Prodigal Steelwielder (Seals of the Duelists Book 3)

by Jasmine Giacomo

  Aleida, lass, I’m so sorry.

  Peeling the Temple

  Bayan fruitlessly surged over a dozen dangerously sharp mountain ridges until he finally located the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies just after dawn. Its white stone arced into view around the corner of a cascade of spiky black spires, rising like a city wall, imposing and solid.

  Bayan rose over the wall and descended in a wide spiral toward the center of the stone bowl. His first instinct had been to call out, but surrounded as he was by various snippets of song, he didn’t want the sound of his voice to interrupt any current magic.

  A cluster of people in white tabards hurried out of one of the many slender towers and waved him down toward an open area of smooth brown rock dotted with spots of green. From above, it looked like a garden. As he drew closer, it became obvious the pattern was entirely flat, melded into the stone of the temple floor.

  He dissipated his wind disc and helped Sabella stand. A woman with strong cheekbones and gold embroidery on the hem and sleeves of her white robe stepped forward from the group, her dark eyes intent. “I do not recognize you, duelist. What is your purpose here?”

  Bayan cupped Sabella’s chin in his hand and gently turned her face toward the First Singer. “My friend needs healing. Can you help?”

  The First Singer’s eyes briefly widened at the sight of Sabella’s red orbs, but she looked over her shoulder and spoke quickly, asking those behind her to fetch chanters. She turned back to Bayan. “How did this happen? Is there trouble?”

  Bayan shook his head. “Nowhere near here. Not yet, anyway. Your name is Liselot de Vosen, isn’t it? I remember you from…” He sighed. Best to be out with it. “You exiled me.”

  An unexpected pang of hurt threaded through his mind as Liselot instinctively stepped back from him. “Bayan. You can’t be here. It is forbidden.”

  “I didn’t have a choice. A friend sent me to warn the empire. He believes there will be an attack soon, and he transported me. This was the best place I could think of to bring his warning. If you want nothing further from me, I’ll be happy to leave Waarden borders as soon as I can. But I would appreciate it if you could heal my friend’s eyes first.”

  Chanters came running from the mouth of the sloping tunnel. He put a hand on Sabella’s shoulder to reassure her and told her, “These people are healers. They should be able to help you see again.” If one of their crystals will work on the Corona blood types.

  Sabella nodded and allowed the brown-tabarded chanters to lead her a short distance away. Liselot grabbed his arm. “What happened to her eyes? Were you attacked?”

  “It’s complicated. In a way, yes, we were attacked. The damage to her eyes was done by my friend’s spell. Inadvertently. I’d never seen a spell like that before, not even from the Corona casters. My friend died performing it.”

  Liselot stepped closer still. “The Corona has magic? How does it work? Do they use elements? Or singing? Something else? Is that what your friend is warning us about? A magical attack?”

  “The Corona has a different kind of magic than anything the Waarden Empire possesses. I haven’t studied it up close. I’m not exactly sure what Corona casters are capable of.” Only its circus freaks.

  “I’ll have to inform the emperor and the Academy Headmaster as soon as possible—”

  “First Singer!” One of the chanters jogged back to where she and Bayan stood. “Our crystals are not working. It seems the Corona folk have at least one blood type we haven’t made crystals for. We can still craft her a crystal from a drop of her own blood, but that will take some time. May I recommend that we turn this matter over to the singers, and have them perform an area heal? That should cure her, no matter her blood type.”

  Area heal? Of course the singers would be capable of mass healing magic, and in more powerful quantities than chanters, who had to work one on one with their patients.

  Liselot nodded and waved the nearby singers toward Sabella. She turned to Bayan. “If you have any more injuries like that scrape I see on your cheek, I recommend you join her. We can heal you both at the same time.”

  All of his bumps and bruises from his tumble out the far end of Ordomiro’s portal tunnel crashed back into his consciousness. He feigned indifference, then nodded, pretending reluctance. “If it won’t hamper Sabella, I’ll stand with her.”

  He joined Sabella in the center of half a dozen singers who were pulling crystals from their deep pockets. He took Sabella’s hand, telling himself it was to reassure her. I’ve never had one singer cast a spell directly on me, let alone six.

