by Ron Collins
Without thinking, he harvested that energy. It filtered through his body with the sharp sensation of cold water drank parched.
Garrick fought against the hunger, fought against the urge to inhale them all in one maddening breath. He leaned against a tabletop, feeling the life force he had consumed and pressing back as Braxidane’s hunger wailed against his restraint.
He felt movement of mages racing for exits.
Had the boy escaped? Had this darkness destroyed him? The idea was an arrow in his gut. He could not have devoured Will, could he? As these thoughts formed, Garrick saw Reynard crawling from under a broken table.
“Traitor!” he called as he stepped forward.
A look of panic crossed the Freeborn’s face, and magic formed on his fingers.
Garrick pinned the assassin into a corner and felt the tide of his dark power draw toward the mage. He could strip Reynard of his life force. He had done it before.
He took a stride, and reached his hand forward.
There came a distant blast, a low, rumbling explosion from somewhere outside the chamber.
Garrick paused his reach toward Reynard, and turned his head to the sound. It came from outside the government center, from the manor yard if Garrick heard right.
Another blast rumbled. Yes, the manor yard.
Puzzled, he turned back to find Reynard had slipped away.
Chapter 10
Neuma marched through town, and approached the government center’s gate. Dorfort was burning around her, and Hezarin’s magic flared again and again.
A guard stood before her and before the gate, his battle axe gleaming in the light of fires.
“You can’t come in,” the guardsman said.
She channeled magic, and closed her fist. The man gave a choked sputter, and Neuma cast a blast that tore a hole in the foundation of the gate itself.
Snow crunched under her boots as she continued into the courtyard.
A satisfying murmur rose among the people as she strode across the manor yard. A guard raced over the expanse to report her presence. Neuma let him go. She was in no danger from the city’s guardsmen, and someone had to tell Garrick of her arrival—though her guess was the Garrick would sense it soon enough, regardless.
A rumbling came from the government center, a blast or pounding of some sort, she couldn’t tell which, but nothing else seemed to be happening, and she did not break stride. Two guardsmen stood in her way. Neuma spoke a word and threw them against the stone wall.
An aura of magic flared from the wall above.
It was a Torean mage, probably new to the craft from the rickety way he built his link. He had run from the building and now his startled face spoke delicious volumes.
Neuma cast blue flames that ripped through the evening with a thundering explosion. The young mage gave a terrified scream that was cut short. The rumbling faded and the dust of debris died down to leave the sight of a gaping hole ripped in the upper walkway of the center’s wall.
More Toreans filed into the area.
Two drew up short, and despite their surprise, prepared a spell that would knit their energy together.
Freeborn, she thought with derision.
Their mages would never be as strong as those of an order, and their attempts to cast in tandem were fanciful at best. Hezarin’s magic filled her. She built a shield, and smirked as Torean fire flowed around her. She was invincible to them, she thought. Untouchable. She sang with laughter and grinned with wild-eyed fury.
Neuma would destroy the Torean Freeborn today just as Garrick had done to her own Koradictines. She would bring the Freeborn to its knees, and then she would revel in watching as Hezarin destroyed Garrick himself.
The plane would be hers.
“Come and get what you deserve,” she yelled as prismatic lightning forked from her palms to splay across the courtyard with another thundering blast.
Voices rose across the pitch, the cries of children, screams of women, and the deeper groans of men. They were all the same, Neuma thought. Everyone was the same when fear overtook them. No cloaks. No veils.
The aroma of scorched wood and electric ozone came from everywhere at once, and the ground rocked with the force of her magic. She had them running now. She would rule them soon, and with Hezarin beside her, she would be unstoppable.
A Torean cast fire.
Her ball of flame met it in a mid-air explosion that caused windows to rattle. She rolled black energy from her fingers and wrapped it around the offending mage, giving the spell a final tug that ripped life from his body.
A door opened, and a tall man stepped out. His black hair was grayed at the temples. He stood with his feet apart, a blue and purple cloak heavy with golden brocade falling from his thick shoulders to cover the shape of a sword that was obviously on his belt underneath. He was old, but his body still held its angles.
“I am Lord Ellesadil of Dorfort,” the man said. “And I demand you bring an end to this.”
Neuma smiled.
“I grant your wish,” she said.
The lord flinched, raising his arm in a useless attempt to protect himself as she cast fire that arced through the evening.
Chapter 11
Garrick smelled fear, and dust, and confusion, and grime as he hurried through the hallway and toward a doorway that led outside to the wall. The hallway was filled with panic. City officials scurried from room to room, and the shrill voices of the servant staff filled the hallway.
His hunger screamed at him as he ran.
Another explosion shook the building.
The hunger pulled deep maws of life force from him, stealing precious energy he had gathered from the dead Freeborn. Each step was harder to take than the last, each needed more effort, more concentration, more outright desire than the one before it. His legs nearly buckled on him as he ran, and he had to hold himself against the wall to catch his breath.
The blood-laden stink of Koradictine wizardry came to him before he arrived at the doorway. Voices cried out as he stepped into the bitter cold of the darkening night.
