by Kim Wedlock
How dare he. How dare he! He didn't hear the words simultaneously bellowing from his own lips.
What right did he have to cast such judgement? Who was he? What did he know?! How could he know?! He had given up everything for his country, and again he was being told he would be its undoing! What gave him the right?! What gave anyone the right?!
"Tell me where it is!"
Salus bared his suddenly wolf-like teeth, but a ghoulish chuckle struggled out between Denek's screams. "Fuhrahz," he hacked, blood running down his chin, and he leered vehemently into the keliceran's black eyes, set within a harsh, gaunt visage. "I would never...tell you where it is... The world...would fall...all over again..."
"Tell me!"
The spells came faster, his movements sharpening in his fury. The chamber reverberated with cries of agony as Denek thrashed in his chair. But through his face's distressed contortions, smiles began to break, and his mindless cackling soon outweighed his howls. Infuriated, Salus's assault became faster still.
But blind rage couldn't smother the sudden tug on the edge of his senses; a familiar trace, a hum in the air, but one that was somehow different from anything memory offered.
Magic. Dangerous magic.
His spell expired, but his fingers didn't repeat it. A flash filled the room, small but dazzling in the darkness, and Salus had the time only to raise his hands in defence. But it was pointless.
The flash - the flash that had been coming for him - never struck.
The light burst, and the immediate crash of shattering wood was punctuated by the most terrible shriek, an awful cry, blood-curdling, and yet braced. And the laughter had stopped. When Salus's vision cleared he found the mage heaped upon the floor, the chair broken and scattered around him while he struggled to push himself up from his side, his hands still tightly bound behind him.
But confusion had silenced his rage and stunned the spinning of his mind. He turned around to the others, but where he had intended to find an explanation for the mage's spell casting despite his bindings, he found only four pairs of eyes staring back in paralysed terror. Even Teagan, portian, displayed something that resembled fright. But while at first it seemed their sentiments were in line with his own, when their eyes didn't shift from their lock upon him, he realised his mistake. Their terror was born of him.
Salus's frown worsened with his confusion until the same nail-scraping laughter, though choked and littered with retching, recaptured his attention.
He spun and grasped the mage by his shredded collar and a handful of long, knotted hair, snatching him to his feet. Another wincing grunt was forced from his lungs, but despite the threat in Salus's blue eyes, Denek continued to laugh.
"What was your grandmother's name?" He asked venomously, grinning like a viper.
Salus bared his teeth. "I have no family."
"Oh, if only that...were true. You look upon magic...with disdain, and yet--" he hacked suddenly, making no effort in exhaustion or politeness to turn his head as he freely coughed blood. "Yet you posses its roots...deeper than you would ever...dare to think..."
His exasperation intensified, but Teagan's soft and suddenly dumbstruck voice intruded from behind him before he could spit his amassing questions.
"Elven blood..."
Denek's foul grin widened. "He's got it."
"Don't try to distract me!" Salus suddenly yelled. "Either of you! Tell me where the Zi'veyn is or you will die here!" His blood boiled over as Denek responded with only a cackle once again, and he loosed his magic without restraint, all concerns forgotten. However he had done it, he would give him no chance at all to cast that unsigned spell again.
"Water..."
The guards ignored his rasping plea.
"W...water..."
They didn't turn. There was no need. He hadn't gotten up. He still lay on the floor of his cell where the breakers had dumped him on Salus's order. He hadn't managed even to roll over onto his back, though his seared and blackened hands played only a minor role in the fact.
"Dol...Dolunokh..."
A slight furrow formed in both of their brows, but still neither turned. "What?"
"There is...a door...in...Dolu...nokh..." He choked and whimpered pathetically. "The Zi'veyn...is there..." Another fit of coughing racked his broken body, and crimson spittle splattered the floor. "Please, water...water..."
