The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4)

by Steven Kelliher

  Shifa was foaming, her claws scratching at the cracks in the glass beneath her as she tried to make for the dais.

  It seemed all sound had been sucked from the chamber, as if all the air in the great, echoing hall had fallen through a pulled stopper. The torches guttered and even the iridescent glow of the Nevermelt walls and pillars dimmed for a blink. When it brightened once more, the air returned, and the sound with it. There was no more cracking and splitting. The percussions that had been coming from below were now lost in a cacophonous roar as the ocean filled itself back in.

  Directly before them, floating above the yawning gap that had been cut into the floor, was a small black speck, no larger than a marble. It floated at eye level, its edges blurred with a strange warping that reminded Linn of the power the Eastern Dark had used out on the ice. It looked like a buzzing fly, or a wasp, caught in some invisible web, railing at its bondage with an almost silent rage.

  Queen Elanil regarded the speck of black as if it were the most deadly thing she had seen in her long existence. Her eyes were wide, her jaw clenched tightly, and her outstretched palm began to flicker, the blue-white glow it gave off struggling against the power she sought to contain and control.

  Shifa had quit her raucous complaints. Baas still gripped her tightly, but the hound only stared at the speck, ears pointed and alert as the rest of them. Her fur stood up in ridges, and her tail was down, tucked between her hind legs. She was afraid. A hound who would attack one of the last two Sages in the World was afraid of a smudge hovering in the center of the room.

  Linn tried to keep the speck in her sights, afraid that if she took her eyes from it, it might grow into something else, expand into some black pit through which untold horrors might claw their way through. The Blue Knights were not enraptured like their queen was. They were afraid as well. All but Tundra, whose knees shook. He stared at the dot slack-jawed, and even began walking toward it, heedless of the drop in the floor, until Elanil held her other hand out to catch him by the shoulder.

  Tundra stopped and blinked. Linn thought she saw some of the darkness about his eyes again. He was attracted to the mote of ash like a moth to a flame.

  “You cannot be blessed twice, dear Tundra,” Queen Elanil cautioned, as if she were a mother warning a child not to eat sweets before bed.

  Linn examined the Blue Knight. He was changed, after all. All the Landkist of this place seemed strange to Linn, but none behaved in quite the way Tundra did. He was silent and often still, but all that beautiful blue skin, shining golden armor and glinting jewels covered a seething, roiling core. The queen had done something to him that she had not done to the others. At least, none who stood here among them.

  “What is—” Linn started, but the queen glanced at her quick enough to stop her.

  “Call it magic, Linn Ve’Ran,” she said, her voice quivering. It was difficult to tell if it was the result of the strain she was under, or the excitement. “Call it power. This here is a bit of the World Apart. Rather, a bit of the stuff that makes it up, that forms the gateways between our realm and theirs.”

  Linn’s heart nearly skipped. She felt Jenk’s horrified eyes on her and could feel the atmosphere beginning to swell as Misha considered whether or not to flare and make an end of the mad Sage. Even Baas’s hand—the one not holding Shifa—began to stray toward the shield that rested along the wall behind his leg.

  “A gateway …” Linn said. Captain Fennick had taken a step toward the chasm. He was a man of action, but he did not know how to act, or in which direction. “You’ve brought a gateway to the World Apart—”

  “The power that forms them—” Elanil bit the words off, her teeth catching on her bottom lip and drawing droplets of bright red that began to run down her chin. “Do not worry,” she said. “I have prepared for this day. I have cultivated this, formed it, drawn bits of the World Apart in beneath the roiling sea, little by little, speck by agonizing speck. I have kept it locked away until the hour of our need, and the hour of its greatest use.” Her eyes widened once more. “The Convergence is nearly here.”

  She looked to Linn again, to all the Landkist of the Valley, who did not know whether to call her friend or foe in that moment. “I did not start this madness, but there is one thing Valour was right about.” She looked back at the mote. “One thing he was very right about. Power … in its rawest form.”

