“You saw that shield the Naor formed from their beast’s blood,” Elenai said to Thelar. “Can you build something like it?”
“I’ve never made a shield,” Thelar confessed. Yet as she reached into the stone and fed him energies, he gamely threaded them together, calling for the others to aid him.
They spun a glittering golden tapestry in a convex shape before the monster’s head.
She braced herself for an attack against her hearthstone, but it did not come on the instant, perhaps because the enemy mages were so busy with their own work. She shut it down before Chargan sensed it.
As their own beast lumbered down the avenue parallel to the wall, gathering momentum, Chargan sent a blood strike against them. The attack drove partway into the protective screen, sheering into the threads without collapsing them, and the mages struggled to lend it greater strength as Elenai followed the curve of the wall and forced her animal into a run, driving straight for the side of the enemy beast. She urged it to lower its horns, fueling its confusion over the loud sounds and strange scents into a rage now aimed at the larger animal.
Kyrkenall swooped past, trying once more, but again his arrows struck the red dome that sparkled into place about the sorcerers and dropped away. He had already blinded the thing, judging by the shafts about the head, but that didn’t seem to change its behavior.
Elenai’s eshlack was but thirty feet out when Chargan’s second attack cut partway through their shield. Most of the energies held, but a line of the blood broke through, passing within an arm’s length of her and taking one of the Exalt squires through the chest. Blood spouted as though he’d been sliced deeply with a sword, and he collapsed.
Sickened, Elenai shouted to keep the shield up.
As they passed by, Naor soldiers hurled spears. Clever Thelar might be, but his shield proved no barrier to physical weapons. In a near effortless display of skill, N’lahr cut the two weapons that loomed closest from the air. He lifted his sword, the sapphire upon his ring gleaming, and Elenai heard the Naor shout his name in a mix of awe and fear.
Thelar seemed to have a better handle on what he was doing now, and she sensed a stronger resiliency in the barrier spread before them.
Chargan’s next attack struck low into the animal’s right front leg. The beast stumbled. Elenai forced the eshlack on through its pain. Unlike the dragon she’d piloted, this creature seemed to retain more of its senses. She was alive to its agony, and shuddered with the animal as she fed that pain into its rage. She moaned as one with it.
She pulled her senses free from the beast in the split second before its horns rammed into the larger animal’s side.
Many of the Naor bodyguards went down and two toppled right over the waist-high leather shielding and plummeted into the street. Chargan and one of the mages lost their footing and dropped to the platform floor.
N’lahr recovered before the rest of them and charged across the sloping skull of their beast. His helm gleamed in the sunlight, and his sapphire glowed. He leapt up to grasp the edges of the enemy eshlack’s platform, already tilted toward him by the impact. In moments he was up and Irion shone in his hand. The elite guard suddenly had something much more troublesome to contend with than regaining their balance.
Chargan pushed himself from the deck to his knees and she felt his eyes upon her.
She had to act fast. “Thelar, I need the winds. Help me jump.” She was already running onto the furry head of their beast as Thelar protested behind her.
As her feet pushed off, she sent a wind behind and beneath her and she felt Thelar helping shape the energies. She ignored a little spark of jealousy that he had learned so much from extensive training she’d never had.
Aided by sorcery, the impossibly high leap sent her up and up so that it was almost like flying. She dropped from above the trio of sorcerers, drawing her sword as she came, and slammed it onto the shoulder of the defensive mage. It drove deep and she had to release it as she went to her hands and knees. He fell with a shout of agony. The enemy beast shifted beneath them, still bawling pain from the impact of its smaller fellow. She swayed to her feet as the animal twisted itself. Chargan swiped the saw-toothed side of his blade at her, but he was still off balance and stumbled back toward the bloody hump, missing his blow.
The other mage, the graybeard in charge of guiding the black beast, retreated toward a quiver of javelins. The sorcerer with her sword in his shoulder clawed at her foot. She braced one boot against his face and yanked her blade free with a great gout of blood. He slipped back along the platform, slanting now as the beast shifted again, and he hit the waist-high guardrail and flipped over, calling out in dismay in the brief moment before he struck the street.
