Spirit-senses took over. A thousand impressions in less than a second.
. . . A small, dark room. Two man-shaped statues, both made, as her senses told her, of cold iron, overlain with sheathes of gold. Iron to bind and contain, gold for conductivity. But the iron was also for support, because the idol for Baal-Hamon also held a brazier of bright-burning coals, heated to about a thousand degrees in that small, enclosed space. And Baal-Hamon’s essence impregnated the metal. To her left, Baal-Samem, woven through his own statue as well . . . but not bound to it. Human male, kneeling, face to the floor, before Baal-Hamon’s statue. Little body inside the idol, burning, struggling, already going into shock, the betrayal in the small boy’s mind, the father’s mind a blank to Lassair, bound and tied to Baal-Hamon as it was, though the man was sobbing now, openly, as he knelt on the floor . . . .
No! Lassair projected the thought with all her strength. No, no, no, no! Life was her business, life was her passion, life, creation, and the nurturing of it. She was the flame-who-creates and the flame-who-sustains, and she could not abide to see this little one burning. No, no, no! She raced forward, and tore the hinged mouth off the statue, plunging her hands into the burning coals and lifting the boy free. She slipped him to the floor, and, uncaring of the battle raging around her, slid into the tiny body, racing to keep the heart beating, the lungs pumping, and to begin healing the burns. It’s all right, little one, I’ve got you. It’s going to be all right. Gentle, soothing thoughts, trying to keep that flicker of life aware and with her, but it was slipping away. She could repair the body; that was never a problem. But she couldn’t stop the shock, couldn’t keep the heart beating. Stormborn! Please, sister, come to me!
No answer at first, but a surge of awareness. The valkyrie was in the sky, torn at by gravitic spells, lashed by flames and concentrated beams of light. Ignoring ice and lightning, and dancing in air, trying to avoid the god-beast that was Dagon as he and Nith continued to struggle. A fleeting moment of concentration, as Lassair showed Stormborn the child’s condition, the faltering, fading heartbeat. A wash of sorrow from the valkyrie. I am sorry, Lassair, but that is not a wound I can heal. It is mortal—
The momentary lapse in concentration cost the valkyrie dearly as a clawed paw slapped her, and sent her tumbling out of the sky. Her consciousness winked out for a moment, so heavy was the blow, and Lassair froze inside the child’s body, fearing she’d cost Stormborn her life. A second later, the valkyrie’s awareness returned, sluggishly, as her body shattered a thin layer of ice and splashed through to hit the ground, the double impact threatening to send her unconscious again. Flare of pure alarm from Steelsoul, fear and anger mixed together in a silent cry of Sig! Determination from Flamesower, as he wrapped earthen bonds around the Devourer’s feet, trying to limit the creature’s mobility.
Lassair felt the child’s last flickers of thought. Vague, incoherent gratitude that the pain had gone away. Love of the father, bewilderment, what did I do that was bad? . . . love for her, the rescuer, the one who had made the pain go away. She had long said that love was more powerful than fear, more powerful than worship, but this love was not a gift she wanted to accept. But it slipped into her anyway, bitter and sweet at once, and then the little life simply faded away.
She looked at the father, still on the floor, but staring now at his son’s body, his eyes wide. She couldn’t read his emotions. And they didn’t matter. Lassair rose out of the tiny body, fighting for a form that somehow expressed the full fury of her rage, her desire for vengeance, and knew, dimly, that she was teeth and claws and flame, all at once, as she fell on the man, who rolled away, putting up his arms and a sorcerous barrier of some sort, meant to hold away fire. You shield yourself from the flames? Her claws skated over the shell of energy, and she could feel some of her power drained, blunted, taken away from her. It only enraged her further. You, who threw your own child to them? She pounced on him, dropping him with her weight, seeing the shocked eyes go even wider. You dare? You who should have protected him from the flames? She settled her weight onto her front claws and brought up her rear ones, kicking and raking at his belly and shields. Who should never have brought him here! You dare!
