Incarnation: Wandering Stars Volume One (45 page)

Sariel turned to Danduel. 
“
It looks like the
Iryllur
ym
will need to provide cover.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,”
the Fer
-
Rada
replied.  Then he turned to
Ananel.  “B
eing a
n
Anduar
himself,
I assume
we’ll find Semjaza in the ground level of his fortress
?”

“His throne room is
actually
one story above the ground level.”

“
Alright,” he mumbled to himself, then turned to the other officers present
with both hands clasped in front of his chin
.  “In order to
defeat him, we’ll need to concentrate our ground
force
s
there
.  W
hich means
we have to get them through th
at
land entrance.  So,
t
he
Iryllur
ym
will need to provide
air
cover, striking quickly at the gate defenses just before our
Anduar
ym
arrive
,” he said, looking directly at
Nuathel
.

“
Once through,
our land forces
will be vulnerable to a flank attack from the bay by
Semjaza’s V
i
dir
ym
.  And that m
eans
our own will need to
have
breach
ed
the sea entrance first. 
We’ll all meet in the middle,” he said, stopping to look up at Sariel.  “And that’s when you fulfill your promise to kill Semjaza yourself.”

Sariel nodded.

“
If we strike fast and make it through the gates, we should be able to use Semjaza’s fortress design against him.  Then it’s just a matter of numbers
; I have
twice the
soldiers
he does.”

Sariel looked to Ananel who had been silent for a while.  The Fer
-
Rada had not only dominated the conversation, but had also made no mention of how the Myndarym would fit into the strategy.  As expected, the soldiers had taken control of the direction of this battle.  Sariel was disappointed that the Shapers, it seemed, were content to allow it.

Kai
-
Niquel
’s sleek body cut through the water with little resistance, requiring only a slight rippling movement of his
rear
fins to propel him forward.  At this depth, the ocean was completely black.  But Kai rarely used his eyes for much of anything.  Instead,
he generated
a
series of
clicking
sounds
from an organ behind his blow-hole.  The returning sounds brought a detailed understanding of the terrain as his resonat
ing
jawbone interpreted the echoes.

But the information had stopped hours ago.  With the ocean floor thousands of fathoms below, there was nothing to return the sound waves.  Now, the only other presence in the water was his division of
Vidirym
, followed by a handful of Myndarym. 
In the silence, they pressed on, having traveled for
nearly twenty four
hours
without stopping.

G
radually,
Kai
began to pick up a presence below him.  The faint echoes grew stronger as the ocean floor rose.  Now, only a thousand feet lay below him, and the distance was closing fast.
  H
e released a louder pulse of sounds,
a blend of
moans and
chirps
, telling his soldiers that they were approaching the target.  The floor continued to rise
by hundreds of feet per minute, gradually tapering off into a gentle upward slope. 
With
the coastline a mile away to his
left
, Kai altered his
southern
co
u
rse a bit to the east and searched the shelf for a change in texture.  As expected, a
smooth delta of sand spilled out into the deeper water, signaling that Semjaza’s fortress was near.

Halfway across the wide sandbar, Kai turned directly east and slowed his approach.
  Just as the Myndarym described, he could feel the jagged mountains rise from both sides of the delta, while directly in front was a flat wall, spanning the hundreds of feet that separated the ocean floor from the surface, blocking their entrance to the
cove
.
  Descending to the sand below, Kai came to the base of the wall and waited for his team to catch up.  Then, he rose slowly,
bouncing sound waves off the wall, scanning the front surface for the passages that the Myndarym described.  It took only seconds to locate the first one, but to his surprise, it was
blocked
by a lattice of metal bars.

Kai could sense the confusion from the Myndarym, but remained silent while resuming his work.  Using a methodical serpentine pattern to scan the wall in ascending passes, he found one
barred passage after another
.  Finally
,
he
backed away and drifted toward
the Myndarym who
had been
hanging back.  “Any other ideas?”
he whispered.

“There’s one more at the top
,
”
one of them replied.

Kai nodded, then
brought his rear fins together, propelling his body upward toward the
surface. 
He came to a stop
fifty feet below
the rippled ceiling.  At this depth
,
the miniscule amount of light coming from the starry skies
above
allowed his eyes to
add
visual information to
his understanding of the obstacle.  H
e could
now
make out the bottom of an unblocked passage.
  But his sensitive ears
, if they could be called such,
picked up something else—
subtle
vibrations coming
through the passage.  Someone was on the other side, waiting.

