Chapter 48.3: Truth of the Matter

Ventyr shook his head, wincing to regain his wits. “Situation report?”

He heard Crusader Jindel fire off another shot from the backside of the wagon barricade, and she whirled back, pressing herself into the wooden bed. “It’s not good, sir.” She opened the gun’s loader and shook out empty casings before tossing the weapon to the ground beside her. “It just got worse. The asura are split between us and the bandits, but we’re pinned down and out of ammu— behind you!”

Before Ventyr could turn to see what had startled her, she flung an axe. He felt wind off the weapon as it passed in a whirling streak and buried itself in the neck of a thickly muscled human rising over the crate barrier. The man screamed, dropping the mace he’d raised overhead and falling back out of view.

Ventyr nodded his thanks to Jindel and rose above their barriers to scan the scene for himself. The crusader was right. Some dozen more asura had come out of the western complex. Jindel, or maybe the bandits, had stopped a couple of them at distance, but the rest were still gaining ground on both them and the humans at the other wagon. Wisened by their losses, those still moving huddled in small cadres behind golems that shielded them from continued gunfire. Equally disconcerting, he realized that the bandits at the wagon weren’t alone; other humans had managed to take scattered gunnery positions around the ravine to slow the progress of the Inquest while the four at the other wagon set their focus on Ventyr, Jindel, and Yissa. In fact, as the broad-chested man with the axe in his neck still writhed just beyond the crates, a man even larger approached with a huge warhammer in hand and a rail-thin rifleman following in his wake. Ventyr recognized them both.

He dropped back to a crouch in the shelter of the crates and hissed a curse. He seldom swore, but he, Jindel, and Yissa were outnumbered and out-positioned in every way, and Ventyr had put them here.

“Not good?” Yissa asked, brushing nervously at her lips.

He shook his head.

“You know, Sergeant,” she said, forcing a fragile hope into her voice, “it would likely benefit us immensely if you could generate another of those pyromantic cyclones.”

Ventyr said nothing, looking from her to his open hands. They shook, and his head still felt airy.

“Just one or the other?” she offered, big eyes locked on him and beginning to glisten. “Just a fire or a tornado? Even another of your assistive, little rock walls would be a substantial improvement.”

Ventyr sighed, clenching hands into fists to stop the shaking. He closed his eyes to tune out the sounds of struggle and extended his senses to conjure anything he could. Whatever element he reached first, he would—

Ventyr froze, eyes opening wide. Yissa watched him with more than a little uncertainty, but she said nothing. It had been years since this had happened, and the recognition of it sent a shiver up his stalk.

He shut his eyes and tried again, incorporating an old chant for focus this time, but the same thing happened: absolutely nothing. He reached for one element after the next, but couldn’t get traction on any of them. Water and earth were nowhere to be found—not even discernible to his mind’s eye. Physically, he could see the ground in every direction, but magically, he couldn’t feel it at all. Air fled from his touch, refusing to stay still enough for his faint grip to do anything with; it laughed at him. Even fire slipped away, dancing furiously beyond his grip and sneering back at his efforts.

He had nothing.

“Sergeant?” Yissa asked. She didn’t even bother dressing her worry this time.

“I’m sorry,” Ventyr said, pressing hands to the ground to keep himself steady. He couldn’t tell if exhaustion or shame threatened him more.“The elements won’t respond.”

“The elements— what?” The scholar scowled incredulously. “Certainly you mean that you were too weak to utilize them. After all, how in the Alchemy could non-sentient, elemental forces have any governance over…”

Ventyr let Yissa’s mouth go off in whatever direction it would, choosing instead to focus on what mattered. Without his elemental control, their available resources were beyond thin. He knew what that meant.

“We don’t have the power to win this conflict,” he said, interrupting the scholar’s ongoing theories of elemental manipulation. “Not in the way we’d hoped.”

Yissa silenced, and Jindel turned uneasy eyes on him. “Sir?”

“The jade is our new objective, not the enemy fighters. If we don’t leave this valley, neither do those shards.”

The crusader looked away, subsuming his words. Ventyr knew she understood the personal implication.

The scholar, however, was not so thoughtful, jumping up to clutch desperately at Ventyr’s chest. “Sergeant, surely you can’t—” She cut off, recognizing the touch of unclothed cellulose and snapping her hand away. The embarrassment wore off all too quickly. “Apologies. But you can’t possibly be intending what I interpret that phrasing to mean. The destruction of any single piece of that mursaat jade would be an immeasurable loss to the historic record of Tyria, but the destruction of all of it would be simply catastrophic! We stand on the threshold of an unparalleled discovery that I can’t possibly allow you to annihilate!”

