Sevenfold Sword: Champion

by Jonathan Moeller

  Though if Archaelon and Khurazalin killed him first, that wouldn’t happen, so Tamlin turned his attention to Castra Chaeldon.

  It was a wasted effort. No enemies came forth from the castra. The orcish warriors on the ramparts rotated shifts, but otherwise, the enemy did not stir. It seemed that Ridmark had guessed right and that the enemy had decided to wait for Archaelon to finish his ritual spell, trusting in their walls to protect them.

  Calliande spent the day casting spell after spell. The whirling cylinder of sigils was twelve feet tall by the time she finished, thousands of symbols spinning around each other like an elaborate magical clock. The power of the gathered magic made Tamlin’s teeth vibrate. When the spell was released, he was very glad that it would not be pointed at him.

  When night fell, Tamlin took a turn guarding Calliande with the other Knights as she labored, and then went to sleep. Tomorrow the Keeper would unleash her spell at the wall, and there would be hard fighting. Tamlin needed to be rested for that.

  In his sleep, he dreamed.

  It was a dream he had dreamed before.

  Tamlin walked through the Agora of Connmar in the heart of Aenesium. To the west rose the gleaming white walls and red-tiled roofs of the Palace of the High Kings and to the east the massive octagonal mass of the Royal Cathedral. Statues of stone stood around the Agora. The largest of them showed Connmar Pendragon striding upon the shores of Owyllain for the first time. Others showed his successor High Kings leading wars against the orcish Warlords or the xiatami or the raiders of the Takai Steppes.

  The Dark Lady awaited him below the statue of Connmar, her black eyes watching him.

  “Tamlin Thunderbolt,” said the Dark Lady. Her cloak of tattered brown and green strips stirred in the salt-scented breeze rising from the bay.

  “I don’t like that name,” said Tamlin.

  She raised one black eyebrow. “Then perhaps you should not throw lightning bolts in battle.”

  “They’re too effective,” said Tamlin.

  “One notes with some amusement that you have told neither the Shield Knight nor the Keeper of Andomhaim about me,” said the Dark Lady.

  “Well, I haven’t told Michael or Sir Aegeus about you, either,” said Tamlin, “and I’ve known them longer.”

  The Dark Lady waited.

  Tamlin sighed. “What am I supposed to tell them? That I’ve been having visions of a mysterious sorceress since I was a child? That sometimes she warns me of danger?”

  “One suspects the Shield Knight and the Keeper would understand,” said the Dark Lady.

  “I rather doubt that,” said Tamlin. “I might as well confess to hearing voices or seeing flying scutians every full moon.” He paused. “Though I suppose I am literally hearing voices right now.”

  “We have reached a junction in time where I can warn you of things to come,” said the Dark Lady.

  Tamlin grimaced. He didn’t like these warnings. Nevertheless, they were always accurate. They had also saved his life a few times.

  She hadn’t warned him about Tysia’s fate, though.

  “Fine,” said Tamlin.

  “First,” said the Dark Lady, “in the battle to come, the Shield Knight will need your help. There will come a moment when it seems that victory is lost. It is then that you must strike with all your power, Tamlin Thunderbolt. Only then will you have a hope of surviving.”

  “All right,” said Tamlin.

  “Second,” said the Dark Lady. She glanced towards the sky. “You need to wake up. Right now. The enemy is coming for you.”

  The dream dissolved.

  Tamlin’s eyes shot open.

  ###

  Calliande stepped back and caught her breath, looking at the spinning column of purple sigils.

  To her mortal eyes, it looked dangerous and powerful, with symbols of purple fire spinning around each other like gears in a clock. To her Sight, it looked far more dangerous. Her Sight saw the spells layered upon each other like the tiers of stonework in a mighty tower.

  Which was an amusing thought, because she was going to use the spell to tear down tiers of stonework.

  “Do you need to rest?”

  Calliande blinked. Ridmark sat atop a boulder a few yards away, his staff laid across his knees. The shifting shadows slid across his face and hands. A memory flashed through her mind, of him standing near their campfire on the isle of Cathair Solas. He had stood guard over her then, even as he stood guard over her now.

