The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6)

by Travis Simmons

  Grace clasped her hands behind her back and stared at Rowan, wondering what she was getting at. It was the same “teacher” look she used to give Angelica when she was being obstinate. It worked just as well on the Guardian of the Realm of Air.

  “I’m sorry,” Rowan said, averting her gaze.

  “Very well,” Grace said. “There are sorcerers to be rallied, and there’s a plan to be put into action.”

  “Yes, Moonchild,” Rowan said. As she turned to leave, Grace grabbed her arm, stopping her.

  “Please, my name is Grace, call me that.”

  Hours later Sara finally joined Grace and Dalah outside. It was nearing dinner time, but Grace didn’t think there would be much by the way of food left unsullied. Still, she sent some villagers around to make a large enough meal to feed everyone.

  “What do you need me to do?” Sara asked. She still looked lost. Grace wasn’t sure if Sara would ever not look lost after the death of Annbell.

  “We have people assigned to the houses they are to defend. All the windows and doors are boarded up except one, through which they will fight. There are emergency exits if they need to escape, but with any luck the sorcerers that have been assigned to each group will be able to keep the house safe enough from fire or whatever the fallen can throw at us. Archers are placed around on the rooftops, but most of them are unskilled, and there’s no telling, even if they’re able to hit moving targets, whether the arrows will be much good against the fallen.” Grace took a deep breath and looked around.

  “And where will we be?” Sara asked.

  “Realm Guardians are stronger than regular sorcerers, and I possess a lot of power now myself, enough to keep the vibrations of this city in tune.”

  “Atorva was doing this thing with his holy power, infusing places and people so they could actually harm the fallen,” Dalah told Grace. “He’s dead, but maybe you can do the same thing?”

  Grace thought about it, and nodded. “I agree. I never thought much about that, but we won’t really do any good against the fallen if we can’t actually harm them. Good thinking.” Grace turned to Sara. “It will be some time before food is ready, and the attack will likely come in the night. Are you well enough to help me spread the holy power throughout the city?”

  Sara nodded that she was.

  “He did it from the roof there,” Dalah said, leading them back into the Votary House.

  Grace followed Dalah through the silent halls of the Votary House. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the house did show signs of the previous battle with the undead horde. She had to sidestep fallen tables, broken lamps, and other debris that had been shoved around in their haste to shutter windows and keep the dead out.

  Grace felt a malicious twinge in her stomach outside one door, and she turned toward it.

  “What’s in here?” she asked, the power from within rankling the Crone energy inside of her. Whatever was inside was the exact opposite of the power she held within her.

  “That’s where Mag is being held,” Dalah told her, and turned away from the door before Grace could read the expression on her face. Grace followed behind her, and Sara didn’t give a second look at the door. Either her sister didn’t register who was behind the door, or she had given up the fight of saving Mag. Normally Grace wouldn’t expect Sara to give up that easily, but with Annbell gone, she seemed to be losing some of the fight she had before.

  Dalah led them out onto the roof, and Grace saw the slaughtered body of Atorva immediately. He lay in a pool of drying blood, his eyes turned, unseeing, up to the darkened sky.

  “We’ll get him inside before the fighting starts; he’ll be burned with Annbell,” Grace said. She turned to Sara before they started working. “I need you to promise me that you won’t do anything silly tonight,” Grace said.

  Sara just looked at her.

  “I know that Annbell is dead, and that has wounded you greatly, but you can’t give up. There are people and a Realm counting on you. You can’t let the pain of one death cause many other unneeded deaths.”

  That seemed to strike a nerve with Sara, and she nodded.

  “You can give up after this if you like, but not before we see this through.” Grace turned back to the roof, and Dalah and Sara followed her out to where Atorva lay dead. There they linked hands, and Grace started working the might of the Crone. Sara and Dalah obeyed, and as with Atorva, the power of the Goddess slithered through the streets, taking holy residence in each human vessel.

