He staggered away, bleeding and livid, and slammed a finger onto his paladin band. “Full release!” he shouted. “We’ll burn it from the other side!”
Every paladin on the field turned at once and began to run.
Cevirt was hobbling, his injured leg dragging.
Naria de Lochenville lay on the ground behind him.
Loch was there within seconds, and had only to look to see that it was too late. Cevirt had gotten Naria’s knife, and then Naria had gotten it back right below the neckline of her pretty gown.
“I should’ve run,” she whispered. “Wanted to help you up this time.”
“You did,” Loch said, and then Naria relaxed and went still.
“Kutesosh gajair’is,” Ghylspwr said sadly.
“Yes, she did.”
“Loch!” Veiled Lightning yelled, and Loch looked over. “The dragon!”
The paladins were running for the font, all of them, including the ones who had lashed Mister Dragon down.
He was up again now, and with a great roar, he sent flame slashing their way.
Kail dragged himself up the last rung of the ladder, pushed himself inelegantly over the top and outside, and saw all hell breaking loose. The Glimmering Folk were heading down into the font. A lot of nobles were running their way.
And Mister Skinner was battering Icy against the golden wall of the font with blast after blast of crimson energy.
“Now, now. Beasts get arrogant, they have to be taught,” Skinner said, and slammed Icy against the wall again with a blast that cracked like a whip.
Icy groaned. His bare torso was a mass of welts and bruises. Still, he got to his feet. “You will not shut down the puppeteers.”
Skinner sneered. “I’ll put a stop to their babbling, and yours.” He flung another blast at Icy, who dove to the side but still took a glancing blow.
Kail pushed himself to his feet with his one good arm, and edged slowly toward Skinner, hoping that the man was paying so much attention to Icy that he would miss his approach.
Skinner looked over almost immediately and, with a smile, flicked a surge of power at Kail.
It wasn’t much, but it didn’t need to be. It jolted the broken arm and slammed Kail to the ground with a white-hot flash of agony.
“Thought you’d come creeping in like a cat?” Skinner asked.
Kail groaned and rolled onto his back. “What did you say?”
“Must’ve been dawdling like a duckling, trying to climb that ladder with one arm,” Skinner sneered.
Then he blinked.
“Excellent eggshells, fondling fern, gullible goat!” he shouted in sudden confusion, and dropped to his knees.
The grassy turf sprouted a field of flowers that blossomed with enormous rainbow-hued petals, and from each of the unfolding petals, a little creature came, something between a fox and a cat and a person, a few feet tall and flickering with pale-blue light. The kobolds from the mine. And among them, rising from the earth, her horn shining in all the colors of the rainbow, and her flanks pure and white again, was Ululenia.
That is who I am, Ululenia said, and her gentle voice shook the ground. I am too often arrogant, and I babble along with the sounds of the forest. I creep through this world, and I dawdle aimlessly, because I was told that I was just stolen magic, my life a theft from the ancients.
The kobolds chittered and clustered around Ululenia, their hands on her legs and flanks.
“That’s right,” Skinner said, shaking his head and fighting to get the words out. “You came from our magic.”
Yes, I was, imperfect as it was. I was corrupted, but the kobolds healed me. They could do that, because your magic came from them, Ululenia said, and her horn flared with a brilliance that made Skinner hide his eyes. Before there were artifacts, there were magical crystals, and inside those crystals, the kobolds lived. She stepped forward, the grass parting gently beneath her hooves. Peaceful. Harmless. Innocent, until you tore them from the earth and turned their lives into tools.
“Beasts.” Skinner sneered at her. “They did nothing with their potential. They did not even stand against us. It was our right!”
They did not fight back, Ululenia said, and so you decided it was your right. But you could not kill all of their essence, and when you left, some of it escaped, and pulled itself together, and tried to become alive again. The fairy creatures. All our lives, we have believed we were but stolen magic, and we were . . . but you were the thieves, not us.
Skinner fought back to his feet and raised his arm. “You are monsters.”
