Age of Death

by Michael

Gath stopped them again, and a moment later, King Mideon appeared with a solemn expression. He faced Fenelyus. “She’s got the Breakwaters guarding the approach.”

  “How many?”

  “All of them.”

  “All?” the fane asked, stunned. “Has she left the rest of her realm open? Why would she do such a thing? Why take such an insane gamble?”

  “A shame we didn’t know,” Gath said. “We could be ransacking the White Tower right now.”

  “Can you do something about the giants?” Mideon asked.

  Fenelyus nodded. “Draw your forces back.”

  The king gave the order, trumpets sounded, banners waved, and troops retreated. As they did, Gifford saw that the way ahead was blocked by a dozen giants with locked arms. These were not normal Grenmorians, but something more rudimentary. Just as roundhouses were simpler versions of Fhrey homes, these giants were primitive even among a race not known for sophistication. They seemed to be unfinished—blunt faces, mouths that hung agape, and dull eyes that constantly looked to one another for reassurance. They were also big and solid and scary, standing with shoulders lined up, making a wall twenty feet high.

  Fenelyus moved forward. As she did, a section of the floor rose, giving her height. At the same time, she grew in size and brilliance. Her cloak became a vast cape of shadows and her hands as bright as torches. They left streaks in the darkness as she moved them in a rotating pattern. Between them, a great ball of purple light took shape and expanded. Then without fanfare, she rolled it forward. As it moved toward the Breakwaters, the ball swelled. Gifford watched in anticipation for a great impact, eager to see what would happen when the line of giants was struck, but well before it reached them, the great purple sphere of light winked out as if it had never existed.

  Then from the right, a jolting blast of lightning streaked across the plain. The blast struck Fenelyus—or nearly so.

  This was not the first time Gifford had witnessed a magic duel. He’d stood with the other residents of Dahl Rhen when Arion and Gryndal had fought. But in the realm of Nifrel, that which had been invisible in the real world was exposed. Just before the lightning reached Fenelyus, he saw a glowing blue shield block it. The shield was simpler and brighter than the armor Alberich had made, but it was every bit as effective.

  Watching the two Miralyith was the key to understanding the true nature of the realm of Nifrel and perhaps all of Phyre. Power came from a spirit’s strength of will, from desire, whether that was to obtain something or merely to exist. But the ability to wield power in meaningful ways was limited by familiarity. None of them needed to walk, to move, or swing a sword to fight. Alberich didn’t need to hammer fictitious metal to make armor, and armor wasn’t necessary. But these were the ways people understood how to achieve what they desired. Fenelyus worked closer to the raw power than the dwarf. She made her armor from sheer resolve. The Art of the living world and the force of will of Phyre had to be nearly the same in principle, except that in Phyre, using the Art would be like painting without the paint. All that was brought to the canvas was the idea.

  A second bolt of lightning struck the shield Fenelyus held. Tracking it back, Gifford saw a familiar ring-pierced face. Gryndal stood on his own raised pedestal of stone and shot his white-hot streaks over the heads of the army. A shout went up and troops charged the former fane’s position. Held fast, locked down in defense, she would be unable to defend herself.

  “Get in there!” Mideon shouted at the Belgriclungreian leader, Caldern, who started forward with a troop of well-armored warriors.

  “Wait,” Fenelyus shouted. With one hand up, still holding the shield that illuminated the world around them, she squeezed her other hand over and over, molding something into existence. Gifford couldn’t see what it was until she threw it.

  A dark ball rocketed across the plain from pedestal to pedestal. Gryndal threw up his own shield of light, but the dark ball passed through, snuffing out the shield as it did. A burst of brilliant light blinded everyone watching. When the flash was over, Gryndal was gone, and so was his pedestal. What remained was a shallow crater.

  By then, the armies were converging on the former fane.

  With a grunt, Fenelyus swept her arms and threw everyone back with a force that, in the land of the living, might have been a powerful wind, but in Phyre, it was a spray of silver.

  “Whoa,” Roan whispered.

  “Fen! The Breakwaters!” Mideon shouted.

