Tangled Engagements (The Memory Stones Series Book 4)

by Jeffrey Quyle

  The palace grounds were covered with observers, their faces turned upward to watch the historic destruction being visited upon Donal’s tower of evil. Theus paused in his work; he was about to start removing another layer of the tower, and it occurred to him that the tower might still contain prisoners being held by Donal. Further destruction could end the lives of such poor, already-damaged people.

  He floated close to the outer wall of the tower, and carefully vaporized away a door-sized portion. Theus peered through the opening, at an empty room that had been someone’s residence, judging by the bed and dresser within. The walls were painted a ghastly red. The boy gingerly stepped into the room, then walked to the door on the far side and found that it easily opened to a hallway. He casually vaporized away the ceiling overhead and the surrounding walls to view more of the tower’s remnants. His location had been a floor full of apartments, for guards or junior magicians, it appeared. There were no cells full of prisoners.

  He let his hand holding the trumpet fall away from his face, as he stood and contemplated what to do next. Ind’Petro was somewhere near. He had to find the temple to the god. Somehow, he had survived his final battle with Donal. He had only the last task left to accomplish, and then he would be free of his obligation to the gods.

  Theus removed the structures of the residential floor slowly and thoroughly, leaving nothing behind, finding no sign of Ind’Petro, injuring no one. He vaporized the structures near the staircase inside the tower, saw no dangers or threats, then descended down to the next floor. It immediately looked familiar.

  He had found the prison floor. He knew the halls; he recognized the place where he had fought a guard. His hackles rose in anticipation of some danger or trouble finally emerging.

  Nothing occurred. He was able to open the door to the corridor of prison cells. He heard the cries of captives – frightened, desperate captives who didn’t know what was happening, but knew that the tower was shaking and crumbling, full of sounds and dust and destruction.

  “Hold on! I’ll set you free in a moment!” he shouted loudly as he pushed the door to the prison open.

  There was a momentary pause in the cries, as the prisoners tried to decipher the meaning of the words and the unknown voice that spoke them.

  “Help us! Free us!” the new cries rang out even more stridently than the previous words of despair.

  Theus approached the first cell door, and saw that it was locked. There was no jailer or set of keys in sight, but his wrist bands continued to glow with energy. He placed his palm upon the door and released a pulse of energy that caused an eruption of flames, and then the door fell into a pile of cinders and ash. An elderly one-armed man cowered inside the cell, stooped in the farthest corner.

  “Come out and wait; I’ll lead you all to freedom,” Theus briskly ordered the man. There wasn’t time to be patient; a hostile deity awaited Theus somewhere nearby. He wanted to send the soon-to-be-freed prisoners to safety down on the ground level, while he continued to hunt for Ind’Petro’s temple.

  He stepped towards a second door and crisply removed it, repeated his directions without even waiting to see the occupant, then moved on to the next door and the succeeding doors.

  When he was finished with his hasty work of destroying the last of the cell doors, he turned to see a dozen people, mostly elderly, standing huddled together uncertainly. “Come on, let’s get together,” he called over his shoulder to the last captive he’d set free. He looked back to see the woman emerge from her cell.

  “Theus, thank you,” she cried in a sobbing voice as she walked towards him.

  It was Torella. An aged Torella. She was middle-aged in appearance, having been clearly used by Donal to supply a considerable amount of the energy he had consumed.

  “Tory?” he asked in dismay. Despite the physical aging, he recognized her features. “Why are you here? How did he get you?”

  “They took Ruune. One day he delivered food to the tower, and he never came back. I came to ask for him to be set free, and they took me too,” she told him as she collapsed into his embrace.

  “Is he one of these other prisoners?” Theus asked, turning them both to look at the group that waited for them near the door.

  “Torella?” an elderly man croaked. He was the first prisoner Theus had set free. He was an elderly man, one who Donal had drained of a great deal of life.

