by Devin Hanson
Within the chamber, a large force was gathered. There were mostly mercenaries, with the distinctive robes of alchemists clumped on the edges and a few of the armored soldiers in runed plate mail. Moments after Andrew had come to a stop in front of the shield and looked out into the chamber, a man’s voice screamed in a high tenor to stop.
In the ear-ringing silence that followed, Andrew made out a tall figure dressed in a ludicrous combination of silk and steel, somehow managing to ruin any gravitas the materials and craftsmanship might have offered. It was Trent.
“Hey, Ranno Kossar!” Andrew called. “Didn’t they throw your corrupt carcass out of the Guild yet?”
Hushed, perhaps awed, silence fell upon the collected mercenaries. Trent was a Salian noble, a filthy rich one, and his ilk did not take kindly to such insults. They watched with bated breath to see how their lord would deal with the challenge.
Trent stormed up to the shielded passage, his face a picture of all-engulfing rage. Pulsing veins stood out in his flushed forehead, his teeth were gritted together with flecks of foam in the corners of his mouth. If anything, he got even angrier when he saw who it was.
“Who dares to – You!” Trent’s speech devolved into an animalistic roar.
Andrew waved. “Easy there, big fella. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
In response, Trent started throwing alchemy at the shield wildly, uncontrolled bursts of flame, ragged bolts of lightning that flickered around the edges of the shield, and storms of ice spears that splintered and spalled off ricocheting fragments.
Andrew braced a foot behind himself as the impact transferring through the shield threatened to knock him off balance. With a muttered alteration to the shield, he forced it out, rounding it into a dome so none of Trent’s efforts were able to impact directly with the shield. The nearest mercenaries were stumbling and jumping away from the shield as the energies impacting it were redirected into the chamber.
Trent was throwing an amazing amount of vitae into the attack. Andrew knew the runes for the shield quite well and his efforts were efficient. The scale he drew his own vitae from was like a lake in spring, full to overflowing, and even the stream of vitae he was pouring into the shield wouldn’t exhaust it any time soon.
Despite that, Andrew was concerned. Bricks reduced to lumps of slag were falling from the ceiling and the flagstone floor glowed a dull crimson. If Trent collapsed the passageway, the amount of force on the shield would quickly drain the scale.
But if Andrew’s efforts were draining, Trent was expending even more vitae in his furious assault. He must have a great deal of vitae on him, several fluxes secreted away in that ridiculous getup. Or he was already an Incantor and had a store of vitae internally sufficient to sustain his rage.
Jules had told him how Iria had tricked Mohandi into self-destructing, but that wasn’t likely to happen with Trent. Mohandi had had only a few weeks of training in runes and alchemy, the few Sayings he had used were likely all he knew, and his understanding of the runes involved would have been rudimentary at best. His shield, while impressive for someone so new to the art, had drained his store of vitae at astounding rates.
Trent, however, was completely different. He had years of training and years of experience on top of that. His runes were extremely precise, and he wasn’t as much of a fool as Mohandi had been. Trent, whatever his other qualities might be, was not stupid.
The storm of energy against the shield trickled away and Trent stood facing them, his chest heaving, but his rage abated. “I waste my time with you,” he snarled, and spun on his heel. “Keep tearing down that wall! You lot!” he pointed to a trio of alchemists clustered together to one side of the chamber, “If this degenerate imbecile drops that shield for so much as a second, blast them all into cinders.”
Jules stepped up next to Andrew and watched the alchemists resume their assault on the Archives portal. “I caught a glimpse of Milkin in the Archives,” she said. “He must have raised the protective shield. How are you holding out?”
Andrew shrugged, made a can’t-complain gesture, focusing on the shield.
“How are we going to do this, Andrew?” Jules crossed her arms, hugging herself. “I don’t suppose you can perform some kind of… I don’t know. Capture them all or something?”
