The Crowned (The Blood and Brotherhood Saga, Book 6) (18 page)

Daring not to have a repeat of the event, Garret ran
headlong out into the field beyond the wall, ducking only to retrieve his sword
before breaking free of the dank tunnel into the night air, where he collided
with two of his foes. As he cleared the opening he began to shimmer, and with a
concussive boom the king of Valdadore exploded in size, his flesh becoming that
of metal, his foes being thrown back further by the blast. Kicking the hidden
portal closed behind him, he flexed his massive shoulders, and with a crack of
his neck he raised his sword above him as a chuckle escaped his lips. It was
time to right the wrongs of his brother.

* * * * *

King Robert Sigrant watched with the unparalleled vision of
an inhuman night predator as the flames upon Valdadore’s walls began snuffing
out. He watched as a wave of bodies engulfed the once white walls. His troops
climbed like cockroaches up the meager defenses that stood between them and the
blood they craved. He heard the familiar boom of a blessed defender, though now
the sound carried on entirely too long and the seemingly lower pitch disturbed
his head due to his vastly improved hearing. He debated joining the lowliest of
his troops for some sport, but that idea was cut short.

Watching as his minions neared the top of the wall, from out
of the sky green and yellow magical fire lanced out and Sigrant felt the
emptiness that came with the loss of his underlings. With wicked speed the
cursed demon prince bore down upon his vampires upon Valdadore’s wall and
obliterated them, hundreds at a swoop. His suspicions confirmed, he dared not
face the prince in an open fight.

If that were not enough, the prince’s beast commander too
was in the air, throwing fireballs and ripping Sigrant’s weakest from their
holds upon the walls. Even so, with the events playing out in extreme slow
motion before him, he could not help but wonder if he could survive a blast
from the prince, or perhaps even attack the demonic man unaware. His speed was
so great, after all, that no mortal stood a chance against him. Sigrant nearly
acted on his impulse, but two things held him at bay when the momentous
decision was made.

First, his troops, though falling en masse before the
prince’s assault, were making progress, some of them beginning to top the walls
and battle the defenders. This meant, of course, that more power would be on
its way.
If time would hurry the hell up
. Second, even in the darkness,
at an impossible range, the invading king watched as a being moved so fast upon
the grounds surrounding the city that only Sigrant and his harem would be able
to track her movements with his eyes. He knew her in an instant, recognition
bringing forth a scowl. Not only had the prince somehow been resurrected from
whatever hell he inhabited after death, but so too was his bride restored to
his side, seemingly more powerful than ever. His scowl deepened. She was near
his equal, and reason made him believe that she, not the prince, was the bigger
threat of the two.

For now, there was nothing better for him to do than watch
and calculate odds.

Seth let the wind gather in his great leathery wings and
used them to glide, more or less, in a great circle around the city. Sigrant’s
troops clung to every wall, clawing and scratching their way to the top like
horrid insects hell-bent on destruction. It was a precarious path Seth strode
down. One he knew would lead him to an inevitable battle of wills. But he knew
in his heart it was necessary.

For those watching his actions from the tops of the walls,
the fields below, or the camp belonging to king Sigrant, it appeared as if Seth
incinerated those vampires upon the uppermost reaches of the wall, but in fact
it was not the case at all. Seth had instructed all of his troops to only kill
as a last resort. Their main purpose at present was to buy time for Sara to
grow stronger than the invading king. Seth’s main purpose was to make it appear
that he was simply killing the enemy, and spare Valdadore’s troops as many
casualties as possible.

He knew it was impossible to save both sides of the conflict
in entirety. One sought only to destroy, the other sought only to survive. For
the majority to live, some
had
to be sacrificed.

So it was that Seth swept down from the darkened heavens
once again. With his hands out before him, he paralleled the great western wall
of Valdadore and sought out his enemies with the power only he could wield. Nearly
simultaneously, he siphoned the lives from nearly two hundred of the enemy
troops, before releasing a fraction of that power back as a great blast of
fire.

