“I find that I am in your debt,” said a disembodied voice. “Long have I been posted in these blasted ruins, chiefly to guard this cursed statue. Now, thanks to you, I’ve a reason to return to home.”
Teah cursed and raised a shield. It was hardly in place before a sphere of inky energy exploded on it. The force of the detonation hurtled her off the dais and sent her skittering on her back behind a crumbled column. Malak, who stood adjacent to her, was thrown onto his face at Elias’s feet.
Elias inched toward the statue, and his sword, which were now on the other side of a six-foot diameter hole.
“Eh, eh,” said the voice, “that I do not recommend. As you have brought an end to my exile, I am willing to spare your lives, if you surrender peaceably. The queen will have a great interest in meeting the man that finally managed to solve the riddle that she could not.”
“If you would deal with me then show yourself,” Elias returned. “I do not surrender to men who skulk in the shadows.”
Malak summoned his second sight as he lay supine on the ground. It was difficult to harness his power and use it to detect the arcane signatures present in the square. The area was teeming with so much magical energy that it was hard to focus, which is likely how the Darkin were able to sneak up on them so easily. Either that or the eroding of the ether was beginning to take its toll.
Malak redoubled his efforts. “He’s at two o-clock, on the side of the brick building.”
“Very well,” said the voice, even as he materialized where Malak had pointed. “Let it never be said that Captain Nekise Wintren eschews a fair fight.” He drew a long, thin saber.
Five other fey, as spare and sharp-featured as their blades, came out from behind the building.
“Well,” said the Captain around a toothy grin, “mostly fair.”
Elias sized up the six saber-wielding Dark Fey. Their hair was the white of winter bone, and their skin as pale as a night-flowering orchid.
“What will it be, Outlander?” asked the captain of the Darkin. “Surrender to the Obsidian Queen, or die where you stand?”
Malak, who had gained his feet, back peddled toward Elias. “What do we do, Wayfarer?” he asked, his voice brittle. “Do we surrender?”
Elias’s thoughts turned to his oath to give up the sword. He thought how he had failed, at least in the spirit of the thing, since he had come to the Enkilder domain. “I’ve not come this far, across the boundaries of time, through the wastes of my homeland to roll over now. We fight.”
As the fey fanned out into a semicircle Malak looked up at him with child’s eyes. “We’re outnumbered three to one, and your sword...”
“I don’t need my sword.” Elias bore his will onto the six swordsmen creeping toward them in battle formation. “I’ve mastered a few other tricks since I’ve been among you.”
And that’s when Elias Duana called the lightning.
The captain, who was at the center of the arrowhead battle formation, took the bolt, which lanced from the heavens, clean on his breastplate. The force of the impact sent him airborne. He crashed to the rubble a blackened and smoking husk. The fey to either side of him were caught in the detonation as well. A ring of crackling energy burst from the epicenter of the explosion and cooked them in their obsidian armor, melting the enchanted ore as easily as wax.
Teah, who had lain in wait standing by for Elias’s lead, leapt from behind the felled column and discharged a bolt of nebulous, raw arcane energy from her hand. It tore through the nearest fey as easily as Kveshian steel. Dead on his feet, the unfortunate Darkin fell rag-doll limp to the ground.
The remaining two fey were unfazed by the sudden carnage and sprinted in to a full charge. Elias tore his scabbard from his belt and readied himself to meet them. While the scabbard was not edged steel, it was made from the same mysterious alloy as his blade. The scabbard held as Elias sank into a lunge to parry the first blow. With a skidding hop he led off his back leg and kicked the swordsman with a low leg sweep. The fey crashed to the ground but tucked into a combat roll and somersaulted to his feet, uninjured.
Elias wheeled about to intercept the charge of the other who bore down on him with a wicked overhand stroke. Elias stepped into the attack and caught the strike on the flat of his scabbard. With his free hand he darted a quick punch, which took the swordsman on the point of his chin. The fey stumbled back a step, momentarily dazed but still in the fight.
