He was stunned at the sight of her, and if the Vilth’s expression was any indicator, he was as well. She took a step forward, arms shaking at her sides, and clenched her teeth. Her chest rose and fell with rapid breaths, and Dormael could see tears leaking from the corners of her eyes.
“Leave him alone,” Bethany snarled, her voice quavering with fear.
The power holding Dormael to the stone stiffened a little, as if the Vilth were reaffirming his hold on Dormael, and he peered cautiously at Bethany as he stepped slowly away from Dormael to square off with Bethany. Dormael screamed on the inside, fearful for the little one, and tried desperately to reach his Kai again. It resisted him.
“Now, now,” the Vilth said in a soothing tone, though the effect was ruined by the raspy tone of it, “you don’t want to hurt yourself, girl.”
Dormael could feel the Vilth tensing his magic for another attack, and everything around Bethany seemed to tense as well, as if she sensed it, too. Lightning arced more agitatedly through the air, and the stones spun and twirled a little faster.
“Get away from him,” she said, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin a little, “Or I’ll hurt you.”
The Vilth laughed low in his throat, “You don’t really want to do that, do you little one?”
“No,” Bethany replied, “But I will.”
The very air seemed to thicken as she said it, and the tops of the grasses around her began to smolder. Tendrils of smoke rose into the air around her and were sucked into the maelstrom with everything else. Dormael could see her hands shaking.
“It’s alright,” the Vilth said, “I’ll go. We’re all just going to calm down now, and I’ll leave, if that’s what you want.” But his words hid his real intentions, and Dormael felt the attack coalescing before he was able to put it together.
“Bethany!” Dormael called, but it was too late.
The Vilth extended one arm toward the little girl, his magic suddenly filtering down to focus there. The air grew suddenly very still, and the rain, the stones, the lightning, and the smoke all stopped rotating and froze completely in their spots, hovering over the ground. Dormael reached desperately for his Kai.
And Bethany screamed.
His magic filled him in the instant that everything seemed to happen, and his senses awakened once more to experience everything that happened in crisp clarity. The Vilth extended his arm and began to pull on his power, readying an attack on the girl. Bethany’s voice rang out through the distance that separated them, and she seized her vast power and stabbed it toward the Vilth in a desperate and powerful surge – and Splintered his spell.
Dormael saw it all happen almost as if it were in slow motion. He saw the Vilth’s eyes widen in shock as his magic suddenly unraveled and left him standing in the midst of that frightening maelstrom, completely powerless. The energy of his attack whipped out into the world around them, fracturing every stone left in the wall and even a few of the statues with a deafening crack.
Dormael fell from the wall, suddenly free, and immediately came to his feet and pulled on his own power, summoning up every bit of strength he could muster. The magic filled him with deafening tones, and he could hear Bethany’s song reacting to it, bolstering it, lending him a bit of its wild potency. He sprinted toward the Necromancer, who was stumbling backward in awe of Bethany. Bethany stood with her fists clenched, arms raised to her face, as if she were straining to hold onto the wild magic raging around her.
“Run Bethany! Get out of here!” he screamed as he ran. She opened her eyes and turned to run, disappearing into the temple. The maelstrom continued.
Dormael grasped the satchel that the Vilth wore in the grip of his Kai and yanked it forcefully from his shoulder. The Necromancer uttered a surprised cry as the thing flew off toward the temple and tumbled across the ground, out of his reach. His face turned toward Dormael, anger burning in his eyes, but Dormael wasn’t done. Pulling the electricity from the swirling vortex of power around them, he planted his feet just outside of arm’s reach of the Vilth and slammed his hand forward.
Lightning cracked through the space between them, pummeling directly into the Necromancer and sending him flying backwards into the cracked stones of the wall behind him. His head smacked against the stone, and Dormael saw a halo of blackened blood spray onto the rock beneath his head. The Vilth seemed a little dazed, but he started to slowly climb to his feet, clutching the space in his chest where the lightning had left a nasty looking burn across his pallid skin.
