Chapter Thirty-Three
Arris slid along the length of the wall in small steps, watching Onorien at work in the doorway. Watching Onorien at work? The man was casting spells down a hallway at the invading natives, presumably turning them into charcoal briquettes as he had the man in the hidden basement chamber. Something – everything – was wrong.
Just then a spear flashed through the doorway, a small decorative blue feather near the handle, and missed Onorien by a hairsbreadth. It cut through the air and then fell with a dull clatter to the ground, its effort expended, gravity and drag having taken their toll. Onorien glanced at it on the floor for a moment before he turned his head toward Arris and gave him a once-over. Arris recognized the look on Onorien’s face: that was too close. Onorien pulled the crystal from a fold in his robe, a shimmer of rainbow colors undulating through the fabric. He raised the crystal to the level of his chest and extended his arms before him.
“Procella Infucatus!”
The crystal glowed to life, blinking on as if a switch had been thrown. Within micro-seconds, the glow slipped beyond the confines of the crystal and enveloped Onorien’s hands, quickly forming into a spectral beam, the colors of the rainbow hovering in the air like a yardstick mounted to the crystal. The colors deepened and became sharper, as if Onorien were adjusting menu functions on a color television, and then the beam darted forward, stretching from the crystal in a line through the hallway door and out of Arris’ sight. There was a shout from down the hallway, then a shriek, then the mixed sounds Arris’ knew well as sudden panic. It was the sound men make when unit cohesion has gone to hell and each man thinks only of himself, the sudden desire to clutch to life the sole focus of each man. It was a strange sound, but once you heard it, you never forgot it.
Onorien began moving down the hallway, disappearing through the doorway threshold without as much as a glance back at Arris. Whatever Onorien was up to, Arris figured Onorien was in complete and total control of the situation. Arris took another small step to the side and banged his temple into something hard, his head stung with sharp pain and his eyes moistened slightly as he gritted his teeth and held his breath. He tightened the muscles in his body to keep from flinching or over-reacting to the unexpected pain.
He raised his hand up to his temple and massaged it for a moment. He turned his head and looked at the black-bladed sword created by a delusional German baron almost two-hundred years earlier. Arris slid his arm against the wall to the hilt of the sword and pushed it, hoping he could tilt it on the wall to allow him to pass by when he was freed from the wall. The suddenness of the release almost caused him to collapse to the ground and he used every reflex honed during a lifetime of special operations work to keep his balance and maintain his wits. For a moment, he bent over at the waist in a bastardized yoga “triangle pose,” concentrating on his breathing and flexing and relaxing his muscles, centering his balance.
His left hand was still touching the hilt of the sword, pressed against it for balance, his other arm outstretched, his legs resisted wobbling as he concentrated on regaining his center of gravity. He turned his head and looked up at the sword and there, clear as daybreak after a storm, was a high-intensity glow emanating from the small green crystal set in the bottom of the sword’s pommel. He stood up and scanned display room; he listened for Onorien, but Arris only heard a weird rush of air, a sound like one heard in a conch shell pressed against an ear.
Arris glanced back at the sword on the wall, the little gem still aglow, and he reached for it, pulling it down with his right hand. He turned the blade over and felt its heft, felt the precise balance between tip and pommel, the center of gravity just forward of his wrist-hold on the hilt. Indeed, the weapon almost felt as if it had no weight, as if it were an extension of his hand, and he twisted it quickly through the air with a few quick flicks to inform his arm of its mechanics. And still, the small stone in the base of the hilt glowed.
Arris stepped away from the wall cautiously, confused at the nature of his release. He made his way through the room and to the edge of the hallway threshold, tilting his head into the space to look down the hallway. Onorien was still walking down the hallway toward the top of the curving staircase that led to the main entry foyer of the mansion. Beyond him, Arris could see a half-dozen of the natives, most still armed with spears, one with an ancient sword, all of them backtracking in panic.
And then the beam of light flashed out from the crystal like the tongue of a snake, engulfing a spear-holding native and instantly shredding him into nothingness. There was no scream, no last desperate gasp, no spasm to cling to life; one moment, the man had stood there, taking small steps backward, the next he was a hole in the air, a spot where a man had stood, where a life had been living. If Arris hadn’t seen a man turned into a block of ashes earlier that evening, he would not have believed what he had now just seen. Or, rather, he would not have known what to make of what he had just seen. Which was still the case, for the most part, as he watched Onorien take another step down the hallway.
Arris crept closer to Onorien, watching the man as he stepped slowly toward the shrinking natives. Arris felt the sword in his hands, the weight of the weapon pressing against the palm of his hands. He tightened his hands around the hilt and let the weight of his body ease onto the ball of each foot as he stepped slowly toward Onorien, his eyes trained on the back of the man, watching as Onorien approached the retreating natives.
“Impello!” Onorien said softly, just loud enough that Arris could hear though not meant for him to hear, and the spectrum of light flicked out quickly, again, enveloping another spear-wielder, disintegrating him into nothing but air and imagination.
For a moment, before the man had dissolved into history, the native bearing the sword had taken notice of Arris. Their eyes had locked, the native giving Arris a look of uncertainty. Of hope. Of bewilderment. In that instant, Arris realized the native had also not expected this outcome was even more amazed at the turn of events. But, also, the man with the beaten sword wondered what it was Arris was doing, creeping slowly, stealthily upon the crystal-wielding multi-colored-robe wearing white-haired man.
The sudden evaporation of the second man, however, changed the composition of the group’s courage, and whatever common cause they shared disappeared along with the man. Arris had seen this reaction before scores of times across the globe. Unit cohesion could only take so much and it was impossible to know what would break a group of men into individuals until after the fact, but the moment the spear-wielder ceased to be was also the moment the remaining five men realized their own mortality. Two of the men with sharpened-bone-tipped spears dropped them and turned head-long down the hall and sprinted for their lives. A breath later, two other men with spears turned and followed suit.
There was a long pause, an eternity expanded by adrenalin and disbelief, as Arris took several more cautious steps and the native with the sword tried to reconcile reality with whatever his preconceptions were. The native backed into the chamber that was the top of the entry foyer, the curving staircase railing to his left, the dome of the room above him. He glanced once more at Arris, a flick of his eyes over Onorien’s shoulders, a look that communicated an enormity of disbelief and despair.