The first part of that answer didn’t surprise me. The second, though, made my brows rise.
“Why does Atrius care if he kills locals?”
Erekkus narrowed his eyes at me, as if I was asking a suspiciously foolish question, and got distracted by another captain’s shouts before he could answer.
This thought nagged at me during the long approach to Alka, like a puzzle piece I couldn’t quite figure out how to snap into place. I was here to assemble a diagram of Atrius’s strengths and weaknesses that we could use to destroy him. He was a mysterious man, certainly, but until now I had felt that I was slowly peeling back the layers.
That little piece of information, though… it didn’t fit with anything I thought I knew about him.
Atrius was silent as we climbed up the rocky paths. It was a difficult journey, the path so narrow that only two men could walk beside each other shoulder to shoulder. And this was the easiest part of the journey—from here, the incline dipped and then rose sharply to the central city, a rocky spire that towered high above us.
While our approach was quiet, no one was under any illusions that this was a sneak attack. Aaves surely knew that we were coming. It was just a matter of when, and how, he would choose to address it.
And now, when we reached the top of the path and the outer gates to Alka, high and locked up tight, my heart was in my throat, my body tense. The souls of Atrius’s warriors stretched out around me, drowning me in a sea of their bloodthirsty anticipation. There was no feeling quite like that of a soldier about to go into battle. Excitement and terror, thrill and fear, all dancing right on the blade’s edge between life and death.
Atrius’s warriors were well-trained and battle-hardened. They were calm and professional. And yet, that feeling was the same. The same fear. Why did that surprise me, that these near-immortal creatures felt so close to death in these moments, too?
Atrius lifted a fist, and his warriors halted, the command silently understood all the way down the line. He paused at the gates, staring up at them. They were tall and thick, but just as ugly as Alka itself—great slabs of unfinished iron cobbled together with spiked chunks of metal and mismatched bars of half-rotted wood, still stained with the blood of the slaves forced to build it.
Far beyond the gates—so high above us that the spires were visible through the mist only as smears of orange light—was Aaves’s castle. Our ultimate target. The head of the snake, to be sliced off.
Atrius took it all in—the hideous gates, the treacherous mountains, the distant gaudy castle—with a stony face. The faintest hint of disgust rolled from his presence, like a little wisp of smoke. He raised his hand, and four of his men took places on either side of him. Each pair held strange contraptions between them—the closest human comparison I’d seen to this were giant metal crossbows, but so large that each had to be supported by two men. At each tip was a little white-blue flame. One warrior from each machine strummed their fingers along the weapon’s carved sides, little flecks of red light shivering at their touch.
Magic. The magic of Nyaxia, surely. The threads quivered in its presence, as if uneasy before something so unfamiliar.
Atrius kept his fist raised, his eyes regarding our target for a long moment, like a final challenge.
Then, so quietly that surely only I heard it, he murmured, “Knock knock.”
He lowered his fist.
The four warriors braced themselves. Two flares of light blinded me.
Explosions of white fire blasted through the gates and kept going, all the way up to the night sky above the castle itself. The chaos was swift and immediate. I felt it in the air, in the threads, in the hundreds—thousands—of distant presences that just roared to life, lying in wait, now ready to hurl themselves at us.
With the gates in shambles and a wall of rock ahead of us, Atrius drew his sword and simply started walking.
Aaves’s warriors came for us immediately. Battle was like a crashing wave—you feel the tension rising, rising, rising, feel the cold shadow of it over its face, and then suddenly it’s everywhere, filling your lungs.
I was drowning.
So many sensations. So many minds screaming. The threads, typically laid out in calm serenity, grew tangled and confusing. And yet, with that chaos came an energy that I thrived on in some sick, shameful way.
Beyond the gates, we were thrust into a series of tunnels. Atrius’s warriors needed to further split up in order to make it up the mountain as quickly as possible. On the other entry points, the other divisions of his army were making a similar trek. The tunnels of Alka were deliberately confusing—narrow, poorly lit, and twisting. We’d climbed up for miles to reach the gates, but the tunnels brought us back down, down, in damp, slippery paths.