Bel looked up, shielding her face from the rain with her hand as she stared into the storm. The clouds were thick and the winds biting, and Bel couldn’t see any end to the weather. They were standing near the crest of a long slope that lead down to the Citadel, and would have been easily visible were it not for the curtains of rain that filled the air.

  “Can you fly in all this?” Bel asked her two gorgons, Crecerelle and Oculaire.

  Oculare grimaced, but Crecerelle shrugged. “I could probably do it,” the gorgon warrior answered. “And Oculaire could fly close to me.”

  She tapped the head of her war hammer. “But I wouldn’t be able to carry much more than I’ve already got. If you’re hoping that we can drop everyone onto the Citadel I don’t think it’ll work.”

  Bel nodded, disappointed but not surprised. She had fetched her group and led them to a good spot that overlooked the Citadel, but now they were standing around getting soaked. The difficulty of the task bit into them, along with the frigid cold. Jan had lifted a curved section of ground to give him and Flan some cover, but with their soaked fur they looked just as miserable as anyone else.

  She turned back to staring at the Citadel. For anyone without sight enhancing abilities there wasn’t anything to see but water, and even for her there wasn’t much more than that. Even with sight enhancement, the water flowing over the panes of the mobile barriers obscured their objective, although she could see the outline of the Citadel.

  “So what did you two learn?” Bel asked as the delver as he trotted back. Beth seemed to step out of a shadow a few steps ahead of him, but Bel couldn’t tell if her sister was actually moving through shadows or just masking her movements. It was a neat trick either way.

  The delver was less impressive, simply running at a speed so fast that his legs blurred. She bit her lip, trying to remember his name. Dirk? Dusky? She was pretty sure it started with a ‘D’. It probably had a ‘K’ too.

  Beth gestured to the man. “You go first, Simos.”

  Do I need to be good at names to be a good leader? Bel wondered.

  The bearded man nodded. “Right, so we’re definitely at the Citadel, but getting in is gonna be tough. There’s those rotating barriers, Technis managed to create a moat around it, and there are lookouts stationed along the towers.”

  “Could you count how many?” Beth asked.

  He tapped his temple. “I got an ability to see their body heat, but when they’re clustered together I can’t tell if it’s one person or a few standing together or just a fire. I’d guess around a hundred of them on the walls, standing an stride or two apart.”

  “How wide and deep is the moat? Does it have monsters in it?” Bel asked. She remembered the fire spirits that the dhvaras pulled out of the lava flows on their layer, and didn’t want any surprise repeats with massive sea monsters here.

  Beth and Simos shrugged.

  “Maybe twenty strides across?” Simos guessed. “Not too deep, I think.”

  He looked at Beth.

  Beth shrugged. “I think that’s about right. They drilled a hole straight through the cliff to the ocean to get the water,” Beth said, “so I guess that it could have sharks or something.”

  “Drilled a hole? Like the cat girls?”

  The delvers gave her quizzical expressions, but Bel didn’t explain the greatest danger on the Golden Plains.

  Beth shook her head. “No, it was rougher than that. More like something burrowed through.”

  Bel frowned as she thought that over. The Citadel was a poorly designed jumble of five towers, four at the corners and the widest and tallest one in the center. Each corner was joined to the central tower by a wall, although the distances from the smaller towers to the central one weren’t the same. The entire thing was shaped like two crossing lines, which Bel realized would make them visible to people on at least two of the walls if they tried to bypass the outer towers.

  “So what’s your plan, leader lady?” Beth asked.

  Bel sighed at the disrespect. “Was there any sign of Technis’ armies?”

  “Armies?” Simos replied.

  Bel lifted up her hands as if holding something large. “Yeah. His armies. We defeated the group at Baytown, and some of the people fighting the Golden Plains didn’t make it back, but he’s got way more than that.”

  Bel gestured at the Citadel. “That thing is way too small to fit all of them, right? It’s just a few towers and a couple of long walls.”

