Walter threaded his way towards Grimbald and away from the choking dust. “Grim?” he shouted and winced at the lingering pain in his ears, remembering a time when his body couldn’t spontaneously heal. How had he made it this far without the Phoenix?
“Ugh,” he responded.
“Shit!” Walter hissed. He scrambled his way over to him. Grimbald’s hands were pressed over his ears and he was laying on his back. “Sorry.”
Walter pulled on his arms, signaling for him to move them and he relented. Luminescent tails of the Phoenix curled into his ears, restoring his hearing, casting his face in its cool glow.
“Could’ve warned me,” Grimbald groaned and muscles in his jaw flexed.
“Ugh, Yeah. Didn’t know it’d be so loud. On the bright side, it looked to have worked spectacularly well.”
Grimbald sat up and followed his gaze, shook his head. The tunnel’s entrance was a smoking wreck. There were a few hunks of stone stabbing into the air, each almost as big as a tavern. Wedged between them were smaller stones, but still heavier than any man or beast could move. It would slow them down, at least.
“Good.” Grimbald nodded with satisfaction. “Before you do the furnaces… let me get far beyond the bone piles. I like my ears not bleeding.”
Walter snickered, cheeks hot. “Will do.”
Chapter 7
Tower Secrets
“What is left out shows what is left in.” -The Diaries of Nyset Camfield
The morning sun speared the sky with blades of gold. Senka sniffed and gently placed a hand on one of her belt daggers. She felt a sliver of comfort with her hand there. She stared out from between a pair of shrubs at the Death Spawn aimlessly milling about the mouth of the cavern. They had searched the forest west of the Tower and around the volcano for almost a week, and had almost given up today, concluding there was no other way for the Death Spawn to cross the realm other than Phoenix portals. She was glad they hadn’t stopped searching.
The shadow ones looked bored. Her father taught her that inattentive people were easy targets. She guessed these beasts were much the same as men. There were nine that she could plainly see. How many remained hidden? She was unfamiliar with the methods of subterfuge the shadow ones used, if they used any at all. Surely there must be some hidden somewhere, she thought.
Isa squatted beside a bush with orange flowers a few paces away from her. His milk white scalp was hidden under a billowy hood. He wore a loose cloak around his body, dark as night and melding into the shadows. Senka noted the bulges of weapons poking out from his hips and back. He, at least, knew how to stay quiet, a rarity for whiteskins.
Senka distrusted him, but would obey the Mistress’s command and work with him. Trust was earned, not given. The Mistress told her that he was a Silver Tower assassin and that he could stand on his own. It seemed he would soon have the opportunity to prove it. He wasn’t a big man like her father was, but tall and wiry. She knew from her own short stature that size was the worst way to judge the strength of a foe. Man and beast alike were vulnerable to at least one chemical. She might be able to carry Isa back to the new Tower if he fell, but she was hoping she wouldn’t have to.
She caressed the needles under her bracers, a gentle reminder of her strength. There were seven under her left forearm, the tips violet with the essence of Acontium petals. Under her right bracer were five coated in yellowy Windroot oil. The needles each sat in their own individual hardened leather sheaths, tips down so that they couldn’t accidentally pierce her skin while going about her day.
The Acontium tipped needles had worked to paralyze the great shadow one named Dressna. The one who had killed her father and almost killed her. Windroot oil worked wonderfully for killing men. The poison would stop the heart in seconds once it entered the bloodstream. Windroot didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the shadow ones. They were dirty, vile creatures that should not be, she thought with a shiver. There was a place for many animals in the realm, but not for these.
She’d spent days searching the land for an Acontium bush. They were incredibly rare here; plentiful in the sands of the Nether. She had finally found it and they would know the taste of her blades. She narrowed her eyes at their quietly gibbering forms, her jaw clamping down. The shadow creature Dressna would pay for the atrocities inflicted on her father and her people. The shadow ones would all pay. She knew it was unwise to have vengeance in her heart, but she didn’t care. Oblivion was all that seemed to wait for her, the last remaining Scorpion. The best she could do for them now was avenge their untimely deaths.
