Disciple of War (Art of the Adept Book 4)

by Michael G. Manning

  Will wanted to help more than anything else at that moment, but he couldn’t. Reluctantly, he pulled his eyes from the scene, though he worried that when he looked back the next time Tiny would be dead. He did his best not to think about what had just happened to Janice, and when he checked on the eastern side, Will saw that Selene had taken his advice and remained behind the shield wall. The trolls had moved into the open, but despite being absolutely swarmed by demons, they seemed to be in their element.

  With long arms and legs, they ripped and tore at anything within their reach, and though they were stabbed, cut, and wounded a thousand times over, it failed to stop them. Watching them, Will saw that occasionally the trolls not only killed their foes, but now and then they would pop pieces of the demons into their mouths. Studying them, he could see that most of them were chewing as they fought.

  Although the trolls couldn’t prevent the demon horde from reaching the shield wall, their presence disrupted its momentum considerably. The fight on the western side might last for hours, considering the numbers, but the humans’ defensive line seemed stable and well controlled. They were in no danger of the same disaster that had befallen the eastern side.

  The combined Terabinian and Darrowan force was now engaged on three sides, but unless the demons’ numbers increased dramatically or something new happened, it appeared that the human army would survive. It would be a protracted fight, but given enough time, victory would be theirs.

  If only that was all we needed to do to win, thought Will.

  Someone new arrived, and when he glanced to his right, Will saw that it was the newly promoted Field Marshal, Mark Nerrow. He met his father’s eyes and nodded. Then the field marshal pointed out the obvious. “Madrok isn’t coming out.”

  Will nodded again. He knew his father deeply disapproved of Plan C, but it was now all but impossible to ignore the facts.

  “Are you still determined to do this?” asked Mark.

  “There isn’t any other choice.”

  The baron closed his eyes for a long second, and when he replied, his voice was filled with reluctance. “The battle is stable for now. If more come, it could turn bad, and if they don’t, it will drag on for the rest of the day. There’s no use in waiting.”

  Will dismissed the travel-disk he stood on and found himself at eye level with the man who had sired him. Then he made the declaration, “You have command, Field Marshal.”

  He started to turn around, but Mark Nerrow caught his shoulder and spun him back before wrapping both arms around him. They both wore mail and breastplates, not to mention helmets and a hundred other encumbrances, so the embrace was anything but graceful. Will didn’t resist, but he whispered a warning to his father, “People can see us.”

  “I don’t care,” said the baron, his voice thick. Then he pushed Will out to arm’s length and held him by the shoulders. “I’m proud of you, William, and I live every day with the shame that I was too much a coward to claim you as my own blood. Can you forgive me?”

  Will blinked, stunned by the admission. It took a moment for his heart to register the words. “Goddamn it!” he swore. “Could we do this some other time?” He blinked again, trying to keep his vision clear.

  The baron’s eyes were red. “There won’t be another chance. This fucked up world isn’t likely to give us any more time. Go!” He pushed Will away and looked in the opposite direction. “May the blessings of the Mother go with you.”

  Will stood there for a moment, unable to move. “Goodbye, Father.” Then he started walking, and under his breath he said the words he had never been able to admit to before. “I love you.” Ten feet farther along and he smoothed his turyn to hide his presence. When he reached the shield wall, he put a hand on two men’s shoulders and shook them before they acknowledged his presence.

  “Let me pass.”

  It took them a few seconds to recognize him, but once they had, they opened a gap and Will stepped through, into the chaos beyond. He had to use his point-defense shield a few times to stop random attacks, but none were really aimed at him, and once he got beyond the line of conflict, even that was no longer necessary. With a quick effort of will, he put a camouflage spell over himself, though he wasn’t sure it was really needed. None of the demons were paying him the slightest bit of attention.

  Alone and unmarked by any and all, William Cartwright began the long walk to the walls of Myrsta.

