The Mage War

by Ben S. Dobson

  The flaw in all magic is the mage. He’d been so focused on the spell itself, he’d forgotten his own words. I can’t stop the siphon, but he can. And what does Endo Stooke care about more than anything in the world?

  Now, he had the answer he’d been looking for. “Use his magic against him,” Tane whispered, letting the words flow back through the Astra. “Indree, you beautiful genius. Just hold the fanatics off of us a little longer.”

  “We’ll give you whatever time we can. Go get him. And be quick about it.” With that, Indree cut off the sending.

  Tane looked across to Kadka, flying on Syllesk’s back. They were just above the shimmering silver of the shield-dome now. He beckoned to her with a finger. Syllesk veered closer, and Iskar flew in with her.

  “Carver!” Kadka shouted across the gap. “You look like you have stupid plan! Not without me!”

  “Never!” Tane yelled back, and then pointed at her shoulder. “We’re going to need your talisman! Have it ready!”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Kadka pulled the talisman from her shoulder. Clutching it in her hand, she nodded at him and grinned her wild grin.

  Tane looked down at Nevka, then across to Syllesk. “This thing you do to protect us from the siphon, we’ll both need it. Can you keep it up from a distance?”

  “I think so,” Nevka said.

  Syllesk nodded. “If he can, I can.”

  “Good,” said Tane. “Iskar, once you get us down there, you, Syllesk, and Nevka need to go help Indree and the others hold the line. They’re struggling, and we need to be alone with Endo if this is going to work. Force won’t do it. I need him to underestimate us.”

  Iskar frowned. “We will do what we can, but we will not—”

  “Hurt anyone,” said Tane. “I know. But Endo’s people don’t. I think a pair of dragons diving at them will be enough to cause some useful confusion, at least.”

  “That, we can accomplish,” Iskar said with a nod. “But… the little ones may not be able to protect you for long, if they have to defend themselves at the same time.”

  “I’m not worried about that. Either this works or it fails catastrophically, but either way it will be fast.” Tane pointed to the shield dome. “Burn it down.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  _____

  SYLLESK EXHALED DEEP, breathing silver-blue fire against the shimmering dome of Endo’s shield. On her back, Kadka let out a delighted cackle. She couldn’t help herself. Soaring through the air on dragonback, watching spells burn away before her eyes—it was exhilarating.

  Beside them, Iskar and Nevka—with Carver clinging desperately to his neck—joined their flames with Syllesk’s. Endo’s shield dimmed and flickered under the assault, and then disappeared. No spell could stand long under that much dragonfire.

  The way was clear. Kadka could see Endo now, sitting in his chair at the center of the park, alone in an expanse of grass flattened to the earth by his force spell. Even without the shield, no one had breached the perimeter he’d cleared—approaching him would be suicide for those under the effects of the siphon. At the edges of the circle, those thrown by his spell lay in heaps atop one another, barely moving. They were in no position to fight back.

  Nevka and Syllesk tucked their wings back and dove, so close to one another that Kadka could almost have reached out and touched Carver on Nevka’s back. Iskar followed close behind.

  “I need you to get that talisman on him!” Carver shouted to her. “I’ll give you some cover!”

  Kadka raised an eyebrow. “Why? Won’t stop siphon, you said!”

  “No time to explain!” Carver answered. “Just follow my lead! He knows what the talisman can do now, so he’ll do everything he can to stop you. Don’t let him! Whatever it takes, short of killing him!”

  Kadka nodded at Carver, grinning wide. Anything that hurt Endo Stooke was just fine by her.

  The dragons spread their wings as they neared the ground, arrested their dive, and swooped low, no more than a few feet from the ground.

  “This is where we leave you!” Iskar shouted from just overhead as they moved over the circle of bare grass Endo had cleared. “Show that man how badly he has underestimated the non-magical!”

  Kadka just grinned up at him, blew him a kiss, and vaulted from Syllesk’s back.

  She landed in the grass on bent knees, and drew her knife with her free right hand, holding her talisman tight in her left. Carver landed beside her, less gracefully. He caught himself on his hands and knees, and the impact knocked the breath out of him. She offered him an arm, and he took it, pulling himself to his feet. Above, Iskar and the little ones banked away, heading for the front lines.