With this method, he contained the vast majority of the
tainted life forces of Sigrant’s troops, and spread magical fire upon the stone
of the city. The fire only lingered for a minute or two, but kept those
attackers below the blast from climbing further while it lasted, buying more
time. Then, seeking out their only hope, Seth unleashed the remaining tainted
power into the woman he loved, making her more Sigrant’s equal with every
feigned blast.

It was a dangerous game Seth was playing in more aspects
than was rational. The gods wanted the power from those dying on the field, and
by collecting it and pouring it into Sara he was denying them that which was
rightfully theirs. He could not help but wonder if such an act made Sara and him
a target of the gods. He imagined that eventually he would know the answer to
that question first hand. Another dangerous aspect was simply the unknown. Man
was not made to possess such power. At what point did the power take over and
the man lose control? Was there a limit to what a person could contain? Was
eternal life possible? It certainly seemed so. Would the immense power alter a
person in irreversible ways?

Seth himself was powerful by mortal standards. Hundreds,
likely near two thousand souls that had been sworn to him had perished and come
to join his own. But Sigrant, and now Sara too, far exceeded the power that he
himself contained. If the physical changes that were so obviously apparent were
so extreme, could not the mental and emotional changes be just as vast? Could
anyone recover from such extensive change and remain sane?

He had a plan to bring Sara back to a reasonable level, but feared
that like his previous attempts at saving her, something could go awry.

Flapping his wings, now against the cold breeze, he felt he
was finally getting the hang of his new appendages. Reaching out all along the
western wall of the city he turned to ash all that clung to the top half of the
wall before lancing fire to coat the stones in a temporary barrier. Again, he
fed Sara life.

Time. They needed more time!

* * * * *

Borrik felt utterly useless winging along the skies,
mimicking his master, throwing fireballs in an attempt to dissuade the
attackers from wanting to climb further. It was working, but his human and
feral sides were at war within him concerning the usefulness of such tactics. Through
his shared pack consciousness he watched as his few remaining men fought atop
the walls, hurling the blood-sucking beasts back over the side instead of
tearing them to bits.

From time to time he would wing in close to the wall and rip
an unsuspecting creature from its surface and fling it into the air, more for
show than anything else. But truthfully his more primal side enjoyed it
immensely.

Deciding that his feral need to kill, or at least maim and
injure, should be satiated once more, he swooped low to tear yet another of the
vampire creatures from the wall. Just as he grasped the foe, a flood of images
flashed in his mind of a sizeable breach not far from him. Releasing his prey,
he flapped hard and began to climb.

Within seconds he crested the wall and slammed to its top,
landing in a crouch, lowering one palm to the stone to assist in adjusting from
flight to land assault.

Before him, nearly two dozen of Sigrant’s bloodthirsty
monsters clawed and bit like savage animals trying to break through Valdadore’s
defenders and get into the city to feed. The bulk of the troops here belonged
to Seth, the rat troops commanded by Borrik himself via his wolven pack members.
Tucking his wings, and leaning yet further forward to charge, Borrik sprang
ahead, recalling his secondary arms as he ran along the wall.

Though he imagined himself an odd sight, a great wolven
beast of a man who was rapidly degenerating, a second pair of arms as he ran
with wings tucked against his back behind him, it was what he watched as he neared
that he found even more peculiar.

All along the wall, though especially right ahead, Seth’s
young rat soldiers battled the vampires. Both sides fought savagely, ripping
and tearing at their foes, like caged animals over a scrap of meat. It reminded
Borrik of a traveling troop of acrobats he had seen once. The way the
combatants fought was almost like a dance. They lunged and leapt over one
another and darted this way and that. Lunge and feigned attacks were used by
both sides, and he was impressed to find that Seth’s young troops seemed up to
the task of defending against the creatures. Oddly, both sides fought nearly
identically. They did not fight as men fought, but then again, neither side was
truly a member of human kind any longer.

