Pawns (The Wielders of Arantha Book 1)

by Patrick Hodges

  As a pilot, she'd faced death many times. She'd conquered her fear then, but this was different. She wasn't afraid of dying so much as she feared she'd led her own son, the only thing she had left in this universe, to his doom as well. And with their deaths, humanity's last hope died with them.

  No. It can't end like this.

  Unable to escape her fate, she stared into the creature's lupine face.

  We mean you no harm, she thought at them, hoping they could understand her. Please don't kill us.

  Please.

  Don't.

  Kill.

  Us.

  She closed her eyes, waiting for the creature to end her life, to rip her throat out with its massive fangs and feast on her flesh and bones.

  Moments passed, and the beasts' snarls faded to a low rumble. She felt the creature back away, lifting its massive weight off of her.

  “Mom!” she heard Davin scream from behind her.

  “Stay back, Dav!” she hollered at him. “Don't come any closer!”

  She opened one eye, then the other, and lifted her head.

  The giant wolf-thing was sitting down on the dusty ground, several yards away. Its two pack-mates were also sitting, their forepaws held together in front of them. They were no longer snarling or growling. They were just … staring at her. Like obedient dogs, awaiting their master's command.

  What the farking fark?

  She gingerly climbed to her feet. They hadn't moved a muscle.

  Did they hear me? Understand me?

  These creatures could have killed her. They should have killed her. But they didn't. Why?

  Maybe…

  Every instinct told her to run away and get herself and her son to safety, but something else, something deeper, told her to do the exact opposite.

  She took a cautious step forward, then another, and then another.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” Davin screamed.

  She turned to see him, grenade in hand, about ten yards away from the nose of the Talon. His hand was on the pin, ready to pull it and toss the grenade in their direction at a moment's notice.

  “Stay back,” she called, as calmly as she could.

  “Mom –”

  “I said, stay back!”

  He nodded, but didn't take his finger away from the pin.

  Turning her attention back to the wolf-things, she inched her way toward the leader, which was now near enough for her to touch. Moving as non-threateningly as possible, she reached out her right hand. She waited for the creature to pull back, to bare its teeth, to snarl at her. But it didn't.

  Her fingertips made contact with the beast's head, and Maeve was surprised at how soft it was: much softer than the fur of a creature living in the wilderness should be. It still hadn't moved. It just watched her, with those big, unblinking yellow eyes. Eyes that no longer looked vicious or feral.

  As she laid her palm upon the creature's forehead, she felt a surge of energy rush through her. It was like adrenaline, but not quite. In a flash, she felt the sensation of running, faster than any human being could run. She felt hunger, hunger that could only be sated by the meat of other living animals. She felt warmth, as it fed its young.

  This creature was a female. With pups of its own.

  How did I know that?

  Somehow, she'd bonded with it. On some level, she'd become one with it.

  It listened to her.

  It obeyed her.

  “We mean you no harm,” she said, barely above a whisper.

  If she expected a vocal answer, she didn't get one. The wolf-thing merely lowered its head, as if in acknowledgment.

  “You are hunters. Go hunt somewhere else.”

  The creature lifted its head and locked eyes with her again. Then, quite unexpectedly, it stood up, turned around and bounded away, back down the wadi. The other two beasts immediately rose to their feet and followed their leader.

  She watched them go, and within moments, the darkness swallowed them up. A few seconds later, the sirens ceased their droning wail.

  Maeve's heart felt like it was going to jump right out of her chest. She barely felt it when Davin came up from behind her, putting his hand on her arm.

  “Mom, are you all right?”

  She placed her hand on his, drawing strength from his touch. Calming herself by breathing through her nose, she nodded. “I'm all right.”

  He stared into the darkness as well. The soft pads of the creatures' paws upon the ground had faded into nothingness. “What just happened?”

