Sac'a'rith (31 page)

The pyromancer danced around, dodging and using his staff to block the fireballs. He was occupied trying to avoid the danger and could not cast a counter-spell. It went well for him until he failed to block one fireball which slammed into his shoulder, breaking his concentration and dance pattern. As he stumbled back, another struck him and he fell hard on his back.

He rolled and used his staff to regain his feet, but the challenger was on him before he could recover. The challenger swung his staff heavily, hitting the pyromancer squarely on the temple. There was a sickening thud as the blow connected and the pyromancer dropped, dead before he reached the ground.

“I have defeated this contender to my title with his own spell line. My claim stands uncontested,” said the challenger as he faced the five remaining magi. “Does anyone else dare to contest it?”

The five magi looked to the body of the skull-faced pyromancer and watched it turn to dust and blow away in the breeze. The challenger raised his hands as if to cast, and all the magi dropped to one knee and bowed their heads.

“No, Grandmaster,” they replied.

The binding ceremony, as Raquel called it, took the rest of the morning and left me quite drained. I sat down and leaned back against the ancient tree with my new staff across my lap. Shira had climbed up into the tree and was sitting on a branch above my head. Raquel had moved a little distance away from us, lost in thought.

“Oh, Zah’rak, this place is so beautiful,” commented Shira.

“Yeah,” I said absent-mindedly. I was chewing on some beef jerky and wondering about Raquel. Something she’d said earlier had concerned me; I feared she might be dying, but she refused to talk about the curse or her health.

“Can I redesign hydroponics to be more like this and less modern?” she asked.

“What?” I asked, realizing she was looking for a response. I hadn’t been paying attention, just enjoying the environment.

“Oh, I was just thinking that, with some work, we could make our hydroponics bay more like this forest,” she said.

I looked up at her in amusement. “And how do you propose to achieve that?”

“We can start by gathering some soil and plants from this world to grow in the labs. Right now the bay is so sterile with vast tanks of oxygen scrubbing plants; it just seems wrong,” she said.

I stood and stretched. “Take plants from here? How will you grow them and care for them? They’ve not been bred for life in space like everything we have now.”

“Oh, we can figure something out, I’m sure. The plants that were brought along with the first space travelers wouldn’t have been bred for space either,” she said.

I doubted that was true, but since that had been thousands of years ago there was no way to know for sure. “Well, if you want to give it a shot, I don’t suppose it would do any harm.”

Raquel came over and looked up. “Shira, can you gate us to the fortress, please?”

“Sure!” she said and leapt from the branch she had been sitting on. It was too high for a safe jump but she slowed her fall, allowing her to touch the ground lightly. It was an advantage of being able to fly. I had to admit I was a little jealous of that power.

Shira cast her gate and we went through it, coming out in the center of the castle ruins. The place was no longer as we’d left it.

“What happened?” called out Raquel in shock. She teleported up onto a wall, one that hadn’t existed the last time we were here.

Shira and I quickly joined her on the wall as she jogged along the top of it. She stopped when we got to the gatehouse, another new addition since the last time we’d been here.

“How is this possible?” asked Raquel.

I knelt and placed my bare hand on the wall. I could feel massive energy there, not unlike what I’d felt in the trees. “The wall is alive and growing!”

Shock crossed Raquel’s face. “But how? This place was on the verge of death when we last visited!”

Shira was examining the gate, which was a massive structure in its own right. The gatehouse was at least ten meters high and twice that in thickness. There were two gates which created a passage not unlike an airlock. Both doors were currently closed and there was a pile of bones scattered around the path to the gate, which I judged to be fallen skeletal warriors who had launched a failed attack on the fortress.

“Where are the bodies?” asked Shira.

“What?” I asked.

“The bodies of the Nightwalkers you killed: where are they?” she asked.

Outside the walls of the fortress there were bodies strewn everywhere, but there were none inside; no sign at all of the battle in which we had fought for Raquel’s life. Even the burnt section of wall had
gone or
perhaps been repaired and now formed part of the exterior wall. I tried to remember where it had been, but too many landmarks had changed and I was lost.

