Atrius moved, as I’d instructed, on the night of the full moon.
It was cold that night, the fog thick and soupy. The moon, which Atrius had watched so closely, was now only visible in fractured glimpses through the clouds, which blotted out the stars and inky night. The mist smeared all light to murky sunspots, making Atrius’s band of warriors look like a long trail of silver ghosts in the moonlight.
I rode near the front of the group, near Erekkus, who did little to hide how appalled he was that Atrius had allowed me to come.
“I’ve fought you before,” he grumbled. “That’s not the kind of skill that keeps you alive. Don’t expect me to save you.”
It bothered me more than it should have that Erekkus dismissed me so easily. “You won because I let you win” danced on the tip of my tongue—petty, childish competition that the Arachessen never quite managed to stomp out of me.
Still, it wasn’t lost on me that, despite his complaining, Erekkus still remained close to me. I didn’t need saving, and he’d see that soon enough, but it was still touching. Apparently he’d gotten a little protective over his ward.
Atrius’s warriors were serious and disciplined. No one spoke on the long ride up to the heart of Alka.
There was no optimal way to approach the city. It was positioned high up in the mountains and spread over several stone islands connected by a network of unusual rock formations, which functioned as bridges between subsections. When the tide was very low, it revealed tunnels and paths that were normally hidden beneath the surf. Tonight, those paths were bare.
Atrius seemed pleased by this, at least as much as the man seemed pleased by anything. He took the extremely low tide as the gift given by my vision. He intended to use these tunnels and formations as additional entry points into the city, climbing up through them into the biggest of the city’s secondary branches.
He broke his army up into many small groups, sending them to each corner of the city, surrounding it on all sides. Alka was difficult to approach not only because of the narrow, rocky paths and tunnels that were hard to scale and easy to defend, but also because it was so decentralized. The tunnels, combined with the other paths on the western land-locked side of the city, meant that he could surround Alka.
“Is he setting up a siege?” I asked Erekkus, as Atrius doled out his commands.
It would be what most would do to take out a city like this. Maybe the smartest path forward.
“We proposed it,” Erekkus replied. “But no.”
“Why not?”
“It takes too long and it kills a lot of locals.”
The first part of that answer didn’t surprise me. The second, though, made my brows rise.
“Why does Atrius care if he kills locals?”
Erekkus narrowed his eyes at me, as if I was asking a suspiciously foolish question, and got distracted by another captain’s shouts before he could answer.
This thought nagged at me during the long approach to Alka, like a puzzle piece I couldn’t quite figure out how to snap into place. I was here to assemble a diagram of Atrius’s strengths and weaknesses that we could use to destroy him. He was a mysterious man, certainly, but until now I had felt that I was slowly peeling back the layers.
That little piece of information, though… it didn’t fit with anything I thought I knew about him.
Atrius was silent as we climbed up the rocky paths. It was a difficult journey, the path so narrow that only two men could walk beside each other shoulder to shoulder. And this was the easiest part of the journey—from here, the incline dipped and then rose sharply to the central city, a rocky spire that towered high above us.
While our approach was quiet, no one was under any illusions that this was a sneak attack. Aaves surely knew that we were coming. It was just a matter of when, and how, he would choose to address it.
And now, when we reached the top of the path and the outer gates to Alka, high and locked up tight, my heart was in my throat, my body tense. The souls of Atrius’s warriors stretched out around me, drowning me in a sea of their bloodthirsty anticipation. There was no feeling quite like that of a soldier about to go into battle. Excitement and terror, thrill and fear, all dancing right on the blade’s edge between life and death.
Atrius’s warriors were well-trained and battle-hardened. They were calm and professional. And yet, that feeling was the same. The same fear. Why did that surprise me, that these near-immortal creatures felt so close to death in these moments, too?
Atrius lifted a fist, and his warriors halted, the command silently understood all the way down the line. He paused at the gates, staring up at them. They were tall and thick, but just as ugly as Alka itself—great slabs of unfinished iron cobbled together with spiked chunks of metal and mismatched bars of half-rotted wood, still stained with the blood of the slaves forced to build it.
Far beyond the gates—so high above us that the spires were visible through the mist only as smears of orange light—was Aaves’s castle. Our ultimate target. The head of the snake, to be sliced off.
Atrius took it all in—the hideous gates, the treacherous mountains, the distant gaudy castle—with a stony face. The faintest hint of disgust rolled from his presence, like a little wisp of smoke. He raised his hand, and four of his men took places on either side of him. Each pair held strange contraptions between them—the closest human comparison I’d seen to this were giant metal crossbows, but so large that each had to be supported by two men. At each tip was a little white-blue flame. One warrior from each machine strummed their fingers along the weapon’s carved sides, little flecks of red light shivering at their touch.
Magic. The magic of Nyaxia, surely. The threads quivered in its presence, as if uneasy before something so unfamiliar.
Atrius kept his fist raised, his eyes regarding our target for a long moment, like a final challenge.
Then, so quietly that surely only I heard it, he murmured, “Knock knock.”
He lowered his fist.
The four warriors braced themselves. Two flares of light blinded me.
Explosions of white fire blasted through the gates and kept going, all the way up to the night sky above the castle itself. The chaos was swift and immediate. I felt it in the air, in the threads, in the hundreds—thousands—of distant presences that just roared to life, lying in wait, now ready to hurl themselves at us.
With the gates in shambles and a wall of rock ahead of us, Atrius drew his sword and simply started walking.
Aaves’s warriors came for us immediately. Battle was like a crashing wave—you feel the tension rising, rising, rising, feel the cold shadow of it over its face, and then suddenly it’s everywhere, filling your lungs.
I was drowning.