The Wizard's Heir

by J. A. V Henderson

  “A feint?” questioned Haleth. “To our best knowledge we are outnumbered at least ten to one: six armies of goblins, three of Lossians, and one of Tomerians, to our one mixed army. We may not survive this feint of yours.”

  Alik glanced at a table in front of Haleth where a map was sprawled with markers showing the enemy armies. He went over to the table and pointed to a blank spot, “Four more of Tomerians makes fourteen. One more of Lossians makes fifteen. Two more of Tryphallian makes seventeen. One more of Brolethirian makes eighteen. One more of Narrissorean and Surthian makes nineteen. And there is the prince of Tomeria, and there is the daughter of Krythar with a squad of Rifters. But only ten are engaging as yet, and those only partially. The great danger is being beyond this.”

  Taravon spoke up. “We shall face that danger as we shall face the danger present before us: we shall shed our last drop of blood to defend our freedom and our peoples. They shall not take the city to find us succumbed to despair, pent up like rats in their cage. We shall make dear with their blood every inch of ground and every drop of our blood.” The prince’s voice faltered. He held onto the table for support but managed to struggle past showing any sign of weakness.

  “It is beyond a doubt,” spoke up Xaeland. “It is beyond all doubt: but if we are to fight, we must know what.”

  Taravon nodded. “Very well, then. What has the young man to say of it?”

  Alik nodded. All eyes were on him. “Morin is here,” he said, “controlling the weather against you, watching you as best he can, searching for his shards. Now only the weather fights against you, but he may also harness flora and fire to be joining at his will. These we may be combating in part, with those powers we hold, but there is danger that in crossing the forces holding together the world, the forces will become too damaged to be continuing to be holding it together.”

  “Then what happens?” asked Saria, as the others could only reflect a blank stare.

  “We all become one,” said Alik, drawing his fingers together to one point.

  Heao, who had been trembling almost uncontrollably in the background, suddenly fell forward and cried out to the prince, “Sir, fire is coming!”

  Taravon glanced around. “Who is this?” he asked.

  “This is Heao Sedhar, Sir,” answered Xaeland.

  Heao stood. “Fire is coming, and the walls are going to fall. Alik, hurry, there is no more time now.”

  In the distance there was a heavy THUMP. The tower reverberated.

  “Sabotage?” exclaimed one of the aides. His eyes turned to Heao and he called out, “Hold him!”

  “Follow me!” Heao shouted to Alik, and skidded out of the room away from the guards.

  Through the Well of Night, the shards completed Heao’s message in Alik’s mind. He saw the complete path mapped out before him as if he had already traveled it. The Well of Night…. The Well of Night…, it echoed.

  He rushed out to the balcony overlooking the city. The prince followed him. Smoke was rising thickly from the inner wall at the place Alik had entered the city—where the goblins had reached the wall. The inner wall had collapsed for at least thirty yards around the blast site, and the armies without were charging the breach, spearheaded by one of the Tomerian armies. The defenders to the left and to the right of the breach were in flight.

  “Sound a retreat!” ordered Taravon. “Defend the breach!”

  Alik searched through the shards, sensing out the strands holding creation together. “May what I am doing not weaken them,” he murmured…then, “Terevakai’ia!”

  The earth shook. Alik grabbed onto the ledge of the balcony to keep from falling over. Another hand grasped onto him from behind: Xaeland. The tower swayed back. Below in the field there was shouting, crying, confusion. Everywhere the world was like a gong. The fog and the smoke obscured everything beyond the inner wall, but within the city, a number of houses could be seen to have collapsed.

  “What happened?” asked Taravon. No one could answer him.

  Alik addressed the prince, “Honored prince, whatever happens now, let you and your people be having of courage. Live well and stand firm. The chasm will be holding back the enemy for a time. If the city falls, the river here will protect you as long as it can. If that fails, you should be following me.”

  He was about to break free but Taravon caught hold of him. “Where are you going? We do not know the way.”

  “The Well of Night,” explained Alik, bowing free of his grip.

  “Wait!” cried Haleth—but it was too late. Alik dashed out through the door and down the stairwell, Saria almost flying behind him. “He is the only hope we have for life,” Haleth crumbled.

