Ferez’s hand slapped against the coarse wooden plank of the jetty and he hauled himself onto the structure with a groan. He flipped onto his back, chest heaving from exertion as Leo popped out of the water to land beside him. The water mage mirrored Ferez; on his back, eyes wide, lungs working like forge billows to circulate sweet, life giving oxygen through their borderline hypoxic bodies.
“I’d say that went well,” Leo said in between breaths.
“Leo, if I could move, I would crawl over there and throttle you.”
“Rude and unjustified.”
With a herculean effort, Ferez rolled onto his side so he was facing the water mage.
“’My power has grown exponentially since you last saw me’. Isn’t that what you said?”
“It has!”
“Damnit, Leo. That was even worse than the time we met Ingrid. I swear, it felt like you actively tried to hit every. Single. Fucking. Pillar.”
“Yeah, that was a looooot harder than I thought it was going to be.”
“Why, Leo? Why was it so much harder that you destroyed not only our boat, which was our only means of escape, but us as well?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Ferez. Maybe because last time I attempted something like this, I had two bloody arms!”
“And you didn’t factor that in?”
“I didn’t expect there to be so many currents to manipulate at once. Have you tried weaving magic with your toes? I’m getting better, but still, that was way more advanced than I was ready for.”
Ferez closed his eyes, focussing on his breathing. In through the nose, slow and controlled back out through the mouth. After a few seconds, his emotions and frayed nerves settled, and he sat up to take stock of their surroundings.
By some miracle, they had made it to the Wail’s dock. He had to admit, as angry as he was at Leo, any other water mage Ferez knew would have died in that attempt, regardless of how many hands they had. The powerful deep sea currents had churned through the stone forest, whipping the waves into towering, foaming monstrosities. Ravenous maelstroms formed with no warning, powerful enough to inhale and crush ships many times larger than their little dingy. After their vessel had gone down, Leo had kept both of them afloat and shielded them from the worst attentions of the vicious ocean long enough to make safety. In truth, it spoke to a degree of control and power that was astounding.
“Alright, I suppose I can find it in my heart to forgive you.”
Ferez stood and bent over, offering his hand to help Leo up. The exhausted water mage eyed it warily before locking eyes with his friend.
“How generous. I almost died too, you know? Because you dragged me out here.”
“It’s not like I twisted your arm.”
“Piss off. You rocked up after decades with a sob story about a poor helpless girl trapped in a vicious den of iniquity. You knew I couldn’t say no.”
“Wait, that’s why you’re here? I thought it was because the Crimson Blade is your biggest rival on the seas?”
“Uh. Yes, no, it is definitely that,” Leo said, pausing to cough up a bucket’s worth of water. “Oh, would you look at the time? We should get moving.”
“Leo…”
“What?”
Ferez stared at the pudgy mage still laying on the ground. He was fidgeting a little and avoiding eye contact.
“You really came out here with your entire fleet to save a little girl you’ve never met?”
“Is that so surprising?”
Ferez sighed and shook his head.
“If it was anyone else, I’d say yes.”
“But?”
“You’re still the same Leo I remember from all those years ago.”
“A dashing rogue? Breaking hearts while breaking bodies, and turning a tidy profit all the while?”
“I was going to say you were the rarest of beasts in this modern world: a man literally too stupid to wear his heart anywhere other than his sleeve.”
Leo grimaced.
“I’m not sure if that was a compliment or insult.”
“Eh, it was a little of both,” Ferez said, making a seesawing motion with his hand. “Now come on, up, up! We’ve got reconnaissance to do.”
Leo finally accepted the offered help, and with a great deal of swearing and groaning on both sides, they finally got him upright. After a moment to get their bearings, they ran along the dock to the great wooden doors leading into the stronghold proper.
They had developed the search plan on the way in, before everything went to shit in the stone forest. They were to work their way up first, identifying troop numbers and artillery emplacements, then make their way to the subterranean level to look for the slaves. The theory had been that, if they were detected early during the infiltration, they could jump into the water to escape. Leo would catch them with his magic, whisk them away to their boat, and they’d sail off into the dawn light, laughing back at their pursuers.
That course of action was obviously off the cards now that their boat was scattered across the seabed in a few thousand pieces, but escaping into the relatively calm waters immediately around the Wail’s base was still a better prospect than being caught underground.
In theory, anyway.
