A Warrior's Legacy (30 page)

They hadn’t even posted sentries to the rear
of the encampment. It sounded like I was in command of a force
numbering in the tens of thousands instead of just over fifteen
thousand by the mighty savage cry of war that erupted in response
to my words.

I turned Relentless and charged him at the
enemy encampment. Words were at an end and the time for actions had
begun. The Lanorian warriors ripped off their black hooded
coverings to run screaming after me towards the enemy.

One in five of the warriors were mounted,
but even being mounted they didn’t draw far away from the main body
of warriors, who were as swift as fleet footed deer and for good
reason. If you didn’t run fast enough in Lanoria you didn’t live
long enough to procreate. Only the strong and the very lucky
survived.

I was sure, perhaps without proof, that the
army I was privileged to lead was perhaps one of the finest in all
of human history. All people know fear, but the Lanorians had lived
with it daily for so long that they had learned to channel it into
the energy to survive rather than to panic.

They weren’t fearless, but they were a
people that controlled fear well and thus were courageous in their
actions. As for the enemy even now streaming out from their tents
to see what was happening I saw their looks of question turn to
horror, as they allowed their fear to control them and they dropped
their swords to run into the night.

To them the glowing eyed warriors must’ve
looked like a swarm of demons coming out of the pits of hell
itself. Come to drag them off to where they belonged.

The Lanorians, in order to aid such a
fearful thought in the minds of their enemies, had splashed
luminescent color all over their bodies. For years the Lanorians
had crushed up trinial and blended it with other minerals to make
different colored fluorescent body paints.

The raging army at my back was bedecked in
every garishly bright color of the rainbow in a vivid statement of
the power of color under the right application. To each other the
Lanorians looked funny to behold, but to the enemy they appeared as
insane monsters come out of the primal darkness of the night intent
on killing and possibly devouring them.

We smashed into the enemy camp and the
onslaught began. I was mindful of nothing other than the enemy
targets falling before my slashing blades and Relentless’s
thunderous power.

I had favored the use of the sabers over my
other sword as per Thora’s instructions. It would no doubt be used
later.

The fighting stretched on as cooler heads
prevailed within the Western encampment and a defense was mounted,
but it was a losing effort. In the first hour of fighting almost a
third of their number fell in the initial chaos of the surprise of
our attack from the rear and the subsequent attack from the
city.

The hours of the night crept onward as a
bitter fight for survival ensued in front of the city only this
time it was the West that fought to escape annihilation for
once.

As the sun rose the Lanorians pulled their
tinted glass masks into place and fought on. The freedom of being
in the daylight and the knowledge of who had taken it from them
unlocked even deeper emotions and strengthened their efforts of
destruction against the sorcerer’s accomplices.

The enemy army started to fracture and
droves of them took off across the plains for their Western cities.
We didn’t bother to follow them. We knew what awaited them.

There were four thousand girls out there
armed with bows and arrows and mounted in the saddle for mobility.
They could dust off a chipmunk with an arrow at forty yards and
still have meat left on it to eat, because if they didn’t they
would have been beaten or have starved to death in their harsh
existence in the north.

The runaways would be picked off long before
they reached the Western cities as the girl’s quivers were full and
their fingers ached to have revenge for all the pain of their
upbringing and being viewed as worthless.

I sliced my way through a pack of
disoriented archers, who looked like they didn’t even know what to
do in close quarters fighting. Raya was right behind me finishing
off the rest of the helpless archers. Raya was speed married with
unparalleled intensity and I marveled that I had come out on top in
our sparing match together.

The Creator must’ve aided me in the fight
because I couldn’t see how I could have won. A wounded enemy
soldier on the ground behind Raya was raising his sword to slice at
the back of her legs!

She would never hear my hell in the din and
pandemonium of the noise of war so I drew back one of my swords to
throw it like a knife, but I didn’t have to. The female alpha raced
in from somewhere and literally bit the man’s arm off.

Nice wolf!

What I should’ve done was to try to elicit
the support of a couple hundred of the creatures. This battle would
have been over in moments!

Where was the big male?

He was back a ways and of all things he was
protecting Relentless as Relentless stood over top of a wounded
Lanorian warrioress.

It was an odd sight to see a wolf protecting
a stallion, who in turn was protecting a fallen warrior. Stranger
things have happened, but this one had to be somewhere on the
list.

Just what was the ability of animals to
think and reason? I didn’t know, but it was high in both these
brutes. I turned back to find Raya looking at me, she’d seen it too
and she shook her head slightly in disbelief at the odd couple
fighting in tandem with each other.

Then Raya nodded at a particularly dense
concentration of the enemy and then at me grinning as she did so.
The girl was crazy, but I loved her. Back to back we twirled into
the mass of the enemy hacking and slashing our way through their
ranks, as if we were kids hacking off cornstalks at harvest
time.

Less than an hour later the enemy broke
unable to withstand either the surprise double sided attack or our
intensity of will. Some forty thousand of them broke and ran for
home and I gave the orders to let them go.

They were barely out of sight when the
ground trembled under our feet and the horizon filled with smoke
and hot ash clouds. From appearances it looked like they weren’t
going to have anything to go home to. I looked around at the
wreckage and carnage of the battlefield.

We had lost thousands, but they had lost
tens of thousands and all of their cities as well. They were
finished as a kingdom and as a people. So was the Northern Kingdom
most likely given their poor leadership. Only the Eastern Kingdom
would remain and the new Kingdom of Lanoria.

One thing remained to be done. Unseat the
sorcerer from his position of power and tyranny over these lands
once and for all. Suddenly I felt myself grabbed and lifted up into
the air. It could only be Gavin or Holon. It was both of them.