  The singers followed Liselot’s lead as she began to croon into her crystals. The magic of the notes pulsed through Bayan’s form, and he felt them ripple through his very being, altering and healing him as they went. The sensation was awkward but not painful. Sabella nearly crushed his hand in her grip.

  The song didn’t last long, though the crystals balanced atop the singers’ slender, handheld brass rods continued to vibrate with tinny notes. Bayan blinked and tried an experimental shiver, finding no pain anywhere. He grinned and looked at Sabella, who met his eyes with an ecstatic smile. Her vibrant green irises fairly glowed at him. “They did it! I can see! Endicir amanaroz!”

  She embraced him, and he squeezed back. Then she went on to hug every singer as well, including Liselot. In the thick Corona accent she had never managed to shed while learning Waarden from Bayan, she said, “My humble thanks for your kind healing, First Singer. It is unfortunate that my first visit to your empire should be inconvenienced by the need for your assistance, but I am humbly grateful for it. If you ever need anything from me in return, I assure you it will not be withheld if it is a request for anything my magic can provide for you.”

  The First Singer’s eyes narrowed in interest. “Are you a Corona duelist, then?” Liselot asked.

  Sabella looked down. “I am blessed with some small magic ability, but it is considered an anomaly amongst my people. I do not possess the usual ability to cast spells with special potions, as the cetechupes can. My skill lies in movement, similar to Bayan’s elementalism. I’m a dancer. I dance, and people come to watch and enjoy the magic I create.”

  Not to mention the way those magical effects make them feel, Bayan thought, while he struggled to keep from smiling.

  Understanding dawned on Liselot’s face. “Ah, like Gaarana, the Dancing Duelist. A legendary character in our history. Until recently, we thought she was unique within duelism. Historical documents have come to light that tell us there were more like her, capable of performing their magic in adaptable ways. It is a pleasure to meet one with such skills.”

  Sabella began to reply, but something drew Bayan’s attention upward, a flickering against his mind. Bayan bent a lens of air in front of him, and the sight of a tall, agile figure wrapped in layers of dark cloth, even over his face, lurched into sudden, close focus. The man held a small object in one hand, brought it to his lips for a moment, then spewed the contents out in a fine mist.

  Bayan’s stomach went cold. Cetechupe. He threw Lifeseeker toward the top of the temple’s vast bowl, and it returned dozens of strong orange lights. All of them stood at the very rim, encircling, surrounding.

  He grabbed Sabella by the shoulders, then pointed toward the temple rim. “We’re too late. They’re already here!”

  Liselot spun in a quick circle, glaring up at the borders of her small domain as if affronted at the cetechupes’ muddy boots upon her clean white marble. “But why have they come here—” The rest of the First Singer’s sentence faded into a strangled whisper as the air in the bottom of the bowl vanished.

  Bayan felt a familiar warming against his skin as the vacuum settled around his body. When he and Tala had raided the Periorion deep within the bowels of the Temple, the vacuum protected the books from damage, but it also prevented anyone from singing spells.

  His lungs began to ache. Unthinkingly, he spread one of his hexmagic creations around him: he crafted
it for one of his earliest storyteller settings at the circus. The heavy, tropical storm that had nearly blown Chandus the Heartworthy into oblivion now allowed Bayan and those nearby to breathe, though its breezes whipped at everyone’s hair and clothing.

  Liselot’s hand locked onto his wrist. “My singers. They’re suffocating. Can you share your air with the whole temple?”

  Bayan suffered a moment of complete uncertainty. “I’m sorry, unless I can see them… I would have to tear your temple apart to find them.”

  Liselot’s fierce eyes locked on his. “Then do it! We can rebuild, but only if we’re alive to do it.”

  Bayan turned to Sabella. “If I can find them with Lifeseeker, can you give them air? Or pull them here?”

  She nodded.

  Bayan closed his eyes, the better to see and sense the orange indicators of life. Dozens of orange lights pressed against his mind, some flickering and fading already. Bayan pointed toward a cluster in a nearby tower, and the stone wall between him and them peeled away like the skin of a citrus. Sabella danced forward, and one of the twisted pieces of stone curled around half a dozen young singers like a flower petal and floated them down to Bayan’s air pocket. The students stumbled, gasping and wheezing, into the humid storm.

