On Wings of Chaos (Revenant Wyrd Book 5) (28 page)

Joya’s heart raced in her ears, deafening her to the shouting and the cries for help from the fallen and injured. Distantly she was aware of Angelica readying her shin-buto, and a dwarf slumped to the ground, sliding off the tip of Jovian’s sword. Angelica seemed to know what the object was before it landed.

But then it landed, and Joya didn’t need to guess any longer. The stony object hit hard, snow and earth flying up upon impact. It was gray, like stone, but it appeared to have clothing on it somehow. And then it started to unfold, and Joya realized it wasn’t stone, but gray skin, hard, calloused, and rippling with muscles.

The troll stood, and Joya was bewildered at how anything could have survived that impact. Joya marveled at how tall it was as it stretched its muscles. The creature was easily three times the height of a man. She had seen a few of them in the courtyard, and people took them on easily, or at least it wasn’t impossible to kill them. If this was just one, they could do it.

The troll roared, and that was enough to break Joya’s deafness and bring sound back to her ears. The noise of the courtyard came rushing back to her ears with a force that made her sway on her feet. Over the din she heard a shouted command from a green message orb floating high in the air above the courtyard.

“Kill it, more come!”

“More?” Joya whispered. Cianna sidled up to her, her rapier in one hand, a crossbow in another. She started shooting bolts at the troll, aiming for his head. Her crossbow had a kind of cartridge in it that kept reloading as she shot. It reminded her of Caldamron’s gun. Cianna was good with the weapon, making her way around the troll, circling it even as she shot. Joya wasn’t sure if Cianna was actually hitting her mark when she shot or not, but each bolt hit the troll in the head, so if she wasn’t aiming, she was certainly getting lucky.

Joya called on her wyrd and took aim at the troll, but a group of dwarves chose that moment to rush her.

There were too many dwarves for her to take on with one attack, and they were coming too fast. Joya flung her wyrd into the ground, gave a mental heave, and the ground buckled, knocking the dwarves to the blood-laden snow. Cianna saw the motion and focused her attention on the dwarves. She started unloading bolts into the crowd, and Joya backed up. She didn’t have a melee weapon, which was foolish of her, so she needed to stay out of range.

Joya retreated and Cianna moved forward to engage the dwarves as they came. Cianna darted in and out, shooting with her crossbow at some of the dwarves and engaging others at sword-point.

Joya called the wyrded lightning from within her, and pink electricity danced across the ground, taking the first dwarf by surprise — its focus had been rooted on Cianna. It fell smoking to the ground, its flesh charred, its eyes staring blankly at the sky.

To her left, the troll was busy with a group of soldiers and Angelica. Her sister wore a crazy smile on her face, loving the throng of battle.

Joya could spare no more than a passing glance, however, and turned her attention back to her cousin.

Fire burned through her veins and wreathed her hands in smoke. Joya threw the fire out, aiming straight at a gathering of dwarves. The dwarves combusted even as several more earth-shuddering thuds landed, alerting her to the coming of more trolls.

Joya looked up to see the trolls. They were going to be quickly overrun. Mag was engaged in her own battle, shouting commands to those she could. On the wall, archers and wyrders divided their time between attacking inside the court and beyond the parapets.

They have to be launching them up somehow,
Joya thought. No sooner had she thought that than a green orb blurted out orders high above.

“Aim all efforts on destroying those catapults!” Mag’s voice issued out.

Still Joya attacked, her mind on the catapults outside the wall even as her fire and lightning strikes laid waste to the dwarves in the courtyard. In time the last one fell, and Cianna reloaded her crossbow with another cartridge from the belt on her waist. She took aim at the closest troll, which Jovian was fighting in a flurry of red-wyrded attacks and blade strokes.

Joya took up the attack too, adding her pink lightning to Jovian’s red. He didn’t spare a glance in her direction, all the while trying to keep the attention of the troll on him, dodging here and there, barely evading attacks as the troll’s cudgel thundered holes into the ground.

Joya didn’t know how weapons could actually work on the troll, but they seemed to be doing something. Maybe they were just aggravating it, keeping it focused on Jovian so that others could take it down.

Cianna had abandoned her crossbow strikes, Joya knew, because she could no longer hear the trigger release.

A noise to her right drew Joya’s attention, and a dwarf bounded out from between barracks. In surprise she yelped, releasing a burst of wyrd. Without form, the wyrd seeped into the dwarf, and it crumpled, dead.

Immediately Joya’s head started to ache from the discharge of the formless wyrd. She tried to push the pain aside, but it was there, like a bee buzzing in her ear, distracting her.

Cianna was now adding her ghostly wyrd to the mix.

“One down, three to go!” the green orb overhead cheered in Mag’s voice.

“We’re going to be overwhelmed!” Joya yelled. The trolls were starting to wreak havoc with the army inside the courtyard. More and more broken bodies were piling up — few of those bodies were trolls, and most were allied soldiers.

Joya concentrated all her efforts and let out a blast of lightning that struck the troll in the head. She watched the seeking fingers of electricity tunnel through his ears. The beast stopped, went rigid as the lightning found its brain, and then fell still.

“That’s it!” Cianna said, dodging out of the way of the falling body. It crashed to the ground, sending slight tremors through the earth and knocking snow off the eaves of a nearby barracks. Cianna looked down to her right, as if addressing a child. “Go tell Mag that we need to focus on the brain. The skin is too tough for wyrd or weapon to penetrate, but if we can get to the brain, the trolls die.”

