by Cindy Dees
“There’s a powerful psionicist on the field,” she said quickly. “The hood protects me from her.” She led him quickly to one side of the main battle, and they moved behind a large tree trunk out of sight of most of the combatants.
“Come away with me,” Eben exhorted. “My friends and I can keep you safe. Kendrick is here, and his curse is cured.”
“What curse?”
“Long story. Suffice it to say you will find our brother much changed since you last saw him.”
Marikeen replied, “My colleagues are very powerful. I’m safe with them.”
“They’re not your family. I would die to protect you.”
Her hard expression softened. “I know that.”
He opened his mouth to argue further that her place was with her family and friends who loved her, but a creature made of fire burning in a vaguely human shape came around the tree just then, and Eben leaped forward to place himself between the elemental and his sister.
“Oh, Eben. Allow me.” She raised her right hand and casually flicked a blast of water magic at the creature. It vanished in a great gout of steam, a faint scream all that lingered where it had just stood.
“Nice trick, sister.”
They traded grins.
A portion of the battle shifted closer to them, and they were in danger of being swallowed by it. Eben had no choice but to retreat with Marikeen and follow her back to the other mages of the Cabal. They didn’t particularly need his protection, but he lent it to them nonetheless, cutting down the occasional fighter who broke through their magical defenses. The amount of magic they cast was astounding. He’d never seen anyone rely solely on magic to wage a battle, and he understood now why people like Will preferred to use a weapon first and reserve magic for special circumstances when it was truly necessary.
“We must find Vesper!” Marikeen shouted to him.
“She’s here?” he called back.
“She will be riding in the body of another, but she’s here somewhere!”
Possession creeped him out. Anyone here could be carrying the Kothite child’s spirit. A group of fighters came toward the mages, but instead of attacking, they wheeled to face off against a group of hydesmyn. The two factions had barely engaged before a stomping earth elemental waded into their midst, stone fists swinging ponderously. All the fighters turned to hack at it.
One of the robed figures of the Cabal called, “Anton! To us!”
On the far side of the elemental, which was not going down easily, a figure waved an acknowledgment. Eben peered through the mêlée and spotted the ex-governor surrounded by a group of rakasha warriors.
He leaned in close to shout in his sister’s ear, “He wants to kill me and my friends! He’s evil! Anton engineered killing our father—our real father—and his assassins, those white tigers he’s fighting with now, killed Leland Hyland!”
Marikeen’s dark eyes blazed with cold fury as she turned to stare at him. “You think I don’t know that? He will answer to me for his crimes, brother.”
“Then come away with me now. Don’t fight for him!”
“But, Eben. I fight to get close enough to kill him.”
* * *
One stood at the edge of the grove, assessing the battlefield, using his host’s immense combat experience to do so. A free-for-all mêlée with no established battle lines, at least three separate forces upon the field, if not more.
“What’s the prize they fight over?” Two asked in wonder.
Three made a sound of surprise. “You mean there’s a point to all this chaos?”
One pointed over the heads of at least five hundred fighters clashing with one another. “Over there. It looks like some sort of large, circular object.”
Two tugged his sleeve. “Lift me up a little so I can see it over the crowd.”
He bent his knee and helped her climb onto it. She had her look, a brief one, and jumped down. “It’s a door. Magical. Might even be a gate to another place. Can’t tell from here. We need to take a closer look.”
One nodded and gestured for Three to stand at his right shoulder, with Two tucked in close behind them. In a tight wedge, they waded into the battle.
They’d made their way perhaps two-thirds of the way to the black door everyone seemed to be fighting over when they encountered a large concentration of elemental creatures led by a tall human wearing old-fashioned gages on his arms.
Although One did not know him, the Gaged Man nodded at him as if recognizing an ally. Furthermore, the Gaged Man did not set his troops upon the three of them. Shrugging, One joined the Gaged Man’s troops in attacking several dozen paxan fighting in a tight Imperial phalanx. He didn’t think the Gaged Man’s forces were going to break the formation, and he drifted around the edges of the battle, seeking a way past it.
“What are we waiting for?” Two asked briskly. “Let’s get to that door. I have business to take care of on the other side of it.”
One frowned at Two. That didn’t sound at all like her. “Are you all right?” he asked doubtfully.
“Never better.” She giggled in a high, girlish voice. “Hurry. I can’t stay here forever.”
He had no idea what she was talking about, but he knew what he had to do. The compulsion deep inside him that had driven him for all these months spurred him onward now. He turned and plowed into the next soldier standing between him and the black door.
* * *
Thanon was struggling to keep his men together in the wild ebb and flow of this chaotic fight. He’d never seen a battle like it. Hundreds of skilled warriors seemed to be attacking anyone and everyone at random. If there was a goal to it all, he had yet to discover it. He’d just felt a great surge of satisfaction from the Kothite on the field a moment ago, but he had yet to spot her.
Yet another group of his men got cut off from the main force, and he had to muster his men to fight through to the isolated pocket of Talons before they all died. They could not continue on like this. Someone had to take control of the battle, containing and shaping it into something manageable. Frankly, he didn’t have enough men to do the job or enough experience to know where to begin.
