The sight of a column of fire raging towards him from the South – conjured by Cat from a small pile of leaves that had ignited thanks to her keeping them bone dry despite the rain, plus Mandalee’s previous fire attacks – snapped Daelen out of his introspection pretty quickly.
From the East, Catriona, from her vantage point atop some Windy Steps, fired blades of sharp ice, formed out of some water she had thrown into the air from a bottle she was carrying.
Mandalee, moving impossibly fast, North of where Daelen flew, inflicted multiple flesh wounds with a blade that returned unerringly to her hand. Simultaneously, she sent forth a volley of tranquilliser-tipped arrows. She had borrowed the arrows from her friend, but she didn’t need the bow, using a simple clerical levitation spell, instead. She, too, was off the ground. Her friend had found a way to add moisture to her Windy Steps so that they split the light, creating a kind of Rainbow Road.
It also began to rain rocks on the shadow warrior’s head. Daelen marvelled at how many spells Catriona could maintain at once without any noticeable magical energy drain. Recalling that it wasn’t really her own personal power, but the power of nature, he began to suspect her magic was probably limited only by her ability to multitask. Rather than trying to counter all these things at once, Daelen chose to take the line of least resistance and fly in the one direction they hadn’t covered: West. Except he flew straight into a wall of superdense air, hitting with an impact that almost knocked him from the sky. The column of fire hit his unprotected back before he could react, burning his flesh painfully.
“Ooh, I bet that smarts,” Mandalee called out, giving her friend a high-five, as Jessica and Sara had shown them. “Don’t worry, we promise to heal you later!”
Catriona was in hysterical tears. “Oh, Mandalee, I haven’t had this much fun for ages. All I have to do is create a trap with an obvious escape route, and he takes it, not sensing he’s just walking into a bigger trap.”
Mandalee just giggled.
The mock battle continued for hours. Sometimes Daelen would gain the upper hand, forcing the others on the run by sheer power, but always, pretty soon, one of them would come up with some trick to turn the tables and give Daelen plenty to think about. He really couldn’t understand how they could be matching him despite the vast power difference. True, he wasn’t using his greatest power weapons, but then they weren’t pulling out their best stuff, either. They were only breathing harder from laughter, not fatigue, and neither was showing signs of power drain. Everything he threw at them, they seemed to have an answer for. They anticipated his every move so well, he wondered if Cat was using telepathy, but no, she wasn’t in his mind. Working together as a team, complementing each other’s skills and helping each other out when necessary, they were formidable opponents. He was glad Cat hadn’t chosen to assist her friend’s assassination attempt a few weeks ago. Together, they might just have succeeded.
Daelen caught them in a kind of giant spider’s web, thinking to keep them stuck tight in its hold, but it didn’t hold them for long.
“Dust?” Mandalee remarked randomly to her friend.
“Mandalee, you read me like a book,” Cat confirmed.
If this was a plan, Daelen had no idea what it was.
“Do you know the basic difference between a spider’s web and a cobweb?” Cat asked him.
Daelen admitted he didn’t.
Mandalee educated him. “Fresh spider’s webs are practically invisible. That’s why they’re so effective at catching flies – if the insects could see them, they wouldn’t blunder into them. But over time, because the webs are sticky, they gather dust. After a while, that makes them useless, so the spiders abandon them and make a new web somewhere else. The abandoned, dusty webs are what we call cobwebs.”
“So, all we need,” Cat continued, “to turn this sticky web of yours into a useless cobweb is…”
“Dust,” Mandalee concluded. “Such as the dust Cat generated earlier when she reduced your training centre to rubble.”
“You might want to close your eyes for a sec,” Catriona advised her friend.
For a skilled druid, the small amount of dust that still clung to a few places in what was now Catriona’s Meadow was all the raw material she needed to create more. Then a gust of wind covered the web in that dust, allowing them to pull free.
