Keri caught Liv by the shoulders as the incantation left her lips. The moment the spell took her consciousness into the dreams of the slumbering people in the caskets, her body went completely limp. Gently, he lowered her down to the ground, settling her head atop her own pack. It wasn’t much of a pillow, but it would be better than the cold metal of the floor.
To his side, he saw that Wren had caught Soaring Eagle, as well, though she struggled a bit to catch the larger body of her tribe’s chief. Ghveris, on the other hand, seemed to have settled his armored body in such a way that he simply became motionless. At a glance, the Antrian could have been mistaken for a statue, or a suit of armor on some sort of armature.
“How long does this sort of thing normally last?” Miina asked. She stood next to the casket, with her hands outstretched toward the enchantment she’d placed in stasis.
“It’s not instant, if that’s what you’re asking,” Sidonie responded. “Master Grenfell and I have done a number of experiments, and he has extensive records from when he and Duke Matthew were using dreamstones to exchange information during the leadup to the war. I would expect whatever conversation they have in there to take just as much time as it would out here.”
“So it may be a few hours,” Keri said. “Can you hold for that long, Miina?”
“I’ve hardly used any magic this entire time,” Miina assured him. “I’ve still got eighteen rings here.” She grimaced. “I suppose I shouldn’t have complained so much when Liv insisted I get measured the human way.”
“It’s helpful to have a common system of measurement,” Keri said, though only half his mind was on the conversation. “It helps to plan, among other things. Let me know immediately if either of you begin to feel like you can’t hold those spells.” He looked to Arjun. “Stay with the three of them, please.”
Wren stood up and fell in at Keri’s side as he moved toward the door, where Sakari, Karina, Kaija, and Lina were standing guard, the two guards just at the door and looking outward, into the ruined corridors.
“Nothing?” Keri asked them.
Kaija shook her head. “Not yet. But I don’t trust it. I don’t trust anything about this place.” She glanced back down the aisle toward where Liv, Soaring Eagle and Ghveris were unconscious. “You’re certain nothing will be able to come through the shadows into that room?”
“Certain? No.” Keri shook his head. “But I’ve seen members of House Asuris use their magic before. The less substantial the shadow, the more difficult it is for them to work with it, and the darker the shadow, the easier. What I’ve left is fairly well washed out under five lights.” He paused, and then decided to say what he was thinking. “I’m surprised you don’t have more experience with the word of darkness.”
“Unconquered,” Kaija grunted, and Keri nodded in understanding. For centuries, the greatest political division among the Eld had been between the Houses that rebelled against the V?dim, and those who had been loyal or stood aside. Peace had been made at the Hall of Ancestors, but that didn’t mean old enemies suddenly became friends. Keri’s family, and Liv’s, had long stood on opposite sides of that line. Now, he reflected, that old division had been replaced with a new one: the Houses who had joined Liv, and those who had refused.
“In any case, I expect any enemies to come through here,” Keri continued. “Unless they break down the walls or the ceiling. A big enough wyrm could do that, couldn’t they?”
“Certainly,” Sakari confirmed. “The size of the one we found out by the steam vents? That thing could bring down a castle wall if it wanted to.”
“Wonderful,” Wren grumbled. “Maybe my father had the right idea. The first one we kill, can I have its heart?”
Karina looked at Wren with wide eyes and an open mouth. “I can’t tell if you’re joking or serious.”
“I’m not certain myself,” the huntress admitted.
And yet, for some time, there was nothing but silence and darkness. Keri peered out into the ruined passage along with everyone else, but beyond the edge of the light, he saw nothing, heard nothing. It went on for long enough that he began to think he might have been wrong. Perhaps Archmagus Jurian and his party had simply drawn too much attention all those years ago. Perhaps the rift had been building toward an eruption, back then. It began to seem possible that Liv and the others would wake, and they would be able to remove the slumbering children of Ractia from their caskets, make their way back to the surface of the crater, and return to the encampment without any more fighting.
Until the sound of something skittering across metal reached his ears.
Keri, Kaija and Wren exchanged glances. Without any need to speak, Keri took up a place in the center of the doorway, with Kaija on one side and Lina on the other, each setting the butts of their weapons against one boot, braced to receive a charge. His spear wasn’t quite as long as their polearms, but taken together they would present quite a problem to anyone trying to come through the doorway.
“Sakari. Karina. Behind us,” Keri whispered. “Wren, start with your bow. Kaija, if I call for a wall, I want you to seal this doorway with ice.”
“That won’t stop a wyrm,” Kaija warned him.
“This doesn’t sound like wyrms.”
The skittering had increased in volume, and now it sounded like hail on the roof of a carriage: a rapid drumming of small impacts, rolling and ceaseless. Keri was fairly certain he knew what was coming before they ever saw anything move, and when the mana beasts poured out of the darkness and into the light spilling out of the room, his guess was proven correct.
A veritable tide of the same insects they’d first faced on the surface of the crater swarmed toward the doorway. Their six golden legs hit the metal floor in rapid succession, making the sound that had preceded their coming, and their antennae waved, jutting ahead of the main bulk of their bodies.