But one man on the field today did. He looked for and eventually found the icy, pale helm of the one he sought and had yet to successfully join. He directed his men to move off toward General Tarses’s position.
Thanon and his men ran into a group of black trolls and nulvari casting void magics and were hard pressed for several long minutes. Eventually, a group of ikonesti and hydesmyn attacked the exposed backs of the nulvari and trolls. Pinched between the Thanon’s Talons and this new attack, the void users fell back and moved away.
The ikonesti and hydesmyn wheeled to face him and his men.
“Hold your attack!” he ordered his men. Not only did he shout the command aloud, he also projected it forcefully with his mind. His paxan troops could sense the command even if they did not hear the exact words of it.
“I wish to align with General Tarses!” he shouted over the din. “Tell him Commander Thanon and the Talons of Koth offer him their swords!”
There was a brief pause, and the two forces, temporarily at truce with one another, fought off desultory attacks along their margins while the message was relayed.
The force before Thanon parted, and the great general himself strode forward, sheathed in full armor made of ice. Normally, Thanon would take a knee to such a man, but in the midst of combat, such niceties were suspended, though he did briefly bow his head.
“Thanon, is it? I see you wear the mark of Korovo. I trained under him.”
Thanon nodded. Excellent. Their men would use similar tactics, and the two forces should integrate easily. He said, “Order must be imposed upon this battle and the chaos corralled. We need one commander on the field on our side of this fight.”
“And what do you see being the purpose of this exercise?” Tarses asked.
“I have been following a White Heart emissary for some weeks, and I believe she
and her companions are the crux of this fight. As far as I can tell, she and her friends are attempting to get through the door on the far side of the clearing.”
“As is everyone else in this place,” Tarses replied.
Thanon smiled a little.
“To the door, then,” Tarses declared. “Let us make it our goal to take the ground in front of it and defend it against all comers. Once we have control of it, we will decide who to let through.”
“I yield to your greater experience. My sword and those of my men are yours to command.”
“Form up in a fighting wedge. Swords to the front, spears and polearms in the second rank. Archers and casters behind. Charge!” Tarses ordered the combined force.
Thanon took his place at Tarses’s right hand and ran forward, shouting the charge.
* * *
Aurelius paused at the edge of the clearing. “Stars above, what a mess.”
Selea grunted beside him.
“How are we ever going to find them in this chaos?”
“Look for Will’s magic,” Selea answered. “Or a healer using mad amounts of magic.”
They worked their way around the edges of the battle as much as possible, staying out of the worst of the fighting. Increasingly appalled as he identified the players on the field, Aurelius pressed onward grimly. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to quietly find the Sleeping King and wake him in secret. Then the king would have time to raise an army and gather his forces before confronting Koth.
But that was a problem for another day. Right now, they needed to find Will and his companions and make sure they were safe.
A nulvari swung out from behind a tree trunk in front of Aurelius and cast several short, sharp bursts of magic at him. The first one burned through his magical shield, and the second activated an automatic shielding on his armor. But the third one struck him. Reflexively, he captured the magic, using his race’s innate skill with trapping and containing magic.
He staggered, weakened by what he identified in shock as shadow magic. Selea’s hand shot out to steady him. Using his off hand with shocking speed, Selea slashed the nulvari’s throat. Where that dagger had come from, Aurelius couldn’t say. But he was grateful for his friend’s lethal skills.
A human stepped in front of him threateningly, and Aurelius released the shadow magic he’d just absorbed, casting it clumsily at the fellow. The man didn’t duck in time and took the brunt of the dark magic, falling to the ground.
“What was that?” Selea asked. “It didn’t look like your usual magic.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Are you all right?”
“No. That shadow magic drained me. Anything much stronger of that same flavor would kill me.”
“Then perhaps I should engage any remaining nulvari we encounter,” Selea commented.
“Be my guest.”
* * *
Rynn gaped as a line of green lizardmen appeared off to his right, forming a battle line that looked as if it prepared to sweep into the battle from the right flank. In and of itself, that wouldn’t have worried him excessively. The chaos was already complete out here. But he spied three creatures with the lizardmen that made his blood run cold.
They appeared to be giant constructs made entirely of nullstone. Each was ridden by a lizardman. One peeled left, taking a flying leap with what looked like honest-to-goodness nullstone wings into the main body of Tarses’s force. A half dozen fighters went down under its claws as it landed in the midst of the tightly bunched troops.
Thanon’s Talons closed in around it, but the construct swung club-like fists back and forth, sending the soldiers from the elite unit flying. They were in trouble. Imperial steel wouldn’t even scratch nullstone, let alone do significant damage to it.
Rynn started forward with the intent to tell Thanon they would need to use Klangon steel to hit the beast, but the second construct charged just then, cutting off Rynn’s path to Thanon. Up close, the construct was reptilian in appearance. It had fins in lieu of arms, and it relied on its tooth-filled mouth for attacks, swinging its head back and forth on a long neck, brandishing its sharp fangs as weapons.
