Elias loosed a nigh inaudible sigh. He had been prepared for this question, and there was no good way to answer it, save lying, that wouldn’t serve to incriminate himself. “I was involved in a struggle with an assassin, having interrupted him trying to kill the princess of my kingdom.”
“Do you mean to say combat?”
“Yes.”
Celiba shrugged. “Did you win?”
“I’m standing here aren’t I.”
“Did you kill your opponent?”
Elias felt heat rush up his neck. “I fail to see the significance.”
“That matters little,” Celiba said. “You are charged with answering the question. Whether or not you see its merit is inconsequential.”
Elias took a breath and placed his hands on his hips. “I disagree.”
Arbiter Cormn cleared his throat. “The Arbiter will remind the witness, that he is compelled to answer.”
“Compelled?” Elias felt his voice boom from his chest, as if uttered by someone else. “Compelled? By what force? Imprisonment? Duress? No, I think not. I’m done answering questions.”
Celiba grinned. “Arbiter, I invoke hostile witness!”
“Wayfarer, it is in your best interest to cooperate,” said Cormn. “The decision will go poorly for you if you not.”
“You profess to be a nonviolent people, Arbiter,” said Elias, turning the face Cormn. “How will you keep me?” Elias held his arms up over his head and rattled the desmene. “With these?”
“If need be,” said Cormn in a soft voice. “I assure you this council takes no pleasure in such necessities.”
“Ah, your shackles are a necessity, but defending yourself against violent and conscienceless men, that is what? Murder?”
“I will not debate the merits of our laws with you, not in this arena,” replied Cormn.
“Arbiter!” cried a white-faced Malak. “I beg a continuance. My charge is not in his right mind.”
Elias held up a hand. “No. My mind is perfectly sound.”
Malak left his table and approached the podium. He took Elias by the arms. “I beg of you, Elias, do not do this.”
Elias mimicked his unlikely friend’s gesture. “Trust me. This is the only way.”
Cormn cleared his throat. “Barrister Malak, resume your post. Your continuance is granted, but I remind you, reign in your charge, or else the Arbiter will summarily rule against him.”
“Objection!” cried Celiba.
Elias stepped down from the podium. “I object as well. I will no longer endure these proceedings. I am going to leave Illedium and find a way to fix this hot mess. To my hosts I say, your energies would better be served aiding me then prosecuting me.”
“We cannot allow this,” said Cormn, his voice barely above a whisper, but by his magic his words carried across the chamber to be heard by all.
Mordum stood, grim-faced and tall. He leveled a wooden-ringed fist at Elias.
Elias stood on the cardinal carpet of the central isle and met Mordum’s gaze. The Enkilder blanched and hazarded a glance to his hand, as if to ensure that he still wore the ring that was bonded with the desmene. His pale, icy eyes flicked back to Elias.
“Is your toy broken?”
“Arbiter?” Mordum asked, as he side-stepped into the aisle to face off against Elias.
“You give me no choice, Wayfarer,” Cormn said. The Arbiter stood and leveled his hand at Elias, his ring-finger outfitted with the twin of Mordum’s ring. After a pregnant silence his voice rang through the chamber. “What is this treachery?”
“Someone’s switched the rings,” Celiba cried in a shrill voice. She backpedaled down the aisle, safely behind Mordum.
Elias watched Teah as she calmly approached to stand by his side. She touched his hand, the spare gesture speaking volumes. “No, said Elias, “your magic has failed.”
As one, he and Teah lifted their hands and curls of black smoke began to rise off their desmene. Soon the wood-wrought shackles were reduced to ash, which flitted away on an arcane wind.
“Elder spirits,” Celiba breathed, as Enkilder began to shuffle and make their way toward the door, though a good many remained seated, transfixed by the drama unfolding before their eyes.
“Clever, boy,” said Mordum as he took a deliberate step toward Elias. “But not half as clever as you may think. It would have gone better for you to live out your days here in Illedium. The Enkilder are at the top of the list as captors go. You would have been comfortable.”
“Not a deal I was willing to take.”