  Linn hadn’t done it on purpose, or at least not consciously, but she felt Baas’s elbow nudge her side. It was only then that she noticed the way the flames of the candles and torches in the throne room leaned in her direction. Some part of her had whispered to the wind without thinking to. She thought to release it, but, seeing the scene before them, she guided it up instead, concentrating on the currents, keeping them high and turning them in, bidding them form a silent, whirling pool high over the pit.

  The queen stepped to the side so that she was nearly straddling the form of her consort. She looked down at him and kept her palm out toward the orb. As they watched and as her fingers curled down into a claw, the orb began to move toward her. It moved slowly, blinking and flashing as if it resisted her every inch of the way.

  When it was close enough that the queen could have extended a finger to touch it, she closed her eyes. Her palm took on a blue glow, the skin encased in Nevermelt armor. Tundra watched the exchange hungrily.

  In a flash, the queen snatched the speck from the air, squeezing her eyes shut as she did. The chamber shook anew, and Shifa renewed her throaty protests. The Frostfire Sage began to shake violently, her skin changing from bright white to shadowed to blue.

  Linn thought for a moment that the queen might simply cease to be.

  Instead, she screamed. It wasn’t a scream of agony, but rather of will. She raised her opposite palm above her head, brought her shaking, closed fist in toward her chest, and then she slammed her knee down onto the dais beside her prince, bringing her fist down in a strike that Linn was sure would split the land into a thousand pieces.

  She brought the blow down upon the prince’s armored chest, the Nevermelt armor on her fist exploding with a bright blue flash. The prince’s features were obscured momentarily by a black haze. When it cleared, he looked up at the heaving, ragged Elanil through bright blue eyes. Eyes that Linn did not think had any centers.

  The chamber was silent. Even the buzzing of the speck had faded, to be replaced by an expectant, exultant pause. It was as if the World were taking a breath, as if the stars above, barely visible through the Nevermelt walls and highest towers, looked down and cast their judgment.

  They had just witnessed the impossible. More so than the conjuring of wind or fire. More so than the Dark Kind, the Night Lords or the Sages themselves. They had witnessed a resurrection, the undoing of death, and it covered Linn with a mix of awe and trepidation. She had known this was what the queen planned to do. She had known it and she had allowed herself to think it the right course. After all, with the prince and princess reunited, the Frostfire Sages would surely be able to topple the Eastern Dark, and perhaps bring order to a World gone mad in the warring of their kind.

  Linn did not know much of the wars before her time. She didn’t know if Elanil and Galeveth deserved to win. She didn’t know the depths of their sins or the heights of their generosity. She did not know what they considered valorous or just. But if having a winner meant an end to the game, she had been willing to gamble.

  Now, as she watched the dead prince rise, standing up on the dais as his consort stepped aside for him, she wondered how she could have been so foolish. If Kole was here, Linn thought he’d have burned one Sage away to prevent the other from rising again.

  Prince Galeveth stood up tall. He was even fairer now than he had been before, whatever vitality his forever sleep had stolen replaced by the raw power the queen had put into him. Linn focused on him just as the rest did, but she saw that the queen’s crescent moon pendant, that cut of bronze that was the sister to the one their own Talmir Caru p
ossessed, still glowed fiercely.

  “I am.”

  The prince’s voice was bold and sonorous, like waves slipping over coarse sand. He looked down at his cream-colored hands, lifted them to examine his chest beneath its silver armor. He touched the long yellow hair that spilled down over his shoulders.

  He radiated power. Linn couldn’t say if it was the stuff he had held before he had been brought down, or if it was a result of what had revived him. Even the queen seemed nervous in his presence. She reached out a hand toward his shoulder, hesitant. Linn could see her eyes watering. What it must be like, to have your love brought back, and to have been the one to do it.

  “That is not our prince.”

  All eyes in the chamber—all but Galeveth’s—swiveled to the Blue Knight who had said it. Linn did not know this one’s name. He was tall. Nearly as tall as Tundra, though not half as broad. He wore the same golden armor as the rest of them, and bore the same golden eyes. He stood to their right, just ahead of them, his boots very close to the jagged hole in the floor. He reached his left hand out and Linn saw the telltale shimmer that preceded the calling of Nevermelt. He chose a scythe.