Mandalee used her super-speed to charge at Daelen, but she stopped in her tracks when she realised that she and Catriona were now fighting a copy. Concentrating, she felt something. Thanks to his training sessions, the assassin was able to sense Daelen even when he powered down into what he called ‘stealth mode,’ and knew that he was behind her. Sending Cat a sympathic warning, she sent out a Fear spell in his general direction. She couldn’t imagine what the shadow warrior might be afraid of, but whatever it was, it made him cry out for a second before he realised it was an illusion. Time enough for them to narrow down his location. The disruption in his mind cancelled his copy, and Catriona quickly asked the plants to pin him in place. Mandalee called a Flame Hammer to her hand, throwing it at the shadow warrior and following it in, while drawing her Pureblade to switch to hand-to-hand combat.
Catriona prepared to back up her friend with magic, combining steel and spells to launch a new style of attack, but Daelen, breathing hard, called out, “I yield!” to put an end to the battle. Cat asked the garden to release him, and Mandalee sheathed her sword. “You make a great team, you two. In all my time in your mortal realm, I’ve never met anyone who fights the way you do. You always seem to have another trick up your sleeves. I get out of one trap and fall into another, despite all my experience.”
“Thank you, Daelen,” Catriona smiled, genuinely touched. She knew what that admission must have cost him in terms of pride. “That’s almost the first time since I met you that I feel you’ve truly given us the credit we deserve.”
“Yeah,” Mandalee agreed, “maybe now you see why we insist upon you treating us as your equal partners.”
“Do you understand the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, Daelen? Power isn’t everything. Agreed?” Cat prompted.
“Well, I see your point, but I wasn’t using my beam cannon or anything like that. No matter what tricks you think up, you can’t beat that. Not with the power I’ve gained since merging with my dark clone.”
“You think so?” Cat arched her eyebrows. “In that case, the lesson is incomplete.” She asked Mandalee to stand well back for safety, then told Daelen, “Shoot me.”
“What?”
“Use your beam cannon – shoot me.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Deadly serious, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Cat, be reasonable. You know what will happen if I do that – a direct blast from my beam cannon – you’ll die. I’ve already killed you once by doing that, I don’t want to do it again.”
“You killed me last time because I chose not to defend myself. I had to make you snap out of your dark clone’s grip, and my death was the only thing I could think of that would be shocking enough. Therefore, I allowed you to kill me. This time I will not. If you’re still worried, I’ll cast a Mirror Image again, so you can just shoot my copy. If I fail, there’s no harm done, but if I succeed, my point will be proven.”
Daelen agreed because he could see nothing else would satisfy her. He walked a short distance away, Cat cast her Mirror Image, and the copy moved well away from the real Cat and Mandalee.
The shadow warrior fired his cannon straight at the copy and got the fright of his life. The duplicate produced a shield of polished glass in an instant – a mirror. The beam struck and reflected back, missing him by inches. The real Cat and Mandalee applauded as the copy took a theatrical bow and vanished.
“Now do you understand?” Mandalee asked. “Your cannon is basically just focused energy – harnessed, enhanced light. In a real battle, you can bet my friend wouldn’t have missed.”
“But no-one’s ever been able
to defend against my cannon before!” Daelen gasped, unable to believe what he’d just seen.
Mandalee supported her friend, pointing out, “You’ve never fought a druid of Cat’s skill before.”
“That’s true,” he admitted.
“It is my experience,” the assassin continued, “that power breeds complacency.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” Cat agreed.
“That can be fatal, especially in my profession,” Mandalee concluded.
Cat continued the theme. “Your previous major battles have always been against other powerful beings who try to match your power with their own. I know your power is far greater than mine, so it would be futile to try to fight power with power. Therefore, I find other ways. I fight power with guile, cunning, finesse, style, and trickery. Why do you think I am taking druid magic to higher levels than ever before? Why do you think Mandalee chose Nature’s power for her cleric magic?”
Daelen didn’t know, so Mandalee told him, “Ultimately, everything comes down to nature. Even as powerful a weapon as your cannon must conform to natural laws like reflecting off shiny surfaces.”
