by Lisa Shearin
Part of me wanted to stop him, to explain, right here and now; but I knew stopping him from speaking was the last thing I should do.
Instead I held my silence and allowed my son, my adult son, to speak for himself.
“As Sarad is wholly your son,” he said, “so I am my father’s—and my mother’s. I did not know her name or that of her family, but my father has assured me that she was a fine and noble woman. I believe in and trust him—and only him.”
I couldn’t breathe. Not with apprehension, but with wonder and pride.
Dasant made a show of sniffing. “Is anyone else tearing up here? Or is it just me?” He put an arm around Talon’s shoulders and pulled him close. “Is this a great kid, or what?”
I knew what Dasant was doing—getting Talon close enough to protect him if he was momentarily unable to do it himself.
As soon as Dasant made his move, Jash had cleared his throat, enough to be heard, not enough to cut his own throat.
He was ready.
So was I.
Chapter Twenty-One
The key to getting the draw on mages at or near your own level of skill is not to think about it beforehand. You also can’t let it show on your face or even by a twitch of a finger. It’s kind of like a card game, except it gets lethal immediately. You don’t wait until your opponent cheats before unleashing on him—or in this case, her.
But in a mage duel, as in a high-stakes card game, there is one absolute.
Someone always cheats.
And I have never been more proud that that someone was my son.
Talon’s words to Sandrina had the attention of every pair of ears in the cave. He knew that Sandrina would be hanging on every word. Talon was a master spellsinger, and he had laced those words with the setup for a paralysis spell I’d seen him use before to great effect. He had spoken directly to Sandrina and those with her. It didn’t matter that the rest of us had heard him as well.
Talon wasn’t aiming at us.
It was so subtle that no one, including myself, had sensed it.
I had seen it.
In the eyes of Sandrina Ghalfari, and in the eyes of every Khrynsani with her as their pupils dilated wider with every word Talon spoke.
The four Sythsaurians were wild cards. There was no change in their slit pupils. But taking out every Khrynsani in the cave and leaving us with only four lizard men went a long way toward tilting the odds back in our favor.
If Talon had the power to complete his spell before the Khrynsani could block him …
I was determined to give my son every chance.
We all had shields at full strength, but when your allies and opponents alike were masters of black magic, things were going to get messy.
Jash had shielded Phaelan and taken his stand in front of him. Agata had shields of ample strength. That, plus her knack for unconventional warfare in a cave that for her was covered in ammunition, made me worry less for her safety. I had to worry less, because Sandrina wasn’t about to give me a chance to defend anyone except myself.
Talon channeled all of his power into his voice, piercing the chaos with notes ringing with a perfect blend of sharp command and silken seduction. A paralysis spell attacking on dual fronts. It was irresistible.
At least it should have been.
Talon froze the plain-robed Khrynsani, and slowed two of the inner circle. We quickly dispatched them, leaving Sandrina, three master Khrynsani, and four Sythsaurians to contend with.
Eight to eight.
If they had all been Khrynsani, I would’ve considered that even odds.
They weren’t, and it wasn’t.
I took a page from Das’s book and lashed out in a broad wave, beginning with Sandrina and the Syth leader, and ending with the Sarad’s fancy-robed friend. The friend was singed, Sandrina was flung across the cave, and the two-legged lizard just smiled.
That was bad.
What I had thought was just tacky jewelry turned out to be something else entirely. The Sythsaurian was wearing wristbands studded with gems. Now they glowed a nasty shade of green.
I wasn’t about to stand there and wait to see what happened. I gathered my will and focused squarely on the Sythsaurian, and a red blaze too bright to look at formed around my hands and ran like wildfire up my arms. When facing an opponent who’s probably stronger than you are on all levels, don’t screw around with what might work, just hit the bastard with everything you have.
I did.
He crossed his wrists in front of his face as my best shot consumed him, racing over and around his body …
… and vanished.
Not absorbed into his body, but sucked into his glowing wrist cuffs, and in a blinding blaze sent right back at me.
I barely adjusted my shields in time to avoid being burnt to a crisp by my own magic.
My team was likewise engaged. The lizard leader wasn’t the only one with deadly accessories.
I couldn’t see Agata.
“Tam, help me!”
The terrified scream came from my right.
Agata was under attack from a Khrynsani and a Sythsaurian. She was bowed into a defensive crouch, eyes wide with terror, her shields gone, empty hands extended to ward off their attack. Her eyes caught mine, wide, pleading for help …
Empty hands? Pleading?
My senses reached out of their own volition, searching for our bond … and found nothing.
An enraged shriek came from behind me.
Now, that was Agata.
I snarled and slammed a ball of glowing red rage down on the cowering woman.
At the instant before impact, Agata’s panicked face winked out, replaced by Sandrina’s features, twisted with raw hatred.
My shot was partially blocked by the Khrynsani who was in on her deception.
The Sythsaurian turned on me, wristbands glowing. His yellow eyes darting to the space directly behind me was all the warning I got.
It wasn’t enough.
