The remaining dead and the cult didn’t make that an easy push. It was clear by now that Decima was already limping along, and Emrys was pushing Rose up the hill because her hands were numb from exertion already.
It was a fight, but not one they weren’t up to. Decima had found a sling on one of the fallen cultists and she used it to shockingly better effect than Rose had ever seen from the boys back home who mostly used them to chase birds off their bean fields. She hurled rocks and broken glass into the incoming cultists with such efficiency and Rose was able to open a few holes and blast a few dead. She even managed to turn one cultist’s boot into a small tarp and the satisfying noise his nose made as he fell was really good. Gusts of angry smoke helped push enemies clear or into the way of Decima’s blade occasionally.
As the three of them reached the huge stone gate (she quickly thanked those slow Westies that it hadn’t been closed yet), Rose felt her power start to creep back in. She hadn’t earned that. It wasn’t the natural flow of her talent within her body, it was simply knowing that her sister lay ahead and needed her. Rose knew that she would burn herself to cinders if it got her sister out of here alive. And that idea didn’t bother her at all.
It was a lovely fantasy, but it was the sounds that killed it. The echoing hoot flowing over the rocky ground. Not one as they had heard before, but many. Now. The master had unleashed his hounds, and this time Rose wasn’t sure they would get lucky.
She turned to look behind them, noting that Emrys was doing the same. More cultists. More dead. What seemed to be guards coming down the ladders to the watchtowers at the gate. How many of these fuckers were there? Was there a single solitary dwarf still in a tomb in this place?
She looked up to Decima. If anybody had a plan, it would be her. Rose couldn’t tell from the look on her face. The woman was hard to read at the best of times and now she was exhausted and frustrated. But she was thinking.
Finally she said, “We must cut through the beasts.” Rose understood what that meant. It meant that going back would be easier, and she had already dismissed the idea. For her. She felt temporarily unworthy, perhaps permanently unworthy. And if they had been chasing after Rose and she had been the captive, she would have told them to leave. If it were her mother out there, she would have already left. She’d already decided that. Fuck it.
Rose said, “I thought I felt something the last time we fought one. See if you can buy me some time.” Decima nodded once and looked to Emrys.
“Still no fire sadly, but we don’t need to cover as much ground here. Let me see what the rock will do for me.” He grunted, kneeling and began to whisper into the ground in the strange flowery language he used for such magics.
“sadiqi hal satahmini…”
And then the beasts were upon them.
Before Rose had been almost hypnotized by their movements. Sometimes they seemed to flicker, and sometimes the number of legs changed. Now that she was able to see them in better light, the whole body did it. Sometimes they had 2 or 4 eyes. Sometimes their maws were longer than others. It wasn’t a trick of the light, it was like she couldn’t see all of them at the same time! Like bits of them flitted in and out of view without going anywhere. What the shit were these things? Where was the rest of them going? And it wasn’t two like orange face mask had said, because of course it wasn’t. It was three.
Decima, it was clear, stood no chance against three alone. Given their ability to flicker from place to place and the way they seemed to sidestep her attacks before she even chose them, she was badly outclassed. But there was something. Rose tried to push thoughts of her sister out of her mind, to be clear headed as she’d been taught, but it was no good. Well, if she couldn’t push those thoughts down, she’d use them. Her third eye opened and a wide blast hit one of the beasts that was waiting on the side to strike at Decima.
And she did strike it. Or, the blast got there. There was a flick from the tail and her blast hit some sort of aura around the thing, like invisible armor? She could see more clearly this time and it was definitely a shield as she had previously guessed: a faint shimmer of blue that dispersed the blast around it. It turned to look at her and got a strike from Decima for its trouble. Not a lethal strike, but Rose smiled.
And then a mass of earth lumbered into the fray. It was a weird collection of stones and dirt and mud … just an unbelievable mess. It certainly didn’t move like something that knew how to fight, but what did Rose know about elemental spirits? She glanced toward Emrys to see what he was doing … and of course he was gone. The elemental took a blow from one of the beast’s tails and it stumbled to one knee before getting back up, letting loose a watery cry.
Oh, fuck. Emrys was INSIDE that thing! Decima also noticed. She lashed out at the thing that had shoved him and was rewarded with a slash at the open air where it used to be. It had shifted to the right, so Rose blasted again. This one connected hard and the thing rolled over. An attack from another creature. Decima dodged right into its jaws which had moved into her path and she left a thick ribbon of blood as she pulled away. The tail had flared again. Rose felt it again. Again.
Holy shit, they weren’t somewhere else, they were some when else! These things didn’t move through time the way everyone else did. They get a second chance! If they miss, they try again. If they get hit, they try again and move out of the way.
