It entered Elora’s body at the collar and proceeded diagonally across the thorax, slicing through the major blood vessels in the shoulder, the heart itself, the lungs, the primary organs below. The blade left her body at the hip with such a spray of blood that Thorn knew Khory had severed the abdominal aorta and the femoral artery as well. Paradoxically, that was the only sign of damage. Elora’s chitinous skin didn’t split or shatter under the blade’s assault, but appeared to flow around the edge and close behind it so that when Elora fell there wasn’t a mark on her.
That didn’t matter. She was dead.
Thorn uttered no outcry as his child struck the floor. He’d believed her lost to him when she accepted the Malevoiy. If he now told himself this was a mercy, he wondered if he’d believe it. In silence, oblivious to everything else about him, he stumbled to where Elora lay and gathered her head into his lap. From there, his arms folded her up to his shoulder and he began to rock back and forth, uttering a keening lament.
Yet another pulse erupted from the Resonator, putting the final seal on the transition, allowing Khory and the Deceiver and what had once been Elora to remain while the rest faded to insubstantiality, returning whence they came.
“Save your grief, Drumheller,” Khory told him calmly. She hadn’t relaxed her stance in the slightest. If anything, she was more wary than ever, as if an attack was imminent. By the door, Anakerie hauled Luc-Jon to his feet and shoved his sword into his grasp, taking her cue from the warrior. Luc-Jon, to his credit, after a startled stare at his slain sweetheart, paid her body no more heed. There’d be time enough for that when the fighting was over. Or it wouldn’t matter to him anymore because he’d be dead, too.
Thorn, however, wasn’t in that kind of mood.
“Go to hell,” he snarled.
“This isn’t over, mage. It’s only just begun.”
Anakerie made the connection, remembering what Thorn had told them on the road.
“The Resonator’s reenergized the Magus Point,” she said.
“So there’s magic to this accursed hole once more?” Luc-Jon grumbled.
“Magic and more. This was the Prime Point, scribe. The one place where the Malevoiy could walk freely from their Realm to ours!”
An outcry from Khory was their first warning. Shadows came to life in the hallway and the sharp tang of steel was heard, then a heartfelt curse as the blade broke. Luc-Jon thrust himself to the center of the room under his own power, Anakerie came by air, courtesy of a blow powerful enough to crack bones and draw blood. She’d have been in much worse shape had Luc-Jon not broken her landing with his own body, the pair of them going down in a tangle of limbs. The Princess Royal managed to turn that collision to her advantage, using the momentum of the impact to roll herself to her feet in close proximity to Khory and Drumheller.
“The Malevoiy,” she bellowed.
They had never seen more than one and that lone representative solely through Elora’s eyes, passed on to Thorn through the rapport they shared and from him to the others in their turn. The Malevoiy were incredibly tall, so elongated in every respect they seemed much like stick figures. And while they walked upright, there was an element to their carriage and stance that reminded Thorn uncomfortably of a praying mantis. Like Elora after her transformation, the Malevoiy presented themselves for battle shrouded in a shade of black so intense it tried to swallow the surrounding light and color. They carried no weapons, they needed none; as Elora herself had proved in battle with the Deceiver, they were weapons. In a purely temporal duel, their claws could cut more savagely than any sword and their chitinous armor was totally impervious to anything crafted at a Daikini forge. As for magic, in many ways, they defined the term.
Khory wasn’t bothered in the slightest. While one hand held her blade at the ready, the other reached into Elora’s traveling pouch, which hung from her left hip, to procure a similar blade for Anakerie and one for Luc-Jon.
“No guarantees, I’m afraid,” she apologized. “But since mine cut through Elora’s armor, they might do the same with the Malevoiy proper.”
Luc-Jon wasn’t thrilled. “I’ve never fought with a blade like this,” he explained.
“Hang back then,” Anakerie told him. “Watch how it’s done.”
