“I will cut that pretty face off before you kill me,” Swarn hissed. “For Audra, for Rea and for the dragons.”
The tiger was upon her then, tearing at her arm with its powerful jaws. She switched the knife to her other hand, swung it towards the tiger’s neck, but before she could cut its throat a tremendous force threw her back towards the wall. She struck it hard and all the air went out of her, but she managed not to drop the knife. For a moment her senses burst open, but the instant she smelled fire she clamped them shut again. She felt Nia approaching with the spear, wrestling with its Magic. She wanted to use Swarn’s own weapons against her, just to show off, but it would take her time to pervert such strong enchantments and this was to Swarn’s advantage. Her right arm had been torn badly by the tiger and was of little use to her now. With her left hand she hurled the knife again towards Nia. The arrows had come back to her quiver. Blocking the pain from her savaged arm as best she could, she fired off a second volley, these ones toward the tiger, but they were all sent off course and the knife too clattered to the ground. Swarn felt her concentration clouding and quickly repelled the Confusion. Slow, she was slow not to have known it was coming before it began. She lunged forward, laying hands on the spear Nia held. For a moment they wrestled for it and, because the spear was hers and all its power yearned towards her, Swarn won. She tried to drive it into her enemy but her hands began to fumble it suddenly. Again she had to pour all her power into fending off the Confusion.
“You look silly running around with your eyes closed and your face all pinched that way,” said Nia. “I don’t have to use Illusion, you know.”
Swarn felt something hurtling towards her. She opened her eyes and saw only a fog, thick and white, and then the thing struck her and she crashed to the ground, stunned. It was one of the carvings come loose from the wall. The stone head of a dragon.
“The Ancients would call it sacrilege,” rasped Swarn. “You murder their Oracle, desecrate their temples, destroy the Hall they built!”
“The Ancients don’t care,” Nia replied, and another great statue, this of a Mage, broke free of the wall and flew across the Hall, slamming into Swarn. The Confusion pressed hard against her mind. She forced it out, and as she did so she was struck yet again. This time she felt her ribs cave in beneath the blow. She gasped for air and pain shot through her. She accepted the pain this time. She could not hold off the pain as well as the Confusion. Somehow Nia had her spear again and she wasn’t sure how it had happened. With all her will she tugged it towards her, and it pulled Nia to her. She wrenched the spear away.
“I will kill you with your own spear eventually,” said Nia in her ear. “The only question is how close to dead you’ll be when I get to it.”
Swarn cleared her mind with an agonizing breath. It was nearly hailing slabs of stone and statues now. She locked her mind on one and caught hold of its flow, swung it round towards Nia. It shattered in the air before it struck the sorceress and Swarn felt a crushing blow to the back of her neck. She was flat on the stone floor, and opened her eyes without meaning to. Flames sprang up around her. She leaped above them, hanging onto her spear, which hovered in the air at a gasped command. Balancing on her spear, she reached into her pocket and hurled a sleeping powder at Nia. Nia brushed the potion from her, but it slowed her for a moment, and Swarn’s spear shot from under her, straight for Nia’s heart. She tried to dodge it but wasn’t quick enough and the spear went through the same shoulder that had taken the arrow wound. Nia cried out in rage and pain as the spear’s enchantment coursed through her bloodstream. Without her spear to stand on, Swarn had plunged into the flames below, but crawled free of them, rolling over to put them out. She could smell her own flesh sizzling.
Nia wrenched the spear from her shoulder, shuddering violently. She tried to hurl the spear at Swarn but it would not go, so she battered the witch with stones, half-burying her in them. Dazed, Swarn lay beneath the heap of rock and for a moment she could not move. It was all the time Nia needed. Clutching the spear with her two hands, she fought it to the finish. It broke with a thunderous clap and she gave a yell of triumph. Swarn was slowly, painfully, pulling herself out from under the rubble. The Confusion came upon her so quickly and powerfully that it took her whole. She fell back, bewildered, lost. Nia smiled, then heard her tiger growl warningly. Something large and white was flying towards her, and she heard the words of a Curse. Her vision began to cloud and a thread of icy fear wove its way into her blood. A Faery. She shook off the Curse with an angry shout, then hurled the bottom half of the broken spear into the myrkestra, which plunged straight to the ground, dead. The Faery rolled upright immediately, drawing his sword and beginning the Curse again. A dragon was coming at her from the other direction, pouring fire from its mouth. Nia pointed a finger in either direction and spoke two spells at once. She sent the dragon and its two passengers flying back into the wall and baffled the Faery’s tongue so he could not finish the Curse. The next instant, Jalo found himself bound with the same silver chains that Alvar had put on Malferio, and Charlie was no longer a dragon but trapped in the form of a cockroach.
