by Dean Murray
Indeed, that is how most of your kind think they work. The average Awakened has never possessed even one artifact in any of their incarnations. They see an enemy wreak unimaginable destruction without ever seeming to run low on emotional reserves and assume that the artifacts are completely self-contained, but the truth is that all artifacts require at least a small amount of memory to be consumed before they will work.
I pondered that answer. So they work kind of like amplifiers, amplifiers that are so effective that from the outside it looks like the user doesn't actually have to sacrifice any of their memories to get them going. How do you know all of this?
The silence stretched out for so long I was almost worried she'd just broken off contact altogether as a way of avoiding my question.
Many thousands of years ago one of your kind explained a surprising amount about the known artifacts to me. I know roughly how they function as a result.
How is that even possible? I thought that nobody knew how they worked.
There was a hint of resignation in the Lady's voice now, like she wished she'd never let slip that she knew how the Scepter functioned.
This individual actually created at least one artifact, and was uniquely positioned to make educated guesses about how the rest of the known artifacts at that time worked.
I wanted to pursue that line of questioning. There was so much I didn't know about artifacts, and yet they were one of the main drivers of the conflict between the different pantheons.
Everyone seemed to believe that getting their hands on an artifact—or even better, getting their hands on journals detailing how to make new artifacts—would change their existences forever. The Lady obviously knew more than she was telling me, but I was growing more and more certain that pushing her on this issue would be a very bad idea.
Maybe Kyle had been onto something when it came to his belief that the fae—Seelie and Unseelie alike—were actively trying to take artifacts out of circulation. The Lady had apparently been the one to give Arthur Excalibur, so at one time she'd been willing to hand out artifacts to the Awakened she trusted—and she'd done it again by giving me the Scepter of Storms—but she'd been pretty clear earlier that she thought she'd made a huge mistake with Excalibur.
Are there any hints at all that you can give me with regards to making this thing work? I understand that you've never used it yourself, but any little tidbit of information could make the difference between me being able or unable to help out during the next engagement.
The Lady was flying less than thirty feet away from Intravil and me, effortlessly gliding on wings that had an ethereal white glow to them. She'd spent the entire conversation up until then apparently focused on where we were headed, but now she looked over at me for several long seconds before nodding.
I don't have very much to give you to go on, but I suppose it's pointless to hold anything back now that you have the actual artifact. More than that, it would be negotiating in bad faith to refuse to tell you what I know.
I was glad she'd pointed that out. I'd been secretly thinking much the same thing, but I hadn't been anywhere near ready to bring it up. It was a good thing that the blood oath hadn't given her the ability to read my mind.
You're going to need to open yourself up to the scepter. I know it's not much, but it's all I have to give you.
Thank you. You're right, that isn't much to go on, but it's a ton better than nothing.
I would have spent the rest of the flight trying to 'open myself' to the scepter, but I'd finally realized that the wards around Camelot were the cause of the sense of pressure I'd been feeling from the first moment we'd arrived in New Mexico. It felt like my brain was being jammed up against the back of my skull in an attempt to get as far away from the wards as possible.
I didn't remember feeling anything like that when I'd been inside of Kyle's bunker, but maybe that had been because I'd been inside the wards rather than outside of them. It was also possible that we'd left too quickly for me to notice the sense of pressure back then, but I suspected that it had more to do with the fact that Kyle's wards had been orders of magnitude less powerful than what we were approaching now.
It didn't leave much room for opening myself up to anything. A minute later we landed and Byron hurried over to me, taking my hand as he led me to what looked like a solid rock wall, but which turned out to be a cleverly concealed door.
"Hold still. I'll key the outside ward to you so that you'll be able to think rather than wanting to just rock back and forth on the ground."
He was right—it only took a second for him to make the wards safe for me to go through, and then the sense of pressure all but vanished. I could still feel the outer ward, I could still sense its incredible power, but it wasn't uncomfortable anymore.
Jace and Kat stumbled over and Byron added both of them to the list of people who could walk through this ward without being instantly vaporized.
"You're safe to walk through now if you want to, but I'd suggest you stay on the outside still. There's another ward a few dozen yards inside there and it's almost as strong. I'd key all of them to you, but I don't think our friends are going to want to wait around for that—besides, it feels kind of pointless to spend the time and effort given that we're here to bring all of the wards down anyway."
Jace nodded. "Understood. Thanks for doing that though—we were going to be absolutely useless here otherwise."
I looked around at the Seelie warriors and realized that none of them seemed to be suffering any ill effects from being so close to the crackling field of energy. Nobody seemed overly eager to get close enough that an accidental slip could result in them being disembodied, but other than that they were all acting normal—or at least as normal as a bunch of powerful fae ever acted.
"I guess they don't have to worry about having the wards keyed to them if they don't want to travel through them?"
Byron shook his head. "Nope. They can't sense the wards as easily as we can, which is pretty useful at times like this."
He looked around at the gathered fae and then, at a nod from the Lady, took a deep breath and stuck his hand into the ward all the way up to his elbow.
