Centyr Dominance (7 page)

The guards managed to keep their nerve, and five of
them moved to stand in front of the now open doors, while the others approached
her slowly, spears down and pointed menacingly in her direction.

“Shibal,”
she pronounced and all of them collapsed slowly to the floor, their minds
slipping into unconsciousness. For a moment she was tempted to do something
else, to reach out and touch them more directly, to turn them against their
dead king, but she restrained herself.

“My king!” shouted Gerold, finally aroused from his
shock. “What is the meaning of this? She is your guest.” To his credit he
moved to stand between her and the king.

King Darogen’s face was devoid of expression. “Take
her,” he ordered the priests standing next to him. Aythar flared around the
men as Celior’s power flowed into them.

Moira had expected that. Her hands had already gone
to her waist, pulling her upper, presumably decorative, belt free. At a touch,
it separated into two smaller strips of braided metal, and her will sent power
flowing through them. The buckle came apart, forming two handles, one in each
hand while the metal straightened into glowing swords. Runes along their
lengths flared to life as the weapons began to glow with dangerous energies.

The belt had been inspired by the enchanted blades that
Elaine had made for her mother years before, but while those were simple
weapons, these were designed for a wizard’s use. Rune channels made them
effective for augmenting her ranged attacks, while a secondary enchantment
simultaneously turned them into deadly swords.

She used them to slice away the offending bands of
aythar that the channelers were using to try and ensnare her as she marched
implacably toward the doors.

What she hadn’t expected was the sudden arousal of the
sleeping guards. Eyes opening, they took to their feet again to block her
path. The part that shocked her was that she could clearly see that their
minds were still deeply asleep. The noble guests also rose from their seats,
moving to surround her.

The noblemen’s minds were a picture of terror and
fear, but their faces were placid, and their bodies moved with calm precision.

They are prisoners inside their own
bodies,
she realized.
How is he doing that?
Her
magesight revealed no extraneous aythar, and she was sure it wasn’t something
being done by the channelers.

Gerold, like the other guests in the audience chamber,
was unarmed, and he wrestled with several of the men trying to reach Moira.
She would have told him it was pointless, they couldn’t touch her anyway, but
there was not time for explanations. The way to the exit was momentarily clear,
and while the channelers continued to harass her, the three of them together
didn’t have enough capacity to really be a significant problem. She had been
engaging in mock battles with her brother for years, and he was far stronger
than these three put together.

She paused and then turned back. She couldn’t leave
the Baron behind and he was already so entangled with the other guests that he
couldn’t possibly hope to extricate himself. Unfortunately, before she could
use her power to create a shield around him and force the others back, one of
the guards stepped forward and expressionlessly stuck a spear through him.

“No!” she yelled, horrified by what she saw. Blood
stained his shirt where the spear head protruded from his back. Without
thinking, she raised her hand and still having the wind bound to her will, she
sent the offending guard flying backward. She could almost feel it when she
heard his skull crack as his body struck the hard stone wall, and it made her
stomach lurch.
I killed him,
her inner voice noted as a wave of guilt
and shame swept over her.

“Run, Moira,” said the wounded lord. “Get out while
you can.”

“Shut up,” she told him, gritting her teeth and
fighting down her rising bile. “I’m saving you. I’ve seen worse than that.”
Extending her aythar, she started to envelop him in a protective shield, but
once more the channelers interfered, attacking her from three separate
directions. Her shield shuddered under the assault, and she knew that she
couldn’t afford to play nicely any longer.

Pointing her right hand sword at the nearest
channeler, a man some twenty feet away, she sent a line of incandescent power
sizzling through his mid-section. The rune-channeled energy tore through his
flimsy shield and ripped a fist sized hole through his abdomen. For a split
second, before he collapsed, she could see through his torso to the damaged
wall behind him. Aiming her left hand sword at one of the other channelers,
she warned him, “You’re next if you don’t rethink your participation here.”
Her hand was visibly shaking.

