“We’ll make an all-out assault once you and the mages are ready, Your Majesty,” Vinian said. “We’ll have the catapults and trebuchets firing in waves, and if we can’t use the Destroying Fire, we’ll settle for good ol’ regular fire. If you’re able to put their mages completely out of action, we’ll drive the bastards back into the sea and drown them.”
Kiara nodded. To Cam’s eye, she already looked older than when she had returned to Isencroft, and in her eyes, he saw the burden he had so often glimpsed in Donelan’s expression.
“Well done,” Kiara said. “Drive the invaders toward the sea. As soon as we’re confident that the attack on their mages has succeeded, the water mages will bring down a large wave to drown the Temnottans and a wicked current to drag them under and out to sea. Mind that our men are well back from it. An ocean is not a precise weapon.”
Vinian chuckled dourly. “Warning taken, m’lady.”
Kiara stood. Even with her armor, it was evident that her pregnancy was advancing. Cam took a deep breath, forcing back protective instincts, reminding himself that Kiara undertook both her risk and her role knowing the danger involved.
“I ask the favor of the Lady on our venture. May Chenne bless you with her sword and protect you with her shield. Tonight, we determine the future of Isencroft. Go with the blessing of the crown.”
Cam lingered to be the last to leave the tent. He looked to Rhistiart and then Royster. “I want both of you to accompany Kiara behind the line of battle tomorrow,” he said. Rhistiart opened his mouth to protest, but Cam shook his head.
“Tomorrow is going to be bad. We’re evacuating all noncombat personnel, so don’t take it personally. I’ll feel better knowing that you two are well behind the lines. Help her any way you can.”
He turned to Kiara. “I need to ask you, have you determined how you want to deal with Alvior? Is he to stand trial?”
Kiara’s eyes took on a hardness Cam had not seen before. “Alvior of Brunnfen abetted the Divisionist plot to murder my father and put the crown of Isencroft under the heel of invaders. He arrives on our shores with a foreign army, to fight against his own countrymen and seize the throne. He is guilty of treason. The sentence is death.” She met Cam’s gaze. “You are the Champion of the Queen of Isencroft. Execute Alvior, in the name of the crown.”
Cam nodded grimly. “That’s all I needed to hear.”
Another candlemark passed before Kiara was in position. The late afternoon was cold, and clouds gathered on the horizon, threatening rain. Despite her armor and her woolen cloak, Kiara shivered, and she wondered whether it was the cold or nervousness about the workings of the evening to come that sent the blood from her fingers and chilled her to her core.
Kiara stood in the center of a large circle whose boundary was set out with the rune stones from the ghost in the crypt, each carefully turned facedown to present blank bone. At the four points of the compass, Brother Felix carefully laid thin disks of iron that he had blessed and charged with protective wardings. A thin stream of salt ran from disk to disk. As Felix laid the iron and salt, Morane followed behind him, smudging the circle with a burning bundle of pine and sage, and then returning to the center to raise and lower the smoking bundle bathing Kiara in its sacred smoke. High in the air, Jae flew in wide circles, serving both as protection and as an early warning should anyone approach.
Kiara stood atop a parchment map Felix had made showing their position relative to places of power throughout the kingdom. Aberponte was on the map, said to be located above one of the rivers of the Flow. Temples and sacred burying grounds, shrines, and sanctified groves were included. Felix and Royster had done a remarkably thorough job of marking them all and drawing lines to run from each place of power back to Kiara, the better for her to call upon their energy.
“You look like you’re about to be sick, my dear,” Brother Felix murmured to her. “Is it the baby?”
Kiara gave him a wan smile. “Not this time. I’m just a little nervous about what we’re going to do.”
Felix chuckled. “You’re wise to be nervous. But after the demonstration you gave us a few days ago, this may be our first real chance to push Temnotta back where they came from.”
Kiara nodded. “I know, but that doesn’t make my stomach any happier about it.”