“No, I don’t think so, not without time to prepare. And even then,” Andrew shook his head, “Jules, I don’t know enough about alchemy to do it. Earlier, I just wanted it to happen and the runes came to me. I doubt I could duplicate it now.”
Jules pursed her lips in disappointment, but nodded. “We can’t just sit here and wait while Trent pillages the Archives. We need to come up with a plan.”
“I don’t really know what I’m doing, Jules. The last time I had a plan, I destroyed the Palace of a Thousand Arches. If Iria was here she might know what to do.”
“Milkin and whoever is with him will put up a fight when they finally breach the shield. We won’t get a better opportunity than that to attack.”
“Right. I’ll follow your lead on that, then. Better let the wardens know. It might not be too long.”
Chapter 27
Battle for the Archives
Milkin leaned on his cane behind a pedestal protecting a toe bone, the claw still attached. The top of the protective cylinder didn’t quite cover the top of his head, but kneeling or sitting on the floor was out of the question. His old knees ached from the amount of climbing up and down stairs the week had demanded of him. If he sat down now, he doubted he’d be able to get up again. He switched hands on the cane and shook his left hand out, trying to get some of the feeling back into it. He was right-handed and was most comfortable directing alchemy with that hand, but his left arm had been getting a workout using the cane on all those stairs and was numb more often than not.
Meria crouched behind a pedestal next to him, a borrowed scale clutched in one hand. Her youthful eyes were hard as she watched the progress the alchemists were making in destroying the wall. Behind the next pedestal, Alexi Fontaine stood, looking remarkably innocuous. If Milkin didn’t know the man was one of the Sicaria, he would have discounted Alexi’s presence completely. On Milkin’s other side was Michael Esterforth, who had collected around him the remaining pureglass vials of dragongas.
So much for the alchemists. The conscripts and guards that were stuck in the Archives were huddled behind the great dome that covered the skull. They seemed to defer to one of the conscripts, a man Milkin had heard Meria refer to as Joel Paul. The plan, such as it was, was for the alchemists to make entry as difficult as possible for the invaders and for the remaining defenders to join the fight only after the majority of the alchemy had died down. As much as Joel and the others wanted to be in the fight, they’d only be getting in the way, and alchemy had no awareness of friend or foe once it was unleashed.
Whoever had designed the portal initially had put a lot of work into reinforcing the stonework. Each block resisted the invaders’ attempts to destroy it for far longer than normal stone would have managed, hinting at strengthening runework in place. But even with the runework the stones forming the wall were steadily being destroyed, one at a time. It wouldn’t be long before the ring of runed stones powering the shield was revealed and destroyed. Once a single part of the ring was cracked, the entire shield would collapse.
Milkin switched his cane back to his left hand and worked his tongue around in his mouth, trying to dig up some moisture. When was the last time he had a drink? Or something to eat? He couldn’t remember. Certainly sometime today. Right?
He was still trying to remember when the shield finally failed with a loud crack.
For a moment, both sides were frozen in surprise. Then, “Igan’anir!” cried Meria, and a lance of fire burned across the Archives, out the gaping wound of the entrance and took one of the two alchemists high in the leg. The man screamed and toppled over, hands grabbing at the charred stump of his leg in horrified disbelief.
The Archi
ves devolved into madness.
It was fundamental to combat between alchemists that the give-and-take of a fight revolved around shields. Using a shield was an effective block to incoming attacks, but at the same time it meant you couldn’t strike back against an attacker. Simply throwing up a shield and hunkering down wasn’t an option as it consumed vitae at an inordinate rate. Combat, then, became something of a guessing game, with the objective being either to outsmart your opponent or force him to expend his vitae needlessly until his source, whether dragongas or flux, ran dry.
Such was combat between two individuals. The combat that raged in the Archives foyer was the same in principle, but was so multifaceted that any sort of predictable give-and-take was completely lost. Milkin threw up a shield and tried to get a sense of a pattern in the chaotic howl of energies before realizing he was just delaying the inevitable.
