21. [Uicha] Escape From Ambergran (Patreon)

--DRAMATIS PERSONAE—

Uicha de Orak, a young man of no renown or loyalty, and Kayenna Vezz, the Orvesian spirit currently inhabiting him, about to learn how to work together

Petra Reatz, a young woman of no renown, Orvesian Witnesses, hit with a missile of magic

Hunn Megeer, Ritualist of the 3rdRenown, Orvesian Witnesses, took some precautions

Battar Crodd, Death Knight of the 13thRenown and Quill of the Orvesian Witnesses, having one of those nights

Ahmed Roh, Archmage of the 15th Renown, the Magelab, didn’t come all this way to leave empty handed

***

6 Hazean, 61 AW

The village of Ambergran, North Continent

264 days until the next Granting

As an Orvesian Witness, a certain amount of danger and physical violence was to be expected. Petra Reatz understood that.

The ruins of Orvesis were a place teeming with nightmares and, beyond the burnt borders of the dead kingdom, the Witnesses tended to invite scorn from the people they encountered. Petra had grown up in a border encampment where both her parents had been Purifiers. Petra might have been headed that way herself if she hadn’t fallen in with Battar Crodd. The danger was less with Battar, but the indignity was greater. Petra had long ago lost count of how many times she’d been spat on.

Even considering her history, the last month in Ambergran had been a painful one for Petra. First, she'd been struck in the side of the head by a rock thrown by an upset villager. After that, the doubts had begun to fester. Ambergran was the first place where she’d lived with people who weren’t Witnesses. It was the first place she’d really seen Battar’s philosophy put into grim, brutal action. Existential pain was new, and unpleasant.

And now, she'd been blasted by a sorcerous burst of energy and tossed through a wooden door.

Petra was not a fighter. She wasn't built for an exchange like this. Her wind was gone, her chest sizzled, and the arcane energy still crackled through her bones. She was going to lose consciousness. That much seemed a certainty.

However, when Battar had assigned her to watch over Uicha, he had not left her completely defenseless, especially not after the boy demonstrated the power lurking within him. Hunn Megeer had prepared a simple rune for her, drawn on a piece of sturdy parchment paper. The symbol glowed slightly, so Petra kept the paper folded and tucked in her belt.

“Tear the paper and I'll know,” Hunn had told her. “And always leave the basement door unlocked.”

Down in the cellar, next to the jugs of tea that Petra had been brewing, Hunn had arranged for himself a circle of polished black stones. In the center, he drew in chalk a sketch of a doorway, and he decorated that with a splash of his own blood.

And so, in those moments before she passed out, Petra groped for the paper Hunn had made her. She did not know what had happened to Uicha, only that the bitter twist of an old man who arrived with the night meant him harm. The fingers on Petra’s left hand were numb, so she had to use her teeth. But tear the rune she did.

The lights went out, then, for both the arcane symbol and for Petra.

She would see Uicha again, but not for some time. Not until he wore a symbol of his own on his throat.

Across the village, Hunn Megeer felt the alarm like a tingling up his spine. The ritualist stood at the back of Ambergran’s meeting hall, trying to make himself small. After the arrival of the Ministry of Sulk and the scene made by their champion, tensions were once again flaring between the people of Ambergran and their Orvesian occupiers. Hunn understood that his presence wasn't a welcome sight—towering and skeletal, bedecked in his ashes and trinkets. He was not the soft touch that Battar wanted with these villagers, but the Quill had nonetheless requested his presence.

Some of the villagers were shoving each other—the ones who had started wearing ashes fighting with those who had so far resisted conversion—while others simply jostled to leave. At the front of the room, Battar raised his voice.

“Peace, my friends, please!” the Quill cried. “The Ministry of Sulk want us docile before the gods! They do not understand the monsters lording over us and what lu—”

“Battar!” Hunn Megeer shrieked. Immediately, he regretted the high pitch of his voice. Villagers near his position scattered as if he were a seven foot tall vulture that had just shaken itself awake.

The death knight’s gaze swung to Hunn immediately.

“The boy!” Hunn yelled.

Ignorant of the screams that would follow, Hunn jammed his overlong thumbnail into the soft tissue of his palm, carving out a bloody circle and speaking the word that connected him to the ritual site he had built in the de Orak basement. Those looking in Hunn’s direction would forever be afflicted with a vision of the gangly Orvesian appearing to be sucked into his own palm.

As these events transpired, Uicha stood on his front porch, staring dumbly at Petra’s feet twitching just over the threshold of his front door. In front of him, the archmage Ahmed Roh’s fingertips glowed as he turned them in a slow circle.

