It was like nothing I’d ever seen. The rock—it must have weighed as much as ten men—flew through the air, first like a bird, and then more like the stone it was. It smashed into the walls with a tremendous impact and the sound of breaking earth. A part of the walls and the top of the northern guard tower came away. Screams came distantly from within the city as the stone found its final resting place somewhere behind the wall.
Two more siege engines sounded their readiness, and it was then I saw the worst of war I’d encountered yet. When we’d taken the earlier cities, Martine had instructed her men to do as little damage to the fortifications as possible, so that they might be held. They would breach the walls and then charge in, taking the city with as little collateral damage as possible.
As I watched the flaming payloads launch toward the walls of Sevenstone, I suddenly knew that Martine intended no such mercy here. Great explosions, larger than any I might have hoped to create with a bit of quick sorcery, slammed into the gate and one of the guard towers, lighting them like torches. The heavy wooden gate seemed mostly unfazed, but the screams of dying archers filled the air and turned my stomach. A third fire pot went over the walls and landed in the city. I’d seen what the ooze in those pots could do. Anything caught in it would burn brighter than the center of a bonfire for more than three minutes, and then gutter out.
It was a horrific way for anyone to die.
Once the siege engines were firing regularly, the armored cohort withdrew from arrow range, and we watched death rain onto the city of Sevenstone.
X
The siege went on for most of the day. When at last a lucky stone shot from one of the engines scored an almost direct hit on the gates, splintering them and smashing them inward with a terrible sound, the Kalais let out a cry of victory.
No one had caught a second glimpse of the daemon on the walls, though I’d devoted almost all my time to looking for it.
“The daemon guards will have withdrawn to the palace,” Martine said from beside me, almost as if reading my thoughts. “The archers will cover a charge to the gates on my command. Once inside, my best knights will accompany us straight to King Talavar’s seat while the rest of the army pacifies the city.”
“And by pacify, you mean...” I said.
“Kill anyone who resists, of course,” she answered flatly, turning away. Perhaps it was all the death in the air, but I’d never seen a battle affect her quite so much. She sent up another signal flare, and the siege engines fired once more each before going silent.
The damaged walls of Sevenstone were eerily quiet.
“Sound the charge,” Martine told her herald.
“I want Mendoz with me,” I said immediately.
Martine waved her hand dismissively, and I took that as acquiescence. I jumped aboard Isteri’s back as the Duchess General’s herald raised the warhorn to his lips and sounded the first charge. Isteri let out the cry of a warhorse at the sound, and we rode to where the Sanfar Freemen were preparing for their offensive.
“Mendoz!” I shouted as we drew near. “We’re heading for the palace, and I want your blade with me!”
He looked up from a conference with the Freemen’s commander—which might have been a game of dice, for all I knew—and nodded. He said something to Falgar, which I couldn’t hear over the din, and drew the massive sword from his back. This was what we did best, his expression said. Something up there had to die. It was either them or us, but he was with me, and I was finally going to be able to tell the world that I’d slain a daemon with nothing but my own sorcery.
This was the most glorious moment of my life. I would stand in the palace at Lannth with my sword, the army of Kalais and my trusted companion at my back, and we would confront the corruption without an Arbiter sticking his nose in. With proper training in sorcery, the people of the Old Kingdoms would have no further use for the Arbiters.
You're a liar, a cheat, a fraud, a coward... my mind taunted.
I would lead the way.
Under the cover of fire from the Kalais archers, Mendoz and I met up with Martine and her host of knights. We rode for the shattered gates of Sevenstone like the heroes out of some ancient tale.
And where are the heroes of those tales now? Dead. Every last one of them.
Ignoring the sick feeling in my stomach, I pushed away all the dark thoughts clouding my mind.
We would be victorious.
We had to be.
XI
After the regulars and the irregulars had pushed their way into the city, the cohort of knights ahead of us crashed through the ruined gates, screaming cries of war. The stench of blood and flame and burning flesh was heavy in the air, making my stomach churn unpleasantly. Martine’s elites, along with the Duchess General, Mendoz and I were right behind them, and it was then that I saw my first city under siege.
Fire was everywhere, consuming buildings with a ravenous hunger. The bright flash burns of the fire pots had given way to regular flame in all directions. The gates opened into what had once been a market district, but I was sure that most of the citizenry were locked in their homes—not that it would save them when the flames reached them in the end. Charred corpses lay strewn about in every direction, broken and blackened by the rocks and the flames which had been rained down upon them.
The market lay atop a slight rise, and the main street sloped downward toward the center of the city. In the distance, against the misty cliffs and the great blue expanse of the Western Sea, I could see the five golden spires of the Lannthan king’s palace, stretching toward the sky like a drowning man’s fingers.
Screams and war cries filled the city as the Kalais cohort moved through. We had arrived ahead of any reinforcements; that much was obvious, given how little they’d defended.
“Knights, with me!” Martine commanded. “To the palace! We must confront the daemon guard as quickly as possible!”
