War of the Fathers (25 page)

Keeping a careful eye on Barc, he released his hold on
Soret and went to the door that led to the kitchen, motioning for her to stay. When
he opened the door, pain shot up his back and through his shoulder. He ignored
it as best he could and looked around. There was a pot on the floor that sat
beside a small doll. On the other side of the kitchen was the door to the
bakery, it was partially open. At first he tried to crouch when he entered, but
his back and shoulder complained too much to allow him to do it for long. Finally,
after it felt like he was going to pass out, he just straightened up and hoped
for the best.

At the door to the bakery shop, he paused and looked
into the room through the door without pushing it open any further. It was
empty and undisturbed by the ravages of what had been going on outside. The
strawberry cake still stood on the counter where the baker had moved it when
Jorad had set down the Hunwei head. It was a wonder that with all the commotion
earlier the cake had been undisturbed. Amazingly, both of the store windows
were still intact.

After determining it was safe enough, Jorad opened the
door a little further and inched forward until he could look into the alley
through one of the windows. He sighed with relief when he saw that there was now
only a single Hunwei guarding the alley. The window had a direct line of sight
on the arch and he was relieved to see that it was closed. So the Hunwei must
have seen something that had made them suspicious. Had they been arguing about
how to figure out what it was?

Jorad waited while the Hunwei paced. It could be a
trap, but it also might be the only opportunity they had. They only needed a
few minutes and then they’d all be safely where the Hunwei couldn’t get them.
After looking carefully through the window as much as he dared, he determined
that there weren’t any other Hunwei nearby in the open. That didn’t rule out
that they might have hidden in one of the nearby buildings, but it was a chance
they were going to have to take. He brought up his blaster and took aim through
the window, hoping the glass wouldn't affect his aim very much. Before he could
fire though, somebody else beat him to it and a hole appeared in the middle of
the Hunwei. Adar or Tarner must have returned.

Ignoring his pain, Jorad burst back into the living
room where Soret and the others were waiting and had to grab onto the door to
steady himself in the process. He grabbed Soret’s hand, called out to the
others and almost fell. Soret steadied him and kept him on his feet.

“Come on! The way is clear.” As he raced for the door,
he almost fell again, regaining his balance at the last moment. When he stepped
outside, he slipped on the wet wood and fell down the stairs. He landed face
first in a puddle. Luckily, he hadn’t dragged Soret down with him.

“I'm okay, run!” Jorad whispered to her and the
others. When he stumbled to his feet, he was glad to see that Soret and the
rest were already halfway across the street. Jorad did his best to chase after
them, hoping that he wouldn’t black out before he reached the alley. The rain
hadn't lessened at all and he had to keep wiping it out of his eyes.

Tere and Karn were coming from one side of the street,
while Tarner was approaching from the other direction. Where was Adar? Why
wasn’t he with them?

“It’s a trap,” Barc bellowed from behind him, causing
Jorad to cringe, and look about for any other Hunwei. The way was still clear.

Jorad could do nothing more for Barc and it was taking
everything he had to just move as quickly as he could across the street. He was
hobbling forward when he felt a sharp pain as a blade plunged into his back.

As Jorad turned to face Barc, he knocked the sword out
Barc’s hands with the butt of his blaster. If Barc had been trained to use it,
he would have done more damage for sure, but it felt like Jorad’s coat had
taken the brunt of the thrust. Regardless of that fact, Jorad’s upper back was
now lit up in pain as well.

Lightning and thunder filled the sky as he looked at
Barc shivering in the rain. It crossed Jorad’s mind that it had been sometime
since he had heard actual thunder. Now as he thought about it, he realized that
the thunderstorm must have continued, but been drowned out by the sounds of the
invasion. He did remember seeing some lightning during his fight with Thon,
surely there would have been thunder as well.

Jorad brought up his blaster as Barc backed away, but
something made him keep from pulling the trigger. Without realizing what he was
doing, he turned his head back toward the alley and saw that Soret was
watching. Her face was disfigured with terror as she screamed. Only now did he
recognize that was why he’d turned towards her, it sounded far away, as if he
had wax in his ears.

“Let my daughter go!” Barc screamed.

“If I ever see you again. . .” Jorad left the sentence
unfinished as he backed towards the alley with everything tuned out except for
Barc, who clenched his fists and took a step forward.

