We•Will•Rise

Chapter Four

"This is a terrible idea," I groan, trying to ignore the bad feeling forming in my gut. "They will have our heads on pikes before we can say mercy."
Nikolai chuckles. "No they won't. No one knows my face, not anymore," he practically whispers the last part, but I catch it all the same. He gives me a onceover, "As for you, I couldn't even tell if you were a man or woman until I saw your face. I think we'll be just fine."
"Who is this contact you urgently have to meet anyway? Why can't he come to you outside of the capital?" I ask, a hint of fear creeping into my bones as the silhouette of the castle rises in the distance. The pointed tip of the black castle juts into the sky like a stake shoved through the belly of clouds. The castle, now infamous for its Queen across the continent of Ingrava, is only a second to the wonder of the Ingrav Sanctum in the Rift. Seeing it should strike a familiar ache of home. Instead, it only scared me, and I remember the night before when I fled across the capital to escape a fate worse than death.
"Endine is the place we have to be tonight anyways, so I told him I'd meet him. His name is Jerrick Elcove, he's an Imordal like us."
"Why do we have to be there tonight?" I ask, but then I remember: the wedding is tonight. The worst case scenario hits me like a bag of stones. "What could you possibly get for going to the princess's wedding?" My voice comes out small, and I hope he doesn't notice. But by the look he gives me, I know he does.
"A hostage."
"A hostage from the wedding? Why?"
"We need one for leverage, and information. It's the best option for right now."
"How do you know where the wedding will be? Or how to get in without being undetected?"
"I know more than you would think," he says, though instead of sounding cocky or arrogant, he sounds troubled. I stare at him a moment before sighing and kicking a rock across the road. Nikolai is full of surprises, that's a fact.
"Very well, I guess I must get used to risking my life and taking hostages if I'm going to help." I ponder what hostage he could possibly want, but if I'm any kind of intelligent I know who it is he has his sights on. Amari will be his goal, and though I agreed to help, I'm not sure I can subject my friend to that. A friend that might think of me as nothing more than a waste of breath now. Either way, Amari is still my friend, family even, and undeserving of being a pawn in a war that isn't hers.
Nikolai must see the gears turning in my head because he gives me a sideways look. "I know what you're thinking about and you should stop. No harm will come to her."
I look at him with wide eyes. "What? How could—"
"You're a smart girl, and I wouldn't expect any less from the Lord Commander's daughter. But if this is going to work, we have to take her. We won't hurt her, just use her. She's the Queen's only weakness."
Which is exactly how I knew that it's her he wants. I shake my head, as if that will clear the congelated thoughts, "Right, I get that but—"
"I would like your help, she trusts you and it would make things a lot easier. However if you can't do it, the process won't go so smoothly for her." He stops walking and grabs my arm, his touch light despite the seriousness of his tone. "We aren't like them. We don't torture and maim, we're just trying to make our own lives easier."
"I know," the words come out as a whisper, and I have to steel myself for what I say next. "I can help." And I mean it. Because if I get kicked off of this, there's no telling what they will do or who'd they have to hurt to get to her. With me involved, I can sneak her away without any trouble. As long as she doesn't hate me and give me away the second she sees me that is.
He says nothing, only nods as he drops his hand from my arm. I take a deep breath as we continue walking.
We're inside the capital after a few quiet hours, having made a good pace after our conversation stopped. He didn't offer any more words of comfort or even any more explanations to how this hostage thing would work. Which left me to my own thoughts; a terrible place to be at the moment. I couldn't decide if I was wrong or right agreeing to this mess, and it left my stomach in an uncomfortable knot. Imordals deserve a life outside of being on the run, but what do we have to do to get it? Would we become like the mortals to get it, power hungry and violent? Driven by greed and hate? And who will sit on the throne once the Queen is dead? Human or Imordal? There are too many what-ifs and what-thens to make me feel okay with it. But right now, besides fleeing, I don't have any other option and as far as I know, Nikolai isn't a homicidal killer bent on revenge. But what of the others? Do they want to see the mortals burn for their mistakes? Have they formed a hate for them, so strong that they don't see them as people, but just enemies? The world is a terrible enough place, with more things to fear and hate than each other.
