Return To Sky Raven (Book 2) (2 page)

“How are they doing?”

She exhaled heavily and pulled her robes more tightly around her for warmth. “No one else is going to die. We lost a few already to ghoul bites that we didn’t identify right away and a couple that were just too injured to save. I’ve never seen human flesh corrupt and fester so fast; these bites and scratches are almost like a deadly beast in themselves. Right now, we’re just trying to close up the last of the open wounds so we don’t get cross-contamination from these conditions; many of them will be scarred though. It got so bad at the end we had to amputate to save some of the kids. I feel worse for the guards and staff who came through though. A one-legged wizard on a crutch is still a wizard and is valuable to society, but for some of these people, the loss of an arm or leg means everything to them.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told you the other twenty times you asked tonight…no.” She groaned, running a hand through her hair. “Really, I appreciate it, but this is one instance where your enchanter spells don’t cut it. We just need to get through the night and pray that things get better.” She squared around and looked me in the eye. “Alex, you realize that you enchanters are now the de facto leaders of this mess, right? We badly need shelter, food and security for these wounded or we’re going to have more losses.” She sighed and attempted to wrap herself tighter yet in her robes. “But I can see that you can’t magically produce all that on this rock of a mountain, so we’re going to have to travel…somewhere.”

“If we give you the rest of today to work and rest, would we be able to move them tomorrow morning?”

“If we can utilize the donkey carts that came through and if we can get enough food to get some of our strength back, yes, it’s possible. But the day after is probably more realistic. It’s a good thing we dragged a couple of water wizards along with us, at least we can get fresh water here. Thank you for taking your warhorse down and snagging some dead trees; we can use the firewood to keep the wounded more comfortable,” she said, teetering shakily where she sat.

“Alera, you need to eat and sleep.”

I could see fear and revulsion in her eyes. “I don’t think I can, Alex. Blood and gore I’m trained to handle, but these undead are just so wrong! Such a perversion of life; they make me soul sick just looking at them…I don’t understand how you enchanters can handle seeing what you’ve seen without going crazy.” She was right in a way, we were the only ones who didn’t seem to be overly affected by the sight of the undead. Facing them just made me mad, not really scared. Oh well, something to ponder when life wasn’t so crazy.

I crouched down, looked her in the eyes and told her, “Things will get better.” Then I placed my hand on her shoulder and placed the enchantment to make her sleep, catching her easily as she slumped over. I got up and gently straightened her out on the cot. Nia dragged a blanket over from somewhere and helped me tuck the exhausted healer in, brushing the hair off her face. Looking down at her childlike sleeping form, I felt a wave of affection for her, not in the physical attraction sense, but more just knowing what a good, kind, and caring person she was, someone who will always be there for others. I was honored to call her a friend.

Nia flittered up to my shoulder and watched her for a moment as well, picking up on my thoughts as she simply commented, “Heart of a paladin.” I agreed.

Nia and I continued around and put the remaining four healers in the area down for naps as well. Grabbing a couple of Maya’s guards, who were in far better shape than the wizards and staff - probably due to the ability of most soldiers to sleep anywhere, anytime when the opportunity is available - I instructed them to watch over the wounded and only wake a healer if it appeared someone was in real distress.

I finally found Rosa and Maya talking with the captain as they looked over a map laid out on a large flat rock. They seemed to be trying to figure out where in the world we were.

Captain Jarsin threw his arms in the air. “We’re on a bloody mountain! There can’t be that many of them on that map; this shouldn’t be that hard. And besides, you built this portal, don’t you know where the hell it comes out?”

The twins fidgeted uncomfortably in their enchanter staff robes as they stood behind Maya waiting for orders or possibly to see if all this yelling was going to turn into violence. Rosa gave me a nod from the other side of the rock before addressing the captain. “The problem, Captain, isn’t that there are a lot of mountains on this map but the fact that there are almost none on these maps. This is the most up-to-date map we had at the academy, but it only has details in the land of the three kingdoms and the area surrounding the academy. As far as where the portal was designed to take us…well, this isn’t it! But we’ll have to make do.”

