“You may not have a choice.” Rikar’s eyelid twitched as if remembering some painful memory. “We’ve all been touched by the Nameless. You can resist all you want, but if you make yourself an enemy, it will only hurt those close to you and likely bring destruction once again to Naru.”
“But can the Nameless ensure that Naru is unharmed by the Jiserians?” Talis said, and Rikar smirked at his suggestion. “I mean he probably only cares about his own desires. What is the destruction of city to the Nameless? Look how easily you were dispatched to wreck Carvina.”
Rikar released an evil laugh. “The Nameless didn’t tell me to do that. I was merely commanded to go and help you and retrieve you both. That was a bit of my own flair at work. Besides, Lord Aurellia hates those of the Order of the Dragons, and likely will reward me if I actually managed to kill a few of them.”
“Not to mention that Zagros will reward you for sending him more innocent citizens that you killed.” At Mara’s mention of the god, the rumble of thunder sounded in the southern mountains, and she closed her eyes and saw the dog-faced Lord of the Underworld.
“Enough of this,” Rikar said, and pushed himself to his feet. “The Nameless has commanded us to tilt the balance of power in favor of his loyal sorcerers in Ishur. You can deny him and both you and Naru will suffer as a result, or you can obey for the time being and see where a temporary obedience leads you. But right now, I don’t see you having any other choice.”
“Can you give us a moment to talk?” Talis said, and Rikar nodded and shuffled away to stare at the City of Ishur.
Mara met Talis’s concerned eyes and wished they’d never followed Rikar in the first place. She stretched out her fingers and scooted over close to him and scooped up his hands, melting a little at the soft feeling of his skin. Wasn’t there another way? They could fly back to Naru and prepare for a Jiserian invasion. But as Mara pictured the ferocious intensity of the Dragons, she knew that Princess Devonia wouldn’t stop until she’d killed every single citizen of Naru in revenge for Mara’s slaying of her father and brother.
“What should we do, Talis? The last time we listened to Rikar we ended up in the Underworld.”
“But in all fairness, it didn’t turn out all that bad, and if we’d listened to him in the first place we would have avoided almost getting killed in that hideous graveyard.”
Mara shivered at the memory of that place. “So you’re suggesting that we follow him to the Ruins of Elmarr, and what, swear allegiance to the Nameless?”
“You forget, I’ve already sworn a blood oath to Aurellia. And if the Nameless is really Aurellia’s master, then I might not have any other choice, ultimately. Don’t look all distraught, we’ll get through this somehow, I know we will. The important thing is for us to stay together. I mean it, I don’t ever want to lose you again. When you went into that palace all furious at me, I was really scared that I’d lost you.” He sighed and in the stillness stared into her eyes. “Do you still care about me?”
A rush of emotion flooded her heart at she gazed into his beautiful eyes, and she nodded her head and squeezed his hands. Of course she cared about him, she loved him and hoped that he felt the same way. “I only have feelings for you, Talis. I have always felt this way, even though you didn’t see it. I guess boys are stupid that way.” She laughed wistfully and glanced up at Talis. When he smiled at her, a sympathetic expression formed on his face, and she relaxed and gestured at Rikar. “Let’s go before he gets all the fun of wrecking Ishur.”
“Let him do the attacking,” Talis said, a worried look crossing his face. “I’d rather know who I am killing first. Rikar might be commanded by the Nameless to kill people who aren’t our enemies. Who knows, maybe the magical orders that are allied to the Nameless are the very ones that attacked Naru.”
“Well, let’s find out, shall we?” She allowed him to pull her up and they walked over to Rikar and joined him in staring at the vast City of Ishur.
“So who are you attacking down there?” Talis said. Mara thought she spotted a twinge of jealousy in his expression towards Rikar, and who could blame him? Talis had always been competitive with Rikar, ever since their competitions in the sparring arena.
