The containment field winked out.
Chapter 55
Wayfarer
Elias pulled the soul-knife back. “Stand up.”
Mordum crabbed into a seated position. He held trembling hands before his eyes. “What have you done? You didn’t speak the words of binding, you didn’t enact the ritual.”
“There are other, older, ways,” Elias said. “Stand.”
Mordum lowered his hands and pushed himself to his feet. He stood tall before Elias. “You’ve stolen my magic. Mean you to humiliate me before you destroy me?”
“I’m not going to kill you, or erase you from history,” Elias said as his companions encircled him. “Your power however is another matter.
“You told us that you had once been with the dark,” said Elias, “but you didn’t tell us that you had been in the service of the Obsidian Queen herself. One of her seven high wizards—one of the Eldritch Circle.”
“Who told you that?” asked Mordum, his voice low. “Was it Talinus?”
Elias chuckled. “No, not the imp. Just human intuition. It was the only thing that made sense, although it took me a while to piece it together. You were always one step ahead of me. You knew of me from the beginning. I saw it in your eyes when we first met. You recognized me, and it was why I never trusted you.
“It was you, Mordum, that hatched the plan to tear a hole in space and create a gateway from the fey realm to Agia. You knew of the time mages, you knew of the Grimoire, and though you could not breach the barrier between realms you had Talinus. He was only your errand boy, your thrall. He was never Sarad’s familiar at all—he was yours.”
Mordum’s expression darkened. “It took me decades of hunting for the Grimoire to narrow down the search to Agia—the one place to which all the old gateways had been destroyed.”
Teah laughed, a clear, bright sound. “Your instincts have served you well, Wayfarer. The tear in the ether resolved as soon as you bound his power. To think, this whole time, we thought that because you formed the rift-gate that you were responsible for the eventual tear in the ether, but it wasn’t you at all—it was Mordum. The question is, how did you manage to bind him?”
Elias shrugged. He wasn’t sure if he could put his peculiar experience with the tapestry into words. “I used the soul-knife for its intended purpose, severing connections. Rather than severing his spirit’s connection to his body, I severed his connection to the tapestry.”
Teah shook her head. “You are an uncommon person, Wayfarer.”
“Britches,” said Bryn, borrowing Lar’s favorite curse, “he’s already saved the kingdom once, and now he’s a time traveler. We can ill afford his head to get any bigger. Otherwise we’ll never get any work out of him around here. Not that I understand a lick of this.”
“Mordum created so many temporal disturbances by his actions that time and space literally bent around him wherever he went,” Elias said. “He had become a living paradox. The rift is a vergence point that touches countless timelines. When he continuously gated through the rift, or in proximity to it, in both the future and the present, he created a tear in the ether. This would have led to an unraveling of all the timelines that the rift touched upon.”
Bryn eyed Elias. “Like I said—I don’t understand a lick of this.”
Teah grinned. “I can understand what you see in her.” When Bryn promptly blushed Teah was quick to add, “Pardon me, I’m not very skilled at casual banter.”
Bryn offered Teah a warm smile. “Not at all. It’s nice to meet someone without guile for a change. Teah, Elias has told us a little of you. I am glad you survived.”
“I had to,” said Teah. She held up the soul knife she had taken from the time-ravaged Mordum. “For my daughter.” She turned to Mordum, who had remained quiet. “Is this the soul-knife that contains Nyla’s soul?”
“Indeed,” said Mordum. “The other was prepared specially for the Wayfarer. Yet you cannot help to restore her without me.”
Teah’s nostrils flared, but Elias stayed her with a raised hand. “Don’t worry. I’ve a solution for that as well. I can’t allow Mordum to return to your timeline. He’s caused enough harm there.”
Mordum grunted. “Will you leave Nyla a future to return to? Though I once served the Obsidian Queen, I have defected. All I’ve done is to protect the Enkilder.”
