by Dave Dobson
Over by the statue, as the dust and haze swirled about them, Colette and Brand rose. Brand held her gently by the arm, protectively, I thought. Could she be special to him in some way? One of Clarice’s arrows darted down from above. It bounced off the statue only inches from Brand’s arm. He flinched and ducked behind the statue, dragging Colette with him. Lucianna yelled again and spat, and then she ran headlong at the four guards, her sword arm out at her side, sword point forward. One of the soldiers suddenly lurched and fell to one knee, an arrow stuck in his shoulder, and as he reached up to paw at his injury, Lucianna struck him hard across the chest. He went down, a red gash blossoming from shoulder to hip.
Boog ran up and stood at Lucianna’s side, his staff weaving and spinning as he struck out at the guards. Though there were three soldiers, my two companions were more than enough of a match. They parried, thrust, dodged, and struck, and after a few moments, the temple guards lay still at their feet. Lucianna bled from a cut over her eye, and Boog now favored his left ankle, but they turned as one back toward the statue, toward Brand and Colette. Boog stared at Brand, his eyes narrowed to angry slits, his teeth bared in a snarl, and he took a step forward.
At that moment, an enormous clanking started up again, this time from below. The entire floor lurched upward, and I fought to keep my balance. Brand looked surprised at this development, and he fell to his knees. Colette clutched onto the statue for balance. After the initial lurch, the movement upward was steady. I shot a glance skyward and saw a few heads poking over the edge of the wide hole in the ceiling. If they were Faerans, they were probably overjoyed to see us. If they were regular citizens, such as sellers of chickens, they were more than likely completely bewildered.
Once Boog was sure of his footing, he again moved toward the statue, running at an uneven jog. He swung a vicious stroke at Brand, knocking him prone. Colette drew a wand from her robe and began a singsong chant of strange words. As Boog spun to strike Colette, her wand glowed with a greenish light. Just as Boog was about to reach her, she flung her hand out, and the wand shot a bolt of green light at Boog. As it struck, Boog cried out and let go of his staff. The light swirled around him. Boog stiffened, his back arched, and then he fell where he had stood, his staff bouncing to the floor.
I shouted in anguish. Boog was down. My best friend in the world. Dead? Absorbed by the power of Faera? I had no idea. But Colette was to blame. I ran at her, howling, my warding rod in one hand, a dagger in the other. And as I raged, I could suddenly sense, below the floor, a presence, a hotness, seething, pushing upward. Was this Faera, alive beneath us?
Colette fired a green bolt at me as well, but the warding rod absorbed its power. I felt a ripple of energy as it dissipated. I reached her just as Brand struggled to his feet again. I swung my dagger at her, but it went wide as she shifted to avoid it. I turned to swing again, but Lucianna was faster. She plunged her sword deep into the priestess of Faera. The wand’s glow faded, and it dropped from Colette’s fingers. She gasped, and her legs crumpled. She slid to the floor.
“No!” screamed Brand. His wand was in hand. I knew what it could do. I dove aside, my warding rod at the ready. But Lucianna did not, and she did what her training told her. She yanked her sword back up, out of Colette, and swung at Brand. There was a flash of light, and a sound like the bark of a small angry dog, and Lucianna’s armor and sword fell to the ground, orange powder billowing up from the pile as it landed.
A wave of acute sorrow and anger washed over me. Lucianna was gone. But I had no time to mourn. I rose to face Brand. He was breathing heavily, looking down at Colette. He was pale, barely able to remain upright. I think that using the wand took a great deal of his energy. As he stood there, an arrow flew down from above and buried itself in his leg. His knee buckled, and he cast his gaze upward as he struggled to remain standing.
It was then as if time slowed to a crawl. I shouted at Brand, not words, just raw hate, a bestial snarl. But he did not care about me, then. He had been shot. The danger was from above. He raised the wand, and I saw that he aimed it at Clarice, up on the ledge, not at me.
Not Clarice.
Not Clarice too.
As crackling energy gathered around Brand’s wand, I hurled my warding rod at Brand, desperate to stop him. I had no time to think. If I had, I might have realized that throwing the rod left me defenseless against Brand’s wand. But I would have thrown it even so, with no hesitation, without a second thought.