*   *   *   *

Sariel came up silently over the rocks, riding the gentle updraft that was forced against the mountains from the wind blowing across the Great Waters.  The back of an Iryllur sentry came into view and Sariel glided toward the enemy with one
vaepkir
ready. 
Without a sound, Sariel tackled the soldier from behind, simultaneously clasping a hand around his mouth and driving the
vaepkir
beneath his right forewing and into
his
chest cavity.

The two soldiers tumbled forward across the rocks, locked in a deadly embrace.

Sariel gritted his teeth as his body slammed into jagged stone and slid across the mountaintop. 
Refusing to
release
the sentry until the task was complete, he held fast with his arms and legs wrapped tightly until they came to stop.  Silence returned once again and Sariel slowly let go.  When he regained his footing, he
resheathed his
vaepkir
and
walked to the edge of the cliff
, giving
the signal that the last of the sentries had been removed.

Overhead, t
he night sky was full of stars which
shed
soft, silver light
across
the mountains. 
On the other side of the deep ravine,
Fim
-
Rada Nuathel and his
Iryllur
ym
slowly rose from
their
hiding places, still
clinging to the shadowed
crevices
like bats
.  Hundreds of feet below, the
front lines of the
Anduar
ym
marched
quietly
toward the
pass
, the only obstacle separating
the ground soldiers
from the
cove
that
housed Semjaza’s fortress.

As
the
silent forms
of the Iryllurym
dropped from the cliffs
, Sariel could
barely make out their
outlines against the
dark terrain. 
He waited for them to cross the ravine, then jumped from the cliff to join their formation as they turned north and made their way further up the pass. 
The flight lasted only seconds before
they turned toward the cliffs again.  Sariel followed and
retracted
his wings
, inverting himself
beneath
an
overhang.  When he came to a stop, he was only a few feet away from the Fim-Rada.

“To that outcropping,” whispered Nuathel.

Again, the
Iryllur
ym
took to the air and headed for a
larger
section of rock that jutted from the cliff
at a higher elevation
. 
As soon as he reached it, Sariel
had a line of sight to the
land
entrance of
Mudena Del
-
Edha
.
 
Its
stone wall
stood nearly one hundred feet tall and spanned the width of the pass.  It was flanked by a pair of angular, pointed towers that loomed ominously over the
gorge
.  As
Danduel’s
army
crept
closer to the gate,
keeping to the shadows on the southern side of the pass,
Sariel
’s eyes darted between the towers and the passage leading through the center of the wall.

“
I don’t see any movement,” he said quietly.

Nuathel leaned out from the cliff slightly
to get a better view
.  “Nothing yet.  Hopefully they won’t know until we
’
re upon them.”

Through the eye holes in his helmet,
Sariel
scanned the ranks of the
Anduar
army below. 
They were within a few hundred yards now—almost to the signal point.

“Get ready,” Nuathel announced quietly.

Sariel
quickly inspected the
towers
one last time
, surprised by the absence of
guards or scouts.

“They’re at the signal point.  Go.  Go.  Go,” Nuathel commanded.

Sariel
jumped
from his place of concealment and
stretched
his wings.  When he felt the lift of the air underneath him, he
thrust himself forward and
into position behind
the
other
Iryllur
ym
.
  The
angels
were superbly trained, quickly assembling into a
column
with their leader at the point.  Dropping a few hundred feet in elevation, their speed increased as they c
overed the distance to the defensive structure.
 
The column of winged angels flowed gracefully over the steep terrain, condensing and expanding with
each outcropping and fissure.

Sariel
reached to
either side of his breastplate and
pulled his
v
aepkir
from
the
sheaths
crisscrossed along his back.  Banking slightly to the west, he
followed the formation
out of the cliffs to come
directly over the top of the wall.  Now only twenty feet below them, the length of the battlements seemed to pass by more swiftly.

The formation broke into six-
person
teams, one for each of the eight corridors on
both
side
s
of the passage. 
As one,
the whole
column
rose, banked, then inverted to come straight down into the channels, with the lead groups taking the
nearest
.

Bringing up the rear, Sariel followed the last group into the
final
corridor on the western
end of the passage
.  The dull starlight was instantly blackened
within
the
confines of the stone structure.
  Pulling his wings inward, he
pressed forward into the formation which now spanned the entire width of the corridor.