Mercy's Trial

by Sever Bronny

  Haylee at first did not reply. Then she slid to the ground and burst into tears. “Unnameables we’re all going to die in this cursed jungle. We’re going to die here for sure …”

  But while she went on about how hopeless it all was, Augum’s mind was blasting through ideas trying to figure out what to do next.

  “Two days for what?” she asked between sobs. “For what, Aug?”

  “Until their ritual is ready. Then they’ll bring the prisoners to that necromantic lair.”

  “Oh, great. And you said there’s, what, four dragons there? And how many Path Archons, not to mention Tyranecron?”

  “Sixteen Path Archons.” Too many. It was an impossible quest. But it had to be attempted.

  “What are we going to do?” Haylee gurgled.

  If only we could communicate somehow. And then he bolted to his feet—an idea had come to him, one he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of before, for it was so simple, so obvious!

  “And what about the others?” she moaned. “Are … are they all right? Who got caught? Did anyone escape besides us?”

  “About to find out,” he murmured, putting the portrait away and summoning his shield.

  Haylee dragged herself off the ground. “What are you doing? Aug?”

  “Pray that this works, Hayles.”

  “Unnameables help Augum with whatever he needs,” Haylee whispered. “Help him … please!”

  “Here we go. Summano vaultus Arcanus.” The three-shield vault exploded in front of him, the Arcaner crests’ golden insignias as bright and shiny as ever.

  He tried opening Leera’s crest shield but it remained locked to him. “But we share the shelving,” he muttered, and opened his crest.

  Sure enough, stuffed into the center shelf was a torn sheaf of parchment, probably taken from within the vault.

  And written in charcoal on the front was the word AUGUM.

  Painting Faces with Mud

  “Bridget and Leera are alive!” he shouted upon reading the note, jumping and waving it about like a schoolboy proud of an exam score. “They’re alive! They’re aliiiiive!”

  “Wait, what? Slow down. What’s it say?”

  Augum triumphantly reread the note. “ ‘Bridget here. Lee and I alive. Don’t know what happened to everyone else. Hope they are with you. Got ambushed by Canterrans but beat them. Have a map. Trying to figure out what to do. Please be okay. Lee very distraught. Is Ollie with you?’ ”

  While Haylee closed her eyes and pumped her fist, Augum pressed his head against the shelves. “Bridge—Lee, can you hear me? Hello?” He figured if the girls were using the vault at the same time, there might be a chance they could hear him. Unfortunately, he got no response.

  “Write them back!”

  “Yeah, of course. Write them back.” He glanced about but realized he had no writing material—and they hadn’t been able to put a quill and ink into the vault because it only allowed documents.

  “Use the monster blood,” Haylee suggested.

  “Good idea.” Augum snatched a loose parchment from the vault, saw that it was important and so replaced it with a small booklet whose title he read aloud. “ ‘Important Heraldic Crests to Remember of the Year 2677.’ ” He snorted. “Hardly important anymore,” and he tore it into pieces to allow for multiple notes. Then he grabbed a stick, scraped one end on a rock until it was a point, and dipped his improvised quill into a pool of blood one of the monsters had left behind. He read the note aloud as he wrote.

  “ ‘Augum here. Haylee with me but injured, unable to ’port. Myrymydion dead. Mrs. Stone captured. Suspect same for Olaf and Jengo. Tyranecron wants to feed her to dragon, become Path Archon. Ritual takes time. We have two days to save them. Got ambushed, have map too, basic provisions. Leaving my map with this note in case yours differs. Position is one league west of four-mark necromantic dragon lair. What is your position? Beyond relieved you two are okay.’ ”

  “Tell them it isn’t your blood or they’ll freak out.”

  “Good point,” he muttered, adding, “ ‘P.S. This is monster blood, not mine.’ ” Then he wrote BRIDGET on the front and stuffed it into her side, making sure to press it against the shield so it was the first thing she saw. He wondered what would happen if she opened her side at the same time. Would she be able to see his hand? Something told him no.

