Benjin
This is it, Benj thought. This is war.
It was the thing that he’d trained for most of his life; yet, as scores of Chovathi poured from the mouth of Ghal Thurái, he suddenly felt very much like a boy who’d been thrust into battle.
In other words: exactly what he was.
Only minutes before, he’d been a confident armiger, attendant to Captain Jahaz, and even a friend of the queen.
Now, he was just another child.
Thyst was beside him, readying an arrow to nock on her bowstring.
“This is insane, right?” she asked. She pulled back on the arrow but seemed to be lost as to where to fire it. At this point, there were entirely too many targets. “They can’t really expect us to fight all of those things . . . can they?”
“I-I think they can,” Benj stammered. “And I think we have to.”
There had been a brief moment of chaos when the creatures had first emerged; everyone in the army had expected the Chovathi to be waiting for them in the depths of the Mouth. What they had not expected them to do was to leave the protection of the mountain city’s walls. This change in expectations had caused a commotion through most of the army, made even worse by something that happened immediately afterward.
Every now and again, on their march up, Benj had caught glimpses of a man riding on the great winged Gwarái’s back. And when the Chovathi started emerging from Ghal Thurái, the surprise must have caused the man to fall off, and the gasps of surprise from the men around him told him that the ending would not be pretty. Benj stared in horror as he watched the man that was now hurtling toward the ground.
But the longer he watched the man falling, the more Benj realized something: he hadn’t fallen at all—he had jumped!
“Look out below, you bastards!” the man yelled, roaring with laughter. His arms were spread wide, and he was holding swords in both hands, chest and head thrust toward the ground in a controlled free fall toward the largest concentration of Chovathi, clustered right by the entrance to the city.
In fact, not only had he jumped, but he was actually aiming!
“Thyst! Are you seeing this?” Benj asked, not taking his eyes off the earth-bound maniac.
“Yeah,” she said in a near-whisper. “Is he . . . ?”
“Aiming,” Benj said incredulously. “Yeah.”
Even Captain Jahaz had stopped for a moment to watch the spectacle. “He’s gone mad,” the captain breathed. “Not like it matters now.”
And then, as if to prove them wrong, mere seconds before he hit the ground, the man twisted deftly in the air so that his back was facing the ground, swords in the air, like a well-armed boulder about to hit home.
Then he collided with the ground so hard that all of Ghal Thurái shook.
“Breaker’s balls!” Jahaz swore.
A massive plume of dust rose up so high that Benj thought he’d just seen the end of the world. He closed his eyes reflexively, as if he expected to feel the death that would inevitably hit him, probably in the form of a rockslide or a crater that would open up and swallow him.
But when neither of those things came, he opened one eye and looked at the spot where the man had crashed into the world: the entrance to the Mouth. The dust was still rising, but there looked to be a huge pile of . . . something where the man had hit.
“Venn, you absolute madman,” Benj heard a woman say. It was General Cullain, the queen’s sister.
Benj looked again at the pile. He squinted, trying to make out just what it was. Then he realized: it was a pile of Chovathi bodies.
And out of the center of it, clawing his way to the top, was Cortus Venn.
“How . . . ,” Jahaz began. “How is he still alive?”
General Cullain laughed from up ahead. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Turning to Queen Lena, she said, “Well, now that he’s made his entrance, what’s say we make ours?”
The queen smiled at her. She was holding her greatsword in one hand. At those words, she thrust it forward and yelled, “For Gal’dorok!”
The entirety of the army—Sharian, Thurian, and Valurian—shouted at the top of their lungs. It was enough to make Benj want to cover his ears; he didn’t feel much like shouting. But, after seeing what the man called Venn had just done, and knowing that he was on their side, he definitely felt like fighting.
He would follow him just about anywhere.
“Come and get it, you bottom-dwelling whoresons!” Venn shouted, loud enough for Benj to hear, as he brandished his two swords around him in a whirl of blades. He was cutting through Chovathi seamlessly as if he’d been doing it his whole life. Benj’s jaw dropped. Was he going to take on the whole army by himself?
“Save some for us, Venn!” shouted General Cullain. She and her army had split off and were making their way away from the main gate where Venn had crash-landed. Queen Lena, on the other hand, was motioning her army forward.
They would be charging the main gate, Benj knew.
He felt the leather sheath by his side, where the sword his mother had given him was hanging.
Glamrhys, she’d called it. He felt that he would need it. He hoped it wouldn’t be soon.
Duna
“That Venn is something else,” Duna said with awe. If she hadn’t seen it with her own two eyes, she wouldn’t have believed that he could survive a fall from the winged Gwarái, several hundreds of feet in the air.
But he’d done just that, and it was incredible.
“I’m just glad he’s on our side,” Captain LaVince said from beside her. He was commanding one of the three battalions that had split off from the main body of the army, with Captains Jerol and Ohlez leading the remaining two. The three of them together would be heading into the subentrances of Ghal Thurái.
“I think he’s his own side,” Duna said. “But at this point it doesn’t even matter; he’s killing Chovathi by the dozens. I don’t even know if they can do anything to stop him.”
She watched again in awe as the Stoneborn slashed his way through a crowd of the lumbering white beasts that still poured from the Mouth. She shook her head and collected her thoughts.
Turning to her men, she put her thoughts into words.
“Now,” she shouted, “we do it how we planned it! Battalion one, take the eastern-most tunnel; battalion two, the western-most. Battalion three, lend your strength as needed; you will watch the backs of the others and make sure they are not caught unaware by unaccounted-for Chovathi. Does everyone understand the plan?”
The battalions and their respective commanders slammed their swords against their shields twice in acknowledgment.
“Then let’s take back Ghal Thurái!” she shouted, raising her sword into the air.
The army cheered in response. Music to her ears.
She turned to Kunas beside her, in charge of the Chovathi contingent. “Now will you tell me,” she began, barely audible over the cheers, “what we have to find once we’re inside?”
He wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was looking over his hulking white troops. “Leave that to us.”
Again with that you versus us, she thought with a frown. What happened in that nest?
“Very well,” she answered. “A lot of people are counting on you.”
Kunas looked at her, his swirling eyes a vortex of fury.
“And all of them are expendable,” he answered. Wordlessly, he turned his horse and headed for the two middle tunnels that formed subentrances to the Mouth, followed silently by the monstrous Xua’al warriors behind him.
The Sharians had already begun their ascent to Ghal Thurái, moments away from clashing with the Chovathi that had come forth from the mountain fortress. And, though the Sharians would certainly be the ones to start the conflict, Duna had a feeling that the Xua’al would be the ones to end it.