Cragen is not the only one who can buy spies.
“Oh, my friend, my friend,” he sighed. “Did your spies sell you cheap, or are you yet out there with another gambit left to play?”
“Guardian!” The sentry called from the tower. “A small party, a vanguard of perhaps fifty riders ahead of the main force. I cannot yet make out their markings.”
He dared not to hope. “Let me help,” he said, and threw a low spray of light across the valley that disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared, lest it mark them for those who followed. Most of the riders hesitated at the edge of the light and skirted it, but one entered boldly and rode straight through the brief light without slowing at all, as if hoping to be recognized.
“The gold and green of Damerien, my Lord Guardian,” the sentry shouted, a tingle of relief and joy in his voice. “But even as they ride like men possessed, they won’t reach Pyran ere the army can take position to attack them.”
“Keep your bow trained on those behind them, son,” frowned the mage. “Guard the duke as you would guard your own kin. Without him, all is lost.”
“Aye, no need to tell me so, sir,” the sentry replied, an arrow already nocked in his bow.
The mage looked around him at the bundles of arrows, the pitch, but no archers yet to use them. “And where’s the rest of your damned militia? Where’s your army?”
“Militia’s here, sir. Mostly infantry, a few archers.” The sentry shrugged over his shoulder, not taking his eye from the scene below. “But the armies are disbanded, sent home.”
“What? Sent home?” The Guardian looked out over the battlements in horror.
“Aye, sir. Back to their homelands. What with the end of the war––”
He spat angrily. “Only a fool would believe that this war is over!”
“Aye,” chuckled the sentry darkly, “that fool would be our Lord Mayor.”
“Was he asleep during the Battle of the Liberation? Does he not grasp that Pyran is the key to all Syon!”
No army. The Guardian shook his head in disbelief. Just the town militia and a handful of elderly, pregnant and infirm mages to defend the city. The rest of his charges, the strongest, the best able to help defend, he’d ported to a field far to the south that was flat and as clear of trees and rubbish as he could hope and where they at least stood a chance of surviving the port, but in so doing, he’d all but assured they would not reach Pyran before the army. He hoped they had the good sense not to try. His purpose was in seeing them safely to Syon and out of Cragen’s reach, and here they were. If Pyran should fall, at the very least, they would not fall with it.
Not right away, at any rate.
The army massed along their eastern border. Whatever they were doing would take time, but likely not long enough to matter. Perhaps Damerien would reach Pyran, perhaps not. With no army, eventually, Cragen’s men would surround the city and besiege it, and eventually, the lord mayor would surrender. Pyran simply could not stand against such a force, and once it fell, Syon would be all but defenseless.
The Dhanani were all but gone, hunted nearly out of existence at the end of the Gods’ Rebellion and restricted so completely by B’radik’s decree that they would be well nigh useless against Cragen’s forces. Besides, they were too far west to be of much use. The Brymandines, and the ghost people… They would as soon fight each other, and they would vie to see who could sell the other side out to Cragen first in the hopes of surviving long enough to gloat. The Anatayans, formidable as they were, were far to the northwest and could not possibly get to Pyran in time, even assuming they were inclined to fight Cragen, which was not by any means to be assumed. Besides, they were as much a danger to mages as Cragen with their damnable superstitions.
With no one left to defend them, how long could the mages hope to last, under those circumstances? How long before all of Syon was subjugated to Cragen’s will?
The sentry followed the Guardian’s gaze across the marshes to where the approaching army stood on the hilltop poised to attack and nodded. “The ghost people keep a shrine to Lim’gar in the temple, if you’re of a superstitious bent. Otherwise, I say we stay here and do what we must.”
“Do what we must,” Galorin repeated thoughtfully. He watched the tiny figures in green and gold racing toward the city walls and the menacing wall of men filling the hills behind them. “And so we shall.”
“They’re slowing at the hilltop!”
Damerien nodded and took the brief luxury of looking behind him as he rode. Indeed, the army that had stayed right on their heels was falling behind now, stopped, so it seemed, on the hilltop and not yet spilling around it to fill the marshland. No doubt they were bringing up their siege machinery. Regardless, whatever they were doing would take time.
“We might survive this yet,” Damerien laughed darkly. “Do not slow your pace. Achieve Pyran. Everything hinges on that.”
The Guardian felt a chill on his spine and looked out over the hillside. He raised a hand to throw more light across the valley but drew himself up short. In his view of the world, amidst the threads and strands of probability and along the certainty trees that overlay everything in the universe in which this world was but a speck, a grayness was spreading, a moldering festering change in the strands of power that started on the hilltop and extended across the valley toward Pyran.
“No,” he whispered. The other mages’ eyes grew wide with terror, and he knew that they also recognized the signature in the power racing toward them through the strands, racing across the valley behind Damerien and his men.
Cragen had not only sent his entire army to invade Syon. He had sent the Wittister mages with their corrupt, stolen power––a power fed by those they’d killed. The sheer amount of force he saw on the strands…the king must have sent them all. Without the rest of the Guardians, he doubted even his mighty protections could withstand the force of their attack. Not after he’d spent so much of his strength to get the others to safety.
