Wondering if she would have enough magic to defeat the wraiths when they finally showed themselves, the sorceress started to climb. The stairs were small, barely wide enough to accept her foot from the toes to the arch. Often, the steps were cracked and so worn that they formed more of a ramp than a staircase. A thousand years of dust lay upon the treads, and she passed over the ancient grime without leaving a track. It took more than a footfall to disturb the torpor of the Gray.
The sorceress climbed for a long time: minutes or hours or days, she did not know. Progress, if she was making any, came slowly. The summit remained veiled by distance, and the base of the tower seemed no nearer. Still, she continued to climb, reassured by the increasing volume of the windsinger’s voice that she was traveling in the right direction. In the stillness of the haze, distance and time were mere illusions, but not Magnus’s song. It came from the outside, and it was real.
After a time, a glowing emerald floated into view. It hovered next to the wall, several steps above, and a large eddy of darkening haze slowly circled it. A pair of green pinpoints appeared in the haze, at about head-height and twinkling with a sinister glow.
Sadira stopped climbing, anxious and ready for battle. Like her, wraiths needed something important from their lives to serve as magnets for their spirits. Although the sorceress had never encountered these particular apparitions before the attack on the Cloud Road, Rikus had. From his description, she knew that for Borys’s followers, a brilliant gem served this purpose. Though she could not be certain, she guessed that Borys had given one of the stones to each of his knights when he took them into his service.
The sorceress thrust a hand into her robe pocket, watching dark haze coalesce around the emerald above. The cloud soon formed the cumbersome figure of a woman in a full suit of plate armor. The warrior wore the visor of her helmet up, so that she could focus the green specks of her eyes on Sadira. The woman’s face was stern and hard, with a cleft chin, sneering lips, and broad flat cheeks.
The wraith pointed the tip of her sword toward the haze below. “Go down,” she ordered.
Sadira pulled a tiny satchel of copper dust from her pocket. The sorceress tore the packet open with her teeth, then waited as the wraith charged. When her attacker was almost upon her, she blew the brown powder toward the warrior’s open visor. The stuff coated the woman’s face.
The wraith’s sword came down.
Sadira twisted away, diverting the blow with a crashing block to her foe’s elbow. From the solid feel of the armor, it was hard to believe the warrior had coalesced out of gray haze just a moment earlier. The wraith stumbled then caught herself and braced to swing again.
The attack came too late. Sadira spoke her spell’s command word, and the copper dust covering the wraith’s face flashed blue.
A tremulous, ear-piercing shriek burst from the wraith’s lips. She dropped her sword and clutched at her face, pitching forward. Before she could clatter to the ground, a blue glow ran through her armor. Her body instantly dissolved into a gray fog and drifted away, leaving a glowing emerald floating where her head had been an instant earlier.
The sorceress plucked the gem out of the air. It was as large as her thumb, cut into an marquise oval and deeper in color than any emerald she had ever seen. The sheen of its many facets looked almost black, while a faint green light glimmered in the center.
Sadira laid the stone on a step, drew her dagger, and smashed the pommel into the gem. The stone did not shatter so much as crumble into a coarse, lime-colored powder. A shimmering radiance hung over the crushed stone, slowly expanding outward in a cloudlike mass. Save for its green tint, the light resembled the mystic energy that normal sorcerers drew from plants to cast their spells.
The cloud burst apart with a deafening crash. Bolts of green light shot through the Gray, lighting it with a spectacular show of brilliant flashes. The storm continued to rage, filling the vast abyss with a tempest of resounding booms and effulgent flares, stirring the ashen haze into a froth of swirling green light.
Sadira was surprised by the tumult. She had known crushing the gem would release a certain amount of life force, for even wraiths needed some energy to bind their spirits together. But the stone had contained at least as much power as she would expect to find in a living woman. Perhaps that was the reason Borys’s knights had been so dedicated to him. If the gems served as repositories for their life forces, it would be possible for him to resurrect them.
