Dragon Rise Read online

  Doing so would be tricky—and dangerous.

  “What is it?” Nina asked.

  “Just a plan.”

  “Why do I get the sense that this plan might not be particularly safe?”

  Fes looked around at the others. They had proven themselves far more capable than he would have expected. “Because it’s not.”

  They reached the back room and, as he feared, it was empty. Even the dragon relics that he’d seen here were gone. Arudis and the others had cleaned it out, removing everything of value. In a way, Fes was glad that they had, not wanting to have left anything behind for the Damhur to claim.

  “Keep them here,” he said to Nick.

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “I’m going to see if I can find another way out.”

  Nick’s eyes widened, and he nodded at Fes.

  He closed the door behind him, blocking the thirty Deshazl inside, and searched the hallways for other doors. When he found one, he threw it open and discovered a small room. Much like the others, it was empty, a layer of dust coating everything. How long had it been since anyone had been in this room? There weren’t any footprints in the dust, so even when Arudis and her people had been here, they had not come into this room.

  That meant it likely didn’t lead out again.

  What had she said about this place? There was a mixture of old and new in the village. Some of it was a remnant from the ancient war, a time from when the empire was building, and some were new, the village growing, taking on a life of its own.

  Maybe this room led nowhere, though if it were anything like the other dragon bunker he’d been to, it once would have led someplace.

  Fes turned to another door, and behind this one, there wasn’t the same layer of dust as there was in the last. People had been through here, sweeping it clean. There was a feeling of activity through here, a feeling that he didn’t have even in the main hallway.

  Fes looked along the walls and found a faint seam, a hidden door, and ran his fingers along it. There didn’t seem to be any way to trigger the door open, but there had to be.

  Hadn’t Arudis used some strange technique to open these doors?

  It had been her Deshazl connection. Fes was sure of that, but how?

  He hurried along the hall, feeling the wall, and tried to reach deep inside himself for that Deshazl connection. It was there, faint but real, and he pushed, drawing that sense up from within himself.

  As he placed his hands on the door, he let that part of himself, that mixture of rage and anger, begin to seep from him, drifting from his hands into the door.

  It happened slowly, but as it did, Fes felt something changing.

  It didn’t change him, but there was a change to the door.

  With a sudden click, the stone popped inward by several finger widths.

  Fes grabbed it and pried it open. On the other side, he poked his head in, looking to see whether there was a stairway as he hoped. He didn’t see a stair, only another room.

  That wasn’t what he wanted. He needed a way out.

  Fes closed the door, pressing it until it clicked, and headed back to the hallway. He stood there for a moment, feeling the steady, building pressure around him. There was a Calling. He could feel it, but it wasn’t anything quite like what he’d experienced when he’d been here before. This Calling had power to it, but not quite the same. He was able to ignore it, at least for now. How much longer would he be able to? How long would it be before he would feel compelled to respond?

  He had to continue to fight.

  The others had to continue to fight.

  Would they be strong enough to do so?

  Hopefully, they were hidden well enough, tucked away where the Calling couldn’t draw them out. Maybe they would remain frozen, nothing more.

  Fes searched the hall and hesitated.

  Was that footsteps that he heard?

  If it was, then the Damhur were coming. He wouldn’t have much time before they reached him, so he would need to move quickly. The lock would hold for only so long.

  Fes resisted the urge to run and check the lock. If he did, there wasn’t anything that he would learn. Instead, he hurried along the hall, checking other doors. Behind each door, he came to places that were much like the others. Each of them was empty, storerooms that no longer stored anything.

  When he was in the hallway, he heard the sound of footsteps again.

  Fes raced toward the end of the hall and reached the door that blocked off his people from the Damhur.

  Inside, Nina looked at Fes, her eyes wide. “What did you find?”

  “Not what I had hoped.”

  “We’re trapped?” Nick asked.

  Several other people began to murmur softly, and Fes shot him a silencing look. Nick didn’t seem to see it, or if he did, he didn’t seem to care.

  “We are not trapped. We’ll get out of here.”

  Nina looked at him. “How do you intend for us to get out of here?”

  “There has to be another entrance. In one of the other rooms, there was a secret door, and I’m hopeful that we can find another one like that.”

  “Like this?”

  Fes turned to see Dobrah standing near one of the walls. She was patting a section of the wall, and he realized that it had a seam around it much like the one that he’d seen in the other storeroom. “Just like that,” he said.

  He traced the outline of the door and slowly let the connection to Deshazl build within him, then eased it out. It was a controlled rage that he poured from himself. With a soft shifting and a sudden click, the door opened just enough for him to grab the edge of it and pry it all the way open.

  Nina and Nick crowded up behind him, with Joey trying to jump up over their shoulder. “Where do you think this leads?” he asked.

  Fes pulled the door open, holding it slowly, carefully, not wanting to pull it open too quickly in case there was something behind it.

  There wasn’t. Only a stair.