“Run!” Karn appeared beside him and yelled in his ear.
“The Hunwei are coming!” Jorad tried to move faster but he was in too much
pain. He looked around and saw that on his left, the Hunwei had indeed turned
onto the street and were running towards the alley.

He tripped and fell onto the dead Hunwei, the rock
hard armor breaking his fall and ensuring that any place on his back that
wasn't already bruised would be now.

Where was Adar?

As Jorad stumbled to his feet, he trained the blaster
on Barc again but then turned towards the Hunwei and fired. Karn, Tere, and the
others were there, firing blasters as well. Jorad didn’t pause as he continued
back and hoped that the moment of betrayal he’d been expecting from Tere hadn’t
come. It took every bit of strength to hobble forward as the rain pelted him,
he could go no faster. Before he knew what was happening, Karn and Tere were at
his side, helping him to get through.

As Jorad slumped to the floor, glad to be out of the
rain, he realized it was noisy inside. The Arches were full of people. Jorad
smiled. The young man with the baby, who was now crying, was trying to calm it
down. The baker and his family had made it as well; the baker gave Jorad a
solemn nod which he returned.

Using the last bit of his strength, he leaned against
the wall and looked out of the arch. He located Barc who was back in the house
staring at them through the window. Did he believe them now? As the alley
filled with Hunwei, Soret screamed for Barc.

The Hunwei disappeared when Karn thumbed the top of
the arch, causing the rock wall to reappear. The last thing that Jorad
remembered was Xarda saying something about the blood that covered him. He
tried to explain that some of it wasn’t his but before he was able to get a
word out, he lost consciousness.  

Adar gripped his blaster as he peeked his head over
the window sill and watched the street below him fill with Hunwei. It could
have been five minutes or it could have been two hours since Tere had jumped
out the window, he didn't know. After several more calming breaths, he felt
like he had a better handle on his anger. He would hunt down
Tere and probably kill him, but he wouldn't be
a mad man running amok. No, he'd be careful. He would search out Tere and take
him when he was off his guard. The man didn't deserve the honor of a fair
fight.

He snorted. That would only happen if something went
wrong with the tower and it didn’t work and he somehow was able to escape the
Hunwei’s annihilation of those in the city. The grim reality of his situation
began to settle down onto him and he sunk back down to the floor. Why did he
have to learn the truth now? Why couldn’t he have learned it years ago before
he’d left Rarbon? Everything would have been different. Adar would have been
Ghar and Jorad would have grown up without the pressure of having to get into
the Portal because Adar would have already done that. They would have had a
fifteen year edge and possibly have been able to build tools to defend
themselves with knowledge from the Portal rather than pinning all their hopes
on ancient technology that might do as much harm as good. He wouldn’t have
found himself here today, without an inch of visibility into the future,
surrounded by Hunwei and waiting for an ancient piece of technology to start
working.

He set his jaw, he’d escaped from a doomed town once
before, he could do it again, last time he hadn’t even had a blaster.
Now I
can take my pick of which one I want to use,
he thought, as he looked
around the room.

The truth was, he didn’t know what to hope for. If the
tower worked, it would strike a blow to the Hunwei, but it would likely be the
only significant loss they would suffer unless Jorad was able to get into the Rarbon
Portal and find other weapons to use against them. On the other hand, Adar
wasn’t ready to die yet either and didn’t want to take a bunch of other people
with him, especially now that he knew who had killed Nelion. He wouldn’t be
able to rest until he had found Tere and punished him.

What would Nelion think if I were to do that?
He pushed the thought away but knew once he had time to calm down that it would
become more incessant. The truth was he already knew what Nelion would want him
to do. She’d want him to let it go. Logically, it made sense to try, if he
became consumed with killing Tere, he would lose focus on what was really
important. Fighting the Hunwei.

There was a roar from a ship flying overhead and he went
back up to his knees again so that he could look down at the alley where Tere
had disappeared. The Hunwei had continued to come, gathering with their
prisoners, and sorting them into groups, just as they had before. Adar looked
among the captives carefully, wondering if Tere had been caught.

Now that would be an easy solution,
he thought,
the Hunwei could do my work for me without any guilty thoughts about what
Nelion would say.
When he died, he would be able to meet Nelion and look
her in the eye when his time had come.

He stopped and returned his attention to a spot he had
just glanced over. Was that a human face peering out of a Hunwei helmet? When he
looked back, trying to find it again, he didn’t see anything like that and
wrote it off as his imagination.