Much of the wall had been destroyed, and much of the walkway had been turned to burning tinder. But the flooring that abutted the main building was still there. From this place, high atop the government center’s wall, Garrick saw bodies littering the ground. Life force hung in the air, as sweet as the aroma of bread straight from the oven.
The sorceress strode across the manor yard.
She was casting.
The target was none other than Lord Ellesadil, ruler of Dorfort itself.
Garrick had no time to spare.
He gritted his teeth, and pulled at his link to the plane of magic.
The instant before her blast took Ellesadil, Neuma’s magic burst into a cloud of foul mist.
She yelled with surprise.
Ellesadil looked as startled as she felt.
She raised her gaze to the top of the wall.
“Garrick,” she said with an enlightened tone.
Neuma had seen Garrick at both Caledena and God’s Tower, though it had been from a distance each time. The Torean god-touched had seemed frail to her then, thin and gaunt. Up close the man looked no more threatening. He was tall and gangly with lean muscles and a mass of longish hair. In a different situation, she might have even considered him attractive.
“I wondered when you would arrive,” she said as she leaned her head back and felt energy pour into her body.
The Koradictine cast a fan of black serpents at him, snakes writhing, bats wheedling, and dragons snapping with teeth of yellow flame. Garrick countered with a shield of raw magestuff.
The spells clashed with a clap of thunder so loud Garrick cringed.
The smell of carbon and blood grew thick in the air.
“You know my name,” Garrick said, placing one foot gingerly on the platform’s edge. “I, however, don’t have the privilege of knowing yours.”
The Koradictine strutted forward, her cape fl
owing in the winter air.
“You will know it soon enough, Garrick. As will all on this plane. My name is Neuma, and I’ve come to claim Dorfort for my lord, Hezarin.”
“You’re a little presumptuous, aren’t you?” Garrick replied.
Lord Ellesadil stood defiantly in the manor yard, his jaw holding the same set it had when he was giving the Toreans their eviction notice.
“This is my city, Garrick. I will handle it.”
“Do not fear, Lord Ellesadil,” Neuma said. “I’ll provide you your chance when I am through with Garrick.”
Ellesadil drew his sword.
“I’ll not be treated as a child.”
Neuma cast another fiery spell toward Ellesadil.
Garrick leapt from his rail, catching his fall with magic and deflecting the Koradictine’s spell as he landed between the two. Neuma’s fireball impacted at the lord’s feet, and the explosion threw Ellesadil through the air and to the ground where then he laid without motion.
Garrick dug into his dwindling pool of magic and turned toward Neuma, but the Koradictine was ready for him.
A golden blast threw him against a mud brick oven. The back of his head cracked so hard that his vision swam. He slumped to the ground, dazed. It took everything he could muster to roll to his knees. The Koradictine was fast, though, and she was strong. He had been wrong to underestimate her.
He rose painfully to his feet.
He had nothing left, and the blackness inside him pounded against his head.
It wanted out, it needed out.
But Garrick saw what would happen once Braxidane’s magic had its head. He imagined himself cutting a swath through the city, burning buildings, destroying people, and filling himself beyond the point of bloating with the life force of the dead. He swallowed the idea down, feeling it stick in his throat like a wad of dry straw. But the all too familiar ball of the hunger’s malignant patience fought him, its aura born of the instinctive knowledge that Garrick could not defeat it forever, and the certainty that every postponement merely served to drive it to greater heights in the end.
He remembered the village of Sjesko, and the hundred lives he had taken. He remembered the tunnels of Arderveer. If he let the darkness loose now he shuddered to know the damage he would render to a place the size of Dorfort. Yet to hold it cost him dearly, and he needed to deal with this Koradictine.
“I have Hezarin’s aid,” Neuma said as she stepped nearer. Her expression was a clot of gloating and masochism. “I cannot lose.”
He glared upward with bloodshot eyes.
“Beware of planewalkers,” he said. “They’ve been known to stretch the truth.”
Neuma’s hand rose, and a sizzling cone of blue fell over Garrick. Only his casting of a reflexive shield kept him from a grisly end. He pulled on his link, and cast a frail bolt of energy at the Koradictine. It missed, but gave him a precious moment to breathe.
A small, female voice came from across the way.
Amanda, the young Freeborn, chanted.
Her magic swirled, and a green lasso rose above her head. It looped around Neuma, tightening over her shoulders and holding her arms to her side.
Neuma laughed, then.
“Surely this is a joke,” she said, shredding the restraint with a shrug of her shoulders, and wheeling to cast the same spell back at Amanda, who fell to the ground, writhing and wriggling, unable to break the bonds.
“If you’re going to cast a spell,” Neuma sneered, “at least have the decency to cast it well.”
Then came Seao-da, a wizard who had joined the Freeborn only within the last week. He cast a bolt of energy that lit the tattooed patterns on his face, but that shattered in mid-air.
Neuma twisted her hand and Seao-da fell to his knees, wordlessly clutching his chest.
The Freeborn, Garrick thought. They were coming for him—some of them, at least, the few who truly believed in Sunathri’s original vision.
