Matteos felt the ground move again. He heard the roar of a demon shift in tone and timbre as it shouted a single name: Illaraphaniel.
He did not hear Meralonne’s reply. He heard shouts. He heard screams. But through them all, he saw Sigurne. In the end, he did what she did not: he cast a shield around them both. He concentrated on floor and wall—he trusted neither. Meralonne unleashed could destroy half the building without a second thought. Sigurne had given clear instructions—but combat, for the mage, was its own imperative.
Sigurne, he thought, what are you doing?
“Do not speak,” she whispered. Her hands trembled. “I must listen.”
He was afraid he knew. He had never asked her about her life in the North, although he knew of it. Rumor, gossip, angry whispers about hypocrisy, often filled the halls in the absence of the guildmaster. But the Kings trusted Sigurne. Matteos trusted her.
He quieted his growing unease as he always had: by guarding her exposed back. He understood the significance of the wild earth, here. What he did not understand was how she meant to thwart it. What he did not understand was why Meralonne expected that she could.
As one mage-born, Matteos could see magic. He could see it as color, as a pale nimbus. Every school of magic, every discipline, had a telltale color associated with its use. He could sense magic. He could, with effort, detect it, if the magic were subtle or faint.
The magic Sigurne now used was colorless. Had he relied on vision alone, he would have said she used none. But without effort, he felt the surge of it; he felt the sudden shift of power. Sigurne huddled against the wall, hands extended and white, as if with strain; she bent, her head falling, her eyes closed.
He wanted to catch her. To carry her. To lift her and remove her from this place. And he wanted, simultaneously, to step back, to step away, to shield himself and protect himself from what must surely follow. He had never followed Sigurne because she was weak; he had never admired her because she required protection from the consequences of her actions. She required only support when the actions required were difficult and fraught—and even then, the support she accepted was minimal.
Sigurne.
The demon’s voice filled the hall; he was no longer roaring. Matteos did not understand the words he shouted, but knew them for speech.
Sigurne’s eyes snapped open; she pushed herself back from the wall, her hands shaking. “I am done for the moment—let us find what survives of the membership of the Merchants’ Guild.”
Breeze moved down the hall; tugging at the hem of both of their cloaks. “Meralonne,” she said, in a voice too soft to be heard. “I have bought time—but in truth, not much. If you do not finish this fight quickly, it will be for naught.”
Matteos glanced at her, and understood, as she headed grimly down the hall toward the assembly room, that whatever she had done required power, and she was spending it. He took no joy in watching the savagery of Meralonne at war; he displayed an almost unholy delight in the act of killing. But just this once, he was grateful.
Or would be, if Meralonne heard Sigurne and understood: she had only the time her power granted her, and her power—unlike Meralonne’s—was not limitless, and it was never spent without cost.
• • •
“Matteos, husband your power.”
Matteos nodded. It was a nod that acknowledged receipt of a command, but did not imply obedience. “I do not trust these floors,” he told her. It was explanation for the spell he had cast; if the floors gave way, they—Sigurne and Matteos—would not fall. “There is smoke in the distance.”
Demons summoned fire; they both knew it. If much of the building was of stone, parts of it were not, and wood burned swiftly when confronted with magical fire. Stone, on the other hand, did melt.
Her lips pursed; she said nothing else. Her expression was both weary and distant: it was as if most of her thought, most of her attention, was elsewhere. This Sigurne, he had seldom seen. In fact, he had only seen her a handful of times—and each and every one involved Meralonne APhaniel.
• • •
There was no longer a door between the great hall and the back halls. There had been; splinters and twisted brass were strewn across the floor on either side of its frame. So, Matteos thought, with some disgust, were large chunks of stone. If this were a bearing wall, he had just shortened the time they had to effect a rescue—and from the screams and the sobs growing in volume in the distance, rescue was not yet impossible.
Sigurne frowned. “Did I not tell him that he was not to destroy the building?”
“Not in so many words, no.” Matteos’ wards flared to life. “How much time do we have?”
Sigurne stepped around him as he paused at the opening destruction had left. She looked up. Matteos did not; the merchants were not in the air. Meralonne was, of course. Meralonne and chunks of debris. The debris itself would kill if it landed in the wrong place.
Matteos cast. Gray light rolled across the debris-strewn floor like a carpet. Orange light encased them both with a harsh brightness that implied fire.
“How many?” she asked. She did not wait for an answer. Where Matteos’ protections were a bright translucent orange, the spell Sigurne now cast was gold; it gilded the former.
“A dozen are dead,” Matteos said, frowning. “A dozen are dying.”
“The rest?”
“Alive. Injured, but alive.” He glanced at her. “You are not surprised.”
“No. Demons are not known for granting quick and painless deaths where they have any other option. I do not believe they thought to be disturbed before the earth rose. They do not hunt in the city; if they hunt at all—and they must—they are kept on a very tight leash. This would have been a gift to them.
“We must hurry,” she added. “They intended to kill all of the merchants present. Now that they know we are here, any sustenance granted from pain and torture is secondary.” She did not need to tell him that the demonic ability to kill the remaining survivors was vastly larger than their ability to protect them.