She missed her father. He had rarely given her the approval she always sought from him. He had always criticized her poisons. They either had too much substrate, not enough water, or her workstation was too sloppy. She was never enough, but it didn’t stop her from missing him. It would not stop her from claiming the debt they owed her.
Isa hissed, grabbing her attention and breaking her reverie. He nodded at her and pressed a porcelain finger to his right nostril, giving her the signal. She returned a confirming nod. His bow gently creaked as he pulled his bowstring taut, drawing an arrow and pointing it at the ground. Senka’s deft fingers found her blowgun under her cloak and loaded an Acontium tipped needle. She couldn’t help but let a grin spread across her face. She had spent her whole life training for moments like this. She wasn’t trained with a sense of honor or fairness in mind, but only for the most effective means of slaying her enemies.
The tip of her blowgun emerged from a bush, the needle tip imperceptibly glowing with violet. She eyed three Cerumal hunched over and squawking about something. Senka inhaled a mighty breath and held it in her cheeks. A Cerumal backhanded the one beside it in the head then snatched a dropped human arm. Her training hadn’t prepared her for this.
Senka’s eyes went wide and her breath leaked from her lips. She felt the blood drain from her face and was overcome with dizziness. She carefully withdrew her blowgun from the bush and placed a hand on the ground to steady herself. The Cerumal took a bloody bite from the arm, tearing free a ragged hunk of bicep muscle. Its brethren jealously shrieked.
Isa hissed at her again. He shook his head at her, his face tight with bitter contempt. Perhaps he felt the same way she felt about him at that moment. She would prove herself worthy. She steadied her breath and brought her hammering heart rate down to a manageable level. She nodded at him, thick eyebrows knitted. She inhaled again and found her first target.
The needle struck the eating Cerumal in the back of the neck. The needle glinted in the light, hardly visible unless you were looking for it. She loaded her gun and blew again, the needle striking the next in the thigh. She eyed her third target, blew, then it started to rise up. The needle hit it in the eye and it roared, pawing at its face and angrily spinning about.
The others turned to face the screaming Cerumal, alerted and snatching up discarded weapons from the ground. Isa sprouted from behind the shrub. His arrow hissed and thunked through a Cerumal’s breastplate. It stumbled on weak legs and collapsed, running itself through the gut with its own sword. Arrow after arrow came with shocking speed, taking down two others, one with a shot through the neck and the other in the chest. Senka matched him, loading and shooting two more Cerumal with needles.
The three she had initially hit started towards Isa but crumpled to the ground after a few steps. One saw her and shrieked, its face like a drowned man whose skin had never decayed. It hurled a spear at her and Senka rolled to avoid the clumsy weapon, thudding into a tree behind her. She darted forward, twin daggers hissing from her scabbards.
It drew a sword with jagged teeth on one side, raised up overhead. She closed the gap before it could swing, stabbed it in the gut and jerked her blade across its abdomen. The blade almost tore free from her fingers when it hit a rib. With her other hand, she made a vertical cut, followed by another horizontal cut below it, making the shape of an ‘I.’ The Cerumal’s burning eyes stared at her, its sword hissing into
the dirt from dying fingers. Offal spilled out from its gut onto the ground, the stomach flesh spreading apart like an opened book. It groaned and slumped to the ground.
Senka pressed her arm against her nose to mute the biting odor of rotting flesh. Its innards were wrong, organs looking as if they’d been dead for weeks. “Vile creatures,” she snorted. She wiped away a line of blood trickling its way down her cheek on the back of her hand.
“The Mistress was right, it seems,” Isa drawled with his strange western accent.
“Yes,” Senka said, only because it seemed like the right thing to do. She’d learned that Westerners grew uncomfortable if you were too quiet. She bent down and cleaned her Milvorian daggers off on the dead Cerumal’s ashen flesh.
