The Shadowmage Trilogy (Twilight of Kerberos: The Shadowmage Books)

by Matthew Sprange

  Lucius found himself disagreeing with that sentiment, however noble it might have been, but this was not the place to argue. That could be left to their next Council meeting, preferably voiced by Wendric. Swinging himself over the wall, Lucius gripped the ladder tightly with hands and ankles, and slid down. He hit the ground smiling. They were far from safe, he knew, as the streets would be flooded with Vos soldiers, but just being able to leave the Citadel seemed a huge step.

  When Elaine slid down next to him, she beckoned.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” she said. “Then we can see just how much damage we have done to the Empire.”

  “And start planning the next strike?” he asked, still smiling.

  “Indeed.”

  The rest of the thieves had dispersed quickly, spreading throughout the city to brag quietly about their heroic escape, nurse wounds or mourn lost friends. Elaine and Lucius ran through the deserted market, but slowed down once they reached the quieter side streets. The streets were unusually busy for the time of evening, people hurrying past them everywhere they went. Lucius dismissed it as a by-product of the thieves’ reign of chaos that evening, but was puzzled as he saw more and more families, parents often carrying children. They all seemed to be heading to the eastern quarter of the city.

  It was Lucius who first voiced his doubts. They had turned onto Meridian Street, the wide cobbled thoroughfare that rolled down the gentle slope Turnitia was built on, from the north gate to the harbour. As he looked down to the city westwards, he gasped.

  “My God, Elaine, how many buildings did you tell our men to fire?”

  “Just...” She trailed off, eyes widening as she took in the devastation.

  The entire western quarter of the city was ablaze, a wall of flame that was gradually creeping through the city, consuming one building after another. Rising from the burning ruins, thick smoke poured into the sky, completely blotting out Kerberos and the stars with an impenetrable black pall. A mass of people flooded the lower end of Meridian Street, all of them climbing the slope away from the flames. Those in front were running while others, much slower, struggled with hand carts and wagons full of whatever possessions they had managed to save from the fire.

  “No way,” Elaine said, still in shock, as the fastest of the fleeing mob began to pass them. “No way did our thieves do this.”

  “Someone got carried away,” Lucius muttered. “Got careless. God, what have we done?”

  “One reckless thief did not do all this. What about those who escaped the Citadel? Some were itching for vengeance.”

  Lucius looked at the rolling inferno, seeing it stretch right across the city, burning through homes and warehouses alike. It was nearing the main commercial hub of Turnitia, the flames beginning to lick around the shops situated on Ring Street, near the westernmost of the Five Markets.

  “No, there hasn’t been enough time – this happened while we were in the Citadel. Someone planned this, Elaine.”

  “Not us,” Elaine said firmly.

  “No, not us,” he repeated. He began to feel an icy hand grip his stomach. “Come on. People are going to need our help.”

  Elaine looked as though she would protest for a moment, then dutifully followed him down Meridian Street. Their progress slowed as they tried to push their way through the crowd, and they were met with dazed, smoke-stained faces. Seeing the crowd get even thicker further on, Lucius grabbed Elaine’s arm and steered her off the thoroughfare and into the side streets.

  Even these were packed with people, all trying to escape the fires, but squeezing between families and carts, they made better progress. The crowds gradually melted away.

  They were near the westernmost market, and though the fires were still at least a quarter-mile away, Lucius could feel the heat from them, swept up through the city by the sea wind which fanned the flames. An orange glow surrounded everything, even when the fires were out of sight.

  They heard the crackling of burning wood, and the occasional thundering crash of a burning building, followed by bright cinders spiralling up into the dark sky. Screams and cries for help reached their ears as a steady rain of ash begin to fall, driven before the flames by the sheer heat. The inferno stretched horizon to horizon.

  “There is no way this can be stopped,” Elaine said. “It’s too large.”

  “Even a fire this big can be made to burn itself out,” Lucius said. “Look.”