While making her threat, she created a defensive
shield around Gerold. The guests, as well as the guardsmen, were still trying
to get to her, despite the ineffectiveness of their hands and weapons against
her personal shield. Their dead expressions, combined with the terror that lay
within their trapped minds, was almost enough to drive her to insanity.

With a surge of adrenaline she pulled the wind around
her, turning it into a violent cyclone of air, flinging them back and creating
more space for herself.

More guards entered from the hall, and these she could
see were still operating normally, that is, their native minds seemed to still
be in control. They gaped at the scene within.

King Darogen’s face changed, resuming its previous
liveliness as he yelled at them, “Shut the doors! Don’t let her escape!” The
effect was profoundly disturbing for Moira, like watching a dead man being
controlled by a puppeteer.

The guards leapt to obey, closing the double doors and
dropping a heavy bar across them to keep her in.

Things had gotten thoroughly and completely out of
hand. Staring around the room, Moira tried to figure a way out of her
situation that wouldn’t result in the death or injury of so many bystanders.
Anger and frustration warred within her, but she couldn’t lash out without
considering the consequences. Most of the people facing her were being
controlled against their will; ‘how’ they were being controlled she was
uncertain of, but she could see the panic and terror hidden behind their calm
faces. The wind roared around her, and the simplest option would have been to
expand her cyclone, destroying the room and its occupants.
I should have
brought a spellbeast,
she thought.
I’d have had more options.

She did have one magical servant with her, a tiny
sprite-like creature named Pippin, but it held little power. She had meant for
it to serve as a messenger later, to let Gram and Chad know that things were
going well, but it was increasingly looking like it would have nothing good to
report.

Moira considered channeling power into the tiny
spellbeast. It would be quicker than creating one from scratch, but doing so
in the middle of an ongoing battle would leave her weakened and vulnerable.
She made her decision.
When fighting a snake, remove the head, and the body
will die.

The wind died abruptly, dropping broken pieces of
furniture and tattered upholstery to the floor as Moira withdrew her aythar.
Turning one of her swords in King Darogen’s direction, she channeled along the
blade again, directing a powerful stroke at the monster that appeared to be
orchestrating the chaos around her.

With uncanny coordination, every person near the line
of fire threw themselves into the path of her attack. The powerful beam tore
through them like tissue, and twelve people died in the space of a heartbeat.
The beam continued on and still struck Darogen, but its power had been somewhat
diminished. The king had dodged as well, and it tore a small hole through his
right arm near the shoulder, rather than piercing his heart.

Moira saw the noblemen and guards collapsing in front
of her, their minds registering shock and pain as their bodies died. Darkness
enveloped each in turn as their terrified minds dimmed and went out. “No!” she
cried, aghast at what had happened.

That was when the remaining channelers struck.

Focusing their power they sent twin bolts of pure
force, not at the young wizard, but at Gerold. Moira hadn’t put the same
amount of power in his shield, thinking it only necessary to protect him from
their non-magical adversaries, and it collapsed before she could reinforce it.
Pain blinded her as the feedback sent her to her knees, struggling to retain
consciousness.

They killed Gerold,
she
realized,
just to capture me.
She could taste iron in her mouth, but
Moira’s anger was rising fast. Shaking her head she started to stand, ignoring
the pain in her skull as she prepared to incinerate the channelers, and
possibly everyone else left in the room.

The milky white bracelet clicked as one of the
guardsmen snapped it into place around her right wrist, sending a tingling
numbness up her arm. She swept her left arm across, and the blazing sword she
held tore through the man as though he were made of warm butter. Before she
could recover from her swing, someone else struck her head from behind, sending
her tumbling to the floor. She dropped her sword as she fell, but she rolled
with the blow to gain some space. Lifting the remaining sword in her right
hand, she discovered it had gone limp, reverting to its inactive form as a
metal belt.
That’s odd.

