by John Bierce
Godrick noticed that the wires seemed to be made of a variety of different metals, not just steel.
“He somehow tore apart the shielding component of the spell around the starfire itself!” Hugh said.
Godrick narrowed his eyes at that, and reached out with his steel magic towards the floating iron plate. The enemy warlock easily wrested control of them away from Godrick, but Godrick hadn’t actually been trying to take control of the plate.
It had been a test.
As Godrick felt the shifts in the stone below the Swordsmen, he kept up the barrage of stone. Not that he thought they would get through— the wire nets and iron plates were blocking his shots easily. He just needed to keep them on the defensive for a moment longer, though.
“You know, I think I’m rather disappointed,” the mage with the floating plates called down. “I’d really hoped the son of Artur Wallbreaker would be a more impressive foe. But then, what else but disappointment could you expect from something of Wallbreaker’s? He should have been one of humanity’s great defenders, and instead he’s just a mercenary battlemage, working for monsters like the Crystal Sphinx, who only benefits from our disunity!”
Godrick did his best to ignore the man’s taunts. Some of the wires in his armor were getting perilously deep, but he only needed to wait just a moment longer.
With no visible warning at all, the entire roof the Havathi stood on simply collapsed, the crystal grain of the orange granite having been weakened on a massive scale by Hugh.
The Havathi, unfortunately, didn’t collapse with it. Both warlocks hurtled off the collapsing roof, and towards the roof of Godrick’s own building, hauled by wires.
Godrick immediately activated the spellform to collapse his armor. The mixed ice and stone dropped off him in great chunks, the burrowing wires deep within it.
Godrick summoned the newly formed Hailstrike to his hand from the lake— it thankfully hadn’t been crushed by the stone chunks falling into the canal. He dodged inside with Hugh before the Havathi could recover, and immediately started rebuilding his armor out of stone.
“We’ve got a wire mage and a lodestone mage on our roof,” Godrick said. “Lodestone mages are a perfect counter ta’ lightnin’ mages too, so ah’m bettin’ it’s similar with starfire.”
“Wire mage?” Hugh asked.
“Well, ductility mage. He’s carryin’ a blacksmith’s enchanted wire drawin’ tools. Reckon’ he probably can’t control non-wire metal, but can turn it into wire easily enough.”
“That’s bizarre,” Hugh said.
“Ah can feel them both up on the roof still, or at least the iron they’re carryin’.”
Hugh was about to say something, then scowled.
“Look outside and tell me what you see,” he told Godrick. “I think they’ve just trapped us in here.”
Godrick raised an eyebrow at that, but poked his helmeted head out the door.
Through his quartz faceplate, he could see spellforms made of wire floating in midair, stretching out of sight in either direction.
“There’s a wire ward around the buildin’,” Godrick said, pulling his head inside. “How’d yeh feel that?”
Hugh shrugged. “I’m getting pretty sensitive to wards these days. If you can cover me for a little bit, I can probably break through the ward.”
“Ah’ve got a better idea,” Godrick said.
Hugh’s spellbook gave him a nervous look as he smiled at it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Broken Bridges
Talia killed two members of the Hand of Sacred Swordsmen with her first spell. It was their fault for standing so close to one of the ash piles scattered among Ithos’ ruins.
Talia tried not to think about how many of the bones were from children as she flooded them with bone mana, just as she tried to ignore the pain she felt every time she used bonefire.
Neither worked, but nobody else ever needed to know that.
One of the survivors carried some sort of floating orb above one hand, and the flame and bone shrapnel simply struck some sort of spherical misty shield around her. It didn’t seem to do any damage, despite the fact that she was standing right next to the ash pile.
Another survivor, carrying a bronze trident and wearing bronze armor, was simply standing too far away for anything more than a few shards of bone to bounce off their armor. Talia didn’t understand Havath’s obsession with bronze, she really didn’t. It might be more resistant to rust magic and other corrosive affinities than steel, but it took far more mana to strengthen it in comparison.
The third carried a proper flaming sword, and the flames from the blast simply curved around him. Quite a few bits of bone shrapnel still cut into him, though, and he collapsed to one knee.
She hadn’t even gotten a chance to see what weapons the other two carried, sadly.
Talia wasn’t just watching idly, though— she immediately followed up with a series of dreamfire bolts. They sizzled strangely in the rain, as though the raindrops were trying to feed them instead of extinguishing them.
The first bounced off the weird spherical shield and the second deflected around the Havathi with the fire sword..
The third, at least, did some damage. So far as Talia could tell, it appeared to split the bronze of one of the armor wearer’s pauldrons apart into its constituent metals.
Talia sent another dreamfire bolt at the bronze-armored figure, then ran for it.
She didn’t run far, though. Just back around the corner, where she immediately started climbing the side of the building she’d just dodged around, using the handholds she’d carved with dreamfire.
The bronze-armored Swordsman was the first around the corner, which was their bad luck. They crossed the ward Talia had carved into the cobblestones with dreamfire at a dead sprint, and it dumped all of its mana as heat into the Swordsman. The bronze trident and armor glowed red, and there was a smell of burnt hair and meat as the Swordsman collapsed to the ground.
