by Joe Jackson
“My name is Danilynn Stahlorr, priestess of Garra Ktarra,” she returned proudly. “Your Majesty, before you ask or make any assumptions, I assure you that I am not, nor have I ever been a servant of your enemy, King Koursturaux. What I did, I did of my own accord to defend my people – from yours and hers.”
Sekassus turned his head to the side slightly again. “Impressive,” he returned with hardly a pause. He glanced off to the side, perhaps at one of the courtiers to his left, or perhaps simply into the foliage beyond them. “Nearly all who stand before me to barter or plead for their lives do so without knowing that the enchantments on this palace prevent any from lying to me while they are within its walls. It takes a great deal of courage to stand before one such as myself and freely admit to ruining decades of planning out of some sense of nobility or heroism. I admire that courage, young woman, but understand that I care little about whether you serve my crimson bitch of a neighbor. You have stood to be counted among my enemies, something I assure you is very foolish.”
“Be that as it may, Your Majesty, you asked why we wanted Se’sasha released, and I’ve told you, completely and honestly,” Danilynn returned. If she was at all unnerved by the demon king’s words, nothing in her demeanor showed it. It hardly surprised Kari: the woman had stood before Koursturaux and come out unscathed and as confident as ever. Kari didn’t imagine the Cobra Lord was as scary as the Crimson Huntress.
Sekassus leaned on the arm of his throne and considered the outsiders before him, but not surprisingly, it didn’t take his son long to reach a decision. “Refuse their offer, father,” Prince Amnastru said. “Let them try to escape your realm, and I will drag them back here screaming for their lives, and then you will have all of them to do with as you please.”
Sekassus chuckled, and that unsettled Kari; the entire plan hinged on the demon king honoring the laws of the Overking. “And if they manage to escape?” the demon king asked.
“They won’t,” Amnastru said with no emotion, and the demon king chuckled again.
Damnit, Kari thought. His idiot son is going to come after us, the Seven Days’ Grace be damned. I need to do something to make them think twice about it.
A ploy occurred to Kari and she turned to Sonja, smiled, and nodded. Her sister-in-law, nervous but determined, met Kari’s gaze and simply nodded in return. It was what Kari was hoping for, if not a smile in response: anything to keep Sekassus and his son guessing. “Well, if you think that’s best, Your Majesty, I suppose you could do that,” Kari said casually. She hoped to Zalkar and all the other deities that her poker face and voice would hold up in this situation. Sekassus narrowed his eyes, sniffing the bait. Kari knew he was always suspicious of his higher-ranking neighbors, and Kari and her friends showing up uninvited had to have alarmed him. If he suspected that she might actually be there at the behest of Koursturaux or even Morduri, it might give him pause. It was really all Kari had to try to get him to keep his son in check.
Sekassus hesitated yet, and Kari pounced on what she thought was an opportunity. “Honestly, Your Majesty, I’m not really happy with this trade to begin with, so if you refused, you’d actually be doing me a service.”
“Enough of this,” Uldriana hissed. There was fury in her face and her voice, and Kari realized her fear had finally cracked, giving way to anger. She stepped up beside Kari, her face set in that uncharacteristic scowl. “We did not come here to play games with you and your son. Either accept this bargain, Your Majesty, or I will return to my people and organize the rebellion you are so afraid of.”
Amnastru started forward but his father held him in check with an upraised hand. The Cobra Lord kept his anger well controlled, but it was still obvious in his eyes. He gestured to one of the other courtiers in the room and commanded, “Go and bring up the priestess.”
The courtier left quickly, and Kari and her companions waited in silence, held in what felt like the crushing grip of the king and prince’s stares. The nearly unblinking vigilance of the Cobra Lord and his eldest son was nerve-wracking in a way Kari had never experienced before, but she tried to imagine that they were just members of her Order’s Council. The priests of her Order’s Council managed to give her that stern, just-shy-of-telling-her-no gaze often enough, and she was honestly a lot more concerned with what they thought than what Sekassus and his son might think. Uldriana looked at Kari now and again, and each time the demonhunter nodded, trying to keep the girl upright and strong as long as she could. The fury was still there below the surface, but as the long moments went by, it threatened to give way to the fear again.
