Awakenings

by C. D. Espeseth

  Yuna Swiftriver, the greatest of the Syklan Order, looked ready to pounce. Beside her was Echinni Mihane, the new high queen, and to Echinni’s right was Adel Corbin who stared in horror at the body of her friend.

  No! The thought screamed in his mind, he was overmatched here.

  “She tried to kill me!” Thannis screamed. “It was self-defence! My father was the one behind all of this, he set up the High King’s murder, he was the one who kidnapped you High Queen. Remus Beau’ Chant was behind the riots! I have proof!”

  “I don’t care!” Adel yelled at him. She had stopped looking at Naira and began running at him. Her black blade held straight out behind her in an assassin’s dash. The blade seemed to pull darkness into it from around her.

  “Begone, Prince of Nothavre! One day you may be able to clear your name, but I will not stand between the new Arbiter and what she sees as Halom’s judgement. I would run if I were you.” Echinni Mihane’s Singer-enhanced voice boomed across the square.

  She’s right. Thannis cursed to himself. The day was lost to him.

  So, he followed his new high queen’s advice and ran. He would still have his vengeance on them all, yet not today. The game had changed. and now he had to escape.

  43 - Pursuit

  The rocs seemed to notice something was awry before my friend Wunjo did. They were very agitated today, one of them even flared its wings at me the moment before I hit it with the stasis-inducing frequency I had built into their code all those years ago.

  Very intelligent birds, but they can’t see how important this is.

  Raidho proved integration is possible, I just have to find the nerve to carry out the next phase.

  But this could give me the chance to fix my mistake, to make it right.

  I’m dying anyway, what do I have to lose?

  - Journal of Robert Mannford, Day 163 Year 69

  Adel

  New Toeron, Bauffin

  Adel burned.

  She was smouldering white-hot rage ignited by twin sparks – the lightning strike which had levelled the people in the square outside Keef’s like the fist of a sky god and the knife across her friend’s neck.

  The lightning blast which had flattened everyone around her had only served to charge her up. Energy thrummed through her, filling her every fibre and coursing like liquid fire through her very skin as her feet flew across the ground running at Thannis.

  Despite the burning energy raging through her body, she felt nothing but the choking emptiness of the hole inside her. A hole which had been punched right through as she her friend’s slumped body bleeding out on the cobblestones.

  Naira.

  Naira was dead.

  Thannis had killed her. Brought his knife across her throat. Adel had seen it happen as they opened the door of Keef’s. The woman, who was her sister in all but name, had crumpled to the ground to the delight of the mob.

  Words came to Adel as if from a great void as she ran. She spoke with the voice of the Arbiter and all the Arbiters who came before her, her ancestors leant her their strength and were united in anger.

  “Thannis Beau’Chant! You have murdered the innocent again and again! Though these people cannot see through your lies, our Lord Halom sees it, and he speaks through me! You are found guilty, and the darkness of my blade shall claim your soul, for it is the reaper of the wicked!” Adel’s voice echoed through the silence of the square as if from the very heavens themselves.

  Thannis had not waited, and his long legs sped across the ground as if he were part deer.

  “Wait for backup! Dammit, Corbin, wait for back-up!” John Stonebridge’s voice yelled at her back as she charged across the square, but Adel barely registered it.

  She was in the void, within a floating calm surrounded by rage, grief, heat and energy.

  The fleeing back of Thannis was her entire world, and it was then she began to see, surprisingly, that he was somehow a match for her speed. In fact, he was faster.

  NO! The thought exploded into her mind. He cannot escape!

  Adel siphoned in the energy swirling around her, felt the white-hot heat in her veins rise once more and welcomed the pain. She sent the fire into her legs, into her muscles and felt her power increase. Felt her feet beat the ground, felt her heart pound harder and faster.

  “Stand and fight! You coward!” Adel yelled after him.

  Yet it only made Thannis run faster.

  They flew through the streets, like twin aspects of the wind.