  A wave of affection surged through her, warming her heart.

  “For just a moment, I think,” said Calliande. “Then back to work.” She sat next to him, their legs and shoulders touching. “I like your new staff.”

  Ridmark lifted it and tapped the end against the ground a few times. “Bamboo’s a strong wood. Pity we don’t have it in Andomhaim.”

  She laughed. “You do seem to go through a new staff on every journey.”

  “Well.” He tapped the end of the staff against the ground once more. “They all can’t be the staff of Ardrhythain. Are you sure you don’t need rest?”

  “No,” said Calliande. “We’re so close.” She lowered her voice. “Gareth and Joachim are on the other side of that wall. I would tear it apart with my bare hands to get to them.”

  Ridmark hesitated. “They’re still…”

  Calliande nodded. “They’re still alive. I check every time I pause for a new spell. I suppose it’s a waste of my strength, but I can’t stop myself.”

  “It is a comfort to know they are still alive and unharmed,” said Ridmark. “Not knowing would be worse. The imagination runs away with itself.”

  Calliande shivered. “Yes.” Even with the Sight, the dread still filled her mind. Were her sons hungry? Thirsty? In chains in a lightless room? Was Joachim calling out for her right now, weeping in fear? “It does.”

  “We’ll get them back,” said Ridmark. He took her hand and squeezed it. “Tomorrow you’ll rip down the wall, and I’ll kill Archaelon and Khurazalin.”

  As ever, he sounded so confident. When he was younger, he had often seemed brash, even reckless. Now he just seemed filled with grim certainty, like oak that had grown harder than iron with age. It made her feel better.

  “I can’t fail them, Ridmark,” said Calliande.

  “We won’t.”

  She closed her eyes. “I can’t fail them the way I failed Joanna.”

  “You didn’t fail Joanna,” said Ridmark, a rasp of pain in his voice. She opened her eyes and looked at him. “No one could have saved her.”

  She gave him a bitter smile. “I am the Keeper of Andomhaim. What good is all my magic if I couldn’t have saved her?”

  “We’re not exempt,” said Ridmark, staring at the distant shadows of the castra.

  “What do you mean? Exempt from what?”

  He shook his head. “From sorrow. Children die more often than they should. Or women give birth to children that don’t make it to their first year or even their first week. It is a great sorrow, but it has happened to many, many people. We’re no different.”

  Calliande stared at him, a mixture of grief and regret and guilt churning inside her. How could she make him understand? It was her fault. She should have been able to do something, anything. Perhaps it was even directly her fault. She had put herself into that magical sleep below the Tower of Vigilance for over two hundred years, and perhaps that had altered her body in ways she did not understand. Certainly, Gareth’s birth and Joachim’s birth had both been difficult. Maybe that was why Joanna had been born so sick.

  It was her fault.

  Yet as she looked him, and as she felt his hand against hers, Calliande felt something inside her start to crumble.

  “Ridmark,” she whispered. “I…I…”

  “To arms!”

  Ridmark was on his feet in an instant, staff in his left hand and Oathshield in his right, the blade starting to flicker with white fire. Calliande stood next to him, the magic of the Keeper’s mantle
coming at her call. Odd that even amid sorrow, her battle reflexes still responded so swiftly to danger. Of course, if they didn’t, she might have been killed centuries ago.

  But those reflexes had not been enough to save Gareth and Joachim from Rhodruthain’s spell.

  “Calliande?” said Ridmark.

  At first glance, it didn’t seem like anything was wrong. The camp had come alive at the warning shout, men scrambling to their feet and drawing swords and donning armor, but the gates to the castra remained closed, the walls and battlements silent. Yet Oathshield was burning in Ridmark’s hand, which meant that the sword was responding to dark magic. The necromantic aura hanging over Castra Chaeldon?

  Or something else?

  “Let me take a look,” said Calliande.

  She reached for the Sight and swept it over the castra.

  At once she saw that something was wrong. The necromantic aura hung over the fortress like a veil of thick black smoke, or perhaps the kind of fog that sometimes rolled off the sea near Tarlion on cold mornings. Yet now the aura was writhing, boiling like a pot of soup over a fire.

