50
It had taken Linna and Akella almost two hours to reach the place where the mountain men had set their ambush for General Alric’s brigades. It took them a little more than half that time to get back.
When they’d started to flag, perhaps four miles into their frantic dash through the woods back towards Pellon, Linna had uncapped the waterskin of “poison” Brother Rennus had brewed and tentatively took a swallow. It tingled a little as it went down.
“What are you doing?” Akella had asked, eyes widening in alarm as she reached out to stop Linna.
“It’s the elixir,” Linna said. “I think.”
Akella frowned and looked at the waterskin. “Are you sure?”
Linna shrugged. “No. Though, now that I think on it, I’m sure… well, almost sure that Rennus was the one making it for the tribesmen in Bawold. It would make sense, right? Twelve years of war yet we’d never heard of such a potion used by the mountain men until a few months ago. Until Rennus was a few miles away from Bawold and had access to beastwalkers who could get it in and out of our camp without being noticed.”
“I thought Rennus was the oh-so-trustworthy head Brother.”
“I thought he was. But you were right all along.” Linna drank a little more of what she was guessing was elixir instead of poison.
Akella crossed her arms against her chest and watched, a mix of concern and triumph written across her face.
Linna waited for something to happen – a surge of strength or a sudden cramp that told her she’d ingested something her body would reject – but neither came.
Brother Rennus wouldn’t actually poison his allies, and Linna was certain now that was what the mountain men were to him. At worst, the concoction inside the waterskin was just flower-flavored water.
She drank more of it, emptying half the waterskin.
Akella held out a hand. “Give it to me.”
Linna handed it over, and the pirate drank the rest.
“We need to keep going,” Linna said.
That had been almost an hour ago. Within fifteen minutes of drinking the waterskin’s contents, they’d both felt amazing. More amazing than they’d ever felt in their life. Strength returned to their limbs. Linna’s lungs no longer burned from effort and winter air. She felt like she could do anything – sprint forever, leap over treetops, throw boulders five times her bodyweight.
No wonder the mountain men in Bawold had kept Third Division tied up for so long. All this time, she’d just assumed General Ambrose was an incompetent leader. That might still be true, but now Linna knew his losses were not entirely his fault.
Linna hoped they hadn’t had too much of the elixir. The waterskin she and Akella had just finished between them was supposed to be delivered into the hands of the three thousand or so mountain men in time for the ambush on General Alric. Hopefully the waterskin’s arrival from Linna was simply some kind of signal from Brother Rennus to the tribesmen and not actually meant for all three thousand of them. Because if it was, then she and Akella had just significantly overdosed.
But she would worry about that later. For now, Linna was strong enough to conquer three thousand mountain men by herself. And from the way Akella was striding along beside her, breaths no longer coming in ragged pants, she knew the pirate felt the same way.
“No,” Linna said aloud when she smelled the smoke drifting towards them from the direction of Pellon. “No no no no.” She picked up her pace.
“What?” Akella asked. Apparently the potion hadn’t strengthened the powers of her senses.
“Pellon,” Linna answered. “Pellon is burning.”
Akella increased her speed to run alongside Linna.
It felt like only seconds later that they were speeding through the burned-out village southeast of the city. The smoke was thick now, and Pellon glowed with fire on the horizon. Linna changed her trajectory slightly, angling for the river and away from the smoke carried in their direction by the east-to-west wind. She was heading towards the riverbank, where the culvert into the sewer tunnel was. If there was a battle inside Pellon, she wanted to avoid it. She wasn’t afraid of it – she wasn’t afraid of anything right now – but a battle might slow them down, and they needed to get to the Empress as fast as possible.
Linna practically dove into the sewer tunnel; Akella did the same. They traversed the narrow part of the tunnel on hands and knees, which had taken them at least fifteen minutes before, in what felt like two minutes. Then they were up on their feet again, hunched but running, splashing through the shallow water that covered the bottom of the tunnel as they ran uphill towards the castle.
They had no lantern this time, and there were times that they ran in pitch blackness. But now that the light of dawn had almost fully transitioned into the light of full morning, sunlight occasionally shone down through the various shafts leading up to Pellon’s streets.
Without Linna even trying to unfurl her senses the way she’d been taught by the Commander, the sounds of fighting and dying and burning wafted down to her through the shafts along with the sunlight and smoke. Most of the human sounds were indecipherable – screams of pain, grunts of effort, wordless cries of fury. But a few times she heard snatches of conversations and actual words. Much of what she heard was in the language of the mountain men. Each time she heard the common tongue, the words she heard spurred her forward. A soldier yelled, “Put it out, put it out!” while a closer voice wailed, “I’m burning!” Someone moaned weakly for his mother. A little further on, Linna heard a gruff male voice command, “Swords out. We’re not going to be able to outrun them.”
