Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [11]
“Quiet, Mr. Hazid. Knight-Sergeant! Stop those wagons. Strike down anyone who refuses.”
“Now or never,” muttered Hazid. He leaped onto the leotau at the front of his wagon, picked up the reins, and slashed the bindings that held the animal to the wagon with his sword. The leotau roared and bucked, but Hazid dug his heels into its ribs and held on. With one good whip of the reins, the leotau took off at a full gallop.
The chanters droned loudly, their mouths fully open all around the circle. Human and rhox knights threatened them with sharpened steel, but never advanced. The chanters’ spell held them in a sort of dazed inaction, and besides, their kind of mass disobedience was unheard of, and more than a little frightening.
Hazid rode hard around the circle, whistling sharply. It was all coming together. One by one, mages inside the wagons threw off the tarps after hearing the signal. Inscribed in the wood inside each wagon was a mystic circle, and after exposing them to the light, each mage sat inside his or her circle and began casting the spell that would propel Hazid into history.
That’s when the castle began to crack.
Hazid didn’t notice the destruction at first. He was too excited, riding at a full gallop around to each of his mages, and wrapped up in the idea that he was actually going to pull the spell off. But it was unmistakable once he saw an enormous slab of one of the white cylinders break off and crash to the ground. Fractures chased one another up the towers. One by one, all but one collapsed in on itself. The citadel that was suspended by the four towers fell with them, exploding in a cloud of pulverized stone.
All the knights and mages fell silent and watched in horror. Hazid pulled his leotau to a stop. His jaw sagged open, and spittle collected in his mouth. The impact reached them in a wind of dust and noise blasting past, and little flecks of the castle peppered Hazid’s face. After the wind subsided and the cloud dispersed, the castle was gone. Only one tower remained; or rather, a sharp, brilliantly white, conical obelisk remained—a structure which must have been hidden under the northwest spire for centuries.
It can’t be happening, thought Hazid.
“What have I done?” he said aloud.
He dropped the reins and looked at his hands, turning them over and over, looking for an answer he would never find.
JUND
It was dawn, a state recognizable by a dim red glow through the ashchoked skies over Mount Jhal. Insects the size of Rakka’s arm buzzed by in force. Her satchel of herbs and sangrite paints jangled on her back, making her shoulders ache, but there was a long way to go before she could put it down.
The clan had already made it deep into Palehide Thrash territory under cover of darkness. Although they hadn’t seen any viashino yet, already the undergrowth had given way to crunchy volcanic pebbles. It was exhausting to constantly slip in the pebble-slides, so they kept their footing with spiked saurid-leather boots and hiking staves.
They walked a thin trail between two vast, bubbling tar pits, so large that the opposite sides were invisible in the fumes of the morning. The foul stench burned Rakka’s lungs.
“Shh,” hissed Kresh suddenly. The clan stopped and huddled down on the thin strip of land between the tar pools. Watchers scanned the skies, but saw no reptilian silhouettes.
“What is it?” whispered Rakka.
The viashino heads looked like large bubbles at first. The tar bloated and spat forth a dozen steaming viashino warriors. Only their eyes and onyx axes were visible through the oily muck.
“Ambush!” Kresh barely had time to say.
The viashino hissed like volcanic vents and pounced on the clan. Three of the watchers were dragged down screaming in seconds. Kresh swung with his sword, cleaving a viashino clean in half and grimacing as hot tar spattered his chest.
Rakka snarled at an attacker that had crept up from behind. Its tongue