by Damien Lake
At the same moment, a second attack sped toward him too fast for thought. Different somehow. In what way Marik had no time to analyze. Instinct ruled him, making him raise his blade while he ducked behind it as much as he could.
The working struck his sword and blasted it backward to strike his head. It hit hard. Colors danced across his vision. Not a fire attack. Simply a raw blast of force meant to break every bone in his body.
It knocked him to his knees. Still confused, he rolled aside. Most of the shields around the sword were gone, their absence felt rather than seen. Seeing anything at the moment was sketchy.
A third working ripped through the snow where he had been. It tore up earth as if it were water thrown up by a stone pitched into its depths. Don’t give him time, fool!
Marik formed spheres, no larger than his palm, afraid to waste time by infusing them with greater power. He launched them at the horses where the mage had been. Speed. Speed. Three at a time, the first striking as the second reached the midpoint, the third finishing its construction. One after the next. A relentless barrage, fast as his mental hands could form them, three in one second, six in two, nine in three.
The first several flew wildly and tore into the soldiers guarding the officers. Marik watched as men were knocked aside or took grievous injury. After the tenth orb flew, he altered their path to the mage.
Damn him! It! Him! Damn it all! He gritted his teeth. Orbs flashed off the mage’s shield, most shattering into energy shreds, others bouncing into soldiers further away.
The mage neither grinned nor smirked, yet Marik still felt the man’s amusement. He raised his hand theatrically. Under the magesight, Marik could see the mass of fire-tinged energy forming, ready to be launched.
Before he could, a deflected orb burned into the horse’s flank. Screaming shrilly, the mage’s horse reared on its hind legs, dancing in pain. Its fore-hooves split a soldiers head. The startled mage clung to its neck.
Marik saw his chance. With hardly any energy left, he directed his last orbs into the horse’s neck, its underbelly, its chest. He pummeled the horse up and back. It screamed loud enough to be heard across the entire battlefield.
He felt his eardrums throbbing with the painful noise. The horse toppled backward off its hooves as flesh and hair was blasted away, the mage going with it, shouting incomprehensibly.
Men flattened by the first blast had regained their feet. Kings continued to fight hard, for which Marik was glad. He felt weak, drained. No chance he could hold off an onslaught by the black soldiers at the moment. Not until he spent several moments regaining his wind and his strength. Hardly enough energy remained to maintain the surviving shields around the sword.
The mass of fiery energy, invisible to everyone except him, still hovered above the clustered horses. Why hadn’t it dissipated when the horse crushed the mage beneath its weight?
It should have, unless—
So fast. It happened so fast Marik hardly understood what happened. He saw the mage behind an elite soldier, leaning on the fighter’s shoulder. His hair stuck out awkwardly, traces of blood and melted snow glazed his face. Marik raised his sword instinctively.
The attack came as a constant wave, a single beam, as of sunlight shining through a hole in the clouds on a gloomy day. Rather than striking at him, it deliberately struck his sword.
The mass is still there! This bastard’s no stranger to dual channeling!
He felt his sword vibrating. Before he understood fully, before he could draw enough energy to counter whatever this bloody mage was doing, the steel glowed brightly. Nearly too fast to register the changes, it shone red, then blue, then brilliant white.
The hilt burned, searing through his thick leather gloves. Marik let go of his sword. He raised one arm to shield his sight from the blinding incandescence.
His sword exploded. Neither in fragments nor flying shards. In molten steel. The liquid metal burst in every direction, a shattering tankard carelessly dropped.
Marik felt hot steel splash across his raised arm, eating through his tunic sleeve. Steel flowed through the air, washing across his face while he clenched his eyes shut.
His face was being torn from his skull. The skin disintegrating, the muscle and flesh beneath boiling off his bones, liquefying into thick, congealed offal. Pain whiter than white, beyond burning, beyond death!
He screamed and heard nothing. His shriek ripped through the battlefield, heard plainly over the noise of other dying men.
Darkness rose, a familiar darkness. It swelled from a point beyond life. He had no recollection of the last time, except he knew it had reached out to embrace him before. Cool, clean darkness. A soothing relief in oblivion. A chill to ease the burning by allowing death to envelope him.
* * * * *
“And be damned to you!” Harbon coughed on the last word. He felt the shoulder he leaned against shake slightly.
Harbon glanced at the general’s guard. He would need to silenced, along with the few others near at hand who had witnessed him calling on god’s power. That cursed mage had forced the issue, preventing him from sitting stately and working unobserved. Now these guardsmen knew he could wield the power, decidedly an abnormal ability for an officer in the king’s army.
Too much knowledge for these particular guardsmen to be trusted with. He would need to kill them quickly so their deaths were lost in the battle’s confusion. And all for one strangling mage!
That had surprised him. No self-respecting wielder in Arronath would parade as a common vagabond, even the ones as weak in the power as this one must have been. Pride in one’s talents should come first and foremost. This land must be far stranger than he had ever believed.
