Rift in the Races (14 page)

At first Orli felt relieved as well, seeing that the child was safe, but a moment later she saw the thick forearm of a green-fleshed creature appear above the edge of the wall, reaching and groping for a handhold at the top. She watched in horror as a large orc struggled to clamber up the vines in nimble little Pernie’s wake. The vines gave way in places as it climbed, the mass of its muscular frame costing it progress but not stopping its ascent. For a moment it dropped back out of view as a length of the vine tore loose, but in the span of seconds it had fought its way back up again.

Orli turned to Altin, but his mind was still far away, locked in the mana stream. She knew better than to interrupt him. She’d been told what can happen if a spell is broken in mid-cast.

She yelled to Kettle to watch out for the orc, warning her to turn and look, but the woman was too stricken with the joy of having gotten the girl back safe, overwhelmed with emotion after what must have seemed a certain doom for the child beyond the castle walls.

“Shit,” Orli said with another glance at Altin, still consumed with whatever he was doing magically.

She got up, stooping at first, and ran back down the stairs. She sprinted across the courtyard toward Kettle and the girl.

The orc had pulled itself up between two merlons and was about to clear the wall.

Orli stopped at the base of the stairs that would take her up to the battlements. She leveled her blaster and fired, sending a streak of red light across the intervening darkness where it hit the stone just inches from the orc’s left hand.

“Shit!” she said again. She fired a second shot, this time wide right, worse than the first.

The orc looked up at her and let out a ferocious snarl that showed huge yellow teeth visible even across the dark shadows that filled the keep. The animal force of that bellow actually drove her back a step in fright despite how far away it was. She had to shake off the terror before she could fire another shot.

She missed again, but not by much, and the orc ducked for cover as best it could behind the nearest merlon. Orli used the moment to pick her way farther up the stairs toward Kettle and Pernie. She kept up fire hoping to keep the orc pinned down.

Kettle, upon hearing the orc so close, recovered herself enough to resume the fight as well. She reclaimed a huge cast-iron frying pan from where she’d left it in favor of flinging the stones and snuck along the wall toward the orc still hiding from Orli’s laser fire.

Orli squeezed off another shot and climbed two more stairs.

Anticipating her this time, the orc jumped out, his arm raised and prepared to throw a wicked looking knife at her. Kettle’s pan clanged so loudly off its skull the dull metal sound of it echoed back to them from the cliffs of Mount Pernolde rising high above them. The creature fell silently back over the wall.

“That’s a fine lass, ya are,” said Kettle. “And right fine timin’ ya ha’ too. I thought mah sweet Pernie and me was a gone fer sure.”

“Get back,” shouted Tytamon then, suddenly nearby and seeing that more orcs were attempting to scale the ivy on the walls. Apparently they’d realized the enchantments that still lingered in those vines made them sturdier than they might naturally have been and recognized the opportunity.

“Come on,” Orli called, holding out a hand for Pernie to take. “Let’s go.”

Pernie started toward her, Kettle right on her heels, but then a thick orc fist reached over the wall and grabbed Kettle by the apron strings. “Oh dear,” shrieked the woman, twisting and trying to hit it with the immense frying pan.

Orli leveled her laser, but couldn’t get a shot. She didn’t need to, however, for young Pernie whipped a small knife from out of seemingly nowhere and began stabbing the orc in the hand.

It howled as it tried to pull itself the rest of the way over the wall, refusing to loose its grip despite the agony of Pernie’s relentless assault. So Pernie stabbed it in the face.

Flick
,
flick
went her little knife.
Flick
,
flick
and the orc was blind. One more plunge and its cheek was opened from jaw hinge to the now hugely gaping mouth. It blew a gout of black blood down into the courtyard as it howled its rage and agony, then released Kettle and toppled off the wall.

“Get down, get down,” Tytamon shouted at them again. “Get off the gods-forsaken wall.”

