Days of High Adventure (14 page)

“You,” she said, pointing to the largest, most fit-looking man. “You,” she said, looking to the next. “Tell me your names. Now.”

Eric moved over to the cart as she spoke, lifting the muslin to ensure that the women in the cart were alright. The three young women, all in simple white dresses, reared back in fright at the sight of him. “Don’t worry,” Eric said, “we’re here to free you, not hurt you.”

“I am Valen,” answered the first slave. “Ajaga,” said the second.

“You are free,” Amanda declared. “All of you are free. You are to take the army’s provisions and head back to the city immediately.

“Valen, Ajaga, you have one special task. Take these girls back to their families,” she said, gesturing to the cart as Eric opened up the cage to let them out. “If that cannot be done, bring them to the temple of Deyallah. Do you understand?”

The men both nodded. Amanda’s eyes narrowed. She waved her wand at both of them, speaking loudly enough to be heard by all. Both of the men briefly glowed with a soft blue shimmer that quickly faded. “You are my servants in this,” Amanda said
loudly enough to be heard by all. “Any here who hinder you in your task or touch the maidens will die screaming. You bear my mark. Abandon or betray your task and I will find you and turn you into newts!”

Both men quickly bowed. So did no few of the other slaves.

Shedding her appropriated enemy armor in favor of putting on her own, Fallon looked to Eric with a concerned frown. “Would she really turn them into newts?” she asked.

Eric shrugged. He suspected it was a bluff. “
Literary reference. Never mind.”

***

Much as the trio expected, the cavern floor was littered with dead and dying men and serpent men alike by the time they reached the underground temple. The walls and many of the bodies bore the scorch marks and ozone smell of destructive magical forces, but clearly the greater weight of the fighting had fallen to muscle and steel. Creeping into the periphery of the main cavern, the companions found that Bel-Danab had forced his way into the temple at the cost of much of his army.

“
No telling how many guys Bel-Danab will have left after this,” Eric observed.

“No,” Fallon agreed, “but
the serpents have greatly worn down his forces.”

“I hope,” Amanda said grimly.
“For all we know, he’ll still have dozens of soldiers. Maybe a couple hundred.”

Fallon shrugged. “It is what must be done, yes?” She looked to her companions, seeing them both nod. “Then decide that you will see it done.
The consequences of failure are irrelevant, because we will not accept failure.” With that, she took the lead, creeping through the underground battlefield with her bow at the ready.

“Wow,” Amanda blinked.

“Yeah,” Eric said, following not far behind Fallon.

“Where can I get one?”

Coming around the temple’s great walls to its outer gate, the trio saw further carnage and destruction. The serpent men had obviously taken a great toll on the human army, only to be countered by greater sorcerous power from the army’s leaders. Serpent men had fallen here in broad groups, burned with magical fire or cast aside by supernatural force. Rising above the scene were the walls of the temple, dominated at the front by great, tall bronze doors now battered and thrown open.

Neither Fallon nor Eric had worked inside the temple complex’s outer walls once the excavation had broken through. They hadn’t gotten a look at the temple until now.
They and Amanda were struck by what they discovered: the hinges and crossbars on the three-story-tall doors were on the outside. The temple had been constructed with an eye toward keeping something in, rather than keeping anyone out.

A tiny garrison of human soldiers remained at the walls, comprised mostly of the walking wounded remnants of the army. One had a horn; he raised it to his lips as soon as he spotted the unfamiliar warriors, only to die with an arrow in his lungs. Eric rushed forward to close the distance between himself and the rest, sword and shield at the ready, while
golden bolts of force sailed over his head to thin out his opposition. Fallon added her arrows to Amanda’s barrage. By the time Eric vaulted up the temple steps, only two wounded soldiers remained. Both immediately threw down their weapons, knelt and raised their hands in surrender.

“Start talking,” Eric demanded with a growl. “What’s going on in there?”

