Page 95 of Elvenbred

Button three caused the bronze rods strewn about the floor to hiss and smoke. As she watched, they glowed a cherry red. Punishment for Rock. He sidled away from the closest. She was running out of buttons. She pressed the fourth shell. She heard alarm bells starting to clang in the distance, and a sudden snap! as the fused larger door of Rock’s cage sprang free. The sound repeated itself as each section in turn separated from its neighbor, and the formerly solid bars returned to their gate-state.

She looked up at Rock. “Well, this is it.” She pressed the last shell at the bottom, and the large cage door slowly swung open. Triana heard a second, and more urgent set of alarms in the distance. Rock pulled up a memory that Triana guessed was plan?

“Improvising, old boy. Two ramps up, out into the sunlight and over the back-fence for you. Hoping the drama up by the city walls will provide the confusion we need to get you out.”

Rock seemed to ponder that a moment. Triana took the moment to sit and pull the boots on. The left went on all right, but the right was much too tight. “Clumsy oaf!” she swore at herself, as she wrenched the boot up over her swollen foot. She stood up. “Are you coming, or what?” Rock sent her a memory of her colt following her across a field.

The mage-lights came back on at that point, though at perhaps half-strength, and the distant thrumming sound that Triana had grown accustomed to hearing returned, but quieter and slower than before. Still, there was light. Rock stopped glowing.

The boots helped, but she still limped a bit. She carried the stick in one hand and used the firelance tube as a cane for her foot. She got to the large stable door, cracked it to look out, saw a phalanx of guards approaching, then closed it. “Crap. They’re coming. About a dozen.” She took a panicked look around. The cage was a mess, the stables obviously broken open, and Rock looming over the passageway. No way to hide. She felt his presence in her mind, soothing, calming. Her ability to think returned. She stepped back away from the stable doors, a few feet and began to cast an illusion, shaping it around the inside of the doorway, so that when they first entered, they would see only what they were supposed to see … a large cage, dominated by a pearlescent house-size boulder, a sleeping girl, both locked in their cage. The illusion wouldn’t last long, especially if they walked through it, but it might buy Triana and Rock a few moments of surprise. She strained to hold the seeming, but she could already see it bleeding away at the edges.

Four guards came bursting in, holding naked swords, gleaming bronze in the light. Where did those come from? she thought. I didn’t see anything that useful in the armory. They stopped, confused. “Alarm?” said one. “False alarm?” The leader, with sier-jant’s pips, looked perplexed. “No, shouldn’t be.” He took a step closer, one step away from walking through the illusion and seeing Triana face-on. She hefted the stick, the one she’d carried all the way up the ramps and back down again, and readied it for a one-handed swing. “Something’s wrong,” the sier-jant said.

She swung the shovel handle then, bringing the wooden club up and through her illusion to clip him on the side of the head. His sword clanged to the floor, and he went down like a dropped sack of grain. The illusion vanished as she swung, and the second found himself nearly face to face with her. He paused, his eyes opening wide as he saw Rock. Triana struck again, stepping in and backhanding him across the face with the shovel handle club. She heard the crunch of his nose breaking and he went to his knees, screaming as blood poured between his fingers. She lined up on him, his head waist high and swung the club with all her might. It connected with his temple as the club rebounded slightly in her hands, and the sound of his screaming cut off. He slumped and fell to the side. The boneless way he did told her she had killed him.

She had ordered the deaths of slaves, sent gladiators to die, even sipped sherbet while they bled in the sand, but this was the very first time she had taken a life with her own hands. There had been the odd poisonings of course, but those really didn’t count; she hadn’t administered the poison herself and she hadn’t been there when the victim died. She felt her gorge rise and knew she would be sick later. She tore her eyes away.

Rock had done for the other two. Both lay dead, small holes in their heads. His pseudopods could kill, then.

Two memories. A dozen. Then. Four. An amused edge to both.

“All right,” she said. “I was in a rush. It looked like more.”

She opened the door and stepped out, then back in. “Damn and double-damn. It’s the Overseer. Back up. We do it again. Same again.”

Rock shuffled back, and she stepped back, raising the illusion as she went. This time she left the room as it was, leaving the two fallen in the open, and simply erasing herself and Rock from the image. This casting was smaller and took less strain. Still, the pit of fear worried at her and undermined her confidence.

One guard stuck his head into the stables and took in the tableau. “No one here, Overseer!”

Other guards open both of the stable doors, pushing and grunting to turn the stiff wheels. Immediately behind, she saw Troniar Vaylan, the Overseer, standing in the hallway, looking in. She made a desperate hand-pass, of a person sprinting away, down the hallway; not a visual, a quick auditory. A pair of guards with Vaylan turned, and went after the sound.

