369. Duel Beneath the Stars
“You’re sure you can walk on that leg?” Ettie asked, for the third time, as she shuffled through the crowd with Ronja and Shooting Star to either side. Wearing the jack-of-plate armor she’d borrowed for them, along with steel helms to conceal their faces, they looked almost like they could be members of the army.
“I’m fine,” Ronja tär Taneli assured her. “I was fine before we went to Coral Bay. I just needed a few nights running mana through the muscles to straighten everything out.” With most of her skin covered, a casual glance would miss the way she flushed lavender, rather than pink.
“I don’t know how anyone fights in this sort of thing,” Shooting Star complained. His hunting spear, Ettie feared, would be the thing about them that stuck out most. The Alliance army tended to use pikes, when they employed polearms, and while there weren’t many soldiers who carried wands, those were at least smaller and less noticeable.
A blast of light soared into the air somewhere ahead of them, and then they shuffled forward behind a squad of Alliance soldiers. Ettie ducked her head when she recognized Edmund Carver and four other students pushing past them to get to where the next transport mage was waiting. None of them were close friends, but she’d seen them around and even shared the occasional class: if they saw her face, if she met their eyes, she was certain they’d recognize her.
“Are you completely certain you want to do this?” Shooting Star asked again, grabbing Ettie by the shoulder of her armor and turning her toward them.
“It isn’t about wanting,” Ettie shot back. “I have to. My entire family is up there, I can’t just let them fight without me. If someone doesn’t come back -”
“Your cousins are staying down here, aren’t they?” Ronja reminded her.
“Rianne is a child,” Ettie said. “She’s got no business going to war. And she’s with the grandmothers, anyway. They’ll take care of her just fine.” But Reikis was a different story - just old enough to want to come. Nevermind that he hadn’t even started at the college yet, nor even got his full height. He was probably going to be furious when he found out that she’d gone and left him behind. But as long as everyone comes home alive, he can be as mad as he wants to be, and I’ll just take it, she promised.
“Forward!” someone shouted from ahead of them, and Ettie turned back to face the front. They all shuffled after the squad, trusting to the press of bodies, and the mix of culling mages and soldiers, to keep anyone from realizing that the three of them weren’t supposed to be there.
They were close enough now that they could actually see who was going to take the group just ahead: one of Auntie Liv’s personal guards, and one of the Eld, though Ettie couldn’t have put a name to the face. His face looked gray, and there were already circles appearing under his eyes. She doubted that she’d look any better, if she’d had to fling herself back and forth through the empty darkness between places a dozen times in a row, even if there was a constant flood of mana being poured into him. Not far from him, and thankfully turned away to address the next group of students, stood Guild Mistress Every. Don’t look, Ettie prayed to the Trinity. Don’t turn around.
“Squeeze in, lads!” an officer with a Lower Banks accent shouted, and it was move now or give the entire thing up. Ettie lunged forward, thrusting a hand through the press of the soldiers and their armor, and she reached back and yanked on Shooting Stars’ hand to pull him along. Ronja and he wedged themselves in somewhere off to either side, but she couldn’t actually tell whether they’d gotten a hand on the man.
“Nesēmus!” the guard shouted, just as Lia Every turned to watch the group go. Ettie met the older woman’s eyes for half a heartbeat, just long enough to see her lips fall open in shock, and then she was swept up in brilliant light and carried away.
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When the world came back, they were all crammed together on top of a crumbling waystone in a dark room. Ettie could hear shouting and the clash of weapons distantly, echoing from wherever the front lines had settled.
“The enchantments in this section of the ruins are broken!” a soldier wearing the rank insignia of a commander screamed at them, the moment Ettie had finished blinking away the light of passage. “There’s no light, and you don’t weigh shit! Move out slow and cautious, or you’ll end up tumbling end over end until you hit a wall! Keep your hand on the man in front of you until you get past the first ward!”
They shuffled forward together, and Ettie felt it immediately - one step sent her floating up two feet before the soldier behind her got hold of her belt and yanked her back down. “Thanks,” she said, turning back to look at him without giving a thought to it.
The man, dark-skinned like one of the Eld who hailed from Al’Fenthia, frowned. “I don’t recognize you,” he said. “You’re not part of this squad.”
“Mage support,” Ronja said, from behind him. “We got orders to make sure there was someone with you all who could break wards.” Ettie was impressed by how quickly and easily her friend was able to lie.
“Stick close to us, then,” the Elden soldier ordered, and Ettie couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief.
They shuffled forward together, out into a dark corridor which had been walled off on the left by a thick barrier of ice. Ettie could only get a hazy glimpse of what lay beyond it, through patches of ice only half-translucent, but that was enough to recognize floating corpses and blown out walls.
