Elias turned from Mordum. “How can I weigh their existence against an entire world destroyed? They should have never been.”
“And yet they are. You ought to say not that you measure them against a world brought to ruin, but a country brought to ruin. You don’t measure a civilization against the world, but one people against another. You and I are no different.”
“Our methods are. I will reset the timeline. I will make things the way they were designed to be by powers greater than we.”
Mordum appeared before him, having stepped through space. He spread his arms wide. “Then the war between us rages on. And it will rage on for all time.”
Mordum turned from him and in a flash of light was gone.
Elias turned his attention back to the church. By now most of the courtiers had filed out. Only a few of the higher ranking members of Eithne’s court remained, all of whom were well-known to Elias. The ponderous, gilded doors at the far end of the central, white-carpeted aisle opened.
Blackwell, a cohort of Redshields on his heels, walked through the doors.
A grim-faced Lar turned to look at Elias. “Are you well enough to handle this?” he asked.
Elias straightened his duster. “Yes. I’m fine.”
Elias met Blackwell at the edge of the arcade in the choir-aisle. He wanted to have his back to a wall, just in case. He didn’t know what he could expect in this alternate reality; nor did he know what would happen if he were to die here, whether this world was real or not. “Captain.”
“Are you unwell?” Blackwell asked, though his eyes flicked to Lar, who stood at Elias’s side.
Elias restrained the sigh that wanted to escape his lips. “I was, momentarily. I’ve recovered.”
Blackwell studied him. “I think it best if you come along. We can pay Phinneas a visit.”
Elias searched Blackwell’s eyes. His blue-eyed gaze was firm, if not hard, but there was something else in them as well—fear, perhaps. “Am I under arrest, captain?”
“Of course not,” Blackwell said at once. “Everything has just been so strange. The loss of Bryn has derailed all of Lucerne.” Blackwell shot him a significant look, and his soldier’s deadpan crumpled.
Elias felt his hands shake involuntarily. “Yes. Yes, indeed.” A wave of nausea passed through him. He retreated a step on watery legs.
Elias sank down against the wall, impossibly weary. His eyes drooped closed, seemingly of their own volition. Wetness spread down his face, which he had first taken for involuntary tears, but they tasted coppery.
“God’s blood!” someone cursed.
“What’s happened to him?” asked someone else.
“Damned fell magic is what!” cried another. “The same that took the princess.”
“Bite your tongues!” Blackwell growled.
Elias felt hands on him, trying to keep him from sliding further down the wall. Someone splashed water on his face. The voices sounded far away, as if he was falling into himself. He raked a hand across his face. He forced his leaden eyes open, and with detachment realized that his nose was bleeding. The room spun. White pain blossomed between his eyes. The sensation of falling accelerated until he felt he could bear it no longer and he screamed, but no sound passed his bared teeth.
Elias Duana wondered idly if this was what dying felt like.
†
Elias awoke to cold water on his face.
He was slow to get his bearings. He was lying on something hard, rocks perhaps, and it was dark. He felt as if his heart had been relocated to his head, its chief purpose to throb out red waves of pain that burrowed deep into his skull.
With no small effort he blinked away the fog that enveloped his senses. Teah knelt by his side, one hand wiping blood from his mouth with the hem of her tunic while the other held aloft a dim light sphere. “You’ve bled so much from your nose I feared you’d choked on it,” she said.
“What happened?”
Teah raised a canteen to his lips. “Here, drink. You lost consciousness and fell into the stairwell. I’m afraid you suffered quite a lump on your head as a result.”
Elias drank down the water in greedy gulps. “I met with Mordum again. In Peidra as it was. In the past.”
Teah made no comment, but her pinched expression spoke volumes. She put the canteen aside. “Hold still.”
She laid her palm flat on his brow and her eyes closed in concentration. Warmth radiated through Elias’s skull. A sigh escaped his lips as the pain ebbed and then faded.
“Come then,” Teah said. “Let’s get you off these stairs.”
She grasped him by the arm with her delicate hands and helped him stand. A brief dizzy spell unsteadied him, but he recovered presently. He stood still for a couple of beats to ensure that his equilibrium had returned. He glanced up toward the dais, but the portal had been closed. “The statue?” he asked.
“There was a lever. I pulled it and the statue slid back. I thought it prudent to discourage any more unwanted guests.”
Elias squeezed one of her hands and she let go her grasp and let him stand on his own. “Nowhere to go but forward then.”
The staircase spiraled deeper into the earth than he would have expected. Were he to guess, he would figure that they had descended at least three stories below ground before they were deposited into a passageway.
The workmanship of the statue was equaled by that of the tunnel. The floor, walls, and ceiling were arrow straight and smooth as the corridors that once comprised Lucerne Palace. Sconces lined the wall at regular intervals and as they passed them they sprung to life, lit by orange flames that hovered over them without any evident source of fuel.
After some fifty feet the hallway ended in a sheer granite door. A simple portal, it featured neither filigree, sigil, or a doorknob. It bore but a single notable feature, a small silver disk with the imprint of a hand. As they neared it Elias saw that four, fine runes had been etched into the depression of the hand. The markings on Elias’s forearm warmed, for they were one and the same.
