Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
M aybe I should have considered further that I had deliberately chosen to sabotage Atrius’s army before I’d insisted on marching with them.
On the optimistic side, at least if I was there in person, I’d get to confirm that my sabotage worked.
Atrius moved, as I’d instructed, on the night of the full moon.
It was cold that night, the fog thick and soupy. The moon, which Atrius had watched so closely, was now only visible in fractured glimpses through the clouds, which blotted out the stars and inky night. The mist smeared all light to murky sunspots, making Atrius’s band of warriors look like a long trail of silver ghosts in the moonlight.
I rode near the front of the group, near Erekkus, who did little to hide how appalled he was that Atrius had allowed me to come.
“I’ve fought you before,” he grumbled. “That’s not the kind of skill that keeps you alive. Don’t expect me to save you.”
It bothered me more than it should have that Erekkus dismissed me so easily. “ You won because I let you win” danced on the tip of my tongue—petty, childish competition that the Arachessen never quite managed to stomp out of me.
Still, it wasn’t lost on me that, despite his complaining, Erekkus still remained close to me. I didn’t need saving, and he’d see that soon enough, but it was still touching. Apparently he’d gotten a little protective over his ward.
Atrius’s warriors were serious and disciplined. No one spoke on the long ride up to the heart of Alka.
There was no optimal way to approach the city. It was positioned high up in the mountains and spread over several stone islands connected by a network of unusual rock formations, which functioned as bridges between subsections. When the tide was very low, it revealed tunnels and paths that were normally hidden beneath the surf. Tonight, those paths were bare.
Atrius seemed pleased by this, at least as much as the man seemed pleased by anything. He took the extremely low tide as the gift given by my vision. He intended to use these tunnels and formations as additional entry points into the city, climbing up through them into the biggest of the city’s secondary branches.
He broke his army up into many small groups, sending them to each corner of the city, surrounding it on all sides. Alka was difficult to approach not only because of the narrow, rocky paths and tunnels that were hard to scale and easy to defend, but also because it was so decentralized. The tunnels, combined with the other paths on the western land-locked side of the city, meant that he could surround Alka.
“Is he setting up a siege?” I asked Erekkus, as Atrius doled out his commands.
It would be what most would do to take out a city like this. Maybe the smartest path forward.
“We proposed it,” Erekkus replied. “But no.”
“Why not?”
“It takes too long and it kills a lot of locals.”
The first part of that answer didn’t surprise me. The second, though, made my brows rise.
“Why does Atrius care if he kills locals?”
Erekkus narrowed his eyes at me, as if I was asking a suspiciously foolish question, and got distracted by another captain’s shouts before he could answer.
This thought nagged at me during the long approach to Alka, like a puzzle piece I couldn’t quite figure out how to snap into place. I was here to assemble a diagram of Atrius’s strengths and weaknesses that we could use to destroy him. He was a mysterious man, certainly, but until now I had felt that I was slowly peeling back the layers.
That little piece of information, though… it didn’t fit with anything I thought I knew about him.
Atrius was silent as we climbed up the rocky paths. It was a difficult journey, the path so narrow that only two men could walk beside each other shoulder to shoulder. And this was the easiest part of the journey—from here, the incline dipped and then rose sharply to the central city, a rocky spire that towered high above us.
While our approach was quiet, no one was under any illusions that this was a sneak attack. Aaves surely knew that we were coming. It was just a matter of when, and how, he would choose to address it.
And now, when we reached the top of the path and the outer gates to Alka, high and locked up tight, my heart was in my throat, my body tense. The souls of Atrius’s warriors stretched out around me, drowning me in a sea of their bloodthirsty anticipation. There was no feeling quite like that of a soldier about to go into battle. Excitement and terror, thrill and fear, all dancing right on the blade’s edge between life and death.
Atrius’s warriors were well-trained and battle-hardened. They were calm and professional. And yet, that feeling was the same. The same fear. Why did that surprise me, that these near-immortal creatures felt so close to death in these moments, too?
Atrius lifted a fist, and his warriors halted, the command silently understood all the way down the line. He paused at the gates, staring up at them. They were tall and thick, but just as ugly as Alka itself—great slabs of unfinished iron cobbled together with spiked chunks of metal and mismatched bars of half-rotted wood, still stained with the blood of the slaves forced to build it.
Far beyond the gates—so high above us that the spires were visible through the mist only as smears of orange light—was Aaves’s castle. Our ultimate target. The head of the snake, to be sliced off.
