Changing Of The Guard (Book 6)

by Ron Collins

  Something hit his shoulder, and the link snapped with a loud crack. Garrick screamed as he crashed against a hard surface. Fire burst around him, and his hands burned as the link tore into the soft meat of his hands. He fell, then, slipping into a vortex of color, spinning out of control.

  Until he found himself kneeling on solid ground.

  He was in open plains land under a sky that crackled with electric bolts. Rock and mud surrounded him. Fire crackled from the debris of his passage. He stood, his hunger suddenly strong and vicious inside him. Blood seeped from scrapes and cuts over most of his body. The muscles of his arms, shoulders, and legs burned. His sweat-damped hair clung to his skull and his neck, and trickled down his back.

  Where was he?

  Where was Ettril? He couldn’t sense the Koradictine.

  Movement came at his periphery.

  There were things here, beings, creatures that were crosses between man and cricket—demons, perhaps—cold and dark and blue, angular, with jutting ridges above gleaming orange eyes, and with backs that were hunched up and cowled. They peered at him with hungry curiosity, shielding themselves from flames that still sputtered around him.

  Garrick set spell gates and tried to latch onto the flow from his link to the plane of magic. He cast fire at them, but it sputtered randomly.

  One demon-thing went rigid, its head thrown back, its mouth opened in a toothless scream. Another creature reached toward Garrick, scoring his arm with a frigid touch that brought Garrick’s energy sluicing forward to heal.

  Another creature closed in.

  He cast his sputtering fire once again, and the thing burned readily. He felt his hunger rise, too, and this time he welcomed it, letting it loose as far as he could. Others pressed in, sucking greedily at the life force that seemed to seep from him at an ever greater pace. And as they absorbed that energy they died. He cast fire and electric flares of power. And still the creatures flowed toward him, dancing and jumping like frenzied insects across the vastness of the horizon.

  There were so many.

  So many.

  He felt his hunger rising from the depths of his life force, but it was sluggish and slow. If he didn’t do something soon, Garrick would not be long for this plane.

  He fanned energy before him, turning from simple bolts to beams of lightning and fire and smoke that flashed with blue and silver streaks. He smelled the creatures’ charred exoskeletons and heard their dying screams. Still, they came, mindlessly throwing themselves into the beams, their empty carcasses building into a dark ridge that encircled him. Each wave grew closer. The bodies of their brothers and sisters shielded them as they pressed in.

  Garrick whirled in an ever-closing arc, grabbing fistfuls of pure magestuff and throwing it into the fray. He ignored the chattering cries of the creatures that had grown into a wall of macabre laughter. In the back of his mind he sensed the trail of Koradictine magic leading away.

  That was it.

  Ettril had known Garrick would follow. He had led him here as a trap, hoping that the creatures would drain his power.

  A coldness stole more life from him.

  He didn’t have time to think further.

  Garrick gave the pressing wave of cricket demons a strong spray of flames. The demon creatures shied back. Gleaming eyes grew larger, their stink more fetid.

  He used the break to concentrate on the Koradictine’s trail.

  As the wall of creatures came forward again, Garrick’s sorcery latched onto Ettril’s pathway.

  A demon leaped at him.

  Garrick swung his fist and the thing fell into the path of three others that had also been flying toward him. He tugged on the link and lifted himself from the throng. He poured what magestuff he could into the spell, and it raised him farther up. Once certain he was free, Garrick gave a final look downward. A vast ocean of the creatures stared upward, their enormous mouths gaping open like an endless field filled with holes of hungry blackness.

  Chapter 3

  Garrick found himself in a chamber that was roughly square in shape. It was a library of some kind. He was confused, but alert. Finding nothing of immediate danger here, he checked his link to the plane of magic. It was still there.

  He calmed himself.

  The muscles across his back ached, and he felt empty inside. His palms were flayed. His life force was drained so deeply that it wasn’t healing him now.

  Garrick scanned the room.

  Each corner was beveled to make it eight-sided, and each of the longer walls was lined with wooden shelves stained to a golden-brown glow. They were filled with tomes and manuscripts. A full-height closet stood in one corner. A maroon rug covered the floor, its weave reminding him of those that came from Farvane. The rug’s padding was thick. It drank up sound so well his movements felt slow. The books were of varied sizes and colors, some bound in leather, others simple loose-leaf collections.

  The only opening was a doorway across the room.

  The trail to Ettril Dor-Entfar, and, therefore to Will, led through that door.

  Something didn’t seem right, though. His skin crawled with an eerie sense of recognition. Garrick felt like he had been here before.

  He stepped across the rug and into the doorway.

  The knob turned smoothly, and he pushed the door open to find another room, this one larger, perhaps a sitting room.

  The clipped sound of a spoon on porcelain echoed from inside.

  Then again.

  The floor here was polished hardwood, and his footsteps rang out as he stepped inside.

  Raw sunlight spilled through windows that were taller than wide. The sun was high, its rays, loaded with dust motes that floated in ghostly waves, were dagger strikes against the linen tablecloth. A high-backed chair sat at the nearest end of a long table, facing away from him. More chairs sat empty along its length. The chair at the table’s foot was empty, also. A stick of incense smoldered from an otherwise empty crystal vase at the table’s center.

