Crown of Steel (Chaos Awakens) (32 page)

Xandrith knew exactly what she meant, but he laughed quietly and pretended to be oblivious to the true meaning behind her question. "I'll probably be pretty tired when all is said and done."

Kassa frowned, looking as though she was only a moment away from applying her fist firmly to Xan's face. "Damn it, I'm not in the mood for jokes. What is going to happen to you when you use that much magic? You said that drawing on the blood magic was changing you, well what is going to happen when you draw on that many lives at once?"

Xandrith's artificial smile fell away and he shrugged his shoulders in defeat. "I'm not sure. I think I can maintain control, but I don't know. If it goes really bad I might need you to ..."

"Don't ask me to kill you. You know I can't do that." Kassa snapped, cutting the assassin off.

"I know you can do what is necessary, Kas. I wouldn't have let you come with me if I didn't believe that." Xan answered, speaking thoughts he'd had many times, but had never dared to put into words. He could have escaped from his friends after they'd set him free from the prison, but he'd hoped that if the worst happened and he lost control of himself that they would be able to stop him from doing anything terrible. The turmoil, rage, and chaos of the troll lineage spreading inside of Xan was a constant source of fear. It was easy enough to subdue when he could avoid magic, but drawing on his powers brought it back to the front, and it was getting stronger.

"You're a fool if you think I'd have let you come here by yourself. We're doing this together, and when we're done, we'll leave here together." Kassa stated firmly. Xan smiled again, an honest expression brought out by the sincerity of his friend. Her faith in him made him question his own bleak outlook.

"I'm sure we will." Xan replied as he stood himself up, stretching out the kinks left in his body from his ordeals over the last few hours. "We should get moving, there is no point in staying here any longer. The Drayid seem to be able to move during the night and during the day. We'll just have to try and avoid them as much as possible. If they don't see us, they can't pursue us."

They stood, getting ready to depart from their hiding spot. As they did Kassa stumbled forward and fell heavily against a nearby wall. Xan immediately reached out and steadied her. "Are you alright?" He asked, unable to hide the concern from his voice.

Kassa shook her head, seeming confused. "I think so. I've been disoriented since we left the gray halls. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to feint, but it comes in waves."

"If you can't go any further I won't hold it ..." Xan began, but Kassa cut him off abruptly.

"I'm fine, just fine. I haven't had a good night's sleep in a while. It's just getting to me." She shrugged, rolling her shoulders and stretching her neck. "I'm fine." She reiterated, and Xan wondered if she was telling him or herself.

Xan was about to express further concern, but Kassa spoke before he could. "How are we going to find the Great Vault? Do you know where to look?" Kassa turned her back to Xan and walked in the direction of the door.

The assassin sighed and let the matter drop. "Tibsenth told me where it was kept during the Order’s rule of this place, but I don't have to rely on that information. The Vault is making a sort-of noise, like a hum. It's all over this place, but it seems to get louder when I move towards where it's being kept. Or where I think it’s being kept." Xan explained, though a hum wasn't exactly the correct way to describe how the Vault was leading him towards it.

Kassa attempted not to look too skeptical. "I'm going to assume this is a magical hum since I haven't heard much of anything since we've been in this cursed place."

"It's not very easy to explain. I just kind of know where it is. It's like ... like it's pushing on me?" Xan shrugged. "The point is, I can find it."

Kassa didn't look impressed. "I guess that's good enough."

The companions pushed their way back out into the alleyway adjacent to the small home they'd been hiding in. As ever, stepping foot onto the streets of Yillan Reach was an unsettling experience. The Reach still looked like a human city, but it lacked all of the key elements that drove home the feeling of inhabitation. The dead city felt like a meticulously created imitation of what a city should be. It was as though it had been built by something that had seen a human city, but never actually experienced one. There was no bustle of life, no mixing of scents that indicated fires were being kept and meals being cooked. There were no distant yells of children playing, and no discordant calls of scavenger birds looking for food in the streets. The Reach stank of death and decay, and yet no birds circled the city at all. It had become a forbidden place, even for the animals.

