by Cindy Dees
Laernan stood up shaking his head. “The healer was correct. His spirit is, indeed, departed.”
“Departed to where?” she demanded in frustration.
“Beyond the Eternal Flame, sister. He is dead, and nothing will bring him back.”
She spun to glare first at the Man in Amber, who she swore stared back at her in smug satisfaction, and then at the cause of this mess, Vlador Noss. “Is this the death you foretold yestereve, seer?”
“Of course it is, my lady.”
“You have no other murders planned this day?”
“I swear upon my sacred power, I do not.”
“Do not lie to me,” she threatened.
“Never, my princess. I vow it upon my life.”
The golden doors to Maximillian’s throne room swung open, and she turned in trepidation to face the wrath of her father.
* * *
Raina listened in dismay as Elfonse began to read the ritual magic scroll, summoning magics first to build the circle to contain the magic and then to summon bottling magic. If only she weren’t White Heart! She had more magic than all these men combined, and if it she channeled it as damage, she could kill them all where they stood.
For an instant, it was tempting to abandon her vows. To summon magic and shape it to do harm. To blow all these men beyond the Veil and wipe them out as a threat to her and her sisters and daughters once and for all.
But she was better than that. Better than them. She would not break her vows or shame her tabard. She was White Heart. She would find a way through this to a solution that did not involve bloodshed even if it killed her.
At first, the ritual’s power was a tingling across her skin, and then it grew to an itch of all over, unbearable torture. That was when the voices began. The whispers she’d worked so hard to learn to control broke free in her mind, muttering in an unintelligible cacophony that grew louder and louder as the ritual did its work upon her, tearing her spirit free of her body bit by bit.
She must stop this! But how? She could not speak, gagged as she was. She could not cast magic, her hands bound down as they were.
The voices became screams in her head. Or maybe that was her screaming inside her own mind. The piercing noise of it was unbearable, ripping apart her mind by slow, agonizing degrees. Must. Not. Give. In.
And then the emotions came. All of them. From every throat screaming in her head poured forth everything they’d ever felt. Joy. Rage. Grief. Frustration. Terror. The onslaught was completely overwhelming, and she felt her own sanity giving way before the deluge.
Too much. She couldn’t absorb it. Couldn’t hold it within her mind and heart without exploding. The mages and their ritual were destroying her body from the outside in and her spirit from the inside out. Tearing her magic from her spirit and her spirit from her body.
They’d lied to her. Lied to Justin so he would lie to her. This had been their plan all along. They couldn’t have their docile, obedient broodmare, so they were going to kill her instead.
How dare they. She was a daughter of Tyrel, by the Lady. Of all people, they should know what she was capable of.
Think, Raina. Think. There had to be a way out of this …
More furious than frightened, although she was terrified, she commenced summoning her own magic. It was nigh impossible to hear her thoughts over the screaming rampage in her mind or to summon energy to herself through the agony of her dissolving flesh and the onslaught of emotions suffocating her.
Even though they’d gagged her after she’d taunted Elfonse, she did not need to speak to summon great crackling balls of unshaped magic to her hands. Experimentally, she sent a bolt of magical energy up toward the ritual circle where it arced upward less than a foot away from her shoulder. Her magic crackled against the ritual shell, and the shell waivered, dimming for a moment.
Hah! She could mess with Elfonse’s circle!
She sent a big bolt of unshaped, chaotic magic toward the ritual shell again. She couldn’t throw it with any force; she would have to rely on the power and volume of magical energy to do the work for her. She sent more magic outward. This time the shell nearly failed.
Elfonse snarled, and a pair of his acolytes jumped toward her. She opened wide the gates of her magic and let a huge burst of it envelop her entire body. The acolytes jumped back, startled.
