Horsemen's War (The Rebellion Chronicles #3) - Steve McHugh Page 0,98
Arthur. To end his tyranny. Once and for all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
NATE GARRETT
Mordred, Judgement, and I destroyed the wall that I’d jumped off instead of fighting an entire battalion of Horsemen by myself. We stepped into the city as the sounds of battle could be heard from where our allies had engaged with the enemy.
“Mordred, lead the way,” I said.
The first group of Horsemen we ran into attacked without pause. There were a few dozen of them, and Judgement was the first to dive into the fray, her blades of light cutting through anyone stupid or unlucky enough to be in her way.
I dodged the swing of a huge maul from a mutant Faceless that had become one of the massive Horsemen, and I drove a blade of lightning into its groin, lifted it up to its heart, and detonated the blade, ripping the Horseman in half.
The dwarves, including their queen, and Tarron did their bit, but mostly they just let the three of us take point and defended rearguard. We fought wordlessly, our magic rending flesh, killing, and maiming, until all the Horsemen before us were dead.
I dropped an ax onto the ground next to the headless Horseman who’d used it, and we moved on without a word.
“Mordred, you okay?” I asked.
Mordred nodded.
“You sure?” I asked. “That guy was a headless Horseman, and you said nothing.”
Mordred forced a smile. “I’m saving up my quips for when I face my father.”
“You got any good ones?” Judgement asked.
“I thought Die, motherfucker would be my go-to,” Mordred said before we ran across a street. I spotted several more Horsemen running toward the battle at the city entrance.
“Catchy,” Orfeda said from behind me.
We reached the top of the lift shaft without incident and descended into the prison. I felt on edge, like Arthur was going to do something bad. There was no chance he didn’t have a contingency in case the city started to fall.
Freeing the dwarves would be one thing, but actually getting them out of the city. . . well, that was going to be a whole different ball game.
We reached the bottom of the lift shaft and exited the elevator into darkness. I ignited a ball of flame, and Mordred and Judgement both did the same with their light magic, which was considerably brighter.
“Show-offs,” I said, extinguishing the ball of flame in my hand and changing my vision to thermal imaging. If something was waiting for us in the darkness, I wanted to know about it before any light touched it.
We walked through the tunnels, Mordred leading the way, and stopped as we entered a massive cavern, where my thermal imaging lit up like a Christmas tree. There were hundreds and hundreds of dwarves just on the few levels I could see. In the middle of the room was a pile of Horsemen corpses. I walked over, and Mordred threw several large globes of light up into the air, illuminating everything and revealing that the corpses had mostly been decapitated or ripped to pieces.
“That would be us . . . we happened,” said a familiar voice.
“Remy?” I asked, looking up.
“Hey,” Remy said. “We got bored waiting, so we started without you.”
Diana’s werebear head appeared over the top floor, and I took a step back so I wasn’t craning my neck to look at them both.
“We came back,” Irkalla said. “I think we’ve got pretty much everyone free at the moment; we couldn’t do much until you’d left with Merlin, but once he was gone, the other soldiers here weren’t much of a problem.”
“Where are Lucifer and Zamek?” Mordred asked.
“Zamek is busy trying to remove a lot of runes,” Irkalla said. “Now that Queen Orfeda has arrived, I assume you can all help with that.”
“Yes, we can,” Queen Orfeda said, ordering her guard to do exactly that.
They ran off to either side of the prison and set about working to remove the runes on the cells as several of the dwarves let out cries of relief.
“You need to hear what Dethian has to say,” Irkalla said, introducing a hunched-over dwarf.
“I’m Nate,” I said.
“It’s a pleasure,” Dethian said, his hands almost forming claws. Whatever happened to those responsible for this, however brutal and painful, it wasn’t going to be enough.
“Tell him what you told us,” Irkalla said.
“They had humans,” Dethian said. “Tens of thousands of humans. We’d see them brought through the realm gate and marched through the city. Most were screaming as they entered the buildings all