Elspeth tumbled in a more controlled manner off Gwena's back. Darkwind reached out an ephemeral "hand" to her; the two of them meshed powers with the ease of long practice, joining shields, just as a second mage-bolt crashed into their united defenses.
They were not given a chance to breathe—bolt after bolt of raw power crashed into them, burning away outer shields and forcing them to devote all of their attention to defenses....
Nor was that all; the death of Falconsbane, the battle, all these had tipped the precarious balance over Hardorn's capital. For too long Ancar and his mages had worked their magics without regard for the world around them, throwing it further and further out of balance.
Now something had thrown it too far, as Firesong had warned might happen. Nature went as berserk as the King.
As Ancar cast his deadly bolts of power, another equally deadly bolt lanced down out of the clouds overhead and struck somewhere in the back of the palace. It hung, shattering the night as it lanced from the skies and lingered, momentarily deafening and blinding them, signaling the worst lightning-storm Darkwind had ever seen. It easily surpassed the storm they had triggered over Ashkevron Manor with their Gate for sheer fury.
Twice, as they bowed beneath the battering of Ancar's mage-bolts, lightning hit the palace itself, setting fires on the roof. Ancar seemed oblivious to it all, intent only on pounding the two of them into red dust on the cobbles of the courtyard.
Then a third bolt struck the doors behind the King. The bolt's thinnest tendrils—enough to split huge trees—licked Ancar's shields, then the charred, exploding doors knocked Ancar to the courtyard itself. It left his clothes singed, but it didn't seem to affect his concentration; he came to his feet immediately and resumed his attack, even as Darkwind was still trying to clear his vision from the flash. Vree and Gwena were nowhere to be seen.
He could not imagine where Ancar was getting all this power! The man couldn't be more than a Master—how was he holding off two Adepts?
"He's mad!" Elspeth cried out, as another bolt of lightning struck and exploded the wall above the metal gates, scattering bricks and bodies down onto the pavement below. Another bolt followed it, and by its light, Darkwind caught a good look at Ancar's face.
He realized that she was, literally, right. Ancar had bitten through his own lip and hadn't even noticed. He was mad; mad enough to burn himself out, crazed enough not to care, using himself up in a prolonged version of a mage's final strike. What was more, the King was insane enough to use the lightning-power. Darkwind felt his skin prickle, his only warning of a bolt coming in the next instant. He leapt to catch Elspeth's wrist, and jerked her aside only to see a bolt of lightning sear the stones where they had just been.
And Ancar laughed, a high-pitched cackle that held nothing of sanity in it, his eyes so wide that the white showed all around, reflecting hellish-red from the blazing mage-energy of his hands. He pointed his finger at them; this time it was Elspeth who shoved Darkwind, and once again they evaded a lightning-strike by no more than a few arms' lengths.
Ancar pointed again—in the flash of a secondary strike behind him, Darkwind saw all of Ancar's hair standing on end as he absorbed the chaotic power of the storm. His aim was improving with every strike, and this time they were both flat on the ground. They would never get out of the way in time!
Two ghostly shapes moved on the scene. One fell from the sky, pale compared to the lightning, but almost as swift.
Vree!
Gwena reared up out of the shadows of the staircase where she had been hidden. Vree dove at Ancar and struck, clawing the King's face to distract him, tearing huge furrows in his scalp and forehead to keep him from seeing the Companion.
Ancar shrieked with pain and his blazing hands rose to engulf the bird.
Gwena came down on Ancar with all the force of her powerful body behind her forehooves and knocked him to the ground. The bones of his shoulders shattered audibly even above the thunder.
Ancar screamed again, first in pain and anger, then in sheer terror, as he saw the hooves coming down on him where he lay.
A single blow of those silver hooves to his head would have killed him instantly, and with a malicious intent
Darkwind would never have credited if he had not seen it himself, she deliberately avoided such a blow. No—perhaps it was to avoid striking Vree, who struggled from where he'd bound to Ancar's scalp and flapped away, wing-wrenched and upset, but alive. In a frenzy of rage nearly as mad as Ancar's, Gwena trampled him, dancing on him with all four hooves until the screaming stopped, and he was nothing more than red pulp seeping into flagstones.