  “Ruune?” the girl in Theus’s arms cried. She pressed herself from Theus and rushed to the stooped figure who watched her warily.

  “We need to go. I’m going to take you out of here, so that you can go down the stairs to the palace,” Theus explained, holding his hands and glowing wrists in the air to draw the attention of the small crowd.

  “What about Donal?” three of the freed prisoners asked fearfully.

  “I killed him,” Theus replied flatly. “He’s dead. He won’t bother you ever again.”

  Two of the prisoners, the two who looked eldest, including Ruune, burst into tears.

  “We need to go,” Theus said. “If you need help walking or climbing the stairs, let me know now.”

  “I’ll help Ruune,” Torella spoke up immediately.

  “What happened to your baby?” Theus asked softly, a minute later, once they were underway, as he cautiously led the way through the halls of the empty chambers of fear.

  “When Donal used me, it killed the baby. He took all the life force of my child,” she answered mournfully, fresh tears starting to run down her cheeks.

  “Oh, Torella, I’m so sorry,” Ruune’s feeble voice spoke up.

  “We turn here,” Theus spoke up, as they reached the last corner they needed to negotiate. There were no signs of any other living being inside the tower chamber walls.

  Theus led the slow-moving group to the doorway, then finally put his horn away by tucking it in the back of his belt, while he cautiously pulled his staff free. With the weapon at the ready, he swung the last door wide open, and looked at the escape route for the freed prisoners.

  Only a single guard stood at the door, the same guard Theus had seen before, a vacant look of idiocy on his face, his mouth smiling in a perpetual grin.

  “Everyone go down the stairs and go find your safety,” Theus told the group, his hand gently touching them on the shoulders as they passed by, trying to impart a sense of urgency in their departure.

  “You ought to go too,” Theus told the guard, as the last of the prisoners went by. “There’s not going to be anything left to guard in another few minutes. Donal is already dead.”

  The guard’s eyes seemed to stare off into the distance while he stared at Theus, but after a moment, they locked on Theus’s face.

  “You say Donal is dead?” the guard asked in a hollow voice. His eyes strayed off into the distance, looking at a dark corner of the tower stairwell.

  “Leave while you can,” Theus repeated his warning. “I’m going to destroy the last of the evil now,” he told the strange guard. He ended the conversation and started to re-enter the remainder of Donal’s domain.

  “Leave while you can,” the guard’s voice repeated mockingly behind him, as Theus began to back away.

  “You do not have what it takes to finish your task, do you?” the voice of the guard changed, growing deeper and harsher. “Your puny gods sent you without the resources needed to finish the task. Killing Donal simply sends his soul to perdition for all eternity, but it doesn’t prevent me from continuing to restore my own dominion.”

  Theus felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck, as he realized the incredible truth of what he was facing. His hand groped around the small of his back, reaching for the weapon that Limber had given him so long before.

  He was facing Ind’Petro. The evil god inhabited the body of the seemingly befuddled guard who had stood outside Donal’s tower entrance every time Theus had entered the chambers. Theus had walked by the source of evil without realizing that it hid behind the banal exterior of the ordinary-seeming guard.r />
  As Theus stared in fascinated horror, his hand momentarily frozen motionlessly on the horn he carried, the guard metamorphized. The man’s hair turned lighter in color, switching from dark to dark blond, and the hair grew longer, becoming a shaggy mane. The guard’s figure grew thinner and shorter, and his face changed features, becoming narrower with more pronounced cheek bones and a less visible Adam’s apple in his throat.

  The guard had become a woman.

  “This is not an evil appearance, is it?” Ind’Petro asked coyly, in a soft, warm, feminine voice. The god shrugged off the light jacket it had worn, revealing a light sleeveless blouse beneath, one that emphasized the figure’s femininity and apparent harmlessness.

  “I can be alluring and rewarding for those who will follow me; Donal found me so. You can be greater than Donal. You can become my true high priest, and know rapturous delights as you worship me,” Ind’Petro offered. “I can make you king of the world, with the use of my powers.”