Benhem, Felix, and Morane took their places on the quarter marks of the warded circle. Joining them was Sister Eunice, one of the rogue mages who had left the Sisterhood to aid the army. Royster sat off to one side, parchment, pen, and ink at the ready to record everything as it transpired. Rhistiart had been put to work as a healer’s helper, should the magic go wrong. He stood next to Cerise, who had refused to remain in the camp despite the danger.
At Felix’s nod, Kiara lifted the lens. She took a deep breath and tried to still the nervousness she felt. Morane began a low chant, and Kiara closed her eyes, feeling the power build around her. She focused her thoughts on the lens in her hands and on sensing the magic that radiated from the four mages in the circle. In her mind’s eye, she saw their power begin to stream to her in bright yellow tendrils, and the lens began to glow.
Once Kiara felt confident that the magic of the four anchor mages was channeled through the lens, she took another deep breath and cast her regent magic farther, down beyond the slight hillock that shielded them from the view of the enemy, to the dozen battle mages among the soldiers who were ready to take an active part in combat. As her magic touched them, she saw golden tendrils of power unwind from around them, undulating through the air, seeking the lens.
The burning glass was growing warm in her hands. Kiara cast her thoughts toward the map at her feet. She had memorized the position of the sacred places, and she began to work her way around the map clockwise, fixing her thoughts on each place of power in turn, using her regent magic to call to it to aid them. For a few moments, there was nothing except the slow inhale and exhale of her own breath. Then Kiara felt a nudge from the magic as new tendrils of golden light slipped through the wardings that opened for them and found their way to the glass in her hands. As she slowly turned her attention from one shrine to the next, she could see each of the places of power clearly. Not only were their images clear to her, but for each, she had associations of sound and scent so that their waterfalls and fountains, their fragrant groves and burning incense were as real to her as if she stood in each of the sacred spaces.
As Felix and Morane had taught her, Kiara lifted the burning glass into the air, holding it firmly with one hand on either side, turning its broad lens toward the battlefield. In the distance, her regent magic identified the location of the enemy mages. Kiara could feel their power. She fixed their places in her mind, making them glowing red dots on her mental image of the battlefield. But unlike during their practice, Kiara did not focus her magic on drawing in the power of the Temnottan mages. Instead, with a forceful exhale of breath, Kiara willed the combined magic in the lens to release its power toward the enemy mages, an invisible, lethal blast that crackled along the currents of magic, traveling at the speed of thought.
Kiara felt the magic burn its way toward its intended targets. As the power struck the first Temnottan mage, Kiara was unprepared for the momentary link opened up by the magic, a link through which she felt the enemy mage’s surprise, his terror, and then the awful, consuming fire.
Kiara staggered but held fast to the burning glass. Eight, then nine, then ten of the Temnottan mages fell, and Kiara reeled from the momentary, intimate link as the magic burned its way toward its victims. She doubted that she would ever silence their death cries in her memory, or the blinding instant of pain as the power burned them from within. A pounding reaction headache was severe enough to make her nauseous. She fought every instinct to drop the lens and fall to her knees retching.
I have killed before in battle with a sword, she told herself, struggling for control. A blade brings no less of an agonizing death. If I were able, I would be with Cam and Wilym in the thick of th
e fighting, killing soldiers myself. The magic changes nothing. Yet in her heart, Kiara knew that the momentary connection to her quarry changed everything, because for one awful instant, she felt their pain and knew their fear. Now I know something of what Tris feels on a battlefield, when he can see the spirits rise from their bodies as they die. If all men could feel this, surely no one would ever choose to wage war.
Before the magic reached the eleventh Temnottan mage, Kiara felt a warning tingle and an undulating crimson wall of power slammed up to deflect her magic. Even at a distance, the crimson wall stank of blood magic and death. Kiara took a deep breath and mustered the magic once more, and this time, she shattered the wall of power. She heard the screams of the dying mage in her mind as she turned the power in search of the next Temnottan sorcerer.
