I pulled on my power tap, and threw up a wall of stone between us before the attack could reach me. The flames ate into the stone like acid, hissing and smoking, but it got the job done.
I threw myself into the air, knowing that staying in one place for long would be deadly against a foe like this. Cerise had taken advantage of my distraction to attack again, and I saw tendrils of darkness twining around one of the dragon’s hind legs. It was turning to deal with her, so I stuck myself against the ceiling and fired twice more.
The dragon roared in pain, though I could barely hear it over the ringing in my ears. For a moment I thought we had it. But then the dryads spilled back into the room’s entrance, locked in battle with a mob of skeletons. Damn it, this whole situation was a trap, wasn’t it? What else was going to go wrong?
I didn’t have time to think about it, because the dragon broke free of Cerise’s spell and leaped at me. Unlike her my reflexes were merely human, and its bony snout slammed into me before I could react.
“Daniel!”
The distraction cost Cerise, as the dragon’s tail blurred around to smash into her. She sailed across the room, and slammed into the wall so hard that the stones cracked around her. Then the dragon was falling away from me, its jaws opening again as black flame filled it maw.
My shield was down, but my coat had blocked even the multi-ton impact of the charging dragon. I frantically threw my earth talisman between us, and conjured a wall of stone in midair. Damn it, I needed to do better than this.
Black flames licked around the edges of the barrier, but the enchantments on the stone kept it from being destroyed. I sent it flying at the dragon, and spared a moment to concentrate on myself. I needed to be faster, react quicker. Could my flesh magic do that?
Yes. The energy cost was huge, and I’d have to heal myself constantly to repair the damage the technique did. But right now I had more power than I knew what to do with. I dropped off the ceiling and wove the spell as I fell. Magic filled my limbs, and the world slowed down.
Cerise was still fighting. She wove across the floor flinging curses at the dragon, darts of shadowy energy that left black marks on ts pale hide. Her tail hung limp, and she left a trail of blood behind her, but she was alive. Thank god. I hadn’t been sure if even she was tough enough to survive that impact.
I threw myself across the room before I even touched the floor. The stone beneath the dragon’s feet turned to mud, and then back to stone a moment later. Varfin thrashed wildly, and the stone instantly cracked and began to give way.
But it gave me time to reach Cerise, and hand her Grinder.
“Now we’re talking,” she grinned. The howling blade came to life, and she rushed back into melee with the giant beast.
This time she had me supporting her, fouling the dragon’s movements with earth magic while she darted around it. I threw up walls and turned the footing to mud, made the floor sprout spikes and grew my earth talisman into a flying boulder to batter it.
But Varfin’s injuries healed almost as fast as we dealt them, and the undead monster was tireless. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Corinna and her dryads still locked in desperate battle against an endless horde of skeletons, where the dragon could cover them in black flames whenever it felt like it. The room itself was rapidly becoming unstable, chunks of earth and stone falling from the ceiling.
I needed a more effective weapon. But what? I didn’t dare set off bigger explosions than the ones my gun produced. I’d just bring the roof down on us, and I had no illusion that being buried would kill this thing. Any fire I could directly conjure would be too weak to be effective, and we were already running out of oxygen down here. The dragon’s bones were steeped in ancient magic, far too strong to easily destroy with force spells.
Magic. That was it.
I abandoned my latest attempt to pin the dragon’s tail under a mass of stone, and hammered a dispelling into its back. Normally that would have been a useless gesture, like trying to dissolve Hoover Dam with a beaker full of acid. But with my energy tap I could throw far more power into the spell than any normal mage.
The ghostly blue glow that stretched across the dragon’s wing bones flickered, and the beast staggered. Cerise took advantage of its distraction to rip a huge gash in its side with Grinder, and plunge one of her athames into the wound.
Alright, so its magic was armored against dispelling. That made sense, most enchantments were pretty tough in that respect. I shaped a different spell, slammed a spike of concentrated magic into its protections and began to pry them loose with sheer overwhelming brute force. Blue sparks crackled across the dragon’s hide, and it whipped around to breathe a gout of black fire at me.