Xan led them along the back roads, not entirely sure where his final destination would take them. He'd wind down one set of streets until he could go no further in the direction he felt he needed to travel, and then he'd change routes and head down another. He focused on the pressure of the Vault as it thrummed its magical presence throughout the city. There were many occasions when the assassin found himself forced to take an indirect route in order to avoid the main streets and wide open areas, but Xan had no intention of being caught out in the open. If possible, he wanted to avoid being seen or tracked at all. Unlike out in the woods, he couldn't exactly get a fix on whether or not they were being pursued. Out in the open it had been easy enough to catch the faint life trails of his stalkers, but the city was flush with the Drayid. They'd been busy since his last visit. Their near-dead citizens crept all through the city.

 Xandrith wondered about the Drayid’s existence and how they spent their time. Did they socialize, or lead some semblance of a normal life? It didn't seem that way to Xan. They seemed merely to be. The once proud Drayid had been reduced to a state of predatory stagnation. They existed only for the purpose of killing and dragging more of their kind partially from the Great Vault back to the world from which they'd been cast. The mages had committed a terrible atrocity and this was the result. The scope of the horror was beyond imagining.

Moving through the silent back streets was a tense experience. Neither of the companions so much as whispered a word to one another in fear that they might draw the attention of the city’s silent guardians. Though Xan could tell the city was full of the Drayid creatures, the mechanna monsters remained strangely and almost entirely hidden. The few times that Xan spotted one it was always distant and never actually moving. Someone who didn't know better might assume that it was dead. Xan knew that it was merely hibernating, waiting for someone foolish enough to get too close and set it off. He knew they had to be aware he was within the city. The same way he could sense them, they could also tell about where he was. Maybe their own heavy presence in the city was hiding him. It was either that, or he was just walking directly into a trap. That was certainly a possibility.

A scurrying noise stopped Xan and Kassa in their tracks. They'd just crossed from an alleyway into a large and relatively open back street when the unexpected sound came scampering down the street in their direction. There wasn't time to jump for cover without making more noise, so they both froze in place as though a lack of motion might disguise just how exposed they were at that moment. As one they focused their attention on the source of the sound and what looked at first glance like a rat came walking down the middle of the road. The small creature stopped and stood on its hind legs as it came within visual range of the assassin and his companion. It took only a brief inspection to see that the thing in the middle of the road was not a rodent at all. It was slightly too large, and its small eyes gleamed with the glow of a blue fire burning from behind glass. It was one of the mechanna creatures, a mixture of flesh and metal, but on a scale Xan and Kassa had never encountered before.

Xan grabbed for a throwing knife, but he didn't have one on him. A moment later Kassa's arm struck out like a snake seeking to inject venom and a small metal blade crossed the distance and slammed into the creature's torso. It thrashed back and forth, writhing on the knife as a tiny shriek began to echo through the empty streets. They were found.

"Shit!" Kassa swore, breaking their long silence as she went to retrieve her knife. Xan was right behind her. He watched as she pulled her blade from the small metal creature before stomping it into silence. Up close it looked even less like a rat than it had previously. The metal work was strikingly intricate, but the living pieces were no less macabre than they were on the bigger versions. A human hand had been haphazardly melded to scraps of a rodent and bolted tightly together with bands of rusting metal. It ran on the fingers, led by the glass eyes set in what had been the rat’s face. It was a travesty of existence.

"I guess we won't be doing this without stirring up trouble." Xan commented. He took a breath and settled his senses so he could focus on the location of the Vault. It was still a long ways off. Even at a run it could take them a few hours to reach it, and that was without having to worry about the entire population of the city trying to kill them. "Come on, this way." He said, and started jogging towards a street he would have normally avoided. The Drayid were coming. He couldn’t pinpoint them within the chaos of the city, but he could feel that they were on the move. They were all connected to some extent. Once one had seen them, it was as good as alerting all of them.

"How long do we have until they're on us?" Kassa asked. In reply, a dark figure jumped from a building top and landed in the street directly in front of Kassa and Xan. The landing made a loud metallic clink and was followed by the unmistakable whirring of gears and mechanna wizardry.

