“Go around, I will hold it off,” Marthek said, lifting his sword.
“We won’t abandon you!” Ashanadra said.
“Go!” the steel mage yelled, as he stepped forward to engage the thing. He raised his sword in salute, then sidestepped smoothly as it lunged at him, one of the arm-blades coming around in a vicious slice. The blood golem was fast, pivoting into a sweep attack with its other arm, but Marthek met it with an expert block. His sword cut through the substance of its body, severing the end of the blade from its arm. The glistening hook landed on the floor with a sick plop.
Ashandra and Keric had hurried around the rostrum, but before they could make a run for the exit, the blood monster shifted back to block their path. The two mages retreated, but the creation did not come after them, apparently content to keep them from safety.
Ashandra held another amulet, but she did not trigger it, clutching the small bronze disk with white fingers. “What can we do?” she asked.
Keric was too terrified to respond. He had pulled out his wallet of scrolls almost by reflex, but neither of the minor spells he had left seemed like they would stop such a thing. Still, he pulled out the one spell that might even have a chance. The spell went by different names; most mages simply called it the Stunner. It operated by overloading the target’s nervous system for up to a minute, rendering an enemy incapacitated without inflicting permanent damage. But while Keric was no expert on magical constructions such as the blood golem, he had a pretty good idea that the thing lacked the biology that would leave it vulnerable to such magic.
Marthek came forward again to meet the golem. The construct spun to meet him, swinging with its remaining blade at his head. The steel mage again met the attack with a solid parry, and again the substance of the golem parted, and its remaining blade fell to the floor. The golem withdrew a step, but Marthek stayed with it. He brought his sword up and with a fierce yell drove it down into the golem’s body. The blade flashed as it bit into the thing, cutting from the side of its “neck” down to where its heart would have been, had it been a living creature. There the steel stopped, caught in the dense substance of the golem.
Marthek’s lips twisted into a growl as he tried to draw his weapon free. The sword quivered, but then runnels of blood flooded out in a torrent down the length of the steel. Marthek’s eyes widened and he released the hilt, but tendrils of the stuff shot out and wrapped around his fingers and wrist, holding him to the creature.
“Marthek!” Ashandra yelled.
The steel mage pulled hard, and the bloody strands lengthened, stretching like gobs of rubber. But he could not get free of them, nor could he do anything to evade as the golem’s arm lashed out again, its end lengthening again into a blade edge that struck him hard in the elbow. The blow severed the young mage’s arm, which snapped back into the blood golem’s body, sticking there with a soft sick noise. Marthek cried out and fell onto his back, clutching at the severed limb with his good hand. There was no blood. He stared up at the golem with eyes wide with horror, and watched as his arm was absorbed into its body. His sword still jutted from its torso, but it was now covered from pommel to tip with a sheen of glistening red, completely engulfed by the golem’s substance.
The golem took a step forward, and the gob of its matter that Marthek had severed earlier stretched out and was reabsorbed into its body.
Ashandra rushed forward to block it, a bright silvery glow flaring into being around her hand as she triggered the power of her amulet. “Back, fiend!” she yelled at the golem, trying to protect the fallen mage.
Marthek tried to stop her, but he could barely roll over onto his belly, let alone get up. “Asha, no!” he shouted, reaching uselessly with his remaining hand, but she ignored him, thrusting the bright glow of her shield spell at the construct. It slashed at her with its blade, which carved into the aura like a steel knife scraping on flint; showers of sparks flashed from the contact, and Ashandra staggered, her protective aura flickering as her magic was disrupted. The golem gave her no chance to recover; it stepped forward, lifting both arms above its head, their ends coming together to form a dense bludgeon shaped like the head of a hammer. It swung hard, and with the impact the shield mage’s spell collapsed with a thunderous reverberation. Ashandra was flung backward, flying several paces through the air before she slammed into the rostrum. She hung there against the stone for a moment, dazed, then collapsed onto the floor.
Marthek tried to crawl away, but the golem moved forward after him, absorbing its other severed “hand” as it went. Its arms separated and again formed into blades, longer and curved into nasty hooks, this time. It followed Marthek, in no apparent hurry now.
Keric had been dimly aware of the battle taking place in front of him, but he could do nothing to help Marthek, or to prevent the golem from striking down Ashandra. He was caught in a battle of his own, as he struggled against the waves of surging magic that permeated and corrupted the Labyrinth.
He’d realized that the stun spell written on his scroll would do nothing against the golem. But as he’d begun reading the runes inscribed upon the parchment, runes he had written, he’d changed the spell.
What he was doing was incredibly dangerous, forbidden even of sanctioned mages, and with good reason. All mages drew magic from the world around them when they prepared their spells, and a small trickle from themselves, an anchor that allowed them to bind the magic to their focus of choice, to store it until it was needed. The very best mages could bind a spell that would remain potent in perpetuity, although there were few alive in Sacreth today with such skill. Magic was in and of the world, a bottomless wellspring limited only by the skill and personal fortitude of the wizard tapping it.