In the next instant, I felt myself enveloped and lifted off the ground by a net of green light constructed by what felt like thousands of angry hornets, their vengeance centered on yours truly. My shields didn’t help; these things manifested inside my shields. Even my flight leathers were no obstacle to being on the receiving end of pain the likes of which I had rarely encountered. Each pinpoint of sickly green light was a hornet with a stiletto for a stinger.
“He’s mine!” I dimly heard Sandrina scream.
I would have gladly surrendered to Sandrina’s tender ministrations just to escape the Syth’s torture net. I desperately reached beyond my own pain, beyond the net, to what was happening to my team.
Everyone—my team and the surviving Khrynsani, now including Sandrina—was being held to the ground beneath Sythsaurian nets. The Khrynsani had been betrayed by their new allies.
The leader had me, Talon, Agata, and Dasant, and the other three had the rest of my team and the Khrynsani. I moved my head with agonizing slowness to look down at myself. I was no longer suspended in the air, but was on my knees before the Sythsaurian leader.
Then a haze passed before my eyes, and between one blink and the next, Queen Baeseria was standing next to the smiling Sythsaurian, his smile and movements somehow frozen in place.
“Not frozen, but greatly decelerated,” Baeseria said. “I have slowed time in this cave. I cannot act on what is happening here, but you are not so constrained.”
“Speak for yourself, Your Majesty,” I said in my mind, since I think my actual voice was busy screaming.
Her lips briefly curled upward. “Once again you are on your knees. Such obeisance is not necessary.”
“Tell him that,” I said.
“You have little time left.”
Yeah, that’s what my screams were telling me.
“He and his kind have gained more power by contact with the crystals.”
“So did we.”
“Not to the extent that they are able to draw power. It i
s why they have come here. They have used such crystals before. They think nothing of taking and laying waste to entire worlds to get what they need. Then, like the scavengers they are, they continue on, searching for other worlds, worlds with sources of power to fuel their war machines. As they acquire more resources, they take on more advanced cultures. However, they consider the world of the Seven Kingdoms to be fairly primitive.”
“We’re primitive? I don’t think I like that.”
“We’re merely a stepping stone. They conquer worlds, taking the inhabitants for food or slaves, leaving no living creature in their destructive wake.”
I didn’t want to know, but I had to ask. “Are we food or slaves?”
“Both. You must stop them.”
I think I may have managed to twitch an eyebrow. “I was trying to do that, before … this.” I still wasn’t sure what this was, but I really wanted it to stop. The pain and the screaming. Right now, I think the screaming was worse. It was so close, and so loud.
“If you stop screaming, you will die,” Baeseria said.
In that case, it was annoying, but I could put up with it.
“Listen to me,” Baeseria said earnestly. “You have it within you not only to resist, but to escape, and to strike back.”
That didn’t sound right, but it might have been all the screaming. Others were joining in. That didn’t improve my concentration.
She grabbed my face between her hands, and pinched my earlobes. Hard. Her eyes bored into mine. “Listen to me!”
I did.
Baeseria vanished, and I was left looking at a sadistic, smiling, green lizard man.
My body drew breath to continue screaming, and in that breath, I felt the stabs of a thousand stiletto-stingered hornets cease their stinging, and I could think.
Better still, I could move.
And I knew how I could escape.
But I didn’t do either. Not yet.
The Sythsaurian had been expending a significant amount of power to hold the four of us prisoner, but I somehow knew it wasn’t all the power he had at his disposal.
That was more than a little concerning.
Escape now, be concerned later.
The Sythsaurians were killing all of us.
I remained on my knees, hands by my sides. I twisted my wrists, putting the daggers strapped to my forearms in my waiting hands. The Sythsaurian knew who I was. He wouldn’t kill me, not yet. Right now, all he wanted was me subdued and captured. He had both. He had lowered the power in his shields just enough.
Confidence can kill.
It can also cripple.
I didn’t know if Sythsaurians were anatomically the same as goblins, but they had two legs, legs that looked the same as ours.
I hamstrung him.
A Sythsaurian scream is more like a keening wail, a really high-pitched keening wail. The leader collapsed bleeding to the ground, and I was pretty sure my ears were doing the same thing.
Shouts rang out as armored goblins streamed into the cave—golden-skinned goblins.
Each held what looked like a smaller version of Phaelan’s shoulder cannon, except these were powered by a fist-sized Heartstone, blazing with light.
The Sythsaurian leader touched a crystal on his wristband, and his body became undulating waves of light before vanishing right before my eyes.
This wasn’t magic. This was something else.
The other Sythsaurians must have done the same. Only my team and the Khrynsani remained in the cave.
One of the Khrynsani made a run for it. A Cha’Nidaar soldier aimed and fired.
A beam of fiery light shot from the weapon and struck the Khrynsani, vaporizing him instantly.
The rest of us put our hands up and didn’t move as the Cha’Nidaar soldiers disarmed us all.
I had no idea if they could understand me, but I had to try.
“Take me to your queen,” I told the Cha’Nidaar with the most decoration on the chest of his uniform, judging him to be the senior officer.
The officer tilted his head and said a few words. They sounded vaguely familiar, but weren’t anything that I could understand.
