What Man Defies

by Clara Coulson

  Bismarck, chuckling, extended her hand to call back the spear.

  On a whim, I grabbed the shaft.

  The spear tore out of the ground and lurched toward its master. It took me with it.

  Bismarck spotted my play too late. I let go of the spear when I reached peak momentum and barreled toward her. She caught the spear again but was too slow to raise it to defend herself. And none of her charms could overpower my magic as I funneled everything I had left into my legs and drove my feet into her chest. The kick connected like a wrecking ball, and Bismarck soared across the room, all the way back into the corridor, where she hit the ground in a hard roll and kept on going for so long that I lost sight of her.

  Only problem was, she didn’t let go of the spear.

  Shit, now what? I landed clumsily and spun around to check on Saoirse.

  Face warped in agony, she waved me away from her and pointed behind me. “The well, Vince. Block the well so she can’t take the water. She doesn’t have any magic of her own. She won’t be able to dismantle the ward.”

  As much as it pained me to leave her lying there, broken and bloody, she was right. I sprinted over to the well, shooing away the people still gathered around it. “Stay near the walls,” I told them. “Don’t step into any crossfire.”

  They scurried away at my commands, all but Kennedy, who I didn’t have time to worry about right now. I slid to a stop at the perimeter of the well and hunted for any physical ward marks. The way it had disappeared, when most wards visibly dissipated upon their deconstruction, made be think…

  There.

  Half hidden under a patch of loose dirt was a convoluted series of white lines drawn into the soil with an indeterminate substance. I wiped the dirt away to uncover them fully, revealing the base construction of the ward. Highly compacted energy still resonated within it, invisible to even the keenest magic sense if you stood more than a foot from its center.

  When Kennedy had completed the unlocking sequence, the ward wasn’t destroyed. It was just deactivated. The way I turned off my home wards when I walked through my front door. Theoretically, that meant the ward could be reactivated, and since the magic energy needed to restore it was still inside the construction, there was a chance I could turn it back on even though I hadn’t built the ward myself.

  But I’ve never worked with a ward this complex. My mind raced as I attempted to dissect the ward mark. There must be a thousand symbols etched among those lines, and I can’t read most of them.

  In the corridor, Bismarck had risen, her silhouette shifting in the darkness.

  Maybe I could psychically infiltrate the ward’s construction to learn its fundamental commands? That was extremely dangerous, even with simple wards, but what choice did I have? If I didn’t block off the well in the next thirty seconds, we were screwed. Me. Saoirse. The other people here. All the people of Earth and Tír na nÓg.

  I have to learn how to work the ward. I have no other choice.

  I prayed this boneheaded move didn’t fry my brain. Then I slammed my hands onto the ward mark and let its essence spill into my mind.

  The world quieted. When I looked up from the ground, the fortress of thorns was empty. No scared kidnapping victims. No injured Saoirse. No unconscious banshee. No bodies. There was only the well, sitting there exposed, the dark water taunting me with its near infinite secrets, and the sensation that someone was standing just out of view. No matter how I turned my head, I couldn’t see the person, this lingering impression of the being who had cast the ward so many centuries ago. But their presence was like a physical force pressing against my back. That sensation grew more intense, more insistent, for each second I spent mentally intruding into the ward’s underlying construction.

  I couldn’t pull back yet, however. I had to figure out how the ward worked. “Tell me your secrets. Come on. Tell me what I need to do to reactivate you.”

  The presence was suddenly right behind me, and a phantom hand ghosted across my neck. At the instant of contact, information spilled into my mind. Glimpses of the ward being drawn onto the ground. The shadow of the diligent caster bent over their work, drawing symbols with a precise finger, the tip smudged white with some kind of paint. Words I’d never heard before spilling from soundless lips, directed at the countless symbols in the ward mark. As each symbol slotted into place, filling a blank in my mind, answering a question, a blueprint of the ward’s overall form and function began to resolve. And—

  Something warm ran down my face. I lifted my hand and touched my chin, but saw nothing. Then I remembered this wasn’t my real body, but rather a projection of it I’d slipped into the space between the ward mark and the energy store that powered it, the space where a faint echo of the ward builder loitered like a signature. Some people called this the “medial space.”

