Tangled Engagements (The Memory Stones Series Book 4)

by Jeffrey Quyle

  Theus bounded up off the ground and immediately pressed open a door on the other side of the corridor, a door that led to a sparsely attended parlor, where a half dozen people looked up at the sudden burst. Theus invisibly held the door open for two seconds, then stepped back into the service corridor, and let the door swing closed.

  “The king!” the front bodyguards both cried out, one in horror and one in disbelief.

  “What’s going on up there?” a guard in the rear, cut off by the toppled shelves, shouted.

  “The king’s gone! He went into the parlor,” one of the front guards shouted in panic.

  Theus darted across the hall to where he knew Letta was waiting with the king. He hastily reached into his pack and pulled out the potion he had prepared, then lifted the king’s chin, pressed the container against the man’s lips, and breathed the word ‘drink’ into the king’s ear.

  As he watched the king instinctively drink, Theus waited for the guards to abandon the corridor. Within moments they all left, and Theus looked over the head of the king at Letta, then gave her a wink of encouragement.

  He unceremoniously lifted the surprised king over his shoulder.

  “Lead us out of here,” he hissed to Letta. “We need to go.”

  She reached back with one hand, which Theus grabbed while his other hand held the king in place over his shoulder. The small company began to jog forward along the corridor, until they reached the end. Letta pressed the door open, heedless of calling attention to the unusual movement of the door, and then the unseen kidnappers burst out into the busy ceremonial hallway, where noblemen and servants dressed for public appearance walked and loitered.

  Letta turned in the direction of the doorway through which they had entered, then she and Theus wove their way through the corridor as Theus heard the king begin to gently snore over his back. They advanced rapidly, but not so fast that they didn’t hear shouts and alarms start to rise in the areas behind them as the news of the king’s disappearance began to rapidly spread. The words of the alarm were indistinct, but the distress in the shouts was clearly audible; people in the hallway began to crane their necks and turn their heads to try to catch the words of the trouble at hand.

  “Just run right between them,” Theus urged Letta in the lead as they approached the doorway that led to the outside. A pair of guards had taken up their posting at the spot in recognition that the king would be nearby that morning. The guards felt the unexpected brushing of Letta, Theus, and the king rushing by, and then the pair who had carried out the improbably plot were through the door; they slowed to a walk and grinned at each other.

  They heard the hullabaloo erupt inside the palace, while the guards they had passed stepped out onto the stone step at the foot of the threshold and tried to see any evidence of the phenomena they had felt pass by them. After moments of uneventful observation, the guards stepped back inside, while Letta and Theus kept on walking away.

  “How long do you say he’ll be unconscious?” Letta asked Theus as they walked. He felt slightly winded from carrying the weight of the unconscious king, and was grateful for the slower pace.

  “Half the day, until mid-afternoon,” Theus speculated as they moved on. “Long enough for me to settle things with Donal.”

  He looked up at the sky, where a line of dark clouds was inching across the western sky. “Long enough for that rainstorm to come and drench the city,” he added.

  They hurried to the wreckage of Letta’s former apartment, while the background level of anxiety and chaos around the palace increased palpably. Squads of guards went dashing by and alarm bells were tolled, as servants stood in huddled groups and whispered in confusion over the crisis in the palace.

  Theus bent over and laid the unconscious sovereign on the thin mattress of Letta’s bed, then stood and arched his back in relief.

  “So, is this it?” Letta asked awkwardly after a moment of silence.

  Theus curtly nodded his head. “This is it,” he said grimly.

  Letta reacted by hugging him. “I want you to know this has been the right thing to do, whatever happens. It’s better to have tried to make this a better world than to have never tried at all.”

  The pair broke their hug, nodded at each other, then Theus stepped to the door. “Just look out the window from time to time to make sure the tower is still there!” he joked. And then he left the room, and started on his lonely path to find and fight the most powerful magician on the earth.

