Thorn spent the better part of an hour snaking his way through its innards, inspecting every working part with meticulous precision. Perfection in both form and function was the benchmark here; anything less, or the slightest flaw, and there was no point even making the attempt. Ch’ang-ja was a relatively benign environment. Nockmaar was not. Unleashing the power of the Resonator would be risky enough; if its power went wild here…
He need not have worried. The Faery artisans had done their work as well as the Nelwyns.
Thorn carried the focusing lens and led the way inside. Maulroon and his crew brought torches for illumination, though they proved unnecessary. Despite the many and oppressive shadows inside the fortress, there was sufficient ambient light to see. The torches in fact proved of little practical help, though carrying them made the crew feel better. As they proceeded, Thorn would stop occasionally, grapple with his notebook—no mean feat considering he was also trying to safeguard the diamond ball—and seek out the relevant passage in his voluminous notes. The farther they went, the more pensive he became, especially as they continued past the throne room and through a doorway which opened onto a rising circular stairway.
“Of course,” he muttered as he began the climb. “Could I have expected anything less?”
It was one of those ascents that seemed to go on forever and by the time he reached the top Thorn’s legs were spongy, thrust through with acid-tipped and cruelly barbed pins and needles. He managed to achieve a couple of steps into the room before they gave way, which suited him fine, allowing him a little time to strike an armistice with his memories and his emotions.
This was Bavmorda’s sanctum, where she had performed her most vile and baneful magics. There was no roof, the entire summit of her tower was open to the sky, yet the elements of nature held not the slightest sway. He felt no breeze, no chill of the outside air—the stones of the tower and the furniture in the room cast off sufficient chill of their own to make a body wonder if he’d wandered into some abattoir by mistake—not the slightest moisture, save for the sweat he’d generated himself with his climb.
Straight ahead, in the exact center of the room, where Thorn knew the ancient ley lines intersected, was Bavmorda’s altar, the spot on which she’d called down the most ancient deities to claim the infant Princess’s soul and consign it to ultimate oblivion.
That was where the Resonator would stand.
Moving the altar was no picnic, the damn’ thing was far heavier than it looked and wasn’t too thrilled with the prospect of eviction. The stone became slippery and minute barbs grew from nowhere to tear at the fingers of the men who tried to grapple with it, even though they wore stout seamen’s gloves.
They made quick work of their business. None wanted to linger.
With steady hand and inhuman care, Drumheller slipped the globe onto its cradle. Once more, he inspected every component, testing the ease with which the platters revolved around their axis, and the interaction of all the various propulsion wheels and driving gears. This was a thing of beauty, of that there was no mistake. The artisans who’d crafted this had imbued it with a portion of their own essences, as had those who’d built the larger clock in Ch’ang-ja.
Now it was Thorn’s turn.
He thought of his wife and children and prayed that they would remain safe and hidden regardless of what transpired here. He also knew that if the Malevoiy regained ascendance, his family would be sought as no others in revenge for his actions.
“Elora Danan,” he breathed, “how could you?”
It was a heartfelt entreaty, but what shook him was that he wasn’t sure which Elora he meant it for—the one he’d helped raise or the other who’d crossed centuries to destroy her.
The slide of sword from scabbard disturbed the silence of the sanctum. As he opened his eyes, Thorn heard a companion blade likewise drawn free. Two figures flanked the doorway, both holding bared steel—Anakerie and Luc-Jon. She had no armor and the clothes she wore had been scrounged from various hope and slop chests aboard Maulroon’s vessel. They were serviceable, they fit comfortably, they afforded some protection from the weather but they were useless against another blade, or any other weapon. Anakerie didn’t mind. She placed her faith in her arm and her blade and was content. Luc-Jon was more formidably attired, but only because he’d found a crewman pretty much his own size.
“Is this for my benefit?” Thorn inquired.
“The others have withdrawn,” Anakerie told him. “We four elected to stay.”
“Four?” he started to ask, then nodded his head at the sight of the brownies, Rool on Anakerie’s shoulder, Franjean on Luc-Jon’s.
“We’ve come this far,” Luc-Jon explained. “We want to see it through to the end.”
“And if there’s trouble,” Anakerie finished, “find a way to pull you out of it.”
“If this doesn’t work,” Thorn said, “there’s probably nowhere in the Realms left to run.”
“Then it had better.”
“Aye.”
He slipped inside the mechanism and pulled the lever that unlocked the gears. He checked the settings, compared them with the calculations laboriously entered into his notebook, then checked them again.