:That!: Her mind-voice was a scream, and she was still pounding the inert meat with her wet, red hooves. :That! That's for Talia! That's for Kris! That's for—:
"Laugh now, horse!" came a shout from the palace, and a mage-bolt took Gwena in the side, lifting her right off the ground with the force. Gwena hit the ground, hooves slipping beneath her, and landed on her side with a thud.
Darkwind's gaze snapped up, to the balcony above the doors.
Hulda!
That was the only person it could be, even though the woman was dressed in servants' livery, and was as wild-eyed as Ancar had been.
"Go ahead and laugh at this—" the woman cried, raising her hands for another blow. Darkwind erected hasty shields over Gwena, who moved her legs feebly and flailed her head as she tried to rise.
Behind Hulda, a man grabbed her arm, distracting her for a moment. "Don't be a fool!" he shouted in oddly-accented Hardornen over the roar of the thunder. "We have to get out of here! Leave these idiots!"
She pulled away from him and started to build power for another attack—but once again he pulled her away, this time succeeding in drawing her back inside.
Darkwind was not going to let her escape—and there was no sign that anyone was going to interfere at this point. The mage-storms and lightning had driven everyone out of the courtyard and off the walls.
He scrambled to his feet and ran up to the sundered stairs, then hooked his fingers around stonework, climbing to reach the balcony. :Go!: he shouted at Elspeth, :Get inside and cut them off from below!:
This kind of climb was nothing to a Tayledras. As Elspeth dashed into the doors below him, his hand reached the balcony itself, and he pulled himself up and over the railing.
And just as he burst into the ravaged room, he felt the unmistakable shivering in the power-currents of someone building a Gate nearby....
They had all studied the plans of Ancar's palace until they could have walked the place blindfolded. Elspeth remembered a stair going right up into the hallway above, just inside the main doors. The place was deserted; everyone had either gone off to fight the fires or fled in terror when the mage-battle began. She ran up the stairs two at a time, and as she reached the top and the corridor that it led to, she heard the sound of a fight on the other side of the second door along the corridor.
She didn't stop to think; she just gathered power and blasted, disintegrating the door and running through the hole while the dust was still raining down.
And she stumbled to a halt as she hit something that felt like a web, a net that closed around her in a heartbeat and held her immobile.
But her eyes still worked, and the very first thing she saw, by the white light of pure power, was the man that had pulled Hulda inside.
The man, who bore a distinctive device on his tunic—Dear gods—the Emperor's envoy!—
—was building a Gate! He already had the framework up. He wasn't even using a real door as his anchor, he was simply building the thing in midair!
How much of what's happened has been his doing?
Darkwind knelt on the floor, beside the shattered doors to the balcony, cringing beneath his shields as Hulda rained blow after fiery blow down on him. So far, Hulda hadn't even noticed her. The hinged splinters of the balcony doors slammed against the wall, as the rainless mage-storm raged outside, whitening the room in flashes
from the lightning. Thunder roared, drowning out any other sounds, and smoke crept in the window from the fires outside.
Elspeth fought the bonds that held her, frantically seeking a weak spot.
Suddenly, the darkness in the Gate brightened—and became a hole in the air, a hole leading to a brightly-lit room somewhere, filled with furnishings in a sinuous style Elspeth had never seen before.
The man turned toward Hulda. "Are you coming?" he snarled. "Or are you enjoying yourself too much to leave?"
Elspeth realized his lips had not moved with his words. He had projected them in open Mindspeech so strong that anyone, Gifted or not, would have Heard him. As his attention wavered for a moment, split between the Gate and Hulda, so did the bonds holding her. She freed one hand, and shook a knife from her sleeve down into it—her old, reliable, predictable, material knives. No pottery to hurl this time....
As Hulda turned to answer him, Elspeth cast the knife, knowing that if the envoy went down, the Gate would go with him.
