The younger sorcerer bent double to protect his skry stone. "North-northwest! Two hundred thirty meters! Two signatures, no three! One is moving away -- an animal! The ether is clouded! I cannot identify the attacker! The stones are being catapulted at us with a spell!"
Oyraebos did not bother throwing a look in the direction that Bilddhri had indicated. He cast his most powerful combat spell, sending an ethereal discharge similar to a bolt of lighting.
He was not going to let these primitive magicians drive him back into the shuttle with mere stones!
They must learn the full power of true magic!
FORTY-ONE
When she heard the thunderous roar, Telriy looked to the sky.
The descending skyship, all metal and sharp angles, grew from the pinpoint size of a high flying bird to monstrously huge in mere seconds and it seemed as if it were falling right on top of her, Celly, and the sorrel.
Just then, the horse, as if spooked by the uproar, went stiff-legged and bucked, and before she could do anything about it she felt herself flying backwards out of the saddle. As the sorrel whirled and bolted back along the way they had come, Telriy, arms wrapped around Celly as she automatically protected her child, landed hard on the flat of her back.
Her breath driven from her by the impact, for a few moments she could only gasp in desperate pain as a great shadow swept across her and Celly.
Afraid and crying, she lay helpless.
Then the shadow passed and the sun returned as the thundering sounds faded. The skyship came to rest as gently as the landing of a songbird, though in doing so it crushed and smashed several of Master Khlosb'ihs' partially assembled hulls with the great rending sounds of snapping wood. Intermingled with the racket, she heard cursing and shouting from various directions; the shipwrights had just seen fortnights of work destroyed.
Then her breath came back and she drew in half a dozen lung filling draughts of air to burn away the feeling of drowning. Almost immediately, she hurriedly scrambled to her feet, still clutching Celly tightly to her bosom, and ran towards the shell of the building to her right. The structural blocks of the ruined walls, denuded of any facade they may have once sported, were half an armlength thick and still tightly set. Beneath the opening of a sturdy-looking arch that pierced the outside wall, she skidded to a still anxious halt, her rapid heart beat urging her to continue running.
But she stayed put. Another calamity had not followed immediately on the heels of the appearance of the bizarre skyship and there was no obvious indication that one would. She leaned her head out of the archway to observe the craft.
After only a few seconds, three men in strange, colorful raiment appeared not far from the smooth, curving side of the alien skyship. Within only a moment or two, she felt sand spheres disturb the ether and instinctively ducked back. Shot from one of Master Khlosb'ihs' polybolos no doubt, the spheres began to detonate, shrouding the three men in clouds of fire and smoke. She continued to feel their presence in the ether, though, and knew that they remained unharmed. Strong magic beyond her ability to delve shielded the trio.
Celly, having had enough of loud noise and rough jouncing, burst out crying and Telriy's shock gave way to a rapidly building anger.
Whoever flew this strange skyship had no right to destroy the skyship works and absolutely would not be allowed to endanger her child!
She had no weapon to hand, but she did have her magic. None of Gran's spells would serve; she must adapt one of Mar's.
Although wood planks, balks, and timbers abounded around and beneath the metal skyship, none was near enough to be affected by her spells.
She could move stone with flux modulations that she had learned by watching Mar, but not very large ones.
As she crouched to begin to soothe Celly, she wove her spells.
All around her gravel and stones stirred, then rose up into the air.
*************
When Mar flew out of undertime, he dragged nhBreen along with him by a loop of pure ether.
"See to Telriy!" the young wizard commanded as he turned to face the ethereal onslaught that sprang at them.
In the shallows of undertime, Mar had paused only long enough to show nhBreen the mostly intact ruin that sheltered Telriy and the babe. The females were thirty armlengths from their exit point at the edge of the skyship yard, just at the head of a cleared street.
He sprinted towards the building as lighting smashed against Mar's wards. The brilliance of the cold bluish light thrown off by the discharge overcame the warm yellow of the sunlight, making the ground that he ran over flash in strange colors. The attacks sent huge jolts through the background ether, telling him that an extremely powerful spell was being utilized.
That they faced a sorcerer of an exalted rank was a given.
Having his back to such powerful magic made him feel terribly exposed. Without his own personal wards, he might as well be naked on this magical battlefield, but he dared not yet use any significant magic where Mar could detect it.
The best that he could do was run faster.
And that he did.
Only steps from Telriy's refuge, he collapsed.
*************
1645 After the Founding of the Empire – Event +32*10 million cycles
PRIMARY SYSTEM MONITOR NODE ONE completed its calculations and without delay broadcast a single command to all nodes: RESET.
*************
Out of the corner of his eye, Mar saw Waleck fall.
His immediate thought was that the ethereal barriers that he had cast to contain the magical attacks from the three sorcerers -- they could be nothing else -- had not been completely effective and some deadly spell had slipped through to strike the old man.