  “Now we wait,” he said, and began pacing. It didn’t take long for a message to blink into existence on his side, meaning his hunch had been correct—the arcanery did not allow for any other sort of communication, verbal or visible.

  He frantically opened the note and read it aloud. “ ‘Lee here. Overjoyed you two okay. Sad Myrymydion gone. Worried about Mrs. Stone and Olaf and Jengo. Bridget distraught about Olaf. We are a little south of you! Thanks for map. Will head your way now. Watch for us. Much love, xoxo.’ ”

  Augum sent back an acknowledgment along with more precise directions, then began the arduous wait. How amazing to be able to communicate through the vault! Like having their own—albeit not as effective—Orbs of Hearing. And he couldn’t wait to see his girl again. He even withdrew her broken portrait and stared at it with glee, before placing it on the ground and spreading his hands over it. “Apreyo,” he whispered, and carefully shepherded the arcane repair until the portrait was good as new. Then he undid the Seal enchantment on the bars and placed the locket, necklace, and Leera’s portrait into the Canterran rucksack, for he did not want to lose these items again.

  While Haylee rested, he formed a plan on what to do next. The ritual Myrymydion had referred to obviously involved preparing Tyranecron for becoming a Path Archon, similar to how Arcaners needed to go through trials in order to earn their shields. And he knew Tyranecron wasn’t one yet because he had seen his shield—and it lacked a Path Archon depiction. Then they would almost certainly offer Mrs. Stone, Olaf and Jengo to the same dragon family that had attacked earlier, simply because their lair was closest and they may have already formed a bond—or so it seemed, as what else could explain the three dragons attacking as one and the Canterrans swooping in immediately after? Although he supposed the Canterrans could have simply followed the family of dragons until they had found the companions; it was hard to say. One thing was certain—he could not underestimate Gavinius’s and Tyranecron’s ability to strategize.

  Amazingly, a muddy Bridget and Leera traipsed right into their camp about an hour later. Bridget carried a Canterran rucksack over her shoulder and Leera’s golden Dreadnought breastplate had a giant gash across it.

  Augum immediately lifted his girl and spun her around, showering her with kisses while she laughed. A crying Haylee allowed Bridget to come into the cave and give her a gentle hug. Then Leera switched places with Bridget while Augum gave Bridget a heartfelt squeeze.

  “We’ll rescue Ollie,” he said, rubbing her back consolingly. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  Bridget only nodded, sniffing, though she refused to meet his gaze when they let go.

  After Augum vanished the vault, they caught up, telling each other what they had encountered. The girls’ faces fell upon hearing about Myrymydion’s effort to stay alive to pass on that crucial information.

  “What an awfully brave thing to do,” Bridget whispered with a melancholy shake of her head.

  The girls had practically bumped into each other in the night “by sheer blind luck,” Leera said, adding that they too had left their rucksacks behind in the melee. “And as you’ve probably noticed, one of the dragons clipped me.” She ran a finger down the huge gash across her breastplate. “Guess it proves that a dragon can damage Dreadnought steel. Had I not been wearing this to sleep, my guts would be all over that campsite. It was such a strong hit that my spectacles flew off my face, but I managed to yank them back in the dark. Quite the miracle really, and I kind of wish someone had seen it—me yanking back my spectacles, that is, not my butt getting thrown into the woods.”

  Then she told how they fought off a bun
ch of monsters, only to be ambushed by Canterrans, who had followed them with a hellhound in tow. “We vanquished all three of them as they tried to take us,” Bridget said. She raised the shoulder with the rucksack. “Got their provisions, or what’s left of them. And we managed to interrogate one of their number, a poor young man who kept crying that he did not want to die—”

  “Though he tried to kill us as he lay dying from his wounds,” Leera added.

  “What did he tell you?” Augum pressed.

  Bridget swallowed and looked to the jungle. “That Tyranecron stole an ancient map from the library that depicted some of the dragon lairs, depriving the information from Mrs. Stone and getting a big head start. He must have had The Path Archons make copies of this map, adding fresh markings as the original would be well out of date.”

  Ah, that explained that. “Maybe the Leyans will punish him for that.”