  The place smelled of ginger, with a touch of mint—the flavor of Sunathri’s magic, he remembered.

  Garrick knit his brows.

  “Will?” he said, his voice echoing.

  The porcelain clatter came again.

  From the other side of the chair, Garrick caught the wisp of gray hair. The memory of Ettril’s face in Sunathri’s communications spell came to him.

  “Where is the boy, Ettril?” Garrick said.

  His only answer was another think clink.

  Garrick stepped forward.

  “You can’t run forever,” he said.

  As the angle changed, though, Garrick saw more of the person sitting in the chair. The man’s hair was pure white, almost silver in the natural light of the sun. His skin looked thin and grainy, as if it was cast of dried sugar and as if a good rain might melt it away. The man’s hand shook as he moved the spoon to his lips. The meal was a vegetable broth of some kind.

  Garrick’s heart pounded.

  It was another trap. It had to be. But, what harm could this man do him?

  “Who are you?” he asked as he stood taller.

  The man gave no answer.

  “I asked you a question.”

  His voice died in the open room. Smoke from the incense continued to coil upward.

  The man reached for his napkin, and dabbed his lips. A goblet of wine, red, sat on the table next to a saucer covered with breadcrumbs. A short knife smeared with butter also rested upon it.

  The man turned his gaze to Garrick with a slowness that was painful. In the instant their gazes locked, Garrick realized who this man was. He recognized the black garments. He saw the curve of his nose, and the way his lips turned downward at the corners of his mouth. In that instant, Garrick realized he was seeing himself aged beyond recognition, sitting quietly in an empty room with nothing but a smoldering stick of incense to remind himself of who he had once been.

  He was alone.

  He had always been alone in so man
y ways.

  He groaned.

  He wanted to turn his gaze away, but he couldn’t. He had to see this, no matter how bad it might be. He had always been afraid to open himself up, afraid to be exposed. It was a well-earned paranoia, of course. Life is not arranged to help the defenseless. But there had been times, hadn’t there? Moments as a boy growing up in Alistair’s manor, times with the other apprentices. Times together with Darien and with Sunathri, yes, times with Sunathri where he could have let his guard down and become the person he truly was.

  But he had not been able to do it.

  Smoke from the incense grew into a shell around him, and his self-loathing gave that shell a substance that doubled back to drive a stake through his heart.

  His isolation was his own fault.

  Braxidane’s dark hunger rose to fill him. You are not alone, it said. I am here.

  “That’s not what I want!” Garrick yelled aloud.

  He stepped toward the fragile shell of his older self. The man’s hand came toward him, decrepit and brittle, palm upward, forefinger extended, shriveled to nothing but bone draped in sagging skin.

  “Don’t leave me,” his elder self said, his voice wavering and reedy.

  Visceral panic mixed with fear. Garrick swept his hand blindly along the table.

  The wine glass spilt.

  Broth splattered onto the elder’s lap.

  It was like shedding weight, like waking from a long sleep, like breathing again after being underwater for his entire life. The smoke shimmered around him.

  The aged hand crooked its index finger again, twisting its call to the hunger inside him, drawing it closer. Garrick felt the thing’s appetite, it’s longing for something else to take, something else to feed into its loneliness if only for as long as it took to digest it.

  He grabbed the knife from the table, and swung it against the old man’s arm. The hand snapped off and twirled through the air.

  An expression of shocked betrayal came over the elder’s face. His lips drew into jagged wrinkles that ran from his cheekbones to his chin. The hunger they shared sucked life force into it. The old Garrick reached with his other hand, fingers cupped in a needful curl.

  Garrick slashed again, sending this hand tumbling also.

  He hacked at his old self then, pouring life force into his short blade. The edge caught sunlight and glinted with a natural flare. Its brilliant reflections danced across the ceiling and along the walls as Garrick stabbed and slashed, again and again until what used to be his older self was reduced to a pile of dust that spread across the floor like sand.

  His blood pounded in his chest.

  Sweat beaded at his brow.

  Garrick stood still, his body limp, his muscles weak.

  His hunger rolled inside him in huge, welling waves that crashed against the inside of his head.

  The incense no longer smoked.

  The table sat at an odd angle, its broken chairs scattered about.

  This entire place was an elaborate hoax Ettril had left in hopes that Garrick would fall prey to his own self-loathing. He shook his head to clear the idea, but Ettril’s magic was so strong that even understanding what was happening did not enable Garrick to rid himself of the ominous weight of the room.

  Garrick turned to the open door.

  “Will,” he said, focusing to find the dim thread he knew would lead wherever Ettril was taking him. It was a low, pulsing line of magic he found. Slight, but clear.

  “Hold on tight, Will,” he said. “I’m coming.”

  Chapter 4

  Ettril sat on a high-backed chair at the top of a marble tower in the grandest castle in the land, waiting. His mind registered every rippling sensation within the flow of the plane.

  Nestafar was perfect.

