the paladins were thudding closer. I couldn’t move. My claustrophobia had a grip on my chest like a vise.
Lhan stepped to it. “I will guide you.”
I grunted with relief as Lhan lowered himself into the hole, then beckoned me to follow. Alone? No way. With Lhan? Even angry Lhan? Okay. I swallowed, then started wriggling after him. Ru-Sul and his paladins appeared at the head of the stairs. Ru-Sul laughed as his guys raised their crossbows.
“Look! A kiv-kiv too fat for its burrow.”
I grabbed the edges of the hole with both hands and crammed myself down into it like Santa down a chimney, scraping my hips and arms all to hell. Bolts thwacked into the junk all around me, and then I was through, and rolling down a slope of broken stairs to a low-ceilinged cellar.
I looked around as Lhan got to his feet beside me. Sunlight coming through cracks in the ceiling showed me we were in a cellar, all caved-in toward the front, with a black trench in the floor right under the collapsed part. It looked like a roof beam had snapped and punched through it into some kind of hidden pit. What the sunlight didn’t show me was any other way back to the surface. We were trapped, and I could hear the priests kicking at the rubble on the stairs. The blockage was starting to crumble. Any second now it would fall in and they�
��d come down shooting.
Lhan looked down into the black trench. “Salvation. It is a sewer pipe.”
That tripped me up. “Sal-salvation? A sewer pipe?”
Lhan started into it without answering. I crawled to the hole and looked after him, chewing my teeth. He was squeezing around the splintered end of the heavy beam and slipping into a broken clay sewer pipe, about a foot and a half in diameter which slanted down into complete darkness. Then he got past the beam and let go, and slid down the pipe like a kid on a water slide—except, you know, into complete darkness.
“Lhan!”
After a second, Lhan’s voice came up to me, cold and echoey. “It is safe. Hurry.”
Safe? For him maybe, with his skinny ass and boyish figure. Me, I was a bit bigger than him all around, and a little deeper in the chest, if you know what I mean. What if I got stuck halfway down? I looked back over my shoulder as more and more rubble was starting to roll down the stairs into the cellar, and more light was starting to show. I tried to tell myself I could take the paladins when they came down, even though I knew I couldn’t—not with the crossbows.
“Okay. Here goes nothing.”
I gritted my teeth and squeezed down into the pipe, feet first. With the roof beam jammed down into it like a two-by-four sticking out of a can of paint, it was way tight going in, and I had to squash my boobs almost flat and twist my headhalf way off getting under it, but after that it was smooth sailing. Too smooth. Once I got all the way into the pipe it was water park time, just like with Lhan. The inside was smooth and dry, and my shoulders actually had a quarter inch to spare.
Just as I was taking a couple of breaths to prepare myself, the last of the rubble on the stair caved in and Ru-Sul and his pals came swarming down into the cellar. Time to jet. I squeezed my arms together and shot down it like it was a Hot Wheels track.
Two seconds later I slid out of the bottom of the pipe into complete black, and a pile of what felt like pebbles and dry sticks. I looked around, heart pounding. I could see absolutely nothing. All I could hear was a moaning wind—at least I hoped it was wind.
“Lhan?”
“Wait. Be silent.”
I shut up and listened. Up the pipe I could hear Ru-Sul and his boys moving around. Then a trickle of pebbles rattled down it and his voice came down to us.
“Demoness! Dhan Lhan Lar! This cowardly hiding will not avail you. You will starve. Or worse. Come up and fight.”
I was gonna give him a snappy comeback, but Lhan put his hand on my arm and I held off. After a second Ru-Sul called down again.
“Dhan? Demoness?” Another wait, then, “Go down and see if they live.”
“No, your reverence. I will not.”
“It is an order.”
“It is an order we will follow—if you will lead.”
A longer wait this time, then finally, “I hear nothing. They must be dead or fled. In either case, we will not find them in the dark. Come, we must go and guard against their return.”
I waited as I heard their footsteps fade, then chuckled. “Man, they really are afraid of this place, aren’t they?”
“Is it any wonder? Look around you.”
I was about to say I couldn’t see anything in the dark, but then I realized my eyes had adjusted, and I could. There was just enough light coming down from cracks in the ceiling that I could see that we were in an arched stone sewer tunnel, bigger and older than the one I’d run through in Ormolu—and filled waist-high with human-looking skeletons.
I stared as I saw that they went on like that down the tunnel in both directions as far as the eye could see. There were mounds of them, all piled up against the side walls.
“What. The. Fuck.”
“Those that escaped the fire from the sky took shelter here, but the fire stole all the air.”
I looked around at all the bones again. I normally don’t believe in ghosts, or any of that supernatural bullshit, but suddenly I could see ’em all down here like they were right in front of me, huddling up with their families, their kids, their pets, looking up at the ceiling and waiting for the all clear. And then the panic as the firestorms on the surface started to suck all the oxygen up and out, and they all tried to claw their way after it, tearing each other to pieces, climbing the walls as they tried to reach one last breath of fresh air.
