The Shadow Wand

by Laurie Forest

  “Lukas!” I scream, lurching forward just as Valasca darts toward me, her expression ruthless as she grabs rough hold of my arms, swings me around, and shoves me headfirst into the portal’s rippling lake of gold.

  Part Four

  CHAPTER ONE

  VONOR

  ELLOREN GREY

  Sixth Month

  Northwestern Agolith Desert

  Everything flashes gold as I fall through the portal’s shimmering depths. My hands slam down onto night-darkened stone as I collide with the ground, fine sand coating my body in a choking cloud.

  I cough and whip my gaze across the scene, wildly disoriented.

  I’m on a greatly elevated ledge and encased in a translucent, runic dome, a dramatically surreal desert landscape with lurid, blood-colored sands splayed out before me. Giant, arcing red rock formations and smatterings of bulbous trees mark the view as far as I can see. They’re washed in dim ruby light that emanates from the blazing stars and moon, which are not glowing their familiar white but a luminescent crimson. An impossibly long band of dark clouds is massed along the entire eastern horizon, lightning scything through it.

  Desperation for Lukas roars through me.

  I force myself to my feet just as Chi Nam rushes through the portal interior, golden rays blasting from a runic frame that’s now marked on the mountainous ridge before me. A bloody Valasca bursts through next, dragging an even bloodier Lukas, a burst of his untethered affinity fire hitting me like a hot, violent wave.

  “Lukas!” I cry as I rush to him and he drops his sword and staggers to his knees.

  I fall to one knee beside him and grasp his arm as I take in the deep gash that’s slashed clear across his chest and shoulder. His tunic is shredded, his power lashing and untethered. He’s frighteningly pale, his normal deep-green shimmer reduced to a sickly white-green.

  A chittering shriek sounds from the portal as a scorpio’s massive forelimb thrusts through its shimmering center, and I flinch protectively over Lukas just as Chi Nam lunges forward and slams her staff onto the portal in another explosion of golden light. The portal’s rippling interior vanishes in a shower of yellow sparks, the serrated limb thumping to the ground beside her.

  “We need alluriem to stop the bleeding,” I implore Chi Nam, invoking my apothecary training as I tear open Lukas’s shredded tunic to better view his injury. My gut tightens as I take in the depth of the wound slashed across his chest and shoulder, his chest slick with blood. So much blood...

  “Support his back,” Chi Nam orders, her face a mask of determination as she lowers herself before Lukas, blue rune stylus in hand, and I recall how she healed my scalp after it was slashed by a killing star.

  I throw one arm around Lukas, his out-of-control fire power whipping out of him and rapidly depleting, like a great star burning out. Lukas is panting, every muscle tensed, his expression agonized.

  His vastly weakened magic seizes mine like he’s a drowning man as Chi Nam draws a blue rune in the air just over Lukas’s chest and shoulder, then swiftly pierces the rune with her rune stylus’s tip and drags the stylus down the entire length of Lukas’s bloody gash, trailing a golden wavering glow that sizzles with heat.

  Lukas groans, his back arching against my arm as he throws back his head, his whole body seeming strained to the breaking point as his remaining magic scrabbles to keep hold of mine, power draining out of him.

  “No!” I snarl, ready to rip through Erthia itself to save his life.

  I grab hold of both sides of Lukas’s head and turn it toward me. “Kiss me,” I growl ferociously.

  Teeth gritted and eyes glazed with pain, Lukas angles his mouth toward mine.

  I capture his mouth and bear down, boring power into his lines in a shuddering bolt. A burn races along my skin and into him as Lukas’s hand grasps the back of my tunic and his depleted lines connect with my power. Chi Nam’s sizzling magic courses over us both as I hold tight to him, feeding and feeding the power into him.

  After a long moment, my flood of magic starts to meet some resistance from his lines. I pull back, sweat lining my brow and his. His color has deepened to a darker green, and his fireline now pulses with the same heat that’s scorching through my lines as Chi Nam swiftly marks a line of blue runes on either side of his gold-glowing wound.

