“So don’t,” Erizen said. “Create a shell over us, then create a second overtop it or underneath it. When one breaks, another will be immediately adjacent. I imagine it will take a great deal of effort and concentration, but it should hold the tide back.”
“And what will you be doing?” Tseka wanted to know.
“I’ll be trying to figure out what exactly this threat is and where it came from,” Erizen replied, ignoring her tone. “And how to stop it.”
People were still coming towards the tavern. Erizen’s spell was working well—all of them moved with urgency and some degree of fearfulness, but without panic. Despite herself, Tseka was impressed. Since she had nothing to do until either everyone was gathered or the swarm arrived, the Nadran warrior turned to the people.
“Go inside. Something’s coming, but you’ll be safe inside,” she urged them. Most of them stood outside the tavern, staring at the oncoming swarm. They blocked the way for those who did want to get through, and they were far too spread out. The smaller the shield Tseka had to make, the better, which meant she had to organize them.
“Go on, go inside. Calm and orderly now. Go on, inside,” Tseka repeated. She herded them like a collection of nervous sheep. They were mesmerized by the swarm like moths by fire, but when she came near they snapped back to themselves.
“Go on, go inside. You’ll be safe inside.” People shied from her outstretched hands even though she meant to touch them in comfort, but she used it to her advantage to steer them towards the tavern.
“Tseka!” Erizen called. Tseka looked back at him and was surprised to see the street was clear. Then she looked up and felt a chill run down the length of her spine and coils. The sky was black.
“Tseka, shields!” Erizen shouted.
It had begun.
Tseka threw up a massive, semi-transparent, scarlet mage-shield around the Staggering Tankard and small part of the street that she and Erizen stood on. The swarm wasn’t quite upon them yet, but they could see where it reached the town. The mage-shield tinted the world red, manufacturing a demonic haze.
The swarm descended on the first house and stripped it clean in a moment—every scrap of food or bit of cloth was devoured. Anything small or light was jostled and smashed around. Doors and windows caved before the onslaught. A loose horse galloped down the street towards the tavern, and an arm of the swarm darted out to engulf it. The horse screamed as its flesh was stripped from its bones in moments—the scream was mercifully cut short, but the horror wasn’t lessened. In a matter of seconds there was nothing but a few scattered, gnawed bones left behind. Elsewhere in the city they could hear other screams, and Tseka could only hope that those were the cries of animals too, and not people that Erizen had somehow missed.
Then the swarm reached her shield. Tseka had practiced with them a great deal, but nothing could have prepared her for the sheer force of the impact. They went through her barrier almost like it wasn’t there, but at least she was ready, and erected a second just beneath the surface of the first. Even so, it was mere seconds before that was battered out of existence as well. Their sheer strength in numbers and single-minded determination to get through the shield worked in their favor. Tseka created her new shields underneath the previous ones for a minute before realizing that she was losing too much ground too quickly. It was far harder, but after that she fought to create the new shield atop the old, without so much as a breath of air between the two before the old vanished. She forced the swarm back to the original perimeter a finger’s width at a time.
Every fiber of Tseka’s being was focused on her shields; she knew that if she failed, she and every person inside the Staggering Tankard would be devoured in a matter of minutes. Her shields had to hold. She felt her body temperature rising and heard her own heartbeat in her ears, drowning out everything else. Her vision became hazy. She swayed to her own internal rhythm, keeping time to maintain her pace of replacing shields the way soldiers sang songs to keep their marching efficient. Time lost meaning.
Gradually she became aware of her body again; the rigidity of her muscles now began to ache and she was too hot. Her chest heaved as she dragged in long, ragged breaths. Her heart raced from exertion, and her swaying wasn’t—couldn’t—keep to rhythm. She faintly wondered how long she’d been keeping up her struggle, but she snapped her concentration back to her shield when she felt it break before she had a second ready. She lost a hand-span of space before managing to put up a new one—it was an uphill battle trying to regain that lost ground.