After a short wait that still managed to feel interminable, an erestram guard appeared and roughly shoved a syrinthian woman to the floor beside Kari and Uldriana. Se’sasha was gaunt and unkempt, someone who obviously had spent many years in a dungeon. She worked her way to her feet shakily, but kept her gaze down to the floor, not even glancing at the other people in the room. Kari had to imagine the girl probably expected she was about to be executed or tortured in some way. She smelled like she’d been in a dungeon for a while, too, and the filthy rags she was dressed in did little to help with that. It was an undignified position for a priestess to be in, let alone a syrinthian priestess, and Kari understood it was as much to hurt and humiliate the rest of the syrinthian populace as Se’sasha herself.
“I accept your terms,” Sekassus said with little fanfare. “Our bargain is struck, then?”
“One moment, Your Majesty,” Uldriana said, and she turned and gestured for Kari, Sonja, and Danilynn to come close. The mallasti girl closed her eyes, took in a deep breath, and blew out a long sigh. When she opened her eyes again, she fixed them on Kari. “When this deal is struck, take this girl and flee as fast as you can. You must be out of Sorelizar by the seventh day including today, or you can be assured they will apprehend you. I already said my good-byes to my family and my people, so now I say good-bye to you. For an outsider, you have been very gracious to me; there is far more to you than simply a hunter. Sonja, you show promise; keep at your study and trials, and you will master the arcane in short order. Danilynn, I did not get to know you all that well, but I can judge you by the company you keep; farewell. Do not mourn me; take this girl and do what you must.”
“Wait, what?” Kari blurted. She tried to grab Uldriana’s shoulder as the mallasti girl turned away, but the mallasti evaded her grip.
“The deal is struck. Do as you will,” Uldriana said.
“Don’t you even–” Kari began, but she didn’t get to finish.
Sekassus never even moved, but there was a sudden surge of power within the room. Kari felt it behind her eyes: a building pressure behind her face that she was sure would relieve itself by causing a nosebleed, if not worse. Her hair began to stand on end from the power, and then it did so when Uldriana let out a blood-curdling scream. The flesh of the mallasti girl’s belly split open from the crotch to her neck in an explosion of blood that splattered the demon king and his son. Uldriana was dead before her innards even began to spill out on the floor of the king’s throne room, and her body fell to the ground with a wet thud.
Kari’s instincts nearly got the better of her, and her hands dropped to the hilts of her swords. Danilynn was suddenly in front of her, one hand grabbing Kari’s upper arm while she put the other firmly on Kari’s chest. “Don’t!” the priestess barked. “Kari, this is what he wants! If you draw your swords, he can kill you. Stand down, Kari! Stand down!”
Sonja screamed. She fell to her knees beside Uldriana’s body, and her hands shook in grief and fury. “What is wrong with you?!” she shouted at the demon king, tears streaking down her cheeks.
Sekassus didn’t even bother to correct her for addressing him so casually. “It seems the prophecy was wrong yet again,” he said evenly, and his son and the others began laughing.
Kari still hadn’t moved, but the laughter died abruptly when a blue glow bathed the demon king and his son’s blood-spattered forms. Zalkar’s symbol
drew itself upon Kari’s chest, shining even through her clothes and breastplate, and there it stayed, pulsing hungrily. Kari approached Sonja and put her hand to her sister-in-law’s shoulder to try to make sure none of them made a fatal error in judgment and did or said anything provocative. The various sylinth and erestram guards around the room brought their weapons to bear, and Kari wondered why they would even bother if the demon king could tear someone apart with willpower alone. Whatever the case, she knew she had to be rational about the situation. She took her other hand off of the hilt of her sword and realized that if she and her friends weren’t out of Sorelizar in six days, the same fate awaited them, if not a worse one.
Danilynn swallowed hard but then gripped Kari’s upper arm again. “Kari, we need to get out of here, now,” the priestess said. “There’s nothing we can do for her, and time is wasting.”