  Once he was outside, he looked up at the tower, the formidable dark center of the palace building. The foundation of the outer wall of the tower was just two hundred paces away. Within minutes, he would be inside that structure, climbing the stairs to begin a deadly battle.

  It would be easier, he told himself with a rueful grin, to just fly up along the outside of the tower.

  And then he paused, because he realized he was right. It would be easier. He grinned again.

  Theus walked invisibly, using the energy in the sunlight to maintain his cover. He reached the exterior of the tower, then paused and took a deep breath. It made sense. He could use the sunlight, he could save his legs, and he could avoid the guards who might be inside. And he might be better able to sneak up on Donal by coming down from the top instead of up from the base.

  Without another moment’s pause, he used his spell to move the air, and he propelled himself upward past the stone exterior of the tower. He felt a momentary shifting in his pack as he moved upward, until it was still once again, and then the only thing he felt was the air rushing past his face. The sunlight seemed reduced somehow; it was only a figment of his imagination, he was sure. There was still an abundance of energy available for him to use.

  When he approached the top of the tower he slowed his ascent. He began to drift to his left, towards where a small balcony was built into the side of the tower’s uppermost floor. With a deft maneuver, he dropped onto the balcony as he released the spell that had pushed him into place. The whole elaborate effort to kidnap the king had turned out to be unnecessary after all. He shook his head; it wouldn’t do to tell Letta.

  Theus was in the tower. His hand gently jiggled the handle of the balcony door, causing it to swing effortlessly open, and he stepped across the threshold.

  He stepped into a circular room, one that he recognized. He’d been in the room once before, in his last days as a slave, when Donal had begun to take a particular interest in him. There was no one else in the room, but Theus remembered the day he had seen a number of captives chained in place. They were people Donal had used, victims he had drained of life force and energy. Donal had killed them to feed his need for magical powers. Those people had looked at him, he remembered, their eyes pleading for help. He hadn’t been able to help them then. Perhaps though, he thought grimly to himself, he’d be able to wreak their revenge on Donal.

  The room gave Theus a feeling of profound uneasiness. He felt as though he were being watched, though he remained invisible as he captured the power of the sunlight that streamed in through the numerous windows that circled the room. He nervously stepped away from the door he had opened, then paused and tried to assess the situation.

  Below, the palace was growing increasingly panicked. The king was missing, and the guards had no idea where he was. If anything, Theus reflected, the magical disappearance of the king might have thrown suspicion on the black magician. Donal was probably alert to the news by now; the evil magician might be suspicious about a seemingly magical disappearance.

  Theus closed his eyes for a moment, wondering if his plot to distract the guards had been a mistake. Kidnapping the king had been meant to distract guards away from the tower, so that Theus could infiltrate it, and it had turned out to be needless.

  With his magical flight, the infiltration of the tower had turned out to be no impediment at all.

  Theus heard a noise, and then boots on stairs. He stepped slowly backwards without even realizing that he was retreating from the looming
threat. He bumped against a table, and felt his backpack jostle free, dropping to the ground with a thud.

  “I heard that,” Donal’s voice rumbled.

  Theus’s eyes darted up from where they had been focused on the pack on the ground to look up and see Donal standing on the top step, looking in Theus’s direction.

  Donal raised a hand and swung his arm to point it towards Theus.

  There was no longer any need for invisibility. He was not hidden from Donal.

  Theus dove to his side, as he dismissed his invisibility, then called forth the hybrid spell he had created once before to fight Donal, the combination of air and intense light, a combination that had become a weapon.

  A loud crack of thunder sounded outside, very nearby. The available energy in the sunlight was truly diminished. If it fell much further, he’d have to reach above the clouds to find the power he was going to need.

  Theus rolled on the floor, as he heard the sound of Donal’s deadly magical beam strike behind him. There was a small explosion and a sudden whoosh of flame.