  Maeve was at a loss. “I–I don't know. It–it spoke to me, somehow. Or it listened to me. I have no idea.” She noticed that the left strap of her tank top had been torn off, and became aware that her shoulder blade now ached, more and more as the adrenaline rush wore off. The creature's claws hadn't just grazed her after all. Her mouth opened in pain, and she let out a yelp.

  “You're bleeding, Mom,” said Davin, surveying the damage.

  “It's just a scratch. I thought it would be much worse.”

  “No shite. You have a gash. It's small, but it looks deep. Let's get that taken care of.”

  With his arm around her, they made their way back to the ship. After sitting her down on the exit-ramp and placing the grenade back into its box, Davin ran inside to fetch the med-kit. He was back in seconds, sitting next to her.

  “Mom, I never thought I'd say this, but … take your shirt off.”

  Too stunned to even make a snarky comeback, she turned her back to him and pulled off the remains of her tank top, using the tattered fabric to cover up her bare breasts. “How bad does it look? Did it get any of my birds?”

  He checked. “You lucked out. It missed your spotted owl by about an inch.”

  “That's good,” she breathed. “Guess if I have to have another scar, it might as well be on my back. It won't look out of place with all the others.”

  Davin cleaned her wound and applied their antiseptic salve. She waited for him to put on a dermaplast bandage, which would regrow the skin and prevent infection. But it appeared he'd stopped.

  “Dav, what's wrong?”

  When he didn't answer, she turned to face him. His eyes were wide, and his jaw hung open. She'd never seen him looking so shocked. “Dav?”

  He closed his mouth with a loud gulp. “It's your scars.”

  Her eyebrows raised. “What about them?”

  “They're …” He trailed off, too dumbfounded to even finish his sentence.

  “They're what?”

  Davin shook his head in incredulity. “They're gone.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  E lzaria stretched out on the former Queen's bed, reveling in the comfort it brought her. She'd slept most of the week since they conquered Talcris, and Elzor had not objected. She replenished her power somewhat by holding her Stone, but her body needed rest after expending so much energy, and there was no substitute for restful slumber in that regard. Every now and then, a terrified servant came by to drop off a tray laden with food and drink for her. After relieving them of their burden, she dismissed them with a condescending wave.

  She smiled as she bathed in her memories of decimating the Agrusian army. Seeing so many heavily-armored, sword-wielding men rendered immobile by the energy she commanded was something she would always remember. It reminded her of the day she used her abilities for the first time.

  Her and Elzor's father was an ogre of a man. Once, in a drunken stupor, he told them their mother was a selfish whore who tried to escape his clutches when she was still pregnant with them. She would always recall his smile when he regaled them with the story of how he cut her throat immediately after she gave birth to them. Elzaria exhaled in disgust at the memory.

  The only person who ever showed them kindness was a man named Ramson. While their father worked in the mines, Elzor and Elzaria spent their days at Ramson's smithy, where he forged all sorts of items from machinite ore: weapons, armor, merychs' shoes, and more. They would help him do his
chores, and in return, he not only gave them food, but he also taught them to read. He even gave Elzor his first lesson in swordplay.

  When they were eight years old, however, disease swept through their village of Orme, killing half its residents, including their father and Ramson. With no other living relatives, they were relegated to an orphanage in the nearby town of Bruck. They spent four miserable years there, their only hope being that when they came of age, Elzor would become an apprentice blacksmith and earn enough coin to take care of both himself and her. Such are the dreams of children.

  Though Barjan law stated that children under the age of fourteen could not be forced into crushing servitude, there were many who flouted this law with impunity. Just before their thirteenth birthday, Elzor and Elzaria were sold to a mining foreman named Rogin, one of the most brutal and repulsive individuals to ever walk the face of Elystra.

  The Mogran mining camp was run much like a prison. Most of its labor force consisted of the orphaned, the downtrodden, the unwanted. They were forced to live in deplorable conditions and barely given enough food to perform their duties, which was to mine for machinite ore. Two-thirds of those sent to Mogran died within a year.

