Changing Of The Guard (Book 6)

by Ron Collins

“You don’t know, do you?”

  Braxidane’s voice picked at him like he was a piece of meat.

  “Typical. You went charging off to save the world without a thought about what you were up against.”

  “I did the best I knew how.”

  “That excuse doesn’t work anymore, Garrick. You know that by now. You need to act as if you understand things are bigger than Adruin.”

  “He’s getting help,” Garrick said, beginning to realize what Braxidane was telling him.

  “Yes. My sister is supporting him.”

  “So is he god-touched now?”

  “She can’t have another god-touched on Adruin,” Braxidane said. “But, yes, Ettril Dor-Entfar is now hers so long as he isn’t on that plane. Or on any other plane that has an existing mage she has … touched.”

  A sense of fatigue washed over Garrick.

  “This is all Hezarin’s doing, then? The whole Koradictine uprising? Rastella, stealing Will? It’s all on her shoulders.”

  “You’re growing brighter with every passing moment,” Braxidane said. “I am so proud.”

  “So once again we’re merely planewalkers’ proxies.”

  “Humans have never needed planewalkers to find cause to combat each other.”

  “Ettril couldn’t have gotten off Adruin without her.”

  “There are many ways to cross planes.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Braxidane. You’re always so firm in your answers.”

  “It’s an unsteady universe, Garrick. You’ll just have to deal with it.”

  Garrick chewed on that as the current pulled on them. Streaks of color passed, scarlet, and yellow, and the blue of a jay’s wing. He was no longer the boy who had been sold to Alistair, no longer the young man who had proposed to his love in the woods.

  He laughed at himself.

  “This is certain, Braxidane: I am going to get Will back. You can’t dissuade me of that.”

  “You’ve got one simple task, Garrick. One. Lead the Freeborn. It’s a task of great value, yet you will risk yourself and everything you mean to Adruin merely to save a boy?”

  “I have to, or I cannot lead the Freeborn.”

  “I cannot help you from this point.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “I’ve already given Hezarin the upper hand by intervening once when you would surely have died. I can’t afford to do it again.”

  “So it’s won’t.”

  “I don’t understand you, Garrick.”

  “That’s not my concern.”

  Braxidane turned slate gray, and dipped a row of gaseous cilia to flow freely in the currents.

  Then Garrick was alone.

  He smiled to himself. It felt good.

  Then he turned back to the gate.

  He had been letting the Koradictine dictate their path and set his traps. The first had drained his life force, the second had dealt a blow to his psyche. Both had caught him by surprise. That couldn’t happen again.

  He used these last few moments to absorb what strength he could. Then he set his gates and gathered life force within him. The two magics folded in upon each other. He trembled with their forces as he wrapped them around himself to create a protective covering that shone brightly throughout All of Existence.

  Then Garrick stepped through the portal.

  Chapter 6

  Garrick landed in a blazing ball of fire.

  This place had once been a city, but was now charred and blackened. Buildings, tall and of architecture that spoke of an artistic people, were fallen in shambles, bricks crumbled, stones cracked and splintered to expose their coarse, rugged innards.

  Bodies littered the ground.

  Men and women. Children. Dogs, and horses, and mules, and cattle. They all lay shriveled and decaying, leaving the city to smell of burnt flesh.

  His stomach churned with bile. Garrick had seen this before.

  He felt a presence behind him at the same time as he heard the moan, a low, familiar cry that grew to a high-pitched wail.

  Garrick turned.

  “Alistair,” he said.

  His old mage superior stood on a platform of charred stone with an ugly blue energy swirling about him like a bruised cloud. His staff was in one hand, his arms outstretched. Ettril had loosed Alistair on the people here, letting him feed upon the whole of this world’s citizens—a foul trick, given Alistair’s inability to draw real sustenance.

  Garrick pushed his senses outward, hoping to see where the Koradictine superior had fled, following the single thread of power that led toward Ettril and toward Will.

  The path went directly through Alistair.

