Talinus padded close to her. “Take what your enemy has used against you and make it your own. Possess it. When their tools have no power over you, you will be free.”
Danica locked eyes with the imp. She nodded. “Let’s go, brother. We don’t want to be late for the party.”
The siblings walked to the foot of the wytchwood. Elias laid a hand on the trunk. “We’re ready, Maya.”
Without delay the wytchwood emitted a green light, which originated in the heart of the trunk and burst out in brilliant aureole that encircled the entirety of the tree and pushed into the mossy earth at its feet. Motes of white light flitted around the energy field, and Elias knew instinctually that each was as alive as he. Luck to you, Starchild, Maya’s voice whispered in his mind.
A sense of weightlessness washed over him then and he felt as light as the energy that surrounded him, and as expansive. The impression of expansion grew greater yet until he lost all awareness of his body. He felt his being shift—that was the only term with which he could begin to articulate the experience—and then he found himself standing beneath the boughs of the sister wytchwood in the royal gardens.
Chapter 38
Wytchwood
Elias crouched close to the trunk of the wytchwood and leaned against it until he recovered his equilibrium. He looked to Danica whose wide-eyed expression told him all he needed to know about her feelings on the short trip. Elias adjusted his sword baldric and whispered, “If Talinus is correct, the illusion that obscures the aspect of the wytchwood should hide us as long as we remain under its boughs.”
Danica nodded. “Can you see the guards posted at the door?”
Elias craned his neck. “No, the hedge is blocking my view.”
“What do we do?”
“Give me a moment to think.” Talinus had told them that Sarad was taking no chances tonight, and thus posted two men at every door in and out of the palace. His meticulousness would have stymied them had they tried to sneak in from outside the palace walls, but since they had circumvented them handily, but three doors stood between them and the throne room where Sarad intended to carry out his fell ritual. The first was at the entrance to the royal gardens, the second at the top of the staircase that connected the gardens to the inner court, and the third being the entrance to the throne room, which would also be barred by an energy barrier.
Elias heard a rustle behind him and he reached for his sword with an oath upon his lips. He turned to find Danica climbing the wytchwood. “What are you doing?” he whispered as loud as he dared.
“You were taking too long, and we’re in a hurry.”
“And you’re too impatient! You’ll get us killed before we get to Sarad.”
“I can see them. Just two, like Talinus said.”
“Good. Listen, I’ll sneak along the hedge and surprise them. You back me up.”
“I have a better idea. Talinus said that we would be invisible as long as we remained close to the tree.”
“It looks like he was right, which is probably the only reason we’re still alive, thanks to your shenanigans.”
“It’s an advantage, brother. We draw them to us and have a proper ambush. They won’t even see us until it’s too late. Then we can hide their bodies in the tree.”
Elias paused and looked up at Danica’s silhouetted features, lit only by starlight, as it was a New Moon. “Brilliant,” he said. “If we make it out of this, you’re never going to let me forget this, are you?”
Elias heard the smile in her voice. “Not a chance. I’ll stay up here and attack from above. You stay by the trunk and pull them in. Ready?”
Before Elias could respond Danica shook a large branch and crowed shrilly. Elias cursed under his breath and drew his sword as quietly as he could manage.
“Did you hear that?” one of the guards said and moments later peered around the hedge.
“Aye,” said the other, “sounds like a wounded pigeon. Rat’s with wings, me mudder used to call ‘em. Why doncha go check it out.”
“Fire and brimstone,” said the first guard and walked around the hedge. Danica gave the branch another shake. “I think you’re right. Just saw a branch move in that big tree.” Danica shook the branch again, with more gusto. “There she goes again. I’m not sure. That’s gotta be one big pigeon.”
“Hold up,” said the guard from the far side of the hedge. “I’m coming. We better check it out just to be sure.”
