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The Split Summon
Chapter Twenty-Six: A new Point of View

Chapter Twenty-Six: A new Point of View

When Ika came to tell her, Hinete was seated at a worktable with seven others. One of the enchanters at the table was Isaac, the other who controlled Sesako’s body half the time. Hinete was busy as she carved one rune after another into the big dragon scale that sat in front of her.

Ika’s long dark hair had been unbraided, and it hung down to her waist. The left half of her face was pulped, purple and blue, with half of the cheekbone caved in.

That injury had already been there, though the bruise had only half developed when Hinete had seen her and Emiku a few days ago.

That had been a celebration. There had been a successful ambush, and Hinete spent the fifteen minutes of her break before going to sleep drinking expensive wine and laughing with them.

It was in her face.

Hinete knew instantly.

“Oh, God.” Emiku was dead.

Another one. Emiku.

Dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

First her uncle Gakonga, and then Kisiko, and then an endless list that stretched long and far. All dead. Dying, dying, dying. And in the end, everyone would be dead, and none would remain to tell their stories.

Hinete leapt up and hugged her friend. “I’m so, so, so sorry.”

Ika sat down. She was shaking as she sobbed. “It was… we succeeded. Emiku saved the rest of us — we killed at least five or six of them. But…” Hand pressed against mouth. A woman mourning her husband.

Dead. Dead.

So many dead.

“He was in my arms. His shoulder. They’d shattered it. So much blood. So, so much blood. He kept bleeding as he died.”

Hinete held her friend.

“I knew the odds — I just thought that it wouldn’t happen to us. Not to me. Or to him. I wish…”

“I know.”

Hinete felt sick and guilty.

She hadn’t faced death with the brave cultivators who had chosen to risk fighting day after day.

Her exceptional skill with enchanting combined with her unexceptional skill in war meant that her duty was to carve rune after rune, the tedium broken up by planning new enchantment schemes, and fixing weapons and armor that had become damaged.

Wake to sleep. Wake to sleep.

Work, work, work. Only a few minutes here and there for food. A few hours for sleep since Hinete wasn’t powerful enough to work endlessly without sleep, substituting chi for rest in the way Sesako could.

She wasn’t doing anything important or dangerous.

And now another.

She’d never been close to Emiku, but Hinete still hurt for Ika. The two of them clung together as Ika sobbed.

Hinete saw from the corner of her eyes that everyone else in the room looked at her sadly. Especially the one who wore Sesako’s body. He clearly wanted to do or say something, but he thought that he had no right.

He had his own guilt about not destroying the island and the emperor when he could have.

Or so he said.

Hinete no longer believed that anything could have ended this vicious war.

Hinete hated this all.

When she stopped sobbing, without paying any attention to the others in the room, Ika took Hinete’s hand and gripped it tightly. She described in closed off, sick, and halting words the fight, the ambush, everything.

There was nothing that she could do — except a part of Hinete’s mind knew that she ought to finish enchanting this piece of armor that would replace Sesako’s already blasted breastplate.

Emiku had died bravely. He had died usefully.

They’d won that little battle and forced the emperor’s forces to send a much larger group to take control of some little, pointless, cursed little ley line across that mountain.

Delayed by a few hours.

Fitzuki could claim another victory.

There was no privacy in the cramped and crowded complex of towers, tunnels, manufactories, and more towers that had been built in the mountains circling the favored valley of the dragons a century ago following the rising. The work room Hinete sat in was a windowless chamber that had been crudely dug out of the ground a week ago.

After Ika finished, in her hollow voice telling the story, she looked around at everyone in the room and sobbed once more. She stood up. “I can’t interrupt your work. I know its importance. We’ll still… we’ll… damn. Damn. Damn. I can’t —”

Sobbing, she fled the room.

Hinete chased after Ika.

Ika had run into someone else who had been walking down the crowded corridor, and he apologized anxiously to the sobbing woman.

Hinete hugged her again, squeezing her hard.

Her friend held her back. She then stepped away from Hinete. “You do need to work — I’ll… it makes no difference.”

“You shouldn’t be alone, and —”

“I won’t be. All of the people in the flying group are going to hold a wake. I’ll be there. And… and it really makes no difference. Go, get to your work — m-m-maybe, somebody will… Just go.”

She pushed Hinete away, and went off, wiping her eyes. When Hinete tried to follow her, she shooed her away, and suddenly Hinete realized that her friend actually wanted to be alone to sob without worrying about her friends worrying about her.

Hinete let her go.

Hinete wanted to be alone too. She wished she could curl up in some tiny room, with her arms around her legs and just not think for a month.

It had only been a month since the fall of the city.

Another dear friend, dead.

Hinete now hated Fitzuki.

It was he who she raged against when another dear friend died.

