“You don’t know her like I do.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Trell found Xander’s eyes. “I won’t let her hurt Kara. I won’t let anyone hurt Kara, ever.”
Xander grunted and thumped Trell’s shoulder. When he looked ahead, he actually wore a grin.
“See,” Melyssa said, still showing her back. “I chose a strong protector for your daughter.”
Xander’s scowl returned. “You could have chosen me.”
“I made choices and I’ve lived with them. I’ve lived ninety years, and I’ve seen more people I loved die than you’ve known in all your life. I’m about ready. If you must kill me, do it, but let me help you save your daughter first.”
Xander glowered at her back, but didn’t say anything else. Trell considered what Melyssa had done to both of them — wiping away their memories and families — and found he could not forgive her. Melyssa might be their ally, now, but that could change. Fast.
Jyllith led them on as Aryn’s light flickered through a tunnel that twisted upon itself like a great snake. Without Jyllith, there was no chance they could have navigated these halls in time to save Kara. Breath taking her Champion had likely saved them all.
They eventually reached a closed set of massive oak doors, locked tight with a bar of solid steel. Byn lifted the bar and set it aside as if it weighed nothing. He barely made any sound.
“How did Cantrall bar this door from the outside?” As Byn grabbed the door ring, Sera snatched his wrist.
“Don’t,” Sera commanded. “Don’t you dare.”
She pushed Byn back and lowered her head. She raised her arms and chanted incomprehensible words in a low voice. Manifestations of darkness appeared before her hands. Demons loyal to Ruin. They snarled and ghosted forward.
More manifestations burst from the oak doors and ripped into those summoned by Ruin. They fought, briefly, but Ruin’s demons soon gained the upper hand, tearing the lesser demons limb from limb. When the conflict was done, Ruin’s demons smashed into the door and burned jagged symbols in the oak. Inky smoke rose.
Byn just stared at her, eyes wide. Lost.
“Open it,” Ruin’s deep voice commanded. Byn leapt to obey. Aryn grabbed the other door ring and the two of them pulled. Together, they forced the ancient oak doors open with a deafening creak.
“Well done.” Xander stared at the huge room beyond and the stairs rising at its far wall. “Shall I shout obscenities down the hall a few times, just to make sure Cantrall knows we’re here?”
“He knows.” Jair Deymartin stepped from the darkness atop the stairs. Two huge revenants clanked into view behind him.
Sera’s hand came up, her slim fingers snapping out. More of Ruin’s indefinable dark nothing leapt from her open palm. It lashed toward the revenants. Jair stepped into its path, and Sera’s power evaporated.
“She fights you.” Jair bared bright white teeth. “Doesn’t she, Ruin? Sera won’t let you destroy her friends.”
Sera lowered her arm. “Step aside.” Something forced her arm back up again. Ruin didn’t care for Jair as Sera did.
“No,” Jair said, as revenants clanked from all corners of the darkness, filling the room. “I don’t know how you found your way here, and I really don’t care. I’m not letting you through this door.”
Trell counted dozens of the armored monsters as he readied the revenant greatsword he had stolen back in Highridge Pass. He searched for any trace of the brave Soulmage he had come to know on the long journey from Solyr. Was Jair lost to them?
“Listen to yourself!” Byn stepped into the room, heedless of the revenants. “The Five are here to stop this! Doesn’t that tell you something about the man in your head? Drown me, Jair, you just told off Ruin himself!”
Jair’s confident smile faltered. “I didn’t...” Then his eyes narrowed once more. “The Five enslave all humanity. If you try to stop Elder Cantrall, I’ll kill you.”
“Trell,” Melyssa said softly. “We need those stairs.”
Trell raised his greatsword and started for the stairs. As he did so, lightning flashed inside the room, blinding him. When his vision cleared, a huge revenant with a skull-shaped helmet straightened in the midst of the others. It held a glowing sword of pure light. The other revenants stomped aside, leaving a clear path for Trell.
The giant revenant lowered its sword. It beckoned him closer. It offered a challenge for the stairs.
