Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle)

by Siana, Patrick

  With a roar of inarticulate rage he picked up the nearest of the Handsmen clear over his shoulder. The agile assassin twisted in Lar’s arms and black lightning lanced from his splayed fingers. The fell electricity coursed through him, rippling down his arms, over his shoulders, and across his torso. The bitter burn of the magic served only to incense Lar further. He lifted the Handsman above his head and threw him to the floor like a sack of grain.

  With a wet THWACK the Handsman went still, as did his spell.

  Lar spared the dead arcanist a glare before moving on to help Danica, but when he looked up his sight grew dim and when he went to take a step his legs wouldn’t obey him and only twitched. The last thing he saw before his sight failed was Danica, pint sized Danica, but large as life. A wistful smile crept over Lar’s face before the black took him and he knew no more.

  Danica squared off against a scimitar wielding Handsman. Armed with naught but a dagger she assumed a defensive posture and an inverse grip on her spare weapon, resting the blade against her forearm. Her opponent sneered at her and opened with a flat cut at her torso. She blocked the slash with a twist of her body, but the ringing blow pushed her off balance and she felt warmth leak down her arm, for while her dagger made solid contact with the Handsman’s scimitar it did not turn the entirety of the blade. When you’re in too deep, that is precisely when you must push deeper yet, a voice whispered from the far recesses of her mind, the shard of an ancient memory.

  The Handsman pulled his scimitar back and cocked his arms to launch another blow, but instead of retreating Danica used the momentum that had unbalanced her and spun low, into the attack. The heavy-handed slice sailed clean over her head. As she completed her spin she shouldered him and drove her elbow into his gut. When he pitched forward she punched straight up. He made a wet exclamation as her dagger opened his throat.

  Danica turned her attention back to the queen, but she was gone. Her heart all but arrested as she looked up to see Eithne lumbering back toward the spell-circle and the bitter battle between Mirengi and Elias.

  Elias pressed his white fire against Sarad’s magic, which at first slowed the roiling globe and then brought it to a dead stop mere inches from his hand. He felt the fell power radiating from the dark mass, which his arcane sight perceived as black concentric ripples that stole the heat from the air, drained his strength, and threatened to snuff out the very fire that was his life. With a renewed sense of outrage Elias bent all of his thought into resisting Sarad and willed the suspended clot of dark energy back across the room.

  Sarad saw his spell return toward him with no small measure of surprise. There were few wizards in the world equal to an arcane working of that magnitude. He had never seen anyone use magic quite like Duana. Still, two could play that game. Sarad flourished his hand and, inspired by his nemesis, cast a beam of black fire across the room and into his reflected spell. The spell, which originally had the shape of a comet, compressed into a dense sphere of warring dark and light energies. The crackling, humming sphere shuddered to a stop, suspended between the two wizards.

  “So, it has come to this, once again,” said Sarad, “a wizard’s duel between the champions of House Senestrati and House Denar.”

  Elias lowered his hand, though the sphere of magic yet hung between them, and looked at the grotesque Dark Lord of the Scarlet Hand who had been disfigured by his hand. A peculiar feeling slid through the Marshal at that instant and the fire of his anger burned out, and left him feeling spent. “Enough blood has been spilt in this millennia-long vendetta,” he said. “Surrender the dark covenant, Sarad. Let us end this.”

  “I once asked the same of you, as you may recall,” spat the necromancer, his face gone scarlet. “And my answer is the same as yours—never!” Sarad threw up his hands and a curtain of black and violet fire drew around them in a great ring, creating a tidy barrier between them and the ongoing melee.

  “So be it,” said Elias.

  Each man lifted an arm and from their hands lanced seething, liquid beams of fire, which met in a crash of sparks and fiery rain as the dark sphere shivered under the amalgam of yet more arcane energy.

  Thus the contest of wills began in earnest.

  Eithne shambled behind Elias, swinging wide of the curtain of cold flame, and toward Bryn, who had gotten her legs beneath her and squared off unarmed against the Handsman who had immobilized her during the ritual. Phinneas, who had played possum while Agnar engaged the Handsmen, pushed his bruised body from the floor and lunged awkwardly at the swordsman who threatened Bryn, tackling him about the legs. The Handsman remained afoot, though he stumbled before kicking free and backhanding the doctor with the pommel of his scimitar.