  He glanced back, nodding to the others. “This is what I was looking for.”

  “Where does this staircase lead?” Nina whispered.

  There were voices in the hall outside the room, and with it came a steady building, the sense of a Calling. It wasn’t nearly as potent as some of the Callings Fes had felt, but near enough that he was worried about it. Would others here be susceptible to it? Would they struggle to resist its effect?

  “Get everybody into the staircase,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Fes unsheathed his sword and stepped back out into the room. “Whatever it takes to get you time. That stair should lead to a building up above. We need to get them down here and have them searching. Take their horses and go.”

  Nina grabbed his arm and pulled him toward her. “We’re not going without you, Fes.”

  He glanced over at the door. If they pulled it closed from the other side, would the Damhur be able to open it? They wouldn’t have the same connection to the Deshazl, so they might not be able to open it.

  The voices on the other side of the door loomed closer. His heart pounded, and the sense of the Calling filled him. Surprisingly, no one else seemed affected.

  Were they targeting him?

  It would be better if they were. Fes hoped that he could ignore it, at least for a while. When everyone reached the stair, closing it off, Fes backed toward the door before hesitating.

  Maybe there would be some way to barricade the door.

  One of the shelves. Fes dragged it, hating that it made noise, but if they could convince the Damhur that the people inside were hiding, that they weren’t attempting to escape, then they would be able to buy themselves more time.

  The shelf scraped across the ground, and he dropped it in front of the doorway just as the door began to open. It slammed shut on the Damhur trying to open it from the other side.

  Fes raced back toward the hidden door and pulled it closed behind him. All around him were
the Deshazl on the stairs, and Fes could feel them standing, waiting. He slipped past them in the darkness, still holding his sword. When he reached the front of the line of Deshazl, Nina waited.

  “What did you do?”

  “Hopefully, I managed to give us a little time.”

  At the top of the stairs, they found another door. This one was much like the hidden one and required him to use his Deshazl connection to open it. More than ever, Fes believed that this was a place to hide from the Damhur and not so much a place to hide from the dragons as he had once thought. There were other places like this throughout the empire, enough that he had to know that these others once had traveled through here, likely Calling Deshazl, intending to use them.

  How many had been Called?

  With the door at the top open, he pulled it open carefully and poked his head outside. Faint sunlight drifted overhead, and he realized that they emerged in a crumpled building. Was this one that had been destroyed before, or was this one that had been rebuilt and subsequently destroyed when the Damhur had come last time?

  He glanced back at Nina. “Wait here.”

  “Fes—”

  He shook his head. “We don’t know what we’re going to come across. Pull the door closed behind me.”

  Nina stared at him for a moment before nodding. When he stepped out, the door closed with a soft click, a sense of finality coming with it.

  He resisted the urge to shiver. How many of the Damhur would he come across?

  If only there had been some way to ensure that they would have been drawn into the space beneath, but there hadn’t been any way to draw them down short of making more noise than he already had.

  Hopefully, the fact that they believed there were this many Deshazl trapped underground, and that the Deshazl had managed to escape and avoid them for as long as they had, would encourage them to send more people. Wouldn’t they need to if they were worried about what the Deshazl might do?

  He remained in the shadows of the crumbling building, waiting and looking out into the village. His mind drifted back to the last time he had been in a barracks like this and when he had faced mercenaries, thinking that was the most frightening thing that he could face. At that time, it had been the most frightening thing he could face. That was before he knew to fear the Damhur, and knew to fear the effect of the Calling.

  The last time he had been through something like this, he had not been equipped for a fight. He could ask Nick or several of the others who were skilled, but Fes hesitated to do so. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them, it was just that he had nearly killed Nick the last time when the Calling had overwhelmed him, and he didn’t want to do the same thing again.

  It was better to go alone.

  He darted to the next building over, pressing up against it.

  Waiting for signs that he had been seen, his entire body felt on edge. The sense of the Deshazl filled him, and he barely controlled the anger and rage seething within him. These others had attacked. They had confined people who had no way of defending themselves, and they had intended to bring them somewhere far from their home. All of that did nothing but make him angry—incredibly so.

  No one came, and Fes crept around the edge of the building, looking for signs of movement. Where were the horses?

  He thought it unlikely that they would worry about him or the other Deshazl stealing horses. These others wouldn’t think that he and the Deshazl were able to think like that. They viewed them as less than people. They viewed them as animals.

  He would show them just what kind of animal he was.

  No. He had to push back that sense of anger and rage, forcing it into the back of his mind. Doing that, acting like that, would do nothing more than draw even more attention to them. They didn’t need attention. They needed to escape.

  Find the horses and escape.

  He raced off toward the next building and poked his head around.

  There was no sign of any of the Damhur. There was no sign of horses. There was nothing. Could they all have gone below?

  If they had, now would be a time to go. Move the Deshazl out of the village, race away while they were searching, and get as far as they could from here.

  At the next building, he saw movement.