I sucked in a huge breath and shivered like a wet dog. “Fuck.”
“Indeed.”
I turned to him and looked him in the eyes. “Listen, Lhan. I wanna apologize. About back there. About picking you—”
He stood and started limping down the tunnel. “Come. We must find a place where we may see the Aldhanan’s arrival.”
Well, okay then. If that’s how he wanted to play it. I stomped along behind him, glaring at his back and thinking of snarky things to say, but then not saying them.
Finally, after a half-hour of tiptoing through the skeletons and searching for another way back to the surface, we found an intersection where a street had caved into the tunnels and sunlight was streaming down through the break onto the drifts of skeletons and making them look like bone snow. We crept up the side of a collapsed pillar and scanned the sky for skelshas. There were some off in the distance, but none above us.
The neighborhood we were in was a lot less fancy than the place where all the temples were, with lots of places that looked like they’d been shops and bars and apartment buildings. Lhan pointed to a nearly intact building with some shops in the bottom. We ran to it and ducked inside, then looked back out to make sure we hadn’t attracted any attention. All good. The big bastards were still circling where they had been. They weren’t turning our way.
Lhan found a flight of stairs and we went up to the top floor and looked out the windows of what musta been somebody’s apartment once. They weren’t high enough. We couldn’t see over the other buildings.
“The roof?”
Lhan nodded and started limping for the stairs again. I made to join him, but he held up his hand, as cool as the other side of the pillow.
“Wait here.”
“Huh? Why?”
He kept walking. “Because I do not require your assistance.”
My teeth clenched. “Lhan, if this has to do with—”
“It has nothing to do with that. With the skelshas hunting, stealth is required, and—forgive me for saying so—but you are, by your very nature, stealth’s antithesis.”
“Are you kidding? I’m light as a feather on this planet. I can out-ninja a ninja. You’ve got a twisted knee.”
He wasn’t listening. “Please. Just wait for my return.”
I stepped after him. “Come on, Lhan. It’s dangerous out there.”
He stopped at the stairs, but didn’t look back. “Indeed. And in the face of such danger, a man must be able to trust his companions. He cannot fear that they will manhandle him without his consent, nor toss him about like a doll, nor break solemn vows as it pleases them.”
And there is was, cold on a plate, no garnish.
I groaned. “Lhan, there were skelshas! That fucking priest was gonna run you through! I’m not gonna let a vow stand in the way of saving your life.”
He turned, drawing himself up. “Then perhaps you should not have returned to Ora. Here, a man’s honor is far more precious than his life.”
And with that, he started up the stairs like an opera singer making his grand exit.
Well, it kinda took the wind outta me, and I stood there, huffing and puffing for a minute, then finally shouted up after him. “Yeah, well, maybe I shouldn’t have, ’cause I sure as hell didn’t come all the way back here to cry over your grave!”
He was already through the door at the top, and stepping out of sight onto the open roof. I didn’t hear any answer.
“Dumbass motherfucker!”
I wanted to go after him, but I wasn’t gonna give him the satisfaction. What the fuck was his problem, anyway? I stomped back into the thousand-year-old apartment, l
ooking for something to kick, but before I did any damage, a shadow blocked out the sun coming through the windows. I raised my head, thinking, “That’s one big-ass skelsha,” and went to look out.
It wasn’t a skelsha. It was a top of the line Oran Navy airship, and it was gliding right over the building!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SACRIFICE!
“Lhan!”
I ran up the stairs and bumped into him as he was limping in from the roof.
“Lhan. The Aldhanan. He’s already—”
“I saw. Yes.” He pushed past me and started down the stairs. “Come. We must hurry.”
Still cold as ice, the fucker.
We headed for the temple as fast as we could, but we couldn’t just go blazing through the streets like we wanted to. We woulda had every skelsha in the city after us in a hot second. Instead we went cover to cover and building to building, trying the whole time to see the airship through the ruins and praying we weren’t too late, and it took fucking forever.
Finally we reached the big street with all the fancy buildings and looked toward the temple from the door of some place that mighta been a bank back in the day.
It was bad.
The ship was already down and tied off, and a troop of the Aldhanan’s personal guard—maybe forty guys—were marching straight for the temple’s front door, their red cloaks blowing in the breeze. There was an officer in a shiny helmet and a priest of Ormolu in a seriously fancy hat toward the head of the line, but the guy right out in front was a tall, silver-haired dude in fancy armor and a gold circlet on his head. Yup, the Aldhanan of the Oran Empire himself, walking right into Ru-Sul’s trap, exactly as planned. Goddamn it! Why did he have to come do this hero shit himself? Wasn’t that what the army was for?
I started ahead. “Come on, Lhan. We gotta warn him.”
“Have a care. We are who they seek, remember?”
“Yeah, but if I start hollerin’, then they’ll come after me and they won’t get jumped in the temple, right?”