  It was a small place of little note, but one with enough energy to serve his purposes. He would use it to destroy the Torean god-touched. In this way he would raise Nestafar from its obscurity to ensure it a place in the histories of mankind—Nestafar, the plane where the Freeborn heard their death knell. Not a bad footnote, he thought.

  Surely more than the plane had deserved before he arrived.

  Ettril looked at the boy, Will, who lay sprawled on a pallet across the room. He had made the mistake of letting Will regain consciousness once, and paid for that error with a barrage of questions that might never have stopped if he hadn’t beaten the boy to silence. Now Will was trussed up. His head lolled to one side, and his mouth was gagged.

  An image of Hirl-enat came to him, coated with a sensation of urgency.

  He brushed it away.

  He could get used to being god-touched. His was the only true magic on this plane, and he was the only creature with a link to Talin, the only one with the Touch of Existence.

  Well, the only human, he thought with a smile.

  Hirl-enat’s image persisted, though, pulling at him with a dogged determination that said the mage wasn’t going away. Ettril spoke a few words of magic and made a connection.

  “I hope for your sake this is important,” he said.

  “Are you all right, Lord? We’ve been unable to raise you.”

  Ettril smiled. “I am more than all right. Tell me what this is about.”

  Hirl-enat paused for only the slightest of moments.

  “Lectodinian raiders are destroying our order, sir.”

  “Lectodinians?” Ettril turned his full attention to his Koradictine subordinate. “Tell me more.”

  “We’ve been polling the order as you asked, and one after the other has been unable to answer. Those who can, however, report of murdered mages left amid traces of Lectodinian magic.”

  Ettril cursed. He cast a burst of magic that twisted across his palms in a caustic blue-brown cloud.

  “Zutrian thinks he’s found us weakened,” he said.

  “He may be right, Superior. I’ve been able to rouse only two mages. We need you back here now.”

  “No!” Ettril’s anger flared again.

  Hezarin would be furious if he left this task undone, and after all this time he would not deny himself the sweet anticipation he felt toward seeing Garrick squirm.

  Beyond that, his god-touch had let him see things in a different light. He had been so wrong about so many things throughout his life. He once thought events on Adruin mattered, that controlling people and obtaining power there was important. But his travels through All of Existence and the taste of his god-touch was enough to change all that.

  He drew energy from his link, reveling in the purity of its strength. Let Zutrian have his day in the sun, he thought.

  Garrick was on his way. It would not be long now.

  “This is my moment of revenge. I’ll not have it wasted by a petty Lectodinian who thinks he understands power.”

  “But if you don’t come now, the Koradictines—”

  “I said no.” Ettril’s voice was sharp as a battle axe. “Take care of this yourself. I will return when I can, and I’ll expect the order to be in proper condition.”

  He shut down the communication link and gathered himself.

  Ettril motioned toward the boy, and felt life force waft with an aroma as attractive as fresh-baked pie.

  The boy moaned.

  He turned his attention back to his spell work, tending the trail he had left to float free. It felt odd to be the bait of his own trap, odd, but wonderful at the same time. It made him feel important. It made him feel like he was in control—which, of course, he was.

  Energy crackled around him—azure and cobalt, lavender, golden chartreuse, browns of soil, and greens of the forests.

  Yes, Ettril thought.

  He was after far larger prey.

  Adruin could wait.

  Chapter 5

  The Koradictine's link grew stronger and easier to follow as it led Garrick back through Existence. He gathered up life force as it flowed over him. Its vitality filled him. It brought him renewed vigor.

  “Don’t you have an
order to run?”

  Garrick recognized the tone of superiority in Braxidane's voice.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?” he replied.

  “I can see you’re wasting your time on things that are unimportant.”

  “Will is not unimportant.”

  “I think you need to prioritize better.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Then perhaps you can explain why the leader of an order of mages is letting that same order crumble rather than face his responsibility.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  “Compassion is not an emotion you're familiar with.”

  “Apparently I as familiar with compassion as you are with accountability.”

  “I’ll do things on my time, Braxidane. Now get out of my way. I have better things to do than argue with you. You’re causing me to lose touch with the Koradictine.”

  Garrick set his gates and drew upon the plane of magic.

  The thread grew more substantial, and he pulled on it to find himself rushing through the gray matter of Existence once again.

  A dark gate loomed ahead.

  He slipped into it, and a blast furnace of flaming energy rose around him—Ettril’s ward. He dug into the flow to bring up a shield of free energy. The gate was strong. It tasted bold and sharp, like dark tea left burning too long.

  This would be it.

  Ettril had run long enough, and the strength of this ward told Garrick this was where Ettril Dor-Entfar would make his stand.

  “How do you think he’s doing it?” Braxidane asked.

  Garrick grimaced, sensing his superior’s trail beside him.

  “I thought I left you behind.”

  Braxidane hung in the flow like a bulbous jellyfish, saying nothing, biding his time.

  “Doing what?” Garrick asked as he probed the ward.

  “How do you think the Koradictine is traveling the planes so easily?”

  Garrick thought about that. He couldn’t have survived Existence his first time without the protection of Karasacti’s robe. How was Ettril Dor-Entfar doing it?