by Joe Jackson
“I have always wanted to visit another world, but Father insists it is too dangerous,” his daughter said with a little pout.
“Depends where you go,” Kari said, stretching out her sore limbs. “If you go to some of the northern realms of Mehr’Durillia – Pataria, Tess’Vorg, maybe even Mas’tolinor – you can learn a lot as long as you can speak their languages and you treat them with respect. You might even get to take in a football game.”
“Football?” Maelstrom echoed. “You mean like our soccer sport?”
“Yes, the mallasti in particular are very fond of it,” Kari answered, but she went quiet when Karinda and Aaron returned from their investigation.
Karinda had a grim expression on her features, as did Aaron. “Reese, you have quite a bit of explaining to do,” she said. “There is no mistaking it: Your signature is all over the portal and the tendrils of power that still encompass it. Explain yourself.”
“Impossible!” he blurted, then turned to his sire. “Father, you cannot believe this! Why would I do something that would endanger our city, the home we have always protected?”
Maelstrom took a deep breath and sighed, his gaze fixed on Karinda. “Much as I would normally hesitate to ask, in this case I must: Are you absolutely certain it was my son?”
“I am afraid so,” Karinda returned with her own sigh. “Gareth, you know the council would be useless if we were unable to determine such things with certainty. There is no mistaking a wizard’s signature. Even if he were to mask it somehow, that in turn would lead us back to him when we were finished peeling back the layers. There is little reason to doubt the veracity of my findings, as Aaron came to the same conclusion independently.”
“It wasn’t me,” Reese said. To his credit, he didn’t make any effort to run or lash out at his accusers. He didn’t even turn a nasty look on Kari, considering she was the first to point a finger at him. “Unless…”
The younger wizard looked at his father sheepishly, then down at the floor, but offered no further words. Gareth at last prompted him, “Unless what, Son?”
“I made a mistake, Father. The last time you left to go to Hrastiria, I looked through some of the books you told us were off-limits. Andrea is always so busy with her research, and I felt like I was not as much of a help to your knowledge-seeking as she was. So, I perused some of the forbidden tomes to see if there was something I could try my hand at that might help you.”
“What did you do? Tell me you did not summon some Mehr’Durillian king and strike a deal with them?”
Reese looked down again and sighed, but then his eyes came back up, now full of anger in addition to hurt. “This is exactly what I mean, Father. Do you think me that stupid? That I might treat with one of the kings for some paltry gift or power in return? I made a mistake, but I would never do something so inherently stupid. But I may know who would…”
“One of your tomes detailed the creation of clones,” Reese continued. “I thought perhaps what you could use was an extra pair of hands and another sharp mind to help you with your work. But the spells and the procedures were overly complex, and the end result seemed to be faulty in some way. It appeared I had successfully made a clone of myself, but it was rude and ill-tempered, so I put it in stasis until I could confer with you about it. I have left it in stasis ever since, afraid to admit my failure to you, but if you or Andrea perhaps released it, suspecting it was actually me…?”
“Not I,” Andrea said, bemused by the situation.
“Nor I,” Maelstrom said. “Had I ever found you in a stasis field, I would not release you without figuring out the truth of the matter first. And I would have detected what the issue was, I assure you. So where do you keep this clone in stasis?”
“In my private study,” Reese said. He gestured for everyone to join him as he turned to the stairway.
Kari struggled to her feet. “No, I have to see this for myself,” she said, waving off her niece’s attempts to get her to lie back down. With some help, she was able to make her way up the stairs alongside everyone else.
They arrived at one of the upper floors, which weren’t open like the main level. Reese let them in, and Kari’s brow knitted immediately. She knew she was still inside the archmage’s tower, but this room couldn’t possibly fit the dimensions of it. What should have been a wide circular chamber was instead like the inside of a house, with stairs leading to other levels, and many smaller rooms off its sides. This was some fantastic usage of magic, the likes of which Kari had never heard of, much less seen.