  “I will do what I may to keep him safe,” Xaeland declared solemnly. “Do not despair: there is more here than our minds can well comprehend. May the Light preserve you.” And with that Xaeland took off after the children.

  Taravon found a chair and collapsed into it.

  “Sire? Are you well?” one of his aides asked.

  “Send word to Stuart,” wheezed the guardian prince. “Better yet,” he changed his mind, “help me up. I will visit the walls.”

  Heao Sedhar flew past the guard at the bottom of the tower. Everything was clear to him: Alik, Saria, Xaeland, Jevan, Deran, Morin. What was this? He did not know. There: across the lawn, a small bench underneath the overgrown pillars where the doorway to the old tower once had been.

  Jevan arose. “Heao? How relieved I am to see you safe once again. I saw you arriving at the wall—but where is Alik?”

  Heao swiveled his eyes back and forth. The old tower loomed up above them like a beheaded sentinel, creepers hanging from the quietly decaying walls, fallen stones littering the frozen, muddy path, a twisted aspen hanging bare over the doorway. “Alik—coming,” he said. “Hurry, we cannot delay.”

  Jevan looked toward the broken tower. There was a sense of doom there: of loss, of fracture, of tragedy beyond understanding. But something about the thin boy who had seen in advance the falling of Aerisia commended itself to him, and though he had never been one to act without fully understanding, he followed. Heao ducked under the crumbling lintel of what had once been the second doorway. Beady eyes flashed in the darkness and disappeared.

  From a distance, Jenna, the Therian girl, leaned against her crutches, watching him go and watching Jevan follow. She sighed.

  Jevan stood for a moment to adjust his eyes. Across the room there was a grand spiral staircase, its rail shattered, a rag strewn across the floor at its foot, a ghostly, misty light filtering down through the stairwell as though from far, far above. The walls were meshed in cobwebs. A piece of broken sword lay halfway across the floor, glinting back to them dully in the darkness. Something else on the floor next to him: sharp, smooth, whitish.

  “Halai’ia,” came a familiar strange voice from behind him. Alik, with Saria and Xaeland. A bluish light illuminated the object Jevan had been trying to identify: a broken human skull.

  Alik moved ahead cautiously. “Adaria, Jendaon….” He named each of the fallen human remains as he passed them and made a movement like the closing of eyelids. The air was thick—so thick that he could barely tell when a cobweb dragged over his head. Where was it? “There,” he suddenly pointed.

  Jevan squinted into the darkness, but for all that he could make out barely anything. It was a place on the wall to their left. The ceiling had partly collapsed, and there was a large stone column laying aslant over something. “We must be going down there,” said Alik.

  Saria looked at it. “The wizard of the purple shard was there. Thaurim. It is infested.”

  “I am the wizard of the purple shard,” Alik replied, drawing the shard forth. “No one move.” Alik hummed something under his breath, and the tower rocked. Bats shot out of the space beneath the fallen column like an explosion, followed by snakes and lizards and rats and in the dark, something large and heavy that smashed straight through the fallen column with a great bellow. Jevan, Heao,
Xaeland, Saria, and Alik stood as still as dead statues; but the tower rocked so, that first Jevan, then Heao, then Xaeland and Saria fell to the floor. “Biesavai’ia,” Alik urged, “biesavai’ia.” The room seemed to swirl in the darkness as the animals passed by. Alik strained against it. Things were wavering: the fissures of energy were too close together, too intense. A scene flashed before his eyes: there was the Stone—in one piece—and there was Morin, and there was Kirion, and there was fire, and there was ice, and there was the rift with the Wizard slipping through, small and frail…. For a moment these things were before him as in a vision. For a moment they were before him as though really there. If all time is eternally present….

  He let the thread lie back where it had been. He lay gasping on the floor. “Everyone,” he faltered….

  Saria understood at once somehow. “Everyone,” she cried, “we have to go down now! They’re coming back!”

