Page 11 of Inferno
Task complete, Nerik picked up the satchel and took one last look around the battlefield. It remained still and silent, with no hint of any human presence to disturb him.
He crossed back to the forest where his clothes waited and slipped the necklace back over his head. Then he pressed the gem to his chest and recited the spell the witch had taught him, back in Chalandros before he’d crossed the gate. “Take my form and fire bend. Smoke and flame to shadows send. To human form this magic lend.”
For a long moment, he was forced to battle waves of cold and nausea, as the magic cloaked his fire and forced his form into that of a human; what was, in effect, a mobile bag of water, and the complete opposite of Nerik’s native state. Thankfully, the discomfort didn’t last long, and once his form settled, Nerik dressed quickly, eager to be away from here.
He felt a wave of relief when he finally arrived back at his cottage, closing the door behind himself and starting a fire in the fireplace. Even in the middle of summer, the presence of flames was a comfort, and he settled onto a chair to stare into the flickering light, finally able to relax for the night.
But now that the stress of visiting the gate was over, his mind was free to wander down other paths. And first and foremost in his mind was Yorin, and the tailor’s cool dismissal of his affections. Damn it all to hell, what was even the point of all this effort if the one thing in life he truly wanted was so far beyond his reach?
CHAPTER SIX
The day that the Gate of Chalandros opened was a true spectacle in Minia. For the hoards of humans, it was a day of grit and determination, of courage and triumph. It was the day the army of warriors gathered in the town square, bade farewell to their loved ones, and marched the hour long trek north to the gate, where they would spend the next twenty-three days defending their home with all the pride and courage they could muster.
But for Nerik and the hundred or so Chalandrians living in Minia, the spectacle was an entirely ridiculous one. “If they didn’t keep trying to kill us, there would be no need for an army at all,” Kit muttered as she stood beside Nerik, waving a crimson banner with the army’s emblem on it. “It’s not like wewantto be fighting the humans.”
“So tell me something I don’t know,” Nerik muttered back, flapping a small golden flag above his head. Gold was the colour of the army’s cavalry, the horses used for hunting down unicorns or for fighting ragions – which the humans called trolls – on the odd occasion that one tried to cross the gate. With ragions standing nine feet tall and weighing about as much as a horse, the army had long ago learned to fight fire with fire, as it were.
The entire town square was jam packed with people, along with several of the surrounding streets, all of them having come out to see the warriors off. The warriors themselves were lined up in perfectly straight rows across the street, standing stiff and attentive as they waited for the order to march.
At the back of the column, the horses were lined up, their riders’ armour glinting in the sun, and the animals would occasionally let out a snort or stomp an errant hoof. And up ahead of the army, there were currently a dozen or so of the serving women, young, beautiful and scantily clad, flitting about the street as they spread flower petals onto the cobblestones for the army to trample into mush.
“I don’t understand this,” Mintesh, Kit’s sister hissed at Kit. She held a smaller crimson flag in her hand, though she was making no attempt to wave it. “We’re against the army, right? So why are we here?”
“Keeping up appearances,” Nerik explained, making sure no one else was close enough to hear them. Though with the cheering and hooting of the crowd, it wasn’t likely anyone would be paying attention anyway. “The humans all think the warriors are minor deities, and if we don’t turn up and display at least a token amount of enthusiasm, people get suspicious. And the gods know that’s the last thing we need right now.” Being relatively new to Minia, Mintesh was still struggling to understand the finer nuances of city life.
Beside Kit, Maky let out a loud ‘woof!’. Thankfully, in his case, the sound could have meant anything, and the fire-dog wasn’t currently attempting to speak telepathically to Nerik, so he remained oblivious to Maky’s true sentiments on the situation. Being just a dumb animal in the eyes of the humans, there was no real reason for Maky to be here. But at the same time, Nerik suspected he continued to come just to offer Kit and Mintesh some moral support. Mintesh’s son Caleon was staying at home for this parade, claiming to have come down with a fever, but Nerik suspected that he was suffering from a fair dose of culture shock instead. For someone who was only eighteen, crossing the gate and having to suddenly be polite and respectful to the species that was routinely trying to kill him was quite a lot to deal with.
“Wave your flag,” Kit hissed at Mintesh, then, when the younger woman failed to do so, Kit grabbed her hand and lifted it herself, giving it a cursory wave so that Mintesh got the idea.