Meanwhile the first swordsman had recovered and renewed his assault. Elias managed to check the fey’s whip-quick slash, but only just. He leapt back to gain some space, but the swordsman pressed his assault without missing a beat. Elias parried and riposted with a quick jab at the Darkin’s exposed face, even as he positioned himself with his back to a disintegrated wall to receive the second fey combatant.
Teah stood at the edges of the melee, trying to come up with an intervention tactic, but was afraid of catching Elias with her magic in the fast-paced skirmish. She hadn’t long to think on it, however, for Malak entered the fray. The young Barrister had run straight for the statue when the combat began and wrested Elias’s sword from the stone keyhole.
The second of the fey combatants realized his predicament too late. He turned about with his sword readied before finding himself impaled by the enchanted steel which Malak wielded in two hands like a spear. Yet, though mortally wounded, the Darkin completed his turn and fell on Malak, thrusting his saber in a last, telling blow.
Malak felt a curious shocking sensation, and then warmth. He looked down to see blood flowering in his tunic like a crimson blossom. He realized with a kind of cold, out-of-body detachment that he had been run through.
Elias screamed. The interruption in the battle had given him the beat he needed to reach his magic. With a pristine rage he funneled his power, and arcs of lightning leapt from his fingers and stole the life out of the remaining fey combatant, who fell to the ground wracked by bone-breaking convulsions.
Elias rushed to Malak’s side and fell to his knees.
“Wayfarer, I think it severed my spine. I believe I am dead.”
“Nonsense,” said Elias as Teah hovered over them and examined Malak’s wound. “Teah will heal you.”
“Too late,” Malak rasped with a wan smile.
“No,” Elias said, “I promised your father I would keep you safe, see? Now we wouldn’t want to make a liar out of me, would we?” Elias held Malak’s eyes though he saw the green corona of Teah’s healing magic at work in his peripheral vision.
Malak grabbed Elias’s forearm. “No, I feel my spirit slipping away.” Elias began to protest but Malak silenced him with a squeeze on his arm. “No, listen closely, Wayfarer, while I can still speak. Don’t forget me, but don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop. I was proud to stand with you. Fix this broken world. Whatever it takes, no matter the sacrifice, you must do this.”
“Malak...”
“Listen!” Malak rasped with uncharacteristic vehemence. “The world is on the brink of ruin. The ether is eroding. My people have lingered for centuries in stasis, isolated, with no purpose, no delight, severed from reality. No one should live this hollow existence. Rewrite history, Elias. Give us a future worth living. Swear it.”
“I will not fail you, friend,” Elias said. “I swear it.”
“Friend...” said Malak with an easy smile, a gesture so hitherto foreign on his countenance. Then his eyes went cold.
“I couldn’t save him,” Teah said in a flat voice as she idly held the blood slicked saber she had pulled from Malak. “His spine was severed. I couldn’t repair it in time.”
“Then we repair the timeline,” Elias said, Malak’s words and his sworn oath yet fresh in his mind. “Perhaps Malak can live again, in a different time, in a different place.”
Teah shook her head. She shivered. “Cormn was right this is a fool’s errand. How can we hope to succeed?”
With a gentle hand Elias pried his sword loose from Teah’s grip. “I don’t know, but w
e start by descending into the vault. Danica built this statue for me. She would have left more clues.”
Teah nodded. “Yes, yes, of course.” She turned wet eyes to Malak. “We can’t just leave him like this.”
Elias felt a prickle dance along his neck. He looked up to see a shimmering, egg-shaped energy field hovering above Malak’s crown. At once Elias recognized it for the aura he saw around people, particularly arcanists. He knew at once that it was Malak’s spirit, but his aura had changed somehow; it had become more concentrated, and yet lighter at the same time. Elias swallowed, and as he did so he tasted the salt of hot tears.