Do what you must.
He watched the taint in the strands as it moved over the marshes toward Damerien and felt sick. At this rate, the corruption would overtake the Great Liberator and steal his life and his power before he could reach Pyran.
The strange vision he’d had of Damerien filled his mind. If the Wittisters could seize upon power like that… The Guardian gulped dry air down his throat, terror filling his heart, not for himself, not for his mages, but for all the people of Syon.
He could not wait. He had one chance to end this and save Syon, only one. He only hoped his power would be equal to the task. “All of you!” he called to the mages assembled on the wall. “Ignore the attackers. Protect the city. All your power, everything you have, into a shield! Do it now!”
The Guardian closed his eyes and raised his hands high over the battlement walls. “Forgive me, my Prince,” he murmured as he felt his power, the full strength of a Guardian, stream through his body, outward, riding out along the same strands of power that carried the Wittister taint, colliding with it, clashing with it, feeding upon it, hearing within those strands the screams of all the mages they had destroyed to get that power.
Peace, he prayed them. I shall not fail you.
He barely kept his footing from the violent collision of power that shook the walls of the city with its force. In the slowed, seemingly infinite milliseconds of the impact, he felt the Wittister mages surge their strength against the power he hurled against them, crackling angrily through the strands, not bending them, not plucking them like a bard plucks out a tune, but burning them away like so many strands of hair.
The hill rumbled menacingly beneath their feet, the beginnings of an obvious if impotent attack. The soil rippled and liquefied in patches, and he could imagine the Wittister mages nodded almost smugly to each other. Such a simple attack would be almost disappointing to them, surely not worthy of a Guardian. A pathetic jab like that must surely mean he was weakened, and why not? He had just used a good part of his
power to port the refugees away. He was perhaps still stronger than any one of them––this, they would know from the collision of power––but together they would believe they could overwhelm him easily. They would focus even more of their power…he smiled. There it was.
He withdrew his strength and felt their control over the strands coming closer still to Damerien and his men. Damerien, whose death would surely feed the greedy Wittister mages for generations to come. By now, he imagined he would almost be an afterthought to them.
Suddenly his shout ripped outward over the marshland, over the hill, over the valley beyond, over the Lacework and to the very edge of Byrandia itself, releasing with it every bit of energy he’d taken and every bit of his own that he had stored, and the land answered, shuddering, bucking.
He felt their power falter on the shifting ground, felt his control of the strands become stronger as theirs weakened, but he also knew they were regrouping for a different attack. Now the rest of the army was surging over the boiling ground, their horses stumbling but racing down the hill into the marshes and toward the city walls. Catapults aligned themselves to attack the city walls. No, they were targeting a specific point on the city walls. They were targeting him. Worse yet, the Wittister mages had redirected their power into the catapults. Whatever would come his way would be devastating.
He grasped the vast body of threads that bound the landbridge. He had to hurry. The catapults let loose their burdens, and at once, giant white-hot boulders flew through the air toward him.
Steady, he told himself. Around him, the other mages understood, at least on some level, and took what control they could to redirect the incoming shots away from him, but at great cost. Some of the stones slammed into the already weakened walls of the city, breaching them wide and dropping militiamen and some of the mages themselves to their deaths below. Others fell amidst the houses and shop stalls within. Explosions and shrieks of agony pierced the night around him but still he kept his focus.
Slowly, so as to retain control, he lowered his hands and closed his fists around the strands of power he had gathered, concentrating his will tightly upon the land that had surrendered itself to him, the whole of the landbridge, the thousands of square miles of inns and shops and roadways, the travelers, the vast armies, the siege weapons, the Wittister mages who only now began to grasp their danger. He felt a few of them port away, not daring to come forward, only retreating backward into Byrandia. He redoubled his effort. He wrestled the great mass of land free, raised it high into the skies above and slammed it violently into the gaping wound in the world below so hard that the water rose hundreds of feet high to each side in astonishment, then collapsed into a crushing maelstrom of whirlpools and giant waves that buried it to a depth no man could survive. Not even the Wittister mages.
Not even Damerien, he thought, as he collapsed against the broken battlements, shaking uncontrollably.
The sea and land thrashed violently for a time, clamoring against the great shield of protections the mages had raised. It claimed and subdued its new realm between the continents, then quieted to a brooding calm in the settling darkness.
No bodies rose, no debris floated to the surface, not yet. Within the tenday, the sea would be foul with those of the hundred thousand bloated corpses that were not eaten by sea creatures. He only hoped they would be able to recover Damerien and his men and bury them with honors. Their lives had gained him the time he’d needed. At last, Duke Ildar Damerien truly was the Great Liberator of Syon.
Around him, no one spoke. No one even breathed as they digested what they’d just seen. Behind them, shouts of people searching for their loved ones in the rubble, the cries of the wounded rose over the silence of their strange and sudden victory.