Linna was filled with questions as she ran. How had the mountain men already gotten in? Why hadn’t the patrols that were always circling Pellon found them? Were they alone in the sewers, or had the mountain men used these underground roadways to infiltrate the city?
But the answers to those questions didn’t matter. Linna cleared her mind completely, turning all her thoughts into a simple, steady drumbeat that matched the rhythm of her footfalls: The Empress. The Empress.
At last they came to the iron rungs leading up into the castle.
There was fighting practically above her head. She didn’t care. She threw open the grate, jumped out, and reached down to grab Akella’s hand. She hauled the other woman up with such force that Akella was actually airborne for a moment as she left the shaft.
Behind them, two soldiers squared off against a Brother in the robes of a Wise Man. The Brother’s back faced Linna, but as he stepped sideways she saw the hint of a beard, which was how she knew he was a Brother. Wise Men were all clean-shaven. A soldier lunged at the Brother just as Akella’s feet landed beside the grate, but the Brother moved with unnatural speed, spinning away from the soldier and slashing outward as if he was performing dancer’s grace. The soldier gave a shout of alarm, shuffling backward just fast enough to avoid a killing blow. Nonetheless, the Brother’s sword still drew a thin line of blood across the soldier’s neck. No wonder two soldiers faced one Brother but hadn’t put him down yet.
Linna cocked her head, momentarily distracted by the soldier’s blood. She stood some ten feet away from him, but she felt she could count each individual sphere dotting his neck where the blade had grazed him. She could smell it, too. It was uncanny.
Something flashed in Linna’s periphery. In the next moment, a knife blade buried itself in the side of the Brother’s neck. He reached up to pull it out, apparently unfazed, and the two soldiers were upon him. When the Brother fell, Akella jogged over and retrieved her knife. The two soldiers finally noticed the women who’d climbed out of the shaft at their feet, and one of them, a soldier with a thick red-brown mustache, grunted, “Thanks, pirate,” as Akella returned to Linna’s side.
“Let’s go,” Akella said.
Linna and Akella made their way into the castle keep, dodging knots of Brothers fighting soldiers everywhere. Somewhere in the back of her mind, beneath the insistent drumbeat of the Empress, the Empress, Linna understood that the elixir she and Akella had consumed was only a small portion of what Brother Rennus had been brewing in his tower room with Udolf. The rest of it, she surmised, had been distributed among the Brotherhood. And since all three divisions of the Imperial Army were concentrated in Pellon, that meant there were about five hundred Brothers imbued with extra strength.
Five hundred Brothers who could create illusions, transform into animals, heal one another, skinwalk, and engrave weapons and objects with runes of power.
Five hundred Brothers fighting ten thousand soldiers would still lose. But they could inflict quite a bit of damage before they fell or fled. Before they set fire to the already damaged city and threw open its gates to let in their mountain man allies.
No fewer than fifteen palace guards in polished black armor knotted around the door to the Empress’s chambers. At their center, five held a wrought-iron floor candelabra horizontally, slamming it against the double wooden doors again and again.
Linna and Akella pushed guards aside until they reached the five at the center.
“What’s happening?” Linna demanded. “Where’s the Empress?”
The guard she addressed took in Linna and Akella’s sudden appearance. They recognized one another, of course. A teenage Terintan girl and an Adessian pirate stood out amongst the castle’s other inhabitants, and Linna, in turn, knew every face within the Empress’s personal guard, along with many of their names.
“She’s inside,” the guard answered. “Ammanta went in there about forty minutes ago – right when everything was starting – and told us to guard the door. But then maybe fifteen minutes ago, we heard the Empress screaming for help.”
“Been tryin’ t’break the door down ever since,” said a second guard. “But it’s gotta be barricaded on the other side.”
As the two men explained the situation, the five with the candelabra continued to beat against the doors with the thick iron base. An arc-shaped dent matching the shape of the base had appeared in the wood above the doorknobs, and Linna heard the sound of something splintering on the doors’ other side.
“You’re close,” Linna told the men. She glanced at Akella, who nodded. “Let us try.”
The first guard snorted, eyes traveling up and down Linna’s petite frame. “What’re a pint-sized girl and a woman pirate going to do that five grown men can’t?” he asked, but Linna and Akella had wrestled the candelabra out of the hands of the five guards before he’d finished saying “pint-sized.” And by the time he got to “pirate,” Akella was already counting.
“One. Two. Three.”