  “Archaelon is working a spell,” said Calliande. “Or maybe Khurazalin. I’m not sure which.”

  “To arms!” came the voice again. This time Calliande recognized Tamlin’s voice. “To arms! To arms! The foe comes!”

  “Come on,” said Ridmark, and Calliande nodded and followed him.

  ###

  Ridmark hurried through the camp.

  He had feared a panic, but the hoplites were too experienced for that. The men hastened to their feet, weapons ready, and started to assemble in lines facing the castra, their decurions bawling orders and shouting threats at any man who moved too slowly. Oathshield shivered in his hand, the sword’s fury filling his mind. The soulblade was reacting in wrath to the dark magic radiating from Castra Chaeldon.

  Just what was the enemy doing?

  Tamlin Thunderbolt stood at the edge of the camp, his dark elven sword ready in his hand as he gazed at the walls. Sir Aegeus and Sir Parmenio had already joined him, and Ridmark spotted Rallios and Kalussa hurrying near.

  “Well?” said Ridmark, stopping next to the younger man. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tamlin. “But something is coming, I’m sure of it.”

  “What the devil is this?” said Kalussa, breathing a little hard. She looked annoyed at having been awakened. “The gates are closed.”

  “It doesn’t look like the enemy is doing anything,” said Rallios.

  Parmenio shook his head. “The sentries didn’t see anyone moving in the hills.”

  “I think it’s a magical attack,” said Tamlin. There was utter certainty in his voice. “If you can cast the spell to sense magical forces, do so. You’ll see that I’m right.”

  “No need,” said Calliande. “He’s right. Someone is casting a powerful necromantic spell within the castra. I’m not sure what, though.” The staff of the Keeper started to burn with white fire in her hand as she called magic.

  “Rallios,” said Ridmark, thinking fast. “Keep the men ready, but have them spread out. Lady Calliande will try to counter whatever Archaelon and Khurazalin throw at us, but if they throw a ball of fire or a blast of dark magic at us, the fewer men it hits, the better.”

  Rallios nodded and shouted the orders, and as he did, the sky overhead went dark.

  At least, that was what Ridmark thought had happened.

  Six of the thirteen moons had been out, along with a multitude of stars, so the night had been relatively bright. But three of the six moons vanished, and for a wild instant, Ridmark feared that Archaelon had somehow gained the power to pull the moons from the sky. Then he realized that a column of shadow had risen from the castra, a shadow dark enough to make part of the sky vanish.

  “What are they doing?” said Ridmark.

  “I don’t know,” said Calliande, her voice distant. Then her eyes widened. “Defend yourselves! They are coming!”

  Ridmark looked around just as dozens of blue points of light seemed to rise out of the ground around them.

  ###

  A horrible chill stabbed through Kalussa, turning her limbs to ice and threatening to freeze her blood in her veins.

  She had never known a chill like that before. The winters of Owyllain were mild, more prone to rainy spells than to snow, and she had only seen snow twice in her life. Even in the snow, she had never been this cold, had never experienced a chill that seemed to reach into her chest and coil icy fingers around her heart.

  Alarmed, she turned, calling magical fire to her fingers as she tried to find the source of the chill.

  An instant later the wraiths rose from the ground.

  There were dozens of the undead creatures. Each one looked as if it had been fashioned from shadow and writhing gray mist. Some of them looked like orcish warriors, ghostly and translucent, and others were men of Owyllain, armored in bronze and plumed helmets. Every single one of the wraiths had a ghostly blue fire burning in their eyes, like Archaelon’s other undead. It was seemingly the only solid thing about the ethereal creatures.

  Ethereal or not, the touch of the wraiths was solid, and it was deadly.

  A wraith touched a hoplite next to Kalussa. The man screamed in agony, but he did not scream for long. In a single instant, he turned from a healthy man of thirty to an ancient of a century, his skin scored with deep lines, his hair turning from brown to white. The instant after that, he was nothing more than a desiccated skeleton draped in crumbling skin, and bones and armor collapsed to the ground. All around Kalussa she heard the screams and the shouts as the wraiths attacked.

