Chapter 65

  Yesui used a powerful gust of wind to push the orc in front of her toward the river. The overgrown green pig tried to hold his ground, setting his feet and squatting, but the word of power she had used, doolselk, was too strong. He flipped end over end and tumbled into the water, at which point Yesui used another doolselk to continuously push down on the surface, keeping the orc’s head below the waterline until he drowned. It was the quickest way she could think of to dispatch a Mountain Guard orc without breaking through his defensive barrier.

  She was standing at the center of Current Street, which started at the western edge of Batulan-bar and followed the river all the way to the eastern side of the city. The western gate was visible a few blocks away, the top of its keystone poking over the roofs of the nearby buildings. Lodge Mother Sarnai had asked Yesui to be the front line of the defense, giving her the lucrative position of standing in the way of the Mountain Guard's easiest avenue into Batulan-bar. While many of the orcs had elected to climb down from the top of the canyon, the majority were now marching in via the city gate.

  If anyone else had asked Yesui to plant herself in front of the most fearsome army on Gaia Eta, she would have flatly refused. She wasn't a soldier. Orcs weren't mutts. Dalex of the Expedition Seven was an insufferable busybody and this was all his fault. But when it came to Lodge Mother Sarnai, even such a ludicrous request was impossible to turn down.

  And she had given Yesui a look that said they might never see each other again. That had made Yesui angry, and now she wanted to prove the Lodge Mother wrong.

  The rapidly growing crowd of orcs in front of her would make that difficult.

  The drowning orc's fellows had noted the demise of their comrade and lumbered away from the river, making it more difficult for Yesui to push more of them into the water. At the same time, two of them barked a round of guttural power words, dropping a column of blue fire in her direction and sending a hail of cobblestone projectiles flying straight at her.

  Yesui dodged down a side street, avoiding the hail of rocks, but the collapsing fire was too large. It loomed over her, casting her shadow in strange directions, and would consume an entire block when it crashed into the ground.

  Luckily, Yesui had known to expect just this kind of attack. She had almost refused Hitasa's offer of a brand-new word of power. Like Lodge Mother Sarnai, Yesui already had a deep and well-publicized lexicon. But there was one spell she had always thought would be useful, but which the dragons would never have let her develop. Even just suggesting it would have been cause to start an investigation into her that would likely end with her imprisonment or execution. But Hitasa had given it to her.

  She shouted, "Arnselk creates a back draft," and waved her hand at the fire as if blowing it away.

  The fire swirled in on itself at the middle and then rushed up into the sky. At first, the flames grew even more intense, but, as the air thinned, they eventually dissipated high above the city. So much incendiary force became dazzling lights in the high atmosphere.

  After spending so much time dealing in wind-related words of power, Yesui had noticed something interesting about how air interacted with fire. Flames tended to follow the wind and eat it. If fire had no air to breathe, it fizzled out. If it had a lot of air to breathe, it waxed larger. And so arnselk created a zone with no air in the path of the fire and a zone with extra air in the direction Yesui wanted it to travel. This way, she could redirect the fire away from herself and the other flammable parts of the city.

  She heard a fair amount of enraged grunting on the part of the orcs and stepped around the street corner to once again stand before them on Current Street. They glowered at her and raised their axes. Both Yesui and the orcs had played their hands. She couldn’t use doolselk to push them into the water again without summoning a storm like the one she had used to keep the hydra at bay with Dalex and Arnaut. That kind of wind would destroy the city. Conversely, the orcs couldn’t use their signature fire spell.

  So, the front line of orcs took the simple approach, charging her, each swinging their weapon with an identical cry of, “Dis aks bash ‘trong.”

  They covered the ground to reach Yesui in the blink of an eye. For such large creatures, they were startlingly fast. Yesui just barely managed to leap out of the way, casting, “Flitkhal grants my feet wings” and launching herself a dozen feet in the air. The lead orc swung at her and missed, planting the head of his axe into the street. It split the ground in twain and made the buildings to the sides of the street tremble.

  Yesui had not fully understood the orcs’ shouting. Their kind had difficulty pronouncing the common tongue of Gaia, but they were forced to use it to publicize their words of power and weapons. The elves and beastkin needed to understand the word being publicized by the orcs, or the weapons would have no power. The orc language was even harder for them to comprehend than the other way around.

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  But even if Yesui couldn’t understand them, the impact of the axe was clear. Her barrier wouldn’t stand up to a single blow from that kind of weapon.

  Sweat broke out on her forehead as she used flitkhal to bounce over the street, evading the orcs that followed up the attack.

  Still midair, she shouted, “Ogtol salk summons scythes of wind.”

  The air around the orcs condensed into spinning blades of wind, picking up everything from grains of sand to small rocks scattered by the impact of the orc’s axe. This debris became the edge of a saw that slashed the still charging orcs. It ground against their barriers, sending a shower of sparks dancing across the street. The orcs seemed unfazed, determined to reach her and cut her in half.

