42. The Yoke (9)
Utekwai rose in a cascade of stone shards large and small, staggering for a moment before he found his balance.
"Hnngh."
He glanced around once, twice, then nudged the man sprawled beside him until he stirred.
"Hey. Wake up."
"......Mnngh."
The man — bleeding from a head wound — screwed up his face, blinked a couple of times, and bolted upright.
"What... what in the world happened?"
"Explosion."
Utekwai's deep-set gaze swung westward. The gate had caved in clean through, leaving a small mound of rubble with a haze of sand dust smoldering above it.
Every man who had stood on the gate tower had been swallowed by the collapse; not even the shape of them remained. All that could be seen now was red blood seeping out beneath the wreckage and mangled lumps of flesh.
"Atilia. That woman."
"Atilia? Who in blazes is that?"
"Nudein warrior. One who borrows power from beyond."
So saying, Utekwai scooped up a massive stone maul lying nearby. The man whose face was streaked with blood — the knight Reinbolt — cracked his neck and grumbled.
"Nudein women this, power from beyond that — all you ever spout is gibberish."
Brushing the dust from his mustache, Reinbolt rapidly took the measure of the field: a violet flash and then blackout, a shattered gate, soldiers scattered in confusion, enemies swarming across the farmland...
"Ha. How utterly clichéd."
He was still wearing his bitter smile when he caught sight of a figure climbing over the wreckage of the gate, and his brows knitted.
"Oh."
Violet light shimmered through the hazy dust. Enveloped in that glow, the figure hovered three or four spans above the ground.
That alone would have been uncanny enough, but the silhouette made it stranger still. Behind the tall, slender figure holding a long spear at a slant, four tentacles writhed like living things.
"...Well now. That's rather novel."
Reinbolt muttered this and drew his sword — and Utekwai swept past him.
"Woman, I take. You handle the soldiers."
"...Fine by me. Sorcerers are the last thing I want to deal with anyway."
Reinbolt nodded, then vaulted atop a heap of palisade timbers lying nearby.
"Enemies inbound! Form up—!"
At Reinbolt's shout, the sergeants and veterans who had come back to their senses started kicking the conscripts into line, hauling the chaos under control.
Around then, Utekwai kicked off the earth and came charging like a maddened buffalo, a thunderous bellow on his heels.
"A—TILIA—!"
Even that furious voice calling her name drew no reaction from Atilia. Through the dust she merely stretched out her tentacles — no, her Spears of the Void — killing intent flaring in her eyes.
The last time he had seen her, the Void spears she sent out had numbered all of two. Now twice as many were rearing up before him.
Yet Utekwai showed hardly a trace of alarm.
"Whoo." A calm, deep breath — an odd thing to pair with a headlong charge.
With that breath, the power of the Mother — of nature itself — settled into Utekwai's grip. The head of the stone maul washed over with the green of new grass.
Shooong—
The maul's head swung around as if ripped from behind his thigh, and in an instant it was at killing speed.
The violet tentacles Atilia had thrown out drove in for his eyes, throat, chest, and belly — then, caught in a pale green afterimage, they were crushed and batted away.
"Ahh—!"
As Atilia let out a thin moan at the agony of severed limbs, Utekwai roared at her.
"Stop! You become our enemy — you die!"
But instead of answering, she flashed her killing intent and drew up her psychic wave.
"Haaah—"
Her psychic force gathered in her pineal gland. In that instant a passage to the Void bored open, and her third eye unfurled.
Utekwai was not about to simply stand and watch Atilia's unsettling transformation.
"Athar Marta—O Mother Goddess—!"
An arrow split the air before Utekwai, who was stepping up onto the wreckage of the gate to leap. From the trench behind, the archer Cole — his wits only just recovered — had loosed it in time with Utekwai's assault.
Thrum.
But Atilia, her forehead blazing as though a piece of amethyst had been set into it, batted the arrow away without so much as twitching a finger. Six violet tentacles, sprouted from her cervical vertebrae, had wrapped her round in a shield.
Atilia, wearing the shape of a monster out of legend, hung a meter off the ground and radiated a monstrous menace.
But she had drawn the worst possible opponent.
"Uwooooooh—!"
Utekwai leapt with his thighs swollen full of power, wrenched his torso back, and wrung the strength of every muscle in his body into a single downward smash.
The six Void spears had folded around her like fingers slipping into a glove —
KWAANG!