She saw Vaylan, just on the threshold of the stables and a few dozen feet from her, thinking. He looked back to where the guards followed her conjured fading boot-steps, then back to the stables. “Illusions,” he said. “Illusions.”

She felt her heart sink as he made a single hand-pass, and her sins were revealed. She and Rock were clearly at liberty, well out of the cage and very close to Vaylan and his guards. She held up her stick. He drew his sword, grinning wolfishly.

She shrugged, but inside she went cold. Slamming a club into the head of someone who wasn’t ready was one thing. Going up against someone who was trained, well armed, and as muscled as one of her best gladiators was quite another matter. Especially when he was backed up by two more like him. Rock, I could use a little help here, she projected desperately.

He swung the sword, slicing her makeshift club in half, then on the backswing brought the blade back towards her body. She scrambled back, trying to protect her face with her arms. The blow never landed. She heard the blade strike stone, and looked up to see a pseudopod angled across her body, blocking the blow. A second lanced out, snapping Vaylan’s sword off a handbreadth above the hilt.

Troniar Vaylan looked up at Rock with an expression of irritation. He reached down into his belt and pulled out the control rod he had used on Triana. He pointed it at Rock and pressed one stud set in the side. Nothing obvious happened. He frowned and pressed it again, then looked at the rod. He looked up again, finally comprehending that Rock was free and unfettered from the bronze control rods.

Vaylan stepped back, and Rock surged forward like a raging floodwater. Triana had just enough time to dodge out of his way. She came around Rock’s bulk in time to see Rock drill Overseer Vaylan five times, the pseudopod punching through his chest at measured intervals. The end of the pseudopod glowed cherry red, as the bronze rods had glowed, and each hole was precise and clean. One hole would have killed him. Rock used five. Overdoing it just a bit, aren’t we? It appeared that Vaylan hadn’t confined his sadism to the elves under his command.

Triana didn’t need to be an expert in interspecies communication to know payback when she saw it. The remainder of the guards fled at Vaylan’s death. She barely had time to call out when dozens of pseudopods lashed out, ripping into the guards as they tried to flee. In the space of a few heartbeats, the passage outside the stables was a dripping red ruin. Triana did throw up then. When she was done, she made it a point to pick up the bronze tube. She hadn’t realized she’d dropped it.

Rock moved out into the passageway, and started up the hall towards the armory and Machina bays. She stepped carefully through the wreckage of the guards and ran to the base of the ramp. “Rock, over here!” Rock reversed course and followed her up one ramp, to the landing, and up the second. She could see daylight up ahead. She turned to call out to Rock, when the floor bucked and she was knocked off her feet. A vast roaring and wind blew past the entrance, and she could see debris and Machina parts blown by the sudden powerful wind. She got to her feet and stumbled towards the exit.

She looked back. Rock hadn’t moved. “What’s wrong?”

A long pause, then a vast sadness swept over her. She went to her knees, overwhelmed by the power of the image, and for a second she feared for her sanity. The pain and emotion passed, and she was left with an image, not a memory of hers, but one placed there by Rock. An Old One had died. Behind it a wall of fury began to rise, that Rock severed the connection to her thoughts before his anger burned through her mind. There will be war.

It was his memory, not hers, of both a great and gentle creature who managed on three legs in this world and as a vast spirit in the Otherspace where Rock’s kind dwelt. Ancient beyond ancient, now destroyed by the elves’ weapons. The last traces of Rock’s mind touching hers were infused with his loss and fury.

“Let’s get you out of here, friend,” she said, putting a hand on Rock’s side, and trying to project the urgency she now felt. A weapon That one fellow warned me about a dangerous weapon that a flying thing was carrying. That must have been one of those weapons. Rock has to get far away before they set off another one. Rock whirled in place back towards her, faster than anything that big should be able to move. She dodged out of the way as he came past, as implacable as an avalanche. Pseudopods emerged from his front, a dozen, then two, then more. He moved past her and out into the light. She quickly followed, then stopped to take in the devastation.

The grassy area and hillslope up towards the front of the estate had been burned black, and mostly blown away. Haldeen’s Tower, and her landmark, leaned drunkenly to one side. She suspected it would go over soon, blown off its center by whatever had happened outside. What had Lord Shitter called the weapon?

An actinic. That had killed an Old One and done this to the city. She looked back at Rock, who headed straight for the outer wall. The pseudopods began clutching at the walls, opening and closing like jaws as they chewed into the stone. Triana saw they would make short work of the wall. Rock began flinging stone to either side, making room for himself to pass through as he dug into the wall. She made it a point to stay directly out of direction he threw, though occasionally a rock or two went astray.