"Not too long." Xan replied even as he reached out with his power to grab the half-living thing and draining it. He wrapped his extruded power around it and slammed the creature into the wall with all the violence he could muster. It exploded into a pile of metal, blood, and human pieces. A sense of dark exultation rushed through Xan. "I'll grind your bones to paste!" He verily spat the words between teeth clenched in glee.

Kassa grabbed him by the shoulder. "Come on Xan. We need to keep moving." Xandrith snapped his head to face Kassa, and for a moment he didn't even recognize her. The lust to crush and destroy flowed through him like a river. "Xan ..." She spoke again, softly, and this time Xandrith's mind latched on to his memories and he pushed away the rage and violent lust.

"Yes, we don't want to get caught in the streets."  He said quietly and they ran on past the destroyed Drayid creature. Xan refused to look at it. He didn't want to entice his darker side any more than necessary. He probably shouldn't have resorted to his magic so quickly. "I need a weapon. I can't keep using magic like that."

"We can probably find you something but ..." She didn't finish her sentence, but Xan knew exactly what she was leaving off. He shouldn't have been able to fight anymore. He'd given those abilities to Kassa, but since he'd traveled the gray halls things were different. He felt more like his old self. Something about those passageways had reconnected his body to his knowledge. Xandrith felt like he was ready for combat.

"I'll be fine. If you see some place where we might find weapons, let me know. I'll try not to use magic unless the situation is desperate from now on." Xandrith tried to be as comforting as possible with his words, though there was a great deal that still concerned him. Regaining his old abilities was a blessing, but he couldn't help but feel that it was a blessing that came cloaked in danger. His only other way to help, his magic, was even worse. The side of him that relished in violence and destruction was steadily growing more powerful. It was far too easy to rely on magic to get him out of bad situations and if he kept allowing himself to do so, it wouldn't be long before there was nothing at all left of his humanity. Xan as a human wasn’t a great person, but he could only guess that a troll version of himself would be much worse.

Xandrith turned them down another path and onto a main road. There was no point in trying to hide again. Now that the section of the city they were in was known, the Drayid would come down on them in force. The only advantage they could keep now was that they might be able to move quickly enough to keep the hordes off of them. They'd have to deal with anything they ran into, but at least they wouldn't be easily encircled.

A pair of metallic creatures ran out into the street from two separate directions. Xandrith recognized them readily. They were the same kind of beasts that had roamed the hallways of the mages’ tower when last he'd been to the doomed city. The closest of the creatures was already spilling acid from its mouth set in a rotted horse's head. The acid shot across the space between the monsters and Xan, hissing and crackling as it landed on the ground and partially melted the remaining organic bits of the horse's face.

Xan suppressed the urge to reach for his magic and instead found himself dancing lithely to the side to avoid any of the vile splatter. Kassa skittered the other way and her sword appeared in the air before her. The assassin had less than a moment to feel jealous of his companion’s weapon before he noticed that his right hand felt noticeably full. He raised his arm defensively and there in his palm was the red tinged bonesteel weapon he'd manifested in the gray corridors. It shouldn't have existed at all, but there it was. Xandrith still wasn't about to second guess his good fortune.

He darted towards the nearest creature as it rose up on its hind legs to meet him. The spidery looking front legs of the mechanna monstrosity struck forward like hinged swords, but there was so much mass to move that they seemed to come slowly at Xan. He dodged first one of the leg-swords and then the other as he dove in close enough to the beast to strike at flesh. He sunk his red knife into two separate areas before he was forced to retreat beyond the monster’s attacking range. The knife blows didn't have a huge effect, but they did stun the thing long enough for Kassa to swing in with her sword and sever the horse head from the shambling creature. Xan and Kassa both spun backwards as their decapitated enemy began to convulse and flop around the street with its dangerous and still deadly legs slicing through the air in the throes of its death. There was no time to appreciate their accomplishment however, the second of the two monsters had never stopped its charge.