Lucius saw that, contrary to what he had seen when further away, the fires were not one, perfect straight line consuming all in their path as they advanced, but patches of destruction racing one another through the city. As the fires reached the Square of True Believers, they slowed, perhaps suppressed by the Lord of All Himself as they licked the buildings nearest the Cathedral, which had remained untouched by their terrible heat. As they burnt through the tightly packed houses that spread away from the harbour, the flames increased in pace, surging ahead as they gouged a ragged, blackened wound in the city.
The streets were mostly empty; they saw only a few men and women, usually on their own, stumbling away from the oncoming flames, looking dazed.
Over the crackle of the flames and the crash of broken buildings falling under the onslaught, Lucius and Elaine both heard calls for help. Whether from those trapped in buildings already aflame or watching their loved ones burn, each cry pulled at their consciences, but they pushed on, following the loudest screams, Lucius dreading what he would find.
All around, dogs barked frantically.
As they neared the firestorm, houses burning on either side of the street, the heat became unbearable, and Elaine staggered, gasping for breath. Lucius put an arm around her shoulders and closed his eyes, summoning an arcane, invisible globe about them. Elaine looked up at him in surprise as cool air washed over her, and their breathing became less laboured.
They heard a man cry out in agony, somewhere very close, just beyond the line of low houses on their right. It was a gargled scream, born of pure torture, and it ended abruptly. An instant later, they felt the ground tremble as a tremendous crash resounded about the street, and a column of ash and cinders rose high into the pitch black sky from behind the roofs of the dwellings.
Propelling Elaine forward, keeping her close so she did not leave the protection of his globe, Lucius led them down a narrow alley between the burning houses. Fire arched over them as it leapt from roof to roof, lighting the alley in a deep orange glow, and he began to run as he felt his grip on the shielding globe begin to slip.
Rushing out the other end of the alley, they skidded to a stop, confronted with a scene of horror.
Blackened, burned and twisted bodies littered the street before them. The buildings on either side, two- and three-storey homes that had once belonged to some of the wealthier trade families of the district, were pouring fire and smoke into the sky, and some had started to collapse. A sheet of flame rose from the far end of the street, crossing its entire width as though the cobbles themselves were burning, and driven against this towering fire were a dozen people, cowering on the ground under the oppressive heat of the flames around them. Already, their clothes and hair were beginning to smoulder, smoke trailing up from each to be quickly lost in the maelstrom of soot and embers.
Before the people was a ragged line of half a dozen Vos soldiers, clearly daunted but resolute in their duty to protect themselves and the people behind them. Most were armed with spears and took cover behind shields, but two were armed with crossbows, and they pointed them upwards, toward one of the burning buildings.
Lucius looked at what they were aiming at, and gasped. The building's entire front wall had already crumbled, opening the rooms inside to the rest of the world. They burned ferociously but, hovering just in front of the second floor, suspended in open space by a column of air summoned to do her bidding, was Adrianna.
Standing motionless in mid-air, she looked down on the small crowd with imperious wrath. She was dressed in her usual black tunic, and wore a dark cloak that billowed out behind her in the air currents that held her aloft.
One of the cowering citizens crawled forward to the line of soldiers. A middle-aged man in clothes that had been half burned away, he started to chant, making obscure gestures with his hands, and Lucius suddenly realised he was a wizard, perhaps one of the Empire's own.
He had no chance to release his spell or even finish its construction, as Adrianna glared down at him and pointed. Lucius felt her magic surge forward, striking the wizard and the soldiers around him. They crumpled before his eyes, as if a great weight had been thrown casually on top of them, flattening them as they fell. Limbs, necks and bodies were twisted at angles that were terrible to behold, and none moved thereafter.
Outside of the spell's effects, the two crossbowmen nodded as they agreed upon a plan, and they broke ranks, each skirting to one side of Adrianna. Aiming high, they loosed their bolts, the dark missiles almost invisible against the glare of fires around them.
