Legend of Ecta Mastrino Box Set 2

by BJ Hanlon

  “What is happening?” Berka whispered, panic was in his voice. “Step, step, turn.” He felt the arm guiding Edin as they turned the corner and there were no more steps.

  Edin glanced over his shoulder. They were in some sort of hall. A tall open hall with huge columns reaching up to a hundred or more feet. There were statues on the walls and metal men. Suits of armor and a green crown.

  “Edin,” Berka said as Edin released a culrian and summoned another one.

  Berka started tapping his shoulder again. Very hard. Edin glanced back at the first beast and saw a second standing next to what looked like an obsidian throne.

  There was a light coming through the ceiling, moonlight, and he looked up to see a blanket of stars through a hole the size of a wagon wheel.

  They were passing a suit of armor. In the thing’s hands was a large spear with a metal haft. Berka pawed at it and somehow ripped it from the armor’s hand. Edin drew his sword as Berka dropped the quarterstaff.

  “I don’t know if we can handle two,” Edin said.

  “I wasn’t sure we could handle one,” Berka replied. The one that’d been chasing them, ever so slowly, paused. The one near the altar did as well, it seemed almost coordinated. Maybe it was, Edin thought. His heart leapt at that and sweat, more sweat at least, began to pour down his neck. It tickled and itched.

  Then out of the corner of the room, near a large nest of branches, twigs and goo, a third, larger one moved. “They cornered us like rats.”

  “I can see that,” Edin said. They were side-to-side watching the three as they all stared back at the two intruders.

  “Is there any way we can beat them all?” Berka said. “I mean, what hurts lizards?”

  Edin went through his memory. Master Horston and his encyclopedia of knowledge would know. He’d probably scorn Edin for not remembering what he’d been taught all those years ago. Reptiles… lizards. “They’re mostly associated with water, so they’re probably vulnerable to fire.”

  “But you can’t make fire,” Berka said. “You can only manipulate it. Right?”

  Wind wouldn’t do much unless he could somehow send the amorphous goo back at the beasts, and even then, would it hurt them? He could send ethereal knives or other sorts of weapons.

  “Lightning.” Edin said.

  “Good idea.” Berka said.

  “I’ll have to let go of the culrian.”

  “Not so good.”

  “No.” Edin looked around the room. There were alcoves and columns to hide behind, there was the throne and a large vase that had brown and gold figures painted on it. He spotted open doorways though they’d probably be just as trapped. They had to find a single spot where they could hide for only a second, maybe ten.

  Then he spotted a column that had been knocked down. It was probably three feet wide and crumbled into at least ten tubular sections. Though it was near the lizard to their right. If they could somehow get that thing to move maybe they could use that as cover.

  He caught Berka’s look. They seemed to be thinking the same thing.

  “Might as well,” Berka said. “You go high.”

  “On three?”

  “Three,” they screamed and charged. There was a moment when the beasts leapt back, apparently shocked by the fact that two tasty treats were running at them.

  The one in front of them, then one nearest the collapsed column, spit. The viscous glob struck the culrian and began melting it.

  It was getting harder to summon another culrian. There was something about that spittle that seemed to peel the energy from him.

  Edin leapt over the glob that coalesced on the ground and the thin lines of wavy smoke rising from it like a damp leaf pile being slowly burned.

  The large shield around the thing’s head expanded and nearly touched the ground. Edin dodged to the right and stepped on a portion of the column.

  The columns weren’t completely rounded, they were grooved, and the grooves rose from floor to ceiling. Despite this, the column rocked slightly. Ever so slightly that as Edin jumped, he mistimed it. The thing twisted its head up at him and opened its mouth as if to snatch him out of the air. The top of Edin’s foot caught one of the razor-like teeth and it slashed through it like a sword. Edin couldn’t stop and the beast slammed its snout into his leg.

  His knee came down and caught the shield around its head. The shield was hard and ridged and his knee felt like it had hit a stone wall. Then it let out a piercing scream just as Edin was sliding off the side of it.