He was not expecting a physical attack; the knife caught him in the throat. It buried itself to the hilt. Blood spurted from a severed artery, a fountain of ebony-red in the hellish white light. The envoy's face convulsed; both hands clutched at his throat. He staggered backward, across the threshold, and through the Gate itself.
The Gate collapsed as he fell through it.
The bonds holding her faded away. And now Hulda saw her.
There was no recognition in Hulda's eyes, but there was plenty of pure rage.
Elspeth readied a mage-bolt of her own, but Hulda was faster. And Hulda was trapped, with nowhere to escape to; Darkwind was between her and the balcony, Elspeth was between her and the hallway. So she fought with all the desperate strength of any cornered creature, and with the stores of energy she had drained from the land of Hardorn for all these past years....
She was an Adept, easily the equivalent of Falconsbane—and she was not handicapped by having an agent in her own mind, or by a disintegrating personality.
Within moments, Elspeth knew with rising panic that stole her breath that she was in trouble, trying to hold eroded shields against a barrage of mage winds, each of them geared to a specific energy, that began to eat their way down through her protections. They circled her in a whirlwind that caught up papers, bits of wood, shattered glass, and other debris, pelting her with physical as well as magical weapons.
But panic made her mind clearer, and a sudden memory matched the whirlwind. Firesong—the lesson—
She spun her shields until they mated with the whirlwinds; then reached through them, and began to absorb the energies of the attack into her own. But the instant Hulda realized that she had found a counter, the woman set the winds on Darkwind, and attacked Elspeth with—
Demons!
Creatures of shadow and teeth boiled up from the floor, and a hundred taloned hands reached for her. Fear sent arcs of cold down her limbs. Elspeth backpedaled and came up against the wall; for a moment, she was lost in panic. She had no counter to this—
Panicked, until in the next heartbeat, she remembered that these might be illusions. Illusions vanished if challenged! She pulled her sword, forgotten until now, and swung.
The "demons" vanished without a sound. Hulda then flung a wall of fire at her. Her confidence increased. This she could handle! Perhaps Hulda was not so formidable after all!
She countered it by absorbing it—took another step toward the woman—
And then Hulda recognized her. "You! The Brat!"
"The Adept," Elspeth screamed back defiantly. "Your better, bitch!"
Hulda's reply was drowned out by another thunderclap; there was a trace of real fear in her eyes, and her face was like a stone mask. Elspeth laughed hysterically. Hulda was afraid! Afraid of her! They could take the bitch, they could!
But Hulda evidently decided that if she was doomed, she would take her enemies with her.
Hulda reached out with her powers in a thrust that knocked Elspeth back into the wall again, and with great shudders of power that shook her body as they shook the walls, she began to tear the building down around them.
The walls and ceiling screamed with the shrieks of tortured stone and wood. Elspeth dodged a falling chandelier that brought a quarter of the ceiling down with it—
—just in time to see Darkwind falling beneath the outer wall, going down under a cascade of stone and burning wall-maps that buried him completely in an instant.
"No!" she screamed, reaching for him with mind, heart, and powers, forgetting her own peril—
Only to receive, not an answer, but a flood of energy. Energy that felt—final, as if it was all he had.
Her heart convulsed, but her body acted.
She shook her arm and felt her other knife fall into her hand. She screamed again, a wordless howl of rage and anguish; invested every last bit of power in the second knife—and threw it.
The knife cut through the air and ripped through Hulda's shields.
Hulda collapsed in a boneless heap, her howling winds collapsing at the same instant, leaving behind an echoing silence filled only by thunder, and the crunch of an occasional brick falling. A glittering knife-hilt shone from her left eye socket.
She was dead, but she had taken Darkwind with her.
Elspeth turned and stared at the heap of broken stones, her throat choked with grief so all-consuming that she could not think, could not even weep. She stumbled a step or two toward the pile—
And Vree came winging in out of the darkness, through the gaping, broken wall. He landed beside the stones, and hopped over to them—to the only part of Darkwind that she could see, his hand. He nibbled the fingers, as if to try to coax life into them, and Elspeth's grief overflowed into scalding tears that blurred her vision. Her throat closed, and she sobbed, then moaned with pain.