  As Bayan ripped the floor and towers of the temple apart and piled the tumbled stones, he heard Liselot ordering the few singers she had into a choir. Sabella pulled more singers into the air pocket in ones and twos.

  Then Chandus the Heartworthy’s incipient cyclone vanished, leaving Bayan gasping once more. Indignant, he glared up at the enemy. They can see me, and worse, they can counter my hexmagic. My hexmagic. That should be impossible.

  Sabella created a small pocket of air, and everyone crowded around her. Bayan felt keenly aware of the passage of time. Every moment that passed meant that the singers he still had yet to reach were one moment closer to death. He glared up at the temple rim. You want to fight with the air? Let’s fight with the air.

  Marshaling his focus, Bayan created half a dozen duplicates of the humid storm pocket one on top of the other, allowing the singers more air and space. The large black bead on his necklace heated until it was almost painful against his skin, and Bayan threw his focus up and out, dragging an entire typhoon out of nowhere and hurling it across the top of the temple bowl.

  The casters’ vacuum spells prevented the typhoon from dropping any lower than the rim of the bowl. Bayan grinned hard as its violent, sheeting wind scraped the cetechupes from their perches and hurled them in all directions. His wind lens showed him half a dozen cracking their skulls against the nearby mountainsides.

  Yet their air-stealing spell did not abate. Sudden fear chilled Bayan’s bowels. The orange lights below began to flicker out. Bayan turned wide eyes to Liselot. “How large a portal can you create with three dozen singers?”

  Liselot did not seem to understand the question. “Where do you want to go? We need you here!”

  “Not me. The vacuum is permanent. We need to move the Temple. Can you make a portal big enough to move the Temple through it?”

  Liselot’s mouth hung open in astonishment.

  “Yes or no? Your singers are dying!”

  Liselot’s eye twitched, and she aimed a calculating glance at the clustered, wide-eyed singers. She turned back to Bayan, her jaw tense, her lips thinned. “Yes. Yes, we can do it. We calm hurricanes and save frozen crops whole provinces at a time. We can lift the Temple. But we need to be outside it.”

  Bayan waved Sabella over, and the singers clustered around them. He formed a broad wind disc that lifted them from the temple floor, and he transported everyone through the vacuum while Sabella maintained an air bubble around them. In moments, he landed the group just outside the Temple’s enormous white wall, between guardian black spires of natural rock.

  Liselot directed her singers into a broad arc. They ran to take their places, and Liselot hurried to Bayan. “The temple is wider than it looks from here because of its round shape. If we are to preserve what remains of its structural integrity, we must either destroy the mountains that hold it in place or move them.”

  Bayan examined the natural black stone formations of the Spineforest Mountains. He lifted his hands and pressed them away from each other as if opening curtains, and the stone folded back from the white marble of the temple wall. It peeled away and separated seamlessly, creating a slender, dark chasm as far around the wall as Bayan could see. His Earth magic told him that the temple was unsupported, and he willed it to hold together so it didn’t shatter under its own unnatural shape.

  Sabella shouted, “Bayan, the cetechupes! They’re coming!”

  “Liselot, sing!” Bayan called.

  Voices rose in harmony behind him, and Bayan embraced the Temple. It was vast, enormous, impossibly heavy. There was no logical reason he should be able to lift it, let alone move it, yet he knew it had to be done. There was no time to consider how to change the stone’s composition. People were still inside, and their lives depended upon his swiftness.

  The earth shook, and the Temple rose into the air. In the distance, Bayan saw cetechupes leaping for their lives to the black stone that had separated from the white marble rim. He coaxed the Temple forward, bracing his Earth magic with a slippery amalgamation of slime made of Wind, Earth, and Water.

  Warm, humid air suddenly burst against Bayan’s back. He dared not turn around, but the smell of the breeze blowing through the singers’ enormous portal was blessedly familiar. Home.