  He pointed down a junction of streets where, at the far end, a squad of Vos soldiers were hacking away at a low building with halberds, axes and whatever tools they had managed to find on the streets.

  “They’re creating a firebreak.”

  “They’re not completely useless then,” Elaine said. “Will it work?”

  “If there are enough soldiers here, then yes, they have a chance.”

  “So what can we do?”

  Lucius watched the soldiers as they brought one exterior wall crashing down, one of them leaping back as a section of the first floor tumbled down near him.

  “I think I can do that,” he said. “With magic, I mean.”

  “You can destroy a building?” Elaine asked, incredulously.

  “It will be difficult, but I think I can do enough damage to make a building collapse. After all, they are using nothing more than hand tools,” he said, gesturing to the soldiers.

  “And if they just happen to be passing by while you are casting your great spell?”

  “That’s where you come in. Watch my back, and we’ll see if we can’t help stop this.”

  Waving a hand to indicate he should lead, Elaine followed Lucius along a side street, away from the soldiers. As they ran, the screams of terrified citizens grew louder, but Lucius guessed they were coming from behind the wall of flame, and were beyond help. Turning back onto a straight road that led to Ring Street, Lucius looked for a suitable building, but his eye was drawn to the bodies strewn across the ground before him.

  Many had been burned alive, the blackened, crisp corpses twisted in agonising contortions by the heat, smoke still rising from the motionless forms. He did not need to mention to Elaine that the fire was close but had not yet reached this part of the city, and again, he felt something cold in his stomach. Elaine tugged at his sleeve, and pointed at another set of bodies. These had not been burned but were lying in unnatural positions, their limbs broken, as if they had been thrown against the side of a building or dashed against the ground like a rag doll.

  As they stood, dumbfounded, they heard a choking cry. Lucius looked around for the source, finally fixing upon an upended wagon, overturned by the evacuating crowd in their haste. Rushing over, he put his shoulder against the wagon’s broad wooden side and heaved, but he might as well have tried to move the Cathedral.

  Elaine had dropped to her hands and knees and was looking underneath the wagon, crawling around to get a better look at who was there. She bent lower, so her head was beneath the overturned rim of the wagon, and Lucius heard her speaking softly. Standing up, she walked around to his side of the wagon.

  “There’s a child there,” she said. “Lord alone knows how it survived the wagon flipping over, but I can’t reach it. Can we roll it back?”

  Lucius shook his head. “It’s far too heavy. Stand back though, I think I can move it.”

  “Careful,” Elaine warned him. “If it slides, you’ll crush the child. Try to flip it from the front, there may be more room.”

  “I can do better than that,” he said, as he vaulted up onto its chassis.

  Feeling the grain of the wooden planks that formed the wagon’s floor, Lucius let the flow of magic course through his body, directing it to his right hand. Flattening his palm, he drove it through the wood like a spear, the spell hardening his flesh and lending strength to the thrust.

  Wood splintered as his hand broke through a plank and, magic suffusing his arm until it burned, he wrenched his hand back, tearing a hole through the floor of the wagon. The spell dissipated,
and he heaved at one of the planks. He studied the hole he had made and waved Elaine over.

  “You are smaller than I am – can you get through there?”

  Elaine joined him on top of the wagon, but looked doubtfully at the thin gap. She bent over it and whispered down.

  “It’s alright, don’t struggle. I’m going to get you out of there.”

  For all the time he had known her, Lucius had never heard a single note of tenderness in Elaine’s voice, and he felt his heart warm to hear it now. He watched as Elaine lay flat on the underside of the wagon, and wriggled through the hole until her head, shoulder and one arm was buried within it. When she started to shuffle back, Lucius grabbed her waist and helped her. As soon as her head was free, Elaine braced herself with her free arm and pulled a dirty, soot-covered child in a ragged shift free from the wreckage.

  The child looked at them with wide eyes, the only part of its body that was not covered with soot or grime. Lucius could not even tell whether it was a boy or girl until Elaine, finally, after gentle coaxing, persuaded the child to talk.