  Xaeland looked. Sure enough, the last of the animals, an injured serpent, had stopped in the entranceway behind them. “Now!” he shouted. Still no one moved. Xaeland gave Heao and Jevan a push and drew his sword. Grasp gleamed against the darkness, cold and hungry. Heao ran for the stairwell down. Jevan and Saria pulled Alik up behind them and followed suit. Into the stairwell they descended…and into great darkness.

  As Alik glanced back, he saw Xaeland with his sword a spiral of fire, pieces of snake and lizard scattered across the floor at his feet. A large shape suddenly blotted out the light of the doorway. Then Jevan pulled him down into the dark, dark stairwell.

  The stairs were broken and treacherous, covered with thick slime. The air was almost unbreathable with the odor of guano, urine, and rotting flesh. Heao began to gag. Jevan felt nauseous. Alik sensed something poisonous in the air. Better hurry, he told himself—as though that were not already true.

  As soon as he set foot on the broken, encrusted flagstones of the room at the bottom of the stairs, a mechanical-sounding voice crackled, “Hawvas Pollis…alaavai.” Saria stared at him. The others looked around in confusion. Bluish lights began blinking on all around the borders of the room, some tentatively, some buzzing and going out or turning red. The dim light revealed a pit of bones and cobwebs and filth everywhere. The walls were covered with little blue lights, many dark, a few red especially on one badly gashed panel. Rows and rows of buttons marked with strange characters were everywhere. In the middle of the room was a well. Saria peered over the broken ledge into the well and was immediately overcome with an aching dizziness. Alik caught her before she fell, then took her over to one of the walls. “Gabrasai’ia au Morin,” he spoke. A series of lights in the panel before him lit up, and there was a huge sound like the roar of a beast. One large red light flashed. The panels began to buzz with static.

  “Snakes!” shouted Heao.

  Dozens of snakes were beginning to pour down the stairs. Heao crushed the head of one of the leading snakes and jumped back before the others could strike. Jevan and Heao drew their knives and began to retreat.

  “What’s the matter?” Saria asked Alik. “Is it broken?”

  He muttered confusedly. “Rifting to Morin was…ah, disallowed. There is needing an…an…override authority.”

  “How do you do that?” she asked.

  He gestured to the buttons lining the panel with their strange symbols. There was a roar from the top of the stairs and Xaeland appeared there, gingerly trying to avoid the claws above him at the same time as the snakes below him. He swept the snakes off the step below him with his sword and turned to stab at the massive arms striking for him.

  “How do you know what those symbols are?” she prodded Alik. Heao and Jevan were right behind them now.

  “Those are numbers,” he explained, trying to think what to do. “One, two, three, and on. These are letters. The shape of the letter is the shape of the sound. Aah, Haah, Lll, Mmm, and on.”

  The code flashed through Saria’s mind. Quickly she stabbed the buttons in sequence.

  The red button continued to flash. “Doalaavai,” the mechanical voice returned.

  “What?” asked Saria, flustered.

  “Maybe another code?” asked Alik.

  “No, this is what was in the wizard’s mind,” she replied, typing it in again.

  One of the keys had failed, Alik saw. He pulled her back up to the panel as a snake struck at her heels. “Onto the ledge!” he warned her.

  The mechanical voice repeated, “Doalaavai.”

  He pulled Saria up onto the ledge of the Well of Night. He could feel its indeterminate gravity. Heao and Jevan climbed onto the rim next to them as snakes flowed around them. “Brother!” Alik shouted to Xaeland.

  Xaeland glanced down across the snakes and lizards pouring down the stairs. The creature behind him lunged. He grabbed it by the arm and swung up onto its back. It let out a furious bellow and smashed against the wall to the left and to the right, but he was already on top of it. It charged down the stairs, hitting first one wall, then the next.

  Alik spoke out loud the code he had seen Saria enter: “Ai—fa—da—af—af—af.” As the red light quietly stopped blinking and the beast crashed into the rim of the well, he let himself fall sideways with Saria in his arms into nothingness.

  The world tilted. Stars spun high up in the sky, then one by one blinked out. He could feel Saria next to him, part of him. Her eyes were closed, and he longed to kiss her but could not move.