Trell walked forward and watched the revenants in the room, but none challenged him. Life’s ice sheathed his blade and then he jogged, ran, sprinted. He screamed with all his might as he brought the blade scything around to cut the revenant in half.
The skull-faced revenant’s lightning blade flashed up and blocked his strike. Trell nearly lost his grip, the impact rattling through his ice-covered arms. He stumbled, barely keeping his balance, and then the revenant moved forward. Striking fast.
Trell somehow blocked the revenant’s first strike, but even doing that sent him reeling. Rippling thunder followed the revenant’s sword as it spun the blade, extended one hand, and offered him a mocking bow. Its skull-faced helmet grinned wide.
The revenants in the room seemed honor bound to ignore their duel, but that had not stopped them from moving on everyone else. Glowing red davenger eyes emerged from the shadows, and then the mass of Mavoureen charged his friends. The front ranks simply evaporated as Aryn raised thick waves of flame.
Xander stepped forward, tossing out scythes that appeared to be formed of green energy. They took off revenant knees and sliced davengers in half. More flame and gusts of air joined those scythes.
“Well!” Xander shouted. “It seems we have their attention!”
The others had the army well in hand. This revenant general was his alone. Trell turned, readied his blade, and charged as one of Sera’s bursts of nothing blew by his side. It struck a davenger, and the demon vanished with a hollow pop.
“Al elite sancadynis tyl adres!” Trell swung his sword.
The revenant general turned Trell’s strike aside so easily that he almost tripped over the stairs. Then it dashed forward, lightning sword striking repeatedly. Trell could not keep up with it, and blow after blow slammed into his icy armor, knocking chunks right off him. How long until that sword penetrated? How long until he died?
Bright yellow eyes flashed inside the helmet as Trell found a pattern in its attacks. He stopped looking at where it struck and visualized where it would strike. Life’s strength allowed him to wield the massive greatsword as fast as a much smaller weapon, yet all that did was allow him to push the revenant a single step back.
“Swordking! Watch yourself!” Xander stepped up to guard Trell’s back, parting a davenger’s head from its shoulders with another spectral scythe. “I can feel the presence inside that body. That actually is one of the Mavoureen!”
That made sense, given the monster’s unusual speed and agility. It fought better than he did, and Trell’s best efforts only kept him from losing yet more ground. How could he defeat it?
Trell ducked, avoiding the lightning sword streaking over his head, and Xander cursed as it just missed him. Trell’s answering strike seemed slow as the revenant flipped its thundering blade in midswing. It parried Trell’s thrust and stomped back.
“As long as I’m watching your back, boy,” Xander shouted, “take care with mine?”
A davenger leapt from the darkness. Blasts of air dropped the davenger the moment it arrived, slamming it into the ground. Jyllith crushed it bone by bone and then a furious tornado rose around them, isolating the revenant general from its army.
“Deal with him,” Jyllith said, her voice soft enough to be a small child’s. “You will not be disturbed.”
Trell turned to the Mavoureen general, now waiting at the stairs with its lightning sword in both hands. It wanted him to attack again. It wanted to prove its superiority once more.
“Life,” Trell said. “I need more power.”
“More
power than this will damage you. Change you forever.”
“I don’t care. I need to defeat this monster and that’s the only way we can do it. Together.”
“My power is yours. All of it.”
The streams coursing through Trell’s veins surged into a torrent. Water filled his lungs and ice crackled over his bones. He and Life were one. He drowned again in the Layn river.
Trell howled and dashed forward, striking so fast he barely saw the blows. The revenant general kept up, but only just. He even managed to back it to the stairs. They were finally matched, and everything Trell threw at the demon simply wasn’t enough!
“Move!” Sera yelled. “I have him!”
Nothing blew past Trell’s left side. The revenant catapulted itself five stairs up as Ruin’s power disintegrated three stairs below. The revenant tossed its lightning sword like a throwing knife.
Trell swiped at the sword as he ducked left. His ice-sheathed blade sliced air as the lightning sword arced under his swing and darted toward Sera.