“How is this even possible…?” she muttered.
Karinda laughed, touched her lightly on the shoulder, and gestured toward one of the deep seats in the sitting area. “It would take some time and familiarity with the arcane to explain, but suffice to say it is magic.”
The wizards proceeded into an adjoining room, and despite Karinda’s insistence, Kari went along with them. Reese’s study looked like any other, but there was a bookshelf that swung out to reveal a walk-in closet-like area. And there, standing absolutely still, his eyes closed as he was held in place within the stasis field, was a perfect duplicate of Maelstrom’s son. Kari found it chilling to look at the “young” man and know exactly what she was seeing. The clone wore only a loincloth, but otherwise resembled Reese – and thereby Maelstrom himself – in virtually every way.
“Ah, Son, I must say I am disappointed,” the elder archmage said. “Those tomes were all off-limits for a reason! If you were curious about cloning and simulacrums, you should have consulted with me first, and I could have told you the dangers.”
“What dangers, Father? I understand there was a mistake I made somewhere during this process, but is a clone inherently dangerous?”
“There are many things that can go wrong in the process,” Karinda said. “I am no expert on it, certainly not to the extent your father is, but this is something heavily discouraged by our council, if not banned in practice.”
“He just smiled,” Kari said, drawing everyone’s gazes. She pointed at the clone within the stasis field. “The clone… it just smiled.”
Reese turned to look at it. “That is not possible, it is frozen within the stasis field.”
Kari felt a massive pressure between her eyes, and her hair began to stand on end. She found herself thrown backwards through the door to crash into the bookshelf opposite the walk-in closet. She struggled to get to her hands and knees, then began to crawl for the more open space of the entry room; a fight in the study would leave little room to maneuver, and give far too many advantages to one who could use the arcane. She didn’t know what was about to happen, but she could still feel the buildup of arcane power as several archmages gathered their focus and prepared to do battle.
An explosion rocked the building, and smoke and dust billowed out the doorway and toward Kari. She hauled herself up into one of Reese’s chairs, and pulled a throw blanket over her face to filter out some of the debris. Karinda, Gareth, Andrea, and Reese stumbled out of the doorway, coughing, but there was no sign of Aaron. Kari put her hands to the hilts of her blades, but she knew she would be of little use in this coming confrontation. She could hardly stand, much less take a stand, and against a potential archmage or caught in the crossfire of several, she wasn’t sure she’d be useful regardless.
It hit her, then: The cold bite in the air, the feeling of dread deep in her guts that told her clearly that a demon was present. Now it made a little more sense: The malevolence, the desire to constantly open the portal to let invaders through, the fact that the arcane signature matched Reese’s perfectly. The thing it didn’t explain was how gangs of Mehr’Durillians were coming into the tower without being detected, much less when they left it. But that was a question for another time – when they were all safe.
“Epaxa chi’pri,” Kari whispered as the possessed clone strode through the door, giving no indication that the smoke or debris affected it. Zalkar’s symbol flared to life, blazing through Kari’
s undergarments and armor to challenge the demon. Her body was in terrible shape, but she felt her deity’s power flow through her, and she knew she could take the fight to the demon as long as she was willing to pay the consequences after. Her body was shredded already, and it would be much worse after this battle, but it was a sacrifice she had to make.
The possessed clone threw his hands out to the sides with a low laugh, and Kari glanced up as the ceiling started to give way. Karinda held her hands up, staving off the crushing weight of the stone above. Even under the strain, she snarled, “You dare show yourself here?!”
All light left the chamber, shrouding them in darkness so pervasive that even the night vision of the rir couldn’t cut through it. Kari’s pulsing symbol of Zalkar, glowing brightly on her chest, was the only source of light that cut through the pitch. Then two others joined it: The golden glow from her scimitars, fighting back against the darkness and the cold of the demonic spirit. With each pulse of Zalkar’s symbol, Kari got a glimpse of the grim smile on the possessed clone.