He was gone. She was alone. Hulda had won, after all. His loss was an ache that would never be healed.
:Damn... bird.: A whisper in her mind.
What?
:Elspeth... ashke:
Grief turned to hysterical joy, all in a heartbeat. He was alive!
She shook her head, frantically wiping at her eyes to clear them, then ran to the pile of stones and began to pull them off of him. Vree hopped excitedly beside her, making odd creaking sounds, as she managed to clear his head and shoulders of debris.
He looked terrible; bruised and bleeding from a dozen small cuts, and she trembled to think how many bones might be broken. But he was alive!
:Gods.: He opened his eyes for a moment, then closed them. :I feel... awful. Like... a wall... just fell on me.:
Her heart overflowing, she resumed pulling stones from his body, ignoring splitting nails and sharp edges that cut her hands, thankful that the winds had snuffed out the earlier fires. Finally she came to a thick slab of wood—a strategic map, showing invasion plans. A map of Valdemar.
It had protected Darkwind from the heaviest of the stones, prevented his lungs and ribs from being crushed. Paint flaked from the board as she twisted it free of him, and troop-counters fell like rain from the "Losses" box she found propping up one end of it. She kept having to shake her head to clear her eyes of tears as she pulled debris away from him, trying to figure out how badly he had been hurt.
:Wait. Check Gwena....: he began, his thoughts coming to her from a haze of generalized pain.
:No need,: Gwena said weakly. :I'm going to live. And there's no one down here to bother me while I decide if I still want to. No bones broken, I don't think—some burns, and bruises that go to the bone. Keep him from fading, I'll call Cymry. And you send Vree for him, in case I can't reach him!:
Although that was somewhat confused, Elspeth had no trouble figuring out which "he" Gwena meant. :Vree,: she said intently, turning to the falcon, concentrating on trying to impress him with her urgency. :Vree, we need Skif. Find Skif. Bring him here quickly!:
Vree bobbed his head once, then nibbled Darkwind's finger, spread hi
s wings, and flapped heavily off into the darkness again.
:He's... a horrible night flyer, ashke. Hope he doesn't hit anything.:
"Just stay with me," she said aloud, fiercely, starting with that hand to check for broken bones, since it was the piece of him least likely to cause problems if she accidentally moved it. Or held it. "Don't pass out on me."
:I'll try.:
"Stop that!" she snapped, still rubbing away tears. "Stay awake, stop fading! Or—or I'll tell you Hawkbrother jokes! How many Hawkbrothers does it take for a mating circle?"
:No... not that... anything but that.:
"Only one, but he has to be flexible!"
:I'm doomed.:
* * *
When Skif arrived, he brought Nyara and Need with him, and his expression betrayed his relief at finding the situation nowhere near as desperate as he had feared from Gwena's weak Mindcall. He told Elspeth that he'd seen worse injuries than Darkwind's out in the field, when miners or builders had been trapped under collapsing walls. Darkwind would not only live, he would do so with all organs and limbs intact....
That gave her some measure of comfort and calmed her shattered nerves a little. And although at some point she would be mad with impatience to hear his side of the story, and the confrontation with Falconsbane, at the moment there was enough on her plate to worry about. They still had to get out of here.
They laid Need down beside Darkwind with his hand on the hilt—she complaining the whole time that she had done enough Healing for one day—and carefully lifted the last of the stones from Darkwind's back and legs. By the time they finished, people were drifting back into the palace, and coming to stare curiously at the wreckage in the room.
But Elspeth and Darkwind still wore their purloined uniforms, and when Elspeth turned and barked "Out!" at the onlookers, they quickly found something else to do.
They limped their way out of the building without being stopped, carrying Darkwind on the map that had saved him, using it as a stretcher. Skif did pause long enough to look down at Hulda and make a tsking sound.
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