As Skinner fired, Ululenia’s horn flared, and when the light faded, Kail saw that she and all the kobolds stood unharmed. The air around Ululenia shimmered, and she stood before Skinner as a woman, her horn still shining.
The ground around Skinner opened up.
“I am a nice unicorn,” Ululenia said, “and a pretty unicorn, and the people you hurt are going to fight back.”
The kobolds surged forward, and Skinner had time for one last shout, and then they were on him, sinking down into the earth, and a moment later the ground closed back up, the grass clean and pristine, as though it had never been broken.
Ululenia turned to Icy and Kail. “What have I missed?”
“Oh, you know.” Kail waved with his less-bad arm. “The usual. Icy, fill her in.”
He crawled back to the doorway, pulled himself onto the ladder, and slid back down. “I think we’re clear,” he called to the puppeteers.
One of them met his gaze and nodded. Then he spoke in the dragon puppet’s voice.
“Remember, everyone. It’s your Republic.”
“Stay informed,” Kail murmured, and let himself ease off into the comfortable darkness.
Overhead, the last of the Glimmering Folk disappeared down into the font, their great forms tightening to fit into the tunnel like a spilled inkwell somehow reversed. The paladins still ran for the font as well, dozens of the wealthiest citizens in the Republic all pelting across the grassy turf.
In front of Loch, however, the great snarling form of Mister Dragon occupied most of her attention.
“All right,” she said, holding Ghylspwr ready. “He’s ordered to come after me. The rest of you run. The ancients will be gone soon, and this will be over.”
“Kutesosh gajair’is!” Ghylspwr yelled.
“We’re not killing him. He’s under their control.”
“No.” Veiled Lightning readied her blade, and beside her, General Jade Blossom had drawn a sturdy broadsword. “It’s not that. I can remember bits of when the paladin band had me. Lesaguris said that he would burn it from the other side.”
Mister Dragon roared, and fire flared out at them. Loch dove away, and Ghylswpr jerked in her hand, swatting at the flames with his own magic and driving them aside. She landed and rolled back to her feet, her leather coat smoking but the rest of her unburned.
“What does it mean?” Loch yelled.
“One last magical signal,” Veiled Lightning called back. “A self-destruct order to bring Heaven’s Spire crashing down on top of us. The explosion will—”
“Got it. Go!” Loch waved Ghylspwr at Mister Dragon. “I’ll draw him away. You stop Lesaguris!”
“NNNO.”
Loch turned to see what was left of Jyelle. The paladins had torn her rocky body apart, and she was only vaguely humanoid now. The shattered parts weren’t healing either. They were dead and dark from the blasts of the paladin bands.
Jyelle pounded past Loch. “SSSSSSTOPPP THEMMM, CAAAAAPTAAAIN.”
With the last of her strength, the daemon threw herself at Mister Dragon.
Loch ran.
Tern looked at the crystal lattice, checked the readings and colors. Then she looked again, because her eyes and her brain weren’t working right, and everything she saw seemed to fall away a moment later.
“The gate’s closed up at Heaven’s Spire,” she said.
“I know,” said Hessler.
&nbs
p; He hung in the air, his body a muscular silhouette enshrouded in a glowing rainbow of magic.
Tern looked at him. The glow made a little glare across the lenses of her spectacles, and she pulled them off. “The gate’s closed, and you’re still here. You’re not just an illusion.”
“I am,” Hessler said, unmoving in the air.
“No.” Tern blinked away tears, felt them slide down her cheeks, but didn’t take her eyes off the shape hovering in front of her. “No, if you were an illusion, closing the gate would have cut you off.”
“I am an illusion of myself, Tern,” Hessler said gently. “The troll transformed the matter of my body into the energy from which illusions are created, the matter of the Shadowlands. I was able to hold myself together the way I maintain a glamour.”
“And you did.” Tern took a step forward. “You held yourself together, and you came back. You came back to me.”
“To say good-bye,” Hessler said.
Tern swallowed. “No.”