  Grace stood atop the rubble of the High Basilica, waiting for the legion from the west. She gazed around her at the five Guardians, also staring off westward. In buildings around the clearing were stationed her defense. She was putting a lot of faith in the ability of the archers and the other infantry they’d been able to arm. With any luck, they wouldn’t have to hold off long before reinforcements from the Ivory City came.

  “This could be slaughter,” Laphrael said, standing beside her. Someone had been kind enough to bandage up his stump of a wing, and the blood had stopped flowing. Still, Grace wasn’t certain how agile he would be with his left arm.

  “It could be,” Grace said. “But what is our other option?”

  Laphrael didn’t say anything. If the Guardians heard the exchange, which was likely, they also didn’t say anything.

  With her new sight, Grace could see the wyrd of the Guardians spreading up around her, like waves of heat coming off the surface of baking stone. They were already working their wyrd. Each of the Guardians, she realized, had a touch of elemental wyrd within them. Into the shield poured the might of the Earth, the agility of the Air, the fierceness of Fire, and the foresight of Water.

  “They near,” Laphrael told her, as if she couldn’t feel their presence humming chaotically across her skin.

  “Be ready,” Grace said, and her voice carried easily around the knoll. All around her the dead army, now with no small amount of decaying verax-acis in their midst, turned their slack-jawed moaning toward the west, awaiting the legion.

  Somehow she could see through the darkness the sun had been cast in. Through the blackened air, just out of the reach of torchlight, Grace could see the black wings circling. Thousands of them, easily outnumbering any force she had been able to scramble together, including the armies of the dead.

  As they came, Grace clasped her hands together high above her head and pulled on the power of the Crone within her. From where her hands were joined a great white light emanated, making the surrounding stones sparkle and sing with power. She was the bait, and the buildings around her were her defense.

  And then wyrd was raining down around them. Fire, lightning, and bolts of darklight plummeted out of the sky in greater quantity than Grace could count. Around her, buildings vanished, undead vanished, and even a few armed villagers who ventured past the wyrded buildings they were assigned to were dissolved.

  But their attackers, winging through the sky above, were just out of range. A few arrows shot up to the sky, but never made it as high as they needed to be. The only thing they could do was use wyrd, and there weren’t that many wyrders left in Lytoria.

  But they fought back. Lightning and fire shot in numerous colors from the buildings, into the night-like sky.

  “We are outnumbered,” Laphrael reported. There was a look on his face that said he wanted more than anything to take to the skies.

  “We knew that,” Grace said. She forced more Crone energy into the weaving. The light from her joined hands flared brighter and with more holy power. The fallen skirted away from the light.

  “I think they know where you are, and they also know they can’t reach you while you are letting out that light,” Laphrael told her. “If you were to stop that, they would come for you.”

  Grace’s heart raced. She knew what he said was true. The legion knew that she played host to the holy power of the Goddess, and they would come for her if she let the power drop. She would be putting all of the Guardians in danger.

&nbs
p; “Listen,” Laphrael said. “If you don’t do this, many will die for nothing. If we allow the legion to come closer, we can strike at them.”

  Grace nodded, closed her eyes, and let the holy power wane. As she lowered her arms, the fallen began to descend. Once they were in reach, the wyrders were more effective, dropping the black-winged beasts as they came into range. The power Grace had infused all the people of Lytoria with allowed their strikes to damage the fallen, putting them on equal ground.

  A detachment of fallen landed not far away, before the Guardians. The army of the dead reacted, swarming to the threat and overpowering the angels. But there were several pulses of darklight that opened a hole through the dead, and the legion came closer to Grace.

  “Stand fast,” Grace said, readying herself for an attack. She let her earth wyrd slip loose, rooting the fallen to the ground as she had rooted the verax-acis. But she wasn’t powerful enough, despite being the Moonchild, to hold all of them.

