CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE—FIRE AND BLOOD

As Samira fell to the ground, Debaku sliced and diced dozens of vines shooting in to coil and grasp at his limbs as they darted and moved aggressively.

He could not hold them back.

“I am here!” she shouted, and join him, putting her back to his.

Debaku ground his teeth, all the while feeling the aura of Achaemenes, but a doubt assailed him. How could Archaemenes truly be here, and why had he come? How had he been captured by this monster.

It seemed all too convenient.

Growling, he cut at the vines as fast as he could, but even while he and Samira destroyed whole swaths of them, more pressed in.

“There are!” He slammed his blade through a dozen at once, then brought his scimitar back up, cutting just as man. They fell in swaths, wriggling and writhing, and yet the stocks, leaking and spurting, pushed forward. He cut them. “There are too many!”

“I know!”

Samira grunted, moved her hands in strange ways as her aura increased. Cyclones of wind appearing and she hurled them at the vines, pushing them back and crying with exercitation with every throw.

“Do not overdo it!”

Debaku ran forward toward those enclosing brambles and jumped, growling in midair as he brought his blade to bear in a powerful magical strike—like the one he had used atop the mammoth shell.

He slammed down upon the ground, the shock of which destroyed hundreds of the tendrils, while others were severed and cut and destroyed. The shock of his impact forced them back even more.

Debaku lifted his blade, the weapon feeling somewhat heavy in his grasp.

He was tired.

Stumbling back, he said, “I fear… I fear I have been a fool.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Before…” he breathed, and paused to take in a breath. Sweat was trickling down the sides of his face and neck. “When you took me to the Angor.” He lashed out at an oncoming vine and cut it in half. “I sensed—no I heard a voice in my head speak my name.”

The vines coalesced for another attack as they twirled and twined into a larger mass. Samira pushed them back with a gust of her wind magic, but it didn’t have much effect, though it got them a little time.

“A voice?! But… was it not your jinni?”

“I… I do not know,” he said. “I felt dizzy, like I was being effected by an alchemical or magical substance—do you remember?”

“Yes,” she said. “I remember what you asked me.”

“I know I sense Archaemenes, but perhaps it is not him at all. Perhaps the Angor has tricked me.”

The mass of vines overtaking Shiro and Jessamine were now so thick that Debaku could not see or hear them at all, other than another flash of yellow-orange light.

“I am ashamed.”

“Enough!” she spat. “The time to think and to feel guilt is not now. We must fight—save your friends!”

He looked at her, admired her resolve and her singleness of mind to fight this monster, if for no other reason to save those in danger, but even if she simply wanted to kill the monster so badly, their goals were aligned.

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Debaku nodded. “Yes!”

“Cut it!” Ali cried.

The man were crawling and howling and dying all around him as the vines attacked, dragged and confused them. The thicker tongue tendrils licked in and out like trees, cutting men down in swaths.

“FIGHT!” Ali screamed, his voice raw and his legs weak like rotted driftwood. He almost fell, but forced himself back up to his feet.

He turned to the archers, realizing their fired arrows were not enough. “Swords!” he called. “Swords!”

Pushing in with the men, images of Hafza flashed inside his mind. He knew that in moments, like so many of the other dead and dying men, Ali would be one of them.

The men in front of him cried out as the green, leaf-like tendril barreled across them like a falling tree. Some of the men flailed past him and one of them, he was sure, hit him in the face with his foot.

Ali flamed into the trampled grass, which by now had been crushed into oblivion, the wet mist turning the entire area into mud. He shook his head as a white light flashed in his eyes.

The Abassir moved his fingers, realizing his sword was gone.

Where…?

As he opened his eyes more fully among the shouting and the dying—it was like a storm of death and horror and anger, a whirlwind of terrible rage and lamentations that he would not soon forget, the tendrils above him coiled like goulash fingers, moving straight toward him.

He tried to cry out, and kicked his legs, but he felt stuck.

He was stuck!

Glancing down, he realized a heavy weight pressing down on him. It was a dead Scorpion. Ali screamed, pushed at the corpse, but it didn’t budge.

The coil came at him, and he gnashed at it with his teeth as his heart threatened to bust. He kicked and grasped at the vine, but as he took hold of it, it writhes and threw his hands off.

They were far stronger than he thought once he had his hands around them.

It coiled around his neck and his air was cut off.

Unnaturally, he convulsed, his need for air suddenly great, but the more he squirmed, the worst it became as he vision began to dim and to darken around his eyes. His eyes pained him and his temples pulsed.

The blood in his ears beat like a man hitting him with a bastinado as his skin tightened, feeling like it might burst like an overripe plumb.

The dimness increased.

Yasser screamed, as snot and saliva dripped down his face. He glanced about wildly as men all around him were dragged away or cut down, smashed and pierces and bludgeoned.

I have to… heal… them!

“Who… who… who… who…”

His breath came in ragged gasps as everything around him swayed and and blurred. Glanced down at the dead bodies and saw the high vizier Ali Al Bashur o nthe ground, his arms held back by the tendrils—like—like his own.

Yasser struggled.

I have to heal them!

“WHO?!”

Ali’s face was read like an apple, quickly turning blue as his eyes rolled into the back of his head, the whites showing.

“NOOOO!” he howled, more for himself than anyone else. “HELP!”

It was so hot!

Shiro shrunk back from Jessamine’s fire magic as she let out gouts of oily flame—almost like molten gold, at the tendrils. They came in, pressing ever closer despite being cooked and destroyed by the hundreds.

As they died and wilted and coiled back, the thicker green ones waited to strike at Shiro.

One of them darted in to pierce his heart, and he slashed at it, his sword snicking the tip but otherwise doing very little damage.

This was where they were going to die.

Not Jessamine.

She could slip back into the lamp, which would probably then be consumed by the monster where it would wait for eternity, and because she was now mortal, Jessamine would die in the void.

Her fate would be far worse than Shiro’s blood end.

A hot rage took him and he snarled, gritted his teeth and screamed, summoning all his power. His blade went from an orange-hot glow to a white-hot light and he grunted loudly as he jumped, whirling and striking out with his blade, the light of which formed a cyclone of movement as he attacked everything above and around them.

The vines and tendrils separated into hundreds of pieces, the physical matter of which was pressed away from his blade as the magic itself cut through the organic mass that threatened to kill him and trap Jessamine forever.

When he landed, the tendrils took pause as they continued to wilt and die and fall in charred chunks.

Shiro realized Jessamine’s outstretched hand.

His heart beat heard then, and he took it.

Looked at her as the vines coalesced and reformed for another attack that would surely overwhelm them both.

Even she had sweat glistening across her neck and cleavage as they were bathed in the golden-white light of their swords.

Shiro embraced Jessamine as she came near to him. “We cannot give up,” he said.

She breathed for a moment without answering as she caught her breath. “I have little more to give,” she said, as her sword began to dim. “It is over, my love. You will not be able to fight this monster off on your own merits.”

In another time he might have been indignant at such a matter-of-fact statement from the jinni, but now it rung only with truth.

He nodded in her arms, then Shiro held her gaze. “I love you.”

She smiled. “And I you, Shiro.”