“Did Gosta get those messages prepared?” Kit asked Nerik, when she saw that Mintesh was getting the idea and waving the flag on her own.
“Now’s hardly the time to talk about that,” Nerik said. While he was willing to grumble a bit in the midst of the humans, discussing plans for smuggling Chalandrians across the gate was something that should be kept behind closed doors.
“A simple yes or no would do,” Kit complained, once again in a foul mood. Though with two hundred hulking men about to face off against starving Chalandrian peasants and children, he could hardly blame her.
“Yes,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Like either of us would forget something like that.”
“No need to snap at me,” Kit growled, then she lifted her hands in the air and clapped, hooting approval as one of the warriors broke formation to give his wife a last, passionate kiss. The crowd around them cheered all the more loudly, then dimmed a little as the horn at the front of the army sounded. “Company attention!” Captain Renfold was out the front of the army, a no-nonsense man who somehow still managed to come off as moderate and compassionate – however possible that was, when leading an army of murderers. The last few stragglers of the warriors slotted into their assigned spots and all eyes turned to watch the captain.
“Company march!”
With a thunderous din, dozens of pairs of heavy boots began a rhythmic stomping down the street, followed by the slow plod of two dozen horses. The crowd flowed into the street behind them, waving and cheering, tossing flower petals and ribbons, while Nerik stood watching them go, a wide smile plastered to his face like it had been etched in stone and a hot ball of rage glowing in his belly. Fucking humans and their fucking stupid ignorance. All anyone from Chalandros wanted to do was survive. And with their entire world dying thanks to the sun that was slowly heating up and cooking every living thing on the planet, crossing the Gate of Chalandros was their last and only hope.
Beside him, Mintesh lowered her arm the instant the last of the warriors was past them, her expression blank. “Gods, it’s worse than I imagined.”
“It gets easier with time,” Kit said. “I mean, it doesn’t get any more pleasant, but I suppose we all just get used to it.” They turned to head back up the hill towards Kit’s shop, thankfully able to avoid most of the crowd, since they’d deliberately arrived late, and therefore been ‘forced’ to accept a position near the back of the crowd.
Back inside the shop, Maky went to curl up in a corner, while Kit, Mintesh and Nerik went through to the kitchen behind the shop. “So what was in these messages?” Kit asked, straight to business, even as she put a kettle on to boil for tea.
“The unicorns have been reminded how to get to Stanley’s farm,” Nerik reported. “He can take one every two days, so that’s eleven or twelve for the whole cycle. The salases are keen to get more vreki across, now that they’ve notionally been given permission to ‘train some more dragons’.”
The vreki were large, lizard-like creatures with black scales and huge, leathery wings. The humans, in their ignorance, insisted that the creatures were dragons – which only reinforced the idea that they’d never actually seen a dragon – and for the sake of trying to convince everyone that they were tameable and harmless, the salases were operating under the lie that the ‘dragons’ were simply dumb animals, no more intelligent than the average horse or dog. Every single Chalandrian, of course, knew that that was an entirely ridiculous idea.
“The vreki won’t come without their salas riders, though,” Mintesh pointed out. It was indeed a problem. Koradan and his men – salas warriors who had set up the entire ruse – were trying to convince the army that they could use their ‘tame dragons’ to capture any ‘wild dragons’ that came through the gate, and then tame and train the newcomers. The reality was that almost every vreki who came through would already be a highly trained battle steed, bonded to a salas rider, and all the ‘tame’ vreki were going to do was round them up and politely ask them to please follow them to a safe distance from the gate where they could regroup.
“Yeah, so the way they’re supposed to get around that,” Nerik explained, “is that the salas riders are going to strap themselves to the underside of the vreki and cover themselves with black cloth. They’re black, and the vreki are black, and if they come through at night, the warriors won’t be able to see them. Then, once they’re away from the gate, Koradan and his men can unstrap them and get them to safety.”
Somehow, and Nerik had never quite caught all the details, Koradan and his team had crash-landed in the middle of a mining village, rescued a bunch of the miners from a collapsed mine and then somehow convinced the entire village that ‘demons’ weren’t evil, and that they should help bring more of them across the gate. And even if the story was only half-true, it had made Nerik envious that interacting with humans could ever be so easy.