Men fell over her, wrestling to hold her arms even as
a strange lethargy came over her. Focusing her will she burned two of them,
but a second blow to her face ruined her concentration. A wrenching pain shot
through her shoulder as her arms were pulled together behind her, and a second
click sounded as the manacles were locked around her other wrist.

She shrieked with fury, but her aythar hardly
responded to her will now. It was fading fast, draining into the strange
shackles that bound her. “Get off me!” Moira kicked and twisted, but she
couldn’t escape the hands of her captors.

An unseen blow sent the air exploding out of her lungs,
and her resistance evaporated. Choking and gasping, she collapsed and in the
relative silence she heard King Darogen’s chilling voice, “Kill her.”

“Go Pippin,” she gasped in little more than a
whisper. “Find Gram, find Cassandra—tell them.” A makeshift club struck her
then, and darkness found her.

“I don’t like it,” Gram muttered, watching the
carriage carrying Moira rumble away.

“Quit yer bitchin’,” responded Chad. “Today might
actually be a good day.”

“How do you figure that?”

“With our little princess gone, we can do whatever we
like.” The ranger gave him a rare smile. “Why don’t we take a stroll about
town?”

Gram frowned. He could sense an undercurrent of extra
meaning behind the older man’s words, but he wasn’t sure where he was leading.
“Aren’t you worried about her?”

“Nah,” said the hunter. “Despite what you think, that
fellow she left with seemed pretty decent. Besides, she’s probably safer with
the King than anywhere else in this benighted city. This is a perfect
opportunity fer us.”

“Opportunity?”

“To see what we can find out about the Earl Berlagen.”

Gram crossed his arms and waited, his posture
indicating that he was anticipating a complete explanation.

“While you were wastin’ yer youth an’
not
takin’
a roll with our most attractive hostess, I was takin’ care of business.”

“’Wasting my youth?’ I was sleeping, which is what
you
should have been doing, instead of spending all evening drinking,” argued
the young knight. What he couldn’t say, what was too difficult, was that his
heart was still broken. There was no way he could even consider lying with
another woman after losing Alyssa. Gram wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to
think of another woman that way, although he could perfectly understand why the
hunter thought the proprietress was so attractive.

“Hah!” exclaimed Chad. “If I had a woman like that
after me, I’d probably still be recoverin’ this mornin’. I could get over a
hangover quicker’n that woman! What you ain’t realized yet, is that Chad here
was workin’ hard last night, an’ while you were restin’ that big wooden knob
you call a skull—
I
was gatherin’ valuable information.”

Gram looked at the woodsman skeptically, “You don’t
say?”

“I do say, an’ you, me boy, would be wise to listen,”
said Chad, giving him a conspiratorial wink. “Our dear Earl is in town,
visitin’ the King. He arrived yesterday, an’ he’s stayin’ at the palace. All
of his people are at his house here in the city. We could take a walk over
that way an’ see what we can discover while their lord an’ master is out an’
away.”

The young knight stared at the hunter, thinking
carefully. After a moment he said, “Moira won’t be back until this evening
anyway…”

Chad gave him a wicked grin.

“But what if she needs us before then?”

“Do ye really think that? That girl’s more dangerous
than both you an me put together,
an’
she’s got magic too!” Chad
laughed a bit at his own joke.

Gram made up his mind, “Alright, let’s do it.” He
made a point of not laughing.

***

“Why am I carrying this again?” asked Gram. He
shifted his hand to indicate the bow stave it held. “This doesn’t exactly make
us inconspicuous. Normal people don’t walk around town with such weapons.”

“Speak fer yerself,” snapped Chad. “Our story is that
we’re bowmen, lookin’ for employment. If ya don’t have a bow, that’ll spoil
the tale.”

Gram sighed, but didn’t argue further.

“See, that fellow has a crossbow,” said Chad, nodding
his head toward a man on the other side of the street.

“He’s a town guard,” answered Gram dryly.

Chad shoved him slightly, “Don’t stop an’ stare, he’s
already lookin’ at us.”

Gram growled, “Then you shouldn’t have pointed him
out!”