  Endo Stooke sat in his chair perhaps fifteen yards away, watching them without obvious concern. He barely looked at Kadka. “All you have to send at me is two non-magicals? Come now, Tane. You know you can’t beat me like this.”

  “We’ll see,” said Carver. He slipped a hand into his pocket, and looked sidelong at Kadka, nodding slightly.

  She charged.

  Every step closer was painful. This near to the source of the siphon, Kadka could feel it sucking at her soul, pulling pieces away even as Syllesk’s protection replaced what was taken. Too much, too fast, and a dragon’s Astral power wasn’t unlimited. She had to end this quickly.

  Endo was already uttering one of his spells to stop her when a brilliant light exploded from behind Kadka. One of Carver’s charms. She was facing away from the source, but Endo wasn’t. He threw up an arm to shield his eyes, and his spellfire went wild, untargeted. Silver flame gouted from his fingers, spilled into the air over Kadka’s head.

  But Endo wasn’t distracted for long. Another shouted phrase of magic, and Astral power spilled indiscriminately over the ground around him, surging outward in a circle like a rapidly expanding puddle of silver fluid.

  Kadka didn’t have time to stop herself; silver flowed over her feet. As soon as the magic found her, it surged up her ankles, gripping her tight, trapping her in place. Still too far away, ten yards between her and Endo. She looked back at Carver, saw that he was trapped too, encased in silver light up to his knees. The circle of silver on the ground dissipated, but their bonds remained.

  Endo lowered his arm as the light faded. “You know these petty distractions aren’t enough, don’t you? I’m better than that.” He smirked at Carver, still ignoring Kadka. It was becoming very annoying. “And besides, even if your pet orc does reach me, what do you hope to accomplish? You wouldn’t have sent your dragons away if you thought there was some purpose in threats. You know you can’t kill me, and you know I’ll die before I end my siphon.”

  “Maybe just break some bones before the end,” Kadka growled, struggling to free herself. “Hear you scream. Is good enough for me.”

  Endo laughed. “Such inspiring ambition. Hardly above an animal, and yet you wonder why I look down on your kind.”

  Kadka’s fist clenched around the hilt of her knife. It took a great effort to stop herself from throwing it at his face, even knowing that killing him would take away their last chance to stop the siphon.

  “Actually,” said Carver, “her vision really speaks to me.” And before Endo could say anything more, he hurled something, hard and fast.

  Endo threw up a shield in front of himself; the object collided with it, bounced off, landed in the grass. A brass globe. It snapped open at the center with an audible click.

  Darkness enveloped the middle of the park, swallowing all three of them.

  Kadka grinned. Orc eyes could see in the dark; gnomes weren’t so lucky.

  The last-second shield diverted Endo’s attention from the bindings on Kadka’s ankles, just enough to let her tear herself free with brute force. He could tell he’d lost her, hurled a wave of force along the ground in her vague direction to keep her back. Kadka leapt aside, and it passed by harmlessly.

  Endo was searching the darkness for her now, casting his eyes back and forth. “Where
are you?” he snapped with growing agitation. There was only one reason he’d expect to see her in the darkness—he was using divination to try to find her.

  And like so many mages before him, he couldn’t.

  Which he obviously didn’t like very much. Disoriented by the failure of his divination, he was slow to try something else, relying on the shield he’d thrown up to stop Carver’s charm globe. But it only protected him from the front. Kadka darted around it in the dark, and threw herself into a headlong sprint.

  Endo heard her coming, started chanting another spell. She was nearly on him now, but she didn’t know enough about the language of magic to tell what he was casting. If it was a trap, a binding like before, she’d run right into it. The darkness charm would end, and she’d have wasted her chance. Carver didn’t have enough useful tricks hiding in his pockets to give her another one, and Endo wouldn’t allow it. He could have killed them as soon as they’d landed, except that he hadn’t thought it necessary. As soon as he could see them again, he’d burn them down to ash. For all she knew, he was about to blanket the area around him with indiscriminate spellfire, sight or no.