  I can feel it clearly—Lukas’s magic is stronger but still too depleted to fully stand on its own.

  “I will kiss you again if I need to,” I tell him, my voice a riot of fear.

  Flame sparks in Lukas’s eyes as he reaches up to take hold of the back of my head and pulls me into another feverish kiss. I twine my tongue around his and force blast after blast of fire into his lines, his rapidly thickening earthlines spiraling over mine with clenching intensity.

  “Stop,” Chi Nam says when I draw back once more, my fire whipping around Lukas’s burgeoning flame and solidifying earthlines. “Any more and you’ll make him Magedrunk. Just keep hold of his hand and let his power restore itself.”

  I grasp Lukas’s hand, my heart thudding with passionate concern as Chi Nam connects the pairs of runes that span Lukas’s entire wound with lines of blue sorcery. The wound is now a streak of glowing gold, his skin charred but no longer gushing blood, and I realize she’s magically cauterized it.

  Chi Nam taps the top pair of runes, and the lines of blue sorcery abruptly stitch tight.

  Lukas lets out a hard, short cry, and I wince at his obvious pain even as the joyous realization circles through me that he’s going to live. I can’t swallow past the staggering relief that’s balling up in my throat.

  “Stay still and let that set,” Chi Nam says as she rises. “That wound should be mostly healed in a few hours.” She moves to tend to Valasca, her sorcery still flowing over Lukas’s wound in a blue aqueous current.

  Lukas’s eyes flash toward mine. “Did you force off his thrall?” he grits out through clenched teeth.

  I realize he means Vogel. During the scorpio attack.

  “Yes,” I say, tears pooling in my eyes to hear Lukas’s ragged voice, to feel his magic gaining ground.

  He gives me a quick wolfish smile through his obvious haze of pain.

  “One of the scorpios,” I tell him, as tears of relief streak down my face, “it was marked with Vogel’s eye.”

  Lukas’s expression shutters as he maintains his tight grip on me and draws on my power in fits and starts.

  Valasca lets out a partly stifled cry, and I turn to her. She’s slumped down, her leg splayed on the stony ground, her pant leg shredded to expose a long slash on the side of her thigh. Her face is tight with misery as Chi Nam expeditiously sends luminous blue sorcery over the bloody cut and stitches it up tight.

  Concern fills me as I take in her tear-slicked cheeks. “Valasca...”

  Valasca’s distressed eyes meet mine, and she shakes her head, as if refuting my fears. “My wound isn’t deep. It’s not that. It’s...” She closes her eyes tightly, her chest heaving as she begins to sob. “The horses. Vogel didn’t kill them. He took them.”

  A chill ruffles through me.

  I think of the beautiful horses we escaped on and remember Valasca’s ability to read horses’ minds. Which means she sensed their terror as they were attacked by those...things.

  If Vogel took them...what horrific creatures will he turn them into? Some elongated, multi-eyed, and soulless version of themselves?

  I let out a shuddering breath as Lukas continues to draw steadily on my magic, replenishing his own.

  “Where are we?” I ask Chi Nam.

  She rises from where she was crouched by Valasca and walks to the portal, the dimmed runes of its frame still rotating against the mountain’s stone wall. She raises her rune stylus, sounds a spell, and begins to tap sorcery codes into the runes. “We are in the Northwestern Agolith Desert,” she says in the Noi language as s
he taps. “Welcome to my Vonor.”

  I mentally place us on the map of the Realms.

  The Northwestern Agolith Desert. Just east of the Caledonian Mountain Range.

  Disturbingly close to Gardneria.

  “I don’t understand what Vonor means,” I say, the translation rune marked behind my ear seeming unable to find a word in the Common Tongue to morph the sound into.

  Chi Nam throws me a cunning smile. “A Vonor is a Lo Voi sanctuary.” She turns back to the portal, the runes brightening in response to the motion of her stylus. “Most portal crones have a Vonor. A place known to no one else where we can practice our craft in isolation, in a location so remote it’s unlikely that anyone could ever find it. This Vonor is set amidst a large stretch of wilderness and bordered on all sides by deadly storm bands.” She gestures to the horizon with a pointed glance over her shoulder.