Mordum offered Elias a thin smile. “I know, even as you know that I cannot allow you to leave this hall.” The Speaker threw off his cloak, and turned to face Elias in profile, as if a fencer squaring-off against a fellow combatant. He raised a hand.
Cormn rushed down from the Arbiter cabinet. “Mordum! Cease at once!”
A cocoon of transparent energy sprung up around the Speaker—a shield of some type, Elias presumed.
“I cannot, Arbiter,” Mordum said. “If I allow the Wayfarer to leave Illedium it will spell doom for us all. I have seen it.”
Chapter 27
Soul-Knife
“By the eldest,” said Cormn, “speak plainly, Mordum, and be quick about it.”
The Speaker obliged the Arbiter, but his eyes never left Elias. “I have spent the better part of a long life seeking the answer to the great question of our age: how did the initial rift that warps the ether form, and how can it be resolved?”
“I have consulted soothsayers across the globe. I have read the texts, consulted the stars, peered into the scrying pools and mirrors of the world. I have even traveled the timeline.”
At this last pronouncement a great clamor rushed through the audience chamber. Cormn approached to stand off to one side of Elias, even as his son joined him, and placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“Are you admitting before all those assembled that you have willfully breached the Second Law?” asked the Arbiter.
“I saw the blackest future for all Enkilder,” Mordum said. “I was left with no alternative.”
Elias felt a sinking in his guts. “What was it you saw?”
“My quest revealed that the original rift that reopened a gate back into the fey realm was created not far from here, in the fabled ruins of Lucerne Palace.”
Elias’s knees went weak. “God, no.”
“Yes, Elias,” said Mordum, as he inched forward. “Though other gates were constructed later, it was you that created the original. The imp deceived you.”
“Don’t you see,” said Elias, “I want to repair the damage, repair the timeline. Allow me that chance.”
Mordum laughed, a hollow, brittle sound. “You don’t understand. That is precisely why I can’t allow you to leave.” Mordum inched further yet up the aisle. “Yes, yes, I can see the truth is just now dawning on you.”
“Speak plainly, damn you!” Cormn cried.
“The Wayfarer didn’t destabilize the ether by his appearance—the ether has been eroding since the original rift formed, and only now has its inexorable unraveling reached culmination. The old fail-safes built by the Darkin to contain the breach have begun to falter, for in the face of the entropic forces of a temporal paradox no Arcanum can endure.
“If the Wayfarer repairs the breach, resolves the timeline, then the fey would have never found their way back to Agia. There never would have been a war. The land would be whole, yes, but they never would have taken human slaves. They never would have mated with them, thus the Enkilder would never have been spawned.”
“Elder spirits,” Cormn breathed in a broken voice.
“Yes, Arbiter. If the Wayfarer resolves the timeline, then Illedium will never exist. Every Enkilder in this great chamber, every Enkilder in this domain, would cease to be, never having been born. It will be as if we never were. A fate, I think we can agree, far worse than death.”
“Yet think of the countless other souls that would hav
e been saved,” said Teah, her voice butterfly soft, but clarion clear in the still chamber. “Think of the blasted continents. Think of a world that may die because the ether is so unstable.”
“And who are you to decide who is fated to survive?” Mordum asked. “Who are you to decide the lesser of evils? Maybe a swaddling babe who even now sucks at his mother’s teat in the heart of Illedium may grow up to restore balance, or take us to a new realm.” The Speaker’s eyes flitted back to Elias. “Do you see, Wayfarer? Do you see why time mages all go mad and why this people have forbidden it? Once you open a door, who are you to close it? You played God. You changed the timeline. Does that give you the right to rewrite it just as flippantly?”
“You know well that was not my intention,” said Elias. “There must be another way. There must be a solution that won’t involve your extinction.”
“There is no way,” Mordum said, without malice. “None that I can see, and I have been studying temporal Arcanum since before your father was born.”
Elias steeled himself for what was to come next, but a sudden intuition bloomed in his mind. “And yet if I did restore the timeline you would remain.” His words gave Mordum pause, but the Speaker did not respond. “You are not Enkilder, are you? You are dark fey.”