“It would seem that your sister took every possible precaution to ensure that what lies beyond would be seen by your eyes only,” Teah said as they came to stand before the door.
“I can’t imagine what it must have taken for her manage such a feat.”
“Only a master of the Highest Arcanum could have done such a thing,” Teah said, naked admiration in her voice.
“Let us not see her effort wasted then.”
Without further ceremony Elias pressed his hand into the depression. A surge of power coursed through him, from his crown to his toes as if he had become a lightning rod, a conduit for a tremendous force. The door slid open.
And that was when the attack came.
Chapter 44
Time Gate
Elias felt the discharge of arcane energies when Mordum gated into the hallway.
Elias grabbed a fistful of Teah’s tunic and, without daring so much as a glance behind, dove into the chamber that waited beyond the door. As they passed the door jamb they pierced an invisible membrane. They slowed as the air thickened and the room beyond rippled. Through their laborious flight Elias had plenty of time to contemplate the odor of ozone in the air and feel each spark of Mordum’s spell rain upon his back.
The pair landed hard on the stone floor beyond and rolled apart to face their nemesis. Mordum moved in exaggerated slow motion, which would have been comical if not for the murderous expression on his face. Each sprinting step appeared to take almost a minute.
The fey had seen much change since Elias last encountered him. His hair had gone from gold to the yellow-white of the long dead. His face was gaunt and pitted and lurid with angry red blotches. The irises of his eyes had gone bone-white.
“What’s happened to him?” Elias asked.
Teah rose to stand beside him. “The cost of time travel.”
Elias shuddered. “Why is he moving so slowly?”
Teah turned her attention to the chambe
r. “I don’t think it’s a question of him moving slowly as much as we’ve sped up.”
“I don’t feel any faster,” Elias remarked.
“This place,” Teah said turning her attention to the ornate spellform etched into the floor, “this place is somehow outside of the passage of time as we know it.”
Elias returned his attention to Mordum. “He found out about this place somehow, but he couldn’t enter. He must have deduced when we discovered it and came to intercept us. Fortunately he failed.”
“I’m not sure he did,” said Teah. “Not entirely.”
Elias followed the track of her gaze and saw that a web of crackling energy lay across the slot on the floor that the door had slid into. Mordum had managed to bar the door open from outside the relative, if temporary, safety of the chamber. The goal of his spell had not been to kill them, at least not initially; rather, his intent had been to keep the door from springing closed behind them so that he would be able to follow them into the secret chamber that lay beyond.
“He’ll gain access eventually,” said Elias, “and that is something we cannot allow.”
“No, that we cannot,” said Teah.
“We’ll have to go out and face him.”
Teah shook her head. “No, he’s too powerful. We can’t risk that we’ll both fall.”
“Fine. We’ll just throw as much magic as we can at him from in here.”
Teah hesitated. “I don’t know the rules of this...time pocket we’ve found ourselves in. I’m not sure if our spells will backfire against the temporal energy field, or have some other unforeseen consequence.”
“What then? We can’t have him following us.”
“No, we can’t.”
Elias studied Mordum. He was at the far end of the corridor and had at least thirty paces yet to cover the distance to the door. “It may take him half an hour or more to reach the barrier, but he’ll make it soon enough.”
“Then we best figure out what this room is for.”
They turned their attention to the interior of the room. Some ten feet across, it was lined with a glossy blue rock that had branches of white running through it like arteries. Aside from the ensorcelled sconces, the only other notable feature was the ornate spellform etched into the center of the floor.
Teah ran a hand across the wall. “Kyanite, a rare stone. I can only imagine the cost of such an endeavor.”
Elias’s eyes remained fixed on the spellform. It was the same that he had seen in his mind during the Wilder funeral ritual. “Is there a significance to the stone?”
“It repels energy, and also contains it. It is likely the reason why this chamber has remained undetected for so long, and is how it has contained the dangerous enchantment within.”
The spellform set into the floor was composed of a milky white crystalline stone, not unlike quartz. Realized in three dimensions and crafted with meticulous art, the spellform had a life that the image burned into his mind’s-eye lacked, or the paltry facsimile he had drawn for Teah and Malak. He traced the geometry of the spell, comparing it to the image he had seen in his vision.
At the center of the sigil lay a circle which contained a series of intertwined ellipses that looked something like a two-dimensional representation of a flower. The lines of the ellipses tracked on and formed another six circles, all of which were intertwined. As Elias tried to trace each individual circle with his eyes, they seemed to vibrate and spin through a trick of perspective.
Elias blinked away the dizzying trick his eyes had played on him. Set around this central form were another six circles. A line ran through the center of each of the six outer circles connecting them together, thus making a hexagon. At the center of the bottom most plane of the hexagon was a narrow slot, like the one at the feet of the statue above.
Elias realized that Teah had been talking to him. He cleared his throat. “It is the very same that I saw during the first whiteout. I’m sure of it.”
“I remember,” Teah said. “It is an elegant form. I’ve begun to suspect that perhaps it is a lost memory from the Grimoire that you have recently recovered. It could be an effect of the warping or because Mordum has changed something in the past.”