Except she HAD hit one, she realized as she lashed out with her talent again, hitting the same energy armor as before. She’d hit one after it used that again whatever it was, and Decima hit one after it had to block her attack! Because it can only do so much at once, right? How to use that? Right now one was pulling at Emrys’ earth covered belly and Decima was closing in. In a haste, Rose blasted. It hit that armor and a moment later Decima slid her blade in along the spine, causing the thing to twist and cry out in pain, releasing one of those hooting echoes that somehow carried pain inside it. The other two turned to look. Decima looked at her, seeming to intuit that there WAS a plan. “Wait for me!” was all Rose could think to get out. Decima nodded. Was that enough? Maybe. She was the soldier, after all. Rose was just some farm girl sitting at the edge of battle.
But she knew how these shits worked now, didn’t she? Whoever this awful masked man was, he had somehow enslaved not only monsters, but monsters that had their own sort of talent. Did that make her hate him more? It did. She felt more of a kinship with these hooting lizards things than she did with him, that’s for sure. And she resented having to kill them to get to her sister, but here they were.
Two more of the things were barreling down on Decima, weaving in and out of existence to get there. As one closed in on the soldier, Rose blasted and as expected, she hit a barrier. But Decima didn’t miss. Not only did she strike that one, but she gave it a mighty shove into the next. Seemed that they weren’t as immune to one another, because it collided solidly and knocked it to the ground where it slid hard into Emrys. For his part, the earth around him made him the equivalent of a trembling rock and the thing hit with a bloody crunch and a sad hoot.
It wasn’t smooth sailing. Even without the ability to reliably try things again they were good fighters. They were solid. It was like fighting a small herd of wolves. More than once, Rose had to frantically blast one as it turned to run for her until Decima could get at it from behind, because these things were a LOT faster than Rose. She hit it again. Blast. Blast. Blast. It was the only thing that worked and … besides, she was starting to have trouble remembering what else she might be doing.
In the end Emrys was only half covered in earth and he had a rough looking claw mark on one leg. Decima was bleeding from half a dozen places, but she just kept going like some tiny juggernaut. And it was Emrys, of all people, who got the killing blow on the last of these things. It sidestepped Decima’s blade with a flicker because Rose was too busy seeing double and possibly triple to blast it anymore and remain human. Her ears were ringing and everything sounded underwater. And Emrys just …. fell on the thing. Hard. It seemed to Rose that maybe he tried to jump, and he was just …. too heavy. But the fall did it. The thing cracked and there was a sad hoot and a snap from the neck and it was over. It faded into just crystal like the others had.
Rose began to push her way forward to meet up with the others. Which was when she heard the noises behind her in the direction of the gate. They had fought their way into the field and road beyond the gate against the again beasts, but now the cultists and guards were starting to murmur among themselves, or maybe Rose only heard it as a murmur. She certainly couldn’t see it clearly. Not the dead, of course, they were probably not murmuring, but Rose would sort of make out which was which based on how the dead were shorter and moved like they were drunk. She couldn’t make them out clearly, but she knew there were a lot of them.
As she arrived where the other two were gathered together, the stones and dirt were falling away from Emrys. He looked like death, but he was in way better shape than Decima, who even smelled of blood. She hurt to look at. One eye was swollen shut and her left ear was like a mushroom on a rotten tree. Her right arm was pulled in tight and she was holding the sword with her left. Was she left handed? Rose couldn’t remember right now, but she caught what was being said well enough. “Just get her away from here as fast as you can. They will not get past me.”
Emrys nodded because, of course he did. Rose didn’t have to hear the rest to know the plan that she absolutely was not okay with. “Fuck that, no chance!” Admittedly, it came out a bit muddled, but she got some of the point across.
Decima – fuck her smug face! – smiled at her. She fucking smiled with the half of her face that would work and said, “You can barely move.”
“YOU can barely move!” Well, that was what she tried to say. It was more like, “Yoo ly move”
Decima crossed the sword over her chest with the tip toward the ground and made a low bow. It felt formal. “Yes, my friend. But I am still a prefect. And the Thessali legion made sure that I could swing this sword for a few minutes after my body was dead.” She wasn’t really joking, but she was smiling.
Emrys was saying, “We must go now, Rose.” He was behind her ready to push, but he wasn’t yet willing to move her without her consent. Later, when she wasn’t so angry, she’d remember to be fiercely grateful to him for that. If they made it.
Rose simply said, “You don’t owe me this.”
Decima was looking past her now, toward the gate. “I owe my life. Nothing more, nothing less. And if I should survive, we will be quite even, I agree. Now, go. Save your sister. I will be here when you return.” She faced the rising sun, her face brilliantly bright. “One way or the other.”
And then she walked toward the gate, and Emrys began to push Rose as fast as his meager legs could carry them.
She saw one bolt hit the ground near them. Even Decima couldn’t stop them all. She didn’t hear the fighting stop, because she wasn’t conscious when it happened. Or maybe they got too far away. She didn’t notice the bolt that had stuck in her leg until later, during a brief moment of consciousness, when the sun was higher in the sky, there was a bloody hole in her leg, and her friend, Decima Cordia, former prefect of the 44th Thessali Legion, was miles behind them, if she was still anything at all.
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