“Pity you took so long to start using your wits,” Mordum returned. “Yes, I am the son of a house that took allegiance with the dark after the Great Divide, but I claim no kinship or fealty to the Obsidian Queen. Not anymore.”
“Then why?” asked Teah. “Why this elaborate scheme to thwart Elias?”
“I traveled the globe,” said Mordum. “I have sojourned to every land, and this, Illedium, is the final bastion of civilization in a shattered world. Oh, the domain of our Darkin has order, but it is tainted with the madness of the queen and the dark powers of her retainers. I will not see this place destroyed.
“I am sorry, Wayfarer, I truly am, but you are all that stands between what I have come to love and oblivion. That I cannot allow. Prepare yourself.”
Elias lifted a hand to summon his power. “Nyla, Flee!” he screamed even as Mordum summoned a razor-thin spear of red energy that discharged from his extended index and middle fingers like an arrow. Elias steeled himself to ward off the blow, but Teah proved the quicker.
She phased with the speed of thought and appeared a pace in front of Elias, having erected a diaphanous, alabaster shield of force. The shield absorbed Mordum’s spell with little more than a ripple and a scant sizzle of sparks. “You’ll not have your quarry that easily, apostate,” said Teah.
Mordum snorted and flourished his hands. In his left a silvered staff appeared, summoned by some magic unknown to Elias. In his right a black dagger materialized, triangular and seeming cast from a single piece of ore.
“A staff of dispelling!” Malak exclaimed.
“He’ll have to get within arm’s-length to use it,” growled Cormn.
“Concern yourself instead, Barrister, with the soul-knife he holds in his other hand,” Teah said.
Elias felt Malak and Cormn stiffened behind him. “What’s a soul-knife?”
“Another bit of forbidden Arcanum,” Teah said, her eyes tracking Mordum as he crept closer. “As a weapon it pales in comparison to steel blades, as it is hewn from Obsidian, but in the hands of an arcanist of sufficient skill, a single cut has the power to capture the victim’s soul.”
“Then we best not get cut,” said Elias, who at the moment sorely missed his sword.
A sphere of fire hurled from over Elias’s shoulder, singeing his shirt. It exploded in the air before Mordum, its concussive force strong enough to press Elias and Teah back, even as Teah’s shield absorbed droplets of liquid fire. The burst of flame cleared to reveal Mordum unharmed, his staff raised high and a nimbus of pale blue light surrounding him, the same icy color as his eyes.
“The pup has teeth,” Mordum remarked.
“Malak!” shouted Corm. “Stand down!”
“I’ll not stand here and let him murder them uncontested!” Malak raised his hands to prepare another volley of offensive magic, but Cormn tackled him. As the father and son struggled, Mordum charged, leveling his staff like a lance.
“Lower your shield!” Elias cried.
The shield winked out at once and Elias threw up both his hands, his memory of his struggle with the Lichlor yet fresh in his mind. Arcs of white lightning lanced from his fingertips in a lethal web.
With arcane alacrity, Mordum changed his grip on his staff and spun it over his wrist. The pinwheeling staff intercepted the wild tumult of magic, but catapulted down the aisle under the force of the collision, blackened and useless. Yet, by then Mordum had closed the distance between them and leapt high into the air, soul-knife raised to deliver a killing blow.
Elias prepared himself to parry the blow unarmed, but at the last moment a spray of blood showered him as Mordum was derailed by an invisible force. The Fey crashed to the floor and slid into Elias and Teah, bowling them over. Elias heard the scrape of steel on stone as he rolled to the side. He looked up and his marrow turned to ice.
His sword pommel skittered on the floor, the blade pressed between Nyla and Mordum who both tumbled across the aisle, propelled by the arcane force of Mordum’s leap. Angry, blue veins protruded on Nyla’s face and throat, and she convulsed, mouth open in a silent scream. Presently, the entangled pair crashed into the table that Elias and his companions had lately occupied. Mordum rolled off Nyla, clutching the spewing wound in his abdomen.
Teah pushed herself from the floor and screamed. The soul-knife was buried to the hilt in Nyla’s shoulder.