As Borrik watched, however, he witnessed proof of not only
the power of his master, but also the thoughtfulness of the dark prince as
well. Witnessing as he rushed ahead to lend himself to his allies, Borrik saw a
small rat soldier fall beneath a pair of Sigrant’s creatures. Dragged to the
ground without a chance of escape, the small hairy soldier grasped at the
medallion given to him by his creator, and Borrik heard the scream that
followed.

“Seth, save me!”

That was it… Poof. The rat soldier vanished. No smoke. No
flash. No boom. Nothing. Gone. The rat soldier had disappeared and those who
would have killed him within an instant fell to the ground where he had been in
a tangle of teeth and claws. Borrik was astonished. He knew Seth had enchanted
the medallions, but had no idea what their effect could have been.

Reaching the spot where the rat man had went down, Borrik
grasped at the creatures who had felled Seth’s soldier and tossed them back
over the side whence they came.

“Poof,” he growled with a smirk, having done a little magic
of his own.

Looking up, he watched ahead on the wall as another young
soldier invoked his medallion and then another. But just when he feared that
the defenders would begin to grow too thin to hold the wall, up they came once
more.

From within the city the rat soldiers climbed back up the wall
to resume their posts in a fairly steady stream. Seth hadn’t made them vanish,
he had simply removed them from harm’s way so that they could fight on.

Smiling at his master’s genius, a wicked feral smile of
fangs and saliva, he charged forward once more to help those who fought on
ahead of him.

* * * * *

As the battle waged on, Sara felt her power growing by the
second. Then at other times she felt a huge wash of power through her, so
intense that had she been weaker she would have been overcome. Though she was
growing stronger and faster and more agile by the second, it was as much a
curse as it was a blessing.

Because she was constantly in motion, momentum was beginning
to become an issue. With each passing moment she moved faster. Higher speeds
meant more time to slow or stop, and also made it more difficult to change
direction. So even though time stretched out before her, she was in a constant
state of flux, having to relearn her limits and the consequences that came with
her power over and over again as they constantly changed. Even so, she was a
terror on the fields surrounding the city.

To Sara it felt as though she walked among the shadows of
men, so attached to the ground they seemed, that they appeared barely to move
as she slipped between them unnoticed. She grabbed them and hurled them like
playthings back the way they had come across the fields, and even at the
distance that they landed she could hear the cracks of their bones and their
screams as they slowly began to mend. She too understood that killing them was
a last resort.

Seeing that the defenders upon the wall were beginning to
see more than their share of the action, Sara rushed to the wall and, using the
climbing vamps like stepping stones, she leapt from one to another up the wall
simply to dislodge them, as she could now make the full thirty story jump with
little effort at all.

With bodies raining down below her, the lethal princess of
Valdadore cleared the top of the city wall and landed as lightly as a wraith
upon the stone defenses. Moving down the wall she walked among and between
combatants, breaking limbs of some enemies and flinging over the side the
screaming and wriggling bodies of others. It was a mundane task at best, as she
now moved too quickly and was too strong for any of them to combat. If it were
a fight to the death, Sara did not doubt that already she could handle the
whole lot of them at once. And that was before the third generation of her
underlings began to awake and feed.

Within two hours Sara had made a few dozen laps around the
defensive wall of the city, clearing its ramparts of invading vampires like so
many leaves into the wind. She had felt them begin to arise, not that she could
sense their actual awakening. But she could hear the new wave of screams that
began within the city, and could feel the power that now came at an even
increasing speed. Hundreds had turned into a few thousand and now that number
had spawned a generation of tens of thousands.

Sara had no idea how many people sheltered within the city. A
hundred thousand? Maybe three times that? She pondered going to count them,
thinking she would barely be missed in the short time it would take her to do
so, but decided against it. She did not want to see firsthand the source of her
power and the reason for its rapid growth. She knew that multitudes of people
within the city were facing savage creatures that had no regard for their lives.
She tried to stop her imagination when she envisioned young mothers and their
babies falling before the teeth of one of her kind. The thought sickened her.