Ventyr was dumbstruck. Even now, the Priory scholar only saw her research.

“You saw as well as I did what it can do to a creature,” he snapped, pointing back toward the eastern wing of the facility.

Scholar Yissa let a grimace slip. “Certainly,” she agreed, “but in the wrong hands, any—”

“I don’t see any right hands here, Scholar. Do you?” He stared at her, driving the words home.

An obstinate innocence remained in the asura’s eyes, something almost childlike. If it hadn’t been so currently sickening, Ventyr might have appreciated it. But before Yissa could rebut again, a crate exploded from the barrier at Ventyr’s back, whipping them all free of their debate.

Ventyr ducked aside, into the upturned bed of the wagon, seeing the twisted shell of a golemite bounce away past the others, as they too pressed themselves into the bed. All three heads spun to get a view of exactly what had happened, when a broad, steel hammer head smashed down into the next crate, blowing it into splinters as well. The dented, steel shell of another golemite bounded out, and bits of hay rained slowly down around them. The large man holding the end of the hammer’s haft came into focus behind the shattered barrier: he was the one Ventyr had recognized from their encounter in the Queens Forest. He sneered, laughing as he lugged the big weapon back up to his shoulder.

Ventyr’s head spun with battle tactics, but he was slow to surface the best of them. Fortunately, a call from somewhere behind the big human forestalled him. “Gregor, you fool! You damage that cargo, and I damage your over-ripe skull!”

This Gregor growled, seeming to think a moment as he rested the weapon over his shoulder and plodded around the barricade rather than continuing through it. Ventyr recognized his course correction above the remaining wall of cargo, when a streak of glowing energy shot past the human’s face. He jumped back a step, and another shot sizzled past. “Remi, the rats are shooting at us!” he bellowed.

Ventyr heard another voice, just beyond the crates. “I can see that,” There was a rifle-crack. “You do your job. I’ll do mine.”

“Well, then, do it already,” Gregor snapped, darting around the crates and into the shelter of the upturned wagon. Legs shifting to a wider stance, he glared down at Ventyr like a grizzly over prey.

Seeing him unobstructed now, everything about the man’s part in their kidnapping and Crusader Jindel’s torture came back to Ventyr. He’d been little more than a tool in the bandit chief’s employment then, and judging by the filth that covered his half-tattered clothing and weary face, he still was. But that excused nothing; a crime was a crime—an abuse, an abuse.

In his periphery, Ventyr caught sight of Jindel’s seething recognition of the man too. She reached for the knife at her belt as Ventyr collected himself, widening his grip on his staff. He seldom had to use it as a melee weapon, but the smoothed knicks he felt in the shaft of hardwood reminded him of all the times it had successfully served him as one. It would have to again.

“Is that your skinny buddy over there?” Crusader Jindel scoffed, nodding beyond the crates. She got her feet beneath her. “Sounds like he’s not protecting you from the big, bad Inquest. Do you need protection? I could help.”

The taunt landed.

The big man huffed, nostrils flaring, and before the response reached his lips, he was in motion. “I don’t need no protecting!”

His hammer arced forward in an overhead swing that aligned with his movement toward Jindel. She rolled aside, rising beyond the wagon with axe and knife primed for an attack as the hammer’s massive head punched through the wagon’s bed like paper. With a yelp, Yissa leapt the other way, getting tangled in Ventyr’s limbs as she scrabbled past him and up against the remaining crates, pressing herself as far into the ramshackle corner as she could get. She was almost— no, she actually was ripping open a crate and wedging herself into it. Ventyr had no time for whatever she was doing.

Gregor’s attention moved with Jindel. He chuckled scornfully, eyes on the two blades in her hands. “Those are cute. What do you mean to do with them, cut your dinner?” He yanked the hammer, but it didn’t come. He’d gotten it stuck between the boards of the wagon.

“Now, Crusader!” Ventyr yelled, spotting the tactical opening. The man seemed to have forgotten him in the clash with the crusader, giving Ventyr an opening to shoot up, spinning the staff for momentum and slapping it down across Gregor’s fingers still wrapped around the hammer shaft.

The big man released his grip, crying in pain and pulling back the struck hand. Jindel lunged, not for the man, but for his weapon. Dropping her knife, she took a two-handed grip on the axe and swung like a woodcutter, biting the blade into the hammer’s haft, which still stuck straight out of the splintered wagon bed. Chips of wood burst from the impact point, but it wasn’t enough. She pulled back and swung again and again, hacking in hopes of shattering the weapon’s grip.