Kari nodded, but looking at Sonja kneeling beside the body, her promise to Uldriana’s mother rang more soundly in her ears. “Can we take her body with us, Your Majesty?” Kari said asked with an unusual amount of calm, given the situation. She straightened out and worked to keep her emotions in check; breaking down now wouldn’t do any of them any good. Uldriana had said not to mourn her, and Kari understood why. She patted Sonja’s shoulder, and her sister-in-law stood up, awaiting the demon king’s decision.
“By all means,” he said sarcastically with a sweeping gesture toward the ruined mess of the mallasti girl. “Amnastru would like nothing more than to see you leave with even more dead weight in hand. You will find that with this crippled syrinthian girl and a mallasti corpse on your hands, you have little hope of escaping my realm. By law, I must afford you Seven Days’ Grace, but today – the first day – is nearly over. When the sun sets on the seventh day, your lives are forfeit regardless of who may have sent you here.”
Kari took her cloak out of her pack and used it to wrap Uldriana’s body. “Kari, are you sure we want to take her with us?” Danilynn asked. “We’re probably not going to make it if we have to carry her.”
Kari glanced at the priestess and reminded herself that clergy was more interested in souls than bodies. Still, Kari had made a promise and wanted to try to keep it in any way she could. “We’re not leaving her here,” Kari said. “I made a promise. We’ll get home if I have to kill half of this realm and his idiot son to escape.”
Amnastru stepped forward and backhanded Kari hard across the snout, and she was thrown sideways to the floor. The prince’s strength was incredible, and the blow left a ringing in Kari’s ears for several seconds; her snout ached and blood trickled from one of her nostrils. Kari knew she’d be feeling that blow for several days. Sekassus found the exchange amusing, but Kari got back to her feet, straightened out before the cobra prince, and narrowed her eyes. “I hope you turn out to be a better challenge than your brother.”
Amnastru brought his hand back to slap Kari again, but his face contorted and he fixed his gaze on his hand as if it wouldn’t obey him. All eyes soon turned to Sonja, whose ruby eyes were glowing with unmasked power. “Keep your hands to yourself, monster,” Sonja growled. Kari moved closer and laid her hand on Sonja’s shoulder again; if the woman went too far and violated the law herself, Sekassus might be within his rights to kill her.
“She uses the power, here? How is this possible, father?” Amnastru asked the king.
“Intriguing,” was all Sekassus had to say on the matter before he turned to Kari. “Take your prize and your discarded payment, and remove yourself from my palace. If you are not out of my realm by six days from now, your Order will have to send people to try to negotiate your own release. I assure you, there is nothing on this world or yours that will secure that.”
Kari understood where Ressallk had gotten his bravado, but she kept such thoughts to herself. If Sekassus thought he was strong enough to fight against Zalkar himself, that was a delusion Kari was happy to let the demon king revel in. “Sonja, can you take Uldriana?” Kari asked, and her sister-in-law hefted the wrapped body of their friend without a word. Kari approached Se’sasha and touched her shoulder, and the tired, defeated golden eyes of the syrinthian priestess at last came up. “Come on, Se’sasha, we’re here to take you home.”
The girl didn’t seem to understand a word Kari said, but neither did she offer argument. She wrapped an arm around Kari’s shoulder and began the descent down the ramps to leave the palace. Danilynn brought up the rear, keeping her eyes cast over her shoulder for any trickery from the throne room. Kari led them out of the palace and gauged which way was south based on the position of the sun. She led her friends out of the city, but Sonja moved up beside her.
“I can carry her for a while, but Sekassus is right: we’ll never make it out of the realm if we have to take turns carrying her and supporting Se’sasha,” Sonja said. “I can try to carry her aloft on a conjured force, but I won’t be able to keep us masked at the same time, and I don’t know how long I can keep up with that sort of strain.”
“I don’t think you’ll need to bother with the masking spell anymore,” Kari said. “If they want to find us, they can and will. Sonja…how did you use your magic in there?”
“I don’t really know,” her sister-in-law answered with a shrug. “It’s not important right now; our speed is what we need to concentrate on.”