With that, the Princess Royal of Angwyn charged. She couldn’t match the Malevoiy for sheer speed but that wasn’t crucial. Her blade made all the difference. It had come from a Rock Nelwyn forge and was composed of an alloy that mixed ore from Nelwyn mines with those imported from Greater Faery. It was composed of steel, but also of noble metals such as silver, its cutting edge coated with a ceramic compound to maintain its sharpness indefinitely. Being single-edged, it was primarily a slashing weapon, though its point was good for stabbing as well. Elora had put blood and toil and tears and sweat into their creation. They were far from the ultimate expressions of the swordsmith’s art—she would need a lifetime to achieve that pinnacle—but they remained exceptional pieces of work that somehow transcended their origins.
They weren’t perfect, but they were very special.
As the Malevoiy quickly learned, to their sorrow.
“Have I gone mad?” Drumheller wondered, perhaps aloud, more probably to himself as the battle raged about him. He had fought too many battles to sit on the sidelines while dear friends shed blood on his behalf, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave Elora’s corpse or even to let it go. “I saw you die,” he said to Khory’s back.
“You saw her vanish, duffer. You assumed she died.”
He yelped in startlement, then felt instantly foolish, telling himself this was his imagination speaking to him, nothing more. Regardless of Khory’s fate, he’d just seen Elora slain, been struck by her life’s blood.
That was when he heard the crack, like the breaking of an eggshell. The figure he held had grown stiff. With the end of the wearer’s life, the chitinous armor lost all fluidity as well. When he peered more closely, however, he saw a hairline fracture threatening to split the casing along the line left by Khory’s swordstroke.
He heard the kind of grunt uttered by someone making a tremendous effort, coming from within the armor, and felt a faint shudder, the tiniest of follow-on cracks that hardly extended the opening by the length of a fingernail.
“Elora?” he called, casting about frantically for either a mallet or a wedge to crack the casement wide. The tools weren’t necessary. He saw movement within the shell, heard a faint scrabbling of hands groping for a purchase and then with a tremendous heave and a roar he couldn’t imagine coming from Elora’s breast, she was free.
Within the shell lay an altogether human, altogether naked, altogether argent—except for her blue eyes and the rudest, most unruly shock of black hair—Elora Danan, beaming up at him like a madwoman, without the slightest respect for setting or situation.
One of the Malevoiy slipped past someone’s guard and took a swipe at Elora, who yelped in alarm and sprang clear so that the creature struck only the cocoon she’d just emerged from. It swiveled about for a second strike but got no farther as a pair of brownie arrows, supercharged by the life force of their bowmen, detonated in its back. A split second later, a madcap pivot by Anakerie removed its head at the shoulders.
That death heralded a natural ebb in the fighting, as the Malevoiy withdrew to regroup.
“How?” gabbled Thorn, his confusion split between Khory’s escape and Elora’s.
Her smile was a wonder, albeit brief, as she filed it away for the duration of the conflict.
“My own variation on your disappearing pig trick.”
“Sleight of hand? By all the blessed Fates, child, why?”
“The last of the Realms of the Flesh is the Malevoiy. The first two of the Circle of the Spirit are Life and Death. I have to know them all, Drumheller.”
“By dying?”
“You said yourself you
were considering using the Resonator. I knew how badly the Malevoiy wanted me, I also knew their strength was my best hope for reaching the Deceiver and confronting her directly. It didn’t take a genius to figure the price they’d demand for my help, but I couldn’t risk telling anyone for fear they’d overhear.”
“You improvised—everything?”
“Sort of.”
“What about what just happened, your own death?”
“Drumheller, while Khory carries my pouch, she’s the caretaker of the dragons, the living embodiment of the Realm of Dreams. That allows her to work miracles. Whatever she does, she can undo, especially in so concentrated a nexus of magic as Angwyn and here.”
“You took a fearful risk, girl!”
“You taught me how, mage.”
Luc-Jon didn’t say a word, he simply crossed to her, dropped to his knees, and enfolded her in an embrace he wished could last forever. She matched him strength for strength, though her own passion was tempered by a hefty dollop of serenity. There was a maturity to her eyes he hadn’t seen before, not so much due to her own death and resurrection but her sojourn within the Malevoiy shell.
