The Lost City of Ithos: Mage Errant Book 4

by John Bierce

  The underside of the palace was covered in faintly glowing algae, and Talia let her dragonbone dagger extinguish. She couldn’t see a thing other than the outlines of the palace’s support columns, but then, there wasn’t anything else to see down here.

  Above her, the palace shook, plumes of dust falling.

  Talia strode out onto the shadows that made up the bottom of the pocket dimension, barely keeping her footing. Slippery was the wrong word for them. They didn’t have any texture whatsoever, it just felt like a force mage was pushing her feet upwards.

  Not wanting to risk stabbing herself, Talia sheathed both daggers and scrambled across the shadows, occasionally steadying herself with one hand.

  She made it halfway under the next palace when the one she’d been in collapsed completely, in a great tangle of broken masonry and tree trunks.

  Talia sipped from her waterskin to make sure she didn’t cough from the dustcloud and give her position away, then started moving in the direction she thought the shots came from.

  After passing through several canals, Talia climbed up to the balcony of another palace. She had to move slowly— she couldn’t rest any real weight on her left arm. Instead, she carefully burned hand-and-footholds into the side of a dripping wet column using dreamfire. In between steps upward, she rested most of her weight on her sheathed kinetic anchor. She’d had a latch added to the dagger’s sheath for precisely that purpose, and had a belt made specifically to be able to hold her entire weight.

  When she made it up onto the balcony, she collapsed there in the dark to catch her breath. She forced herself back to her feet before long, and staggered off into the palace, only allowing herself the smallest bit of flame from her dragonbone dagger to see by.

  She finally made it up to the roof of the palace, and crawled across it to find a good vantage point in the darkness.

  Down in a nearby street, she spotted Hugh and Godrick being confronted by the spear-wielding Havathi from Zophor. Qirsad, that was her name. There were a couple of nearby trees growing out of the ground near them, meaning they were in Grovebringer’s line of sight.

  Talia had to restrain herself from rushing to help them. She needed to trust they could take care of themselves while she took care of Grovebringer.

  She did trust them. Both of them.

  She just needed to focus on what she had to do so she could help them.

  Unfortunately, according to Alustin and Artur, Grovebringer’s wielder was supposed to be able to turn invisible.

  It seemed like her friends and Qirsad were talking, so Talia started scanning the roofs nearby. She could barely see anything in the distant light supplied by the three down in the street below, however.

  To her irritation, Talia realized that she was going to have to do some math. At least it was just geometry— it could definitely be worse.

  Talia tried to mentally calculate which roofs around her would have had angles at her friends, on the street where she’d been shot, and the palace she’d fled into. It was hard to focus, however, with her friends fighting for their lives.

  Then the city started phasing again, and Qirsad attacked her friends with one of her weird lava bombs.

  To her surprise, the attack didn’t smash into one of Hugh’s wards. Instead, as the lava bomb approached them, it accelerated up and to one side, missing them by a wide margin.

  Talia smiled proudly at that. Don’t take a hit head-on if you don’t need to.

  Qirsad didn’t launch another lava bomb at Hugh’s ward as the rain fully resumed. Instead, what looked like a cloud of burning ash erupted out of her spear, rushing to envelop her friends.

  Talia forced her attention away from them again.

  It wasn’t hard, considering what she saw off in the distance.

  Namely, Artur punching a dragon in the face. What was more, Artur’s armor was half ablaze with dragonflame, lighting up the storm.

  The dragon went tumbling back, crashing through a building. The creature must have been at least a hundred and twenty feet long, dwarfing Artur, but his stone armor still must have outmassed it several times over.

  Before Artur could follow up, a second dragon lunged at him from behind, and he went staggering.

  Past Artur, three more dragons were landing. She could see what looked like dozens, even hundreds of Havathi debarking from their backs.

  Talia’s attention was dragged back to Artur as a pair of trees started growing out of his back.

  Grovebringer.