  Linn looked across the gap and saw the other knights call their own weapons—one twin axes and the other sporting what looked to be spikes or quills on the ends of her knuckles. At first, Linn thought they had done it in response to their fellow, that they meant to defend their prince from him. But then they faced the dais, weapons bared, mouths and chins set to their new purpose.

  “Captain …” Linn said slowly, but Fennick seemed unsure how to proceed.

  Tundra stepped down from the dais and stood a stride before the broken gap in the palace floor, his bulk obscuring the lower halves of the Frostfire Sages.

  “What is this?” Queen Elanil seemed too shocked to form a proper response. She looked from one of her Landkist to the next, her expression more wounded than angry. But the latter was coming, and quickly. The air around the queen began to warp, and she took on a bit of the glow she had held earlier. Linn noticed it had more black than blue this time, and she wondered how much of that fell power she had absorbed, either consciously or otherwise.

  “Your prince stands before you,” she said. “As I have promised you. I have used the power of the World Apart to recall him.”

  “You have brought him back from the realm of death,” one of the knights said, as if that were answer enough.

  “He was not dead!” Elanil screamed. Her hair began to dance on currents she seemed to make without meaning to. “He fell in battle, yes. But I preserved him. I kept him, so that I might find the power necessary to wake him. You know this.”

  Linn winced as her own conjured, whirling storm of wind began to moan as she passed it through the gaps, arches and the tops of the columns above them. None seemed to notice in the commotion. Shifa had ceased her barking, but she stood with fangs bared, and Linn glanced down to confirm it: she had no eyes for Tundra and none for Queen Elanil. Her attention—her murderous intent—was focused solely on Prince Galeveth, or whoever it was who stood before them now.

  “He is dead,” the Blue Knight said. “My queen, he is dead. We have suspected it for some time, but now we know it.” She pointed one of her spiked, glittering fists at him, her golden eyes intense. “That is not the prince. That is something else. A demon.”

  Tundra took a step in the knight’s direction as Elanil ground her teeth, knees bent. Linn thought she might lash out and smite the Landkist on the spot. Perhaps she wanted to give her another chance, or perhaps she did not have the power left.

  “Might be time to make a choice,” Jenk whispered in Linn’s ear. He glanced nervously at Misha, who had also taken a step toward the gap. Linn was sure that if the Ember had known whom to strike, she’d have cleared the space already.

  Queen Elanil seemed to notice the Valley Landkist anew. She sent an imploring look toward Linn, ignoring the others.

  “Ve’Ran,” she said. She laid her left hand on the silver-armored shoulder of her prince, and stretched the other one, palm up, fingers splayed, toward her. “Galeveth is not himself. Not yet. But … look at him.” And the queen did. The prince was still intent on his own hands. He turned them over, flexed his fingers and curled them into fists before relaxing them. His left hand brushed the top of his scabbard, which was empty, and Linn thought she saw a slight frown crease his brow.

  The Blue Knights began moving in, the three stepping over the cracks in the floor cautiously as the mighty Tundra’s eyes tracked them, like a lion facing down jackals.

  “We will find Reyna,” Elanil said, and Linn grimaced at the obvious attempt to entice her. “We will kill Valour.”

  “You didn’t seem very concerned with Kole just a few minutes ago,” Linn said. Baas reached down and lifted his shield. He didn’t brandish it in a threatening manner, only held it loosely by his left side, which made it all the more threatening. He released Shifa. Thankfully, the hound remained in place, watching the prince who was not the prince.

  “You knew this,” Elanil said, her tone shifting, taking on an edge. “You knew I needed him, that I would call him back. Now, we have the power we need to deal with Valour. Now, we have the means to stop it.”

  “Valour …”

  The Blue Knights stopped just as Tundra formed his shining Nevermelt armor, his fists changing to gauntlets. The queen looked at the prince, all tension forgotten in the presence of his first words.

  “Valour …” He raised his chin, looking above their heads, staring into the vaulted heights as if remembering. Linn watched him, but watched the queen more closely. She did not seem afraid, but rather on the verge of rejoicing. This was Galeveth’s voice, then, and his bearing.

