Blood of War (50 page)

Gaven nodded. “Aye, sir. I made sure there was no one left.”

“How many Soldiers?”

“I'm not sure. The echoes make it hard to pinpoint. I would guess a thousand interspersed throughout the tunnels.”

Kurin chuckled. The old priest had not entirely recovered from his captivity. His eyes were sunken and hidden in shadows. His usually lean frame was emaciated. When he walked, he still teetered and often accepted Mikal's arm for support. Yet his voice held as much power as it ever did. But it was cold now. Always cold. The quiet chuckle was enough to give Gaven a shiver.

“You did well, Captain,” Mikal said. “Go join your troops ahead. Get them moving toward the Abbey end. And double time it. Anyone in these tunnels in the next fifteen minutes is going to be in for a very nasty surprise. When you reach the exit, deploy your men around the adit. Wait for us there.”

“Sir!”

With a salute, Gaven hurried on, squeezing against the wall as a handful of Salosian priests rushed past on their way to join Kurin. Reaching his men in short order, Gaven relayed their orders, and took his place at the front.

A short time later, they broke free of the gloomy cave three miles distance from Twin Town and into late afternoon light that, though dimming and shadowed by the thick trees surrounding them, still made them squint. They had been in the warrens under Twin Town for days though it felt like weeks; as happy as he was to be free of the dank, dirty network of tunnels and rooms, he still winced as the weak sunlight pierced his eyes.

Barking a few orders, he set his men up in a tight defensive circle around the mouth of the cave. Then they waited.

His men shifted their weight anxiously from foot to foot as time passed and silence reigned. All held their swords ready; none knew what Kurin had planned. None save Gaven and those still down in the tunnels. And probably Metana who had returned to the Abbey as soon as they arrived along with most of the survivors and the defected Soldiers of God. A corporal cleared his throat, spit a wad into the underbrush and Sergeant Tak growled for silence.

Beneath the earth, there came a deep rumble. The groans of tortured stone began to fill the chill air and clouds of dust began to puff out of the cave entrance. The rumble grew louder, stronger, until the ground began to shake. Just a light tremor at first, a vibration like a plucked lute string, it quickly grew until Gaven's men were shouting in dismay as they fought to keep their feet under them.

As the ground bucked underneath them, and Gaven's troop began one by one falling to their knees, Kurin and the priests, followed in the rear by Mikal emerged from the billowing cloud spewing from the cave opening like bolts from a crossbow.

Covered in grit, eyes wide, Kurin motioned frantically to Gaven. The ground was making such a noise that Gaven could not hear all the words that Kurin yelled, but he got enough of it. As one, those that had just exited the caved dove to the side, most landing heavily and covering their heads with their hands, Mikal, of course, nimbly rolling to his knees before burying his own face in his cloak.

“
Move!
” Gaven shrieked. “
Move away from the cave!
”

Just as the last of his men crawled out of the way, a deafening racket exploded as stone and earth tore itself apart. A jet of dirt and stone erupted from the entrance, a thousand projectiles that could tear flesh from bone. After one last ear-shattering, bone-jarring boom from the bowels of the earth, all fell still.

Dazed, Gaven coughed and rubbed grit from his eyes. He sat up and with a glance, saw that no one seemed injured.

Men and women began picking themselves up off the ground, brushing dust and grit off their clothing, coughing it out of their lungs. With Mikal's help, Kurin rose to his feet. The old man shook, gasping for breath as though he had run a hundred miles but he wore a crazed smile, his eyes dancing with fiery excitement.

“We did it, Mikal! We bloody well did it!”

Mikal responded with a grunt.

His guts roiling, Gaven suppressed the urge to sick up. He had to concede, tactically speaking, the plan had been a good one. Lure the Soldiers of God to the various entrances leading into the ancient warren of tunnels that criss-crossed the earth beneath Twin Town, then collapse the tunnels on as many Soldiers as possible. It would have the double effect of killing many Soldiers while the Salosians suffered little to no casualties, and leave only one route open to the Abbey: above ground, through the dense forests and powerful wards that surrounded the Abbey and past the several platoons that waited at various strategic points in ambush.

The plan had been a good one, but still Gaven strove to keep his last meal down. He could not begin to imagine what it must be like to die in the dark crushed and suffocated by thousands of tons of earth.

He avoided looking at the adit, knowing that he would no longer see an opening to a cave but dirt and stone packed solid, as he gathered his men and prepared them for the final march home where they would waste no time in finalizing the defense of the Abbey. He avoided the thought that, amid the broken twisted bodies of the dead, there were probably men and women down there, still alive, calling piteously for help that could never arrive in time. Who was he kidding, he asked himself. Help would
never
arrive. He avoided thinking on it because there was a chance that he knew some of those men and women, that he had fought alongside them. Though he was no longer a Soldier of God, and, in fact, stood against them, there were those that, at one time, he might have called friend.

And ultimately, he avoided it because he knew there was much more, and much, much worse, to come.

“Damn it, Jurel,” he muttered to himself as they got underway. “Where are you? We need you.”

* * *

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” the sentry declared haughtily. “No one may leave the Abbey grounds. It isn't safe. Especially for a pretty young thing like yourself.”

“I said get out of my way,” Metana snarled. She raised a clawed hand to eye level and let crackles of energy play between her fingers.

He leapt as though bitten by an adder, squeaking apologies and she swept regally past.

Keep calm. Keep cool.
That's it. You didn't mean to lose your temper. It's just that everything is so bloody
wrong!

She strode away from the Abbey wall, and into the trees, cool as ice but with the urge to strangle someone,
any
one, boiling just under the surface. She needed time to think, time away from Mikal and Gaven and the rest of them.

