Beyond The Vale Read online

  “Could you make them explode?”

  “If I ceased my efforts, they would rupture.” “How long would it take?”

  She thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I would think not more than a few seconds.”

  A plan formed. He found a cloth on a nearby table and wrapped the crystals inside. “Let’s

  go.”

  “You can’t leave us here,” called one of the Bomar. “Lysa is wounded. She’ll die.”

  Drake’s jaw tightened. The Bomar had enslaved and abused the Nelwyn. That alone made them deserving of justice. Perhaps even death. But if his plan worked, they would die slowly, the pain of hunger and thirst plaguing their final moments. They would turn on one another, desperate for just one more moment of life. It would be horrendous. Regardless of their crimes, no one should die that way. But what else could he do? The choice was to save the Nelwyn or release the Bomar. He glanced over to where the Nelwyn had gathered on the far end of the last table.

  No. There wasn’t a choice. There never was.

  Drake tossed the key into the cage. “Stay there until we’re gone,” he said, turning away, unable to look at them. He started toward the exit, the Nelwyn close behind.

  He placed a large crystal half way down the tunnel and another at the base of the ladder. “You are sealing them in?” asked the Nelwyn woman. It wasn’t disapproval in her

  expression and tone. It was…regret? No. It was pity.

  “I can’t allow the Bomar to use the crystals. And if I let them go, we might not make it out of here.”

  She gave a sad nod. “I understand. May the Mother keep them.”

  The other four adults lowered their head in silence for a few seconds. After all they had suffered at the hands of the Bomar, they did not appear to desire vengeance. They felt genuine sorrow for their oppressors.

  “Will they not simply dig it back out?” asked a short, flaxen-haired woman, once they raised their heads.

  “With the tools they have, it would take months. By that time, it won’t matter.” Before she could press further, he said: “I’ll explain everything once we’re out of here. But for now, I need you to do exactly as I say.”

  They nodded in compliance.

  Drake ascended the ladder and listened at the door. There were a few voices, some of the soldiers having left the burning building to return to their post. He then gestured for the rest to climb up. He had been concerned that the children would be too frightened to stay quiet. But they did not make a sound, keeping close to their mothers.

  Drake pressed his shoulder to the door and leaned his weight in. It stuck a bit, as it had when he entered, but with a bit more pressure it eased open a crack. He peered out and saw that three soldiers had returned to the pavilion and two were standing off to the right where they could still see the fire. At that moment, he was dearly missing his P37.

  Drake pushed the door open enough to extend his arm outside and tossed a crystal behind the pair of men. One glanced over at the sound, but then deciding it was nothing, dismissed it.

  One by one, Drake tossed out the crystals until they were scattered in an uneven row between the building and the front gate. The first few seconds would be the most dangerous.

  “When I open the door, run as fast as you can toward the gate,” he whispered. “Stay right behind me and don’t stop for anything. As soon as I tell you, let the crystals rupture.” He took a deep breath and pressed his hand to the door, then glanced back to see that the Nelwyn were lined up and ready. “Now!”

  He shoved it wide, and they raced from the building toward the pavilion. The distraction of the fire kept the two nearest guards from noticing them until they were several yards away.

  Drake fired off two shots as they fumbled to unsling their rifles. One was struck in the shoulder; the second took a kill shot to the heart.

  The wounded man cried out a warning just as they passed where the crystals were scattered. The guards at the pavilion saw their approach. Unlike the first two, they’d leaned their weapons against the tent post and took them quickly in hand. Drake fired his three remaining bullets, but only one was accurate, hitting a soldier in the throat. The rifles rang out in response, and Drake felt a sharp pain in his right leg that had him staggering. The second shot struck the ground just in front of his foot.

  Tossing the empty weapon aside, he drew his blade, forcing back the pain from the wound. The bullet had pierced his flesh, but not deeply. He reached the pavilion just as they had both chambered another round. With two blinding sweeps, he opened a pair of massive wounds to the chest of the soldier on the left. The last remaining man, realizing his rifle was too long and clumsy, heaved it at Drake as he reached for the pistol at his side. Drake raised an arm to deflect the rifle, then with a precise strike, sent mana-infused steel slicing through the exposed neck of his foe.

  “Do it!” he shouted, even before the head had hit the ground.

  Drake turned and saw that the rest of the soldiers had already rounded the building and were nearing the crystals. A shot whizzed by his head. “I said, do it!”

  The Nelwyn shoved her children toward another woman and spread her arms. “Forgive

  me.”

  There was a blinding flash of pure white light. A split second later, Drake felt as if a hammer had slammed into his chest, and the air was sucked from his lungs. The last thing he felt was being lifted from the ground, his body hurtling through the air. He had underestimated the raw

  power of the explosion; woefully so. His last image before consciousness slipped away was the faces of the children. His stupidity had killed them all.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “He’s waking up.”

  Drake tried to open his eyes, but his body would not obey his commands. “Get some water. He’ll be thirsty.”

