“Try to get around their shields!” Alex shouted as the nearest boat struck the sandy bottom and stopped moving. “Or use spells that don’t require components!” The pirates climbed out of the boat with amazing speed and agility, and ran the boat farther up the sand.
“None of those are lethal!” shouted one of Alex’s frustrated fighters.
“Just do what you can!” replied Alex, flinging spells one after another.
The pirates rushed through the water toward the Artiméans at an alarming speed, holding their shields in front of them. Alex and his warriors continued pelting the pirates with spells, but only a few met their mark. As they reached land, the pirates drew their swords and ran at the Artiméans, and it was then that Alex finally realized just how big these enemies were, and how long and sharp their swords were, and how unprotected he and his people were. The Artiméans were forced back, casting spells as quickly as they could, but the pirates were too many, too fast, and too strong.
Rather than killing the pirates, which now seemed like an impossible task, Alex began casting glass spells between the two parties, trying to slow the enemy down and keep his team safer.
That definitely helped, as the pirates weren’t expecting such a thing. Several of them smashed into the walls of glass, their weapons clanging against them. But each glass wall Alex put up took several seconds and a good amount of energy and concentration, and Alex wasn’t nearly fast enough. Some pirates began to slam their shields against the glass, while others simply went around the panels and began swinging their swords wildly. Alex’s team had nothing with which to protect themselves, and with only a small percentage of their spells causing any harm, they began to panic.
Some of them ran to the fountain in the middle of the lawn for cover, while others hid behind the mansion and cast spells from there, trying to find a better angle. Mr. Appleblossom on the roof was the most successful, for he could strike pirates on the head, but the pirates soon discovered him and moved out of range.
Alex, finding himself backed up against a shattered mansion window by a pirate twice his size, had no choice but to flip backward through the frame and scramble to his feet again in time to send a freeze spell at the pirate’s ankles. It hit its mark, and the pirate froze in place. Alex jumped back out through the mansion window and finished off the brute from behind with a triple dose of heart attack spells, and soon the pirate fell over on his back, both frozen and dead. Alex grabbed the man’s shield.
More boats arrived on shore. Alex looked up just in time to see thirty or more pirates with shields and swords running toward him, with none of his team around to help fight them off. Desperate, Alex began casting spells with all his might, but there was nothing he could do to stop them all.
Just then, Simber came swooping down from above and plowed into the line of pirates, knocking them flat. Swords and shields went flying. “Grab the shields to protect yourselves!” Alex screamed to his team. “Swords too, if you know how to use them!” The team descended on the items and armed themselves.
The next boat reached the shore, and the pirates piled out as before. Simber knocked them down as well, but the first row of flattened pirates was getting back up again.
“Into the mansion!” one of the pirates cried out.
Alex felt his heart throbbing, and his throat was parched. “No!” he yelled, and ran to pick up a sword. He brandished it awkwardly, then ran at the pirates. They knocked him aside like a feather. As they broke down the door, Alex, still prone, dropped the sword and found his extra stash of heart attack spells. He rolled to his side and pelted the pirates’ backs with them one by one, and they toppled over, but it wasn’t enough, and soon they were storming into the mansion.
Alex flopped back, exhausted, and then he struggled and scrambled to his feet and ran after them until he’d stopped every last one of them. He raced back past the hospital ward, shouting to the nurses, “Use the magic lock to protect yourselves—this is going to get very ugly!”
The Brunt of the Attack
Lani and her team took on the pirates the best way they knew how—by running past them into the water once they reached the shore and firing at the pirates’ backs. It worked the first time, and seventeen pirates fell to their deaths. But all the rest of them whirled around, furious, and began brandishing their weapons. The pirates were big and they were strong and some of them were even smart, and Lani knew her team was in trouble.
