Days of High Adventure (8 page)

“Bel-Danab’s plans must not be allowed to culminate. When he returns, he will likely rush to finish them. Until that time, you must hide. Without the resources of this tower, his ability to find you will be limited, yet he is still a powerful sorcerer and the chosen servant of a god.”

Amanda grimaced. She had hoped knocking out the tower would be enough. In hindsight, she realized that was foolish. “How do I hide from him, then?”

“The only thing that can shield you from the eyes of a god is another god,” the water explained. “Seek refuge in the temple of Deyallah, the harvest goddess.”

“Won’t there be a price for that?”

“Nothing is ever free,” the water answered. “Yet you have already found one ally whose price was in your own interests. Even some of the gods of this age can be dealt with thusly.”

Amanda nodded. She looked out over the city, then over the tower, making sure she had her directions straight. “Thank you,” she said.

Nothing further came from the bowl. She heard only the whistle of the wind.

For all the lightning and flame of her battle with Yaol, her next step
offered the truest test of her power and confidence. The spell was short and simple, yet precise. The cost of failure was dire. Amanda breathed in deeply. She reminded herself that screwing up anything else along her way here would have cost her life just the same. Tracing a simple pattern in the air, Amanda let out her breath, inhaled again, and stepped over the parapet into the night air.

Her heart was in her throat for the first moment of her descent, but then her spirits soared. She fell, but only slowly, buoyed along by the wind. To be sure, she cou
ldn’t fly, but she fell at the speed of a casual walk.

Laughing for the first time in weeks, Amanda
made an effort at steering herself. She had little control, but she managed to at least turn to let the wind blow her further away from the tower. She came to land well outside the walls, finding herself on the roof of a two-story building nearby.

She had a good view of the window to Yaol’s laboratory, high above her
at a point halfway up the tower. Taking another deep breath, Amanda pulled the haversack down from her shoulder, drew from it a wand different from the one she’d used in her fight, and pointed it toward the window. She steadied her aim and recited the words to the spell over and over again. Unlike her fall, she had more than one shot at this, but it was a long shot just the same.

Amanda barked the key word of invocation. A
streak of lightning burst from the wand up to the tower, striking against the stone near the window. She cast again, coming closer. A third attempt struck a bit high.

She heard shouts from the street below. Her activity
naturally caught the attention of the many people out late that night. Amanda put it out of her head. Wizardry required nothing if not concentration. Once more, she fired.

Her
blast struck home, smashing into the rack of alchemical solutions and concoctions she had arrayed near the window. Most were dangerous enough in and of themselves. Many of them were never meant to be mixed, let alone set off together.

The explosion pulverized great stone blocks from above and below the window and blasted loose still many more. Even from her spot many stories down, Amanda felt the shockwave as it passed with a thunderous boom that was heard for miles. She was forced to look away for a moment, closing her eyes, but when she looked back she saw that the damage was even more
dramatic than she expected. Shouts and cries of terror erupted all around. Amanda saw the guards at the wall wisely fling open the gate to save themselves. Everyone from Bel-Danab and Randast’s concubines to the lowliest slaves ran for their lives.

Amanda felt a sharp pang of relief at that. It was no less than she expected, but just the same she had worried. Looking back up as more and more debris fell from the tower, Amanda felt herself taking instinctive steps backward along her rooftop. The hole she had made was huge. Further explosions ripped through the tower as more of Yaol’s raw materials reacted. In a room near Yaol’s laboratory were his acid vats, now surely overturned and spilling everywhere.

Loud, frightening cracking sounds split the air. An awful grinding followed. The tower buckled around the gaping hole at its center. Amanda’s heart raced as the top of the structure began to collapse under its own weight. The impact of so much mass falling from above was too much for the floors and walls below. Like so many others in the city that night, Amanda watched in awe as the Tower of Bel-Danab came crashing down within the high walls that marked the sorcerer’s territory.

The cloud of dust created
such destruction was predictably immense. Amanda turned away, pulling up the hood of her cloak as she fled. She needed to take advantage of the chaos and all the eyes focused on the massive distraction.

Amanda hopped down
from her perch onto the roof of the next building over, fled across it and climbed up to the next. Eventually she found a place to climb down and shadows in which to hide. While others ran to see what was going on, Amanda moved further away, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the disaster she caused. She slipped into dark, empty streets, hiding under the hood of her cloak.

She found the temple shortly before dawn. Torches mounted to either side illuminated the steps from the street to the tall pillars marking the temple entrance.
With her head still enshrouded by the hood of her cloak, Amanda walked up the steps to the small shrine within the pillars and knelt. The shrine itself was a simple white lion statue under a white marble arch. Upon the lion sat a dusky-hued woman wearing little more than jewelry and beads who watched serenely until Amanda bowed her head.

“What brings you to
Deyallah, child?” the woman asked. She was herself hardly older than Amanda, but she spoke with self-assured elegance.

“I seek refuge,” Amanda said. “I was abducted from home and taken here against my will. I escaped, but they hunt for me. I need a place to hide.”

“Refuge we may grant,” the woman said, “for Deyallah values freedom. Yet hiding is not the way of Deyallah, or her daughters. We practice our faith openly. We abhor shame.”

“
Shame doesn’t drive me to hide,” Amanda replied. “I hide from danger.”

The
other woman nodded. She turned to ring a small bell sitting beside her. A minute later, two more women emerged. They looked about Amanda’s age. They were almost as lovely as the woman sitting in the shrine, with similarly dark complexions and similarly scant clothing.

“Refuge is granted,” said the woman on the lion, “until the dawn. The high priestess will speak with you then. Hide nothing from her, nor from yourself. Leave behind both shame and fear upon these steps.”