  Thannis stepped, hopped, and sprung onto a low wall, then vaulted up onto a roof without losing a step.

  Adel copied the move, then rolled just as a thin throwing knife whistled past her head.

  Another knife flashed through the air towards her, but this time, she was ready, and her blade knocked it aside.

  Thannis’s attack had cost him a large part of his lead on her.

  She siphoned in energy and pushed everything she could into the black sword in her hand and felt its hunger for blood, for justice.

  Her feet whipped across the ground, and her heart pumped fire. Energy surged into her muscles, into her bones, and the sword drank it in with her.

  Reacting on instinct rather than on any knowledge of what might happen, she siphoned the energy through her into her sword. She had seen a crate of metal bolts outside a steelwork, and she swung for the box with the tip of the black blade, releasing the energy within her.

  BOOM!

  The box and its contents exploded forward, showering the street in front of her with hundreds of white-hot projectiles.

  A primal part of her revelled in the destructive power she had unleashed while another was horrified as the bolts tore through windows, carts, market stalls, and smashed brickwork off buildings all around her. Thankfully, they were in an alley, and only Thannis was in front of her.

  She scored a hit as she heard Thannis snarl in frustration. He stumbled and fell as if groping for purchase on something to keep him up.

  “What in the hells was that?!” A steelworker threw open a door just ahead of Thannis. His mouth was open to yell at the source of the explosion, but he didn’t have a chance.

  Thannis pounced on him like some sort of horrible predatory cat.

  “No!” Adel screamed. She ran to the man but knew it was already too late.

  Thannis’s big knives slammed in the steelworker’s chest. Thannis threw his head back in a fit of ecstasy as a flash of light lit his chest from under his clothes.

  Before the flash had ended the steelworker was thrown aside, and Thannis ducked inside the building. He looked to be completely healed and refreshed, running almost faster than he had at the start.

  “Impossible,” Adel hissed through burning lungs. She knew she was in amazing condition, she had been training every day for the last ten years of her life, yet this man was her equal if not her superior in condition, and he had found some way to heal himself.

  “Fight me!” Adel screamed at his fleeing back just before Thannis ducked around a corner and disappeared.

  Heat washed over her as soon as she entered the steelwork.

  The fiery glow of molten metal radiated throughout the room, and Adel was drawn to it like a moth. The energy flowed into her as if her body had been starved for it. Sparks from struck steel within the steelworks all began to jump towards her as she ran through the stunned workers.

  “He went through there!” A man shouted and pointed to the back door.

  She ran through the door expecting an ambush, but as she stared down the thin gap between the steelwork and what must be the southwest edge of the Academy wall, there was nothing.

  Thannis was gone.

  “No!” Adel yelled. “No, no, no. He has to have gone somewhere!” she cried to herself, but there wasn’t anywhere for him to have gone. The end of the thin alley rose nearly twenty feet into the air as it abutted the Academy wall towering overhead to her left.

  “Do not miss the obvious. Distance yourself from yo
ur assumptions and focus on what your senses tell you.” The words of Adel’s father rang through her thoughts, and she remembered one of her more painful lessons.

  She took a deep breath and let herself smell the stink of hot metal and sweat, felt the wind on her face, heard the noise of the street as that wind moved through it.

  There. What is that? The wind whistled against something as if it were rushing around a corner not far away.

  So why ... Her thoughts trailed off as she moved forward, she held the pommel of her sword and instead of siphoning the energy in she concentrated on feeling the swirl of the energy in the air around her, felt its chaos and then felt the flow of a pattern running through that chaos. It came from a spot on the Academy wall.

  She moved forward slowly, and then she heard it, another sound. Very distant, but there.

  It was footsteps slapping against stone.

  Adel took another two steps forward and found it. A thin crack in the rock face hiding a tunnel which was completely invisible from the back door. A thin stack of rusted metal rods had been covering the whole in the stone and had probably been a secret for years.

