by John Bierce
Hugh’s wards, instead, were scattered strategically around the city, buried in the stone of bridges, narrow walkways, and the entrances of buildings that offered effective cover.
The sheer diversity of Hugh’s wards was kind of astonishing. Attention wards shepherded the Havathi away from less defended and more open areas without them even realizing. Flame wards ignited anyone who stepped over them. Simple force wards sent them tumbling into the canals. Glass wards shattered bottles of who-knows-what carried by various mages as the wards blocked the passage of glass and only glass. Gold and silver wards blocked the passage of jewelry, gruesomely tearing out earrings and breaking the fingers of people wearing rings.
Wearing jewelry to battle was, of course, ridiculous, but Sabae knew that most battle-mages thought themselves above a lot of the common rules for soldiers.
The Havathi took the worst damage from the defenses the first time they phased into the pocket dimension with the city. Their positions became even more obvious to the Skyhold party, who were entirely hidden behind wards and shaped stone defenses. Hugh’s wards became especially frustrating for them in the dark, because many of them were attention wards specifically built to split apart the Havathi war party, forcing them to spend valuable time reuniting.
Sabae couldn’t help but notice how close together the phases were coming now. They were barely a quarter-hour apart on average, and the city was spending nearly as much time in Anastis as in the pocket dimension.
Sabae, meanwhile, just lurked inside the ward Hugh had built for her. It was a powerful attention ward that let her observe everything from atop the Emperor’s palace tower without being noticed herself. It also had one secondary function she was even more excited about— it was a momentum magnifier. Just once, when she windjumped out of the ward, it would amplify the jump to speeds and distances far beyond what she normally would have been able to reach.
She just had to pick her moment correctly.
The fundamental principle behind nearly all their defenses remained the same— they were trying to delay the Havathi, not defeat them. Time was more important to them than killed enemies. They quite deliberately included obvious but time-consuming ways to evade or defeat their defenses, like the stone mages searching for Hugh’s wards or Talia’s bonefire traps. Thanks to Hugh’s will-imbuing, his wards and traps were completely harmless to the Skyhold party, meaning they could move around far more freely if they needed to.
They only needed to wait until Kanderon arrived.
The Havathi, of course, decided not to cooperate.
They’d expected the Havathi to eventually come up with the plan of escaping the city into the canals while it was phased into Anastis and positioning themselves closer to the Exile Splinter unopposed in Lake Nelu. Given how much fiercer the defenses were towards the Splinter, they’d likely lose a lot of mages doing it, but it was the logical move.
They hadn’t expected the Havathi to try it after only a single phase into the pocket dimension.
The time spent phased into the pocket dimension without the Havathi stretched longer and longer, until most of an hour must have gone by. With fewer Splinter-aware minds inside the pocket dimension, she assumed that the Exile Splinter’s power must be less strained.
When it finally started to phase back, Sabae was fully expecting the Havathi to launch themselves from some sort of improvised magical platform onto the stones of the city, and for them to resume their slow, grueling advance.
What Sabae wasn’t expecting, however, was a massive tower of vines and intertwined trees, stretching almost as tall as the Emperor’s palace, and standing only a short walk away. The trees appeared to be the skeleton of the tower, while the vines lashed them together.
Several parts of the tower’s base had been ripped and torn apart by the city’s phasing, but it stretched across a fairly massive area, and there was more than enough to keep the slender living tower intact.
Sabae stared at the tower, aghast. Even for an elite magical force like the Sacred Swordsmen, this was ridiculous. The only way this could have been done was if…
Grovebringer. Grovebringer had somehow followed them from Lothal in time to face them. She suspected the vines weaving the trees together had been grown by the brash Swordsman with the vine whip they’d encountered in Zophor.
Sabae’s initial panic at spotting the tower started to ebb as she thought through its implications. If they had built themselves a fortification, it seemed probable that they were planning a slow, cautious conquest of the city, with the tower there as a safe base to rest and heal in.
Sensible under any other circumstances, or if the Skyhold party’s goal had been actually winning, rather than just delaying.
Later, Sabae would reflect that Talia would have probably been very angry if she’d heard what Sabae had to say then. She’d probably have a long-winded lecture about things you didn’t say because they were asking for trouble, all of which she’d drawn from the novels she read.
“They’re playing right into our hands.”
That, of course, was when the tower started bombarding everything around them with spells.
Not least, what appeared to be a massive boulder of congealed volcanic ash hurtling straight towards Sabae’s tower.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Living Siege Tower
Sabae didn’t wait around for the spell to land. Nor did she wait around to figure out how, exactly, the Havathi had seen through the attention ward around her. Instead, she pulled together wind-armor faster than she ever had before, and detonated all of it at once.
Straight down against the tower.
As Sabae passed up out of Hugh’s momentum magnifier ward, she accelerated so hard she actually felt her eyes pressing back against her sockets, and her vision started to spot over. Below her, she could hear an eruption of sound as the lava bomb hammered into the tower. She barely kept herself from falling into a tumble in midair and losing control. Instead, she somehow managed to spin up a new set of wind armor.