He stood as best he could.
His back hurt, but he ignored the pain to pull what magestuff he could manage from the plane of magic and cast it into defensive spells that slowed Neuma’s advance.
The Koradictine threw another ball of fire in his direction.
Garrick deflected it.
The sparking debris fell into a row of corded wood, hissing and smoldering in the darkness. Another bolt of lightning came, then another. Garrick turned them each away, but the work numbed his arms and his shoulders felt like they were on fire.
He fell back, his hunger growing black and cold.
As he stepped away, his glance went to the window of his room. It was an unconscious movement, one he had done ever since Ellesadil assigned him to the space. Before, though, that glance was filled with wonderment of how he had risen from street urchin to fill such a place.
But today he saw something different.
Today he saw the shadowed face of Will, standing there in slack-jawed concern.
Neuma grinned as she followed his gaze.
“I see,” she said, whirling to cast a looping rope of fire toward the opening.
“Will!” Garrick yelled.
The boy disappeared behind the window just as the fire struck, and Garrick had no way to tell if Will was hurt.
He dug deep, though. He gathered the tiny scraps of what energy he still had into a nexus point. It didn’t matter, he thought. The darkness was coming no matter what he did, and it would wreck its devastation through him no matter what he wanted. This hunger that flashed with quicksilver edge in the darkness of night was nothing less than the corruption of the planewalkers themselves.
Somewhere, Braxidane was giving that wry chuckle of his.
But Garrick could at least do this one thing. He could at least rid the plane, and his Freeborn siblings, of this one Koradictine menace.
He screamed then, and he raced forward with a vision of utter clarity, throwing everything he had into this last raw burst of power.
Neuma backpedaled toward the entry gates, grinning.
“That’s more like what I expected, my friend,” she said.
She twisted her hands, casting a whirling set of spinning balls on connective rope. The contraption twisted up Garrick’s feet, and pulled them together.
He fell into the snow, his face buried in a drift, his head swimming with fatigue. It was hard to breathe.
One of Neuma’s boots filled Garrick’s vision. The cold flash of a shark’s movement turned inside him, and he felt her life force pulsing like a beacon, so near. So near.
“You are weak, Garrick. That’s why the Torean order was fated to fail from its very beginning.”
Garrick rolled to see her better.
The air became choked with the thickest smell of blood magic he had ever felt.
Hezarin.
She appeared a ways from Garrick, radiant and thin, her red dress flowing about her, maroon henna curling up her arms and over her forehead.
Neuma’s gaze flickered to the planewalker. She smiled.
“You are just in time, my Lady,” Neuma said.
A glint came from behind Neuma.
A simple flash of lavender in the winter gloaming that Garrick thought was somehow familiar.
The sound of steel in flesh punctuated the moment, and Neuma gave a grunt as a sword blade suddenly protruded from her chest.
Neuma’s eyes bulged, and she fell to her knees.
Behind her stood Darien, and behind Darien was the tall outline of a guard Garrick knew was named Ashgood.
“Save me, Lady,” Neuma said to Hezarin, as she stood there on her knees, frozen in time but tottering, the words bubbly in her chest.
Hezarin’s smile was wicked and cold.
“You served me well, Neuma. You’ve left Garrick right where I wanted him.”
“But?” she responded.
“You’ve proven to be devious, though,” Hezarin said, spell work crackling on her fingertips as she brought them to Neuma’s face. “You kill off
more of my mages than I do.” A single beam of scarlet lit the evening. A hole burned through Neuma’s forehead, and she dropped facedown to the ground.
In the distance, Amanda, her bonds broken with Neuma’s death, scuttled away, and out of the manor yard.
Chapter 12
Garrick tried to get away, but he had no strength. His hand slipped in the mud, and he felt the sudden sting of the winter cold. Hezarin approached, gliding like a cat, the pupils of her eyes drawn wide.
Darien stepped between them, his sword flaring purple, its etched runes writhing along the blade.
“You’ll have to kill me first,” he said.
“That can be arranged,” Hezarin replied, casting magic at him.
“Darien!” Garrick said, throwing the dregs of his life force into a shield around his friend.
The impact sent a curtain of sparks dancing across the grounds.
Hezarin yelled, and pointed a finger at Ashgood.
The man died before he knew what was coming.
Darien glared at Garrick and pushed against the barrier.
“Let me out,” he said.
“I can’t let you die for me,” Garrick replied.
He stood alone and exposed as Hezarin turned like a black widow at the end of her web.
“Protect your friend while you can, Garrick. Funnel your power to him as you will. But I will kill him after I’m through with you.”
A fist of power crashed into Garrick’s chest. He fell against an open wagon, and reached desperately to the wooden wheel to keep himself upright.
“Braxidane!” he yelled. “Braxidane!”
“My brother cannot help you,” she said. “I’ve played his own game against him and cut deals with half the powers in Existence. He cannot come to Adruin now and expect to live.”
Garrick tried to breathe, but drew little value. His vision danced red. She was playing with him, now. She could kill him any time she wanted.
