by Karen Chance
I saw a bedraggled, wet, freaked-out woman in a muddy bathrobe. I saw a manlikan that must have been sourced from the upper reaches of a mountain, because he had a beard made out of icicles. They had formed on some kind of moss or other vegetation, I couldn’t tell, but it was loose enough that they chimed together as it jerked its head in shock.
Because I just had.
For a moment, we simply looked at each other.
Okay, I thought. All right. What . . . what now?
Bathrobe Cassie did not appear to know. Bathrobe Cassie looked like she’d like to pass out. Go ahead; you’ll wake up dead, I told her viciously, and lumbered to my feet.
And, suddenly, I didn’t have to wonder how the fey did this anymore. It wasn’t necromancy. It was something far more . . . elemental.
I could feel it, the solidity of the earth under my feet, only it felt like it extended up through my feet, as if I had roots instead of toes, digging deep. I was connected with everything: the distant mountains, which I could hear as deep kettledrums, a barely-there rumble, but reassuring, known. The ground underneath me was a closer, clearer thrum, like a giant heart beating once every year or so, but with reverberations that I could feel even now. The artificial mountains of the city were sharper still, a bright glissando of bells instead of a drum, but somehow superficial. An ant hill that time would wear away as it did all things.
Except for earth. Earth was eternal, its song dark and deep and strong and true. Earth was what formed me, animated me, and would one day reclaim me.
Earth was me and I was earth.
I came back to myself slowly, blinking, but also certain that the fey used the same elemental magic to control the beasts that they did to create them. They sent some of their earth magic into the creatures, infusing them with their power, and binding the two of them together as I just had. Only that was the part that still confused me, because I had necromancy, but I didn’t have elemental magic, not of any kind.
But Pritkin did, I realized.
To be precise, he had all four elements, although—as luck would have it—earth was his least favorite. But it seemed to be working—at least for now. I decided to test a theory, picked up an Ancient Horror, a slimy, multitailed, squid-like creature, and ripped it in half.
It was so easy that I did it again, and again, clearing off a patch of the shield. My double vision was currently skewed a lot, because I was something like fifteen stories high now. And looking down on the tiny ward that was so thin by now that I could see every terrified face inside.
Including Pritkin’s.
He had gone slack jawed and horrified, staring first at me and then, slowly, like a guy in a horror flick, at Bathrobe Cassie. She was just standing there and she didn’t look terrified any longer. She gave Pritkin a vague, slightly loopy smile when he ran over and shook her.
But then he did something else, I wasn’t sure what, but I was suddenly back again, wrapped in soggy terrycloth instead of the warm embrace of the entire landscape. I felt cold and alone. I didn’t like it; I wanted to go back—
“Cassie!” I saw him mouth it, and then he slapped me across the face—and he slapped me hard.
My eyes finally focused on him, and for a second I was shocked and then I was pissed. And then I was worried, because I’d rarely seen him look that afraid. “What?”
He said something, but I couldn’t hear him. Until another war mage came over and cast a silence spell around us, I guessed because he was wounded and couldn’t help with the shield. I glanced at him, and then did a double take.
“Caleb!” I said, seeing an old friend. One with a bandage over both his eyes. “What happened to you?”
“Faerie.” It was terse. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Caleb was big, bald, black and blunt, especially the latter. Of course, most war mages were, but he took it to an art form. So I tried not to take offense. “Trying to help.”
“You let her come?” he demanded, looking at Pritkin. And although I couldn’t see his eyes, I somehow knew he was glaring.
“I tried to talk her out of it!”
“You should have tried harder!”
Pritkin ignored that in favor of shaking me some more. “What the hell were you thinking?”
I assume he was talking about my new ride. “I was thinking about getting us some extra troops—”
“You could have lost yourself in there! People sink into their elements, and they don’t come back out again! Do you understand?”
“No,” I told him. “All I understand is that we’re about to die if we don’t start fighting back. Are we going to stand here and argue, or do something?”
“I have been doing something!”
“The reinforcements are coming, then?”
“No, better—”
“What could be better?”
“I’d like to hear that, too,” Caleb said.
Pritkin glared at both of us, but I took the brunt of it because Caleb couldn’t see him. “Remember what Aeslinn said about the Old Ones?”
“No?” I said.
“What Jonathan told us! That they were going to rue the day that they joined our cause!”
“Oh, yeah.” I remembered him saying something like that.
“I informed HQ and they told the Old Ones’ representative and—” he shook his head. “Long story short, they’ve determined that they might be able to shift the ley line just a bit more.”
“A bit?”
“Maybe a dozen meters or so.”
“Which does what?” Caleb demanded. “We’re nowhere near there. A dozen meters won’t do shit—”
“It will if there’s a ton of our enemies standing in the middle of it!” Pritkin said furiously. “They’re going to shift it—and rip it open at the same time. All we have to do is get the other side over there—”
“How?”
“And let the line do the rest. It will tear them apart!”
“And again, how do you expect us to do that?”
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, looking at Pritkin. After a moment, I crossed my arms.
“No,” he said emphatically.
“Why not?”