Byn caught it a pace from Sera’s face, bending it and twisting it. Doing all that with just one hand. He forced the blade to turn, jammed it into the davenger clutched in his other hand, and flinched as the demon corpse exploded in a burst of black blood.
“Finish it, Trell! Take it down!”
Trell charged. The now unarmed revenant lowered its grinning skull. The yellow in its eyes flared just before Life’s power sliced through its chest, but as its armor split open, Trell found it empty. The Mavoureen had vanished.
As the armor crumbled, Trell realized the revenant’s last gesture had been one of sincere respect. He ignored that, dashed up the stairs, and met Jair’s simple iron blade. Metal crunched ice.
“You can’t do this!” Jair shouted.
Jair struck again and again, eyes green and strikes precise. Trell blocked and frowned. Jair was channeling a swordsman, a talented one at that, but even this soul would be no match for a revenant general. Or the Tellvan swordking who had just struck him down.
“Don’t be a fool!” Jair fell back with each step and swing from Trell, blade shaking in his hands. “Without the Mavoureen to save us, this world will—”
Trell sent his opponent’s blade spinning into the darkness with a single upward strike. “Quiet.” He punched Jair in the gut, hard enough to knock him breathless. “Move.”
Trell pushed Jair aside and hopped over his prone, writhing body. He hoped he hadn’t broken anything, but the important thing was Jair wasn’t dead. “I’m going for Kara!” he shouted.
Confused shouts answered him. One was deep enough to be Sera or Ruin, but Trell paid no heed. Two more revenants fell to his blade, and then the hallway to Kara was clear.
Trell dashed into the darkness with ice inside his veins.
Chapter 24
KARA WAS VAGUELY AWARE of the world around her, and screams filled that world. Someone with a very deep voice was chanting some very bad things. After a long moment, she realized she was chanting. Cantrall was chanting through her lips.
“Well,” her own lips said. “More resourceful than I expected.”
They looked down. They still wore the same bloodied academy shirt and brown pants Kara had worn since she left Solyr. She even felt the comforting weight of her reagent pouch against her chest. Cantrall had not discarded it, and why would he?
They sat cross-legged in the middle of a rounded tower of stone bricks. It was bigger than Solyr’s Council Chamber, the rocks enormous and pitted with age. Charred silhouettes burned into the walls showed her where the Mavoureen had incinerated the Terras elders. The first casualties of thousands in the All Province War.
Behind them rose a pair of great oak gates, shut and sealed with blood glyphs. The gates of Terras. Beyond those gates the Mavoureen hungered.
“Cantrall.” Kara forced her lips to move. “My friends have come for you, haven’t they?”
Cantrall stood them up. “This doesn’t change anything. It just means I’ll be forced to inflict more senseless pain.”
Kara examined the ring in which they stood. It was an immense, multi-tiered circle of glyphs, painted in glowing magesand. Demon glyphs, but more complex and powerful than any she had ever seen. Were these the glyphs of the Mavoureen themselves?
“They didn’t even realize what they were doing,” Cantrall whispered. “The Terras elders were fools toying with gods. What did they expect would happen?”
“They’ll kill you,” Kara said. “They’ll kill me!”
“My life is meaningless, but yours is not. Very soon now all this suffering will end. All the suffering in the world will end.”
Cantrall didn’t know how true his last words were. “Damn you, listen—!”
“Silence.” Cantrall snapped his fingers, and then Kara could not control her lips or anything else. She was his.
“I have to concentrate.” Cantrall sang.
Kara recognized the words of his quiet hymn as the ancient language. It shocked her. No one had been able to sing the ancient language since Torn. It was an art lost to their world forever, far more powerful and flexible than simple glyph magic.
The words Cantrall sang were almost impossible to comprehend. They didn’t sound like they could come from any human tongue. Kara could not understand a word of it, but the closed oak gates in the side of the tower trembled.
When Cantrall finished, thunder rumbled ominously. The gates flew open with a massive crack. That revealed a yawning maw of swirling purple clouds and unleashed inhuman screams.