It wasn’t her usual mode of fighting, but you couldn’t expect her to be friends with Hugh for as long as she had and not pick up any wards, after all. Her tattoos, it turned out, affected her wardcrafting ability as well, but if she was trying to create a fire ward, well… for once it worked in her favor. It was probably the closest to being a real fire mage she’d ever be.
She also couldn’t help but notice that her short hair didn’t get all sodden and difficult in the rain like her hair used to when it was longer. She still missed her hair, but she wasn’t going to complain about this part.
Talia was already on the roof by the time the other two Swordsmen approached the corner, not having seen their armored companion’s fate. The woman with the floating orb had brought the wounded flame mage inside the weird bubble shield, and was helping to carry him.
Unfortunately, Talia hadn’t the slightest idea of what sort of affinity the Swordsman might have gotten from her pact with that weird orb. It wasn’t any material she’d seen before, but it was a dull brown approaching black, with spellforms carved deeply into its surface. Or melted, maybe? They were fairly jagged and irregular.
Generally, the best way to defeat a mage was by knowing what their affinity was, and if that failed, simply by overpowering the enemy mage.
And Talia heavily doubted she could overpower whatever that shield was.
She did have one trick that might work, though.
Talia yanked the shard of sunmaw bone off her necklace, charging it with bonefire, and then hurled it at the spherical shield. The weirdly corrugated pattern of the bone grew even more distinct as it grew larger, and was nearly the size of her torso when it hit the shield.
Then bounced off.
Both of the surviving Swordsmen turned to look at her, and the wounded one leveled his sword at her.
Talia threw herself back as the sunmaw bone exploded.
She waited a few seconds, then she poked her head over the edge again.
The misty shield was still intact, and both
of the mages were still unharmed, but Talia noted, to her delight, that there were weird ripples in the shield, almost identical to the corrugations in the sunmaw bone.
“You were on the top of the list for those we should attempt to persuade to join us,” the wounded flame mage said. “But I think you’ve just proven yourself too dangerous for that.”
The flames around his sword all rushed into a sphere at its tip.
“Danavar, don’t!” the woman shouted, but not in time to stop the man.
Rather than shooting towards her, the flame detonated at the tip of his sword, filling the entire shield with flame. It erupted out in a couple places, but largely stayed contained.
Talia’s smile grew wide at that. She’d been waiting for ages for a good opportunity to use sunmaw bone in battle. Sunmaws had a curious property— they disturbed the aether around them, making spells near them collapse and fail. Their bones were famously useful for wardbreaking tools and windshield penetrating arrows as well, carrying some small portion of that effect.
When subjected to bonefire, sunmaw bone didn’t shut down spells. Rather, it tended to make them fail.
Explosively.
Just like Talia’s spells used to.
It would be at least ten minutes before the aether nearby stabilized enough for spells to work again, so Talia quickly moved to find somewhere more secure.
She vaguely considered collecting the Havathi weapons, but her scalp twinged with remembered pain. Carrying one or two of them around probably wouldn’t trigger another resonance cascade, but…
The weapons could stay right where they were for now.
She’d just left the affected area when the city phased again.
When she’d lit up the area with the flames from her burning dagger, she glanced behind her, and realized, to her shock, that the area affected by the sunmaw bonefire hadn’t phased with them. There was a hole in the city where a great chunk of the city had been left behind, the edges of it torn and crumbled in that same corrugated pattern again.
Talia whistled at that.
She really wished she had more sunmaw bone, but that stuff was hard to find. If only she’d thought to harvest more from that sunmaw she’d killed out in the Endless Erg last summer.
Right now, though, she needed to find her friends.
One of whom was her boyfriend now. Talia had to admit, she was thoroughly enjoying this trip, for the most part.
If she stumbled across a few more Havathi while looking for her friends, well…
That would just be a nice bonus.
In truth, Alustin’s situation was rather worse than the Swordsmen knew. He was running low on many of his standard combat glyph papers, and worse, his paper mana reservoir was down to dregs. It was refilling itself from the newly enriched aether around them, but it wasn’t going nearly as fast as he’d like. Going toe to toe against the Havathi in the living tower had been an absurdly mana intensive option, but he’d wanted to pull the tower’s attention away from Godrick, Hugh, and Sabae, wherever they were in the city.
He really hoped it had been enough. He’d put a lot of work into his students, and had grown quite fond of them. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to track them down with his scrying. He was pretty sure Hugh’s spellbook was doing its anti-scrying thing, and Sabae tended to move around too quickly to track. Not to mention, his farseeing was location based— he could send his vision to places, but it didn’t magically track whatever he was looking for.
Still, Alustin had learned better than to underestimate his students.
Alustin ran his eye across the Swordsmen, who were spreading out to attack him when the last ward fell. His face was still behind a paper helmet, but he tried to keep any expression off his face when he saw what was behind them.
The rain began to pick up even more, and several more leaks sprang in Alustin’s armor.
He carefully ran his affinity senses through the storage space inside his tattoo, taking stock of what he had available.