  He wondered how Ettril had found his old superior, but in the end, perhaps that didn’t matter at all. Perhaps it was Hezarin’s doing. Perhaps not. What mattered was that Garrick had created this thing that was now Alistair, and that Alistair had done this wicked deed. And what mattered was that he had to find a way past Alistair if he was going to get to Will.

  “I’ve made a mess of you,” Garrick said. “Of that, I’m sorry.”

  Alistair’s voice screeched in the wind. He waved a staff that glowed ugly green. An aching need grew from nowhere to draw on Garrick from every direction.

  A woman’s arm moved, flaking with skin of ashes and oozing with dark fluid. A man stood up, his face peeling from his skull. They rose like that, more and more of them, tens of the dead at a time, then hundreds, bones clattering, teeth against teeth, wailing with dry, creaking screeches.

  Alistair waved his staff again and their eye sockets filled with need.

  These people were damned, their life forces destroyed in some obscene fashion. Their cold desire snaked between them as if they were a single thing.

  Garrick set gates and drew on his link to Talin. He leaped to the tallest pedestal of stone and fire flared from his fist. Lightning flashed from Alistair’s staff. The explosion of their meeting rocked the ground.

  A bony hand wrapped itself around Garrick’s ankle with a touch that burned so cold he thought the flesh had been flayed from the bone.

  Garrick turned his fire on it.

  He couldn’t hold back and expect to survive, so he channeled life force to form a long bladed sword of pure energy built of Existence itself, and he rained it down on anything close to him. Everything it touched burned, and everywhere it went Alistair’s zombies gave their final screams.

  His foot throbbed as he fought. He had expected his life force to heal whatever wounds he suffered, but it did no good against the zombie’s touch. Hobbling and gritting his teeth, he faced Alistair with even deeper respect.

  Alistair prepared another spell.

  Garrick leaped into the mass of blackened bodies, cutting a swath through them with wild swings of his sword. He paid a dear price, though, as each strike drew his energy down. He skewered a woman, then spun and destroyed a line of charred bodies.

  Alistair cast magic after magic.

  Garrick’s power drained further.

  Two snakes, huge and bulbous, raised their hooded heads and spit vile globs of blackness at Garrick. The poison sizzled as it flew through the air. Garrick reached out with raw magic, grabbed zombies, and threw them into the poison’s path, ducking under clouds of ash that formed as they were struck.

  Garrick slashed his way farther across the field in a battlefield ballet, weaving, spinning, and ducking. Sweat poured from his aching body. He no longer thought. There was only him, only his enemies, and only the sword that seemed tied to him like a brother.

  The snakes closed in, and one whipped its tail at Garrick.

  He leapt away and jammed his blade into the beast’s mouth. The other was behind him, and took advantage of the moment to close its jaws over Garrick’s chest, its ichor covered fangs sliding past his rib. It raised its head and screamed with anger as it shook him.

  Garrick stared into its dead, black eye, and poured life force into the blade as he raked the weapon over the snake�
��s head.

  Its body gave a spasm, and he poured more fire into this new wound, rending it deeply, then splitting it in two. The reptile faded and fell dead to the ground, dropping Garrick into a free fall. He twisted, barely able to get his good leg under him before he hit the ground.

  More zombies pressed in.

  Alistair was nearby now. Close.

  Garrick stood and fought with a mindless sense of survival. He forgot about Will or Ettril. He forgot about the Freeborn, forgot about Darien, Reynard, or Sunathri. For that moment there was no future. No past. Only now, and only here, and there were only blackened bodies that stung with deadly cold, and a weapon that pulverized his opponent if he could just get it between them.

  Alistair chanted a steady stream of magic. His skin hung from his face in limpid pools of decay. A hole in his jaw showed three blackened teeth, and the pupils of his eyes glowed an unreal green.

  Garrick’s life force flowed as he fought his way through the mass of Alistair’s zombie army.

  Then he was on the dais with his past master.