She abandoned caution and activated her hearthstone. As the graybearded mage sent a javelin tearing toward her with impossible speed, she sidestepped, navigating the way through her split-second glimpse of possibilities. At that moment she neither knew nor cared if it were some natural gift or insight from Rialla. She followed its guide path, then with an ease that astonished her, lifted a screen of energies even as Chargan scythed blood at her. The attack splintered to nothing on her magical shield, and then she struck out with her sword as the mage snapped another javelin at her. Her parry sent it twirling away.
The beast they rode forced itself upright, tearing free of the others’ horns, its will subsumed to that of its master. The Naor sorcerers then alternated their attacks upon her: slices with the blood and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of javelins. Only her glimpse of the best path forward guided her between one calamity and the next. She leapt over one slow lash of the blood whip and then her sense of the future dropped away. The graybeard hefted another javelin and she understood she was off balance and wide open.
The man’s mouth sprouted a feathered arrow and he staggered back, hands going to his throat. She heard a familiar mad cackle and glimpsed a winged form soaring past on the edge of her sight.
Elenai advanced on Chargan.
The mage’s eyes narrowed. Behind her Elenai was dully aware of the shouts and screams and clang of weapons. It might have seemed ages, but so far this battle had lasted a minute at best. N’lahr was still engaged with Chargan’s bodyguard. Over the sorcerer’s shoulder she perceived a ko’aye diving at the Naor who’d now taken one of the walls. Naor had forced their way onto Rylin’s wall as well, she saw, though the bearded alten was in the vanguard of the defenders fighting them back.
Others, though, had ceased their combat to watch her fight with Chargan. Perhaps they had seen N’lahr’s jump or heard the bodyguard calling his name and thought it was he who battled their general.
Chargan laughed, and his sorcery lent him a godlike voice that echoed through the city. Elenai watched the threads of his spell coiling through the air with the words that followed. “You’re not bad, fae girl,” he called. “You just haven’t had practice. And now you never will.”
He brought the sword down at her head. She parried, saw the gleam of the sharpened blood on the slim side of the weapon. The strike notched her blade. He twisted it as he pulled back, trying to catch her chin with one of the projections on its saw-toothed side. At close range, she saw that the weapon’s pommel was a fanged skull with glowing rubies for eyes.
Laughing still, he lashed out again and again with the blade. What he lacked in skill he made up for in the energy that burned within him, powered in part by the hearthstones carried at his back, and in part by the blood of the creature beneath him. She had used magic to sustain and even boost herself, but this was far beyond anything she had managed. As he said, she lacked practice with this kind of fight. Her next thrust was true, but the blade didn’t pierce his well-made armor, and only a brief glimpse of possibilities swung her away from a savage slash that would have taken off her hand.
And her parry of his next blow sheered off half her sword.
She backstepped, wishing Kyrkenall were here, or N’lahr. She had done all she could, hadn’
t she? Where was Thelar?
But they were not here, at this moment.
Chargan laughed. “Nothing can stop this blade,” he cried.
But that wasn’t quite true. She leapt to the side, buying herself a moment, saw N’lahr battling a final pair of soldiers. The animal they’d ridden against Chargan was under assault by a second and Thelar and the older mage were retreating onto the wall. Kyrkenall was nowhere in sight.
She ripped the satchel from her shoulder and brandished it in her left hand as a weak shield even as she flung a powerful sleep spell at the advancing Naor sorcerer.
He laughed off the attack and strode toward her. She swore, wishing she had some better choice, and readied to face him, her broken blade in her right hand.
He came in with a slashing blow from the side.
And she interposed the satchel, with her hearthstone.
She felt the moment the blade struck, tearing straight through the bag and into the stone. Elenai released her hold on the artifact at the moment of impact and threw herself sideways.