“Queen Baeseria,” I said. “Please take us to her.” I gestured to include my team.
I don’t think the officer heard anything past Baeseria’s name. He blanched nearly platinum, as did those near him.
I didn’t think that was a good sign.
The officer said three words in some ancient form of Goblin. I heard the queen’s name and a word that was close enough to the modern term that I could understand him.
Now it was my turn to blanch.
He had said: “Baeseria is dead.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Our hands were secured behind our backs with manacles fitted with Heartstones that negated magic. I knew they negated magic, because I tried using it to get out of them. Unlike the bonds used in the Seven Kingdoms for restraining mages, these didn’t inflict pain if you attempted to use magic. Your magic simply didn’t work.
The Cha’Nidaar had taken all of our weapons and had done a depressingly thorough job of it.
The officer had also found and taken the ring and pendant that Agata and I wore.
I tried to reach Queen Baeseria without luck, which made me wonder if the ring had been my link to her, or if that in combination with my magic had enabled me to communicate. Or, what was seeming most likely, that she really was dead and that I was delusional.
Dead.
How could that be? She’d pinched my earlobes, which, aside from an area significantly south from there, were the most sensitive parts of a goblin’s body. I’d already been in pain from the Sythsaurian’s attentions, but I knew what I’d felt.
Queen Baeseria had spoken to me on three separate occasions.
That she was dead was an unexpected twist, but communicating with the dead was possible. I’d seen it done. What I wouldn’t give to have Vidor Kalta here right now to find out exactly what was possible. Though I was certain Vidor wouldn’t feel the same way.
The Cha’Nidaar were keeping us separate from the Khrynsani. We were in the front with the Khrynsani behind, with four Cha’Nidaar soldiers between us.
It wasn’t nearly enough.
I would never trust any Khrynsani at my back, but especially Sandrina Ghalfari and three members of Sarad’s inner circle.
“Tam.”
I tensed, thinking it could be Baeseria. Then I tensed further, and added a wince, realizing who was speaking to me mind-to-mind.
Agata.
So much for her not realizing what had happened between us. Though considering that we were manacled and being marched to who knew where, I was grateful to be able to talk to her without anyone else hearing. An umi’atsu was a magical bond. Perhaps magic-blocking manacles only worked against physical manifestations of magic.
I sighed. “Yes?”
“You’re not surprised that you can hear me.”
“Do I detect a faint note of accusation?”
“You do, and there’s nothing faint about it. What happened to us?”
“It’s complicated.”
“If it involves you, how could it be anything else?” She paused. “I heard you and Baeseria talking.”
Now that was a surprise. “You heard?”
“In the cave back there.”
“You heard the other two times?”
“No, just this instance.”
I hesitated. “Do you think she’s dead?”
“She could very well be. I mean, if she were still alive, that would make her over a thousand years old.”
“I’ve met two people who were around the same age. One—Rudra Muralin—is dead as of a few months ago, or at least I hope he is. The other—Eamaliel Anguis, Raine’s father—is very much alive. Both had extensive exposure to the Saghred. Baeseria could have had the same length of exposure to the Heart. So, yes, her being alive is possible.”
“Except the officer said she was dead.”
“There is that. We wore Heartstones for over a month, with no effect. Yet thirty minutes in a geode amplified all of our magic.”
“Well, I did stop an earthquake,” Agata noted. “I’ve never been able to do anything like that before. But that doesn’t explain Talon being able to help me. He said nothing like that has ever happened to him, either.”
“I’ve given up trying to explain what Talon can do.”
“You haven’t found his limits, have you?”
“No, I haven’t, and I wish I could.”
“The geode doesn’t explain why we can mindspeak,” Agata said. “Or whatever this is.”
“Umi’atsu.”
“What?” Agata blurted out loud.
Two of the guards behind us prodded us, none too gently, with the barrels of their guns.
I should be grateful Agata didn’t have the gun at my back.
She would’ve shot me.
Three guards held their Heartstone-powered guns on us while others removed our manacles and locked us in a cell made entirely of Heartstone. It had the same effect as the manacles: our magic didn’t work here.
“And we thought we were going to have trouble finding this stuff,” Elsu said, sitting on a Heartstone bench and kicking at the Heartstone floor with the heel of her boot.
“Not only is it everywhere, apparently it’s useful for all kinds of things,” Malik added. “Amplified power, imprisonment, talking to dead people.”
I threw him a look. “Mal.”
“My apologies, Tamnais. Merely venting my frustrations. If you say you’ve spoken to Queen Baeseria, I believe you. I thought every one of those Cha’Nidaar would faint dead away when you told them. There’s something afoot. Most people would have simply looked at you like you were crazy. Those men looked afraid.” He glanced around at our prison. “Any chance of you pulling some strings with her to get us out of here?”
“I’ve been trying. Nothing.”
“Do you think it’s because they took your ring?” Dasant asked.
“I don’t know. Every time we’ve spoken, she initiated it.”
“Maybe she doesn’t think you’re in danger now,” Elsu said. “She gave you what you needed to break that Sythsaurian’s hold on you … Maybe she thought her work was done.”