He ended his inspection with a slight, wry grin, the kind he used to give Elora before trying a new spell. Then he gave the main flywheel a flick of his fingertip and as it began to spin he held both cupped hands over it. He sketched an image of the wheel in his thoughts and imagined it racing up to its rated speed. A heaviness swept over his body, a sense of flesh taking on the characteristic of stone, the sign that he had achieved a measure of rapport with the primal forces of the earth. As fire was Elora’s personal sigil, so was the earth his. Breath left his lungs in a sharp but basso hufhf and all that solidity started to shift within him, as massively as the tectonic plates that comprised the planetary crust. Up from the balls of his feet, outward from his shoulders, that tremendous power flowed with ponderous deliberation down his arms to his hands. Thorn bared his teeth in a grimace as his body took up the extraordinary strain of sustaining extremities which had assumed the mass of mountains. This wasn’t like Ch’ang-ja, where lightning flashed about his body, nor did it resemble what often happened to Elora when she summoned fire to her. Outwardly, there was no visible sign of the forces he had manifested—beyond his stance and the tenor of his breathing, which was somewhat labored by this juncture, a cause of some concern to Anakerie.
With a suddenness that made Thorn stagger, the pressure vanished. His hands regained their correct weight and as he drew them apart for a look at his handiwork, he beheld a blur where the flywheel had been. He had imbued it with power to spare.
He reached for his notebook, then left it in his pocket, giving it a reassuring pat instead. He knew what was required; he needed no more reminders.
He reached for another level, and engaged the first platter.
* * *
—
They fought like starving wolves, neither offering nor accepting quarter. The Deceiver slashed at Elora with spells and enchantments, and the young woman responded with brute force and claws. As the battle between them raged, Elora discovered to her amazement and delight that magic was no longer denied her. The Malevoiy could not reach her when she stood on the cliff in Chengwei; that land was wholly on the corporeal side of the Veil. Here in Angwyn, the seat of the Deceiver’s power was even more supersaturated with arcane energy than Ch’ang-ja had been right before the end. The Deceiver needed such awesome levels of power to maintain her very existence in this reality; but because her own nature contradicted and even violated all the structures and laws of nature, because at her core the Deceiver was closer kin to demons than she dared acknowledge even to herself, the barriers between the Realms were consequently weakened. The Malevoiy could reach out with their power and cast it into Elora.
She didn’t understand the
nature of their sorcery. These were conjurations that dated from the dawning of the world, and the use of them reduced her to little more than a conduit for the Malevoiy themselves. She was their weapon, the hands that directed her. She didn’t care. What filled her mind’s eye were the images of the friends she’d lost over her lifetime thanks to the Deceiver, what filled her heart was a black, choking, toxic cloud of rage and hatred whose only outlet was the struggle with her other, older self.
For all that might, for all the dark and brutal emotions that fueled it, Elora’s efforts came to naught. Every move was parried, every stratagem anticipated. Wherever she turned, the Deceiver was a half step before her. Whatever she tried, the Deceiver cast back in her face. She was an open book that her foe had committed to memory.
The longer they fought, the more Elora began to change, the less that transformation seemed to matter to her. Gradually her limbs elongated, taking on the aspect of the most ancient race of elves. Though the general arrangement of those limbs might be considered human, the overall result became increasingly less so. Elora achieved a beauty beyond the aspirations of mortal beings and yet at the same time seemed more and more a creature actually carved from the obsidian shell that covered her. She gained height on the Deceiver, and reach, and speed. Anticipating her actions became less relevant because Elora was able to react to the changing fortunes and necessities of the duel with an alacrity that made the Deceiver appear clubfooted by comparison.
A sheen of sweat glistened on the Deceiver’s features and the gay accents provided by the rainbow had long since faded, leaving her pasty-faced and increasingly desperate. Elora meanwhile was having fun. A flick of one finger scored her opponent’s armor without fear of similar retaliation. The same from another opened a slash in the Deceiver’s cheek deep enough to draw blood. Only nothing fell from the wound; there was no blood within the other’s body. No life, either, save that sustained by what until then had been an indomitable will.
“I hear no boasts, Deceiver,” taunted Elora. The Deceiver’s response was so profane it made Elora laugh the louder, never noticing that her amusement presented itself with the chittering twitters of the Malevoiy.
“No,” the Deceiver snarled. “It won’t end like this, I won’t allow it!”
“You’d do better trying to stop the stars in their course across the heavens. There is the mark of the Malevoiy upon you. Accept that. Be One with Us again.”
Elora had no idea what prompted the offer. Her speech, like her actions in the battle, was increasingly dominated by the Malevoiy, while the essence of Elora steadily shrank within herself almost to nothingness. However, it proved the wrong thing to say, with a vengeance.
The Deceiver lunged forward like a berserker and for the first time in a while Elora found herself seriously on the defensive, being driven back across the central dais of the amphitheater toward the section of the audience that had been set aside for the Malevoiy.
* * *
—
Another breath, another lever to be pulled, another platter to set in motion. This was the eighth, Thorn noted, the one representing the Malevoiy.
As it began to spin, a snap of energy flared up from the platters to strike the crystal. That made Thorn jump, partly from surprise but also from a flash of alarm, because that was how things had started going wrong in Ch’ang-ja.
Again, as in that doomed city, there was a tremendous tearing sound, as though two titanic forces had gripped the crust of the world and ripped a length of it apart as they might a piece of cloth. He reeled from the shock and saw that the remaining platters had started spinning of their own accord.