Again, a blood-red curtain of magic rose to block her. “They know they can’t stop you, but they’re hoping to wear you out before you can strike all of them,” Brother Felix warned. “Draw on the power of the lens. Don’t draw on your own power.”
The crimson wall became a lightning bolt, streaking back across the tendrils of power. Instinctively, Kiara moved the lens to intercept the bolt, bracing herself as the bolt slammed into the concave surface of the burning glass with a force that shuddered down her arms like a sword strike. She gasped for breath, staggered by the sheer force of the blow. A pounding headache throbbed in her temples, but she grasped the lens more firmly, using it to absorb the full power of a strike that was meant to kill. Kiara sank to one knee, still holding tightly to the lens.
“Kiara, are you all right?” She could hear Felix’s voice, but it sounded far away. For a moment, Kiara swayed, drained almost to the point of losing consciousness. She heeded Brother Felix’s warning and gathered the strands of magic around her, from the mages in the circle, the Isencroft mages on the field, and the distant places of power. Magic rushed toward her with her incoming breath, easing the pain of her headache and giving her the strength to stand. Grimly, Kiara turned just as another bolt of crimson lightning burned toward her, ready this time for the onslaught. There are still at least ten of them, and only one of me. This is going to be a contest to the death.
Cam and the generals led their soldiers into battle with a fearsome shout and the din of drums and pipers. The Isencroft army swept toward the invaders in a thunder of hoofbeats and the pounding footsteps of armored men. Though Cam possessed no magic, he was certain that anyone with a beating heart could feel the power that crackled in the air just above them.
“Look there!” Cam’s head snapped up at the cry that rose from his men. The horizon had taken on a greenish glow, setting the battlefield in an eerie foxfire light.
“Best we be about our business, and leave the mages to theirs,” Cam muttered.
The din of battle rang out over the field as torches rose and the thunder of catapults rivaled the steady beat of the drummers. A large, fiery lump of something heavy landed only yards away from Cam, crushing two foot soldiers beneath it and lighting four others afire. Cam’s horse shied, but he reined in the frightened beast, intent on cutting a swath through the invading line to clear a path for the foot soldiers behind him.
Cam blocked and parried, using his size and strength to batter through the defenses of the enemy host that swarmed toward them. As he fought his way through the tide of soldiers, he watched for a glimpse of Alvior’s standard or the green crest of Brunnfen.
“By the Whore! What in the name of the Crone is that?” One of the foot soldiers pointed in horror toward an open spot amid the fighting. Cam caught his breath. The ground was littered with the bodies of the dead and dying, both men and horses. But where the soldier pointed, the bodies were sliding together. Broken bodies of Isencroft and Temnottan soldiers and the carcasses of downed horses, drawn together by an invisible bond, gradually took the shape of a giant man.
The Temnottans surged forward, heedless of the horror, and Cam wondered if a trick of their mages had robbed the men of normal fear. The Isencroft soldiers met the charge, but Cam could see across part of the battlefield, where more of the monstrous creatures rose out of the assembled corpses of the dead.
“How in the name of the Crone do we fight that?” One of Cam’s captains reined in his horse within shouting distance.
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Cam admitted. “Hard to kill something that’s already dead.”
“You’d better think of something fast.”
Cam looked up to see the corpse-giant begin to move. It had no actual hands; instead, two long chains of bodies hung from what might be regarded as its shoulders, and as the monster lumbered forward, it swung its shoulders from side to side, knocking men out of its way with the force of its powerful sweeps, or stepping on those who fell in their mad scramble to get out of its way.
“Close ranks!” Cam shouted above the fray, grateful that this new horror had at least silenced the pipers. Nothing drives a man into a killing frenzy as quickly as a dozen damn pipers, he thought.
“Strike in a tide, like the sea,” he shouted. “Topple it.”
Cam could see the terror in the eyes of the men who surged forward, and he wondered if they saw the same fear in his face. While he hoped that the sheer momentum and weight of the running troops and galloping horsemen would take the corpse-beast off its feet, he had no idea how to vanquish it once they had it on the ground.