  He swung his sword of pure life force to meet Alistair’s staff. They crashed in a shower of eternally blue sparks, and the staff splintered like driftwood.

  The mass of black creatures paused.

  Garrick’s arm felt dead.

  Alistair’s expression became filled with hatred. A grated whisper leaked from his rotted mouth.

  Garrick recognized that sound.

  Alistair was focusing on magic, verbalizing distantly memorized favorites from the time when he was Garrick’s superior, teaching again. Alistair was always teaching.

  Garrick transferred his sword to his good hand, searching Alistair’s eyes for something that looked familiar, but seeing nothing beyond blackness and pain.

  Screaming, Garrick buried the blade in Alistair’s chest.

  He pushed life force into the hilt, using the weapon to inject it into Alistair, flooding him in a single release of raw anger that had built since the day his superior had been taken from him.

  The blast was immense.

  A ball of white fire tossed Garrick backward.

  Maybe he screamed again, but any sound he made was dwarfed by the explosion that filled all space and all time.

  Then everything was silent.

  He lay on his back, trying without success to rise up. He was spent. Done for.

  Finally, sound came to him, a wind moaned its way through buildings that towered above. He had to find his sword. He had to find Alistair. He had to find Will.

  Will?

  Who was Will?

  Finally, he rolled to one side, and his fine hair fell over his face like a cobweb. He tried to blow it away, tried to swipe at it with his hand, but nothing moved like it should.

  Then, slowly, everything faded to black.

  Chapter 7

  A sensation of movement came over Ettril Dor-Entfar.

  It was Garrick, he realized, the wrinkle Garrick made in the fabric of this little plane upon his arrival in Nestafar.

  He sensed the intensity of the battle between Garrick and Alistair.

  He felt the web of the plane split with each spell casting, felt the zombies’ hunger—it was a hunger that was unsurprising in its desperation given that he, Ettril Dor-Entfar, had already absorbed every bit of life force on the plane. The creatures would ache forever, but this was of little consequence to him. He felt Garrick’s triumph over the snakes, his sense of achievement at reaching Alistair. The inclusion of Garrick’s old superior in this game was a masterful stroke that had raised the plan from merely a satisfying work of substance to a rare piece of art.

  The final explosion startled him.

  He gazed again at the boy.

  All that sacrifice for a single child. It made no sense.

  There was nothing special about him. He was small, with freckles over his nose. He wasn’t particularly well kept. He had no foreseeable future. No, Ettril thought, it made no sense at all that Garrick would go to these lengths to save an orphaned boy such as Will.

  He felt Garrick’s life force fade as the Torean laid on the cold surface of the Nestafarian tundra.

  He stood then.

  The time had come to play his last gambit. The time had come for him to claim his eternal right.

  Chapter 8

  Garrick felt as if he had been whipped a thousand times. He was cold. His vision was a blur. His mind numb. He thought his foot had been shredded, and he wasn’t certain he even had a left hand any more.

  His hunger was like a creature gnawing inside him.

  He had fallen. He remembered that.

  And Alistair.

  He remembered Alistair, remembered the dead look in his superior’s eyes just before he broke into a thousand pieces. At least Alistair’s pain was over, he thought. At least there was that.

  He scanned the battlefield without moving his head.

  Debris scattered in the wind. Tatters of cloth and paper blew in eddy currents. The smell of burned and rotted flesh seemed the only presence left on the plane.

  Against this backdrop, Ettril Dor-Entfar glided into his view.

  At first, the Koradictine was a speck on the horizon, distant and tiny, moving with what appeared to be ant-like speed. But he drew near quickly, and Garrick saw that he traveled on a disk that glimmered with scintillating mage flame, riding him forward like a magic carpet. His crimson robes, with their golden-threaded brocade, were anachronisms amid the blacks and grays of the rest of the plane.

  As the mage drew nearer, Garrick saw another disk followed behind. It, too, glowed blue, and it, too, hovered inches from the ground.

  Will lay in a pitiful heap upon it.

  Will.

