65
Last Stand
Tharfen and Xemion had the strategic advantage. High ground. They stood on a wide copper disk atop the domed roof of the tower, holding on to the flag pole in the middle. Night had now fallen completely and thick clouds had rolled in.
Despite his protestations, she knew that Xemion had become too weak to fight. It had taken all but the last of his energy to climb up the ladder to the roof. He had his sword out, but he could hardly stand. She was holding him up with one arm and gripping her blade with the other. It wasn’t entirely impossible she could beat forty men from this precarious position and live to tell the tale. For the moment, she needed to keep Xemion alert.
“I guess you’re going to have to take care of that missing piece of me a little longer,” she said quietly as the wind whipped his hair against her face.
“We’ll have to keep being off kilter,” he answered in a whisper.
Montither’s kwislings were battering at the door just below them now.
“We haven’t done so poorly,” she said. “Maybe we needed to have something missing. I kept thinking that not having that piece of myself was throwing me off course, but maybe really it’s thrown me on course.”
“Maybe it’s like that final point the Great Kone never quite gets to,” Xemion whispered, “the point that all the Great Kones in all the worlds never quite get to, but have in common. It joins you to a greater—”
There was a loud crash as the door that led to the room below burst open. They listened as the kwislings started cursing at finding the room empty. The wind had ripped a hole in the clouds and Tharfen and Xemion stood illuminated in bright lunar light. Tharfen could see how drawn and weary Xemion was. He whispered. “There were times lately when I felt so hopeless I wanted to die, but I found something within me that I thought might be Loceklis. The goddess Loceklis. It gave me strength because it was steady and strong and determined and even a bit vengeful when I needed to feel vengeful. But I realize now, Tharfen, that it wasn’t Loceklis at all. It was the piece of you.”
Just then the shutter of the window down below banged open and someone shouted “Yes!”
Slowly a head peeked up over the edge of the roof. Unfortunately the clouds were halfway scattered now and the moon spotlit Tharfen and Xemion like two large black ravens on the roof. The head ducked back down quickly.
“They’re up here!” the man yelled excitedly. Soon a number of the kwislings, their visors down, torsos protected in iron breastplates, lifted themselves up over the edge and began to disperse around the rim of the dome. Eventually Montither’s crest rose above the edge.
“That’s not her,” he said with disgust when he saw Tharfen.
“She’s gone where you can’t get her,” Tharfen called down to him.
“But that is him,” Montither said with a smile, “and I can get you.”
“You can try,” Tharfen taunted.
“You are mine,” Montither said with a sadistic smile. He drew a jagged edged sword and began to make his way up the curve of the dome toward them. But then, seeing the almost eager look on her face, he thought better of it. “Archers,” he shouted over his shoulder, “prepare your weapons.”
Tharfen watched as twenty bowmen reached into their quivers for arrows. She looked up and saw the star she had danced to. It will look down on the earth a billion years after I am gone, she thought. Why did she have to die now? To the east she could see the first signs of dawn and a large cloud of black birds circling in the distance. There was too much more to do.
She raised her sword to the sky and gave the battle cry “Ahai!” as she heard Montither yell “Ready!”
At that moment, a dark shadow fell over them all. Montither’s men started screaming and Montither himself yelled “Fire!” as Poltorir came swooping down, closed one mighty claw around Tharfen and Xemion, and lifted them off the roof. Twenty arrows flew at once, but they all missed their mark.
Tharfen looked down at the tower shrinking beneath her. And there was Montither, standing on the roof with his sword out. With her free arm she grabbed her sling and inserted a stone from her kit. She whirled it three times about her head and let it go. At first the stone looked like it would miss by a wide margin, but she had allowed for the dragon’s flight. The stone’s trajectory curved faultlessly, straight into Montither’s face, knocking him clean off the roof.
And still Poltorir rose. The sky cleared and dawn peered up from the edge of the Earth. Soon Tharfen could see the city far below. It looked so small she could almost imagine it secure and at peace. Far out to sea the last of the galleons was gone, but her own ship, the Dawnrider, tacking into the wind, was on its way back to Phaer Bay. She pointed this out to Xemion, but he didn’t hear her. He was now deep in spellshock. The high wind streamed through Tharfen’s red hair and she hauled it in and tied it back in the red sash as Poltorir turned toward Ilde.
Tharfen now realized that it wasn’t blackbirds she’d seen cycling in the sky — it was dragons. Maybe a thousand of them.
66
Love Is Not …
Love is not the answer,
it is the question.
It is both.
It is the command.
Lexicon of the Phaer Isle
Arthenow: the continent across the western sea from the Phaer Isle ruled by the blood magic of the Necromancer of Arthenow. Original home of the Thralls.