  Beth lifted her hand to her face and chewed on her thumb as she stared into the stormy weather. “That’s a good point.”

  “Ya thinkin’ it’s a trap?” Flann asked.

  Bel snorted. “Of course it’s a trap. I just want to know what the trap is before we step into it.”

  “Maybe he’s sacricin’ them,” suggested a delver. “That’s what I hear he’s been doin’ with all the people he took away.”

  “Sacrifice them for what?” asked another.

  “To open his portal thing, maybe?”

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  “You mean it’s already open?”

  Bel shook her head. “If he already opened the portal then the Citadel wouldn’t be guarded.”

  “Maybe they’re inside then, rolled up like bales of hay? Who cares?”

  That question came from Tim, who slammed his rock-encrusted fists together with a grinding thump. “Let’s just hit ’em hard. When they come spilling out like ants we can crush ’em.”

  Another delver nodded vigorously. “I know you’re built tough, lady. Why all the hesitation?”

  Bel closed her eyes and remembered Clark’s ambush in the Underworld. “Because these guys are crafty. We don’t want to rush into a trap.”

  Bel could tell from the delvers’ expressions that they weren’t interested in her hypothetical concerns.

  “They’ve got a point, Bel. If we can’t see the trap we won’t be able to avoid it, no matter how much we think about it. Let’s just crack open a wall and see what’s inside.”

  Bel cast a withering gaze at her sister. She knew that Beth was a stab first, think later kind of person, but couldn’t she see that rushing in was a bad idea?

  “Okay,” Bel said with a sigh, “but I want some people to hang back in case there’s a surprise.”

  She looked at Cress and Oculaire. “You two wait here. Technis’ soldiers don’t know how to deal with gorgons, but that won’t mean much if you’re caught in, I don’t know, a giant pit trap or whatever.”

  The two gorgons nodded.

  “The rest of us will just rush up to the closest tower and bash our way inside.”

  Bel frowned at the simplicity of her plan. “Anyone got any abilities that are good at breaking walls?”

  Jan and Tim raised their hands.

  “Right, I guess we’ll be counting on you two again. How about abilities to block arrows? Anyone got something for that?”

  One of the delvers, a burly woman with a twisted lip, raised her hand. “I can pull up a thick mist. It won’t stop an arrow or anything, but it’ll make it impossible to see us.”

  “Can we see out of it?” Flann asked.

  “I can see out of it, but not the rest of you.”

  I felt like we had to rush, but now I wish he had practiced this somehow.

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” Bel said firmly. “I’m going to transform into a big lava creature and charge the nearest tower. I’m pretty durable to arrows in that form, although if they’ve got a cannon up there I wouldn’t enjoy that.”

  She pointed to the mist person. “You and Beth and anyone who can conceal themselves spread out and move in from different directions. Everyone else follow behind me.”

  She pointed at the Citadel. “We’ll time our charge so that one of the rotating barriers is blocking their line of sight for as long as possible. They’re hard to see through and they should block attacks going both ways.”

  “What if they can control them?” Jan asked. “They’re just spinning around the place now, but it’d be strange if someone couldn’t move them into place.”

  “That’s why I want us to converge from different directions,” Bel replied. “I think I can get around them, too. And the gorgons can attack from above if they’re distracted with us.”

  “What about crossing the moat?” Simos asked.

  Bel’s brow furrowed. “It’s only twenty strides across, right? Can’t everyone jump over that?”

  Silence was the only reply.

  “Okay, that’s fine, who can get everyone across the moat?”

  “I can make a bridge,” Jan offered.

  “Is it fresh water?” one of the delvers, a tall man with dark skin and shaggy hair, asked. “If it’s fresh water then I can turn it into a thick mucous that hardens when it dries.”

  Bel stared at him, wondering why in the world someone would want that kind of ability.

  “Why the hell do ya have an ability like that?” the mist woman asked.