  She stayed hunkered down, but started scanning the nearby roofs for a spot with lines of sight to her original position, Hugh, and Artur. Grovebringer’s range was monstrous, but there weren’t many spots with lines of sight to all three, which meant…

  There.

  Talia didn’t fire on the roof right away, she just waited.

  And then she saw it.

  A patch of rain that wasn’t falling quite right, then a blur of motion through the air as Grovebringer fired once more.

  Talia began manifesting dreamwasps as fast as she could, not even bothering to aim beyond spraying the general area of the roof where she’d spotted Grovebringer. She kept it up for a count of three, watching tiny plumes of multi-colored smoke and the like rise from the holes she was leaving in the roof, then she dove aside to cover, in case she’d missed.

  No return fire arrived, and Talia carefully levered herself up to look.

  She didn’t see anything at first, and then noticed something lying on the roof.

  Grovebringer.

  The living bow was massive, with great clumps of leaves at either end.

  As she watched, something else faded into view. It had likely been a human body once, but Talia’s dreamwasps had mangled it almost beyond recognition.

  Talia started to turn towards Hugh and Godrick’s battle, until her attention was drawn back to Grovebringer.

  Its spellforms were starting to grow brighter and brighter, and several appeared to be… broken. Not to mention sparking.

  Talia’s eyes grew wide. Destroying powerful enchanted items was generally considered a very, very bad idea. A destructively bad idea. And uhhh…

  She may have just damaged Grovebringer irreparably.

  And Grovebringer was rather exceptionally powerful.

  Hugh’s wards flickered again under the pyroclastic assault of Qirsad’s volcanic ash. It spun and battered around them like some cruel parody of the sandstorms against the shields of Theras Tel, but this storm was grey, lit an angry red from deep within. Even through his wards, he could feel its blistering heat forcing its way in.

  Worse, as his mana reservoirs drained, he could feel the weight and heat of the cloud grow and grow.

  “Ah might have a’ plan,” Godrick said. He nearly had to yell to make himself heard over the roaring ash. “But, uh… yeh’re not goin’ ta’ like it.”

  “I’ll take just about any plan other than being incinerated by volcanic ash!” Hugh shouted back.

  Godrick hefted Hailstrike. It was starting to melt in the heat.

  Hugh stared blankly for a moment, then groaned.

  “Really? Do all of your plans end up involving you breaking your hammers? Enchanted weapons really aren’t cheap.”

  Godrick shrugged.

  “Ah’d prefer not ta’, especially since it feels a bit murdery, but do yeh have another plan?”

  Hugh grimaced. “Hailstrike’s about as aware as a snail, if even that, and it doesn’t have any sort of conception of self, so I don’t think it counts as murder, but yeah, it feels pretty weird. I don’t have any better ideas, though.

  “Hailstrike’s goin’ ta’ be a lot harder ta’ shatter than mah last hammer. Give me as long as yeh can, alright?”

  Hugh nodded.

  Godrick sighed, then broke the ring of ice out of its hammer shaft. Its spellforms started glowing, and Hugh could feel the stress Godrick was putting the ring under via his affinity sense.

  Hugh felt oddly powerless, as though
he was just a bystander in a race to see whether Godrick would manage to break Hailstrike or Qirsad would manage to break through his wards first.

  As it turned out, it was neither.

  Hugh wasn’t sure when he started hearing the rumbling noise over the sound of the ash, but it grew steadily louder and louder, until he realized that the ground beneath their feet was shaking.

  He exchanged puzzled looks with Godrick, then reached out with his affinity senses in the direction of the noise.

  There was something huge tearing through the stone towards them.

  Qirsad’s pyroclastic assault slackened for a moment, and Hugh got a glimpse of what was rising up nearby.

  A tree. Or, rather, a massive, deformed pillar, as though some mad archmage had jammed a thousand different trees into one.

  Then the ground beneath the two of them crumpled, and they were hauled skyward by the rising branches of the new tree.