Rage drove him forward as he watched the corpse-beast use the bodies of their fallen comrades against them, wielding the dead as bludgeons. Its long “arms” hit with the force of a catapult strike, crushing soldiers beneath its weight or sweeping a line of men and horses out of its way. The survivors of the first wave reached the “feet” of the beast and began to push against it to knock it over, but it swept them away as casually as a child might flick a gnat, sending men flying through the air.
Goddess help me, I have no idea how to fight a thing like this, Cam thought. The green glow in the sky grew brighter, replacing the dying light of the sunset with its own sickly glare. It will take a river of blood to fight our way out of this.
Kiara tipped the burning glass, barely averting the crimson fire that blasted toward her. Morane and Benhem were chanting new wardings, while Felix and Sister Eunice sent more of their own magic toward her. If the Temnottan mages had merely sent lightning, the wardings would have been sufficient to keep it beyond the circle. Instead, they sent their defensive blast along the same tendrils of power Kiara had used, following the trail of her own magic back to her.
Kiara could feel herself growing weak from the onslaught. Her head was pounding too hard for her to think clearly. Taking a deep breath, Kiara grounded her energy and held up the burning glass once more, marshalling her power to go on the offensive.
She reached out for energy from Brother Felix and the mages in the circle and from the Isencroft mages, taking all she dared without weakening them. Kiara returned her focus to the parchment map at her feet, working her way across it, concentrating on each place in its turn. As she turned her concentration to the palace at Aberponte, a bright blast of crimson fire surged through the channel of power she had opened toward the Temnottan mages. Before she could move to block it, the fire hit her, immobilizing her and sending a wave of excruciating pain through her body.
Sudden power welled up in Kiara, rising from the ground beneath her feet. It rose so quickly that she gasped as it drove out the pain of the crimson fire, and she felt the new energy like a fever, burning inside her. The power rose from nowhere and everywhere; it flowed upward from the ground, through the map, up her body, and into the lens. In her mind, Kiara could see a blinding light of coruscating colors, and for an instant, the radiance of the new power threatened to consume her with its intensity. Kiara felt the channels of magic burn raw with the sheer power that coursed through her.
White light blasted from the lens, visible, Kiara was sure, even for those without magic. It streaked across the sky in a dozen directions at once. But
what amazed Kiara most was that, for an instant, as it coursed through her body, the light seemed to have a primal sentience of its own. It was angry over the strike that injured her. And in a blind, primitive rage, the power struck back at her attackers with wild force.
As quickly as it came, the light went dark, and Kiara collapsed to the ground, completely spent. She was barely conscious as Brother Felix hurriedly dismissed the wardings. Cerise and Rhistiart ran to her side. Felix and Morane joined them a moment later. Morane and Felix hung back as Cerise attended Kiara, and Rhistiart scrambled to do the healer’s bidding. Finally, Cerise sat back on her heels and motioned for the others to come closer.
“What in the name of Chenne was that?” Kiara managed, her whole body still tingling uncomfortably.
Brother Felix exchanged a nervous glance with Morane. “I believe you managed to channel the Flow,” Morane said uncomfortably. “What were you thinking right before the power surged?”
Cerise pressed a wineskin of warm wine to Kiara’s mouth, and she took a sip. “I was working my way across the map, drawing power from the sacred places. I had gotten as far as Aberponte when the Temnottans attacked,” Kiara said.
Brother Felix nodded. “The Flow runs beneath Aberponte. It might be possible that you accidentally tapped into that power to protect yourself. The Temnottan blast could have easily killed you.”
Kiara swallowed hard, grateful for another sip of the wine. “There was something else. The power… was aware. Not completely sentient, but aware in a primitive way, as if it was striking out on instinct. I had the strangest feeling that the Temnottan attack made it angry, and that it was protecting me.”
Brother Felix met her eyes. “There is something else besides the Flow in Aberponte, something in a box in the necropolis,” he said quietly.
The Dread: The Fallen Kings Cycle: Book Two Page 44