  Chapter 60

  As he walked, Will’s sorrow slowly turned to anger at the ridiculous fate that had led him to his current situation. Hadn’t he done enough? He’d saved his country once already, and he’d saved Cerria at least twice. In every case, he’d faced the same lonely road, though at least the first time Selene had been there to walk most of it with him.

  He wasn’t planning to die, but Mark Nerrow hadn’t been wrong. None but the most foolish of gamblers would be dumb enough to put more than a few pennies on Will walking away from what he intended to do that day.

  Hell, the odds aren’t even that good, thought Will. The goddamn cat knew well enough to stay out of this one.

  A hundred yards passed beneath his feet, and Will was into the open ground behind the demons. His anger had also passed during that time, leaving only numb acceptance and empty resignation in its place. He walked, and gradually the vast and mighty walls of the ancient city of Myrsta grew tall in front of him.

  Ahead and to his right, Will saw a new horde of demons beginning to emerge from the gates. It meant little for his task, but he didn’t like the thought of the battle behind him going sour while he was away. The void turyn spilling over the walls had grown to a usable level, so Will stretched out his will once more and caught the currents of power in his grasp. His jaw clenched as his resolution solidified, and the power around the city snapped again, transforming into a sonic wave that slammed into the wall in general, and the area in front of the southern gates in particular. Thousands of demons died in an instant, causing him to smile grimly as he resumed his slow, trudging journey.

  Maybe I die today, but I won’t be the only one.

  He was less than a hundred yards from the wall when he noticed that the sounds of battle behind him had shifted, becoming quieter. Looking back, Will saw that the center portion of the demon army, the part he had walked through, was gone—or rather they were now positioned horizontally in death, instead of on their feet. Twelve grey-green giants lumbered toward him at an impressive pace, and Selene’s head bobbed in and out of view over the shoulder of the largest of them.

  Will rubbed his forehead in frustration. She’s not supposed to do this.

  He kept walking until the trolls were almost upon him, and then he let his personal turyn return to normal and waved his arms at his allies so they could see him before they trampled him by accident. Gan grinned hideously at him, but Will only had eyes for the woman riding in the basket over the troll’s shoulder. “This isn’t the plan.”

  “The plan needed improving,” she returned.

  “How so?” he asked.

  “The protections on these walls won’t let you bypass them using the ethereal plane, so you’re going to have to bring down some of the wall. That isn’t a good way to begin an infiltration of an enemy stronghold,” she explained.

  Will put his hands on his hips. “But a rampaging group of trolls will improve things?”

  Selene smiled. “Do your worst to the wall. After the dust settles, we part ways and the trolls and I will have some fun. Destroying a section of the wall will draw attention, but we’ll be there to serve as a diversion.”

  “Goddamn it,” he swore. Her logic was impeccable, as usual.

  “You know I’m right.” Selene offered her hand to help him climb up into Gan’s basket. “The trolls move faster.”

  He took it and climbed up. The space wasn’t meant for two people, but Will never minded crowding into a tight space with his wife. “You can’t handle the void turyn in there,” he warned.

  “Try me,�
�� she challenged. “I’ll be damned if I don’t. I can use the demon-armor spell if it gets too be too much.”

  Selene’s hair was tightly braided and wound into a coil that barely showed beneath the edge of her helm. He wished she had a breastplate, but the lack made it easier to get close and wrap his arms around her mailed torso. “Fuck it,” he said, agreeing with her. “Let’s go.”

  She slapped Gan’s shoulder, and the troll took off at a lope that caused them to sway wildly. Not that Will minded. He used the opportunity to press his face close to Selene’s cheek and neck and inhale. The predominant smell he caught was that of iron and rancid sweat, the perennial scents that made armored humans an olfactory nightmare, but beneath those odors he still detected a trace of mountain laurel and sage. The person underneath that smelly armor was the one he loved the most.

  “Don’t you dare die before I do,” he warned fiercely.