“My Lord?” The sentry’s voice was so quiet the mage barely heard him. The boy had climbed atop the rubble remains of the southeast tower, bloodied, shaken, chilled both with the cold rain and shock. “You saved us.” He laughed weakly, still in shock from what he had seen. “We were all going to die, and you saved us!”
“I did not save you.” He smiled sadly. “It were better said that Pyran was saved by the old and the infirm. By expectant mothers. They shielded you. Not I.”
“An it weren’t for you lot,” seethed a woman in the crowd who threw a rock at him, “we should never have been in danger at all. Bloody mages. Bloody Guardian!”
“No, no Guardian am I now.” He sighed, red spots of blood swimming before his eyes. “No, the Guardians do not do such things. The Guardians do not save people. The Guardians do not stop armies. The Guardians…do…nothing.” A violent sob shook his body, and those near him took an involuntary step backward. “No,” he said, looking out over the new waterline below the city walls. “I am only Galorin now.”
One
The Citadel
Northwest Badlands, Byrandia
in the year of Byrandia, 15345
in the year of Syon, 3862
The woman moved slightly, breath filling her lungs in a way that reminded him of wind blowing through a tomb. The depth of her lethargy was such that they would hold a mirror to her mouth from time to time to be sure she yet lived. Each time they saw the telltale clouding on the mirror, and each time they––or at least he––felt a certain disappointment. But she was still their leader, such as she was, and just now they had need of her wisdom.
She opened her eyes and stared at him for a time before she spoke. “What have you done?” she asked in withering tones.
He looked away from her glare reflexively, hating himself for doing so. “The great strands…” he began, uncertain how to continue in spite of having rehearsed this moment for hours. Lacking words, he handed her his peace offering, a goblet of water from the spring.
“You did something to disturb them.”
He was only momentarily distracted by her sagging wrinkled form beneath the diaphanous robes she wore. She had been beautiful once, so long ago he could barely remember. Now the sight of her filled him with revulsion. He watched her sip the water, and as he did each time, he imagined her parched tissues greedily soaking it up and life along with it. The thought sickened him.
“No, not precisely.” He kept his tone neutral. “We saw a disruption in the strands, and I––we, all of us––thought to forestall it. But I fear we may have made matters worse.”
She closed her eyes for a time, and he knew she was looking over the rich fabric of probabilities and the certainty trees that surrounded them in this place, trying to see what had happened and what would likely happen, following the thickest strands of power where they frayed and split off here and there. He waited silently while she got her bearings, not daring to presume to follow.
High in a sheer cliff wall, surrounded by bare rock faces and steep mountains, and concealed deep within a natural cave stood their citadel, hewn and chiseled from the native rock itself and nearly as ancient. No grand façade marked the location, neither outside the cave nor in. Shafts cut into the stone allowed sunlight into the chambers by day for warmth and light, and a tiny spring filled a pool deep within the citadel to provide water.
Below the cliff wall, a town toiled from season to season, unaware of anything beyond its own meager borders and oblivious to the nature of the Citadel to which it yearly offered up a good deal of its cattle and crops. Beyond the town which was called only G’ragne––“town” since the inhabitants knew of no other––the unforgiving Byrandian badlands extended for hundreds of miles in every direction, guaranteeing that no one was likely to make the journey, not without dire business one way or another.
“I still see a turbulence.” She rubbed her temples.
“Yes,” he answered simply. “We see the same. If anything, it is worse now than it was, though how that could be is beyond our ken. This turbulence is why the others sent me to awaken you.”
She laughed, that derisive, irritating laugh that always brought a flush of shame to his cheeks. “They fear me, so they send you. A
clever man might tire of their manipulations and their cowardice.” When he refused to rise to her bait, she rose irritably and shook the dust from her robes and her matted white hair. “As ever, you wake me to clean up your mess.”
“Not our mess. You recognize the power behind that turbulence.”
“Yes,” she sighed with a certain resignation, a dry whistling sound that rose from the disused depths of her chest. “How could I not? Ever he has been a noise along the strands, and ever we have ignored him since he chose not to be among us.”
“Yes.” He looked away again, uncertain how to continue, how to make her understand. “But this disruption is something altogether new.”
“So we watch for a time and see how it resolves.”
“Yes, but––”
“The danger, if any, is not imminent, nor is it likely ever to be so, coming from him.” She handed the goblet back to him. “I do not see how this grand deduction required waking me.”
“It should not have,” he said quietly. “Except that we perceived the threat to be more immediate and more dangerous.”
An ugly grimace stretched the skin of her face so tight he thought it might split. “After all these centuries, with us in our citadel and him off on that insipid island, suddenly he is an emergency again?” She laughed.
“In our estimation, yes.”
Her laughter faded. “What did you do?”
“We tried to…eliminate the cause of the turbulence.” He saw his meaning register on her face. “Our first attempts failed. We had not counted on the strength of his allies. But this time, we received word that our agents were successful.”
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 3