Hah. I belted out another overpowered dispelling, and blew the magic of its breath weapon apart. The unnatural flame dissolved into broken bits of magic, intangible and too disordered to be any great threat.
“Mortal fool. You think you can overpower a dragon?”
Varfin reared up on his hind legs, with his wings spread wide. Ignoring Cerise’s attacks, he spread his jaws and unleashed a torrent of liquid black fire at me.
I countered the same way I had before, with a dispelling that tore apart the magic of his attack before it could reach me. But this time it didn’t end after a second. Instead it grew, more and more of the unholy flame rushing towards me. I planted my feet and drew deep on my power tap, pouring more energy into my dispelling.
My power stone was a machine that would never tire. I would, eventually, but I’d shaped spells at nearly this intensity for twenty minutes at a time when I built my stronghold. I doubted Varfin could keep up his attack for that long. So I gritted my teeth, and maintained the spell for the longest minute of my life.
Then Varfin’s attack collapsed, and he began thrashing wildly. My dispel washed over him, making his wings flicker again, and this time they kept flickering instead of recovering. A jet of violet plasma burned its way out of the dragon’s rib cage, and I realized Cerise had taken advantage of its distraction to actually cut her way inside its body. I could see the sharp outline of her aura deep inside the magic that animated the dragon’s bones, tearing it apart from the inside.
“Get… out of me… you parasite!”
Varfin thrashed wildly. His tail swept through the melee at the entrance to the chamber, sending dryads and skeletons alike tumbling across the floor. His magic seemed to convulse, streamers of blue energy erupting in all directions to orbit furiously around him.
Well, that was too good a distraction to waste. I retrieved my earth talisman, and formed it into a multi-ton mass of iron with a blade along the bottom. A little blunt, since the talisman’s shaping magic wasn’t precise enough to make a real razor edge, but I slapped a force blade over it to fix that. Then I flew it over the thrashing dragon, and waited for him to move to where I wanted him.
The giant guillotine fell, biting through the dragon’s long neck to bury itself in the floor.
Varfin went still for a split second. Then the blue glow exploded out of him with a violence that shook the room. More chunks of stone fell, and I glanced up to see the whole dome collapsing.
I rushed to the dragon’s body, where Cerise was just starting to cut her way free, and threw a banishment upwards.
“To me!” I shouted. “The room is collapsing. Everyone to me!”
The stones falling on my head dissolved into nothingness as my magic touched them. The nearest dryads reached me, but now the whole ceiling was coming down like a tsunami of hard stone. Corinna dove under a mass of loose earth, towing a wounded dryad behind her, and fell at my feet. Cerise looked around wildly, dissolved into shadows and reappeared next to me with a dryad in each arm.
The last dryad, the one I’d spoken with earlier, only made it halfway under my protection before the roof came down.
Again I held hard to a spell that pushed the limits of my ability to channel power. All around us the room was buried in solid earth and stone. More ear
th fell above us, trying to fill in the hole that protected us, but I banished it as fast as it could fall.
Finally the rumbling stopped. We were at the bottom of a steep funnel-shaped hole, with faint lights visible far above us.
“Alanna?” Corinna said worriedly, kneeling next to the half-buried dryad. From the way the stones lay on top of her it was obvious that she’d been crushed flat from the waist down.
“Back to my tree… for me,” the dryad said weakly.
I put my hand on her shoulder, and flooded her with healing energy. She gasped.
“Dying can’t be much fun, even if you do come back from it,” I said.
“It sucks,” she agreed. “Sorry, Corinna. I was too slow, and I’m all flat now. Can you… take me home?”
“Of course I will, Alanna. Do you have the strength to return to wood?”
She nodded. “Our lord is giving me lots of strength. Thank you, kind master.”
Her form wavered, and shrank into a green mist that curled up Corinna’s arm and coalesced into a wooden bracer.