“No,” he cried, clutching at the governing levers. “No!”
He might as well have cursed the Cataclysm, or the storm that raged over Angwyn, or his own mortality. The levers had no effect.
He staggered from the interior of the box and was cast to his knees by a basso thrumm of such a low frequency it was felt more than heard. The sensations were awful, making his insides feel like they’d been turned to jelly. A look toward the doorway revealed no sign of Anakerie or Luc-Jon and he feared for a moment that they’d suffered the same fate as the Chengwei sorcerers. Then, the young man’s hand caught him by the collar and hauled him behind an upturned table, where Anakerie gathered him close into her arms. He returned the embrace, thankful for human contact, grateful that it was with a dear and beloved friend.
“Is there anything to be done, sorcerer?” Luc-Jon demanded, assuming the manner of a Pathfinder officer, casting aside the deference of the scribe for the decisiveness of a warrior, a battle-seasoned leader of men.
“I thought you said you could control this, Peck,” Anakerie chided, not unkindly.
“I can. I will.” He thrust himself to his feet, going up on tiptoe to peer over the edge of the tabletop. “Just not with gears and levers.”
“It’s going to open that damned portal again, isn’t it?”
“That’s the plan.”
She faced him, aghast.
“But not quite yet,” he explained. “Not without our principals.”
He held up a pair of fetishes, superb carvings of both Elora and the Deceiver. Anakerie’s mouth twisted in disgust as the Elora model lost cohesion in Thorn’s grasp, reshaping itself before her eyes into something that was recognizable both as the Sacred Princess and as one of the Malevoiy.
“And then what?”
“Shove them through and slam the door.”
“That’s your solution?”
“Have you a better one?”
“What about hope, Drumheller? What about the dragons?”
“That was lost when she slew Khory. I told you, Anakerie, the binding spell was sealed by the three of us. It can only be released the same way.”
“I refuse to believe that!”
“Then you’re a fool!”
“Drumheller, you’re not listening! I have hope, damn your eyes, you silly little peck! I can imagine better days! How can that be if the dragons are extinct?”
He stared at her for what seemed the longest time, as if she’d been speaking gibberish. His eyes were slightly unfocused, a dissociative look she recognized; it meant he was thinking, fast and furiously, processing whole new orders of information.
“I’m an idiot,” he said, and just as she replied, “No news to me,” he idly tossed the fetishes into the maw of the Clockwork Resonator.
Again they were hammered by that fearful noise, this time accompanied by that disturbing atmospheric effect that gave the air the properties of water. A pulse of energy rippled from the Resonator, gathering up everything movable in the room—whether debris, furniture, or people—and shunting them along until they collided with the closest wall. Even then, the oscillation was so formidable that the massive walls themselves actually groaned with strain.
Within the space that was cleared, a new scene had superimposed itself on the sanctum. Both Thorn and Anakerie recognized it at once: the dais in Elora’s tower in Angwyn. The Deceiver was battling an Elora by now almost completely subsumed within the form and personality of a Malevoiy. The fury of the older woman’s assault had driven Elora back until she’d sprawled atop the body of the slain dragon, Kieran Dineer.
As they watched, pulse after pulse erupted from the Resonator, on a regular basis that Thorn only belatedly realized was in tune to his own heartbeat. With each outrush of power, the merged scenes became more tangible. Figures perceivable as outlines became translucent, then opaque, gradually working their way up to solid.
The Deceiver lunged, outlined in a corona of power, but she’d passed the crest of her rage. The fury that sustained her, that enabled her to get the better of her foe, now ebbed from her body as quickly and dramatically as it had manifested itself. Initially the difference was minuscule, no more than the smallest of fractions.
It was enough.
Elora rose shakily to her feet, a trifle disoriented, confused by the double images of place—was she in Angwyn or Nockmaar, the amphitheater or some sorcerer’s workshop?—and that bewilderment was her undoing.
From the shadows in Angwyn, strode a tall, angular figure, approaching Elora from her blind side. It seemed like she was crossing a fair distance yet within a couple of steps she was there and Thorn was gasping with amazement once more to behold Khory Bannefin.
For a fateful moment, he didn’t register the implacable look on her face, the gravity of her mien. She wore her normal broadsword strapped diagonally across her back; at her belt was the curved blade forged for her by Elora. The moment the pieces fell together for Thorn was when Khory reached for the sword.
So much happened so quickly. To Thorn, although every element remained distinct and sequential in his thoughts, it was all pretty much simultaneous.
He cried, “No!” and started forward, breaking from Anakerie’s grasp as if her strength were nothing.
Elora turned to confront this new threat, managing a hate-filled curl of the lip as she saw who it was.
Khory pulled Elora’s blade clear and raised it overhead, joining one hand with the other.
What was strangest to Thorn was Khory’s speed. He’d never seen such quickness, in Daikini or elf, never imagined it was possible. That cry and Elora’s snarling reaction were all they were allowed before Khory’s sword reached the apex of its draw and descended, propelled by every scrap of strength the warrior possessed.
Shadow Star Page 48