  When they first arrived, they quickly learned it was safer to keep their heads down and ignore everyone around them. Workers dropped dead from exhaustion, malnutrition, and disease on a daily basis, and those that attempted escape were tracked down and whipped to death in front of everyone, usually by Rogin himself.

  Countless times, Elzaria wanted to give up, to surrender to death, reasoning that whatever lay beyond the Great Veil had to be better than what they were forced to endure here, but Elzor possessed an inner strength she never had. Whenever one of the bigger boys tried to steal their meager helping of food, he fought them off. She remembered one instance when he actually snapped the neck of a boy nearly twice his size. The rest of the workers left him alone after that.

  There were times, however, that even Elzor's strength wasn't enough to protect them. One of Rogin's favorite hobbies, apart from getting drunk on manza cider, was having his way with the female workers, and for him, the younger the better.

  Remembering the several instances when Rogin dragged her into his quarters made her skin crawl. He was a large, pot-bellied man, whose stink alone was enough to make her gag. When he was on top of her, inside her, all she could do was close her eyes and pray for death.

  For two years, they survived this horrific routine. And still, Elzor refused to give up. His will to survive remained steadfast. He seemed to draw strength from his anger, his hatred for all that had led them to this place. He hated their father for dying, their mother for letting herself be slaughtered, and Rogin for stealing the innocence of children to satiate his own drunken lust.

  Ramson tried to teach them as children that Arantha watched over all of Elystra and protected the righteous. By the time Elzor and Elzaria turned fourteen, however, they'd renounced all of their former mentor's beliefs. No benevolent deity would allow such atrocities to flourish. They could only depend on themselves.

  One day, deep in the mine, they snuck away during a rest period. Elzaria had grown ever more frail and sickly, and Elzor decided that the time had come to attempt escape. With only a small lantern in hand, they followed a closed-off shaft that had been mined out. Elzor had overheard a whispered rumor among the workers that this particular tunnel led up to the surface, a hidden exit from the mountain. He had no idea if the rumor was true, but he and Elzaria were out of options.

  They followed the passage for about half an hour when Elzaria collapsed, clutching her head in pain. Elzor had to clamp his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming, as its echo would likely be heard all the way to the surface. The pain eventually overwhelmed her, and she lost consciousness.

  When she woke, though, she felt rejuvenated. Where her sudden strength came from she had no idea at the time, but as Elzor guided her farther up the shaft, she felt her pain recede. They reached a steep rock-face, twenty feet high, that they needed to climb to continue. And climb they did. Elzaria, much to Elzor's amazement, scaled the wall in no time.

  After helping him up onto a flat ledge, they rested. They couldn't wait for long, though; they had neither food nor water, and their lantern would soon burn out. They had no way of knowing how close they were to the surface, and the only path left to follow was a narrow tube just wide enough to accommodate their thin frames.

  They crawled, foot by foot, up the tube. Twenty minutes later, their lantern went out, plunging them into darkness. Elzaria began to sob, but Elzor kept her moving. Her newfound strength was ebbing, but he staunchly refused to let her give up.

  For hours more they climbed in total blackness, until they lost all sense of time and place. And then disaster struck again, as they felt the entire mountain tremble.

  Tremors were common in Barju, and though most of them did little more than shake a few layers of dust from the ceiling, this one was far worse. Dozens of tiny pebbles and chunks of stone rained down, but just as it felt like the entire mountain would collapse on them, the shaking stopped.

  The two of them huddled together, breathing in the thick, stale air, coughing and choking on the dust. When they lifted their heads, they had to blink their eyes from the light pouring down the shaft. It took them several moments to realize the light wasn't coming from the sun. It was coming from a small, fist-sized lump of stone that had fallen from the roof of the shaft and now lay, illuminating them in an eerie blue light.

  Mesmerized, Elzaria crawled forward and grasped the stone tightly in her hands. Within moments, her body was wracked with an indescribable pain, as power the likes of which she could never have conceived coursed through her. Through the pain, though, Elzaria felt something come over her: a knowledge that she would be safe. She was given a gift, a gift she would use to escape their vile prison.

