by Ben Wolf
Commander Brove chuckled and sneered at him. He extended Aeron’s spear toward Mehta. “I’ll enjoy burying all three tips of this spearhead in your face.”
This time, Mehta held his tongue.
Kent marshaled his strength and managed to stand. He opened his mouth for a cunning retort, but a deathly groan, deep and animalistic, sounded from the side.
The wyvern that the frostbloods had taken down jerked to life, now frostbitten and covered in ice. It loosed a roar that sounded like that of a beast trapped in a chasm, and it spread its wings wide.
It had become a frostblood itself. Then it launched toward the wyvern knights.
Chapter Seventeen
The moment the frostblood wyvern awakened to its new, unnatural existence, Mehta’s plan to deal with the remaining wyvern knights dissipated like a drop of blood in an ocean.
Perhaps he should have expected it, given how insistent the frostbloods were on trying to bite them. It must’ve been how they spread their condition to others.
But a full-grown frostblood wyvern wasn’t something Mehta would’ve predicted.
It took to the air, chasing Commander Brove and the surviving wyvern knights around in a high-stakes game of aerial evasion, pursuing its fellow wyverns relentlessly as they stabbed at it with their spears. Their attacks proved as ineffective as they had been before, and the wyvern just kept coming.
A snarling growl sounded from where the wyvern had awakened, and its corresponding knight rose to its feet and started toward Mehta.
He nudged Kent, though his thirst urged him to try once more to handle it himself.
Kent had already noticed the knight, and with another blast of blue magic, the knight burst apart from the center of his chest outward. His limbs careened away, thumping along the cavern floor where they would remain, possibly forever, still and silent.
Kent’s legs wobbled, and Mehta rushed to brace him. Together, they managed to stay standing, though Kent was heavier than Mehta had expected.
Kent had grown up wealthy, especially compared to the life Mehta had lived, but a man with Kent’s prowess didn’t get to be his age without a lot of training along the way. That prowess, combined with his magic, made Kent the most lethal of the Blood Mercs—even more so than Mehta.
And he had just proven it yet again by slaying a creature no one else in the cavern could slay. But they still had that wyvern to deal with.
Or did they?
“We should go,” Mehta said.
“And let them handle the wyvern?” Kent nodded. “A wise decision. It will give me time to recuperate, and we can begin to make our way deeper into this cavern in search of an exit. I will follow you. You can see far better than I can.”
Mehta nodded. He felt odd, leading the way into the darkness as he had back in the dungeon in Muroth, but with his enchanted vision, it made sense to do so.
Before long, Kent and Mehta had left the cries and the screeches of the aerial battle behind them.
To Aeron’s relief, the cavern not only offered a way to move forward but also one that was wide enough for Wafer to fit through.
Compared to the other knights’ wyverns, Wafer was bigger by a small margin. Only Raqat’s wyvern, named Trokos, was larger—and even then, not by much.
Aeron couldn’t help but wonder how a confrontation between Wafer and Trokos would play out, or between himself and Raqat, if it came to it. They’d both be wielding spears, and without the one Commander Brove had reclaimed from Aeron, neither of them would have a discernible advantage in a fight.
Aeron pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind and returned his focus to the path before him. If Raqat went against his word, Aeron would deal with it then, and he’d have no problem with Garrick running rampant through the remaining wyvern knights.
The path curled down into the mountainside, away from the wall of ice. Were it not for the torches and flint brought by Raqat and his knights, Aeron couldn’t have seen where they were heading.
As they advanced, the tunnel narrowed to the point where the wyverns could no longer fly through it. Instead, they landed and walked on their hind legs and the knuckles of their wings with their knights still riding them. Most wyverns hated walking for very long, but they didn’t have a choice at the moment.
Wafer didn’t care. He was too concerned about staying alert and watching for potential threats. Aeron tried to urge him to relax through their bond, but Wafer refused to shake the mentality. A few minutes later, Aeron realized why.
