The Coin that Cannot Be Spent
Selena stumbled and nearly fell for the fifth time in twice as many steps. She struggled hard against the rope that bound her wrists behind her back and was rewarded with the feeling of her skin scraping off until she felt the blood pool in her palms. She didn’t dare use her light weaving as Accora had used ice to sever the bonds. Without control, she could disintegrate her own hands. She ran on.
Hundreds of booted footsteps thundered behind Selena, trampling dead leaves and breaking branches in their pursuit. The men’s voices, loud and brash and ugly, were like cracking whips, spurring her on. She leaped over fallen trees and ducked low branches. The birches were like pale sentries as she passed them. The moon—a tiny sliver of a waxing crescent—kept ducking behind fat rain clouds so that she could hardly see three spans in front of her face. A twig scratched her cheek and she flinched at how close it had come to her eye. She lost her balance and tumbled down, only just managing to twist so that her right shoulder took the brunt of the fall.
The Bazira were getting closer.
I have to break free or I’m dead.
Selena squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated weaving the smallest ball of light she could.
“Luxari,” she whispered.
Her skin screamed in white hot agony but the ropes were burnt through instantly. She arms fell apart and she nearly wept with relief until she heard the men’s voices call out to one another. The light had alerted her pursuers to her location. Selena scrambled to her feet and ran.
With her arms free, she was much fleeter and surer of foot. She slipped through the trees and heard the Bazira fall behind. The trees released her to the beach and panic stole the slim sliver of relief she’d known. Seventy spans of gritty beach gave way to the water that was foul with corpses and stunk of everything rotten. She thought to run parallel to the woods and then double back in but the Bazira had fanned out and were drawing down fast. Lack of food and water had left her with shaking limbs; she didn’t think she could run much further if she tried.
The calls of pursuit drew closer. The Bazira had almost reached the beach. Desperately, aimlessly, she ran for the edge of the corpse-strewn water. The filthy tide lapped at her boots. Swimming it would kill her; she knew this as surely as she did her own name. There was nowhere to go and the Bazira horde was coming out of the forest.
No! I will die fighting the Bazira, as befitting my station as an Aluren Paladin.
She held her hands aloft, one over the other, fingers curved slightly, and started to utter sacred word to weave light…just as the meager moon disappeared behind thick storm clouds. Selena realized with deepening despair that there wasn’t enough light to weave against a hundred men or even fifty. As the first Bazira adherent breached the forest, Selena thrust her hand to her belt, instinctively reaching for her sword that had been taken.
God, please help me!
Through the material of her overtunic, she felt something round and heavy against the back of her hand and thrust her hand inside the pocket. Her fingers closed around the coin of Oshkat.
“The coin that cannot be spent,” she murmured.
The horde broke free of the trees. There were only fifty spans of beach between them and her, fifty spans between life and death. The glint of their steel swords and maces gleamed brighter than the coin in her palm. The face of some Zak’reth lord or general was etched into it, scowling at her.
Hopeless. Selena let the coin fall through her fingers where it landed soundlessly in the sand.
An instant later, a reverberant whump sounded from behind her accompanied by a great splashing of water.
“Yai kah!” screamed a hundred voices in unison, like a thunderclap.
Selena recoiled and then froze, rooted in place by old memories. In front of her, the Bazira horde that was on the beach—to a man—stopped short. Those racing out of the forest behind them crashed into their brethren and for a few precious moments there was a chaos that would have been comical in other circumstances.
Yai kah! Selena had heard those words screamed a thousand times during the war. She still heard them sometimes in blood-soaked dreams. To hear them now… a sliver of terror slipped down her back. She turned.
Behind her, one hundred Zak’reth soldiers stood in perfect, orderly rows in the shallows. Their spiked plate armor was of red steel only the Zak’reth blacksmiths know how to forge. Their swords, pikes, and maces seemed dipped in blood under the moonlight. Their helms, forged to resemble ferocious beasts of nature and legend, looked afire. Tiny pinpricks of yellow light glowed from between slits in the helms where the warriors’ eyes should have been. A scream caught in Selena’s throat and her hand reached again for her absent sword.
One Zak’reth stepped forward; a general or commander. His helm resembled a dragon with a gaping mouth from which protruded a sharp, two-pronged tongue that was a sort of weapon unto itself.