Gritting his teeth, he redoubled his efforts, layering sound-color on top of sound-color to confine the trio and the others that the ether told him were within the metal skyship. As one ethereal attack after another, all spells that he recognized from the old man's instruction in the Great Waste, struck at his bulwarks, dislodging and disrupting some, he continued to build more, both above and below ground. The aggregated mass of spells came to resemble a sphere and when it was done he knew that it was impenetrable to any magic or natural force that he knew.
Indeed, at about the same time as it became apparent to Mar that the spells cast against his barriers were entirely without effect, the attacks from the trapped sorcerers ceased. For good measure, he continued to add even more layers: illusions and guises to trap and confuse, undertime barriers to block physical escape, fields of raw modulations drawn from the earth, the stones, and the sky that would crush, break, and suffocate
Then he ran to Waleck. It was with undisguised relief that he saw the old man sitting up. Waleck had a hand to his head, but Mar saw no blood.
"Are you hurt? I can get you to Llylquaendt in an instant."
The old man shook his head and stood without difficulty. "No, I am fine. I think I just fainted. Our swift passage through undertime may have weakened me for a moment."
Mar nodded and then dashed around the face of the building to the archway where Telriy stood with their child.
She smiled when she saw him and some of his anxiety faded. He made his expression stern. "Attacking the sorcerers was foolish."
"Someone had to."
"It didn't have to be you."
"Then who else?"
"Me."
"Even wizardry can't put you everywhere at once."
When Waleck walked into view, Telriy stiffened.
"I want you to take Telriy and the baby back to her villa," he told the old man.
"I'm staying," she declared.
"Celly doesn't need to be here."
"She's safer here than she is anywhere."
"With the two of you here, I won't be able to focus on what needs to be done."
This, at last, seemed to convince her.
"Alright, but I don't need him as an escort."
He started to tu
rn away, but she came up to him, hooked one arm behind his neck while the other cradled Celly, and kissed him intensely, then spun about and walked away along the street.
Since it had been years -- at least for him -- since she had kissed him like that, his eyes lingered on her until she turned a corner and went out of sight.
*************
As he stood alongside Mar observing the shuttle, Waleck considered his memories.
His mind was flooded with them, not overpowered, just full.
They were no longer fogged and incomplete.
He remembered everything.
He remembered every time that his broken mind had conjured a new facet of himself.
He remembered every name that he had ever used.
He remembered every scheme and plan that those various beings had concocted.
He remembered every person that he had encountered, both in peace and in war.
He remembered every woman that he had tarried with.
He remembered every child that he had sired and left when his madness had taken him onto another path.
He remembered every deed, both good and foul, that he had done.
He remembered every day and every year of the dozens of lives that he had lived.
And none of the remembrances caused him much distress. He did wonder after the lost children and their mothers, but knew that all of them must have lived out their lives long ago.
His memories were just facts and places and moments, the vast majority of them so far separated from this moment that they no longer had any significance.
And he was just ... himself.
FORTY-TWO
With a hard glance, Mar dispersed the first two balls of pulsing green light that appeared between him and Waleck and the invaders' ethereal prison. The second vanished with a twitch of his eyes. Both flux modulations were too weak to cause any harm even if they had gotten close.
"How are those getting through my wards?" he asked the old man in complaint.
"Those are not weapons, Mar," Waleck informed him with a gentle smile. "Those are imps. Imps are based upon a natural ethereal phenomenon and are created from local background ether at the target point, a linked manifestation of a flux modulation that exists at the caster's location. You could think of them as a reflection. There is no direct linear transference of flux between origin and target, thus standard wards cannot intercept them. This particular sort functions primarily as a communications device. They are trying to talk to us."
"Can they be at all dangerous?"
Waleck gave a slight smile. "Not to you."
They still stood in the archway that had sheltered Telriy and Celly. From here they could see both the grounded skyship and the figures of the three sorcerers, who had made no move to return to their craft.
"Do you know where that might have come from?" Mar asked Waleck, pointing at the skyship, which was all smooth metal and sharp surfaces like shark fins.
"Oh, yes. That is a shuttle."
Mar recognized that the term was from Common, but his all but faded knowledge of the ancient language provided no meaning. "Then it's from the age of magic?"
"Most assuredly. Shuttles were used to pass outside the atmosphere -- Did you know that there is no air above a certain altitude? -- to reach the Orbitals, manmade moons crafted and put in place with magic. Today we call them the Cousins."
Waleck stopped and looked around. "I did not put it together until just now, but the Monolith is -- or was -- the location of the third launch site. The location was a well kept secret, but few facts escaped the scrutiny of the City's intelligence service. Civilian shuttles, such as that one clearly is, had to land and take off with assistance from the magics of the sites. They were not designed for independent navigation. They had no choice on where to land. It had to be here."
"Could these sorcerers have been living up there since the end of the ancient world?"