Amanda bowed again, not really knowing the etiquette for this, and followed the other women inside.

***

“Left. Left. Up again. Faster. Remember your feet. Trust your instincts. Faster—no! Too slow,” Fallon snapped. She ducked in under the swing of Eric’s cloth-wrapped stick, sliding hers across his right thigh at the hip and then his left just over the knee in a single slash.

“That would cripple a man,” Fallon said, rising again. Their only light in the cave
came from a small lantern, making it hard for Eric to make out the expression on her face. Her voice didn’t convey disdain, but there was no approval in it, either. He wished he could make out her eyes.

They slipped into the abandoned shaft a few hours before dawn every night to practice, ever since that first rainy night. They practiced with simple sticks and bare hands, sparring until the oil ran out in the lantern, as was happening just now. The flicker of the lantern’s light warned them that it was time to return to the surface, and then to another day’s toil in a different cavern.

Fallon cast her sparring stick aside. “Let’s go,” she grunted before walking out.

Eric dropped his stick and followed. They had only a short distance to cover, then out into the camp, creeping past guards and overseers as they went. Before he met Fallon, Eric had never thought himself particularly sneaky. It turned out that he only needed a little coaching from her. After that, stealth seemed to come naturally.

Already up before the dawn, Eric and Fallon were the first to grab at the bread and cold meat cast out to the slaves as they awoke all over the camp. They lingered briefly on the surface, watching the guards for any changes in their routines before inevitably returning to the underground dig.

“More guards now,” Fallon noted as they headed down the main tunnel. “And the priests of Set have looked troubled for the past few days. Something must have happened outside the camp to put them on edge. They speak of some disaster.”

“Must be outside the camp,” Eric nodded in agreement. His shoes had finally fallen apart under the wear and tear of the tunnels, forcing him to resort to crude sandals. He hoped his cut-offs would continue to hold up. The loincloth look didn’t do much for him. “They were pretty pleased up until a couple days ago.”

“
The dig has almost breached the old temple,” Fallon shrugged. “Could get inside any day now.”

“Fallon,” Eric
ventured, having worked up the courage for his question over the last couple of nights. “Why are you still here?”

“Hm?”

“You could slip out of here whenever you want. You said so before, and by now I completely believe it. Why are you still here?”

Fallon look
ed at him like it was a silly question. “Because bringing you with me would slow me down,” she said. “I could get away on my own, yes, but we could not escape all these guards and cover all this distance together. Your skills improve, but you are not ready for such a challenge. We need a better opportunity than I have seen thus far.”

“But that’s what I mean,” Eric pressed, stopping in his tracks. “Is it really worth all this bullshit just to stay here with me?”

The barbarian woman’s brow furrowed deeper. “Yes.”

Eric blinked. “Why?”

“You asked me to help you.”

“I’m grateful. I’m really grateful. I just...I keep thinking of how much I owe you and how much happier you’d be to get out of here, and I can’t understand why you stay for just me.”

Her mouth turned into a frown. “I left the North alone, and have been mostly alone for all the years since. Hardly any man has looked at me without either disdain or fear until I met you. And you may be from some soft world, but you are neither cowardly nor weak. Perhaps I expect much of others, but I will not lower myself to expect less. Friends have always been the hardest of treasures to find.” She paused and added, almost as an afterthought, “And I like your face.”

Eric was stunned. Guilt had been eating at him for the last few days. He
wanted to encourage Fallon to move on, but her response floored him.

“You there!” growled Tronus. He came stomping down the tunnel from the entrance, flanked by a pair of guards. “Get down there and get to work. This isn’t a tavern!”

Fallon didn’t bother to look at the overseer. Her gaze was still on Eric. “Although my patience with this place does wear thin,” she added.

Grinning with her, Eric turned and headed the rest of the way to the main dig site. They arrived to find the main bulk of the slave labor force already at work in what was now a huge, broad cavern. Space had been cleared out all around the ancient temple, as Set’s priests demanded full access to every rune on every wall before continuing. Further cave-ins had occurred, freeing space between the temple’s roof and the ceiling of the cave and removing the need for at least some of the harsher digging, though at the cost of other slave lives.

Light was now plentiful in the cavern. Holes had been bored from up above to provide bright shafts of daylight as well as ventilation. Ropes dangled from each hole to enable slaves up above to lower buckets of water without having to traverse the tunnels. Supervision increased, too. Scattered around the cavern were priests of Set studying all of the ruins in detail, along with guards and overseers to keep the work force in line.

A scream split the cavern air as Eric and Fallon arrived, resounding clearly from within the temple’s outer walls despite the noise of the ongoing dig.
Given the complete lack of safety measures, screams of pain from accidents were commonplace; screams of terror like this one were another thing entirely. They heard another, and then a third, and then a rush of cries as slaves ran from the ruined gate through the temple’s outer walls. Shouts of panic quickly spread.

Fallon gripped Eric’s shoulder. “
Some foul magic is at work here,” she growled. “I knew these fools would unleash something better left buried.”

Within heartbeats, Fallon was proven right. As guards rushed in to control the crowd and slaves fought to get out, the pair saw one last man emerge from the temple walls. Clinging to his back was another man, or something close to it
—except for the green, scaly skin and the snakelike head atop its thick, long neck. It reared back with its fanged mouth open wide before clamping down on the slave’s neck with a fatal bite.

Even as the man staggered and fell, more snake men appeared. They bore spears and bows, with shields covered with black leather and swords fashioned from some ancient creature’s bones.
Dozens of the snake-men rushed out, then dozens more, all of them falling upon their human prey without mercy.