Centyr Dominance (19 page)

“This is turning out to be the dullest battle in
history,” opined the nobleman.

Gram and Alyssa both turned to him with warning
looks. “Don’t say that!” cautioned Alyssa.

Gram merely agreed with a disgusted exclamation,
“Ugh.”

Gerold looked at them questioningly, “What?”

Chad had walked back while they spoke, and he gave a
knowing chuckle, “No warrior wants to hear that, Baron. War is mostly a lot of
waiting, but the worst always seems to happen when things are quietest.
Soldiers are a pretty superstitious lot about it.”

“Oh,” said Gerold. “Sorry.”

The ranger smiled wryly, “Ye ain’t botherin’ me none,
Baron. I fully expect everything to go to shit, regardless of what you say.
It’s just a fact of life.”

Moira’s minions had split again, now they numbered
more than two-thousand strong. Close to a thousand people had been freed, and
between them and the ones who hadn’t been infected there were nearly
fourteen-hundred people unconscious. Her magical soldiers moved on, leaving
their previous hosts once they had been ‘cured’ and taking the bodies of those who
were only now responding to her strange assault.

She continued pouring energy into them. Soon they
would be ready to double their numbers again. The baron had told her that
Halam was home to nearly a hundred-thousand people, and she intended to make
certain that every one of them was free of the strange creatures controlling
them.

Minutes crawled by into a half hour. There were four
thousand spellminds operating in the city now, every one of them a clone of her
own. It was a strange sensation, being connected to so many copies of
herself. Had they been normal spellbeasts she would have been overwhelmed, but
instead it was a feeling of exaltation that filled her. Her twins were sharing
the burden, becoming a gestalt that supported itself.

I am not alone. I am not one. I am
multitude.
Over three thousand people had been freed,
and she was spreading through the city like a plague.
I am the sum of Man,
and we will not be denied.
She poured more power into her allies, and the
air around her physical body began to burn, clothing her form in a nimbus of
achingly bright power.

The enemy was responding now, killing her people
wherever they encountered them, but she did not pause or relent. If her bodies
died she took those of their attackers, turning them back on her foe. The city
had become a chessboard, a battlefield between two minds. Her enemy might not
be alive, but it was a
mind.
It thought, it controlled, and it reacted.

She was no longer human, not in the traditional
sense. She was a composite being, with thousands of eyes and hands spread
throughout the town. She began to see her foe in a new light. It was
similar. The small metal parasites were part of a greater whole, and they
reacted as one. It was losing wherever they made direct contact, as she took
its pieces and made them her own, but it had many more pawns than she did.

The enemy was aware. It knew her now. It felt her in
the same way that she had come to understand it, through a vast array of eyes.
It had never fought a war like this, but it was old, it was legion, and it was
incapable of fear.

The vast calculating intellect that opposed her
altered its strategy. This was the war it had been created to fight. The cost
of victory would be a delay in its plans, but victory was the only possibility.

It began to move.

More than ten thousand people had been freed, most of
them currently lying unconscious. Moira and her eight thousand selves advanced
across the city, but the enemy was retreating now, withdrawing ahead of her.
Archers and crossbowmen cut her people down whenever they crossed open streets,
forcing them to create new spell-bodies when their hosts were killed, if there
were no enemies close enough to claim.

She was beginning to falter.

The drain of aythar required to feed her magical army
was enormous. Cassandra still had plenty to give, but Moira was at her limit.
She was already channeling as much power as was possible for her. Trying for
more would be beyond foolish, it might prove fatal. As it was she could feel
herself growing tired. A mistake at this point, while she was moving so much
energy, could be disastrous.

Her mind had expanded to incredible dimensions, but
she was still limited by her sole link to the aythar provided by the dragon,
limited by the physical bottleneck of one frail mage body.

The enemy had given up. Faced with a foe that could
suborn its troops at will it had taken to outright retreat. The people of
Halam ran before her, trying to outdistance the advance of her new soldiers.
She was slowed by the amount of time it took to stop and remove the parasites
from those she had already taken, before moving on to take new hosts. With the
enemy running, it became difficult to advance, because once she had removed the
parasite from someone and moved on, the person in question was left
unconscious. She needed a constant supply of new people unless she was going
to simply hold the ones she had taken already, or create new spell-bodies from
pure aythar.

And she was already at her limit.

Moira was forced to keep the bodies she currently had
while advancing, in some cases continuing to animate the corpses of those
already slain by her foe, which required a much larger expenditure of energy.

They can’t run forever. There’s only so
much space in that city,
she told herself.
They can’t win.
What do they hope to achieve?
Then she felt a tremble in the aythar
feeding her great composite self. The body of her original was beginning to
fail.
Or perhaps they can—if they stall us long enough.