"Ghk—!"
The moment the shockwave burst, the violet tentacles scattered as if shattered — or melting away.
The stone maul Utekwai wielded — known as Slonhe's Village — was a sacred relic bearing the power to banish beings of other dimensions. Just as spirits struck by the maul are driven out of the Middle Realm, so the power born of the Void was scattered apart by that relic.
It did not leave her helpless, though. It was Atilia who pulled the Void's power in, and Atilia was, after all, a being of the Middle Realm herself.
"Kghhhh—"
By nothing more than opening her third eye wider, she restored the warping Void spears in the space of a breath.
"Dirty tricks!"
Utekwai snarled like a beast and set his body moving in rolling, dynamic rhythms. Ruddy muscle surged in rough waves, and the pale-green afterimage of the maul flowed on without a single seam.
He swung the maul as he stepped, twisted his waist, rolled his shoulders, snapped his arm — and every movement looked exactly like an exhilarating dance.
It was the weapon art of the plains tribe Licuwa, unfolding in a great warrior's hands.
His body seemed sluggish at a glance, but the maul's head tore the air with a vicious shriek and hammered at Atilia without pause.
KWAANG!
"Uuugh!"
Each time Atilia drew power up from the Void and mended her spears, Utekwai smashed them apart again.
She bit her lower lip bloody against the searing pain, then — following instinct — spun back like a swallow and let fly the spear angling in behind her: White Thorn.
Utekwai shifted with exquisite timing, swatted the spear aside on the haft of his maul, and in the same motion thrust it out to hammer her in the belly.
BAM!
Atilia, sent rolling violently across nearly ten meters of ground, flung her mouth open wide.
"Gahh— kehek—"
She vomited blood laced with shreds of organ and fought for breath. As she clawed and thrashed at the earth, Utekwai came on in long, unhurried strides.
The two had once stood back to back and saved each other's lives, yet in Utekwai's deep-set eyes there was not a flicker of hesitation to be found.
"Ah— ugh—"
Atilia instinctively raised the steel-scale guard on her left arm — the so-called Guard of Reflection — but the flaring maul snapped her arm in a single blow.
"Aaaagh—!"
With the broken bone of her elbow grinding through her flesh, Atilia rolled her golden eyes back, bloody froth on her lips.
Her consciousness clouded over, the passage through her pineal gland narrowed, and her third eye began to lose its light.
Just as Utekwai, indifferent to all of it, moved to crush her skull—
"Antina, iidaana—you who are cursed!"
At the venomous voice of an old man ringing out from somewhere, a black energy coiled about Utekwai's face.
"...Hm?"
Even Utekwai was rattled by a curse flung over him out of nowhere.
Heaven and earth flipped before his eyes. Horrific screams drilled into his ears, a reek like burning corpses stung his nose, and a bitterness like chewed gall spread through his mouth. It would have been stranger not to be shaken.
The one who had cursed him was some old man — who was now bellowing at Atilia in a shrill Nudein scream.
"Get up, Atilia!"
The old man crouching behind the wreckage of the gate under the protection of two attendants was Deloto, one of the elders of the Al-Kadari clan.
"Can you not hear me?! Get up, I said!"
Even at his shouting, Atilia only blinked her unfocused eyes and scraped at the ground. No answer came.
"You— useless wretch!"
Deloto pulled out a pendant set with a deep-green gem, and clutching it, began muttering something in an ominous, unintelligible tongue.
"Kghhh—"
Then the third eye that had been fading flew wide open once more, and Atilia rose to her feet.
No — she did not rise. It was as if something unseen had seized her by the skull and hauled her up.
"Ugh—"
"Atilia! Kill that savage!" Atilia, having spat out a little blood, turned to look back at Deloto. On her face was the expression not of the clan's foremost warrior but of a spoiled little girl.
"...Grand... Grandpa..."
"You stupid girl, pull yourself together! The fate of the clan hangs on you!"
"Uh... ugh."
Atilia swayed a moment, shook her head hard, drew out her six tentacles once more, and fired them straight at Utekwai.
Shwuk! Utekwai, still flailing under the curse, never sensed the ambush coming.
"Kgh—"
Pierced through his left hand and forearm, his shoulder, then his chest, thigh, and abdomen, Utekwai staggered backward.
His hide was as tough as a rhinoceros's, but the Void spears carried force enough to shred thin sheet iron.