I rested my hands on top of their shoulders
awkwardly as they hoisted me up. Both Lanorians and Easterners
alike were chanting something loud and jubilantly, but all I knew
was that I was grateful that those I cared for most had come
through safe. It wasn’t right for them to be giving me so much of
the praise though. So many things could have gone wrong and even
did go wrong along the way.

The only way this had been the success that
it had been was because the Creator had wanted it so, but the crowd
chanted all the louder in praise of me. Their chant came to a
screeching halt though at the sound of loud horns blaring in the
distance.

They turned as one to see what the
disturbance was, but I already knew.

I tapped Gavin and Holon on the heads, “Let
me down the battle is not yet won.”

Coming down across the plain towards us were
the marched ranks of the Sorcerer’s men. We had more soldiers than
the force approaching us, but we were battle weary and the soldiers
we faced were not ordinary.

In one night some of their number had
assassinated the entire royal family of the Eastern Kingdom except
for Zalisha. Those soldiers might have been modified in a hundred
different ways just like Raya had been.

It would be a bloodbath for our side. Storm
clouds crawled over the early morning sky approaching our army and
the city at our back like a brooding threat of menace. The enemy
line halted in the distance and a voice as loud as thunder boomed
out from the clouds.

“So you think you have won have you? You’ve
won nothing! All you’ve done is to do my work for me. The West was
getting hard to command anyway with all their petty demands, but
your act of aggression will not go unrewarded! I’m going to make an
example of you the likes of which has never been seen before! You
will beg me for death and I……”

And on and on the voice went in its
enumeration of all the many things we would suffer before we were
allowed to die. I got Holon’s attention and he looked at me
questioningly.

I pointed at Raya, “I’m going to do
something dangerous, which she might object to and I want you to
promise me that you’ll keep her from interfering!”

“I promise. What are you going to do
Zevin?”

“I’m not quite sure yet. I guess we’ll find
out together old friend.”

I turned to Gavin, who was looking at me
strangely, “Keep the army together and hold them back and say a
prayer for me brother.”

I left then and walked out from the sea of
bloodied warriors towards the advancing storm clouds alone. Raya
started to walk out after me like I knew she would. She would
probably follow me anywhere.

“Stay!” I said roughly surprising her with
my harshness.

She stopped and hesitated and then started
again, but Holon’s big arms held her back and even as strong as she
was she was held virtually immobile.

“Zevin?” She screamed looking desperate to
understand what was going on.

“Stay Raya! Just stay!”

I turned back to the presence of the enemy
army in the distance, with its dark overshadowing cloud that hadn’t
ceased in its jabbering of dire threats and insults. I put another
four hundred feet between me and the army under Gavin’s command.
That should be enough hopefully.

I pulled my sword out loving the comforting
feel of it in my hand.

“Creator it was You that crafted my soul and
gave my bones flesh. Unto You, Ancient of Days, I commit myself to
the fight for Your cause is just. All I ask is that You deliver the
peoples of this land from the oppression they have faced for so
long, even as I pray that You will deliver the power of the enemy
into my hand!”

I pulled the master of war ring from off my
finger that Zalisha had given me and with a slight turn the red
crystal came out of it setting and fell into my palm. I picked it
up and brought it to the point of the sword and pushed the tip into
its center. The crystal gave way folding around the blade securely
as it did so.

The red crystals on both ends of the sword
snapped with color and the blade began to emit a high frequency
hum. The enormity of what I was about to attempt weighed heavily
down upon me. Thora had said that what I was about to do hadn’t
been done to her knowledge since Tadias had last done it.

The experience had nearly killed Tadias. It
didn’t matter. The mixed multitude of people at my back made it
worth the risk. I brought the pommel stone crystal up to my face
and tapped it with my finger.

The thundering voice calling out threats and
insults was interrupted by the amplified tapping of my finger,
which matched the thunder of his angered tone.

“Excuse me I think I speak for all of us
down here when I say that we’re tired of hearing you talk. Your
time of oppressive tyranny is over! This is your last chance to
leave before we come and kill you.”

“Who do you think you are impudent warrior
to threaten me so! I am the great sorcerer! Ruler over all of
Assoria! I do as I please when I please. It has amused me up until
now to let the East linger on, but now I will crush them! You may
have a little technology at your disposal, but it is nothing in
terms of the power that I wield! Prepare to die all of you!”

The voice ended even as the dark storm
clouds got expressively darker. I wrapped both of my hands around
the handle of the sword and brought it up in front of me. I spoke
one word against the crystal formed over the tip of the sword

“Intercept.”

The humming of the sword intensified and
then began alternating the rhythm of its sound. Strands of red
light shot out from the crystals and formed a fast spinning spiral
weave around me and then I felt my feet leave the ground as I
hovered upward within the weave of colored light.

It still felt like I was standing on solid
ground even though I was hovering some forty feet above the ground.
Out of the brooding clouds over the enemy army a bolt of blue
energy shot out headed for the city’s center behind me. As it
neared the wall however it reared back off course as if it was
somehow drawn towards the tangled weave of fast rotating red energy
all around me.

The bolt of icy blue power arced back around
from the city and headed directly toward me. I sliced the sword
down through it with a speed I had never possessed in terms of
natural ability. The streak of blue lightening fractured into
shattered particles of its former glory and bounced off the red
halo of light around me before plunging into the ground below
kicking up heaps of dirt into the air as the energy dissipated back
into the ground.

There was a furious scream of rage that
rebounded across the plains and then dozens of the blue energy
beams shot out from the fake cloud on course for the gathered army
and city behind me. But each one of the beams was drawn off course
towards me.