Quickly, she willed the entire mass of energy she’d just summoned into the spot in the ritual circle beside her that was still dim. The ritual shell broke with the noise of a thunderclap, deafening in the enclosed room. The cot she lay on toppled over with the force of it, and had she not been strapped onto it, she would have taken a hard fall. As it was, she shifted in her bonds, and her bonds themselves shifted, sliding to one side enough so she could slip her right hand free of its buckled strap.
Shouting erupted, and feet raced all around her. Plunging her freed hand into her belt pouch, she was relieved to feel the cluster of small glass globes from the Black Widow inside. The mages hadn’t searched her before they’d strapped her down to drain her spirit and kill her. A mistake, that.
She grabbed several of the globes and threw them up at the men leaning over her. The tinkles of shattering glass were not audible over the din of shouting men trying to relight torches and contain the ricocheting magic of the failed ritual circle and the loose ritual magic flying about the chamber, bouncing from wall to wall in search of a target.
The three acolytes dropped to the ground beside her. She wriggled frantically out from under one of them and tore loose the gag from her mouth. She cast a quick spirit form on herself, which would make her temporarily invisible and noncorporeal.
“Where is she?” Elfonse shouted in the darkness. “She’s got to be in here. The door is still barred.”
A few torches sputtered to life.
She moved as quickly as she could in the invisible, drifting state of a spirit form toward the door, dodging mages and scooting around them as they raced around the chamber doing damage control and seeking her.
Crouching low, she got down beside the fellow guarding the door and reached for the latch.
“Somebody cast an area-of-effect spirit anchor!” Elfonse shouted.
The anchor spell would force her spirit form to drop. Not waiting for that, she dropped her own spirit form at the same second she lunged for the latch. Her body popped back into existence in its physical form, heavy and awkward, but she managed to grasp the latch and yank it down as the guard beside her lurched and grabbed for her. She rolled below his reaching arms and slammed against the door panel. It flew outward into the hallway, and she tumbled after it.
She did scream then—at the top of her healthy, young lungs. Ironically, it had been her older sister, Arianna, who had taught her how to “scream like a proper female” some years ago, a piercing shriek fit to wake the dead.
Someone threw a silence spell at her, and she incanted a magic shield just before the silence spell arrived. That shield dropped, and as fast as she could say the words, she put up another one. She resumed screaming for all she was worth.
But then they were all casting at her at once, and she couldn’t put up shields on herself as fast as two dozen or more mages could pepper her with silencing spells.
Her scream cut off abruptly, her throat paralyzed, no more sound coming out. She could only hope it had been enough. Rough hands grabbed her and dragged her back inside the ritual chamber, shoving her into the circle and down to her knees.
She glared up at Elfonse in defiance, daring him to do his worst to her, silently vowing not to go down without a fight.
“That was costly, you wretched child!” he snarled. “Now we’ll have to cast a new circle and start the whole ritual over again with new components.”
She summoned a glow of magic to both hands menacingly, as if to say she was willing to start the fight over as well.
“Knock her out, you fools!” Elfonse snarled.
Raina glanced back over her shoulder and
saw a pair of acolytes with the butts of their daggers raised, hesitating to strike her. She mouthed the words White Heart as both a warning and a threat.
Memorizing their faces so she could recognize them the next time she saw them, she would take pleasure in pointing them out to the Royal Order of the Sun as the men who’d struck down a White Heart member.
They seemed to read her intent in her eyes, for both of them paused, frowning, and failed to swing their short swords at her.
“Oh, for the love of Hadrian, I’ll do it,” Elfonse growled.
Something hard smashed into her temple, and everything went dark.
* * *
With the death of the chamberlain, there was no one to announce their entrance to the throne room, and Endellian was forced to step inside herself, calling out, “Princess Endellian and the Child of Fate, Vlador Noss, answer the summons of His Most Resplendent Majesty, Maximillian the Third, Emperor of the Eternal Empire of Koth.” She added a little desperately, “May he ever rule in prosperity and peace.”
“What’s this?” her father asked. “Where’s my chamberlain?”
