Marked for Death

Chapter 54

Bastard dropped its sword, and the guards holding Sallah and Burch let their prisoners go and dove for their lives. The airship sped forward, her hull looming larger than a moon before the people on the box’s platform. Burch glanced around, desperate for any way to escape.

“Stop!” Bastard said through his golden horn.

The two titans hauled back on the airship’s rope ladder and mooring line, and the craft came to a shuddering halt. Deothen pitched forward off the bridge and went skittering along the deck until he came to a stop at the railing across the bow. Still anchored by the two titans, the side of the ship bounced off the arena floor shy of its mark, the ring of fire causing the wooden panels to burst into flames.

“More power!” the senior knight shouted as he scrambled to his feet.

The ship rose back into the air as she strained upward and forward, and Deothen reached out over the railing as if he wished for nothing more than to strangle the gloating warforged below with his bare hands.

Burch took advantage of the distraction to scoop up Kandler’s blade where it lay near his feet and vault down onto the arena floor. He turned and beckoned Sallah to follow, but Bastard reached out and snagged the lady knight by her sleeve.

Burch was about to race back into the private box when he heard a roar from behind. He looked back to see Kandler raising the blazing blade he’d borrowed high over his head in a two-handed grip as he dashed the few steps toward the mooring line. The titan next to the justicar spotted him coming and smashed at him with its hammer-hand, but it miscalculated Kandler’s intent and the blow went wide.

The vibration in the floor from the falling hammer might have caused Kandler to stumble, but he leaped into the air before the shockwave hit him. Stretched as far as he could go, the justicar slashed down at the mooring line with every ounce of strength in his arms.

The long rope snapped. The titan holding on to the loose end tumbled backward to the hole its hammer blow had just made. It tried to stop its fall, but its hammer-limb disappeared into the hole. There was a terrible crunching sound as the arm was twisted around under the moving city in a direction it was never meant to go.

The mayhem in the stands drowned out that noise. The weight of the titan no longer pulling it back, the airship darted forward and crashed into the stands like a meteor falling from the sky. As the ship came careening in, Sallah tore her arm away from Bastard, leaving him holding an empty sleeve of her shirt. Free from the warforged leader’s grasp, she dove out of the box and toward the arena floor.

The airship’s bowsprit lanced into Bastard’s reserved seats, and Deothen hurtled over the railing. He landed amidst the wreckage of the box. Only his armor saved him from being impaled on the collection of jagged boards on which he landed.

The titan still attached to the rope ladder sailed along after the ship, yanked off its feet by the sudden change in momentum. It crashed into and through the bottom of the airship’s hold, its top half wedged in the hole it made. Its legs landed in the airship’s ring of fire and were incinerated.

The airship’s restraining arches held, although they creaked with the effort. The lower arch broke through the arena floor like a plow cutting through a field. The stands beneath the airship burst into flames as the ring worked to reestablish its natural shape by turning everything in its path to ash. Burch grabbed Sallah’s arm and dragged her away from the fiery ring.

The warforged in the stands trampled over each other as they tried to escape the disaster. Some near the top opted to leap over the exterior wall to the platforms far below rather than brave the flames or the stampedes. Some of these crashed through the platforms to the earth moving beneath.

“Hey!” Kandler said, as he dashed up behind Burch and Sallah. “I think you have something of mine.” He held up Sallah’s sword.

Burch handed Kandler’s blade to him, and the justicar returned the sacred sword to Sallah.

“That’s a fine blade,” the justicar said.

An amplified voice called out from the burning wreckage of the stands. “To me, my people!” It was Bastard. “Kill the intruders! Save me! Save-! No!”

The voice stopped, and Burch led Sallah and Kandler around perimeter of the ring of fire to where they could peer through the smoke engulfing the stands. As they watched, two silvery forms came flashing out of Bastard’s private box, their polished surfaces glinting in the angry light of the airship’s blazing ring.

“Father!” Sallah screamed.

Deothen landed atop Bastard and pounded the creature’s face with the pommel of his sacred sword. The warforged leader snarled and shoved the senior knight off his body.

“Look!” Burch said, pointing at Bastard. “It’s stuck.” The spikes on the creature’s back had pierced the floor onto which the creature had fallen, pinning it there.

As Bastard struggled to break loose, Deothen circled the creature, looking for the perfect opening for his sword. Before he could strike, the warforged twisted its body free. The action wrenched a large part of the flooring behind it away, and it fell through the hole it created.

“You’ll not evade me so easily!” Deothen shouted as he leaped through the hole, following Bastard down into the nether region beneath the city’s moving platforms.

“No!” Sallah shouted as she watched her father disappear. Before she could race across the arena floor to join him. Burch grabbed her by the shoulder.

“We have a bigger problem,” the shifter said.

Sallah turned to see what Burch was talking about. Before her, the titan with a remnant of the airship’s mooring line still wrapped about it tore free from its mangled hammer-arm and climbed to its feet.

Burch leaned over to Kandler and said, “What do you suggest we do about that?”

“Only one thing seems to have worked so far,” the justicar said, grabbing Sallah and Burch by their arms and shoving them before him. “Run!”

The three raced off across the arena floor. They avoided the hole through which Deothen and Bastard had disappeared and gave the burning section of the stands a wide berth.

When the trio reached the far end of the arena, they looked back to see that the one-armed titan was still lumbering after them. “It’s following Bastard’s last orders,” Sallah said. “It’ll run us down until we die or it’s destroyed.”

“See that?” Burch said. He pointed to one of the ballistae mounted on the low walls on each corner of the arena. The crew that had been stationed at it had abandoned it when the fire began. The weapon stood loaded and ready, pointed outward as part of the city’s defenses against invaders. It looked very much like a giant-sized version of Burch’s beloved crossbow.

“Bet it turns this way too,” the shifter said.

“Get up there,” Kandler said to Burch. “I’ll keep this moving mountain of armor busy.”

Burch slapped the justicar on the back and then raced away, looking for a way to get on top of the wall.