If the mana beasts had been only knee high, it would have been easy work: Keri and the two women to his sides could have stabbed down at them, piercing them through the back. As it was, they were in the unenviable position of essentially receiving a cavalry charge. Keri settled his weight, kept the butt of his spear braced, and took the first mana beast that came at him in the center of its body.
The creature's momentum forced it halfway down the spear, bringing Keri face to face with its utterly alien head. He was convinced that no insect should ever be grown to such a size: the horror of their serrated mandibles and over-sized eyes was much easier to ignore when they were only crawling about beneath your boots.
To either side of him, Kaija and Lina had each speared one of the mana beasts, as well, but that was about the extent of how well things were going. None of them had the strength to keep their weapons from being torn out of their hands - it was like trying to hold up a dying warhorse as it fell. All you could do was get out of the way.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
That meant falling back into the well lit room, where Sakari and Karina charged forward to meet the fourth insect with their swords. An arrow shot by Keri’s head, just visible in his peripheral vision, and drilled through the black eye of a fifth insect, so deep that the fletching was pressed right up against the surface of the eye. Karina had managed to put a mana shield right in the face of the monster she and Sakari were fighting, and the thing’s mandibles clenched around the pane of blue mana uselessly, as if it were trying to swallow a piece of food far too big for it. As the two members of House Iravata hacked away with their swords, foul-smelling fluids sprayed through the air, sticking in great glops on the surface of the walls and floor.
Keri set his boot against the corpse of the mana beast he’d killed, and with a great yank managed to get his spear out. Kaija and Lina, in the meanwhile, had each drawn arming swords, leaving their halberds behind in the chaos.
“Wall!” he shouted. “Kaija, wall! Everyone else, back!”
At Kaija’s shouted incantation, layers of ice began to build up from the metal floor, filling the doorway. When the ice was waist high, the insect that Sakari and Karina had been fighting collapsed across the top, but that didn’t stop her spell: the ice simply continued to build up, freezing over and around the mana beast and encasing its torso in the wall. Immediately, something hit the barrier, visible as hardly more than a dark shadow against the ice, and the impact sent a crack through the entire thing.
There was a part of Keri that wanted to look back and see whether Liv was awake yet, but he resisted the urge. He’d known once she was: it would be obvious. Until then, he couldn’t afford to let himself be distracted.
“This isn’t going to hold for long,” Kaija grunted, pouring more mana into the wall to thicken the ice against successive impacts. A second impact shook her fragile construction.
“Can you put spikes out the front, or something? Press it forward like some kind of drill?” Wren asked, from where she waited with another arrow nocked on the string of her bow.
Kaija scowled. “It would be really nice if you did not assume that I can do everything Liv can do,” she grumbled. “Spikes, yes. Drill, no.”
“Start with the spikes, then,” Keri told her. “That will buy us a moment.”
“Celent’he Aiveh Svec Aimāk Scelim’o’Kveis,” Kaija grumbled, and chittering squeals of pain erupted from the other side of the wall.
“Form a line across the aisle, with Wren behind us,” Keri ordered. “Use the caskets to hold our flanks when they come through.” He took a quick moment to scan his companions, and what he saw didn’t give him a great deal of confidence. Kaija and Lina had trained together for months, and both fought through the entire campaign in Varuna. Both of them were doing well enough.
Sakari and Karina, on the other hand, were not soldiers. A few weeks training at Coral Bay wasn’t enough to prepare the younger woman for what she was facing, and Keri could see that the hand holding her sword was trembling. Sakari was a lifetime diplomat who’d been thrust into the position of leading his house because just about everyone else had died. Keri was certain he’d had a bit of training with a blade, over the course of his long life, but that wasn’t the same thing as being a professional.
Worse yet, neither of House Iravata’s words were truly suited to combat, absent a wyrm to ride into battle. Conjuring a bit of poison to slick your blade was all well and good in a duel, or when trying to assassinate someone, but against the kind of mana beasts they were facing, that was simply too slow to be effective.
“Lina,” Keri asked, “can you do anything to reinforce our defenses?”
The dark-skinned Elden woman shook her head. “If we were above ground, maybe. There’s a lot of plants that can take root in the cracks between the stones. On a metal floor? I can’t grow anything.”
“Remind me to get you a second word,” Kaija grumbled.
“Ranged attacks the moment something breaks the ice,” Keri decided. “Ice shards from you, Kaira, and Karina, I want mana knives, as many as you can make. Wren and I will add what we can.” Unfortunately, after lighting the way for the part over the course of the entire expedition, he didn’t have enough mana left for more than a blast or two using Savel.”
Something splattered against the outside of the ice, and it immediately began to steam and melt, far faster than Keri would have expected.
“Wyrm venom,” Sakari shouted. “I’ll do what I can to protect you all from it.”
Another spray of venom hit Kaija’s wall, and this time the thinnest parts dissolved completely, letting some of the yellow-white liquid through. Where the spray hit the floor, or dripped down the inside of the icewall to pool at the base, even the metal began to smoke. Sakari began mumbling beneath his breath. Keri wasn’t quite certain what incantation the ambassador had in mind, but he wasn’t about to interrupt.