The first guard, clad in mercenary piece-mail, and bearing the crest of House Oberon on his tunic crept toward the wytchwood. He drew a long-sword. As he passed within reach Danica lowered her rope, which she had tied into a hasty loop with a slip-knot. She dropped the impromptu lasso over the guard’s head and gave it a jerk. Instinctively, she poured her magic through the rope in blue-white ripples of energy that danced along its length like liquid light. The guard went rigid at once, stunned by the shocking spell.
Elias sprung at him, grabbed his tunic, and pulled him under the shadow of the wytchwood. The senseless guard crashed to the ground, face down, with Danica’s lasso still about his neck. Elias gave his hand a shake, numbed from contact with Danica’s magic.
By now the second guard had rounded the hedge and approached the tree. “Firth? Firth, where’d you get to?”
Elias waited until the guard ducked the low hanging boughs of the wytchwood and struck him behind the knees with the flat of his blade. The guard pitched forward onto his knees with a cry, but Danica silenced him in short order, for she dropped from the tree, landed on his shoulders, and wrapped her arm around his mouth. Danica bore him to the ground and wrapped her legs around him as she rolled onto her back. The guard struggled against her but it proved in vain, for he didn’t have the necessary leverage with which to free himself.
Elias laid his naked sword at the guard’s armpit, where his raised arm left an opening in his breastplate. The guard went stock-still. “Be quiet and don’t fight us, and you may yet live,” Elias said. The guard gave a curt nod. “Good. Danica, let him loose.”
“You can’t be serious,” Danica hissed between gritted teeth.
Elias crouched and laid a hand on her arm. “We’re not the enemy. We won’t kill a defenseless man. He wears the tunic of Oberon’s mercenaries. He’s likely just following orders.”
Danica released her hold on him. “What’ll we do with them?”
“Tie them together. By the time they free themselves or are found we will have gained the throne room.”
“We won’t be any trouble,” said the guard as his wild eyes flitted between Elias and Danica. “Oberon doesn’t pay that well.”
“Shall we cut out his tongue so he doesn’t scream?” Danica said and winked at Elias.
“I think not,” said Elias. He crouched by the guard, who still lay on his back. “Tell me, what’s your name?”
“Seamus.”
“Now, Seamus, are there guards posted at the door atop the staircase?”
“Yes,” said Seamus. “Two.”
“Good. Do you know their names?”
“Yes, they’re both Justicars.”
Elias exchanged a glance with Danica. “Seamus, I think we’re going to need your help.”
“I don’t know that I could be much help to you,” Seamus said in a small voice. He looked away from Elias and focused for a beat on his comrade, who was yet unconscious.
“Seamus,” Elias said, “you don’t want me to give you to the witch, do you?” He indicated Danica with a nod.
Seamus swallowed. “Witch?”
Elias spread his hands. “You’ve seen your fellow. He’ll wake—I think—but I don’t envy him the headache he’ll have when he does. Now, can I count on you, Seamus?” The beleaguered guard nodded. “Excellent. Here’s the plan.”
Scant minutes later Seamus knocked on the door atop the staircase that opened into one of the two main halls in the royal wing that connected the great hall, the audience chamber, the greater courtyard, the throne room,
and the royal apartments beyond. “What?” came the immediate reply in heavily accented common.
“Alhazarad, it’s me, Seamus.”
“What?”
“I need to use the privy. Please open the door.”
A disgusted sigh sounded on the other side of the door. “Go outside.”
“I can’t. I had curry last night.”
Silence fell, and then an outburst of ill concealed laughter. The door swung into the hall. “Honestly,” Alhazarad said, “I don’t know where Mirengi’s lackey found you goats.” Alhazarad peered into the stairway. “Seamus, why are all the sconces out? It’s as black as sin in there. Seamus?”
As the Handsman stuck his head into the stairwell Danica let fly the rope that had once served as the object of her torment. Crackling with silvered lightning, the rope wrapped around the throat of the false Justicar. Unlike in the gardens, Danica held nothing of her power back and the Handsman was dead on his feet before she, with a mighty tug, pulled him through the doorway and over the shoulders of Elias, who crouched near the top of the staircase, but outside the small ring of light that bled into the stairwell from the floor above.
