Chapter 15 - Ambush

We poke our heads over a rocky ridge, looking into the valley down below. There are several large metal cages, carried by harpies, and partially filled with various monsters that have been grabbed off the mountainside. Directing the whole operation are two individuals, one of whom I somewhat recognize as the harpy Karalga who took Ruby from me all those years ago, but she has transformed drastically. She has an extra pair of both wings and legs, and there is a third eye on her forehead. The crown of the harpy queen, melted and distorted, has somehow been put straight through her head, going through her temples and arching over top of it in a circle.

“Catch the spiders! Dig the den! Dig the den!” She chants, perching on top of a cage as the other harpies do her dirty work, widening a hole in the ground where a colony of giant spiders is no doubt nesting.

Nearby, another figure watches silently. He has black robes, six arms, and a pale clay mask in the shape of a bird beak. It’s quite creepy.

Along with me and Pumar, our assault force consists of several elite Marmothi warriors, including Arvel, Yosh, and a fire mage named Brog.

Pumar meets my eyes, and with a serious nod, he signals for us to attack.

The plan is simple. Hit them hard and fast. Focus on the surgeon, and kill him before he even gets a chance to fight back. I take a deep breath.

Pumar vaults over the stone ridge. As soon as his feet hit the other side, he kicks off the stone, launching himself through he air at our target, quickly yet quietly. He brings his sword down on the surgeon’s head from behind.

The surgeon dodges on instinct at the last possible instant, and he immediately draws long sharp knives from all six of his sleeves.

I announce our presence with a thunderclap.

Lightning!

I flash to the surgeon in an electric bang, and draw my sword, sending a thread of fate straight from the tip of my sword to the nape of his neck. My blade rips forward.

Clang!

He deflects my slash with one of his daggers, but drops the knife from the lighting that went coursing through his arm as a result.

Pumar takes the opportunity to bring his hulking blade crashing down on his off-balance prey.

In a whirl of limbs, the surgeon twists around Pumar’s blade, and I step back to avoid a future where I take a knife to the eye. Pumar does no such thing, letting his mythril armor do the work as he steps straight into the whirling blades with a merciless follow-up strike. I fire a volley of magic-blocking moondrops into the surgeon at the same moment, preventing him from using whatever creepy-feeling power it is that I sense surging up inside him.

Pumar’s attack connects. I hear a crunch of chitin and there’s spray of green blood, and the surgeon hisses in pain, dashing away. He now has only four arms. The two topmost ones on his left side have been cut clean off, and are flailing wildly on the ground.

I shoot towards him in a lightning bolt, unleashing a flurry of slashes. He deflects them all with his four remaining limbs, but I concentrate my attacks on his left side, and he can’t keep up.

I slash into his head.

My sword bounces off as his mask shatters, my moonlight breaking through whatever protective enchantment was strengthening it. The clay shards spin in the air as the surgeon’s real face is revealed.

It’s hideous. He has eight beady eyes, crusty chitinous flesh with buggy hairs, and many mandibles around his toothy mouth. He’s a devil, I realize. A man who consumed the flesh of a giant spider.

Once again, he tries to do some sort of creepy magic, but I put a stop to it with the gentle moonlight that radiates all around me.

Luminous Authority!

This close to me, he can do nothing. In a crack of thunder, I slash once again.

I can see it now, the raw panic in his inhuman eyes.

He sacrifices the last arm on his left side to escape my attack, but Pumar is here. He slashes from the side where our prey has no arms.

Crunch!

Pumar’s sword cleaves deep into the surgeon’s torso. The huge Marmothi kicks the devil’s body off of his blade, and it crumples limply onto the rocks.

I let out the breath I had taken in, before the battle began, not two seconds earlier.

Only now does Karalga notice us. “Huh? What’s that noise?” She turns towards us and all her eyes go wide. She shrieks. “Master is dead! Murderer-kidnapper! She returns to murder again! Fly away! Fly away!”

The harpies take to the air.

Having now caught up with Pumar and me, the Marmothi warriors fire a volley of arrows up at the harpies. Brog blasts a fireball at Karalga, but she dodges it.

“Fly away! Fly away!” Karalga chants, and she beats her wings high up above.

The low cloud cover suddenly descends in a thousand twisting misty tendrils, pulled down by Karalga’s magic.

Lightning!

I flash up into the sky towards her, slashing to kill. She manages to counterattack while partially avoiding my attack. I cut off one of her four wings as she kicks me in the chest, sending me falling back. With a furious scream, she vanishes in the mist.

“Murder-kidnapper! You dare defy the great king?! You shall rue this day! Rue this day!”

Lightning!