  With teeth clenched and eyes ablaze, Fenelyus thrust an outstretched hand and sent another purple ball of light. Once again, it picked up speed and size until it was huge. The bounding boulder rushed at the giants, who braced for impact, tightening their locked arms and leaning forward. When the sphere hit, it did nothing. The great boulder of light popped like a bubble. But at that moment, Fenelyus clapped her hands and the ground beneath three of the giants tilted sharply upward.

  They fell back, sliding into the Abyss.

  Hooked arm in arm, unwilling to let go, the chain of giants was dragged backward, toppling one by one over the edge. The armies stopped to watch the sight, for there was a terrible slowness to this strange inevitability. No one screamed, no crash of weapon defeated them. What brought that powerful wall down was the giants’ inability to let go of one another’s arms. Fenelyus had ingeniously and elegantly touched off a landslide, and everyone paused to watch the tragedy unfold.

  When the last three giants were whipped off their feet with looks of disbelief in their dull eyes, there was a pause in the battle that Gifford wanted to think was a moment of silence to honor the Breakwaters.

  It lasted less than a minute.

  Then the clash returned, and Gath ordered them forward again.

  The White Tower was as beautiful as a winter’s night when it was so cold that ice cracked. No chairs, no cushions, no furs—everything was hard, white, and chilling. Sebek hadn’t lied to Tesh regarding the tower being vacant. Stairs and corridors were silent, save for the sound of Andvari’s, Tekchin’s, and his own footfalls. And as he rushed as best he could to escape, Tesh saw no one but his own reflection. Nearly all the walls were polished to a mirror-like shine.

  “Don’t look at the walls!” Andvari shouted, but Tesh already had.

  He saw himself—not as the hero of the Harwood, not as a Techylor, but as a Dureyan. Even less than that, he was a Dureyan boy, thin, dirty, and frightened.

  Tesh stopped to stare at himself.

  Am I really that pathetic? That small?

  He did feel tiny. Ever since entering Phyre, he had felt like that—the way he was brought up to feel. What he saw in the mirror was how he still saw himself, that part he had struggled to erase but failed.

  Maybe because that’s how I am. I have no false body to disguise the truth. In Phyre, Gifford is an athlete, but this is what I am.

  “Stop looking and run,” Tekchin called back.

  Tesh felt a hand on his arm and found Andvari pulling him away.

  “This is an enchantment,” the dwarf said. “Who you are lies at the intersection of how you see yourself and how others do. Where the two overlap is truth. You aren’t seeing yourself. This is how the queen sees you. You’re looking at yourself through her walls—her eyes. It’s not the truth.”

  “But it isn’t a lie, either.”

  “It is a truth. Her truth.”

  Tesh forced himself to look away and focus on running—no small feat, as he still felt the terrible weight. Reaching the main floor, they spotted two soldiers in black-and-white armor.

  Not entirely deserted, after all.

  Tesh slowed down and watched as Tekchin waved to the soldiers. One waved back. Neither of them looked at Tesh—at the dirty Dureyan boy.

  “Better hurry. The party is about to end,” the guard who had waved told Tekchin. “The queen has unleashed Orr.”

  Tekchin cursed as he bolted out the door. Tesh followed. No one stopped him; none looked his way; no one cared.

  Back on the
stony plain, Tekchin and Andvari no longer waited, and Tesh fell hopelessly behind. He knew where to go. Lightning bursts flashed at the front of a bridge beyond which lay nothing else.

  Tesh was fearful that without Tekchin, the forces of the queen would recognize him for the escaped prisoner he was. None did. Even as he ran past hosts of men, he didn’t receive even a second glance.

  Maybe all they see is a starving boy in a ragged shirt. No threat here.

  He came to a crack in the valley, one of the many crevices that weren’t wide enough for a bridge. Others were jumping it with ease, but they weren’t panting from exhaustion, or stooped over like an old crone. And this time he didn’t have Brin to help him across.

  With no choice, he made a running leap, hoping this would be another illusion, a mere crack in the rock. It wasn’t. Still, he almost made it.

  Most of him reached the far side. His left leg was the exception. His shinbone cracked against the sharp stone’s edge. He heard it snap. Felt the bone break. Crying out in pain, he fell and rolled, thrashing on the flinty rock. His eyes watered, and his sight blurred. The pain ran up his leg and coursed through his whole body. He clutched at his shin and found the brittle bone where it punched through the skin.