A pity the Artifact needed to be destroyed. It had the ability to defend against his workings. No telling how far that might have gone. Stronger workings directed at its wielder might trigger Sudden Death presets, such as dramatically boosting its wielder’s strength in the power, or unleashing a high level Deathblow. Too much remained unknown about Artifacts to risk such dangers when facing any, including the ones believed to be well understood.
Harbon felt the guard supporting him shudder a second time, obviously nervous about the colonel’s abilities. As he should be. He studied the faces surrounding him, marking who knew too much. The firecloud he still retained, despite being thrown off his mount, would make an adequate end to them.
Most of the guards had scattered during the barrage, or been killed. All to the good. Three remained too close to trust, along with a dozen who might or might not be trouble. Five soldiers fought nearby, a sixth approaching him. No doubt to ask for orders given that very few must have been issued with Adrian staring into space.
He ignored the approaching soldier to finish his appraisal until the solider had the temerity to speak first; a serious breach of protocol. Given that the words had sounded like the mangled form of Traders spoken by these people, the language mutated horribly during their long isolation, he must be in a shocked state. Either from an unseen injury or from the magical displays the strangling mage had forced.
“What say you, man? Is your report so urgent?”
Harbon waited. The man stared back at him without replying. Cold eyes gazed unflinchingly from behind the helm’s vision slit. So like shards of frozen steel.
An angry order that would seal the daring man’s fate for all time hovered on Harbon’s tongue before he noticed other oddities. The man had lost his shoulder guards, and also lacked all arm and leg protections, as well as the gorget from his neck. His cuir bouli appeared thrown on over a white tunic shaggy as a sheep.
“Wh—” he started to demand, realization an instant too late when he felt the dagger slip into his ribs.
Harbon lurched, burning ice stabbing through one lung, his strength pouring away through the hole in his torso, departing while blood gushed over his vest. He fell as the stranger cut open the guard’s throat with the dagger, then whirled to face the others with a sword h
e had concealed behind his back.
The cold from the frozen ground seeped into him with frightening speed. Harbon groped for his strength, for the energy he could feel draining away. Wildly he snatched at whatever he could, finding the slippery essences from hundreds of dead men saturating the snowfield. Life forces that had not yet completely dissolved or lost the personal signatures impressed on them by the men they had once been.
He grabbed all he could. Most slipped fishlike through his mental fingers. The inflow slowed the chilling loss of his own life, yet as much as he snatched, he could not gather them in fast enough to match the leak.
Harbon wanted to scream in frightened frustration. He opened all his channels, desperate for life, to channel the power back into himself before he lost it forever.
His control slipped. Rather than initiating a siphon loop, he felt all the energy, the wriggling life forces from dozens of men, escape through the channel still feeding the firecloud. Harbon’s head slumped, his last vision showing him the cloud swelling tremendously, rising, dipping, swaying, and finally begin a descending arc to the north.
Then his eyes glazed over in death.
* * * * *
Walking in the darkness. So dark he could see neither sky nor horizon, could not see how far he had come, nor where he might be going to. He could see no ground either, but it must be there. Logic demanded it. How could he walk if there was no ground to walk upon?
Still, with nothing at all discernable, Adrian might have been traveling a world where ground, sky and everything in-between were nonexistent. This must be the space between moments, the place between the ground and the sky, a space through which the forces creating the world had worked during that unimaginable creation.
When had he last eaten, or drank, or slept, or defecated? He could produce no answer, could not know, since measurements of time held no meaning in a world where time remained still.
Something had changed though. As to what it might be, Adrian struggled to define. The air no longer felt the same. He continued to walk.
A dot of light appeared far away. This was the first time he had ever seen anything in the blackness. His hands were invisible, as were his feet and clothing, but logic insisted he must have a body to be able to walk. Adrian studied the white dot. It must have relevance, least why would it appear? Walking brought him no closer.
He paused to consider that before noticing the dot waver of its own accord. What might that mean? Should he walk toward it?
Before he could decide, the dot rushed for him. It split as it closed the distance at frightening speed, becoming a pair side-by-side. When they drew closer, the whiteness took on color. All sorts of colors that resolved into shapes.
Almost like looking through windows, he thought. Two windows, one slightly to the side of the other. The views were slightly offset. In fact, it was like looking through…eyes?
The two dots shot toward him faster than he could react. He screamed, or wanted to scream, but the two viewing portals continued to grow. Through them he saw men fighting, men in black Arronath armor fighting others, a few dressed as misfits, most clad in green.
Both portals flew at him, filling his entire vision until they crowded the black void out. They struck him with force enough to rock his head back. He teetered, nearly tumbling when the portals grafted to his own vision.
“Sir! Are you hurt? Were you shot?”
Adrian looked down. He could see his hands, could see his clothing and the horse he sat upon. Also the guardsman with concern painted in every facial line as he gripped his general’s leg to prevent his officer from falling to the ground.
“Wh…wh…what?”
“Bayonne! I think the general has been arrow shot! Grab the Healer!”
“What’s…happening…to me? To me? Where am I?”
Adrian stared around. The guardsman’s concern grew palpable. It looked like he was in the middle of a battle! But what—
Behind him, frightfully close, came a great fiery explosion that rent the ground, shook snow from the surrounding trees, and flung the general high into the air, horse and all.