“Though I’ve resolved the tear in the ether, I’m not going to stop the rift from having ever been created,” Elias said. “To do so would only create another paradox, as I’d be traveling through time again only to erase the very thing that caused me to travel back in the first place. No, I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll not be doing that again.”
“Then what is your solution?” asked Teah.
“I will seal the rift now, preventing any further incursions into this timeline.”
“A clever solution,” said Mordum. “If it works.”
“Rasen and I have already proofed it. It will work.”
“I don’t understand, Wayfarer,” said Teah. “If you seal the rift won’t it still prevent the Enkilder civilization from being spawned?”
“No,” replied Elias. “The moment that the rift sprang into being a timeline vergence was created, birthing multiple parallel timelines. The paradox I created thrust me into another timeline—yours. I am sealing the rift in this timeline, but in your timeline I am leaving it intact. But even though I am leaving the rift intact in your timeline, I did resolve the tear in the ether, caused my Mordum’s meddling, which means that Illedium will be saved.”
“Now I know why all the time mages went mad,” said Danica.
Teah looked at the faces around her, from the human queen, to Elias’s sister. “But that means...”
“It means your timeline is still intact. The Enkilder are safe. And remember, the future can always be rewritten.” Elias knew Teah’s mind. In her timeline all of those who shared the room with her had been scattered or killed. Humanity had been all but destroyed. It was a thought that had occurred to him. It was the kind of thought that could keep a man up at night. Yet Elias had decided that it was not for a man to understand the entire wonder and breadth of the universe, but to do the best with the time that he had.
Mordum barked a short laugh. “A convoluted plan, Wayfarer, even for me. Time alone will tell if you’re correct, but even if you’re right there may be unforeseen consequences. Take it from your predecessor: when you travel through the boundaries of time and space things are not often as simple as they seem.”
“God’s blood,” said Danica. “Can we do something with him already, or at least gag him?”
“Indeed,” spat Mordum. “Your time with the Enkilder has softened you. You say you won’t kill me, yet where will you send me? Surely not back through the rift, for then there will be two of me in the Fey realm. Have you done the calculations on that?”
Elias’s eyes hardened as he cast his glance at the dark fey that had almost torn the rift so wide that the very existence of myriad timelines teetered on the brink of oblivion. “To a place where you can do no harm, or rather a time when you can do no harm.”
Mordum dove for the rift, but he didn’t make it far. Danica’s whip-dagger wound around his leg, even as Bryn lunged at him with her sword-arm cocked back. The princess punched him square on the nose. She held one of her long, straight daggers yet in her hand and the heft of the Aradurian steel weighed in the impact. Mordum’s head snapped back and his eyes went glassy as the bones of his nose broke.
The fey toppled unceremoniously to the floor.
Bryn grabbed a fistful of his hair as blood streamed from his nose and down his lips. “I don’t share Elias’s forbearance. I won’t hesitate to cut out your heart and burn it just to be sure you stay dead this time. It’s in your best interest not to give me any excuse.”
Lar grabbed Mordum by his collar and dragged him to his feet and across the floor, away from the rift.
Elias stood before the rift and gazed into its
flickering depths. He had succeeded in crossing the gaping abyss of centuries. He had returned home. Now but a few tasks remained to him.
Danica came to stand beside him and wrapped an arm around his waist. He leaned on her, and drew strength from her even as she rested her head against him, like when they were children and she was sick or afraid.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“It can wait a moment,” Elias replied. “I just need the strength to send Mordum away. Another moment of him in this timeline is a moment too long.”
“Just let me stabilize you,” she said and pressed a hand to his wound.
The hasty spell he had woven to keep himself from bleeding to death dissolved under the gentle yet insistent press of her power and his wound drew together as if having the benefit of a field medic’s hasty stitching.
Elias squeezed Danica’s hand and turned from the rift.