  “What happened to you, then?” Elaine asked.

  “I was running with everyone,” the boy said. Lucius guessed he was in his early teens, but short for his age. “From the fire.”

  “With your parents?”

  The boy shook his head. “No, they’re dead.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Elaine said, shocked by the boy’s bluntness. He gave her an odd look.

  “They died years ago,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  Lucius smiled, in spite of himself. “He’s one of Sebastian’s lot.”

  “A beggar?” Elaine asked.

  The boy looked up defiantly at her. “It’s an honest profession.”

  “You don’t need to explain,” Lucius said. “Can you tell us what happened here? How did the fire start? Was it the thieves?”

  “They started fires, sure. We all saw what they were doing. People started panicking, soldiers started running around. And then death arrived.”

  “Death?”

  The boy shrugged. “That was what people were calling it. It floated, and looked like a woman. It looked like the saints look, in the pictures – but saints are supposed to be nice, aren’t they? This one killed. Went from street to street, killing and killing everyone it met. It came along here. Started killing soldiers and when they were all gone, it started killing everyone else. I hid...”

  Lucius and Elaine looked at one another meaningfully.

  “I’ve seen bodies like that before, Lucius,” Elaine said, venom creeping into her voice.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “So have I.”

  “It’s your witch, isn’t?” There was accusation in Elaine’s voice.

  Lucius grasped her shoulders. “Elaine, I want you to leave now. Take the boy with you. Find somewhere safe to hole up.”

  “The hell I will!”

  “Elaine, you cannot fight this woman. She’s too powerful.”

  “No one bests me twice, Lucius,” Elaine spat, and she jumped off the wagon to walk away, heading toward the oncoming flames.

  She called back to him. “I presume we just follow the screams.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE SCREAMS DID indeed lead the way.

  As they drew closer to the raging inferno, Lucius and Elaine felt the heat building on their skin. The air was hard to breathe, as though the flames were sucking it from the city, intent on turning Turnitia into a wasted ruin.

  Lucius saw that, contrary to what he had seen when further away, the fires were not one perfect straight line consuming all in their path as they advanced, but patches of destruction racing one another through the city. As the fires reached the Square of True Believers, they slowed, perhaps suppressed by the Lord of All Himself as they licked the buildings nearest the Cathedral, which had remained untouched by their terrible heat. As they burnt through the tightly packed houses that spread away from the harbour, the flames increased in pace, surging ahead as they gouged a ragged, blackened wound in the city.

  The streets were mostly empty; they saw only a few men and women, usually on their own, stumbling away from the oncoming flames, looking dazed.

  Over the crackle of the flames and the crash of broken buildings falling under the onslaught, Lucius and Elaine both heard calls for help. Whether from those trapped in buildings already aflame or watching their loved ones burn, each cry pulled at their consciences, but they pushed on, following the loudest screams, Lucius dreading what he would find.

  All around, dogs barked frantically.

  As they neared the firestorm, houses burning on either side of the street, the heat became unbearable, and Elaine staggered, gasping for breath. Lucius put an arm around her shoulders and closed his eyes, summoning an arcane, invisible globe about them. Elaine looked up at him in surprise as cool air washed over her, and their breathing became less laboured.

  They heard a man cry out in agony, somewhere very close, just beyond the line of low houses on their right. It was a gargled scream, born of pure torture, and it ended abruptly. An instant later, they felt the ground tremble as a tremendous crash resounded about the street, and a column of ash and cinders rose high into the pitch black sky from behind the roofs of the dwellings.

  Propelling Elaine forward, keeping her close so she did not leave the protection of his globe, Lucius led them down a narrow alley between the burning houses. Fire arched over them as it leapt from roof to roof, lighting the alley in a deep orange glow, and he began to run as he felt his grip on the shielding globe begin to slip.

  Rushing out the other end of the alley, they skidded to a stop, confronted with a scene of horror.