  Theus rose to his feet and pointed his hand at the top of the stairs, firing a large bolt of his own fiery energy.

  Donal was not there; the flames struck the stone wall behind the steps and set a tapestry on fire.

  Theus drew in even more of the energy from the slight sunlight, and created a whirling wall of compressed air that swirled around him protectively, while his eyes searched the large circular room. He was looking for Donal, and found the magician standing sideways behind a stone column that helped to support the vaulted ceiling overhead.

  Theus ceased his air curtain, then fired another bolt of energy at Donal, followed by another and another.

  They struck the column and made it begin to splinter, while Donal fired his own beams of energy back at Theus.

  Their two beams struck each other, and blazed with a sustained contact as the two magicians fought one another by releasing extraordinary amounts of energy. The scene was far different from the battle scene in Great Forks just months earlier, yet it was the same, and Theus smiled grimly. If a contest of one magician’s energy versus another’s was going to decide the outcome of the battle, he suddenly felt greater confidence. He had won such a battle before.

  Donal slowly inched out from behind the damaged column, looking grim. He squinted his eyes as he focused his energy on fighting the battle.

  More thunder rumbled nearby. A storm was coming, a fitting symbol for the battle underway, Theus thought.

  Theus felt his energy begin to weaken noticeably, as the two beams continued to strike one another. The contact point between them ceased creeping towards Donal, and held steady. Donal suddenly gave an evil-sounding chuckle.

  Theus felt his energy fractionally shrinking further, and he hastily raised the level where he collected the sun’s energy, seeking to reach above the storm clouds that he knew were rapidly approaching. The light outside the tower windows began to dim.

  The contact point between Theus’s blue light and Donal’s red beam began to slowly move away from Donal. The dark magician was gaining the upper hand. He was growing more confident as well, as he smiled more broadly, and began to actually step forward.

  “You don’t realize, do you?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  Theus’s beam of light had become the shorter of the two, and continued to shrink, as he continued to suffer the mysterious shrinkage of his power source. Even at the higher altitude, he could find no more energy.

  “It’s an eclipse,” Donal said.

  Theus was aware of distant wails coming from people on the ground or in the palace; the wails had a more distinct sense of panic than the cries he had heard earlier when the king had been missing.

  “An eclipse is when the sun’s light is blotted out. You need the sun’s light, don’t you?” Donal was almost conversational. Theus was backing up. He could collect hardly any energy from the sky at all. The interior of the tower was growing dark, and the world outside around it was growing dim. He heard a rooster crow in some nearby chicken coop.

  Theus called upon his personal energy, seeking to bolster his defenses with the stores within himself.

  “When there’s an eclipse, there’s no sunlight. When there’s no sunlight, there’s no energy for you to glean. It’s a real pity for you,” Donal taunted Theus.

  “I don’t have that problem. With the vast reserves of energy that await use by a black magician, I am not in danger, as you are,” the black magician continued.

  He suddenly rolled his shoulders forward and seemed to increase his efforts, creating a more powerful wave of energy that struck Theus’s dwindling beam and shattered it. There was an explosion, and Theus was thrown backwards. He struck the windows of the door that he had stepped in through, and his body crashed through the glass, landing him on the balcony outside, atop a layer of shards from the broken window panes.

  Donal was no longer firing his beam of energy. He was laughing.

  Theus’s eyes looked up, and for a moment he saw that a black disk covered half the sun, though it seemed that the amount of the sun that was exposed was increasing. And then a dark cloud cut off his view of the sun altogether.

  Theus scrambled up, and jumped up on a low wall, then threw himself up onto the slate roof of the tower, narrowly avoiding another hostile shot from Donal. Theus recklessly ran across the slippery slates to move to the other side of the tower.

  Overhead, he saw that a tremendous storm front was moving across the sky, delivering a heavy sheet of falling rain that was approaching rapidly, accompanied by strokes of lightning.