Atrius took it all in—the hideous gates, the treacherous mountains, the distant gaudy castle—with a stony face. The faintest hint of disgust rolled from his presence, like a little wisp of smoke. He raised his hand, and four of his men took places on either side of him. Each pair held strange contraptions between them—the closest human comparison I’d seen to this were giant metal crossbows, but so large that each had to be supported by two men. At each tip was a little white-blue flame. One warrior from each machine strummed their fingers along the weapon’s carved sides, little flecks of red light shivering at their touch.
Magic. The magic of Nyaxia, surely. The threads quivered in its presence, as if uneasy before something so unfamiliar.
Atrius kept his fist raised, his eyes regarding our target for a long moment, like a final challenge.
Then, so quietly that surely only I heard it, he murmured, “Knock knock.”
He lowered his fist.
The four warriors braced themselves. Two flares of light blinded me.
Explosions of white fire blasted through the gates and kept going, all the way up to the night sky above the castle itself. The chaos was swift and immediate. I felt it in the air, in the threads, in the hundreds—thousands—of distant presences that just roared to life, lying in wait, now ready to hurl themselves at us.
With the gates in shambles and a wall of rock ahead of us, Atrius drew his sword and simply started walking.
Aaves’s warriors came for us immediately. Battle was like a crashing wave—you feel the tension rising, rising, rising, feel the cold shadow of it over your face, and then suddenly it’s everywhere, filling your lungs.
I was drowning.
So many sensations. So many minds screaming. The threads, typically laid out in calm serenity, grew tangled and confusing. And yet, with that chaos came an energy that I thrived on in some sick, shameful way .
Beyond the gates, we were thrust into a series of tunnels. Atrius’s warriors needed to further split up in order to make it up the mountain as quickly as possible. On the other entry points, the other divisions of his army were making a similar trek. The tunnels of Alka were deliberately confusing—narrow, poorly lit, and twisting. We’d climbed up for miles to reach the gates, but the tunnels brought us back down, down, in damp, slippery paths.
The vampires, though, seemed undeterred. Darkness was their friend, after all. They were faster than humans, more sure-footed. And Atrius was right: his warriors were very good.
But no one was better than him.
“Stay close to me,” he rasped when the first wave of Aaves’s warriors descended upon us, and I obeyed.
Aaves’s men were known for their brutality. They were drug-addled and sickened, but also frenzied and desperate, and those could be dangerous qualities. They came at us with axes, swords, machetes—weapons stolen from those they had raided, or cobbled together, as if they’d made a game of death. This was their home—they knew it well. Some of the vampires had to pause to make sense of the layout, unsure of how to fight such an unpredictable enemy. Even I, with the insight the threads gave me, still found myself surprised by the rare unexpected attack.
Not Atrius.
Atrius fought like it was what he was created to do.
What I had seen in our little sparring session was nothing. That was play. He did not hesitate. Did not stumble. Did not pause. Every strike of his sword found its mark, quickly, efficiently. He’d open wounds with quick sweeps and then use their blood as if it was another limb, pulling enemies to his blade or tossing them away.
He led the group as the tunnels grew narrower, taking the brunt of the waves of crazed Alkan warriors hurtling down at us. But it didn’t matter if four men came after him at once, or six, or ten. He dismantled them, and all while his presence remained as smooth and untouched as a wall of ice.
I had never seen anything like it. There was no twitch, no hint of anticipation, not even when Aaves’s men came flying at him from around corners. Every other fighter naturally revealed glimpses of their anticipation, and good ones were thinking several steps ahead of their opponent.
Not Atrius. It was as if he didn’t anticipate anything at all—didn’t even try. He simply responded. To do that while sparring with me was one thing. It was another to do it here, in battle.
It was incredible.
We fought through the tunnels, deeper and deeper. The walls grew tighter. We continued to split off into smaller and smaller groups as the paths deviated, rocks slipping beneath our feet. It was dark—an advantage for us, since vampires could see without light and I didn’t need to see at all. My sword was bloody, the hilt slick with gore. I’d long ago lost track of how many I’d killed. Surely Atrius alone had taken down dozens.
Eventually, we reached an area of strange silence. We pushed forward, tensed, waiting for more attackers.
When several minutes of stillness passed, Atrius glanced back at me, asking a silent question. I’d already found the answer, reaching out with my magic to sense movement in the threads far above us. Too distant for me to make out individual presences, but something was there.
“There are people ahead,” I said. “Lots of them.”