“What in the nine hells,” began the other, stunned Handsman before he drew his scimitar and sprinted through the doorway, tracking Danica’s footfalls down the darkened staircase, only to find himself stopped short by four-and-half feet of steel as he impaled himself on Elias’s readied sword.
“Elias?” Danica hissed into the pitch black as the residual flame that had consumed her rope burnt out.
“Yes,” whispered Elias as he heaved the dead Handsman off his sword. “I’m fine.” He turned as he sensed Danica approach. “Nice work—I think the whip may be your favored weapon.”
Danica snorted. “Well, I’ll have to find a new one that’s less flammable.”
Light bloomed in the stairwell as Seamus lit a match and rekindled one of the snuffed wall sconces. “Is it done?” To his credit, his voice quavered but slightly.
“Yes, Seamus,” said Elias, “well done. Now, go hide in the gardens.” The petrified mercenary wasted no time in complying. To Danica Elias said, “Quickly, take one of their cloaks.”
They dragged the bodies deep into the stairwell, then crept into the upper hall and closed the door behind them. The siblings crouched back-to-back while they waited to see if their hasty ambush had drawn any notice. When Elias didn’t hear the sound of boots clacking down the cavernous hallways he leaned his head over his shoulder and whispered, “The men posted outside the throne room may have heard us, but they daren’t leave their post.”
“Fine by me, as long as no one else is coming to sandwich us,” said Danica. “But what now?”
Elias considered but a moment. “Draw up your hood. We walk straight at them. Don’t stop. We take them out quick, press them into the energy wall Talinus told us about.”
“Together.”
“Together,” Elias said. “Now.”
They stood, drew up the hoods of the dead men’s cloaks, went straight down the hall, turned the corner, and walked toward the throne room. The two men that guarded the throne room’s double doors, before which stretched a radiant, scintillating wall of diaphanous, brick-red energy that stretched from floor to ceiling, had their scimitars naked and in hand.
“Ho!” called one of them. “Who goes there?”
“Cease! Show yourselves!” cried the other, even as the first began to chant in the guttural tongue of the necromancer. A ball of black, liquid fire coalesced in his free hand. After a final exclamation he hurled the flickering sphere of fell magic down the hall.
“Gladly,” snarled Elias as he threw back his hood and flourished his sword from underneath his pilfered cloak. He caught the fireball on the tip of his sword. The terrible inertia of the conjured flame pressed against him, but he pushed into it, driving forward with his legs, and the oily flame shuddered and succumbed to his steel, funneling into the enchanted blade, as the runes etched into its base burned with all the fire of a blacksmith’s forge.
The Handsmen exchanged a glance and raised their scimitars into high guards. The Duana siblings closed the distance to the doors without breaking stride and raised their hands as one. Concave rings of force lanced from their palms and hurled the Handsmen from their feet and into the cataclysm of fell magic at their backs.
Chapter 39
Reckoning
The doors to the throne room reverberated under an explosive crash with all the sound and fury of a catapult delivering a payload of burning pitch. Eithne strained her neck against the arcane ropes of puce energy that bound her fast. The granite doors buckled again with a ringing, concussive clamor—THWANG! A sly smile tugged up the corners of the queen’s mouth as she swung her head forward and locked eyes with Sarad Mirengi.
Bryn straightened against the magic that fixed her in the spell-circle and raised her head from her shoulder as a small, bright seed of hope blossomed in her heart and lent her battered mind and body a renewed strength. She licked her lips and forced a laugh from her cracked throat. “He’s come, Sarad,” she rasped. “Elias has come.”
Sarad kept his eyes fixed on the spellform featuring a six sided star that he had drawn on the throne room floor. He said nothing, but the color drained from his face. Sarad refocused on his work. He raised his hands palm-up to the sky and chanted in the spirant tongue of his masters. An inky clot of energy formed above the spell-circle as a beam of mottled light shot down from the moonless night and through the skylight.
The crackling, opaque cloud descended.
THWANG! The doors shrugged on their hinges.
