Voice of Dominion (The Spoken Mage Book 3)

by Melanie Cellier

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said. “It’s too broad. There’s a battle going on, a big one, and it’s going to confuse your working. The last thing we need is to be led straight into the middle of the fighting.”

  “A homing composition set to locate a breach team would obviously be more useful,” he said, “but since there hasn’t been a breach team in centuries, none of us exactly carry those on our persons.”

  “That’s where I come in.” I thrust his composition back at him, already running over the words in my mind, revising and adjusting them.

  “Not too much power,” Lucas warned in my ear. “We don’t know how many of them there might be, and we’ll need you before the night is over.”

  I nodded, too focused on my composition to speak. A distant explosion shook the ground, and orange blossomed in the sky to the north of us.

  “They’re already fighting at the river,” Martin said. “We need to move.”

  “Give her time.” Lucas glared at the lieutenant.

  But the last of the composition had formed in my mind, and I hurried to begin the binding words. I instructed my power to search for the breach team, overlaying the name with the sense of a group of Kallorwegian mages creeping through the night. And then I sent it rippling out from me with a final, “End binding.”

  The commonborn soldiers shifted from foot to foot, peering uncomfortably out into the darkness while we waited. The five mages stood poised, each of us facing in a different direction as we waited for the slightest sensation of power returning in our direction.

  “They might feel it,” whispered Araminta. “And know we’re coming.”

  I bit my lip. Should I have tried to work a shield into my composition? Lucas had said to conserve power, and that would have been a complicated and chancy working…

  “We’ll just have to hope they pay it no mind,” Martin said tersely. “With all the chaos going on tonight, no one would be surprised to feel odd surges of power rushing around.”

  I exchanged a glance with Lucas. We could only hope the lieutenant was right.

  Somehow I had ended up pressed almost against Lucas’s side, and he reached out under cover of the darkness to clasp my hand. We stood like that through the drawn-out moments of waiting, until a soft squeak from Araminta accompanied a steady thread of power arcing back in our direction.

  “Does everyone feel that? Where it’s coming from?” I looked around at the other mages. As soon as they all nodded, I severed the flow.

  Martin started, staring into the dark and then back at me.

  “Where did it go?”

  “Conserving power, remember,” I told him.

  “Things operate a little differently when you’re the Spoken Mage,” said Lucas with a hint of both amusement and pride in his voice. “Much more efficiently, for one.”

  Martin looked intrigued, but he didn’t stop to question me, leading us instead in the direction my power had indicated. Lucas dropped my hand, increasing his pace to run beside the lieutenant.

  “We’re curving toward the battle,” he said, so low I almost didn’t hear it.

  “If the breach team did feel her working,” Martin murmured back, “then they will have felt our location just like we felt theirs. I’m taking us around to approach their position from the rear. And don’t worry, I’m taking into account the progress they must be making toward Bronton.”

  Lucas nodded once before letting his pace slacken enough that he dropped back to my side.

  No more bright fire lit the sky, but we could hear the growing sounds of battle. Shouts and screams rent the night air, and the crashing sound of rising and subsiding water sounded over the top of it. I cast a nervous glance at Lucas.

  “They’ll be trying to clear a path through the river, and we’ll be trying to turn it against them,” he said. “They were no doubt intending to be safely through before we discovered their presence.”

  “If this is an all-out offensive, and they’ve returned to the old ways, they may have wind workers among them.”

  Wind workers specialized in all weather and were therefore the experts on manipulating water. The thought that it might be them who turned the river against our own forces made me shiver. I tried to see up north, but the darkness prevented me from making out anything more than occasional flashes of light illuminating a distant sea of dark bodies.

  “Remember all of our seasoned officers do a year with the wind workers,” Lucas said. “A necessity when your front line is dominated by a river.”

  My anxiety lessened slightly, but I still feared our mages might be outclassed.

  A moment later, a southern stretch of the glistening river came into view, the water still frothing and tumbling from whatever gymnastics it had been forced to perform upstream.

  “Look,” yelled Araminta, pointing up the river.

  I followed her finger and gasped when I made out figures moving in the dim light only a short distance from us. The moon sailed out from behind a cloud, bringing them into sharper relief. A blue-robed mage led a group of black and red clad soldiers from the river. They walked up from its bed as if the water did not exist at all, an invisible bubble holding it back.

  Araminta’s cry must have reached them because several turned in our direction. But a battle cry from upstream had them pivoting into formation, facing north. What looked like at least three squads of our own soldiers raced toward them, spears locked. Behind them ran a silver-robed man who sent fire balls flying toward the Kallorwegians.

  The glowing spheres broke against an invisible shield, but the mage kept sending them. The final two crashed through the unseen barrier, although they fizzed as they did so. With a renewed yell, the commonborn soldiers poured through, clashing with the Kallorwegians.

  For a brief moment we had all fallen motionless, spell-bound by the battle before us. But Martin urged us onward.

  “Surely we must help them,” protested Clarence.

  Lucas shook his head, shoving our year mate back into movement. “No, we must stop the breach team.”