As she slowed and reached the top of her ascent, Sabae found herself higher in the air than she’d ever been on her own. She could see the spire she’d just escaped crumbling down to the plaza containing the Exile Splinter. She could see a truly stunning array of Havathi spells tearing apart huge chunks of the city around it. She could see the entirety of Imperial Ithos spread out below her, on a scale that dwarfed even Ras Andis and Theras Tel. Something seemed odd about the layout of the canals to her, but she couldn’t tell what. She could see the edges of Lake Nelu, which made the city itself seem small.
Then, as she reached the top of her arc and began to fall, she said something that, in retrospect, she was fairly sure Talia would also be angry about.
“How can this day get any worse?”
Then she looked up, and in the distance, rapidly bearing down on Lake Nelu from the west, she saw something that, unfortunately, was not Kanderon. Something she hadn’t noticed at first, from the sheer shock of the living tower.
It was one of her grandmother’s storms.
Hugh crashed into the hard cobblestones of the walkway, almost rolling all the way into the canal from how hard Godrick had thrown him. Hugh’s floating quartz crystal somehow managed to impact his shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise, as did his spellbook as he rolled over it. He frantically turned over to look for Godrick, only to spot him staggering out of the collapsing palace, his magic the only thing still holding up the doorway. The instant Godrick was out, it collapsed in a cloud of dust and debris.
“Ah think the plan might a’ gone a bit sideways,” Godrick said, then started coughing.
“I think you’re right,” Hugh said, looking around. He couldn’t see Alustin and Talia’s position from where they were at, but Sabae’s tower was simply… gone. He hoped she’d made it out safely.
Almost reflexively, Hugh started building a protective ward around the two of them. Godrick, meanwhile, was already constructing his stone armor, and
putting the quartz faceplate into place.
“Which way should we go?” Hugh asked.
“Ah think we need ta’ get ta’ cover and regroup,” Godrick said. “Then figure out some way ta’ take down that tower.”
“Works for me,” Hugh said. “I…”
He was interrupted by a crack against his ward from something striking it. Seconds later, a tree was rearing up from the canal next to them, its branches reaching for his ward.
“We should run now,” Hugh said.
Another arrow impacted the ward, this one already sprouting roots. The first tree was already pressing its branches against his ward, and Hugh could feel it wavering.
“Where?” Godrick asked. “We’ll have trees growin’ out a’ us no matter which direction we go.”
“Not quite,” Hugh said, then glanced down.
“I hate this plan already,” Godrick said. “On three?”
Hugh’s ward started to flicker.
“Nope,” Hugh said. “Now!”
The walkway beneath them crumbled apart between the combined power of their spells, plunging the two of them into the lake below them.
Hugh would just be exposing them to arrows if he hit them with a levitation spell, so instead Hugh improvised a crystal spellform that pushed the falling rocks away from them so they wouldn’t be injured by them. Godrick, apparently, had the same thought, because they went firing away with astonishing speed. One tore through the trunk of one of the new trees, while several more tore through nearby walls and columns.
They plunged into the water of Lake Nelu, and Hugh immediately dove down and swam away from the canal. When his breath was about to give out, he surfaced, finding himself in the dim space beneath one of the palaces of Imperial Ithos, floating between the columns supporting it. Fairly close by, he could see where the collapsing palace had punched through the foundation and down into the lake.
Godrick didn’t surface at first, and Hugh started to panic, thinking that Godrick hadn’t gotten his stone armor off in time.
Then Godrick bobbed to the surface a few feet away, armor still on him. The fact that it was floating probably had to do with the fact that most of the armor was ice, with a few patches of stone mixed in. Godrick held Hailstrike in one hand.
The whole palace above them shuddered. Hugh reached up with his crystal affinity sense, but the stone above them still seemed intact enough.
“Ah’ve got an idea,” Godrick said through his faceplate, and touched the striking face of Hailstrike against the water. A floe of ice immediately began to grow around it.
“Are we making a boat?” Hugh asked.
“Not exactly,” Godrick said, then explained his plan.
“Well, that’s insane,” Hugh said. “I’m all in.”
Talia shielded her head with her hands, not that it would do anything to protect her from the toppling monolith.
Only it never struck.
She looked up cautiously, only to see the massive stone monument suspended no more than ten feet above her head. A series of white columns stretched between the cobblestones and the monolith.
Talia blinked in shock when she realized that they were made of paper.
“When it comes to paper,” Alustin said, “It really is all about how you fold it.”
She just glowered at her teacher’s obnoxious smirk, until she felt the cobblestones shifting under her feet.
“Though, on second thought, we should probably move,” Alustin said.
They’d sprinted out twenty feet from underneath the monolith by the time the cobblestones buckled and the monolith collapsed. It punched through the courtyard entirely, plummeting down into the lake below. The impact threw both Alustin and Talia off their feet. Alustin fell into a graceful roll and sprang right back to his feet.
Talia, meanwhile, crashed hard against the stone, leaving her with a lot of cuts and soon-to-be bruises.