“I just told you why not! You don’t know a damned thing about elemental magic! It’s dangerous—”
“All magic is dangerous—”
“Not like this!”
“Well, if you have a better idea—”
“I bloody well have a better idea!”
I waited.
“All right, I don’t have a better idea, but we’re not doing that!”
The shield overhead started to crack.
“Can I drive one?” Caleb asked me.
“Can you see?” I asked him back.
“No, but it can see for me, right?”
“I have no idea—”
“That’s the bloody point!” Pritkin snarled. “Neither of you knows a damned thing about elemental magic!”
“Lucky we have you to help us, then, isn’t it?” I asked him.
Pritkin cursed a lot.
Chapter Forty-Five
There were a lot of wounded mixed in with the Corpsmen—more than I’d realized. I guessed that was why so many had been clustered together, using some fallen colossi as a makeshift fortress—to try to protect their comrades. But that left us with a serious shortage of riders.
All together, we had maybe sixty who were hale and hearty enough to have a current of elemental magic shot through them, binding their wills to a bunch of rock monsters. And even fewer who seemed to think that this was a good idea. But, as Pritkin had admitted, we didn’t have a better one.
“On a count of three,” I said. “Okay?”
The healthy Corpsmen looked at me. They were bunched under Caleb’s expanded silence spell, so I knew they’d heard me. But not a single one answered back.
“Are you fucking deaf?” Pritkin snarled. “Answer her!”
“Yes, Lady!”
Okay, mayb
e I just wasn’t swearing enough, I thought. “Okay, on a fucking count of three, we’re going to fucking do this, all right?”
“Yes, Lady!”
“It’s disorienting,” I warned them. “Don’t get lost in the sensations. Just focus on—” the shield above us cracked down the middle “Shit!”
“Do it!” Pritkin yelled, and grabbed my hand.
I didn’t know if that was to strengthen the connection between us, or just for luck. And I didn’t have time to ask. I did it.
A stream of brilliant golden light shot out of me, branching off like lightning, and spearing each of the mages with Pritkin’s elemental magic. Their eyes flew wide, their mouths opened in little screams or just gaped like fish, and their bodies shuddered all over. And then abruptly went still when I threw the stream wide, sending their magic sprawling out over the battlefield, looking for places to land.
I wasn’t sure whether they found them or not. I wasn’t sure of anything. Because I was suddenly flying, too.
The disorientation of the first time was back, only worse because I was simultaneously watching the shield cave in from above and below. Above was better, I thought, watching my body scream. Above was way better.
And then I picked up a creature with ten arms and threw it as far as I could.
I could throw it pretty far, as it turned out. I saw it disappear over the horizon, and then I was jumped by maybe three other Ancient Horrors. I didn’t know what any of them were—and I didn’t care. I started ripping things off them, legs, arms, whatever I could find, and then using the stumps to beat anything else in the vicinity.
Acid-like blood spewed out everywhere, coating me, but acid doesn’t do a lot to solid rock, as it turns out. Another creature tried to slash at me with foot long claws, but instead got them torn up by the granite-like outer layer of my chest. And even if they’d gotten through, I didn’t think it would have mattered.
Manlikans don’t have hearts to rip out.
Unlike humans, I thought, kicking an Ancient Horror away from the mages, right before it tore into a bunch of the wounded. I grabbed two others who were trying to do likewise, and slammed their heads together. And discovered that Mircea’s trick worked pretty well, even on demons.
Black blood rained down, the medics scrambled to cover their patients, and I looked around for Pritkin, wondering if he was on the field or still down in the fortress with the others. And then I spotted a manlikan that simply had to be him: a craggy old specimen with a mossy hide and two gnarled trees on its temples, like twisted horns. It looked like the green Man straight out of Celtic mythology.
And, needless to say, it was kicking ass.
So were several smaller varieties, one with a hut perched like a jaunty hat on one side of its head and another with a gaping hole of a cave where its mouth should be—which suddenly vomited up a huge mass of bats in a silent scream. I saw even an Ancient Horror pause and look at it, like what the fuck? But most of the other colossi were remained quiescent, either standing still or lying where they’d fallen, as if no one was home. And the rest . . .
Well, they were moving, just not always in the right direction.
One wandered past me, dragging a tree the size of a full-grown sequoia, which I guessed it had been using as a club. But it wasn’t using it now. It wasn’t doing anything now, except wandering drunkenly around.
And without the rest of our group, we couldn’t make the plan work.
“What’s happening?” I asked Pritkin mentally. “What’s wrong with them?”
But all I got back was a slight scream and then a bunch of mental cursing. “How are you in my head? How?”
“Mircea has mental abilities.”
“Is that what this is?” Caleb asked. He sounded relieved. “I thought I was losing it. I keep hearing voices.”
“What kind of voices?” I asked, because I wasn’t hearing anybody. Which was weird, because the magical stream that Pritkin and I were channeling was the thread that everybody else was supposed to grab onto.
Only they didn’t seem to be grabbing.
“It’s too strange for them!” Pritkin yelled, even though he didn’t need to. He was in my head. “The only ones managing anything are the few who are part fey. But we don’t have enough of them!”