  While Phinneas had failed to take the Handsman down, he bought Bryn precious time as Eithne, with Danica on her heels, closed in on them, all of which unfolded around the epic struggle between Sarad and Elias who continued to pit their magic, and wills, against each other.

  Bryn pressed close to the Handsman as he threw off Phinneas and punched his nose with an upward angling open-palm strike. His eyes watered and blood streamed from his nostrils, but the veteran warrior retorted without delay and hooked Bryn on the chin with the hilt of his scimitar, proximity having rendered the blade useless at such close quarters. Bryn’s head snapped to the left, the room spun, and she fell to her knees.

  Ogden’s first order of business when he regained consciousness, his brow having been bloodied by a falling shard of cast iron from the skylight, was to give Elias what aid he could. Elias’s intervention had dispelled Mirengi’s ritual, sundering the spell-circle that contained the six sided star, but he still stood in the center of a greater spellform, a ring of sigils and incantations in the flowing script of the darkspeech, that served as a gateway to the dark magic of the Senestrati. If Ogden sundered that spellform he could reduce Mirengi’s strength and give Elias an edge.

  Ogden blocked out the bedlam of clashing steel and the crackle and thrum of arcane energies and activated his arcane sight. He saw the fell magic harnessed in the spellform as a bruise colored energy field that formed a flowing circuit. He needed to arrest the current and thus sever Mirengi from the teat of his fell masters. Ogden collected his own power before him in a ball of sun-golden light. He shaped his magic into a wedge and with an exclamation in the tongue of the ancient Eurinthian—Vahnara Dosh Eroshtya!—he thrust his spell through Mirengi’s spellform with an audible pop. The cycling field of dark energy derailed and dissipated into the air like ashes in the wind.

  Mirengi cursed in the darkspeech as his reservoir of power lessened, but he never took his eyes from Elias, his concentration unwavering. Ogden had done all he could for Elias, for he daren’t cast his own magic into the mix which would cause an unstable amalgam of energy that could potentially destroy them all. Their fate, and that of Galacia, now lay in the hands of his student.

  Danica realized that Eithne had broken away from her and gone back into the fray to help Bryn, but she was damned if she was going to leave her brother to face Mirengi alone in order to save the queen only to fail at her appointed task. She closed in on the melee on the other side of the circle at a dead run just as Bryn fell to her knees. She reacted without thinking and shoved Eithne out of the way and leapt over Bryn, straddling the downed woman as she raised her dagger to intercept the scimitar blow that would have ended the young courtier.

  Rather than disengage to mount another attack, the Handsman bore down on Danica. Her dagger bowed under his heavier weapon and she gave way under his greater strength and leverage. Danica bared her teeth and tightened every muscle in her body against him, but the scimitar gained steady ground against her and descended inch by inch toward her skull. Then, without preamble, a gout of blood erupted from his mouth.

  While Danica and the Handsman were engaged in their stalemate Bryn had recovered and shrugged off the stunning pommel blow. She rolled into a combat crouch and reentered the melee, the Handsman never feeling the sleight-of-hand t
hat unburdened him of the kris than hung at his left hip. She buried the wicked, curved dagger in his stomach, and then somersaulted between his legs and hamstrung him. The Handsman fell to his knees and without ceremony Danica crescent kicked him in the side of the head with the heel of her boot.

  Agnar had been hard pressed by the two Handsmen he had engaged, both of whom were expert swordsmen. After the initial volley of blows he launched to buy himself some space, he retreated to the throne dais to gain the advantage of high ground and discourage flanking. His enemies fought in tandem, attacking either simultaneously or in a syncopated rhythm, which forced him to squander his stamina for he had to constantly feint, riposte, and counter attack to hold them at bay.

