The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3)

by H. Anthe Davis

  So he tipped the man a wink, and said, “Not alone.” Then he reached out and broke the ward that held the doors.

  They swung open to slam against the walls of the entry-notch, and both women startled. Elementals poured in—flying, wafting, crawling, their forms made visible by the bonds on them but blurring into and through each other: translucent air-serpents crossing paths with chained sparks, glowing phosphors, crystal-spined geodelings, bright smoking salamanders. The mob spilled across the floor and through the air, converging upon the women in conscious waves.

  Farcry scuttled backward, fingers flicking out layered wards with the speed of a cardsharp. Flying elementals rebounded from a hard wedge of aquamarine light, and her footwork kept the tougher crawling ones at a distance—for the moment.

  In contrast, Varrol did not retreat. Hammer in one hand, she yanked a small drawstring bag from her belt and shook it open with a sharp word of command. Pieces of metal began to spill from the tiny sack—far more than it could fit—and leapt to her skin as if magnetized, assembling into an all-covering scale armor that repulsed every elemental that struck it. As the last piece flew into place, she dropped the bag and charged Salandry.

  What? thought Enkhaelen. I reveal that I'm the nefarious necromancer and instead she picks him to fight?

  Granted, he does look fun to hit.

  But this was supposed to be his Valent endgame, not a generalized brawl. So as Farcry dodged the creeping phosphors and Salandry and Varrol traded blows—one with the hammer, the other with half-molten salamanders and geodelings as proxies—Enkhaelen took control of the iron ring that encircled the room.

  Normally it was used to skim away the ambient energies that collected on mages like lint. He had deactivated it upon entry, though, and sunk a few hooks in. The Primordials of Metal might be his enemies now, but this was dead iron; he could manipulate it with ease.

  Now he lifted it cleanly from its setting and set it to a slow rotation two feet off the ground. Farcry glanced his way, alarmed, and he flashed her a grin as he forced it into a tilt and stepped up into thin air.

  The chamber was slightly taller than it was wide. Perfect for a vertical rotation.

  The first sweep of the lower edge took Salandry at the ankles, knocking him backward over the swinging rim with a scream. Enkhaelen grimaced, but he had seen the flash of a ward, which probably meant no broken bones. Varrol, who saw it coming, hopped the leading edge like a jump-rope, her plated feet clashing down on the tiles on the other side. Elementals spun from the ring's way or were whacked clear; Farcry jumped it; then it slammed into the crescent-moon table and the Councilors' chairs, reducing them to splinters.

  “Second swing!” announced Enkhaelen, and all eyes locked on him.

  He hiked it up just enough to skim the prone Salandry rather than cave in his skull; it was too early for that. But it made jumping harder; in her layered armor, Varrol got clipped and went down, then rolled to her feet and stagger-rushed him in the ring's wake. For her part, Farcry took his cue and stepped up onto a platform of wards, and when the ring crushed the lowest one, she rebuilt it before she could drop.

  One hand still directing the threads that made the ring rotate, Enkhaelen held his palm up to the charging Varrol and pushed. Soft force rolled down his arm, powered by the energy he had drained from the ring and the pylons and all his other canceled spells, and struck the armored Artificer like a pillow wielded by a giant. She staggered back, the scales on her face echoing her surprise, then made a striking gesture of her own.

  Six scales spun off her arm to smack into his wards. He had prepared an absorption ward as the outermost—a layer that would not stop a blow so much as suck up its kinetic energy—but the scales adhered and switched the flow, eating up the spell and threatening to nip into his reserves. He obligingly dropped it, and they flew back to Varrol.

  “Nice leeches,” he said. She came on swinging.

  Another soft-force push—which split in front of her, divided by a wedge-ward Farcry had just cast—and then there was a hammer at his sternum, its enchantments puncturing two strike-wards before rebounding from his skin-tight. Then Varrol hit him bodily, armored limbs hooking around him to rip him from his midair perch, and he laughed as he went down.

  An instant later, the iron ring slammed into the small of her back and flung her to the wall.

