Chapter Seven #2
“We need to turn back,” Trick yells from behind me. “Our soldiers were winning the fight inside the castle. This is too dangerous!”
“It’s too late,” Elianna says, her voice calm even though her eyes are wide with fear. “Zhagarn just entered the tunnel behind us. I can feel their magic.”
The soldier at the back of our group with Trick immediately turns to face the way we came, sword drawn, and Chitai races past us to join him, unsheathing more knives as she moves.
Kaelen draws his sword and pulls me behind him. “Stay close.”
He pins Trick with a hard, measuring stare before tossing him a dagger. “Thief. Help me protect your friend. If the amulet is lost, Altarra is doomed.”
Trick scowls, but he catches the dagger and turns to put himself between me and whatever may come up behind us. I try to keep from panicking and have never felt less successful at anything in my life.
“Now,” Neville growls.
The Sylvan lightly runs up to join him, notching an arrow in his bow, then swings around the corner of the tunnel, pulling arrows and shooting faster than I could have dreamed possible.
“There were only two Zhagarn, and both are down. Unfortunately, all ten of yours are also down,” Andras calls back to us. “I can’t see inside or behind that building, of course, but the horses aren’t calling out warnings.”
For a moment, I don’t understand—does he think horses talk? But then I remember horses turn restless around strangers and will shift in their stalls and nicker with distress. Surely, if anything would cause a horse distress, it would be the Zhagarn or, far worse, the Fell.
Neville crouches down to check his soldier, but he shakes his head and closes the man’s eyes. “He’s gone.”
Shouts crescendo behind us, and I whirl around to see a dozen armed men, all dressed in gravestone-gray clothing, running down the corridor toward us.
They’re brandishing swords and daggers, and their expressions are a study in grim concentration.
When they get close enough for me to spot the iron armband around their biceps signifying they’re Zhagarn, my blood turns to ice, freezing me in place.
The Zhagarn are the monsters’ masters, and anyone who can force the Fell to obey their commands terrifies me more than the monsters themselves.
Next to us, Elianna calls to her magic, balls of shimmering light forming in each hand. She sends them sizzling along the ceiling to the attackers, where they drop on the men and set fire to their hair and clothes.
The Sylvan runs back to us and begins shooting arrows, while Chitai hurls knife after knife. The attackers keep coming, ducking and dodging, rolling in the mud to put out the fires, and ignoring any arrows or blades that dig into arms or legs.
But most of the arrows don’t strike arms or legs. They drive into hearts and lungs and even into one man’s throat when he raises his chin to shout. Chitai’s knives find similar homes, and one plunges into an attacker’s skull, taking his eye.
I bend double, afraid I’ll either faint or throw up from the grisly sight. Kaelen offers his hand. “I’ve got you.”
After a deep, shuddering breath, I take it and straighten.
We start for the end of the tunnel where Neville, Bern, and the dead soldier are grouped in the entrance.
Before I follow Kaelen, though, I turn to find Trick.
He drops into a crouch just before a charging attacker can run a sword through him.
Trick viciously stabs up with Kaelen’s dagger, catching the man in the groin and yanking the blade up and through to his abdomen.
The sharp smell of the dying attacker’s blood and loosening bowels is nauseating, and when I see the glistening coils of intestine, I turn away, retching, and stumble after the prince.
“That’s all of them, Neville,” Chitai calls out. “But your man is wounded.”
The soldier who hung back is clutching his shoulder, blood pouring out between his fingers.
Elianna rushes over to him, digging in her valise. She pulls out gauze and a jar of herbs and jerks her head at Chitai. “Cut his shirt off.”
The woman raises one eyebrow. “As you command, Air Touched,” she says mockingly, but she does as requested and bares the wound to be treated.
Elianna chants softly while she packs herbs into the wound, which stops the bleeding immediately. Then she wraps his shoulder with the gauze. “He’ll have to stay here,” she announces. “He can’t travel with this injury.”
“None of us may be traveling if we can’t get to the stable,” Kaelen says, staring out at the palace grounds.
I walk up beside Kaelen and look out. The stable is roughly a hundred paces from the end of the tunnel, the distance littered with fallen bodies.
“To the horses, then,” Neville says grimly.
“But your soldiers,” I protest. “We can’t just leave their bodies on the ground like this.”
“We can’t stop for them,” Kaelen tells me. “Our priority is to get you and your burden out of Pallanhold. Now.”