  Leera snorted. “Forgive me if I’m skeptical.”

  “Something tells me Tyranecron has other plans,” Bridget said.

  “Well, we know of two hopes of his,” Augum replied. “He wants to become a Path Archon so he can summon dragons for himself.”

  “But what’s the point of that?” Leera pressed. “He can’t return to Sithesia, it’s impossible … right?”

  “Maybe he simply wants to rule Ley,” Bridget replied. “And in effect, turn himself into an Unnameable that way. But we’ve learned long ago that even the strictest rules can be bent or broken, so who knows.”

  A thoughtful silence lingered between them.

  “We were both haunted by what we heard during the dragons’ attack,” Leera said quietly. “Thought the worst …”

  Augum squeezed her hard. “I did too.” He let her go to face them both. “Listen, we have two days, and speaking of crazy, I have a plan …”

  * * *

  They reinforced the cave door with a strong Seal enchantment and blanketed the area with a dozen explosive First Offensive traps, as well as multiple traps infused with Confusion and Fear castings. Haylee was given almost all of their meager provisions and two skins of water, refilled in a nearby creek. She was also given three stones enchanted with Object Alarm, one by each of the trio. They were placed in a divot in the cave wall so that she could call for them should monsters breach all the defenses.

  Before the trio departed, Haylee pressed her pale face, smudged with mud and marred by tiny cuts, against a small gap in the sticks. “I’ll be thinking of you every moment I’m awake. I won’t call unless things get really desperate. Please fetch me as soon as you can. And if you don’t and I get well enough to teleport, you can bet your hides I’ll clear out myself if I have to, Canterran traps be damned. Not going to go down without a fight.” She sighed. “May the Fates find mercy upon us all, and I wish you nothing but luck in your trial ahead.”

  She extended a hand through the gap and they each took it, wishing her luck in return. The trio then set off, mindful of the ring of traps. Augum glanced back to see Haylee watching them go, face streaked with tears.

  A six-winged bug landed on Leera’s neck. She slapped it, examined her hand, and flicked the bug guts off. “I hate this place. Don’t ever want to come back here.”

  “Same,” Augum muttered.

  Bridget kept quiet, brows perpetually furrowed, face anxious.

  They walked down the sloping mountain. The three suns dipped behind thick black clouds, darkening and quieting the jungle.

  “Great, a storm’s coming,” Leera said. “Last thing we need.”

  Augum examined the sky. “Hopefully it’ll just be a windstorm.”

  They soon came across a shallow stream.

  “We should muddy ourselves up,” Augum said. “Swath is ahead.”

  As they muddied up their already filthy robes and covered their skin, they watched the jungle and lashed out at anything that popped out, even if only with minor spells, just to scare the thing off. It was a clever tactic that kept things at bay—rather than wait for large things to near, they scared off the small things, which in turn seemed to scare off the larger ones too. Funny how things worked in the jungle.

  They finished by painting each other’s faces. And although Augum and Leera bantered a little, Bridget kept quiet. Using darker mud from a thick clay deposit by the riverbank, Augum painted warrior lines across Leera’s eyebrows, accenting their hawk-like sharpness. He resisted giving her muddy lips a kiss. As for Bridget, he painted tiger-like lines across her cheeks, making her appear ferocious and unforgiving.

  Then he stepped back to admire his work, noting, “You two look like monster hunters.” Only the whites of their eyes and their nostrils were visible.

  Leera carefully replaced her clean spectacles and then looked at her hands. “This cursed place is consuming us. I feel like a barbarian who’s crawled through a pig pen.”

  Augum glanced down at himself and then at the girls. Both were staring into the jungle, lost in their thoughts. The three of them looked lethal and prepared, if not a bit overwhelmed by the circumstances.

  “Let’s do this,” he said.

  They resumed the journey. The jungle soon leveled off, indicating they were approaching the dragon lair. Luckily the foliage wasn’t too thick here, and there were even animal paths that allowed them a relatively easy walk. They began smelling nectar pools and heard animals fighting nearby. Insect swarms came thick as clouds, forcing them to constantly shove at the air. Augum routinely zapped insects with his lightning. But despite having entered the swath, they had done such a good job of muddying themselves up that relatively few beasts took notice.