He spilled their blood like water to give the Great Ones an extra month of life. With brutal brilliance he had turned this campaign into a hellscape, a sort of war that Hinete had rarely heard stories about.

She pressed her head against the freezing cold stone of the wall. It had been roughly hacked out of the mountainside, and nobody had bothered to smooth it down. There were edges that she could cut herself on if she wasn’t cautious.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

When she had gained her golden core, Hinete had spent two hours every single morning in combat training and drills for three years, and she’d spent an hour three nights a week being lectured on the theory of warfare.

That simply was the way it was, everyone who gained a golden core was expected to take part in the defense of Yatamo if it became necessary.

At the time she would have laughed if someone had told her that a desperate war would come to the island. Like everyone else, she assumed that the mile deep seas that surrounded them would always protect them and the Great Ones from the emperor.

Deep breath.

Once. Twice. Thrice.

Hinete stood tall, squared her shoulders, and marched back into the work room.

The enchanters nodded to see her come in, and Isaac stood while he waited for her to sit down. He tugged at his hair. He did that when nervous. It was an odd habit that she’d noticed while studying him to trace similarities and differences with Sesako. He had many little quirks that made him very clearly not Sesako.

The mountains here were empty, snow covered, cold and windswept. They were broken up by many small valleys in which small communities of farmers lived with their cattle and deer. In the summer on the lower layers of the mountain there was a huge blooming of scrub plants and flowers that were chewed to nothing by hordes of mountain goats and particularly agile deer.

The area was also cut through by thousands of tunnels and caverns.

Golden cores could only stay at heights more than twenty-five thousand feet above the sea for an hour or two without becoming sick. They could acclimate to the heights with time, but it reduced their ability to use magic in combat, and their speed of flight. Many of the peaks within the long range went as high forty thousand feet up.

It was impossible for the sort of support functions that made a firing team operate smoothly to be brought with the purified cores at such heights if they did not stick to the lower passes.

Thus, the emperor blasted his way along these passes, only going over mountains where the crossing point was thirty thousand feet at most.

As he moved forward, the Yatamo forces commanded by Fitzuki ceaselessly ambushed him, attacking again and again from clever little firing points hidden in the valleys, with caverns through which the ambushers could flee. The emperor’s armies had to move slowly, with the strongest cultivators carefully combing the ground beneath them for ambushes hidden by powerful enchantments.

And despite these efforts, more of these little ambuscades worked than failed. Each day dozens of the emperor’s purified cores were killed by strikes that attacked them from an angle where their defensive formations were insufficient.

Everyone said that Fitzuki was a maestro in the art of war, and this great campaign was his master symphony.

Perhaps only Hinete had grown to hate him.

Or maybe most of them had, but they simply did not believe they could say it aloud. It was impossible for Hinete to say so. Everyone agreed — or at least everyone who had not fled a long time ago — agreed that any amount of blood spilled in the defense of the Great Ones was worth it, even if the bleeding would do nothing in the end.

Hinete stared down at the half-carved line of runes on the armor. She willed her blurring eyes to not tear up in front of the others in the room.

Breath. Another deep breath.

The emperor himself was a cunning man, with the wisdom of many centuries, and the practice of many wars. While he lacked the innovativeness and cleverness of Fitzuki, he had a force that was many times more powerful. He sometimes trapped the trappers.

He had twice dug his own tunnels through the mountain passes during the course of a night, blasting his way through the mountainside personally, to create traps that killed dozens of the Yatamo cultivators.

His forces advanced on multiple axes, flanking other groups. He had an intrinsic sense for where traps were likely to be, and far more often than not Fitzuki’s brilliant preparations came to nothing.

In this brutal duet it was clear that Fitzuki was the superior commander, but that he would not be the victor. With equal resources Fitzuki would win every time, but the emperor was too skilled to lose with such an advantage as he held.

Three weeks of forced battles, bloodshed, brutality, and death.

More than ten thousand cultivators of the Yatamo had died.

They were dead forever and ever.

Tens of thousands more had been injured, mutilated, and horribly broken forever and ever.

Many of the dead were drawn from the ranks of the golden cores, but nearly a tenth of the purified cores of Yatamo had died.

It had been a brutal culling. The losses amongst the emperor’s forces had been great, though likely not so high, due to the caution with which he advanced. And in any case, his losses would necessarily be proportionally far smaller.

The endless death parade.

Gakonga. Her uncle who had flown up with Sesako the day he had first accessed the power of the fourth dantian. Then another cousin on her mother's side of the family. Her great uncle, who was quite old, but still a capable purified core. And then more and more.

Now Ika’s husband.

Sesako was… a little broken.

She rarely saw him for more than ten minutes, or twenty minutes at a time. When he controlled the body, he always threw himself desperately into the fight, going wherever Fitzuki told him to go. He launched attack after attack.