  Suddenly he sensed something else there: cold, beady malice. He strained desperately to turn, to look, to see what was wrong. A jet of black smashed into them sideways. Alik, Saria, Jevan, Heao, Xaeland and the beast were scattered in every direction. Two drakes spun out of the glassy blackness with a frail, pale looking girl dressed in black leather armor and a black cloak: Zarya. Beside her there were two rifters: one reddish-violet with scaly skin and dark eyes, the other milky-luminescent, clothed in tarnished white, carrying a glowing staff.

  Stuart Channethoth stood atop the wall of the haven with Sianna, Rigel, and Ciarthan, surveying the field. There was shouting and disarray from down there in the fog all about. Messengers came and went, bringing in information pieces at a time. Piachras paced back and forth on the outer wall, fully exposed—except for the fog—to any enemy arrow.

  “Sir,” bowed a messenger. “We have mustered what people we can to defend the breach in the inner wall. We are setting up a temporary repair, but we cannot be certain how much time there is.”

  “Very well,” said King Ciarthan. “Do what you can.”

  A second messenger came up. Stuart immediately recognized her as Perrenna Kalina, the deserter he had cut off on the Therian plains. She bowed nervously. “Sir, General Arnon has passed away. He did not survive to reach the healers.”

  “I am sorry to hear it,” Stuart replied. “Very well. Where are you serving?”

  “I have been moved to the breach along with Paiat and Erne,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

  “Today you are restored to Ristoria,” he declared. “Defend her well.”

  “I shall try,” she replied, bowing and departing.

  Another messenger dashed up: the one Stuart had been waiting for. “What on earth is happening out there, Phrios?” he addressed the messenger, a fellow Ristorian, once a palace guard back home.

  “When the earthquake struck, Sir,” Phrios answered, catching his breath, “a chasm opened up in an arc from one side of the breach to the other. I cannot help but think there is something supernatural at work in that. A few of the Tomerians are on this side of the chasm, pinned there, but they are not attacking. The rest of the enemy is on the opposite side bringing up ladders and panels.”

  “Is the chasm defensible?” Stuart asked.

  “There is no cover,” Phrios replied. “The enemy arrows would tear us apart.”

  “At least their attack will be slowed,” Stuart grimaced. “We shall hold them and then drive them back into the chasm. We shall look for an opening to cut their bridges once they
attack. How long?”

  “It will take them some time, I think. They are only just beginning to bring up the ladders.”

  But almost as he said it, a clamor arose from the left of the breach. Stuart hurried along the wall to where the commotion was and the others followed. At first he didn’t see anything. There was a relentless, guttural chanting, “Tear down the wall! Tear down the wall!”—but only trees waving in the fog.

  A few arrows were flying from the troops below. “Hold your fire!” he shouted out. Then it struck him: the trees, he realized, were chanting. The trees, he saw, were lumbering toward the wall. And for a moment he could only stare.

  “Tear down the wall! Tear down the wall!” In the branches of the trees he could see Lossian warriors with swords drawn, ready to leap down onto the parapets. The trees were already reaching the outer walls.

  “Target the soldiers in the branches,” King Ciarthan told his archers.

  “Axes, comrades!” came the familiar bellow of Piachras from below. “Chop them down!”

  The two voices brought Stuart back to reality. “There won’t be enough time,” he realized. “Sianna, Phrios,” he addressed the two, “fetch torches and pitch to the top of the walls. And bring reinforcements, quickly! Whatever you can find!” He drew his sword. “By the cyndans of Ristor and the elms of Emeria, we will hold this wall!” Sianna dashed away fleetly in one direction and Phrios in the other. From below there was the crack-crack of axes in the fog and a tremendous growling. The roots twisted around one of the attackers and crushed him to death.

  With a crash the trees met the city wall and began to dig in their fingers. In the taller trees, the soldiers leapt or climbed down from the branches onto the parapet, slashing down the archers immediately below them. Stuart, Ciarthan, and Rigel led their lightly-armed archers into the attackers with a yell. The clashing of swords and knives reverberated from every stone. The attackers quickly banded into a few knots of resistance around the trees and made no further progress, but new attackers continued to leap down. Soon, thought Stuart, there would be too many of them for the few troops he had.