  Donal suddenly appeared on the far side of the roof, looking at Theus intently. He raised his arm to fire a shot of his deadly red power at Theus.

  There was no place to hide. Just as Donal released his fatal attack, a bolt of lightning dropped from the sky and struck the frightened Theus. The power of the lightning strike unleashed an explosion that knocked Theus off the tower roof.

  His wrists felt suddenly warm, while he found himself falling towards the ground. He was confused and disoriented and unable to think, except for the thought that if he struck the ground he would be dead.

  And his descent stopped. He felt air blowing him upward, and he realized that he was making it blow; he had released the wind-controlling spell without even knowing, and he was manipulating the air with ease.

  His wrist guards were glowing with a rich golden color, glowing brightly.

  They were full of energy. He was using the energy. He had more energy at his command than he’d even known before, more than even when he’d beaten Donal before. It was the power of the lightning; his wristlets had captured energy from the lightning bolt, stored the energy, and now they were releasing it back to him.

  He was flying upward, back towards the top of the tower, and he was ready to fight on.

  Donal looked on in astonishment as Theus rose to a level even with where the magician still stood on the roof.

  “The reign of evil must end in this kingdom, and evil’s end begins when your life ends!” Theus told his adversary.

  “You can’t!” Donal started to protest Theus’s impossible survival, but as he did, Theus raised his hand and unleashed a blast of energy that struck Donal full on. For a moment the man was a dark silhouette set against bright white surroundings, and then he was gone, vaporized into nothingness. And with him went half the top floor of the tower.

  It all was vaporized, rising in a plume of hot white smoke, as more lightning struck nearby.

  Rain began to fall. It fell in sheets and waves. Theus remained floating in the air, staring vacantly at the large hole in the tower roof, where nothing remained of the roof, or of Donal.

  The divinely-forged bracelets on Theus’s wrists still glowed with captive power, and Theus still floated in the air.

  He gently maneuvered himself down through the open roof to the floor of the ruined top of the tower, then went and picked up his discarded back pack.r />
  He rooted through the contents and quickly plucked out the horn that limber had given him. It was meant to be a weapon against evil, a weapon that could destroy the temple where the evil power of the evil god Ind’Petro resided.

  The temple was someplace in Donal’s tower, Theus knew, and he was going to find it, then destroy it.

  Theus walked back to the roofless portion of the tower, and rose into the air again. He circled around to the unharmed side of the tower. The fall of the heavy rain was starting to lessen. Theus pointed his hand at the remainder of the top floor of the tower and released another blast of the powerful energy his metal bands contained, vaporizing those ruins as well. The sky began to noticeably brighten, as the sun moved into visibility above the clouds.

  The top of the tower was only a jaggedly flat, sheared-off place of rubble. Somewhere below the top had to be the hiding place where Ind’Petro’s spirit resided. Theus didn’t want to go into the tower; he didn’t want to have to stumble upon Ind’Petro accidentally, unpreparedly.

  He wanted to be in control of his encounter with the monstrous god.

  Theus held the magical horn to his lips with one hand, ready to be sounded should the temple appear, while he pointed the other hand at the next layer of the tower, and vaporized another section of that floor. Nothing appeared exposed, no temple made itself evident as his gaze raked over the rubble and remains that he had exposed.

  He repeated the effort, letting his glowing metal wrist bands provide the energy he used to smoothly raze away more of the tower’s temporary upper floor. The rain was letting up as the storm front overhead moved inland, and the sky had become a familiar murky mass of roiling clouds. The eclipse that had blocked the sun overhead had finished.

  Theus looked down. He was effortlessly floating in the air over the palace grounds, focusing on the tower alone, while life continued on for the traumatized place and city. In a matter of just minutes, their king had been kidnapped, a powerful magical battle had erupted atop the palace, an eclipse had taken place, Donal had been killed, and now the dreaded tower of the black magician was being methodically destroyed in full view of the population.