Mendoz and I exchanged a glance. He shrugged, hefting the weight of his northerner’s flame-shaped blade in his hands. The knights moved off in their hulking armor, making a racket which might have shaken any peasant with a pitchfork to his very soul. They kept a ring around the three of us, and we stayed with them to ensure our own safety.
My mind raced, my heart pounding in my ears. The rush of blood in them nearly drowned out the screams of the dying and the clash of steel on steel, but not quite. I ran over every inch of the enchantment I’d constructed, the one which had successfully eliminated every trace of corruption in the flesh of fel beasts on half a dozen occasions.
I’d constructed the spell from the darkest kind of magic, incorporating several phrasings and foci from the Yzgar the Black’s Verse of Undoing, a spell I’d used in its entirety to save my own life an eternity before. Still, if I was right, it would capture the daemon’s essence and metaphorically tear it limb from limb, shredding the power which held the corruption together and releasing the manna. It essentially disintegrated the bodies of fel beasts, and I believed that it would do much the same to a daemon. It would take a great deal of concentration and willpower not to get drawn into corruption of my own, but I was the strongest-willed person I knew.
All it needed now was the ultimate test subject.
We crossed the city amid embers, smoke and flame. Martine’s army was fighting the battle on the streets, occupying the bulk of the force while we moved swiftly through alleys and between houses. The few times we were confronted by Lannthans who’d broken away from the engagement, our knights cut them down without so much as a second thought.
I averted my eyes during those slaughters.
My throat and nose burned with the smoke and ashes flying through the air. I would have given anything for a drink from a waterskin or a cool stream during the seemingly-endless trek across the city of Sevenstone, despite the fact that I had no physical need for it.
At last, the palace drew near. The spires were even more impressive up close; thin, spindly things plated with gold, spear tips whic
h dared to threaten the sky itself. The palace was resplendent. There was no doubt that the Lannthan nobility had co-opted most of its nation’s wealth. Even ablaze, the heavy black and red stones of the structure stood defiant. It may have even been more majestic for its obstinance.
When we crossed the line marked by the first pillars, a cry of war sounded from all around us.
An ambush.
Lannthan soldiers and knights emerged from the long shadows cast by the palace, deepened by the dust-choked air and the brilliance of the blazing city. They ran at Martine’s circle of knights, brandishing weapons of all kinds. I stood in the center, raptly watching as men screamed bloodthirsty screams and charged at one another, bloodied blades gleaming wickedly in the orange and gray light.
All I could hear was the screaming and the clash of metal. Everything around us was pandaemonium. Martine sported a wicked-looking bow, letting arrows fly at the archers trying to flank us with deadly precision. Each twangof the string was accompanied by a heavy rending sound and a scream of agony as an archer fell, an arrow in the eye or the knee. They were all here protecting me, the Arbiter, the sorcerer, Edar Moncrief—because I was the only one with a hope of defeating the daemon guard.
A slim, desperate hope held together by wishes and dreams is no hope at all, that voice in my head laughed.
Arrows began to whiz past my head, screaming through the air, each one carrying death on its barbed tip. I ducked down to avoid them, and then suddenly there was a break in the fighting, a clear way opened up to the palace. My eyes caught it only for a second, but I knew that it was my only chance to flee with all of my limbs intact.
“Come on!” I shouted. “They’ve opened the way!”
Martine’s bow thrummed once more, and another archer died with a gurgling shriek and an arrow to the throat. She glanced at me, and then to the edge of the circle where her knights had broken the Lannthan morale. Lightly-armored soldiers ran screaming in the face of the implacable Kalais knights, tripping and stumbling over the bodies of their compatriots.
I was going to be sick for a week after this.
Mendoz, Martine and I rushed for the opening. Mendoz, who had been carefully conserving his energy, swung his massive sword only twice, separating two heads from their attendant necks in fountain sprays of blood and ichor. Arrows screeched and chimed as they reflected off his armor, never quite finding the niche that they needed for a killing blow.
We made a run for the palace doors. They would be locked and barred, which I well knew. We had no battering ram, and all of our knights were engaged with the enemy. If we were going to get inside, it was up to me.
There was no way I was going to let a few hundred pounds of wood and steel stop me now.
As we ran, I summoned the manna. My skill at manipulating the fundamental force of the world had improved greatly in my time with Mendoz, particularly my ability to control exactly how much power I needed at a given moment. When I’d been in my lab, nearly all of my spells had been fixed, unchanging. The vagaries of hunting fel beasts for three years had honed my senses and given me a kind of flexibility which was, in my humble opinion, simply incredible.
There was one spell which would work for this, but it would require a kind of power I’d only rarely summoned raw before. I focused my eyes on the door ahead of us, running full tilt, and thrust out my hands. I barely heard my own scream above the din of the invasion, though my voice cracked and my throat felt as though it might be torn to shreds.
“Kettek!” I screamed.