“On guard!” called out Raquel, and I looked up to see massive skeletal beasts flying overhead.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Dragons, or rather they used to be dragons; now they’re foul undead creatures, perhaps some of the most dangerous creatures in existence,” she said.

Shira swallowed hard. “They don’t even fear the sun.”

I watched as they circled over us. There were three of them, watching but making no move. “Will they attack?”

“No, we’re safe for now, I think. The fortress has regained too much of its power. They might be able to break through, but I think the protection will hold,” she said. She didn’t sound as confident as usual.

“Might? You think?” I asked. That didn’t hold out a great deal of comfort. I watched them as they circled and wondered what held them aloft. There were no visible signs of propulsion, and the skeletal wings surely couldn’t provide much lift.

“Let’s see what else has changed,” she said and hopped off the great wall, landing lightly on her feet thirty meters below.

Shira followed her jump but I didn’t risk it; instead, I teleported to the ground. I assumed they were using telekinesis to slow their fall, and I supposed I could do the same but I was more comfortable with teleporting. It seemed too much like tempting fate just to jump and hope for the best.

“It’s probably best if we stay inside the new wall,” said Raquel.

We explored the ruins but found little of interest. Grass and other plant life had started to come back, giving the fortress a more pleasant feel. Some of the rock faces had vines growing up them and there were plenty of traces of small animals.

We moved towards the centermost pillar where we had fought the wraiths. The exterior appearance was unchanged, but I could feel a fountain of power erupting from it and feeding the other rocks in the area.

The undead dragons continued to watch from above. They were too high up for me to get an accurate idea of their size, but I estimated them to be at least thirty meters long. They had no flesh, but their eyes glowed a malevolent red.

“When the fortress was young, this was a great central tower from which its defense could be coordinated. It was the command center for the Sac’a’rith,” said Raquel.

“I think it’s powering the regrowth in some manner. Power is flowing from it through the ground and into the wall,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” said Raquel. She placed her hand on the pillar and looked around again in obvious disbelief. “At the height of its power the fortress could repair itself, but only under guidance; now it’s far from the height of its power and no one is here to guide it. This should not be possible.”

“Perhaps I awoke the fortress somehow with my staff?” asked Shira.

“Maybe; but even if you did, who’s guiding the reconstruction?” she asked.

“That I don’t know,” said Shira.

“And who is defending the castle?” I asked. “Those bodies and bones we saw by the gate seem to indicate some kind of battle.”

We wandered around some more but didn’t find any more clues. Late in the afternoon, we took a break from our exploring to discuss the situation.

“Before this castle fell, there were three walls. The one that’s growing out there now is the innermost,” said Raquel. She took up a stick and drew a map of the castle in the soil. “Each of the three gatehouses was placed a little further around the perimeter than the previous one, in order to slow any rush into the fortress. That also made it difficult to get supplies in and out.”

She continued drawing until she had completed a map of the entire fortress. “There, that’s what used to be here. I remember running along the walls and around my mother’s garden as a child, along with many more memories.”

“I imagine that to you it only seems like a couple of decades since you were last here?” I said.

“Yes. I don’t think this design would work as well with modern war machines,” she mused.

She had a point. In the last ten thousand years, military tech had moved on. “True. We’d want some sort of anti-aircraft defense, perhaps on these towers,” I suggested.

Together the three of us modified the map of the fortress, adding modern defenses, launch pads, food production and underground sections. It was an enjoyable exercise, but when we’d finished nightfall was fast approaching.

“Shira should gate us back soon before we lose all the
light,” said Raquel.

“It’s a shame we can’t take a picture of this plan,” I remarked.

“We could leave it for whoever is rebuilding this place,” said Shira with a grin. “Maybe they’ll get the hint.”

Raquel nodded in bemusement. “Sure, why not?”

Shira opened a gate back to the other gate to take us home. On the other side, she said, “We have around an hour of light left. I want to collect some soil and plant samples.”

