She hadn't known the gunner, but she had fought beside him. His loss struck her so swift and so hard that it left her breathless and gasping. Hatred and a desire for revenge hatched in her like demon spawn. The harpies were something to loathe; that was a basic truth.
But whoever was behind them, as Caje had implied—–this faceless, nameless force was the real object of her hatred.
Jordan silently promised the dead gunner that if she lived through this, she would not rest until the malefactor was found and made to pay.
She heaved another sob as a great, dull shadow passed overhead. Beyond where she knelt with her hands clutching at the Nycht's shoulders, great taloned feet settled some incredible bulk upon the paving stones.
Jordan dragged her eyes upward, her hands still on the gunner’s vest, to see a huge, haggard female waddling in her direction. The monstrous animal cocked her head to the side, like a chicken, and glared at the injured Arpak that Jordan and the gunner had first come to aid.
The Arpak had collapsed, and was sitting with his back against a stone building nearest the road, his broken wing jutting awkwardly to the side. His face was ashen, but his chest was rising and falling. His eyes were on the hag, watching his death approach with nothing more than a weary acceptance. Jordan didn’t know where his weapons had gone.
The Nycht gunner had saved her, and sacrificed himself. He hadn’t shown an ounce of hesitation when he saw his comrade in trouble. Jordan's teeth clenched. In that moment, there was nothing more important to her than getting between that big female and the wounded Arpak.
The harpy lowered her heavy head and scraped a claw across the ground. The sound of talons raking on stones sent Jordan's skin crawling.
She cast about for a weapon. She spotted the blade of her last unbroken sword, grabbed hold of it, and heaved. It did not budge, being locked in bone and slippery with blood.
She loosed a growl of frustration. She caught the glint of the gunner's curved sword where it lay on the ground, half hidden under the fallen harpy’s black feathers. Jordan closed her fingers around the hilt, shoved herself to her feet, and tried to run. Her legs betrayed her, but she managed a stagger.
She was beyond any rational understanding of exhaustion.
Her very bones feeling leaden, she stepped forward on numb legs, hoisting her sword. Her wings were so slow to respond, so heavy. They trembled, and their quiver ran through her entire back.
"Get away from him!" she tried to scream at the hag.
When had her throat become so tight? Her mouth so dry?
The harpy ignored her, rearing her head and chest back to strike at the injured Arpak.
"Get. Away!" Jordan snarled through parched lips. She knew she wouldn’t be able to cross the ground fast enough, so with everything she had, she sent the sword flying.
***
The harpies had pressed the Strix forces inexorably back over Middle Rodania, and that fact was driving Toth to desperate measures.
Calling on Caje as he had done near a dozen times before, he sent his brother and the dwindling wrecking crew of Strix to hammer at a pocket of harpy strength. This time, though, he had not read the tides of war correctly; he had not noticed until too late, a contingent of harpies composed of some of the largest, most battle-scarred females, coming up from below. They were suddenly frightfully close and tearing straight for Caje's crew.
When he saw them, Toth's guts turned to stone.
Screaming until his throat felt it would tear itself to pieces, he called to his brother's squad to fall back.
The wrecking crew of Caje's warriors fell on the enemy and wrought a terrible slaughter, and then lifted their faces to see death coming.
They died like heroes, but in the end, they died all the same.
Caught exposed and hanging in midair, most were slain instantly by the impact of talons punching through their leather-clad chests. Those few not instantly slain fought as best they could, but they were outnumbered and overwhelmed.
His heart twisting in his chest like a tormented animal, Toth watched as an immense harpy hit Caje hard and bore him down toward the city. The creature rolled mid-flight, and with a mixture of horror and pride, Toth watched his brother shove his entire hand down its crooked throat.
Like a tumbling rocket from a siege engine, the harpy and Nycht together struck a tower, smashing straight through the stonework, which crumbled in on top of them both. That terrific crash was Caje's death knell, and the chord that snapped the last line holding Toth in check.
