Page 109 of Heart of the Desert

“Zoren.” He tapped his fingers to his brow in respect. “Welcome back to Kelvadan.”

“Thank you, Zoren. I’m only sorry I was gone so long.” I looked up and down the alley at the other civilians who had jumped into battle at the slightest sign of battle. Their clothes were tattered and many of them looked even more skeletal than they had during the famine, but they stood tall. They may dwell in the Great City, but they still carried the fighting spirit of the desert within them.

“Calix’s men took all our weapons, and we’ve stayed hidden in our homes, for tangling with his men that patrol the streets often leads to bloodshed. But around our fires we whispered that you and Queen Keera and Commander Aderyn would return, and we had to be ready when you did,” he said excitedly, clearly relieved that his prediction had come true.

“You’ve done well,” I told him, giving him a clap on the shoulder. “The time to fight has arrived.”

He hefted the leg of the chair in his hand, clearly intending to continue to use it as a weapon. “I’m just glad I have lived to see—”

A whistling sound cut him off, followed by a crash that echoed within my very skull. I blinked my burning eyes open to see the sky, not even realizing I had been knocked down. I gasped for breath and smoke filled my lungs, but I pushed the burning sensation to the back of my mind. Instead, I focused on scrabbling to my hands and knees, trying to figure out what had happened.

Where before there had been an alley lined by the more modest homes of the city’s citizens, now there was a dark scar. At the edge lay Zoren, a smile of hope still on his face even as his eyes were devoid of life and a trickle of blood dripped from the corner of his mouth. I coughed ash from my lungs as I crawled over to him, but I already knew it was too late.

He was dead.

Blinking to clear my still hazy vision, I spotted a smoldering boulder at the end of the black streak. Viltov had turned their own catapults on the lower levels of the city. They would rather destroy it and the citizens trapped there then risk our success.

A hand on my arm helped pull me to my feet, and I found myself looking into Warrick’s grim face. He pressed us against a half-collapsed wall so as not to make us an easy target for another attack. A spray of dark blood across his face contrasted with the copper of his hair and a smear of ash decorated one cheek.

The look on his face told me he already knew many of his men had been lost to the blast.

“We have to take down their remaining trebuchets,” he shouted to be heard over the ringing that I was sure persisted in both our ears. There wasn’t time to dwell on those we had lost. Only to try to ensure we didn’t lose any more. “Any chance there might be more monsters on the horizon?”

I closed my eyes and dipped my fingers into the angry tangle of magic around me—it wasn’t difficult as my blood boiled with the senseless loss around me. Even as I searched, though, I could feel none of the dark tangles that indicated the desert’s monsters nearby. Either she had abandoned us after the failure of our initial attack, or I simply could not call to them from within the rocky confines of the city’s walls.

I shook my head grimly.

Warrick set his mouth in a hard line. “Then we will have to do this the old-fashioned way.” His voice slowly returned to a more normal volume as our hearing returned to normal. We looked around, finding many of his surviving men and the remaining civilians in similar positions, taking cover behind the surviving structures and blinking dust from their eyes. “My men know how to disable their weapons—it’s a simple matter of knowing which ropes to cut—but it is no use if we can’t get close. They will see us coming from a mile away.”

I craned my neck up to find the wooden contraption that had targeted us, its long wooden arm pointed up at the sky like an accusing finger. It and several others decorated the roofs of buildings several levels above us. I briefly considered summoning lightning or fire to try to destroy the machines from here, but Zoren’s lifeless face burned behind my eyelids. Too many people were likely trapped in their homes in the city, and I couldn’t risk any more of them falling to the same fate at my hands. The dark swirl of the desert’s power around me told me that any attack I summoned would be destructive and without finesse.

“I can draw their fire. You take your men up the stairs in that direction and sneak up from behind,” I suggested, nodding my head toward the end of the now destroyed street.

Warrick gave me a hard look, a sharp nod, and then gave his men a signal with his hand. Quickly, they followed him in darting from cover to cover in the direction of the stairs that would lead them to the next tier of the city. Meanwhile, I found the closest citizen of Kelvadan still on their feet. With a hand on her shoulder, I directed, “Try to find your way out of the city. The gate has been broken down, and it is no longer safe within these walls.”

With wide eyes, she tapped her knuckles to her brow in respect, before gathering everyone she could and ushering them in the direction we had come from. I sent a brief plea to the desert to be merciful to them—I had wrought this bloodshed, not them—but I didn’t watch them go. Instead, I stood tall and stepped out from behind the rubble that had hidden me.

The soldiers of Viltov would not want to squander the chance to take out one of the two commanders of the enemy army when he offered himself up so freely. I just had to survive until Warrick and his men found their opening.

A bright flame appeared near one of the three remaining trebuchets, and I knew they were preparing to fire again. I raised my saber in a clear challenge and planted my feet in a wide stance. I took a deep breath in through my nose, letting the smell of charred flesh and dust on the air feed my power. The rage of battle filled me easily, bubbling up like a desert spring to boil in my mind.

These were my people, and this land was my home. If they wished for its destruction, they would have to destroy me first, and my flame was not easily quenched.

The high counterweight on the first trebuchet dropped, and the long arm swished through the air. The familiar whistling noise came again, but this time I was prepared. I rooted myself to the ground as the flaming missile hurtled toward me. Just before it bowled into me, I sliced my saber through the air with a shout. Magic poured off my blade and out of my mouth in hot waves and split the rock clean in two.

The heat of its flaming mass scorched my skin as the two halves hurtled past me on either side, missing me by inches. Embers landed on my clothes and smoldered, but I didn’t have time to smother them as another projectile followed hot on its heels. I slashed out at it with a blade of magic, to similar effect.

However, the third trebuchet had already fired, and the next attack was too close. Instead, I threw myself to the side. My shoulder hit the ground hard enough to rattle my teeth as the flame-doused rock crashed into the spot I had been half a breath earlier.

My eyes watered with the sensation, but I didn’t have time to recover. Instead, I dived into the burning pain, letting it feed my magic. It pulled me into the horribly knotted and twisted magical landscape around me, and I let it.

I sprang to my feet unnaturally fast, pulling on the threads around me to hasten my movements, but the first of the three trebuchets was already reloading. In this tight landscape of rubble and collapsed walls, I had no more room to maneuver.

I shoved the blade of my saber between my teeth before throwing myself at the wall of the closest still-standing building and flinging myself up it. I climbed quickly, thankful for countless nights scaling the palace walls in the dark to see Keera, and scrabbled to my feet on the top and grabbed my sword again.

Here, I was an unmistakable target, but I was far from trapped. As the foreboding whooshing filled the air again, I set off at a sprint. Rock exploded behind me as the projectile landed, spraying my back with debris. I threw my arms up to shield my head, but I didn’t stop running. The edge of the roof loomed, but I launched myself into the air with a tug on the fibers of magic around me, landing on the next roof over with a crouch.

I forced the trebuchets to track my movement, firing rock after rock as I jumped from roof to roof. My breath came in sharp pants and sweat stung my eyes. Blood dripped down from my hairline where a jagged piece of debris had cut me, trailing hot and sticky across my face.