  I was seeing a place that didn’t quite exist in reality, but didn’t quite not exist either. A place easy to get lost in, if you weren’t careful. A place where your body and mind didn’t coexist in the right way, as if they were slightly out of step, slightly out of touch, your mind pulled slightly to the left. A place where you could miss physiological reactions to the damage being done to your mind by a ward that didn’t want you poking around in its internal mechanics.

  In the “real world,” I was bleeding from my nose from the strain of infiltrating the ward. That wasn’t good.

  But the information I needed to utilize the ward was a few pieces from a completed puzzle. A few seconds more. A few words more. A few more symbols clarified.

  The blood flow from my nose increased, warmth dribbling down my chin. It was joined by a second stream cascading down my left cheek. Now I was bleeding from my eye too.

  Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

  The last symbol was matched to the last word—and suddenly, it was like I’d always known exactly how this ward worked.

  I ripped myself out of the medial space.

  The pain hit like a dozen icepicks rammed into my skull. My vision shifted out of focus. The taste of copper filled my mouth. Dizziness took me for a spin so intense I nearly fell over. My face was covered in blood, and it steadily dripped off my chin, splattering onto the ward mark beneath my hands.

  The ward mark I now knew how to decipher. For the ward I could control. My trip into the medial space had taught me that the ward didn’t obey a single master. It was a sovereign ward. As long as I followed the proper procedure, I could restore it to an active state.

  As far as I could tell, all I needed to do was place my hands on two specific points—which I did—and then speak an invocation that was based on two groupings of symbols that each sat inside a pentagon shape on opposite halves of the mark. The invocation added up to seventeen sentences, in a dialect I’d never spoken before. Oh, sarcastic tongue of mine, don’t fail me now. I only have one chance to invoke this thing right before…

  Bismarck staggered out of the corridor. The blow to her chest had sent her for a spin, but some of the charms she was wearing must’ve negated most of the force. She was breathing in harsh pants, but she wasn’t coughing up blood or showing any other signs of serious injury. The kick that would’ve killed an unaided human, would’ve shattered an entire ribcage and riveted all the organs inside, had only bruised or cracked a few of Bismarck’s bones. Abarta had armed her to the teeth. She was on par with a practitioner right now.

  She sought me out on the battlefield and found me in the last place she wanted me to be.

  Now, Whelan! I screamed at myself. Reactivate the ward.

  The invocation words spilled off my tongue so fast they sounded like utter gibberish. But I didn’t pronounce a single one incorrectly. It was almost like I’d said the words before, or…

  “Oh no, you don’t!” Bismarck hefted the spear again and took aim.

  I forced myself to speak even faster. Ten lines. Twelve lines. Fifteen lines.

  Bismarck threw the spear.

  Seventeen lines.

  The ward reactivated wit
h a blinding flash of light.

  And the Spear of Lugh struck true.

  I made a desperate dive for safety, but my battered body wasn’t agile enough to outwit the spear’s target-seeking ability a third time. The sharp tip pierced my lower abdomen, clipping my pelvic bone, tore out of my back, and drove me onto the ground, where it pinned me in place at an awkward angle.

  For a second, I was too stunned to even feel pain. But that didn’t last. Agony resonated from the impact site, setting every nerve in my abdomen on fire, and I choked out a scream. I clutched at the shaft of the spear with my good hand. It had twisted after exiting my body, before it drove itself into the dirt. If I didn’t pull it out at the correct angle, I’d deal even more damage to the organs in my abdomen—

  The spear vibrated.

  Absolute terror consumed me.