“Erch’ki, Komdarh?” the Zak’reth asked of Selena in a voice that seemed to come from the ground. Its yellow eyes flickered.
Orders, Commander? Selena heard it clear in her mind. The Bazira were coming out of the trees, regrouping, a battle cry rising up among them.
Selena drew in a breath and screamed, “Attack!”
“Yai kah!”
She cowered as the Zak’reth troops surged out of the shallows, parting around her to bear down on the Bazira. None touched her. None hurt her. The wind of their passing was so light, she wondered if it even existed or if it was merely the wind of the storm that had broken over the island that she felt. But the smell helped her memory-tossed mind know that they were real. The Zak’reth of then and of now smelled of hot steel, fire, ash, and blood.
But are they real?
The sight of the warriors slaying the Bazira at her command felt like an illusion, or a strange dream. She watched a Bazira lock swords with a Zak’reth warrior—A phantom? A shade?—and then the Zak’reth’s red steel blade sliced the man’s arm off, leaving singed flesh at the shoulder.
The Bazira prayed for ice, their swords sang, they screamed as they died. But for their initial battle cry, the Zak’reth fought silently. The red warriors made no sound, no grunt of effort, no cry of pain when a Bazira man’s weapon bit home. Selena watched as a Zak’reth was stabbed from behind by a Bazira’s icy shard. The red-and-brass armored warrior arched his back, as if in pain, and fell to the ground. The pinpoint lights in its helm slits went out.
But for every Zak’reth who fell, half a dozen more Bazira perished. During the war, it had been the same: despite having an initial advantage of numbers, Alliance and Aluren fighters fell to the Zak’reth in droves. Their god imbued the warrior race with a talent for battle and a thirst for blood that was unrivaled on all of Lunos. The Bazira army was cut to pieces.
As the last Bazira fell, the remaining Zak’reth warriors vanished. But for the Bazira dead, the beach was empty. At her foot, the coin of Oshkat glinted dully. She bent and returned it to her pocket.
Another whumping sound shook the air and the Zak’reth warriors were lined up before her once again. Their numbers were undiminished; one hundred strong. The general with the dragon helm stepped forward. Phantom or no, his red blade dripped blood and more spattered his armor. Selena shivered and tried not to recoil.
The general spoke in his guttural tongue and Selena heard the words in Tradespeak resounding in her mind.
Your foes are no more. The general turned his helm to the moon that was obscured by storm clouds. You may call us again after three turns of the moon have passed. Twice more we will answer, then we rest and rise no more. For now, we serve until the sun rises.
Selena nodded, unsure what to say or if she should speak at all. She supposed she should thank them but the words stuck in her throat. The Zak’reth said nothing more and she knew they didn’t converse; they waited for orders. Her orders, and it mattered not that she didn’t serve the god Oshkat.
Another god has spoken to me. Helped me. She looked down at the burn on her wrist. A round patch of skin under her thumb was black and flaking off.
“Illuria,” she murmured and the burn healed. Strength returned to her body. And this is how the Shining face helps me. To heal my body from Bacchus’s attacks so that I might live long enough to close the greatest wound.
Accora had told her healing was the key to Bacchus’s defeat, and now Selena understood. In the thick of battle, there is no time to reach for an ampulla or the moon. The only mystery remained was why the god chose a Bazira as his vessel to instruct her but Selena no longer doubted. As she had told Ilior, if one waited long enough, the god’s light would reveal itself, no matter how dark the sky had been. And her sky had been cold and empty for ten long years.
Thunder bellowed. Lightning lit up the sky, tearing it open. The rain came down in sheets, soaking Selena instantly and turning the sand into a gritty mud. She turned her face up to the sky and let the rain fall into her parched mouth. Nothing tasted sweeter. Another gift. Selena almost laughed but a vein of steel was being forged within her and there was no time for laughter.
She turned and walked up the beach, her stride long and steady. A Bazira man lay face down in the sand. The pool of blood around his head was black in the darkness. She took up his sword. It was lighter than her own Paladin’s blade and the balance of it felt foreign. But it would do. For now.
Selena slipped the sword into her belt and peered through the pouring rain into the line of trees. Bacchus was in there, somewhere. Waiting for her. She laid her hand over the cold wound in her chest.
“This ends tonight,” she said, and marched into the forest.