A single look, brief but meaningful, passed between the guards, and after an unspoken exchange, one stepped away on silent feet. Denek's haggard, shredded breath was all that disturbed the silence until several pairs of urgent footsteps echoed their way down the corridor. They drew up level, and at the creak of the iron door, he pulled his tired eyes back open as far as the swelling would allow.
The keliceran's silhouette stepped inside, and he felt his rapid heart jump. He watched him drop into a crouch before him and study him with deceptive eyes. "Dolunokh?" He asked quietly. Denek nodded slowly, and Salus measured him with his gaze for another long moment, doing nothing as he choked. "Take us there. Elf."
Chapter 60
Silver blinded. Shards of violet tore the sky. Crackling and humming throbbed in the air. Thoughts stalled as chaos deafened the senses and tumultuous shifts of the land buckled knees, dropping Rathen to the tangle of up-heaved grass, jagged rocks and gnarled roots. His mind blurred as if his eyes were spinning in their sockets; primeval alarm and disorientation roared through his veins, conflicting with the oppressive, peaceful aura that wove into every terrible detail, seeking like a forest wisp to lure him to a gruesome fate.
But he knew better than to succumb to it.
He squeezed his eyes shut against the turmoil and forced himself back to his feet, but a sudden shudder beneath his left unleashed another hot surge of adrenaline. He barely managed to scramble away as the ground yawned open beneath him, a bellowed warning tearing from his lips, but as he found safety and turned to ensure the others', he found himself alone.
He spun around in a frenzy, wondering in the midst of his panic just who this Eizariin was and where in this most recent demonstration of brazen elven presumption he had sent them.
But he found no sign of the others, nor any clue as to where he was himself. Dizziness joined his confusion. He grounded his feet, forcing his spinning to stop, and focused himself on recovering his bearings and driving them back into place. "Garon!" The land shifted abruptly once again. He fought to stay on his feet and braced as a wind, one curiously alluring, struck him out of nowhere. "Anthis!" There were no answers. He began twisting in renewed agitation, searching for any sight of them, grasping all the while the single unlikely comfort of knowing that Aria had not been among them. "Petra!"
Again, he forced his panic to subdue. A door. He'd said there was a door.
But where?! There was nothing here! Trees stood shattered, raised, bent and tilted, crossing like wooden blades on a petrified battlefield, while the land around it either rose like welts or had been rent into chasms that even the unending flashes of lightning couldn't illuminate. Rocks torn free floated in the air, some mere pebbles, others the size of wagons, and travelled along random paths until they crashed into trees, which merely altered their relentless course. Orange glows rose from crevices in the distance, but he didn't dare to consider their source.
But there was no construction. This place, increasingly unrecognisable as belonging to any world he knew, had probably been nothing more than a sparse forest before this magic had obliterated it. Perhaps elven ruins had stood, but if so, they'd been torn apart beyond distinction and any lingering traces swallowed by the earth.
Nothing at all stood for a door to have been built into.
A petrifying thought began to creep up in the back of his mind, clawing its way forwards as his skin grew hot and clammy. This is what fate awaited Turunda if they failed.
A boulder twice his size hurtled through the air at frightening speed, which he noticed just in time to avoid with a hasty backwards jump. But as it crashed into an
d felled a tree, another, lighter realisation mercifully followed: if this magic was leaking from the 'place of magic', and the door to that place was indeed somewhere here...then he now stood at its source. Perhaps, if he could get inside, there would be something he could finally do...
'Find the Zikrahlehveyn and get out.'
He evaded another gaping chasm and shielded his eyes from another burst of purple lightning, feeling the hope sink before it could truly rise. He would have no opportunity. It would be too dangerous to spare the attention. If the magic was so destructive outside, then a place built of nothing but would be inconceivably worse, and as the only competent caster among them, he had a responsibility to keep the others safe from it.
Assuming he ever found them...
"Eyila!"
Then a voice, one broken by the winds and muffled by the air's dense hum, slipped through the discord. He called back and followed the answer, and soon a silhouette rose over the crest of up-heaved land and staggered against an uprooted tree.