He gripped his blaster and took several deep breaths, letting
each of them out slowly while he considered his options. It was too late to run;
Tere and Karn had made it away at the last possible moment before Hunwei had
completely surrounded the building.

Adar wasn’t sure how long they had left, but if he was
going to be responsible for the deaths of so many, as least he would face what
he’d done. Maybe the tower wouldn’t work and an opportunity might present
itself for him to slip away. He ran out of the archives, made his way down the
stairs, to the now unrecognizable and rubble strewn meeting hall. At first he
moved slowly until it appeared that the town hall was empty, after that he
quickened his pace somewhat but was still careful to keep a close eye out. Those
two Hunwei he’d killed most recently couldn’t have been the only ones left in
the building.

The meeting hall ceiling had mostly caved in but it
was still passable. The mural was gone and the rubble had become slippery with
the rain that was now coming into the room through the openings above. When
Adar crossed through, he made sure of his steps to avoid as much noise as
possible, and more than a couple of times had to rethink his approach to keep
from falling down the slick rock. When he arrived at the town hall entrance, he
found that the guards they had overcome earlier were gone. He hoped that they
had made it away, but suspected that they had been rounded up by the Hunwei and
were now being sorted into a group of men. The thought of them regaining consciousness
only to find Hunwei made him feel sick, their deaths would be on his head. The
door outside was no longer on its hinges and the table the guards had used for
gambling had been broken in half. The room smelled of alcohol and he noticed a
broken wine bottle underneath the remains of the table.

He slid up against the wall by the door and peered
out. More than a dozen ships had landed in the field between the town hall and
what used to be the governor’s palace. The palace had once been a tall proud building,
though a little less impressive than the town hall. The town hall was still
standing, but the palace was now a pile of rubble. From his vantage point he
could make out some standing walls, but the grand structure was far beyond
repair. Had the Hunwei known the difference between the palace and the town
hall and known which was the seat of power for the city?

Adar hoped not. The Hunwei already had a superior
enough advantage with their ships and overwhelming weapons. He hoped it was
happenstance that they'd focused on the true seat of power, instead of the
largest building.

He could also make out women and children being loaded
aboard the ships while the men were separated into another group. It was all he
could do to not make a one-man suicide mission to try to save them and instead
he focused on the smaller version of the Vigorock tower. It didn’t look any
different since he’d armed it and he tried to gauge how long it had been, but
came up blank. The fight with Tere was still too fresh on his mind and had
warped his sense of time.

Maybe it had all been for nothing. Could he really
expect that the weapon would still work more than a thousand years later? He
couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. He wanted to deal a severe
blow to the Hunwei but didn’t want innocent people to die in the process.

He was disturbed from his thoughts by a sound from
behind—Melyah, he had picked a fine time to get lost in thought!—and turned in
time to see two Hunwei walk in from the meeting hall. They looked as surprised
to see him as he was to see them. He aimed his blaster at the first, which was
the taller of the two, and his shot ripped into the chest of the Hunwei and
sent him to the ground.

Before Adar could turn his blaster, the other had closed
the distance and ripped his blaster away. The next thing he knew he was looking
into the muzzle of a blaster with a very angry Hunwei on the other end, his
orange eyes had become slits and he was baring his fangs and hissing.

Adar ducked and grabbed for the blaster, but the
Hunwei was prepared and kicked Adar's legs out from underneath him. He rolled,
and was charging into the legs of the Hunwei, when an arrow exploded out of the
Hunwei’s neck. Blue blood gushed down the neck of the monster as he and the
Hunwei fell to the ground. When he got up, he recognized a black tipped arrow
point, and felt a flutter of hope. It was a match for the black tipped dagger
the Ou Qui had given to him.  

He grabbed the dead Hunwei’s blaster and fired a shot
into another Hunwei that had just appeared in the doorway of the meeting hall
but it wasn’t until after he’d fired that he realized there was already an
arrow protruding out of the Hunwei’s neck as well. He glanced around but didn’t
see any obvious Ou Qui and he didn’t dare call out to thank them.

Turning back to the doorway, he took a deep breath and
ran outside headed towards the tower. A thought had just occurred to him and he
kicked himself for not thinking of it earlier. Perhaps now that the tower was
activated, he could use his thumb to get in using the same method for accessing
the Arches. If he could get in, maybe he could deactivate it and keep everybody
from dying. With the Ou Qui on site, they might have a fighting chance after
all, assuming that an ancient weapon didn’t rip them all to shreds.