  The massive stone bowl approached Bayan, and he lifted it just high enough to glide above his head. It blotted out the sun and most of the sky, and mucky lubrication flowed around him and the singers, as deep as they were tall, but he only had eyes for the stone city he bore with his will. As he turned to follow the Temple’s progress, he caught his first glimpse of the choir’s enormous portal. Through the sliver of open air beneath the curve of the Temple’s bottom, he saw an entire mountain range of dark red runrock waiting on the far side.

  Bayan glanced back to check on Sabella. She leapt and danced just outside the shadow of the Temple, and the sky blossomed with her distraction spells. A smile had just begun to ease the tension in Bayan’s jaw when Sabella twinned again. One of her figures sashayed to the right while the other pirouetted left, then they snapped together. Bayan flung a tendril of anima, quick as a whip, toward her, but had to break off the spell when the Temple seemed to double in weight. At a jog, Bayan chased the floating Temple through the portal and entered his homeland. The choir followed, and a faint cessation of sound hinted that they had let the portal snap shut behind them.

  The long, broadleaf grass beneath Bayan’s sandals was still wet with morning dew. Copses of upland palms paraded down every bend in the land, every crevice and valley. And all lay in shadow beneath the hovering hull of the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies. A small herd of kalabao, muscular and brown with faint, lighter stripes, thundered away from the strange sight, bawling in surprise and fright.

  Bayan fell to his knees, the edges of his focus shredding. The sheer weight of the Temple’s stone was too immense. He shouldn’t have been able to lift it in the first place. In fact, he still wasn’t sure how he was doing so. I’m going to drop it. I’m going to drop it, it’s going to shatter, people will die. What do I do? Bhattara, if you ever loved me, give me strength.

  Agony split the fibers of Bayan’s body into individual strands. The magic he needed was more than his body could bear. Moving the Temple was killing him.

  Heavenly notes surrounded him, as if Bhattara were welcoming him into his sunny blue realm of eternity. I failed, I’m dying.

  The strain eased—the singers had joined in chorus to assist him. The Temple passed along a series of songwork-formed stone pillars that rose dozen by dozen to support its weight on its way the mountains.

  Bayan gasped in relief and fell forward onto his hands in the muck. “Thank you, Bhattara.” Perhaps his god had been so quick to answer him
because he had made his request on home soil. Gathering the shreds of his being, Bayan marshaled his will and looked for a safe place to rest the Temple. His gaze rose up and up some more to the sharp red ridges of runrock. The slopes were too sheer for greenery to take root along the crests of the mountains. In a way, the steep red mountains seemed a fitting cousin to the sharp red spires of the Spineforest.

  A tiny, dark lump on the bridge of the mountain caught his attention, and with the flick of a thought, Bayan created a wind lens. What he saw brought both nostalgia and inspiration. Covered in mud, he got to his feet and ran toward the singers, who were walking in the shadow of their temple, escorting it on its supporting pillars as it moved up the hillside. “Up. We have to send it up.”

  Liselot looked beyond the temple then nodded at Bayan and waved her arms in a complex series of commands. The singers altered their melodies, and the pillars multiplied in number and began to sprout large stone hands to speed the Temple’s rise. Bayan kept tight control of his Earth magic to maintain its shape and rose behind it on his wind disc, following as it climbed its way up ever-steeper slopes.

  Soon, Bayan hovered over hundreds of strides of thin air, and the enormous stone hands lifted the Temple’s enormous bulk along the nearly vertical slope. A sudden voice reached his ear. “I’m sorry, little brother, but this mountain is already taken, and I have no need of a giant stone house.” Bayan looked over, surprised to see the Skycaller on the mountaintop hailing him through a tiny wind tunnel.

  He felt a surge of affection for the Balanganese caster, who used his elementalism to protect his valley countrymen from wicked weather events on a regular basis. He borrowed the man’s wind tunnel and replied through it. “I beg your pardon, Skycaller. But this giant stone house is very heavy, and I will need to set it down soon. Hopefully, it will not be too inconvenient for you to have neighbors for a short while. May I task you with welcoming them to your mountaintop and making sure everyone inside is safe? They’ve had rather a shock.”