Batal climbed the stone steps etched into the mountainside. His bow and sword were fastened to new and better fitting copper armor, each plate of which was rubbed in ash and mud the color of the surrounding rock. Most of Zaeafran’s warriors blended into the wall and all carried the longest bows and tallest shields Batal had ever seen. Each set of eyes carried hatred or respect. Batal cared little of what the warriors harbored toward him, the Guardian who had killed the best of them, as long as fear was part of it. He reached the two-meter-wide ledge hewn from the rock over the past centuries. A meter and a half of the wall protected the ledge from the sea and enemies beyond. Rich, yellow flags hung limp and high on the posts embedded up and down the ledge’s path. The Zaeafran crest emblazoned on the flags was distorted in the bunched material.
Batal stared at the horizon and the line of Northern Horde ships approaching the island. “How is this possible? There are so many.”
Drago appeared, his armor smeared with ash and his face painted to match. “Ten times as many as we faced at Skye Stone. The Horde is growing and remains unchallenged.”
“What does that tell you, young Guardian?” a voice behind the two men asked.
Batal turned to see his aunt, who was wearing the same ash-smeared armor as the rest of her warriors. The only difference in hers was the symbol etched in the copper breastplate: a pair of crossed khopeshes.
“Queen Zasar.” Batal half bowed, then gave up. “The other nations of the Spice Islands are likely dead, or worse, they have made an alliance with the Horde.”
“Maybe.” Her hand pointed to the horizon. “The Horde are not men. Those choosing the North lost that distinction long ago.” She opened a hand toward Drago—“Your spyglass.”—who placed it in her hand. She passed it to Batal. “Which is it? Dead or an alliance?”
Batal leaned into the wall and scanned the endless ships covering the horizon. “Dead.”
Zasar nodded. “Even from here, I can see there are many vessels from the nations of the Spice Islands floating among the Horde’s ships.”
“Yes, there are many,” Batal confirmed. “But the decks are filled with the radiation-rotting beasts of the North.” He handed the spyglass back to Drago. “They are closing in and they have the catapult ships with them.”
No longer trying to hide their numbers, the ships in the Horde’s fleet now spread out in an endless row across the sea. Two-hundred twenty, Batal counted. At least twenty bore the hull design of the catapult ships that had launched their warriors into Skye Stone.
A lone vessel hung back. It was three times the size of the next largest ship, a vast catapult built off-center into its deck so its catapult arm could clear the mainmast that was also part of the frame. The ship’s metallic hull reflected in the sunlight. She is beautiful, Batal thought, and a destroyer of walls. How could beasts design such a thing?
The flags on the wall fluttered southward and drooped. It would not be long before the winds decided what happened next. Batal prayed that Boreas, god of the north wind, would spare the nation of Zaeafran and his family and not fill the sails of the Horde. So…the Trials of the Guardian have not taken everything from me. I am afraid for those I love. That is something.
A girl then filled his thoughts. Bright green eyes with braided hair the color of silver and sunlight with the pale skin of a northern clan from a faraway nation. A land destroyed by volcanic eruptions and consumed by the sea. Why choose me, Kaminari? Why choose a boy you tormented with insults and laughter? One who now has his first lesion and has not avoided the radiation’s grasp. I am like everyone else, slowly being consumed by the legacy of our ancestor’s creations. He looked to the sky, waiting to see the next streak from those dying weapons spinning around the earth. We have fallen so far. Or have we?
“She would not stay with the strandwolves!” A voice called from below.
“Vlad?” Batal asked, looking over the edge. “What are you doing down there?”
“Stefan and I are doormen or door openers for dogs, or something. Good luck! We’ll see you when it’s over!” He then disappeared.
Danu raced up the stairs and slid to a halt at Batal’s side. She wore embossed leather armor that covered her back and chest. The designs reminded him of those from Skye Stone. He ran his hand down her neck and patted her armored side. “No, she doesn’t wait. Danu the brave,” he said. “The bravest.” He leaned toward her muzzle. “I am sorry, girl. I will not lose myself again. I can’t bear to see that look in your eyes one more time.”
Danu’s tongue found his face, her eyes never leaving his.
A gust ripped the flags above the ledge and held them steady, pointing south, toward the wooden wall.
“Fucking, Boreas!” Drago spat. “God of wind? Fuck the northern bastard!”
“Here they come,” Queen Zasar said.
A deep bellow of a horn rumbled from the encroaching fleet. Dirty white sails dropped from the masts of the Horde’s vessels and black ones rose from the captured Spice Islands ships. The massive vessel’s sail filled first, hiding the rest of the ship. A blood-red circle with an hourglass inside it was painted on the sail. Batal’s breathing shortened, his throat dry, but he still stood. The symbol of mass extinction was closing in. A hand rested on his shoulder.