“Demon, you just made your last mistake,” Kari hissed, rising to her feet. She almost couldn’t feel her legs beneath her, but her footing was solid. There was a twinge of doubt, a minor irritation at the feeling that she was a puppet, but she shook away the thought. Instead, she surrendered her will to that of her divine patrons.
There was a deep hum from somewhere below them, and Kari wasn’t the only one alarmed by it. “The portal!” Maelstrom barked. “Karinda, can you hold this creature here?”
“Easily,” the head of the High Council of Wizardry said, her black eyes narrowed to mere slits that looked solid ebony in the pulsing darkness.
“We’ve got this; you and Andrea go shut that portal down – permanently,” Kari said.
Maelstrom nodded. “Andrea, Reese: With me!” he shouted.
“Where’s Aaron?” Kari asked.
“Safe for the moment,” Karinda answered, swatting aside several bolts of arcane force and fire from the possessed clone. With the ceiling no longer under threat, she brought her full arcane power to bear, restoring the light and the structural integrity of the tower around them. “We need to take this fight elsewhere to safeguard our companions and the city.”
There was the sudden, jarring sensation of the room spinning, and Kari’s vision went blurry. She had to close her eyes to keep from losing what contents remained in her stomach, and when she opened them, her jaw dropped open slightly. No longer were they inside the archmage’s tower in DarkWind, but they stood instead on a broad, barren expanse of rocky plain. Kari had no idea where they were; it looked sort of like parts of the Badlands of Terrassia, but the sky, overcast and pink, looked utterly wrong. Kari got the impression they might not even be on Citaria anymore.
There was another deep hum, but this one didn’t come from some portal deep below them. It emanated from Karinda and their surroundings, and Kari could feel some ethereal gust blow past her in the direction of the archmage. Karinda’s robes billowed around her despite the lack of any tangible wind, and the woman’s hair was floating eerily as if on currents of fiery air behind her. Kari no longer saw her niece beside her, but some bastion of arcane power that had just drawn in every available ounce of strength.
“Kari, are you ready?”
“I think so,” the demonhunter answered. Every minute the divine power burned within her put her body further at risk, and she could feel the tendrils of fatigue worming their way into the edges of her consciousness. They had to get this done quickly, and there would be plenty of time to get answers in the wake of the demon’s destruction.
The demon looked around itself, apparently curious to the change in location, but then it turned a sickening grin on the two women. “Here or on Citaria, it matters little–”
It was cut off abruptly as the land around it erupted in spiny stalagmites that exploded, tearing at the flesh of its mortal coil. Kari tensed as the clone rose into the air under arcane power, but it was soon slammed into the ground and several nearby rocky outcroppings repeatedly. It was nearly a minute before the possessed clone managed to push back against Karinda’s arcane power, and by the time it did, its body was already heavily damaged. Still, it was not a mortal but a demon encased in flesh; the damage to the body did only so much.
“I can strip it from this body, but it will be up to you to destroy it,” Karinda said.
“Should we try to spare him, though? Get the demon out but let–”
“No. Both must be destroyed. I will explain in due time, but trust me for now.”
Kari nodded. “Can you handle it in an arcane duel?”
Karinda snorted but didn’t answer, swatting away the clone’s attempt at a counterstrike. Power flared up around the archmage, making Kari’s hair stand on end. She suddenly recalled Eryn talking about the way she could feel Emma’s power, and realized the same held true here for Karinda. If there was any mystery to why the woman had become head of the High Council of Wizardry, it was being quickly washed away in the tide of power that swirled around her as an arcane maelstrom.
That thought gave Kari a chuckle as she considered how Gareth had gotten his surname.
The demonhunter tensed and prepared herself to fight the demon once the body it held was too damaged to inhabit. The demon used the arcane-trained clone to enact its evil through the use of direct magic, but its power was inconsequential beside Karinda’s. Fireballs were snuffed out, windstorms and blizzards were calmly dispelled, and even attempts to reshape the land and turn it into a weapon were easily countered. Kari had seen some impressive arcanists in her day – Triela and Sonja among them – but Karinda’s display was far beyond even that.
