by R. K. Thorne
The wall did falter somewhat. A storm cloud coalesced inside the wall of flame, lightning snaking out toward the mages nearby, upsetting the wall or at least the mages’ grip on it.
Some troops were caught by the flames, but others surged and sprinted around it.
Jaena did her best to help them as soldiers reached mages. She knocked a mage off-balance behind a soldier who wasn’t looking. Then she lobbed a stray boulder to finish the job. Mages finally drew their swords in combat, and she poured energy into the metal. Six swords dropped in a matter of seconds.
In spite of the determined efforts of the healers around her, both forces slowly dwindled. Two platoons hadn’t been much to send up against this handful of mages. And then, before the last mage slave had fallen and faded away, another twenty poured forth, like they were nothing. The new mages trudged—clearly already exhausted—on foot toward the battle. She gritted her teeth. They deserved better than this. Better than no choice but to march to their deaths. Or their mass murders.
Still, though, it wasn’t even two hours before all the soldiers of the first wave were dead. She didn’t catch quite when it happened, but all of a sudden, she looked up and couldn’t spot any Akarians. Stands of archers took over behind her now, peppering the battlefield with arrows. Some of them burst into flame as they approached their victims.
Seven hells, the destruction.
The death.
The mage slaves might be exhausted. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were just getting started.
The buildings outside the wall started to fall now. Systematically, each was torn asunder, wood splintering when rock tore through it, stone sliding and grinding apart—and then flying into the city, impromptu artillery.
Another wave of troops surged past Jaena and her creature mage fellows. Pytor and Luha were hard at work on bees, brambles, and vines, while Elise was healing and Dom guarding their backs. Which, frankly, was nice in this situation. Certainly he was probably donating his mother power too.
But it wasn’t really working. It wasn’t really enough. Almost pointless, even. In next to no time, the new wave of troops that had been four times the size of the last were melting already.
She winced. These mages would destroy everything in their path. Everything. Every beautiful white tower and sunny, tree-covered garden, all the way to Panar’s quiet docks. Step by step, these mages would work their way through the city, until all the buildings were gone.
Where Panar had once stood, only a dusty field, bloodstains, and skeletons would remain. And all of her dreams of making a life here with Ro would be gone too, sand blown into the wind.
“Tharomar!” she yelled. “Ro! Where are you—”
Dom grabbed her arm and shook her. “Keep it down, or they will come looking.”
“Or drop a boulder on us,” Luha mumbled.
Forgetting the battle—no, she wasn’t giving up, she just… needed to know what had happened to Ro—she grabbed Pytor’s arm. “Help me find Tharomar. Please.”
With one quick nod, the creature mage shut his eyes and began searching.
AVEN DIDN’T bother to question whether riding out into the fray was a bit suicidal. It was definitely suicidal. But he had no other ideas, and so he fell back on what he knew best.
The kind of war that involved swords and horses.
Derk at his side, Aven raced out toward the mages. A wall of fire appeared, predictably, and Aven started grabbing energy left and right, ripping the wall apart. Derk followed his lead.
The formation fell to pieces, but now he was too full, too hot. He seized hold of the energy, formed it into lightning, and flung it at the Kavanarians closest to him.
Three mages went down, writhing. Aven searched for the command tent and its red flag, but the fog and the smoke obscured nearly everything.
Abruptly, he felt himself falling, almost as if—as if— No, it was really happening. The warhorse Derk had found was shrinking down beneath him.
He landed awkwardly, stumbling onto his side. He glanced up just in time to see a boulder flying toward his head.
He rolled, dodging. A sword left its sheath behind him. He staggered to his feet, whirling as he drew his own sword. Keeping the blade low, he waited. A burly mage with feathered wings on his back stared him down. Damn, a creature mage. He’d have to strike a killing blow.
The mage seemed determined to out-wait him, so Aven lunged forward. His opponent’s sword rose, but not fast enough, almost… intentionally slow. His blade sunk into the man’s ribs. Aven straightened, yanking the sword away, alarmed.
Just then another one of the mages leapt in front of him, but facing the other slaves. Almost as if she were ready to face them. But that couldn’t be, she was a—
“Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you doing?”
“Menaha,” the woman growled. “And I’m defending you, obviously.”
Menaha. Menaha! “From Mage Hall?”
“Good guess,” she said wryly.
“I freed you!”
She whirled to look at him incredulously. “You—it was you?”
He nodded, but lunged around her to block a slave who’d sought the opening. “Time for getting to know each other later!”
Derk joined them, and together the three of them fought their way through the rest. But even as the last one fell, forty more mages marched forward.
Enough. Time to get back. But first…
The new mages hadn’t yet taken control of the skies yet. Aven brushed a hole through the clouds and yanked down every bit of Erepha’s energy he could. He blew the spell across the wind, and the forty approaching mages gradually slowed to a stop.
No… only thirty or so did. Some of them, the furthest out, didn’t feel it. In fact, they were already shaking awake the others who did. Moments later, the sky split with lightning, vicious attacks beginning to fall.
“Come on. We better get back in.” He gestured to Menaha to follow.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.
They took off at a sprint for the battlement—or what was left of it.