“Malak is beyond us now,” he said, “but you’re right. We won’t leave him here for the Lichlor and their ilk.” Elias stood and held his sword over his head. He drew the static energy pregnant in the clouds above. The blade became lambent with blue light.
“What are you doing?” asked Teah, equal parts awe and dread in her voice.
“The kings and knights of old were to put to flame and cremated, given to the wind. We Marshals hold the same tradition. I won’t let my friend’s final resting place be this cursed ruin. Stand back.”
Elias laid the point of his blade on Malak’s sternum and summoned his power with a wordless appeal to all the spirits above him. With a gentle surge, like a lazy tide going out to sea, liquid blue flame bled from his blade. It consumed Malak at once, with such intense heat that his remains sublimated with but a sigh and not so much as a wisp of smoke.
A soft wind swirled through the ruins and caught Malak’s ashes in a miniature twister and carried them up and away into the leaden twilight.
Chapter 43
Mordum’s Offer
Elias and Teah stood at the edge of the dais and looked down at the staircase that wound into the earth.
The fine hairs on the nape of Elias’s neck stood up and he knew that they were about to descend into a place of power. He touched Teah’s hand and she pressed against him, trembling slightly. The stoic Enkilder had been derailed by the death of Malak and for that he could not fault her. Still, he had been more than a little surprised to see her weeping openly. Long had the Enkilder been removed from the ways of the world, from the violence, scheming, and daily betrayals, and perhaps it made her ill prepared to suffer such loss.
Loss was something with which Elias was all too familiar. Perhaps the Enkilder were right to hide from the world in their haven, secreted away from such things. Of course such isolation came at a price, but Elias found himself in no place to judge them for they lived in a cursed world. A world darkened in part by his actions. A world that if he did manage to save might very well see the Enkilder cast into oblivion.
The enormous gravity of this predicament weighed upon Elias as he and Teah stood numbly at the entrance to the vault his sister had left for him.
“Elias, are you unwell?”
Elias teetered on the edge of the dais, feeling suddenly thin, as if his body had lost mass, or else he was moving out of it. The world began to whiten around the edges. “O God,” he croaked, “not again.”
†
Elias dropped to a knee. He pressed a hand flat against the floor to brace himself until the whiteout cleared. It took longer than the last time and Elias feared that it wouldn’t lift and here he would abide, in oblivion, until the end of time.
Yet that was not to be his fate. Presently the whiteout faded and he was grounded once more in his body.
Someone grasped him by the arms. “God’s blood, man, what is it? Did you forget to eat again?”
Elias looked up into a face that was somehow familiar. The man was tall, with square features, a short-cropped military hair cut, and an eye patch. He studied the lines on his weathered face. “My God. Lar, is that you?”
Lar grunted. “Who else? Listen, I know you’re grieving, but try to hold yourself together. She would’ve wanted it that way.”
Elias went cold. He pulled away from Lar to get his bearings. He looked at the pews and the vaulted ceiling and the stained glass windows. It was a couple of beats before he realized where he was; he had only been to the Lucerne temple a couple of times before. Courtiers milled about the quiet hall, dressed in feast day finery. A somber air pervaded the chamber.
With dread Elias looked past the throng in the central isle and saw a casket laid before the altar. “Who is that up there?”
“For the sake of the realm, pull yourself together, man,” Lar said, not unkindly.
Elias pulled himself away from Lar and walked up the aisle on numb legs. A murmur went through the courtiers and they parted, standing to the side to a man to allow him to pass. He mounted the altar, panic closing his throat and robbing his shaking legs of strength.
He fell to his knees before the casket, a wracking sob escaping his lips. His heart beat so fast he was certain it was sure to arrest.
The undertaker had done his art well, but Bryn didn’t look like herself. She seemed a waxy statue made to scale. The paint on her face couldn’t cover up the blue tint to her skin, and her hair, once so lustrous, was as brittle as stale straw. Elias couldn’t bear to look upon her another moment and tore himself away, his feet tripping over each other. Fortunately, Lar was there to catch him.
