by James Hunter
But there was nothing for it. He couldn’t sit here and wait for his destruction nor the death of his friends.
Roark stalked out of the Throne Room and through the Citadel, death looming in his mind. Either his or Lowen’s—at the moment, he was too tired to care which of them death’s summit went to.
“You look like hell, Griefer,” Griff said when Roark stormed onto the first floor.
“Better than Kaz, Zyra, or Mac,” he muttered.
“Here.” The grizzled trainer shoved a Sufficient Health potion into his hand, one of the bottom-tier potions Griff kept in his Inventory for the low-level trainees. “Drink this ’fore you fall over.”
“Why hasn’t he attacked yet?” Roark demanded. “What’s he waiting for?”
Griff frowned. “Puffed-up owl’s been yelling about talking to you. For heaven’s sake, lad, drink that already. It’s not much, but it’ll fix...” He faltered, eyeing Roark over. “Somma this, anyway,” he finished.
Roark grimaced and gulped down the meager contents—the sickly sweet taste of the draughts never sat well in his belly—then tossed the bottle aside as a quarter of the red liquid poured back into his filigreed Health vial. He should have stopped in Zyra’s lab on the way up and filled his Inventory with Absolute potions, but there was no way he was turning around now.
He mounted the stairs to the bailey.
“Where in blazes are you going?” Griff caught up to him. “You can’t give that Lowen character what he wants, Griefer. Talking to you, it’s a trap. I’ve only got one eye, and even I can see that.”
“I know!” Roark snapped. Realizing he was yelling at the only friend he had who hadn’t been sent to respawn, he shook himself. “Sorry, Griff. But we can’t fight that army out there, even with our specialty forces, and unless he challenges me for the Cruel Citadel, he can’t kill me forever-dead. It’s possible he’ll try to capture me, but Zyra gave me something for that. Just in case.” He offered a morbid grin as he pulled out a vial filled with burbling black sludge. “Specially designed contact poison that will drop me in a second. This probably is a trap of some sort, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Thinking of Zyra and poison reminded him to take off his Clearblood Ring. Wouldn’t do to get captured thinking he could escape only to be thwarted by his own protections.
“What about that stone thing?” Griff nodded at Roark’s chest. “You said that’s what he wants. If he kills you, he can just take it, and not a one among us can stop him.”
Roark shook his head. “The World Stone Pendant is soul-bound. He can’t remove it from my corpse.” He considered its properties for a moment. “I’m not even bloody sure I can remove it,” he said. “The point is the stone’s not going anywhere. At the very least, we need to know what he wants. The Citadel can’t hold out forever in a siege, especially not if one of the Heralds figures out how to get past the Curse Chain—and in an army that size, there’s bound to be at least one who does, even by accident. I can’t fight him off yet, so I need to know what he wants, try to stall for time.”
“Some kinda protection, lad,” Griff insisted. “That’s all I’m asking.”
Roark stopped long enough to scribble a pair of rebound spells, one for magick and one for physical damage, then cast them on himself.
“There.” He turned to Griff, casting a second pair of spells on the trainer. “Now if they’re hoping to pick me off as soon as we step outside, we’ll be protected. For the next sixty seconds, anyway.”
“And we’ll come straight back in,” Griff said, his raised brow belying the tone of command in his voice. “No fooling around or engaging ’em if they attack.”
Roark didn’t make any promises, just resumed the climb toward the surface. With a disgruntled sigh, the one-eyed old man followed him out into the bailey.
The wind howled across the gloomy midnight landscape and whistled through the ranks outside the crumbling walls, but Roark could hear the creak of leather and faint jingle of mail over it. He strode through the eddying ground fog to the rusty iron portcullis, bracing himself for a hail of arrows and spells.
None came.
He locked eyes with Lowen, the Herald’s brown-speckled wings silhouetted by the moonlight. As usual, the arrogant mage carried no physical weapon, content to rely entirely on his magick. The thought gave Roark a split second’s satisfaction knowing that Lowen would be one of the first transported to the Star Iron Hills if his army attacked.