  He was right, of course, but it still galled me to turn and run as our fellow Ardannians fought and died. But far more would die if we couldn’t incapacitate the breach team.

  Martin led us southward away from the battleground but now curving eastward as well, back toward Bronton. We had circled the breach team and would come at them from the rear, gaining the much-needed element of surprise.

  The town walls came into view in the distance as we passed along a line of boulders, a copse of trees to our right. Had we cut our path too wide? The breach team would nearly be at the town by now, and we needed to spring our attack before then.

  Lucas once again moved up to jog beside Martin. “Shouldn’t we have warning compositions going ahead of—”

  Several thin whistles, followed almost immediately by a loud thwump and a sharp scream to my right, sent me diving to the ground. Leila and Tobias followed suit on my other side, hitting the dirt hard.

  “Ambush!” Lucas screamed, as the sound of ripping parchment filled the air.

  A surge of power rushed to form a shielded bubble around us. I turned on my hands and knees to attend to the downed soldier, but even as I watched, he spasmed and lay motionless, blood pouring from his chest. A direct hit to the heart. Leila peered over me and moaned.

  Armed figures emerged from the boulders and trees on either side of us. Every single one of them wore a mage’s robes, just as the townsman had warned. In Ardann, the solid black material would have indicated academia in either the University or the Academy. In Kallorway it promised death, and it concealed from us which specialty belonged to which mage.

  Somehow they had known we were coming and had laid a trap of their own. Several of them already had compositions in hand and spears of pure power hit our shield from every direction. It weakened, only just holding. Another lanced toward us, Martin tearing a composition of his own and activating another shield just as Lucas’s working shattered
.

  I scrambled up and ran to Martin.

  “Do you want me to shield or attack?”

  This time several of the boulders uprooted themselves and catapulted toward us, colliding with the shield and dropping to the ground with thunderous crashes. Already our second shield was weakening. Both Clarence and Araminta pulled new ones from their robes, but there were four of them and ten of the enemy. This wasn’t a scenario we could win.

  When Martin didn’t immediately answer, I turned to Lucas.

  “Shield or attack?”

  “Attack,” he said after only a moment’s pause. “We need your flexibility.”

  My mind bounced uselessly from possibility to possibility. No use aiming for their hearts here. Every one of them was a mage with the ability to properly shield themselves. I would burn myself dry before I broke through.

  My eyes fell on three mages who stood between us and the thicket of trees. Blindly I grabbed at the closest arm, pulling Leila toward me.

  “Get the others ready to run for the trees,” I whispered, and she slipped away from me.

  Whispering the binding words, I added, “Split the ground and send them falling.” I weighted the words with a description of the three mages I wished to target, before finishing with, “End binding.” My power raced toward the ground at their feet.

  A localized earthquake erupted, gouging deep fissures in the earth and sending rocks and even the first row of trees jumping and falling. The Kallorwegians cried out, two of them falling to their hands and knees while the third staggered away from the attack. The two downed mages sent questing hands into their pockets.

  “Now!” I screamed. “Run!”

  I didn’t waste time looking back to see if my team followed me, but I could feel them at my back as we burst through the tree line and into the cover of the trees, our shield dying behind us.

  “Spread out,” Lucas called. “Find shelter.”

  We scattered.

  I threw myself behind a bush, Leila beside me. With a rustle, Clarence disappeared into the branches above us. He climbed faster than I would have thought possible for someone of his size.

  An unnatural wind blew through the trees causing a thud and stifled exclamation from above me, although Clarence didn’t plummet down through the leaves as I expected.

  Tobias, thrown off balance by the force, stumbled into a shaft of light, and an arrow curved impossibly through the air to pierce his throat. He fell sideways and didn’t move.

  A stifled scream from beside me preceded a single sob from Leila. I turned my head away from the downed soldier. Another person I hadn’t liked but who hadn’t deserved death. I drew a deep breath as I tried to think what to do.

  They had ambushed us, no doubt alerted to our presence by my composition. But we had to do more than hold them off. We had come out here to ambush them, and although we had lost the element of surprise, we still needed to take out every one of them.

  Peering slowly around the bush, I saw that the three downed mages had all regained their feet. Two more had come to join them, and they formed a line five abreast, advancing toward the trees.

  A ripping sounded above me, and leaves tore away from trees all around us, throwing themselves into the air and dancing on invisible currents. It obscured my view, but I still managed to make out a silver-haired, grim looking woman in the rear group reach into her robes.

  She had only made it halfway through ripping her retrieved composition when another tearing sound above me caused a fiery cord to spring into being and wrap around her throat. She had time for a single, strangled scream before its burning length tightened, and she toppled to the ground.

  For a brief moment our attackers stood frozen in shock, all their eyes on her, and then ripping sounded throughout their ranks, and a wave of solid power rippled into existence around them. Only now did I notice that they had previously been relying on a shield between the front row of mages and the trees.

  Clarence had killed her. He had come up with a way to identify their wind worker, and then he had cut her down. How had he done it? A composition aimed at any enemy in the midst of activating a composition perhaps? I threw off the thought. I didn’t have time to consider it now. I needed to follow his example. We all did.