  He turned to her, and when their eyes met, Linn saw the recognition only in one of them. Elanil smiled, her eyes shining. “Galeveth,” she whispered. He didn’t respond, except to ask, “He is close? Ray Valour is close?”

  Queen Elanil looked disappointed for a moment, but she recovered quickly enough. “He is.” She nodded. “Very close. Once you have recovered, we can make an end of him, just as he tried to make one of you.”

  “Recovered?” The prince laughed. It was a wicked sound, and one without mirth. Elanil winced on hearing it. Linn couldn’t help but notice the way Tundra stood, his dark eyes intent on his fellows, who had ceased their deadly approach and now regarded the prince with confused stares.

  “I am quite well, brave, foolish Elanil,” the prince said. “Quite well.”

  “And who are you, exactly?” Linn asked, her voice loud and clear.

  The demon that wore the prince’s skin turned his head to look at her. He turned slowly, and though his face barely changed, she felt upon staring into those deep blue pits as if she were a sparrow beneath the considered and collective gaze of a legion of hawks.

  She didn’t see him move his hand until it was too late.

  As Linn swallowed, trying with effort to tear her eyes from the stare of the prince, his right hand moved up toward Elanil. The light in the chamber seemed to swell, and then to collapse. It was as if lightning had struck, leaving no sound behind but for the surprised, pained gasp of the queen. When her vision cleared, Linn saw Prince Galeveth standing in the same place he had been before. Queen Elanil held his wrist in both of her hands, squeezing, shaking as she attempted to push it back, along with the black, shimmering blade that had passed through her armor, gut, and ultimately her back as if she were no more than wet parchment.

  Those in the throne room watched in stunned horror as the prince brought Elanil in close enough to kiss, and then flung her aside unceremoniously. She hit the edge of the dais with a sick crunch, rolling until her back smashed against the base of a pillar, which dislodged a pained yelp from her as if she were a kicked dog. She left a bright red trail behind. She twitched, but then lay still, and Linn could not tell if she lived or not.

  Linn started the chaos that followed.

  She reached skyward,
seized upon the swirling torrent of wind she had gathered above them and pulled it down. The blast hit the prince hard, bowing his shoulders and bringing him to one knee as the palace was filled with the fury of a hurricane. He clutched his shimmering blade, which buzzed like the black sphere had before, and braced himself with his opposite palm, gritting his teeth with effort and letting out a growl that matched Shifa’s.

  The Blue Knights exploded into motion, charging the dais from opposite sides. Tundra turned to his left, where two knights approached, and charged them. He swung at one with his left, forcing him to duck, and then snatched the scythe-wielder by the neck. He brought him up over his head and then down, breaking his neck as he slammed the back of his skull into the icy floor. The knight managed to earn a stab as he died, his blade buried up to his fist in Tundra’s side, but the brute only roared at his dying form and stood and turned to face the next.

  Linn’s wind ran its course just as the other Blue Knights made for the dais, and the prince straightened and took in their approach. He flashed into motion, slicing through the midsection of one and bringing his left fist screaming in as the female with Nevermelt spikes launched a salvo of strikes that he dodged with expert precision. His fist crushed her skull and sent her back fast as a bolt, where she broke against the back wall.

  Misha and Jenk ignited their Everwood blades, filling the chamber with fresh heat, and Captain Fennick drew his thick iron sword.

  “I suggest you leave, Captain,” Baas said, calm as the rest were frantic. “This fight is beyond you.”

  “Looks to be beyond any of you as well,” Fennick said through gritted teeth.

  “Could be.”

  “Go,” Linn echoed Baas. “Make sure your people are safe. Pull them back. There’s no fighting a thing like this—whatever it is—with anything you’ve made in those smithies.”

  Fennick was a brave man, but not a proud one. He ran from the palace without another word, and Linn took heart that he might get some of his people out. She concentrated, moving behind Baas as the Riverman rounded the left side of the chasm, shield held up before him as a ward. As they passed close to the shattered edge, Linn spared a look down. She could see sloshing, white-foamed falls raging far below as the ocean rushed in to reclaim a space that had been kept dry by the force of such a tiny thing. There was a bridge extending from somewhere out of sight.