Isa slung his bow over his shoulder and produced a skinning knife from his belt. Squatting down, he started cutting into the flesh around his arrow. When he pulled it free, it squelched out with a hunk of flesh attached to its barbs like skewered meat. He hacked flesh from the arrow’s tip and slipped it back into his quiver.
It was a curious gesture. “Why not just leave the arrows?” Senka asked him.
“These are not ordinary arrows made by a common fletcher. I make these myself so they fly true.” He slipped his dark hood off and adjusted it over his bony shoulders.
Senka understood. The weapons one made were vastly superior to those purchased. She made her own needles in the Nether. She understood their character, weight, and feel. They were uniquely hers. She started to smile, snatching up her needles from the fallen beasts and slipping them back up into her bracers.
“You find their deaths comical?” Isa asked. She couldn’t get used to his grating voice. It sounded like the whisper of steel on a whetstone, soft, deadly, and sharp as his arrows. She wondered if he could kill with his voice.
“No,” she looked up at him, felt her eyes go soft at meeting his. They were a striking cobalt, swimming with an almost burning intensity. They were the most beautiful eyes she’d ever seen. Her heart felt as if it stopped for a second, then thundered a few beats to make up for the pause.
“Then… why do you laugh?” He furrowed the area of flesh where eyebrows should have been. His head was hairless as far as she could tell. He was a bizarre figure with his strange light eyes and milky skin.
She snickered uncomfortably. “No reason.”
Isa shrugged and started working to cut out another arrow from a dead Cerumal.
Senka paused to take in the scene. There were a few iron bound barrels full of water at one side of the cavern. She grinned at seeing such a guarded treasure. Water was precious in the Nether. Beside the barrels were the mutilated bodies of what she guessed was once a man and woman, judging by their frames. She walked towards the bodies and peered down. Their faces had been eaten, eyes, nose, lips, cheeks and all. It made them look as if they were smiling, but she guessed they didn’t die happily. “Vile, vile shadow ones.” She gritted her teeth.
Was this the fate that had befallen her village? She had run like a coward and left them to die like this. Her hands found her dagger’s hilt, pressing into the scarlet leather. She realized then that when she escaped from the Black Furnaces, she’d left her father’s body to the shadow ones. He was like these people, reduced to food for the dirty creatures.
Isa came up beside her, his steps quiet as a stalking cat. “If you ever find yourself captured by them, end yourself. They like to eat the flesh while the victim still lives.”
“Never.” Senka exhaled, mastering her breath. “The sun has set on today and tomorrow brings new warmth,” her father’s voice said in her head. Senka nodded at Isa. “Thank you for the advice, Isa. It sounds… wise.” It would be a coward’s death, but she knew that excruciating pain had a hasty way of changing one’s mind about a subject. Men always pounded their chests, invincible until the bleeding started and the poisons did their insidious work.
Senka walked into the mouth of the cavern, squatted down and eyed the muddy boot prints. They looked to be going in both directions. So many shadow ones. No, they’re known as Death Spawn here, she corrected herself. Could there really be this many? She felt her throat going as dry as sand.
“They use this cavern to travel across the realm,” Isa growled, examining the boot prints.
“We have to get back to the Arch Wizard.” Senka coughed. “She’ll want to hear her suspicions were correct. Never would I have guessed that the Shadow ones could be so clever.” She took a sip from her waterskin and corked it. Her eyes were invariably drawn to the pair of barrels filled to the brim with rainwater.
Eying the barrels again filled her muscles with tension, feeling like an invading tribe might come to commandeer them at any moment. Those days were long past, beaten away in the scourges of time — like her, like her people, and like her legacy.
“You mean the Death Spawn? No, they’re not this intelligent.” Isa peered around, his eyes keen. “They’re lead by Black Wynches usually.”
“Black Wynches?” Senka quietly repeated the words so she wouldn’t forget them. They were strange, new words that felt odd on her lips.
“Make things a little harder on them.” Isa raised his boot and pressed it against the side of a water barrel. He pushed it over and it fell with a thump, spraying and glugging water out onto the dirt.
“Wait!” Senka reached out, her voice a spear of panic. It was too late to stop him and already done.