The path had widened to a small cavern near where the first light shined through the stone. Shafts of icy blue light glowed from the wall of the path at random spots, illuminating the opposite wall well enough that they wouldn’t need torches to navigate this new room.
At the sight of the shafts of light, Wafer issued a low growl, and so did several of the other wyverns in the group.
Aeron exhaled a vapory breath. Part of him wished he had a torch of his own so he could use it to warm himself, but the downside of that was having only one hand free to wield his spear.
Bad, came the impression from Wafer.
If Aeron had wanted to, he could’ve commanded Wafer to fly over the majority of the lights. It would be a tight squeeze for some of them, but if they were truly bad, as Wafer had suggested, then avoiding them was worth a bit of stress.
“Smell something, bud?” Aeron asked.
Wafer’s head bobbed up and down, and he sent the same impression through their bond again: Bad.
Raqat and Trokos thumped up to their position, next to Aeron and Wafer. “Your wyvern senses it, too?”
Aeron nodded. “I don’t know what it is, but Wafer doesn’t like it.”
“Wafer?” Raqat eyed him. “Your wyvern is called ‘Wafer?’”
Embarrassment passed between Aeron and Wafer, and Wafer sent back anger. A piece of that anger latched onto Aeron’s heart, but he tried not to let it hit his voice, too. It wasn’t the first time someone had poked at Wafer’s name.
“Yeah,” Aeron responded.
“What possessed you to give a brittle name to such a mighty beast?” Raqat asked.
Aeron opened his mouth to explain it, but a series of grunts and curses sounded from behind their position.
“Move. Out of my way,” Garrick grumbled as he pushed through a sea of wyvern wings. When he reached the front of the group with Raqat and Aeron, he added, “One of you was infuriating enough. Now I gotta deal with six scale-bag lizards and their idiot riders. And why’d we stop?”
Aeron rolled his eyes and nodded toward the cavern with the lights.
Garrick’s expression shifted from crumpled disdain to raised eyebrows and wide eyes.
“Oh.” Garrick blinked and stared at the lights again. Then, in a flat voice, he said, “Oh. We stopped to stare at the pretty lights. What a treat.”
“You’re welcome to demonstrate your boundless bravery and venture through first.” Raqat motioned him forward.
Garrick looked up at him, though not by much. Even with Raqat atop Trokos’s back, Garrick stood only a few feet shorter than the two of them put together. “What are you not telling me?”
Though some part of Aeron wouldn’t have minded if Garrick had strolled unprepared into whatever danger lay ahead of them, he’d sworn the same blood oath that Garrick had. They were brothers now, and Aeron refused to jeopardize that.
“The wyverns are spooked,” he said. “Wafer keeps telling me something in there is bad.”
“Bad, how?” Garrick asked. “I can deal with bad, but I need a little more to go on.”
“Not sure,” Aeron replied. “None of us has ever seen anything like this before. Have you?”
Garrick shook his head, and his mop of blue-black hair moved with it. “No. But we won’t get out of here just by standing around. Give me one of those torches.”
Raqat waved his gloved hand, and one of the wyvern knights tossed Garrick a torch.
Garrick caught it and started t
oward the first shaft of light. He stopped short of the first shaft and slowly reached his hand into it.
Aeron held his breath.
Kent’s fatigue from expelling so much raw magic had faded by the time they reached the cavern at the end of the path. He’d walked on his own the second half of the trek, and with each step, his energy returned.
The sounds of the battle raging behind them had faded as well. Now they couldn’t hear anything. Either the battle had ended, or they’d delved too deeply into the mountain to hear anything else.
Without much light, Kent had to rely on Mehta and his enchanted vision for guidance through the dark. Kent’s magic would’ve produced enough light, but he didn’t want to burn any more of his energy if he could avoid it.
When Mehta stopped him halfway through the cavern, Kent tensed. “What is it?”