His boots clicking on the marble floor were the only sound in the room as he made his way toward the Sentinels, who stood in a circle around Mordum awaiting the time mage’s fate. Elias produced a nub of golden chalk from his pocket and drew the infinity blossom on the wall behind the Darkin. He took the Grimoire Infinitum in hand and thumbed through its pages.
To Mordum he said, “Had you a choice, where would you go? I’ll not condemn you to the Wandering Isle.”
Mordum looked up at him. His eyes shone, but did not spill tears. “I am old, Elias. So very, very old. I want to be new again, when the world was young and fresh, in a time before the Great Divide between the dark and the white, between fey and human, to a time before all wars.”
A faraway look stole over Elias. “They say in the first age of the world, that all Agia was covered in a primordial wood, governed by eldritch godlings. Perhaps you will find some comfort there.”
Elias held up the Grimoire and golden light poured from it. The infinity blossom he had drawn on the wall sprung to life and pushed from the wall, the ornate spellform constructed from thousands of motes of light vibrating against each other. The infinity blossom collapsed on itself and into a stream of incandescent, raw time energy. It snaked around Mordum, cocooning him until he disappeared beneath the swirling energy matrix. The golden motes of light dissolved and winked out like embers, and with them went Mordum, out across the vast chasm of time.
Elias closed the Grimoire. He stroked a hand down its binding. “The ink is made from purified, enchanted gold. Magic the likes of which the world has never known, or ever will again, is bound to each and every script and spellform scribed in these pages. In a very real way, this tome is alive with magic.”
“A wondrous thing,” said Ogden, “and dangerous.”
“What now?” asked Eithne.
“I will reestablish the containment field and then return to the Wandering Isle with the Grimoire, where it can be destroyed and where Teah can be sent home. Then I will return and seal the rift permanently.”
“Will the seal hold?” the queen asked.
Elias took his duster off and took the Grimoire in hand. “It’ll hold.”
“If you think that I’m going to move back in here then you have another thing coming, sir,” said Bryn.
“When I return I will seal the entire room and bind the doors and windows in spell-forged cast iron and gold,” said Elias. “I will then take the other rooms of the apartment as my study and bedchamber. I’ll see to it that the energy of the rift remains sealed and never spills into Agia ever again.”
Eithne cleared her throat and shot Elias an arch look.
“With your permission, of course, Your Grace,” Elias added.
“Under the circumstances, granted,” said Eithne. “Welcome to the royal wing.”
Elias bowed his head. “Thank-you.” He returned his attention to the rift.
“Do you have enough strength to raise the containment field again?” Ogden asked.
“I will siphon some of the Grimoire’s native magic to empower the containment spell,” said Elias.
Ogden and Phinneas exchanged glances. “Is that safe?” asked the wizard.
“Mostly,” said Elias.
Without further comment he opened the Grimoire and pointed a finger toward the spellform Danica and Ogden had drawn around the rift. He faltered, his legs suddenly losing strength, as the tremendous quantity of energy he had expended coupled with his physical injuries caught up with him.
Danica for one, had watched him with wary eyes, having anticipated this moment. Her brother had changed since she had seen him last, but time mage or not every man had his limits. Despite the fact that she had stopped his bleeding from the stab wound, he had lost a lot of blood and he had suffered significant soft tissue and likely organ damage. She took him in hand and guided him to sit against a wall. Bryn, who was quick to read Danica’s mind, sprung to her aid.
“You seem to have forgotten you’ve been stabbed,” said Danica.”
“And there’s that burn on his arm,” Bryn added.
“And likely a moderate case of arcane backlash,” offered Teah.
“How many nursemaids does one man need?” Elias quipped, but his soft smile belied his gibe.
“Stop squirming, you big baby, and let me take a look at you,” said Danica.
She turned her attention first to his stab wound. Though the soul-knife hadn’t stabbed him deeply it had nicked his lung. She decided she could work around her previous, hasty arcane binding easily enough and pressed her power directly through her magical sutures.
