Chapter 8

Sari frowned as she turned her gaze from the temple complex to Charlotte and Sir Seldon. The two of them were looking just as grave as she felt, while the soldiers and sailors from the boat were exchanging looks. “We still need to get the Ninth Dragon’s reliquary,” Charlotte said, her voice growing determined. “But it seems that our diplomacy is going to need to be a bit more...” She paused. “Hurmph.”

“Well, not everyone’s following this new King of theirs,” Sari said, nodding, as Rana ambled off, whistling, towards the temple complex where the dissidents had been executed by the followers of the orcish King Trjokar. The crowd had already dispersed, while the bodies had been left where they had fallen, headless and still twitching. The stink of fear seemed to have settled over the entire area. Rana vanished into the wall of one of the ziggurats that made up the complex. Sari shook her head slightly, then looked back as Sir Seldon sighed.

“I say we cut our way through this temple complex. The maps say that if we go along the eastern edge, we can reach the main building at the end of the cliffs. There, we can infiltrate their lower levels and begin to work our way to the center of the Chanti ruins. All we have to do is get the crystal to that ruin and we’ll be able to open the puzzle box in the center of it. The less we run into orcs, the better. We’re not here to settle their succession crisis.”

“True, but...” Sari shook her head. “Trjokar’s ascension over Queen Araktesh seems incredibly well timed.”

“I have no idea how the Corpse Lord would have managed that,” Charlotte said. “But Tanner’s plan is a good one. And ... well, if we can make contact with any loyalists along the way, then we’ll have a hope.”

Rana emerged from the ziggurat that she had entered, stretching her arms behind her. Her smiled was wry.

“Loyalists like the scared family in there?” She asked, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. “I heard them talking about it.”

Sari rubbed her hand against her cheek. “Let me scout ahead,” she said, figuring that was the best way to get the information across without sounding like a crazy person. “I’m pretty stealthy, and better I find out how safe it is than all of us getting captured. Just promise to come rescuing me if a big shout starts.” She smiled at Charlotte, who smiled back. Sir Seldon put his hand on Sari’s shoulder, gripping her with a companionable squeeze that made Sari’s belly tighten with nervous guilt.

“Stay safe, Sari,” he said, quietly.

“Right,” Sari said, then started to move forward. Her feet crunched softly on the sand that filled this part of the valley until she came to some low growing scrub that had colonized the region right beneath the cliff – vines and creepers shooting up to drink in the sunlight that shone down on the side of the cliff while the rough roots worked their ways into the sand itself. From there, she was able to steal along the narrow passage between ziggurat and cliff-face, coming to a fissure in the wall of the ancient structure, some long passed cataclysm having let in the air and the sun both. Looking in, she saw a trio of orcs working on the daily tasks of civilization – in this case, weaving. They were sitting in the sun, working at a steady pace, and muttering to one another.

“What happened to the Queen is a crime, and what happened to Gezelle was worse,” the first of them – a youngish woman, her skin a bright orange-red in contrast to the darker greens and blacks of her companions – said. Her long, curly hair bounced as she shook her head. “This is wrong!” She shoved the wicker she was working on weaving together down between her legs, then stood. “We’re sitting here like nothing has happened!”

“Be quiet, Zarua!” The dark green woman of the trio spoke up. She was clearly older than Zarua, with wrinkles on her features, yellowing on her tusks, and streaks of gray in her hair. “They say that the King has eyes everywhere.”

“Futter his eyes!” Zarua hissed.

Sari, who had been trying to figure out the best way to step out and introduce herself – hello, I’m a human adventurer here to depose your king seemed like a bad way to start things off, started in surprise as Rana stuck her head through the far wall of the ziggurat, shouting to her: “Someone’s coming!”

Sari drew her staff from her belt as Zarua threw up her arms. “What’s he going to do? Execute everyone who looks down on his bloody handed madness?”