  But Kadka had known too many people like Endo Stooke. He thought himself brilliant, cunning, above people like her, but he had lived his whole life with money and comfort and magic. He’d never learned to hunt at night in the Svernan tundra, where the things in the dark were very real. When the lights went out, people like him didn’t fight. They hid under the covers.

  Kadka made her guess, and dove forward. She hit the ground on her shoulder, rolled to her feet.

  Endo finished his spell, and the silver dome of a shield surrounded him. Just as Kadka had expected. Hiding instead of dealing with the threat.

  Poska. He might as well have just pulled the covers up over his head.

  The darkness charm ended. Sunlight rushed back over the park. Endo’s eyes widened as he looked up to see Kadka.

  Standing inside his shield. No more than two steps from his chair.

  She lunged, thrusting the talisman at him with her left hand. He had no time for a spell; instead, his fingers jammed against a glyph on the arm of his chair.

  A net of silver strands erupted from the chair, wrapped around Kadka, and anchored itself in midair. Wherever the magic touched her body, it stuck, across her torso and around her arms and legs. Her left wrist was held fast in silver webbing, no more than a foot from Endo. She was so close she could feel his breath.

  But she couldn’t reach.

  Endo looked at her hand, trapped, with the talisman clutched in her fingers. A smug smile turned his lips up.

  That smile turned to fear just as quickly when Kadka lashed out with her knife. Her right arm extended through a gap in the web, only trapped above the elbow; she could still manage a decent swing. Her blade arced at his belly.

  He hadn’t expected that, had assumed the talisman to be the threat. He’d convinced himself as much as anyone else that they couldn’t afford to kill him.

  And he was right. So she didn’t. Instead, she slashed through the belt holding him to his chair.

  Panicked, Endo began to speak another spell. She dropped her blade, cut off his voice with a hand around his throat. Lifted him from his seat. He weighed almost nothing. Gnomes were slight to begin with, and both his legs ended at the mid-thigh.

  Kadka bared her teeth in a savage grin. “Should have left my family alone.”

  Endo’s own silver web wrapped around him as she yanked him, chest-first, into her talisman.

  _____

  The darkness fell away, and Tane could see again. He’d dived to the side after throwing his charm globe, so that Endo couldn’t just hurl spellfire at the spot he’d been standing. Now, he lay on his belly in the flattened grass.

  He pushed himself up, looked ahead. Saw Kadka, inches from Endo, trapped in midair in a net of Astral webbing.

  “Spellfire,” he whispered. That’s it, then. We don’t get another shot at this.

  And then Kadka reached through the net, grabbed Endo by the throat, and yanked him out of his chair.

  Tane raced toward her, praying to the Astra that she’d gotten the job done. He knew even before he got there that she had. Endo hadn’t cast a spell since she’d grabbed him, and that said it all. I should have known better than to count her out.

  As Tane drew near, he saw how she’d managed it. Her left hand, the one holding the talisman, was trapped in the Astral web, but her right was free. She’d pulled Endo into the pin instead of putting the pin in him. Her right hand was around his throat, preventing him from speaking beyond weak croaks of protest. Silver strands held them both in place, clinging just as tightly to Endo where his body touched the web. Not a carefully targeted spell. A last moment attempt, even as Kadka had lunged. Impressive that he even had time to—

  And then he saw the glyph on the arm of Endo’s chair, still glowing silver-blue. Ah. Built into the chair. No wonder it wasn’t terribly specific.

  Kadka only saw him as he stepped into her field of view. She couldn’t turn her head; a strand of webbing clung to her neck and cheek. “Carver. Talisman is in. Get us down.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Tane. He pressed a finger against the glowing glyph. Nothing.

  Endo’s hand dangled from the silver netting above. Tane grabbed him by the wrist. Endo struggled, but he was too bound up to resist effectively as Tane mashed the hand against the glyph.

  The webbing vanished, and Endo and Kadka fell free. Kadka landed on her feet, still holding Endo to her chest. He tried to squirm out of her grasp, but she just bore him straight down to the ground, pinning him there under her much greater weight. Her right hand stayed on his throat; her left never budged from his chest, where she held the talisman in place.