Probably Chargan felt the immense blast of magical energy at the same time she did. She rolled away, coming to her feet, broken sword in hand.
The result was almost instantaneous. So it had been when N’lahr himself had struck a stone. So it had been when the dragon damaged one. The hearthstone itself surged against its attacker. Bloodred crystals erupted across Chargan’s hands, spreading up across his armored limbs as spiky jets of blood erupted from his torso. Chargan wailed in terror and pain, his sounds cutting off sharply as Elenai passed her half sword through his neck and separated his head from his shoulders.
The crystalline transformation overtook his body, a warped rectangle of bloodred spikes. His helmeted head was left unscathed and she looked down to find its eyes fixed in a look of bewilderment.
The air was rich with the energies of the shattered stone. Her stone, she thought, and she scrabbled desperately to grasp at those powers, as one might pick up the largest pieces of a shattered pot. N’lahr had finished the bodyguards, for she found him panting steely-eyed beside her.
They had only moments to shape a victory.
Elenai tore the helm from Chargan’s head and lifted the grisly trophy by the hair.
Three of the four walls yet held, but the Naor had gained one, and a hundred or more of their army were dashing for the palace steps even as Elik’s cavalry troop led a handful of defenders to intercept them.
With her fading power she sent a mighty wind at the Naor on the nearest beast, blowing many from its back. She staggered the Naor running below. With a sweep of her hand she crackled a vast sheet of lightning over the heads of enemy soldiers on the far wall.
Nothing was left of her hearthstone’s power but minute tendrils. She used its last remains as she called out to the farthest corners of the battlefield, her voice heavy with an anger just held in check, not just for the destruction wrought to the city and the lives lost, but for the sacrifice of her wondrous stone.
“Yield, Naor!” Her voice echoed through the city, as though Darassus itself had been given voice. “I have slain your general!” She raised Chargan’s bloody head as proof. Though there was still the isolated clang of arms, most of the combatants had paused in their battles to contemplate her. “Surrender, and you may live! Defy, and you will be destroyed!”
N’lahr raised his own voice beside her. His gruff battlefield delivery sent his words almost as far as her own. “Hear me, Naor! I am N’lahr! Victor at Vedessus and slayer of Mazakan. This warrior Elenai brought me back from beyond the grave to oppose you! She has vanquished every power you possessed! This is your last and only chance! Surrender or die!”
It was a gamble. Perhaps their last. If the Naor pressed on, their numbers might carry the day. But did they know it?
The silence stretched on for what felt a thousand years, until a beardless Naor officer before the gate shouted up to them. Elenai knew that there were no women in the Naor ranks, yet she could have sworn the warrior shouted up in a woman’s voice. “We will never surrender! But we will serve the stronger chief!”
“Then swear allegiance,” N’lahr called back.
The beardless Naor looked to his fellows, then sank to one knee. “Hail, Elenai Half-Sword!” The soldier bowed his head. His companions stared at him. Then another beside him followed suit, crying out Elenai’s name. The ripples spread, and bit by bit the helmed heads sank, the numbers swiftly growing and spreading beyond the wall until almost fifteen hundred Naor knelt in fealty. They swore not to N’lahr, but to her, and she knew a terrible chill, a presentiment very different from those exhilarating glimpses of the best path forward.
Cheers erupted from the buildings and spread along the wall.
Still reeling from the energies she had wielded, Elenai looked to N’lahr. His eyes met her own. She saw pride there, for her, and maybe a little sympathy. What had he gotten her into? Was this how he’d expected things to play out?
No, she thought, this time he had improvised, just like her. She let out a breath she hadn’t noticed she’d been holding. Some improvisation. A better mage might have defeated Chargan without sacrificing her only tool. How was she to wield meaningful sorceries without her hearthstone? It troubled her that amongst all the other tragedies, the loss of the stone plagued her most, and that she already wondered if N’lahr had brought Belahn’s old stone, or if it would be possible to use Chargan’s. She would resist the impulse to ask, or to look for them on his corpse. She had understood only at the end how close she had been to tapping the limitless powers that the hearthstone offered. But she had seen, too many times, that the hearthstone road led to madness. Though she might regret the sacrifice for the rest of her days, perhaps it was better that she had surrendered it before she became its slave.