Dormael, giving him no time to recover, reached out into the storm of power and seized one of the floating stones, hurling it directly at the Vilth. He felt the man’s power awaken and the stone shattered when it was just a few links’ distance from him, but Dormael whipped another one at him, then another, and another. The Vilth was forced to defend against the great stones instead of working against Dormael’s power, or be crushed beneath them.
Dormael screamed, enraged and drunk on his magic, pushing the stones harder and harder at the Vilth. The Necromancer, though, had taken a few steps forward from the wall, and was shattering them with greater and greater focus. The flying stones kept him from trying to Splinter Dormael’s power, though, and so Dormael kept them coming.
Then one of the great stones came hurtling at Dormael, and he had to split his mind and knock the thing aside. Fire spat from one of the Vilth’s hands and screamed toward Dormael’s face, but he pulled water from the rain around them to meet the fire halfway, and steam boiled up in a great cloud, obscuring Dormael’s view of the Vilth. He hurtled another stone through it all the same, and heard it shatter in turn.
Then the Necromancer came through the steam, hands outstretched into grasping claws and face locked into an enraged grimace. Dormael hadn’t expected the man to attack him bodily and was caught off guard. The Vilth grabbed him by the armor and bore him down to the grass, struggling to reach his throat.
Dormael grabbed tightly to the man and tried to punch him as the Vilth struggled into a position on top of him, but the close quarters kept the blow from doing any real harm. The Vilth snarled at him, eyes wild as he tried to snake his arms beneath Dormael’s and pin one of them to the ground, but Dormael was stronger than the Necromancer and was able to keep him from doing so. Then the Vilth head-butted him, and stronger or not Dormael’s nose broke with a snap and pain exploded across his face.
He felt the Vilth reach for his belt and get his hands on the armlet.
Dormael panicked, scrambling to get his own hands on the thing and keep it from the Necromancer’s grip. The two of them struggled with the thing back and forth, and the Vilth was able to wrench it from Dormael’s belt and pull it toward himself. Dormael strengthened his grip on the artifact with a desperate burst of energy, knowing that if the Vilth was able to take it from him that this would all be over.
Dormael pulled the artifact in close to his chest and tried to arch his back and throw the Necromancer from atop him, but the Vilth rode his attempts down. He wrenched his shoulders back and forth, trying to defeat the man’s grip on the object, but the Vilth snarled and held desperately to it. Dormael tried to roll over and pull the armlet beneath him, but still the Vilth held on. So Dormael did the only thing he could think of that would keep it out of the Vilth’s hands. He threw his head forward, slamming his forehead into the Vilth’s nose, and in that moment of surprise and pain when the Necromancer’s strength faded slightly, Dormael slipped his right hand into the armlet.
At first nothing happened. Dormael was able to wrench the thing away from the Vilth as his wrist slipped down into the artifact, and he tore it roughly from his grasp and punched the Necromancer in the face with his left hand. The Necromancer reeled back from him, and Dormael kicked the man from atop him and rolled to a crouch.
“What have you done?” the Vilth said, looking at Dormael in horror.
Dormael opened his mouth to reply, but then the armlet started to sing, and he felt it inside his body, as if
the song were vibrating his bones. The gem set into the artifact suddenly burst into life, crimson light and streams of flame reaching out into the rain, and the song took on an elated tone. Dormael stared down at it in surprise, and reflexively moved to slip it off of his wrist, but it was too late.
The silver of the Third Sign suddenly became pliable, and as Dormael watched, the armlet slivered up the length of his arm like a liquid silver snake, wrapping tendrils of the cold metal around his bicep and up his shoulder. It would have been beautiful if it wasn’t so terrifying. He could feel the thing’s joy at being donned again, and he knew that this was exactly what the armlet had wanted the entire time – to be used again.
To burn again…
The gem moved itself to the outside of his shoulder muscle, and burned with a sullen flame, ready to do his bidding. Dormael felt the song of the thing greet him happily, and he felt the eagerness running through it; a quivering anticipation that almost made Dormael’s body shiver. He was almost swept up into the feeling himself, and had to concentrate to reaffirm where his mind ended and the presence in the armlet began.
