“How will we do that?” Amoni asked.
Aric put his left hand beside his mouth and took a deep breath. “Rieve! It’s Aric! Where are you?”
Silence held, with only the distant sound of more raiders wending their way from elsewhere in the fort. Then Aric heard something else, a strange, sibilant fluttering. “Look!” Mazzax cried. He pointed into the air.
A bizarre, tiny creature flapped over their heads. Green and blue and red, with yellow and black stripes on a long, serpentine tail that gestured toward them almost like a curled finger, it turned in rapid circles, as if trying to attract their attention.
“Look at its tail!” Aric said. “I think it wants us to follow it!”
“Is it a trap?” Amoni asked.
“Only one way to find out!” The winged creature took off in a straight line, and Mazzax raced behind it. “If trap it be, then I’ll add to my count!”
“Let’s go!” Aric shouted. He thought it was on their side, and in any event, he didn’t want to lose sight of the dwarf. He ran after them both, and Amoni and Ruhm fell in behind him.
He saw the Thrace family at the same time as the raiders did.
“Rieve!” he cried.
“Aric!”
Nine or ten raiders rushed toward them from a side road. The little creature hurtled toward them, and Corlan, who had acquired a bone sword somewhere, stared at it with a beaming smile on his face. “It worked!” Corlan shouted. “You’re alive!”
A psionocus, then, Aric knew. A manufactured beast, brought to a sort of life as the servant of a powerful psion. He remembered being told that Corlan was a student at some psionic academy.
The raiders were closer to the Thrace family than Aric and his friends were. Corlan, the only one armed, looked away from his creation in time to notice them. Aric had already broken into a sprint, but Corlan met them first, his yellowish-brown weapon flicking out and cutting the fingers of a raider wielding a lotulis.
Corlan slew that foe and moved to the next, and Aric recalled that he had been selected to teach Rieve swordsmanship. No wonder—in addition to being psionic enough to animate a psionocus, he was good with a blade.
Aric joined the fight. Almost instantly, the wildness overtook him again. He was fully immersed in the battle, but at the same time a sense of calmness filled him, as if he knew he would win—or if he didn’t, then it didn’t really matter. As if the fight, not the result, was what counted.
A minute later, perhaps less, it was done. Aric was coated in blood, little of it his own. His blade had drank deep. Amoni, Ruhm and Mazzax had barely reached them when their enemies had fallen.
“Aric,” Rieve said. Ignoring the gore coating him, she rushed into his arms, embracing him with a warm, tight fervor that almost made him forget Corlan watched. “You came for us.”
“Of course,” he said. “But we’ve got to go. There’ll be more raiders coming.”
“Which way?” Tunsall asked.
The psionocus fluttered its wings, beckoning again with that little tail, and then shot off the way they had come. “Follow that!” Aric said. “It’ll show us the way out!”
Rieve slapped at her hip. “My sword! They took it …”
“I’ll make you another,” Aric promised. “Come on!”
They all dashed off behind the tiny winged thing. Aric looked back once, noting that Rieve and Corlan ran hand in hand.
He was surprised to find that he wasn’t more upset.
We had better take our leave,” Myrana whispered. Raiders were opening the gate. Their numbers had decreased considerably, as something had been drawing them away little by little—something she believed must have been Aric and the rest, fighting to free his friends.
“Do you think they’re finished?”
“I don’t know, but if we don’t do it soon, we will be.”
Sellis still had his swords, of course. And she her dagger.
But the raiders’ mood had changed. She hoped that meant Aric’s group was winning, and the raiders were angry over yet another defeat.
Hope was only hope, though, not certainty. Myrana’s only certainty was that if those raiders got the gate open and attacked them, there would be a bloody battle—maybe a long, bloody battle, maybe short—which wouldn’t end until she and Sellis were dead.
“Fine,” Myrana said. “Ready to run?”
“I’m ready.”
The raiders unlatched their wooden gate and scraped it open, bumping it against the ground as it swung unevenly on its hinges. Before they could throng out after Myrana and Sellis, he hurled the bag of gold coins over their heads. It landed in the road behind them, bursting at the seams, gold spilling everywhere.
“So it’s the gold you want?” Sellis shouted. “Have it, then! It’s yours!”
Raiders stared at the two strangers, but the pull of gold was stronger. With a loud outcry, they darted for the coins.
Myrana and Sellis ran.
And as each coin fell from the bag and hit the earth, it bounced into the air, turning into a golden bubble instead of a coin. Whenever someone touched one of the gold bubbles, or a bubble brushed against any other surface, it exploded. Within moments, raiders were squealing in pain, their hands blown off, a few of them dead. Their structures suffered too, as the explosions loosened timbers or knocked stones from walls. The dozens, then hundreds of smaller bursts combined into one massive explosion.
It shook the ground, even dozens of feet away. Myrana’s legs were knocked out from under her, but Sellis caught her up and kept running. Another blast sounded, and gold sprayed into the air.
“That,” he said, “is some serious magic!”
“It’s about as dangerous as my magic gets,” she said. “You can put me down.”
He set her on her feet, and they kept running, back toward where they had tied the kanks, out of sight of the fort. “I don’t like using magic to kill,” she said. “Even to injure is bad. My magic is meant to preserve, to protect.”
“You were protecting us!”
“That’s the only reason I did that,” she said. “Even so, most of those raiders will live. They might be temporarily blinded and deafened, and they’ll think twice about giving chase. But I never meant to kill them that way.
“Look at Athas. Could it have always looked this way? Scorched by the sun, frozen at night, with little water and less shade? Could a population ever have grown under such conditions? Many believe it’s magic did this, dark magic. Magic tied to death and destruction. It’s not just in the spells themselves, but in the motives behind them. Magic meant to kill is just not something I choose to partake of.”
“I understand,” he said. They topped a low hill and the kanks were right where they’d left them. Aric and the rest had not yet returned. “I don’t mean to make you keep explaining.”
When she spoke again, any anger had left his voice. “It’s fine, Sellis. I want you to understand, that’s all. I can’t fix everything bad that happens with magic, and I won’t intentionally use it to kill. But it’s a useful tool sometimes.”
“You’ve been wonderful, Myrana. Here I thought I was protecting you, when all along it’s been the other way. I’m not sure I deserve what your family pays me.”
“When we finally get back to them, I’ll tell them you said so.”
“You won’t have to, because I will.”
They both started laughing, and sat down to wait, all tension between them evaporating like a puddle of water in the Athasian sun.
XX
Confession
Aric and the others raced around the hill, into the little dell where they had left the kanks, and found Myrana and Sellis laughing uproariously. When Aric asked why, Myrana described the exploding gold coins, and the looks on the faces of the raiders as they reached for floating golden bubbles that blew up in their hands.