For a moment, there was nothing but blood, and as the life-force trembled before her, naked and still bound by Baal-Hamon and Baal-Samem, Lassair snarled and refused to taste of it, rising from the, burned, mangled, shredded body and wiping the blood off her face with the back of her hand. This is your fault! she cried out to the two presences within the room. You could have stopped this! You could have! Why do none of you understand that love, a gift freely given, is far more powerful than blood!
I . . . could not. The voice was low and confused and . . . strained. Lassair stared at Baal-Hamon’s statue. They tear me, fireling. They pull and saw at my essence. I was already fractured and ready to be divided, and that was done on purpose, so that I could . . . be torn apart. As is my role. To be divided and rejoined and renewed. They pull on me, and I pull back, but every bond goes both ways. They will . . . not . . . release me. I hoped for . . . enough power . . . to stop them. To unsunder myself . . . aaaaaaah, they pull, they tear!
In less than a second Lassair understood, as the god allowed her to perceive his essence. There were indeed fracture points in him; he looked, like Sophia, to be a broken mirror still held together, if barely, by its frame. And to each broken piece, a strand, like a spider’s web, adhered. Some of the strands had gone limp—sorcerers already slain by the hands of the Praetorians. But a dozen still remained, and while Baal-Hamon clung, tenaciously, trying to hold himself together, there was only one piece of him that wasn’t buckling. Wasn’t moving. Emberstone.
You know my servant, fireling . . . I have felt your presence in his wife before . . . .
Have known him and loved him longer than your Name has meant anything to him than something to swear by. Lassair’s lips curled back from her teeth, and she wondered what would happen if she shattered the god’s damnable statue. Could I kill him? Could I free Emberstone, so?
A squall of rage from the trapped, bound god, and then a massive surge of force from behind her, as Baal-Samem manifested, pulling himself free of his idol. Lassair’s body flew through the air, flung into the nearby wall; mortal consciousness of pain as battered flesh and bone protested. Spirit-self pulled the body upright, and transmuted once more to pure flame.
He was darkness, night incarnate, and a horned moon rode his brow. No, fireling. The lord of the daytime sky will die, but not at your hands. I will not permit you to consume him, or free him. His power will, in time, be mine, and I will rule both night and day. The ancient spirit’s voice was surprisingly calm as he closed with Lassair, wrapped his arms around her form, and then fire and darkness fought. The darkness to snuff, to consume, to put out; the fire to burn, to illuminate. All while Baal-Hamon screamed in silent agony, trying to hold himself together, trying to reach down along the ties that bound him, to kill his own mortal servants who so tore at him . . . but each of them, except for Emberstone, was also connected to Baal-Samem. Which gave them a measure of protection.
A whisper of darkness plunged into Lassair’s heart, like a hand, searching for her core. Trying to find where her Name resided, and tear it from her. Consume it, utterly Flamesower! Stormborn! Steelsoul! I need you!
At the base of the tower, Kanmi had engaged Germelqart in a duel, taking the leader of the sorcerers out of the fight. “Brother Carthage” was not much of a traditionalist, any more than Kanmi was; he specialized in gravity in a way that Kanmi couldn’t begin to match. Germelqart actually increased localized gravity at four points inside Kanmi’s body and attempted to contract his heart, liver, brain, and intestines down into dense, solid pebbles of carbon. “Traitor,” the man snarled. “I’d hoped you could come to understand that this was all for the betterment of our people. Our salvation.”
Kanmi could feel his consciousness skew. Blood vessels were starting to pull and stretch. The pain w
as indescribable, and he clutched his head between his hands, doubling over. His stomach tried to retch, reflexively, under no control besides its own flailing nerve endings and perhaps the brainstem. Panic, almost impossible to control, poured through him . . . and to his astonishment, Baal-Hamon helped him. Not my only faithful servant. Not this way. The voice was strained and feeble, but the god’s intercession was just enough to unravel the spell before it could destroy Kanmi’s brain . . . and the backlash of the spell’s failure hit Germelqart, giving Kanmi time to get off his knees. Saved by a god. How the mighty have fallen. He repressed the desire to tell Baal-Hamon to leave him alone, that he could manage, and instead, reached down deep for the core of rage that usually filled him. Stepped forwards . . . and wrapped a hand around Germelqart’s throat.