  Selene turned her head, banging the edge of her helm against his before finally lining up for a quick kiss. “Don’t you dare die at all,” she replied.

  Their approach with a gang of wild trolls was the farthest thing from unnoticeable. Under ordinary circumstances, riding up to a wall held by hostile enemies would have been foolish in the extreme, but thanks to his hours of sonic assaults, there were no defenders atop the parapets to observe them or drop stones on their heads.

  Defenders weren’t strictly necessary anyway. The walls were impregnable, though Will intended to challenge that proposition.

  They reached the base of the wall without trouble, and Will gave Selene a final kiss before climbing down. He moved up to the wall and then looked around to see that she had dismounted and stood right behind him. “This is where we part ways,” he told her.

  She shook her head. “After you blow up the wall. You need someone to protect you, so you don’t wind up underneath a million tons of stone this time.”

  Will pursed his lips. “Stop being right all the time.”

  “Why?”

  He winked at her. “It’s distracting. I get flustered, and then all I want to think about is your butt.” Shifting gears, he looked at Lrmeg and pointed at the ground. “Dig down. Be safe.” It was the best he could do with his limited command of the troll tongue.

  Lrmeg seemed to understand, and he and the other trolls dug into the ground with astonishing speed. In less than two minutes, the trolls managed to dig enough to get most of their bodies into shallow holes just below ground level. When he felt sure they would be safe, Will turned and reached out to the wall with his right hand.

  The stones were sheathed in coruscating bands of magic that accomplished a variety of purposes. Most were to strengthen the stone and protect it from magical interference, but some of the magic was meant to dissuade enemies from touching the wall at all. Unlike most wards that Will had dealt with in the past, these wards resonated at several different, but complementary frequencies, making it more difficult to match them all simultaneously.

  Moving slowly, half an inch at a time, he accomplished it anyway, keeping the skin of his hand and wrist in tune with the turyn that flowed at each particular distance from the wall. It took him almost five minutes before his fingers touched the stone, and then he spent additional time making sure he wouldn’t slip up and let his attunement shift out of sync.

  Once he was fully assured that he had the feel for it, he turned his focus first inward and then outward to send fine tendrils of turyn through his fingers and into the wall itself. When they had made contact, he began feeling for the subtle vibrations within the stone.

  Since there wasn’t currently a major influx of sonic energy, the vibrations that persisted in moments of relative quiet would be those that were most in harmony with the resonance of the wall. Will found them and began gradually using his power to amplify them, adding energy and volume. The sound was too low for human ears, but he could feel a gentle hum begin to grow within the wall.

  “How long is this going to take?” Selene whispered into his ear.

  “Why?” he growled back. “Do you have somewhere else to be?”

  “I need to pee, but I don’t want to step away if you’re about to blow yourself to hell and back,” she replied with frank honesty.

  Will rolled his eyes. “You’re shitting me.”

  “No, just pee. Let’s not make this more complicated than it needs to be.”

  “It will take at least five or ten minutes, maybe more,” he told her.

  She nodded. “I’ll be quicker than that anyway.” And then she moved a short distance away.

  Peeing in armor was a pain even for men. Will didn’t want to think about what the process would be like for his wife. Ordinarily, her dresses simplified the task in certain important ways, but today she had worn heavy woolen trousers and mail over that. He decided the best thing he could do was mind his own business and focus on the wall.

  Damn it. Now I have to pee, he realized. It had been a long morning. He ignored the urge; there was no way he could stop now.

  Minutes ticked by, and the hum in the wall gradually grew stronger. At some point Will felt Selene signal her return, placing a hand gently on his shoulder. He continued amplifying the vibration within the wall, and now it could be felt as a physical thing, a weird sensation that sang through the flesh of his hand.

  More.

  “It’s almost there,” he warned Selene, pausing to cast his prepared iron-body transformation on himself. She followed suit a moment later. A fresh thought occurred to him then. “How are you going to protect me? You can’t put up a force-dome or force-wall. My hand is in the way.”