They kept walking. They were on the west side of the
city now, and while they hadn’t yet reached the more affluent section where the
Earl of Berlagen kept his city home, something felt distinctly out of place.
Gram couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, but it made him itch
between his shoulder blades.

“Cut to the left there,” said Chad quietly as they
were about to pass the corner of one building.

Gram did, but his eyes looked a question at the other
man. They were now in a narrow alley between two shops.

“We got a stalker,” Chad informed him quietly. “If he
turns the corner, be ready. If he keeps walkin’, just stay silent.”

Gram waited, letting his mind go still in the
particular way that Cyhan had taught him. It was second nature to him now.
Seconds crawled by until a man passed the entry to their alley. The stranger
stopped, looking ahead and then turning into the darkened passage. The man’s
eyes widened in surprise as he spotted the two men he had been following
crouching on either side of the alley.

Time froze as Gram flowed forward, his speed seeming
almost secondary to the perfect grace of his movements. His right hand
stretched out, and his palm caught the newcomer under the chin, slamming his
head back with such force that the man fell senseless to the ground. His skull
echoed loudly as it struck the cobblestones; he had been completely unconscious
before he hit the ground.

“Damnitt,” swore Chad. “How’m I ‘sposed to question
him now?!”

The young knight grimaced, “Oh…”

The hunter was already kneeling over their would-be
follower. “Shit, I think ye killed him.”

“What?!”

“No, wait—he’s still got a pulse, but his eyes are all
out o’ kilter. How hard did you hit him?”

“Hard enough…,” said Gram somewhat sheepishly. Cyhan
had once had him train with regular soldiers to teach him to moderate his
blows, but since he had received the dragon-bond he still hadn’t quite adjusted
to his strength.

“Anomaly detected,” said the stranger quite audibly.
Opening his eyes, the man began to sit up.

Gram hit him again.

“Gods-be-damned! What were we just talkin’ about?
Why’d ya hit him again?” cursed Chad.

“He startled me.”

The stranger began to twitch and spasm as he lay
between them.

Chad gave the younger man a hard stare of disapproval.

“It was an accident,” said Gram, but he felt terrible
already.

“There’s somethin’ not right about this fellow,”
observed Chad. “He was actin’ odd, and talkin’ odd besides. Do you know what
an ‘anonomy’ is?”

“I think he said anomaly,” replied Gram. “It means
something strange or unusual.”

“I know what it
means
,” growled the hunter. “I
just misheard him.”

Gram wrinkled his nose, “He smells terrible. Why is a
tanner following us?” He held up one of the stranger’s brown stained hands to
highlight his observation. That combined with the strong odor of urine was all
the proof of the man’s profession anyone would need.

“Good point,” agreed Chad. “He’s a weird choice for a
spy.” The ranger glanced down the alley and then back toward the street.
“Let’s go. We’ll draw more suspicion if we’re seen hoverin’ over an injured
body.

Gram didn’t like leaving the man there, but he
couldn’t argue with the hunter’s logic. The two of them made their way out of
the alley and back down the street, doing their best to walk normally. There
were a few people along the road, and each of them seemed to take far too long
staring at them as they passed, heightening Gram’s paranoia.

Their road intersected two others a hundred yards
farther on, and the crowd grew dense. The open space there became a makeshift
market, filled with people selling a variety of vegetables and other foods. It
seemed ordinary enough, but Gram noticed several people openly watching them.

You’re letting your imagination get the
better of you,
Gram told himself.
This is just a
regular market. Nobody has any reason to suspect us of anything.
Chad’s
hand on his arm drew his attention.

Twenty feet away a fish seller stared at them from his
stall. After a moment, the man’s face changed, going strangely slack as he
stood and began to walk in their direction. Most of the people in the crowd
ignored the man, but a few others stopped and began doing likewise.

At least eight or nine different people were approaching
them from different directions within the crowd. It might have seemed less
unusual if they had all had something in common, like being guardsmen, but
these townsfolk were seemingly unrelated. Two were women, still carrying their
purchases, while another was a dried fruit merchant.