Plenty of blank paper, but he didn’t have nearly enough mana left to take on an entire Hand just with blank paper. Almost no exploding glyphs left, and only a handful of flash-glyphs left. He could probably take one or two of the Swordsmen if he blinded them with flash-glyph papers, but that would leave him largely defenseless against the rest when they recovered.
If the Hyphal were closer, he could just attack her from inside the ward, but she hadn’t moved in closer than the outermost ward had been yet— her mycelial strands just spread across the stone towards the Exile Splinter.
Alustin ignored his library and his personal effects, none of which would help in the slightest at the moment. He had plenty of ward-papers left, but this Hand would easily be able to overpower one of his modular paper wards.
“Halfway there,” the Hyphal said.
Alustin’s affinity sense briefly passed over a heavily warded section of his storage space. He never accessed it except when he was somewhere he was convinced was proof from scrying— usually his quarters or office back in Skyhold. Even Kanderon didn’t have any suspicions about this project, so far as he knew.
Not that it would do him any good. It was a pipe dream at this point, and he doubted it would be ready for a decade, at least.
And he really wasn’t sure he’d still be alive ten minutes from now, let alone ten years.
He briefly considered his half-congealed third mana reservoir, but an attempt to use it now would probably fail, if not collapse it and waste years of effort on his part. Just a few more months and it would have been ready, but…
Alustin’s senses raced past a half-dozen other projects in various stages of completion. Most were intended as weapons against Havath eventually, but none were ready yet.
Most people who knew of Alustin’s vendetta assumed he had some grand master plan, but there was nothing of the sort. Alustin preferred a far more improvisatory approach— it was best, so far as he was concerned, to have tools to react to any sort of situation, rather than relying on a more fleshed-out plan.
That isn’t to say he didn’t have plans at all, of course. Plans were fine so long as you remembered that they were just tools, not goals in and of themselves. People tended to get over-attached to plans, to the point where they would fail to achieve their objective rather than abandoning the plan they’d put so much time and effort into.
Alustin couldn’t help but smile as his senses finally crossed over the perfect tool for this job.
They grew even wider when he realized that the Hand still hadn’t looked behind them.
“I’ve given your proposition some consideration,” Alustin said. “And I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three flaws with its base assumptions. Well, quite a few, in fact, but three that are most pertinent at the moment.”
Springcloak sighed. “Of course you have. Let me guess, you’re somehow going to find a way to lecture us on agricultural magic.”
Alustin was vaguely offended by that. His interests were diverse and widespread. Agricultural magic was just a sentimental favorite, was all.
“The first flaw,” Alustin said, “is assuming that you’ll break through that last ward.”
Hyphal gave him an irritable look.
“I should rephrase,” Alustin said. “It’s assuming that I’ll let you break through that last ward.”
“Really?” Amberglow said, sounding contemptuous. “Bold words, coming from—”
“When am I anything but bold?” he asked, interrupting Amberglow.
Alustin really would have let her speak, but he really needed to stay on schedule, at least if he wanted his dramatic timing to work.
He really needed to teach his students to get better at being dramatic. They tended to fight in silence, save when coordinating. It was very deadly, efficient, and intimidating, Alustin supposed, but it was also so… boring.
“Second, you should know that the Exile Splinter’s phasing effect seems to start from the outer edge of the city and wor
k its way inward,” Alustin continued.
Several of them just stared at him blankly, but Springcloak and the Marrowstaff were clever enough to realize what he meant, and whirled around.
The phasing events were happening faster and faster now, and it took only seconds for the wave of darkness to creep across them, and drag the city back into the pocket dimension. Alustin waited until it had passed, and for the Havathi to ignite various light spells and glow crystals. Forgeheart ignited flame from his molten blade, while Amberglow made the heart of their jewel-blade start glowing in a cascade of brilliant gold.
Alustin let his paper armor collapse off him— he needed the rest of his mana for something else. He gave the Havathi a toothy smile.
“Third,” Alustin said, “I don’t know what rainstorm you’re talking about.”
He lifted his arm, and pumped all his remaining paper mana into a particular pile of glyph-covered papers, then blasted all of them out of his storage space up into the air above them, activating their glyphs as he did so.
The huge stack of paper expanded into a massive cloud of gently drifting paper, slowly settling towards the ground, their glyphs glowing faintly in the dark above them.
No one spoke for a moment.
“That’s it?” Amberglow asked. “Just… going to throw a bunch of paper into the air? Really?”
“He just ran out of paper mana,” the Marrowstaff said.
Alustin would give a pretty penny to know how the Marrowstaff could know that. Or at least one of the wooden coins Talia had turned the sea serpent into, he still had a couple of those sitting around. There were only a handful of mages and enchantments Alustin had ever even heard of that could detect mana levels of other mages.
He turned his head up and watched the paper sheets slowly fall, fluttering through the air.
“Almost through,” Olstes’s Hyphal said.
Alustin thought the sheets of paper looked oddly beautiful, the glyphs at their centers and edges glimmering as they fell.
“He clearly didn’t have enough mana left to activate them fully, or they would have done something by now,” the Marrowstaff said, and reached up to snag one of the lowest sheets out of midair.