  Rough hands grabbed Grace from behind, but before the rephaim could sink teeth into her neck, Laphrael spun, his flaming blue sword streaking over Grace’s head and dispatching the fallen. She felt the embrace of the beast slacken as it turned to dust around her and tumbled to the ground at her feet.

  “Watch my back,” she told Laphrael.

  “Good idea,” he said, taking up a place behind her.

  Grace reached back out with her earth wyrd, trying to hold more and more fallen in place, but the thinner she spread her wyrd the less effective it was, until she was only slowing their approach, not halting it.

  The dead were still pouring in on the fallen, but as more and more of the legion took to the ground, drawing ebony blades, the dead were nothing more than another means of slowing them.

  But the angels had wings, and not all of them dropped from the sky.

  As Grace was distracted by those that were coming from in front of her, and Laphrael was amusing himself with those coming from behind, dozens fell from the sky all around Grace.

  “Moonchild, is it?” a dark-haired fallen said to Grace’s right.

  “Yes, I believe it is,” a male said to her left.

  “I will enjoy stripping the flesh from your bones,” the woman on the right said.

  They sped at her, but a pulse of light from Laphrael vanquished them where they were, dropping their ashes to the ground. The only thing left behind were a points of light that spiraled up to the heavens.

  Mag could feel the coming of the angels in the thrum of her alarist power. Her eyes fluttered closed as the intoxicating power of Arael flowed through her.

  The legion approaches, the voice spoke into her mind. It wasn’t the voice she was used to. This one was more feminine, but it was her old master all the same. If you help me, if you obey, I will forget your little relapse to the whore goddess. If you help me, I will spare your family. If you deny me again, you will be among the first to be destroyed, and you know how we like to destroy traitors.

  Mag remembered like it was yesterday; the young woman who had betrayed her group of alarists had been strung up on a tree, stripped naked, covered in honey, and the bees were allowed their victim. She had been left out in the weather, with no food or water, until she was near death and too weak to fend off whatever scavengers came to pick her bones clean while her heart still beat.

  Mag clung to her throat, feeling the swell of her heartbeat thundering to her brain.

  The host comes behind them. You must strike now, or all might be lost for the legion.

  “Astanel,” Mag called, opening her eyes. Across the room the blond-haired boy straightened with a start. Outside they could hear the onslaught, the battle which she had been denied. “The time has come.”

  “Now?” Astanel asked. “Shouldn’t we wait?”

  “Why wait?” Mag asked. “We are needed now, before the tide is turned.”

  Astanel rubbed nervous hands on his trousers and came to stand before Mag. He gripped his hands around the shackles that bound her and looked into her cold blue eyes.

  “Just a little pulse of darklight, directed at the shackles,” she told him. “That’s a good boy.”

  He did as instructed, the power of Arael swelling up inside of him, leaking out through his fingers and into the iron of her bindings. The shackles vanished. Mag rubbed her chafed skin where the cuffs had dug into her. Her wyrd sang through her body. She had felt it before when she was inside the bindings, but she hadn’t been able to use it. Now it greeted her like a long-lost friend, embracing her in its warmth.

  She held her hands out before her and let a little bit of the green wyrd leak from her fingers, illuminating a space before her face. She sighed, and closed her eyes against the wash of relief. Part of her had imagined she would never be able to cast again. She smiled.

  Gathering Astanel behind her, she made her way to the cell door. She listened for a moment, and when she didn’t hear movement directly outside the cell, she unlocked the door with a pulse of wyrd. As she expected, there were no guards in the hall outside her door; they were already out of the house. Defending or attacking, whatever they were doing, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was serving the one who ruled her.

  “Stick close to me, and do as I do,” Mag told Astanel. She reached behind her and took his sweating hand in her own. Where her fingers latched around his wrist, she could feel the hammering of his worried heart. She tried to will strength into him, unsure if it was helping or not.

  There was a sickness in her stomach from the combination of her alarist wyrd and the wyrd of the Crone that infused all of the buildings, but she pressed through the cramps it caused. She turned left and through a doorway up into the unnatural night above the Votary House.