"I guess it's time to get this show on the road."
The first discharge of energy took me completely by surprise. I'd seen sun lances that were powerful enough to destroy armored cars, but that had been nothing compared to this.
It was like standing at ground zero for a lightning strike. My hair started to float upwards and then everything took on a blue tint as the first arc of energy lashed out from the surface of the ward. Jace, Kat and I had stayed in place, standing just a few feet away from Byron, and it wasn't until that instant that I thought about the fact that all of that energy was going to have to pass through us on its way out to the waiting fae.
That first jagged, cerulean bolt of lightning went right through me—right through my chest and out my back. I screamed in surprise, but it didn't actually hurt. It was a warm breeze that went through me like I was nothing more than a thin piece of material.
I turned my head just in time to see the energy arc towards the ground and then abruptly change direction and slam into the Lady, outlining her with a brilliant corona. Her expression didn't give anything away, but I had to assume that it didn't hurt her because she just nodded to Byron.
"Bleed the energy out faster—the rest of my people won't be able to grab any until you reach the limit of my ability to absorb it. Ramp it up slowly so that we don't waste any of it, but ramp it up."
Byron's eyes took on the distant gaze of someone who was trying to do a complicated math problem in his head, but the arcs of power started to increase in frequency.
It only took a few seconds before there were nearly always at least three or four discharges of energy leaving the ward at the same time. The rest of the fae stepped closer to the ward and I watched as the bolts started hitting them as well.
Once the power coming off of the ward exceeded the L
ady's ability to soak it up, the arcs started splitting, forking into jagged blue tongues that hit multiple fae at once. I saw Bethany absorb a finger of power that was no bigger around than a paperclip and realized that the group as a whole must be pretty close to their maximum if she was starting to get in on the action. My hypothesis was confirmed an instant later when, for the first time, a discharge of power hit the ground rather than being soaked up by one of the fae.
"That's it, Byron! Hold it right there if you can—that's as fast as they can take it without wasting any of it."
He nodded in response to my yell, but it was obvious that he'd reached a point where it was becoming difficult to hold back the tide of power that wanted to leave the wards. Jace grabbed my arm and pulled both Kat and me back more than a dozen feet.
"He's at the tipping point. There's enough energy being discharged from the wards that he's going to start struggling to keep it all from going at once. I've seen it happen before, but never with something this big. We're not going to want to be too close if he loses control."
The alarm that I'd felt when the first arc of power bored through my chest was back. "Wait, nobody said anything about this being dangerous. Is he going to get hurt if he loses control?"
Jace shrugged, but the normally casual gesture betrayed his concern. "I don't know. It's not usually a problem. It's rare that anyone brings down a ward like this, and usually when they do the fairy who is sucking down the power is more than equal to the task of absorbing everything, even if it all comes down at once. The energy is keyed to all of us, so it shouldn't hurt us, but it's still theoretically possible that our bodies could get overloaded if enough power—even keyed power—were to be shoved through us."
The lightning coming off of the ward was growing despite Byron's best efforts. The blue glow given off by the bolts lit him up with a harsh light that made him look a lot older than he'd looked even just a few seconds earlier. Every wrinkle and bead of sweat stood out in stark relief, and I could feel the burden on him growing by the second.
The Lady was at the center of a continuous discharge of power that was so bright I couldn't look directly at it, but that was the case for all of the fae. They were all wrapped in jagged, erratic bolts that differed only in the amount of light that was being given off.
"Selene, don't look directly at it! It's like looking at an arc welder—it will blind you if given enough time."
I let my eyes rest on Bethany—now almost a full inch taller than she'd been a few minutes before—and then forced myself to look away as I realized that she might already be past the point where she could only absorb my memories, and only then if they were powered by the emotion that had originally created her.
Part of me was happy for her. I still wanted to believe that she was really on my side, that she was fully Seelie, but mostly I was just worried about the fact that I'd missed my chance to prove where her allegiance actually rested.
Kat was obsessively scanning our surroundings. She caught my gaze and motioned outwards with her chin. "You need to be amped up and watching for threats. This is as critical a time as we're going to see today. While their full attention is focused on absorbing all of that power, our winged friends are all the next best thing to completely vulnerable."
I nodded, and did my best to follow her orders, but I couldn't stop myself from stealing glances at the wards out of the corners of my eyes. There wasn't as much of the power hitting the ground now as I'd expected there to be.
There was still a lot of it being wasted, but judging by what I was feeling there was more than twice as much power shooting out of the wards as there'd been when I'd told Byron he'd hit the sweet spot. That should have meant that just as much power was now striking the ground as there was being absorbed, but that definitely wasn't the case. It took me a second to understand what was going on.
The tendril of energy feeding into Bethany was as big around as a pencil, and it looked like all of the rest of the fae were likewise absorbing more as well. They'd all apparently absorbed enough power that their strength was growing and thereby increasing the amount they could each absorb.
