The Wizard and the Warlord (The Wardstone Trilogy Book Three)

by M. R. Mathias

  Rosa was glued to the scene until the top of a familiar head bobbed into view. She hadn’t seen Phen since he had recovered from his petrified state, but she recognized him immediately. Fear shook her to the very core as he charged out heedlessly to attack the massive demon beast.

  Without thinking, she threw open the sliding door and charged out to the balcony rail. “No, Pin! NOOOO!”

  Queen Willa’s guard and an elven swordsman roughly pulled her back inside.

  ***

  The Warlord’s powerful blast rocked Claret’s body and she roared out in surprise. The blow was so heavy that Hyden feared it to be fatal. Claret tried to hold her path toward the palace but faltered. She was determined to help Hyden, though, so she let their crashing fall carry them over the fountain.

  Hyden leapt from Claret’s back in mid-flight. He knew, and regretted the fact, that he could do nothing to help her or Phen. He had to stop the Warlord, no matter the cost. Why the fool boy was still trying to act like a hero after the last time, he couldn’t understand. This was the Lord of Hell, not a Zard ship. With only a flick of its wrist it had just knocked the biggest dragon in the realm from the sky. Hyden didn’t know what Phen hoped to accomplish. He'd hoped that Oarly’s death, and the events that had transpired at the Leif Repline, would have put some sense into the boy, but apparently not.

  As he prepared his levitating spell to halt his fall, Hyden saw Mikahl swooping in on the bright horse to help Phen. The Warlord saw him, too, though, and in a sudden flash of realization, Hyden saw it all falling apart before his eyes. He wanted to shout out a warning but it was already too late.

  Mikahl saw the swath of sapphire energy leap from Phen’s hands toward the Warlord. An instant after, the Dark One’s clawed fingers sent ten jagged bolts of lightning directly toward Phen’s chest. Mikahl forced the bright horse down and dove streaking like a crossbow bolt toward Phen. He had to knock Phen out of the way or he would be charred to a smoldering husk. He didn’t see the Warlord’s thick tail whipping around to greet him. The sound of his dead wife calling out Phen’s name in her unmistakably peculiar way distracted him from it. “Pin!” He turned to see her being pulled back into an upper room by Queen Willa’s guards, then tried to refocus his flight to save the boy.

  He was utterly stunned. How could it be? Rosa alive and here in Xwarda? It was the last thought he had before the Warlord’s tail smashed into his face. His momentum saved Phen when he and the bright horse crashed into him, knocking him clear of the Hell Master’s lightning. In the process, though, Mikahl lost Ironspike, and consciousness, and was then blasted across the courtyard when the Warlord’s lightning hit him full on.

  Hyden came falling feet first out of the sky with his arms held high for balance. The Tokamac Verge was in his right hand. He was ready for Mikahl to loose Ironspike’s power at him so that he could magnify it with the crystal and banish Gerard to the Nethers for good. But Mikahl was nothing but a heap of charred flesh, and Ironspike was still spinning to a stop on the blood-slicked cobble walkway near Phen. Hyden halted his fall with his levitation spell and came to a hover a few feet above Phen.

  “Hurry! Put Ironspike in the High King’s hand!” he said as he turned to fight the Warlord. “Hurry, before it’s too late!”

  Phen understood. The healing power of the sword could restore Mikahl if he was still alive. Phen grabbed the weapon by its hilt. It was so heavy that he could barely drag it, but he did so as quickly as he could.

  The wizard and the Warlord met each other eye to eye, Hyden hovering a few feet above the surface of Whitten Loch, the thing that still had his brother’s eyes standing waist-deep in the pond. It was those eyes that arrested Hyden’s attack. In that brief instant of hesitation, the Warlord swatted him across the air like he was no more than a pesky insect.

  Using the thrust of his levitation spell, Hyden recovered swiftly. He held forth the Tokamac Verge and cast a spell through it. Three sizzling rays, one crimson, one lavender, and one bright blue swirled out and into the Warlord. The powerful magic held him there nearly half a minute, sending violent shudders through his plated form. When the spell exhausted itself, the Warlord still stood. He was snarling, and a few curls of smoke were rolling up from his flesh. He turned and roared at the wizard, defiantly bathing him in a searing gout of dragon’s fire.