“A dead end,” Mehta replied. “There’s no way out that I can see.”
“Do you need light?” Kent asked.
“No. It wouldn’t change anything.”
“So we must go back?”
“No other choice.”
Kent sighed. If they had to go back, it meant they’d encounter Commander Brove and his wyvern knights. Facing off against six flying foes with Mehta at his side wasn’t insurmountable, but it wouldn’t be easy, either.
Together, they turned to face the way they had just come. But before Kent could take a step, Mehta stopped him.
“Something’s coming,” he uttered.
“The wyvern knights?” Kent asked.
Mehta didn’t say anything. He just stood there, silent, waiting.
Then Kent heard it, too. The distant cry of a wyvern from down the path.
“We should make our stand here,” Mehta said.
Kent nodded. “And so we shall.”
He considered the ice-forged dagger hanging at his hip. He’d abandoned its walking stick sheath and hooked the weapon to his belt instead. Perhaps if he concentrated more, a new blast, more focused, could take out some of the wyvern knights before they even saw it coming.
But it would drain him yet again. It was a god-forged weapon. Gods used them because they had, presumably, more than enough magic to power them.
That is, if gods used weapons at all. Kent didn’t really know.
Whatever the case, as a mere mage using that dagger, Kent knew he couldn’t use it to its fullest potential. But he didn’t have to master it in order to use some of its capabilities.
He drew it from his side and held it in his right hand. It pulled at his magic as it had before, and he felt it urging him down, ever deeper, into the deep of the mountain, but without a way to get there, he couldn’t do anything about it.
A reptilian screech sounded ahead of them, then another. Before long, the orange glow of torchlights flickered up the path.
The wyvern knights were coming.
Kent readied his magic, gathered it in his right hand. As he did, the ice-forged dagger began to glow with familiar, ice-blue light. The moisture in the cavern air around it crystallized into flickering flecks of frozen water, and they orbited the dagger like snow flurries in a tiny blizzard.
Mehta glanced over at Kent, and Kent returned the look with an exhale of vapor that soon joined the rest of the storm gathering around the dagger. It had gotten noticeably colder in the cavern once Kent had activated the dagger, and he had to fight to keep his teeth from chattering.
The orange torchlight grew brighter and brighter until the first of the wyvern knights appeared along the path. The wyvern launched at them with its leathery wings flapping hard against the chilled air.
Kent had hoped for Commander Brove, but he’d led armies for decades. He wouldn’t have gone first, either.
Kent loosed his magic fully into the dagger. The swirling ice particles sucked into the dagger, and it spat a familiar blue-white beam at the wyvern knight.
The overwhelming power threatened to fracture Kent’s mind again, but he forced his eyes to see what was in front of him rather than in his mind, and he concentrated on the wyvern knight instead.
The beam totally overwhelmed the wyvern knight. It washed over the wyvern and its rider and launched them back into the cavern wall, pinning them there in an icy tomb. The torch in the knight’s hand extinguished along with the knight’s life.
Kent gasped and stopped the flow of his magic. The act had devoured half of his reserves, at least, and the fatigue had returned once more. Another attack like that might render him unconscious, or worse.
But the rest of the wyvern knights didn’t know that.
Commander Brove and his four remaining wyvern knights flew into view, spread into a V-shaped tactical formation, but they weren’t advancing. Each of them held a torch instead of a weapon, including Commander Brove, who turned his head to look at the wyvern knight now encased in ice.
Kent hadn’t noticed it before, but with the added torchlight, he could see clear through the ice tomb, almost perfectly—including the wyvern knight’s wide-eyed expression, now permanently frozen in place.
“Do not come any closer,” Kent warned. “Or his fate will befall you next.”
“Only a coward would rely on magic to fight his battles for him,” Commander Brove called.
Insinuations of cowardice weren’t anything new to Kent. For virtually Kent’s whole life, lesser men had accused him of hiding behind his rank, his family name, his nobility, and whatever else they thought they could use against him mentally.
