Just one flight up, they passed a pair of gabbing servants, who hushed themselves and bobbed their heads in deference to Gladdic. As they ascended past the sleeping chambers, a chaotic roar sounded from outside the building. It went on for several seconds before stopping abruptly. Alarmed voices sounded from the bedrooms, as well as from the study above them.
Dante smiled. "That would be the other tower collapsing."
"Gladdic, make a note," Blays said.
Gladdic furrowed his brow. "Of what? Our location?"
"This is the first time Dante's ever been right."
Gladdic continued upward until they reached the floor where Sorrowen and Raxa were being held. Dante pointed him toward one of the doors. Gladdic lifted his gnarled knuckles and knocked.
The door practically sprung open. A priest in gray robes rather finer than Gladdic's eyed them from the other side. "Yes?" The man's eyes few wide. "Ordon Gladdic! We thought you were dead!"
"There have been times, recently, when I have thought the same," Gladdic intoned. "You have a prisoner inside?"
"Well yes, Ordon. A spy from Narashtovik."
Gladdic nodded gravely. "It appears we did not expose their treachery in time. Narashtovik's heretics are attacking the Redoubt as we speak."
"That crashing sound—?"
"Indeed. You and your fellow believer are to travel to Parcel Square. There, you will mount a defense and drive out the invaders. Adaine has entrusted me to relocate the prisoners to a safer location."
"Are the foreigners expected to strike here?"
"There is no telling, is there? Now move, before Adaine is obliged to come find out why you have chosen not to secure the city against the heretics."
The priest inclined his head and stepped outside, motioning for his brother in faith to follow.
"You will come with us, young intruder," Gladdic said to Sorrowen, making sure his voice carried out into the hall. The steps of the two Mallish priests diminished as they entered the stairwell.
Gladdic advanced on Sorrowen, who jerked back his head, clunking it against the back of his chair. "Please, sir, I haven't done—"
Blays closed the door. "Too late for that. Now hold still and prepare for judgment."
Dante lowered his hood. Sorrowen swayed in his chair, groggy but shocked. He had a few cuts and bruises on his face, but nothing to indicate serious torture. Gladdic pinched the fingers of his hand together, then splayed them wide. The heavy locks closing the chains around Sorrowen's wrists and ankles popped open with iron clicks.
Sorrowen gaped. "Dante—"
Dante clasped his hand over the boy's mouth. "Is going to throw you out the window if you say his name again. Can you stand?"
"Yes. I think. Maybe."
"Then how about you try it and find out?"
"Oh. Yeah." Sorrowen stood. He looked shaky, but that seemed to be more due to the surprise of sudden rescue than any injury or weakness. "Are you going to get Raxa?"
"Yes. And then we're going to go downstairs and get out of here. If anyone questions us, we're Mallish priests, and you're our prisoners. Understand?"
Sorrowen nodded, wide-eyed.
"Good," Dante said. "Then let's get out of here before everything goes to hell."
He returned to the hallway with the others in tow. There was some clamor and chatter above and below as soldiers, priests, and servants tried to understand what was happening outside. Dante could feel the ether flickering distantly.
He crossed to the door to Raxa's cell and pressed his ear to it. Silence. He tried the handle and found it unlocked.
He swung open the door.
"Release!" a man yelled.
Ether poured from the hands of ten priests and crackled toward Dante's head.
6
The light of the ether cast harsh shadows to all sides. Dante flung himself to the right of the doorway, grabbing at the nether as fast as he could. The ether struck the entryway, blasting it into gobbets of wood. Sorrowen yelped in surprise; Blays dropped into the nether, ducking out of harm's way; Gladdic lashed back with a wallop of ether. The doorway exploded with light.
Dante blinked, dazzled, and hit back with a swarm of black bolts. The priests stood their ground, three of them countering each strike while the remaining seven assaulted the hallway with a rush of ether so dense it felt like the formation of a new world.