Epilogue
As Rylin took the switchback toward the cemetery, he deliberately kept his eyes forward. If he were to look left he’d see where the statue of Darassa should have risen above the city domes, at least two of which had gaping holes. He might have glimpsed the Naor camp, or the ruins of the stadium. So that evening, as the shadows grew long, he gazed only upon the city of the dead, for the present and future were far more painful to contemplate than the past.
He rode along the lane beside the cemetery ridge, stopping at last beside a little grassy square where two mounts grazed. Both horses, a brown and a light gray with a black mane and tail, looked at him curiously before returning to their own business.
Rylin left his horse with these and strode forward on weary legs. As he continued on, it occurred to him that this is where he’d had the first intimation that something strange was afoot. He hadn’t really been paying close enough attention, of course, but he’d been sitting his lost horse Rurudan right over there, next to a now equally lost Lasren. And then, in the midst of a dull speech, Kyrkenall had galloped off with Elenai in tow, riding as though someone’s life depended on it. Curious, he had thought then, and wondered what mad impulse had taken the archer from an important ritual he’d never before seen fit to attend. Rylin recalled losing track of the droning oratory to imagine a confrontation with the famed Alten if whatever he was dragging Elenai into went badly for her.
He trudged the final yards up to N’lahr’s tomb and found the door standing open.
The last time he’d been here, Varama had opened the door and even smashed the corner of N’lahr’s beautifully rendered sarcophagus lid to minutely examine his lifeless remains. This time the real N’lahr was there, but he was living and breathing and sitting on the bench, far less pristine than the perfect false corpse Varama had discovered within. Kyrkenall sat beside him, one leg up, his booted foot pressed against the stone coffer.
“Hail, Alten,” Kyrkenall said, and lifted his bottle in salute.
“Hail, Altenerai,” Rylin replied as he lingered under the lintel. He glanced to the right of Kyrkenall’s dusty boot, where part of the relief of N’lahr’s sleeping, carved face had been sha
ttered by Varama.
“Come inside,” N’lahr said.
“You’re blocking the light,” Kyrkenall added.
Rylin came through, glancing around the dim interior, and his eyes dropped to the sarcophagus. Even though he couldn’t see the fake cadaver inside and he knew it wasn’t real, the thought of it still disturbed him. He wondered if N’lahr had looked over the eerie duplicate of himself housed within.
He stepped around the stone coffin and its broken image of N’lahr reposed, and sat down on the other side of the living man.
“How did you find us?” Kyrkenall asked.
“Elenai thought you might be here.”
N’lahr noticed the direction of Rylin’s gaze. “I looked inside,” he said.
“It’s bad enough for me to look at it,” Rylin told him.
“I think we should drag the thing out,” Kyrkenall said. “We can pull some pretty great jokes with it, don’t you think? Especially with the chunk missing on the face.”
N’lahr silenced him with a look.
The archer leaned past N’lahr to better see Rylin. “Here to tell us to come back?”
“Mostly. But I wanted to hear more details about Alantris.”
N’lahr sighed with regret. “It was bad. Two-thirds of the city is in ruins. Some are saying it should be abandoned. Others want to rebuild. But the Naor are finished there.”
“And what about the squires?”
“They were a credit to the corps,” N’lahr answered. “They steadily weakened and demoralized the enemy before we arrived, and opened the gates for us.” He fell silent for a moment, then looked over to him. His voice grew somber and slow. “But they suffered terrible casualties. All of Varama’s lead squires perished.”
“All of them?” Rylin felt a sharp pang. “What about Sansyra?” Odd, that he should care suddenly for the fate of someone who had never liked him. At least, not until the end.
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