When Darkness Falls

by Mercedes Lackey

  The room was entered, of course, through a Mage-door, which opened at a touch from Lord Lalkmair. Since the servants were to follow, he left it open, but when he closed it again, there would be no way out until he opened it again.

  Of course, Idalia thought with mordant humor, all the sealed doors in a High Mages’ house were said to open upon the Mage’s death, so they did still have one way out.

  Lord Lalkmair scooped books onto books and moved armfuls of scrolls out of the way, clearing himself a place to work. He opened one of the boxes on the table and drew out a sheaf of blank parchment and a thin silver rod: writing implements.

  “Now, Lady Idalia. Let us speak of this spell.”

  “WHERE is my son?”

  In the makeshift Council Chamber, the High Mages had been in the midst of dealing with a report from the City Watch when they felt the Wards rebuild themselves.

  Every Mageborn in the City, down to the lowliest Student Apprentice, must have felt it. The very stones rang with a power Volpiril had never felt before in his life, as if the Pure Light itself had burst forth from the Sanctuary of the Temple. Not since the days of Camorin Andralan, First Arch-Mage, had a power so pure and strong been unleashed in the Great Circle.

  Such power could not be summoned forth without … sacrifice.

  Interrupting the report of Guard-Captain Madus in midsentence—fires were burning in Bending Square and all across the Low Market, and due to the disruptions caused by the fall of the bell-towers, many of the wells were dry, and there were not enough Journeymen available to combat every fire in the City by magick—Volpiril leaped to his feet and ran for the Council Chamber, his gray robes belling out behind him.

  The spell had run its course. The golden doors, sealed by magick for the duration of the Working, opened at a touch. Clouds of incense rolled out into the hall. The Mages who had performed the Working stood—or sat, or lay—upon the marble floor, dazed. Volpiril had eyes for none of them.

  In the center of the pattern, the Great Sword of the City still clutched in his outflung hand, lay Cilarnen.

  His son. The jewel, the crowning pride of House Volpiril.

  No Mage lived forever. What any man built, he built for the future, for his sons. All that Lord Volpiril had done, he had done for two things: for Armethalieh, and so that Cilarnen might rise to greater heights than he himself would ever reach.

  He had seen all that snatched away when Lycaelon—Light curse and blast his name!—had told him that Cilarnen was a traitor. Had gloated over him, as though Lycaelon’s two mongrel whelps had not both been Banished as Wildmages.

  Volpiril had cared about nothing after that.

  When Cilarnen had returned, he had not cared that the boy had obviously been driven to the verge of madness by his unjust Banishment. Madness itself stalked the land, in the form of Demons. Destroy them, and there would be time to repair every harm the world had done to Volpiril’s only heir. His Gift was intact, and he was still loyal to the City. Nothing else mattered, save surviving the day. To that end, Volpiril would conspire with Elves and even Wildmages, to save Armethalieh and his son.

  But now …

  He was so still.

  He knelt beside Cilarnen. Stiffly. Old bones. Mageborn did not marry early, and Cilarnen was his youngest child.

  The only one who truly mattered.

  Then the boy’s lips parted in a sigh, and Volpiril knew that he still lived. He straightened.

  “Send for the Healers!”

  A few hours before sunset, the City opened her gates to their wounded.

  During a lull in the fighting the City Militia rode out.

  The battle ebbed and flowed like the tide of a great ocean. Not every unit was engaged at once. The line stretched for miles; the thousands of Elves, Centaurs, and Men of the Allied Army slowly being winnowed by the onslaught of the Enemy. At least the forces in the field against them could be killed, and Kellen’s troops killed them. But each death came at a high price.

  The Allies gained ground, forcing the line forward, into the forest. Yet they dared not advance as far as the Demons might allow them to. Their purpose was to protect Armethalieh, not to follow the retreating Demon army. And so Kellen held his forces back, kept them on the killing ground hour after hour, as monsters for which he had no name threw themselves against his lines.