Ferez cracked the door and peered through, eyes sweeping through the gloom. It was dark, a pair of flickering torches doing little to dispel the blanket of night hanging over the room. Despite that, he could still make out a few bodies strewn about the floor of a large room, a cacophony of snoring suggesting the figures were passed out drunk. He nodded to Leo, and they darted through.
They picked their way along, careful not to tread on anyone. It was going swimmingly until Leo misjudged a step in the gloom and crushed a poor sod’s hand. The pirate’s eyes flew open and his lips turned down in a snarl as a vicious tongue lashing bubbled up from his throat. It petered out into confused gurgles as Leo plunged a knife of pure ice through his trachea. The man’s hands flew to his wound, trying to pull the magical weapon free, but his hands kept slipping on the slick spike. It as a pitiful sight.
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“Gods, Leo,” Ferez said, wishing he could look away but oddly mesmerised by the absolute mess of it all.
“Yep, yep, sorry, just… gimme,” Leo replied. He waved his hand and the knife flattened out into a surface barely wider than a hair, before it snapped up through the pirate’s head and out his crown. Blood spattered the man sleeping above him and the two mages held their breath, waiting for him to wake.
“Fuggin’… pissers o’er there,” he said, waving a hand, then rolling over and going back to sleep. He didn’t even open his eyes. Ferez fixed Leo with a damning glare and got an apologetic shrug in response. Rolling his eyes, the fire mage set off again.
“Deplorable,” Leo whispered, as he followed. “We should have been discovered then. Where are their patrols? When I’m in charge of this fortress, there’s going to be roving guards around the clock. And an actual barracks, not drunkards falling down wherever they please.”
“They probably feel safe here,” Ferez replied. “I mean, look at how much trouble we had just getting here.”
“Sure, but that’s no excuse for complacency. The easiest way to defeat an opposing commander is to subvert his expectations of how the terrain shapes the battlespace.”
Ferez stared at Leo with his mouth hanging open.
“I know the words that came out of your mouth just now were Common. I even understand what they mean individually. But I’m pretty sure the order you put them in was gibberish.”
Leo chuckled and gave him a sly wink.
“I told you, I’m an accomplished military commander these days. Why does it still surprise you whenever I do something commander-ly?”
“Firstly, commander-ly isn’t a word and secondly… actually, I don’t know. I guess I’m just not used to you seeming so competent.”
“You’ll get used to it. Now come on, we’ll map out this floor, then head up. We’ll confirm the layout is broadly the same, then focus on finding the artillery emplacements. We can count troop numbers as we go.”
Leo pushed past to lead the way, showing surprising speed and stealth, excepting the mishap in the first room, of course, and within a quarter of an hour, he had a rough sketch of the ground floor etched onto a scroll. He tucked it away in an oiled pouch and doubled back to a set of stairs.
The next few floors were much the same, a series of large rooms arrayed in a circle around a central shaft that appeared to run to the very top of the structure. Water churned at the base of the shaft, fed from a tunnel lying somewhere below the water’s surface. Each level had a single set of stairs with a solid stone guardrail connecting it to the level above, with the next flight located on the opposite side of the shaft.
“This is bad,” Leo muttered as he stomped up the set of stairs leading to the third floor, fiddling with the water flask at his hip.
“What is?”
“This place, it’s almost impossible to assault. I hoped the internal defences would be lacking since getting here is so tricky, but whoever built this structure was more cautious than the current occupants.”
“How do you mean?”
“Look,” Leo said, pointing at the flight of stairs opposite them. “Each staircase is only wide enough for one person to climb at a time, and each level only has a single set of stairs connecting it to the level below. It means, even if an invading force seizes an entire floor, they have to fight their way through another chokepoint to progress. Even putting the stairs in this shaft was deliberate, the handrail,” he said, slapping the thick earthen wall beside him, “won’t provide much cover from archers on the higher levels, but it will protect said archers from return fire.”
“So, even if we take a floor, we’ll need to fight our way one soldier at a time up to the next while taking arrows from every floor above, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Pretty much. We would need an army between ten and fifteen times the size of the Crimson Blade’s force to take this place through conventional means.”
“Right,” Ferez said, finishing Leo’s thought in his own head.
We don’t have that many soldiers.
Even if he assumed the density of the pirates decreased the higher they went, based on their initial sweep of the ground floor, they might actually come into this fight outnumbered.
They pressed on, each lost in their own thoughts. They finally found someone awake on the third floor, a pirate relieving himself through an external window. He was literally pissing into the wind, but was so drunk he didn’t notice the urine spraying back over him.