He set his jaw and lowered his shield long enough to roll out a Saying of his own. “Igat’danla,” he cried, sending a rolling wave of flame shooting across the stone floor. He threw his shield up again before the flames hit the approaching forces and flinched as a hail of ice shards shattered on it immediately afterward. The alchemists in the front row of advancing invaders saw the fire coming and naturally threw up their own shields. For the most part, the fire parted around them harmlessly, but one had formed her shield with a gap between the ground and the edge of the shield, whether in an attempt to conserve vitae or through some ingrained habit. The rolling fire went straight under her shield and through her robes. She shrieked and lost focus on her shield, beating at the flames that lapped hungrily upwards, then an arrow took her in the chest and she went down in a blazing tumble of limbs.
As chaotic as it was, Milkin had expected the invaders to be more organized. The truth, he reflected, was a lot more complicated. Trent’s forces had been formed up waiting for the shield to be breached, it was true, but when it had finally happened, nobody had expected it. Meria’s preemptive strike had caught the invaders by surprise and their reaction had been largely unplanned. The intelligent thing to do, Milkin thought critically as he traded fire with an alchemist before catching the man with his shield down and blasting a hole through his chest, would have been to raise a shield of their own, gotten organized, and attacked at their leisure. Instead, the fight had turned into a mad rush into the Archives with no organization at all.
It wasn’t a complete failure, though. Despite losses, the invaders had forced their way past the foyer and were into the Archives proper. The mercenaries had come in behind the shielding alchemists and were spreading out through the Archives, searching for opportune angles to bring down the defenders.
The conscripts weren’t waiting any longer. With Joel Paul in the lead they rounded the dome and charged the mercenaries, containing the flood of enemy forces. A squad of four archers hung back behind the dome, shooting arrows at anyone who presented an unshielded target.
But the invaders weren’t bottled up in a narrow foyer any longer. Milkin found it impossible to lower his shield, which was under a constant hammering from alchemists and enemy archers. Meria was crouched behind her pedestal, still managing to find openings to return fire, but her pedestal was taking a beating, with great gouges torn from the basalt. Michael’s pedestal was completely gone, just a ragged stump rising from the floor, and Michael himself was nowhere to be seen. Milkin hoped that meant he was alive.
Meria’s efforts gave Milkin a few seconds opening, and he took the opportunity to send a hail of ice shards toward the invaders but didn’t stick his head out into the open long enough to see if any connected. Fire boiled around his pedestal, and Milkin threw up a shield and barely hung onto his concentration as he beat out a sleeve that had started to burn.
Things were looking grim. Any second now they would be overrun by mercenaries or alchemists pushing forward to flank them around the pedestals. Abruptly, the intensity of attacks hammering against his shield faded away to nothing. A clash of arms was audible, and a voice rose in a shout, “For the Speaker!”
Andrew saw the Archives shield go down. The three alchemists tasked with keeping them bottled up got very alert, hands raised, Sayings primed and ready. He scowled; there was no way he could drop the shield long enough to perform any alchemy with the three watching him so closely.
“Jules,” he called, “think of something!”
“What can I –” a thoughtful look came over her face. “Can you lower the shield on the top a few feet?”
“Sure.” Andrew refocused and called out, “Ban!” The shield reformed with a slender opening at the top, and Jules drew her runed blade and threw it through. Her throw was high and off and her blade skittered across the ground behind the alchemists.
One of the alchemists laughed, full of malice. None of them paid any attention to the blade once it had come to a stop.
“Doco’lani,” Jules hissed, and the runed blade leapt off the ground and buried itself hilt-deep in the back of the alchemist who had laughed. The other two gaped at their fallen comrade, blank confusion writ clearly on their faces.
Jules repeated the Saying, and the runed blade leapt from the body it was buried in and drove itself clean through the stomach of another alchemist, trailing a spray of blood behind it.
