She soon saw them. Two pairs of red wings approaching in the distance. They stood out in stark contrast to the night sky.
Eirik reached for his cursed krises and stared intently at the Mercesti as they neared. Ariana knew after listening to Eirik issue orders to his followers that he insisted that none of the group traveling with him use their wings. There was no greater attention-grabber to the Waresti patrolling the mainland than the luminescent glow of a Mercesti’s red wings against the black backdrop. She imagined he was ready to kill the Mercesti coming toward them the moment they landed.
To their credit, the two Mercesti in the air didn’t fly right to Eirik’s location. They were apparently smart enough to land a safe distance away and then walk to their destination.
Eirik stood with his krises in hand, his eyes shifting between her and the path leading up into the mountain from which the two Mercesti were bound to approach. She figured he was debating what held more importance. He made his decision, shoving aside several of the Mercesti around her so he could move a few steps closer to the mountain path.
A few minutes later, the two Mercesti approached. Ariana recognized the two cast-outs and realized that one of them carried a third being over his shoulder. All she could see was a pair of long legs clad in purple pants and combat boots. It appeared as though the third being’s hands were tied, indicating that Eirik had another prisoner. The knowledge filled her with dread.
“What are you doing back here, Bertram?” Eirik asked, his gaze moving between the two males. “Tycho? Are you ready to die?”
“If it pleases you, sir,” Bertram said as he fell to one knee and crossed his right arm over his chest in a bastardized version of the greeting normally reserved for elders, “we have brought you a gift in hopes of receiving your favor and forgiveness so that we can once again serve you.”
Ariana watched along with all of the Mercesti around her as Tycho leaned down to drop the Estilorian he carried to the ground.
Oh, no.
The thought flashed through her head as she realized it was another female. This female’s clothing was in terrible shape. The scrap of cloth wrapped around her upper body was doing a haphazard job of covering her. The pants she wore hung so low on her hips that Ariana could see the bones of her pelvis. Her skin was mottled with bruises and scrapes.
“I have a female in the camp already,” Eirik said in frigid tones. “I have no need of another.”
Deimos issued fierce growling noises that made the hair on the nape of Ariana’s neck stand up and a number of gazes move warily in his direction. When she dared to look at him, she saw he was fighting like the animal he was to free himself from the Mercesti containing him. His red eyes focused on the female on the ground. Saliva flew from his sharp teeth as he bared them and snapped at the hands holding him. Even Eirik looked back at him as if to figure out what caused the aggressive behavior.
Bertram ignored Deimos, apparently more concerned with his own neck. “But this female is different, sir,” he explained. He reached over and removed the gag, revealing more of her face. “This female is a Kynzesti.”
Ariana’s eyes widened in shock as she looked again at the other female. She found herself walking closer, even pushing past some of the Mercesti around her so she could get a better look at the new prisoner.
She realized Bertram wasn’t lying. The female had markings around her eyes in the deep blue-green color of the Kynzesti class. Blood from a head wound coated almost half of her face. How on the Estilorian plane had a Kynzesti ended up here?
Deimos started howling. The sound was so horrifying that Ariana brought her hands to her ears. When she dared to open her eyes after squeezing them shut, it was to find Eirik standing directly in front of her.
“So,” he said, “you were ready to sacrifice yourself rather than help me on my quest.”
She swallowed hard when his gaze moved behind him, to the Kynzesti female. She knew what was coming.
He again looked at her, his eyes soulless orbs. “Tell me…are you willing to sacrifice her?”
Chapter 35
“Holy light—they’ve got Tate!”
Sophia and Quincy had only just caught up with the Mercesti camp when the two stray males made their appearance. Sophia watched from their position within the tall branches of a nearby tree as the males unloaded their burden and engaged in a conversation with the leader of the rogue Mercesti. She couldn’t hear anything from their distance.
Quincy didn’t respond to her statement, but he did give her a squeeze that told her he heard her and also recognized the form on the ground.
Sophia stared at her cousin with an overwhelming mix of disbelief, joy and terror. She tried not to think of the fact that she and Quincy had been sleeping while Tate was captured. Whatever had happened, it had occurred far from them. There was nothing they could have done.
“I have to shift—” she began.
“You can’t,” Quincy interrupted.
She tried to turn to look at him, but it was all but impossible while in the confines of the flight harness. “I have to, Quincy,” she argued. “Tate needs us!”
“Yes, she does. But a limping animal will hardly be a match for all of those Mercesti, and you’ll tear your stitches. You’re better than you were before we slept, but you’re far from a hundred percent.”
“Quincy—”
“No, Sophia,” he said in a firm voice. “There have been many times when I’ve admired your independent nature, but I won’t let you go into a Mercesti camp alone, especially while injured.”
She again opened her mouth to argue, her focus on Tate. He reached up and brought his hand to the side of her face, forcing her to look at him as he leaned closer to her. Her pulse thrummed in the side of her neck as she caught his gaze. His lips were mere inches from hers.
“I will tranq you, Sophia, if that’s what it takes to keep you safe.”