Gladdic hammered at the incoming energy with a geometry-defying tangle of ether, his face as stern as a betrayed king. Sorrowen joined him with the nether, his shadows plentiful but poorly controlled. Dante supported them on the fringes, mopping up any arc of ether that tried to dart past their defenses.
"Sons of Taim!" The man who'd given the initial order to attack threw back his dark-haired head. He wore the robe of an ordon and his voice resonated unnaturally, as if the tower itself was speaking his words. "The enemy is within! Come to the aid of your brothers!"
Dante fired a shower of nethereal spears into the room, craning his neck to spot Raxa among the snowstorm of black and white sparks. A few golden asterisks were flying about as well, but Dante was far too caught up in not getting slaughtered to try to put the stream to use stopping the enemies' connection to the ether.
Blays, who had just crept through the wall in an attempt to backstab the priests, was ejected from the shadows as roughly as a spitball from a reed.
He popped to his feet. "I don't see Raxa. Shall we run?"
"Even more of them will be on us in a second," Dante said. "We have no choice."
The stairwell was out of the question, it would be thronged with priests on their way up to kill them. Dante yelled at the others to withdraw, blasting indiscriminate clouds of nether behind him as he made a dash for the room they'd rescued Sorrowen from. They piled inside and slammed the door. Gladdic waved his hands, bracing the door with a cage of glowing white lines.
"Hoping they'll get bored and run away?" Blays said. "Or are we about to jump?"
"Just a short one." Dante ran to the window, right hand outstretched. It was too narrow to crawl through, but a flick of his wrist sent the rock jumping back from its edges, expanding it enough for grown men to crawl through.
He leaned out. It was a fifty foot drop to the ground. He'd actually survived a fall of much, much greater height involving an absurdly tall tree in Weslee, but during that incident, he hadn't had to worry about a legion of enemy ethermancers disrupting him.
Instead, he reached into the rock below the window, pulling it out into a narrow shelf, curled up at the outer edge. He extended the shelf along the curve of the tower, declining it at a thirty degree angle, so that the ledge began to wrap itself around the building in a downward spiral.
Behind him, something rammed into the door so hard its boards began to splinter.
With a grimace, Gladdic restored his faltering wards. "It will not hold!"
Dante had barely gotten started on the ramp, but if he didn't move now, he'd never have the chance to finish it. "Everyone, after me!"
He rolled out the window and landed on his artificial ledge, bracing himself in case it cracked under his weight. It held, but he didn't, sliding down it with rapid acceleration. Heart thumping, he threw his mind back into the rock, extending the slide downward around the tower's face.
Behind him, Sorrowen gave an unsteady wail and Blays laughed. Wood burst apart, clattering across the room they'd just vacated. Gladdic brought up the rear, robes flapping as he slid downward.
The rock slide was as smooth as glass and Dante was soon shooting down it at the speed of a galloping horse. By keeping his full focus on his work, he was just able to keep extending the slide in front of him without overtaking it.
Sorrowen was making noise again. Dante chanced a glance up. Translucent white arrows flew from the windows. Gladdic lifted his hand, spraying ether to deflect the attacks.
Dante curled around the tower, removing himself from sight of the assault. He was nearing the bottom and hastily drew the slide to the g
round, gentling the angle at the end. Light flashed overhead; Gladdic and Sorrowen yelled out. Rock snapped apart.
Dante shot from the end of the slide, rolling over the grass. Blays was right behind him, and somehow managed to somersault twice and jump to his feet. Unfortunately for them, Sorrowen and Gladdic were tumbling down in a hail of broken stone.
Still dizzied from his landing, Dante sank his mind into the ground, sloppily converting it into a mud pit. Gladdic and Sorrowen slapped into it with the dignity of a trebuchet-launched pig. Blays helped yank them to their feet as Dante fended off another barrage of light from above.
The same priests they'd tricked into leaving Sorrowen's cell were now charging across the grass toward them, looking significantly more furious than during their initial meeting. Dante ran in the opposite direction, lobbing black bolts behind him. Against the brown of the mud coating them from head to toe, Gladdic and Sorrowen's eyes shined as whitely as ether.