“Well, that was something,” Cerise said weakly, leaning into my side. But somehow she didn’t feel as cuddly as usual. I looked down to find that she had scales now, of white and pale blue, and a stubby pair of leathery wings grew from her back.
“Looks like you sucked down a little too much dragon, there,” I told her.
She nodded. “Yeah. I’ll have to pass most of this off to Hecate in my next sacrifice. The power is nice, but I’m not keen on the scales. Corinna, what about the rest of your girls?”
I looked around, and realized that only six of the dryads were still with us. Damn.
“They’ll recover,” Corinna assured us. “Their spirits will return to their trees. But as weak as they were, it will be a week or more before they can manifest again. Unless our lord can heal them?”
“I’ll give it a try next time we have a free minute,” I told her. “But for now we’d better make sure the town is still going to be here come morning.”
There were sounds drifting down from above, and as I listened I realized it was a battle.
Cerise groaned. “I’m too full. I can’t eat another bite.”
I mussed her hair. “Nut. Keep Grinder, then, and you can just kill things without eating them.”
I took a minute to give everyone in our party a quick burst of healing, enough to stop bleeding and wash away fatigue. Then I started forming a steep stairway up the side of the hole, and we crept towards the surface in single file. It was easy work, compacting loose dirt and pebbles into something like sandstone, and in a few minutes we reached the top. I peered carefully over the edge, and frowned.
We were in the middle of the plaza in front of the High Temple of the Aesir, just a few blocks over from city hall. The plaza was littered with bodies. Hundreds of them, some fresh and others years or decades old. Here and there was the smoking wreck of one of the Conclave’s war golems, its iron limbs pitted and deformed like it had walked through a blast furnace.
But the battle wasn’t over.
On the steps in front of the temple’s main doors a few surviving heroes fought to hold the line. Priests waving spears that crackled with lighting. Knights armed with flaming swords. A single wizard, conjuring shimmering spells like giant soap bubbles that dissolved enemies and healed allies at the same time.
Attacking them were several hundred heavily armed and armored corpses, bolstered by a half-dozen remaining golems. But what caught my attention was the giant two-headed fox leading the assault.
Cerise popped up beside me, and cursed under her breath. “Looks like we found our missing girl.”
She was unstoppable. In the moment I’d been watching she pounced on the wizard, shaking him in her jaws while her fiery aura immolated the defenders around her. One knight tried to run her through with a blade of ice, but the shallow gash it left on her flank healed in the blink of an eye. She batted him away with her tail, sending him tumbling into the back of one of the priests. A golem stepped on them both.
“You sound like you still like her,” I noted.
“Of course I do,” Cerise replied. “Just look at her go. She’s awesome.”
“She tried to kill me,” I pointed out.
“Not very hard. I know, I know. I just wish things could have been different,” she said wistfully.
A bolt of lightning descended from the cloudy sky to strike the giant fox. But she just shook it off, her luxurious pelt smoking, and turned to rush the temple doors.
“Me too,” I admitted. “But we can’t let her destroy the whole city. Come on.”
I led my little force left, trying to flank the enemy so I could fire into them without hitting the temple defenders. But we were out of time.
I’d expected the doors to slow Mara down until we could get into the fight. But instead she grew to the size of an elephant, and slapped her paw against them.
“Open!” She commanded, her clear voice carrying about the sounds of battle.
The temple’s wards, fortified by centuries of prayer and sacrifice, shattered like glass. The doors flew open, the enchantments meant to hold them closed unravelling in an instant. Mara stalked into the temple like an angry goddess, and a chorus of screams rose up inside. The remaining defenders were pushed back from the entrance, and their resistance was clearly about to fall apart.
I raised my gun, and started firing bouncer rounds into the rear of the enemy.
Once again, the whirling force blades were frightfully effective against the packed mass of enemies. Each round tumbled through their ranks in a spray of severed body parts and mangled equipment, tearing long furrows in their formation.