  At least he thought it was the thing. It could’ve been Edin who screamed. He landed hard on a section of the column and tumbled off into a crook between the one he’d landed on, and another. Above him, he saw the thing thrashing with greenish blood pouring from a gaping wound in its neck.

  It reeled back. Sharp crillio like claws scratched at the air like it was a cat trying to get through a door.

  Then it began to tilt. It turned slightly toward Edin and started to come down. It was slow, like watching a wide canopied tree being felled in the forest.

  Then it sped up. Edin had nowhere to go. He squeezed himself down into the spot between the columns as the large body crashed on top of it.

  Edin was enveloped in darkness. A tomb. A moment later, he heard the screams of the other beasts and of Berka. Edin tried to summon an ethereal ball, but he couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t even think.

  His brain was hurt as if it were getting sat on.

  Edin’s eyes stung with the fumes from the viscous liquid. A panic began to set in, and his heart seemed to skip three beats and an empty gut feeling filled his body. The sudden irrational thought that he was buried alive came over him. It never had before. Deep in the underground. In the dwarven and other tunnels, he’d never felt that way.

  Until now.

  Edin screamed. He kicked his good leg out into the dead beast. The thing was heavy and it didn’t move. He looked down and could see a small opening between his feet. It was barely big enough for his head. Edin started to press himself down trying to ignore the pain in his thigh, foot, and knee.

  He tried to summon the ethereal light again. It flickered but that was it. He saw legs run past. Human legs.

  “Berka,” he cried out, his voice cracking just a bit.

  “Help,” Berka yelled. Then he heard one screaming. Not really a scream more of a growling, moaning sound that was almost half feline and half wolf.

  Edin kicked up and hit somewhere that apparently wasn’t as heavy. A leg. It flipped up and for a moment, there was moonlight in the sliver of room between the column and the beast’s body.

  That and fresh air. Well fresher air at least.

  Then the leg fell right back into place. Edin kicked again and this time was able to move into that area. He lifted his head and grasped it.

  The panic of being trapped had left and he had just enough energy to summon another culrian. He knew it was the last one he’d be summoning while still in this fog of pain.

  It pushed the leg up and out and Edin followed falling over the column and onto the ground.

  Edin was on a knee and there was a hiss near his head. He looked up at the beast right before him. The thing reared back startled and Edin saw the glob forming in its mouth like when he’d try and fill the back of his throat with all the phlegm he had before launching a giant wad of spit at someone. Dexal would’ve been the best target.

  Edin somehow still had his sword in his hand and though his leg barely worked. He pushed off and leapt at the thing. It spit, catching the culrian in mid jump.

  Though it started to melt away the shield as if it were made of wax, Edin was able to cross the few feet to the beast.

  The culrian dissipated and the globule splattered to the ground between them.

  Edin was above it and he drove his sword into the thing’s chest and pulled up. He heard and felt bones breaking and the skin being split apart. The thing rocked backward.

  Then as it fell backward, Edin went
with it. He landed hard on the chest and rolled over it. He felt a tooth snag his tunic.

  As he landed on unsteady feet he dropped to a knee. He quickly ripped off the tunic and fell to the ground beside the beast.

  A drip of the mucus splattered the ground next to him but Edin just laid there. He could barely move.

  “Up you damned fool,” Berka screamed.

  Edin blinked and took a moment to see what was happening. There were two dead beasts near him. Only one more to go.

  “Could use some help,” Berka yelled.

  Edin spotted him, it was difficult in the shadow-filled room. He looked to be hobbled a bit and he wasn’t holding that spear anymore. The last was the largest of the beasts. Even from there, he saw the enormity of it. Fifteen feet long, its head was the size of a fully-grown hog.

  It was somehow crawling on the wall behind Berka. It clung to it like a spider and seemed to be moving slowly. He got the feeling the thing was playing with Berka despite its two dead mates.

  Edin stood and felt vertigo for a moment. He saw more thin strands of the smoke rising from the ground like fumes in a particularly heinous marsh.