"Garon!" Rathen ran towards him, ricocheting as he was grazed by another small but violent wind, and rushed to catch him as the inquisitor stumbled down the sheer slope. Somehow, he stayed on his feet, but his limp revealed that it had been more luck than skill.
"Where are we?" He asked as Rathen steadied him at the foot.
"I have no idea. Where are the others?"
Garon shook his head, then cast a surveying glance around them. "Where do we go?" He turned his eyes back upon him with purpose, no duller for the havoc of their surroundings nor his own apparent injuries, his limp joined now by a subtle clutching at his side. "Have you found the door?"
"Look around!" Rathen yelled over an eerily hollow crack of thunder. "There is no door!"
"There are no buildings. The place was built inside out from magic, the door could be just as intangible! The elf said you're the only one who can open it - you could also be the only one who can find it!"
"The magic is in chaos--"
"Then the magic of the door should be organised!"
Rathen growled over a rumble of the earth. "You assume it's still standing!"
"We wouldn't have been sent here otherwise - just search!"
His body stiffened, but he couldn't dispute the point. He closed his eyes, shutting away the world and Garon's dutiful calls to the others with his very best efforts, seeking out longer and longer spell chains amongst the ethereal rubble while fighting off his swelling panic and the unnatural tranquillity that permeated the violently thrumming air.
Salus's stomach turned, but his composure didn't break. He'd used the Arana's translocators in the past when urgent missions had demanded near immediate results, but the spell discs had been slow to work and the dematerialising sensation, he now realised, was quite comfortable. But the magic of elves - for Denek was indeed such a thing - was instantaneous and sent a flood of nausea through him like nothing else.
Fighting it away, he found himself and those few he'd ordered to follow standing under a foreign sky, filled with a full and blinding moon and streaked by amethyst lightning. The land around them was cataclysmic, but the worst of it was hidden by the darkness. Rage filled him; this was what fate awaited Turunda if he failed.
He stood taller and turned to the elf, ignoring the persistent tremors beneath his feet. "Where is this door?"
Denek, still brown-haired and white-skinned beneath the spell he was too weak to break, looked back at him in exhaustion. He would have been in a heap on the ground if Erran hadn't been holding him up, the only one among them even loosely capable of predicting and countering his magic. "It is hidden," he rasped.
"Then perhaps you ought to find it."
He swallowed dryly and looked around, but it was clear his glazed eyes were not what searched. He soon pointed eastwards towards a spot identical to where they were standing. They each peered, but there was nothing to see but splintered tree trunks.
But Salus didn't share the others scepticism. "A spell?" The elf nodded. "Then do what you must." He nodded to Erran, whose own eyes glazed with another sense's concentration while the elf focused himself upon the spot.
Salus's heart thumped so hard it could have shattered his ribs. Was he really so close? In a few moments, could the Zi'veyn really be his and out of the Order's reach forever? Could he truly, finally be about to foil the Order's plans to plunge Turunda into true chaos? Had he actually outmanoeuvred Anthis Karth? The thoughts sent a dizzying wave of butterflies through his stomach and he felt himself begin to sweat. Desperation mounted, and an overwhelming sense of peace begin to settle in his mind far too soon. But he embraced it, until his heart leapt into his throat at the collapse of the ground beneath his feet.
A crack had snaked from a nearby fissure and was widening impossibly fast. Stone, soil and grass crumbled under his weight like a trapped door, as though the earth had already been hollowed out beneath. He slipped. He dropped. He heard the startled yells of the two cell guards who followed. His own voice caught in his throat.
Something solid struck the bottom of his feet and his knees gave way beneath him. Before he knew it, he and the others had been returned to the surface, dumped on the shaking ground and left to scramble to their feet and escape the rapidly widening chasm on their own. Its direction suddenly veered and Teagan was next to fall, but Erran was just as quick to rescue him.