“Follow me!” I ordered, and boosted my speed again.
My limbs burned with magic, but I bounded across the plaza at a speed I could never have managed normally. I switched to explosive rounds as we got closer, and blew one of the surviving golems over. Then we smashed into the remnants of the enemy formation.
I carved a path through the undead with a long blade of force, cutting through swords and armor with equal ease. Beside me Cerise fought with Grinder in one hand and a whip of shadow in the other, mowing down her opponents like they were standing still. Corinna and her dryads fought with inhuman ferocity, their wooden swords hewing through chain mail and beheading moldering corpses with an ease that testified to the strength of their magic.
Then we were through, standing on the steps of the temple.
Cerise’s whip of shadow snaked out to pluck a figure from the back of one of the remaining golems, and lay him out on the ground at our feet. I looked down, and saw that it was Carl Stenberg.
“Ah, I surrender?” He called over Grinder’s scream.
I threw up a low wall blocking us off from the remaining undead, and Cerise deactivated Grinder.
“I’m guessing Mara isn’t your sister, and you’re actually a spy,” I said mildly.
“Lokin resistance cell,” he replied. “Like your girl there, only we follow Loki instead of Hecate.”
Corinna put her spear point in his face. “Shall we kill him, lord?”
I shook my head. “The Conclave would get pissed if I just kill one of their members without convincing them he’s a traitor first. We’ll turn him over to them, if we can.”
I made the flagstones beneath our feet grow into heavy cuffs around his wrists and ankles. Then I remembered that Loki was big on shapechanging magic, and added bands around his neck and waist.
“Perfectly reasonable,” he agreed. “Ah, no hard feelings?”
“We’ll see. Corinna, hold this position. Cerise, with me.” I turned and rushed into the temple, with Cerise at my heels.
There were dead priests on the floor, and a door in the far wall was smashed open. We were barely halfway across the room when there was a thunderclap from somewhere ahead of us, and the whole temple shook.
We burst through into the sanctuary to find Mara standing over a smoking hole in the fl
oor, with a large stone covered in runes in one of her mouths. She was smaller than she’d been a few moments ago, but still the size of a very big horse.
I hesitated, unsure of the best way to attack her. Unsure of whether I wanted to, for that matter. She was tough as hell, and if that was the veil anchor in her mouth I probably couldn’t get it away from her before she destroyed it. But I’d be perfectly happy to see Loki’s forces invading Asgard, if it meant they left Kozalin alone.
“Too late,” Mara crowed triumphantly. “I already have the veil anchor. I have to give you credit, though. I thought the trap in the catacombs would keep you busy for hours.”
“Daniel is better than that,” Cerise said, completely ignoring the sheer luck that had led us to the surface right next to the temple. Although it might not have been luck. The temple could have been built next to the dragon’s tomb on purpose, and Mara could easily have missed that detail when planning her trap. For that matter, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect divine meddling given the situation.
“The dragon was pretty badass,” Cerise admitted. “But he won’t be coming back again. Thanks for the wings, by the way.”
Mara chuckled. “You’re welcome, Cerise. I hope you learn how to fly someday. It’s every bit as good as it looks.”
“You know, guys, it’s not too late to join us,” she went on. “This is the second of my trials, and father made mom promise to give me my immortality if I can finish all three. With your help whatever she gives me for the third trial will be easy.”
“I thought we were going to be trying to kill each other, after the way you turned down Daniel,” Cerise said.
Mara lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry about that. I have to succeed here, no matter what. But I didn’t really want to hurt any of you. No one has ever made me an offer like that before.”
“As beautiful as you are? You’ve got to be joking,” I said skeptically.
“I was raised in my mother’s realm,” she said softly. “It’s… not a good place. But things are going to be different soon! Hel and Jormungandr have both been really nice to me, and father actually thanked me for freeing him. I’ll be rewarded when Asgard falls, and so will anyone who helps us. So what do you say?”
Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) Page 38