“All right, you insufferable chav, I’m here.” Roark’s head spun, and he grabbed the rusty grating, hoping it looked more like he was trying to contain his rage than stalling long enough for his Health to fully regenerate. “What do you want?”
“The World Stone, of course,” Lowen said. “You have a pendant I want, so I came to trade it for something you want.”
“That’s well, then,” Roark said. “I accept your unconditional surrender and honorable suicide. That’s the only thing of value you have to offer me.”
“You uppity half-breed bastard.” Lowen shook his head condescendingly. “Always out-clevering yourself.”
“Uppity I’ll grant you, mate, and half-breed too, but if I remember the Academy gossip right, you were the bastard. What was it your mum sold it for? A new court dress so she wouldn’t look like poor country nobility? Or was that time to pay off one of your father’s gambling debts?”
The Herald’s face twisted with rage before quickly smoothing over again. He let out a condescending laugh.
“Very funny. Would you like to meet someone who isn’t laughing while you waste time stroking your own ego with juvenile insults?” Lowen nodded over his shoulder at a scar-faced lieutenant. “Her.”
The lieutenant sneered and dragged another Herald out of the crowd. She whimpered and fought against him, her black raven’s wings flapping pitifully. They looked broken and torn in what must have been brutal, deliberate beatings and perhaps even torture.
Spidery white text appeared in the air over her head, the nameplate just visible at Roark’s distance.
[Talise]
Roark had to stop himself from taking a step back. It was just an illusion. Had to be. Some sort of Glamour Cloak ability like his, with a name substituted for who or whatever that poor creature really was. His sister was dead. Had been dead for twenty years, just like everyone else in his family, save him. The sole survivor of the von Graf bloodline.
But the memory of that vision of Bloederige Nocht flickered through his mind, showing him once more the Tyrant King settling a shaking six-year-old Talise on his hip like a kindly old grandfather and carrying her away from their slaughtered family.
In the silvery moonlight, it was hard to discern detail, but she looked the right age. And was that a slight Lyuko curve to her nose? True, her Hearthworld form was different, but under the golden sheen of her Herald skin, she looked pale, a white gold rather than the true gold of the rest. Where Roark had always taken after their mother in complexion and temperament, Talise’s skin had been like their father’s, as light as porcelain.
“It’s a trick of the light,” he muttered. But try as he might, he couldn’t silence his doubts. What if it was her?
“Don’t matter what it is,” Griff said, snapping Roark out of his trance. “You tell that overblown bee to buzz back to his hive. We ain’t buying what he’s selling.”
“Roark?” the raven-winged girl cried. “Is that really you?”
Lowen backhanded her, and she dropped to the ground, clutching her mouth.
Red filled Roark’s vision. He’d used every spell in his tome, but he still had all of his Jotnar abilities at his disposal. He was halfway to casting Infernal Thunder before he caught himself. It wouldn’t affect a Herald anyway. They were immune to Infernal spells. This time he was bloody going to have some Impulse Control. More than PwnrBwner would have, at least.
“Prove it’s you,” he called back to the girl.
“What are you doin’, boy?” Griff
snapped, grabbing him by the arm.
Roark shook his hand off and yelled, “Prove you’re Talise and I’ll get you away from that tosser.”
She faltered, looking up at Lowen as if afraid she’d be hit again. The mage nodded, a sneer curling up one corner of his lips.
“When I was little, you led me down into the passages beneath the manor and lost me on purpose,” she answered in a halting voice. “Cousin Dirk had to come save me.”
When Roark didn’t immediately reply to that, she kept speaking, perhaps assuming he wasn’t convinced. “Father let me sleep in his and Mother’s bed that night, and I... I think you lost your hunting privileges for a month, but I don’t remember.”
Seven hells. It felt like someone had laid his head on an anvil and tried to beat it out with a flatter hammer. It’d been a fortnight—he’d been forbidden to go out with the men for fourteen days as punishment for leaving his sister scared and alone in the secret tunnels below the manor house—but no one but a von Graf could know that, could they?