“Not just me,” Rikar glanced at Talis with questioning eyes. “You’ll need to help if you are indeed joining me in pursuing the Starwalkers. And don’t worry, we’re attacking the two Orders that led the assaults against Naru, the sorcerers who work for money and the necromancers who work for blood. In both cases they were commanded by the Emperor himself to strike out against our city. Considering you’ve beaten them before, this should be easy, right?”
Talis shook his head. “Be careful with the sorcerers and runemasters. In Carvina I fought three sorcerers who cast runes in the air that absorbed all the power of my spells and it even made them stronger. If it wasn’t for Mara, they’d likely have won.”
Rikar frowned in puzzlement at his words. “Sorcerers and runes? Hah, I wish we had Mistress Cavares to help us out on that one, she would have proven very useful.”
“Just watch out, shoot testing shots of weak power to see if any of the sorcerers cast that kind of spell. With the amount of power you’re commanding, it will only make them stronger and more difficult for us to deal with.”
“And don’t forget about me,” Mara said. “I remember what those spells look like. I can always help go after them, assuming you can keep the flying spell on me during the battle?”
“We’ll be quite a team,” Rikar said, and grinned with a strange fondness that made Mara suspicious. She preferred him as an enemy. It was weird to have him on their side.
With a flourish of Rikar’s hands, Mara found herself floating alongside Talis, and the three of them flew down the mountain and shot towards the tall, red buildings in the heart of Ishur, where thick, black smoke poured from a raging fire.
33. THE SKIES OVER ISHUR
Of course, as luck would have it, the sorcerers that Rikar first encountered in the heart of Ishur flung brilliant blue runes into the air that sucked all the power out of his attacks. As much as he hated to admit it, having Talis and Mara there to back him up really helped. Talis would position himself to the side of the sorcerer they were attacking—creating a distraction—while Mara came in from behind for the savage, bloody kill. With Mara’s daggers providing her with complete invisibility, they were almost an unstoppable force.
That was, until to Rikar’s horror, at the zenith there blossomed a brilliant blaze of white light that unfolded in flaps around the blue sky, and four figures flew out and hovered over the City of Ishur. Rikar felt his heart make a weird tremor and he had to force himself to breath as he gaped at the sight, watching and wondering what they would do next. They’re going to kill you, thought Rikar. Though likely they were going to do something far worse.
Then the strangest thing happened. Instead of attacking or swooping down on Rikar, the Starwalkers began singing a sad song, a chorus, of love and loss and despair. He recognized the clear and beautiful voices as from the song the Starwalkers had sung on Vellia, and Rikar wondered if there was a connection somehow. But this song was different than the one before, more of a mother bird singing because she has lost her little ones. A searching, probing song meant to evoke a response from the lost Starwalkers. None came, for as Rikar knew all too well, they were utterly destroyed.
He waited, despite being caught in the middle of a battle with three sorcerers who now stared dumbfounded at the strange star portal still open in the sky. Now everything seemed meaningless next to the power and grandeur of the god-like figures surveying the cityscape. When they discovered that their comrades had been slain like that, in a way so cruel and inhuman, they’d certainly rain fire and obliterate the Ruins of Elmarr and bury that foul presence underneath the sands of the Nalgoran Desert forever.
Talis had sidled close to Rikar and now pointed at the figure of a Starwalker descending from the sky.
“I recognize him,” he whispere
d. “He was in Illumina that day. Can it really be Jared?”
“Why would they send him?”
Rikar felt a faint whisper of wind behind him, and he turned to see Mara appear. “Jared knows us. Of course the Starwalkers would send him after the Nameless killed the first quad in the desert. But I’m guessing that Jared doesn’t know that they’re dead, otherwise they’d likely send more quads to fight. Look at them, they’re not even thinking of fighting, they’re just singing a song to find their friends.”
Mara was right. The more Rikar studied the sky where the Starwalkers searched, he realized that they were confused somehow, likely perplexed because they could sense their friends. They waited as if wondering why they didn’t respond to their song.