Endellian stepped fully into the room, bowing her forehead to the first golden step leading up to her father seated in his black nullstone throne in the shape of a rising flame. It was the full obeisance of a commoner and one she never, ever used. “I am sorry to say he is dead, Your Most Resplendent Majesty.”
“Rise, for pity’s sake, daughter!” Maximillian snapped. “What’s this about my chamberlain being dead?”
“Something happened with the Man in Amber. The Child of Fate claims to have opened some sort of mental conduit from the Man in Amber to the chamberlain that the Man in Amber used to … kill him…” The explanation sounded lame even to her ears, and her words trailed off uncertainly.
“This would be why I encased that whoreson in amber in the first place!” her father snapped. “Has the chamberlain gone to resurrect, then?”
“I’m sorry to say his spirit has departed,” she replied reluctantly.
“Laernan? Why did you not anchor his spirit back in his body?”
“By the time I reached the chamberlain, his spirit had already departed too far beyond the Veil for me to retrieve it.”
Maximillian frowned. “How long ago did the chamberlain die?”
“No more than five minutes, Father,” Endellian answered, cautiously adding the familiar term as a gentle reminder to Maximillian that she was more than a regular courtier to him.
“And you cannot reach his spirit?” Maximillian questioned Laernan.
“I cannot. It must have flown from his body directly to the flame and beyond, at high speed.”
“Enhanced speed?” Maximillian queried.
“Just so, Your Majesty,” Laernan answered solemnly.
“Well, well. How very interesting. Step forward, Child of Fate.”
Vlador did so, bowing in the same manner Endellian had. Maximillian let the seer remain bent double for somewhat longer than he had her before finally granting permission for Vlador to rise.
“What did you do to my chamberlain?” Maximillian asked mildly enough.
The question was accompanied by a wave of mental power from her father that stripped bare all deception, cut through evasion, and tore the truth directly from the mind of the one he interrogated. It was this exact power of her father’s that made him so formidable. None could deceive him, and none could hide even their deepest, innermost, secret thoughts from Maximillian when he chose to pry into someone’s mind.
Vlador Noss answered easily, “Upon my word of honor, Your Majesty, I did nothing to your chamberlain. I merely … enabled … mental communication between the Man in Amber and your servant.”
“Did you hear or feel the nature of this communication?” Maximillian asked.
“I did.”
“Describe it.”
Vlador frowned for a moment. “It felt almost psionic in nature. And yet, not. It was not a skill the Man in Amber called upon, but rather a mind power intrinsic to his being.”
Maximillian planted an elbow on the arm of his throne and his chin in his fist. He sat thus for a long minute, thinking. The emanations of his mind rippled out across the room, although Endellian could discern nothing of his actual thoughts. Sometimes she forgot just how powerful her father truly was. But in an unguarded moment like this, when he did not bother to channel or contain his mental powers, the display was fearsome, even to her, and she was closer to him in power than anyone else alive in the Empire.
At length, he said, “You may live, seer. For now.”
The rush of relief she felt at that pronouncement surprised Endellian.
Her father said to Vlador, “Tell me more about this rebellion you see brewing, specifically where it grows and who is behind it.”
“Of course, Your Majesty. I see a person with no name standing in a wild land…”
* * *
Raina blinked awake to the sounds of fighting. Painful magic coursed through her body. Someone had cast some sort of healing spell at her, apparently. Her face rested on something cold and hard. Stone. A floor. Feet stomped perilously close to her face.
“Get up, Raina!” a familiar voice shouted. Cicero.
Startled, she pushed upright and saw a wild mêlée before her, a tangle of dark blue robes with fists and swords and bolts of magic flying wildly. She had no idea where to wade into the fight, who to help, or who to hinder.
Then she spied a familiar face. Justin. Standing back-to-back with a big figure. That must be Kadir. And they were losing. In spite of both of them spraying magic like mad, they were outnumbered and out-cast by a factor of at least twelve to one. A third man joined them, his sword flickering in and out among the robes almost too fast to follow. Cicero always had been a fine swordsman.