  “Got you,” Adel growled and felt herself drink energy in through the sword, and she pushed it hard into her muscles, feeling the burning pain.

  Adel moved into the darkness, and a line of blue light burst into being along the fuller of the black blade as if responding to her need.

  Adel marked its usefulness and moved on. She did not care or wonder at the strangeness of the sword, somehow knowing what to do as her mind was once more consumed by the man running through the darkness away from her.

  Adel held her heightened senses at the forefront of her mind, not thinking, just reacting to what the tunnel was telling her, running at breakneck speed through the darkness.

  She was gaining on him.

  She rounded a corner and was blinded by sudden daylight. An opening in the cave wall bloomed forth out of the darkness ahead of her showing nothing but open sea far below.

  She was somehow beneath the Academy, weaving her way through the stony crag upon which it sat. This was one of the small caves a person could see from the coast as they sailed into New Toeron’s harbour.

  The daylight forced Adel to squint, and as she did, she saw movement from the corner of her eye.

  It saved her life.

  Knives flashed through the light as she turned and tried to block. Hot pain shot up her forearm as one of the knives bit deep into her flesh, a second attack bit through the armour on her leg and into her thigh. Adel grunted and brought her sword up defensively.

  “You’ve left me no choice it seems,” Thannis said as his knives flashed out again.

  Adel blocked again, but he struck with such force it drove Adel to her knees. It took everything she had just to defend herself.

  The twin knives came faster and faster, sparking against her sword. She parried and twisted, but his surprise had worked, and her speed was hampered by the injuries of his first attacks. As he moved, her mind catalogued the grace and precision of the forms she was seeing. Nothavran short blade techniques were among some of the most complicated of any martial discipline, and Thannis was already a master. His height and length meant that the reach advantage her sword gave her was significantly reduced. Both of his knives had upturned sword-catching crossguards which could nullify many of the sliding cuts she might try to inflict on his forearms.

  Yet as good as he was, she had seen these techniques before. Her father had also been a master of blades, and not just of the slightly curved black sword she now held.

  She waited for the slight gap in the combination Thannis threw at her. She blocked low and saw him pivot temporarily exposing his back as he repositioned.

  “Hai!” Adel yelled with her strike forcing the air through her and exploding forward. Her blade sliced upwards with ferocity. She meant to cut right through Thannis’s spine.

  Yet her kill stroke met the steel of his knife and instead of slicing through vertebrae all she managed was a grazing cut, barely enough to draw blood.

  Thannis had somehow twisted nearly in half like a gymnast might. His long arm twisted back upon itself, and his blade flicked against hers. Too late she saw his second blade flick out as he continued to contort and twist like an elastic band.

  Fire erupted in her leg as Thannis’s knife found the gap just along the bottom edge of the leather cuisse on her thigh. A strike that should have been impossible from his previous stance.

  Adel stumbled as her momentum carried her onto the injured leg. She fell to the ground, gasping as she saw her blood splash onto the rocky floor, but she could feel that the blade had not cut deep. She could push through it.

  “Now that was fast.” Thannis nodded appreciatively at her. “Much closer than I would have liked, though I would have been surprised if you had a counter for that particular combination. “His hand went to his back and came away with a bit of blood. “Far too close. Father would have had me punished for allowing you to cut me.”

  Adel thrust forward, using a combination of her own, and this time it was Thannis who fell back, grunting in frustration as he struggled to keep his defence. But as she pushed, she felt herself become sluggish and begin to slow.

  “You’ve poisoned your blades,” she said in sickening realisation. The cold itching sensation creeping up from her leg could mean only one thing. “Blue witch-root extract,” she growled in anger. “You coward.”

  “Coward? Ha!” Thannis snorted as he watched. “I’ve got more important things to do than dance around with some self-important zealot. The Arbiter, are you? Who are you to judge the likes of me?” Thannis pointed a blade at her in derision. He pounded his chest in anger. “I have a vision for this world, damn it. I will make a world to rival the greatness of the Jendar themselves, one in which the secrets of life and death themselves may be revealed. For that is my most glorious work, the one which I have spent most of my life exploring, and once we unlock enough of those ancient tablets, we will have the technology to realise it.”

