Taellaneth Complete Series Box Set

by Vanessa Nelson

  “Humans are more fragile. An Erith, possibly with no training. Any shifkin. Or a strong human with training. All could have done this.”

  “Surjusi?” Arrow asked.

  “They do not have physical form,” Kester objected.

  “Not in our world. But we do not know what is possible here.”

  Kester’s face tightened, probably also considering the possibilities of surjusi with physical form. It was not something Arrow wanted to think about either.

  Kester’s attention had gone past her. “There was more than one person?”

  “At least two. But there could have been more.” Arrow kept her wards dormant with effort, heart skipping. There could have been an entire army of humans, all willingly going through a portal to the demon’s world.

  “There is something moving. Not far away.”

  Arrow rose with him, moved to stand at his shoulder, her eyes straining to make out any details. There was something moving. At least two somethings, coming towards them at rapid pace.

  “That looks like Dorian and Juniper,” she said.

  “They seem cross,” Kester commented, folding his arms across his chest and standing square to meet them.

  The pair of combat magicians were more than cross. They were furious.

  “What the hell did you do? Where are we?”

  “How did you bring us here?”

  The questions went on for a while without pause for Arrow or Kester to answer, then Juniper spotted the corpse lying behind them. Her eyes, like Dorian’s, were gleaming with the tell-tale signs of an enhancement spell.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “That’s Brian. What did you do to him?”

  Arrow exchanged a glance with Kester, and stayed silent while the magicians exhausted themselves with questions.

  “Are you done?” Kester asked when there was a short silence, voice frosty enough to catch the magicians’ attention. Arrow had to bite the inside of her lip to hide a smile, both at the sound of that very human phrase from an Erith and at the expressions of shock on the two magicians’ faces. They had not expected him to speak common tongue, or to challenge them so directly.

  “We did not bring you here,” Arrow told them. “The portal was already opened when we found it. This one,” she indicated the corpse, “was ahead of us. Look, he is prepared for travel.”

  “You’re suggesting Brian opened the portal?” Juniper’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “To wherever this place is?”

  “Brian didn’t have the juice,” Dorian dismissed the idea, stepping past Kester to go and inspect the body. “Broken neck.”

  “No defensive wounds,” Juniper added.

  Arrow watched, Kester silent beside her, as the pair made their own assessment of the body. Her mind, sifting through the questions they had raised, caught on an important detail.

  “You do not know where we are?”

  “Of course not.” Dorian straightened, glaring at her.

  “The portal spell opened into the surjusi realm,” Arrow told him. His expression did not change. “The demon realm,” she explained.

  “Rubbish,” Juniper spat and gave a short, derisory, laugh. “Demons don’t exist. Stories to scare children.”

  Interestingly, Dorian did not agree with her, skin paling, eyes widening slightly. He looked around and Arrow thought his breathing had quickened as well.

  “Your final training. Due next month,” Dorian told his deputy. Arrow found it interesting that the humans appeared to follow the Academy’s pattern of saving the hardest lessons to last.

  Juniper was staring at her leader with open disbelief. “I know you said there was more to learn. But, still, demons. Seriously?”

  “You remember the pile of body parts?”

  “From the photographs?” Juniper was standing square to her leader, chin jutting out. “Could have been anything. Some sick psycho.”

  “The spell circle in the middle,” Dorian said, tone coated with irritation. Arrow’s opinion of him rose fractionally. He was doing his best to teach. She also wondered how he had got photographs of the recent disturbances in Lix.

  “Two hundred years ago,” Juniper said, still dismissing the possibility. “Those black and white photographs had no detail to them.”

  Not the most recent incursion, Arrow realised, relief coursing through her. Details had not been leaked.