Chapter 28
Fire and Stone
Lar watched as the funeral pyre burned down to ash. Between liberal amounts of pitch and the arcane ignition source, courtesy of Ogden, who wasted no time in stepping fully into the mantle of resident wizard since revealing himself earlier that afternoon, Jonesy was cremated nearly instantly.
The fire lit the night, a beacon to all Lucerne. At first the flames cast only the shadows of the Lucerne Sentinels and the three odd score of Marshals upon the newly raised Marshal Hall, but one by one the Black and Redshields that had known Jonesy meandered up. Before long many others, from the household staff, the court, and countless others beside crept up to the memorial pyre to pay their respects, or else to witness the spectacle.
Silence reigned for the better part of an hour, the popping and crackling of white ash the only sound, until someone began to pluck doleful notes on a steel-string guitar. At this point, people began to move around and form into groups. A couple of muscled porters from the household staff rolled up a white-oak barrel. “The queen’s Whiskey,” one of them announced.
On cue, Eithne glided from around the high hedge that separated the stables from the outer gardens. The muffled sound of more than a hundred souls dropping to a knee in deference to their monarch punctuated the guitar like a syncopated drum-beat.
“Rise sons and daughters of Peidra,” Eithne said. “Today every one of us, including me, pay homage to a fallen soldier, not to crown and scepter. Now, uncork that knoll whiskey!”
The porters required no more prodding and cracked the cork, being the first to enjoy a glass, handily reaping their reward for rolling out the several hundred pound barrel from the larder. Once the whiskey was flowing the solemnity of the affair was replaced with a more festive energy. Before long, those that knew Jonesy best began making toasts in his honor. During one such honorific, a piebald mare wandered into the clearing and whinnied. “Look!” exclaimed the bleary-eyed Blackshield whose speech had been interrupted. “Jonsey’s horse wants to make a toast too!” This earned some hearty guffaws from the gathering and liberal exultations of “Hear ye, Hear ye!”
Lar found himself smiling despite the black mood that had dominated him since finding Jonesy’s letter. He left his resting place against the stables with his party and approached the mare. He calmed the anxious mount with a pat on her muzzle a
nd a bit of verse that Elias had taught him, claiming it calmed horses down at once. “An old Marshal trick, from dad,” he had remarked. Lar swallowed the memory and realized that the gathering had gone quiet. He became glaringly aware that everyone’s eyes rested on him.
Someone passed him a glass teeming over with knoll. Someone else cried, “Toast! Toast!” and yet another, “To the First Marshal!”
On a whim, Lar mounted Jonesy’s horse, while holding the glass of whiskey aloft in one hand. The mare fussed briefly, dancing about the embers of the pyre, before settling down under Lar’s practiced hand. Lar hoisted his glass and said, “Tonight we drink only to Jonsey!” In a single motion, Lar swallowed the entire four fingers of knoll, then threw the glass into the crimson coals, which elicited a wild cheer from the gathering.
The mare reared under the noise, but Lar brought her down with a gentle nudge. “Today we lost a good man. A man who sacrificed himself to save a comrade in arms, and whose bravery may very well have saved countless others, including his queen. This loss stings, because Jonsey was a good guardsman, a good Marshal, and from what many a man have told me, a good friend.
“But it also stings because each of us that wear a sword or shield, or work in the palace, know that we could have died today, as easily as Jonesy. Myself included. These are not easy times. We have only just overcome a great danger and now a new one comes, and again it threatens us at the heart of our country. And we’re afraid. I’m afraid. Marshal Padraic Duana said to me once that a man in command should never show fear to his men, and he was probably right. But I ain’t him. And I ain’t ever thought I’d be wearing his boots.
“And I can say this to you all, because his son, Elias, taught me that fear can make you stronger, if you use it right. It’s like smithing. Hotter coals, stronger steel. It’s up to us here to see that Jonesy’s death wasn’t for nothing. That surviving that business last fall wasn’t for nothing. That the First Marshal’s quest, wherever he’s gone, isn’t for nothing.
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 24