“They’re not done,” she told them after she and Luc-Jon finally pulled apart. The young scribe stripped off his shirt and offered it to her for clothing. It was long and full enough to serve as a tunic—and looked quite attractive once she cinched her belt snugly about her waist and settled her traveling pouches on her hips.
“They’ve been in exile too long,” she continued, “they’re too hungry. They see this as their sole chance to regain the rank and stature they once possessed.”
“By seizing the dragons?” Thorn asked.
“Can you imagine,” Elora said, “a world whose dreams are shaped by the Malevoiy?”
“I’ve seen it,” the Deceiver told them, voice turned bleak and hollow by despair. “I’ve fought my whole life to stop it. In the end, to save my world”—it wasn’t pleasant laughter, what emerged then from her bruised and swollen lips, there was too much in it of the Malevoiy—“I had to destroy it.”
The Resonator pulsed again, accompanied by a succession of clicks and whirrs and thunks as gears shifted and platters rearranged themselves. No one paid any attention to the device, however. Their eyes were riveted on the Deceiver. She was like a painting from which a layer of detail had just been removed. She stared at herself in horror, then collapsed in upon herself, wrapping her arms about her head in a futile attempt to hide, refusing to comprehend what had happened to her.
“Drumheller,” Anakerie said, “it’s eating her alive.”
“Something’s happening,” Luc-Jon announced from his sentry post by the entrance, fear and wonder wrangling for dominance.
“Something’s coming,” Khory agreed, the stillness of her tone telling them all how serious this was.
Elora heard the chimes, felt the reverberations of the Caliban’s massive footsteps on the staircase.
“Bavmorda,” Drumheller said in hardly more than a whisper.
The sorceress Queen of Nockmaar was younger in these ghostly images than he’d ever seen her, in the full flush of youth, her world chockablock with infinite possibilities. Right here in what was to be her sanctum, she was flirting with a young man whose raiment marked him as royalty, and his fiery hair, as Sorsha’s father. He didn’t know he was doomed, any more than Bavmorda suspected herself in those early days to be the instrument of his destruction. This was a happy time for them and the inexpressible delight that lit her face when she spoke of wielding her magic struck a strongly resonant chord in Thorn himself.
“What is happening?” Luc-Jon demanded again, torn between his fascination with the scenes presented by the Resonator, drawn forth from the history of this foul place, and his real apprehension about the creature advancing along the corridor.
“The three of us together,” Anakerie suggested to Khory. “We can take him!”
“We’ll get in each other’s way” was the warrior’s laconic response. “He’ll make mincemeat of us.” She shook her head and let a dangerous smile stretch across her face. “This is my fight, Highness.”
Anakerie nodded. This, too, was the kind of battlefield decision she’d seen before. She held out her right hand and Khory took it.
A sharp cry from Elora broke them apart, leaving Khory to stand alone before the doorway while Anakerie and Luc-Jon withdrew to where the others huddled together, holding on to one another as the only elements of stability in a space that was rapidly losing all other coherence.
“The Resonator’s more under control this time,” Elora noted. “There’s no fireworks like in Chengwei.”
“In a way, this is worse,” Thorn told her. “It’s creating an active pocket of chaos instead of a portal.”
“What does that mean?” demanded Luc-Jon.
“The Resonator creates a field of energy,” Thorn explained hurriedly, thoughts racing in a frantic effort to find a solution. “Within that field, the concepts of space and time as we comprehend them no longer have meaning. Past, present, future, here, there, they can all be jumbled together. When the field stabilizes, it’s possible to move from one to the other, as you saw when Elora, Khory, and the Deceiver were transported to Nockmaar. There’s no danger of that at the moment,” he assured them hurriedly. “What we’re watching are shades, no more, images of other events, like ghosts in a haunting.”
“She’s no ghost,” said Anakerie, tossing her thumb toward the Deceiver.