Keening a scream of rage from the pit of his fracturing soul, Toth set to work with his blades: stabbing, slashing, hacking, and gouging with wild abandon. He saw his brother's life end and knew a terrible emptiness.
He would fill that emptiness with blood, but it would never be enough. There was not enough harpy blood in all the world to fill this new and terrible void. Inside the manic winged barbarian, a sinister seed of guilt took root.
***
Emerging from the haze of blood and death, Sol and Chayla looked around with heads wobbling on sagging shoulders, and realized that Strix not from their squadron now tread the air beside them. All were bent with weariness; not one had escaped unscathed, though none seemed put out of the fight yet.
They looked to each other. If they'd had time, they might have shared the guilty looks of survivors who passed through hell. Instead, they watched a harpy horde descend upon Rodania.
They had merely slowed an inevitable assault.
Some of the Strix army may still have been caught down there in that churning mass that was chewing its way through the air, but there was a good chance that the unhappy few were all that was left. From the looks they shared, it was clear they thought so.
Sol dug deep and found words to fortify them. "We've not come this far to give up now."
Chayla loosed a wild, if breathless, laugh.
"Give up?" Her lip curled as those dark eyes narrowed at the scene below them. She brushed the blood from her facial gash off her brow. "Who said anything about giving up?"
***
The screams of the city rose to meet them as the last of the Strix army flew between the towers and buildings of Rodania, hunting and being hunted. Like a pack of hungry curs, they went from street to street, striking where they could.
Most civilians had been wise enough to get to cover. Some stupidly brave or lamentably foolhardy individuals had been drawn out to the streets to watch the defense of the city. They soon found themselves the target of descending harpies. They scrambled for shelter, and not all made it in time.
The Strix took down a squabbling trio of males clustered around a body before the harpies even realized what was happening. Yet, as quickly as they had felled those few invaders, the battle-worn band had to flee in the face of a mob of harpies that came pouring through the streets. Darting between buildings and spiralling around steepled roofs, or under galleried causeways, the Strix were fractured into a handful of desperate pairs and trios.
•••
Toth may have been tired, and bleeding, and surrounded by a coterie of the same class of harpies who had killed his brother, but none of that mattered in the face of spilling just one more drop of blood. The cold fire had eaten up everything else inside him, until only this one, chilly ember remained to sustain him. It was fed on blood alone.
They had begun to coordinate their attacks, one or two harrying him while the others jockeyed for a position to strike a telling blow. He eluded them with nothing but speed, strength, and an utter unwillingness to let himself fall. All his evasion and counterattacks had dragged their battle over the rooftops of Rodania's middle tier.
In flashes, he caught sight of the harpies laying waste to the city, tearing into windows and perching on balconies in an effort to fish out the cowering flesh within. He thought he saw the occasional Strix straggler fighting on, desperate and doomed, but whenever he raised his head again, everything was harpies and the ruin they wrought.
&
nbsp; It would be over soon. Despite the fact that he could not feel his limbs tiring and wings flagging, Toth knew that they were. Eventually, he would not be fast enough, and then he would fall, like the rest of the army he had commanded.
His death would be the final just penance for his failure to save Rodania.
Within the light of that cold ember of his brother's loss, he almost welcomed the thought. Then, in a flash of familiar color, he spied a pair of yellow wings fleeing a harpy.
Jordan, bloodied and bedraggled, was flying as fast as she could to stay ahead of a shrieking hag with half a sword protruding from the meat of her shoulder.
Fresh energy clawed its way up from the barrens of his soul. If he could get to Jordan, if he could just save her, then perhaps this was not all in vain. Maybe Caje would not have died in vain; maybe the emptiness would not be so vast.
Toth made to cut hard one direction and then roll back the other, but it did no good.
They had him ringed in.
Everywhere he turned, his attackers pressed in, sensing his sudden desperation to be away, his need to free himself.
Talons slashed, beaks snapped, and he could not get out.
And all the while, Jordan's pursuer grew closer.