"We're almost there," Nikolai speaks for the first time in hours, pulling me from my thoughts. Nikolai took me a different route than I had come. This time, we passed through the flat lands of the farmer's pastures and into the Fringe, the side of the lowest on the totem pole of power. The people here are poor or homeless, no in between. The Fringe is an unkept place, forgotten by the capital. It's streets are littered with trash and sludge from the sewer and the homeless. It always has the smell of mold and smoke in the air. The homes are little more than clay shacks with sheets of wood for roofs and they're spaced so close together there isn't room to put a coin between them. Here, the people are in a perpetual state of hunger and they amble along the cobblestone with dead eyes and thin mouths.
But they aren't the only ones. Guardsmen prowl through the area with whips at their beck, ready to enforce their power to "keep the peace", but they mostly inflict uncalled for punishment in their sick craving for violence. They look at these people as less than because of their social status, and the Queen couldn't care any less.
We slide through alleyways to avoid the Guardsmen. Two nicely dressed citizens wondering by the Fringe would surely draw their attention, even if we did nothing spectacular to catch their eye. They are always on the lookout for some poor soul to give trouble too. Bullies, is what they are, so low on their own sheet of power that they take it out on everyone else.
Nikolai gets us through the Fringe without a problem as we slowly come into the Outer Quarter that surrounds the Royal Square. Here, there are the most decent people. Middle class, old families or friends of the nobles. Some even have electricity, and the streets are free of clutter and roaming varmints unlike the Fringe. The citizens here are not hungry or greedy or malicious, they simply work for their living and come home. The houses are mostly nice, not stone like the nobles, but wood, with solid bases and roofs.
"We're here," he says, stopping at a house that doesn't particularly stand out amongst the rest. It's less clean, with mold growing around the stones and a door that has a long crack in it. He raises his fist and raps at the door.
I hear a set of heavy, booted footsteps from inside and then the door is cracked open by a bald man with a blonde goatee. "Nikolai," he breathes in relief, opening the door wide for us to step through. "Hurry."
We step inside the warmth of its walls, and I take in its surprisingly baren state. There's hardly any furniture, save a couch without cushions and a broken coffee table. The walls are a deep brown, with blankets instead of curtains covering the windows. I try to keep the frown off my face as the man paces back and forth in front of us. He's a tall, lanky man, almost as tall as my father, with beady blue eyes and a long nose, wearing a white tunic and brown, cotton jacket. He's clearly not from the capital, and if I had to guess by his rail-thinness and pale skin, I'd say Colford, the most northern of the cities.
"What is it, Elcove?" Nikolai asks, grabbing the man by the shoulder so he stops pacing, which I'm thankful for. It was making my nerves worse than they already are.
"They—They came out of nowhere," he begins, his face blanching and eyes far away in remembrance, "One second we were fine, the next everyone is running. They tore apart the city."
"Who's they? What happened? Where's Jhaun and your brother?"
"They killed them! Slaughtered them like pigs!" His voice starts getting frantic and Nikolai quickly shushes him, but it doesn't work. "They're all dead!" His voice gets an octave higher, and without thinking, I grab him, roughly tugging on his arm to face me.
"Shh," I soothe, letting the warmness of my belly travel to where my hand rests on his arm, my gift wrapping him in a sense of calm. The panic in his eyes slowly starts to fade, until his gaze is one of a sane man again. I figured out that my gift could calm people when I was a girl and used it on a frightened dog that injured its leg. After healing the dog, I realized that to reduce something's pain, they have to be relaxed. It's an effect that goes hand in hand. I can feel Nikolai's eyes on me, but if he finds his reaction odd, he says nothing about it. "Who killed them, Jerrick?" I ask again, in the calmest voice I can muster.
He seems to see me for the first time, his eyes widening a bit. "It was the vamphir."
My grip unintentionally tightens on his arm, making him wince, and my heart drops like a weight into my toes. The vamphir, that isn't possible.