Elias grasped Lar by the lapels of his Marshal Duster. “How did this happen?”
“I know no more than you.”
Elias’s teeth gritted. “Humor me.”
Lar shrugged. “Fell curse, or else poison. Not a mark on her. It was you that sensed a foreign magic.”
“Where’s Danica, Eithne?”
Lar’s brow furrowed. “Danica and Ogden are in Aradur trying to find a way to fix the unraveling of the ether. Elias, you look sick. Perhaps we should get you to bed.”
Elias was unable to resist the compulsion to look back at Bryn. “Are all the women I love cursed to die?”
Lar pulled him away and led him off the altar.
A flash caught Elias’s eye to the far side of the altar beneath the statue of St. Dorothy. Elias’s blood went hot and he reached for his sword only to find it gone. He reached at once for his power and a ball of lightning coalesced in his hand.
“Britches,” Lar cursed, “we’re in church! What in tarnation are you doing!”
A cry went up among the courtiers who began to take cover in the pews or else flee toward the exits.
“Mordum,” Elias spat. “He’s behind this.”
“Who in the nine hells is Mordum?”
“Him,” said Elias leveling his hand at the Darkin, who leaned casually against the wall. “That smug son-of-a-crow.”
“There’s no one there,” Lar growled. “Come to your senses, man. You’ve the entire court groveling in fear. We have enough problems as it is. Pull it together.”
Elias lowered his hand, and his spell winked out. His eyes never left Mordum. “You can’t see him?”
“See who?” asked Lar.
“He’s gone mad with grief,” someone said, and another cried, “Call the guard!”
Lar cursed and turned to face to courtiers that remained. “Peace, everyone! These are unusual times with the rift in magic. The First Marshal has only your best interest at heart.”
Lar went on in an effort to appease the court, but Elias tuned him out and made his way over to Mordum.
“I should have known you were behind this,” Elias said.
Mordum shot Elias an arch look. “I’m not responsible for you bouncing around. You set that in motion when you initiated a divergent timeline and made yourself a living paradox.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“The answer remains the same. You derailed the timeline. You started the war for Agia. The culpability is yours.”
Elias studied Mordum. “Is this even real or is it another one of your tricks?”
Mordum shot him a smile, not entirely without mirth. “Who’s to say what is an echo and what is actual? The echo may be dependent upon he who cries out, but does it not
still exist? For my part, I am outside time now, and you are getting there.”
“Enough of your mind games.” A cold fury burned in Elias. “Let us settle this now.”
“You forget yourself. I am not really here.” Mordum pushed himself from the wall and stood tall. “It didn’t have to be this way, Elias. Your loved ones could have lived, were you content to endure your fate. And you would have had a good life with the Enkilder.”
“And what of them?” asked Elias. “To live under the yoke of the Dark Fey, watching their world disappear?”
“They would have at least had a life. They would have been old before the Fey managed to capture Peidra.”
“You lie. The portal was in Lucerne itself. Peidra would be the first to fall.”
“No,” said Mordum, a wistful smile playing about his lips. “Your sister was too clever by half. She managed to close the portal, but not before one of the Obsidian Queen’s wizards—a scout—managed to sneak through. From this dimension the magical barrier separating your realm from ours is not anathema to us, and thus was he able to open a door in a place where the veil was thin. A place far to the north where the queen could raise her army.”
“If this is true, why are you telling me?”
Mordum leaned close. “Because I am hoping my candor will prevent you from trying the change the timeline further. Can you not sense deceit? I’m hoping that you will prevent me from having to do this. Believe what you will of me, I take no pleasure in killing.”
“Not killing. Murdering.”
“Murder is taking life without reason, or without reason beyond personal gain. This is war, Elias. A war, I must remind you, that you began. And let me also remind you that if you succeed in your plan an entire civilization of people will cease to exist. If I am to wear the mantle of murderer, my friend, then so must you.”
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 35