The Necromancer looked on with horror and dread painted over his face, and he pushed himself warily to his feet, never taking his eyes off of Dormael. Dormael felt the Vilth’s magic moving through the air around them, searching out some advantage, something he could use. Dormael felt powerful, he felt Godlike, he felt like burning this bastard where he stood, feeling his bones crack, making his skin sizzle, immolating him until nothing was left but ashes and the stink of burning flesh.
Dormael started, realizing that the thought hadn’t been wholly his own. The armlet had intruded on his mind, twisting his intentions. He clamped his mind down on the thing, and in the space of a single instant, there was a struggle for dominance between his mind and the armlet’s empathic presence. Conflicting thoughts and emotions ran through Dormael’s consciousness, until finally he forced the thing into submission with an iron will and the focus he’d learned through years of studying at the Conclave. The alien song they’d been in fear of for an entire season suddenly calmed, and bent to his will.
Dormael smiled.
The Necromancer gritted his teeth, and Dormael saw desperate thoughts racing in his eyes. They faced each other for a moment, the Vilth staring daggers at Dormael and Dormael repaying him with a grim, angry glare. The maelstrom continued to move around them, undulating with unspent, wild magic.
Dormael saw the decision in the Vilth’s eyes when he made it.
Suddenly he threw an arm out, and another great stone came hurtling from the vortex. Dormael snapped his Kai toward the stone, intending to shatter it as before, but the alien song of the armlet reached out with him. The thing exploded outward with a flash of fire and a great booming noise, and pieces of the shattered stone tore through the courtyard. Dormael had to brace himself and pull up a hasty shield with his Kai. Pieces of the rock bounced off of it and went tumbling back into the maelstrom.
Dormael barely had time to register another stone flying at him, and he whipped out with the Nar’doroc again, causing the stone to explode as the one before it had. The Vilth screamed in frustration, and the ground under Dormael’s feet suddenly rumbled. He felt a moment of panic as the dirt started shifting beneath him, flying outward in every direction and being sucked into the spinning vortex with everything else. Dormael scrambled to the side, trying to get out of the quickly forming hole, but it was sucking him down as surely as quicksand.
Dormael screamed out his own frustration this time as the hole became chest high, the flying soil making it impossible for Dormael to get out. He pushed outward with his Kai, trying to prevent the hole from closing on him, but moving that much earth was near to impossible, and the outward pressure he was exerting simply pushed against him instead of the earth, and he had to cut that working short before he suffocated. Dormael began to panic, his heart beating in his ears and his brain working furiously to find a solution. He needed an escape route, and the only way to go was up.
Up.
Dormael turned his eyes skyward. If he were going to try this then he needed to think of a way to get there fast – the hole would be closing up any second now. Wizards had experimented for years trying to find a way to fly without changing forms. One could lift an outside object with his magic, such as a rock, but for some reason that no one had discovered as of yet, a wizard could not lift himself with his magic. It had been tried before, and had proven frustrating for some wizards, and fatal for others. It had always seemed, though, that there was an endless train of people who wanted to attempt it, and to find various ways to do so.
Dormael thought furiously, trying to come up with a solution. His floating spell might work, if he could get enough velocity beneath himself to actually move upwards, but how to do it? Pulling a rock or another object into the hole with him and standing on it wouldn’t work – that had been tried, also. The problem was that when a wizard lifted something, or moved something aside, he or she needed to anchor their magic to a bracing point. It was the same effect he’d experienced when trying to move the sunken ship from the riverbed on the way to Jerrantis; the ship had been filled with water, and had weighed more than the ship he was standing on when he’d tried to move it, so the prow had dipped steadily toward the water in response to the force being exerted on it by Dormael’s magic. Only when Dormael had anchored his magic out behind him, decreasing the force, had he been able to lift the thing.
And that was his answer.
Dormael suddenly laughed in triumph. He wouldn’t be flying, precisely, but he could definitely get himself moving in an upward direction. If it worked, that is. If it didn’t…well, Dormael had no time to worry about that.