  The Militia who rode out through the Lesser Gate were only a few hundred men. Toy soldiers in toy armor, on horses that looked like scrubs next to the Elven-bred beasts. But their captain, Amrun, had brought fresh news from the City.

  The Wards were back in place, and the High Council was working closely with Cilarnen, Jermayan, and Idalia. Amrun knew nothing more, save that Lord Volpiril had ordered them to aid the army—and he had brought a message from Idalia.

  Somehow, she had convinced the High Council to open the City to the Allied Army’s wounded.

  When had Lord Volpiril been returned to the Council?

  Kellen didn’t care. All that mattered was that he could shelter the injured in a place where the Enemy couldn’t reach them. What the City would make of the influx of Centaurs, Elves, and Mountainborn he neither knew nor—at the moment—cared.

  But Vestakia could not join them. The Wards would permit it, but the people within …

  He sent word to the Healers, sent what was left of Belepherial’s command to escort them and the wagons into the City.

  Sent Amrun and his men to fight beside the Mountainborn. Safer than putting them where they would be distracted by fighting beside people no one born in the City had ever expected to see in the flesh. But they would see enough on the battlefield to distract them, perhaps fatally.

  Kellen knew he was sending them to die, and tried to shut the thought from his mind.

  There was a break in the line.

  He rode toward it.

  IF Armethalieh had not sent High Mages, they would all be dead now.

  Scattered pockets of Magelight and Coldfire—two names for what must be an identical spell—illuminated portions of the army, and turned the roiling black pall that hung above the battlefield to a deep indigo. Fortunately, the Elves’ night vision was good.

  Not that anybody could see much of anything in the smoke.

  And Kellen needed no sight to see at all.

  Firareth had exhausted the last of even his great resources at sundown; Kellen was riding Valdien now. The Elven destrier seemed to know Kellen’s need was great; Jermayan’s mount had accepted him unquestioningly.

  There was a flash of light as a column of fire arced down from the heavens, followed by the red-gold flare of Fire. Kellen smiled grimly.

  The Allied Army was—impossibly—holding its own upon the field, and—because of that—the Demons Themselves had come at last to the battlefield, only to find that They had waited too long.

  The Allies were ready for Them.

  High Magick and Wild Magic—together—could slay Demons. And every single one of the Mages Armethalieh had sent was acceptable to the unicorns.

  There were, in fact, more unicorns on the field now than when the battle had started. Kellen didn’t know where the rest of them had come from, but he was glad they were here. They protected the High Mages far better than anything else could; the Demons dared not approach them.

  Some of the High Mages were even mounted by now, taking the places of fallen Unicorn Knights.

  Another flash—more lightning. A spell the Wildmages could not cast, but—apparently—a simple spell of the High Magick. He saw, with eyes that saw everything, the Demon pinned to earth by the column of white fire. Saw the swarm of dwerro move up to protect their fallen lord, trying to buy It time to Heal Itself. Saw the Elven cavalry slam forward, clashing with the misshapen creatures on their hideous mounts, trying to force them back so that the Wildmages behind them could make the final kill. Both sides slipped and slid in the slurry of mud and blood beneath their animals’ hooves.

  In the sky above, the Starry Hunt’s forces mir
rored the actions of the troops on the ground below. A thousand times, since the Demons Themselves had taken to the field, the Allied forces would have been annihilated in a heartbeat, save for the ghostly star-crowned cavalry that rode above them, hunting down the Demons’ spells as if they were living foes.

  Kellen’s sword was slicked with blood, his surcoat and armor was sodden with it, but Kellen’s own true battle was yet to come. At the rear of the Dark Army stood the Demon General, waiting. It was He whom Kellen had to destroy.

  But it was not yet time.

  They were fighting in the forest itself now.

  Each lightning strike—each Fire spell—rekindled the trees around them, though they were hardly more than columns of charcoal now. But even charcoal could burn.

  And so, despite all other calls upon their energy, the Wildmages continued to duel with the Demons over the weather, forcing it to rain, and rain hard. Steam and smoke boiled up out of the trees and the ground, veiling the whole landscape in a choking fog. If Kellen had not been able to see with his battle-sight, to give orders constantly and clearly, the Allied Army would have been lost in confusion long ago.