“There,” Nia said a little breathlessly, smiling at Jalo and shrugging off the last clinging shadows of the unfinished Curse. “Isn’t it convenient I hung onto those chains, you naughty pactbreaker. Won’t your new king be cross when he hears what you’re up to?”
Nell was sprawled on the floor, banged up and winded from the dragon suddenly flying into the wall – this had not been in any way part of their attack plan. The cockroach scuttled to Nell’s side. She had not for a moment really believed they would fail – she didn’t have much experience with failure – and so she was slow to realize what was happening. Ander had spent a long time in the army, however. He had not really believed they would succeed and was quick to assess the new situation. He saw that Nia had neutralized the two new attackers who posed any kind of practical threat – the Faery and the Shade – and would now turn her attention to the witch. He knew what she would do even as she did it and he acted without thinking. The mission, after all, was to help the witch, to get her out of here. He was already up on his feet and running when the other half of the broken spear left Nia’s hand. He knocked it to the ground, picked it up and turned on the Sorceress. And then it was hard to say what happened, but the spear shaft was in her hand again rather than his and a moment later it caught him full in the chest. Nell could see the point of it come out his back, but it didn’t register, even as he staggered and then fell back amid the broken statues cluttering the ground.
Nia said, “That was rather heroic. Pointless, but heroism usually is.”
Rising to her feet was painful and her balance was off, but Nell stumbled over to where Ander lay impaled, staring about him in a startled sort of way. Nia watched them, interested.
“Mr. Brady,” said Nell thickly, “are you all right?”
It would occur to her later, when she had time to process it all, that this was probably the single stupidest thing she had ever said in her entire life. Ander Brady was not all right. He had a spear through his chest and would be dead in moments.
“Hello Nell,” said Ander, which was also an odd thing to say under the circumstances, but Ander would have no time to think about it later. He gave a sputtering little cough, gasped down one last breath, and then his eyes glassed over and he stopped breathing altogether.
Nell stood next to him, unable to think for a moment. Then she walked over to where the Faery had dropped his sword, picked it up, and looked at Nia with bleak hatred.
“Nell, don’t,” Jalo begged her, his face white and stricken.
But Nia was laughing. “You are adorable!” she exclaimed. “What in the worlds are you and that man doing here?”
“I’m Eliza’s friend,” said Nell, and she ran at Nia with the sword.
She found herself sitting down hard. The sword was in Nia’s hand, who twirled it at her threateningly and then said, “That makes perfect se
nse. Where is Eliza, anyway? I hope she’s still having fun with the present I Made her. I haven’t had a chance to look in on her, I’ve been so busy, but no doubt she’s hard at work. I’m quite eager to see how much she’s figured out. She’s an original, isn’t she, our Eliza?”
“Are you going to kill me now?” asked Nell dully. The cockroach was racing across the rubble-strewn hall towards her, as if he might protect her in insect form.
“Oh, no!” said Nia. “You get a free pass, my girl. I’m not about to go killing Eliza’s friends off. She’d think I was being malicious and, oddly enough, her opinion matters to me. He wasn’t a friend of hers, was he? I didn’t really mean to kill him but he did get in my way.”
Nell looked at Ander again, lying back with the spear in him. She could not weep or feel sorrow or fear or anything at all really, beyond a hazy sense of nothing being quite real. She looked around the Hall. The shattered statues, the dead myrkestra, the Faery bound in silver, his face a mask of misery, and Swarn sitting on the pile of rocks, eyes darting about but settling nowhere, her mouth hanging open. The cockroach reached her and crawled onto her hand. She watched Nia go to the myrkestra and pull the lower half of the spear out of it with a hideous sucking sound that made Nell want to throw up.