“We should go to them,” Talis said, “before their confusion turns to frustration and indiscriminate anger.”
As Talis turned to fly, Rikar seized him by the arm and shook his head. “No, it should be me that goes, it’s me that they want.”
“We’ll go together. I know Jared and he’ll listen to me.” Talis raised a palm to placate Rikar. “They don’t want you, they’ve only come to find out what’s happened to their friends. We need to talk to them, or they’ll certainly start blasting this city to bits.”
With the renewed intensity of the Starwalkers flying across the city, and their song changing to a frantic rhythm and shrill tones, Rikar knew that Talis was right. So he flew up high above the red buildings and black, billowing smoke and hovered there waiting as Talis and Mara joined him.
Soon the nearest Starwalker sighted them and slowly flew over while two others of his quad joined him, women with long, billowing golden hair and the same silver and black shimmering robes that Rikar had remembered from Vellia. Another man flew over to Jared, a youthful, fierce-looking man with silver hair and dark skin the color of chocolate, and his alien eyes surveyed them with curiosity.
“How is it that find myself once again in the presence of these three young humans?” Jared spoke to the other Starwalkers as if explaining an unknown story to them. “Two of them loyal and true and pure of heart, and one a murderer, but is it really him?” The Starwalker flew close and Rikar found his hands twitching nervously at the man’s quick advance. “You look very different from the last time I saw you in Illumina. Your hair and skin has changed. Some mystical force has completely renewed your body? A familiar energy now courses through you and radiates like the stars…”
Jared gasped in shock as his eyes went wide and he wailed a mournful exhalation and shook his head in disbelief. “Can it really be true? That the essence of my fellow Starwalkers resides within your cruel body?” He came so close that Rikar flinched as if worried the man would strike him down in an instant, but the Starwalker only sniffed. “Your skin even possesses the smell of the Starwalkers? How is this possible?”
Rikar tried to retreat from the uncomfortable distance between himself and the Starwalker, but Jared narrowed his eyes and Rikar felt woozy and delirious in an instant. Jared came very close to Rikar again and small, spindly snake-like cords shot out from his fingertips and attached themselves around Rikar’s wrists like an octopus latching onto its prey. To Rikar’s horror, the green strands clenched tight and he could feel something sink into his skin and caused his arms and fingers to spasm uncontrollably.
“How, how, how?” Jared shouted, and his bull eyes glowered at Rikar, a wrathful agony twisting up the once beautiful features of his face into a horrific scowl. “You have all four inside you? As if you ingested their blood and ate of their flesh? But, no, not in your stomach…in your blood and in the cells of your body, in your mind, in your energy. Somehow you have been remade with their very essence? What kind of foul blood magic is this? Jeremiah tampered with the dark arts, but nothing so cruel and nefarious as this…”
“A cruel deed has been done to Rikar by the one called the Nameless,” Mara said, her voice soft and sad, and Rikar was surprised that she spoke up for him. “It is the same being that has slain your Starwalker friends, deep in the black heart of the ancient Ruins of Elmarr. But by what dark method, none of us know.”
The Starwalkers stared at each other with sorrowful expressions and the women whimpered weakly and darted their tear-filled glances at Rikar, their eyes like long needles of hatred stabbing into him.
“Must we accept the words of these mortals as truth?” The dark-skinned Starwalker aimed a finger at Mara. “How do we know they are not simply leading us away from finding our brothers and sisters?”
“Janesh, I understand your concern, but it is undeniable that bits of the essence of all four members of the quad now reside within this young murderer.” Jared studied Rikar with doubtful eyes. “Though I am quite certain he doesn’t possesses the power to kill them. This causes me to believe that likely the girl’s story is true. And if it is true, then we are in grave danger remaining on this world. We must consult with the high council. Especially since a fragment is now in the hands of an enemy.”