“This way,” urged Chad, heading to their left. It was
the shortest distance out of the crowd and to one of the roads that led away
from the congested area.

They made it ten feet before another stranger, one whom
Gram hadn’t spotted yet, put his hand on his shoulder, tugging hard to arrest
his forward motion. Already filled with adrenaline, he turned to loosen the
man’s grip and planted his left elbow in the stranger’s belly. Without
stopping, they continued forward, ignoring the gasps of surprise as some people
noticed the sudden altercation.

Chad stopped suddenly in front of him. Someone else
had grabbed him without warning, and the two men struggled briefly. It was
impossible for Gram to see precisely what happened, but then the newcomer fell
away, and the ranger began moving again, a flash of steel in his hand and blood
marking the ground.

He just stabbed someone in front of
everyone,
thought Gram.
The town guard will be after us in a
minute.
Despite the worry that thought evoked, it paled beside the mystery
of why they were being followed and assaulted by perfect strangers. Two more
people grabbed at Gram’s sleeves, and he struck out, knocking one sideways and
sending the second one flying. He felt the distinct crunch of bone as his fist
connected with one of their cheeks.
That was a woman!
Guilt and fear
fought for dominance within him.

People were screaming now as others within the crowd
noticed the unexpected violence. The man Chad had stabbed was bleeding on the
ground behind them, and several others were struggling to rise after falling
back from Gram’s reflexive blows. The most eerie part was that the injured
made no sound at all. The only ones yelling were onlookers.

The hunter shoved a stunned farmer out of his path and
broke into open air, his feet moving into a run. Gram stayed close behind him,
and the two sprinted from the square and into a narrow road. Most of the
people in the market watched them with expressions of either outrage or surprise,
but a select few followed with blank stares.

“What’s going on?” Gram said loudly as they ran.

“I dunno, but it’s damn weird!” shouted the ranger.

“Which way?” asked Gram as they approached a new
crossroad.

“Right, that should take us to the gate.”

“We can’t leave without Moira!” said Gram, already
turning in that direction.

“She ain’t wanted for murder an’ assault,” responded
Chad.

“They attacked us,” argued Gram.

“Tell that to the judge an’ see if he believes ya,”
said Chad, but then he stopped. “What the fuck?”

A line of people stretched across the road in front of
them. None of them were guardsmen, they appeared to be simple townsfolk, all
with blank faces and glazed expressions.

Gram paused beside him, using the opportunity to
summon Thorn and his armor. “I’ll break through; stay close behind me.”

“There’re too many,” countered the older man.
“They’ll drag you down.”

“They’ll shy away from the sword,” said Gram. “None
of them even have weapons.”

“How did they even get in front of us?” wondered Chad,
but he followed the young knight as they ran at the line of townspeople.

Nothing happened as Gram had expected, however. The
people in front of him showed no fear of the sword at all and instead threw
themselves at him. He twisted and pulled, using his elbows and shoulders to
tear himself free, reluctant to strike down unarmed civilians, but the ranger’s
prediction proved accurate. Within moments he found himself mired in a throng
of grasping hands, and their sheer weight began to bear him down.

Chad was showing less restraint, using two long knives
to cut at any who approached him, but several bleeding opponents were already
dragging him down to the cobblestone pavement.

Forgive me,
thought
Gram, desperate now. Despite the weight of those tugging at him, he ripped his
arms free and swept Thorn outward, cutting two men down with one stroke. Blood
flowed, and within seconds the roadway was slick with sanguineous fluids and
dying men. Cutting fiercely, he cleared the area around himself and then moved
to free his companion. Thorn rose and fell, and arms and legs came away from
their owners as the great sword sundered flesh and bone.

More people were emerging from homes and shops that
bordered the bloody street. Some cried out in dismay at the sight that greeted
them. Men and women lay scattered and bleeding in the road around the metal
clad knight. A loud whistle in the distance signaled the approach of the town
watch.