  Hugh wasn’t paying much attention to that, however. He was paying a lot more attention to the cloud of pyroclastic ash he’d just been hauled through as his ward collapsed.

  Alustin was cleaning the blood off his sabre when a new sound reached him.

  What he saw when he looked up was surprising even to him, but he took his time wiping off his sabre on the formerly pristine white Havathi tunic.

  He was finding it almost impossible to scry his students through the storm, and he was sure at this point that Hugh had activated his spellbook’s anti-scrying field, but as he watched the mind-bogglingly huge tree tear its way through the outskirts of the city, he was absolutely convinced his students had something to do with it.

  Probably Talia. Blaming Talia for chaos was usually a safe enough bet.

  As Alustin strode off towards the tree, he didn’t spare a glance for the Hand of Sacred Swordsmen lying on the ground.

  None of them had been veterans, and none of their weapons had earned any sort of real fame yet. Not even the one with the staff that threw chunks of metal that burned on contact with water, and Alustin had only heard rumors of that sort of affinity.

  This had probably been their first mission. Most of them weren’t much older than his own students.

  He almost felt sorry for them.

  As sorry as he could feel for any Havathi, at least.

  Sabae cursed as Artur almost stepped on her again.

  “Ah’m not exactly used ta’ carryin’ two people in here,” Artur said. “And ah’m a little busy fightin’ dragons ta’ reshape the spells, so yeh’re goin’ ta have ta’ just deal with it fer now.”

  Sabae climbed to her feet again in the little space inside Artur’s armor. It was hot, stuffy, and largely filled by Artur himself. It was also pitch black in here, because Artur wouldn’t let her use a light cantrip— he apparently found light distracting while operating the armor.

  “Yeh sure yeh can’t get yer grandmother ta’ end this storm somehow?” Artur asked.

  “I have no idea how I’d even contact her. I can almost guarantee she’s not paying this particular storm any attention— she’s generating them by the dozen. All of her attention is probably on the battle against Ephyrus for control over the winds in this region!”

  The armor shook, and Sabae barely kept to her feet. She reached out with her affinity senses, but she only got a garbled impression of storm winds and falling rain.

  When she’d windjumped onto Artur, latching herself on with her shield, he’d almost swatted her before somehow realizing it was her. She still had no idea how Artur saw the area around him.

  He hadn’t, however, seen the approaching dragons, so he clearly had limited range. He’d barely gotten her inside the armor before the dragons arrived.

  “Ah’ve got some good news, some bad news, and some weird news,” Artur said. “Which do yeh want ta’ hear first?”

  “The good news,” Sabae said. “I’m not Talia.”

  “The good news is ah’m not gettin’ hit with Grovebringer’s arrows anymore,” Artur said. “The weird news, which ah reckon is related, is that there’s a tree bigger than the ones in Zophor growin’ in the outskirts a’ the city.”

  “And the bad news?” Sabae asked.

  “Ah’ve only taken down one dragon sa’ far, and ah’m about dry a’ mana. Mah suit at full size was never really meant ta’ fight fer this long. Which still leaves us with four dragons and a small army a’ Havathis.”

  “That, uh… that definitely counts as bad news,” Sabae said.

  “Ah don’t suppose yeh got any tricks that will help us?” Artur asked.

  The armor shook with some massive impact, and Sabae lost her footing again. She barely managed to not hit her head or crash into Artur.

  “Actually,” Sabae said, “I think I might have a plan. You’re going to need to take a fall, though.”

  Godrick’s day went from bad to worse in a shockingly short period of time. And considering that bad had been being trapped inside a pyroclastic cloud bent on their annihilation, that said rather a lot.

  When they broke through it Godrick felt the heat of the cloud even through the warded faceplate Hugh had made him for his last birthday. He felt it even though the cloud had already mostly dispersed.

  His first thought, to his later shame, was Hailstrike. He almost lost control of its dissolution— destroying it too fast would be even worse than destroying it too slow. Once he’d started the process, he’d rapidly reached a point of no return, but Hailstrike seemed vaguely aware of what was happening to it, and he could feel it fighting back weakly.