Andrew dropped the shield and snapped, “Igan’anir,” catching the last alchemist as he was spinning back to face him, his hand raised. The fire lance caught him high on the shoulder, flipping him backwards to the ground, his clothes smoldering.
The commotion had drawn attention, but there was too much chaos for more than a few mercenaries to turn to face the new threat coming from behind. The wardens poured out of the passage, their footsteps silent. A few crossbows twanged, but both Jules and Andrew shouted, “Ban!” at the same time. Their overlapping shields deflected the bolts and collapsed, allowing the charging wardens to pass through.
The wardens crashed into the rear ranks of Trent’s force, blades flashing. Mercenaries screamed in surprise and died cursing. The assault on the Archives faltered as more and more people turned to deal with this new threat.
“For the Speaker!” Hakhim shouted.
For a moment, it looked like the wardens would win through just from the shock and unexpected ferocity of their attack. But there were only ten of them against over a hundred enemy. One of Trent’s soldiers wearing the runed plate armor charged forward, shrugging off the blows the wardens rained on him, his armor impervious to their weapons. He bowled one of the wardens over and slew him with a great spiked mace before Andrew could react.
He couldn’t unleash his alchemy into the whirling melee without threatening the wardens, but the hulking soldier stood free. Andrew called, “Igan’anir!” at the same time Jules shouted, “Eki’la’ani!” Fire and lightning smote the soldier, blowing through the runed armor, searing and electrocuting him.
The mercenaries had never faced warriors like the wardens before and they were ill-prepared for it now, but they had numbers on their side and, while Jules and Andrew were limited in their ability to support the wardens, the enemy alchemists had no such compunction. Another warden went down, impaled by a flurry of ice shards, the spray cutting down several mercenaries at the same time.
Hakhim rallied, Fakhir at his side, and together they kept the warden’s line from breaking, but Fakhir’s left arm hung limp at his side. Andrew saw the wardens waver. They were worn from their long run to the Archives, and now they were fighting a pitched battle against a force many times their size. There was only so much muscle and bone could endure.
A great axe rose above the surging press, double-bladed, mounted on a long haft. A warden in front of it stumbled, went down on one knee.
“Doco’lani!” Andrew screamed, seizing at the axe and flinging it to the side with all the force he could put behind the Saying. The Song rose in him, his study and new understanding of the Do rune calling out to be used. The axe came alive, spinning and hewing at the mercenaries with more force than any m
an could bring to bear. The initial Saying had knocked a dozen men sprawling, and now the axe spun through the air, ripping through flesh and bone with equal ease.
A soldier in runed armor intercepted the axe with his shield. Sparks shrieked through the air and the heavy oaken haft of the axe shattered. The soldier staggered back as the axe head, free of the haft, wrenched itself from the soldiers shield and spun about viciously, hammering the soldier back with a staccato rhythm of rending metal.
The Song gripped Andrew and the axe was an extension of his will, but the axe was merely steel and no alloy lacking reinforcing runework could stand up to the punishment Andrew was inflicting upon it. The metal of the axe head split and tore, but not before the soldier went down, his armor stove in at a dozen places.
Dimly, Andrew was aware of Jules by his side, her Sayings crisp and precise as she protected the wardens from alchemy and struck out against targets that revealed themselves. Scores of the invaders had fallen, but even with Andrew’s Song and Jules’s support, the wardens were being driven back.
A second frisson ran through the invaders and Andrew heard a cry raised from within the Archives, a woman’s voice shouting, “For Andronath!” A collective roar followed the cry and the mercenary force seemed to quiver and surge first one way than another as their leadership gave them conflicting orders on which flank to focus on.
Milkin peeked over the top of his pedestal. The mercenaries were turning away from their attack on the Archives, rearranging themselves to contend with a new assault from the rear. A glance showed him Meria was leaning against her own pedestal, winding a strip of torn cloth around a bloody wound in her calf, her shield held around her through gritted teeth.