***
Jordan could not keep this up. Her wings were stiffening as she fought to maintain altitude while weaving between the streets of Rodania. Only the lumbering size and clumsy movements of the old female had kept the Arpak beyond reach. The next moment, or maybe the one after that, would be all she would have left. Then it would have her. The hag's jaws would snap shut, and she would know no more.
An incredible, primeval roar set the air quivering over and through all of Rodania.
Having expected to hear the sound of her own bones crunching beneath a harpy's jaws, Jordan was struck dumb. She nearly fell out of the sky.
There was only one creature that was capable of that sound.
Dragon.
In spite of the looming spectre of death that was coming for her, Jordan searched the sky. Her heart seized with an insane and giddy hope.
"Blue?" she called in a winded pant. "Blue?" It was all she could do to say his name.
Something huge set the clouds above to boiling.
Like a great shark breaching the waves, an immense draconian form descended upon Rodania.
Its proportions were incredible—–more vast and terrifying than anything Blue could ever dream to be. This juggernaut of scale and jaw was clad in brilliant crimson from snout to tail. Wings beat the air into gusts that sent both harpies and Strix tumbling. This dragon seemed too huge to sail through the air so gracefully, its horn-crowned head held high.
Some internal luminescence rippled through the creature’s armored breast, like sunlight on river water. The beast bent its head and poured out its fiery displeasure in a torrent. The dragon's fire was a brilliant inferno of blue, with tongues of flame haloed in impossibly bright shades of turquoise and green, bleeding into white. Jordan winced against the sudden light, and watched the flames engulf an entire block of Rodanian real estate that was swarming with harpies. A hot blast of air, stinking of sulfur, thudded against her body, blew her hair back, and dried out her eyes.
Confusion made Jordan dip and lose altitude. How can this be happening? How can a city that’s already fallen be consumed in dragonfire? It was too awful, an event born of some great, unfeeling cosmic whimsy.
But the joke had not yet run its full course.
The great red reptile was heading straight for her.
Both she and the harpy at her heels had faltered with the advent of the dragon. With a wild unhappy laugh of disbelief, Jordan put on what little speed she could manage as the harpy surged after her.
Perhaps she hopes to claim me before the dragon does?
The harpy was close enough that Jordan could hear her rasping snorts.
One more turn, she thought. Just one last turn to spite her. I'd rather go to a dragon than a harpy.
Her wings cramped painfully. It was an ugly, clumsy turn.
Her strength left her, and she lighted upon a tiled roof in what amounted to be a graceful collapse. Her limbs quivering with fatigue, Jordan looked up to watch the harpy that had been chasing her pass by overhead without another glance.
Almost casually, the dragon soared behind, its great jaws widening like the jowls of a universe. It unleashed a brilliant, multihued death upon the harpy, and the female became a spectacular torch of greasy feathers. The spiky fireball sailed a hundred more feet before striking the side of a stone tower in an explosion of burning feathers.
Jordan's mouth went slack with wonder as the red-scaled colossus gave a roar that set the tiles beneath her quaking. Arching its sinuous body, the dragon circled, and leveled an eye at Jordan where she knelt helplessly on the roof.
She waited for her own fiery death to come—–her mind unable to fit the pieces together any other way. Her war-battered thoughts strained with fragility, and she noted numbly as she watched the leviathan wheel, how very much this dragon's eyes resembled Blue's; in shape, if not also in character. In fact, now that she was really looking, the dragon's entire head followed achingly familiar lines and aesthetics. This dragon was so very like Blue, yet dwarfed him in size.
A second roar rent the sky, this one higher in pitch.
Her neck creaking, Jordan watched as a dragon clad in scales of familiar blue and yellow descended from the heavens. He was far larger than when she had last seen him, though not nearly as immense as the red. There was no mistaking her reptilian partner.
"Blue," Jordan whispered.
She finally understood, and her relief was so great it seemed to break her in two.
Blue dipped his snout as though he'd heard her. He sailed beneath the red as she curved away from Jordan and toward the thickest mass of harpy flesh. Blue lifted his nose up as the red sent her snout down. The two dragons met in the briefest of touches. Jordan watched them part and then approach the harpy horde from either side. Tandem glows appeared in both scaly bellies, and dual blasts of fire lit the sky.