  Old photographs. Two hundred years. Not the last incursion in Erith lands. Before that. About the time that Sanctuary had been founded and Oliver Anderson, part Erith and pretending to be human, had created the stones. And apparently died soon after. Arrow wondered if Oliver Anderson’s death and the incursion had been linked. It seemed too big a coincidence. Sanctuary created as a place of peace and refuge during an incursion. The puzzle pieces were joining in her head, the whole picture not yet clear.

  The last major incursion, a hundred years before, had been contained on Erith lands. Surjusi far preferred Erith power, infecting the Erith and destroying them from the inside until there was nothing left but a shell. Arrow’s first encounter with surjusi, on a deserted street in Hallveran, had left a warrior dead, the remnants of his soul screaming in second sight before she had raised his soul stone.

  The last incursion was still fresh in the minds of the Erith. The cost had been high. There was a statue on the grass outside the Taellaneth’s main building as a potent reminder of the price required to send the surjusi back to their realm. The statue showed the six who had made the final stand against surjusi, when Houses had been destroyed and many Erith had already died. The six had been the last line of defence. They had held, had pushed back the incursion, and saved the Erith from destruction, at the cost of their own lives. Fallen not Forgotten.

  She realised that she had not given any thought to the impact a previous incursion might have had in the human world, or how that might have been stopped. When Erith were not available, surjusi would make do with humans. Shifkin were immune to the surjusi, but not to the damage a possessed Erith or human might do.

  Even as she considered that, she realised that the Erith might not have noticed an incursion in human lands. The Erith were generally exclusively concerned with their own affairs, noticing the other races only when it affected them.

  While Arrow had been thinking, something in Dorian’s expression cut through Juniper’s anger and she paused, folding her arms, still facing him. Listening, though, which was an improvement.

  “The photographs were taken of the aftermath of a summoning,” he told her, voice tight. “Some idiots thought they could call up a demon and play with its power. Never occurred to them that the demon might eat them.” He swallowed. “It took the entire Collegia. Every. Single. Magician. An entire day to dismantle the spell. A lot of them died. Too much power needed. But they made sure there was nothing left. Then they burned the place. Made sure it would never be used again.”

  “The remembrance garden,” Arrow said, realisation prickling across her skin. The largest space of green within the city limits, a beautiful place for the citizens of Lix to relax even as some of them complained about the limited land the Erith let them have. There was no explanation provided anywhere in the garden of why it had been named, or what was being remembered. Among the Erith, place names often had significance and Arrow had spent a day in the human’s remembrance garden looking for an explanation, wondering what it was the humans wanted to remember. There had been nothing. Just the soft brush of wind through leaves, the scent of green and growing and the cool ripple of water from a manufactured water feature, cut through with the raucous cries from urban birds taking refuge in the green space.

  “Very few people know,” Dorian answered, voice tight. “It took decades for the Collegia to recover.” There was a complex knot of feeling in his words. Resentment. Admiration. Grief.

  “Your family were involved,” Arrow guessed. There was too much hurt in his voice for this to be just the history of the Collegia. With the human’s love of stor
y-telling, it was possible that there were accounts of that time shared among families. Not even the long-lived humans like Brother Edward would have first-hand memories from two hundred years before.

  “Yes. My great-grandfather was too young to take part, but he remembered. Never forgot. Told his sons, who told theirs. Written down, and told out loud. Such tales.” Dorian swallowed, hard. “I was too young to understand when I first heard them. But we remember for him and for those that died. His father. Uncles. Too many gone.” The self-assured, arrogant, self-styled combat magician was gone, replaced with a human stripped back by his memories.

  “I am sorry,” Arrow said, sincere.

  “That does not explain Brian,” Juniper pointed out after a short, awkward pause.

  “No.”

  “Who was he?” Kester asked.

  Before the humans could answer, the sword at Arrow’s back pulsed once, silver spilling out.

  “What does that mean?” Dorian demanded. “It flared earlier.”

  In the meeting room, he meant, when the portal had been opened.