"Build a slide like that in Narashtovik, and you could charge for it," Blays said. "Although you might want to leave out the mud part. And the 'score of angry sorcerers trying to rip you apart' part."
They scampered across a winding path toward the main road ringing the central towers of the Redoubt District. As soon as they ran from behind the hedge that marked the border between the dirt path and the cobbled street, they came face to face with a crowd of men and women carrying staffs, wood axes, and rocks.
"Them!" a man screeched, jabbing his finger at them. "Them's who did it!"
A roar arose not unlike the hurrah of an infantry charge. Then dozens of stones took flight not unlike a barrage of crude arrows. Dante reversed course down the street. The mob kept up with the four of them enough to tempt him to kill a few on the front lines, which would have scattered the others in fear, but which would also have had the rather less desirable effect of whipping up a Bressel-sized army against them.
"That appears to be an angry mob," Blays said. "Where did the angry mob come from?"
Gladdic wiped mud from his face. "Perhaps they were enmaddened by the unprovoked destruction of their neighborhood."
"It was hardly destroyed," Dante said. "It was just one old building. There probably wasn't even anyone in it."
"No one respectable, anyway," Blays said.
A rock thudded at Dante's heels. He cursed as a group of ten people ran at them from the side, pelting them with stones. He thought of yanking up a blockade of earth behind himself, but the mob would simply divert through the gardens to either side of the street.
"We'll circle around to the entrance I opened to the tunnel," he said. "Once we're inside, I'll seal it behind us."
He veered left in the general direction of the hedges where he'd dug his way into the old passages. A few more rocks landed behind them, but trailed off as they opened ground on their pursuit.
"Hey now." Blays pointed down a fork in the road. "Isn't that Raxa?"
Down the fork, a group of men in gray robes hauled a trussed-up and muzzled Raxa away from the central towers of the Redoubt.
"I'm only seeing five of them," Dante said. "I like those odds."
They ran down the fork. Dante was bleeding from being struck by splinters during the fight in the tower and the nether zipped to join him. The crowd was still yipping and baying, covering the approach of their footsteps as they closed on the burdened priests. Blays knifed into the shadows with a ripple so subtle Dante might not have felt it if he wasn't already wrapped in them himself.
One of the priests glanced back, fixed on them, and uttered something to the others. They picked up speed, but carrying Raxa between them, it soon became clear they had no hope of outrunning Dante and the others. They cast Raxa onto the cobbles and swung about, ether glinting from their fingertips.
"Hit them as hard as you can," Dante said. "If they break, we cut Raxa loose and run like hell before this gets any worse."
The street was a wide one, big enough to have been a boulevard. Trees and greenery adorned it to the left while the right was lined with a mixed block of freestanding towers and the more common formation of buildings jammed shoulder to shoulder. Dante felt ether stirring from one of the towers and whirled to face it, but when no attack came, he pivoted to face the priests, who were just launching their initial attacks.
Dante slung his arms forward, unleashing a crackling wave of nether large enough to dim the street. In the next instant, he bored into the earth beneath the priests' feet, prising it apart. A balding, portly priest flung himself to the side with surprising grace. Another slipped, falling into the ravine and catching himself on its edge, face reddening with panicked exertion. The portly man rushed to his aid.
One of the priests stood nearly a head taller than the others. He was lean-bodied and though he wasn't much older than Dante, his long face was deeply creased from his cheekbones to his jawline.
He crushed something fragile in his hand and cast aside its ruins. Ether speared forth with the paralyzing squeal of two pieces of sharp glass rubbed against each other. It slashed into Dante's wall of nether, cutting it into ribbons that disintegrated in the sunlight.
"Ordon Gladdic." The man sounded so reproachful it was impossible to tell if he was mocking. "You've thrown in with the enemy, too?"
"I have, Adaine," Gladdic said. "Does this at last show you the gravity of the far greater enemy mustering against this city? The city that I still love?"
"Do you? Is that why you traveled to Tanar Atain? To conspire with the Drakebane as to how to conquer Bressel for yourselves?"
