King of Sword and Sky

by C. L. Wilson

  Screaming defiance, he flung out the weaves.

  The crumbling mountainside froze. Kieran gritted his teeth, feeding his power into the weave, holding up the weight of the mountain through sheer force of magic and strength of will.

  Raising his voice, he shouted to the warriors behind him, “Five-fold weaves, kem’jetos! Keep that scorching Mage Fire off us!”

  But the Fey were already locked in a desperate battle for their lives.

  And they were losing.

  Between the snarling filth of the darrokken and the fury of Mage Fire, the warriors couldn’t protect themselves against the barrage of sel’dor arrows as Eld archers came within bow range. Weaves faltered, and Kieran screamed in helpless rage as his blade brothers began to fall. Acid seared his thigh as a barbed sel’dor arrow sank deep.

  “Master Baristani, take the girls. Go with the shei’dalins into the Mists! Run!” Another darrokken crashed through the Fey, ripping and slashing warriors. Two of the shei’dalins grabbed Lillis and Lorelle and ran up the mountain towards the Mist-shrouded peaks. The other three screamed as Mage Fire, sel’dor arrows, and darrokken herded them back away from the safety of the Garreval and towards the waiting Eld army. “Kiel, scorch it, where are the Fey?”

  Kiel slammed a furious Spirit weave towards Chatok and Chakai. «Fey! Ti’Kieran! Ti’ku! Ti’Teleon!» To me! To Teleon! Spinning blue weaves shot out from his fingertips, desiccating the darrokken pursuing Lillis and Lorelle.

  Rumbling thunder shook the ground at Kieran’s feet. Krekk! More Mage Fire? If the ground gave way beneath him, he was dead. He didn’t dare divide his weave or the mountain would come down upon them all.

  But this time, the rumble wasn’t an avalanche spawned by Mage Fire.

  The eastern army of the Fey charged out of the Mists, magic blazing, steel bared. Hundreds of them…a thousand…more. All of Chatok and Chakai had emptied and come rushing to the aid of their embattled brothers.

  Two more arrows struck Kieran’s back. His weave faltered, and he screamed with fury as the mountain fell.

  Eld ~ Boura Fell

  The collection of moving lights at the edge of Vadim Maur’s display of Celieria winked out. He frowned and tapped the map of the Fading Lands, scanning the area near the Garreval, but the moving lights of the chemar didn’t show there either. They were gone.

  His brows drew together. Scorch those fools! They were supposed to capture Ellysetta Baristani’s family, not destroy them and their precious chemar with Mage Fire.

  He spun the display of Celieria into place. In Teleon, a new trail of chemar led away from the main grouping. The bread crumbs Den Brodson had left behind to lead the way into the hidden Fey fortress.

  He tapped four more white lights around Teleon, turning them red. “Send in the second wave. Unleash the demons on the army in the Garreval.” He tapped the line of chemar leading into the Fey’s hidden fortress. “Send the Black Guard here and the Primages here.” Last, he turned one final pinpoint red. “And here. Bring me Lord Darramon’s wife.”

  “What about Lord Darramon, Most High?”

  He glanced across the table and raised a brow. “Kill him. Leave no survivors.”

  Celieria ~ Teleon

  The shouts of the Fey and the sound of booted feet racing were the first signs the Eld had breached the Fortress. Lord Darramon gripped his sword more tightly. Den moved towards Lady Darramon. He knew what was expected of him.

  When it came, the attack happened with shocking speed. The gateway opened without a sound, a great gaping maw of darkness from which black arrows flew as thick in the air as a murder of crows. Lord Darramon rushed towards his wife and died, skewered on the barbed sel’dor blade of the High Mage’s Black Guard. Lady Darramon screamed and fought like a madwoman until Den’s fist clipped her temple. Then the silvery blue stone room ran red with blood, and demons howled as they rushed from the Well to feast on the dead and dying.

  Eld ~ Boura Fell

  “Victory at Teleon, my lord.” Primage Rao bowed. “We have captured Lady Darramon, three shei’dalins, and two dozen Fey warriors. All are pierced and being brought through the Well. The hidden fortress and the outpost have been destroyed.”

  “The Fey?”

  “They suffered heavy losses, my lord. Nearly a thousand slain before we drove them back into the Garreval.”