They scrambled down the stairs in time for a storm of lightning to break loose. At least fifty bolts of it rained down as Tytamon bathed the side of Altin’s tower and the ground beyond in a massive storm of electrical energy that made the air buzz as if filled with a billion insects. Orli could hear the screams and agonized cries of death coming from the other side. The two orcs that had just gained the wall as Tytamon began casting the spell now slumped halfway over, burning and hissing steam, adding the reek of their burnt flesh to the odious atmosphere that had settled upon the keep and making Orli’s stomach turn.

She felt something hot against her back as she was looking up at Tytamon’s handiwork, and she turned around in time to see another one of Altin’s massive white-hot fireballs form and then whip away from the flagstone courtyard, up and over the wall. The explosive crash coming from the other side was awesome and terrifying.

My God these people are powerful, she thought as she watched the two mages make war. It was as if Zeus and Apollo had appeared on Prosperion from the pages of ancient Earth myth.

That’s when she heard Tytamon cry out from behind her. It was just a bark. Like a half word, but it ended abruptly and with a flash. She spun to see the great mage fall to the bulwark, half dangling over the edge and smoking from around his beard and wispy white hair. He was sliding over the edge, about to drop to the flagstones far below.

That never happened in the stories of Zeus.

She sprinted back up and grabbed him by the robes before he could fall to the distant ground. So much adrenaline coursed through her, she was easily able to pull him to safety before Kettle and Pernie arrived to help.

“Oh, this inna goin’ ta be our day,” Kettle muttered as she pulled Tytamon’s limp body off of Orli’s knees. Then to Tytamon she spoke, urgently, “Master Tytamon, can ya hear me, sar?”

Pernie squealed and pointed to the ivy near Altin’s tower. Orli looked around and saw another orc had already made its way up in the absence of Tytamon’s lightning spell. She turned, leveled her laser and let him have it. This time she didn’t miss. The streak of light was followed by a red mist erupting from the side of the orc’s misshapen face. Most of its cheek and eye burned away, and it turned to roar at her with a countenance that was now half bone and half mud-green flesh.

Pernie whipped her sling loose from around her waist where it doubled as belt and let fly a small, round rock deftly plucked from a pocket in her dirty little apron. Her projectile broke a fang out of the orc’s steaming face just as Orli’s second shot turned its head into a burst of gore running down the tower wall.

“Tytamon, wake up, wake up,” Kettle shrieked into the vacant, wide-eyed glare of the old sorcerer. “Now’s no time ta go ta sleep on us.”

Another immense ball of molten white shot over the wall from where Altin fought, and Orli saw Gimmel duck behind a merlon just as a huge spear came through the archer’s gap. It clattered down onto the stones below. She tracked its path through the dim light by the wooden sound of it sliding over the uneven ground and by the faint glow emanating from the iron tip. She’d just begun to turn away when she noticed in her peripheral vision that the glow began to pulse and brighten. She turned back to see the spear lift from the ground and shoot up at Gimmel again as if it had just thrown itself.

The middle-aged huntsman dodged it a second time, knowing well enough not to take his eyes off the enchanted thing. It struck the stone where he’d just been leaning with a mighty
thwack
, after which he leapt on it, pinning it down. He grabbed it and tried to break it over his knee but apparently could not, and Orli watched as once again the spear tip flashed and glowed and began to stab at him as if it possessed a will of its own.

Altin saw it too, for suddenly he ran, stooped as low as possible, to where Gimmel rolled about wrestling with the enchanted spear. The barefoot mage gripped the shaft of the spear in his hand and spoke a few words of magic, though Orli could not hear them, and unraveled what remained of the seeking spell. Gimmel threw it into the courtyard with an expression of mixed relief and horror. Altin was already casting another fireball.

A shriek from Pernie turned Orli’s attention back once more to the wall near Altin’s tower. The damned orcs were not going to give up trying to use the ivy as a way to get up and into the keep.