Still, she knew a losing fight when she saw one. Pulling an abandoned blue cloak over her like a sheepskin, she crawled forward on her hands and knees until she could pop up to her feet beside her defenders.
She tossed all her remaining sleep gases toward the exit door, trying to create some sort of corridor for them to escape through. Shocked mages fell over one after another as she mowed them down with the Black Widow’s sleep gas globes. Because she did not have to incant a spell and gather magic before throwing each gas globe, the alchemy was extremely fast at knocking down their foes.
“This way!” she shouted to Cicero, Justin, and Kadir. The three of them moved in a tight cluster, backs pressed together, as she fired off silence spells and sleep spells as fast as she could cast them.
The screaming from before resumed in her head, nearly splitting her skull in twain, nearly driving her to her knees in agony. A horrendous rush of fear and rage filled her mind until she could barely shape magic, but she kept on casting grimly.
They’d nearly made it to the door when at least a dozen more men charged through the doorway, weapons raised and hands glowing.
“Get them!” Elfonse screamed, pointing at her and her companions.
Raina braced to go down, but of a sudden, the men in front of her started turning around. Casting magic away from her. What on Urth? Someone was attacking them from outside in the hallway.
Without stopping to see who it might be, she took advantage of the backs of her foes and nailed them with more sleep spells. They toppled over like pins in a lawn bowling game. She leaped over their prostrate forms, yelling for Cicero, Kadir, and Justin to follow her.
The entire fight poured out into the hallway, lit by torches guttering wildly in the air currents stirred up by the combat.
She was stunned to see the prisoner brandishing a shield and sword, dropping the last pair of mages who fought against him.
“To me, White Heart!” he shouted. “I am Royal Order of the Sun!”
He wore no colors, but she didn’t care one whit. She bolted forward, praying that her companions were still on their feet and close behind her.
The prisoner turned and sprinted down the h
allway, leading Raina around a corner. He ducked into a small room, and she charged in after him. As he began to slam the door shut, she grabbed his arm frantically.
“Those three are with us!”
Cicero, Kadir, and Justin screeched through the opening, and the prisoner shoved the door closed behind them, dropping a stout wooden bar into place to bar it. Total darkness enveloped them.
“Where are we?” Raina whispered.
Kadir’s voice floated out of the darkness, out of breath but disgusted. “A storeroom filled with casks of wine. There’s no other way out.”
A glow from Kadir’s hand illuminated what was, indeed, a small, low-ceilinged chamber mostly filled with barrels and casks. He murmured the incant for a wizard’s lock, and a protective glow abruptly encased the wooden panel.
The prisoner said, “I have a magic item. It will transport one person out of here. Take it, Emissary.”
“No, thank you.”
“I’m not going to debate this with you. It is my duty to protect you—”
She cut him off. “I have a better idea. Let’s all get out of here.”
Pounding commenced on the door at her back. The portal glowed brightly for a moment, accompanied by a sizzling sound, as the wizard’s lock spell Kadir had just cast upon it met the dispelling magics being cast upon it from the other side.
Kadir quickly cast another wizard’s lock as Raina fished frantically in her pouch. She found and pulled out a bumpy stick of wood, about the length of her forearm and slightly tapered on one end. “I don’t know how to use this, Kadir, but perhaps you could do the honors?”
“Bless you for your stubborn, willful ways, and for stealing that from me long ago,” Kadir muttered as she held out the Wand of Rowan to him. He took the powerful magic item and ordered, “Everyone grab onto me. Not my cloak. My skin.”
Raina grabbed onto Kadir’s forearm as he uttered a complicated command word.
The door to the wine cellar exploded behind them, and Elfonse raised his hands to cast a gigantic bolt of magic at them—
—and then it all blinked out of existence.
In the enraged mage’s place stood a young, beautiful, green-skinned woman, clothed only in woven leaves and artfully draped vines, staring at them curiously.