Isa dropped into a low crouch and his hands sprung out of his cloak, clutching a hatchet in one hand and short sword in the other. He whirled around, hatchet raised across his chest and sword behind his back. “What is it? Enemies?”
“You wasted all that precious, invaluable water.” She pointed and frowned down at it. She cocked her head at the large stones that had rolled out the barrel, fanning out in different directions. But they weren’t stones at all. They were human heads, she realized with mounting disgust.
“The brutality,” Isa trailed off, his arms falling to his sides, the blackened weapons like shadows.
Senka stared down at a bloated head, the skin shredded, eye sockets empty. Her chest tightened like she was being crushed by a boulder. Something rustled in the wood and every part of her screamed for her to turn, but she couldn’t take her eyes away. Her peripheral vision blurred with flitting shapes. She wondered dreamily if this was how rot flies felt when seeking decaying flesh.
“Senka!” a distant voice roared.
How could they taint the water like this, the most precious of all the world’s gifts? It was the giver and stealer of life. It would have been a priceless amount in the Nether, enough to induce the tribes to bloodshed.
Something slammed into her side, sending her sprawling onto the dirt. Dry earth fanned across her cheeks and pushed into her nostrils. Fire tore through her shoulder and the world snapped back into focus. She looked up and saw a dark shape with talons as long as daggers raised up to strike Isa. Senka scrambled to her feet, fishing for her daggers and missing their hilts with nervy hands. She blew hard through her nose, expelling crusts of dirt.
Isa screamed and stabbed with his sword, following up with a hatchet swipe. The beast unnaturally twisted in the air like an eel, dodging his blows with ease as if it lacked bones. It countered with furious slashes, catching Isa’s robes and throwing out a swathe of dark fabric. Isa fell back into a roll, came out of it and hurled his hatchet. It collided with the Black Wynch’s pyramid shaped helm, thudding with a dent. It advanced with clacking talons glinting sunlight.
Senka started towards it with her daggers now tight in her hands. She’d open this beast up, make it taste her edges.
The Wynch’s narrow mouth dropped open with an ear-piercing shriek.
She dropped her daggers to cover her ears, the sound making her wince with pain. The Shadow one took great leaping steps to close the gap between it and Isa. It slashed, and he blocked with his sword, metal on metal clanging in the air.
Senka snatched her daggers up an
d sprinted to the creature. Its attention shifted to her and slashed out with shocking speed. She dropped to her knees, skidding across the dirt. Air sighed across her cheeks from its missed cut. She grinned, ramming her daggers into its thighs, aiming for the femoral arteries. She pulled them free and its blood spurted onto her chest. It hacked down at her, and she raised her daggers to block. Isa’s sword stabbed the air, blocking its strike.
Isa’s lips parted in a feral grimace, his arm swinging at it with a hammer. The hammer crunched into its helmet, punching through the dent he’d made earlier. The Black Wynch stumbled back, one hand whipping daggers for fingers, the other wrenching the hammer from its oversized helmet. Dark blood bubbled down the side of its pyramid-like helm, pattering onto its jagged shoulder plate. A pool of blood was forming around its feet from Senka’s inflicted wounds. It tore the hammer free and Isa was upon it, slashing high, low, then stabbing, giving it no rest. It dodged with ease, though blood shot out in grisly spurts now that the hammer left the wound open. It wasn’t the brightest move.
Senka had scrambled onto her feet, about to strike from its flank, but stopped a couple paces before it. Isa mirrored her, creeping back and joining her side, sword held up. The Black Wynch hissed and mindlessly whipped its talons through the air. Its strikes slowed and became lazy, arms sagging with weakness.
“A poison?” Isa asked.
Senka let a cruel grin slip over her face. “A very painful one. Daughter of Fire makes all the nerves tell the brain the body is on fire while turning the nerves to paste.”
“I like it.” He turned to her with the beginnings of a smile. He winced and took another step back from the dying Black Wynch, then sheathed his sword.
A New Light (The Age of Dawn Book 5) Page 14