Catriona added to the lesson. “Take our initial storm battle. I don’t create a major storm here in this spot the way you do. I can’t. Storms like that don’t just appear naturally; it’s impossible. So, I do it nature’s way: conjure a small disturbance far over the ocean and give it a push in this direction. By the time it reaches here – a process I can speed up – it’s stronger than the storm you created yourself, and I don’t need to expend much energy to do it.”
Desperate to find a way out of admitting defeat again so soon, Daelen argued, “Ah, but going back to my cannon, your copy was able to deflect it because she knew it was coming. In a real battle, you wouldn’t know.”
“Yes, I would,” Cat countered, choosing to conceal Dreya’s lesson about the Temporal element she knew her magic to possess. “You always use your cannon. It’s your most powerful weapon, and your instinct is to go for the quick kill. Therefore, you appear, fly, power up and fire. You’re not exactly subtle, as I’ve told you before, so I’d have plenty of warning before you fired. More than enough to sprinkle a bit of sand from my vial and create a good enough mirror to reflect your cannon beam.”
“Maybe I need to rethink my tactics, then, if I’m so predictable.”
“He’s learning,” Mandalee remarked to Cat.
“Finally,” she agreed, with a friendly smile.
“In that case, maybe I should open with something like this, instead,” Daelen cried. Quick as a flash, he drew his sword…or at least, he would have done, had it not been stuck in his scabbard.
Trying not to smile, Mandalee explained she’d heated it with her Burning Blade spell, anticipating a hand-to-hand strike. The metal had naturally expanded and was now stuck tight.
“It’s only temporary in this case,” she assured him, “but I could melt it if I wanted to, then you’d never get it out again. You really must learn to be a little less predictable,” she smirked. “Like this.”
Mandalee stepped forward and kissed a stunned Daelen full on the lips. When she broke the kiss, she directed his vision to the knives in her hands. They were sheathed for safety, but in a real situation, she would have sprung them open in a split second and sliced open his neck.
“How did I not see those?” Daelen asked, incredulously.
“Jessica mentioned Sara had what she called ‘tech skills.’ I asked Sara about it, and together, we had an idea.”
Mandalee was now sporting what appeared to be a ring on one finger of each hand, but they weren’t merely pieces of jewellery; they each contained a tiny perception filter that concealed the knives.
“If you were my enemy,” she flirted, gazing seductively into his eyes as though they were lovers, “my lips would be the last thing you ever felt. You wouldn’t even feel my knives open your arteries. You might just have time to see your lifeblood fly from your body before you died.”
Daelen grinned, “If that kiss was the last thing I ever felt, I could think of worse ways to go,” he quipped.
Mandalee gave him a playful shove for his trouble, but she appreciated the compliment.
“Alright, you’ve convinced me,” he admitted. “Now, I don’t know about you two, but I think that’s enough training for one—”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence before the assassin, all smiles a moment ago, let out an agonising scream and shot off in a blur, towards the house.
“What happened?” Daelen asked. “I didn’t hurt her, somehow, did I?”
Cat shook her head. “No, nothing like that.” She turned to look at Daelen, her face ashen in shock. “I can feel it through our sympathic connection.”
“Feel what?”
“Pain,” she answered, tears welling in her eyes. “Not from Mandalee. From Shyleen. I think our enemies on Tempestria have found StormClaw and Shyleen’s been injured – really badly. We have to get back there now!”
“I’ll have to leave a quick note for Sara and Jessica.”
“Do what you must,” Cat growled, a look of fury and determination on her face, “but I’m not waiting around. Shyleen was hurt once before, and I wasn’t there to help her and Mandalee. That is not happening again!”
Rather than waste time running back to the portal room, she simply widened the Prismatic Sphere micro-portal that had been allowing her access to her world and her magic while on Earth. She stepped through it to the other side. She didn’t waste time closing it, deciding she might as well leave it open for Daelen, but she had no intention of going back.