“I watched from the other side,” Hessler said. “I saw that you needed me. I saw Dairy in pain. I helped bring him back, and I came back to help you. But I cannot stay.”
“You can.” Tern took another step toward him. She couldn’t see his face. He was still just a silhouette backlit by way too many rainbows.
“If I touch the ground, I will be destroyed, just like the Glimmering Folk. I can only keep this idea of myself in my mind for so long. I stayed long enough to save you—”
“Stop!” Tern shouted, and the glowing figure flinched. “I don’t need you to save me. I need you here.”
She reached out and took Hessler’s hand. It was wrong, too large and thick, the hand of a warrior.
“If you need someone to focus to keep you whole,” she said softly, “let me.” She thought of Hessler’s hands, bony, long-fingered, always twitching as he thought. The hand holding hers shifted, the fingers thinning. “Because you are never out of my mind.” She took his other hand, and it felt right, it felt like him. “You are the smartest man I know.”
She closed her eyes and put a hand to his chest. No, too muscular. Thinner, softer, there, and she inhaled and smelled the scent of the soap he liked.
“You are a great wizard.” Eyes still closed, she stood up on tiptoe and ran her hands up to his shoulders. Thinner again, yes, always a little hunched, either because he’d just been reading or because he didn’t want the world to see how tall he was.
“You are the man I love,” she said, and pulled him down to the ground.
She felt the jolt when he touched, a crackle of energy, and she put her arms around him as he shuddered, and he fell into her, his long bony arms encircling her as well, and his face pressed to her cheek with his stubbly beard.
Tern pulled back a little and opened her eyes.
The glimmering rainbow light was still there, leaving only a silhouette. But it was his silhouette, and looking through the radiance, she could see his thoughtful, always-squinting eyes.
“I thought it would kill me,” he said, and his voice changed, and it was a normal voice again, “but my inherently terrestrial nature must allow me to survive. But . . .” He looked down at himself, still shining in all the colors of the rainbow.
“It’s close enough,” Tern said, and her voice caught and cracked. “We can make it close enough. Right? We can do that. We love magic and crystals, and we can make it work.”
“All right,” said Hessler, the Glimmering Man, and kissed her.
Around the golden wall of the font, battle raged.
While General Jade Blossom guarded her flank, Princess Veiled Lightning spun, her skirt billowing as she sidestepped a blow, and then she chopped down with the Nine-Ringed Dragon and sliced the paladin band from the arm of her attacker.
The person wearing the band, a heavyset man in his midfifties wearing guild robes and a signet ring, stumbled back and looked around in confusion, and Veiled Lightning moved on, with one more saved and one less to worry about.
A few yards over, grass twined up into sudden curling vines to trap an older woman in an airman’s uniform, and as the woman struggled, Ululenia stepped forward, one hand raised, her horn shining upon her brow.
The woman went limp, and vines coiled around her arm and snapped the paladin band free.
Veiled Lightning whirled toward the next paladin, a young man in a noble’s robes, but not one of the black coats. He blocked her slash with his own blade, and moved to counter, but as he did, strong lean fingers struck three rapid blows to his forearm, and the paladin band fell free.
Unstoppable Deferential Fist, the greatest warrior-monk the Empire had seen, nodded to Veiled Lightning as he rolled away from another strike. He was shirtless, and despite the welts and bruises he had received, his lean body gleamed with sweat and muscle.
They could not stop all of the ancients. Even as Veiled Lightning moved to another, she saw a black-coated paladin leap up onto the wall of the golden font and then dive in, apparently confident that the fall would not kill him. According to Ululenia, the black-coated ones had chosen to bring back the ancients. Veiled Lightning mourned the loss of an idiot and focused on saving the person she was currently fighting, a young woman in a military uniform.
A great roar sounded from over near the podium, and Veiled Lightning saw the Dragon breathe a great gout of fire onto the daemon, destroying it utterly. It turned to the font, where Loch and her magical hammer had leaped down, and began to charge.