  “I was in a cave once when someone broke a wall into an underground river,” the man explained. “The entire cavern flooded with water and half of us drowned. If I’d had this ability back then, I could have plugged that wall right up.”

  “It’s saltwater,” Beth said. “It’s from the ocean.”

  “Oh, then I can’t help. It’s really slow with saltwater.”

  Bel turned to Jan. “I guess this one is on you, too.”

  The half-height meerkat shrugged. “Sure, it’s the fate of people like me who got such fantastic abilities.”

  Flann whacked him in the shin with his cane and Jan casually backhanded him in the stomach.

  “Great,” Bel said. “That’s the plan until we get inside. After that, I guess we stab people until we find Technis.”

  That got a cheer from all the delvers, and from Beth as well.

  Bel turned to the gorgons. “You stay here until we’ve hit the wall or we get into trouble.”

  She leaned closer and whispered. “And if it looks like Technis is gonna wipe us out, you can just run. I won’t mind.”

  Cress clapped her on the shoulder. “I’m sure that won’t happen.”

  Bel shrugged.

  “Okay, everyone who can conceal themselves, spread out.”

  Bel reached up to her head and ran her hand along Sparky. The little magma snake wasn’t pleased about the weather, and she could tell it was feeling lethargic from the cold. “Things are about to heat up,” she promised.

  She undid all of the buckles on her leather coat and hung it around her neck using the metal chain that clasped the front. Essence flowed into the little snake as Bel mixed spirits. Her body shifted and swelled, and her skin cracked as her flesh transmuted to stone and magma. The rain sizzled against her body as she grew hot to the touch. She stifled an instinctive roar as horns burst from her head.

  She turned to the citadel and snorted, eager to bring her justice straight to the heart of her enemy.

  A soft, metallic noise sounded to her side. She whipped her head around, and saw a thin metal wire flying through the air ten strides away from her position. The mist woman had kicked it loose from something, and was staring at it in wide-eyed horror.

  Before anyone could react, the ground around the mist woman erupted into flames. She didn’t mind the heat, but the force of the explosions pushed the Belemental back. She roared with frustration; any thought of surprise was gone now.

  As if to confirm her thoughts, thunder shook the air, but she knew it wasn’t from the weather.

  “Cannons!” she shouted.

  She meant for them to take cover, but, when faced with an immediate threat, the delvers’ instinctive response was to attack. They charged down the hill, any semblance of a plan forgotten. The delvers naturally spread out as they ran, some leaping over obstacles while others dodged around them. The cause of the first explosion became clear as more of them kicked wires that were randomly scattered along the rocky slope.

  Explosions from cannon fire joined the ones from the traps, filling the field with death. Blood joined the rain on the downward slope, and the ranks of the delvers thinned. The Belemental watched with dumbstruck horror as the slower delvers were picked off.

  Tim was the slowest of them all, but he gave up any attempt at running when a near miss tossed his rocky form to the ground. Rather than rise, he rolled down the slope, accreting the stones as he rolled over them. Soon he was a rocky boulder three times his original height, and strikes from cannon balls merely redirected him, unable to penetrate his thick, rocky shell. As Technis’ soldiers focused on the largest threat, the other delvers put on a burst of speed, making rapid progress towards the wall of the citadel.

  The Belemental looked at Jan, Flann, and the gorgons, the only people who were still waiting for her orders.

  “Maybe we shoulda burrowed under it instead,” Jan said.

  “Too late for that now, ya idiot!” Flann yelled.

  “You two stay behind me so I draw their attention,” she told the demi-humans. She looked at the gorgons. “And you two wait for a good moment to jump in. They probably have soldiers with flintlocks along with the cannons again, so wait for them to be distracted and be careful.”

  “Stay safe,” Cress said.

  Oculaire opened her mouth and gave a loud war cry. Bel responded with a shout of her own and took off down the hill. She melted the metal of her armor into two thick shields which she held in front of her face and prepared herself for the inevitable cannon strikes.