  The band of dark clouds hugging the horizon is spitting lightning along its length, and I view it with trepidation, the gloom of it seeming impenetrable. The storm band has the appearance of a line of mountains traveling parallel to us. The scarlet moon hangs above it as if in bloodred warning.

  “Ancient One,” I breathe out, turning back to Chi Nam as she reaches the last rune on the portal’s arcing frame and taps a code into it.

  “Those storm bands are called ha’voor,” Chi Nam tells me as she straightens and turns around, narrowing her gaze at the horizon. “They were created by the Zhilon’ile Wyverns after the last Realm War. They’re virtually impassable.” She leans into her runic staff and points at the horizon’s band of darkest gray. “That storm band is part of the much larger net of storms that are cast over the entire desert. Fly over them, and you’re hit with the entirety of their lightning. No matter how high you come in.” She casts me a sly smile. “Difficult for both Gardnerians and Vu Trin to get through.”

  “Vogel marked one of those scorpios that attacked us with his eye,” I warn. “He was watching us through it. He also formed multiple deflection runes that all of you were surprised by. It seems to me that we don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  “I’ve ward-illusioned this entire area,” Chi Nam says, her tone hardening, as if in direct challenge to Marcus Vogel. She flicks her gaze up. “And the runic shield above us is military grade. Much like the dome that protects both the Amaz and the Noi lands.”

  I raise my brow at this as I take in the translucent runic dome just above us, remembering the dome-shielded Amaz city of Cyme. This shield encases our immediate area like a huge bubble, the barely visible sphere liberally splashed with dim, curving Noi runes.

  “When you say this area is ‘ward-illusioned’...does that mean it’s glamoured?” I ask.

  Chi Nam’s head bobs in affirmation. “That’s an apt description. If you were to look down at us from above or from a distance, you’d see only a rocky mountain. Unless you got very close.”

  It’s reassuring, but only to a point. I’ve an intrinsic sense that it’s only a matter of time before Vogel finds a way around all of this sorcery and swoops down to claim his Black Witch.

  “Vogel might send out search spells,” Lukas bites out through his pain. “And Elloren is currently unshielded.”

  “We’re too far away for any search spell to reach from Gardneria,” Chi Nam counters. “And search spells cannot penetrate this dome, even amplified.”

  “We don’t know what he can do,” Lukas presses. “We need to get her farther east as quickly as possible.” Lukas glances at the portal, and I follow his gaze, the brightened runes of its frame slowly rotating against the mountain’s stone wall.

  My eyes stop on the severed scorpio forelimb strewn before it, and a shiver passes through me. “I’m assuming you’re charging it again?” I ask Chi Nam. “To get farther east?”

  “I am,” she says as she moves toward the mouth of a shallow cave that lies beside the portal and taps her stylus along the cave’s flat inner wall.

  A door springs to life, made up of a solid mass of multiple rotating blue runes, the cave’s shadows now infused with sapphire light.

  “The portal’s trajectory is newly set for the Noi lands,” Chi Nam tells me as small threads of blue lightning fork from the door’s edge. “Toward a corresponding rune in the Dyoi Forest. But it takes time to charge it for one passage. More for four. And it’s not precharged like the portal we used to get here. Even using the bulk of my stored magic, it will take weeks to charge this portal powerfully enough for us all to get through the bands of storm magic and to the Eastern Realm.”

  Weeks?

  Worry mounts. “How many weeks?”

  “Perhaps four.” There’s a flicker of grim indecision in her dark eyes that I don’t want to catch but do. She, Valasca, and Lukas exchange somber glances, and my apprehension flares higher. I can read in their shared expressions how unlikely it is that we’ll reach the end of so much time without Vogel finding us here. And I realize...we’re gambling.

  It’s a bet that we might lose.

  Who needs good odds? Where would the fun be in that?

  A sliver of morbid amusement rises as I remember saying that to Trystan, the thought prompting a familiar pang of longing for my brothers as I glance up and follow the crimson constellations east.