Adrianna did not betray any movement or reaction, but the bolts stopped suddenly in mid-air, just a foot away from her heart, as if they had been fired against an invisible wall. Their points blunted, they fell harmlessly to the street below where they clattered uselessly on the bone dry cobbles.
This seemed to attract Adrianna's attention, and as she raised both her arms high above her head, the two crossbowmen followed suit, kicking and screaming as tightly controlled winds picked up their bodies and hurled them into the sky.
Lucius did not see where they landed, as they were thrown clear over burning roofs. He strode down the street towards Adrianna, Elaine just a few paces behind, neither entirely sure of what they were going to do.
"Aidy!" Lucius called.
Slowly, Adrianna turned to face him, the soldiers and city folk forgotten for the moment.
"Lucius," she said, acknowledging his arrival. Her voice was calm and level, as though spoken in normal conversation, but still he heard it clearly above the howling of the flames and screams of the dying.
"Aidy, what are you doing?" Lucius asked, despairing.
"This is the time, Lucius," she said. "Now. Right now. Help me erase the Vos scum from the city and we will finally be rid of their influence. Finally, we will be free!"
He gestured at the burning buildings around them. "Aidy, there will be no city! You haven't declared war on the Empire, you are killing everyone."
"They had their chance to leave," she said, nodding towards the frightened people below her. "Instead, they chose to hide behind Vos. They have chosen their path. Their lives and homes are forfeit!"
"What justice is that?" Lucius called up to her, desperate to keep her talking, even as his mind raced to find a way through this.
She looked down with a puzzled expression. "What in hell has justice got to do with anything? Was it justice when Vos soldiers first marched into this city? Was it justice when they started wiping out anyone who opposed them? Or was it justice when they killed Forbeck? No, Lucius, this is not about justice. All that is left is victory for us, and total, crippling defeat for them. It is not enough that we drive them out - they must be too scared to come back for fear of what we will do to them."
"At what cost, Aidy? How many innocent people must die, how much of this city will you destroy in order to save it?"
"As much as it takes, fool!" she spat. "A city can be rebuilt. A city can be repopulated. A Shadowmage cannot be replaced. You, as much as any of us, should understand that."
He shook his head. "I cannot agree."
For a moment, Adrianna just stared at him, and Lucius could not tell whether it was out of pity, disdain or loathing.
"From the day I first met you, I knew you had abilities that could surpass any of us. I also knew you would never reach your true potential. You, Lucius, are the worst kind of traitor to us. You have the talent that could change the entire world for us, but you are too lazy, ignorant and feckless to see that. Go. Take your whore with you, and go. Consider it my last favour to you that I spare your lives."
"I cannot let you carry on with this massacre," he said flatly.
She smiled at him without a trace of humour. "I did not think you would."
With the speed of a coiled serpent striking, Adrianna's hammer bolt of magical energy surged down towards them. Lucius and Elaine dove away from it, rolling on the ground as the bolt smashed into the street, throwing up cobbled stones
and earth from the impact.
Rolling back to her feet, Elaine whipped out the last throwing knife at her belt and let it fly at Adrianna. The knife hissed through the air, but was deflected from its path at a gesture from the Shadowmage. In turn, with a contemptuous look, Adrianna punched the air.
Lucius recovered his own footing just in time to see Elaine thrown through the air. He reached out with his own magic, but felt the threads slip from his control as he realised he could not build a spell in time to counter Adrianna's. Elaine soared across the street as if propelled from a catapult, and crashed through the burning front of a small shop. The force of the throw brought down timbers from the floor above, and the flames inside billowed briefly, swallowing the assassin completely.
"By all that is holy, I'll make you pay dearly for that, Adrianna," Lucius said, his voice low.
"This is what I have been trying to get through to you, idiot!" Adrianna shot back. "People like that are barely worth the ground they walk on! You and I, on the other hand, we are precious, Lucius."