She sucked in an insulted breath, fully prepared to blast him with indignation. Then he had to go and ruin her efforts with a kiss.
It was quick, hard and done before she realized what had happened, but it interrupted her tirade like a bucket of ice water. She stared at him in stunned silence instead.
“You’re too important,” he said, making her wonder what he meant. “Don’t argue. You have more than one ability. We’ll work together to help Tate.”
All she could do was nod.
Zachariah found the alcove where Tate had slept. It was easy enough to identify after having visited it in the dream. He also found the garment she used as a cloak. It was shredded and useless. He imagined her captors had used some of the fabric to bind her.
He would have.
He spotted her unusual nunchucks and wondered why they had been left behind. Reaching down, he picked them up. A surge of some kind of energy seemed to vibrate through his arm. That hadn’t happened in the dream state. He wondered over it, but shrugged it off in the interest of time and tucked them under the waistband of his pants, covering them with his tank top. Although his skin grew uncomfortably warm and seemed to pulsate with that unusual energy where the nunchucks touched him, he ignored it.
His eyes scanned the ground as he sought clues as to what happened and where he needed to go. He spotted footprints in the dirt made by two males and one female—Tate. It was obvious there had been some scuffling. Whatever Tate did, it allowed her a brief escape, something that now had him nodding briefly in approval.
He followed her prints out of the alcove. He knew she had run to escape her attackers, and he imagined this had been what he experienced through her while he gathered his things.
Her boot prints came to an end quite a distance from the alcove. A wide patch of flattened earth told him two bodies had slid along the ground. At the end of the swath, he found numerous spatters of blood and evidence of an intense struggle between her and the two males.
She had been tackled and beaten into unconsciousness. While she was bound.
But she hadn’t gone down without a fight.
He searched for the male boot prints that sank deeper into the loose dirt than the others, indicating the male who carried Tate. As soon as he found them, he extended his wings and flew in the direction they faced.
Ariana didn’t have any choice.
She allowed Eirik to secure the broadsword in the harness and fasten it to her back once again. Before he did so, he used the sword to cut the palms of her hands. Deimos began keening and lurching in her direction rather than toward the fallen Kynzesti.
“I suppose it is helpful to have a couple of options for Deimos when I decide he can feed,” he said, holding Ariana’s gaze as he finished latching the harness.
She didn’t reply. Her bleeding hands throbbed. She wanted to find the closest weapon she could lift and run it through Eirik’s evil heart. Instead, she turned to the lavender path stretching before her and started walking. Behind her, the male who had carried the other female into the camp was ordered by Eirik to again pick her up. Apparently the former outcasts, Bertram and Tycho, had succeeded in working their way back into the fold.
A stretch of forest rose up on her left. They had been above the treetops for a while, but now hiked along a lower part of the mountain pass that wound along the mountainside. It narrowed to a point where they couldn’t walk more than three beings wide without risking someone falling.
They didn’t have very far to go. It was in part because she sensed their proximity to their goal that Ariana had chosen to stop in the first place. Within the span of fifteen minutes, they reached the bottom of the path.
It opened up into a grassy clearing surrounded on one side by trees and the other side by a circular expanse of mountainous rock. Ariana moved with the large horde behind her into the clearing, her steps heavy with a sense of impending doom. Then she frowned in bewilderment.
“Where do we go now?” Eirik asked as he stopped beside her.
Ariana shook her head, trying very hard to ignore the inhuman sounds issuing from Deimos. The Mercesti were taking shifts to try and contain him. Closing her eyes, she drew on her second power to enhance it as much as possible, figuring she was somehow misinterpreting what she was seeing. But when she opened her eyes, she discovered that nothing had changed.
Her power pointed her right to a wall of solid rock.
Tate fought against the darkness. She felt as though her head had been cracked like an egg. There were muffled sounds, like a number of distant voices, but she couldn’t reason out where she was or what was said. Pain radiated through her, provoking moans of agony.
Slowly, she drifted back into awareness. Her stomach hurt and breathing was difficult. She realized she was settled on someone’s shoulder. When she tried to move her hands, she discovered her wrists were bound. That was when she remembered the incident on the mountain with the two Mercesti. They had obviously bested her.
Tate…
She heard Tiege in her mind. At first, it was a distant echo. As she drifted closer to full consciousness, however, his voice grew stronger. She realized he was trying to reach her.
Tiege, she thought.
Even as she sensed his immense relief, she felt the being holding her come to a halt. She did what she could to open her eyes. One of them wouldn’t cooperate. It felt glued together. Her vision in the other eye was blurry. She blinked to clear it.
Where are you? Tiege thought.
I don’t know. A couple of Mercesti have me.
She lifted her head, though the effort sent spears of pain through her. When she managed to get her head high enough to see behind her, she caught the eye of a Mercesti. And she realized as her working eye moved from side to side, there were a lot more where he came from.
Uh…make that a huge number of Mercesti have me, she thought as fear rushed through her.
She was suddenly lowered to the ground. Because they were on a slope, her momentum carried her backwards as her feet went out from under her. She performed a back shoulder roll and landed on her feet.