"Such a claim is too ridiculous for words. I was there to—"
"Learn how to destroy the greatest threat to Mallish dominance." Adaine's eyes moved to Dante. "Now, you stand side by side with that threat, while you work in the employ of the man who stole our city and murdered our king. There is no need to convince me of the great darkness of the swamps of Tanar Atain, Gladdic. It's more than clear you've already fallen under its spell."
With a snapping gesture as quick as a striking snake, Adaire drew a glowing pattern in the air in front of him. The ether pulsed forth, assaulting them like a whining storm, so intense that for a moment Dante, Gladdic, and Sorrowen were all obliged to defend against it.
During the initial moments of the confrontation, when everyone had been distracted slinging light and shadow back and forth, Blays had been circling around on the enemy, but he'd stopped during the brief conversation, hardly rippling the nether. Now, he sprinted forward and vaulted free of the shadows, one of his Odo Sein blades held at an angle above and behind his head, its black blade snapping with silvery-purple energies.
He swung at the rickety priest who'd been pulled out of the crevice. The weapon cut right through the man's ribs. Both of his halves thudded to the pavement. The upper half screamed while the lower half wriggled.
The portly priest gagged, eyes watering as he lashed at Blays with ethereal whips. Blays stooped as if entering a low door and ducked back into the shadows. The fat man uttered a high-pitched cry of anger and shoved Blays back into the physical world. But before he could try to kill Blays, he was called to the aid of Adaine, who was struggling against a counter-onslaught from Dante and Gladdic.
A fog of shadows hung in the air in front of the Mallish ethermancer, its leading edge boiling away as Adaine struck it with steady streams of light. Yet the fog continued to advance toward him. His face grew focused, the brackets around his mouth deepening while sweat broke out across his forehead.
"Men of the Redoubt!" His ether-amplified voice boomed across the street. "All good people of Mallon! Come to our aid! Drive out the usurpers and punish the heathens!"
Dante took a quick look around. The street seemed empty except for the nine living people and one dead body currently contending for control of it. Yet as the energies continued to grind against each other, inching closer to Adaine and his priests, first rivulets and then rivers of people poured into the street, waving makeshift weapons above their heads and ho
wling for blood.
"Keep the priests at bay!" Dante pivoted, dropping to one knee and slapping his palm against the ground.
Thirty feet away, well ahead of the closest member of the mob, a ditch opened in the street, starting from the buildings and cutting across the cobblestones into the yards on the other side of the road. Men skidded to a stop at its edge, mouths hanging open. A few began to hurl rocks.
Dante extended the ditch to the nearest building ahead of him, cutting off all immediate approaches. It would only buy them a minute or two, but that would be all that they'd need. He pushed toward Adaine again, striking at him with dart after dart of nether. All three of his surviving priests fell into defensive postures to fend off the swarm. Gladdic, meanwhile, was still driving straight at Adaine with both ether and nether. Aided by Sorrowen's much lesser power, his blows drew closer and closer until the sparks of their deflection were falling right at Adaine's feet.
Adaine took two long steps back. Power flickered to Dante's right. Stone groaned against itself. A tower—the same one he'd felt the ether stirring in earlier—came unmoored from its foundation, tipping toward the street.
And a smear of darkness connected him to the tower.
The crowd began to scream. They tried to run, but they were packed too tightly against the ditch Dante had carved through the dirt. The shadow of the tower moved across them. Men and women screamed as they began to spill into the ditch. Some tried to jump across it, but they only joined those who'd been jostled into the depths. The tower smashed down like the hammer of Taim.
The ground shook. Dante threw his arm across his face just in time to protect it from the cloud of dust blasting away from the impact. People shrieked in pain and panic, pushing at broken stones pinning down their mangled limbs. The tower's top had landed across the ditch, stuffing it with rubble. Dust-covered men and women picked themselves up and staggered back from the scene.
"The northerners have come to slaughter you!" Adaine bellowed. "Fight for your lives or flee for them—but you cannot stand helpless!"
The Spear of Stars Page 9