  As he lay on his side, shivering in agony and fear, he felt a downbeat of wind. Above him a great shadow passed, a long one with two vast wings and a massive tail.

  The army of King Mideon was nearly to the pylons of the bridge, which appeared as twin spears jutting up from the end of the flinty plain. Those formations marked the start of the narrow crossing. A roar sounded. That Gifford could hear anything above the crash of combat was astounding. The battle had reached a tumultuous pitch. He felt it, as he had once perceived Elan through the Art, but Gifford didn’t believe it took much insight to feel the urgency in the rapid claps of swords on shields and the staccato cries of desperate men. This was the push. Here was the final conflict. The two sides threw themselves into the effort—and the forces of Mideon were winning. Inch by inch they advanced. Gath coaxed Beatrice and the six of them closer to the bridge.

  A monstrous creature with a small head, tiny eyes, fangs, and a spiked club charged, but it was brought down by half a dozen men wielding spears. A squad of dwarfs from the queen’s forces advanced in chevron formation. Swinging shining hammers, they ripped through rings of defenders. Seeing them, Gifford understood how it was that the Belgriclungreians came so close to defeating the Fhrey. The dwarfs made small targets and shook off blows that would have crushed an average man. The last of their attack made it all the way to Gath who, along with Bran of Pines, put an end to them.

  By then, they were close enough to the bridge that Gifford saw it wasn’t merely narrow; the width was so small that their passage across would need to be single file. He thought of Tressa and worried whether she could manage it.

  If she’d had so much trouble with a crack, how will she traverse a walkway across the Abyss?

  Despite the horrific violence around him, Gifford couldn’t help thinking the fight was anticlimactic. He’d expected more. They were nearly to their goal, and only a few opponents remained in their way. The dire warnings had braced him for a far more desperate struggle. He smiled at Roan. She smiled back. They were going to make it.

  Then the dragon came.

  Not a creation of Suri, nor a manifestation of the Art, this was the real thing—or at least a deceased version. Until that moment, Orr had been a story told by a lodge’s firelight. The dragon was the embodiment of power and evil. A creature of the old world, Orr slew Gath of Odeon, and in turn the beast was slain by Gath’s Shield, Bran of Pines, in the greatest epic tale the Keepers had to tell. “The Song of Gath” was the story always recounted on the night of Wintertide, and the tale of his death often brought tears to the old and nightmares to the young. As a boy, Gifford had imagined Orr as a monster so ugly that he could never fully picture it. To him, Orr was a mass of eyes and shadows. And while Gifford had no way to know what Orr had truly been in life, in death it was terrifying.

  Larger than three gilarabrywns combined, its great, dark wings swept silently over the heads of the army. With all the effort of an afterthought, Orr swept fifty souls from the field, tossing them with catlike amusement before settling itself on the causeway. Possessed of fore- and hind legs, a barbed tail, and a mouth of teeth the size of trees, the beast rose and glared down at them with eyes alight and filled with joyful malevolence.

  “The queen is insane!” Fenelyus shouted as she stared at the dragon. “She’s emptied her house—but why?” Fenelyus whirled to look back at the six of them. Confusion gave way to suspicion as she focused her attention on Beatrice.

  “Fen?” Mideon called excitedly.

  “I can’t fight Orr!” she shouted at him. “That thing is . . .” She never finished, but in her eyes, a story of frustration and fear bloomed, and Gifford guessed she spoke from experience. “You have to summon the golem.”

  The king’s eyes darkened, his lips folding up in anger.

  “It’s the only way,” Fenelyus told him.

  “Golem?” Brin asked.

  “It’s old magic,” Beatrice explained, “from the days when our people lived closer to the stone. Those of great power could call the ground up to fight for them. My father did it once near the end of the Great War. At Neith, he called up a golem of stone that withstood Fenelyus, allowing most of our people to escape to Drumindor. Doing so nearly killed him.”

  The dragon flapped its wings, knocking those closest to it to the ground, then laughed. Nothing about the horrific sound was reminiscent of laughter, but once more Gifford felt it. He sensed the glee in that sound, which was more akin to a hundred-foot-tall rabbit screaming in a snare.

  “Do it!” Fenelyus shouted at Mideon. “Do it, or this is over!”