She was still climbing back to her feet when a fireball detonated a short distance away. She looked up to see at least a half dozen more heading straight towards them from the living Havathi tower, as well as several arrows, a slow-flying snake made out of fiery ash, some sort of web of wires, and several more magical attacks she couldn’t identify.
Not a one of them hit. They all were simply deflected in midair by a ward. Not one of Hugh’s wards, but a great floating circle of paper nearly fifty feet across. Fireballs bounced off to crash into canals in an explosion of steam, the wire net simply fell harmlessly to the ground, and the arrow deflected to start growing into a full tree on a nearby bridge.
Grovebringer.
And then Alustin counterattacked. Hundreds of glyph-marked sheets of paper arced towards the tower. Most were deflected by other attacks or by magical defenses. The living tower appeared to have wards of its own woven out of vines, but they were taking a serious pounding from Alustin’s exploding sheets of paper. At the same time, Alustin was covering himself in what looked like spellform-encrusted full plate made entirely of paper.
Talia had never seen another mage channel so many spells at once. It was absolutely absurd.
“You could be helping, you know,” Alustin said. “That ward’s one-way, it’s not blocking your shots.”
“My dreamfire bolts can’t travel that far,” Talia said. “I’m not exactly the longest-range battle mage out there. I’m definitely more of a middle-distance attacker. Unless, of course, you’d like me to use a siege spell right now.”
“Dreamfire bolts, no, but did you really think your fine magical control was the only reason I helped you develop dreamwasps?” Alustin said.
Talia gave him a hesitant look, then manifested a dreamwasp. The green-purple spark hovered over her hand for a moment, then she launched it towards the living tower.
She was convinced it would go out before it made it a third of the way there, but it took almost no mental effort at all to maintain it all the way to the living tower, where it splattered harmlessly against the wards.
Or, perhaps not harmlessly. She could swear she detected an odd crunching feeling as the dreamwasp impacted the wards, as though it had taken a tiny bite out of them.
“And how many dreamwasps were you successfully manifesting at once before?” Alustin asked.
A wicked smile crept across Talia’s face as dozens of dreamwasps began manifesting in front of her.
Then they exploded forwards.
The swarm of dreamwasps impacted a fireball first, which simply… froze. It tumbled to the ground, and shattered like ice across one of Ithos’ bridges.
The swarm was diminished but hardly quenched by that, and slammed through another of Grovebringer’s arrows. It sprouted into a tree in midair, but the tree was visibly rotting, and tore apart into sawdust when it impacted Alustin’s ward.
Finally, they impacted the slow-flying ash-snake, burning away a large amount of its mass, though it reformed itself and kept flying towards them.
Talia began manifesting another swarm.
“You really don’t need gaps in between manifesting dreamwasps,” Alustin said. “You should be more than capable of manifesting them continuously.”
Talia frowned at him, then tried it. Most of the dreamwasps flew off course or extinguished at first, but within a few breaths, Talia had a thin but continuous stream of dreamwasps flying forwards. Most impacted enemy spells, but a few started consistently making it through to the enemy wards.
And it was hardly using any of her mana.
“Not bad, Talia,” Alustin said. “Dreamfire even in small amounts should wear down their wards quickly— it’s hard to ward against something so erratic.”
She glanced at the hundreds of sheets of paper intercepting enemy spells or detonating against the living tower, then scowled.
“Screw small amounts,” Talia said.
The stream of dreamwasps began to swell, the numbers of the dreamwasps doubling, then tripling.
Talia began to laugh.
Though, if you asked
anyone else, they’d probably describe it as a maniacal cackle.
Sabae was, to say the least, in an awkward position.
She couldn’t actually fly, after all, so she couldn’t stay up in the air. And considering the massive bombardment of spells coming from the tower, she didn’t want to try to land somewhere near it, nor did she think she could successfully make it outside the range of the bombardment.
So she had, well, decided to land on top of the roof of the living tower.
She’d expected the vines and trees of the tower to immediately grab at her, but to her shock, she seemed to have landed unnoticed.
She didn’t try to take immediate advantage of that fact, however. Instead, she took a long moment to look around.
The bombardment was focusing especially hard on areas Sabae knew Hugh had built attention wards in. She didn’t know how the Havathi were spotting them, but they hadn’t actually seen through them, or they would have just targeted the ones protecting the Skyhold party. Instead, they were indiscriminately firing spells at any attention ward in range.
There were already a shocking number of new trees sprouting across the city from Grovebringer’s arrows, and great chunks of the city were being obliterated. The Havathi might claim to be the rightful inheritors of the Ithonian mantle, but they were clearly unconcerned with damage to the ruins— Sabae doubted they had any interest in anything but the Exile Splinter.
Sabae smirked. Or maybe Heartburner.
The whole tower shuddered, and Sabae almost overbalanced, but she caught herself by sticking her shield to the nearest protruding tree branch. When she’d recovered, she let the shield’s magical grip on the branch dissolve, and crouch-walked over towards the edge.
Crouch-walking in wind-armor was hard.
The source of the explosions was, unsurprisingly, Talia and Alustin. The two of them were somehow going spell for spell against an entire bombardment from the tower.