  He fell again to the side, as much from the vertigo as the fact that his leg was nearly numb with pain.

  It must’ve been the fumes. They were messing with his thoughts, with his concentration. He had to get away from them. He had to clear his head.

  “I cannot concentrate,” Edin called out as Berka ran behind a particularly large column that had a triangle carved in it about head height.

  He used a bit of the collapsed column to stand and started to hobble around the dead bodies of the two beasts. He spotted the altar.

  Black and with the same feeling and weirdness that he’d gotten from the one in the Great Cliffs; at least there were no magical arrows piercing him.

  For now.

  Edin hobbled and stumbled closer toward it while the last large lizard-like beast chased his friend. It wasn’t the curiosity of what the altar held; it was the fact that he could see no puddles of the fuming spit over there. Maybe the air was cleaner.

  Quick hands caught him as he stumbled.

  “Hurry, do something!”

  Then Edin got a breath of air. Clean, un-fumy air. He almost fell just thinking about that single near-clear breath. But that didn’t stop the pounding, thudding, and somehow still piercing headache ripping into him.

  Berka yelled something as Edin moved further away from the two. They were coming around the far side of the hall about fifty yards away.

  Edin reached the altar and put a hand on it. Unlike the last time, his body didn’t immediately cure itself of wounds. A different spell maybe.

  But he turned and felt a little more clarity. To his right he spotted another of those metal knights. This one hand a horsehead knife. It was exactly like the dematians, though the armor was clearly human.

  He moved to it and yanked the weapon out with a snap. “Come this way,” Edin yelled.

  Berka was already heading that way. Though he wasn’t sprinting directly toward him. Berka was dodging in and out of columns. Zigzagging between them, over the crumbled one and around the bodies. He leapt the large ball-like tail of one of the dead ones.

  “Here,” Edin yelled and threw the weapon at Berka. The weapon clattered onto the ground with a loud clang that echoed through the room. Berka picked it up and spun as the beast was coming at him.

  Berka thrust the weapon. It struck and stuck.

  Right into the shoulder though that didn’t seem to stop the thing. It didn’t even seem to hurt it. The beast snapped at Berka. A moment later, Edin saw something coming from behind its back. It was sneaky and almost invisible.

  It was that boulder-tail.

  “Berka look out,” Edin screamed as the huge ball like tail wrapped over the shoulder like a scorpion striking its prey.

  Berka tried to spin out of the way but the thing caught him in the side. It flung Berka into the wall with a devastating force.

  Edin cried out and took a deep breath clearing his head of pain. With it, he felt rage. Edin felt power, energy bolstering him, running through him, not a lot but enough and he saw the glint of the metal of the haft in the beast’s shoulder.

  Edin shot out a hand. Lightning erupted from his hand and hit the shaft. Apparently, it was deep enough that the electricity got past the thick skin and turned it into a red and yellow glowing bit of skeleton and muscles.

  Edin could see blood. Then its eyes burst and the thing dropped from the wall like someone had snipped the strings that were holding it there. It crashed to the ground with a splat and blood began to pour from its mouth, its eyes, and nose.

  The same happened to Edin, without the blood. He fell, his body giving out nearly completely from the pain and the drain. For a moment, he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He hiccupped and got a whiff of the death as he saw the beginnings of sunlight coming through the small hole.

  12

  Raising the Swamps of Old

  He blinked around the room after he caught his breath. The ceiling was grand like the monastery above and the place looked to have been some sort of ancient king’s hall. There were carved statues, gargoyles, and men and demons. Then he looked at his leg. The one that had been burnt by the creature’s spit, had a slash in the foot and his knee had doubled in size. Then he looked to Berka twenty feet away and unmoving.

  His eyes widened with the memory of the strike. Edin stood, though he was as unsteady as a rickety ladder against a listing shed from a hundred centuries ago. He hobbled slowly to Berka. All three of the creatures were dead within about two yards of each other. He inched closer and looked at him.