  Blackened, burned and twisted bodies littered the street before them. The buildings on either side, two and three storey homes that had once belonged to some of the wealthier trade families of the district, were pouring fire and smoke into the sky, and some had started to collapse. A sheet of flame rose from the far end of the street, crossing its entire width as though the cobbles themselves were burning, and driven against this towering fire were a dozen people, cowering on the ground under the oppressive heat of the flames around them. Already, their clothes and hair were beginning to smoulder, smoke trailing up from each to be quickly lost in the maelstrom of soot and embers.

  Before the people was a ragged line of half a dozen Vos soldiers, clearly daunted but resolute in their duty to protect themselves and the people behind them. Most were armed with spears and took cover behind shields, but two were armed with crossbows, and they pointed them upwards, toward one of the burning buildings.

  Lucius looked at what they were aiming at, and gasped. The building’s entire front wall had already crumbled, opening the rooms inside to the rest of the world. They burned ferociously but, hovering just in front of the second floor, suspended in open space by a column of air summoned to do her bidding, was Adrianna.

  Standing motionless in mid-air, she looked down on the small crowd with imperious wrath. She was dressed in her usual black tunic, and wore a dark cloak that billowed out behind her in the air currents that held her aloft.

  One of the cowering citizens crawled forward to the line of soldiers. A middle-aged man in clothes that had been half burned away, he started to chant, making obscure gestures with his hands, and Lucius suddenly realised he was a wizard, perhaps one of the Empire’s own.

  He had no chance to release his spell or even finish its construction, as Adrianna glared down at him and pointed. Lucius felt her magic surge forward, striking the wizard and the soldiers around him. They crumpled before his eyes, as if a great weight had been thrown casually on top of them, flattening them as they fell. Limbs, necks and bodies were twisted at angles that were terrible to behold, and none moved thereafter.

  Outside of the spell’s effects, the two crossbowmen nodded as they agreed upon a plan, and they broke ranks, each skirting to one side of Adrianna. Aiming high, they loosed their bo
lts, the dark missiles almost invisible against the glare of fires around them.

  Adrianna did not betray any movement or reaction, but the bolts stopped suddenly in mid-air, just a foot away from her heart, as if they had been fired against an invisible wall. Their points blunted, they fell harmlessly to the street below where they clattered uselessly on the bone-dry cobbles.

  This seemed to attract Adrianna’s attention, and as she raised both her arms high above her head, the two crossbowmen followed suit, kicking and screaming as tightly controlled winds picked up their bodies and hurled them into the sky.

  Lucius did not see where they landed, as they were thrown clear over burning roofs. He strode down the street towards Adrianna, Elaine just a few paces behind, neither entirely sure of what they were going to do.

  “Aidy!” Lucius called.

  Slowly, Adrianna turned to face him, the soldiers and city folk forgotten for the moment.

  “Lucius,” she said, acknowledging his arrival. Her voice was calm and level, as though spoken in normal conversation, but still he heard it clearly above the howling of the flames and screams of the dying.

  “Aidy, what are you doing?” Lucius asked, despairing.

  “This is the time, Lucius,” she said. “Now. Right now. Help me erase the Vos scum from the city and we will finally be rid of their influence. Finally, we will be free!”

  He gestured at the burning buildings around them. “Aidy, there will be no city! You haven’t declared war on the Empire, you are killing everyone.”

  “They had their chance to leave,” she said, nodding towards the frightened people below her. “Instead, they chose to hide behind Vos. They have chosen their path. Their lives and homes are forfeit!”

  “What justice is that?” Lucius called up to her, desperate to keep her talking, even as his mind raced to find a way through this.

  She looked down with a puzzled expression. “What in hell has justice got to do with anything? Was it justice when Vos soldiers first marched into this city? Was it justice when they started wiping out anyone who opposed them? Or was it justice when they killed Forbeck? No, Lucius, this is not about justice. All that is left is victory for us, and total, crippling defeat for them. It is not enough that we drive them out – they must be too scared to come back for fear of what we will do to them.”