After a time, the storm gave one last rumble and died away in a wave of flickering color. Once more, Magnus’s voice descended from the tower summit, clear and unimpeded. Before starting up the stairs, Sadira paused long enough to look under her robe to see how much mystic energy her spell had consumed. The enchantment had been a costly one. Most of her upper torso had paled to the normal hue of her flesh. If she were going to get past all the wraiths, she would have to find a more efficient way to use her magic.
The sorceress began climbing. By this time, Magnus had repeated his sibilant rhymes so many times that she knew the syllables by heart, even if she did not understand the meaning of the words. Sadira began to sing along. The melody lifted her spirits, and keeping a watchful eye for more wraiths, she bounded up the stairs two at time.
Finally, the sorceress rounded a curve, and the staircase broadened into a small apron that sat before the open gates of a white bastion. The ramparts were built of alabaster and finished with undulating caps of ivory. Beyond the entranceway, a pool of shimmering blue water filled the inner ward of the citadel, with a single pathway of limestone blocks leading toward its center. The walkway stopped at the base of a minaret rising directly out of the water. This slender steeple was faced with white onyx and crowned by a crystal cupola.
Although she had reached the summit of the Pristine Tower, Sadira’s singing croaked to a stop. Between her and the gate stood ten wraiths, all armored in gray plate similar to the first woman’s. They wore their helmet visors down, so that all the sorceress could see of their faces was the jewel-colored slivers of light emitted by their burning eyes: ruby, sapphire, citrine, amethyst, and more. None of them carried weapons.
The largest wraith stepped forward. He extended a mailed hand and, in a raspy voice, ordered, “Go down.” Sadira reached into her robe and shook her head. She was vaguely aware that Magnus’s booming voice had grown urgent. Directly above the citadel’s minaret, the pearly haze swirled about in two great eddies, each spinning in opposite directions.
“Stand aside—” She paused to clear a nervous catch in her throat, then continued, “Let me pass.”
The wraith shook his head. “Borys is aware of what you and Rikus are doing,” he said. “He has demanded your deaths.”
Sadira tensed, her limbs cold and aching. She wanted to ask how much the Dragon knew, and whether he had found Agis, but realized that it would be futile. If the wraith replied at all, his answer was sure to be misleading.
“Then Borys should come for me himself.” The sorceress pulled a tiny, two-tined fork of silver from her pocket. “You won’t stop me.”
She struck the fork against the wall and pointed the quivering tines at the wraiths. The leader’s purple eyes flashed brightly, and he threw himself to the ground. Several of his fellows followed his lead, but not all were quick enough to react before Sadira finished her incantation.
A shrill, painful screech shot from the end of the fork and blasted over her foes. Blinding flashes of colored light flared inside the visors of the wraiths who had not yet hit the ground. First their helmets, then the rest of their armor burst apart, the shards instantly dissolving into wisps of gray fume. The whole tower shook with the violence of the explosion, and the air erupted into a maelstrom of streaking colors: red, blue, yellow, and all the hues of the prism. Only the leader and four other wraiths, all lying on the stony apron, escaped the destruction.
The blast knocked Sadira from her feet, making her ears ring and sending her tumbling down the stairs. The so
rceress dropped the silver fork and clawed at the porous stone, breaking off half her fingernails. As soon as she brought herself to a stop, she reached into her pocket for another spell component.
By the prickling sensation of her skin, she knew that her enchantment, one of the most powerful she could cast, had drained her mystic energy down to her hips. She had expected that, gambling that the attack would destroy most of her enemies in a single blow. But she had not expected so many of them to drop to the ground, where the tower’s stone would absorb the magic vibrations she had sent to shatter the gems holding their life forces.
Sadira came up ready to attack again, the stairs still trembling beneath her feet, and the maelstrom tearing at her clothes. In her hand, she held a small iron hammer, the first syllable of her incantation already spilling from her mouth.