One of the men swallowed hard and looked away, refusing to take surrender to the point of betrayal. The other, battered and wide-eyed, was not so firm. “Bel-Danab and his apprentice work to open a great seal in the floor with their sorcery!”

“How many soldiers remain?”

“But a handful,” the man said. “We died in droves. Bel-Danab pushed us on until the serpent men came in fewer numbers. Men say he can devastate armies, and I have seen now that he can. Yet he hardly took part when he would have saved lives. And then he sent more inside to die from traps and mystic wards that protected the entrance! It’s as if he
wanted
to spend most of our lives on this!”

“Quit whining, you fool,” snapped the other man
, wincing in pain from the arrows embedded in him. “It is our duty to die in Set’s service.”

Eric
gestured to the arrow sticking out of his knee. “Bro, chill. You still got a career as a town guard ahead of you.” He put his foot on the defiant mercenary’s shoulder and shoved him onto his back. Then he returned to the remaining captive. “You need a new boss,” he said as Fallon and Amanda came to his side.

“I do,” the man nodded with a whimper. “I truly do.”

“What else can you tell me?”

“I only went a short distance inside,” the man said. “All I can tell you is that the statues inside depict a great reptile, but it is not the image of Set. It is not Set at all. The serpent within has legs and a great body, and...and wings. The priests who survived the battle called it blasphemy,
claiming the temple is no home to the god at all. Bel-Danab destroyed them for their protests.”

“Alright,” Eric snarled. “Get the hell out of here. Find a new line of work and a new god.”

The demoralized soldier didn’t need to be told twice. He scrambled away from Eric, slowing as he ran only to half-bow before Amanda and Fallon and then never looked back.

“You hear all that?” he asked.

“We did,” Fallon nodded. “I’ll take the lead. You two follow, quietly as you can. Steel does not often count for much against sorcery, but surprise may make the difference.”

The
y had little else to say. Fallon crept inside the tunnel with Eric and Amanda following not far behind. Lanterns and discarded torches gave off enough light to see by, while providing plenty of shadows to aid in stealth. As the soldier had warned, the depictions of Set all over the outside of the tunnel were replaced inside by carvings and statues of dragons. Fallon spared hardly a glance at the foreboding artwork, nor the burnt and battered corpses of soldiers strewn throughout the hall, but her companions shared a troubled look as they moved.

A second set of great bronze double doors awaited them, once barred but now opened in the same fashion as the first. Weird green lights flashed from within. Two deep voices carried from beyond the doors, chanting in an odd cadence and tone. Despite his fluency with
so many languages, Eric couldn’t understand any of it. Amanda was more familiar with the world’s ancient lore; she knew these were not words so much as invocations of names of old, forgotten powers.

Fallon set her bow and arrows down in front of the entrance. She looked back to the others, holding up two fingers and then pointing to either side of the doors. She gestured for Eric to come up behind her. He put a hand on Amanda’s shoulder, then silently moved forward.

She watched the two slip in past the doors. For a moment that stretched all too long, Amanda waited, wondering what she was supposed to do. Then she saw Eric reappear and wave to her with an arm covered in blood. Amanda rushed forward, finding Eric unharmed with two dead soldiers at his feet on a round walkway over a huge pit. To her right, Fallon was already moving off along the walkway in the other direction, leaving another two dead men behind.

The chamber was
shaped in a huge, wide circle surrounded by a broad walkway. Several staircases descended from compass points on the walkway down to the center of the room. The heart of the room was a flat stone floor, devoid of furnishings or statuary. Runes carved in spiral patterns covered the heart of the circle, all pulsating in the same green light that Amanda and Eric had first seen in her doorway in Seattle.

The only structures in the pit were a pair of altars on opposite sides of the great circle. Atop one stood Bel-Danab, flanked by a pair of
warriors, wielding his staff and chanting steadily. Atop the other was Randast, wearing green robes and a golden skullcap. He, too, was guarded by two men.

Amanda looked on with a pit in her stomach. She thought of the vast gap in knowledge and power between herself and these two
wizards. Then she saw Fallon crawling low along the walkway, getting into position to strike somehow at Randast. It was too late to back off now.