  The line of five mages stalked forward, reaching the first trees which had been damaged in my earthquake. As they kept coming, they spread out, one walking toward us, his eyes darting through the trees. I examined the forest around him, watching the way his shield did nothing to flatten the leaf litter and detritus at his feet. A limited shield, then.

  Whispering my words as quietly as I could, I took my time with a binding, needing finesse rather than brute strength this time. When I ended the binding, a vine, bright with spring green, unwound itself from a nearby tree. Slithering along the ground, it reached its quivering length for the mage’s legs.

  Wrapping around him, it had made it to mid-calf before he felt its presence. With a yell, he tried to swipe it off, but it tightened, drawing his legs together and sending him crashing to the ground. His head smashed against a jagged rock, and he rolled once and didn’t get up.

  A crash on the other side of the copse told me that battle had been joined elsewhere, as well, but I couldn’t see any of it. A sound at my side sent my arm flying up, my elbow aimed at the newcomer’s face.

  “Elena!” Lucas’s whispered word reached my ears just in time for me to redirect the attack before it smashed into his face.

  “Where’s your shield?” I asked. “There should be power around you!”

  “And give away my position?” He shook his head. “But forget about that. We need to get through the shield around them.” He pointed at the four mages who stood to one side of the fallen wind worker.

  A shout, and the sounds of a tussle erupted off to one side of us, but greenery blocked my view. Surely we needed to deal with the mages among us, first?

  “Do you see the young one?” Lucas’s eyes hadn’t left the Kallorwegian mages.

  I examined them again, despite the panic threatening to overwhelm me. One did indeed look younger, more like our age than that of the older mages who made up the rest of the breach team.

  “Yes, I see him,” I said.

  “Well, I recognize him. Two years ago, our intelligencers sent back a portrait of the Kallorwegian royal family, and that is Crown Prince Cassius.”

  Chapter 23

  “What?” I wobbled in shock and peered around the bush again. “The Kallorwegian crown prince? Here in Ardann? But why would they risk that?”

  “Never mind why,” said Lucas. “We can work that out later. He’s the one we need to focus on. Without him, I’m betting this breach falls apart.”

  Leila leaned in toward us. “I could create a distraction? If it would be helpful.”

  I shook my head. “No, you keep out of sight. We should never have let the general send you. This is a mage’s battle, and you’ll only get yourself killed.”

  She frowned but didn’t argue.

  I refocused my attention on the crown prince and his three attendants. Now we knew why they were hanging back.

  “Raw power?” I asked. “I could bombard them until the shields give way.”

  “No.” Lucas spoke quickly. “We don’t know how many they have with them or how much power they’ve put into them.”

  I nibbled on my lip.

  “Each one can only contain limited power. There’s no way anyone drained themselves to make a single shield composition. They’ll be relying on quantity. So maybe Leila’s right. We need a distraction. Something to make them forget to set new ones. Or to make them unable to do so.”

  One of Lucas’s royal guards came shooting out of a dark space between two trees. His foot caught on the body of the Kallorwegian mage, and he went sprawling. A black robe fluttered as the man pursuing him leaped out into the open.

  Lucas’s hand dove into his robe, but he wasn’t going to be fast enough.

  “Shi
eld him,” I whispered, and power burst into life around the guard just as the mage’s sword descended toward his neck.

  The mage gazed around, his eyes attempting to pierce the gloom and discover who had protected the guard. The guard, meanwhile, had twisted onto his back, somehow releasing the dead mage’s sword which had been trapped beneath him.

  The mage looked back down at him, his eyes widening as he attempted to pull his own sword back up in defense. But there was no time.

  The guard’s sword speared upward. For a moment it seemed to slow as if encountering some barrier, and then it flew forward, faster than ever, to pierce his chest.

  I didn’t need to ask Lucas what had happened. The ripping sound in my ear had been enough to tell me that the guard’s attack had been given extra power. They were down three mages now, but that still left seven.

  A scream in the trees to my left that sounded all too much like Araminta, nearly sent me to my feet. Lucas’s restraining arm held me down, however.

  “I’ll go,” Leila whispered and was gone before I could protest.

  “The prince,” Lucas whispered. “We need to focus on the prince.”

  I drew a deep breath and tried to think.

  “What about Colonel Jennica’s trick? The illusion of the attacking army. I bet you’ve been working on that since we saw her work it.” He wouldn’t have been able to resist the intricacy such a composition would require.

  Lucas didn’t try to deny it. His hand slid into one of his many internal pockets and returned with three compositions.

  “All of them,” I said before he could ask. “Use all of them. Let them think there’s an army descending on every side. We need them to scatter.”

  Lucas hesitated for the briefest moment, glancing at the pieces of parchment. How much time and energy and training did they represent? But in another second, he had shaken off any hesitation, tearing them all through with a single movement.

  A cacophony of sound instantly filled the air. The thud of pounding feet and the roar of battle cries accompanied the sight of soldiers pouring out of the landscape toward us from every direction.