  Agnar Vundi, however, was born of the bloodlines of the warrior kings of Ittamar and thus no mere adept with a blade himself, though it was his custom to fight with two swords. With this in mind he lunged forward with a wild half-moon swing to push his enemies back and then leapt further up the dais, onto the very seat of the queen. The first Handsman rushed him with a low slash to cut out his legs. Agnar jumped over the stroke and down from the throne, landing close to his quarry. When the Handsman retorted with a back-hand blow Agnar caught his hand and promptly head-butted him, followed by a thrust to the abdomen with his short-sword. He cast the impaled Handsman off the dais with a kick, but held onto his scimitar. “Well,” he said around a broad grin to the remaining Handsman who had to leap the tumbling body of his fellow, “it looks like the two swords to one advantage now belongs to me.”

  The Handsman responded with a ferocious feint and remise, but Agnar read his shifting stance and turned the attack with his scimitar and sliced his opponent’s forearm with his short-sword. The Handsman withdrew a step and adopted a two handed grip on his sword, but Agnar was quick to capitalize on his advantage and pressed his wounded foe’s sword aside with a heavy downward stroke of his scimitar and then landed him a blow to the head with his short blade, ending the Handsman, and the skirmish.

  Agnar dashed from the dais and glanced about the throne room. Against all odds the queen’s party had prevailed over the Scarlet Hand, but Elias and Mirengi still fought, a bloated mass of magical energy suspended between them. He took a deep breath, finally having time to process the maelstrom of activity that had occurred in the last few minutes. Elias Duana, defying all reason, had managed to survive the wilds of the Renwood and stole back into Lucerne Palace to thwart his nemesis. On the day he joined his fallen comrades in the halls of their fathers—which might well yet be today—he could say that he had lived.

  Agnar cautiously made his way to the rest of his party, giving Mirengi and Elias a wide berth. He clapped his hand on Danica’s shoulder as she stood, heaving, over the body of a fallen foe. The young woman offered him a grim smile, but then her eyes suddenly went wide and her mouth dropped opened, a curse on her lips. Instinctively, Agnar wrapped his arms about her, and bore her to the ground in a headlong dive. He rolled over as they skidded across the floor to see a cone of ragged black fire rush toward them.

  With what he thought was his last thought, Agnar cursed himself, for the Handsman he had run through yet lived, and had risen to his feet, one hand staunching the hole in his guts while the other discharged the blast of fell magic. Agnar, however, did have another thought, and it was to wonder how the mass of writhing flame bent back upon itself as if it had struck a wall.

  Ogden stepped over Agnar, his hand outstretched toward the fell arcanist. “Your final lesson, whelp, is to never leave an Archmagus alive when you have him at an advantage.” Ogden’s thick brow drew down over his eyes in concentration. He shaped his shield from a flat disk into a concave basin of arcane force and then into a sphere, which contained his enemy’s spell and then snuffed it out.

  The Handsman reacted at once and formed a ball of black lighting in his hand, but Ogden proved the faster. He threw both hands open and a volley of blue energy bolts shot from them. The missiles lifted the Handsman from his feet and hurled him against the wall behind the throne. He was dead before he hit the floor.

  Danica stood and spared Ogden a nod before turning her attention to her brother’s fight with Mirengi, but the curtain of dark fire stymied her.

  The shuddering mass of magic pendulumed between the two wizards as each took turns yielding ground to the other and then taking it back in a brutal tug of war that left both men teetering on the edge of collapse. Elias knew that if they continued like this for much longer they both would surely die. The body and mind were not designed to withstand infinite amounts of arcane energy, and the sheer volume that he and Sarad had channeled would have burnt lesser wizards to a cinder.

  Elias lost ground to Sarad for his focus ebbed as he wracked his brain for a solution to end the stalemate and turn the tide against the necromancer. An intuition came to him then as he remembered the first law of Arcanum that Ogden had taught him: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transmuted. He couldn’t extinguish Sarad’s original spell, but if he could find a way to redirect or transmute it he could at long last defeat the dark lord of the Scarlet Hand. The doorway to the infinite energy of the tapestry lay inside each person—he was sure that someone had told him that once. Thus it stood to reason that energy could pass both ways; as the wizard could draw on the energy of the cosmos, so could he absorb it by sending it back through that door.