  Thannis stepped closer, leaning in as if to a fellow conspirator. “Did you know that during the transition from life to death, there is a moment when you are neither in this world or the realm of the dead. All existence can be experienced in that minuscule moment, everything that you were can be tasted through every fibre in your body. It is in that moment, Adel, holy arbiter of justice, where the very secrets of life and death can be found. Your friend, Naira, was somehow tapped into that moment, when her body began to scream, she could travel through that place which is in-between worlds, I felt it in her. But she was taken from me before I could taste her secrets. It will not be adherence to ancient scripture that will finally enlighten us, but science! Science and a mind such as mine, unhindered and willing to use and improve upon that which the Jendar left for us to rediscover.”

  Thannis spun back to her, and in the grip of his mad zeal as he began to snarl. “But everyone keeps getting in the gods-damned way! Father! Esmerak! The Senior Prefect, your dock rat friend, and now you!”

  He sprang forward, but during Thannis’s mad rant Adel had been busy, adjusting her weight to allow her enough motion for one last strike.

  She twisted, taking one of his blades on the metal-lined bracer on her forearm. She siphoned all the residual energy she had pulled in and sent it smashing through her sword.

  The shock energy of her attack numbed his knife hand, and he dropped the weapon, yet his second knife still managed to scrape across her forearm, and Adel felt the sting of his poison once more.

  “Will you just die already!” Thannis howled angrily spinning on his feet and recovering his dropped blade.

  “You’re a monster,” Adel said in abject disgust and abhorrence.

  It was then the spasms rocked her body again. Her muscles seized up from pushing too much siphoned energy into them just as the effects of the witch-root took hold. Her body was paralyzed, and she could only watch as he walked towards
her, eager for the kill.

  “Yes, I am. A great monster of vision and determination. A monster who knows how to save our miserable union of Salucia.” He cocked his head at her. “Too bad you won’t be around to see what this monster reaps. Goodbye, Adel Corbin.”

  She wanted to scream as she watched his knife slice down, but even the muscles in her throat could no longer respond.

  44 - Awaken

  Raidho found a way for my nano-technology to be directly integrated into the bloodstream. His theory is that an NRE could survive and somehow join with that of a human host.

  Incredible.

  The implications have given me a new idea…

  - Journal of Robert Mannford Day 102 Year 60

  Adel

  A tunnel beneath the Academy, New Toeron, Bauffin

  A snarling animal flashed through the dim light and slammed into Thannis’s chest, its teeth bit down on his forearm.

  Thannis yelled in anger and pain, and Adel stared in amazement as a dog ripped at Thannis’s arm with vicious savagery.

  Yet the surprise of the attack wore off quickly. The dog yipped in mortal pain, and Thannis threw the animal to the floor.

  He stepped over to it and slammed his knife into the dog’s head. White light flashed up the knife and into Thannis, and this time Adel did feel the pull of the sudden vacuum of siphoning.

  Where Adel should have seen a torn and bloody arm, she instead only saw the white scar tissue crisscrossing Thannis’s forearm.

  Feet slapped against the stone back from the direction the dog had come, and a metal sphere shot out of the blackness behind them to slam into Thannis’s chest.

  “Get away from her, you bastard!” Senior Prefect Stonebridge yelled as he stepped out from the darkness and into the light of the open cave mouth to their right. The senior prefect stepped in front of her. He spun a length of rope in his hand. A meteor hammer, Adel thought in wonder. She had never been trained in it but had seen a man from Xin Ya put on a demonstration with it during the harvest festival in Blossom Bay. The weapon was effectively just two weighted spheres with a length of rope between them, yet the Xinnish warrior had put on a devastating display while they had watched.