The scarlet Nadra willed her vision to clear—she needed to know what was going on. What was Erizen doing? Her thoughts were disjointed—she couldn’t think about anything other than her shields without risking letting them in, but something had to be wrong. She found Erizen beside her still. He looked almost as strained as she—perspiration liberally beaded his brow and his usually sleek ponytail was marred by a dozen fly-aways. But what truly scared her was that he looked worried. Erizen never lost his detached, aloof veneer. Never. Tseka squeezed her eyes shut and managed to concentrate enough to push back the swarm a couple fingers’ widths. It wasn’t much, but it gave her an iota of leeway.
“What—” Tseka’s voice cracked against the question, but Erizen heard her. He tried to hide his emotions, putting on his mask of detachment, but he didn’t entirely succeed.
“There’s no end to them. I can’t find where they’re coming from, and there’s no end to them.” Erizen’s voice was strained. Outside the shield, fire blossomed, and a portion of the swarm dropped from the air to litter the ground. That was when Tseka saw how many of them he must have killed—the swarm-creatures mostly vanished when killed, but they left behind a light dusting of…something, and it had accumulated into an ankle-deep layer against the perimeter of the shield. Given how little dust each creature produced and how much had accumulated on the ground… It spoke of uncountable numbers. Erizen could easily destroy a dozen or more of the creatures with a flick of his hand, but it made no difference; it was like trying to boil away the ocean with a campfire. There was no end to the water—no end to the hungering mouths that mindlessly, relentlessly pressed against the shields.
For a moment, Tseka’s heart went cold. Hope fluttered in her chest like the wings of a fallen dove, then went still. Her shield shattered prematurely again and she lost a hand-span of space before she erected another, but the new one wasn’t even strong enough to slow them down before shattering. The swarm was no more than a pace away when a silver shield snapped into existence where the red one had failed. Erizen burned away a few swarm-creatures that were within the circumference of the shield when it went up, but now he had the burden of the shields.
“Tseka! There’s no getting out of this if I waste everything on shields!” Erizen shouted. Tseka knew that, but the first two shields she tried to put up atop his had no effect. Her resolve was brittle, and it seemed her shields reflected that. She was going to die here—here, away from her home, her people, her family. She was going to die without so much as a friend by her side. She was going to die for some measly town of humans who were so ignorant and prejudiced that they couldn’t even return a friendly smile when passing in the street.
“Tseka!” Erizen yelled again, and she knew that maintaining his shield against the swarm would be like pouring his magic into an endless abyss, and what hope they had would be draining away with it.
“No,” Tseka suddenly hissed. A bright scarlet barrier overlaid Erizen’s, then a second, and a third, pushing back the swarm again.
“I am not going to die here,” the warrior growled. “We are not going to die here.” She wasn’t just fighting for some stupid humans; she was fighting for her people. This battle was part of a larger war, part of bigger cause that she was fighting for, and she was going to have an impact on the outcome. She let herself fill with rage, drawing strength from her emotions. She bared her teeth at the swarm. So what if Erizen couldn’t do anything? When had she ever rel
ied on someone else to fight a battle for her? She still had a weapon left to yield; she hissed at herself for neglecting a piece of her arsenal, for hiding behind shields when she should have been attacking, as she was meant to.
She took her rage and directed it at the swarm with an inhuman screech. She channeled the other power the Ashiier had given her at the creatures that wanted to devour her and every other living thing. She used her magic to provoke them, to drive them into an insane frenzy. They were already mindless, hungering mouths, but it didn’t matter. They were filled with an insane rage now too—they lost all sense of direction. They jostled each other as they tried to penetrate the magical barrier between them and their food, and each time an individual was bumped or jolted, it lost its sense of the hive.
The swarm turned on itself. The swarm-creatures no longer saw others of its kind as extensions of self and attacked each other. Dust, bodies and a thick ichor rained from the sky as they bit and devour each other. The shields were no longer so burdensome as the focus was taken off the prey within the barrier. It was like the swarm was imploding, collapsing in on itself and squeezing together so tightly that liquid rained down.