  The wraith who had killed the hoplite reached towards her. It looked like the ghostly image of an orcish raider, clad in fur and leather. Kalussa snarled and cast a spell, throwing all her magical strength into the attack. A bolt of fire leaped from her fingers and slammed into the wraith. The fire dispersed as it struck the wraith, ripping through it like flames through a leaf.

  The undead thing hissed, but the fire did not destroy it. The wraith lunged towards Kalussa, and she jumped back. Her boot came down wrong on the rocky ground, and she lost her balance and fell backward, her armor clanging.

  The wraith reached for her, and Kalussa tried to get away, tried to stand, tried to work a spell…

  White fire flashed, and a blue sword ripped through the wraith. The white fire exploded through it, and the wraith unraveled into nothingness. Kalussa turned her head, her heart pounding, and Ridmark stepped past her, Oathshield trailing fire from its blade.

  ###

  Ridmark destroyed another wraith, and then another, the creatures screaming as Oathshield annihilated the dark magic that animated them. No creature of dark magic could stand against the fury of a soulblade, and the wraiths were no exception.

  Yet there were so many of them…and the men of Owyllain had no defense from the creatures. Already a dozen hoplites had fallen to the wraiths’ killing touch, their withered corpses falling to the ground. The hoplites tried to fight back, but it was useless. Their blades of bronze passed through the wraiths like smoke. The Arcanii had better luck, but their elemental spells only slowed the wraiths without destroying them.

  Ridmark had fought wraiths like this before, ten years earlier. He had been looking for the Frostborn, and wraiths had attacked him and Calliande and Kharlacht and Brother Caius and Sir Gavin in the marshes near Moraime in the Wilderland. Except Gavin hadn’t been a Swordbearer back then and Ridmark hadn’t carried a soulblade, and the only way they had been able to wound the wraiths had been through…

  “Calliande!” shouted Ridmark, and her blue gaze met his through the chaos. “The day we met Morigna!”

  She blinked, and then nodded and cast a spell.

  White fire blazed up the length of her staff and then exploded from her in a ring that spread across the battlefield.

  ###

  Tamlin hurled another arc of lightning at the approaching wraith. The
blue-white coil of lightning wrapped around the undead creature, slowing it for a second, but the creature kept coming. Tamlin slashed with his sword of dark elven steel. Unlike a sword of bronze, his blade seemed to pain the wraith, but it did nothing to destroy the creature.

  Tamlin had feared he would die a hundred times, maybe a thousand times, since he had been taken as a slave to Urd Maelwyn. Sometimes he had almost welcomed the thought. But since Tysia had been murdered, he had wanted to know the truth.

  “Find me again,” Tysia had said. “The New God is coming.”

  What did that mean?

  It seemed he would never find out.

  Then brilliant white light flared in the darkness. White fire shone from Calliande’s staff and exploded across the battle. For an instant, Tamlin thought Calliande had cast a mighty spell to strike down the undead, but the white fire passed through both living men and wraiths without harm.

  The fire instead wrapped around his sword blade, wreathing it in white flames.

  It was so unexpected that Tamlin blinked in surprise. The fire looked like the same sort that burned on Ridmark’s soulblade. Did that mean the fire could strike the wraiths? Tamlin stepped back and saw dozens of hoplite swords had burst into similar white fire.

  “Now!” Ridmark’s voice thundered over the fighting. “Attack!”

  Tamlin obeyed and drove his sword towards the wraith.

  This time, he felt the sword catch on the immaterial creature. The wraith shrieked, and the white fire on Tamlin’s sword blazed and spread through the undead thing.

  The wraith unraveled and dissolved into nothingness.

  Tamlin threw himself into the battle, slashing and stabbing at any wraith that approached.

  ###

  Calliande gritted her teeth and concentrated, holding the spell in place.

  She was strong enough to enchant the swords of about fifty hoplites at once. Dividing her power and her concentration into that many different directions was a challenge, but she held on, maintaining the flow of power to the blades of the hoplites.