Sonja was burying her grief; Kari had seen enough people do it in her lifetimes. Sonja had been much closer to Uldriana than Kari or Danilynn, and it was more than just a student-and-teacher relationship. They had become friends, and Kari was almost positive that Sonja had never witnessed the death of a close friend or loved one before. Kari knew she had to be hurting, but there would be time later to mourn. At that moment, Sonja and Danilynn were both right, and Uldriana’s body was going to slow them down too much.
“We’ll burn her when we break to camp,” Kari said. “A hunter’s funeral is about the best we can do for her out here. Can you conjure up an urn or something to carry her ashes? I think…I want to bring her back home like I promised.”
“We need to reach the Overking’s realm first,” Danilynn said, coming up beside Kari. “We can head to Moskarre from there, but we need to be smart about this if that’s what you want to do. If we don’t make it out of this realm, there’s going to be five bodies to cremate.”
“No, you’re right, that’s what we’ll do,” Kari agreed. “I can’t…Gods above, I can’t even believe what just happened…but I’m honestly not sure why it surprised me.” She sighed, shook her head, and glanced at Se’sasha. “Gods, girl, I hope you were worth it.”
Se’sasha didn’t say anything; she seemed pretty out of it. The four women managed to get a couple of miles outside of the city before the sun went down, and Kari figured there was little reason to make camp far from the road. If anyone was looking for them, it wouldn’t be all that hard to find them once they began to cremate Uldriana’s remains, regardless of how far from the road they camped. They set up their camp off the side of the road. Kari and Danilynn were only able to find enough wood for a campfire, but Sonja assured them she could enhance it with her newfound arcane strength.
They set up a pyre for Uldriana, and Kari spent a minute running her hand down the side of the dead girl’s furry snout. She wondered how she kept ending up in this position, finding herself not only befriending, but mourning what she’d initially thought were enemies. “Sonja, would you like to say a few words?” Kari asked.
Sonja folded her knees up to her chest, put her head down between them, and started to weep. Kari looked at the ground, sorry she had asked; she could imagine how much worse the girl’s mother’s reaction would be. She turned her gaze to Danilynn, but the priestess shrugged. She must have felt the same way Kari did: at a loss for words.
Kari started the fire, stepped back from it, and sighed. “I promised your mother I’d bring you home; I’m going to keep that promise,” she said, and Zalkar’s symbol began to glow on her chest again. “And you will be avenged, one
way or another, Uldriana. That’s a promise.”
The fire was sputtering, but Sonja ignited it fully with a thought, then she conjured a simple urn and put it near the fire. No further words were spoken around the funeral pyre, and the four women watched the flames consume Uldriana’s body. Kari sighed. It was going to take them some time to escape Sorelizar if they had to help Se’sasha along the whole way, but it seemed unavoidable: the girl was severely undernourished and weak. Perhaps Sonja could summon something to help the girl walk or float along, just as she’d offered for Uldriana’s body; Kari would ask tomorrow.
Kari looked back north in the direction of the city of Sorelizar, half-expecting that Amnastru would come for them without delay. She set up watches with Sonja and Danilynn, and the priestess came up beside her near the pyre. “Are we going to head straight south and hope nobody stops us?” she asked.
Kari shook her head. “Just far enough to make them think that’s our plan. Then I want to swing around west and then northwest, and we’re going to try to get into Si’Dorra. Arku’s realm is mostly pine forest, and we may be able to lose any pursuit when we get there, and sneak our way through it. I don’t imagine Sekassus is going to tell his friend Arku that he lost track of a handful of mortals.”
“No, I suppose he won’t, at that,” Danilynn said. “Sounds like a good plan. Do you want me to take first watch?”
“No. Get some rest, I’ll wake one of you in a while. I have a lot of thinking to do.”
Danilynn helped get Se’sasha bedded down, and then she and Sonja tried to get some sleep and allow Se’sasha to rest through the night. Kari stared back at the city and the silhouette of the black pyramid against the twilight sky. Her snout ached, she was still sore everywhere due to the pregnancy, and she had a headache that she imagined was probably a hair shy of a full-on concussion, but she felt strangely focused. They had only six days to escape Sorelizar, they were nearly that distance from any of its borders, and they were sure to encounter pursuit or trickery on the way.