But despite the turmoil, Salus was not completely blind. Another familiar tug on his numbed senses turned him around just in time to leap away from the scything claws of a ferocious white beast. He had no opportunity to wonder at where it had come from as terror surged through his core; his blood burned, reflexes sharpened, and as it turned, tracking his movements with three times his speed, he felt a pang of helplessness. But he could not be helpless. He forced himself to dive away from its frightening agility, narrowly avoiding another rake of its claws, but it twisted into a pirouette, an inescapable, spinning mass of black and white thorns.
His eyes gaped in shock as blue fire exploded between them, engulfing the mass and leaving him unscathed. The beast howled raggedly, a blood-chilling sound, and its advance devolved into a frantic flailing.
Salus needed no time to understand the source of the flames. He leapt into the writhing fire, identified the creature's head, and snapped its neck with practised accuracy.
Then, finally, he breathed. Slowly, the world returned to a familiar pace, the cool flames extinguishing as his alarm passed, and the smoke was sucked away by a miniature cyclone, revealing beneath him the charred and smouldering remains of what once resembled a man.
He moved quickly as the ground shook again, but the split had trailed off in another random direction, and the others - Teagan, Erran and the two cell guards still well accounted for - had moved to safety a distance from the abyssal ledge. And all four stared at him with varying degrees of dubiety.
"We don't need him," Salus declared as he approached them. "The door is a spell. Erran can locate it."
"The spell will be of elven make," the mage pointed out carefully. "I can locate it, but I doubt I could do any more."
"Then I'll open it."
"Forgive me, Keliceran," Teagan then spoke up, "but if you do possess elven blood, it's only partial. There may not be enough for you to be able--"
"Well we'll never know until we try, will we?" Salus whipped away from him, his eyes venomous, and looked instead to Erran who yielded to his unspoken command, setting himself to locating the spell. It didn't take long before he stepped away. They followed close, trekking carefully over the narrowest cracks of the momentarily-still ground and dodging the paths of flying rocks, until they reached the same unimpressive spot Denek had indicated.
Then the duty shifted onto Salus. He closed his eyes and breathed to calm his fervoured mind, but while he concentrated, grasping his magic to search through the blinding, arcane jumble, doubts among the others began to rise. Salus felt them, too, but he also knew that he was right: until he tried, none of them
would know for certain if he could do it. He had, somehow, deflected Denek's attack in the cells on instinct, and had summoned an obedient flame only moments ago - all without signs, all without thought. Only the elves were said to be able to cast spells so effortlessly.
And his grandmother - Salus knew nothing of her, nor of his parents, but Denek wouldn't have been so specific if he hadn't known something. Perhaps he could tell, could see the ratio of elf to human within him, and while Salus was disinclined to take so little to heart, at the same time, he couldn't fight the gut feeling that it was all absolutely true.
He reined in his growing impatience and refocused his mind, ignoring the cynical looks he could feel burning into the back of his head. He could do this.
The five scrambled through the bombardment of magically-infused elements, hands and arms shielding their eyes from the shredding winds while they followed Rathen's equally blinded lead, taking care over their every uneasy step.
They had been reunited one at a time; Petra first, no worse for wear, and Anthis who had suffered from the onslaught of aerial rocks just as Garon had, but where Garon walked on by himself, refusing any help, Anthis needed none. But Eyila hadn't been so lucky. A deep cut had scored her thigh while her torso had been lashed by what could only have been quickly-spinning tree roots, and she walked only with Petra's aid. But that was not all; she was distracted, sluggish and doe-eyed, and in no mind to heal the wound that bled with her every step. Petra had bound it as best she could, but whether the girl's sudden subdual was a result of another injury or the touch of the surrounding magic, no one could say. Ensuring someone kept close enough to watch her and support her struggle was decidedly best for either possibility, and all that could presently be done.
"This magic," Rathen guessed when Petra had asked what had scattered them. "It must interfere with spells. I expect it'll affect anything I cast, and the elf must not have compensated for it."
"Then how do you expect to open this door?"