“Why did you do that?” Uicha asked. “You hurt her.”

“Are you a friend to the Orvesians now?” Roh snapped. “Or perhaps the thing inside you has already infected your mind with sympathy for her kin. It doesn’t matter. You will come with me, boy. I will free you from her influence.”

“I…” Uicha hesitated. The archmage made a bad first impression, but that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He could be free of all of this…

“He will kill you.”

The flickering apparation of Kayenna Vezz appeared once again. Her dark hair hung over one side of her face, but Uicha could still see the sections of skull that peeked through her broken skin.

“He can’t kill me,” Uicha said. “The gods won’t allow it.”

“What does she say?” Roh asked. “Of course, you’re right. I will merely lighten you of this burden.”

“He will force me out and it will drag you with me,” Kayenna said. “Your body will not die. But he will empty it.”

Uicha swallowed. He met Roh’s hard eyes. “How? How will you do it?”

“No,” Roh replied. “No, I am not taking questions.”

With a flick of his wrist, a rope of energy whipped from Roh’s hand and wrapped around Uicha. His arms were pinned to his sides with enough force that he felt like his elbows might snap inward. Uicha tried to scream, but he couldn’t get any air down. He kicked his feet and realized that he now floated above the porch. Roh held him like a child would a kite.

Uicha couldn’t see the man’s Ink—would not have understood it, even if he could—but the symbols for [Arcane Whip] and [Force Blast] were not even close to faded.

“You need to give me the body,” Kayenna Vezz said.

Uicha’s face crumpled in confusion.

“You must consent,” she said.

Not understanding, but feeling his ribs creaking, Uicha nodded.

Without understanding how he came to be there, Uicha now stood to the side of the porch where Kayenna had been. He could still feel the suffocating tightness of Roh’s binding, but it seemed like a faraway thing.

Looking up, he saw Kayenna was now tangled in Roh’s arcane grip. Uicha’s eyes widened. If he focused, he still found himself staring down at Roh’s gaunt face through Kayenna’s eyes—his eyes, though not presently under his control.

“Oh,” Uicha said.

But now, Roh didn’t hear him.

Instead, the archmage heard the sharp crack of his binding sheared in half by a lance of icy blue energy that ripped from Kayenna’s chest. She dropped softly back to the porch as Roh stumbled backward. Uicha winced and touched his sternum. The skin there felt cold to the touch and scalded—frostbitten.

Roh’s eyes lit up as he righted himself. “Is that you, Vezz?”

“You know my name, young one, but are beneath my notice,” Kayenna said. The voice was Uicha’s, but huskier and with more precise enunciation. “I had apprentices that outstrip the masters of this age.”

Briefly, Uicha wondered when was the last time someone referred to Ahmed Roh as young. A new flare of energy grew in the archmage’s fist, but before he could let it launch, the porch at his feet split apart. Crackling coils of ice wrapped around Roh’s feet, his shins, his knees—frozen snakes tried to drag the archmage beneath the house. A layer of rime spread upward from the ice, covering Roh’s spotless silk clothes. In the grip, Roh shivered spasmodically.

Uicha felt his heart seize and his lungs constrict with sudden brittleness. Looking on, he saw Kayenna hunch over and gasp, cold air flowing from her lips, bringing up flecks of blue blood as she coughed. Uicha could taste the blood on his own tongue. He felt like he’d swallowed a winter’s night.

“Stop!” Uicha yelped. He lunged forward, shoving Kayenna. “You’re killing me!”

In that moment, Uicha retook his old position standing opposite Roh. He also claimed full feeling of all the damage Kayenna had done to his body—frostbite inside him, his heart stuttering, throat closing. He fell to his knees.

“I’m sorry,” Kayenna said, now beside him again. Uicha barely registered the surprised remorse on her shadowed features. “I did not fully understand…”

The ice holding Ahmed Roh crumbled away as Kayenna’s spell faded. The archmage brushed himself clean with a curled upper lip.

“Humbling, isn’t it?” he asked. “The bargain has changed since your time, hag. The old ways have new costs.”

Ahmed reached down and grabbed Uicha by the chin. Seeing the fear in the boy’s eyes, he nodded.