But there was a reason that spells were confined in objects, and constrained to very specific parameters. A mage who drew too deeply from that wellspring, or who tried to draw without the benefit of a focus, was just as likely to burn himself out as to shape the magic to his desire. Keric had had this message battered into him by his instructors: raw magic was like a sword that had points at both ends.
He knew that, and had no guidance other than instinct as he rearranged the order of the sigils as he read them, shifting the inflection, unraveling the complex and delicate web he’d created when he’d written the spell. He changed it only slightly, a subtle difference, drawing upon the magic that infused the Labyrinth to augment his spell.
Almost at once he felt it surrounding him, a corrupted torrent. He felt sick, and nearly lost the spell. He imagined that he could feel the thick tendrils of red taint twisting around him, passing through him, leaving marks upon his soul like the greasy slicks left by a gusher of black oil spurting from the ground. He knew that he could not long retain his grasp upon the spell, so he completed it as quickly as he could, summoning every bit of stamina that he had left and adding to it the energies he’d stolen, combining the whole into a single massive blast that he hurled at the golem. As the magic fled he felt as though he’d come up from the bottom of a lake, life flowing back into him like that first sweet breath of air. He slumped to his knees, and quite nearly fell further.
It took a great effort to look up.
The golem was splattered against one of the tiers of the hall, the gooey mass of its substance trickling over a row of benches, soiling the expensive cushions. The sight of it filled him with exultation; the spell had worked! A sound that was half laugh, half groan escaped his lips. He tried to get up; his head spun, but he was able to stagger to his feet. Marthek had crawled nearly over to Ashandra, who was stirring, coughing as she tried to suck air into her bruised lungs.
He started toward them, but managed only one step before he froze. He’d heard something, a subtle noise, a small squelching pop that chilled his blood. He turned his head slowly, knowing already what he would see.
The shattered mess of bloody gore that had made up the golem was scattered over the stone and wood of the tier, but at its co
re were several dense gobs of material. Those gobs were quivering, and as Keric watched, he saw the scattered splatters begin to shift and move, slowly extending to absorb or be absorbed into larger masses nearby. Slowly it was coming together again, gradually taking on form as it reconstituted itself.
Action replaced conscious thought, and he ran over to Marthek. The steel mage had reached the edge of the rostrum, and was using it to try and pull himself up, without much success. Keric grabbed him and lifted him, holding him against the weathered stone base of the platform. “We have to get out of here!” he said, making sure that he would stay up before turning to help Ashandra.
But the shield mage was already getting to her feet. Keric saw her tuck a small crystal vial, now empty, into her sleeve. She was battered and unsteady, but was standing on her own power, and she seemed to grow stronger with each passing second. “Help me,” she said, pushing past him to take one of Marthek’s arms. Keric took the other, all too aware that it ended at the elbow. Blood was finally starting to ooze from the terrible wound, but it seeped sluggishly, smearing on Keric’s hands as he helped Ashandra carry the crippled mage toward the Petitioner’s Arch.
Behind them they could hear the noises of the golem growing steadily louder behind them, but neither looked back. Marthek was trying to help them, but his limbs fumbled, and he could not manage to get his feet under him. The other two mages all but dragged him through the arch, then Ashandra pushed the steel mage into Keric’s arms.
“Get him as far away as you can,” she said, turning back toward the hall.
“You can’t fight that thing!” Keric said, his voice on the thin edge of panic.
“I’m not going to fight it,” she said, taking another amulet from a pocket in her dress. No, it was two amulets, he saw, as she pulled the thing apart with some effort. They were lodestones, and she attached one piece to either side of the arch. The arch was made of stone, not metal, but the black stones stayed where she put them, and she began focusing on them, lingering in what Keric recognized as preparation for a spell.
“It won’t stop—” Keric said again, but Ashandra cut him off. “Damn it, setting up a resonance on the fly is hard enough without you chattering at me. Get him as far away as you can, now!”
Keric took up Marthek and dragged him down the passage. In the real Hall of Order, the passage on the far side of the Arch led to a small cloakroom within ten paces, but this one stretched on for what seemed like an eternity. With the limp burden of the steel mage and his armor dragging him, Keric felt as though he was trying to push a boulder up a hill. He glanced back to see Ashandra still in the archway, still working her magic. He could see the effects of it now, a visible distortion that stretched between the two lodestones, filling the opening, a haze in the air that vibrated and wavered like the surface of a wind-swept pond. There was something else, too, a red outline that grew until it nearly filled the arch.
“Ashandra!” he yelled.
The shield mage reached out and touched the distortion, provoking a violent reverberation. The stones of the arch started to shake, and a high-pitched whine that was just short of painful filled the corridor. Keric turned, shielding Marthek with his body, as Ashandra ran toward them. The explosion, when it came, was almost an anticlimax. The shock wave knocked him down, but not roughly, and it was almost easy to slide over the rest of the way, and drift off into oblivion.
* * * * *
Chapter 8
The Labyrinth Page 7