  And then I knew nothing but pain as the Spear of Lugh tore me apart.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Consciousness was a piece of silk that kept slipping through my fingers. Again and again, I grasped brief images. The ceiling of thorns. The glow from the reactivated ward. Indistinct shouts of anger. Screams of fear. Whimpers of resignation. The sensation of blood pooling around my body. The tickle of air in a place air should not have been able to reach. The taste of blood. And the smell, that unmistakable copper tang. And beyond all those physical signals misfiring, a feeling that I’d lost a fight I could not afford to lose.

  I didn’t know how long I lay there in the dirt, gut ripped open, weeping blood and shredded bits of organ tissue, dipping in and out of awareness. But at some point, my brain finally managed to grab hold of the world around me, and reality drifted back into focus the way sand shifted in a gentle wind.

  I didn’t dare move a muscle and give away my status to Bismarck. I couldn’t defend myself right now. The pain in my abdomen wasn’t as severe as the pain from the iron wound Bismarck had inflicted three weeks ago with that damn hatpin, but the degree of damage was undeniably worse. The act of tearing the spear from my body had destroyed everything in my lower right abdomen. My intestines. My muscles. My blood vessels. My nerves.

  I didn’t think I could walk, much less fight. My right leg was numb. My pelvis was scored. And if I moved the wrong way, all the organs in my abdomen would spill out of the ragged hole. Half fae I may have been, but I still needed certain organs to function.

  No. I was down for the count.

  I couldn’t physically engage Bismarck again.

  If I got extremely lucky though, I might be able to throw a weak spell her way. But she was so well protected by Abarta’s array of charms that I doubted a direct strike would get through. And the second I revealed myself as more than a cooling corpse, she’d throw the spear at me again. This time, I wouldn’t be able to dodge it at all. It would lodge in my heart, and I would die.

  Would that be better or worse than watching her set the stage for the world’s destruction?

  Because that was what she was currently doing.

  Bismarck had Saoirse by the collar, spear pointed at her eye. “I know you remember the combination to deactivate the ward, Daly. You’re not too dumb to remember a simple sequence. So don’t play games with me. Unless you want me to start throwing these people into the circles at random—which clearly didn’t end well the first time around—you will tell me the correct order.”

  Saoirse didn’t flinch. She stared Bismarck down with barely restrained fury. Her teeth were biting the inside of her cheek, hard, as she debated what to do. If she didn’t tell Bismarck the combination, the woman would make good on her threat to sacrifice the remaining survivors. If she did tell Bismarck the combination, there was no guarantee that the cutthroat mob boss would let anyone live once she retrieved a sample of the well water. The survivors were only worth their ability to deactivate the prism ward. Once that value dropped to zero, Bismarck had no incentive to keep them alive.

  In fact, it was more tactically sound to kill them. Because they’d seen too much.

  Saoirse knew this as well as I did. She steeled herself and finally replied, “Go to hell.”

  Bismarck’s expression darkened. “Fine. If that’s the way you want to play it”—she threw Saoirse to the ground and kicked her repeatedly, in the gut, in the chest, and once in the head—“then I’ll make you sit here and watch each and every painful death of each and every so-called ‘innocent’ in this room. And I won’t let you die until you’re the last bitch left standing. So you can carry all the guilt of your pitiful failure into the afterlife with you.” She gave Saoirse one last brutal kick. A rib cracked. “I hope it fucking hangs you like a noose.”

  Turning away from Saoirse, Bismarck scoured the group of cowering people for her first victim. As she stalked closer to the line of huddled forms near the wall, a hand reached up from the ground and clutched her pants leg. Bismarck halted and glanced down in disgust at the bruised and broken face of the banshee. The woman could hardly be called awake. Her eyes were glazed over, and her attempt at speaking came out as nothing but indecipherable puffs of air with the odd sound mixed in. The strike to her head had dealt her a great deal of brain damage that would take time to heal. Time she didn’t have.

  Bismarck made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “So much for the great and powerful fae. I can’t believe you got bested by a half-blood and a couple of human accomplices.” She roughly prodded at the woman’s bloody stump of a shoulder. “And you lost the arm Abarta gave you? That thing was one of a kind. It was supposed to give you an edge over even the sídhe. Where the heck did it go?”