KAE DASHED up the steps of the second tower two at a time. At the top, he stopped short, panting.
“Only two?”
Elder Wunik turned and nodded darkly.
“But this was the second meeting point,” Kae said weakly.
“No one else has made it here yet,” said Beneral. “It’s just us air mages now.”
“Fortunately,” said Wunik, a touch proper, “we can do quite a lot.”
Kae strode to the tower window and looked out at the battle. To his surprise, where there had been twenty mages, there seemed more like thirty now. More were falling every minute, but he could also see more mages readying to join the field behind them.
“Lightning,” Beneral suggested.
Kae nodded. “Yes, all three of us together. Let’s take some part of the storm over them and shock them a little.”
“Or a lot,” grumbled Beneral.
Wunik led the way, and the three air mages poured their energies into a twitching ball of lightning, swinging it out over where the mage slaves fought. And then, when it was just so—they struck. Kae’s fist tightened as the first bolts darted out.
But even after attack after attack left a mage smoking on the ground—more were still coming. They could barely handle these twenty. How were they going to handle nearly the whole two hundred?
“THAT WAY—DOWN by the shop with the green sign, see it?” Pytor pointed across the square and down the street. “Right there.”
“Got it. Be right back.” Jaena darted away.
“Wait a minute—” Dom started. “Maybe we should come with you.”
She stopped, already shaking her head.
“If you don’t return and the situation is dire,” said Pytor, “we’re falling back to Ranok.”
She nodded sharply and took off through the fog.
Down the street, and toward the green sign. The str
eet was empty. So was the side street. Where was he? She stepped forward and opened the door of the shop.
The shop… was no longer a shop. The roof had fallen in—or been crushed—leaving only a raw husk. But inside, healer mages and nonmages buzzed around, patients laid out in a semi-orderly fashion.
One thing her eyes didn’t see was Ro.
She ducked as another incoming boulder shook the earth, and when she straightened, Ro came around the far corner, stepping gingerly over the rubble and holding a young man in his arms. He was dust-covered, and his face was tight with worry, but there was no blood. Well, only a little blood that didn’t seem to be his. No missing limbs.
Thank all the gods and all the ancestors.
She ran to him even as he sat down the man, dodging mages and the injured, and once the man was out of his arms, she threw hers around him.
“I was so worried,” she said softly.
“Jae!” He nodded against the side of her head. “We’re here now.”
“But the battle isn’t going well, Ro. This is a losing game. We’re only delaying the inevitable.”
He shrugged. “We knew the odds were stacked against us from the start.”
She pressed her lips together, unwilling to take failure as an answer. “Come on. We aren’t stopping them; at this rate, they’ll level the city. We need to find Aven.”
There had to be some other path to victory. She just couldn’t think of it.
AVEN STARED out at the battle, panting as he knocked yet another air mage on his ass for trying to toast a soldier. It didn’t feel like nearly enough. The darkness fell like a smothering cloak over him, choking hope.
Calling down Sagus, he tried another star spell. Anger, this time. Maybe he could turn them on each other. But no. He winced as the Kavanarian mages only fought harder, sudden ravenous beasts but still single-mindedly focused on Panar. And still only two dozen or so. He couldn’t reach them all, and it wasn’t helping. If anything, it was hurting. He swept the calming spell across them again, lulling the enraged ones into a temporary sleep. This one didn’t last much longer than the first.
He fought off the icy rain, and each time others fought to bring it right back. The earth around Panar was churned and raw; gods only knew what was happening to it back by the camp line. Flames flickered in the darkness before being snuffed out. Lightning struck at the fighting mage slaves, followed sometimes by screams, sometimes by silence.
Screams rang out when mages hit brambles or were assaulted by beetles. The city’s catapults loosed stone after stone, most deflected or dodged.
Nothing was working. None of it. Sure it slowed them down, but these mages fought on, losing fewer troops and doing greater damage. It was an equation that was not in Akaria’s favor at the moment.
The mages had no choice, really.
They weren’t the real enemy. Daes was.
If Aven could cut off this monster’s head, the limbs would stop flailing. Or maybe stop collapsing buildings with innocent, unarmed people inside.
Twenty more mages joined the current twenty, then an hour later another twenty, and still the fighting raged on. Somehow distracting them was slowing them down. Fog blinded, swords rebelled, vines hindered. But he couldn’t free any. He couldn’t even see Casel now. And eventually he and his friends were going to get tired first, and what then? He needed something better—a plan—but no one had come up with one for actually winning. Only stopping, delaying. And they were doing that.
But this wasn’t just ceding the city to an enemy. The entire city was being destroyed.
A messenger caught his eye, running fast in royal leathers toward where they were hunkered. “Sire!” the messenger shouted. “Lord Beneral sends word. Ships approach. Armed! From Reilin.”
“Reilin—why—” Aven stopped short and swore. Of course. Queen Marielle was from Reilin.
By the gods.
“He’s readying the fleet, but if it gets colder, they’ll be trapped in the ice.”
“Got it. Go, get out of here.” The messenger raced back away from the battlement. He wanted to offer help, maybe some way to melt the ice, but who knew if there’d be a mage available to do it?