Common magic: magic that can be initiated by the turning of a spell kone rather than by the vocalizations of a trained mage.
Cross-spell: contrary or contradictory or paradoxical spells invoked upon the same person or object or locality. Often the magic will compromise, pleasing one part of one spell and another part of the other.
Cyclopes: one-eyed peoples of the Isle of Cyclos. Usually two or three feet taller than humans.
Elphaereans: the ancient people now departed from the Phaer Isle who are thought to have created and written the Great Kone.
Era of Common Magic: also known as The Phaer Era, this is the fifty-year period after the invention of spell kones and before the first Battle of Phaer Bay. It was a period of increasingly ludicrous magical achievements.
Examiner: an official of the Pathan government once empowered to examine Phaer youth in order to detect the spellbinders among them.
Great Kone at Ulde: a huge, mostly subterranean cone-shaped structure. The downward spirals of text written upon it are reputed to be the ancient foundational spell-riddle of existence. The area around the bottom-most point of the Great Kone is shared by an infinite number of other Great Kones whose spells create infinite other universes.
Ilde: the isolated western portion of the Phaer Isle dominated by Mount Ilde.
Kagars: a piratical sea people who defeated the Phaerland forces at the first Battle of Phaer Bay at the end of the Era of Common Magic. Surrogates of the Pathans.
Kone: a conically shaped structure upon which a spell or riddle is written.
Kone craft: spells invoked by the turning of a spell kone; textual magic other than that written on the Great Kone.
Kwislings: traitors who have collaborated with the Pathans.
Loceklis: an earth goddess whose cult has recently gained a footing in the Phaer Isle. Her followers, the Loceklians, forbid the practice of spellcraft and take all puns and coincidences, which they call crisscrosses, as dire omens.
Mage: a learned master of the spoken magic. Applied to both ancient Elphaerean mages and Phaerlander mages.
Middle mage: a mage with no magical powers of his own, but who is capable of transmitting the power of another mage’s spell, usually by hand contact.
Nains: a people of short stature renowned for their earthworking skills and their ferocity when forced to fight.
Necromancy: blood-based magic most powerful in the continent of Arthenow.
Panthemi
um: the stadium where athletic events such as the racing of gorehorses took place during the time of the Elphaereans.
Pathans: an underearth people whose armies have taken to conquering the surface world. They have a crystal-based biology.
Phaer Isle: the mountainous, mid-ocean island, once the home of the Elphaereans and later home to the Phaer people. Lately liberated from the Pathan Empire.
Phaer people: residents of the Phaer Isle; also known as Phaerlanders.
Shissillil: a former suburb of the city of Ulde. Due to the earliest known case of spell-crossing a place reputed to be without friction.
Spell fire: refers to the fire that occurred in the Great Kone when it stopped turning during the Battle of Phaer Bay.
Spellbinders: Phaerlanders, usually children, with the innate vocal quality necessary to become a mage.
Spell kone: a crank-driven cone upon which a spell is written in one long spiral from the rim to the point. Turning the crank causes the cone to revolve while the eye or “witness stone” descends — thus “reading” and invoking the text of the spell.
Tell kone: a device made of seven cones one inside the other, which when spun can be used for prefiguration.
Thralls: beings who escaped their enslavement to the blood magic of the Necromancer of Arthenow and migrated to the Phaer Isle five hundred years before the events of this tale.
Traitling: still-living parts of people’s personalities magically removed in a quest for moral perfection.
Ulde: the capital city of the Phaer Isle. The ancient village was formed around the Great Kone.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank and acknowledge the generosity of my first readers, whose commentaries helped shape the narrative of this book: Marsha Kirzner, Amelie Prevost, Ellie Kirzner, and Allen Booth.
A big thank-you also to my editor, Allison Hirst, whose efforts have helped vastly improve this volume.
Special thanks also to: Natasha Graham, Jane Mann, John Robert Colombo, and master satirist Sherwin Tija, who is one of the finest fantasy cartographers I know.
I also acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council for a writer’s reserve grant during the fifteen-year writing of this series.
Copyright © Robert Priest, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Editor: Allison Hirst
Interior and cover design: Courtney Horner
Map by Sherwin Tija
Cover images: ship © Michael Shake/iStock; vines © Deviney/Dreamstime
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Priest, Robert, 1951-, author
Missing piece / Robert Priest.
(Spell crossed)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-3043-4 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3044-1 (pdf).--
ISBN 978-1-4597-3045-8 (epub)
I. Title. II. Series: Priest, Robert, 1951- . Spell crossed.
PS8581.R47M57 2016 jC813'.54 C2016-901972-1
C2016-901973-X
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
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