He did not wait to hear more. Knowing that Adrianna had access to far greater magic than he, Lucius realised he had to use any advantage he had if he were to survive this encounter, let alone emerge without defeat. Seeing Elaine so casually killed, he finally knew that he had to try to take Adrianna down any way he could.
Quickly tugging on two threads of magic, he sent twin bolts toward Adrianna. They were not powerful spells, and he nodded grimly to himself when he saw them dissipate harmlessly against the shield Adrianna had raised around herself, and was apparently maintaining without effort. In his mind's eye, he saw the bolts completely absorbed. That told him something, at least.
Seeing the distraction, the crowd of people caught near the fire began to move. First one started to crawl away, then another sprang to their feet and started to run. Within seconds, they were all sprinting for their lives, scrabbling to get away from the terror that had nearly claimed them.
Adrianna noticed this and frowned. As they ran past her, she conjured a great ball of air, the currents whipping around inside tighter and tighter. Hurling it down, she threw it into the front of a building just as the people streamed past it. The structural support for the front wall buckled under the strain and started to tumble, even as the flames inside grew with a new intensity as they were fed with the released currents of air.
With a terrible but inevitable slowness, the front of the building collapsed, masonry and burning timbers crashing down into the street on top of the crowd. Only those who had first started to run escaped; the rest were crushed by falling stone or consumed by the flames.
Cursing Adrianna's callousness, Lucius aimed another set of magical bolts at her, this time drawing on different magical threads. One of them, the bolt that took its energy from the darkest of magics, reacted violently with her shield.
His theory, and that of Master Forebeck, was confirmed. Now Lucius had his weapon.
He pulled on the thread of unlife, pouring its energy into a new spell around Adrianna. Almost instantly, she saw what he was doing and began to fuel her own shield, but as he clenched his fist, Lucius felt the pressure of his spell begin to squeeze her shield dry of energy.
The rate at which Adrianna repaired the damage he dealt to the shield was impressive, he could not deny, but the death magic he used simply annihilated the natural energies she was using, draining them as fast as she could funnel magic into her defence. Flooding the air about her with his spell, Lucius felt the crack as her shield buckled and broke.
As his spell reached Adrianna, she screamed aloud, and he saw her skin turn grey as heat, vitality and life were drawn from her. The air currents holding her aloft failed, and she plummeted to the ground, where only a hastily improvised spell saved her from a mortal fall. Hitting the ground hard, she rose shakily to her feet almost immediately.
Her face was a mask of hate, filled with rage that Lucius dared to penetrate her magics and had actually managed to hurt her. Colour flooded back into her skin as arcane energies surged through her, and Lucius quickly reshaped his spell to form a protective wall between them.
The dark bolt of energy that she flung at him ripped through his magical wall as though it were paper and exploded against his chest, throwing him back as it sizzled with a cold fire. Clutching his chest in pain, Lucius cursed himself for not anticipating her move; after all, the shadow bolt she had just sent his way was a branch of magic that Shadowmages were all familiar with. Now he had to find a way to trump the magic of shadows as well as Adrianna's grip on natural sorcery.
He saw Adrianna fuelling another spell, and there was no mercy in her expression. Lucius could feel the thread of shadows twist and lose focus as Adrianna pulled upon it to do her bidding and relinquished all control, knowing he could not compete with her directly. Instead, he plucked the more stable strands of four threads, more or less at random, sweating as he quickly assembled them into a multi-layered shield.
The shield was only just raised in time, and Lucius knew he would have to be quick in its manipulation if he were to survive her next strike. Each layer was painfully thin, having been hastily formed, and the effort of controlling four threads at a time was taking its toll, as his vision blurred and breathing became shallow. He could feel the strength ebbing from his limbs and his thoughts becoming disjointed.
Adrianna's next bolt of shadow was a hammer blow that shattered the first two layers of his shield as though they were no more than air. The next, a gossamer thin construction, formed from the same natural magic that Adrianna was gifted with, held.