  Her grip hauled him along for a few feet but then broke, and he rose in the ring's wake only to be bombarded by a stream of air- and fire-elementals. They tore at his coat, his hair, his jewelry; to anyone else, their burning fingers would have been death.

  The silver embroidery on his clothes lit up. Ribbons of smoke rose from his hair. Then he reached out with his free hand and sieved it through the rushing crowd, caught Salandry's command-threads between his fingers, and broke them.

  Dozens of elementals spun away, dazed by the suddenness of their release. Others jackknifed immediately to attack Salandry, who had been lifted out of ring range by his air-serpents and was gesticulating with the fervor of an orchestra-master in mid-piece—advancing the creeping phosphors toward stunned Varrol, assaulting Farcry with aerial foes, and pulling another batch together to strike at Enkhaelen. The turncoats rebounded from his defenses and were caught again, his bracelets lighting up as they resynchronized with their slaves.

  Enkhaelen drew a hand back, thinking to strike, but felt an alert from the dim web of spells that monitored the Citadel's status. They had been there since Rivent's time, keyed to him yet usually dormant. Now the deepest ones, which corresponded to the construct tunnels and the janitorial systems, were lighting up the back of his mind with warnings.

  The magma was rising.

  “Time to step outside,” he mumbled, and stopped the ring's spin. Angling it up at the high narrow windows, he pulled himself into its center on cords of power, then jerked the whole rig toward the wall with all the force he could muster.

  Stone, glass and lead solder cracked under the impact, cutting a line across a quarter of the room. The iron ring dented in places, its inactive enchantments not enough to reinforce it, and he spun it to a fresh section and canted it to ram again just below the window arches. Air-serpents battered off his skin-tight ward and he ignored them, spun the ring and hit the wall again. This time the stained-glass windows shattered, sending shards spilling into the sunlight as that part of the wall collapsed outward.

  With the iron ring hanging mangled around him, he flew backward through the gap. Salandry's elemental horde boiled out in pursuit.

  Flying came easily to him. His current method was a composite of many types: terrestrial repulsion, raptor-spirit traits, wraith-like gravity denial, elemental buoying, air-current control, wards, wings, soulcraft. He had been at it for so long that switching types was a matter of reflex, shifting from instant to instant as the environment changed.

  And so he did not need spells or gestures or more than an instant's warning to dodge the three Artificing constructs that tried to spear him from the sky.

  He swung the crimped ring about in response, barely missing the trailing one. There were three in total, all bright metal and sailcloth and crystalline shock-batteries, their carapaces covered in reflective 'eyes'—actually scrying mirrors linked to their operators in the Artificing labs. He had seen them in flight before, and even now admired their grace and precision.

  Varrol had done much to advance the Artificing discipline. He would be sorry to kill her.

  Well. Sorry-ish.

  The constructs had long saw-edged blades at both ends. They scythed through the air as the constructs banked, then came in for another shot.

  He flipped the ring up at the last moment, batting one into the sky with a crunch of delicate machinery, and dropped out of the center at the same time. The remaining two cut a scissor path over his head, barely missing each other, and took their distance while the falling one struggled to glide.

  “Are the blades new?” he shouted toward the broken wall. There was fig
hting still going on in there; he could see the flare of salamanders and phosphors, hear the clash of metal and stone. The lack of attention irritated him, and he regretted giving Salandry the wink; that stupid man had decided they were starting the revolution and then had thrown elementals at him.

  Oh well. I suppose I did hit him first.

  But destroying a few constructs was not his idea of a good fight. As he evaded another pass, he glanced down at the Citadel he had raised from dust. Most classes were over for the year, the population perhaps a third of what it usually was, but the balconies were full of staring faces, and the bridges and catwalks and spiral stairs were crowded. No construct palanquins moved, only foot-traffic: walking swiftly or running.

  And there were portals open everywhere.

  He smiled. Snowfoot and Qisvar were doing their jobs.

  In the depths, where no one had bothered to whitewash the black rock and no windows opened, he sensed the boiling. The magma would make quick work of the earthglobs, root filters and janitorial slimes that dealt with the effluvia of the city. He would have pitied them, but most elementals felt no pain—only Wood, and he and Wood were not friends.