All Kari could think was that should the worst come to pass and Emma be used as a weapon directly against the Order and Citaria as a whole, Karinda would be able to stand against the mallasti sorceress. She swatted away, absorbed, countered, or redirected every attack the clone could throw at her, and in those brief minutes that still felt as though they were hours, Kari could see any confidence the demon had being stripped away. It faced not just an archmage, not just some practiced summoner who had risen to the headship of a paper council. The demon faced an absolute master of magic, someone who embodied the very essence of arcane power.
Kari watched as light blue stripes appeared on the sides of Karinda’s snout, much like the natural ones that adorned the faces of the kirelas-rir. Her eyes went from the dark black pools to empty white, then, and her brow came low. A slender staff with a glowing vortex of white light floating above its end appeared in the archmage’s hand. When Karinda touched its end to the ground, a shockwave rolled out around her, staggering Kari only slightly. The demon, by contrast, finally had the flesh blasted from it, the shredded remains of the clone’s body torn off and disintegrated in an arcane blast.
“Do you recognize where you are now, demon?” Karinda said, her eyes taking on their solid black hue again. She let show the slightest of smiles as realization hit the being of evil. “Oh yes, and you will die here, like so many of your brethren before you. Kari?”
The demonhunter was distracted for a moment, wondering what Karinda had meant about their location, but she shook it away. With her scimitars continuing to cast their golden glow, she approached the demon. She wasn’t sure why Karinda couldn’t handle it, but figured it might just be some immunity the demons had to arcane power. The creature continued to look around at the blasted plain they were on, but soon enough the black pits of its eyes turned on Kari. It screeched something in that guttural, vicious language the demons used, but Kari paid it almost no mind.
“Save your threats,” Kari said, assuming that was what it was saying. “Just come throw yourself on my swords and save me the trouble. I’m about due for a nap.”
She heard Karinda snicker behind her, but Kari wasn’t feeling as mirthful as her words made it sound. She was bone tired, and as much as she wanted to kill this demon before her, she was more concerned for those she
and Karinda had left behind to deal with the fallout – literal and figurative. This fight had to end quickly.
The demon came at her, and Kari wondered at its boldness. It had lived in DarkWind for however many years; did it not know of her? As the first inky tendril came forward to touch her, Kari slashed it off casually with one of her glowing blades. The creature screeched again, in pain this time, drawing back from her, and Kari snorted. Ignoring the protestations of her body, she drew on the divine power within and entered the deadly dance of her fighting style.
As in her fight with the demon that had so cruelly used her friend’s body against her, Kari took this one apart piece by piece. There was no vortex of light above into which she could throw the creature once she subdued it, but nevertheless, it made no attempt to escape in this odd place Karinda had brought them to. It lashed out at her, but knowing what to expect, Kari treated it as though it were harmless, hacking off bits and pieces of it any time it mustered the courage to try attacking her again.
She called upon the light of Sakkrass, the blessing of Zalkar, and the life-giving warmth of Be’shatha, and she made to end the demon’s existence as mercifully as she could. Striking off its apparent head seemed to serve that purpose, the same way it had when she’d killed the demon in Shisaevas. On the one hand, she was surprised at how easy it seemed to kill these demons, but the truth of the matter was plain to her once she considered it. Not every man and woman carried the power of several gods within them, nor did they have the power of an angel or a high-ranked archmage to aid them.
I’m not a puppet, Kari thought. I’m a vessel, and a grateful one at that.
Karinda held her staff aloft, brightly illuminating the landscape about them in the wake of the demon’s passing. No trace of the shadowy creature presented itself under the staff’s glowing vortex, and the archmage smiled ruefully. The look softened when she turned it on Kari, and she leaned on her staff for only a moment before she made a gesture and it disappeared back to wherever it had come from.