The captain’s mouth dropped open and he was boiling with rage. He wasn’t really mad at us, though, but at the loss of almost all his men. The academy had a guard force of just under a thousand but fewer than sixty made it through the portal in time, and three were wounded so badly that the healers couldn’t save them. I think we were all feeling the weight of the world on our shoulders at that point.

Corporal Higs jogged over and nodded to me, saluted Maya, the captain, and Rosa. “Headmaster, we finished taking inventory of the emergency boxes that made it. Out of the twelve total, six were filled with food, three with clothing, one with general materials like rope, nails, etc., one with tents, and the last one is filled with shovels, rakes and picks.” Rosa winced at the totals and sighed. “I would have liked to have at least one box with travel gear and equipment, as well as one with weapons, but we will at least survive with what we have.” Higs raised a finger, “Headmaster Rosa, we also managed to bring along three donkey carts filled with hay, each with two donkeys to a team.” He grinned. “Someone had just left them loaded, hitched, and tethered right next to the portal, so when we started shooing people through the portal, we brought them along as well.”

“Good, they can help haul the heavier gear and possibly some of the wounded, too. Good job, Corporal,” Rosa purred. “How about horses?”

“No, Ma’am, with the exception of Mistress Maya’s and Sir Alex’s warhorses. But no real surprise there, those two are just uncanny. All the other animals went uncontrollably wild, crazy really, at the sight of the undead. We were lucky the donkeys were too stupid to notice.”

“Alright, Corporal; now the difficult question. How…many made it?”

His face fell. “We got most of the healers out so we have fifty-two of them as well as most of the earth wizards and druids counting at forty-five. There are a few of the others; I counted four wind wizards and six water wizards. But they are all just students; none of the teachers or graduates made it out of Central. I also counted 106 support staff, including maids, cooks and even a few stable boys. The guard was hit the hardest, there are only fifty-three of us, and four of them will never be able to lift a sword again.”

Both the corporal and the captain cringed at that last part, and I could read Maya’s sorrow in her posture; she had personally trained many of those troops. Rosa moved on quickly, doing her best to keep their minds busy with details. “So about two hundred fifty six of us, then.”

The captain spoke up, “How are we going to feed that many people with only six boxes of food? And you wizards eat a ton of food in the first place.”

“Each of those boxes contains enough food to feed two hundred wizards for a day and we have six of them. Not only that, but every night they refill themselves and they will do so one hundred times. So even if we eat full meals, we still have enough food for over a year. That’s the good news. The bad news is they are basic iron ration packs; crackers, salt pork, bacon, cornmeal, and flour. We won’t starve but it’s going to get monotonous.

A small amount of stress faded from his face, but not nearly all of it. “Well, that’s a relief, but we still have no idea where in the world we are.”

Nia surprised me by jumping off my shoulder and landing on the map. “I know where we are!” We all stared at her in surprise. She sailed straight up into the air and pointed at the lake down the mountain. “We pixies call that Dragonfly Lake because of all the dragonflies, but humans call it Dashern Lake.” She zipped back and pointed to a spot deep in the black area of the map. “We’re about here.”

The black area means undead or goblin-controlled territory. Great, just what we needed. The captain said what we were all thinking. “We’re in the middle of the damn undead homeland! Could our lives get any worse?”

Nia smiled, showing her pointy teeth. “It's not so bad here; I lived in that forest for a time. We pixies travel a lot; in fact, it’s the time of year that we would normally be here.”

Maya was still wearing her full armor but, unlike me, she hadn’t taken her helmet off yet. “Why? What’s so important about this time of year?” Nia blushed and flew up and whispered in her helmet. “Oh…um, never mind. But why there? Don’t you have to deal with the undead?”

Nia flew back down to the map and shook her head. “Nope, something keeps them away; there are even humans who live downstream on the river that flows out of the lake because the undead won’t come within a mile of it, normally anyways.”

The captain snorted. “Are we really going to listen to what a pixie is saying…” He stopped talking when he noticed that every single one of us was glaring at him, even the corporal. “What?”

