“Caw! Caw!” cried Edgar, as the rook caught up to Ivar. He’d been following the gyro as quickly as he could. Now he circled around the Asura’s head. “What are you waiting for? No time for standing around!”
Ivar nodded and turned, his gaze searching the grandmasters who stood now in the shadow of the giant Raptus. He spotted Cassandra and started running toward her.
“No time for much of anything,” the rook said as he followed, his words nearly lost in the noisy chaos of the attack on Raptus.
Several mages shouted as they saw Ivar pass. He wondered if some of the older grandmasters were afraid he had betrayed them. But in the midst of the horror of this war, he couldn’t have blamed them for finding fear in everything. Their deaths were but moments away.
Unless …
“Cassandra!” he shouted.
Edgar reached her first, cawing loudly and circling her head. Cassandra spun around, hands glowing with magic so white that it hurt Ivar’s eyes to look at it. She saw him, and though she must have been in a frenzy, trapped in the panic of the moment, something in his face must have shaken her, for she whipped her hands up in a gesture that created a shield around all three of them, and she turned her back on Raptus … turned her back on death.
“Ivar, what is it? What’s happened?”
“A message from Tim,” he said grimly. “You must reach the Voice. A warning must be given to all of the mages still in Arcanum to evacuate the buildings, to get clear of every structure and into as open an area as possible.”
Cassandra frowned. “What? I don’t understand!”
Ivar reached for her hand. “You must.”
Edgar paused in the air, wings beating, keeping him in place, a single black feather floating to the burned ground. “Remember when SkyHaven fell?”
If there had been horror on Cassandra’s face before, now it was a picture of despair. She went white, mouth open, and the defensive shield she’d erected flickered with hesitation. But then her expression hardened and her eyes went cold.
Cassandra nodded. She had realized what Ivar already knew. There was no other way.
“With me!” she said, and she began to run.
Ivar and Edgar kept pace with her on the ground and in the air. All around them bits of ruin were burning. Grandmasters and combat mages were launching attacks up at Raptus. The air was charged with static. They ran past Arcturus Tot, who could not stand. It looked as though his legs were broken—perhaps when the wind of Raptus’s wings had thrown him—but still he wielded powerful sorcery that formed a ball of greenish yellow energy between his hands … and then he hurled it at Raptus.
They did not slow to see what damage it might do.
Lord Romulus stood at the center of it all. He held a sword aloft and the blade seemed to be drawing lightning from the sky. No ordinary lightning, it was the indigo blue of the hour before dawn and the huge warrior’s body shook with each touch of that power. Using magic, Romulus was tapping into the very nature of the world.
He lowered the sword, aiming its point at Raptus’s chest. Lord Romulus shouted a battle cry as he rechanneled that magical energy at his enemy. The burst of destructive power that launched from the tip of his sword threw him backward, and he crashed to the ground with such force that his helmet cracked in two, one of the horns breaking off.
The attack was high. It struck Raptus in the snout. The monstrosity staggered backward two steps, left foot crushing the corpse of a dead combat mage. His snout was burned and gouged where the spell had struck him, and Raptus opened his maw to bellow in pain and rage.
He was wounded. But Lord Romulus had given everything that was within him, and Raptus still stood.
Dropping the remains of his helmet to the ground, Romulus stood and wearily raised his sword again.
But then Cassandra and Ivar were past him. Alethea Borgia stood with Lord Foxheart and several others, all of them working independently. This was what their defense had become, a scattering of powerful mages doing their best. They had tried working their magic together and it had failed. Now they were just hoping an onslaught would do the job. Ivar knew they were just holding on to whatever hope remained.
The Voice held her staff in front of her and the magic that coalesced around its head was like churning liquid gold.
“Madame Voice!” Cassandra called.
Edgar came swooping down toward Alethea’s head. Ivar wanted to shout to the bird to stop, that she might think she was under attack, but the Voice was neither rash nor foolish. The bird was lucky she had not batted him out of the air.
“Listen up!” the rook cried. “There’s only one shot at this!”
“You have a plan?” the Voice demanded, staring at Cassandra and Ivar.
Even in the midst of this horror, Cassandra looked beautiful. Ivar could understand why Timothy liked her so much. But the girl was a grandmaster, and it was with all the weight of that duty that she turned now and looked at Ivar.
“No,” she said. “But Timothy does.”
Ivar nodded. “You must use the Voice to speak to every mage in Arcanum.”
He told her again what Timothy had said about evacuation. And he told her why.
Edgar fluttered his wings and landed on Ivar’s shoulder. “Most of the city’s already empty. Only those who could fight stayed behind.”
“But we’ve got to get the acolytes and tradecrafters out of those buildings right now!”
Alethea Borgia had been made the Voice of Parliament for good reason. Not only was she as powerful as nearly any other mage, but she had courage, cunning, and wisdom that had no rival. She saw immediately that there was no other choice.
Ivar felt humbled with respect for this woman.
The Voice clutched her staff. She turned to Foxheart and the others nearby. “Shield me!” she cried.