Jordan closed her eyes as hot tears tracked through the dirt on her face.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Blue and his mate cleared the skies of harpies with fire and jaws, inevitably leaving smoking wreckage behind them. The stink of harpy, brimstone, and sulfur hung over the city, thick and choking. As the last of the harpies fell in burning greasy fireballs, or turned tail and winged west, Jordan found enough energy to take to the skies.
Blue and the monstrous dragon were out of sight, buried somewhere in the clouds, or perhaps chasing off the last of the harpies over Rodania. Jordan was too tired to pursue them.
Her wings carried her in a slow, painful trajectory, over the city, back to where she'd started this insane battle. Smoke billowed from fires scattered throughout the countryside and in the streets of small towns. Rain began to fall, striking Jordan’s cheeks in fat plops.
The carcasses of the dead, both harpy and Strix, peppered the landscape. With a grim satisfaction, Jordan noted that there were far more dead harpies than Arpaks or Nychts, but then again, there hadn't been that many Strix warriors to begin with—–a paltry sum when compared to the horde they had fought.
Jordan landed on the tower, letting her wings droop behind her. The useless Lewis gun sat cocked at a jaunty angle, pointing at the sky, and the stones were coated with empty shell casings.
There were no other Strix in sight.
Have all of my companions died, then?
Jordan felt like she was being filled with cement slowly, from the pelvis up. Is Sol alright? How do I even begin to search for my father, for Eohne, for Toth? The event of near total devastation had not been discussed. She surveyed the skies for familiar winged shapes, her eyes stinging with the thickening smoke.
She squinted as the sound of wings reached her ears. Smoke and cloud cycloned as a shape emerged, and Jordan couldn't control the torrent of silent tears that came
as she recognized the set of Sol's shoulders and the breadth of his wings. Relief made her breath hitch, and as he barrelled into her, they nearly fell with the impact.
"You're alive," she choked into his neck. Her fingers wound through his hair and squeezed, probably too hard. "You're alive." She gloried in the feel of him under her hands, his heat, the smell of his sweat, even the stink of harpy on him.
"Let me look at you," he said, setting her back.
But it was Jordan's eyes that grew horrified. "How much of this blood is yours?"
"Only a little," he said. He turned her, catching her feathers in his face. "Your back? It's not cut?" His hands prodded and touched, sweeping over her frame.
"No. I'm mostly just scraped and bruised. Where are you hurt?"
"I'm fine. You're alive." He hugged her again, squeezing her so tight her ribs creaked. "I can't ask for more. Have you seen anyone else?"
Jordan shook her head miserably. "Can this really have happened? Can we have lost everyone?" She hardly dared to ask if Sol knew where Allan and Eohne were. "It was such chaos. I need…" She took another hitching breath.
"We'll find him, don't worry," Sol grabbed her shoulders. "Jordan, we won. Yes, it cost us dearly, but we won."
Jordan nodded. "Thanks to Blue and his new friend."
"Yes, thanks to Blue. Come on. Let's go for the training grounds. Some will likely go there. It's out of the worst of the smoke."
The Arpaks took flight, heading northwest to the small islands just beyond Middle Rodania. There were survivors there, but a sad few. Jordan was relieved to see Toth and one of the Strix from her own squadron. Being the strongest fighters of the bunch, several Nychts from The Conca were there as well.
Jordan and Sol greeted their fellow combatants with fierce hugs.
"Caje?" Jordan asked, looking for her fearless leader.
Toth only shook his head. His face was an expressionless mask. Jordan closed her eyes as grief climbed onto her shoulders once more. The big Nycht was gone. Jordan opened her eyes and reached for Toth, but his body language made her hesitate; the way he turned his shoulders a little away from her and brought his arm across his stomach. Toth didn't want comfort.
Combatant: The Revelations of Oriceran (The Kacy Chronicles Book 3) Page 24