  The banshee couldn’t answer.

  Bismarck rolled her eyes. Then she rammed the spear through the banshee’s neck. It severed the spinal cord. The banshee died instantly.

  Bismarck ripped the spear from the body with a sickening squelch and cast her attention on the stunned crowd. “I’ll ask once, and if no one answers, then I’ll throw the spear at the first person who twitches.” She raised the spear for emphasis. “Where is the arm of Nuada?”

  No one said anything for some time. Bismarck, annoyed, started hunting for prey.

  Then someone spoke. Christie.

  “It’s in the well.” She pointed to the circle of stones. Her fingers were trembling. A little too much. She was faking most of her fear. “It got cut off with a sword during the fight, and it fell into the water before anyone could grab it.”

  Bismarck pursed her lips. “Oh, great. Another thing to add to my agenda.”

  I wondered where Christie had actually stashed the arm. Her poker face revealed nothing.

  “All right? Who’s up for the hot seat first?” Bismarck swept the spear from left to right across the line of people. Like she was playing a game of chance with their lives. The point of the spear eventually stopped, directed at a woman I recognized: Rebecca Shriver, Amy Newsome’s cousin. She had been injured at some point during the arduous trek through the cavern. One of her sleeves hung off her arm in bloody tatters. The torn skin beneath needed stitches.

  “Up.” Bismarck ordered. “Into a circle. If you remember the right one to use first, good for you. If not, that’s your problem.”

  Shriver trembled as she stood up, but she didn’t back down. Didn’t beg Bismarck to choose someone else, or to let them go. Clutching her shredded arm, she limped off toward the prism ward. Bismarck didn’t follow her, thinking the threat of her spear was enough to curb any enthusiasm for defiance. Shriver walked halfway around the well, then paused, appearing to debate which of two circles was the correct first choice.

  “Hurry up,” Bismarck barked. “I don’t have all day.”

  Shriver’s head snapped up, a twinkle in her dark and stormy eyes. “You’re right. You don’t.”

  Christie attacked. She jumped up, revealing she’d been sitting on the conduit the whole time, and once more lifted the arm like a bat. Bismarck, whose attention had been focused on Shriver, whirled around to combat the new threat. But Christie was too quick on th
e draw. She swung the arm in a blur of silver, and the only thing Bismarck could do in time was raise the spear in defense.

  The arm hit the shaft of the spear, and it was like two battering rams collided. Both ancient relics backfired with a thunderous boom. Christie was thrown into the wall of thorns. Bismarck was thrown halfway across the room.

  Saoirse was waiting for her. Under the guise of writhing in pain, she’d managed to recover the sword she’d nicked from the dead elf earlier. As Bismarck staggered back to her feet, Saoirse lunged forward and swung the sword at Bismarck’s neck. Bismarck dodged, but the blade bit deeply into her shoulder. She cried out and kicked at Saoirse, but Saoirse pinned the leg against her waist and heaved Bismarck off her feet. Bismarck fell onto her back, and Saoirse brought the sword down again.

  Bismarck raised her free hand, her sleeve slipping down to reveal the charmed bangle that had blown Saoirse away in their last scuffle. Saoirse never fell for the same trick twice, so she bailed out of the sword blow and threw herself aside, releasing Bismarck’s leg just before a force wall blasted through the space where she’d been standing. Bismarck then pushed herself off the ground with one hand, more dexterous than she should’ve been, riding high on Abarta’s charms. She leveled the spear at Saoirse at the same time Saoirse leveled the sword at her.

  “Didn’t realize you were so gung-ho to die first, Daly.” Bismarck glanced at Christie, who was tangled in the vines that made up the wall, thorns tearing into her clothing and skin. Christie still clung to the conduit arm. Bismarck huffed. “Should’ve seen through that ruse. She a friend of yours?”