Cassandra went to aid them. As Ivar and Edgar watched, she helped Foxheart cast a spell that wove a powerful magical shield around the entire group. And the moment it was ready, the Voice held up her free hand, and golden light began to spray upward from her fingers and from the top of her staff, rushing into the air and spreading across the city like a shroud of glittering rain.
“Hear me, Arcanum!” she began, and Ivar felt her words resonating in his very bones, inside his skull, as though she spoke directly into his mind. “I am the Voice of Parliament. You must hear me now, for your lives depend upon it.”
Edgar felt hope growing inside of him. He had been largely silent, trying his best to help where he could, distracting Wurm in the air for Timothy and Ivar. But what else could he do? He was just a rook, after all. Just a bird. Now he ruffled his wings, felt the heat of the aftereffects of Raptus’s fire under his feathers, and he shifted on his perch on Ivar’s shoulder.
He felt hopeful.
Then Ivar spoke. The Voice was not even finished with her warning to the city, but the Asura cursed softly under his breath.
“What is it?” Edgar asked.
Ivar put a hand to his forehead. “We have forgotten, Edgar! What of Sheridan? He and the Wurm children … they won’t hear the message. They’ll still be inside the Cade house when it happens!”
Edgar was already flying. His tiny heart hammered in his chest and he beat his wings madly, slicing through the air with every bit of strength and speed that he could muster. Ivar’s words were already lost on the wind behind him. Fear drove the rook on. No longer was he thinking about Raptus or the invading Wurm. There were shouts of furious mages reached him, and then there were screams. He felt heat behind him and a blast of searing air struck him. It meant that Raptus had let loose his volcanic fire again, that more mages and grandmasters had died, but to Edgar it was a blessing. It pushed him from behind, adding to his speed.
Frantic, the rook flew higher. Ahead was a beautiful building constructed by Phaestus, the most famous architectural mage in the history of Arcanum. It was beautiful, its outer shell a substance that caught all the colors of light and refracted them, mak
ing it a constantly shifting rainbow of soft hues. The top three floors were a massive bell tower, and it was from there that the loudest of the warning bells had sounded.
Now the bells were silent.
A battle was under way on the roof of that building. Several of Raptus’s raiders were harrying what appeared to be six or seven acolytes. Edgar saw two of the Wurm breathing fire that engulfed one of the mages, and the other acolytes attacked them with colorful bursts of destructive magic as well as swords. One acolyte wielded a huge ancient battle ax and leaped from the rooftop to land on the back of a Wurm.
There was blood.
Edgar tore his gaze away. He could not stop to help them. His destination was higher. Twenty feet above this battle, another was being waged. Verlis and Cythra were in mortal combat with a pair of Raptus’s loyal soldiers.
Even as Edgar flew toward them, forcing himself to beat his wings even harder, a cold pit of dread grew inside him. He saw Cythra rip the wing off her enemy, sending the Wurm spiraling toward the ground. Then she helped Verlis to finish off the other.
They were about to fly down to the bell tower and help the acolytes when Edgar intercepted them. He flew right in front of Verlis’s face.
“Cythra! Verlis! Stop!” he cried.
“Edgar?” Verlis snarled. “What are you doing?”
“Just listen!” the rook said, flapping madly to stay in place. “There’s no way to defeat Raptus now that he’s got the Spawn of Wrath in him. The only way to stop him is to take it away. Take the magic away. Timothy’s going to try to get close enough, but if he can’t … he’s going to have to interrupt the matrix, like he did at SkyHaven fighting Alhazred. And then all the magic will blink. We don’t know for how long. Some of the buildings aren’t made to stand without magic. They’re all being evacuated … the Voice is communicating with all the mages now—
“But Sheridan won’t hear her. He’s not a mage. Not even flesh and blood. He won’t hear the warning!”
Cythra’s eyes went wide. “No! The children!”
Verlis roared, fire pouring from his jaws, not in fury but in panic. Both of them turned toward August Hill and began to fly at speeds that Edgar could not hope to match. Still the rook pursued them. They raced across the sky above Arcanum, August Hill looming in the distance.
Chapter Twelve
This isn’t the way things are supposed to be, Timothy thought. He felt a terrible sadness and dread as he counted down the last seconds of the delay he had given himself, time for the Voice to warn the mages and for them to evacuate.
“Now,” he muttered to himself.
Crossbow still gripped in his hands, he pressed the left foot pedal in the gyrocraft and it turned to the north, rotors humming. He had made his way around behind Raptus and now flew directly at the back of the gigantic Wurm’s head. There were dangers in coming at Raptus from this direction. If he brought his wings up abruptly, he could knock Timothy out of the sky.
But that was better than being burned by his fire or swiped from the air by his talons. He didn’t like the idea of a cowardly attack from behind, but Raptus was no ordinary enemy. Attacking him directly would be suicide. Sheer idiocy. There was no shame in avoiding that.
The air was superheated just from Raptus’s presence, and it crackled with the magic that emanated from him. There were screams and shouts somewhere ahead, beyond the monster, but Timothy didn’t allow himself to think about those or to wonder if his friends were still alive … if Cassandra was still alive.