  But it wasn’t over yet. The siphon was still going. The chill was growing beneath Tane’s breast; he was close enough now that his Astral link was failing faster than Nevka could repair it. And in the middle of Endo’s chest, the talisman’s glowing peridot was already marred by large blotches of clouded green, slowly creeping toward one another. If it failed too soon, it was all over.

  “Let him speak,” Tane said. It wouldn’t work if he just talked at Endo; there had to be a back and forth. Room for Endo to convince himself.

  “More fun this way, but is fine.” Kadka lifted her hand from Endo’s throat.

  Endo coughed, cleared his throat, glared up at them. “So you’ve proven that your brute can out-wrestle a gnome with no legs. What of it? You’ve accomplished nothing. You know I won’t stop my siphon. It won’t be long before you and everyone you’re fighting for are reduced to drooling imbeciles.”

  Tane took a breath, touched the watch case in his breast pocket with two fingers. Here goes nothing. “Keep the talisman in, Kadka,” he said, purposely ignoring Endo. “It won’t take much longer.” I hope. He glanced down; the cloudy spots covered nearly the entire surface of the talisman’s peridot now.

  There was something wild in Endo’s eyes, far from the usual disdainful calm. “What are you talking about? What is this thing supposed to do? You know you can’t kill me!”

  “Not going to kill you,” Kadka said, and showed her teeth in what might have been a snarl or a grin. “Have other plans.” She quirked an eyebrow at Tane, then, let him take the lead. A perfect set up, even though she didn’t know what he meant to say.

  Tane knelt down, and mimicked the same condescending tone Endo was so fond of. “Come now, Endo. Why do you think we keep trying to jab you with these things? Why do you think it stops your magic? I designed it to protect us, yes, but that’s not all it can do.”

  Endo narrowed his eyes. “You can’t mean…”

  Let him get there on his own. Tane just spread his hands. “What do you think I mean, Endo?”

  “If it’s operating on the other side of the Astra, like my siphon…” Endo shook his head. “No, if I’m riven, the siphon won’t end. It will still be tied to my Astral signature, I’ll just b
e too senseless to stop it.You must know that.”

  “Close,” said Tane. “But not quite. You won’t be riven. The talismans protect the non-magical by creating a decoy channel to communicate with the Astra, so when your siphon tests us, we look like mages. That’s why you can’t cast spells—the artifact can’t tell a request made by a real mage from one made by the siphon, so it just diverts both down that false channel. But here’s the thing I’ve come to realize about using it on a mage: it leaves your innate channel empty. And the Astra abhors a vacuum.”

  Endo’s face went pale. “No.”

  Tane let a cold smile curl his lips. The more Endo saw himself looking back at him, the better. “That’s right. As we speak, the Astra is filling in that space inside you. Soon, it will be gone altogether. And then it will be too late, even if we remove the talisman, or the gem breaks. Your mind will still be there. But your magic won’t. You say you’re willing to die for your cause, but are you willing to live? To spend the rest of your life in a cell, without magic? To be remembered as a powerless failure?”

  “That’s impossible!” A slight sheen of sweat covered Endo’s forehead. “You couldn’t have created such a thing! You… you lack the magic, the understanding!”

  Kadka leaned her face down, made a show of looking close. “Then why look so scared?”

  “Because,” Tane said, “he knows that a lot of things are possible now. It was impossible to directly access the Astra, until Thorpe’s machine. It was impossible to tell mage and non-magical apart with magic. Until you, Endo, found this little channel. You showed me how. I know it’s hard for you to believe that a non-magical came up with a way to take your magic from you, but look at it like this: I didn’t.” Tane extended a finger, touched it to Endo’s forehead. “You did.” He smirked. “And you’re a brilliant enough mage to do it, aren’t you? But just think: very soon, you’ll be no different than me.”

  Kadka cackled at that. “Not so good for next great Mage Emperor.”

  Endo was visibly trembling now, but he hadn’t let go of his defiance. “You’re lying. I’d feel something. I’d feel the magic going.”