Elias felt an intense warmth pour from Danica’s golden-haloed hand. The throbbing pain ceased at once and the wound sealed, leaving behind a thin shadow of a scar. “I can see I’m not the only one who’s learned some new tricks,” Elias observed.
Danica next turned her attention to his left arm, which had been scalded up to the elbow, while Teah and the others looked on. She followed this with a cursory exam and in short order declared him fit.
“Now, put this thing to bed,” she said and helped him to his feet.
Elias felt the weight of the others’ eyes upon him as he made his way back to Danica and Ogden’s spellform. He reopened the Grimoire and again leveled his finger at the rift.
He spoke the words of sealing and a golden spear of light shot from the Grimoire and alighted on the apex of the spellform. The geometric patterns and scripts all lit up at once and a golden hemisphere of shimmering energy sprang up around the rift, pressing it closed.
Elias withdrew to the center of the chamber, flipping through the Grimoire and muttering to himself. “Back away to the far edge of the room.”
He withdrew his golden, alchemical chalk from a pocket and scrawled a couple of symbols on the floor and then drew an ellipse around it. He chanted a litany in the vowel-laden language of the time mages. As he spoke a pressure built in the room. When he reached the crescendo of the spell a golden doorway formed with a clap of thunder.
Elias beckoned to Teah, who came to stand by his side. He turned his attention to his party and the line of battle-worn Whiteshields and Marshals that stood behind them.
Daryn Blackwell clapped his fist to his chest in salute and the score of men that he had led into battle against Mordum’s cohort followed in kind, the sound of vambraces against breastplates and riding gloves against dusters echoing off the marble walls of Bryn’s former bedchamber like the clip clop of horse hooves.
“Fear not,” said Elias. “I will return to you, and soon.”
Bryn crossed the room in three long and quick steps. She grasped him by his lapels and kissed him hard and fierce on the mouth. He could feel the heat of her, the soft, sweet fury of her. “You damn well better, Elias Duana.”
Elias looked at her, dumbstruck, and he felt the heavy, stunned silence of the others filling the chamber.
Bryn gave him a playful shove. “Go on then, get.”
Elias locked eyes with the princess and memories from another life flooded through his mind, and they filled him with a longing ache that
was at once sweet and unbearable. He knew then that what he had said was true. He could never leave Lucerne again. Even if fate and circumstance dictated that he could never have her, the heir to the throne, he could never leave Bryn again.
His eyes flashed to Danica, who wore her wry and knowing smile. He looked to Eithne, Ogden, Phinneas, to Lar, Blackwell, and finally back to Bryn, whose gaze he held. There was too much to say, so, following the advice he had given Cormn on the day he departed Illedium, he said nothing at all, where words could only hope to fail him.
He turned, took Teah by the arm, and stepped through the portal.
Chapter 56
Spirit Sword
Rasen awaited them in the sycamore grove.
Elias and Teah stepped from the Golden portal. A cool wind ruffled through the branches of the trees. “I’ve never felt a breeze here before,” Elias said.
Rasen’s eyes glittered in the half-light and he wore a peculiar expression. “The Grimoire has come home.”
Something in the time mage’s bearing troubled him, but Elias pushed the thought aside. “Rasen Motyl, meet Teah.”
Rasen took her hand in his own. “I enjoyed my conversations with your husband. He was a good man.”
Teah cocked her head. “You knew Leosis?”
“After a fashion,” Rasen replied. “Sometimes when he went into his trances we would talk. I, like he, have studied scrying and other more subtle arts. I told him of the Wayfarer coming to your land.”
Teah looked from Rasen to Elias. “That was how he knew to trust in Elias; it’s why he wanted me to help him. You foresaw that Elias was to succeed.”
Rasen held up hand. “I saw many futures. I told Leosis to trust his instincts. They served him well. Now, come.”
Elias held out the Grimoire. “Long have you waited to have this back.”
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 46