“Do not fear, Batal.” The queen’s voice grew louder like a pounding drum. “They approach a nest of vipers.” She then turned to address the gathered army. “Warriors of Zaeafran!”
The Zaeafranians roared back in reply.
Drago readied his bow and Batal followed. Danu placed her paws on the top of the wall and stood on her hind legs, eyes following the approaching ships. Her nose raised, puffing and snorting.
“If they smell this bad to us from so far away,” Drago said with a laugh, “I feel sorry for the hound!”
Shadows appeared and grew larger near the shoreline. A hundred wooden decks broke the surface, their catapults already in motion toward the wall. The Horde had shown their fleet with intended arrogance while the bulk of their catapult ships crept in from below. The sky filled with armored orbs and not a single arrow flew in their direction.
“Behind your shields!” commanded the queen, now their general, too. “Let them open! Let the Horde spill from their cocoons!”
Batal followed the spheres’ descent as another wave filled the sky, and another. It’s happening again. No one is safe. Once the ships’ supplies of orbs were spent, their catapults stilled. The first shells split. Patchwork sails opened and muscled men, rotting and stinking of death, dangled from ropes, twisting and turning as they fired their crossbows at any target they could spot. Batal shifted to the side of his shield and started to draw his bow, but bolts shattered on stone all around him and clanked off his shield. He moved back under its protection.
The grunting, brawny forms descended behind the Zaeafranian wall, unmolested, drifting on the cool breeze, sending bolt after bolt, until landing in the killing ground of the strandwolves.
“The doors!” Zasar commanded, and hundreds of armored wolves erupted from the walls, charging out of wooden doors, perfectly set into the stone and covered with mud and ash.
Those invaders still in the air began firing at the strandwolves, and the Zaeafranian warriors left their shields to loose arrows at a sickening pace. Wolves died, but only a few, and the killing field soon became a feeding bowl. Batal drew his bow multiple times only to find his target riddled with arrows and falling from the sky. Danu did not join the feast and instead remained at Batal’s back, adjusting her position as he spun, searching for living targets.
“They are escaping! The Horde’s ships are fleeing!” sounded all along the wall.
“Arrows!” the queen-general commanded. “Before they submerge!”
There was something about Queen Zasar’s order that puzzled Batal. Arrows against hardened hulls? Pointless. Her gaze fell on him for a moment. Was that a smile? But then it was gone, and he continued searching for targets.
The sea resounded with the thunk of arrow points penetrating wood and the slice of shafts entering water. The Horde’s catapult ships disappeared beneath the surface. A sheneb blew and the strandwolves, now covered in gore, stopped feeding and disappeared into the mountain sides once again, the doors closing behind them and fading into the rock.
Drago turned to Batal. “If Jenna had seen that, she would not think these wolves so gentle.”
“But the ships got away,” Batal replied. “We had them and let them go. We could have filled the bay with spirits and turned it all to flame. Why—?”
“You’ve done nothing but twirl with your dog and watch,” the queen stated. “Why not watch a bit longer, YOUNG Guardian. The Horde doesn’t engage a strong enemy, and fleets don’t fear bows and arrows.”
The massive Horde ship moved ahead of the remaining ships in the fleet, dropped her sail, and four anchors splashed into the sea. The sound of a chain rattling over steel filled the air then stopped. A glow appeared from the deck. The fleet stretched out at the lead ship’s flanks, and then each sail fell slack and limp.
“Wall!” ordered the queen.
Every warrior dropped to their knees and pressed their bodies against the stone. Drago and Danu followed, but Batal stood long enough to see the ball of flame launch from the Horde ship, the force driving the towering bow into the sea while the stern anchor snapped with a metallic twang.
Drago pulled him down. “What the fuck are you—?”
Fire hammered the wall, and the impact flung warriors off the far ledge to the ground below. Some stood dazed, others lay dead or unconscious. Outside, the stone burned with a black tar, the heat traveling through the rock.
“Incoming!”
Another ball of flame exploded a meter above the last, and a crack appeared in the wall. Another impact. The crack grew, and fractured stone slid off the wall’s face.
“Hold!” the queen ordered as two more projectiles slammed into the wall, one after the other. She peeked over the stone; most of the fleet’s sails had been raised again and were filled with wind, moving the ships beyond the anchored monstrosity that continued its siege. “Let them come,” she whispered before crawling toward a shaking Batal, Drago, and Danu. “Only a few minutes more, Spartans,” she said with a wicked smile as she crawled past. Below in the killing field, strandwolves and their handlers burst through doors beneath the cracked end of the wall, seconds before it shook from another impact and the section collapsed.