I flash back up towards her voice, but she isn’t there. She’s gone.

I let gravity take me back down to the mountain, the ruffles of my dress slowing my descent.

I land lightly on a boulder. The mist is dense enough that it’s hard to see the others. I can’t use my luminous authority to dispel it either. There is no magic to dispel anymore. Karalga’s spell simply moved the cloud down. It will disperse in time.

“Pumar! Are you there? She escaped!” I shout.

“No matter. This is a victory nevertheless. With the surgeon gone, the unspeakable king will cease to be able to create chimeras. His military power will be severely crippled,” Pumar says.

“Where is the corpse?” Brog asks.

“He’s right th—” Yosh says, then freezes, pointing to the place where the surgeon’s body was.

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There is only a patch of green blood on the rocks. The surgeon’s body, and his severed arms, are all gone.

“Oh no,” I say.

He must have played dead, and escaped in the mist.

“Damn it!” Pumar curses, kicking a boulder.

I sigh. “At least there were no casualties on our side either. We can consider it a draw.”

“Can we? They will want to know why the supreme commander of the Marmothi was here,” Brog says, and whispers, “they may deduce that the Great Burrow is close by.”

“I should have made sure he was dead. This failure is mine, and mine alone,” Pumar says.

“Don’t blame yourself, Commander,” I say. “At the very least, we learned that you and I make a great team. We crushed him like the bug he is, and he could only run.”

Pumar grins. “That, we did.” He pats me on the shoulder. “Let’s go home.”

We all return to the great burrow, our spirits rather low. Arvel looks especially distraught, and he refuses to talk the whole way back. Once we return to the Great Burrow, we head to the palace to report to the high priest.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I ask Arvel.

He nods.

“You can go home early. We’ll take care of the report.”

He shakes his head.

“Oh, you’re back! How did it go?” Lara asks, but her smile fades when she sees our faces.

“You can listen to our report,” I tell her.

We all enter the sacred enclave together, and Arvel walks straight towards the high priest.

“Did you want to talk to him first?” I ask.

He pauses, and nods. Pumar shrugs, and we let Arvel approach the high priest alone.

And then I see the future, and realize that this was a horrible, horrible mistake.

“That’s the surgeon!” I scream.

Lightning!

I flash forward, but I am too slow.

The surgeon bursts out of Arvel’s corpse in a spray of blood, with all his missing limbs somehow reattached. Then he plunges all six of his knives into Gorentus, stabbing him deep in the neck, the heart, the stomach, the lungs, and twice in the head, all in an instant.

Boom!

In a sudden motion, Gorentus counterattacks. His hand flashes forward, blowing a hole clean through the surgeon’s body.

Both of them collapse limp on the ground.

“High priest!” Lara screams, running forward.

“Lara no! He might not be dead!”

But Lara doesn’t listen, she runs to Gorentus, and the surgeon leaps up, despite the hole through his torso. He nimbly dances behind Lara, restrains her from behind, and holds two of his knives against her throat.

Lara screams.

“We both live, or we both die. It’s up to you,” the surgeon says.

“Lara!” I cry out.

Pumar reaches for his sword, and the surgeon presses his knives into Lara’s neck.

Lara cries out in grief and terror. She sobs, and the surgeon tightens his grip. Pumar lets go of his blade, and the surgeon slowly walks toward the exit, dragging his hostage along with him.

“Kill him! Just kill him!” Lara screams. “He will reveal the location of the Great Burrow!”

We all look at Pumar. He is trembling. He collapses to his knees.

“I am sorry, Sister. I cannot,” he says.

The surgeon takes Lara to the elevator. We follow him along the main road. Everyone is watching in shock as the priestess is used as a hostage, the supreme commander not daring to raise a finger against the evildoer.

“I will enter the moving box with her, then send her back once I am free,” the surgeon says.

“Swear to me! Swear to me you won’t kill her!” I cry.

“I swear it,” the surgeon says.

“He is known to be a man of his word,” Pumar says, deep pain in his voice.

“No!” Lara screams, crying. “Kill him! It’s okay, you can let me die. Just kill him!”

Then the surgeon pulls her into the elevator, and the door closes.

We all wait with agonized, baited breath. An acolyte shows up, delivering word that Gorentus has been confirmed dead. Then the elevator descends back into the burrow. The doors open, and Lara comes stumbling out, unharmed.

“Lara!”

“Sister!”

Pumar and I run to her, and embrace her. She cries out in grief, collapsing in our arms.

“I love you,” she says to us both. “I love you so much, but you’ve doomed us all.”

“The unspeakable king would have eventually located the Great Burrow either way, without the high priest’s magic protecting it. At least this way, you’re alive,” Pumar says.