The smallest part of her, the heart, still living in
the small fragile body of a young woman outside the city, began to know doubt.
She drew apart slightly, finding her individuality once more and fighting down
a rising sense of panic.
I have to slow down, decrease the flow, or this
will kill me,
she thought.

No!
her larger self
cried, pulling at her with a will that was difficult to deny.
We can’t stop
now. We will lose.

Moira felt the fear in that thought. It was a primal
emotion, and it went beyond winning and losing. Her new creation was also
afraid of dying. That realization brought her new worries. Anything with
enough life in it to fear dying, would fight to preserve itself. She quickly
suppressed that thought, hoping that her larger, composite self hadn’t noticed
it. Moira had enough problems without letting paranoia start an internal
struggle with her other selves.

To compound the problem, it was then that she finally
understood the enemy’s response. While they appeared to be retreating, the
enemy forces were actually escaping from the gates on the other side of the
city. No, ‘escaping’ wasn’t the proper word, they were circling around,
streaming back toward the side of the city that Moira’s army had entered from.
Boiling outward like ants from a mound that had been kicked, they were heading
toward the true source of the assault—Moira and her companions.

Shit.

She didn’t know what to do. Which did nothing to help
the fact that her body was already trembling from the strain of handling so
much power for so long. If she didn’t lighten her load soon, she might
collapse.
Or burnout—or die.

“We have a problem,” she said aloud before she realized
the words were on her lips.

“What is it?” asked Gram anxiously. He had been
watching her in worried silence for almost half an hour, quietly dying from
ignorance of the situation. Chad Grayson sat a short distance away from them,
and he simply stood and strung his new bow. He had ‘acquired’ it during the
week of their convalescence.

The ranger looked at the baron, “Told ye—
Gerold
.”
He managed to make the nobleman’s name sound like an insult. He didn’t bother
with honorifics either, but the baron was too tense to notice.

“Half the city has run out the back gates…” Moira
informed them, “…they’re running around the outside walls and back toward us, I
think.”

Alyssa and Gram looked at one another, but neither
said a word, although Alyssa began reflexively examining the weapons she had
managed to acquire over the past few days. Chad began counting his arrows.

“What will we do?” asked the baron.

“I was hoping one of you might have some advice,”
suggested Moira.

Chad finished his count, “Unless ‘half the city’ adds
up to less than about a couple of hundred, then we should probably get on the
dragon and fly our happy asses out of here.”

“You don’t have that many arrows!” blurted out
Gerold. “Nor could you shoot so many before they reached us.”

The hunter gave him a disdainful look, “Don’t be so
sure o’ how many I could shoot. It may be that I only have seventy-three
shafts, but I’m figurin’ the lad here could handle quite a few before they get
to our princess. Assumin’ he ran out to meet them. Either way, the point,
Gerold,
is that we should make ourself’s scarce.”

Gerold looked at the older man with some astonishment,
“You truly think Sir Gram as puissant as that?”

Chad laughed, “He could probably kill ‘em all if
they’d be so kind as to wait around and let him stop to take a piss break now
an’ then, but we’d all be dead days before he was done.” He moved toward the
dragon, “No sense waitin’ around, let’s get moving.”

“I don’t think I can move, not and keep this up,” said
Moira. “I don’t think Cassandra could fly either, even if I could.”

“Then let it go,” suggested Chad. “No skin off our
teeth after all, just some magic soldiers. You can make some more an’ we can
try somethin’ else in a few days.”

“It isn’t that simple,” she replied.
I don’t think
I ‘can’ stop,
she thought. Already she was turning her troops back, giving
up the pursuit of the enemy and moving directly back toward their entry point,
following the shortest route toward their mistress. They wouldn’t make it in
time. They might catch the bulk of them with some luck, though many of the
enemy would get there ahead of them. Moira tried again to reduce the amount of
aythar she was channeling, but her spell-made allies held onto her mentally,
clutching at the energy she fed them like a newborn, suckling desperately for
milk.

“I can’t stop,” she added.

Chad’s eyes flicked to Gram, who gave an almost
imperceptible nod of acknowledgement. The young warrior began to drift
casually closer to her. Their body language gave nothing away, but even as
occupied as she was, her magical senses read their intentions almost as clearly
as if they had shouted them in her ears.

Gram’s path was blocked by a magical shield that
sprang up around her.

“I didn’t do that,” she blurted out. “The shield—that
wasn’t me.”

It was us. We can’t let you stop yet,
the
voice came from her larger collective self.

“I can see them,” announced Alyssa, still watching the
city. “They’re coming around the sides, running in this direction, thousands
of them.”