Griff stepped up beside him. “Whatever you’re thinking, give it up now.”
“Only the real Talise could know that,” Roark growled.
“There’s ways of findin’ things out, lad. Making a replacement sound convincing by feeding her a handful of facts you thought nobody else could know. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”
“But if it is her—” His throat closed, and he had to swallow hard before he could speak again. “Even if it isn’t, we can’t leave her in Lowen’s hands.” He glanced at her battered wings. “There’s no telling what she’s had to go through already.”
“Lad, they’re preyin’ on your sympathies—”
“Send her closer!” Roark shouted at Lowen. “Let me get a better look at her. If she’s truly my sister, then I’ll fight you one-on-one, a mage’s duel. Winner takes her and the World Stone.”
Lowen’s brows rose.
“I expected to haggle with you a little longer,” he said, smirking. “Isn’t that what you and your dirty Lyuko brethren like to do? Drive the price of valuable items into the dirt and steal hard-earned wealth from those in dire straits?”
“We also like to curse nobles to horrible fates,” Roark said coolly. “Take my offer now while it’s on the table or I’ll fall back on my people’s nature.”
“Fine.” Lowen waved a hand at the girl. “Go, if it’ll shut him up.”
She turned wide eyes from her captor to Roark. After a moment, she stumbled to her feet and started limping uncertainly toward the portcullis that let into the inner bailey.
Griff shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“He knows I’m lying,” Roark murmured, squinting at the Tyrant King’s right-hand mage in bemusement. “Why is he going along with my demands?”
“’Cause he’s got something else up his sleeve, lad.”
“That’s not like him. Lowen’s all force, no finesse.” Roark looked past the girl to the army, rows upon rows of Heralds, hands on swords and ready to cast a barrage of Divine spells. “Get inside, Griff. As soon as she steps into the bailey, we need to get out of range. They’re leading up to an attack.”
As the girl claiming to be his sister drew closer, Roark cranked open the rusty iron grating. Damnation if she wasn’t the image of their mother, all except for that porcelain undertone. Up close the similarities were uncanny. Long raven hair with the same weight and wave as his got when it was getting long. The hook in the bridge of her nose, far less pronounced than his own. She even had a tiny scar across her right brow, just like Talise had gotten from falling down the entry stairs as a toddler.
The scar was what did it. Lowen couldn’t have known about that. As far as Roark knew, the mage had never laid eyes on his sister and couldn’t possibly have the knowledge to magick up a doppelganger with that degree of accuracy. It had to be her.
“Talise?”
Lips quivering, eyes wild, she nodded, curled in on herself, then darted toward him, arms wide, tears streaking down her cheeks. She ran right into his waiting embrace, burrowing into his chest like a frightened child.
He pulled her toward the crumbling stair into the Citadel. “Come on, we’ve got to get you out of range.”
“Is it really you?” she asked. “My brother? After all these years?”
“In the flesh. Sort of.” He tried to smile reassuringly down at her, knowing his sharpened black teeth and curling horns would offer little comfort.
His stomach sank when he caught her eye and realized he’d been tricked.
The girl’s eyes were the same cool gray as their father’s, the same as Roark’s, but the scared, broken prisoner clinging to him should’ve had wide, frightened eyes, perhaps gaining some measure of hope now that she was being saved. Instead, the gray depths of her gaze glinted with a cold, calculating frost.
Her hand darted into her bodice. Roark grabbed for it.
Too slowly.
With a snapping sound, she cracked a smooth river rock in half, activating the glowing blue rune carved into its surface. A violet portal tore open around them, and the bailey disappeared in a whirl of light and sound.
The Twist
THE SMELLS HIT ROARK first as he stumbled to his feet, trying to regain his bearings. Rotting food, refuse, and something chemical and flat that felt as if it coated the inside of his mouth and sinuses. Early evening light filtered down from above, illuminating shiny black bags overflowing squared waste-flecked barrels, and walls of too-uniform brick rose on either side.
An alleyway?
Something roared at the alley’s mouth, a huge contraption of metal whooshing past, the tone of its cry shifting as it drew farther away.