The Abbey was in an uproar. The refugee camp had been transformed into a staging area where those refugees who could fight were assigned platoons and those who could not where assigned other tasks, while Salosian soldiers, the new and the old, performed battle exercises in the hastily delineated training grounds. Inside the Abbey walls, defenses were seen to, supplies were being gathered and stored where they were most useful, three audience halls had been set aside for use as infirmaries—one of which Metana was assigned to. The smithy was a roaring, stinking inferno as those who had even the least knowledge in the area of metalwork were sent to the blacksmith. Hundreds of tasks and meetings and each one took a bloody room; there was nowhere anyone could go for a little peace and quiet. She had tried to stay in her room but there
was so much noise in the hallways that she may as well have sat on an anvil in the smithy.

Shivering, she pulled her cloak tighter around her. Autumn was full on the land; the Day of Shadows only a few days away, cool and blustery winds scoured the earth under a quilt of gold and scarlet and brown, amidst the musty sweet scent of trees preparing for the long slumber.

It felt like just yesterday that they were toiling under the punishing heat of the brutal midsummer sun. Maybe it was her sense of time that was off. It seemed the last weeks had all welded together into one long, incomprehensible blur.

And no wonder either. First, she had tramped out with an army to fight a battle that had not only ended badly but
spectacularly
badly, then the great oaf had gone off all sulky, and lately she had been feeling under the weather. Not just the silly sadness of a lovelorn girl, but nausea and cramps and fatigue. Which was understandable. This little adventure was the longest she had been out of doors since she was thirteen. She was bound to catch something. What was not understandable, what frightened her and warmed her all it once, was that several weeks had passed since she had lain with Jurel in his place and she had yet... No. Best not to think of that.

With a curse, she stuck her finger in her mouth and glared at the thorn bush that had pricked her. Stupid thing. What was it thinking going and jumping in front of her like that? She pushed her way through the underbrush, feeling the morning dew seeping through her trousers. Over a small ridge, more a berm really, of crumbling soil and jutting roots, she climbed, grunting softly when a root she used for leverage pulled free almost causing her to fall back. It was only with a quick, desperate snatch at another part of the twisting network of roots that she managed to find a more solid hold.

At the top, she glanced back down. A flutter, a dash of vertigo, passed through her because
though the berm was not really particularly high, from her vantage it seemed she stood on a cliff
overlooking nothingness. She snapped her eyes away before she tumbled—with her luck, she would not fall back onto the berm but over its edge and into that empty nothing that seemed to
go forever, and
that
would just be perfect. Maybe it was a good idea to step away from the edge.

She continued through the hallowed halls of the ancient arboreal temple, passing between its timber pillars, running her fingers on rough bark, or smooth, along gnarled limbs and velvety, or parchment-dry foliage. Where was she going? Nowhere, really. Just
away
for a bit. She would be back before anyone missed her.

And why did he have to be such a stubborn, pig-headed fool anyway? He had to understand. Why could he not understand? In the span of just a few days, she had gone from the height of perfect bliss, to the deepest dankest terror she could ever have imagined. Gods, when she had been in his place that very first time, she'd had no idea, not even the faintest clue, the drastic twist her life had been about to take. She felt her face heat up as she took a moment and thought of how he had enveloped her, heart and soul, thought of her body pressed against his, thought of his lips pressed against hers, thought of...well, she felt the chill of the day a little less.

Though in a way she was secretly glad he was gone. She loved him, she had admitted that much to herself weeks ago. But he frightened her. The weeks preceding the disastrous battle had been some of the most trying of her life. Every day that had passed, Jurel seemed to grow. Not physically—his height and his girth remained constant—but in an impossible-to-explain-rationally kind of way. Somehow, his presence had grown; every day, he had been...more there, more real, more solid, until he had become like a lodestone and they had been the human equivalent of iron filings. Every day, she'd had to fight with herself, to restrain herself from running to him and desperately begging him to spend more time with her, until she had pretty much started to avoid him lest she lose herself in his being. It was not difficult to stay away; for those last few weeks, he had been so busy that he had barely had time for more than a quick meal with her or a very rare short walk. Bloody oaf. It was all his fault. If only he did not have that bloody presence like he had his own gravity, that bloody natural way he had of drawing people to him while simultaneously seeming larger, more solid than everyone else. Now that he was gone, she felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

She grimaced; it shamed her that she should feel that way. Because even as she felt lighter, so too did she feel incomplete without him; he was as important to her as her right arm...no, more than that. He was as inseparable a part of her as her heart. How she had so easily and completely succumbed to him, she did not know, but there was no point in worrying over it; it was already done. What was important, what filled her thoughts, was what should she do about it?

She entered a small clearing where she saw a rock formation, jutting from the ground at an angle, one atop another so that it looked like a shoulder high staircase that had fallen. Beyond that, she heard a stream gurgling quietly, somberly, sluggishly as though it too was preparing for a winter nap. And why not? It was already in its bed. Haw haw.

Carefully, she climbed the side of the formation and she sat on the very top where she was met with quite a pleasant little surprise.

At the opposite end of the clearing from which she entered, the trees thinned, and there was a gap through which she could see, well,
every
thing. There was the stream she heard, angling toward the gap at the end of the clearing and disappearing over a cliff. From her vantage, she could not tell how high the cliff was but it must have been high because the landscape beyond
opened up; it seemed she stared at the world's most detailed map. A broad valley stretched
outward hazing into the distance, bordered along one side by dense forest whose trees were glowing with nature's autumn fireworks and on the other by a craggy, barren hill that dropped precariously on the other side into the Sun Sea. The stream meandered through the center of the valley, curving this way and that, like a glittering ribbon of diamonds dropped by Gaorla. Above that, as a backdrop, rose the dark spires of the Eastern mountain range.