  He lay still for a few minutes. Gradually, sensation returned to his limbs. But along with it came a throbbing pain, extending from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. A moan slipped out.

  “Be still. You’re fortunate to be alive.”

  Drake peeled open his eyes. The Nelwyn woman was kneeling over him, smiling. “What happened?” he croaked.

  She reached out, took a cup from an unseen hand, and poured a small amount of water into his mouth. “Don’t worry for now. You’re safe.”

  Drake struggled to rise, fighting against the pain. “The children…”

  She placed a firm hand to his chest to keep him still. “They’re unharmed. The Mother’s power does not affect us as it does your kind.”

  “The Bomar?”

  She averted her eyes. “They are gone.”

  It was then he realized the sun was just setting. “How long have I been like this?” “A day only.”

  Hearing this, his senses sharpened, and he forced her hand away. “We need to leave now, before they find us.” With a heavy grunt, he propped himself onto his elbows. They were beside a rock outcropping, pillars of thick black smoke rising in the distance to his left. “Is that the cavern?”

  “We need not fear the Bomar. Please. Rest for a while.”

  He pushed himself fully upright, the throbbing increasing with each movement. “They’ll come looking for whoever did this.”

  The other Nelwyn were gathered a few yards away, around a small fire.

  “Put that out,” said Drake, wincing and sucking his teeth. He noticed the Nelwyn woman’s eyes filled with tears. “What’s wrong?”

  “Tell me your name,” she said, ignoring his question. “Drake.”

  “I am Hylariel. Thank you for saving my people.” Her voice quivered, and her hands shook. “We’re not safe yet,” he said. “We need to find a way out of here.”

  “I told you: there is nothing to fear from the Bomar. Not anymore.”

  “You need to tell me what’s happened. Why don’t we need to fear them?” “Because they are dead.”

  “I understand that. But more will come.” “There are no more.”

 
Out of the corner of his eye, Drake saw another line of smoke rising. “What’s that?” “That was the cavern,” she answered solemnly.

  “Then what is that?” The smoke on the other side billowed out, covering the sky with a black haze. There was too much to be coming from the cavern; far too much.

  “That is Malizar.”

  “What?” Gripping the rock, he pulled himself to his feet. He could now see that the smoke was coming from farther away also. “Are you saying…”

  “The cavern they had found was but one. More extended beneath the entire city. I tried to stop it, but it spread too quickly. Had we been closer, even we could not have withstood it.”

  A cold knot gripped his gut, and he felt a wave of nausea. Hanna. Gymal. He doubled over and vomited. What have I done? How many people have I just killed? He felt a hand gently touch his shoulder.

  “I too am shamed,” said Hylariel. “My heart is broken. As are those of my kin. But we must look to our children.”

  Children? How many children had died in Malizar? Entire families torn to pieces. He fell to his knees, weeping into his hands. Hylariel knelt beside him in silence. Hanna. She had been so kind to him. Had she only known that she was bringing the destruction of her people into her home… Even Gymal, for all his flaws, had not deserved this.

  It was fully dark before Drake stood back up. His body was still sore, but he did not care. He deserved a far worse pain. He deserved to die. The smoke was visible against the light of the half moon. He did not remember taking a step, but found himself walking toward the city. He could hear footsteps behind him. The Nelwyn were following. Hylariel moved up beside him, while the rest remained a few paces back.

  “Have you seen it?” he asked. “Yes.”

  He glanced over. Her expression was a stone mask, her eyes fixed straight ahead. “You don’t have to come.”

  “You should not see this alone.”

  Her words caused a chill to rush over him. He didn’t want to see what had happened. Not really. But he knew he had to. He had annihilated the Bomar. He needed to bear witness to the consequences of his actions.

  As they neared the outskirts of the city, the wind shifted, and a stench unlike anything Drake had experience stopped him dead in his tracks. It was as if every piece of foulness that had ever been created had come together as a single mass of putrescence.

  Hylariel reached out and grabbed his arm. “You can go no further.”

  The city was not yet in view. Drake was about to pull free and insist on continuing when he saw that the ground a few feet ahead dropped sharply away. He approached the edge and peered down into the gloom. A few faint flickers of firelight told him that it was about fifty feet to the bottom. Straight ahead, the dense black smoke concealed the devastation, though more fires appeared sporadically, vanishing a second later.

  “The daylight reveals little more,” she said. “Only that there’s nothing left standing. We can wait until dawn if you wish.”

  Drake strained his ears, but could hear nothing but the crackling of flames and the rush of the wind. Not a single voice cried out. He looked back to see the children clinging tight to their mothers.

  “No. We should leave.”

  They started back toward the caverns for a time, and then turned north. “You cannot blame yourself for this,” said Hylariel.

  “Then who am I to blame?” he snapped back, with more intensity than intended.

  “You are but a single strand of a rope,” she replied, unmoved by his hard tone. “This was always going to happen. Had the Bomar not invaded, we would not have been captured, you would

  not have been sent, and Malizar would still stand. Your actions were merely a result. Not the cause.”