Brand was familiar with the warding rods. He had seen me use mine, and he and Marron had likely plundered all of the Guild’s magical secrets. He knew that if it touched him, he would be paralyzed. So, he did that which came from instinct. He used his wand to knock aside the rod.
But his wand was an object steeped in destruction, in death, in chaos, and it was charged to strike. And my rod was an object designed to nullify magic, to cancel it, control it, and also to dissipate anger, passion, and violence with stillness, with peace. It was an object borne of control, of order. And as Stennis had discovered in the tavern, as Novara had found through the pool, and as Gora had told me, the surest way to ruin, as a wizard, is to try to bind aspects of chaos with aspects of order.
As my rod struck Brand’s wand, the rod discharged. Order struggled for an instant to contain chaos. But only for an instant. Brand’s wand exploded with a searing burst of light and heat. I saw Brand fly back from the blast, just as I was thrown back as well. My head struck something hard, and I slipped into darkness.
60
The Eclipse
Claws dug into my chest, and something sharp stabbed repeatedly at my face. Over and over. Not a weapon, unless an enemy with a blade was toying with me, prodding me. I opened my eyes to see a hideous feathered face, twitching to the left and right, bulging eyes staring at mine.
The chicken pecked me again, right in the nose. I knocked it off my chest, and it squawked and fluttered off. I sat up. I couldn’t have been out for long. the floor was still rising, clanking and grinding, although it was now almost level with the ledge where we had entered. The stairs we’d descended, cut into the wall, were now nearly covered up by the rising floor. Somewhere down there at the base of the stairs, now in a deep hole, was Marron. The whole chamber was much shorter now, and sunlight streamed in, replacing the darkness. I checked myself quickly for new injuries, but I seemed to be all right, other than ringing ears from the blast and a lump on the back of my head to match the one on top from Tolla’s blow. My other wounds ached, but the stitches held. As I looked down at my hands, I noticed that the shadows they cast were strange. Where light passed through my fingers, instead of crisp, regular edges to the shadows, they were curved into crescents.
The eclipse! I stared up at the sky. The moon covered most of the sun. It was too bright for more than a glance, and spots danced in my vision as I looked away. The daylight around me darkened noticeably as the eclipse progressed. I stood and cast my gaze around the room. A group of the Faerans was gathered at the edge of the room, wet and filthy, some of them climbing up onto the ledge, which was now only four feet above the floor and sinking fast. I saw that they were trying to reach Clarice. She skirted them and ran around the ledge. There were too many of them to fight, but she seemed to be keeping ahead of them for now. She fired several arrows back into them she ran, and some found their mark.
Across the room from me, I saw Brand struggling, crawling across the sun symbol. I didn’t know what he meant to do, but it couldn’t be good. I stumbled over to him, weak, my feet treacherous. He reached the midpoint of the sun part of the floor carving, where the small hole was cut into the floor, and then he noticed me approaching. He looked up, and I saw that his face was a burned, bloody mess. His right hand was missing. Taken, I presumed, by the explosion.
He laughed, wheezing. “You brought it,” he said. “You brought it.”
“What?”
“I hoped it would work without it, that one key would be enough. But you brought it! It can
only be destiny. Two keys.”
I couldn’t figure out what he meant. I had lost my dagger as well as my rod, so I had no weapon to use. I reached down and grabbed a handful of his robe, but as I did so, he raised his remaining hand. Clutched in his grasp was Novara’s amulet, the moon and sun of Faera. I pulled on Brand’s robe, tugging him closer to me, and with my other hand, I grabbed at the amulet. But he was too quick.
The sky darkened. Above us, the moon slid over the sun, and the only light came from a ring of fire around the dark disk of the moon. Brand slapped his remaining hand down, pushing the amulet down into the hole in the floor at the center of the carved sun. The amulet disappeared down the hole, and its chain slid in behind it. Suddenly, at my knee, I felt a burst of fire. It was the amulet we’d recovered from Stennis, the one I’d been carrying for so long. Pain shot up my leg, and a jet of fire spewed out from the patch. My trousers burst into flame.