  “Berka?” he whispered as panic began to crawl up him like an ant on the calf. Edin bent down and reached for his friend’s neck. Please… please… please, went through his head as he felt for the pulse.

  There was a terrifying moment when he didn’t feel it.

  But then he did. It was faint. Very faint. Edin bent over and felt for the broken bones. He’d always known where the injuries were when he’d healed before. A lot of times it’d been obvious. A cut on the arm, a joint the wrong way, but now, he could tell only a few and they weren’t life threatening.

  A cut to the head, not deep and it had already stopped bleeding, his arm was twisted in a way that seemed extremely painful and a hand was crumbled like it’d been smashed to pieces under a massive hammer. A leg was out of position as if the hip had cracked. But nothing looked fatal.

  Edin rolled him over to his back.

  When Edin finally heard the breath, he knew it was labored and something was wrong with his lungs.

  If he even had the energy to help, he couldn’t. He didn’t know where to start, the injuries were everywhere.

  The enormity of it overwhelmed him. Edin felt the weight of these injuries. They were like the avalanche that had almost taken over them in the Northlands. Like being hit by a wave that was three-hundred feet tall or being smashed into the side of the mountain.

  He’d lost Arianne in some tunnel, his mother and Kes to a mob, Horston to mage hunters, Dorset, who knew. Hopefully he was okay.

  Edin wasn’t going to lose Berka too.

  His breathing became hurried and painful and his head began to swim as he tried to focus. Berka was two, then three in his eyes.

  “No,” he said and slapped his forehead with an open palm. It stung but he didn’t notice. He was barely thinking as he did it. Edin tried to calm himself. “You’ll live,” he whispered, “I got this.” The words were clipped and rushed but he was sure he was saying them. They weren’t just in his head. They were somewhere within the rational part of his mind that stayed above all of this emotional panic and weakness.

  Edin gritted his teeth and spotted a small yellow dot on the wall. It looked like a single ray of sunlight piercing the darkness. It was a dot. A target on the gray granite wall. Around it, the stone was smooth and cold but in it, he saw the fire.

&n
bsp; He could almost feel that heat despite being quite a few feet away.

  I can do this; he thought and closed his eyes. He’d remembered Dorset searching for the injuries and trying to take some sort of inventory of them like he was an accountant looking at product.

  “Accounting stinks.” Edin hissed and put his hands over Berka. With the talent, he tried to reach out with his senses. He didn’t want to touch Berka in case it made something worse. He probably shouldn’t have rolled him to his back.

  Despite his own pain and weakness, Edin pictured the body in his mind and tried to somehow see inside it. He was never any good at spells and healing; he had friends for that. But now he was alone and he couldn’t rely on them. He could only rely on himself.

  Edin took a deep breath again, the fumes were dissipating but he got a whiff of dying lizard-like creatures. It made him almost puke. But he didn’t.

  Then he felt a sort of connection to Berka’s body. It was like he could feel the pain inside his own body. Though thankfully, not as intense.

  A headache pounded in his skull. He felt the breaks, small ones, fractures in bones, blood vessels ruptured, and the blood rushing out. The left lung was punctured by a rib, an arm was snapped, the kneecap and hand seemed utterly demolished.

  Edin took a breath and held his hands out toward the rib and lung.

  Breathing was a bigger priority then broken bones, though he had to stop the internal bleeding also.

  He spoke the word, eletanto. He felt his palms warm like they were above a flame after a few moments. The rib started moving, pulling back like a snail retreating into its shell. The lung’s tissue began knitting itself and after a few minutes, both were healed.

  Berka’s wheezing stopped.

  He felt the internal bleeding. The worst was in the gut area and hadn’t stopped yet. Edin reached for it.

  Sweat was coming down, burning his eyes and nostrils but he couldn’t stop. Edin felt the body healing. He was growing tired and his arms were heavy, Edin concentrated on what he needed to do.

  Then he felt a breeze hit him and heard a sort of whoosh. It came from behind and was rather near to him. Edin was dizzy on his knees and was about to fall when something touched his shoulder.