Batal raised his head just enough to see the Horde’s fleet racing toward the shoreline and the opening in the wall beyond. Their decks filled with fighters. The siege vessel, protected by a handful of ships, launched a final few salvos of smaller projectiles that thudded against the stone and rolled along the sand. Hundreds of heads with wide eyes.
What was left of the other Spice Islands nations? Batal wondered.
A flaming arrow rose into the sky above the wall. Queen Zasar was loosing them at a methodical pace. On each side of the wall facing the sea, ash-and-mud-covered doors dropped open.
Batal watched as strange rods resting on heavy wooden guides slid out of the mountain, then pointed at the bottlenecked Horde fleet. Crews attached ceramic vessels on the front of the rods and lit a fine piece of cloth on the tail ends. Each bolt was at least four meters long and thick like an oak branch. “Ballista,” he murmured. He couldn’t take his eyes off the huge crossbows.
“FIRE!” Zasar roared, a banshee warning of death’s arrival.
Rods flew from their cradles, were reloaded in seconds, and fired again. Smoke trailed from behind. The first volley exploded across the rear ships of the fleet, turning their decks and hulls into raging infernos, which blocked the retreat of the rest. Burning bodies collapsed whole or in pieces as the ballistae kept firing, wave after wave, until they engulfed the bay in rolling flames that leaped from ship to ship.
Another flaming arrow rose into the sky. Yellow sails appeared from the west, the ships tacking to keep their sails full. The Horde’s siege ship rocked as her crew worked to pull up the four anchors. The protecting Horde vessels headed toward the small Zaeafranian flotilla, but they were too late and the wind was against them.
Smoke-trailing rods flew from the sides of the main sails and the five Horde vessels erupted in flame. The yellow sails tacked around the burning hulls, a smattering of desperate arrows thumping into their sides. The siege ship’s mainsail filled, and she ran for the open sea until her sail faltered. Then she again tacked toward the wind. The Zaeafranian ships cut off their chase, and with the aid of the wind, raced toward the safety of Zaeafran’s wall and the ballistae.
Another fleet then appeared on the horizon—this one filled with the Horde’s massive siege ships.
“Go!” Queen Zasar yelled toward Batal and Drago. “Go while you can. The wind is with you! There is nothing you can do here.” She hugged Batal, then pressed her lips to his ear. “The Trials are over, leave them behind. You carry your father within you. He was our king before he chose Amira and Skye Stone. You must unite with the Akiro Clan, or we all fall.”
A small group of Horde vessels broke off in the distance, tacking east.
“They’re trying to cut us off.” Batal looked to Drago. “They know why we’re here? Where we’re going?”
“Trust no one,” the queen insisted. “Leave now or all will be for nothing. The Aeolus was the finest ship your father designed, and she will fly with Jenna’s hand.” Queen Zasar then moved back to the wall.
“We will hold!” she yelled. “We are Zaeafran! We are warriors!”
The roar of her warriors faded with each step as Batal, Drago, and Danu entered the gore of the pit. Vlad and Stephan exited from one of the wooden doors, and the five ran toward the dock, passing men pulling catapults toward the wall. Warriors and strandwolves jogged up mountain trails to man additional posts and weaponry.
The Zaeafranians are ready for this day, Batal thought as they passed wagons full of ceramic spheres. “It would take decades to create these fortifications and weapons,” Batal stated.
“Your father started it, and his sister, Queen Zasar, continued the work,” Drago huffed.
A shadow passed overhead and a body thumped to the ground, riddled with arrows.
“We must close the gate!” a warrior hollered from a ledge above, and the hinges screeched as the wooden slab began to close.
Danu jumped through the gap with Batal and the rest spilling out after her. A few Horde boats sailed into the protected harbor. Jenna and Amira were on the Aeolus, crouching behind the cabin and popping up to fire well-timed shafts.
“Run for fuck’s sake!” Jenna screamed as arrows and small stones skipped off the deck. “It will only get worse!”
Batal and Danu flew across the dock and slid up to the hull with Vlad, Stephan, and Drago right behind them.
A stone grazed Batal’s chest plate, and he ducked down again. “We can’t get out of the harbor with those—shit!”
A handful of wooden doors covered in ash and stone swung down, clapping off the stone below, and ballistae appeared on the hillside above the gate. Thick bolts tipped with ceramic heads flew toward the Horde’s ships, and within seconds, fire consumed them. Screams followed, and the Aeolus now had a clear path to open seas.
“Siege ships are coming from the north!” cried a voice from one of the warriors operating a ballista. “The queen sends her love, Batal. Zaeafran’s survival rests with you. Go! And may the gods be with you!”