  Theus looked at Ind’Petro, then thought of Coriae. The dark-haired beauty was temperamental at times, and unpredictable, but never truly dishonest, certainly never the walking embodiment of lie and falsehood that he knew the fair figure in front of him was.

  The muscles in his hand behind his back unfroze. The fingers firmly grasped the mouthpiece and pulled the instrument free from his belt, then swung it around towards his lips.

  “You don’t have to serenade me,” Ind’Petro spoke alluringly, but Theus saw the alarm that suddenly lit her eyes.

  The woman became a large bear, and stepped forward, swinging a clawed paw forcefully at Theus’s face.

  He reacted by pressing the mouthpiece of the horn against his lips and blowing hard. And at the same time, he instinctively thought of the spells for ventriloquism and air energies, and applied them to his use of the horn.

  A mighty blast of sound, a deep musical tone that was a physical assault because of Theus’s efforts, emerged. But the sound was something more; the sacred instrument made it a scourging tool, a wave of sonic energy that obliterated evil as it struck.

  Theus played a long, sustained note. The wristbands of metal glowed brightly, and the horn glowed brightly, and Ind’Petro could do no more evil.

  The bear-creature iteration of the evil god froze without movement, then raised its snout straight upwards and emitted a wail of anger and despair.

  “You must not kill a god!” the being roared. With that, as the musical note continued to blast, the creature began to shrink and melt and morph, growing smaller, changing shape, altering its nature until it was suddenly a snarling coyote, then a blinking toad, and then a large brown roach, that lay on its back, its legs wildly flailing in the air.

  And then it crumbled into dust. Theus stopped his magic, and he stopped blowing on the horn. He let the instrument drop away from his lips, and stared at the small heap of debris on the ground. It was unbelievably all that was left of a god.

  The pile of dust suddenly erupted upwards, making Theus jump back in fear.

  A bright beam of energy shot upwards, while a deep, rumbling, wordless scream accompanied the light beam. The beam struck the ceiling above, and vaporized it as it rose. Dust and debris began to rain down as the explosion of energy, the release of the last of Ind’Petro’s essence, tore upwards and destroyed what remained of Donal’s domain overhead.

  Theus called on the energy in his wristlets and created a powerful blast of rising air that rose up to catch and suspend the falling tower fragments of stone and mortar, then he shook his head and knew he had to leave. He went pelting down the steps, down the long flights of stairs, and found that his rescued prisoners were all on the ground floor, standing in the center of the opening beneath the tower, staring up in astonishment at the open sky that was visible, and the suspended load of debris that remained floating because of Theus’s efforts.

  “Everyone out!” he shouted. He pressed them all forward, into the adjoining hall, and he released the air spell that held the tower remnants above. They crashed downward with a sustained, deafening roar and a cloud of powdery dust.

  “What happened up there Theus?” Torella was next to him, cupping her hand to speak loudly in his ear.

  “Heal her, heal them all. Use the power of Bellance’s gift,” Theus heard a familiar voice speaking in his soul. Limber was talking to him.

  “You have accomplished the Great Task. You will be a hero in the pantheon of historic heroes for what you have done in driving away this age’s greatest source of evil, my son,” Limber whispered.

  “Apply the energy in your bands to those around you and give them back the energy that Donal took. Then help Southsand society find a stable foundation. And then come home to us and enjoy your just rewards. We will await you,” Limber’s voice was a soft sigh.

  As the words faded within him, Theus realized that he knew what Limber was telling him about the healing of the freed prisoners. Within the memories of hidden spells that lay dormant within him, one rose to the forefront of his consciousness.

  “Torella,” he murmured the name of the woman next to him, as he raised his hands to either side of her head. He pressed the metal wrist bands against her temples, then closed his eyes as he released the spell in his memory.