It never worked, because he always called them on it right then and there. Some of the time it led to actual confrontations and even fights, not all of which Kent had won, but more often than not, it served to identify the real coward in such situations.
“Step down off your wyvern,” Kent said, “and I will gladly deliver you a thrashing unlike any you have ever experienced.”
“No chance,” Commander Brove replied.
“Who, then, is the coward here?” Kent countered.
“You are murderers, fugitives, and criminals,” Commander Brove said. “Your word is not to be trusted.”
“Perhaps you should reconsider your view of us,” Kent suggested. “Our offer of mutual cooperation stands.”
He continued to point the dagger at Commander Brove specifically. If that gray wyvern so much as flinched, Kent would plaster them to the cavern wall like he had with the wyvern knight before him, regardless of the consequences.
“If we work together, perhaps we can find a way out of here,” Kent added.
Commander Brove didn’t respond at first. He sat on his wyvern, staring down the path at Kent and Mehta, who returned his stare with their own.
That suited Kent just fine; the longer Commander Brove contemplated his options, the more Kent’s magic could recover. If he recuperated enough, then he might yet be able to stand after a second blast. Or even better, he might be able to keep fighting.
Commander Brove continued to glower at them until finally, he pointed his torch and snarled. “You’re murderers, fugitives, and criminals. And I will bring you to justice.”
The wyvern knights around him shot forward.
And the only thing that kept Kent from freezing them all of out of the sky was the sensation of the cavern wall to his right moving on its own.
The shaft of icy, blue light didn’t feel any colder on Garrick’s left hand, nor did it turn his hand to ice or freeze his fingers off.
He’d considered all of those possibilities before reaching into the light, and he’d decided it was safe to do it. After all, if the light could shine all the way across the cavern and hit the rock wall without coating it in ice, it probably wouldn’t do anything to his hand, either.
If Irwin had been there, he would’ve protested the idea and tried to test the light some other way. Maybe he would’ve stuck a weapon into it, or a stick, or virtually anything other than a part of his own body rather than risking literal life and limb in the process.
But Irwin was long gone, murde
red by Noraff and Phesnos. He would never again perform any experiments, concoct any more solutions, or babble on about the wonders of alchemy—if he could ever get it to work.
He was dead, along with Coburn, and their murderers were probably sunning themselves on the island of Caclos that very moment.
Meanwhile, Garrick was here, in Northern Etrijan, freezing his green rear-end off instead of hunting them down and delivering the revenge he’d sworn to deliver so many months ago.
But at least nothing had happened to Garrick’s hand when he reached into the light.
He turned back and faced Aeron and the wyvern knights, who’d stayed a safe distance back, just in case.
Garrick scoffed. Bunch of ninnies.
“It’s fine.” He held up his unharmed hand and waved it at them. “See? Totally safe.”
As those last two words escaped his lips, the cavern wall with the lights shifted abruptly, and the cavern rumbled with the movement. Garrick stumbled forward and caught his balance, but the rumbling persisted. The cavern wall kept moving.
The lights winked in and out as the wall moved and shifted beside him. Garrick surfed on the shaky ground, wary and watching the wall’s every move.
The nearest shaft of light, the one Garrick had reached into with his hand, flashed across Garrick’s torso. And as it did, a red, vine-like thing shot out of the hole and smacked against Garrick’s chest.
It stuck to his leather chest armor and dripped with pinkish liquid, almost like a mix of blood and saliva. The vine itself more resembled an unraveled intestine than a vine.
He stared at it. “What the—”
The vine yanked him forward, pulling him off his feet and toward the hole, which blazed with blue light and now oozed with ice.
Chapter Eighteen
Though he didn’t know why, Aeron had urged Wafer forward when the wall started moving. Then the red tentacle-thing had lashed out, grabbed Garrick, and jerked him off his feet—and Aeron was the only one who had any chance of intervening.