  At last they came upon a wall of earthen rubble resembling the lip of a volcano. It was strewn with the bodies of monsters in various states of decay.

  “That’s a little ominous,” Leera said. Just as she went to climb it, Augum grabbed her wrist.

  “Wait.”

  “What is it?”

  He stepped forward and spread his fingers. “Un vun asperio aurum enchantus.” Sure enough, the entire rocky lip lit up with sickly green arcane tendrils he had never seen before. The weaving was crude, the tendrils thick and spread far apart. It was wild arcanery done on a large scale—arcanery cast by a dragon.

  “You two need to see this,” he whispered, leaning closer and inspecting the tendrils.

  The girls gasped upon casting their own Reveal spells and crouched down to inspect the tendrils for themselves.

  “Remarkable,” Bridget whispered. “It’s a massive and potent poison trap. It looks so primitive and yet so … perfect … as if nature itself was expressing the arcane arts. No wonder Mrs. Stone said she thought all arcanery came from dragons. Look at it. It’s beautiful. Imagine what we could learn from studying their castings.”

  “We could disenchant this easily,” Leera noted. “I mean, the tendrils are cast perfectly, but look how far apart they are and how thick each one is. It’d be like pulling on rope instead of thread. You can really see how far arcanery has come. Like the difference between a miner and a jeweler. Wait, is that the right analogy? Or maybe the tendrils are so big because dragons are so big. Meh, whatever.”

  While the wind picked up around them, rustling the trees, Augum found the beginning thread of the tendril patch and switched spells, opting for Disenchant. “Exotus mia enchantus duo dai ideum exat.” He reached in, grabbed the thick green tendril, and carefully pulled, angling his hand this way and that, adjusting as needed. After undoing only a few feet of the tendril, the entire trap swath disappeared, leaving a gaping hole for them to walk through.

  Bridget straightened. “From now on, the person in front has to keep a Reveal spell up.”

  They agreed. Augum recast Reveal and plodded up the embankment. When they peeked over the lip, they saw an enormous arena-sized pit, not unlike a crater, sides strewn with massive boulders. But it was what lay at the center of the rocky floor that drew their attention, for curled up like a big black cat was a sleeping necromantic dragon.

&
nbsp; “I’ve never seen anything so lethal looking before,” Leera whispered.

  Behind the dragon was a monstrous gaping cave hole. What really stood out, however—what made Augum wish he had Mrs. Stone’s spyglass—were the stones embedded around the entrance of that cave.

  For those stones were perfectly square.

  Ancient History

  “Those look like temple stones,” Bridget whispered after Augum pointed out the blocks. “How is that possible? Arcaners didn’t build temples here … did they?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Augum replied. “We’ll investigate them when we get closer—”

  He was cut off by a distant beastly scream and looked up in time to witness a bolt of lightning illuminate the underside of a bank of dark clouds. The trio pressed themselves flat against the lip and watched as three dragons came into view. One was a massive black dragon outmaneuvering two medium-sized others—a green earth dragon and a lightning-infused blue dragon.

  The green dragon flung earthen spears at the black dragon while the blue flung lightning bolts. Both occasionally struck true and yet did little to no damage, for the necromantic dragon was simply that much larger.

  As they drew closer, Augum saw that the black dragon clutched small objects in each of its two rear claws. Then he heard a great whoosh as the dragon from the pit floor abruptly took off.

  As it rose, so did its Fear aura, which swept over the trio in a cold wave that made them gasp—though their Mind Armors managed to hold strong. Luckily, the wave disappeared as the dragon flew to help its brethren. It was massive, at least four barns wide. After it passed, they received a rancid waft of rot that made each of them hold their nose.

  The moment the smaller green and blue dragons saw it approaching, they let loose beastly cries of anguish—the sort a mother or father would wail knowing their children were lost—and turned around. Augum took careful note precisely which direction the dragons flew off in.