  Soon the service Summoners and greenhouse Artificers would be rushing up the stairs, trying to escape. Soon the Warders whose spells blocked the sewage-stink from the rest of the Citadel would feel their work fray and dissolve. Soon the smoke would rise to clear the balconies of gawkers.

  Soon they would all run.

  He beat another construct from the sky with the ring, still waiting on his Council enemies. More constructs were approaching from below, their silver backs reflecting the sun, and he thought about how he had planned to gas this place in its sleep. Shunt water into the magma chamber and dissolve it under pressure, build up the volatiles, then seep them into the vents and ducts that webbed the entire Citadel.

  Perhaps half a century ago, he would have done it. He had certainly planned for it when he raised this place over the magma pool. Its whole structure anticipated it: the narrow passages behind the walls, the fine network of drains and tunnels and reservoirs, the air-tight seals that kept the towers temperate throughout the year. All were made to trap the occupants, to fill the rooms with poison: to gather the Silent Circle into its supposed place of power and exterminate it in one sweep.

  He wasn't sure, exactly, what had changed his mind.

  He still felt the rage. Four hundred years had not dimmed it one speck. They and their ilk had hounded him, killed his friends and relatives, and ultimately betrayed this land—siding with Altaera over Ruen Wyn in that ancient, devastating war. He had fought them as hard as he could, those hypocritical bastards. Those liars and murderers, purported to be above such politics yet willingly chaining themselves to a throne.

  Only the names had changed. Altaera and Ruen Wyn were both gone, but the Silent Circle now huddled under the wing of the Risen Phoenix, and though it had split from the Inquisition, it taught the same blinkered view of history. Heroic mages; wicked spirits and cults; invaders who civilized those they conquered.

  Yet he hadn't lied when he'd told Geraad of his time as a student. From the moment he set foot inside the Citadel at Darakus, the rage had been balanced by wonder—by the sense of a whole new world opening up before him. Screw the politics: there was art too, and wisdom, and literature, mathematics, systems, symbology—all unpacked and argued at length by people as fervently in love with magic as him.

  For a mage trained via brief apprenticeship and violent self-study—for a man who still felt like a boy, lost, unmoored, uncultured—it had been like a punch in the gut. This was why the Circle thought themselves superior. Because, in many ways, they were.

  Perhaps, if he hadn't been bound to the Emperor, he would have surrendered to his intellect and been subsumed into the way of the Circle. Perhaps he would have been happy.

  But Aradys was always there. Demanding. Reminding.

  And every time he was pulled from his studies to see the grander Imperial pattern, the rage swelled up again. Nothing had changed. Four hundred years and these people still repeated the mistakes of their ancestors, antagonized the world around them, and believed all would be well as long as they meant well.

  He'd tried crippling them. Stealing knowledge, erasing it. Killing innovators who would have given the Empire an edge on its neighbors. Fomenting and crushing internal conflicts to keep the organization in line.

  It wasn't enough. The Emperor had kept him on too short of a leash to really quash the Circle's advancement, and though they were handicapped in comparison to mages of the Gejaran and Yezadran schools, they could still hold their own. And as his plans had faltered, so had his focus. What could have been a revenge for the ages was now a shoddy victim of the game he played with the Emperor.

  He wanted to enjoy this. He needed to. Yet, looking down upon the scurrying ignorant masses, he felt nothing.

  Shake it off. It's not over. Anything could happen.

  Trying to trick himself back into the mood, he focused on the distant people. They were escaping him, and he liked that. As much as he yearned to chase and kill, he also appreciated the clever, the tenacious, the pragmatic. The survivors.

  And sometimes it hurt to see someone die, like a fist around his windpipe. He didn't know why.

  He was about to wave to some gawkers when a new torrent of air-serpents knocked him into a spin. Easily corrected, but he lost his grip on the iron ring, which dropped out of reach and punched through the dome-ward of a balcony six floors down, scattering students in all directions.

  “Sorry!” he shouted. Then a flying rock phosphor splattered against the side of his head.

  Aggravated, he detached the ward that it had hit, its radiant fronds expanding across the pane like quick-time moss. As Salandry emerged from the hole in the wall, he flung it back.