  The door hushed shut behind her. The sky was alight with wyrd, with fire, with the burning wings of the legion, and the darkness of a blacked-out sun. Her breath caught. Never before had she felt such power from her old master as she did just then, staring off into the corrupted sun. His awesome power shivered through her.

  High above, black wings soared, coming close to her, but once they sensed her chaotic wyrd they left her alone. Even the legion recognized the power taking root within her. Mag closed her eyes and felt the Crone energy in the mortar beneath her booted feet.

  She opened her eyes again and stared off to the west, through the carnage of the night and into the darkened sun.

  “I have a new master now,” she told the sun. With that she let the alarist wyrd gather inside of her, and shot out a bolt of pure darklight at the amassing black wings overhead. “And it’s no longer you, Arael. Her name is Sara Bardoe.”

  Behind her Astanel loosed his hold on her hand and followed suit, blasting out with bolts of darklight, vanquishing the fallen as they came near. Recognizing what was happening, the fallen came for the two of them, bent on destroying them.

  Mag had just a moment’s notice to throw a shield around herself when the fallen started dropping to the roof of the Votary House. She pumped her strength into the wyrding, hardening it like a wall around her. Their blows glanced off her ward, but she could do nothing to attack through the shield. It was all she could do to keep it held firm under the attack.

  “Astanel,” Mag yelled, but there was no answer. She turned back to see how the boy was holding up in time to see a fallen cleave Astanel’s head from his body. His last bolt of darklight shivered uselessly into the night sky as his body slumped to the roof and pumped the last thrums of his blood out around her feet. His dead eyes stared up at her accusingly.

  Pi could finally feel once more. Though Devenstar had wyrded numbness through her body, the numbness she felt in her mind was created by Clara. Over and over, Pi saw the scene play out in her mind. The bloated worm burrowing into Clara’s flesh, the realization in her girlfriend’s eyes that everything was about to change, and then the determination. Pi knew, moments before Clara rushed off, what the blonde sorceress was about to do. She could read it in her eyes.

  Pi moa
ned. As if mirroring her grief, the sounds of battle rose up from outside the window. Steel against steel, the roar of fire nearby, and the moans of the dead.

  Fallen, she thought. Everything seemed to come back to her then, what was really happening, and why Clara had thrown herself into battle. For a time all she had been able to think about was that Clara was gone, but now Pi was starting to remember why she was gone. She struggled against the wyrding Devenstar had placed on her. So concerned that she would harm herself, he had wyrded her prostrate. And then forgot about her. But the power of the wyrding was loosening as time wore on. She could still reach her wyrd; Devenstar hadn’t been able to block that, or he hadn’t thought to try. Pi worked against what he had done until finally she could move her legs.

  Sensation rushed back into her extremities with a pain that left her nearly breathless. She massaged feeling back into her legs, and then pushed to her feet.

  The window was hanging open slightly above her head, and the sounds of battle came through it loud enough to wake the dead. That thought made her head swim with images of Clara running off into the horde of undead, her skin ablaze, to take out as many as she could before she died.

  But would she die? Pi wondered. She had seen the worms slithering into the wound, but would that be enough to kill a sorcerer? She didn’t think so. It would have been enough to kill a mortal, but didn’t the head have to be removed to kill a sorcerer? Her head swam sickeningly with the thought. The death of a sorcerer had been a main concern in the Realm of Earth during the war with the chaos dwarves. Wasn’t everyone concerned that Sara would die from the poison of Wyrders’ Bane?

  The thought that Clara might still be alive pushed Pi to her feet, wobbly from the wyrding Devenstar had placed on them. She pushed the window open and saw night had fallen already. Or had it? Most of the buildings between the Votary House and her vision of the western horizon had been vanished with darklight. She could clearly see the sun hanging on the horizon, blackened out as if by a swarm of bugs.