Prodigal Steelwielder (Seals of the Duelists Book 3)

by Jasmine Giacomo

  Kiwani shook her head without taking her eyes off the scene before them. “I never saw him. I didn’t even know Aleida was here until now.”

  “Is the emperor down there with the healers?”

  Again, Kiwani shook her head. “I don’t know. Lifeseeker doesn’t get specific. It just shows weak or strong.” Then she looked at him with sudden focus. “Weakness.” She sent a look of intense concentration toward the crowd for a moment. Her face told Bayan what he didn’t want to hear. The emperor was indeed below, right where the Corona assassins wanted him. But they didn’t seem to know it.

  After a few more moments of study, Kiwani said, “I can see him with a wind lens now. He’s in disguise, dressed as a eunuch. I don’t see any imperial duelists. It’s possible they’re all dead.”

  Bayan used his own wind lens to study the Corona casters. Each of them wore a myriad of small vials around his waist and clasped at least two, tucked between their fingers just so, in their right hands.

  “You remember our first battle here? How you did that battle spell Instructor Ithrakis tested us on just before we headed to our Talent Tournament?”

  Kiwani nodded, jaw tense. “You take the left, I’ll take the right.”

  Without another word, he and Kiwani parted ways. Bayan took a dip into his Earth magic and mentally readied four identical, avatar-level versions of Tegen’s Grave. He glided slowly forward, appearing cowed by the enemies’ threatening poses, then slammed his spells into place against the four nearest casters. They vanished within coffin-shaped stone formations, with one exception: their right arms all stuck out helplessly. Unable to balance while encased in stone, the casters fell from their perches and crashed onto the bricks.

  On the other side of the forum, Kiwani’s spell snapped into place as well, though her giant coffins locked the cetechupes into place atop the pillars where they stood. Bayan breathed out a sigh of extreme relief.

  He zipped in closer, intending to land in front of Doc Theo and seek the emperor. But a great wail rose from the crowd, and Doc was already running toward him, frantically waving his arms.

  I’ve missed the big picture. Fear shot through Bayan, and his fear bead burned white hot against his skin. His eyes flicked to his hexmates, who met his gaze with horrified looks.

  Taban spoke first. “It was a trap. Their mouths were already full!”

  Geysers of lava fountained from half of the casters’ stone coffins, forcing the trapped villagers closer together. Tarin rode her disc down amongst the hostages, even as the others shouted after her not to. Bayan tried to reach in with his magic and pull some villagers to safety, but his elements dissolved, and he couldn’t make contact. Infuriating Corona magic! He dashed in after Tarin, hoping to assist in the rescue before it was too late.

  Doc’s words finally penetrated. “No, no! Back away, run! Get out!”

  Then everything went black. Dozens of voices echoed painfully in the darkness. Someone created a friendly yellow light overhead, but all it revealed was a shiny steel dome. Another voice screamed at the edge of the crowd. “The metal is hot! We’ll roast to death!”

  Within seconds, the dome was warping and pinging under the extreme heat of the lava that surrounded and splattered its surface. Tarin tried something Bayan had never seen before, stealing the heat from the dome and forcing it into a tornado of flame that got louder and bluer as the temperature rose. Then, to his horror, the tornado took on a life of its own and roared amongst the villagers. It spawned miniature versions of itself even as Tarin swore and raged at it. Bayan managed to snuff out three of them, but then one descended upon him from behind, and his world turned to blue heat.

  His lungs searing with pain, Bayan could only retch in agony as his body crumpled to the hot bricks. His bones snapped, and a blazing pressure built in his skull. Torment threatened to rob his mind of all sense, but he clung to one single thought. At least I got to see her one more time before I died.

  A Thousand Leagues of Hatred

  Calder spun within the water, seeking an upward direction, but the current held him down. He hexed a fresh bubble around him and gulped desperately. He glanced in all directions but couldn’t spot Hanna or Teos or anyone else, for that matter.

  Where did this wave come from? Has the Godsmaw gone mad and decided to drown us all?