  “Excellent. Seed the Garreval with chemar. If the Fey come through again, we will be waiting for them.” Vadim Maur turned his attention back to the illuminated vertical map display and scrolled to the section that showed Orest and the locations of the inactivated chemar there. He tapped fifteen of them. “Vargus, contact your commanders at Boura Dor. Begin the conquest of Orest.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Celieria ~ Orest

  On the ramparts and streets of Lower Orest, Celierians and Fey fought side by side. Axes, swords, and war hammers swung, cracking bone, severing limbs. Magic exploded from shining hands. Fey’cha flew with blurring speed and lethal precision until the pearlescent gray stone ran red with blood.

  But still the Eld kept coming.

  Devron Teleos swung his ancestor Shanis Teleos’s meicha hard, blocking the downward slice of a sel’dor blade. The blow rattled his teeth, but he merely snarled and slashed out with a red Fey’cha, angling the blade upwards, beneath the black scales of the Eld soldier’s armor. His opponent screamed and dropped to the ground, dead in an instant from the lethal tairen venom forged into the lute’cha steel.

  “Where the flaming hells are they coming from?” Dev shouted, whirling to battle another foe. Rain had warned him the Eld had learned how to use the Well of Souls to travel, but there’d been no whiff of Azrahn—nor warning of any kind—before the portals had appeared and poured twenty thousand Eld into their midst. The entire lower city was overrun.

  Tajik vel Sibboreh swung his seyani long sword in his left hand and fired red Fey’cha with his right. “Scorched if I know, but so long as the maggots keep coming, I’ll keep killing them.” His red plaits swung about him like tails of fire, and his weapons moved at blurring speed. He fought like a demon. Nothing stood against him. His face was drenched in blood, his searing blue eyes an eerie sight in the mask of gore.

  A tairen length away, a massive Eld soldier with biceps like tree trunks was sweeping a war ax like a scythe, sending gutted Celierian bodies flying.

  Tajik bared his teeth in a savage grin, ran up a pile of rubble, and leapt across the melee towards the giant’s back. Screaming, “Miora felah ti’Feyreisa!” he brought his sword down in a killing blow, severing the Eld’s head with a single strike. The headless body remained standing for a moment, fountains of blood spurting up from its neck. Tajik turned his face into the shower and laughed.

  All around him, Fey fought with lethal skill and eyes lit like savage stars. The sight filled Tajik with pride. Not one of the Fey had abandoned Orest, despite the nonsensical “retreat to the Fading Lands” krekk Tenn v’En Eilan had spewed across the Warriors’ Path earlier in the day. Every blade under Tajik’s command knew what his steel was made for, and it scorching well wasn’t for retreating before the enemy even showed up on the field of battle!

  A sel’dor arrow glanced off Tajik’s shoulder plate. His eyes narrowed as he sighted a knot of Elden archers who’d made their way to the top of the city’s inner wall. Magic blasted from his fingertips. Half a dozen archers burst into flame and tumbled off the wall.

  Another wave of Eld came rushing around a rubble-strewn corner. Tajik greeted them with a clap of magic that brought a building tumbling down upon them. “You want death, Eld maggots? I’ll give you death. This is for all the honorable and worthy friends you slaughtered! This is for my sister!” Ablaze with magic, he leapt into the billowing dust cloud and swung his sword in savage arcs, his Fey’cha flashing between each strike like bolts of lightning. “Come dance with the tairen, if you dare!”

  Leaving Tajik to his slaughter, Dev ducked an explosion of Mage Fire that too
k out half a dozen less lucky fellows behind him and scrambled up a flight of stone stairs to the battlements of the outer wall to get a better view of the city. Lower Orest was in flames. Entire blocks of the city were burning with billowing clouds of thick, black smoke, and the screams and howls of battle rose from the conflagration.

  From his vantage point, he could see Earth master Rijonn vel Ahrimor, the tallest Fey Dev had ever met, shaking a mile-wide swath of land like a carpet. He struck the ground with weave after pounding weave, sending huge shuddering ripples of earth racing out like waves on the sea, ripping buildings from their foundations, tossing enemy troops and massive siege weapons like flotsam. Nothing in his path could get through. Eld archers had turned the Fey’s back into a damned pincushion trying to bring him down, yet the giant merely set his rock jaw and kept spinning his earthshaking weaves.

  «Fey! Ti’vel Ahrimor!» Dev sent the order spinning across the Warriors’ Path, then shouted to his commander in both voice and Spirit. “Take out those archers, men! Protect that Fey!”