“What in all the hells is this place?” Roark muttered, glancing around wildly, unsteady on his feet. He shot a look down at his hands, fingers still tipped with the familiar claws of his Jotnar form. He flexed his wings, feeling the strain of the muscles in his shoulders, and reached out for his potent Infernali magick—still flickering in the back of his skull like a candle. He was himself, or at least himself in his Troll form, but this landscape was new and strange.
Glass crashed behind him.
He spun around to find Talise, still in Herald form, though her broken raven-black wings were healed. On the ground at her side was the shattered remnants of a potion bottle.
“A world like Traisbin, where death is real,” she said darkly. “There are no respawns here, not even for a conniving coward like you.”
With a flick of her hand, a ball of crackling amber lightning shot toward Roark. Instinctively, he threw up an Infernal shield. The lightning slammed into the violet light and dissipated in a crack of thunder. A fiery meteor, twisting bone lance, and blast of icy air followed in quick succession, each one shoving him backward across the strange stonelike ground, but thankfully unable to penetrate the shield.
Then Talise stepped forward, aiming her open palm at him. Roark knew what was coming before the javelin of pure golden light burst free. Angelic Lance.
He dove away, tucking into a tight roll, then coming up to her right. His Infernal shield wouldn’t protect him against Divine spells. About as effective as spinner’s thread against a set of sharpened steel shears.
But that was why he’d been studying with Ick.
As Talise stepped forward again, Roark dropped into the low posture the Nocturnus had taught them, whipped his arms as quickly as he could through the techniques, then thrust them out, the motion tearing a low growl from his throat.
It was a far cry from Ick’s accomplished casting, but the Discordant Inversion web he’d defined so long ago for Divine spells flared to life in front of him. The Angelic Lance struck it, immediately transforming into a bolt of Undead Chaos and rebounding back at Talise.
She turned, trying to dodge, and took the sickly green lance in the upper shoulder rather than full in the face. The impact drove her to the ground, but she hardly paused. From her knees, she flung a counterattack of Heav
enly Wrath at him.
Snarling a curse, Roark whipped through the postures again, casting his second web. The deadly golden light flashed to Undead green and ricocheted.
Ready for it this time, Talise dove away, quickly regaining her feet.
Sweat poured down Roark’s face as he cast the final web. He’d better bloody well hope she gave up on the Divine spells soon. This was his last Discordant Inversion inscription, and the cast for each had taken nearly every last bit of his flagging energy.
When Talise turned to face him again, she had a golden rapier in hand. Instinctively, Roark pulled his Slender Rapier and Kaiken Dagger, both enchanted with Light magick for the fight against Aczol and unlikely to do much damage in this fight.
The thought struck him as immaterial. He didn’t want to kill her, especially not in a world where there were no respawns. What he wanted was some bloody answers.
“I should have known you’d have a magical riposte to anything I cast,” she said, each word frozen with icy hatred. “You were always so proud of your spell writing.”
She lunged pie’ fermo and whipped the rapier in a tight sottomano at his ribs. Not a full-strength attack, but a test. Roark batted it aside with a flick of his shoulder.
“Why are you doing this?” Roark demanded, pressing in, cutting the distance between them and trying to force her onto her rear foot, where she’d always been weakest.
Instead of falling back, she skipped forward a step, forcing him on the defensive. Their blades rang and sparked, the sound bouncing from the alley walls as she executed precise diagonal slices dal poso, from the wrist. Another calculating assessment. She was trying him, searching for weaknesses without overcommitting her blade.
He stepped back, refusing to go on the attack. Exhausted as he was, and as economical as she was keeping her combat, taking the offensive would only give her the advantage in the long run.
“Don’t try to play the innocent with me, snake.” Despite the venom in her words, Talise’s countenance remained cold and blank as she flicked a riverso tondo at his throat. He batted it aside in with a sloppy parry, his attention locked on her expressionless face. The slightest curl of her lip was the only hint that she felt anything at all. “Marek told me your blood price.”