When she looked toward the wraiths, she held her spell. To her surprise, they were not charging. Instead, they stood on the apron between her and the gate, their feet planted wide to brace themselves against the raging tempest. Behind them and directly above the minaret, a faint gleam of pink was beginning to show through the swirling haze.
The sorceress raised her hand toward the light, hoping it came from the sun and that its rays would restore the mystic power to her body, but her flesh remained pale. Sadira started up the stairs again, catching a few notes of Magnus’s song between the storm’s booms and crashes.
The leader of the wraiths held his hand out toward her. Sadira felt her stiletto slip from its sheath. She lashed out, but the dagger was gone before she could catch it. The weapon sailed straight to his hand, coming to rest with the iron handle in his palm.
“I believe this weapon once belonged to Agis’s mother,” he said, lifting the stiletto. He had to raise his voice only a little, for the tumult was beginning to fade.
Sadira scowled and stopped a dozen steps below the wraiths, still holding her small iron hammer. Although puzzled by the warrior’s action, the sorceress was less interested in what he was doing than in selecting her next attack. She estimated that her body contained enough energy for only one more spell. If she wanted to escape, she would need to pick a good one.
“What does it matter who owned it?” Sadira asked.
“You shall see.”
A pearly cloud of haze began to swirl around the dagger, coalescing into the face of a handsome human, a man with even features, a patrician nose, and long black hair streaked down the center by a single band of silver. The rest of his body took form below the dagger, and soon he stood with his sinewy arms hanging limply at his sides and his shoulders slumped for ward.
Forgetting about her spell, Sadira gasped, “Agis!”
The noble said nothing. The pupils of his eyes remained milky and vacant.
“Don’t worry, he’s still alive,” the wraith said in a reassuring voice. “The Gray often disorients the spirits of the living.”
Sadira’s heart felt as though a hand of ice had closed around it. The wraith was lying. Agis’s spirit had coalesced out of the Gray, not been drawn through it. Had the noble come from Athas, he would have arrived fully formed.
The wraith continued his lie: “Your husband valued his mother’s weapon highly. I used that attachment to summon his spirit from Samarah.”
For a moment, Sadira did not move, too shocked to react. Then she cried out and almost collapsed, her whole body convulsing with grief. Samarah. She repeated the name over and over. That one word confirmed her worst fears. The wraiths had found Agis—or Borys had—and they had killed him. All that remained of her husband was the glassy-eyed apparition at the wraith’s side, a spirit that could not remember his own name.
“Go down,” the leader said. “Step into the Gray, or I’ll take your husband’s life.”
“Take him!” Sadira yelled. Her chest suddenly felt constricted and hot. “What good is he to me now?”
The words had barely passed her lips before the sorceress felt sick with guilt. She could not have said such a thing. It had to have been some other woman, a weak woman who had not truly loved her husband.
Sadira knew that she should be sorry for Agis’s death, concerned about the portents it held for the future. She should be worried that Borys had taken the Dark Lens, and that now she and her companions would have no defense against his mastery of the Way. She should be seeing young Rkard, his red eyes blazing with determination, standing before the beast that had killed Agis and a million others. She should be thinking of what came after Borys killed her and Rkard and the others, of how he would raze Tyr and murder its citizens, of how, too soon, an immense pile of rubble would lie where Athas’s only free city had stood.
But Sadira did not feel any of those things. She only felt angry, angry at the husband who gone away and died so far from her.
Magnus suddenly stopped singing, and an eerie silence fell over the tower. The wraiths cast nervous glances back toward the minaret, where a pink band had appeared between the swirling eddies in the sky. The leader motioned to his companions, then started down the stairs, pushing Agis’s spirit before him. The other wraiths followed, taking no chances that Sadira would make a run for the gate.
Magnus’s voice boomed out of the sky. “Sadira, you’re almost out!” he yelled. “Help me. Sing!”
The leader looked up, as if his amethyst eyes could actually see the words booming out of the sky, then he halted two steps above Sadira. “Stay silent!” he ordered. “The time has come for your decision.”