He kept his life by a hair: the instant something drove at his heart, instinct had doubled him over and drawn his guard up to his throat.
After a brief moment's thought, Utekwai let the maul fall. Then he whipped his right arm around and seized the bundle of violet tentacles fast with his forearm and grip.
Then he swelled his forearm and hauled the tentacles in — and like a dozen burly men pulling as one, Atilia found herself dragged helplessly toward him.
"Kgh—"
Gritting her teeth, Atilia gave up resisting and started running at Utekwai instead. She kicked up the white spear rolling across the ground, clamped it in her fist, and flung herself at him.
A heartbeat before the snow-white spear, like a sprig of mistletoe, could skewer the great warrior's throat — the tattoo etched across Utekwai's back flashed black.
Vwoom—
The Blessing Tattoo of the Night Sky, a pouring river of stars inked across his skin, flared bright and hurled Atilia far away.
"Ghk—!"
Flung more than twenty meters, Atilia instinctively caught herself with her left arm — and shrieked. The bone broken earlier had punched through her flesh and ground against her scale guard.
As she lost her balance to the white-hot pain and tumbled across the earth, Deloto, unable to contain his frustration, shouted out once more.
"I go to the trouble of waking the Void's power for you, and this is what you do with it! Now is not the time to be tripped up by some savage of all things—"
He never got to finish.
One of the attendants had abruptly seized his sleeve and pulled.
"Wh-what is the meaning of—"
"Stay low, Elder."
"Wh... what?"
Only then did Deloto remember, amid the confusion, that a metallic ring had sounded a moment before. Looking down, he saw a short bolt no longer than a palm rolling across the ground — the very shot that had just flown at his neck.
"An assassination attempt."
"Assassination? By whom?"
"Unknown."
The attendants in their loose, rumpled clothes calmly drew scimitars from their belts. The eyes with which they swept their surroundings were sharp past all telling.
They were no ordinary servants, but the clan's finest warriors — the sacred bodyguards known as the Hares Kees.
One of the Hares Kees glanced back and studied the army of Count Tristan. It had already closed to Longville's very doorstep: archers loosing volley after volley, and spearmen in chainmail poised to come storming over the shattered palisade and gate at any moment.
"It isn't safe here. We should join them—"
The Hares Kees got that far before snapping a hand up to shield his face.
Sticking out of the back of his hand was a dagger, as if it had simply sprouted there. Any other man would have screamed at having his hand skewered without warning, but the Hares Kees only swept his gaze around the area, face blank.
The one struck in the left hand asked his companion:
"See it?"
"No."
"Carry the Elder. I'll cover the rear."
"Right."
The instant that brief exchange ended, the man struck by the dagger crumpled where he stood. And there he died.
Deloto, realizing the man was dead, went stiff and held his breath.
The last remaining Hares Kees shot a sidelong glance at his fallen comrade. A hand gone black, a mouth full of froth.
A vicious poison. And I have not so much as glimpsed the shadow of the one striking at us.
He knew he was going to die, but he did not waver. He simply pushed Deloto along as he backed away.
"Stay close. There's no telling when the next blade will fly."
"Elder, closer—"
The Hares Kees turned — and his eyes widened slightly. A sharp blade was jutting out just beneath the Adam's apple of the backpedaling Deloto.
The moment the blade was drawn back out, the Hares Kees found himself staring into the assassin's eyes.
Eyes where the white showed all around the dark of the iris, blazing with vicious light — a killer's eyes, black pupils narrowed to slits.
The assassin in a short cloak — Mungchi — shoved Deloto's corpse hard at the Hares Kees.
He swept the body aside and swung his scimitar, but Mungchi dropped low, as if to drive her face into the dirt, and flowed around behind him.
"Kgh—!"
A sharp sting at the back of his heel wrung a small groan from the Hares Kees.
Fwup, fwup, fwup.
Having slit his Achilles tendon, Mungchi drove her blade once through his groin, once through the nape of his neck, and once through his heart. His whole body torn apart in the span of a breath, the Hares Kees was dead before he hit the ground.
Just then, the army of Count Tristan came surging in.
"For my lord — in the name of the Light!"
"For Count Tristan!"
Mungchi swept her eyes over the spearmen crashing in like a raging tide, then quietly licked her lips. Letting out one hot breath, she folded herself back out of sight.