“Is such a thing possible?”
Teah tilted her head to a side. “No more impossible than anything else that’s happened since you appeared under that tree a month ago.”
Though it was a curiosity, Elias put the subject of the spellform aside for now. He had more important things to focus on. “Do you know how to activate it?”
“I’ve never activated a dedicated spell circle like this before, but I know the theory behind them.” Teah crouched before the spell circle and traced the outer circle with a finger. “This stone is likely lucite, which will contain the magic poured into it, not unlike your sword. To activate it, one must pour enough raw magic into it and then will the desired effect to take shape, in this case a portal, or so I presume.”
Elias looked into the hallway. Mordum had closed some of the distance, but was still only about halfway down the hallway. He returned his attention back to the spell circle. His eyes alighted on the slot at the base of the outer circle and he found himself smiling. “Luckily, Danica provided us with the means to activate the portal as well.”
Teah arched an eyebrow. “How so?”
Elias drew his sword. “The ward she cast on the statue. Its power has been stored in this blade. If my guess is correct, it will be just enough to activate the portal. And look here at this slot. Another keyhole.”
“Have at it, Wayfarer.”
Elias positioned the tip of his sword above the slot that lay across the bottom of the hexagon. His runes warmed. He pressed his sword down and it slid into the fissure with ease, until it clicked into place with the majority of the blade inserted into the floor. Only the base of the blade protruded, with the runes etched into the steel facing the interior of the spellform.
He knelt just outside the spell-circle with both of his hands on the hilt of his sword. The hairs on his arms stood on end as a static charge wound up his hands. He reached for the void, for his connection to the blade, and willed the power pent up in the enchanted steel to pour out. The steel glowed with a blue nimbus as raw arcane energy poured into the stone of the spellform. The stone lit up, tracking first along the circumference of the sigil before racing on toward the middle. As the bead of energy closed in on the centermost circle it slowed and Elias knew that the magic within his sword had almost spent itself.
He reached for the wellspring of power within himself with trepidation, for he still did not trust it, or his ability to manage it. He channeled his innate magic through his blade and pushed the flow of magic further yet, willing the remainder of the spellform to activate. As the center most ellipses of the spellform became incandescent a high pitched hum resonated through the chamber.
“Take me to the Wandering Isle,” Elias cried as he poured the final dregs of his power into the demanding spell.
Beams of white energy lanced from the six corners of the hexagon and collided at a single point in midair. Amidst the collision of arcane energies an elliptical vortex formed. At long last Elias had found passage to the Wandering Isle.
Elias pulled on his sword, but it was anchored to the spellform by a tremendous force. Try as he might it would not so much as loosen. He grasped intuitively that the blade itself was a key component in the operation of the gate. Danica had designed the spell well—he, and he alone cold operate it. Unfortunately, this meant that he would have to leave his blade behind, again. As he thought on this it occurred to him that perhaps this is why he had been without his sword in the first place: he himself had used his sword to power the original spell that had sent him back in time, but he didn’t remember it because the temporal paradox he created had compromised his memories.
He cast one final glance at his father’s sword. If he were to see it again, he would have to succeed in returning to his own time.
E
lias took off his sword baldric and laid it outside the circle. He gathered his pack. “Come on then.”
Teah made no move to join him. She looked at her feet, then up at him. Her eyes glittered in the golden light of the portal. “I’m not going with you.”
Elias’s heart dropped. “What?”
“We can’t allow Mordum access to the Wandering Isle. The spellform must be destroyed.”
Elias looked over her shoulder into the hallway and Mordum’s plodding race for the finish. He left the edge of the spellform and stood before her. “Teah, I will not leave you behind. Not after all we’ve been through.”
A wistful smile stole over her features. “You know what must be done as well as I. Mordum cannot be allowed to gain the Wandering Isle. He must be denied victory at any cost. I know that now. I always have, I suppose. If it is my fate to die this day, then so be it. It is as good a day as any, and I am not afraid.”
Elias lost himself in her green-eyed gaze and he found himself unable to find the words with which to say goodbye to her. He shook his head. “Teah...”
She silenced him with a quick, shy embrace and held him fast. “I don’t know how this will play out, but promise me one thing.”
“Name it,” Elias said.
“Save Nyla. Even if all the Enkilder are destined to go back into the ether, see her soul set free.”
Elias held her close and she exhaled hot breath onto his neck. “Count on it.” He pulled away and with two easy strides he stood at the precipice of the portal. He looked over his shoulder. “I will come back for you. I will find a way.”
Tears shined in Teah’s eyes. She smiled, and then he was gone in a blaze of golden light.
Chapter 45
Passage to the Wandering Isle
Passage through the portal was similar to Elias’s other experiences with such modes of travel, such as the sensation of being stretched and moving at an impossible speed. Unlike his encounter traveling via the wytchwood, however, he lost nearly all awareness of his body. For an indeterminable amount of time he felt as if his body had dissolved into ethereal matter, as if he existed purely as consciousness, unbound and unfettered.
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 36