  «Lord Teleos! Get down!» A fist of Air slammed into his chest, knocking him to the bloody gray stone walk just as a massive sphere of Mage Fire shot past where his head had been.

  Dev gave a grim wave to the white-haired, black-eyed Gillandaris vel Jendahr, Tajik’s good friend, who was quite possibly even more savage and lethal than the red-haired Fey general. Magic blazed in Gil’s hands, and with a heave, he flung his weaves over the crenellated stone. Dev scrambled to his feet and peered over the wall. Half a dozen Eld war barges floated in the middle of the mile-wide river, each carrying a full dozen blue-robed Primages who flung great balls of Mage Fire at the outer wall. Behind them, on the northern banks of the Heras, enormous trebuchets—where the Dark Lord had they come from?—launched explosive mortars against the outer wall.

  Gil’s weave hit one of the war barges, and his magic exploded with a concussive blast, sending shattered wood flying. «Fey!» Gil cried on the Warriors’ Path. «To the wall! Five-fold weaves to the river! Sink those barges and send those Mages swimming!» He flung another weave of his own over the walls, hitting the same barge a second time, in the same spot. The hull cracked, and the Mages shrieked as the water of the Heras poured in.

  Dev watched the screaming Mages in grim triumph. The Source-fed waters of the Heras burned Mages the way sel’dor burned Fey, which meant the rotting blue-robed rultsharts were bathing in acid. He couldn’t think of a better fate for them. “Trebuchets!” he cried. “Aim for the river! Take out those barges!”

  Gil grinned and gave a white-blond braid a deferential tug. «I’ll leave the boats to you, Lord Teleos. We’ll take care of the Mages in the city.» He leapt from the outer wall on an arc of Air, landing like a cat upon an abandoned wizard’s tower on the inner wall. «Water masters! Divide the falls! Let’s make it rain!» His laughter danced eerily through the smoke and sounds of war. Dense clouds of blue magic swirled over the city, and half the torrential falls of Maiden’s Gate suddenly swept into the air and flooded Lower Orest.

  A bell later, most of the Mage war barges had sunk, and Lower Orest was shin-deep in water. But the Eld kept coming. The trebuchets on the north banks of the Heras and the remaining Mages had made Orest’s outer wall and its armaments their target. The wall went down, taking hundreds of men and Fey with it.

  Dev abandoned the ruins of the outer wall and made an Air-powered leap to the crumbling walk of the inner wall. Reports were flying in from all over the city of new portals opening, delivering fresh enemy troops, demons, and darrokken, those foul, pestilential monstrosities created by the Eld.

  The city’s defenders were outnumbered, and even with the wild, murderous skills and magic of Fey sword masters like vel Sibboreh and his friends, the enemy was decimating them. The entire perimeter of Lower Orest was in flames, and the enemy was on the march west, towards the mountains. If the allies didn’t retreat now, they risked being cut off and slaughtered.

  The fight for Lower Orest was over. Aloud and in Spirit, Dev shouted, “Retreat to the mountains! Retreat to Maiden’s Gate!” The series of stair-stepped walls that climbed the slopes of the Rhakis would be much harder for the Eld to conquer. The walls were thick, the armaments many, and the high ground gave the defenders the advantage. «Retreat to Maiden’s Gate! Retreat!»

  Wrapped in Gaelen’s invisibility weave, Tajik raced after the retreating allies, slaughtering unsuspecting Eld as he went. But as he drew nearer Maiden’s Gate, he began to realize the call for retreat might have come a little too late for him. The enemy was closing in, new, fresh, well-rested waves of them. Tajik began doing more running and less slaughtering.

  Less than a mile from the fortified terraces of Maiden’s Gate, a pack of slavering, filth-ridden darrokken burst out of an alleyway into the road in front of him. Though Tajik was still cloaked in Gaelen’s undetectable weave, the beasts immediately turned and began racing towards him, red eyes gleaming, foul mouths dripping a froth of loathsome poison.

  Tajik muttered a foul curse. Darrokken didn’t sight their prey. They smelled them.

  Though how the jaffing things could smell anything beyond the foul reek they exuded, Tajik could not begin to guess.

  Red Fey’cha flew from his fingers. He spun north and took off running, his legs pumping as if his life depended on it. Which, he realized as the pounding footfalls of the beasts grew closer, it did. He dropped his invisibility weave and poured all his magic into speed and maneuverability, running faster than he ever had.