“Not yet,” Luc-Jon noted. “Not for a while.”
The scene changed to a woodland glade, a man and a woman riding. They were both of a height, even for Daikini, though there was something about the man that set him apart from the general run of the breed. The woman had golden hair and a marvelous laugh and only an idiot could fail to see the resemblance between her and the Deceiver. Strangely, Elora’s features tended more toward the man. His hair was dark as a raven’s wing and altogether unruly, his eyes like chips of cobalt, blue highlights against a magnificent darkness. There was strength to both their faces, but the woman’s was softened by a life of privilege, whereas her companion had been pared down to his essence. His coat of arms and gear marked him as a knight errant, a wandering paladin bound to no house, vassal to no lord. It was the sight of his shield that had prompted the outcry from Elora, for it was emblazoned with the same dragon rampant emblem she’d designed for her own battle flag.
Without thinking, Elora stepped forward into the scene, eyes flashing from one rider to the other as they cantered past, reaching out to them both and looking as if she’d been whipped as their horses passed through her. They were ghosts to her in every respect and she was the same to them. Suddenly, though, the man pulled on his reins, twisting in his saddle as though he’d heard or sensed something untoward. He looked Elora in the eye and flashed a grin bright enough to light her heart forever.
All father and daughter had was that moment of recognition, so quick and fleeting she might well have imagined it, for with the next brace of seconds the knight’s attention was demanded elsewhere. The woman had pulled a little away during his pause and she waved for him to catch up.
That was when lightning smote the earth. A fat and messy bolt, mere feet from the nose of the knight’s animal. It reacted by rearing, intending to flee. The knight hadn’t been expecting an attack of any kind and found himself unhorsed, his landing as undignified as it was painful.
Elora heard a kind of thunder, but it had nothing to do with the weather, as a score of burly riders clad in black leather and mail hurtled from the surrounding woods. Their leader was a mountain of a man with spiked pauldrons on his shoulders and a skull-faced helm. Thorn recognized him at once.
“Kael,” hissed Drumheller.
“Who?” asked Luc-Jon.
“Bavmorda’s general.”
A net was hurled and the woman
’s horse went down, a pair of soldiers leaping to the ground to take her prisoner. The paladin, of course, wasn’t about to let anyone abduct the woman he so clearly loved. He drew his own sword and made for them afoot.
The first to try that blade paid for it as dearly as a man can.
Kael wasn’t perturbed.
Again from a clear sky came a pair of lightning bolts, each as powerful as the first, to bracket the knight. The concussion alone would have slain the strongest Daikini and the release of such energies seared the knight like meat on a spit. Impossibly, he still lived, still groped for his sword and struggled to his feet. The woman he loved was in mortal danger and he meant to rescue her, regardless of odds or cost. She screamed at the sight of him, not in horror but in sorrow, while Kael laughingly called for a spear. One was tossed to him and he spurred his charger into a gallop.
“You’re a fool, General,” Elora said with quiet delight, as she watched the knight set himself. Either his burns were mostly show and he’d hardly been scratched by the lightning, or he had the same gift of healing that had saved Elora’s life on more than one occasion, because he wasn’t moving like one of the living dead, which is what he looked like. It was a decent performance but he was too relaxed in the joints, there was no sign of trauma or even significant pain anywhere on his apparently scorched flesh.
Evidently, Bavmorda noticed as well. As Kael closed on the man, a final bolt struck. It was nowhere near as powerful as its predecessors, this wasn’t designed to slay but to bedazzle. All the witch-queen desired was a few fatal seconds for Kael to finish the job and she would be content.
The spear took the knight through the heart, lifting him from his feet and punching him back against the trunk of an old oak. He was dead before he struck and Kael decided to leave him there, to impress the locals with Bavmorda’s puissance.
They’d gathered up the woman when a tremendous crack filled the air, accompanied by a gusting breeze of considerable force. Kael looked back at the oak and was thankful that none of his troops could see his face beneath his helm, for it was stamped with stark terror.
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