  Debris floated past: entire mansions, partial roofs, trees. Waterborne sand banks made it hard to see very far. Calder struggled to raise his bubble to the surface of the water, but it seemed an unseen force was holding him down. Someone was actively trying to kill him. Fear shot through him as he worried for Hanna and Teos, the rest of his duel den mates, and the entire population of Muggenhem. But hot on its trail was anger.

  As Calder struggled futilely to force his bubble to the surface, the distant water in the direction of the Godsmaw took on an unearthly, murky green glow. Momentarily mesmerized, Calder sent Lifeseeker in that direction, but what he found was like no sensation he’d ever felt with the anima spell. A powerful force existed out there, but he couldn’t pin down its location.

  Then it was inside his mind as well. No words came, just pure, animalistic, black rage, blacker than anything Bayan had ever embodied and far more powerful and ancient. Calder’s mind gibbered in fear at its very presence.

  A brief ring of light flickered outside his life-sustaining air bubble. A portal! But it was underwater, and he had only a brief glimpse of Tala before a wall of water rushed through her portal, washing her back. Her portal winked out.

  I thank the sints for that gorgeous singer. She can save me if she can only open that ring close to me. His mind flipped through the brief images he had seen of her location. He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like she had been standing in front of a firedust display, complete with exploding colors and great plumes of smoke. Did she go to some holiday celebration without me? Maybe it was to be a surprise. Too bad I’m so preoccupied. That sounds like a lot more fun than I’m having.

  The vast rage monster seemed to reach out from his mind and grasp his bubble, trying to collapse it. Calder threw every ounce of his concentration into willing the skin of his protective sphere to resist the entity’s diabolical force.

  Tala’s portal reappeared, again underwater. Calder’s brief moment of exasperation at her inability to save him was quickly replaced by surprise as an explosion behind her hurled her bodily into the chilly waters of the Godsmaw. Her portal winked out, and her body tumbled slowly in the water.

  Though it seemed he’d been fighting the Godsmaw for his life moment ago, it occurred to Calder that he hadn’t actually been doing much more than lazily flicking its ear. Several of the beads on his necklace went hot, and he swooped forward on a dozen fizzy hex avatars of Wind and Water. He grasped Tala as she slipped through his bubble and held her tight. He slammed a massive vortex below him and spun up, up to the surface.

  The surface didn’t materialize as quickly as he hoped. Frustrated, he aimed much higher, managing to clear the main body of the flood waters on a frothy jet of panic and determination, yet a column of dark green water still chased him as he climbed ever higher into the sky. Muggenhem nestled between the sea and low, rounded hills, and from his height, he knew it was doomed. The Godsmaw loomed like a mountain.

  He concentrated on the green water that flexed through the sky in pursuit of him, fixed it in his mind, and used the spin of his vortex to fling it away. He burned the area around his bubble with fire, morphing every last droplet of Water into Flame and flinging the heat safely away. Once free of the malevolent water, he planted an air disc beneath his feet and flashed away through the sky, still clutching a barely conscious Tala in his arms.

  He shot upward until the air turned thin and nearly freezing, making him and Tala shiver. She met his eyes with a woozy look. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse. “The Kheerzaal is under attack. I’ve called everyone but you. Even Bayan is there. You should go help them.”

  A warm thread shot through Calder at the ment
ion of his closest friend, but he looked back down at the water swarming its way across the town and burying it under dozens of strides of irate waves. “I canna leave now. I don’t know what the Godsmaw is up to, but I think it’s attacking us, and I canna leave this corner of the empire undefended. I… I think the rest of my den is dead. I didn’t see anyone else escape.”

  Tala blinked a few times, then looked down at the distant sea. It was indeed invading the land, swarming the valleys and low spots, working its way ever upward, consuming the High Way. “Your hexmates did say they didn’t understand how Corona magic works. Maybe their casters can move the Godsmaw, too.”

  Corona? Alarmed, Calder spread Lifeseeker far and wide, and found to his relief that dozens had survived the deluge, at least for the moment. But he didn’t sense anyone on any kind of vantage point from which to control the sea. To be sure, he aimed his disc downward and did a swift search across hills around the town but spotted no one who seemed to be in a position of control over the oncoming water. And it was still very much oncoming. Another arm of twisting water flew after him. He rose more than a league straight up with a biting wind in his face before the arm of water retreated behind him.