He didn’t need a word or a gesture for this, and sometimes subtlety was, as Minori like to remind him, better than loud and showy. Kanmi smiled faintly, and pushed with his will. One sharp, hard push, and hydrostatic pressure in the man’s body skyrocketed, as all of the blood in his body raced to his brain. Kanmi remembered how painful it had been as all the water in his blood had migrated to his lungs to drown him, years ago in Judea. How torturous it had been, trying to recover each drop, pulling it back in through his skin by osmosis. The Persian who’d employed the spell had known it was cruel, but hadn’t understood how inefficient it was. Sure, someone died by drowning, by the heart trying to beat sludge, by a brain aneurysm, by suffocation. But you didn’t need to be elaborate, a thousand deaths inflicted at once. All you needed was to tear the brain apart. And that was what the blood itself was doing as capillaries burst, as veins sundered, as the brain was torn apart from the inside. There was nowhere for the blood to go, until the capillaries in the eyes burst and blood began to pour out of the ears and nose. And then Germelqart slipped to the ground, and Kanmi released his grip, with a backwards glance at the rest of the battlefield.
Minori, on the shore at the far edge of the battle, could see now that almost everyone she cared about was out of the main area where the sorcerers still were making their stand. She was with Rig at the moment, her arms hooked around two weeping, frightened eight-year-olds, and she tilted her head up, considering the rain pouring down from the clouds. Who am I to turn down such a gift? she thought, and incanted rapidly under her breath.
In a tightly demarcated circle, just around where the sorcerers stood, the rain turned from drops of rain to ice, and formed itself into long, sharp spears. More aerodynamic. Achieving terminal velocity high above. Minori half-closed her eyes, and took friction away, concentrating on super-chilling her ice-spears . . . and let gravity do the rest of the work for her, pummeling the other sorcerers’ shields with what were, effectively hundreds of bullets a minute. Forcing them to shield above themselves as the lethal ice hailed down on them.
On seeing Sigrun hurled through the ice and into the water, Adam had nearly lunged from cover to go to her. Trennus caught his arm and held him where they were, crouching on the low portion of the earthen berm the ley-mage had raised, and behind the wall of stone itself. The only non-conductive area besides the shore itself, for hundreds of feet in any direction. “Stay down!” Trennus had snapped at him.
“She can still drown!” Adam had jerked against the restraining grip like a dog on a leash. After a hit like that, she’s probably unconscious, too!
She awakens! Saraid told him, and the spirit manifested just enough around Trennus to protect him from a blast of fire launched by yet another sorcerer. We need you here, Steelsoul. Stormborn will provide us with more of her excellent distraction in a moment. Be calm, and continue as we have been. Her voice was surprisingly commanding, and assured.
Rattled, Adam shook himself, and got back to work, lining up another shot. All of Rig’s illusions had now faded from the battlefield, which left Adam with many more open targets, though at least one of the sorcerers out there appeared to work in illusion, himself; he had a slew of duplicate selves, all seeming to move with him. Adam opted not to waste time on that one, and focused instead on the ones using magic that could actually hurt him, or the others.
As he fired on another sorcerer, and as he could see Sigrun staggering back to her feet out of the corner of his eye, however, Lassair’s voice lanced through his thoughts. Flamesower! Stormborn! Steelsoul! I need you! Panic in the spirit’s usually mild thoughts. Baal-Samem is not bound! He has manifested, he fights!
Adam’s mouth firmed into a grim line. They were completely separated from Lassair by a sea of bodies. “Tren? Can you make us a road?”
Trennus swore, viciously, and under his breath, and another sorcerer was yanked down into the mire, entombed. “I want to get to her more than you do, but you’re not going to like anything I can do, Adam,” he called back. “If I fissure the ground here, I’ll probably knock down the tower, and drain the lake doing it.”