  Behind him, the darrokken ran faster.

  Just as the fetid breath of the foul beasts warmed the back of his neck and he felt the cold kiss of death draw near, a familiar Spirit voice cried, «Vel Sibboreh! Duck! Five-fold weave!»

  He glanced up to see swooping darkness and a gaping, fang-filled maw filled with boiling flame. He dove for cover, shielding himself with magic as tairen fire enveloped the darrokken, incinerating them on contact.

  The shout rose up from Maiden’s Gate: “Feyreisen!” Two black-leather-clad shapes leapt off Rain’s back and landed near Tajik, blades unsheathed and magic blazing. Bel and Gaelen ran to his side, grinning like fiends.

  “You’re getting slow, my brother.” Bel smirked. “The darrodogs almost had you.”

  Tajik dusted himself off and tossed back his braids. “Me? Ha! You’re the ones late to the fight.” His cocky grin melted to a sincere welcome as he clasped their forearms in a tight grip. “Meivelei, Fey. You’re a happy sight. But come, let’s hurry. Teleos has called retreat to Maiden’s Gate.”

  “We arrived just in time, then.” Gaelen brandished his steel. “I wouldn’t want you to have all the fun.”

  The three of them ran for the western city, weaves blazing and swords flashing as they protected the flanks of the retreating allies. Behind them, Rain swooped across the ruins of Lower Orest, plowing the enemy lines with row after row of incinerating flame.

  The battle of Lower Orest continued to rage. Rain’s flame granted cover to the wounded and trapped allies struggling to reach the safety of Maiden’s Gate. He flew as he had not flown since the Mage Wars, diving, soaring, twisting his lithe tairen’s body through the sky with the sinuous ease of a sylph.

  His nostrils filled with the scent and heat of his flame, the smell of roasting flesh and magic. Rage was there, pounding beneath the fury of his flame. Memories flooded him. Memories of the Wars, of Eadmond’s Field. The voices of the dead grew loud once more, battering his mind with the fresh screams and bitter death of every Eld who fell to his flame.

  But despite the wildness that hovered so near, a sense of peace he’d never known before anchored him to sanity. Ellysetta.

  Their bond was not yet complete, yet she was there, singing across its threads. Weaving her love, her faith in him, across the distance. «I am here, beloved. I am with you. Together we are strong.» Her song was a shining light in his soul, a brilliant golden-white sun that warmed the icy grip of his ancient demons and cooled the
heat of his Rage. The beacon that kept his soul from plunging towards Darkness. «Fly, shei’tan. Fly for us both.»

  And he did.

  Again and again he swooped and he soared. Again and again his roar ripped the skies over Orest, mighty, triumphant.

  His presence gave hope to Orest’s champions. From the ramparts of Maiden’s Gate, archers fired flaming arrows whose hollow shafts were filled with intensely flammable, sticky fluid that burned hot enough to melt leather and skin. Along the last inner walls of Lower Orest, Water masters continued to funnel the waters of the Heras towards every spark of Mage Fire, while Fire masters amplified each blast of Rain’s tairen flame and the archer’s fire arrows, incinerating rock and stone, flesh and bone. Earth masters, shouting with effort, ripped great ravines across the ravaged sections of the city, swallowing entire legions of Eld before closing up again.

  But for every portal Rain seared shut, another four opened. He couldn’t understand it. There couldn’t possibly have been that many selkahr crystals buried in Orest undetected. Yet portal after portal opened, and legion after legion poured out of them.

  Sel’dor arrows filled the sky like swarms of locusts. His swooping attacks drew more of the enemy’s fire with each pass, and despite Air masters’ spinning whirlwinds and sharp downdrafts to knock the arrows from the sky, scores of acid black metal shafts pricked the membranes of Rain’s wings like the thorns of a kaddah.

  Exhaustion, blood loss, and pain finally drove him from the sky to the shelter of Upper Orest. He landed in Veil Lake with a clumsy splash. Panting, exhausted, he lay there, letting the faerilas wash over him, too tired to swim ashore. Bel, Gaelen, and Dev simply plunged in and swam to his side to hack the barbs off the sel’dor arrows that pierced him and cut the poisonous black metal shafts from his hide. Freed from sel’dor, his wounds turned the waters around him red.