  Tala looked at him, wide eyed. “Calder, what did you do to annoy the Godsmaw today? I do believe it’s trying to murder you.”

  Calder stared down at the oncoming flood. “They say the greatest duelists in history have battled unseemly odds, but I don’t remember ever reading a story about one fighting the ocean itself. If that water keeps coming, its salt will ruin every field between here and the capitol. People will starve. I have to stop it somehow, but even if all the Hexmates were here with me, I’m not sure how we would accomplish it.”

  Tala shifted next to him so that she too looked back at the Godsmaw. “Then it’s a good thing I’m here. I think you need a singer.”

  Calder’s arm was tight around her waist. His hand patted at her pocket. “You’ve lost your crystals.”

  “I think I dropped them when that explosion threw me into the water. I can chant some, but I think it would be faster if you hexed them for me.”

  Such a simple task, yet it gave Calder hope. His Eward-inspired bead grew pleasantly warm. “I can do that.” He held out a hand to catch the crystals he formed in the air, identical to the ones he had seen in Tala’s possession. Long, black, hexagonal, and built with perfect matrices, they fell into his hand and clinked gently together. He handed them over. “Will these do?”

  Tala supported one of them against her fingernails and balanced it horizontally, then sang an experimental note. The resonating tone was exquisitely crystalline. “Well done, you. Now all we need is a plan to hold back the rising sea.”

  Calder stared downward. The Godsmaw had overcome the nearest ring of hills around Muggenhem and was spilling over them as if they did not exist. And perhaps they didn’t anymore—long brown streaks permeated the water, suggesting the current had simply disintegrated the inconvenient mounds of soil and rock.

  From his height, the layout of the northern section of the province of Helderaard looked like nothing so much as a giant, colorful map, a toy canvas upon which he might have placed mills and farmhouses as a child. “We need a dam.”

  He bolted downward and skimmed above still-dry fields whose seedlings were just beginning to push through the rich soil. Calder launched a battery of Marblenose clones into the soil ahead of him and had them cast a continuous Rising Mountain spell, which produced, in effect, a giant earthen dam several dozen strides high. Back to back with him, Tala balanced her crystals on her fingertips and sang a tune that flew away on the rushing wind and bolstered Calder’s wall from both sides with stone earthworks. The leagues flew past in a blur beneath his feet, and the furious flood continued to approach. As fast as he flew, though, Calder knew he could not come anywhere close to fully encompassing the Godsmaw’s waters before the closest of them struck the beginnings of his dam. Still, diverting one side of the flood might allow him some time to catch the other side against the distant mountains.

  If it wants to stop. Something is driving this water, and if that something doesna think my dam is worth acknowledging, then it will carry on past.

  Finally, Calder circled all the way back to the seashore with his makeshift dam on the eastern side of the flood. In the distant west, the Spineforest rose menacingly, jabbing at the sky with its needle spires. He scudded straight across the flood, desperate to reach the distant mountains and hem in the flood.

  But the water sensed him once again. Faster than he could think, it rose and engulfed him and Tala, pinning them in place. Calder slammed his air bubble around them again, but it could not stop the images that flooded his mind.

  Deep, dark, murky water, laden with thousands of aging and modern sea wrecks. Rippling sunlight and the distortion of rainfall on seawater. And a burning, bitter hunger at the sight of every meager scrap of wood that dared to float upon his surface. His surface. The sheer immensity of the being’s existence made Calder want to find the nearest cave and barricade himself within it for the next ten years. So grand, so powerful, and such pure hatred for mortality, the force registered at the furthest reach of Calder’s comprehension. Its presence was a shadow whose form he dared not raise his head to behold. Except that the shadow emanated from below, which made it all the more terrifying.

  I’m floating over a thousand leagues of hatred, and he’s staring up at me. I think I’ve already wet myself, but I’m shaking too hard to be sure.

  Tala’s voice trembled within the bubble, echoing amidst Calder's chaotic thoughts. “What is it? Bhattara—what is it—get it out of my head!”