  Fes stared, watching until he saw that there were two, but no more than that.

  He held onto that barely controlled anger and lunged forward, cutting down one of the men before he was aware Fes was there. Fes spun, feeling the sense of the Calling for the briefest of moments until he slashed through the other person, who fell with a spray of blood.

  Thankfully, neither man had made a sound as they had fallen.

  Fes dragged them toward the nearest building and pulled open the door, forcing the bodies inside. It would do nothing to mask the blood staining the ground, but he could at least conceal the bodies so that anyone who might be on patrol wouldn’t see what he had done.

  He stayed in the doorframe, looking out for a moment before creeping back out. Two more buildings and he reached the edge of the village.

  Would he even be able to find his way back?

  He thought that he could. The buildings looked dissimilar enough that he should be able to find it, and with the destruction that had happened recently, there were only a few that looked stable enough to be where he had emerged from below ground.

  At the edge of the village, he saw a small copse of trees. Tied there were the horses.

  Three guards stood monitoring dozens of horses.

  Now wasn’t the time to attack. First, he wanted to get the Deshazl out, and once they were there, once they followed him, then he could race forward and attack the men guarding the horses. Fes made a circuit of the village, hurrying from place to place, and came across another pair of scouts that he cut down and hid in another building. There was no sign of any of the Damhur. Either they were inside, having gone underground, or they were hiding.

  When he raced back to the building he had come from, a nervous energy filled him. Using his Deshazl connection, he opened the door. For a moment, he feared that they wouldn’t be down there, but Nick jabbed forward with the sword. Fes blocked it.

  “It’s you,” Nick said.

  “Come on,” Fes said. He stepped off to the side, and the Deshazl hurriedly came out of the stairs and back up into the village. “Nick—take Sarah and Celine and guard the rear of the line. Follow me.” He turned to Joey. “I want you to keep an eye out. If you see anything moving, use that bow of yours.”

  Joey tried to smile, but it lacked any of his usual bravado. He was scared, the same as the rest of the Deshazl.

  Fes guided them through the village, keeping close to lines of buildings. The village was empty, and he saw no sign of movement, but feared that any time, someone would appear.

  “Where is everyone?”

  Fes glanced over at Nina. Her entire body was tense, much like Fes knew he was. “There were a few of them standing guard, but I removed them as a threat.”

  She nodded.

  “There will be three more at the line of horses.”

  “More than that were following us.”

  “I think they are in the tunnels beneath the village.”

  Nina nodded. They reached the edge of the village. So far, they had managed to do so without detection. He crept around the edge of the nearest building and looked toward the line of horses, and his heart dropped.

  There weren’t three of the Damhur standing guard. Now, there were nearly a dozen.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Fes jerked his head back behind the wall and sighed. How many would they lose attempting to escape? It wasn’t a matter of whether they would lose somebody anymore. With as many soldiers as were there, and with the likelihood that some of them could perform a Calling, he was more concerned about how many would be lost.

  “What is it?” Nina asked.

  “There were only a few by the horses before,” he said.

  “How many are there now?
”

  “Ten or twelve.”

  She nodded. “It’s the only way for us to get to safety, isn’t it?”

  “We can’t outrun them on foot. We need the horses.”

  “Could we run to another village?”

  “I was lucky to find this one. I don’t know what else would be out here.”

  “Then it’s these horses.”

  He looked at the line of Deshazl. Everyone was standing there, seemingly waiting for Fes to tell them what to do. He looked over at Nick. “I’m going to need you to be ready. You’re going to need to fight, but you need to fight the Calling if it comes.”

  Nick looked into his eyes and nodded solemnly. “I will fight,” Nick said.

  Fes looked at Celine and Sarah. “You too. It will likely come down to all of us fighting. We have to be ready.”

  Sarah nodded slowly. Celine showed a little less emotion.

  Fes took a deep breath. Even though they had been under siege since they had escaped, this was the first time where he really feared that he would lose some of the Deshazl he had rescued. He had grown closer to several of them in the last few days. He didn’t know everybody, but he knew them well enough, and he didn’t want anything to happen any of these people. They deserved more. They deserved an opportunity to be safe.

  He glanced over at Nina. “Whatever else happens, ignore the sense that makes you feel like you are going to freeze. You can fight that. Focus on yourself. Get to the horses, get the others to the horses, and head west.”

  “Why west?”

  “You need to head toward Anuhr. If nothing else, the capital can protect you. I don’t think they will risk the empire.” Yet. Eventually, he suspected, but not yet.

  She studied him. “We’re going to be okay.”

  Fes wished that he felt as confident as Nina, but he forced a smile. What else was there for him to do?

  Tapping Nick on the arm and motioning to Joey, he poked his head around the side of the building again. There weren’t any more than the last time he’d checked. It was still ten or twelve soldiers, no more than that, and if he could let that rage out of himself, if he could find a way to release it, maybe he would be able to get them to safety. Perhaps he could be enough to overpower these soldiers.