  The metal bands blazed with new light, then Torella also began to incandescently glow for a long breath, as the others in the group shrieked in fear at the latest manifestation of unknown power. When the glow receded, Torella was once again the same young girl Theus had been a close companion with.

  The other rescued captives began to shout for his attention, and other residents of the palace were emerging from hiding, coming to see what remained after the destructive battle of Donal’s tower.

  The hallway was crowded as Theus made each of Donal’s prisoners glow and return to their previous age and appearance. Ruune was the last he touched, and the man returned to the state of health Theus had restored him to once before, when he had first demonstrated his healing powers as a slave in the Southsand palace.

  Torella embraced Ruune as soon as Theus drew his hands away from the man’s head, and Theus stepped back. There were former prisoners, there were bystanders and curious people, there were guards, all filling the confined space of the hallway. At one end, there was no longer an exit, for a pile of rubble filled the space that had long been the lobby to Donal’s tower.

  Suddenly, Theus felt trapped, squeezed in and pressured. He had to leave the space. He needed to breathe. He needed to find a quiet place where he could let the enormity of his accomplishment sink in upon him.

  He engaged his white magic spell for traveling, and took a short step forward. He left the palace behind.

  He swallowed a mouthful of saltwater, and floundered as he found himself in the deep waters of the ocean. He hurriedly reached out and grasped the clouded sunlight that was falling in the early afternoon, then brought a bubbling burst of air down into the ocean waters, and back up again directly beneath himself, so that he popped free of the water and hovered above the frothy waves.

  “I’m surprised it took this long to land in the water,” he muttered to himself as he thought of the many times he had traveled via his magical powers, and landed on or near beaches. He could have easily found the seas on any of those occasions.

  There was no point in floating in a stationary position he decided. He altered the flow of the air beneath him, so that he began to move to the east – or so he hoped, as he tried to judge the proper direction while the sun hid behind the intermittent clouds.

  Minutes later the shoreline and the mountains behind it loomed suddenly before him. He made himself invisible as he flew over several empty fishing boats on the beach, then he moved inland towards the city. A pillar of rising dust and smoke directed him towards the palace grounds, so that within several minutes he was able to gently land invisibly near the building where Letta had remained.

  He needed to visit her, to find out how the king was doing, and he apparent
ly was expected by Limber to remain in Southsand to help the king restore stability and order to the shaken city. Theus was ready to leave. He longed to see Coriae. But even more, he found that he longed to simply find a place where he could sit quietly, and let his soul absorb all of the experiences that had engulfed him. He was changed by what he had experienced, and he needed time to come to terms with that change, he thought as he walked into Letta’s building.

  There was no point in remaining invisible in front of his companion, so he released the spell that hid him, then gently knocked to announce his arrival, and he stepped through the door, and into Letta’s apartment.

  “Theus!” Letta’s voice rose an octave as she drew out his name and spoke it in relief the moment he was inside. She snapped into visibility as her own use of the invisibility spell ended; as she became visible she was in motion, hurtling towards him, to engulf him in a profound hug, a long, intimate embrace that expressed support and joy and pleasure and relief.

  “He’s dead!” she said emotionally.

  “I know; I killed him,” Theus agreed. “It’s what I came here to do.”

  “No, I mean the king. The king is dead. I think he died when you killed Donal. I watched your battle on the top of the tower. When the two of you fought one another atop the tower, the king remained unconscious and peaceful, but then when you destroyed Donal, the king awoke. He sat straight up, and he said, ’I feel the weight lifted from my soul.’

  “It frightened me. I looked over at him, but then he just gave a soft smile, and he slumped over, dead,” she indicated the body that was stretched out on the floor.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked plaintively.

  “We will take him back to the palace, and say that the king is dead. We will offer to use our magic to help the new king, whoever that is,” Theus told her. It was the only course of action, his intuition told him. It appeared that Limber had known the king had died. Subsequently, Theus had been told to remain to help the kingdom adjust, and helping them pick a new ruler would be an important and necessary first step.