Then the air in front of Veiled Lightning flashed with sudden light, and three figures appeared in the grass, knocking aside surprised paladins.
Veiled Lightning focused on blocking the soldier’s attack, but from the corner of her eye, she saw one of the figures run toward the Dragon.
Veiled Lightning spun, tore the blade from the soldier’s hand, and chopped down on the paladin band, slicing it free, and as the soldier fell to her knees, the princess looked up.
The Dragon roared, and a great wave of flame washed over the figure running at him.
When it faded, the figure was still there, impossibly unharmed.
Then Veiled Lightning recognized who he was.
As the Dragon inhaled to unleash another gout of flame, Dairy rushed in, leaped up, and tore the silver chains free from the Dragon’s head and throat.
Sister Desidora smiled as the Dragon shimmered into the shape of a man and fell into Dairy’s arms. Then she snatched the arm of a passing noble, and her face went pale as she took hold of the band on his arm. She wrenched it free with a crackle of magic and turned to Veiled Lightning.
“What have we missed?” Desidora asked.
“Loch and Ghylspwr went after the leader,” Veiled Lightning said, neatly ducking under an attacker’s swing while Unstoppable Deferential Fist came in from one side and disabled the paladin band with his pressure-point strikes.
“Loch and who?” Justicar Pyvic asked, parrying a blow from his own attacker.
“The hammer!” Jade Blossom said, still guarding Veiled Lightning’s flank. “He and Loch were working together!”
Desidora’s skin lost its pallor, and Pyvic stepped in to block a blow that would have taken her head off.
“Ghyl,” the death priestess whispered. And without another word, she turned and leaped, pulled herself up onto the golden wall of the font, and then dove in.
As far as Veiled Lightning was concerned, Loch’s plans always relied upon a lot of luck and goodwill at the end.
Loch fell, Ghylspwr pulling her down the glowing red walls of the tube, and looking at the ground, she saw the golden hoop that Desidora and Ululenia had talked about, a tiny thing that she could not possibly fit through. But then Ghylspwr jerked in her hand, correcting their course in some tiny way, and either Loch got smaller or the hoop got larger, and she fell into it.
And came out in another world.
She landed feetfirst on the ground, and it crunched under her boots. It was not dirt, but old crystal, broken and
worn down to rough sand, and she looked up into a dark sky filled not with stars but great globes of rock, studded with crystal that shone and glittered in every imaginable color. And upon each of the great globes, palaces of stone gleamed, and figures of living crystal walked the streets.
Only they were not walking now. They were running and yelling.
The Glimmering Folk, impossibly huge, coiled around the globes, their rainbow-shining tentacles winding a trap around their prey. Blasts of light slammed into them from the little stone cities, and they roared in pain but did not let go.
A thousand floating cities, a thousand Heaven’s Spires, all of them wondrous and impossible and burning in battle.
Loch realized that what she had taken to be the ground was just another of the globes, differentiated only by the great golden hoop, huge on this side, that led back to her world.
Before it sat a great red crystal as large as she was tall, housed in a cradle of old, dead stone. The crystal tapered to a seven-point tip that was pointed directly at the hoop. The hoop was twenty feet high, and on this side she could see that it wasn’t really gold but rather thousands of tiny yellow crystals bound together into one massive form.
“Full burn?” Loch asked. Her voice echoed strangely, as though she were speaking through a tin tube. “That’s what blows everything up?”
“Kutesosh gajair’is,” Ghylspwr said grimly.
“Think it’ll take down the gate if I destroy it?” Loch asked.
Ghylspwr hesitated.
“Kutesosh gajair’is,” he said again, but more quietly.
“And us too.” Loch nodded. “About what I was expecting.” She looked around. The globe they were on was old and ruined except for the gate, as far as Loch could see. Hills of old cracked crystal left them in a makeshift canyon. The cool wind made old crystal chime as it rushed by them.
“Kun-kabynalti osu fuir’is.”
“I know, Ghyl. It’s all right.” She forced a smile. “They’ll get by without us somehow.”
The Paladin Caper Page 38