  As Elias worked through these thoughts, the sphere had pressed close to him. Sarad, believing that his victory was at hand, pushed with all his will and drained the final dregs of his power. Elias observed this with stoic resolve and drew his magic back into himself and probed within his being for the gateway he hoped dwelt there.

  “Oh, God,” cried Danica, “he’s losing! Ogden, can you dispel the barrier?”

  Ogden surveyed the magical barrier and the boulder of energy oscillating between Elias and Mirengi. He knew at once that to set his will against that much power would only incinerate him and quite possibly the entire chamber. He was unable to look Danica in the eyes when he told her he could do no more to help his student. “I cannot,” he said, hearing his own hollow words echo in his head as he reeled with the thought that all hope was lost to them.

  As Sarad’s spell closed the final feet between them, Elias gathered his own repelled magic into a disk of white fire and then shaped it into a funnel, his eyes half closing with the exertion. He reached desperately into the void, delving deeper into that mysterious chasm between thoughts, between worlds, than he had ever dared go before.

  He opened his eyes and they gleamed with an otherworldly light.

  The fiery funnel churned and at its base formed a vortex that had the aspect of a bright and starry night. Elias relinquished all resistance to Sarad’s magic and poured all of his effort and power into widening the vortex. The pregnant sphere of fell magic discharged into his funnel and disappeared through the gateway at the vertex.

  Sarad, who suddenly had no force to push against, fell to his knees. “Impossible,” he said. “It cannot be.” No one could absorb magic, and certainly not to that magnitude. His spell would have rendered an entire household to ash.

  The queen’s party stood dumbstruck, stunned to a man. Bryn was the first to break the silence. Overcome with emotion, she broke out in an outburst of laughter as tears streamed down her face. Danica took the courtier in her arms and hugged her tight. “Wha…Wha…What?” Ogden said, mouthing the word over and over again, while Phinneas pressed a knuckled fist to his heart and cried, “By God, he’s done it!”

  Elias conjured an arc of purple energy with a chop of his hand that dissolved Sarad’s wall of black flame. His boots clacked on the marble floor as he closed the distance to Sarad. The necromancer’s face contorted in rage and he pressed himself to his feet, hands splayed in a final act of resistance. Bolts of puce energy fired from his fingertips. Elias deflected them with hands wreathed in violet-white light, and willed them to return to their source. The repelled missiles gained momentum
and the gravity of Elias’s magic, and Sarad, who had tapped the final drop of his power, was unable to mount a defense.

  The magic bolts lifted Sarad from his feet and bore him to the ground. Even as Elias closed the last steps between them, and the final remnants of the wall of fire fizzled, he spoke solemn words of power, incantations of the Deep Arcanum, and drew symbols in the air with fingertips haloed with silver fire.

  His boot-heels clicked to a stop.

  A shining, faceted sphere drawn in lines of golden light formed above Sarad, its many faces lambent with fiery runes. The arcane spellform descended onto Sarad and caged him before collapsing into him in a shower of golden sparks.

  Elias stood over the felled wizard. Skeins of black smoke rose from his ruined face and hands. In his final act of defiance Sarad had drawn the energy to power his spell from his very life force, and the resulting arcane backlash left him burnt and blistered.

  The queen’s party drew around Elias. Danica stood by his side. “You’ve done it.” She held out his sword. Elias wrapped his hands around the familiar hilt, and felt the leather braids press into his hand. He held his sword over Sarad.

  “Go on then,” Sarad spat. “Finish it. Death holds no fear for one such as I.”

  Elias peered down at the man who had been the perpetrator of myriad evils; the man who had brought a nation to its knees and who had very nearly eradicated an entire bloodline and fathered a dark age from which the world may never have emerged. Yet for all that, when Elias looked down at him he saw only the child from the vision he had when he and Sarad had linked minds during his imprisonment. That same child who cowered in fear as his father bent his dark will and that of his benighted order upon him. Sarad’s legacy and that of his fell masters was one of vengeance and of fear. Elias refused to enter into that same dark legacy and become its new sire by letting his hand be moved by the same black motives.