Gregor rubbed his struck hand once and then let it go, recognizing Jindel’s strategy. He swore something vile and moved for her, extending hands toward her throat as she dug the axe into the hammer’s shaft again.

Ventyr came at him from the side, bringing down another overhead strike through Gregor’s extended arms. The man wasn’t paying attention, and Ventyr caught him solidly across both forearms, knocking his outstretched arms downward with a force that pulled him off balance. The sylvari was panting again with the exertion—he felt his hands still shaking—but with a man this large, there was no holding back. He followed the momentum of the swing to the opposite side of his own body, switching grips and bringing the staff back down again across the man’s shoulders and then his neck, bouncing from one blow into the next with all the weight he could muster. Gregor belched a grunt and sprawled to the ground, but not before grabbing hold of the very end of the hammer haft. His weight, combined with another chop from Jindel’s axe, wrenched the wooden shaft in two, most of it coming free in the bandit’s grip as the head and top few inches fell to the ground on the other side of the wagon.

Bleeding where his mouth had hit a rock in the road, the huge man thrust himself back up, ramming the butt of the severed hammer haft into Ventyr’s middle and knocking out of him what wind remained. Jindel moved at the attacker, but before she could get there, Gregor flipped himself to his back and smashed the opposite end of the wooden shaft across Ventyr’s face. Stars popped in Ventyr’s vision, and he flew, the earth spinning past until it suddenly rose to meet him. 

Seconds passed before he came to himself, body still sparking with pain, ears ringing, skull on fire, and his open mouth full of dust. And Gregor, he could sense, stood over him.

Ventyr rolled, scrambling to right himself before the next blow fell. With the power in this man’s arms, he could split Ventyr’s head with or without the hammer. He summoned any strength he had and pushed himself up from the road, already throwing arms across his face in defense, but Gregor, he saw between crossed arms, wasn’t there. Instead of seeing the hulking human looming over him, he saw the man once again belly-down in the grass, a couple of yards from the wagon and crates, his face turned toward Ventyr, eyes open and vacant.

Ventyr rose to his knees, gritting his teeth and trying to make sense of things. Every little movement was a stab of pain to his temple, and he felt cool sap leaking from an open wound in his head, but when his eyes found Yissa, he quickly understood. She stood beside an opened crate, its golemite pulled out a few feet and opened up, with wires stretching to the asura’s hands, where the ends still sparked. There were two similarly sized burns in the fallen man’s leg, back, and head.

“Dwayna’s light.” Jindel whistled lightly, glancing at the asura with what was either unease or admiration.

“Thank you,” Ventyr rasped, still trying to regain his breath. “Thank you, Scholar. I’m not sure I would have—”

“Apologies, Sergeant,” she interrupted, still wielding the charged cables, “but we currently have no time for gratitude.” She pointed a thumb beyond the crate stack. “There are more humans and Inquest approaching from the north and west. And the gentleman over there is performing some manner of ritual on one of the golemites.”

Ventyr felt his brow rise, unbidden. “A ritual?” He dragged himself to his feet and pushed weakly above the crate pile to see what in Tyria the scholar was talking…about.

He blinked, seeing precisely what she’d described.

Several asura and a couple of their golems had fallen while approaching what remained of the two wagons. That didn’t seem to disparage the rest of them, though. Even the bandit shooters still harrying them from ever nearing vantage points failed to stop the Inquest headway.

Two of the bandits’ number had made their way to the jade wagon and taken up positions in defense of their overseer, who sheltered against the east side of the flattened vehicle and its crystalline payload. As Yissa has said, he sat, eyes closed, mouth moving, and hands marionetting the air. Only, it clearly wasn’t the air that the man was controlling. Ventyr could only just see the rivulets of faint, purple light wafting out of a golemite at the scarred man’s feet, but it was there. 

Before he could process the information, though, one of the guards beside the bandit lord caught his eye. Their gazes locked, and the shabby, dark-haired human raised her rifle.

Ventyr ducked just as a round whizzed over the wooden barricade, and he heard calls between the bandits on the other side. Someone was being sent their way again, but his mind was on the other detail: that of the purple light being drawn out of the little, deactivated golem.

He looked to Yissa, who nodded. She flashed a glance at the pile of crates and displaced golemites, and he knew she’d come to the same conclusions, though in her they seemed to stir excitement.

“Astounding, isn’t it?” she said. “The last source of mursaat magic in Tyria isn’t even as far away as that wagon. It’s been right here in these crates this whole time. And that human over there? My ears, I suspect he can manipulate it!”