The proper entrance to the ziggurat – a simple wicker door – burst inwards. A pair of orcish guards swaggered in, clad in heavy iron that had been beaten into a rough shape to suit them, with the same brutal cleavers that had been used in the executions. They smirked as Zarua turned to face them. The weavers stood – trying to reach for Zarua, but they were too late.

“Well,” one said. “Told you she wouldn’t even try.”

“Gonna enjoy this,” the first said, leering at Zarua.

“You two pigs!” Zarua stepped backwards.

“Zaura!” The older weaver said, grabbing her arm. Zaura shook her off, then thrust her finger at the two orcish guards. She was in a full fury now.

“Bayzik! Jonk! You two leaped to join the Iron Guard What a stupid name for an organization. What are you gonna do? Kill the best weaver in the whole valley? When your king needs us working?” She spat at them, clearly showing absolutely no sense of ... what it meant to spit at men heavy armor, with heavier weapons. The two men leered at her, and Sari could see long promised and long hoped for fantasies flickering in their eyes. Well.

Time to act.

Sari stepped from the shadows and slammed her staff down on the ground. “If you touch her,” she said. “Then I will make sure you never touch anything ever again.”

The entire room froze.

“Oh, so you think I need your help dealing with these two-” Zarua shouted, sounding offended.

The first of the two orc guards backhanded her. He either forgot or didn’t care that he was wearing an iron gauntlet – and Zarua dropped, blood spurting from a broken nose. The other orc hefted up his cleaver and sprinted straight for Sari while the weavers scrambled out of the way. A half finished basket was crushed underfoot as Sari gripped her staff, then thrust the tip into the orc’s throat, hitting the seam between helmet and cuirass. He was so shocked at the impact that he stopped, choking and clutching at his chest with his gauntleted hand. Sari swept his legs out from under him with a thrust of her own legs, sending him sprawling, and then she pointed at the other orc – a blast of flames shooting from her fingertip. He lifted a burly arm and the flames washed over his dark red skin, scorching him lightly, but doing little damage.

“Orc will crush humans this time!” he bellowed, rushing at Sari. Sari rolled to the side as the cleaver smashed into the sandy floor she had been standing in, shattering stone and sending up a spray of gritty chips. She came to her feet and, holding her staff in two hands, thrust one tip, then the other tip towards him in an alternating pattern. From each burst a flame bolt, but the orc, despite weathering the blows with shocking ease, didn’t seem to go down. He didn’t seem to even feel the fire very much at all.

“Orcs are fused with demon blood, Sari,” Rana said as the orc walked through the hail of firebolts. Sari used her staff to block a glancing sweep with his cleaver, the impact sending her skidding backwards and flinging her guard wide.

The orc grabbed her throat.

The wicker door exploded into splinters as Sari was thrown through it, skidded along the sand covered pathway, and fetched up against a plinth of ceremonial statues. One of them was large enough to loom almost six feet tall above her – a carved humanoid figure, head bent in contemplation, the face worn away by time and wind.

“They’re pretty hard to burn,” Rana said, dryly.

The two orc guards stomped out of the darkness, showing only the slightest of discomfort from the hail of firebolts. Sari scrambled to her feet before one of them put a sword in her belly. She stumbled aside, as the orc in question shouted: “We have a human weakly wizard coward!”

Sari, her staff in her hands, growled. “Weakling?”

She pointed with the staff. Purple fire wreathed the statue that the orc now stood beside.

Sari made a wrenching gesture with her staff, then brought it slapping down. The tip of the staff hit the sand, sending up a puff of powder.

The statue, following the same arc as the tip of the staff, sailed upwards, then came smashing down on the orc’s head, crushing him into a fine red paste with a crunching squelch. The orc next to him gaped as Sari twirled the staff, mana flowing through her as her twirling motion brought the statue smashing into the orc like a wrecking ball – the inanimate object still following the same trajectory as her staff’s tip. She crooked the staff over her shoulder, bringing the statue to rest behind her, hovering about six feet off the ground with a faint shimmer of distorted air and a flicker of purple flames.