  His second thought was shock as he looked around. The section of cobblestone they’d stood on had been lifted far into the air by the massive malformed tree growing up through the city. It was suspended halfway out on a branch wider than a hallway. Godrick couldn’t even see how big the tree was through the storm. It was a hideous amalgamation of different tree species— he could see pine and oak branches as large on their own as entire trees. The overwhelming majority of its bulk appeared to be yew, however.

  Even more alarming, he saw his father, locked in battle with multiple dragons, and what looked to be an entire army of Havathi. His father’s armor was burning, half-covered with what had to be dragonflame. The thick, flammable liquid clung to everything, and even submerging it underwater could barely put it out.

  There was, at least, one clearly dead dragon sprawled in the ruins of one of the countless Ithonian palaces.

  It was only third that his thoughts went to Hugh, and that was only when he heard the cough. It was a nasty, hacking sort of cough, and something in Godrick seized up immediately, knowing there was something wrong.

  He almost didn’t want to look.

  Godrick couldn’t see exactly how bad it was, since Hugh was mostly covered in volcanic ash. What he could see was horrible enough, though. Hugh had vicious looking burns across his face and arms, and there were charred spots all over his clothes— some burnt all the way through. His breath rasped and rattled with every movement of his chest. Godrick wasn’t even sure if he was conscious or not.

  Hugh’s spellbook was nuzzling at Hugh’s side in confusion, trying to get him up.

  Godrick was just about to lean down to check on Hugh when he felt something moving with his stone affinity sense. Something swirling and hot and…

  He’d turned and thrown Hailstrike before he even realized what he was doing, propelling it even faster with his magic. Qirsad Vain never even saw him— she was still clambering up onto a lower branch.

  The ring exploded just feet away from her, in a massive flare of power. The explosion dwarfed that of his last hammer, only it was cold, not hot, and he could see ice and frost coating the trunk near the blast.

  Of Qirsad, or the branch she’d stood on, there was no sign.

  Godrick was bending down to tend to Hugh when the day got even worse.

  The city was phasing again, but not all at once. Chunks of it were phasing in while some were phasing out, and others seemed to be flickering
back and forth uncontrollably. The phasing process was only taking seconds now, not minutes.

  The massive tree groaned as several of the buildings holding it up phased out and then phased back in.

  The clouds began to flicker, and Godrick knew what was coming. He crouched over Hugh, trying to offer him a little shelter against the rain and any falling debris.

  The entire sky exploded with lightning again. It struck his father’s armor, it struck building after building, and most of all, it struck the tree. About the only thing it didn’t strike were the dragons, who apparently had Havathi mages guiding the bolts away from them.

  Or maybe the dragons were lightning mages.

  Tree-sized branches tore loose and plummeted burning towards the ground, breaking through countless other branches on the way down. It was only sheer luck and the deformed trunk of the tree that kept any of the debris from striking their own branch.

  Then the whole tree shook, and there was a massive groaning sound as it simply began to dissolve. Gouts of sawdust shot out into the air from the trunk as it began to peel apart, though the rain and wind quickly washed most of the sawdust out of the air.

  Godrick still had no idea where this tree had come from, or how it had grown so quickly, but it was clearly unstable to start with. Of course, the lightning, the rapid phasing of the city, and Hailstrike’s destruction probably hadn’t helped anything.

  Two more bad things happened as their branch started to shake beneath Godrick’s feet. One happened far away and one nearby.

  Far away, Godrick saw his father’s armor take a heavy blow to the chest from one of the dragons. It wasn’t the first time— they’d been circling and battering at Artur this whole time.

  The difference was, this time Artur’s armor didn’t just stagger backward.

  This time, it started to crumble as it fell back into a canal.

  If Godrick hadn’t been watching his father fall, if he hadn’t stepped forward, if he hadn’t been screaming in denial, maybe the next bad thing, the one nearby, wouldn’t have happened.