They stared as a dot burst from a distant purple cloud, growing rapidly in size and sound. A spectral worm lined with spinning spikes. As it sped toward the tower, it made a sound like a thousand butchers sharpening knives at once. Kara couldn’t even scream.
The entire tower shook as the worm slammed into the far side of the open gates. How could those gates have stopped such a beast? The worm reared, three joined flaps peeling back to reveal a hollow throat. It latched onto the archway like a leech on a wound.
Glowing yellow eyes flared inside the worm’s gullet. They drifted forward as the space between the gates crackled with green magic. A shield of spectral energy threw them back, and then Kara saw Torn.
She caught a glimpse of a thin, naked man with short gray hair, a hard chin, and a web of bloody scars across his body. They would have torn any normal man apart. He stood inside the open gates and held that green shield strong despite his wounds. His torture.
Kara felt sick and cold. Her great-grandfather, the High Protector, had held these gates shut with his blood glyphs and will for over seventy years. He had endured torture far worse than anything she could imagine and he had never faltered, never broken.
Now she was going to make all that mean nothing.
“Cantrall!” Trell shouted.
They spun around at the fierce challenge to find a man covered in icy armor. He charged into the room and Kara struggled with her lips. She tried to shout, tried to scream.
“Trell, no.” Cantrall raised her hands. “Stop.”
Trell pointed his sword. “Release Kara. Now.”
Her sleeve thrashed as Cantrall threw out her hand, scribing a glyph faster than she could follow. Her Hand of Breath tossed Trell into the wall like a cork in a massive wave. Kara screamed, silently.
Trell hit the bricks hard enough to send chips and powder rattling across the floor, yet Life’s Champion struggled to his feet with one determined grunt. A collision that would have smashed any normal man into paste had barely fazed him. Perhaps Life was going to save her!
“Fall.” Cantrall threw out both hands. Trell snapped his sword up as Life froze the glyphed air. It split Cantrall’s strike around his raised sword in a giant, glittering snowflake, and then Trell charged.
Kara felt her lips move and realized Cantrall was distracted. He blew her body into the air with a thick Hand of Breath, flipping over Trell’s next swing, but he couldn’t keep that up forever. If Trell
distracted Cantrall, could she seize back control of her body?
“Make him glyph!” Kara shouted. “Do that, and I can—“
Cantrall shut her mouth. “What is your plan? To murder her?”
Trell halted. “No.”
Kara wanted to scream at him, but Cantrall wouldn’t let her. She tore at the walls of her mind and found another opening, another few words. “Kill me! Please!”
Trell raised his sword. He bared his teeth and dashed forward, blade coming around. “Forgive me!”
Cantrall scribed and stars flashed before Kara’s eyes. Astral glyphs. They spun, now behind Trell, and tossed a massive Hand of Breath into Trell’s back. It was so powerful it lifted his whole body and slammed him into the wall. He dropped his sword.
Kara gasped. “Stop!”
The Hand of Breath dropped Trell and then caught him again, spinning him and smashing him against the wall. Over, and over, and over. Cracking ice and bone. Blood splattered the stones as Kara finally managed to jerk her own hand to the left, mussing Cantrall’s glyph. Far too late. Trell’s broken body fell.
“Useless.” Cantrall stalked forward and scribed a Hand of Heat. “I didn’t want to kill you, swordking—”
Gouts of massive flame roared from the doorway. Kara’s fingers scribed rapidly and raised a wall of ice. The flames cut right through it and then they were backing up, stepping inside the circle of Mavoureen glyphs just in time to avoid incineration.
“The power of the Five,” Cantrall said. “How inspiring.”
A blistered human form stomped into the Terras glyphing room with both its black-charred hands lit with flame. “That’s not the half of it.” The demon launched another fireball. “It’s time for you to burn again, respected elder.” That charred corpse was Aryn Locke.
Cantrall sat the two of them, knees spread and heels crossed, right in the middle of his circle of Mavoureen glyphs. He pressed her hands to her thighs as Aryn’s flames rolled around a protective bubble. A Mavoureen variant of Olden’s shell?
“Aryn!” a woman shouted. “Watch your flames!”
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