But she’d also seen Alex put up glass spells, and while she had never been able to pull off that spell, she knew Samheed could do it, so in the midst of a high-speed chase with a lumbering pirate behind her, she ran toward Samheed’s team. “Sam!” she cried. “Glass barriers!” She hoped he heard her. She circled around, three pirates on her tail now, and tried freezing them, but they blocked all of her attempts. She tossed heart attack spells over her shoulder, but they couldn’t find their marks because of the shields.
She wished she’d grabbed a sword when her team had felled the first round of pirates, but those weapons were out of reach from where she was now. She knew that all she had to do was kill one of the pirates chasing her to get one. But it was proving impossible. She ran away from the water toward the rocky hill that led up to the road in Quill, now leading half a dozen pirates away from her team. Nimbly up the rocks she ran, and realized the pirates weren’t quite as agile as she. She climbed faster, her legs burning, and the pirates fell farther behind. When she reached the top, she picked up a huge rock and threw it down at the first pirate, and because he was looking down at his footing, he didn’t see it. It smashed into his head, sending him tumbling backward and knocking down the two women behind him.
Lani followed up with deadly scatterclips, one right after the other, putting an end to all three before the pirates behind them could reach her. Heartened, she picked up the pace again, going down the rocky hill this time, leaping recklessly, but with no other choice. She ran past a few of her team who were struggling and managed to fire heart attack spells at their enemies’ backs as she ran.
More tenders landed, putting Lani and her team in even bigger trouble. Lani managed to dodge the chasing pirates long enough to go back to one of the fallen ones and grab a shield and sword. She swung the sword wildly, finding it a good bit heavier than the swords Mr. Appleblossom trained them with in Actors’ Studio, but she soon adjusted. And when she managed to knock the shield out of the hands of a pirate, she threw her own shield to the ground so she could grab a handful of heart attack components.
“Heart attack!” she cried, flinging them. They hit their mark, sending the pirate tumbling down the hill.
Lani lunged for the shield, but she’d lost concentration for a split second, and a burly pirate scooped her up from behind, then flung her over his shoulder. She kicked with all her might into the pirate’s stomach and slammed her sword into the back of his leg. He spun around, roaring.
Lani wiggled a scatterclip from her vest pocket, and as he started pulling her off his shoulder, she shoved the clip deep into his ear and shouted, “Die a thousand deaths!”
The man went limp. He dropped Lani hard to the rocky hillside and fell on top of her. She was trapped.
“Get! Off! Me!” Lani yelled, struggling with all her might to push the pirate off, but one of her arms was trapped. She took a second to look out at her team, trying to see how many of them still stood, and counted fewer than half. She struggled again, and then realized the other pirates were ignoring her because she was on the ground. She eased her free hand under the pirate’s smelly armpit and reached into her vest pocket, grabbing as many scatterclips as she could get her fingers around, and then laid them out on the dead pirate’s back.
Whenever a pirate got close enough, Lani fired. She managed to take down eleven pirates over the course of her lengthy entrapment. But things were only getting worse instead of better, as a seemingly endless stream of pirates rushed ashore. Soon Lani was the only living member of her team who hadn’t taken to the tr
ees in hiding or run into Quill for safety. The remaining band of pirates rushed toward the mansion.
“You stupid brute!” Lani yelled, pounding on the dead man’s back. She pushed with all her might, but with only one hand free, she wasn’t nearly strong enough. Finally she fell back, exhausted. Her trapped arm had lost feeling by now, and the rocks dug into her back. She closed her eyes, furious, and breathed heavily, trying to build strength. And then, out of immense frustration, Lani tried a spell she’d never done before.
She put her hand on the dead pirate’s back, took a few calming breaths, and concentrated on an image in her mind of Queen Eagala’s stupid face. When she felt good and calm and ready, Lani whispered, “Transport.”
An instant later Lani was free, and almost simultaneously a hideous scream rose up from a nearby ship. Lani grinned. That voice was one of the very few sounds she’d heard when she and Samheed had been captive on Warbler Island—it was the unmistakable scream of Queen Eagala.