He killed. And then he killed again.

And the men he killed, they too were dead, forever and ever.

Perhaps it was Isaac who had taught her to see the tragedy when the cultivators of the emperor died, but Hinete now saw how clearly those deaths tormented Sesako.

Battle. Bloodshed. Terror. Close fights. Men dying in front of him.

Sesako did not speak of it.

She’d heard more descriptions of his battles from those who fought in his formations. But she imagined how terrible it had been.

While he had participated several times in sieges before this war, he had never been involved in brutal wars where large numbers of cultivators died, blown out of the sky, punctured through the belly by enchanted bolts. Hundreds and hundreds of enchanted crossbows bolts.

It just took one bolt. A shot through the visor that splattered the brains apart.

That was the one death that Sesako talked to her about. A man whose head he’d half blown apart, bits of brain floating for many seconds in the air, before the power of flight that the cultivator had given himself faded away.

Sesako had a haunted look to him, and she knew that it was those he killed that ate at his soul.

Damn Fitzuki.

Could Fitzuki not see? Could he not see that —

The Great Ones were worthy.

Hinete spoke her catechism.

The Great Ones had blessed their isle.

The Great Ones had blessed them, and the Great Ones had brought the blessings of greater happiness to the Yatamo over the endless years.

The Great Ones deserved this bloodletting. For their sake they should suffer.

She could not hate the Great Ones. She would not hate them. She would not resent them and curse their names.

Damn Fitzuki.

Isaac said something to Hinete that helped her to understand herself: Death was not normal for her.

Everyone close to her had at least established their foundation. She had been fortunate in her mentorship of those with less skill, and both of them had broken through, and then matured their ability to condense power.

She had lived in a safe and happy world where nobody would die until they were old and had lived at least a hundred years.

Until now.

Friends, those she adored. Her relatives. One of her mentors. Three of her classmates. One of her mentees.

And she wasn’t fighting.

Each day she was safe. From the instant she woke up, to when she fell asleep exhausted, she was safe. She just carved the runes again, and again, and again.

Spears, shields, armor. Crossbows, hurlers, cloaks and clothes. Disguises and everything.

Boring work, broken up by those times when she’d been asked to incorporate into Sesako’s equipment some enchantment that could only work now that he was able to feed it crimson power.

They now had just two or three days until the emperor’s army would force its way to the fortresses protecting the pass that led into the favorite perches of the Great Ones. That would not be the end of the war.

End the war?

Not our maestro of battle. Fitzuki would not permit that.

Fitzuki planned to send the Great Ones to the northern mountains, which were much lower and smaller, with weaker ley lines flowing through them, but still sufficient to support the life of the dragons.

It would take two months after that for the emperor to fully establish control over the southern mountain range, such that it would be impossible for the dragons to safely return, and even then his garrisons and towers would be vulnerable to attacks that Fitzuki would continue to launch. After that the emperor would launch his campaign against the northern ranges.

That would be an easier campaign.

The mountains were lower, there were far fewer tunnels, and the intrinsic advantages to defensive enchantments would be far smaller.

At that point the dragons would be left with no options.

There was no other land to which they could flee — the only other lands with sufficiently thick ley lines were already inhabited by great magical creatures, the fifty-foot-tall behemoth elephants in the jungles of Diet Vinh, the whales that were even larger in size than a Great One who lived amongst the reefs of a great southern continent. Or the giants that lived around a giant canyon.

It was the Yatamo who fed the Great Ones — though the great wealth they had accumulated through trade over the last centuries would allow them to pay other nations for enough cows, pigs, giant fruits and wheat to continue to feed them.

However, even that would not be sufficient — the emperor had made it clear that he intended, fore his own purposes, whatever they might be, to kill all of the dragons, and he would pursue them to any country which gave refuge to them.

A large pile of dragon scales from the most recent molting stood in front of her, and due to the toughness of the material, she had to carve the runework into them by hand.

This was to be a new breastplate to replace one of Sesako’s that had been destroyed. He would wear it to battle the day after tomorrow.

It was like an unending pain in her stomach. Clawing, cramping, clenching. There. Always there.

Hinete was terrified.

So, so scared.

The fortifications around the valley that the dragons used for their home were far more substantial than those elsewhere in the mountains, and as a result the emperor needed to use a series of formal firing clusters to attack them and blow the towers apart.

This would take several days — perhaps even longer if the emperor did not commit a large number of purified cores to serve as loaders instead of the golden core cultivators who could not survive at such height.

The tunnels that Hinete sat in were so high up that often she felt out of breath, and a little lightheaded, just sitting down doing nothing but carving, and carving until her hands hurt.

Hinete sat back and stared at her work.

A weak and unworthy part of her wanted to just quit and never do anything again.