  The crystalized tear drop hanging around Hyden’s neck protected him from the blast, but by the time the flames were gone, the Warlord had dived under the surface and was swimming toward the Wardstone.

  Chapter 58

  As Phen dragged Ironspike’s blade across the bloody cobbles toward King Mikahl’s roasted body, something extraordinary happened. The blade became as light as a feather and a throbbing buzz filled his ears. Slowly, like the sound of an approaching bandwagon in a parade, the murmur turned into a melody. Then, all at once a full cacophony exploded into Phen’s head. The sensation was staggering and nearly brought him to his knees. The sound sorted itself out, leaving an angelic chorus shimmering over a powerful and rhythmic melody. Phen’s blood was hot. It tingled and pulsed in time with the music.

  Phen couldn’t believe what was happening. Ironspike’s blade was blazing bright blue, just as if the High King were holding it. It was impossible. Ironspike’s magic only worked for those of Pavreal’s bloodline.

  Phen forced the confusing thoughts out of his mind and ran the last few steps to High King Mikahl’s side. Instinctively, he knew what to do. He’d seen Mikahl heal people with the sword a few times. He touched Mikahl’s blackened flesh with the glowing blade and separated out the melody of healing from the rest of the symphony in his head. The blade answered by fading from blue to a bright green, then yellow. Phen could feel Mikahl’s life pulsing away before Ironspike’s magic took effect. Slowly, the High King’s heartbeat strengthened, but not much. An untuned note, sour and mis-struck, sounded in Ironspike’s music. Like a bad taste in an otherwise delicious stew, the tone offended the rest of the music horribly. A feeling of warning came to Phen. Ironspike’s power was dwindling. He was suddenly worried that if he used the sword’s power any longer to save the High King, it wouldn’t be strong enough to help Hyden Hawk banish Gerard.

  Torn, Phen didn’t know what to do. Rosa would never forgive him, and he would never be able to forgive himself, if he let the High King die.

  The rotten note in the symphony grew more prominent, and Phen could feel the sword’s might ebbing away. He clenched his eyes shut, and tears started flowing down his face. He felt he didn’t have a choice. He pulled the blade away from Mikahl’s flesh. The sword reverted to its normal bright blue color and the music in his head became beautiful again, but when he opened his eyes he saw King Mikahl still dying in the bloody snow.

  Hyden’s insistent voice, and the sudden darkening of the entire sky, brought his mind back to the battle. He whipped around to see the waters of Whitten Loch frothy and boiling. Hyden was hovering just above them, wild-eyed and frantically trying to get Phen’s attention. Behind Hyden, the Warlord rose slowly up out of the boil, his jagged mouth split into a smug, self-satisfied grin. Dark purple emissions of smoke jetted out of his clawed hands into the sky. Phen saw the Verge crystal in Hyden’s hand and remembered with perfect clarity what Hyden had told him about it at their camp in the Giant Mountains. He knew what had to be done.

  “At you or at the crystal?” he asked with a shout.

  Hyden, confused beyond all rationality that Phen was holding Mik’s blade while it still glowed with power, saw the uncertainty fade from Phen’s face. The boy’s expression grew deathly serious. Hyden could feel the dark power radiating behind him. Gerard had found the Wardstone and already was working his newfound power to blot out the light of the sun.

  The meaning of Phen’s question became clear. “All of it, Phen!” Hyden called out with more than a little fear and uncertainty in his voice. “All of it at me!”

  The wizard spun around to face the Warlord. The beast was ecstatic and marveling
in wicked delight as the power of the Wardstone came funneling through him. He looked at Hyden and Hyden saw plainly his little brother’s innocent joy in the expression. He missed Gerard so much. His brother hadn’t been evil; he’d just wanted to be a mage, or something other than a cliff-climbing clansman. Now he had to be destroyed.

  Beyond the Warlord, at the edge of his vision, Hyden could see the limp hind quarters and tail of Claret’s body lying across a section of broken palace wall. She had crushed it when she fell. Above her, her young hatchling flapped and screeched in confusion and sorrow because his consistent pestering refused to rouse his mother.