  More sensations poured through his mind, tinged with dark amusement and anticipation of doom. The thing in the water hinted at plans in the works and events yet to come. He knew of something to the east and something to the south and something even further to the west. They would all draw together in a final cataclysm that would please him immensely. Yet not even that pleasure could extinguish his hatred.

  Calder wrapped himself around Tala and squeezed her until she squeaked, his only proof he wasn’t being tortured in the afterlife for his many sins. She dug her nails into his shoulders and sobbed, no doubt experiencing similar horrors.

  Calder's bubble began to contract. The water around them took on a sickly green glow, an evil incarnation of the algae from the southern seas. Calder clasped Tala’s cheeks and met her eyes. She nodded. They would not die without a fight, and they would not die alone. Calder grinned and looked up. “You really should get that glow looked at. You don’t look so good to me, mate.”

  He clasped Tala’s hands tightly, trapping her new crystals in her hands, and collapsed his own bubble before the Godsmaw could do it for him. In the moment before the water crushed the life out of him, he wrested it under his own control, formed a current and tucked it within yet another current, and dived deeply into the dark floodwater. Just below them, the tops of the ruined mansions of Muggenhem shredded as they succumbed to underwater sand dunes and debris. He held tightly to Tala’s wrists and angled deeply out into the Godsmaw’s basin, seeking the lowest, blackest part of the sea floor.

  Calder was surprised he had made it to the wreck-strewn floor of the Godsmaw. Perhaps the water was too busy flooding, and he had slipped its notice.

  Or perhaps not. His outer water current vanished in a swirl of the tiny bubbles and then the inner current as well, leaving him tumbling, clinging desperately to Tala’s arms. Now. Has to be now.

  Latching onto his fear, not only for his own life but for Tala’s, Calder let his terror mount, then crammed as much emotion into his Flame Savant magic as he dared. The bead against his chest burned like molten metal. The water began to steam and bubble. Across the entirety of its basin, the Godsmaw began to boil. It exploded upward, propelling him and Tala into the sky over the center of the swirling sea.

  Desperately gasping for breath, he crafted a new disc, caught Tala in his arms, and rose
even higher than before, letting the icy breeze chill his scalded skin. Beside him, Tala knelt and retched over the disc’s edge, her stomach contents spiraling away on the breeze. “I lost my crystals again. I’m sorry.”

  Calder's chest heaved with gasping breaths, and he sank to his knees beside Tala, looking down at the vast circular sea. So much of the water had swirled up out of its basin and flooded the land that the Godsmaw’s original floor appeared, exposing giant mud flats, swaths of sand, and dozens of shipwrecks.

  He closed his eyes and fell forward onto his hands. His throat was raw with seawater, and he coughed like a seal. He hawked a blob of briny sputum over the edge of his disc, hurling a mental curse with it.

  It only took a few moments of bliss and quiet reflection for Calder to come to a terrifying realization. Only one force in all the world had ever made him feel so small and insignificant. His hand closed over Tala’s empty one. “It’s a sint. The Godsmaw. It’s a sint.”

  Tala was silent.

  Below, the floodwaters swallowed yet another series of hills as they continued their seemingly effortless journey south toward the capital. “Any innocent piece of ocean can make a simple gyre. But this thing, it hates. I canna believe no one figured it out until now. We all know it eats ships, that it accepts human sacrifice as a form of pacification. It makes all the sense in the world now.”

  “But no one ever told us sints could be evil. They’re all such benign, helpful gods. How could we possibly have known?”

  “I’m open to any ideas you have on the subject of battling a sint, Trio Singer Tala.”

  Tala gave him a startled look. “You’re asking me?”

  He managed a lopsided smile. “Well, in my defense, I have managed to avoid it until now. I thought perhaps your perspective on our running and fleeing and nearly dying was different enough that you had some sage advice.”

  Her mouth hung open with a mix of frustration and amusement as if she was unsure whether to say anything at all or simply box his ears. She managed a single, breathless huff. “Well, as you know, no singer is capable of much without her crystals. If you’re going to make me take on a sint today, I’m going to need a lot of crystals.”