Nobody had given me a clear idea how long it was supposed to take to bring down the outer ward around Camelot—probably because nobody had any experience with a ward this powerful—but we'd been there for nearly five minutes by that point. I was feeling pretty good. Byron had managed not to lose control of the energy and discharge it all at once and the fae were getting noticeably stronger.
Everything was going perfectly right up until I felt the first hostile signature approach. I turned towards Jace, but he didn't need my warning. Neither did Kat, but she looked like she was about to have a heart attack.
"What do we do, Jace?"
There was a second of relative silence as Jace flared his signature, and then he kicked a nearby rock with enough force to shatter unaugmented bones.
"There are eight of them."
"That's too many—even three would probably be too many right now given that we need to defend the Lady and her warriors. We need a plan!"
Jace turned back to Byron, shielding his eyes against the brilliant blue light with one hand. "Byron! Bring it all down at once. We've got hostiles incoming and we're going to lose half of the fae if they get here while everyone is still overwhelmed trying to absorb all of that power."
Kat grabbed Jace's arm. "We're never going to get another shot at this. Once that ward is down it's down for good—all of that extra power will just be wasted."
"I know, but Byron is obviously in too far to back out now—it would rip him apart to try to cut the flow off. It's all he can do to keep it from just grounding out all at once. Better to consolidate the gains we've got so far than risk having the Lady and all of her most powerful warriors disembodied by a few Awakened."
Kat looked doubtful, but she nodded—only it didn't matter because nothing had changed on Byron's end.
"Byron, can you hear me?"
Kat and I lent our voices to Jace, but it didn't seem to make any difference. Byron was too consumed with trying to regulate the tide of power breaking over our companions to register any kind of external stimulus. Jace tried to push forward and physically shake him, but he only made it a few feet before his steps faltered. Translucent ripples of force sprang into place around Jace as he created a barrier effect, but even that wasn't enough to buy him more than another four or five steps.
Jace retreated back to my side, shaking his head. "It's no good. It's like trying to walk into a tornado."
I scrambled for a solution, but by then it was too late. I'd been focused on the eight signatures I could feel quickly approaching us, and completely overlooked the fact that it was unlikely Kyle would have sent out that many Awakened all by themselves.
The tide of dark shapes that came racing over the hills wasn't moving as quickly as the Seelie fae could have flown, but they were moving much faster than any natural creature could have, and given the way that the rocky hills had shielded them from view, they were still on us almost before my overworked mind could register their presence.
I thought we were all dead. They outnumbered our side by more than three to one, and the Lady's warriors were all still frozen in place as they dealt with the raging torrent of energy being directed their way.
That was exactly what would have happened, but as the Unseelie fae closed to within a few yards of us they started absorbing the power coming off the wards, and suddenly our people were moving around—sluggishly, but they were moving again.
Jace was already surging forward as the first set of lightning bolts hit our enemies, and Kat was only a couple of steps behind him. By the time I realized that we had a brief window of opportunity and got myself moving in the same direction, Jace had reached the closest Unseelie fae and lashed out with a titanic blow from his ax.
The fastest Unseelie fae had largely been the smaller, weaker members of the horde. When you combined that with the fact that they were also moving sluggi
shly now that they were caught up in the maelstrom of energy, they were easy targets.
Jace tore through the three closest enemy fae. He dropped them to the ground with three strikes and took no damage in return. Kat reached her first target as Jace disemboweled his third enemy, and her sword took something that looked like a centaur across the chest in what I was sure was a fatal wound even for a fae.
I stepped towards a snake dog that looked an awfully lot like the thing that had ambushed us in Denver, and lashed out with the Scepter of Storms. Under normal circumstances, amping myself to three or four times normal speed was barely enough to allow me to stay half a step ahead of even a moderately powerful fae. Luckily, this wasn't anything like any of the other fights I'd been up against.
The snake dog was moving like it was drunk. It was all it could do to even begin to dodge my blow, and it was child's play for me to adjust the arc of my swing so that my weapon took it across the head. The results weren't as gruesome as what Jace and Kat were doing with their edged weapons, but the thing that fell to the ground less than a second later didn't look much like it had before I'd hit it.
I was pretty sure I was going to be sick later, but right then there wasn't time for any of that—I was just glad that the much-vaunted Scepter of Storms was still effective as a plain, old-fashioned blunt instrument.
More of the Unseelie fae were arriving every second, but even with the new arrivals it hadn't been enough to make it so our people were moving like normal. All the fae, both good and bad, were moving like they'd forgotten how to make their limbs respond to their desires, and each Unseelie fae we put down was one less fae to help absorb the energy still pouring off of Byron's ward, but there was nothing to do but kill the bad guys as quickly as we could while they were still unable to resist us.
Right now Jace, Kat and I were the next best thing to unstoppable, but once the eight approaching Awakened arrived the balance of power would flip back to the other direction. Our only prayer of winning was if we could manage to kill so many of the Unseelie that the Seelie warriors could help hold off Kyle and the rest, but even that was a faint hope as long as everyone was still distracted by the lightshow Byron was putting on.