The six Handsmen who stood at the points of the six sided star, each behind one of the sacrifices—Ogden, Phinneas, Agnar, Lar, Bryn, and the queen—whose very essence was to be harvested to power the fell ritual, joined their voices to Sarad’s incantations. The star and the sweeping characters and sigils that Sarad had fastidiously etched into the marble of the throne room floor emitted a scarlet light.
“You best hurry, apostate,” cried Ogden, “your death is behind those doors!”
“Lords of House Senestrati,” Sarad screamed. “Undying shades of the utterdark, I invoke thee!”
THWANG!
Six rays of black light erupted from the center of the cloud and speared each member of the queen’s party in the solar plexus. “May the vitalis of these six usurpers break the geas that binds you and bars your get from these lands, for nigh is the House of Denar no more!” The six sacrifices levitated toward the engorged miasma of fell magic.
THWANG!
All eyes turned to the entryway as the doors blew into the throne room in a burst of cerulean spellfire. Through the heart of the detonation rushed Elias Duana, Danica at his side, his duster flapping in the preternatural wind. Without breaking stride, Elias hurled his sword, aflame with a blaze of white magic, like a javelin into the pulsating mass beneath the skylight.
The two arcane forces repelled each other with such vehemence that the glut of dark magic exploded back through the skylight, vaporizing the stained glass, while the sword spun to the floor in a ring of white fire, sundering the spell-circle and showering all occupants of the room with powdered marble before skittering across the throne room and ricocheting off the wall.
The queen’s party dropped. Likewise, the Handsmen behind them were heaved from their feet in an arcane backlash as the spell they used to immobilize the queen’s party broke under the torrent of arcane forces that tore through the chamber. The queen’s party and their fell wardens alike lay stunned, while Sarad Mirengi and Elias Duana stared each other down as the marble dust settled like lazy snowfall.
“Impressive,” said Sarad, standing firm in the center of the star, where all lines of the spellform intersected. “But tell me, Marshal, how will you turn aside my magic, now that you are bereft of your father’s precious sword?” The necromancer spun his hands, one over the other, shaping a stain of black energy veined with crimson lightning
between his palms.
“Protect the queen,” Elias said to Danica, although his eyes never left Sarad’s. “The necromancer is mine.”
For perhaps the first time in her life, Danica wasted no time on words and sprinted for the queen, short-sword and dagger in hand. She slid on her knees, barreling aside the stupefied Eithne, who swooned on her knees at the bottom point of the spellform, perpendicular to Sarad’s position in the center, even as his sphere of dark magic shot overhead. Agnar, she saw, was the first to recover having risen to an unsteady crouch. Acting on intuition she cried his name and tossed him her sword, before whirling about and burying her dagger into the stirring Handsman that had held Eithne captive.
Meanwhile, Elias strode steadily toward Sarad as he reached for the spark of the arcane that he knew flickered somewhere within him in the deep beyond the void. He gathered all of the power available to him as the fell wizard finished shaping his spell, both men oblivious to the fervent melee that had begun to rage about them. He had crossed half the throne room when Sarad heaved the ragged meteor of black magic at him. Elias raised an arm without slowing his advance. As the gestalt of fell energy, which sputtered black flame and ball lightning, approached within a few arm-lengths of Elias, a white beam of liquid fire shot from his palm and into the dark mass.
Agnar struggled to find balance as the world pitched and swam before his eyes, but then he heard his name, called clear as a clarion horn, and he found himself transfixed by the jade fire of Danica Duana’s eyes. The glint of steel whirred at him and on reflex he reached out, feeling each drumbeat of his heart, and pulled it from the air. With his favored weapon in hand a lifetime of memory and training returned to him.
Agnar Vundi surged to his feet and went to work.
Danica dragged the senseless queen from the battle as Agnar guarded her retreat, her sword dancing in his hand like an arc of silver lightning. A couple of the enemy swung wide of Agnar to recapture the queen, but Lar Fletcher had joined the fray.
Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 42