  Where are you, Rafe and Trystan? I wonder, as I’m seized with a desire to be reunited with my brothers that’s so strong I’m ready to fight through every horrific thing Vogel can throw at me just to get back to them.

  “I’ll do a perimeter check,” Valasca announces, and she forces herself to her feet with a tense groan, her rune blade fisted in her hand. She tests her leg, bouncing slightly on it, her gash still encased in a streak of glowing blue, a fringe of shredded fabric framing it.

  “Be mindful of the wraith bats,” Chi Nam cautions just as the interior of the cavern’s door ripples blue and the stone disappears, revealing the Vonor’s sapphire-lit passageway.

  Valasca smirks at Chi Nam, a lethal gleam entering her dark eyes as she deftly flips the blade in her hand. “You should be warning them, Chilon.”

  Chi Nam cuts Valasca a look of censure over her cheeky use of the sorceress’s informal name, a tang of power flaring in the air that sends a frisson of bright blue energy through my lines. But then Chi Nam’s expression quickly morphs to one of narrow-eyed amusement and she lets out a long sigh, as if resigning herself to the rebellious company she’s keeping.

  Valasca tightens her hold on her rune blade, strides toward the runic dome, and raises her palm to it. Her rune-marked palm rays blue light as it makes contact with the dome, and she effortlessly passes through it, then makes her way to a twisting path that switchbacks down the long incline set directly before our stony platform, sheer cliff drops to either side of it.

  “What are wraith bats?” I ask Chi Nam, nerves jittering.

  “Bat-like predators,” Lukas answers, his voice deepened by his labored breathing.

  “Bred during the Elfin Wars using twisted magic. They’re not difficult to take down if you can resist their psychic attack.”

  I meet his pain-glazed eyes with concern as he sends a tendril of his fire out to embrace mine, solid strength in his magic now that I’m heartened by.

  “They feed on fear,” he adds, an edge of challenge in his eyes. “Catch hold of it. Amplify it.” The side of his mouth quirks up slightly. “Which means you need to hunt them.”

  To learn how to control my fear, he means.

  I consider this, along with our short window for me to train before we take the portal farther east.

  I drove Vogel out of me, I think as I glance down at the gray hand I have wrapped around Lukas’s shimmering green one. I drove Vogel straight out of me with my magic.

  And by finding my courage.

  “All right, Mage Grey,” I tell Lukas, suddenly ready to face whatever he and Valasca and Chi Nam want
to throw at me. “I’ll hunt some wraith bats.”

  Sparks light throughout Lukas’s restored firelines and send a charge through us both, a sardonic look coloring his gaze. “You’ll be slaying wraith bats in no time, Mage Grey.”

  Another shiver of his heat rushes through me as I unexpectedly warm to my new name.

  “Both the wildlife and the weather here are quite dangerous,” Chi Nam says, giving me a canny look. She steps toward Lukas and me, supported by her staff. “But they’re our good friends, toiya. They’re what keeps Vogel and the Alfsigr from being able to easily bring an aerial or ground force to the East.” Her lips curl into a lethal smile. “And they’re what will enable us to train you, during this short respite. So you can fight with us to take down both Vogel and his Shadow Wand.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  DESERT LAIR

  ELLOREN GREY

  Sixth Month

  Northwestern Agolith Desert

  “I got us some dinner!” Valasca announces as she climbs up the switchback path to our broad stone ledge, her spiky blue-and-black-haired head bobbing in the gaps between boulders.

  A cool breeze rising from the desert ruffles my own pale gray hair as I watch her ascend, her slender form washed in crimson moon and starlight.

  Lukas’s arm is draped diagonally along my back, his hand snug against the curve of my waist. Chi Nam, Lukas, and I are all gathered around a blazing-red metal firepit, my bloodstained cloak balled up beside me.

  Valasca throws her rune-marked palm against the dome-shield in a spray of blue light, then steps through it and onto the ledge, a sizable python marked with a stunning blue-and-violet-diamond pattern slung over her shoulder, some slim branches tucked under her other arm.