I let go of Brand and jumped back, pawing and slapping at my knee. I tore at the thick cloth, singeing my fingers, but the flames died out. The amulet dropped out to the ground. It glowed red. I reached for it, but it was too hot to pick up. As I pulled back my hand, I felt something incredibly hot pass through me. I realized it was not a physical object, but instead a wave of energy, rising up from below. The same hot presence I’d felt before, then trapped below the floor, pushing upward. Now, it was free.
On the ground in front of me, Brand cried out. “Faera!” he screamed. He writhed and twisted, whether in pain or ecstasy, I couldn’t say. As I watched, black smoke poured out of the hole at the center of the sun carving, and it flew into his mouth and nose. His body transformed. His missing hand grew back, but not as a human hand. It was webbed, and his fingers were thin and ended in round balls, like those of a frog. He held up his other hand, and it contorted and stretched to match the other. His mouth widened, his upper lip protruded, and his eyes grew large and shifted outward, toward the sides of his head. His skin healed, then turned a dark green. His eyes turned red as blood, and his pupils expanded to vertical slits.
And he grew. His body expanded, and a rippling yellow-green mass of flesh wormed out from the bottom of his robe. As I watched, it extended, sprouting pairs of legs along the side, ending in feet with long feathery digits. His robe split and ripped as his body grew, and I saw that his whole body was yellow-green, with the backside a darker shade of green with angular spots. He was no longer recognizable as Brand. As he changed, I felt a flash of intense heat, emanating from the beast. It took me a moment to realize my skin was not blistering, and I seemed to suffer no lasting damage. I realized that the heat I sensed was not physical heat – it was the heat of chaos, of the magic I’d learned to sense from Gora’s teaching. And it wasn’t just Brand, or whatever he was now, producing the heat. He felt like a simmering ball, but there was a thick strand of chaos magic connecting him to something deeper, below, underground. It was so intense I didn’t need to close my eyes or extend any effort to sense it. It was just there, feeding into Brand from a source below the ground.
I backed away from the beast as it reared up, supporting itself on its thick, worm-like tail. It opened its mouth, waved its frog arms around, and let out an uncanny howl. I turned to run, and though I feared it would come after me, it did not. It was still twisting and growing. Its head was twenty feet above the floor now, and its body was twice that length with the many-legged tail section stretching out behind him.
To one side, I saw the group of cultists. They had given up their pursuit of Clarice, though she still ran away from them. Some stared, open mouthed. Others cowered. A few approached Brand, their arms outstretched. The central floor of the chamber was still rising. It had reached the level of the ledge now, and if it kept going, we would emerge from the hole into the open air, into the city. The statue of Hrogar was bathed in the dim sunlight of the eclipse, as was the top of the large blue glass disk behind the statue, its metal arms stretching out to either side. Clarice stepped up off the ledge onto the rising platform.
Brand, or Faera, or whatever he was now, bent down toward the cultists who approached. He extended his long, skinny arms and wrapped his glistening fingers around their heads. As he touched them, one by one, they sank to the ground, and then they too began to twist and change. There were five of them now, Brand the largest.
I saw Clarice loose an arrow. It flew straight to Brand and struck him in the yellow flesh of his upper body, under the grinning head. But as the arrow struck, it burst into flame and turned instantly to ash, leaving no mark on Brand. She shot again, and again her arrow was destroyed. Brand paid her no heed.
The other creatures had grown to match Brand’s size, though their coloring and spots were different. The platform was only a few feet below the surface now, and I could see the tops of buildings around us. Gradually the north market came into view. We had risen up in the center of the marketplace, in Fountain Square. In fact, the opening cut through the fountain itself. That must have been the source of the water that had cascaded down on us when the ceiling opened.
All around us, there were crowds of people, staring and shouting at us as we rose up. At the sight of the monstrous creatures that Brand and the other cultists had become, most of the spectators fled through the streets or into nearby buildings, although many remained. I saw around the necks of many of those who stayed the small moon and sun pendants. These were cultists, then, secure in their belief in Faera, or wanting their promised reward.