“I should snap her out of it for this last bit,” commented Nia to Nell. “It’s no good killing someone when they aren’t even aware you’re doing it. It takes away the whole point of revenge.”
Nell tried to get up but couldn’t. Something was stopping her, something she had no way of fighting. She curled a hand around the cockroach and looked away. She didn’t want to watch. Nia stepped carefully through the rubble and waved the end of the spear before Swarn’s face. Swarn’s eyes cleared. She drew in a painful gasp of air and stared up at Nia.
“You’re a better match for me than your sister was,” said Nia, sounding quite friendly.
Swarn glanced at the spear, her face showing nothing.
“Last words?” asked Nia. “Something like I’m sorry perhaps?”
“I’m not sorry,” rasped Swarn.
“Those are the last words I would choose, too,” said Nia approvingly, and drove the broken spear down towards Swarn’s heart. It glanced aside, and Swarn laughed weakly. Nia looked very put out.
“How can there be deeper enchantments on it?” she asked petulantly. “How long do you spend on your weapons? Never mind. I’m not inflexible. If I have to kill you with a Faery sword instead, so be it. It’s not as poignant, but it’ll serve.” She tossed aside the shaft of the spear and pointed the sword at Swarn. “They say you have to pierce a witch straight through the heart and then burn her to be certain she’s dead. Burning and drowning, those are the most popular, aren’t they? But we’ll begin with the heart. Then I’ll burn you to cinders and drown the pieces on my way back to Di Shang. I don’t want you coming back for me.”
She lunged for Swarn again. Again the sword glanced away.
“Barriers!” cried Nia. “I know a thing or two about barriers, you sad sack.”
She pressed her hand against the barrier. Swarn kept her eyes fixed on Nia’s face.
“It’s strong,” said Nia, then stood up straight, looking around her in surprise. “Too strong for you to have done it just now, weak as you are. Who is there?”
Nell looked up just in time to see ravens pouring into the hall, filling the great vault with the sound of their wings. The tiger gave a full-throated roar, driving the ravens up to the top of the vault, where they swarmed and screamed.
“Eliza!” shouted Nia. “Spare me your feathered friends! Come out and say hello!”
The wall opened and Eliza stepped through it, dagger in hand. She did not cast a glance towards her friend – even when Nell called out to her – or the Faery in chains, or even the dead man. She fixed her gaze on Nia.
“What are you doing here, Smidgen?” said Nia irritably. “Can’t you see I’m busy killing this witch?”
“I’m done with the Kwellrahg,” said Eliza.
“You can’t be.”
Eliza said nothing.
“You didn’t kill it,” said Nia. “And you didn’t make that barrier by yourself, either – it’s too strong for you alone. Who is with you? You didn’t find a stray Mancer I missed, did you?”
“No,” said Eliza. She looked around at the hall briefly. “You’ve made a mess, aye,” she said.
“Yes,” said Nia happily. “The Hall of the Ancients! You can really feel it here, can’t you? Their vast indifference. You and I are all that’s left of their long-ago, too-slight pity.”
“How profound,” said Eliza.
Nia raised an eyebrow. “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Smidgen. What are you up to? Where is the Kwellrahg?”
“Usually I’m impatient and you want to talk,” commented Eliza.
“Oh, have you come to talk?” asked Nia, thoroughly annoyed now and keeping one eye on Swarn. “What would you like to talk about?”
“You’re the only one who knows everything my mother used to know,” said Eliza. “You have so many of the answers I want.”
Nia rolled her eyes. “Answers are over-rated. They wouldn’t satisfy you anyway. Now, I can see you’ve made all kinds of progress in the last few days, as your noisy flock up there attests. I’m obviously good for you. But if you want to sit down and have a long chat, do you mind if I kill the witch first? I didn’t kill your charming little friend by the way, even though she started waving a sword at me. How’s that for generous?”