“Your slumber ends, ancient one,” Bel-Danab
bellowed. His words should have been alien, but once more Yaol’s linguistic enchantment made it easy for Amanda and Eric to understand. “We come to bring you out of your prison. We come to call upon your power. We bring gifts. We bring the blood price.”

At that, Bel-Danab’s gaze lifted from the glowing runes on the floor to Randast. The apprentice
gestured to his pair of guards. “Fetch the virgins from above,” he beckoned. The men bowed in turn, then moved off to hustle up the stairs. Randast lifted his arms again, a glowing orb in one hand and a curved dagger in the other. He resumed the chant while Bel-Danab continued on with a mixture of flattery and vague, expectant declarations of sharing power.

Amanda and Eric stayed silent until the two soldiers were up the platform and on their way out of the chamber. “Focus on the wizards,” Amanda advised Eric with a whisper. She pulled out her wand, trying not to let her fingers shake. “Those guards are probably his best men, but if either one of the casters gets off a spell, we could be totally fucked.”

“Rule Number One,” Eric nodded.

“
Take out the mages first,” Amanda concurred grimly. “Hey,” she said, catching his glance. She gave him an apologetic look. “Thanks for walking me home.”

He took in a long, steadying breath. “What are friends for?”

“Right. Okay. So do we have some cue or a go sign?”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, they saw Fallon leap off the platform behind Randast with her sword held above her head.
Her blade struck his skullcap, resulting in a flash of magical light. The enchantment saved him from the worst of the blow, but even that could not keep him from being knocked off his feet by the weight of Fallon’s body.

She
, too, tumbled to the floor, but forced herself upright in a flash. “Wizards,” the barbarian spat, and with a leap she brought her sword down on him again in a furious chop.  Her blade hacked into his shoulder with all her might, shearing the man’s right arm clean off. Randast howled in shock and agony.

Bel-Danab
reacted with sharp instincts. As his apprentice fell from an attack from above and behind, he spun around, expecting the same. He was absolutely correct in his judgment, turning just in time to dive forward in avoidance of the green blast of acid that streamed from Amanda’s empty hand. His bodyguards weren’t so lucky; both of them were caught by the resultant splash when the stream hit the altar. Neither fell, but both lurched away in pain.

Following his lover’s example, Eric dove off the ledge. Bel-Danab was already reaching out his hand with some sort of spell.
Having seen the results of Fallon’s first sword stroke, though, Eric led with his shield instead of his blade. He struck against the sorcerer with brutal force, driving him to the ground and disrupting his spell. Though Eric rolled with the impact, he didn’t come away unhurt or unshaken. He forced himself to think past the pain, rising as fast as he could.

Then he found himself floating up off of his feet. Eric’s eyes went wide in sudden dread as he saw Bel-Danab raise his glowing hand in time with Eric’s ascent, only to yelp when Bel-Danab turned his hand and slammed it down on the floor. Eric’s body followed the same action, smashing down hard against the stone tiles.

Amanda threw another spell, trying this time with the first one she’d used against Yaol. She was more accurate with this one than with the acid. Green mist escaped from Bel-Danab’s mouth and nostrils, causing him to shudder and twitch. His strength and concentration broken, Bel-Danab could no longer hold his spell over Eric. The younger man escaped Bel-Danab’s sorcerous grasp before he could be lifted up again, but he was still left winded and thoroughly battered on his back.

A
cross the chamber, Fallon was blasted off her feet as her wounded foe lashed out with raw magical force. She sprung up again with her sword at the ready. Then she winced in pain; she’d come down hard on one ankle in her landing and found now that there was more to worry about with it than just severe discomfort. Her opponent looked far worse for wear, though. Randast lay sprawled against the altar with the tattered remains of his sleeve hanging limply over a bloody shoulder without an arm. He gasped for breath with wild eyes, but focused past the pain and recovered his wits much faster than Fallon or anyone could have expected.