Lani eased up off the rocks and got to her feet. She shoved a sword in her belt, grabbed a shield, and shook out the prickling arm that had fallen asleep. “Yowch!” she muttered, half laughing and half crying as it came back to life. “Now that really hurts.”
A moment later a stampede of pirates rushed along the shore below, coming from where Samheed had been fighting and heading toward the mansion. Lani knew that could mean only one thing . . . everybody on Samheed’s team was down or gone.
“Oh no. Sam,” Lani whispered. She peered to the west, then shouted for him. “Sam!” She started running toward his station like a mad person, searching the fallen bodies on the rocks.
“Where are you?” she said, her voice pitching higher with fear. “Sam!”
She scrambled up the rocky bank to the trees that lined the road. “Samheed!”
A body dropped out of a tree next to Lani, startling her. She reached for a component, ready to attack. And then she saw his face.
“Hi,” whispered Samheed. “Are they gone?”
Lani blew out a breath of relief and nodded. “They’re headed to the mansion.”
Samheed whistled like a bird. “The coast is clear, everybody. Let’s go help out Alex.”
Seven or eight Artiméans dropped from the trees and gathered around Samheed, and they all began jogging toward Artimé, picking up a few of Lani’s hiding teammates along the way. Samheed slipped his arm around Lani’s neck as they fell in step. He wore a mischievous smile on his face and said, “Did you hear Eagala’s deathly scream? I’d know that horrible sound anywhere. I wonder what that was all about.”
“Hmm,” said Lani with a grin. “I wonder.”
Aaron Fights His Battles
On the west side of Quill, not far from the base of the new lighthouse where the palace used to stand, Aaron watched and waited with his mishmash team of Necessaries, displaced Wanteds, and a handful of Artiméan spell casters. Those with makeshift weapons stood at the top of the steep rise of rocky land, finding they had better footing there to stop the pirates from getting past them, and a better chance of knocking them off balance on the rocks.
The squirrelicorns had been by to deliver the news about the protective workings of the shields, so the spell casters set themselves up in trees and in the windows of the lighthouse in hopes of staying out of range of the swords and perhaps having a better angle at which to fire their spells.
Seeing the pirate ship stationed in the water with the smaller tenders full of pirates coming toward them gave Aaron a particular sense of dread, for he’d witnessed this scene before—on the way out of the palace before the pirates had thrown him face-first into the smaller boat.
Aaron cringed, remembering the pain. He didn’t want revenge. The truth was that he wanted to hide. It didn’t matter that Aaron was immortal now—he could still feel pain. And with the number of pirates coming toward shore, Aaron assumed the worst.
He also expected the worst from his team. While they had grown to over fifty in number and were the largest of any team fighting for Quill and Artimé, many of the members had never fought before. True, Alex had given Aaron some especially strong spell casters, which was great. But if the spells were having as little effect as the squirrelicorns reported, Aaron wasn’t sure what he was going to do.
The pirates reached the shore and climbed the rocky hillside. Aaron gripped his dagger tightly in one hand and some components in the other, and willed his hands not to sweat. When the enemy grew close, Aaron gathered his courage and rushed forward, tossing heart attack components and scatterclips and shouting the verbal components that went with them, trying to hit the pirate men and women before they had a chance to block the components with their shields.
He knocked down two with lethal components, and several others with the single component version of the heart attack, figuring he’d better conserve components and just try to stop the enemy first. He could kill them later.
His plan served to infuriate the mass of pirates, and several of them changed direction and came charging up the hill toward Aaron, determined to stop him. Aaron cast as many spells as he could, but aiming and throwing them individually and calling out the verbal part of the spell took more seconds than he had before the pirates reached the top of the hill. With one last “Die a thousand deaths!” Aaron turned his back and ran to the lighthouse, ducking inside as his team members came to his aid, swinging rusty makeshift swords, clubs, and even the water buckets that they’d been using all night to douse the flaming tar balls.