“I willnay let you kill Swarn,” said Eliza.
“You’re going to stop me, are you? I’m fascinated. You’re actually a bit creepy when you’re being cryptic and calm. Well, let’s see who you’ve brought with you.”
Nia turned her back on Eliza and made her way towards Swarn. Nell found she was able to move again. Immediately she scrambled to her feet and ran to Eliza to embrace her. Eliza gestured her aside, barely looking at her, murmuring, “Not yet, not yet.” Nell stepped back. Nia was pressing on the barrier around Swarn with her palms. She laughed and turned, beckoning. The wall opened again and Uri Mon Lil found himself stumbling out into the hall.
“A wizard!” said Nia. “Under a Curse, no less. What odd friends you have, Smidgen.”
The ravens started to descend and the tiger roared again, sending them all flapping back up, shrieking noisily.
“Well. Are you going to tell me what you’ve done with the Kwellrahg?” asked Nia. “Or are you going to make me guess?”
Eliza drew the rock out of her pocket and held it out on her palm to show the Sorceress. A flicker of alarm crossed Nia’s face.
“How in the worlds did you manage that?” she asked. “You can’t possibly have broken my spell.”
“I didnay break anything,” said Eliza. “I added things.”
“But what?” Nia’s gaze was fixed on the dark rock.
“It’s nay Magic,” said Eliza. “You wouldnay understand.”
Nia laughed shortly at that, then held her hand out and spoke its former name, Kwellrahg. It didn’t budge. Nia paled slightly.
“The renaming was Magic,” Eliza admitted.
“How clever you are, Eliza,” Nia said quietly. “Much cleverer, as it turns out, than me. But what will you do with it?”
Eliza did not reply. She kept her eyes steady on Nia, her mind closed firmly against the Sorceress. They were at a stalemate until one of them acted.
“I could kill you easily,” said Nia, her voice still very soft. “It would take me half a second.”
“I know,” said Eliza. “But what a waste of power that would be.”
“Yes,” said Nia, a smile tugging at her lips. “Precisely. Oh, Eliza, what are you thinking?”
Nia made up her mind. She spun around and made for Swarn. She uttered a powerful spell that left the barrier in tatters instantly and snatched up the broken spear shaft again. As soon as Nia used her Magic, Eliza whispered her command to the core of the Urkleis.
Nia arched backwards with a sudden, startled cry as Magic poured out of her, drawn to the Urkleis. She swung to face Eliza, understanding now, and raised the spear, but it was too late. The Urkleis drew Nia’s Magic towards it in a great rush that made the Hall tremble and, at the same time, poured her Magic back at her. Her own Magic met itself in an unbreakable deadlock and Nia, whose physical form and strength were made up so entirely of Magic, was pinioned mid-run, her body rigid with the effort of tearing herself free, arms out, the fingers of one hand spread, the other hand clutching the broken spear.
“Eliza,” she said, her voice strained. “Don’t do this to me.”
Eliza shut her out, keeping her eyes down now. She knew if she but looked at Nia she would relent. As Nia had done in the Arctic, Eliza whispered the name, Urkleis, and pressed the dark rock to her chest, just above her heart. It was excruciating. Flesh and bone pried themselves apart to make way, and closed again around the stone.
“Well done,” breathed Uri Mon Lil.
For a moment, none of them moved. Then the cockroach became Charlie, Swarn rose slowly to her feet, and Nell threw her arms around her best friend.
“So you are the Shang Sorceress,” said Jalo, with deep respect.
Chapter
~22~
The ravens had all disappeared now. Nia’s tiger paced around his Mistress in circles, snarling at the group. Nia struggled to speak, but she could not move her tongue.
Eliza unchained the Faery. They gathered around the body of Ander Brady.
“Is that the police chief from Holburg?” asked Eliza, shocked.
Nell bent down to close his staring eyes and Swarn pulled the end of her spear from his body. Jalo removed his cloak and laid it on the ground. Together they lifted the large man onto it and wrapped it around him.
The Unmaking: The Last Days of Tian Di, Book Two Page 27