Concentrating, Dormael pulled his power down into the hole, focusing on a point just between his feet. He pulled as much power as he could from his magic, then tapped more of the force spinning in Bethany’s maelstrom, adding that power to the working. He focused, bracing his magic along the line of his shoulders, and clenched his jaw in anticipation.
He was either about to save his own life, or he was about to die.
Building his power to a raging crescendo, Dormael pushed violently against the earth beneath his feet. He felt his body ripped violently upward, his feet leaving the bottom of the hole. His chest compressed as he pushed, and if his ribs weren’t broken before then they certainly would be now. He cleared the top of the hole and realized that he was flying through the air with nothing to support him. His legs began kicking and his arms flailing as he turned in midair, trying to stay upright. He desperately enacted his floating spell, and he was suddenly moving upwards at half speed, the motion of his violent push still working to move him up.
He looked down at the ruined courtyard. The Vilth stared up at him in shock, mouth open and eyes wide. Dormael smiled despite the situation.
That’s right you son of a whore, he thought, you’d better be ready to die.
The Vilth let go of the earth, and Dormael felt him readying another spell. Before he could do anything, though, Dormael slammed his Kai into the Necromancer’s, Splintering his magic once again. The Vilth stumbled back, and as Dormael reached the apex of his improvised jump, he whipped out his left hand and sent another bolt of lightning arcing directly at the Vilth.
This time, the armlet reached out with him and laced it with hot, orange fire.
He heard the Necromancer’s screams as the lightning connected. He was suddenly ignited and burning, the rain doing little to extinguish him. Dormael could summon no pity for the man, and without waiting an instant he locked his magic around the Vilth and slammed him bodily into the nearest stone wall with his magic. Dormael hadn’t expected to travel in the opposite direction, as if he were on the other end of a pendulum, but he used the motion to his advantage and swung the Vilth back toward the hole he’d jumped from, and dropped him inside.
Dormael let go of the floating spell and fell the last few links to the earth, the impact drivin
g spikes of pain into his chest and his knees. He was exhausted and his power was almost spent, but he forced himself upright and reached out into the storm around him with his magic. He pulled on the soil that had been floating in the vortex, caught up in Bethany’s power, and slammed it into hole atop the Vilth, screaming with righteous anger as he buried the Necromancer in the cold, unfeeling earth.
He packed it down tight with his magic, and pulled even more debris from the vortex. Rocks and shattered remnants of the temple’s stones began to fly into the depression, and Dormael brushed them with the power of the Nar’doroc, superheating them into formless lava. Once he was satisfied with the amount of earth stacked atop the Vilth, he reached down into the ground and pulled the energy from it suddenly, turning the liquid rocks instantly solid again. There was a great cracking noise, and a rumble beneath his feet, then all went silent.
Dormael fell to his knees at the edge of the barrow he’d created, exhausted and in pain. He let his Kai sleep finally, and the hurts he’d taken in the battle suddenly crashed into him, threatening to drag him into unconsciousness. He bent over and spit blood into the dirt, clutching at his chest and trying to breathe shallowly. He definitely had some broken ribs.
He heard running footsteps approaching and barely looked up in time for Bethany to rush into his arms. She hugged him, and he hugged her back fiercely. He stroked her hair as she started to cry, and he shushed her and tried to comfort her as best he could. The swirling vortex around them slowly abated as he coaxed her back into stillness, until finally her song dwindled and her magic slept.
Stones began falling to the earth around them, and the rain suddenly fell naturally again within the courtyard. Dormael was glad for it. He felt covered in grime.
The armlet, sensing that its purpose was complete, receded into a nondescript piece of jewelry. It rested on Dormael’s upper bicep, and as it went to sleep he slowly untwined himself from Bethany and reached up to tug the thing off of his arm. It slid off without any trouble, and Dormael felt relieved. He’d half expected the thing to latch onto him.
The Sentient Fire (The Seven Signs) Page 99