  “Nothing good,” Kester said grimly. His personal wards flared and he freed a sword and long knife from under his gentleman’s coat. The magicians both blinked, astonished.

  “Are all Erith armed?” Dorian demanded.

  Arrow did not answer, turning a slow circle, straining her eyes to see. The sword was awake at her back, magic twisting. It had recognised its enemy.

  “Stay behind us,” Kester told the humans.

  “Like hell,” Dorian snapped back. “We’re trained for this.”

  “Trained for what?” Juniper demanded, standing shoulder to shoulder with her leader. Ward spells crackled to life around them, marginally stronger than Arrow had expected but still weaker than Kester’s.

  Despite straining her eyes, the only warning was a slight sound of something brushing against the surface. She turned, her wards rising, Kester her shadow.

  Nightmares rose out of the dark around them. Twisted shapes her eyes could not make sense of. Vast faces made of shadow with all the features in the wrong place. The things rose, higher and higher, towering over them, the familiar and unwelcome static of surjusi presence crackling through her hair, strands catching across her face, coursing across her skin.

  The sword at her back pulsed, silver blazing as she drew it.

  The nightmares attacked. Noiseless. With a single purpose, swarming over the group. Arrow grabbed Kester’s sleeve, pulling him closer, stepping back towards the humans, extending her wards to cover them all as the nightmares smothered her wards, bright silver drowned by the dark.

  “Stay down,” she told the others, voice tiny in the endless dark. She did not wait for acknowledgement, straightening up, the sword a blinding sliver of lightning against the black.

  Before she could move, Dorian stepped past her, face twisted in a silent snarl, one of the vials from his belt in his hand. He threw the vial out with a word, the spellwork searing through Arrow’s wards with a sting that made her hiss even as the vial struck one of the shapes, shattering and spilling the liquid spell across the black surface.

  The thing twisted and roared, speckles of burnt yellow casting across its shape before the spell was simply swallowed up.

  Arrow had a moment to register the blank shock on Dorian’s face. Whatever he had been expecting, it had not been that. She guessed it was one of his most powerful spells, simply absorbed into the nightmare in front of them.

  “Stay down,” Kester ordered, grabbing Dorian’s arm, holding him even when he struggled. Arrow took a step forward, trusting him to deal with the magicians, putting them all behind her. The sword knew what was needed.

  Her body moved, sword flickering out, slicing through the shapes. A wordless sound, deep enough to vibrate the bones in her skull, a furious howl of pain, and one of the shapes fell, sliding away into dust. The others pressed in, seeking a way through her wards.

  Her body moved again. Spinning on one heel, sword out, she cut through more of the shapes, sword and her body moving in harmony without her conscious will until the shapes were all gone and she was left, breathing hard with effort, wards bright, heavy piles of dust around her. Kester was where she had left him, on one knee, wards extended, sword ready, his own wards close around him, eyes reflecting amber as he took in the scene.

  Dorian and Juniper were huddled down, tucked within Kester’s wards, wide-eyed and visibly trembling.

  “That was extraordinary,” Kester told her, rising to his feet and sheathing his weapons in fluid, practised movements. He took a few paces towards her, wards dying down now that the danger was passed and paused, inflection of his voice changing to concern. “Are you alright?”

  “Yes.” She did not sound alright, she realised, and wondered what expression was on her face. Dazed, perhaps.

  The light of her sword died as abruptly as it had flared, leaving her with a negative image of it imprinted on her eyes, the dark sword and bright sky. She blinked to clear her eyes and looked down at the weapon. It was not the first time her body and sword had seemed to know what they needed to do without needing her mind to guide them. She had created the sword using spells given to war mages on graduation. A war mage’s spirit sword had one purpose. To cleave through spirit and not flesh. A weapon against surjusi. Somehow, in her use of it, in her need of it, the sword had changed. Become solid so it now cut through flesh as well as spirit. And apparently connected at a fundamental level with her body to deal with threats against her.