A thin wisp of gray wyrd manifested and slithered through the air, seeking the short-haired sorceress in green robes shouting commands atop the parapet.

Cianna darted toward another troll, and Jovian moved with her. Joya shrugged off the pain the blast of unfocused wyrd had caused, and followed. She noticed when they reached the troll that it was the one Angelica had focused on. Now there were fewer soldiers; most of them had been smashed into a red stain in the mud by the troll’s cudgel.

“Shoot for the brain, however you can reach it,” the orb shouted. “That’s their weakness. Their skin is too tough to penetrate.”

Jovian looked to Angelica, nodded, and darted between the troll’s legs. He drew the attention of the troll away from Angelica, slicing at its legs as he went between them. The troll lumbered around, taking aim at Jovian yet again.

Jovian dodged another club attack, and Angelica stepped back, taking aim for the head of the troll with her purple wyrd. Cianna had stopped helping attack the troll, and instead engaged a group of dwarves as they rounded on Angelica.

Joya tried to focus her wyrd, thinking of a way to control it once it had left her. She knew that she could focus on a target and have it hit the target, but was there a way to control the path the wyrd took once it struck, or was that happenstance?

As it turned out, there wasn’t any way Joya could control the lightning that spouted from her fingers. She could control where it hit, but she couldn’t shape it into a specific path. She couldn’t influence the wyrd to travel through the ear and to the brain, but she could strike at the ear until it worked.

Angelica was on the other side of the troll, her leather vest and trousers slick with blood and gore, her lapis sword strapped to her back. She had a different approach; she wasn’t using lightning, but instead the wyrd that flew from the stigmata on each hand was like a bolt from Cianna’s crossbow. She would launch it at the troll, aiming for the eyes, but it wasn’t a sure strike. The troll often batted the attacks away, and sometimes when they hit it seemed like there wasn’t enough force behind the attack to make it strike through the eye and to the brain.

Still, her darts were like glass in the eye, and soon the troll was blind, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Jovian was still able to keep its focus, but it was swinging blind now, and that meant all of them were in danger.

Joya fell to the ground, narrowly escaping the blur of the cudgel as it passed overhead. As she stood, she saw one troll a group of soldiers were struggling with some distance away vanish from sight in a blur of black lightning.

“Astanel,” the orb barked. “Focus on the catapults first.”

Joya jumped back as the club swung past her again, and then resumed the tempest of lightning until, by some stroke of luck, one tendril of electricity hit the proper channel, and the troll fell dead.

If that’s the only way to kill them
. . . she thought, but then she saw one felled without damaging the brain. There had to be other ways, right? It couldn’t just be the brain. But it was too tall for them to do any real damage to any other part of its body.

“One more catapult!” the orb said. Joya wished she could see the massive weapons vanish and the stir that created on the ground, but there was too much to focus on where she was.

Mag surveyed the last catapult. It was apparent that the dwarves didn’t care that at any moment this catapult would vanish too, and the trolls weren’t smart enough to see the danger. Despite several groups of their soldiers running into the blackened wall of wyrd closing the breach and vanishing, the trolls couldn’t comprehend what was happening.

Mag kept the shield around her steady, hardened like armor. It wouldn’t be enough to stop a melee attack, but it was enough protection to make the arrows the enemy launched at her bounce off uselessly.

She was also keeping Astanel shielded. It was too hard for the boy to use the alarist wyrd and keep his mind focused enough to fight the will of the wyrd. Mag couldn’t imagine him trying to split his concentration. But she had to use him. The truth was she hadn’t touched her alarist wyrd in so long it was difficult for her to call it up now. It was still there, tempting her when she drew on her wyrd, but the whisper of invitation to draw on it had grown less and less over the years. Mag was afraid she wouldn’t be able to muster enough force to do what they needed.

Astanel focused his mind; she saw the way his eyebrows knitted together. He held his hands up in front of his face, like he was holding a ball. Mag watched as the dark light of his alarist wyrd filled the space between his hands until Astanel thought it was strong enough and launched it. He really didn’t need to make the motion he did, tossing it away from his body like it was a ball. The wyrd knew where he wanted it to go, and it would go there once he released it.

The ball slipped over the wall and bobbed over the heads of the dwarves below. Like before, several dwarves swung at the orb, trying to fend it off with weapons, only to look around spooked and perplexed when their weapons vanished once they connected with the darklight orb.

Mag shook her head in disbelief.

Still, the darklight orb reached the catapult. Just before the lines were cut, hurling the equipped troll over the wall, the catapult and troll vanished in a small pulse of light. That was the last one. No more.

“Catapults are down!” Mag said, and her voice was amplified across the courtyard. She looked over to Astanel, to tell him to start focusing once more on the trolls below, but he was tiring, barely able to keep standing. She needed to get him away from the fight, but he was on the other side, the wider side. Archers and soldiers held chaos dwarves at bay on the ramparts behind him. They were keeping the enemy forces from him.

Mag turned her attention back to the courtyard. She surveyed the amount of people dead or dying, and panicked. There were too many trolls and dwarves still in the courtyard. She didn’t know what to do. It was bad enough that each troll took a party of at least two to take it down, but the groups of dwarves were relentless in their attack too.

There was nothing for it. She had the opportunity to attack from here, and she needed to take it. The trolls were too hard to take down from where she was, so Mag focused her wyrd on the dwarven forces closest to the wall. With a blast of lightning, she started taking them out.