“Ah. She abandons you to your broken body.” Roh crouched down and pressed his palm to Uicha’s ice cold sternum. A healing warmth flowed into him, undoing enough of the damage that Uicha could emit a strangled cry. Roh shook out a handkerchief and blotted some of the blood from Uicha’s lips. “I am not yet done with—”

The rest of Roh’s sentence was lost to the night. In a flapping of wine-colored silk, the archmage was flung limbs akimbo into the wheat field. Blinking, Uicha looked up to find a glowing dome now enclosed the farm, separating the house from Roh’s distant landing spot.

Hunn Megeer’s hands still glowed as he ducked his head to step out onto the porch. The ritualist glanced back to check Petra’s breathing and, satisfied she lived, came to Uicha’s side. Uicha had never felt so glad to see an Orvesian.

“Uicha, what happened here?”

Overcome with racking coughs, for a moment all Uicha could do was point into the wheat field. “Attacked us,” he barked.

“Who was that?” Hunn asked, looping a spindly arm around Uicha’s waist and pulling him upright.

Hunn’s caftan hung open and, as he lifted Uicha, the boy noticed how much of Hunn’s small collection of Ink had already faded.

“Ahmed Roh,” Uicha croaked. “Magelab.”

Hunn blinked. “The champion?”

Uicha nodded, leaning on Hunn.

“Oh,” Hunn said. “Well. Fuck me.”

A rumbling came from the sky. Uicha squinted. The evening had seemed clear when he and Petra had been lounging on the porch. As Uicha gawped, a jagged streak of lightning buffeted the shield that Hunn had erected. Another quickly followed the first. Holding onto him, Uicha felt Hunn’s whole body vibrate. Cracks showed in the dome protecting them.

“You’re going to have to run now,” Hunn said through gritted teeth. “Out the back door, through the fields. Head for the road. Find Battar. He should be on his way.”

“What about you?”

The ritualist rolled his neck. “I’ll do my best.”

Uicha scrambled into the house. Another bolt of lightning struck the dome, and he heard Hunn begin chanting behind him. Uicha paused briefly to look down at Petra, swallowed, and then kept going. Barking madly, Parrot tried to keep up with him.

“No!” Uicha yelled. He pointed at Petra. “Stay with her!”

The dog didn’t exactly listen, but did run to hide under Uicha’s bed as another lightning bolt hit, this one slicing through the dome and into the ground outside, shattering the front windows.

Uicha grabbed his mother’s scimitar from its spot by the fireplace, then staggered out the back door. His breaths were hot with blood and he realized that he was still shivering, even as sweat prickled his back. He dove into the fields and ran on rubbery legs, trying to hold back the coughing spasms that threatened to trip him up.

Thunder pealed behind him. He only needed to stay ahead of that. Ahmed Roh was powerful, but he wasn’t subtle.

While he’d never felt any affinity for this land, Uicha still knew his way around. He’d run through these fields hundreds of times as a child, although the only thing ever chasing him was his father with a bucket of water. He could beeline straight from the house, then veer west when he reached the Longbloom farmstead.  That would bring him to the road between the village center and his property, and hopefully put him closer to Crodd than Roh.

Despite the disturbing crunchiness in his lungs, Uicha mostly kept his feet under him. He only fell once—tripping over a jutting piece of foundation. He’d forgotten that the Longblooms had been annihilated along with their farm.

Was he really running toward the leader of the Orvesian Witnesses for rescue? Uicha pushed that question aside. Better the devil he knew, at this point.

Kayenna Vezz had gone quiet since her failure at the farmhouse. If the spirit riding in his body had any opinion on his escape, she kept it to herself.

The storm sounds behind him had gone quiet. That could only mean that Hunn’s shield had fallen. How much time could the ritualist buy him? Had Ahmed Roh already realized Uicha’s escape and plunged into the fields after him?

Uicha tried to redouble his speed and felt his lungs rise in rebellion. He buried his mouth against his shoulder and hacked up a dark glob of blood. He was awkwardly twisted like that as the fields parted before him and the road appeared.

A single rider waited for Uicha. They must have heard him coming—running madly, coughing and gasping.

Uicha stumbled to a stop and stared up at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Shakily, he wiped blood and mucous away from his mouth.

“Uicha de Orak?”

She knew his name.

The woman wore heavy armor like some hero from an old war story. Her blonde hair flowed freely, and Uicha saw the handle of a broadsword peeking over her shoulder. The shield symbol of the Ministry of Sulk decorated her throat.

Uicha nodded dumbly.

“My name is Sara Free.” She offered him her hand. “Would you like to leave this place?”

Uicha nodded again. He took her hand and she swung him easily onto her horse.

As Sara Free dug her heels into her horse, Uicha pressed his face into her armored back. He didn’t want her to see how he cried.