He brought himself within thirty feet of the back of Raptus’s head. The flesh was gnarled and tough like leather. His horns jutted upward, and for the first time Timothy noticed a smaller ridge of short, sharp horns that ran down the back of his skull.
“Now,” he whispered again.
And he began. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was so much magic in the air, both from Raptus and the mages combating him, that Timothy barely had to try in order to sense it all around him. But it wasn’t just the surface—the magic went deep. There was the energy that ran everything, the spells that lifted sky carriages and kept doors locked, that held the souls of long-dead mages inside ghostfire lamps that lit cities and villages around the world … and then, much deeper, was the magical matrix, the reservoir of magic that all spells sprang from.
Timothy felt it all, the way he felt the wind on his face. If he had closed his eyes, he thought he would almost be able to see the layers of magic in the world.
The sorcerous power of Raptus was like a storm of magic just in front of him. It displaced all the other magic around it.
With a mental push, Timothy forced his nullifying field out in front of him, stretching it outward, creating a zone in the air around him where there was no magic, where spells would not function. It was a bubble, expanding from the un-magician and his gyro, growing larger and larger. Raptus roared, and fire spilled over the sides of his huge jaws as he prepared for another flaming onslaught, ready to murder even more of the Parliament.
Timothy felt beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. He focused, imagining the nullifying field becoming an invisible sword, and then he reach out and touched Raptus… thrust that null field into him like a blade.
The connection was instant. It was as though Timothy were inside a tent, and the storm of magic whipped at the sides but could not touch him. Magic could never touch him, but oh, how it tried.
Raptus roared and arched his back, letting loose a stream of fire from his enormous maw, a volcanic explosion that sent liquid flame spouting into the air, the fire showering down across the ruin of buildings below. The Wurm—the dragon he had become—staggered forward a step, reaching around to try to touch the place where Timothy had cut into the magic that surged within him.
It was all Timothy could do to keep the gyro from spinning out of control and falling from the sky
He could feel it even more then. The magic. The matrix. In the air he could see phantoms flitting about, and he knew them for what they were, had seen them before. Now he was tapping so deeply into the matrix that somehow, he could see them again. They were the souls of mages long dead, men and women whose spirit, whose magic, helped power the matrix and the world. Timothy had planned to just attack Raptus. To touch him the way he had done Nicodemus once upon a time, to just turn off his magic for a moment.
It wasn’t working. There was too much raw magical power in Raptus. A touch would disrupt it, but to shut it down would require more than that.
Timothy gritted his teeth. Raptus staggered again and turned, searching for the source of this attack. The wind whipped the gyro, and Timothy worked his foot pedals to keep it straight.
Raptus spotted him.
The boy forced his terror away, raised his crossbow and fired. The shaft flew straight and true and struck the dragon in the eye. Raptus roared, half blinded, and in that moment the magic inside him, the power, wavered.
Timothy shouted with the effort as he spread his nullifying field out farther, and the bubble grew large enough that it engulfed Raptus. All along, Timothy had suspected that the Spawn of Wrath, the enchantment that had turned Raptus into this towering monstrosity, was drawing from the well of power, the depths of the magical matrix itself. Now he knew it to be true. He felt it.
He had wanted to avoid this at any cost, but now he knew he had no choice. Raptus had slaughtered half the Parliament already, and if Timothy did not stop him, he would destroy Arcanum, and then the world.
He had to cut Raptus off from the matrix, so the Spawn of Wrath could not leech any more power from it. To undo that spell, the ancient magic of the Dragons of Old, he had to disrupt the matrix itself.
Just for a moment.
Once before the un-magician had touched the matrix, pushed his nullifying field into the very fabric of power that pulsed through the world. Now he did it again.
Timothy could feel all the magic around him, and with a shout of sadness and fear and effort, he pushed his nullif
ying field with all of his might.
He felt the matrix give way.
The magic winked out.
From far below he heard all the mages who still lived cry out in surprise and alarm.
Raptus roared in pain and spread his wings, but he seemed to be falling. It took Timothy only a moment to realize that his eyes were deceiving him. Raptus was not falling at all.
He was shrinking.
The Spawn of Wrath had been undone, the spell destroyed. The Wurm’s power had been taken away. In seconds he collapsed in size, diminishing with astonishing speed. Raptus roared with pain as his bones and flesh reknitted themselves, but his voice was smaller now and no longer shook the sky.
The last time Timothy had done this, disrupted the matrix, it had lasted two or three seconds.
There were screams now and shouts of panic and a distant rumble like thunder. Timothy looked around, and it took him a moment to understand what had happened. What he had done.
The matrix had not blinked out this time. It had not shuddered.
It had shut down.
The magic was gone.
Not far away a massive building—home to some guild or other and constructed so delicately that magic held it up—began to fall.
Edgar was flying after Verlis and Cythra, wings beating so hard that they seemed on fire with exertion. The moment he had warned the Wurm couple what Timothy was going to attempt—and what the consequences might be—they had taken off across the sky. Their children were at the Cade estate, after all. And not only their children, but all the children of their clan. The warning had gone out, the Voice had used magic to speak to all the mages in Arcanum, but Sheridan was nothing more than a man of metal and would not have heard such a warning.
Wurm War Page 16