As he ran out into the open, he tried not to think
about what he was doing. Running out where there were Hunwei all around was
stupid, but heading towards a weapon that might do something at any time, was
even worse. There was movement all around him as the Hunwei took notice of his
idiotic run. Several blasts came his way, but thankfully, they missed, though
one of the blasts had come close to robbing him of a hand. It would have been a
hard loss to deal with but at least he would have been alive.

When he was less than ten feet away from the tower, he
noticed that it was glowing, and increased his speed. There wasn't time for him
to examine it more closely because he heard footsteps coming from behind and
was forced to turn. He brought up his blaster, but he was too late. A Hunwei
barreled into him, slamming him into the tower and pushing a blaster up against
his neck. Adar fired into the Hunwei’s feet at the same time an arrow ripped
through the Hunwei’s throat.

Melyah, those Ou Qui were deadly accurate with their
bows. He hoped never to be on the receiving end of one and was glad he’d
entered into the truce without hesitation. Despite his anxious state, he
noticed the surprised and painful look in the Hunwei’s eyes as he tried to push
the dying Hunwei away from him. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, and eventually,
he just got out of the way of the heavy beast and let the body fall against the
tower.

When Adar looked back at the town hall, he was
surprised to see that it was surrounded by Ou Qui. At first glance, he thought
there was only several hundred, but then he surveyed everywhere else and saw
that there were several thousand. Where the Ou Qui had been hiding he didn’t
know; he was just glad that they were fighting the Hunwei.

It looked like a battle between monsters because the
Ou Qui looked strange with their odd camouflage as they fired arrows at the
Hunwei. Adar saw several Ou Qui with black tipped swords that were cutting through
the Hunwei like a man with a scythe might do to grass. He had found himself
wishing for one of their disguises several times during the last several weeks
but now he realized that he needed to have one of their swords instead, or even
better, some of the black stuff for his.

When he saw an Ou Qui jump off the roof of the town
hall, he was taken aback. A moment later, another followed. Surely, they
couldn't survive the four-story fall? As the two Ou Qui landed and took off at
a run, Adar was unable to make sense of what he was seeing. The Hunwei must
have been surprised as well because many of them converged to fire on the two Ou
Qui at once. When several of the blasts hit the Ou Qui, they were unfazed, even
though some of their camouflage was blasted away revealing metal underneath.

In a surreal moment of wonder, Adar almost let out a
shout for joy. Those weren't Ou Qui. They were metalmen. Jorad had mentioned
that the Ou Qui he’d run into in the woods outside of Neberan had said
something about metal gods. Adar’s first thought had been of metalmen. Thinking
it was quite different than actually seeing it happen.
What other legends
are going come to life?
he wondered, as he recognized the Ou Qui bows and
arrows in their hands.

He turned back to the tower hoping there was a way to
disarm it from the inside and found that he had to shield his eyes because it
was now glowing bright yellow. A red mist had also formed around the tower,
giving it the appearance of being on fire, and a low rumbling whine sung out
from the structure. He stuck his thumb to the tower, hoping that the red mist
wouldn’t harm him, and found that the tower was actually quite cool to the
touch. He moved his thumb along the wall of the tower but nothing happened. Growling,
he tried again with his other thumb and received the same result. The red mist
began to spin around the tower, slowly gaining momentum as air was sucked
towards it. The mist was also growing, and rather fast at that. When Adar
realized he was in the middle of it, he broke from his trance and ran. Whatever
it was that he had put into motion; there was no stopping it now.

Several Hunwei were nearby and they stared at the
tower with fear covering their faces, they stood as if frozen to the ground. Despite
his imminent death, Adar was happy to see that the Hunwei too could feel fear.
I
don’t hear any gurgling laughter now,
he thought as he increased his speed.
All around him the air started tingling and he ran faster but found that he
wasn't outrunning the sensation.

When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw that the
red mist had taken on a more solid appearance and was swirling faster around
the tower. Without warning, the ground shook with a thunderous explosion and
the tower showered twisting balls of lighting into the air. The sound was
deafening and a mighty wind rushed forward from the tower, knocking Adar and
everyone and everything to the ground. Once it had passed, he heard the others
screaming as he lay waiting to die until he realized that he didn’t feel any
different.