Atrius nodded and readied himself. The sensation grew closer as the path dipped sharply, bringing us to the apex of three tunnels… and a morass of people. A wall of them—far more than the warriors Aaves had been throwing at us so far.
Many more than our dwindling group.
Behind me, Erekkus muttered what I could only imagine was an Obitraen curse.
“We fight through them,” Atrius commanded, his sword raised in anticipation. “No hesitation.”
But my steps slowed—because something here wasn’t right.
The presences were now close enough to sense. And it was difficult to feel the emotions of such a large group, but these… they overwhelmingly reeked of fear. And these people were coming for us , yes, but it was a lurching, stumbling walk, like they were being packed into these hallways and forced down?—
Just fear. Just?—
I grabbed Atrius’s arm just as the crowd of people was almost upon us.
“They aren’t warriors,” I choked out. “They’re innocent. They’re civilians.”
Typical of these warlords. To use their starving, homeless populace as shields when he was starting to run out of warriors. Use them to flush us out.
Realization fell over Atrius’s face in the same moment that the wall of bodies surrounded us.
He spat a curse. For a moment, I was absolutely certain I was about to ruin my cover—because Atrius, I was sure, was about to cut through all these innocent people, and I’d have to stop him.
But to my shock, Atrius lowered his sword just as the mass closed around us, shielding its sharp edge from the flesh jammed into every crevice of the hall.
He turned back and screamed a command in Obitraen. Then he lifted his sword above his head, high enough to avoid the bodies, reached back to grab my wrist, and pulled me forward, as if to keep me from getting swept away by the sea of people.
“Hold onto Erekkus,” he told me—not that he had to, because Erekkus was already holding onto my other forearm, tethering us.
There wasn’t enough air to speak. My head pounded, a nasty side effect of being surrounded by such an overwhelming quantity of people—and emotions—in such close quarters.
Neither Atrius nor his men killed a single person.
We just fought our way past the tides, pushing through the morass of sweaty, terrified flesh until it thinned, then disappeared.
Atrius and Erekkus released my arms, and I let out a shaky breath. My headache throbbed, but subsided. Sweat plastered my clothing to my body. Distantly, I sensed that mass of innocent people continuing down the tunnels to Weaver-knew-where, blind with terror, like a herd of panicking cattle.
Atrius muttered something in Obitraen to Erekkus, who nodded. It was harder than ever to sense Atrius’s presence now, with my abilities so exhausted by the pack of people, but I glimpsed a faint whiff of disgust.
“Good to know that human kings have so much respect for life,” Atrius muttered to me, and I couldn’t help but let out a ragged laugh at that.
“I’m sure vampire kings are very kind to their subjects.”
His lips thinned. “Maybe kings are the problem,” he remarked. Then, before I could answer that, he lifted his chin down the hall. “How much farther?”
It was hard to tell how much closer, overall, we had come to the peak of Alka. The tunnels were disorienting, rising and plummeting in seemingly equal measure, twisting so frequently it was impossible to say which direction we were headed. Aaves’s sea of humans hadn’t helped that, either.
I paused, my breath coming heavy. “I need a moment,” I said. My magic was exhausted, but I reached through the threads, letting my awareness ripple out in all directions.
Nothingness around us—not a soul. We hadn’t climbed far. If anything, we were deeper than where we had started at the gates. I could sense the sea nearby, the salty brine scent stinging my nostrils.
I followed the threads up, up, up. Up to a cluster of auras far above us… to one in particular, far above them.
“He’s far,” I said.
“How far?”
My brow furrowed. The threads shivered and trembled.
I ran over them again, following them to the castle.
No, this wasn’t right. I had to have missed something.
“There’s no one for a long time,” I said.
But that didn’t make sense. Aaves had plenty of bodies to throw at us. And yet, the halls were empty.
I leaned against the wall. My palm touched wet stone.
The realization came too late.
There were many things that were very unique about Alka. The rocky terrain, its confusing tunneled construction, the many interconnected formations that made up its body.
But perhaps the most dangerous was the tide.
It was an unusually low tide the night of a full moon, revealing paths that were usually underwater.
But the tides of Alka were vicious and swift and sudden, more so than anywhere else in Glaea or, perhaps, the world.
My vision had specified the crescent moon. I had taken us during the full. And Aaves had just driven us into the deepest tunnels of Alka. The ones that really belonged to the sea.
A sea that was ready now to take them back.
I whirled to Atrius. “We need to go back—” I said.
But the sudden wall of water swallowed my words.