  The boy rolled to look at Garrick, his eyes wide and his mouth gagged. His thin arms were tied firmly against his sides, his hands bound behind his back.

  Garrick’s heart plunged. He raised himself to an elbow, wincing with the effort.

  Braxidane! Garrick gave a desperate call through his link. Braxidane!

  There was no response.

  He struggled to draw his legs underneath him, pleased to see his foot, though swollen and bloodied, remained intact. The movement came with pain, though, and his limbs were jelly.

  Garrick looked once more at Will, and anger fueled his strength.

  He stood, his legs trembling.

  He held his ribs awkwardly, his hand numb against his belly. His life force sputtered like a candle drowning in its own wax. He set a gate and felt a gentle trickle that dulled his pain, but could not remove it.

  Ettril towered over him amid the rubble of this devastated city. The intensity of his presence burned against Garrick’s hunger like a raging sun. That hunger surged with the Koradictine’s nearness. It wanted to drink Ettril in, to reach out and take him as it had once taken a serving lad in a village outside Dorfort, to rip Ettril’s life force from his body as he once had done to mages on the fields of God’s Tower. But Ettril Dor-Entfar was no simple mage. He was god-touched himself, and he was having none of Garrick’s fantasies.

  “If you harmed the boy,” Garrick said, his tongue clay in his mouth, “I’ll kill you.”

  Ettril gave a deep belly laugh. Energy crackled across the Koradictine’s entire being.

  “I’m so pleased to find you’re still alive,” Ettril said, his voice echoing inside Garrick’s skull.

  Ettril seemed larger than life. His staff flowed like liquid in his hand, and he smiled with vile humor as he took in the destruction that lay around him. His silver-gray hair shifted and waved of its own volition. His skin glowed. His eyes were puffy, white, and bloated, their pupils dilated and wild.

  “It wasn’t Alistair who drained the plane at all, was it?” Garrick said, shivering with the cold wind. The trickle of mage stuff was helping him. At least he could stand on his own. “You’re the one who created these creatures.”

  “Weren’t they wonderful?” Ettril said.

  “But now y
ou have no one to rule.”

  “I never intended to rule Nestafar, Garrick.”

  Garrick was aghast. “You destroyed an entire plane on a lark?”

  “I destroyed it because I needed its energy, and because I needed someplace to draw you toward.” He glanced around and gave a smile, his lips full and pulsing. “So, in a way, you could say Nestafar’s fate was your fault. Isn’t that just … perfect?”

  “These people were merely mage fodder to you?”

  “It was a selfish plane, anyway,” Ettril said, “filled with people interested in wealth and material rather than knowledge. Their greed had already changed the very composition of their plane. So, you see, I didn’t really do anything they weren’t already doing to themselves.”

  “You spout Hezarin’s credo like an expert,” Garrick said.

  “Only because she’s right. I’ve done this plane a great service. Now it can rebuild itself.”

  “You are generous to a fault.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way. It will make it more pleasant to think of you when I use your life force someplace else.”

  The blow came almost from nowhere, but Garrick was schooled enough to react as soon as he smelled the Koradictine odor rising within the fabric of the plane’s energy. He pulled as much magic into his mind as he could and threw a shield haphazardly over himself.

  Still, the Koradictine’s fist of power tossed him to the ground like a rag doll.

  Garrick took refuge behind the cornerstone of a broken building. Ettril’s god-touch was strong, his magic sizzled with vitality. Garrick would never beat him if this battle came down to sorcerous power. His only chance was to somehow nab Will, and get off the plane.

  “Come out from behind that rock,” Ettril said. “You know you can’t hide from me anymore.”

  Gripping the boulder, Garrick stood up again, strangely ready to die. It would be worth it if he could save Will, he thought. And it would solve so many problems.

  Energy seeped from the Koradictine.

  Garrick’s hunger was drawn to that energy. It yearned for its sustenance and drew morsels from its fringe.

  Will squirmed on the disc, obviously understanding of what was happening around him.