• • •
The great hall in the guildhall was two stories in height, the ceiling that capped it, rounded. The Order of Knowledge boasted only two rooms that approached this one in size.
Matteos braced the crumbling stone of the wall that had once contained the servants’ entrance and exit. The entrance through which the merchants had come was not, of course, the one that Matteos and Sigurne had followed—but the doors that they’d entered were closed. They were also standing. From this distance, Matteos could see that they were magically protected. They might also be barred; he hadn’t the time to waste ascertaining that.
Most of the merchants—those who survived—were huddled against the walls of the great room, or beneath its tables. Some were huddled protectively over those who had fallen; it was folly, of course.
But folly was part of humanity, and there was, in this reckless and hopeless attempt to come to the aid of friends—or even strangers—something they would spend the rest of their life attempting to preserve.
“Matteos.”
He nodded. He knew her. He knew what she wanted of him. The demon was occupied with Meralonne APhaniel; Meralonne could not afford to be distracted. Matteos glanced up; the familiar brilliance of blue sword met the sharp edge of burning red in midair; the impact drove the combatants apart. They did not stop; their trajectories were decided by air, by fire, by power. Driven back, they traveled in an arc, the lowest and highest points the moment at which they pivoted, gaining traction in a way that no one mortal could.
They spoke in a language that sounded familiar; the words, however, were taken by wind and rock and the sharp, harsh crackle of flame.
Fire.
It devoured tables in an instant; the merchants screamed as they realized their slender protections were gone. Gone as well were table
cloths, pitchers. Shards of broken crystal littered the floor; they had already drawn blood.
Sigurne gestured then.
The fires banked. In any other circumstance, Matteos would have turned to stare. The merchants couldn’t know that magical fires differed greatly in nature. They couldn’t be expected to understand the difference between wild, elemental flame and the fires the magi could produce; death was death, after all.
But Matteos knew. Sigurne knew. What the demons summoned was no simple artifact of power; it had will. It had voice. It had a life of its own. Wild elements were lore, legend; only one mortal voice in recent history could be heard by them at all.
She was gone. The ancient wilds had swallowed her whole; no one—not even the Kings—knew if she would return. And in her absence, the demons had attacked. In her absence, they chose to summon the wild earth.
In her absence, Sigurne had lessened their impact. Sigurne had somehow managed to forestall the waking of the earth. The fires did not vanish. But they burned less wildly.
“It will not last,” Sigurne said, as if she could hear what he did not put into words. She cast again—and this time, there was blessed familiarity in the spell. Light—magelight—spread across one section of the floor, in a perfect, glowing line, the width of two men standing—albeit tightly—abreast.
She lifted her chin, and as she did, raised her voice, projecting it into the room. She was loud, clear, and unstoppable; her words cut through sobs and shouts, swamping whimpers and even screams.
• • •
“Follow the path that appears on the floor in front of you. Those who can walk, help those too injured. We do not have much time.” She extended a shield of protection above the path.
Sigurne could sound calm and harmless at the heart of a storm. Even this one. Her glance grazed the characteristic greatcoat of Loren; the merchant had lost the whole of his left arm, and lay unmoving and wide-eyed in his own blood, one of two dozen such bodies.
Some of the living hovered over the corpses, shouting their names in a series of repetitive, cascading syllables that denied not death, but truth. Sigurne understood, and understood further that too many of these people were bereft of their normal good sense.
The Guildmaster of the Order of Knowledge was considered a polite force to be placated when events became “unpleasant.” Were the demon and his fire gone from this room, Sigurne could have led the injured away.
He was not, and his fire posed a very real threat—as did Meralonne’s wind. Sigurne looked past the dead, the dying, the injured; past the men and women who stared, unseeing, at nothing. She required help, but could not see the logical choice of designated commander, the guildmaster of the Merchants’ Guild, in the hall, either alive or dead. An autocratic and proud man, the cut of his clothing would have given his body away, and he was unlikely to cower.
But he was not present.
She exhaled with otherwise unvoiced relief when her gaze alighted on a familiar woman; she was surprised to see her in the guildhall, as she was not aware that the merchant had returned to the city. Eva Juwal had seen her share of death; she traveled, caravan firmly under her figurative whip, through war zones, in which deserters lurked in wait for merchants and their cargoes. Eva was not without scars; she was perfectly capable of wielding a sword when necessary, although she was practical enough to prefer a crossbow at a distance. She was not small; she was not retiring.
Her scars—the visible ones—were stretched and discolored; she was unnaturally, but not unexpectedly, pale. “Merchant Juwal,” Sigurne said, gilding her voice with magic so it might carry. Sigurne’s talent was not bardic; she could not pitch her voice so that it was heard only by the individual in question—not without a great deal of preparation.
But Eva recognized Sigurne’s voice instantly; she turned. “Guildmaster.”
“Your help would be greatly appreciated.”