“I’m managing,” Caleb pointed out. “And I’m not fey.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, ripping the head off of . . . something. It was disgusting, and that was before it started spewing black tar out of its neck hole.
“Pretty sure,” Caleb said dryly. And, finally, I spotted him. I’d thought he was controlling one of the smaller creatures, but I should have known better. Caleb’s motto was “Go big or go home,” so of course, he’d snatched the largest ride he could find.
In this case, that meant a colossus half again taller than anything else on the field, and looking like it must have been one of the early ones the Svarestri had made. You could tell a difference between those and the ones they’d hastily thrown together after Jonathan’s warning. The latter were fairly basic, with no effort made to give them personalities or to differentiate one from another.
Not so here.
Caleb’s ride was cut through with veins of orange-yellow quartz, not just on the head but across the entire body, making it look like it had tiger stripes. They gleamed in the light of the setting sun, boiling with color, and turning him into a beacon. Which probably explained why he’d just been jumped by half a dozen hell beasts.
Who were quickly wishing that they’d made different life choices. I guess he could see through those pitted eyes, after all, because he was laying waste. I knew which manlikan he was in by the rhythmic grunts he gave while slamming them into one another and then into an outcropping of dark rocks—over and over and over again.
“You’re the exception, then,” Pritkin yelled. “The learning curve is too steep for most of them. They’re not helping!”
Yeah, I’d noticed. Out of sixty, we had exactly five that were fully functional, including mine, and another three or four who looked like they were at least trying to figure this shit out. But it wasn’t going well; they moved like toddlers still trying to learn to walk, stumbling around, uncoordinated and slow. One grabbed for a demon, missed by a mile, and then just stood there, staring at his flexing hand.
At the moment, they were mostly helping by getting in the enemy’s way.
But that meant that we were barely able to defend the area of the now dissipated shield, and protect the wounded inside. Driving anybody anywhere wasn’t happening. And we were running out of time.
“How long do we have?” I asked Pritkin.
“We don’t! The line could move at any time, and the Old Ones only have enough strength left to do this once. We get there, or this is over!”
“We can’t get there,” Caleb said. “We leave, and everybody dies.”
“It’s stalemate then,” I said, and realized almost before the words left my lips that I was wrong. Because a large group of our attackers had just broken off and were headed for the city. “Shit!”
We watched them go, knowing that there was nothing we could do.
“Mircea,” I said, trying to warn him. “Expect company!”
“This would not be an optimal time,” he told me grimly.
And, suddenly, I had the brief, disorientating image of a battle in a massive corridor, and there were no generals in this fight. Mircea had a sword out and was battling alongside his men, giving me the frantic view from his perspective. And even with vampire speed, it was insane.
I watched him slide under not one, not two, but three different sword thrusts, the wicked blades missing our face by a fraction of an inch, then jump back to his feet, spin and decapitate the last attacker in the row, before being jumped by the other two.
Somebody pulled one of them off, Mircea gutted the other, and then put his fist—literally—through the face of a third who I hadn’t even noticed sneaking up on us. And all of this was
done in a couple of seconds, because vampires haul ass. But then, so do other things, I thought, my vision snapping back to the roiling mass of hate headed his way.
I felt my heart clench. “Mircea! Get out of there!”
“If we get out, we lose,” he snapped back, when Mircea never snapped. “Figure something out!”
“Like what?” I looked around desperately, but there was just no one left to help us. “I can shift you—”
“Don’t you dare! We’re right outside the throne room! Another few minutes—”
“You don’t have another few minutes!”
“Damn you, you sorry bastards! Get up!” Pritkin yelled, but the war mages did not get up.
They were trained for the unexpected, but not like this. Just today, they’d invaded another world, been ambushed, seen their comrades shredded by the hundreds, and been attacked by vicious things that bent the brain to look at and didn’t seem to die no matter what you did. And now they were about to get eaten by some of those same creatures unless they flawlessly mastered a new magic system that they’d never used before and did it immediately.
Pritkin was right; this wasn’t going to work.
“Damn it! Get out of my head!” Caleb yelled.
“What?” I asked him. “I wasn’t in your—”
“Not you. Them!”
I looked up, following his pointing finger, to see that I’d been wrong. Maybe we were going to get a Caedmon ex machina, after all. Because his men were coming in fast and hard to avoid the flailing limbs and clawing hands of our attackers. Brown feathers gleamed, feline bodies twisted this way and that, huge wings banked and swerved and dipped and landed, with only a few casualties along the way.
“Earth magic isn’t my forte,” Caedmon said, talking to Bathrobe Cassie. “But I’m rather good with elemental. Perhaps we can help?”
“Perhaps,” I said, and watched her lips move, echoing the words. “Caleb, you’re the end of the line. Hook them up!”
He hooked them up. Once again, the lightning splayed out, jumping from Caleb to the fey, where it gleefully arced and leapt and sizzled.
It seemed to like them better than us, I thought.
But for a moment, nothing happened. I held my breath, watching the fallen colossi, because Caedmon’s people used elemental magic, but the air variety, not earth. I wasn’t sure they could channel Aeslinn’s type at all.