The sorceress opened her mouth and sang, though her thoughts were more on the small hammer of iron in her hand.
The leader stepped back, pulling the hand with the dagger out of Agis. The noble’s spirit looked toward Sadira, his mouth half-open and his eyebrows arched in sadness, then the apparition dissolved into haze.
Sadira stopped singing and threw her hammer past the leader’s head, crying out an incantation. The weapon smashed into the next wraith with a resounding boom. The impact knocked him into the one behind him, and they both fell to the ground.
The hammer hovered over them for an instant, then enlarged to the size of a kank and crashed down. The impact flattened their helmets and demolished the stairs beneath their heads. As the gemstones containing their life forces shattered, a tremendous blast rocked the tower. The explosion hurled the leader into Sadira and blew the other two wraiths off the stairway.
The sorceress and the leader crashed down the steps together, locked in a tight embrace. Each time they rolled, the wraith’s armored body battered Sadira. She fought desperately to throw her attacker off, while he struggled to drive the stiletto into her heart. Finally, they came to rest with Sadira lying on her back, her head lower than her feet. The wraith kneeled astride her, the dagger still clutched in his fist.
Sadira looked past his leg and up the stairway. Her magical hammer had disappeared with the two wraiths it had destroyed. The two who had escaped the blast were nowhere in sight, but the sorceress could see her own feet lying five steps above. They were as pale as ivory, clear down to the toes. She had used the last of her mystic energy.
“No more spells,” hissed the leader, following her gaze.
His purple eyes flashed malevolently from behind his visor, then he tossed the dagger aside. He grabbed Sadira by the shoulders and started to rise.
“Now you go to the Gray.”
“Hardly!”
The sorceress drove the heel of her palm into the bottom edge of the leader’s visor, forcing it up and away from his face. Sadira lashed out with her other hand and grasped the wraith’s withered visage. She began to pull, as though she were drawing mystic energy from a field of Athasian plants. A warm, stinging sensation rushed up her arm. Had the wraith been alive, it would have been impossible for her to draw the life force directly from her foe. But the creature was not alive, and the energies that held him together were not bound into the gemstone nearly so tightly as they would have been fastened into a true body.
The wraith screamed, a
nd his leathery skin began to flake away beneath Sadira’s fingers. He tried to push her away, his arms already trembling from the loss of vital energy. The sorceress wrapped her free arm around his neck and held tight. The leader stepped toward the Gray, gathering himself up to leap off the tower edge.
Sadira thrust her hand deep into the papery mass of his dissolving head and grasped the dark amethyst inside. The leader’s flesh turned to dust. He jumped, but the sorceress felt her feet drop onto the coarse rock of the tower and knew she would not be carried with him. The wraith drifted past her in a dun-colored cloud, which quickly dissolved into hazy wisps as it drifted out into the Gray.
When the sorceress saw no sign of the other two wraiths, she quickly picked up her dagger and used the pommel to smash the leader’s amethyst. This time, there was no storm of escaping energy. She had already drawn all the life force from the stone and could feel it tingling in her flesh, which had assumed a faint purplish cast.
Keeping a watchful eye, Sadira started up the stairs. She began to sing again and pulled a small lump of green clay from her pocket. After she dribbled a few drops of saliva onto the mass, it began to hiss and pop, burning the palm of her hand with tiny droplets of corrosive fluid. The sorceress did not care. She had not yet destroyed the last two wraiths, and when they attacked, she intended to be ready.
By the time Sadira reached the open gates of the bastion, a crevice of crimson light had appeared above the minaret’s crystal cupola. Magnus’s voice sounded clear and pure. There was no sign of the wraiths on the path anywhere between her and the center of the citadel. Nor did she see them in the blue pool that filled so much of the bastion, but she knew that did not mean much. Her enemies could be hiding anywhere beneath the water, and the shimmering waves would make it impossible to see them.
The Cerulean Storm Page 8