A battering ram of light flashed forward from my outstretched palms, as big around as the corpulent Conte of Selvaria and ten feet long. It was a roaring gale of crackling wind and energy, and blew back our hair with its wake. The manna bolt—my manna bolt—thundered and screamed out ahead of us for half a second, and then there was a sound not unlike that of a catapult payload striking a solid stone wall, accompanied by the rending and tearing and splintering of wood. Screams of surprise and pain issued from inside the door as the guards who’d been lying in wait were blown off their feet by the impact.
I stumbled; the sheer will required to control so much manna left me suddenly drained. Like as not I would have simply collapsed to the ground and lay there, my mental pathways scorched and drained with the effort, if it weren’t for Martine’s steadying arm that caught mine and kept me from falling.
“We’re almost there now, Arbiter,” she said, her voice strong and reassuring. “Don’t collapse on me now.”
I thanked her with a tired nod. “Then let’s finish this.”
XII
The further that we retreated into the palace, the quieter it got, until the din of the melee behind us faded away to nothing. The cavernous halls of the royal seat were eerily silent, and our footsteps echoed as we traversed them. Martine moved with speed and confidence, as though she’d studied the layout. We wandered through empty hall after empty hall, some with plates of food and steaming mugs of warm cider still sitting on the table as though they’d been abandoned mere minutes before.
I’d expected that, as we drew closer, the familiar tingle which I’d come to associate with proximity to a fel beast would take hold. I’d even considered the possibility that the feeling might be distracting, or even debilitating, as we closed on the daemons. As we walked the empty halls of Sevenstone Palace, though, I felt nothing.
“The daemons hide themselves from even my sight,” I muttered under my breath.
Martine nodded gravely. “They are very dangerous.”
We passed through a hall of portraits, most of them labeled as kings, queens and princes of Lannth. There was even one of a woman who looked remarkably like Martine; not that it was any great surprise. The noble bloodlines of the Old Kingdoms were so thoroughly in-bred that likenesses were bound to recur every few generations or so. Even though she’d been born a kingdom away, she was probably less than three branches removed from the royal Lannthan line.
“This place is damn creepy,” Mendoz whispered to me as we left the hall of portraits.
My mouth was dry; I couldn’t find anything to say, so I just nodded back at him.
When we reached a long corridor which ended in a set of large double-doors, Martine held up her hand to stop us.
“Just ahead is the royal antechamber,” she hissed. “That’s where King Talavar will be hiding with his daemon guard. They won’t dare to show themselves, so we’ll have to go in after them. Just remember: everything in there is tainted beyond hope. Everything will have to die.”
Mendoz and I both nodded. He shifted his great blade from one hand to the other, finally finding a grip down low where the blade was straight and unsharpened. There was no room in these halls for the full swing of a barbarian’s sword; he would need to be fast and deadly.
There was no real point in drawing my own weapon. It was a fake, after all, but as I pulled it free from its scabbard and the enchantment took hold, the blue light which suffused the corridor took the edge off of my nerves. Martine dropped her bow to the side and drew a thin rapier from her belt, the hilt twisted and curved in a masterwork style. I was no weapon connoisseur, but it was clearly of fine make.
Mendoz shot me a glance as she drew the blade; he was trying to intimate something, but I still had not mastered the fine art of reading his mind. I shrugged instead. He looked troubled, but said nothing.
“If you would take the lead, Master Mendoz?” Martine asked, gesturing down at her rather light officer’s armor. “I think you may stand a better chance against our assailants than I. After all, you two work best together, do you not?”
“Aye, that we do,” Mendoz said. He still had that look in his eye, but I still didn’t understand it, and he still didn’t say anything.
“Then I will allow the two of you to handle the daemons. I will push on to find King Talavar.”
“What if he’s taken by the daemons as well?” I asked.
She grimaced. “I hadn’t considered that. Well enough
then; I’ll stand back and allow the two of you to work, then. Once the daemon guards are dispatched, we will seek out the king together.”
My heart jumped up into my throat. The moment of truth had arrived at last. My sorcerer’s mind tried to slink away, whispering seeds of doubt and discord throughout my confidence, but I would not allow the coward to stop us when we were so close to making history.
“This is going to be a moment for the ages, Mendoz,” I whispered to him as we made our way down the corridor toward the double doors.
“If you say so,” he whispered back. “I trust you, Edar.”
My mind reeled; the monster hunter had never said anything that rang with such sincerity in his entire life, I’d have wagered. I sputtered, trying to come up with a response, any response, which could possibly communicate three years worth of shared experience in a short, pithy phrase.
At the same moment, the doors ahead of us smashed open from within, and two daemons raised their humungous swords and screamed an otherworldly cry as they charged at us.
XIII
Time stopped. My breath came hard, echoing in my ears as a hollow rasp. I became hyper-aware, noticing everything from the tonal variation in the ululating cries of the daemons, the horrible faces which seemed to be fixed in a dire grimace as they shrieked the sound of death. Tingling shudders ran down my spine, prickling at my fingertips and my toes.
The Elements of Sorcery Page 18