Eva, a woman half Sigurne’s age on a bad day, had an arm beneath an older man’s; he was bleeding at the left temple, his eyes wide and almost unblinking. He moved because Eva supported his weight; if not for Eva’s support, Sigurne doubted he would be walking at all. He did not seem to be fully aware of his surroundings. “I’m a bit busy, Guildmaster.”
“Of course you are, dear.”
A merchant from the tender age of four if one listened to her stories about her own life, Eva frowned. She was taller than Sigurne, although some of that height was due to Sigurne’s posture. “I hate it when you ‘dear’ me.” She had the voice of a military man; she regularly terrified men of rank, wealth, and more delicate sensibilities. But fully a third of her personal income came from the Order of Knowledge—she traveled to and from the West, as far as the mottled collection of small countries known as the Western Kingdoms if one didn’t happen to live in one of them.
She could not afford to offend the guildmaster, and they both knew it.
Her language when annoyed was salty. She was clearly annoyed at the moment; enough so that she didn’t flinch when fire landed two inches above the top of her head, spreading to either side as it flowed around the protections Sigurne had cast.
Sigurne, however, failed to hear her. Eva was a merchant in almost all of her dealings, but the man she escorted to the jagged remnant of what had once been wall was not one of her subordinates. Left to her own devices, Eva’s instinctive reaction was almost always to offer aid when it wasn’t too costly.
Cost, in Eva’s case meant money. She didn’t seem to recognize that death generally prevented earning any more of it, but she had always survived what many considered to be her recklessness. Sigurne had never considered her reckless. She waited while Eva barked at another stunned merchant, handing responsibility—and physical burden—to him. That accomplished, Eva strode quickly toward the magi.
Sigurne did not waste time. “I have three different barriers erected at the moment. I cannot supervise our retreat without losing at least half of the people present.”
“Conservative guess?”
“Yes. Take command as you can. There is a narrow strip of ground the fire will not reach.”
“The gold one?”
“Yes. The protections are not the only work I have done today; in the context of the city, they are not even the most significant.”
“How much time do we have?”
“As much as we absolutely need—but not a minute more. Leave the dead.”
“The injured?”
“Use your discretion. What did the demon demand?”
“Death,” Eva replied, shrugging. “And fear.”
Sigurne nodded. “Fear feeds them, in a fashion. If he meant to kill you all, he was far too self-indulgent—but even thus engaged he is not without power.”
“And we are.”
“Unless you were prepared for demons and magical attacks, yes.”
“You’ll owe me for this.”
Sigurne expected no less; she wasn’t pleased, but she didn’t have time to make this clear. Loss of a handful of merchants caused difficulty—but loss of most of the guild would be far, far worse for the city. “Yes. Where is the guildmaster?”
Eva frowned.
“Never mind; now is not the time.” A cascading rain of raging fire swept the room, charring flesh; the stench made breathing difficult, and the barrier buckled under its concerted attack. Not all of the merchants had moved to safety. There were men and women she could not save. There had always been men and women she could not save. She concentrated only on those she could.
She bent her head as Eva left. The younger woman kept her wide feet firmly planted across the narrow stretch of illuminated floor that Sigurne had pronounced safe. “Listen up,” the merchant snapped, her voice filling all of the space not occupied by wind, fire, or immortals. “Corin, get the hell away from the mantel. Now. Bring that idiot friend of yours with you.”<
br />
The idiot friend appeared to have lost half a hand. It was his left.
“Jill—shut it or I’ll give you something to scream about.”
No less a person than the head of House Montaven’s jaws snapped shut. She was younger than Eva; she was not a woman to whom commands were given. But she had undeniably been whimpering. And she had never, in Sigurne’s hearing, been called an unvarnished “Jill” before. Sigurne was not certain that that was her official given name.
Eva never failed to surprise.
The merchant had already moved on. She understood, as Matteos had, exactly what Sigurne wanted from her; it was likely she would have taken the lead regardless, but where it was possible at this late stage, Sigurne did not wish to leave things to chance.
In the rain of fire, lightning was red and blue; thunder was demonic, a great roar of fury that shook the ground—but did not wake the earth as was intended.
Eva’s voice was drowned out, twice, by the clash of two swords. What was almost metallic thunder died before the merchant’s voice did; she had a job to do now, and bent a ferocious focus upon only that. Demons were foreign, terrifying nightmares—but the magi were now here; men who fought creatures standing on nothing but air were therefore not Eva’s problem. The merchants were.
She wasn’t gentle; she didn’t have the time. She slapped at least two people; Sigurne heard and registered the sound, but didn’t see who; nor did she now care. The shadows that had sealed the public doors, so effectively preventing escape began to flow away from them.
Toward the merchants; toward Eva herself.
Those doors now burst open; standing in them were armed and armored men. Men, Sigurne thought, not demons.
But men could be bought; men could be coerced. They could also be killed—but not with any ease, not while the barriers were being maintained. The calculus of magic was always difficult; one borrowed against oneself, and one repaid the debt with interest. Some debts could not be paid; a fourth barrier against men wielding plain steel could be erected; it would halve the duration of the other three.
Oracle: The House War: Book Six Page 17