In the process, her non-working eye opened with a sear of pain. She had to blink back tears that formed as the red gunk clinging to her lashes got into her eye. It was dried blood, she realized.
Her gaze moved wildly around the large clearing. There was some kind of animal making hair-raising noises just out of her range of sight. The Mercesti male who had been holding her now eyed her with a mix of hatred and unholy interest. She couldn’t help but realize with satisfaction that his eye was also swollen shut.
There are hundreds of Mercesti, Tiege, she thought as her heart tried to escape her chest. You can’t come after me. Stay away from here.
Shut up, Tate, he argued. Open your thoughts to me so I can find you.
It wasn’t worth fighting over, especially because she knew she would have said the same thing if their roles were reversed. So she did what she could to open her mind to him even as she looked around to figure out why everyone was just standing there.
A soft gold glow drew her attention. Turning to the left, she realized that the attention of the Mercesti was split. Some of them stared at her, and others stared at a second female. Just beyond the female was the source of the glow, but Tate couldn’t see past the beings surrounding her to identify it.
“What do you mean, this is it?” asked the large Mercesti standing next to the female.
He was enormous. His wide torso was covered with a furred vest that left his huge arms exposed. Thick leather bands adorned his upper arms just above his bulging biceps. Black leather pants and boots showed an equally muscular lower body. His long blond and red-striped hair was worn in a spiked half-ponytail on top of his head. It gave him the look of one of the barbarians she studied from human history.
When his red gaze shifted to her, she had the brief thought that she was looking evil right in the eyes.
“I mean that this is where my senses have led me,” the female said with rather impressive vehemence. She turned to glance up at the male. When she noticed him looking at Tate, she also looked at her. Her lavender eyes lighted with panic and she looked again at the male. She spoke quickly. “Perhaps there’s an entrance somewhere to gain access to it.”
Tate couldn’t shift her gaze from the male’s. He stared at her as if trying to steal her soul.
Tiege, she thought. Her heart pounded so hard in her chest that she felt it in her throat. She instinctively felt for her nunchucks and realized they were missing.
We’re coming, Tate. Be strong.
His tone was calm, but she felt his fear for her. She struggled against her bonds, but they had no give. Hoping she could loosen them, she produced a bit of water and got the bindings wet. Praying no one noticed the liquid trailing from her hands to the ground, she rubbed her wrists raw as the water soaked into the fabric.
A surge of activity to her right finally broke her eye contact with the barbarian. The animal sounds got louder. A group of Mercesti cursed and shoved at something in their midst. Whatever it was also caught the barbarian’s attention. He stepped closer to the group of Mercesti holding the creature at bay and snapped a few words. The sounds diminished.
When the barbarian moved, Tate saw what caused the gold glow. Not even twenty feet from the other female was a pedestal housing a sheet of parchment. The entire pedestal glowed with gold light.
Holy crap, she thought as she stared at it. What’s that?
I think its part of the Elder Scroll, Tiege replied, concern filling the thought. She had almost forgotten about their connection. Alexius just told us about it. Believe me when I say we don’t want them to have it.
She was distracted by the fact that the barbarian was striding toward her. His face was a cold mask. Backing up would have been ridiculous. A wall of Mercesti stood behind her.
“Who is your father?”
She didn’t know what to say. Should she be honest? Would it help her or put her in greater jeopardy?
Silence stretched between them. It seemed the sa
fest avenue. Then his fist came at her face. She instinctively ducked and struck back at him with her foot in a move she had practiced hundreds of times throughout her life. Her aim proved true. His knee buckled.
Unfortunately, even as he regained his footing, the Mercesti soldiers behind her grabbed her and held her in place. The look on the barbarian’s face hadn’t changed, but she felt his fury pouring off him as he neared.
“I no longer care who your father is,” he said in a low, hard voice.
Then he reached out and grabbed a fistful of her hair, using it to drag her closer to the other female. Even as she bit back a cry of pain, she realized her efforts to free herself from her bindings were working. They were definitely looser. When they stopped next to the Lekwuesti, the barbarian yanked her head back by her hair and held a blade to her throat.
“You had better hope there is an entrance to access the scroll,” he said to the other female. “Or you will be the reason this Kynzesti dies. Slowly and painfully.”
Tate hadn’t even swallowed her rising terror when another voice responded, “If she dies, it will be at my hands.”
And Sparky strolled right into the Mercesti camp.
Chapter 36
Harold commanded his Waresti to remain a fair distance away from him as he investigated the alcove where he believed Tate had slept. He didn’t want anyone disturbing the area and possibly destroying clues as to the direction they needed to travel.
He recently heard from Donald, who was tracking Quincy and Sophia. His lieutenant had connected with adelfos James, archigos Knorbis, archigos Jabari and the Waresti who traveled with them. About ten minutes ago, they came across a location where it appeared Quincy had treated Sophia for an injury. They found discarded bandages and some blood. Then it seemed the couple had taken flight, something that concerned Harold.