The pirates slashed and hollered, charged and stabbed, swung and connected, and soon the Necessaries and Wanteds who had joined Aaron either ran away in fear or lay dead on the road. Aaron and the other spell casters barred the door to the lighthouse and began pelting the pirates with spells from the windows above, taking out a few of them in the process. After concerted efforts to break through the door failed, the pirates grew annoyed by their thinning ranks, and most of them gave up.
“To the mansion!” one of the pirates cried. All but two turned and headed in the direction of Artimé’s mansion, the roof of which was barely discernable through the trees, shining golden in the morning sunlight.
With the pirates fleeing, Aaron’s confidence surged. Feeling emboldened and remembering his immortality, Aaron recklessly jumped from the window and landed on top of one of the two remaining pirates. She staggered and dropped to one knee. Aaron pummeled the woman until she flopped to the ground, then flung three heart attack spells at the other pirate’s back, felling him.
Breathing heavily, he checked himself for wounds, finding a slice on his arm that barely emitted a trickle of blood before the skin came together again. While evidence of the injury clearly remained, it was certainly healing at an alarming rate. The pain, while present, was less than he expected. “Yes,” he whispered. He could take some risks. At the moment, he couldn’t imagine a better ability to possess than immortality.
He looked all around, and when he was certain the coast was clear, he called to his remaining team. “They’re gone! Let’s go!”
Aaron’s team came running down the lighthouse steps and gathered around him. “What now?” one of them asked. Of the fifty, there were only six men and women left.
“Let’s check on Liam and Gunnar and the teams on the north side of the island to see if any of them need help,” said Aaron. “And then we’ll head back to Artimé to protect the mansion.”
Those remaining agreed and set out.
But soon another huge wave of pirates came from the direction of Liam’s station, also heading toward the mansion in Artimé. Knowing it would be crazy to take them on, Aaron and his group hid behind a stand of trees and waited for them to pass. As the last limping pirates passed by, Aaron and his team soundlessly took out the trailing ones, unbeknownst to the other pirates. When the enemies were out of sight, Aaron’s team ran north toward Liam’s station to see if anyone was alive.
“Liam!” Aaron called softly.
A few of Liam?
??s team emerged from behind a group of rocks, Liam among them. “There were too many,” Liam said, dazed. His pant leg hung in tatters, and there was a bright red bloodstain spreading on the remaining cloth. He limped out from behind the rocks, and his four remaining teammates followed.
Shouts rose up in the distance behind them, but they couldn’t see anything. “Th-that’s probably another shipload of them coming from Gunnar’s station,” said Liam. “We’d better check on them.”
“We’ve got twelve of us now,” said Aaron. “Let’s stick together. We have to do something! I can’t imagine what things are going to look like in Artimé. I hope . . . ,” he said, thinking of Alex, thinking of everything. “I hope everyone is okay.” He slipped his hand inside his vest to make sure the robe was still in place. It was. The battle inside his head returned while the one on the ground took a brief respite.
Aaron led the group toward Gunnar Haluki’s post with Liam hobbling along behind, slowing them down. A short time later, Haluki came out from behind a section of houses. Seven women and men followed him sporting various injuries. Their faces were grim, and they barely spoke.
Gunnar flashed Aaron a defeated glance, and soon the group of twenty was moving along together, growing more fearful of what they would find with the teams on the north shore of the island.
Liam continued to lag, and finally Aaron sent him back to Artimé with one of Gunnar’s injured team members, telling them to go to the hospital ward. That left eighteen. They began jogging eastward along the north shore of Quill, looking for signs of Artiméans, but for a long stretch they saw no one and feared the worst for Sky and her team.
“Perhaps Sky’s team has already joined the others in Artimé,” said Gunnar.
“I hope that’s it,” said Aaron. Neither of them believed it. They ran faster.
Finally they heard shouts and clangs of metal in the distance behind the Ancients Sector. Aaron and Gunnar’s squirrelicorns rose up, spotted something, and pointed out the direction. The leaders pressed doggedly onward with their teams struggling to keep up.