  “I’ve got lots of tricks,” she whispered into his ear. A second later, an odd hemispherical force-wall appeared, with one particular oddity. It had a hand-sized hole located where his wrist was. Will had learned a lot of different force spell variants, but it was one he hadn’t seen before.

  “You had that prepared in advance?”

  “No. I prepared it while you’ve been busy molesting the wall.”

  “Oh.” He still found it impressive that she had known such an odd variant spell. She’ll be a hell of a wizard if we live through this. “Brace yourself.”

  He hadn’t had the benefit of a force-wall to protect him the first time he’d done something similar, so he would probably be all right, but now that he was mostly protected, he couldn’t help but worry he was about to lose his hand. His hand wore a mail and leather gauntlet, plus the iron-body transformation that toughened his skin beneath that.

  In the end, it turned out to be a non-issue. The hum built to a level the wall could no longer sustain, and then large cracks began to appear. Unlike the wooden gate he had destroyed before, the stone wall’s destruction started more gradually. Shards of stone were ejected forcefully in certain places around where the largest cracks appeared, but those cracks were five to ten feet apart. None of the cracks showed up in front of them, and in retrospect it was obvious that even the force spell had been unnecessary.

  A series of deep popping noises rang out, and when Will looked up he saw the wall begin to sag, as though it was made of stiff cloth rather than stone. Selene’s hand tugged on the gorget that protected his throat, and remembering himself, Will began running back with her, away from the wall—which was slumping downward at a deceptively fast speed.

  What had seemed like a slow collapse became a thundering roar as more than a hundred feet of wall shuddered to the ground between two of the small towers that repeated at regular intervals. A cloud of dust rose into the air, and when it finally began to settle Will saw that where the wall had been there was now a sloping hill of rubble and broken stonework.

  Selene gaped at him. “Holy hell. You really did it,” she muttered.

  “You didn’t believe it before?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s just different—seeing it in person.” A second later, she collected her senses and gave him a regretful look. “Go on. You need to start moving before they come looking for
the culprit.”

  He nodded, kissed her once more, and headed into the dusty gap. Clambering over the rubble was more work than he’d realized, but he did his best. He stretched out his will as he went, threading it through the dark turyn within the city. This time he was deliberately looking for the knot that represented Madrok. That was where the spell-engine would be.

  With luck, he could get there without being detected, and with even more luck the demon-lord might leave the engine unprotected long enough for him to destroy the infernal device. So far, he had no reason to think it wouldn’t happen. He found Madrok’s presence and made note of it.

  And then it vanished.

  Glancing sideways, Will saw Selene and the trolls scrambling up another portion of the collapsed wall. A swirling storm of turyn began to boil between their positions, and Will realized with horror that Madrok had already found them. Selene’s eyes found his as Will opened his mouth to shout a warning. “Run!”

  A black cloud of crackling energy appeared, and then a foul wind blasted into their faces, threatening to send them tumbling. A moment later, the cloud had vanished, and a heavy-set man with dark blue skin stood at the base of the broken stone hill. Other than his odd skin tone, the newcomer looked entirely human, but any person with the ability to sense turyn could tell he wasn’t.

  The air practically shimmered around him, like a heatwave in the summer. The sense of power was so strong that it immediately reminded Will of the fact that he badly needed to empty his bladder. “Looking for me?” asked the man in perfectly accented Darrowan.

  Will half slid, half climbed down the broken masonry slope. He needed firm footing for what was yet to come. Across from him, he saw Gan had picked Selene up and settled her into the basket on his back before leaping down in one long bound. The young troll backed away from the blue man while Lrmeg and the other trolls assumed a more aggressive posture. Will heartily approved. Good boy, he thought.

  “Not a bad idea,” said the blue demon. “It’s always better to die on level ground.”