Rynn ducked under a swing of its nullstone tail and then leaped over it as the tail swung back toward him. The construct was using its open mouth to mow down the humanoids in front of it like weeds in its path.
He lost sight of the third construct and looked around wildly for it. And then he felt the ground rumble beneath his feet. He took off running and found himself barreling headlong into Vesper’s massed elemental phantasms. All of a sudden, he was embroiled in a pitched fight for his life as the phantasms swarmed him.
He whirled and kicked and punched, using every ounce of his skill and speed to hold off a half dozen phantasms at once.
The ground beneath his feet began to give way, and he used his extraordinary agility to leap aside just as a great hole opened up and the third nullstone construct burrowed up out of the ground.
The lizardman riding the creature shook himself, sending a rain of dirt down on Rynn, who backed away quickly. He would rather face a dozen phantasms than tangle with that nullstone monster.
Fortunately, in a matter of seconds, the Gaged Man and Vesper’s forces had their hands full dealing with the construct, and he managed to slip away, retreating toward the Talons where they were attempting to regroup, repair armor, and heal the worst of their wounds.
He shouted to Thanon, “Use Klangon steel on the nullstone beasts!”
Thanon shouted back, or maybe he was mentally projecting the order at his men and Rynn intercepted it because he was also paxan, “Unseat the rider, but choose your moment! The construct will follow the last order it was given before the rider is taken down. Choose an order you can live with!”
Rynn spun and headed back toward the construct and rider who had burrowed out of the ground. As soon as the lizardman rider gave his beast an order to kill all the trolls or kill all the phantasms, he was going to find himself abruptly separated from his ride.
* * *
Sha’Li turned the amulet this way and that, catching the light on its dark surface so she could see the faint markings along its rim. Glancing up, comparing it to the door itself, she happened to glance through the cutout in the amulet. A dozen symbols on the door were visible through the sinuous hole in her trinket.
Frowning, she intentionally brought the amulet to her eye to gaze at the door through it. Swearing, she all but smacked her forehead in frustration as the trick of the amulet dawned on her. The cutout on it was not a symbol. It was a map. It showed her a linear sequence of symbols to activate on the door, like a code.
“Raina, I need you to go over to the door and push each symbol I describe to you in the correct order.”
“Right. Give me a minute to get over there.”
While the healer made her way to the door, using her colors to safely pass a group of Imperial soldiers fighting a group of Anton’s rogues, Sha’Li continued peering at the door. Which end of the amulet’s path to start at? She tried doing it from the top down, pointing and shouting at each symbol she could see through the amulet. They got to the end of the sequence, and Sha’Li ran over to help Raina push on the door.
Nothing.
“Let’s try again,” Sha’Li panted. “This time we’ll work from the bottom up.”
Raina nodded grimly.
Sha’Li had to kill a rogue who had, in her absence, camped out in the protected spot Sha’Li had been hiding in. She took a moment to roll the body aside and put the amulet to her eye again.
A groan went up across the battlefield, and she glanced up to see a trio of giant black, stone beasts stomping about, annihilating everything in their paths. She caught sight of Anton’s main force and Vesper’s forces combining efforts to attack one of the great creatures. Funny how imminent death made fast allies of men who’d been trying to kill each other moments ago.
She turned her attention back to the door.
They had to get it open and soon, or she and all her friends were going to die.
“Push that one on the left down by your knee that looks like a house with the door open!”
Raina complied.
“Now move inward one circle in the spiral of symbols and to the right about an arm’s length to the one with the three horizontal bars across a box!”
One by one, they worked through the symbols revealed to her by the amulet. They got to the last symbol, and Sha’Li ran forward to push it herself. The stone knob sank several inches into the stone face of the door, and all of a sudden, a crack opened up around the edge of the circular slab of stone.
“You did it!” Raina cried.
“Stay here and don’t open it any farther. I’ll go get the others,” Sha’Li replied. “And then we’ll go inside and wake the king.”
* * *
Hemlocke lurched, stunned. They’d done it. The paltry humans had defeated her defenses. How. Dare. They.
She crouched, bunching her mighty muscles, and leaped, bursting through the bubble she’d slept in for the past century and more, exploding up and out of the watery protection of her sea.
Her own proscribing magics in the Griefalls prevented her from transporting herself magically to the door of her brother’s prison. Forced to fly, she accelerated and turned northward, skimming aggressively over the surface of the sea. The city of Zarva passed under her nose, and she registered the pale oval faces of humans and lizardmen alike, staring up at her, mouths agape.
In her wake, she both heard and felt the cries. “Hemlocke flies! The dragon is awake!”
Their fear and wonder lent strength to her righteous fury, and she gained altitude, rising above the sands of Iridu, racing northward toward the Griefalls. For five thousand years, she had jealously guarded her greatest and most secret treasure, and no one—no one—would take it from her now.
Unleashing a great roar of fury that echoed for miles and turned a swath of the desert beneath her to glass, she pumped her wings several times, hard, rising up high into the sky over the Griefalls. Banking up on her right wing, she executed a barrel roll into a vertical dive that gathered speed until she blazed downward like a burning star falling from the heavens.