“But now we have no time! As soon as that monster returns to the unspeakable king, the army will be marching our way!” Lara says.

“Then we will have to march first. We will march on Ymirskrod. The time has come.”

Pumar calls an emergency council meeting. Varg and Lara are there, as well as old Mugen and various other influential elders of the Marmothi. It’s the first time I’ve attended. The chair is much too big for me.

“The high priest is dead, and our location has been revealed to the enemy,” Pumar announces.

There is a long silence. Pumar continues.

“The battle for our survival has come. I have made the decision to send our army to Ymirskrod, to face the unspeakable king, and slay him.”

“And why do you have the authority?” A Marmothi who I’ve never met before asks. “As far as I’m concerned, you ceased to be the supreme commander the moment that you betrayed the safety of the Great Burrow for your personal interests. Everyone saw. You should have slayed that intruder, but you let him live, just because your sister was the hostage.”

“If you wish to impeach me Emmett, you may call a vote,” Pumar says.

“I move to impeach. All in favor?” Emmett says.

My eyes go wide. A surprising number of council members raise their hands, including Lara.

However, after counting, it is still slightly less than half.

“It appears I remain the supreme commander. In that case, we will prepare our forces tonight, and begin the march to Ymirskrod tomorrow.”

Suddenly, the doors of the council room burst open. A temple acolyte comes running in, panting heavily. She takes a moment to bend over and catch her breath, then stands tall.

“The promised hero is here! The one sent from Lorencia! He has finally come!”

My eyes bulge. What unbelievable timing. The others seem just as shocked as I am.

“Bring him here,” Pumar says.

The acolyte nods at Pumar, then runs off. We wait patiently for a while, and when she returns, she is accompanied by a human man.

He has neatly trimmed curly dark hair, deep-set eyes, and angular cheekbones, and is extremely tall and slender. He wears simple grey wool robes, and fine leather boots.

“Greetings, Marmothi,” he glances at me, his eyes narrowing. “And cat.” He smiles, his lips forming a thin line. “My name Sephtis. I come from Lorencia to slay a fool named Skald.”

The pressure of the name fills the room, and I see corrupted threads of fate reaching down towards Sephtis, but they fail to reach. They wither away to nothing.

“Fantastic news!” Pumar exclaims, standing up. “We were just about to march on Ymirskrod. You may come with us, and aid in our assault.”

Sephtis clicks his tongue. “Oh no, that won’t do. I had a plan, you see. I will face Skald here. You may evacuate, of course. Send a messenger to him, and announce your surrender. I will prepare a trap for him. It will collapse this city on his head. Simple and effective.”

“I like this plan,” Emmett says.

“But this is our home,” I say.

“This city is barely a hundred years old, is it not? It is little more than a hiding hole, as far as I understood the matter. Do you claim such meager history is more important than your lives? Besides, you are not a Marmothi, unless my eyes deceive me,” Sephtis says.

I frown. “I guess the council should decide,” I say.

“I still vote to fight in Ymirskrod. I believed in our victory, even without this hero,” Pumar says.

“I vote to follow the hero’s plan,” Lara says.

“I concur. Raise your hand if you believe we should listen to the hero,” Emmett says.

The council votes. It looks close. We count the hands, and it’s split exactly in half.

“It’s a tie,” Pumar says. “Normally this would leave things up to the high priest.”

“Shouldn’t that now be your sister?” Emmett says.

“Me or Varg,” Lara says. “But even so, we have already voted.” She glances at me.

“What? No, I shouldn’t get a vote,” I say.

“Then just out of curiosity, what do you think we should do, Ayla?” Lara asks me.

“I don’t want to see this place destroyed. I want…” I hesitate for just a moment.

If I fear to even speak his name, how can I hope to fight him? I cannot be afraid.

I take a deep breath. “I want to go to Ymirskrod with Pumar, and fight Skald.”

A crushing weight falls on my shoulders, a knot of terror twisting up deep inside my stomach. Corrupted tendrils of fate descend from above.

This is a test. No, this is a declaration. I am ready.

Luminous Authority.

Gentle Moonlight radiates from me, and drives the pressure away. The corrupted tendrils of fate are purified, and they settle back into the weave. The knot within me unties.

“Pumar and I can defeat him,” I say.

The council stares at me for a long moment.

“How about we compromise,” Sephtis says. “My plan does not rely on an army. Let’s do both. March on Ymirskrod, but include a delegation who will stay back from the fighting to announce your surrender if the assault fails. I will remain here and prepare my trap as a backup measure.”

Emmet and Pumar exchange a glance.

“All in favor?” Pumar asks.

Everyone raises their hands.

“Then it is decided.”