Immediately dissolving the rest of the threads, Lucius sank more energy into that single defence. He felt Adrianna narrow her focus as she, too, poured magic into her spell, trying to drive her bolt through the shield and into his body. Lucius' control began to slip as his shield grew in power to match the onslaught, but still Adrianna's spell pressed at him.
For a brief second, Lucius felt the pressure of Adrianna's spell relax, and he wondered whether she had abandoned it. Then she threw a second bolt at him. It sped into the shield, growing in strength as Lucius' own spell began to fuel it. He cried in alarm as he saw his defences falter and felt an icy grip of cold air begin to circle him like a snake. As if a giant had plucked him from the ground, Lucius found himself tossed through the air, flying across the street to land hard on the cobbles.
Choking, Lucius was dimly aware that the throw had stunned him, and struggled to draw breath into his tortured lungs. He knew Adrianna was not far away and would be preparing her next spell, one that would finish him off if he did not get back on his feet.
Shaking his head to clear his vision, Lucius took a deep but painful breath, and then raised himself up on his arms. Slowly, he stood, and faced Adrianna.
She had taken to the air again, and was floating above the ruined shop. Her defences were back up again, and Adrianna was already summoning magic in readiness for their next bout. She looked as healthy and alert as when they had started this fight.
"I never wanted to kill you, Lucius," Adrianna called down to him. "But you are beginning to prove a hindrance. For the good of our future, you cannot be allowed to interfere further."
Lucius felt the energies build up within Adrianna, and knew that he had neither the strength nor the talent to defend himself. He knew he had only a few more seconds of life left to him.
"It doesn't have to be this way, Aidy," he said bleakly. "We could still be allies. You just have to..."
Words failed him.
"You have no idea of what is going on, or what has truly been at stake. You have wasted every opportunity the Shadowmages have offered to you, and now that will prove your downfall. You could have been one of us, Lucius, not a common thief."
"So maybe I am just a common thief, Aidy. You could let me walk away now. I've left this city before, I'll leave it again," he said, trying not to sound as though he were begging. Dignity aside, he guessed how Adrianna would regard any display
of weakness.
Instead, she actually smiled.
"You would come back," she said. "You always will. I don't think you could ever stay away for long."
In his mind, Lucius felt Adrianna start to feed energy into her spell. He stared up at her, facing annihilation.
"This would just happen later, if it did not happen now," Adrianna said. "Best we end this now, Lucius."
A flash of movement from behind Adrianna drew Lucius' gaze, and he was astonished to see Elaine. Shakily moving toward Adrianna, sword drawn, Elaine looked ravaged. She was blackened with soot from head to foot, which did not disguise the ugly wound that bled from her scalp or her limp.
Lucius opened his mouth to shout, but he suddenly realised he did not know who to shout to. Despite her injuries, Elaine slithered towards Adrianna with cat-like grace, a look of grim, deathly determination on her face.
Sensing something amiss, Adrianna spun around, and saw Elaine, just feet from her. Before she could reshape the spell, the assassin sprang forward, hacking down with the sword and burying it deep into Adrianna's shoulder. Lucius saw blood spray from the wound, the sword's tip visible through her back.
Adriana screeched, a piercing, inhuman wail. She raised her free arm and let the magic she had gathered flow without control. A firestorm of bright, multi-coloured light sprang from her hand, shards of magic lancing through Elaine's body and spilling out into the shop's crumbling walls where they exploded in a shower of burning debris.
Unable to take this last abuse, the building sagged and collapsed in on itself in a mass of flames, rubble and smoke that billowed up into the sky, carrying burning embers with it.
Lucius stared at the ruin, where Elaine and Adrianna had fought a moment before, now buried deep within the burning rubble.
Lucius fell to his knees and, covering his head with his arms, wept.
Chapter Twenty
Night's Haunting Page 22