* * * * *
“You killed entire innocent village. Pay you the price now!” Colbey waited for the comprehension to dawn in the Dead Man’s eyes. The vile killer simply looked back, not a trace of understanding illuminating those pale orbs. He acted as if he had completely forgotten!
The dull look persisted until Colbey could stand it no longer. He had his knife out in an instant, stabbing the murderer through the ribs. It would surely kill the black-hearted mage, another greedy power feeder lusting after the village pool. Clearly the true face all mages wore, this one’s unconcealed where others hid their nature.
He killed the murderer’s follower before the criminal could react. In short order he dealt with the others at hand. None were much trouble, and his fury still burned brightly hot. When the last sat clutching his eviscerated belly and screaming, Colbey stepped closer to the Dead Man.
Only moments of his life were left. Blood bubbled from the mage’s mouth and he wore of look of terrified horror. Good, except only the least of what he had deserved. Mages were all the same, killing woman and children, babies and elders, for no better reason than that they could gain a shred of power to set them above others.
Yes, all mages were alike. He glanced back to where the mercenary mage lay on the ground. His shorter friend knelt by his side, frantically checking the body for life signs.
No, Colbey saw, what he actually did was different. He pealed away the mage’s clothing, those garments that had been splashed by his melted sword. The little rapier man also dug at his pouches for bandages.
He would not be working so frantically if the man were dead. Colbey smiled, a portrait of teeth. Good. That damnable man had not only lusted after his village’s dormant power, he’d also meant to cheat Colbey from his justice.
The detestable mage had made a hard drive to reach the Dead Man before Colbey could work his way through the invader’s ranks, meaning to steal his vengeance, meaning to kill the man first so the souls of his people would never find a peaceful rest. If he still lived, then Colbey would see to it the man understood that he could never prevail against him. Not him, the Guardian chosen to exact due payment from the murderers who slaughtered helpless innocents, killed children, destroyed the tree-born walkways, shattered the buildings, ripped the flesh and limbs from weaver women and candle makers and spinners and forest gatherers and mutilated their corpses and tore their bodies to shreds and trapped their souls in a limbo purgatory unable to rest or sleep or find peace…
While he slowly walked to the prostrate mage, the fog crowded in, obscuring everything except the mage. The roiling black, the turbulent darkness, focusing his awareness on this poisonous man who was no better than the mage he had just killed. Given any opportunity, he would have done no different. Rage sharpened the thick noir fog, highlighting curves inside the clouds with red flashes of interior illumination.
Yes, if this mage lives still, I will make such an example of him that no other mage in all the world will ever dare so much as look at a Rovasii tree without shuddering. I will make the burning of steel seem a refreshing swim, and see to it that he does not die until he has been reduced to a quivering pile of madness!
“Against all…”
Colbey nodded to agree…then stopped cold. He felt his lips come together, which must mean they had been open. Open…to speak? Had he spoken those words? Or had the restless spirit spoken through him?
He felt…Colbey frowned. How did he feel? Any different? Did he feel the presence of the third spirit at all? Liam had fallen silent, surely so he could listen, but Sylvia’s hand no longer rested on his shoulder. Where had she gone?
Against all? What does that mean? I have already avenged you by killing the leader of these murderous swine! Has Sylvia gone to rest? Are you staying with me, Liam, to help me continue fighting off the mages to come? What—
He never
finished the thought, because the world exploded in noise, rumbling earth, and fire. The ground bucked him. A blistering hot wind grabbed him before he could fall. With force beyond that of his first plummet while learning to climb, Colbey was slammed into the frozen ground from which all snow had been stolen by the angry wind.
“And why do you think that is?” Thomas studied the eight scout trainees. The fourteen-year-old boys and girls, excepting Colbey at a year younger, studied the instructor right back. Certain answers were never handed to the trainees when the subject touched a vital portion of their training. If they were unable to reach the correct conclusion on their own, then it would be necessary to reevaluate that person’s aptitude for serving as a scout.
Thomas allowed the youths what time they needed. Life could demand quick thinking, but life also demanded careful consideration more often than not. Finally Ramon ventured, “Probably because, when you’re out working the patrol routes, any tensions with one partner will effect the performance of both. It’s best for the second person to help the first resolve their personal problems beforehand.”
He glanced at Thomas, who smiled. Before the Guardian could comment on Ramon’s deduction, Enid stormed in, her tone an inch short of mocking. “Since when can boys ever do anything but make a woman’s trouble’s worse? What do you know of the woman’s world, Ramon?” Ramon flushed, yet refused to back down from his position. She countered, “The obvious answer is that partners need to know they can trust each other implicitly. Working to help your partner outside of scout duties lets you come to know each other far better than if you only spent time together when on patrol!”
They glared at each other across the room, neither demanding that Thomas support either, knowing the Guardian would speak in his own time. Colbey snorted deliberately, letting the two know exactly what he thought of them flying past the true answer without seeing the forest for the trees.
Enid glowered while Ramon challenged. “You think you have a better answer?”