Aven caught his breath as a new crushing sound rang out, close by but behind him. He turned to see a shop crumble, then the house behind it.
Then another. And another.
He offered up a hasty prayer that no one had been inside, but a chill ran down his spine. It wouldn’t take terribly long for them to do that to the entire city.
He had to do something. Anything.
He whirled back, glaring at the Kavanarian mages, the tents across the chasm beyond. Actually, on this side of the canyon, one tent sat slightly bigger than the others, and its top was flagged red on top. The head of the monster.
Daes.
He turned his attention to the sky. A backup plan had occurred to him in the dead of the night, and he knew it was time. He was out of other options, besides letting the city be flattened.
Frowning, he pushed the clouds apart and reached up. Not for Casel. Not for Erepha.
No, not this time.
He winced and gritted his teeth as he reached for Masari and pulled down its essence—thick, hot, squirming, rotten. He poured its rage and heat into the dagger in his belt, poured until it would fill no longer. It flowed into the metal, settled there. Kae’s book had taught him that much.
Letting go, though, the energy started to race out. He clamped down on the dagger, gradually refilling it back up.
He would have to hold it closed, like a damn bottle with his thumb over the lid. He sighed. Let his opportunity to use it come soon.
He unstrapped the dagger sheath from his belt and wrapped it around his forearm, covering it with his gambeson and the mail that Perik had so valiantly brought. The boy deserved to be more than a servant. Too bad Aven likely wouldn’t survive this to raise him up.
Hand and mind clamped over the dagger, he turned back to the field. Devol was hunkered nearby.
“Dev! Devol, I need you to send word. A messenger. Tell them we want to negotiate.”
“Negotiate! Aven, you can’t. Not with Kavanar.”
“Look around you, Dev. They’re going to destroy the whole city,” he shouted. “We have to try.”
No one else needed to know. It was too great a risk they’d give the truth away. The dagger felt warm, writhing like a snake inside his sleeve.
Devol’s face was dark as he scanned the wreckage. Buildings had collapsed all around them. Rubble was on fire. And that wasn’t even on the battlefield yet, where real chaos reigned.
“All right. All right. I’ll go. Be careful, son.”
Aven nodded, gripped the dagger tighter, and waited.
18
SACRIFICE
Morning light had just cracked the horizon when the Kavanarian group rode out and stopped on the field, signaling they’d accepted his offer to negotiate. Aven sighed, feeling a sense of victory that no other Akarian did. He hid it deep down behind the sigh and got on his horse. The fighting had drifted down to nothing in the wee hours of the night, and Aven had sent his messenger, and here they were.
His finger stayed clamped on the dagger, along with his mind, but he blinked, exhausted. How long would he have to maintain this? He couldn’t do it forever.
The Akarian group that rode out was nearly all mages. Devol and Derk rode on either side, Siliana, Jaena, and Ro at the back. All of them armed and armored to the teeth.
Aven stared down Daes the minute he could spot the man. The Kavanarians had their mages too, and a few average soldiers posted around the corners of the group. But Aven wasn’t worried about a violent altercation. Not with what he offered. Daes looked much the same, if better dressed and with a circlet of rubies this time. The queen was there too, to Aven’s surprise, placid and statuesque on horseback beside him.
“So, we meet again,” said Daes.
“Unfortunately,” growled Aven. No reason to fei
gn politeness. Daes wouldn’t buy it.
“No courtly formalities?” Daes grinned at the queen. “Not much of a king, is he, Marielle?”
“You’re Queen Marielle?” said Aven, faking surprise. “You’re not what I expected.”
“Why do you say that?” she said in a perfect courtly voice, neither challenging nor sweet, hard to read.
“Well, you’re quite lovely, for someone as ruthless and self-serving as Daes.”
A corner of her mouth quirked. “Ruthless and self-serving was a welcome change.”
“Enough,” Daes said, cutting them off.
“Enough courtly niceties for you?” Aven pursed his lips.
“You call that nice?”
“Akarians clearly have a thicker skin.”
Daes clenched his jaw for a moment before speaking. “You said you wanted to negotiate a surrender, not trade insults. What do you want?”
“I don’t want to see the White City destroyed. Neither should you. And I want us to be left alone, of course. What do you want?”
A slow grin spread across Daes’s face. “Ah, but what have I ever wanted? You, of course.”
“Well, you can’t have him,” barked Devol from behind.
“Wait.” Aven held up a hand.
Daes’s eyes twinkled with amusement. “You know, I didn’t believe you when you said you were the only one with the star magic. But now I see it’s true, you really haven’t told anyone. I want the star magic destroyed, above all things. I want mage slaves never to be freed. Ever. And I want you to become one of them.”
“No, Aven, you can’t—” Devol started.
Aven held up a hand to silence him again. “If I go with you, you’ll leave the city? Leave Akaria? End the war?”
“Well, I can’t go quite that easily. I suppose I need the brand too. How else will I make you a slave? I will rip every brick from this city and toss it into the ocean until I find it.”
Aven could feel Jaena tense behind him, and what he was about to say was only going to make that worse.