  “So it’s the Bomar’s own fault they’re dead?” His anger was building.

  “I did not say that.” She lowered her head for a moment, then said: “If you are hungry and you see fruit in the high tops of a tree and you fall to your death attempting to reach it, who is to blame? Your stomach? The fruit? The wind that blew you from the branch? Or perhaps the ground where you landed? Perhaps they are all to blame.”

  “It sounds like you’re saying we don’t have a choice.”

  “We may not. There is no way to know. What I do know is that had you been aware of the consequences, Malizar would not have been destroyed. But you were not.”

  “And what if you’d known?”

  “To save my own life? I would not have done it.” She looked over her shoulder where her two children were walking. “But to save my children…that is the shame I must carry. I weep for the Bomar. But I would do it again.”

  Drake did not know how to feel about what Hylariel said. He had no children. But if it were Lenora’s life hanging in the balance, what would he do? He would, and had, killed to protect her. But this went far beyond protecting her from a threat. Intentional or not, this was genocide.

  He stumbled forward, the faces of the Bomar racing through his mind. Hanna’s smile, the friendly bartender who had taken special care to help Drake bundle Gymal into the carriage. The woman at the Imperium who sat at her desk reading… countless others who had never harmed a soul. Again, he emptied his stomach and dropped heavily down. Drake could not remember when last he truly wept. In this moment, he did so…uncontrollably.

  “Are you all right?”

  Drake felt a tiny hand touch his arm. He looked up and wiped his eyes. One of the children, a young boy with dark curls, no older than six, his face still smeared with dirt from his captivity, was kneeling beside him.

  Drake nodded. “I’m fine. Thank you.” He pressed himself up and turned to the Nelwyn. “We need to find water. It will take more than a week to cross the desert.” There would be time for sorrow and shame. Plenty of time. He had paid a great price to save these people; he at least would not fail in that.

  “You needn’t worry about us,” said Hylariel. “We can go days without food and water. Far longer than the Bomar. And the heat of the sun does not burn our flesh as easily.”

  The vex crystal gave Drake superior endurance. But the long crossing would test his limits. “I still need to find water before we start out.”

  Hylariel smiled. “We can see to that. There are springs to be found hidden in the sands if you know how to look.”

  The wind shifted again, bringing back the hellish stench in force. Where before he had been compelled to look, he was now desperate to be away from this place and quickened the pace once they started out.

  There were Bomar living elsewhere. They had not yet learned what had become of their homeland…their entire civilization. The war was over, and the Bomar were defeated. What would they do? Would they sue for peace with the Nelwyn? Or perhaps they would choose to fight until they suffered the same fate as the rest of their people. It would depend upon the mercy of the Nelwyn as much as what the Bomar decided. Personally, he would not want his fate in the hands of a people he had murdered and driven from their homes. As he gazed into the darkness where

  the ruins of Malizar still smoldered, a truth became clear: both peoples had their reason to hate. None were innocent.

  And there is no one more guilty than I.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The journey was far easier than Drake feared. As Hylariel had said, there were small areas she called monoay where pools of cold water bubbled up from underground springs. Food was sparse, and their strength was sustained by thumb-sized pink berries that grew on a thorn bush. Picking them earned his arms dozens of tiny scratches that itched terribly for hours afterward.

  Hylariel and the other three adults, Tyrani, Sillis, and Nyromiel, were eager for news of home and disappointed that Drake knew so little. They had been captured two years before when the Bomar had first brought their cannons from Malizar and used them to pound their villages to dust. It had been this weapon that had frighten them into fleeing closer to the mountains.

  It dawned on Drake the new Bomar weapon would likely have been ineffe
ctive. The Nelwyn had survived the explosion, and Maliel had withstood a shot from a P37 that would have killed anyone. Up until now, the Bomar had been winning through fear. Their guns and cannon had made the Nelwyn believe they could not win. He recalled something his partner had told him when he was first initiated into the royal guard: your P37 is not your best weapon. When people think you are stronger than they are, you don’t need a damn thing to back them down.

  He told them about Vale, Troi, and the events which had brought him to Malizar. As Maliel had been, they were intrigued by the machines run on mana. Sillis, as it happened, knew Maliel, and was most pleased to hear he was still alive.

  “You say my people have agreed to help you defeat your enemy?” asked Hylariel, soon after they entered the desert.

  Drake nodded. “In exchange for teaching you to use aggressive magic. Though it seems like there’s no point to that now.”

  “It is hard to imagine solas being used to destroy,” remarked Tyrani. “Though I think it might be a good thing to understand, even without the Bomar. If one day a new enemy finds us, we should know how to fight.”

  It was on the eighth day that they came across the body of a Bomar man. He was clutching at an empty bottle, and quick a search reveal he had no food or any other provisions.

  “Why would he brave the desert like this?” mused Hylariel. “No food. No water. He would surely know he was walking to his death.”