“But what does this mean for us?” Mara’s forehead creased in worry as she glanced at Talis and back to the Starwalker. Rikar felt like something terrible was going to happen, and the voice of the Nameless was shrieking frantically in his mind, warning him to leave and fly away. He knew that if any more prodding pressure pushed his mind he would fall off into the black emptiness and go insane.
Almost in unison, the sky around them filled with sorcerers and necromancers rising up from the streets of Ishur. Jared wheeled around slowly and surveyed the threat, his amused face forming a grin.
“Why look, have we guests come and worship us?” A look of humor passed between the Starwalkers, but their bull-like eyes retained the alien coldness that sent chills prickling along Rikar’s arms.
“I imagine these robe-wearing magicians are loyal to the one you call the Nameless?” Janesh fixed a fierce scowl on Mara.
Rikar cleared his throat and forced himself to concentrate. “I sense the Nameless is furious and he now commands his loyal servants to protect us.”
Janesh spread his arms wide. “These insects dare challenge gods?”
The image of Rikar slaying the Starwalker woman played out in his mind, but he forced himself to remain quiet and expressionless for fear of invoking their wrath. Though they were certainly powerful, they were not gods, nothing like the power and fury of Zagros.
“Be wary of these insects, brother,” Jared said, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he studied the threat. “You may find some of them scorpions.”
The Starwalker clapped his hands and a white, shimmering star portal flowered in the sky and caused the crowd of sorcerers and necromancers around them to cringe in fear at the power and glory of the portal. Jared snapped his fingers at Talis, Mara, and Rikar, and they went woozy and the world went bleary from the spell. Rikar tried to fight against the power of the Starwalker’s mind, but he found the effort like swimming upstream against a raging river, and he gave in and allowed himself to be flung along the swift current until blackness overtook his mind.
34. BETWEEN THE STARS
When Talis woke he found himself alone in a glittering, glassy world like the view of a sun-filled day staring through a faceted, clear crystal. Glancing around, he discovered he was lying on a low bed in a room made completely of glass or crystal or perhaps even gigantic diamonds. Some light outside the room or within the crystals illuminated the facets and sent light beams across the whitewashed floor. One entire side of the room opened to a tropical garden with a low waterfall spilling into a lily pad covered pool. The foliage reminded Talis of the jungles of Lorello.
In a fright he looked around and soon discovered his backpack beside the bed and the Surineda Map case still safe inside. Wanting to find Mara, he withdrew the map and felt the familiar force of fire magic slither up his hands as he closed his eyes and sent the map his command to locate her. The map immediately came alive and drew a shimmering point of light in a room next to his. He sighed and strode over toward
s the garden and heard a hiss as he passed through the edge of the building.
Outside, he glanced back at the building and saw a scintillating shield covering the room’s face. Strange, was this some kind of a magical barrier protecting the room from the animals and insects outside? He heard monkeys chattering high in the trees and the chanting of birds and cackling of parrots as he followed a footpath through exotic orchids. Rounding a guava tree, he found another shield covering the room next to his. In a movement of curiosity, he raised his hand to the shield and found that it melt away at his touch, and to his relief, revealed Mara’s sleeping form curled up inside.
He sat next to her and could see the gentle rise and fall of her chest as he admired her pretty, sleeping face. Her eyelids fluttered as if she were having a dream. She smacked her lips like she was nibbling on something delicious, and Talis stroked her long, auburn hair illuminated by the velvety, crystalline light, and was enraptured by the smooth silkiness of the feeling. He thought that she was the most beautiful girl in the whole world and worried whether she still cared for him as before.
She stirred from her sleep, and startled, he smiled and met her eyes as she squinted and glanced around the room.
“Where are we?” She pushed herself up and stared at the curved crystalline ceiling that arched down and around into walls. Her head swiveled around and she squealed in delight as she caught sight of a strange peacock flaring its beautiful, green feathers as two smaller females pecked around at the ground.
Star Mage (Book 5) Page 21