Neville nods at the bandaged soldier trudging toward us, his face drawn. “He’ll take care of our fallen. The prince is right, lass. Our gear is already in the stable, if the ravens-begotten Zhagarn didn’t steal or kill our horses and rob our packs.”
“The horses are still there and alive,” the sorcerer says, staring into the distance. “But … I feel something … Damn them! The enemy is warded. More attackers are coming from behind the stable now. At least two, maybe three.”
“That few, we meet them head on, take them out, and go for the horses,” Neville orders. “Go!”
Bern pushes forward to stand in front of me. “I’ll protect you, my lady.”
Kaelen nods. “Good. Let’s go. I’ll take care of the attackers, and you protect Soli.”
Following Kaelen, we rush out of the tunnel toward the stable, but Elianna stops so suddenly we nearly run into her. She clutches her head and screams, a sound so high and brittle it must fracture any stars within reach. “I was wrong. The Fell! The Fell are here!”
Terror floods my veins with ice, and I freeze, unable to move another step. The Fell. Corvynne’s mutant creations. Here? In Pyrrh? It’s not possible.
And yet it’s true.
A swarm of … creatures pours out around the side of the stable, and the moonlight itself shrinks away from lighting their faces. Descriptions I’ve read have chilled me to my bones, yet none of them were even close to the truth.
None of them were nearly horrific enough.
They look almost like men, but just different enough to cause my stomach to wrench with nausea.
Men, but only if the goddess Corvynne combined animal parts with human ones.
And not just any animal parts—only those of predators.
Blood-drenched, lupine muzzles. Heavy, ursine shoulders and snouts.
Even raptors are present in the monsters shrieking from beaks while their talons curl in preparation to tear and rend.
There must be twenty of them—no, thirty. And three of the gray-clad Zhagarn are with them, shouting orders.
Or rather, only one order, repeated over and over: “Kill them all and find the amulet!”
Kaelen whirls around, ripping his jacket off as he turns. He throws it on the ground next to me. “Soli. Stay here. Bern! Guard her with your life!”
Bern snaps to attention, raising his sword. Neville herds the sorcerer over to stand next to me, and the three men surround us in a loose semicircle, putting themselves between us and the approaching monsters.
Chitai, Andras, and Trick race to us, weapons at the ready. The Sylvan yells a high, wild war cry and fires his last arrows at the attackers before scooping up a quiver from one of the dead Zhagarn to continue his assault.
“Protect Soli,” Kaelen orders Bern, just before he … moves.
I, who for years and years and years read every book, tome, and scroll I could find, and can claim a vast vocabulary, can’t think of a single word to adequately describe the prince in motion.
He prowls forward through the hail of the Sylvan’s arrows with a deadly grace that combines liquid movement with perfect balance.
The image of a Khyrran lion flashes into my mind.
The monsters jeer at this pretty prince coming alone to face them. When they lunge for him, though, he’s suddenly not there. At their every attack, he’s always just out of reach of teeth and claws and knives, although he barely seems to move.
Kaelen’s laughter is rich and deep and wild, a countermelody to the poetry of his movement as he slides through the Fell like a deadly Kraken whipping its powerful body through the Sea of Ice.
He flicks his sword in tiny, precise motions that strike down every creature in his path.
His body moves as fluidly as water, but there are so many attackers that I can’t understand how he avoids every blow aimed at him.
“Stay with Soli and Elianna,” Neville growls, then rushes forward to help Kaelen. And by “help,” I mean follow in his wake to double-check that everyone the prince encounters is dead.
He needn’t bother, but I’m sure it’s important to feel useful in these situations.
Andras drops his bow and scoops up a sword from the fallen soldier.
He lays into the few Zhagarn and Fell who skirt past Kaelen and Neville, while Chitai hurls knives at the horde.
Elianna comes back to herself and flings sizzling energy spheres at the attackers, leaving burning cloth and flesh everywhere they land.
I move out of her way to give her room to work, wishing I had some way to help defend us.
Wishing, again, not to be useless.
Trick stands beside Elianna, dagger clutched in his hand and teeth bared in a grimace.
I want to say something to him, but I don’t know why or what.
Some idea of last words to my only friend, maybe?
But when he glances over at me, his eyes widen, and he shouts my name, lunging toward me, staring at something over my shoulder.
Or someone.