  Unsurprisingly, Salandry was surrounded by aerial servitors, which brushed aside the hapless phosphor before it could get close. They were less effective against the bolt of blue-black energy Enkhaelen flung in its shadow, and three serpents screamed their teakettle death knells as it rent them apart. Then it glanced off an aquamarine ward—Farcry's work—and Enkhaelen wondered what he had missed.

  “So you've switched sides?” he said as Salandry flew toward him on borrowed wings.

  The summoner's face twisted incredulously. He was coated in his own armor now: a shell of rock and ropy vine that reminded Enkhaelen of the Guardian, except not as impressive. Only his face remained uncovered, because if there was one thing Trivesteans could not do, it was to place something between their eyes and the world.

  “What?” he said, pausing to hover amid his cloud of servitors. More were rising from below, either summoned from his chambers or belonging to his students—whom Enkhaelen could see ascending toward the fray, their bracelets glinting with power.

  He wondered where his own students were. Through the portals, if they were sensible, but the Energies discipline did not attract sensible people.

  “Farcry. Did you make a deal with her behind my back?”

  “You just tried to kill us all!”

  “Yes, but so did you.”

  “It was a...miscommunication between myself and my servitors.”

  “Oh, so the ladies were too tough for you?”

  “You betrayed me. We had a deal.”

  “And you expected me to keep it after I said I was the necromancer?”

  “I was open to the idea.”

  And that was the problem with Salandry's type. Everyone 'knew' what necromancers did, what they were. Everyone 'knew' that it was essential to kill them on sight. And yet Salandry had been willing to jump onto that wagon of horrors without batting a lash. Such cold ambition irritated Enkhaelen almost as much as the smug look that came with it.

  “This is why I never took an apprentice,” Enkhaelen said, and primed another bolt.

  Grinning, Salandry advanced. Perhaps he thought he had a better chance up close; most Energies mages
did prefer to keep their distance, and Enkhaelen was short, slight. Grappling a larger, sentiently-armored man was a bad idea for almost anyone.

  Enkhaelen shot the bolt, saw it burn through a serpent and a phosphor then be deflected, and put on an alarmed face as Salandry reached out with an armful of vines and bonds—

  —only to have his fingertips rebound from the aquamarine pane of a ward. “Don't touch him, you fool!” shouted Farcry from the gap, where she stood alongside Varrol. The Artificer was raising a voice-caster to her mouth, the scales of her armor separating before it.

  “ALERT LEVEL BLACK,” she intoned, enhanced voice echoing from the walls like a giant's roar. “EVOKER ARCHMAGUS IS ROGUE. ALL CONSTRUCTS SET OFFENSIVE ARMAMENT.”

  Not far below, a set of four porter constructs dropped their palanquin and looked up, eye-holes kindling white.

  “All constructs?” said Enkhaelen, surprised and pleased. “You weaponized everything?”

  Varrol snarled in the moment before her armor closed over her mouth. Salandry took his distance, shouting something at Farcry, and in the moment's breather Enkhaelen stripped off his gloves and the rings atop them. The only one below was the silver ring, his wedding band, and he kissed it absently as he pocketed his gloves.

  He could tag people through the leather but it was easier bare-handed. Flexing his fingers, he scudded backward in midair and watched the three for their next move.

  'Stop playing with your food,' said Kuthra in the back of his mind.

  “Shh,” he replied.

  Kuthrallan Vanyaris—haelhene visionary, Seal creator and former Ravager—manifested at the corner of his vision. Pale and radiant, the wraith wore a familiar look of disapproval, those crystalline eyes narrowed to slits. 'We are not here to indulge in playtime.'

  “Speak for yourself.”

  'These are not apprentices. If you continue to take this lightly—'

  “What, they'll hurt me?”

  '—they might escape before you can eat them.'

  Enkhaelen scowled. It was a valid concern, but he hated it when Kuthra decided to pop up and 'teach' him things. He had been stuck with the arrogant wraith for four centuries, and though it had been impressive back in the day, now it was just a nag. The remnants of a great entity stuck in a body it did not own and could not control.