"The Orbitals are far enough away to have been unaffected by the reinforcing flux overloads of the cataclysm and the space beyond has no water or air to corrode them, so the structures could have survived intact for these millennia -- as they clearly have -- but the habitable sections are not large enough to sustain an expanding population. Also, I doubt that an active population could have succeeded in maintaining static numbers for all this time without serious complications, both social and genetic."
"More ancients in stasis."
"That would be my guess."
Mar felt the ether stir and turned to see Master Khlosb'ihs and a dozen marines in full armor trotting up the street. All of them hugged the ruined building walls to the left, but the shipwright was trotting without much regard for the armsmen who were trying to keep their shields between him and the ancient skyship.
"My lord king!" Khlosb'ihs called out. "The Queen told us where you were and I thank all the Gods that you are here! I have all the legionnaires and marines of the Monolith Contingent prepared to attack on your command."
"How many casualties did we suffer?" Mar asked as the marines automatically formed a defensive shield rank around him, Waleck, and the shipwright.
"None, my lord king. The Gods must have intervened. No crews were at work on the hulls that were crushed. We had moved everyone over to rush the completion of the Albatross. One lumberman who was working in the stacks fell and broke his arm when he ran out of the way, but that was the only injury."
Mar made a mental note to arrange the "intervention" when he had more time. If written out, his list of needed "interventions" already would have covered more than seven dozen pages -- front and back.
"Order the marines and legionnaires to stand by. I want everyone cleared at least a thousand paces away from the yards."
Khlosb'ihs nodded in quick agreement. "Should I leave the marines here with you, my lord king?"
"No. I may have to destroy the metal skyship and I don't want to have to worry about anyone else."
As the Viceroy and his guards moved away, Waleck caught his attention. "They have sent another communication imp."
Watchful, Mar allowed this one to approach. It proved to be about the size of a melon and more or less transparent. When delved, he found a simple coughing-copper shell with an excited-tan at its center.
The voice that came out of it was strong, male, and polite. It spoke with a cultured Mhajhkaeirii'n accent, its solid consonants and fully voiced vowels similar to Lord Ghorn's manner of speech, but Mar felt that this accent was somehow artificial.
"Greetings. We propose a truce and discussions to end this standoff."
Mar mimicked the same accent. "There is no standoff. You have been imprisoned for your crimes. We are determining at this moment whether the others aboard your craft are innocent of your actions or also deserve to receive the same fate as the three of you."
He glanced at Waleck. The old man grinned and nodded to indicate approval of Mar's tone and gambit.
The voice replied immediately. "Only I am responsible for the violence done today. My two companions here and those aboard the shuttle had nothing whatsoever to do with my actions and should be held blameless for any injury or damage caused by our arrival."
To absolutely insure the privacy of the consultation, Mar opened a portal and drew Waleck halfway in, so that they were neither fully within normal time nor fully within undertime. The old man, while he seemed uncomfortable still with the ethereal torrent, made no reaction to the unannounced transition.
"He's taking all the blame on himself," Mar said, thinking.
"The sign of an honorable and brave man," the old man agreed. "Or a very sly one."
"Even if they surrender, I can't let them go. As powerful as their magic is, no one else could stop them."
"Then keep them under your thumb here at the Monolith. If they are honorable, then we should be able to negotiate a binding agreement with them."
"What if they don't keep their word?"
Waleck waved a hand towards the annihilating heart
of the torrent. "Then their fate is that of all dishonorable men."
Mar shifted the two of them back into normal time. Only one second had passed.
"If as you say," Mar said to the imp, "your comrades are blameless for the damage that you have caused, then they shall not be held liable for it. However, they are not entirely without fault. As you, they have entered the territory of the Empire without permission."
"The magic of our craft would not allow us to land anywhere else."
"A fact that does not excuse the violation, only explains the means of it."
"I apologize for the offence that we have given and wish to learn how we might make reparations."
"That shall be determined in due course. If we release you, will you agree to return to your own places?"
"Our craft cannot return us without the magics that are buried beneath your city."
"You can access these magics?"
"We do not know of a certainty, but believe that we can. The spells are not presently working. We know that extensive repairs must be made, but do not yet know the exact nature of those repairs or the length of time that will be necessary to accomplish them."
"Why did you land here without knowing that you could leave?"
"One of our other craft was damaged by a magic projectile fired from this vicinity. It crashed, but there are survivors. We came to render them aid."
Mar took note of the fact that the disembodied voice had been careful to make no accusations that might enflame the situation.
"We fired no projectile at your other craft."
"In our rush to help our friends, we made a number of quick assumptions that have since proven incorrect. Our fundamental objective, however, has not changed. Our friends must be rescued." The voice paused. "Will you allow some of us to fly to the site of the crash? Many of them may be injured."
"No, but we will have the survivors brought here."
"Misunderstandings between the people that you send and our friends would be certain, as many of them do not speak your tongue. The smaller craft that we carry, which is much like your skyships but many times more swift, could reach them in less than an hour."
Thief (The Key to Magic Book 7) Page 23