  The City Wards might be in place, but the walls of Armethalieh were only stone, and stone could be destroyed … if it could be reached.

  They didn’t need the City if They could perform Their Great Sacrifice.

  But They would certainly want to destroy anyone who could possibly stop Them.

  The hours passed.

  The battle continued.

  ZYPERIS had expected a quick and definitive victory to lay at his Queen and mother’s perfumed and gilded feet.

  But it did not happen.

  Every attack he made was countered. The beautiful children his glorious Mama had bred and nurtured were slaughtered, brushed aside, as if they were not terrifying. The Deathwings fell from the sky in flames.

  True, the ground ran red with blood. Coldwarg tore unicorns limb from limb. Frost Giants battered Elven Knights to death with their iron clubs. Shade-walkers ripped Centaurs apart as if they were gutting rabbits.

  But it was not enough. Never enough.

  They could not reach the City.

  Time passed. The hateful glowing orb by which the Lightborn reckoned time moved across the sky. The mortals died by the thousands, but the creatures Prince Zyperis commanded died, too. And he was no closer to entering the City than he had been when he had begun. Somehow, no matter what he did, no matter what orders he gave, the troops of the hated Lightborn were there before him, spending their foolish lives recklessly to keep him from his rightful prize.

  Then—suddenly—he felt a sudden upwelling of the High Magick and knew that he had miscalculated. Disastrously.

  The City was Sealed against him once more.

  Properly sealed, in a way it had not been since Queen Savilla’s Mage-man had begun his tampering. No breath of Dark Magic could cross its walls now to touch the minds inside.

  And as the human city was sealed, so he, too, had sealed his fate.

  But … there was yet one thing he might do to redeem himself in the eyes of his mother, his love, his glorious Crown of Pain. He understood, now, why the Lightborn enemy had reacted as if it were the fingers of one fist. Why, even though individually they were so weak and powerless, they were such a formidable enemy.

  A Knight-Mage was their commander.

  Zyperis had not yet been born in the time of the Last War, but his mother had spoken to him of Knight-Mages, and he knew that this one had resisted her at the Black Cairn. Better that she had killed Kellen Tavadon then, instead of trying to make him her pawn.

  If Zyperis killed him now, his mother would forgive him everything. With Kellen dead, he would destroy the army, obliterate the city, leave nothing behind but a wasteland in celebration of Queen Savilla’s glorious victory.

  And so he had waited for a lull in the fighting, and gone to summon his own personal guard to join him upon the battlefield. The preliminary sacrifices at the Place of Power were nearly done; his Mama would not miss them. It was only a few dozen of the Endarkened—and Lesser Endarkened at that—out of the hundreds gathered there. The Lightborn would be defenseless against their strength and magic.

  But they weren’t.

  They, too, died.

  He called the rest of them back. He must save them, now, for the moment when he took the battlefield himself.

  And destroyed Kellen Tavadon.

  Personally.

  EVERY chamber within the Council House that could be used for the casting of spells was occupied by Mages.

  Now, at last, Armethalieh had entered the fight.

  Rain lashed and battered the City itself, a storm such as had not been seen within the City walls since the first stones were laid.

  The Apprentices watched the battle from the walls, and brought back word of the battle’s progress, though they barely understood what they saw. When they had reported that the forest was burning, Idalia had demanded that the Mages remove the weather-shields from the valley, and bring rain to quench the fires. The Council had had to go to the walls themselves and gaze out at the carnage below before they would agree, but after they had seen it, they made no more trouble.

  As far as the eye could see—for mile upon mile—there was nothing but fire and burnt and dismembered bodies. The forest was in flames, all the way to the horizon.

  The Mage College had become a hospital for the army’s wounded. The students had all been sent to their homes, the Mages who normally occupied its grounds had been called away to Workings. Binding spells wreathed the Mages own defenses, so they would not attack the Allies, and the tents and wagons of the Healers now filled every open space.

  There were few wounded.