The monstrous, enormous head of a black scaled wyrm burst through the ice, sending a spray of frozen chips in every direction. Weakened by two successive blasts of venom, the base and edges of the wall crumbled and broke away against the dark scales of the monster, allowing a full twenty feet of its length into the room.
“Loose!” Keri shouted, though only one of them held a bow.
So many things happened at once that he could hardly keep track of them all. Karina raised her left hand, shouting an incantation, and three daggers of shining blue mana coalesced in the air in front of her, then shot out. They glanced off the scales of the wyrm, two of them gouging scars in individual scales, and the last catching just right, so that it took an entire scale off, exposing raw flesh beneath.
The wyrm opened its mouth, exposing fangs the size of a grown man’s entire leg, and a jet of venom shut out from the venom sacks, somewhere behind its eyes, actually through the fangs, which were hollow, and directly toward them. Keri felt Sakari’s Authority reach out, surrounding them all, catch the venom, and throw it aside, so that it splattered against the lefthand wall where it hung, hissing and steaming against the metal.
Kaija shaped a volley of needle-thin spikes of ice, nine of them, which slammed forward into the exposed neck of the wyrm. Unlike Karina’s attack, these drilled straight through the scales, sending gouts of serpent blood out in their wake, and the monster hissed in pain.
Wren’s arrow found the thing’s lefthand eye, and for just a moment, Keri thought they might actually have managed to kill it. Its head thrashed back and forth, in obvious pain, and then it struck, head lashing forward, jaw extended, descending directly at Kaija.
The captain of Liv’s guard dove to one side, but Keri could already see that it wouldn’t be quick enough for her to avoid the bite - and he had just enough time to curse himself for waiting to cast, for holding his final spell back, before Lina barreled into Kaija, throwing the older woman into an uncontrolled roll across the ground.
The wyrm’s bite took Lina at the waist, leaving a set of severed legs standing for just long enough that Keri’s eyes fixed on the waist, pouring blood, before they tumbled down onto the steel floor. The rest of the woman from Al’Fenthia was gone, swallowed whole by the wyrm, armor and all.
“Savelet Aiveh Dvo Fleiam o’Mae!” Keri shouted, dropping his spear, and he extended both hands toward the monster’s head. Twin bars of blinding light, so bright that everyone without his family’s word flinched aside, raising their arms to shield their eyes, linked him with the wyrm. The light burned through the monster’s head in less time than it took a dry leaf to go up when touched with a spark, continued on, and scorched the far wall black. The air was filled with the stink of burning snake, burning blood, burning venom, and then the immense neck dropped heavily to one side.
The floor shook beneath them at the weight of the impact, and the light from Keri’s hands guttered out. He swayed on his feet, his mana utterly spent, and dropped to one knee. There, he scrambled to get a grip on his spear, set the butt on the floor, and use it to level himself upright.
There was silence for only a moment.
“She’s dead,” Karina gasped. “Trinity, she’s actually dead. Did you see that? I -” Suddenly, the young Elden woman lurched to one side, dropped her sword, and began to empty her stomach against one of the broken caskets. Sakari was there, thankfully, and he put one hand on the apprentice’s back.
Keri couldn’t afford to take time to think about it. “Ring counts,” he gasped, the moment he was upright. The body of the wyrm blocked the doorway for now, but they couldn’t count on that to last. If there was another one of those monsters, it would come through: even the insects would probably eat their way through the carcass, eventually.
“One,” Kaija said, getting to her feet. The veteran had managed to keep her sword in her grasp, Keri saw.
“Thirteen,” Sakari said. “Karina.” He shook the woman. “Do you have any mana left?”
“None,” Karina gasped, in between heaving breaths, and wiped her mouth with one arm.
“I’m out, as well,” Keri admitted.
“We can’t face another wyrm like that,” Wren said, and Keri knew it was what they were all thinking. She thrust her bow and quiver at him, and drew the enchanted hunting knives from the two sheathes at her belt.
“What are you doing?” Sakari asked.
“Going for its heart,” Wren said, striding through puddles of blood, gore, icemelt and venom. “It should be about one length of the skull down the neck. Try to keep anything from killing me while I cut it out and take it to Arjun.”
volume nine is off and running!
here. I am more available there than I am here.
Dramatis Personae
Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. In charge of holding the line. [20 Rings of Mana.]
Kaija - Former Armorer at Kelthelis, captain of Liv's personal guard. Being held to an unreasonable magical standard. [21 Rings of Mana]
Karina of House Iravata - First year student at Bald Peak. May be going into shock. [16 Rings of Mana]
Lina - Member of Liv's personal guard. Made her choice. [21 rings of Mana]
Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. "...so you've all done this before, right?" [21 Rings of Mana]
Sakari, Elder of House Iravata — Venom goalie. [21 Rings of Mana]
Sidonie Corbett - Guildmage. "I actually have extensive data on dream time, from a series of experiments..." [19 Rings of Mana]
Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Heart-eater.