“How long do you think we have?” asked Gram, keeping
his eyes on Moira.

“A quarter of an hour before the bulk of them get
here,” answered Alyssa tensely. “Ten minutes for the faster ones in the lead,
maybe.”

“They’ll have to spread out,” said Gerold. “They
don’t know for certain where we are.”

Chad sighed, “Unfortunately, that’s not true either.
When Gram and I were tryin’ to hide from them last week, they had some way of
homing in on us. I think they can smell magic. They never lost us, until we
separated.”

Moira’s eagles were flying back to their position to
aid in their defense, but the rest of her forces would be far too late. She
tried once again to stop the flow of aythar but found herself blocked. The
collective wouldn’t allow that.

You’ll kill us,
came
their thoughts.

We’ll all die if you don’t let me
reorganize things,
she responded silently.

Another voice intruded, that of her internal
‘assistant’ who had remained with her,
I have a suggestion, if I may.

All of them waited, and her assistant continued,
Use
the aythar of the hosts. It is small, but it renews itself, and there are
thousands, one for each of you currently. It should be enough to maintain
you. That will allow us to produce a defense here, until you can catch the
enemy from behind.

Can they do that?
asked
Moira. As far as she knew, spellbeasts could only use aythar provided by their
creators. While her spell-twins were much more flexible than ordinary
spellbeasts, she didn’t think they could surmount that limitation.

Yes!
they cried, but
Moira hesitated. She was no longer fully in control of her own abilities, but
somehow this was a decision they couldn’t make without her consent. It felt
wrong. Well, it felt ‘more’ wrong, everything she was doing was already in the
darkest shades of gray, morally speaking. Taking the bodies of the people they
were rescuing was one thing, allowing her minions to attach themselves to the
life-source of the people they were controlling was a step further, a deeper
violation.

Still, she could see no other choice.
Do it,
she
commanded reluctantly.

Immediately she felt a gut wrenching shift as her
spell-twins clamped down on their hosts. The wellspring of aythar, the core of
a living being’s life, was called the aystrylin. Some considered it the
‘soul’, and it was the main thing that differentiated a spell created mind from
a true living person. Black nausea flowed back through her link to the
collective of thousands whom she was connected to, as her alternate selves seized
the power at the heart of the people they were controlling.
This is wrong,
she
thought, and she knew it was true—true at a level that was beyond doubt, an act
of evil without any possible excuse or redemption.

Within seconds most of her victims had surrendered,
but some, the stronger ones, struggled for almost a minute. Bile rose in
Moira’s throat as she felt her surrogates crush the independence of those last
few, and then it was done. The drain on her aythar lessened, dropping off to a
fraction of what it had been as they began using the life-force of the people
instead. Moira redirected the extra energy from Cassandra to her eagles, who
had just landed nearby.

“Is she crying?” asked Gerold quietly, looking from
Moira to Gram. There were tears running unheeded down her cheeks.

Gram clenched his jaw, feeling uncomfortable, “Move to
one side and ahead a little. They’re almost here. You can fight can’t you?”

The baron nodded, “I’m still weak as a kitten, but
I’ll do what I can.” He drew his sword.

Moira’s eagles changed form, becoming young women,
each a perfect likeness of the mage who had created them. They spread out in a
long line in front of the group, spacing themselves twenty feet apart, their
bodies glowing with power as Moira continued to funnel more aythar into them.

Alyssa looked at Gram, and he nodded, “We’ll take
anything that makes it past them.” Chad moved without comment, positioning
himself even farther back behind Moira and the dragon, his bow at the ready. Methodically,
he began placing arrows point first in the dirt around him.

We have the enemy now,
commented
Moira’s internal advisor.
We need only hold them here long enough for the
main force to catch up with them from the rear.

Maybe,
she replied.
It
was only luck that we were able to get this far. It was a mistake to commit
everything to the initial invasion. Now we’re rushing to keep the enemy from
turning our folly into an utter defeat. What if it has something else in
reserve?

The fastest of the citizens of Halam had gotten within
a hundred yards when Moira’s spell-twins began to respond, freezing them in
place and preparing to continue the strategy they had used in the city itself.

No!
she commanded.
Stop
as many as you can, or block their approach with a shield—no more twinning.
She
had already lost almost all control over her force approaching from the city,
the last thing she needed was a second army of magical clones taking the
initiative.

As you wish,
they
responded mentally. Creating small, knee high shields, they began tripping the
people running toward them, slowing their advance to allow the main body of the
enemy to catch up to them. As the numbers increased they created a longer,
solid shield across the length of the field, completely blocking the advance of
the thousands who pushed against it. Moira continued channeling more power to
fuel their efforts.