Zarua, who had stepped from the door of her weaving shop, her hand covered in blood as she tried to seat her busted nose, looked stunned, gaping at the two brutally slain orcs before her.

“Well!” the old weaver said as she emerged next to Zarua, sounding annoyed. “I did keep telling them that the statue of Zanik the Warrior needed a blood sacrifice. I never thought I was being so literal about it.”

“Human!”

Sari turned and saw that several more of the orc guards that had sworn themselves to their new king were advancing. Two of them had bows, one had one of those big cleavers, and the last of the four was carrying nothing at all. She frowned, then barked an order over her shoulder. “Get into cover,” she said, while the two archers knocked arrows and loosed them. Sari shifted the stone statue between herself and the orcs, the arrows rattling harmlessly off the statue of Zanik the Warrior. The orc with the sword slowed a few paces off, slapping his sword against his shield.

“Stop your demon tricks,” he shouted over the shield, clearly not willing to get close to the levitation statue.

“For Shandil!”

The sudden bellow took both Sari and the orc by surprise. He turned and saw a full three hundred pounds of armored knight dropping towards him, feet first. It looked that Sir Seldon had snuck around the sides of the ziggurats and temple buildings, found a way to one of the roofs, and was now ... well, dropping right onto an orc’s head. The orc lifted his shield and Sir Seldon bore him down to the ground with a spray of sand. Sari saw that one of the archers was knocking another arrow – and she thrust with her staff, sending the statue she was levitating arcing through the air like loosed catapult. The orc was reduced to a red ruin against the wall behind him, while his companion dove for cover.

The orc without any weapons had reached the battle. He held up his hands, barked out a word, and then thrust his palms at her. Sari lifted her staff at the very last second, moments before the blast of lightning crashed into her. The staff surged to life as Seldon stood, his sword bloodied. The last orc archer loosed another arrow. It bounced off the side of Seldon’s armor and he shouted. “I’ll handle him!”

He started to surge forward – moving remarkably quickly in that much armor.

Sari focused on the orcish shaman. She snapped the staff to the left, twirling it and then letting loose her own blast of freezing energy. The wave of frost swept towards the orc, enveloping him in a statue-like wrapping of ice as his arms crossed over his chest. But before she could do anything, the ice bubbled, hiss, steamed, then exploded apart around him. When the steam faded, several gleaming ice projectiles hovered around him – sharpened stalactites that he was controlling with a stream of muttered incantations.

Sari scowled, then twirled her staff around as the orc thrust out his finger – stalactites shooting at her with a hissing whip whip whip sound. Her staff knocked one, then another, then a third down, while a fourth whipped past her shoulder – drawing a thin line of blood as it sliced through cloth. Sari hissed, but saw that her staff wasn’t crackling with absorbed energy. “Neat trick,” she said. “Throwing it with telekinesis – they’re solid projectiles, not magic energy I can absorb.”

The orc smirked, then slammed his palm into the ground. Sari, intuiting that standing still was a bad move, flung herself to the side as a spear of stone shot up from the ground with a grinding crack. She landed with a grunt as Charlotte came onto the scene – emerging onto the roof of a nearby temple building, her fingers flickering with fire as she weaved her palms around an orb of fire nearly the size of her head. She lifted her arms above her head and threw the ball down.

The orc shaman didn’t even bother to move as the fireball streaked down and detonated. Molten sand flew in every direction and he walked from the smoke with a smirk. Sari shouted: “They’re mostly immune to-”

“The demon blood, right! I read it in the- EEP!”

Charlotte waved her hands to bring up a glittering shield of glowing purple fire as the orc thrust his finger at her – a lightning bolt exploding out and, then, reflecting off her shield and into the sky with a distant crackle. Sari grinned, then pointed her staff at the discarded statue. Drenched in blood, it creaked and groaned, then whipped through the air as she swept her staff in a half circle – planning to smear the orc into the ground. But the shaman, turning, saw the statue. He pressed two pointer fingers together, then dropped into the sand with a flare of green light – leaving no trace of himself behind!