“You can tell the queen’s come this way,” the man in front of her shouted, and a chorus of cheers and laughter echoed up and down the line as they turned to the right, away from the ice. There was no fighting here, but the long window along the outer wall of the corridor had cracked in multiple places. Outside was nothing but an empty gray plain, the base of some sort of enchanted tower, and endless stars sprinkled throughout the darkness of night. Ettie tried to think of how she would survive if the window shattered and she fell out, but couldn’t come up with any good plan.
They passed the wreckage of an Antrian war-machine, dragged off to one side of the corridor, along with a few corpses. It reminded Ettie of Ghveris, who she was sure was somewhere at the front of all this, fighting beside her aunt.
“That used to be a ward,” Ettie pointed out, as they passed through the broken remnants of a door. In front of it ran a strip of black iron, circling the floor, walls and ceiling, engraved with Vædic sigils. “If you see anything else like that, don’t cross it unless you’re certain someone’s already dealt with the problem.” As long as they were with this group of soldiers, she was going to at least try to do the job Ronja had lied them into having.
Once they’d passed into the next section of corridor, the good news was that the enchantments were working. That meant strips of mana stone and enchanted tiles in the ceiling lighting the way, and it also meant they could walk normally again. The bad news was that the inner wall of the corridor began to have doorways, opening up into branching tunnels or chambers, and through each one came the sounds of soldiers fighting.
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Another officer stood at an intersection, screaming and waving them forward. “This Way! We need more bodies in the dome! Move, move!”
“Stay behind us,” the soldier who’d pulled Ettie back down to earth before said, clapping her on the back and stepping in front of her. There was room for them to walk three across, weapons at the ready, and she found herself pushed even behind the second rank, who paused just long enough to shoulder their crossbows.
Ronja and Shooting Star held back with her just long enough for the hunter to ask, “Where are we going, Ettie?”
She looked back and forth, from the Alliance soldiers advancing at a job in front of them, to the officer at the junction of two corridors, to the glare of sunlight reflecting off the long windows at his back, and Ettie realized that she didn’t have the slightest idea where her parents were.
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Then we stay with these soldiers,” Ronja declared, drawing her wand in her left hand and reaching out with her right to take Ettie’s. “We’ll help them as much as we can, and maybe someone will know where your parents are. Come on.”
They dashed forward together, catching up to the squad of soldiers just as they came to the end of the corridor and entered an enormous, circular room filled with greenery. Ettie couldn’t even see the other side, between the towers at the center and the crops growing at eye level, but it had to be larger around than the entire top of Bald Peak, the palace and courtyard combined.
To her left, golden wheat waved in the rush of soldiers running past. Above, towers stretched up toward the stars, a dozen levels or more each, and at every level hung leafy green plants, scattered with the bright red of hanging berries or apples. To her right, beds of cabbages and turnips had been ground underfoot beneath the boots of soldiers. A line of pikes clashed with Two Antrians and an Elden man wielding two curved blades. There were bodies scattered to either side: while most were no longer moving, Ettie saw at least two who’d crawled off a distance and were moaning pitiably. One, a boy her age who’d ripped his own helm off to reveal a gushing scalp wound, was calling for his mother.
As Ettie watched, two mana shields flickered into existence, catching the volley of crossbow bolts launched from the men she mentally labelled ‘her squad.’ The bolts skittered off to either side, and then the Antrians dropped their shields again long enough for the Elden man to lunge forward, duck low, and slice along the back of an Alliance pikemen’s knee. The soldier screamed - a woman, from the sound of the voice - and stumbled backward. Her place in the line was immediately filled when one of the soldiers who’d come with Ettie and her friends rushed in to take her place.
“Should we help them?” Shooting Star asked, levelling his spear at the enemy.
Ettie hesitated. She’d hoped to find someone she knew here, but she didn’t recognize anyone at all, and she was now wondering just how large this place was, and how many soldiers were fighting their way through dozens of chambers like this one. Harsh, bright sunlight slanted down through the glass dome above, and she could actually see the stream of molten fire hanging like some kind of leaning tower, stretching down to the enchanted struts on the surface of the moon. For just a moment, the entire situation just seemed too big, too overwhelming, for anything she did to matter. It was a mistake to come.
The Iravatan warrior shouted an incantation, then actually opened his mouth and hissed, like some sort of snake. Milky-yellow venom sprayed out into the faces of the men in front of him, and they screamed, dropping their pikes and clutching at their eyes in clear agony. Before anyone could rush in to fill the line, the Elden cultist reached out, grabbed the helm of the man in front of him, and yanked it off. Then, he drew his curved blade beneath the chin of the screaming man, just above the gorget. Blood sprayed out, and he threw aside the corpse.