Chapter 28
Mandalee tore through the StormClaw forest, with tears blinding her vision. She had to find Shyleen. Shyleen was more than she appeared. Shyleen was a part of her. She had given the leopard god half of her soul in return for the knowledge and power of nature. But more than that, Shyleen was, well, Shyleen. Her friend. Her only constant companion since she was a child. Even as Mandalee ran, she could feel half of her own self slipping away.
With a sob, she cried, “Shyleen, I’m coming!”
Moments later, she stumbled across a large clearing. The great leopard was lying there at the far end from her perspective, not moving and barely alive. Mandalee saw at once the vicious wound in her side and knew she had to heal her, quickly. But she also knew something else: this whole situation was screaming ‘trap.’ She forced the tears to stop as she got a grip on her emotions. Shyleen needed her to be in control. She had no choice but to spring the trap, but she could choose what happened when she did, and she decided at that moment that Shyleen was not dying today.
“I know you’re out there!” Mandalee called out. “Waiting to strike. Please, just let me heal the leopard. She’s my friend, though I suppose you know that.” She stepped out of the treeline and made a show of stripping herself of her weapons. “Look,” she encouraged them, “I’m unarmed now. Let me get to my friend, and I don’t care what you do to me.”
About a dozen people – warriors, wizards and clerics, along with half that many demons of various kinds – stepped out of the trees near Shyleen’s prone form. Mandalee knew there were more, a lot more, and she wanted them where she could see them. She took a small step forward.
“Kill me, torture me, take me as a hostage to use against my other friends. Doesn’t matter.”
More enemies were emboldened to join their comrades. Still, Mandalee could hear the animals on the island communicating with each other. From them, she knew there were still more concealing themselves. If she let even one stay hidden, she would die and worse, so would Shyleen. That was not going to happen.
She took another step, slowly, carefully, making no sudden movements, keeping her enemies calm, allowing them to relax. The more relaxed they got, the slower their reaction time when she finally made her move.
Holding up her hands, she showed them that she was indeed carrying no weapons…at least, none that they could s
ee. More enemies stepped into the light, taking the number well into the thirties. Still not all.
As she continued to step slowly forward, a mist began to roll in off the sea…surely a coincidence. Her enemies paid it no heed, whatsoever.
“I’m at your mercy.” Mandalee allowed fear to creep into her quavering voice. “You can take your time with me.”
She wasn’t wearing her mask, and she recognised the looks on the faces of many there present. It was the same look she had seen many times before from people who couldn’t accept her gender identity. It was the same look she had seen at that party in Walminster before she first met Daelen. The look that bartender gave her when he insisted on calling her ‘sir.’ She allowed the anger of that moment to fill her. She let all of her rage from all of those moments fill her. The rage she kept deep inside. The fury that slowly built every time she had to wear a mask to cover her face from small-minded people. It all built inside her, seeping into every muscle, every tendon. She was like a snake, coiled and ready to strike, but she needed to wait. The total was up to forty, but it still wasn’t all. She needed them all.
“Think of all the things you could do to me, all the things you want to do to me. You don’t want to miss out by holding back, do you?”
More stepped forward. Nearly all, but not quite. Mandalee was almost at Shyleen’s side now. Just a few more steps. Just a breath or two longer. Some of them had started jeering at her now. Rude comments assailed her. Wolf-whistles came at her. Many began to describe the things they were going to do to her. The many ways they were going to enjoy themselves with her. How long they were going to make it last for her. And a couple of particularly imaginative souls simply went with, “Freak!”
“You can see the leopard's injuries,” she implored them, ignoring the comments. “I know some of you are clerics like me. You know how drained I’ll be once I heal her.” She could see some of them nodding. “So, let me do it. Please!” she begged. “I can do nothing to you. You can watch my every move, you can watch everything, but if you hold back too much, you won’t be able to see. Think about what you’ll be missing if you can’t see.”
Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) Page 24
