Chapter 59
Earth, Wind, and Fire
"Contact! Rocks from above!" The lead guard shouted.
The mercenaries raised their shields, forming a shield wall. We heard high-pitched hooting as the stone wall was hammered with a volley of stones. One of the mercenaries caught one in the shoulder, spinning him sideways.
More and more stones pelted us.
I looked up and saw dozens of grey-haired monkeys. They were on the lip of the canyon and whipped stones at us with both hands. Each throw made a whip-crack as the stone left their hands.
"God da—" Zo said as a stone screamed past her head, cratering the rock behind her.
The stones came down in clusters, aimed at the wagons and the guards and anything that moved on the trail. Two more mercenaries went down. One took a stone to the chest and sat down hard, coughing blood. The other caught one in the knee, his leg folding backward.
"Fish!" Zo's eyes were locked on the ridge, the Sacred veins in her forearms pulsing. "I can get up there."
"No." I caught her shoulder. "We're nobody, remember? Low-ranking mercenaries. Let’s stay down here… we don't want to be singled out, let them do most of the work!"
Her jaw tightened.
"Stay. Down."
At the front of the line, the Dragoon at the front had finally made his move. His blade sliced two of the rock slingers in half, their upper bodies sliding to the ground in a spray of blood. The remaining monkeys scattered, their volley eased enough for the caravan drivers to push forward.
We moved. The wounded were dragged onto wagons, the dead left where they fell because there was no room and no time.
The monkeys kept throwing their stones, claiming a merchant who'd been running alongside his wagon, and a crossbowman who'd been doing cover fire from behind a wagon got hit in the hand, his crossbow and three of his fingers blasting off the trail.
The caravan pushed through the canyon and out the other side into a wider area of the trail.
We were just out of the monkeys' range, and their stones stopped. The monkeys sat up there on the rocks, howling with their fists in the air. We’d lost three to them, and five more were wounded; two of those were hurt badly.
The wagons clustered together, pulling into a circle.
They were slammed by a hard blast of air, tipping two of the wagons onto their edges. Throwing crates and rations onto the floor.
They were bigger than the rock throwers.
Five feet tall, lean, with long arms and dark green fur, they sent devastating blasts of wind at us with their howls.
One of the mercenaries was slow and was hit in the chest with one of their howling blasts.
It ripped a hole through his chest and sprayed the wagons with gore.
The Dragoon moved quickly, dodging the blasts and leaping up the rock face, cutting down the howlers before they could hit him. He was fast. But there were too many of them. Every time he would get close, they would just jump off the rock on a cushion of wind, howling.
The Dragoon killed six howlers before the rest retreated into crevices in the rock where he couldn't follow. The caravan reformed and pushed forward once more. We lost two more. And a wagon's worth of supplies was destroyed.
The howling hadn't even faded when the air started to smell of sulfur. Fat red-faced macaques with flaming fur were sliding down the side of the mountain. One opened its mouth and vomited a stream of liquid fire directly over the lead wagon
The world went orange.
The driver threw himself off the seat and rolled on the ground, beating at the fire on his sleeves. The beast pulling the wagon screamed and cried in pain, then bolted forward with the burning wagon still hitched to it, dragging a tail of fire up the trail.
Then three more streams hit us at once, from both sides.
Mercenaries scattered. Their shields were useless against fire; the men dropped them, screaming and holding on to their burned hands. The Dragoon was at the front again, cutting down the fire monkeys ahead, but the ones on our end had no one to put them down.
"Zo—"
She was running toward the children who were screaming. She jumped into the burning wagon. She broke one of the water casks, soaked a blanket, and tossed it over the two kids and their mother, shielding them with her body.
The fire monkeys scurried along the rock walls, leaping from ledge to ledge, and every few seconds, one would stop and spit fire.
One aimed at the Golden Rose wagon. It hit the gold-threaded canvas. The fire splashed against the fabric and ran off it in fiery droplets, burning on the ground below but leaving the wagon untouched. The Golden Rose had fire-treated their wagon.
I pulled a small worm from my forearm, imbued it, and threw it.
The bomb worm struck the wall just below the fire spitters and exploded. The blast wasn’t as big as I thought. It blew two of the creatures off the ledge, taking their arms and blowing a bloody hole in their chests.
Luckily, nobody had seen me throw it. Everyone was too busy burning or trying not to be burned to death.
Eventually, the screams stopped, replaced by the crackle of burning wood and the hiss of scorched flesh. We didn't stop to rest; we just reorganized the survivors and kept rolling.
Over the next three days, the pattern repeated. Rock throwers in the morning. Howlers in the afternoon. Fire monkeys at dusk. The caravan bled.
Eleven wagons became eight, then six. Forty mercenaries became twenty-five, then nineteen.
The merchant who'd sold me the supplies for the wyrm fangs died on the third day.
One of the howler's blasts took out his lower body, evaporating it from the waist down.
His organs spilled onto the floor as he died.
His upper half was placed onto his damaged wagon that had been stripped for parts and pushed off the edge.
The family with the children kept their wagon's canvas closed. I could hear the mother praying through the fabric.