“Well?” the man screamed. “You came to kill us all, didn’t you? Came to kill the Great Mother? Come forward, then!”
The soldiers hesitated, and Ettie knew they would break if someone didn’t do something. Her father had commanded men at erupting rifts, and though he’d been left back to hold Castle Whitehill during the war against Lucania, he’d taught Ettie everything he’d learned from her grandparents.
Ettie ripped her borrowed helm off and threw it aside, striding forward as she shook out her hair. Someone has to remind them how to be brave. “I’ll face you,” she shouted, wand in her left hand. “Aluthet’he Sekis,” she muttered, and a rapier of shining mana, striated in bands of blue and gold, coalesced in her right hand.
The Elden man cocked his head to one side, like a wolf who’d just caught sight of something interesting, and was considering whether he’d found prey, or a threat. “Who are you, then?” he asked, circling to one side and carefully stepping around corpses until he’d gotten himself onto better ground. He waved back the two Antrians who’d been fighting at his shoulders.
“Lady Henriette Summerset, heir to Whitehill,” Ettie declared, and it was with some satisfaction that she observed the gasps and widened eyes of the soldiers around her. She lifted her blade, settling into one of the stances her mother had drilled into her from the time she was a child, angling her body so as to minimize his target area.
“Summerset,” the Elden man repeated, with a sneer. “I am Rasmus ka Anssi-”
“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Ettie interrupted him, shouting his words down. “You’re dead.” She lunged forward, the dark, loose earth of the vegetable bed soft under her boots, and Bheuv sparked to life with a whisper of intent. She’d never once managed to cast a silent spell before, but in that moment she didn’t have the slightest doubt it would come when she called, and it did.
She could see everything: the minute movements of Rasmus’s eyes as he watched her come, the change at his hips, the heel of his boot when he made his decision and had to shift his weight. I was like reading the familiar salutations at the beginning of a letter from an old friend, everything so familiar that she could just glance ahead, confident she knew what was coming.
Ettie circled the tip of her blade around Rasmus’s parry, and then she was inside his guard. She slammed her rapier through his belly to the hilt, let it dissolve into motes of mana, and skidded past him as he fell, not turning until she was well out of his reach.
Rasmus ka Anssi, of the House of Iravata, swayed on his feet. He clapped his left hand over the wound in his belly, as if trying to hold the blood in. “I’ll kill you,” he gasped.
“No,” Ettie said. “Terset Æ'Manis.” She levelled her wand at him, and felt the mana surge down her arm, focused by the length of wood, and spring out to claw at the wounded man in front of her. For just a moment, something resisted her - his Authority, Ettie knew. She’d heard Liv and Sidonie talk about it enough times, and her father had warned her that using their word against another mage, or an Eld, was likely to fail.
But the man before her had already nearly exhausted himself fighting, and now he was wounded, besides. He might have had the focus, the strength of will to fight Ettie off, had he been rested and whole; but now his resistance crumbled before her, and the spell struck. All at once, his skin began to wrinkle, and the flesh beneath to shrink. A mist began to boil off his body as he dropped his sword and screamed. Even the man’s eyeballs shriveled, like grapes drying in the sun, and he raised his hands to claw at his own face from the pain.
By the time Rasmus ka Anssi had stopped moving, he was little more than a withered husk. Every bit of moisture in his body had been removed by the Summerset word of power. Though she’d known the incantation, Ettie had never actually used it to kill a person before, and the sight made her stomach roil.
The soldiers looked nervously between Ettie, and the two Antrians, who had retreated and raised their mana shields.
“Your orders, m’lady?” one of the uninjured men asked. He was at least ten years older than her, but from the tone of his voice, Ettie knew that any anonymity she’d bought for herself by wearing that helm was gone.
“Take those things out, and then we sweep this entire chamber clean,” Ettie ordered. “Ronja -”
Her friend grinned. “Was just waiting for the word.” Ronja muttered an incantation beneath her breath, raised her wand, and conjured chains of darkness up from the very shadow of the two Antrian war-machines. Before the constructs could move, they’d been pulled off their feet, toppling to the ground, where they struggled against the word of darkness.
Shooting Star rushed forward, stabbing his spear down through the gaps in the enchanted steel plating that covered the Antrian’s interior. The soldiers joined him, stabbing down at the bound machines until they finally stopped moving, and the Vædic sigils on their blades dimmed.
Ettie walked over to the Elden man she’d killed. In the convulsions of his death, his hand had released the hilt of his sword. It wasn’t a rapier, but she’d rather have something in hand than not, so she bent over and picked it up. With a flick of her wrist, she sent most of the blood on the blade off in a single spray that painted the leaves of the plants at her feet. There were sigils etched into the steel, but she could look at those later.
Right now, she had a lot of ground to cover to find her family.