  Hyden felt Ironspike’s white hot swath of power hit him in the back. In the span of a heartbeat, he saw in his mind’s eye Vaegon Willowbrow shredded and broken in the rubble; Brady Culvert being eroded in his tracks by a black dragon’s acidic spew. He saw Oarly’s pulverized body, and the smoldering form of the High King lying in the bloody slush like a roasted animal. When he looked back up at the Warlord and started channeling Ironspike’s power through Claret’s tear drop, all he saw before him was evil. When he directed that tremendous flow into the Tokamac Verge, he knew that even though none of Gerard’s goodness remained in the thing before him, it would remain in his own heart, where it would always be.

  ***

  Durge and his fellow dragon-riding guardians had herded the bulk of the common folk fleeing the gates into a snowy, horseshoe-shaped valley in the hills north of the city. One of the cocky red-scaled wyrms had set a good portion of the trees on fire to keep them warm and the others had taken up positions to defend them.

  Jicks, on his long, sapphire dragon, and the two white wyrms that seemed to obey his blue’s every command, found themselves in trouble. Most of the imps and wyvern had fled the sky out of fear of the dragons, but the hellcats, Choska demons, and the larger beasts still fought with ferocious intensity. Just when it seemed that the young swordsman’s mount had gotten the best of the dark flock, a noxious purple radiance filled the sky. One of the ice dragons began sneezing out shards and circles of frozen spew as the stuff irritated its nostrils. A Choska hit it hard and raked a claw down its back. White scales opened wide, exposing pink muscles and cartilage that were soon flooded with crimson. Blood streaked across the dragon’s scales in thick rivulets. Before it could recover, it was set upon again, this time by two hellcats that savaged the wounded wyrm’s wings until they folded back, broken. Finally, with a shriek of horror, the proud white wyrm went spiraling down to the earth like an autumn leaf falling from a tree.

  Jicks’s blue and the other ice dragon fought with all they had in them. Now they were fighting to get out of the choking purple cloud, instead of being on the attack. With half a hundred hellspawn still in the sky, all of them unaffected by the miasma, the situation was suddenly grim.

  Corva could feel the pulse of the Arbor’s Heart coming from his Queen Mother. He urged the sparkling blue he rode toward her. He found the battle on the palace’s front steps. The horrid stench that was permeating the sky wasn’t as bad down low. He found it was bearable, but for how long, he didn’t know.

  Hyden Hawk and Phen were battling a beast so malignant that it actually pained Corva to look upon it. A patch of golden green on a blackened Westland coat caught his eyes. A ruined man, whose chainmail armor had been melted to his torso, fought in vain to survive. Corva might have been able to help him, but he doubted it. There were elves pinned down who needed him and his dragon far more desperately.

  Three elven swordsmen were fighting a losing battle around a pair of wounded pikemen and a dwarf who had lost a forearm. Some two-legged, wolf-headed monster, whose claws and furred head were soaked black with the blood of its previous victims, had hemmed them in at the edge of the forested park that flanked Whitten Loch. Corva urged his dragon to the scene just in time to save one of the two uninjured defenders.

  While his dragon’s attention was on the attack, a hellcat attacked Corva out of nowhere. It happened so fast that the elf was ripped from the dragon’s back before he even felt the claws digging into his shoulders. The blue dragon wasn’t physically harmed, but feeling the proximity of the demons behind it, and with Corva’s weight suddenly gone from its back, it whipped around and left the warriors to their fate. The two uninjured men joined to attack the bloody beast. The sparkling blue dragon leapt back into the air in pursuit of the hellcat that was still holding its rider in its claws. The hellcat led the blue wyrm up into the toxic cloud the Warlord had created, and then dropped the elf. Torn between chasing the demon and trying to catch Corva, the dragon followed its instinct. It could only assume that Corva was already crushed to death, so it went after the beast. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had chosen to dive after its rider, though; it had been led into a trap.

  From above, below, and even behind the sparkling blue, a dozen or more hellcats, and a massive red-furred apish thing converged on it all at once. The red-furred beast had a black, leathery chest and its wings were far too small to actually carry it. It flew by way of magic. It was a greater demon and it tore into the blue with its power while its minions did the same with tooth and claw. It was all the hellborn creatures could do to get away from the wyrm when it started falling from the sky.