Higs spoke up first, “Sir, I would like to give you a solid piece of advice; don’t make fun of Nia, or any of them for that matter. I’ve seen Alex punch massive holes in the undead with only his hands; Maya’s armor seems to be alive sometimes, on top of her unmatched skill, and Nia is probably the strongest wizard we have ever had. And if they don’t take you down, I guarantee you that Mistress Dawn and Mistress Dusk will. All in all, sir, even at full strength, I don’t think the full city guard would last fifteen minutes against the enchanters.”

He didn’t seem to like the thought of that, but it shut him up. So I changed the subject. “So, we hide in the forest?”

“No, the pixies won’t like that. They might let us pass through though, “Nia said thoughtfully.

I sighed, “So we still don’t have a place to go?”

There was silence for a few seconds, then Rosa flinched like she had been stung by a bee. She reached into her pocket and handed me one of the letters from my parents. “I’ve held on to this for you. This has been very hot for a while now so you best take care of it before it bursts into flame…and tell them I’m sorry.”

I nodded and took the letter from her. Maya followed me over to another rock nearby as I put my foot up on it. Maya opened her faceplate, facing away from the camp, and wrapped her armored form around mine as we read the letter together.

With very little pause, words started streaming angrily across the page.
“ABOUT TIME! I was about to unleash the wrath of the heavens on you two!”
There was a brief pause and the writing style changed.
“What your mother was calmly trying to say is we’re glad you’re both alright. We were getting worried that we would have to break the tenets and come down there ourselves. But we were wrong, and with the way your armor performed and your fighting abilities, we really didn’t have to worry.”

“But why did the undead attack the academy?”

Nothing showed up on the page for a long time, long enough that Maya and I exchanged several concerned looks. Then more writing slowly appeared. “
‘In a time of darkness, when the undead outnumber the living, a Child of Light and a Child of Darkness will unite and fight against the great evil, driving it away. These heroes form the basis for the return of magic.’ Just so you know, I summed that up. The real prophecy script is over twenty feet tall, 3,456 hieroglyphs long and carved in basalt…boring as hell!”

We exchanged glances again as Maya asked, “So you believe that the Lifebane thinks that we are the ones in this prophecy? All those people died yesterday because of us?”

“No, we know you two are the ones; I recited and paraphrased the few lines that apply to the two of you. I am sorry that you have been labeled a Child of Darkness, Maya. We know that your heart is just as bright as Alex’s.”

She smiled a little, still confused. “Thank you…sir.”

“Someday, I hope you will call me Dad. The Lifebane would have attacked the school anyway, Maya. It has two of the things he hates most, magic users and people with the determination to stand in his way. If anything, you two coming together when you did probably made him rush his attack planning. Without that, he would have sprung a trap so deadly no one would have survived. But we need to get you guys off this mountain. Now we aren’t allowed to order the living so Winya, if you please?”

Maya yelped as her visor slammed down and her hand shot out to cover my face. But before I could even respond, or just use my mage sight to look around it, she dropped her hand.

“Winya, what was with that?” Maya almost shouted.

“
I’m sorry, but I swear that wasn’t me! I’m guessing your father made me do that so I was the only one who could read the letter.”

“I guess we should be used to it by now,” Maya grumbled.

“Winya, do you at least know where we need to go?” I asked.

“
Yes, and I feel like a fool for not noticing. We’re only two days hard march from Sky Raven Fortress!”

Maya and I looked at each other and she gave me a quick hug.

“The fortress from your story? That Sky Raven?” I said still trying to wrap my head around the whole situation. I mean, would it even be still standing?

“Alex, of course I haven’t seen it in four hundred years, but I’m pretty sure it will still be there. You both have to see the place; it’s almost impossible to describe ”
Winya beamed warmly across our link. A real fortress would be a major advantage to us. We proudly marched over to the others who were still arguing with Nia about the forest and the pixies in it. They must have noticed our approach and the smile on my face; Maya had her visor down again.