They removed him quietly and pushed his body into the sea beneath his makeshift urinal. They continued in this fashion, rapidly clearing floor after floor. Any conscious pirates they found were dealt with, either by Leo’s ice or Ferez’s sword, until they reached the seventh floor. It was here they found the first artillery emplacements; huge stationary ballistae set onto platforms on the Wail’s external wall. From the weapon bank, they could count more launchers on the next two floors, with a combined total of nine siege weapons. They were all pointed at the channel running between a pair of stone pillars leading to the docks.
“Not much chance of getting the fleet in here with these ballistae firing,” Ferez muttered, rapping his knuckles against one of the sturdy weapons.
“Yeah, no hope in the Pit. We’ll need to deal with these first. We might even do that ourselves before we get out of here.”
“Still not sure how we’re going to do that.”
“Relax, will you? I have a back-up plan.”
“Is this where you tell me your mind is like a steel trap again?”
“It is a steel trap, thank you very much.”
“So what’s the back-up plan?”
“Hope Ingrid comes to save us somehow.”
“Honestly? I’m not sure she would, even if she could.”
Leo cocked an eyebrow at Ferez.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
Ferez sighed and ran a hand through his hair.
“Not really, no. Let’s just keep searching. Do you need to see anything else up here, oh wise and powerful admiral?”
Leo snorted. “No, I think I’m good. Let’s head back down and try find this girl of yours.”
They doubled back and returned to the ground floor, but it was another half hour of searching before they found a concealed trapdoor leading to the subterranean level. It was fairly well lit, at least, with torches burning in wall brackets at regular intervals. They crept along the hall as it curved around, following the broad arc of the floors above. Unlike above, this area had always been intended as a prison. Cell after cell lined the corridor, the solid steel gates the best maintained piece of the stronghold they had seen so far. Slaves were crammed inside like cattle, men, women, and even children from every nation.
Reactions to their presence ranged from wary defiance, the men hiding the women and children behind them as they passed, to numb acceptance, the more haggard looking slaves watching their passing with dead eyes.
“How are we supposed to find your girl? Do you know what she looks like?” Leo whispered. His usual jovial manner was gone, replaced with a hard look that seemed out of place on a face Ferez had seen split into a grin far more often than not.
“She’ll be the northern Emrinthian girl with red hair. Not too many of those getting around.”
“True, hang on, I’ll search her out, try to get a bead. If she’s as powerful as you say, we should be able to sense her from here.”
Leo closed his eyes, his brows creasing slightly as he quested out with his senses, searching for her Talent. His frown deepened after a moment and his face scrunched up before his eyes flew open. His expression was almost, scared.
“Gods, Ferez.”
“What is it?”
“Try search her out.”
Ferez closed his eyes, quietening his mind and reaching out, seeking the pressure strands that indicated a mage nearby.
It was everywhere. He felt smothered under a blanket, or fully submerged under water, if that water had an almost impenetrable, solid quality to it. Staggering from the sudden feeling of vertigo, he caught himself against the wall as his eyes flew open. Leo stared back at him with something akin to fear.
“Ferez, is this girl of yours even human?”
Such raw power was unimaginable. Even when in the presence of the strongest mages in The Six, one could still make out the ripples and eddies in the latent Talent they gave off. But there was no break or heterogeneity in her presence. It was a dense, uniform soup of raw energy.
“Never mind that. How didn’t we notice as we approached?”
Leo looked down the hallway, lost in thought.
“If I were to guess? I’d say the radius of her latent Talent pressure is so large we’ve been bathing in it for a while.”
Ferez shook his head and resumed his march down the corridor. With this much power, it was imperative the girl be rescued from the clutches of these animals. She would need guidance, care, and compassion. She would have a profound impact on the world, one way or another. Either as the greatest mage ever to have lived, or the worst monster to have blighted the land. He would not stand by and watch the creation of another Fahroul.
They found her after another couple of hundred meters, her cell held separate from the others. She was alone, sitting cross-legged in the centre, her flaming red hair matted and gnarled and full of the straw that carpeted the floor. She was dangerously thin, her cheeks sunken and her brown skin pulled tight over her collarbones. There was a weeping rash covering her shoulders and extending partway down both arms, probably irritation from the hessian sack she was wearing as a makeshift dress that had grown infected in the filthy conditions. Despite this, her green eyes were alert, and the flame of hatred burned bright in their depths.
“Try anything and I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth,” she said.