Tseka gave a crow of triumph, a barbaric action, but a justified one. They learned that the swarm was not endless; patches of sky became sporadically visible through the cloud of hungering mouths, if only for moments at a time. After a matter of minutes, the swarm thinned further still, until it was only like a shady tree, with sunlight streaming through gaps in the branches. Still the swarm diminished at a steady rate. Soon Tseka held a single shield easily as the winged mouths of the swarm forgot them entirely and focused their rage upon one another. Tseka even saw one of the creatures on the ground, its wings torn off, chewing on its own leg. It died even as it gnawed, mindless until it disintegrated into a trace of dust.
Tseka’s chest swelled with labored breaths, and she leaned heavily against her spear. She could feel her strength desert her even as her rage and exhilaration drained away. The sky cleared as if it were dawn, but now that they could see the horizon, it was clearly dusk. The bright orb of the sun was almost behind the distant mountains. They had fought for hours; there had still been a good portion of the day left when the swarm had descended.
People began to tentatively emerge from the tavern behind them, gazing about at the destruction beyond the still-present scarlet shield. Then the shield vanished, and they didn’t know what to do. Some wept—perhaps out of fear, perhaps relief, Tseka didn’t know. She sagged a little further and felt a wave of vertigo wash over her—exhaustion. She knew that she would have collapsed if she hadn’t had her spear to support her.
“Come on, Tseka I think you finished them,” Erizen said. Indeed, the sky was clear.
“You need to lie down before you collapse. Come on,” Erizen coaxed.
“The job’s not done,” Tseka objected, even as she knew it was stupid to do so. “We have to make sure.”
“I will. You rest. Here—” Erizen turned from her and pointed at one of the townsmen. “You there, pick some reliable people and set up a watch. Keep a lookout for those things returning. I’ll be right back.” Orders given, Erizen simply assumed they’d be followed and turned his attention back to Tseka. Incidentally, the townspeople seemed disinclined to displease their protectors and did what they were told. Tseka wisely let Erizen help her into the tavern; he ushered her into one of the ground-floor rooms.
As she slithered atop the bed, it occurred to her that they should probably let Toman and Esset know what had happened, but when she tried to say something, she found a black veil drawing across her vision. Her mind swam, and she forgot what she was trying to do until her eyes drifted shut and unconsciousness stole her away.
Esset jolted awake.
“Summoner Esset, wake up!” A young guardsman shook Esset’s shoulder to rouse him. Esset blinked as the faint impression of dreams of fire faded from his mind.
“What is it?” the summoner asked, sitting up. He’d been tired and cold, so he’d just slipped under the covers fully dressed and fallen asleep. He wondered how long he’d been out for—it didn’t feel like long.
“Captain wants you, sir. There’s been an attack,” the guardsman reported. Esset fought through the fog of recent sleep to process the message.
“What kind of attack?” Esset threw back the covers and rose swiftly.
“Sorry, sir, I’d like to know too, but I’m just the messenger,” the guardsmen said.
“Then we’d best not waste any time. The quicker we get there, the quicker we find out,” Esset replied. The messenger needed no encouragement.
As they stepped outside, Esset got to find out what time it was—judging by the position of the moon, it hadn’t been more than a couple hours since he’d gone to bed. They hurried to the war room.
“Captain, what’s the news?” Esset asked when they arrived. A great map of Baliya covered the massive table in the center of the room, and markers had been set up across it. Esset identified the places where people had gone missing and their bodies were later found. The map had always looked pretty accurate to him, and he’d flown over the territory many times before.
“Snowhill was attacked. No survivors,” Captain Langson replied grimly. “I just got the news from one of my patrols.”
“Snowhill? But we were just there today. When did it happen?” Esset could hardly believe it, but this was Moloch—almost anything was believable when it came to his abilities and his depravity.