The platform reached ground level, the clanking ceased, and the movement shuddered to a stop. Brand and his companions split up, slithering across the platform and out into the marketplace, each of them trailing a strand of hot chaos magic below them. Many of the cultists were brave enough to approach the creatures, and some of them were grasped and transformed into still more of the monstrous things. But others burst into flame and turned to ash at the creatures' touch. There was no pattern I could see in who survived and who was destroyed.
Faced with the choice of being changed into a hideous frog worm or burned to ash in an instant, the more timid of the cultists turned to flee, running through the debris and chaos of the marketplace. Once they did, the creatures pursued them, their long bodies and many legs propelling them quickly around and over all obstacles. When they caught up to someone fleeing, there were no more transformations. All those the creatures caught were burned and destroyed. I saw a city guardsman charge at one of the creatures and attack, but he screamed and dropped his sword as it hit the creature. Most of the blade was simply gone. Only the hilt and a jagged bit of blade remained. The creature’s hand flashed out and touched the guard, and he was gone in a fiery instant, a cloud of black ash drifting in the breeze.
It was a terrible scene. There were now perhaps twenty of the things, and they spread out into the town, following the fleeing crowds down streets, or scaling the sides of buildings to find new prey. In the tumult, I had hidden behind a nearby market stall. When the shouts and screams receded, I came out, and I saw a few other people cowering or crawling through the destroyed marketplace.
Suddenly, ashamed, I remembered Boog. Dreading what I would find, I went over to him. He was out cold, but his chest still rose and fell. Not dead. Not yet. Relief washed over me. I rolled him over on his back and shifted one of his legs to a more comfortable position.
“Marten!” It was Clarice. “Is he…”
“Alive,” I said. My voice failed me after that. She was standing nearby, on the broad platform that had been the floor of the temple. I ran to her, and she hugged me, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“It was terrible – Lucianna, and all the others… What are those things?”
“We’ve failed,” I said, miserable. “I think…… the city is lost. Maybe the world.” I realized I hurt all over, bruised, burned, carved up. I sat down heavily, and Clarice knelt beside me. Above us, the moon crawled across the face of the sun, dimming the daylight and twisting shadows into bizarre arcs and curls.
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br /> “Is there anything we can do?” she said. “There must be something.”
“We can’t fight them,” I said. “I don't think they can die.”
“We can’t run,” she said, ferocity in her voice. “I won't let them kill all of us. There must be something we can do.”
I tried to calm myself, to think. Something nagged at me, and I realized what it was. The pool’s foretelling had shown the city destroyed by fire, not by immortal overgrown amphibians. Had the pool failed? Or did the fire come later, once Faera really got going? Perhaps the monsters were merely the first of countless plagues to come.
As I thought, my breathing slowed, and my mind became clearer. I closed my eyes, and I sensed once again the cool presence I’d detected earlier, at the end of the tunnel when we neared the temple. It was directly below me now, under the temple floor, still vast, bigger and stronger than anything I’d felt before. This must be Faera’s prison, I supposed, that had kept us protected for centuries. But it was cracked, torn, shuddering. I also felt something nearby, a small but intense spot of coolness. I opened my eyes to look, and saw the amulet, the one that had burned itself out of my trousers.
Just as a key can unlock a door, it can also lock one, Gora had said.
I went over to it. Why was it cool now? I had only sensed it before when angry, and then it was a hot presence, chaos magic. But now it was cool, the same as the pools, as the warding rods. How could it change?
Then I remembered – fae-rah, which Gora said meant fusion, or unity. Perhaps it was both. The prison had been both, in a way. A huge, strong presence of control, of order, locking down its destructive prisoner, itself an immense power of chaos and death. If the amulets were the keys, as Brand had said, then perhaps they too had both types of magic combined. But chaos and order were supposed to be opposed. When my rod touched Brand’s wand, it had exploded. Had the ancient builders of this place found a way to combine them? Perhaps that was the only way they found to contain Faera, to nullify it. Maybe Faera was more properly the name of the prison and its prisoner together rather than just the being.