  “Put me down!” Queen Rosa screamed at the Blacksword Knight who’d just brought the Queen Mother in from the gate. He was fearfully trying to drag the queen of the realm from the balcony. “Tell him, Willa!” She thrashed and swung as she yelled. The last words she spoke very loudly and very clearly. “Mikahl is out there!”

  Queen Willa gave the man a nod and he let the High Queen loose. Telgra stepped up to her quickly in order to keep her from scratching the poor man’s face.

  “Come,” the Queen Mother of the elves said. “Both of you. Stay close to me and the Heart of Arbor will shield us from sight.” With that, she shouldered away the stupefied guard.

  Rosa saw Mikahl lying burned and broken in the snow, saw Phen touching him with Ironspike. The fact that the sword was responding to Phen didn’t register on her. She was overcome with grief. From her vantage, Mikahl looked injured beyond hope. She barely heard the gasps of the other two women.

  Queen Willa was gasping because of Phen. She remembered vividly the large Westland lord named Ellrich who’d brought the boy to Xwarda so long ago. In a single sitting he had eaten the better part of a roasted pig.

  Willa hadn’t been a queen then, only a princess. The expression of anguish on the boy’s face as he pulled the sword away from the High King said more than words ever could. She stepped up behind Rosa and gave her gentle support.

  Telgra gasped because the sight and smell, the very presence of the thing rising up out of the water before Hyden Hawk, was appalling to her senses. The Arbor’s Heart hammered through her chest in disgust and she had to fight to breathe as some dark purple taint jetted up into the sky from the Warlord’s outstretched hands. She didn’t even notice the body Phen had been worrying over, but she saw the sword’s bluish glimmer brighten to red, then orange, then pure white. She could almost feel the heat from the magic warming her skin. In her heart she cheered Phen as he strode forward purposefully and pointed the sword at Hyden. Her intense focus was broken suddenly as Corva’s body came slamming down into the balcony with a sickening crunch. All of the women screamed in terror. The way the body lay across the rail, like a grain sack, limp and still, left no room to hope that he had survived.

  Queen Willa, shocked to the core by the impact, pulled Rosa back into the chamber. Rosa was far too traumatized to resist.

  Telgra knew immediately that it was Corva, and it crushed her emotions into a compressed knot so tightly that they exploded. She lost the spell of concealing she’d cast over them. She fell to her knees and wailed out tears of sorrow. That was when Phen sent Ironspike’s magical blast into Hyden Hawk. It was the last thing she saw, for the elven guards rushed out onto the balcony and pulled the Queen Mother, and then Corva’s broken body, out of the open.
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  The Warlord was in ecstasy, especially now that the High King was dead. That brief moment of terror when the stubborn man and his glowing pegasus came streaking back in had been enough to jolt the Warlord into action. The fact that the High King had survived his frozen fall was as infuriating as it was eye-opening. He thought he had already disposed of the man. This time, he was certain.

  It was nearly as frustrating as fighting the wizard. He wasn’t worried, though. In the bottom of the pond he had found the Wardstone and claimed its power as his own. This wizard might be able to survive dragon’s fire, but he wouldn’t survive what was coming.

  The long-consumed demon Shokin’s voice came calling through the glee. A distant, whispery sound, but clear enough to be heard above the rest. “Pavreal’s blood still powers the blade,” it said urgently. “Beware.”

  The Warlord disregarded the warning words while continuing to spray his toxic miasma into the sky with one hand. He conjured forth a blast of magical force powerful enough to level a mountain with the other hand. He then sent his churning destructive construct directly at Hyden.

  Chapter 59

  It was too late when the Warlord realized his mistake. Had he heeded Shokin’s warning and conjured forth a shielding, he might have had a chance. As it was, the power of Ironspike, magnified by the crystalized dragon’s tear, then multiplied further by the Tokamac Verge, hit the Hell Master just before he could release at Hyden. It didn’t hurt the Warlord, and it didn’t immediately stop him from using the Wardstone’s power, but it held him fast and confused him long enough for Hyden to do what he had to do.