“Dusk. My men arrived shortly after, but there was no one but the slain, left where they had fallen. No trace of who or what was responsible, but the people were cut down by blades,” Captain Langson said.
“I need to get in the air. Whoever or whatever did it could still be close,” Esset said, turning on his heel to head back outside. Thoughts of sleep were forgotten—he would rest when this was over.
“Esset!” the captain called after him, but Esset didn’t wait. Captain Langson followed him outside into the courtyard as the alien syllables of an incantation poured from the summoner’s lips. A fiery bird burst into existence before him, searing away the night vision of any onlookers.
“Aren’t you a little obvious for a night-flight? You’ll be making a target of yourself!” Captain Langson objected.
“Good,” Esset replied, stone-faced. “Then they’ll come after me instead of a helpless target, and save me the looking. But I need someone to come with me. I’ll mostly be looking through the eyes of my summons, so I’ll need someone to keep me in the saddle, so to speak.”
“I’ll—” the captain began, but Esset cut him off.
“No, you’re too important. You’ll be needed here, especially if this ends with a goose-chase. Just because I think I’ll find something doesn’t mean I will. This is Moloch we’re up against; he’s unpredictable,” Esset said. Moloch was a step ahead, too, and Esset kicked himself for letting the evil mage stay ahead of them. They were supposed to get ahead of him. They were supposed to protect people. But Esset had failed, and he hated himself for it.
“Okay,” Captain Langson acceded.
“I’ll go, sir. If the summoner will have me.” It was the young guardsman who’d fetched Esset earlier—Esset and the captain had hardly even noticed that he’d followed them outside.
“What’s your name, Guardsman?” Esset asked him, even as he wondered how old the guard was. Toman and Esset had set out young, and gotten themselves into a hundred scrapes they’d barely survived, but even so, this guardsman looked young to him.
“Jess, sir. My name is Jesseph Arikson,” the young man replied. Esset glanced at Captain Langson, who gave the slightest of nods. One volunteer was worth a dozen conscripts, and Esset only needed one man.
“Good to have you, Guardsman Jess. Your job should be fairly simple.” Esset gestured him forward. Captain Langson reached out and took the guard’s spear as he went by—he wouldn’t be able to keep it and fly at the same time. The sword at his hip woul
d have to do if he ended up needing a weapon, which was unlikely.
“I’m going to be in something like a trance and controlling everything I’ve summoned. I should be able to see better than you while we’re scouting, but if you do see something first, you’re better off trying to get the attention of this bird we’ll be riding than mine. If you need me to wake up, which is unlikely, a good thump on the ribs should do it. But basically your job is just going to be to keep me on the bird’s back, ’cause I won’t be terribly aware of my own body. Got it?” Esset pitied the kid—he was in way over his head, whether he knew it or not.
“Got it,” Jess said. At least his resolve was solid. Esset couldn’t tell if he was scared, excited, or both. Probably both.
“Okay, come on. Climb up behind me.” Esset easily climbed onto the bird’s back and reached back a hand to help Jess up. At least Jess’s relatively small stature would work to their advantage. The bird would lose some speed and maneuverability with two passengers, but less than it would have had Jess been bigger.
“Wrap your hands around my waist. You’ll have to adjust our weight to adapt to the bird’s movements,” Esset warned him. Jess just nodded.
“Good luck!” Captain Langson called after them as the bird heaved itself into the air. Esset didn’t spare a glance back down—his eyes were already on the darkened sky. The wind tore away the syllables of incantations repeated again and again, and by the time they had flown down to the countryside surrounding the castle, four other birds had joined them. They flew low enough that the brightness of the summons’ fire lit up the ground below, briefly illuminating anything and anyone below.
That was when Esset turned his head to look at Jess. He gave the guard a nod and tapped the hands wrapped around his waist to signal that he’d be relying on Jess to hang onto him from there on out. Jess nodded back and Esset leaned forward and closed his eyes.
Fire Within: Book Two of Fire and Stone (Stories of Fire and Stone 2) Page 32