Orli shot the next three that climbed up, but the thump of wood on stone drew her attention to the pair of posts that indicated a ladder had just come against the wall nearby. Thump, came a second. Then a third.

“Oh, shit,” she said, mainly to herself.

“Yer not far off,” said Kettle, having heard it anyway. “Come on then, lassie; help me get him down.”

The two of them grabbed Tytamon by the robes and began hauling him down the steps, roughly, too much in a hurry to arrange him better between them for the descent. Pernie followed, knocking orcs off the ivy with her sling with amazing efficiency. At least for a time. A pair of orcs soon came over the wall from the first two ladders and, seeing that all was clear, called back over the wall to their comrades. More ladders sounded against the stone. Another orc came up by the ivy.

Orli had to let Tytamon go.

She and Pernie fired repeatedly up at the wall; small river stones and bright streaks of red laser light striped the air and dropped the toothy brutes as fast as possible. But it wasn’t fast enough. There were just too many of them. They climbed over in waves that seemed as if they would never stop.

That’s when she heard Altin shouting across the courtyard at her. Suddenly his voice broke through the din with such urgency she couldn’t help but catch it through the chaos of the battle. She only heard bits of what he said, though. She squinted and leaned toward him, as if that might help, but she couldn’t make out what he wanted at all.

He had to turn back and conjure a fireball down at the orcs still pounding on the gate, a smaller one, burning orange, but still deadly. The sounds of orc agony came muffled through the thick wood of the gate, which was spared for another moment, but even that sturdy protection was showing the signs of weakening. Smoke poured through the gaps under and above it.

Orli had to spin back to face more pressing issues. She aimed carefully, remembering to breathe in the way both Roberto and her father had told her time and time again. She shot three more orcs. Pernie dropped another after that. Five more came over the wall.

This wasn’t going to end well, she knew.

Altin was screaming at her again, but she still couldn’t make it out. But she now heard another familiar sound: Taot’s roar. She heard it twice more right after that, the first seemingly distant and the next much closer now, as if he were coming fast toward the castle wall.

With hope surging in her veins at the sound, she stood her ground over the fallen Tytamon, standing before Kettle and Pernie, defiantly blasting orcs as fast as she could squeeze off the shots.

“Die, you fuckers, die!” she screamed as she lit the gloom with a spray of bright red light. Orcs fell like scythed wheat, toppling down and landing in heaps on both sides of the wall.

Dimly aware that Altin was still screaming, she tried to make out what it was. It sounded as if he were about to lose his mind, his voice frantic, the pitch rising, seeming almost terrified. She almost stopped shooting to turn back to him again, but then his voice was lost in the awesome thunder of Taot’s rage pouring over the wall in a wave of sound, heat and fire.

Suddenly the space above her turned orange in a whirling cloud of burning gas. It washed over the wall and down at her like some great volcanic blast had just crashed against the outside of the keep. The heat was overwhelming, and the force of its wind blew them backward like paper toys, Orli, Kettle and Pernie flying back, and Tytamon’s prone form rolling limply across the flagstones.

Orli covered the back of her head reflexively with her right hand as her left reached out and tried to drag Pernie into the protective curve of her body as they fell. They hit the ground together, hard, the three of them in a pile, all cowering beneath the wicked heat.

Still the fiery wind blew. It washed over the wall in a churning cloud of conflagration that sucked all the oxygen from the air around them as the dragon blew and blew and blew. She knew as she trembled and singed beneath it that it was Taot, for there could be no other source of a fire like that, and yet still she marveled at the heat. And the stamina of the wind. She felt blisters begin on the back of her neck and arms. Her uniform smoked and the synthetic armor fibers heated up and burned where seams pressed against her flesh.

How long could the dragon possibly breathe like that?

And then, finally, it stopped.

Air rushed back into the space, and all of them gasped for the first breath in over a minute. Finally
she
could breathe.