The statue smashed, unimpeded, into the wall of a ziggurat and shattered into a thousand pieces.

“Well, Zanik’s going to not like that in the afterlife,” the old orcish weaver’s voice echoed across the suddenly silent battlefield – supernaturally loud in the aftermath.

“Where’d he go?” Charlotte asked, stepping from the roof she stood on, floating down in a nimbus of purple light. Sir Seldon, his sword dripping with blood, hurried down from where the last archer laid in a pool of his own blood.

“Maybe he fled?” Sir Seldon suggested.

The sand behind Sir Seldon exploded. When the sand vanished, a strong black-green arm was thrown around his throat and a knife made of glittering ice was pressed to the thin slit of his armor, fetched up against the underside of his helmet. The orc shaman stood behind him, holding him in place. “The staff. Drop it,” he growled. “Put your hands up. Now.”

Sir Seldon huffed. “Master Mage, have you been versed in the arts of martial combat with armored warriors?” he asked, quietly.

“Silence, fighter,” the orc growled.

“Thought not.” Seldon shifted, then slammed his helmeted head backwards. The orc stumbled away, a rasping squeal of edged ice against metal filling the air. Seldon turned around and slashed the orc’s head off his body with a single swipe of his sword. “I have a gorget! Arrogant mages!” He rubbed at his helmet, panting through the visor. Then he turned and quickly, stammering, he added: “C-Current company excepted, of course!”

Charlotte giggled, kicking at the sandy ground, while Sari laughed, softly.

“Uh...” She said.

“Don’t think about how you’re plowing his girl, don’t think about how you’re plowing his girl, don’t think about how you’re plowing his girl,” Rana whispered in Sari’s ear, unhelpfully.

“W-We should get going!” Sari said.

“Not without me, you don’t!”

The three of them turned to find that Zarua was emerging from where she had been hiding. Her voice was muffled and faintly nasal thanks to the blow she had taken – though as she walked forward, Charlotte let out a soft coo and stepped over. Her applying a wave of healing magic to Zarua’s face only barely slowed Zarua down.

“I’m one of the most respected craftswomen on this island – I may be young, but even the masters know that I’m fated for greatness, half the orc boys want to shag me, and I know all the secret tunnels and passages that old King Ironass hasn’t heard thing one about. I can get you to the Queen, I can get you to the King, I can get you anywhere on this whole island without you needing to butcher every single stupid male who thought he could get an easy ride by working for Trjokar ... as much as I think we’d be better off without most of them, I can’t exactly allow it...” Zarua said, sniffing slowly as her nose popped back into place. “Ah. That’s better.”

“You know, some people say thank you to their healing mages,” Charlotte said, quietly.

“Well, you’re not my healing mage,” Zarua muttered. “You’re from the mainland.”

Charlotte looked faintly bemused, but Sari shook her head. “Do you know a way through that?” She pointed up at the curtain wall. “We need to get to the Chanti ruins.”

Zarua nodded. “We’ll take the way through the bathhouses,” she said. “Follow me.” She started off, heading towards a small set of stairs that were built along the edge of the curtain wall – made from wood, recently constructed. She started up them, taking them one at a time, while Sari hurried after her, and Seldon after her, and Charlotte after him. They came to the top of the curtain wall and Sari saw that it didn’t lead to an enclosed keep, but rather, to a raised plateau of white stone - the whole temple grew from that plateau, towering above them.

A distant, echoing roar rang through the air. Sari frowned, while Rana murmured. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said.

“What’s that?” Charlotte asked.

“The drakkon,” Zarua said, casually.

“You have a drakkon!?” Charloette squeaked, her eyes widening. “A corrupted descendant of the Dragons themselves? A flying winged reptile of insatiable lusts? That kind of drakkon? Since when?” She grabbed onto Zarua, spinning the orcess around to face her. “Why wasn’t I informed?”