  NO bells rang in Armethalieh tonight. The City of a Thousand Bells lay mute beneath the fury of the magic-and-magick-called storm. But the High Mages did not need the City’s bells to reckon time.

  It was nearly midnight. Their spell would be timed to match that of the Demon Queen. They had spent precious hours as the day drew on preparing and adapting it from the old records in Lord Lalkmair’s archives, and then rehearsing it, because they could afford no mistakes. It would work precisely as the Wild Magic had promised Idalia that it would.

  In the Council Chamber, Idalia prepared to begin.

  She wore nothing but a light gray Mage-robe, her hair loose and unbraided down her back, and of all the things that had happened in the City today—dragons, Elves, Wildmages, spells, an entire Demon army right outside their walls—it was this that had stunned the Mages of Armethalieh nearly to the point of frothing catatonia.

  A woman dressed as a High Mage.

  A woman in a Mage Circle.

  At least she knew now where Cilarnen got his stubbornness from. Lord Volpiril had done everything up to and including threatening the High Mages with death and immediate Banishment to get them to work with her, and it was as much an acknowledgment of their desperate situation as it was a tribute to the force of his personality that he had succeeded.

  Thirty-six Mages stood with her, Setarion Volpiril and Dyren Lalkmair among them. In a moment, she would step into the center of the Circle, and they would begin.

  She had not told Jermayan the truth.

  He believed—everyone here believed—that the spell they were about to cast would bring Lycaelon Tavadon here from the Spellstones, whisking him out from beneath the Demon Queen’s hand to join her at the moment her spell was cast.

  It wouldn’t. No human magic—not even a Triple Circle—was that powerful. But the spell surrounding the Demon Queen’s altar would permit a substitution, so long as what was substituted was closely enough related in blood and magic.

  A daughter for a father.

  A Wildmage for a High Mage.

  Tonight she would die.

  But this was the Mageprice asked of her—and that she had consented to—long ago. To give her life. And because she was a willing sacrifice—not one ripped unconsen
ting from life in blood and fear, but a death hallowed by the Wild Magic—her death could not be used to break the bonds that would allow He Who Is to return to the world.

  “It is nearly time,” Jermayan said to her.

  “Yes,” Idalia said. She reached into the pocket of her robe, and drew out her Three Books. She took Jermayan’s hand, and placed them into it. “I want you to keep these for me. I do not think they would … do well within a Mage Circle.”

  “Perhaps not.” Jermayan smiled, but his dark eyes were worried.

  “Perhaps there is something you would wish to give me in return?” she asked.

  It would not matter now.

  He smiled, and reached up to unclasp the chain from about his neck. “I have waited long to give this to you, Idalia. I had thought this day would not come.”

  He clasped the silver eight-pointed star around her neck. An Elven Betrothal Pendant. It settled in the hollow of her throat, still warm from his skin. She reached up and touched it with the tips of her fingers.

  She could not say goodbye. If she did, he would know what she meant to do. It was possible he might even try to stop her, offer himself up in her stead, and there was no time to explain why that could not be. He would know soon enough. She had kept the truth from him—selfishly—because every moment in these days that could be spent without pain was a gift from the Gods, and she would give up none of them. Instead she smiled, saying nothing at all.

  “Come, Lady Idalia,” Lord Volpiril said.

  She turned away and stepped into the Circle.

  JERMAYAN watched from the edge of the room as Idalia stepped away and took her place at the center of the gray-robed High Mages. The room began to fill with smoke, making him wish to cough, but he schooled himself against it sternly. Only a few moments. Midnight would come, and Lycaelon Tavadon would join her in the Circle.

  And they could leave.

  He did not like the human city.

  It was too crowded, too filled with ugliness and hate. There was nothing here of appropriateness and harmony; no respect for the natural world that was the gift of Leaf and Star. No wonder they had fallen so easily to Anigrel’s plots; these humans were already half in love with Darkness. It made him sad. Far better to face that Darkness openly upon a battlefield than to pretend it did not exist, dulling your own senses until you saw nothing at all, not beauty or ugliness, truth or lies.