"Elcove, that isn't possible." Nikolai says, echoing my thoughts. His voice sounds strained, like he's holding some kind of emotion back. "They're extinct, have been for centuries."
"No, no, no, no," Jerrick chants, whirling on him and grabbing him by his shoulders. "They're alive and they're here. They came from the Misted Mountains, they brought the night with them."
I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean, but it sent a primal fear deep into my bones. A fear that humans have had for milenia.
The vamphir were—are—a race of sadistic, bloodsucking creatures that have existed since the beginning of time. They came from the grounds of the Misted Mountain, the Gate to the Underworld, some call it. They're the reason for the Imordals creation, the reason for a human's primal fear of the night. They kill and feast on anything living, pillage towns and cities and burn them to the ground when there's nothing left. They did this for centuries until the Imordals were gifted to the humans by the Primordials. We, with matching vamphir's strength and speed, destroyed their race and anything left went to die back in the Misted Mountains. Or so we thought.
"This changes everything," I say as Nikolai pulls Jerrick's hands off of him. "We have to warn everyone."
"How? No one will believe us. I'm not sure if I even believe it." Nikolai shakes his head, "Elcove, are you sure that's what it was?"
"I will never forget their faces," He whispers, dazing off again.
"Oh Gods, the wedding," My hand unconsciously travels to my mouth. "It'll be a slaughter."
"There's no telling if what he is saying is true. He could have eaten an Eldric berry and hallucinated it all." Nikolai says, sounding more like he's trying to convince himself. I, on the other hand, am taking the better safe than sorry route.
"Nikolai," I begin slowly, "Think. Where would his brother and the other man be? Something is wrong."
Nikolai shakes his head again and starts to pace. Jerrick mumbles something about death and I chew on my bottom lip. We're all quiet for a moment, letting reality sink in I suppose. The vamphir are alive, not extinct. And they're coming. Colford is a week away from Endine, but if Jerrick made it here right after the accident, then so will they. We have to be prepared.
"Jerrick," I reach for him again, gently tugging on his sleeve so he'll face me. "How did you get here? How did you avoid them?"
"I—I rode by horse. I left them all to die," he sniffles, quickly swiping his sleeve across his nose. "They didn't see me, they were too busy feeding."
A shudder runs through me at the word and I have to shake myself. "Okay," is all I reply, my memory going to an old book in the library. The History of Tungrave, the old Kingdom of the North that was destroyed by the vamphir. They said the only way to kill them was with a weapon of Grimstone, the gemstone mined from the Ingrav Sanctum. And of course I know exactly where I can get a weapon like that.
"Nikolai, we have to go to the wedding," I say, a plan formulating in my mind. "vamphir are nearly invincible without the right weapon, and I know where I can get one."
"Grimstone, right?" He runs a hand through the tangles of his hair. "Let me guess, the Lord Commander has one."
I nod, "He has two. A matching set, a dagger and a sword. But we can mine more—"
"That would take months, Maltrov," he says, catching me off guard by the use of my last name. "We don't have months."
"Jewelry then, we can melt the stones from the Amari and the Queen's jewels and tip the swords." It's hard to keep the desperation from my voice.
"That could work, but we can't wait until the wedding. That could be too late." He says, scratching at the stubble on his cheek as he thinks.
"How else do you suppose we do it? If I show my face right now, I'm dead."
"Not if they think you're contained," he begins, looking at me with steely eyes, "You won't like my plan, but it could work." I frown, but wave him on to continue. "Tie you up and bring you in front of the Queen. I'm sure your father would be right beside her to watch as punishment. He will listen to you."
"And if he doesn't and we're stuck in a castle full of people that want me dead?" I raise an eyebrow.
"Then we fight," Jerrick chimes in, having come back to reality. He looks stable now, but could I rely on him to have my back when the time comes? He must see the look on my face because he offers a tight smile. "I'll be okay."
"So be it," I sigh, not liking the plan one bit, but having no other choice but to go along with it. This is no longer just about Imordals or what I want, this is about the fate of human civilization as we know it. "But there's someone I need to see first."