  Yesui had no idea how strong a Mountain Guard barrier was supposed to be. Did she actually stand a chance of cutting through one? She continued to retreat, summoning another set of wind scythes and throwing them at the orcs from the other side. Her blades put the orcs at the center of a razor sharp vortex of debris. The combined attacks jostled them a bit, and the sparks flying through the air dazzled their big black eyes, but they kept on coming.

  One of them came close enough to take another swing at Yesui, but she managed to push him away with another doolselk, shoving him toward the river. His eyes went wide as he noticed his trajectory, and he scrambled to stay on dry ground, surging against the force of Yesui’s wind and away from the water. As she had expected, doolselk did not have enough force to push him all the way. The orc managed to recover and rejoin its friends in the charge.

  Yesui threw another set of wind blades at the mass of advancing flesh. She wasn’t used to fighting opponents with barriers. Mutts didn’t have that kind of protection. They relied on their regenerative capabilities to stay alive. Yesui had bragged to Dalex that she could handle a human of Michel’s caliber in a fight, but she wasn’t actually sure that was true. As her scythes spun ineffectually against the orcs’ magical defenses, she became more and more sure that her words of power were incapable of breaching a barrier at all.

  She became aware of how far the orcs had forced her to retreat. How long before they pushed her all the way back to Drakko’s Square? She caught glimpses of other battles raging around her. Hunters who she recognized contended with smaller groups of orcs. Some of them held their own. Others fell back as she did, fighting all the way. Civilians rushed around them, fleeing away from the carnage toward the center of the city. Some of them were cut down in their flight.

  Maybe Yesui really wasn’t going to see Lodge Mother Sarnai again. She frowned as she jumped away from another slashing axe, throwing yet another useless flight of scythes at her enemy. Why was this happening? Why did she deserve to die for what Dalex of the Expedition Seven had started? Why did Batulan-bar have to suffer for the actions of one man? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. It didn’t match the years of peaceful loyalty she and the city had offered to society.

  She had known the humans were callous and stupid. She knew the dragons could be cruel and longsighted. But this was far beyond anything she could have expected from either of them. What did this wanton slaughter prove? What point was there in wiping out an entire city?

  Yesui knew the worlds were not perfect, but they had always seemed controlled; safe for those who followed the rules.

  She looked left and saw two children running together, a fox-eared brother and sister. The boy led the girl by the hand through the city streets. Together, they fled a single orc. The brute swung his axe, trying to split the girl’s head open, but he underestimated her speed, striking the ground just behind her. Still, the impact made her trip, and she lost her grip on her brother’s hand.

  Yesui stretched out a hand, the beginning of ogtol salk in her throat. But she would not make it in time. Even if the scythes reached the orc before he finished his swing, Yesui’s word of power might not even disrupt his aim. There was nothing she could do.

  And then something bright and explosive slammed into the orc’s chest. He stumbled back, his barrier protecting him. He let out an enraged snarl and looked up at the sky just as a fully gray man with no eyes, mouth, or clothing flew down onto the street in front of him and blasted him several times with some kind of big musket. The sixth shot broke through the barrier and put a hole through the orc’s head.

  The little girl got to her feet, took her brother’s hand, and continued running while the strange gray man advanced down the street out of sight, looking for more orcs.

  “Huh,” Yesui muttered to herself. She had never seen anything like that before. Had Dalex come up with reinforcements?

  Encouraged by the knowledge that the fox-eared damekin child was alive, Yesui threw one last round of ogtol salk blades at the orcs still trying to chase her down. They ignored the grinding blades, but only for a moment. Suddenly, just as the blades began to peter out, the lead orc sustained a cut to his right side. His eyes went wide, realizing his barrier was broken.

  Yesui had been worried her scythes weren’t having any affect at all, but they had been chipping away the orcs’ barriers with every touch. Finally, the orcs’ defenses were beginning to collapse.

  “Oh, never mind,” Yesui said aloud. “What was I worried about? You pigs are bacon, because darinager means your lungs fill with my breath.”

  She pointed at the wounded lead orc. He still ran towards her but stopped a few seconds later. His fellows paused in confusion behind him. Suddenly, the orc clutched his chest. His body expanded as if something inside was trying to get out. Blood dripped down his lips, and then he fell over dead.

  His comrades looked at him and then looked at Yesui. They wouldn’t have seen the air that rushed into his lungs through his mouth and nose, far too much even for a creature of his size to sustain. Yesui had blown him up from the inside. The only thing that had been in her way was the barrier.

  She began chanting another ogtol salk, forming a new wing of spinning wind blades. Now that she knew she actually could break that barrier, she felt like the odds were a little more in her favor.

  “I’ll teach you to give me such a defeated look, Mother.”

  She threw the blades at the horde and blew away the barrier of the next orc in line.

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