  Orr took a mighty breath.

  “Dammit!” Fenelyus braced herself, throwing out her arms.

  Massive flames burst forth, washing over all of them.

  Gifford gasped, staggered back, and fell. The world was gone, all of Nifrel lost as they were bathed in fire. He could see it brush up and over them, held only a few feet away as if by glass, the licking flames washing by in an oily smear of colors. Heat. He felt as if he were standing too near a bonfire, except this heat rolled in waves.

  Fenelyus was screaming with effort, fingers splayed, hands shaking. At last, the dragon ran out of breath. The fire went out, and Fenelyus collapsed.

  Again, the dragon laughed. “Such sweet fruit,” Orr said in a voice that Gifford felt more than heard. “And oh! What a banquet.”

  Moya raised her bow. Beatrice touched her arm and shook her head. “Wait. Not yet.”

  That’s when the ground rose up.

  Deafening cracks and pops announced the shards of stone that grew from the stone floor of the valley. They coalesced and stood up. Dark rock in the general shape of a colossal man rose to face the dragon, who eyed it cautiously.

  “Back! Get back!” Beatrice shouted, shooing them to give the golem a path to the dragon.

  “Move that beast out of the way,” King Mideon ordered, though his voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Clear the bridge.”

  Gifford never saw the initial clash, as he and nearly everyone else was scrambling to get clear, abandoning the field to the gigantic combatants. He didn’t need to see it. The impact declared itself. The ground jumped, the dragon roared, and a clap loud as thunder echoed. Both Gifford and Roan, whose hand he still held, fell and sprawled on the ground that sprang and shook with all the bounce of a stretched tarp.

  Beatrice huddled them together. “Here! Stay here.” She turned to view the fighting behemoths. “Prepare to run.”

  Gifford looked back and saw the hulking brutes, two shadowy mountains grappling in the dim light. One staggered—

  Brin was the first to scream, but not the only one, as the stone giant grabbed hold of the dragon and pulled, taking a step toward them. One massive stone foot slamm
ed an arm’s length away. The ground hopped, and they flew into the air, spilled once more off their feet.

  “Now! Run!” Beatrice shouted. “Across the bridge! Go!”

  Moya got them moving. She led off, running for the causeway. If she hadn’t, Gifford didn’t think any of them would have moved. The golem had managed to wrestle Orr off the bridge, leaving the way clear. Less a way and more a window. The dragon was none too happy about being pulled aside, and legs the size of columns danced across the path between them and the bridge.

  Gifford held tightly to Roan. Too much so, he guessed, but Roan didn’t complain, probably didn’t feel it, any more than Gifford felt the ground he sprinted over. Despite the dancing giants, the war was back on as everyone saw the race to the finish. Dead Galantians fought with deceased Techylors. Iron-clad dwarf warriors clashed with bronze-covered Fhrey. And fur-wrapped spearmen fought leather-armored swordsmen. Spears flew, javelins rained, and feet charged. Shields clapped as the last of Mideon’s defenses held back the engulfing wave.

  As they came to the bridge, Gifford saw Gath go down. Not by Orr this time, but by sheer numbers. Bran fought valiantly at his side, then he, too, fell to multiple blows. Only Melen remained. The huge man shooed them forward, onto the span, as he took position at the start of the bridge to stop any would-be followers.

  They had made it.

  The king joined Melen at the mouth of the bridge, swinging his great ax and cleaving all comers. Fenelyus, back on her feet, took up position beside Atella. The four heroes formed a wall where the Breakwaters once stood as the golem continued to wrestle with the dragon.

  Gifford saw that the span across the Abyss, the path to the door to Alysin, was clear. He could see a cave on the far side, a dark opening that he guessed was the door, the exit from Nifrel. Then, as Gifford took his first step forward, Roan was ripped from his hand—pulled straight up.

  It’s not broken. It’s not broken, Tesh repeated in his head.

  When that didn’t work, he said it out loud. “My leg can’t be broken. I don’t have a leg!” No one heard, not even himself. He could feel the throbbing, shooting pain, which exploded from just below his knee. He shoved himself up, first on his elbows, then his palms; then Tesh crawled. He dragged his not-broken leg, the one that certainly felt fractured.