  The Erith’s Academy purported to teach everything there was to know about the high magic that the Erith wielded. Arrow had discovered before that there were things they did not teach, not even to their graduates. What her sword could do now was another thing that had not been taught. She pictured the Archives, the vast underground warren containing the scrolls and parchments of the Erith’s magical knowledge, and wondered what else was hidden there that the Erith did not teach their students.

  CHAPTER 11

  “W-w-w-what w-w-w-was that?” Juniper’s voice was a high screech. She came to her feet with jerky, uncoordinated movements, personal wards active around her, hands twitching close to the weapons she carried. Not just magical weapons. The magicians each carried at least one knife and gun as well.

  “Surjusi,” Kester answered, voice terse. Arrow glanced across to find him watching both magicians with intense interest. They were frightened and irrational. Dangerous.

  “Th-that was a demon?” Juniper’s voice rose higher.

  “More than one,” Arrow told her, keeping her voice as even as possible. Dorian had straightened, too, seeming less shaken than his colleague. He had known about the existence of demons before now, though. She could forgive Juniper much of her shock.

  “Th-they were huge. Huge. H-how are we supposed to fight them?”

  “We’re not,” Dorian said, voice icy. He was staring at Arrow, jaw set. “She’s going to fight them.”

  “As needed,” Kester said.

  Arrow looked between them and wondered what unspoken message they were sending each other.

  “We do not know this realm,” she said into the crackling silence. “We should keep moving. Others may be on their way.”

  “Yes. Let’s go.” Juniper took a few hasty steps forward, stopping when no one else followed. “Come on!”

  “A moment.” Kester moved over the body on the ground and turned it over, tugging the backpack off.

  “Now you’re robbing the dead,” Dorian said in disgust. Kester slanted a glance up at the human, eyes glinting amber.

  “Arrow, would you mind asking the idiot if he has brought water and other essential supplies?” Kester’s voice was mild, the words in Erith, a bite underneath them.

  “Do you want to fight him just now?” she asked in her turn, also in Erith, matching his mild tone, without the bite. She crouched beside him as he opened the pack.

  “I suppose not. They might be useful.”

 
“What are you muttering about?” Dorian demanded, standing across the corpse from them, hands on hips, glaring.

  “None of us were prepared for a journey,” Arrow answered in common tongue, rising to face him. “Do you have water and supplies with you?”

  “No, of course not. We were guarding a hotel.” Dorian’s lip curled, the sneer fading as he looked around them, comprehension dawning on his face. “There’s nothing here.”

  “No. But these humans came prepared.”

  “You keep calling them humans. But you’re human, too, right?” Juniper asked, voice quavering. Trying to find something familiar to hold on to, Arrow thought.

  “Not really,” Arrow answered, breath coming out in a sigh. Not really human. Not really Erith.

  “We should go.” Kester rose, backpack in hand.

  “I will take that,” Dorian held his hand out. “You need to be free to fight.”

  “It is heavy,” Kester offered in the common tongue. He had been practising during his visits with Arrow, his fluency improving.

  “Still.” Dorian insisted, and spent a moment fastening the backpack in place.

  “It is heavy,” Kester told Arrow in Erith whilst Dorian adjusted the straps to fit around his collection of weapons and vials. “I doubt the humans would be able to carry it for long.”

  “So, they were near their destination? Or were they planning to camp on the way?” she speculated. He shook his head, not having any answers either.

  “Which way?”

  Arrow took a moment to gather her senses, sending them out to see if she could find the Erith magic she had sensed before. Just the slightest hint at the very edge of her range.

  “This way.” She waved her hand to show direction and watched as Juniper took off at a run.

  “We should all stay together,” Kester suggested mildly. He was looking at Dorian.

  The human magician glowered in return.

  “This isn’t over,” he said before setting off after Juniper.

  “What is going on?” Arrow asked as quietly as she could as she and Kester began walking after the humans.