“I didn’t ask you to part the Red Sea—” Adam fired another shot, and this one, the sorcerer actually managed to shield himself against, and Adam could hear another howl from Baal-Hamon in the distance, as the god once more voiced his protest at being used as a battery. “All I want is for them all to be out of the way—”
At that point, the two titanic creatures, who had mostly been wrestling hundreds of feet off to the right, surged back into the middle of the battlefield. Niðhoggr had misjudged his angle of flight away from the god-beast, and, tail caught in one of the massive, clawed paws, slammed to the ground on his back, sliding thirty or forty feet before landing against the salt pyramid that held the tower. If the gold-filled circuitry that comprised the binding circle hadn’t already been broken by Minori, Niðhoggr’s shearing entry surely effaced the circle completely . . . and the tower itself began to lean and sag, visible cracks forming in bricks made of salt, and pieces beginning to shear and fall away.
The god-beast bellowed and lumbered towards Nith, every step making the earth shake. “Now!” Adam shouted. “While everyone’s looking at them!”
He and Trennus jumped over the edge of the earthen berm, and Adam hoped devoutly that all the electrical current in the water had dissipated by now, and that the ice pelting down from above would abate.
Running in knee-deep water would have been a challenge even as a young man; add a silty, sandy bottom that yielded with every step? Every stride was leaden, and he couldn’t keep up with Trennus’ youthful, fleeting steps. Struggling, bogging down, pieces of rapidly-melting ice cutting into his legs. His breathing was still even, but Adam was slow. I will not be a burden, he thought, and ran harder, his thighs and calves burning. Ahead of him, Trennus reached out his arms to both sides and the earth under the mere buckled. Rippled. Surged. Adam could see it undulate up and down like a sine wave, and the sorcerers on all sides lost their footing and fell into the water, spell-casting, for the moment, disrupted. Kanmi had just run for cover at the far side of the tower, and now beckoned to them, imperatively, catching Adam’s arm and yanking him down as he pulled up a half-dome of frozen air, trying to hold off any incoming missiles from the other sorcerers. “Glad you could join me!” Kanmi shouted, as Trennus vaulted over the salt hummock against which they were currently taking shelter, sliding down to land beside the sorcerer, panting. “I’ve been feeling lonely up here!”
Adam found a fleeting instant to put a hand on Kanmi’s shoulder. “You should have invited us to the party earlier!” He ducked as the god-beast mistimed a swing at Nith’s head, and tore off the top of the tower, instead, and debris went flying. Kanmi held up a hand and a chunk of masonry the size of Adam’s torso bounced off the air above them, redirected towards one of the summoners, who’d stumbled backwards into the tents south of the tower, proper.
“Lassair’s still in there!” Trennus shouted, popping his head up and over the edge of the hummock, and then pulling back down again, immediately, as a blaze of fire streaked towards him from the hand of some sorcerer or another out in the lake.
“I saw her go in, but I
can’t hear her anymore. Baal’s got me blocked, jealous son of a bitch that he is,” Kanmi snapped out. “Hate to say it, but Lassair’s not our biggest concern right now. Either of those two behemoths hit us, and we’re going to be flatter than foolscap—”
Sigrun took that moment to streak in from overhead, as Dagon reared back his head to try to bite Nith. The dragon was still prone, his claws, breath, and teeth the only reasons why the god-beast had not yet simply lowered its crushing weight onto him to finish the job. She ducked, dodged, and rolled through the air, avoiding a half-dozen assorted attacks from the sorcerers, who clearly didn’t know which target to be attacking at this point. Their leader had been killed at some point in the past ten minutes, and Sigrun had no idea at whose hand the man had fallen. She glanced down into the shattered opening of the tower, and could see Lassair, fully in flame-form, fighting for her life against some creature that seemed to be made of night and shadow. If she helped Lassair, Nith could be killed. If she helped Nith, Lassair could die. But if Nith and the god-beast didn’t move, everyone around them could be crushed. Hold on, Sigrun flung the thought towards Lassair. I will aid you!
But first, she swept in a parabolic arc, around, up, and then behind the beast that Niðhoggr fought, where there were no weapons to attack her. She brought down lighting on all sides of her, and landed atop its head as it once more arched back to scream in pain. Slipped and slid down over a brow ridge, landing in front of a surprisingly small golden eye. A defensive measure, surely; an adaptation to ensure a smaller target for a vulnerable area, at the expense of vision. And how much vision did one really need in the ocean, after all?
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