  With a stupefied Elzor behind her and the stone's blue glow lighting their way, they were able to make their way to the surface. They had to push through a series of narrow openings and tear through some gnarled roots and scrubby bushes, but they'd never been more relieved in their lives than when they tasted fresh air.

  It was pitch dark outside, and they were a good distance away from the camp, so they did the only thing they could think of: make a break for it through the forest. Elzor had to tear off his shirt and wrap it around the stone lest it become a beacon for their captors to see. Eventually, they emerged into a small clearing, starving and dehydrated. The surge of strength the stone gave her had waned, and they collapsed on a patch of grass on the edge of the clearing.

  They woke to find rough hands twisting their arms behind their backs by several large men whom Elzaria recognized as Rogin's hired thugs. Once bound, the thugs threw them into the back of a merych-drawn cart and drove them straight back to Mogran.

  Rogin was quite pleased to see them. Smiling his broken smile, he promised to torture Elzor to death in front of her, right before cutting her throat. First, though, he planned to have his way with her one last time.

  With Elzor bound and gagged in the corner of Rogin's bedroom, the sadistic foreman started by smacking Elzaria's face so hard the redness was easy to see in the dim light against the paleness of her skin. Then, holding her down, he used a knife to cut her clothes off, one piece at a time. As she lay naked on the floor, sobbing, with her brother powerless to do anything but watch, Rogin stood over her, his eyes flitting between her body and the stone they found.

  He rolled it around his grimy, meaty hands, puzzled as to what it was and what it was doing inside a machinite mine. For it certainly was not machinite. It was like nothing he'd ever seen before. “Oh, the coin I'll fetch for such a rare and precious item!” he boasted.

  As he continued to fondle the stone, dreaming his squalid dreams of wealth and power, Elzaria felt her strength grow again, and a surge of energy pulsed through her weakened body. The stone's glow returned, dim at first but with increasing intensity,
and with it, the power within her began to manifest.

  The blinding light forced Rogin to drop the Stone. It fell to the floor as he shielded his eyes. When he opened them again, they widened in terror as he beheld Elzaria, on her feet and surrounded by a field of crackling blue energy. Tiny bolts of lightning flew out from her naked body, randomly striking the walls of Rogin's cramped hovel. Elzor, out of self-preservation, curled into a fetal position to avoid the deadly discharges.

  Elzaria couldn't remember exactly what she said, but all her hatred and pain and hopelessness poured through her at that moment. As if guided by an unseen force, she held out her hands in front of her. Rogin didn't have time to react before a massive bolt of lightning shot from her hands and into his body. The wispy strands of hair that remained on his head stood on end, his back arched and his arms and legs twitched in a dance of death. His mouth opened, but he couldn't even cry out.

  Lightning continued to shoot from her body, striking the walls and ceiling. One bolt flew into a pile of dirty, grubby clothes Rogin had piled up in one corner of his bedroom, and within moments, they were ablaze. Elzaria obliviously kept her focus on Rogin, pouring surge after surge into his body until there was nothing left but a charred, twisted, smoking corpse. By the time she regained self-awareness and the power within her abated, one side of the room was on fire.

  Thinking quickly, she used Rogin's knife to cut through Elzor's ropes. He ripped a filthy sheet off of Rogin's bed and wrapped it around her. They exited the hovel to be met by Rogin's gang of thugs: five loathsome men with pockmarked faces handpicked by Rogin for their greed and cruelty. Each man brandished a sword, and all were pointed at them.

  Elzor immediately leaned in and whispered in Elzaria's ear, “Kill them, sister. Kill them all.”

  At his words, Elzaria's rage grew once again, and the blue crackling energy reappeared around her body. Without taking her eyes off the thugs, she whispered, “Take cover, brother.”

  Elzor, having backed away at the reappearance of the blue energy surrounding Elzaria, retreated around the one corner of Rogin's house that hadn't yet caught fire.