“How much?” I asked as Raquel activated the gate.

“As much as we can take in an hour,” she said.

Raquel wasn’t happy with that idea but I wanted to oblige Shira so, before Raquel could object, I took charge. I told Raquel to stand guard on the forest side of the gate and got Ragnar to help on the Night Wisp side. Shira pointed out what she wanted, I lugged it to the gate and passed it through to Ragnar, who placed it out in the corridor. From there, Marcus and Purwryn brought it to hydroponics. Through this teamwork we were able to acquire many different kinds of plants and buckets of soil from the planet.

As night fell, I ended the operation and everyone returned to the Night Wisp.

The fleet had finally arrived and we were preparing to jump, so I joined my crew on the bridge. When I arrived I found Marcus manning our weapons, Purwryn in the pilot’s seat and Ragnar handling communications and the science station. Raquel was in the captain’s chair but vacated it when I arrived.

“Zah’rak, the fleet is ready when we are,” said Ragnar.

“Okay. Lock in but don’t engage our jump drive. The fleet is big enough to cover us, and I want to be able to jump out if need be,” I said.

Something was really bothering me about this mission. I couldn’t place my claw on it, but I had a really bad feeling about it. I had learned long ago to trust my feelings when they spoke this loudly, but in this case I didn’t know what I could do differently. We’d just have to be careful.

“We are locked into their graviton field. We’ll be ju… ” Ragnar started to say, but the last of his sentence was cut off as the comforting azure of jump space wrapped around us. I liked the feeling and wished the transit there were longer. It was nice to relax in its embrace with nothing to worry about.

I sighed and basked in the simple comfort until we dropped back into normal space. Through the post-jump haze I could hear alarms going off and had a vague sense of Raquel taking command; by the time I’d recovered, she’d broken away from the fleet and activated all our defense systems.

I gave my head a good shake, trying to clear the cobwebs. “Report!”

“It’s a trap,” she said. “A Cyborg fleet has engaged the Phareons. I have us in a sensor shadow for now, but our cover won’t hold.”

“What! Why?” I demanded.

“No idea,” she said.

My head was finally clear enough to process what was going on, and I realized that Raquel had acted long before any of the rest of us could respond. When we weren’t in the middle of a battle, I’d have to ask her how she did that.

“What’s the status of the fleet?” I asked.

“Their computers took over post-jump, so they’re already fully engaged. Probably they’re only now realizing the situation, just as we are,” said Ragnar.

Raquel had put tactical up on the main screen, and I could see that the Phareon fleet was outnumbered and the Cyborg fleet was moving quickly to secure its advantage. The fight wouldn’t go well, and I expected a swift victory for the Cyborgs.

“Can we jump out?” I asked.

“The Cyborg fleet has some kind of jamming tech,” said Purwryn. “I’ve never seen its like, but somehow it’s blasting out gravitons; as long as we’re in its field, the jump drive is useless.”

I looked at Raquel and knew how she felt about this. “Okay, start prioritizing targets. Primary targets are whatever is jamming the jump drives. Someone call Crivreen and tell him to get ready for emergency repairs.”

“Cyborg fighters incoming!” called out Ragnar.

“Taking evasive action!” shouted Purwryn.

The Night Wisp lurched and turned, desperately trying to dodge the incoming attackers.

“Bring us about!” I called out. “Engines to full, target control to maximum rate of fire. Charge their squad, all guns firing!” It was a move born of panic, but I could not see what else to do.

Purwryn brought us about as Marcus’ hands blurred across his command console. The Cyborgs hesitated at our approach, and that was all the time the Night Wisp needed with its recently-upgraded weapons. We passed through the heart of the squad, wreaking devastation all around us.

“Come about for another pass,” I said. I doubted it would work a second time, but I had to do something.

“The Cyborgs are adapting. They’re scattering into groups of two,” said Marcus.

Not good,
I thought to myself. “Pick the closest pair and destroy them. Ragnar, find us a way out of this jamming field.”