Glyphbinder (32 page)

Xander stepped forward, tossing out scythes that appeared to be formed of green energy. They took off revenant knees and sliced davengers in half. More flame and gusts of air joined those scythes.

“Well!” Xander shouted. “It seems we have their attention!”

The others had the army well in hand. This revenant general was his alone. Trell turned, readied his blade, and charged as one of Sera’s bursts of
nothing
blew by his side. It struck a davenger, and the demon vanished with a hollow pop.

“Al elite sancadynis tyl adres!”
Trell swung his sword.

The revenant general turned Trell’s strike aside so easily that he almost tripped over the stairs. Then it dashed forward, lightning sword striking repeatedly. Trell could not keep up with it, and blow after blow slammed into his icy armor, knocking chunks right off him. How long until that sword penetrated? How long until he died?

Bright yellow eyes flashed inside the helmet as Trell found a pattern in its attacks. He stopped looking at where it struck and visualized where it would strike. Life’s strength allowed him to wield the massive greatsword as fast as a much smaller weapon, yet all that did was allow him to push the revenant a single step back.

“Swordking! Watch yourself!” Xander stepped up to guard Trell’s back, parting a davenger’s head from its shoulders with another spectral scythe. “I can feel the presence inside that body. That actually
is
one of the Mavoureen!”

That made sense, given the monster’s unusual speed and agility. It fought better than he did, and Trell’s best efforts only kept him from losing yet more ground. How could he defeat it?

Trell ducked, avoiding the lightning sword streaking over his head, and Xander cursed as it just missed him. Trell’s answering strike seemed slow as the revenant flipped its thundering blade in midswing. It parried Trell’s thrust and stomped back.

“As long as I’m watching your back, boy,” Xander shouted, “take care with mine?”

A davenger leapt from the darkness. Blasts of air dropped the davenger the moment it arrived, slamming it into the ground. Jyllith crushed it bone by bone and then a furious tornado rose around them, isolating the revenant general from its army.

“Deal with him,” Jyllith said, her voice soft enough to be a small child’s. “You will not be disturbed.”

Trell turned to the Mavoureen general, now waiting at the stairs with its lightning sword in both hands. It wanted him to attack again. It wanted to prove its superiority once more.

“Life,” Trell said. “I need more power.”

“More power than this will damage you. Change you forever.”

“I don’t care. I need to defeat this monster and that’s the only way we can do it. Together.”

“My power is yours. All of it.”

The streams coursing through Trell’s veins surged into a torrent. Water filled his lungs and ice crackled over his bones. He and Life were one. He drowned again in the Layn river.

Trell howled and dashed forward, striking so fast he barely saw the blows. The revenant general kept up, but only just. He even managed to back it to the stairs. They were finally matched, and everything Trell threw at the demon simply wasn’t enough!

“Move!” Sera yelled. “I have him!”

Nothing
blew past Trell’s left side. The revenant catapulted itself five stairs up as Ruin’s power disintegrated three stairs below. The revenant tossed its lightning sword like a throwing knife.

Trell swiped at the sword as he ducked left. His ice-sheathed blade sliced air as the lightning sword arced under his swing and darted toward Sera.

Byn caught it a pace from Sera’s face, bending it and twisting it. Doing all that with just one hand. He forced the blade to turn, jammed it into the davenger clutched in his other hand, and flinched as the demon corpse exploded in a burst of black blood.

“Finish it, Trell! Take it down!”

Trell charged. The now unarmed revenant lowered its grinning skull. The yellow in its eyes flared just before Life’s power sliced through its chest, but as its armor split open, Trell found it empty. The Mavoureen had vanished.

As the armor crumbled, Trell realized the revenant’s last gesture had been one of sincere respect. He ignored that, dashed up the stairs, and met Jair’s simple iron blade. Metal crunched ice.

“You can’t do this!” Jair shouted.

Jair struck again and again, eyes green and strikes precise. Trell blocked and frowned. Jair was channeling a swordsman, a talented one at that, but even this soul would be no match for a revenant general. Or the Tellvan swordking who had just struck him down.

“Don’t be a fool!” Jair fell back with each step and swing from Trell, blade shaking in his hands. “Without the Mavoureen to save us, this world will—”

Trell sent his opponent’s blade spinning into the darkness with a single upward strike. “Quiet.” He punched Jair in the gut, hard enough to knock him breathless. “Move.”

Trell pushed Jair aside and hopped over his prone, writhing body. He hoped he hadn’t broken anything, but the important thing was Jair wasn’t dead. “I’m going for Kara!” he shouted.

Confused shouts answered him. One was deep enough to be Sera or Ruin, but Trell paid no heed. Two more revenants fell to his blade, and then the hallway to Kara was clear.

Trell dashed into the darkness with ice inside his veins.

KARA WAS VAGUELY AWARE of the world around her, and screams filled that world. Someone with a very deep voice was chanting some very bad things. After a long moment, she realized she was chanting. Cantrall was chanting through her lips.

“Well,” her own lips said. “More resourceful than I expected.”

They looked down. They still wore the same bloodied academy shirt and brown pants Kara had worn since she left Solyr. She even felt the comforting weight of her reagent pouch against her chest. Cantrall had not discarded it, and why would he?

They sat cross-legged in the middle of a rounded tower of stone bricks. It was bigger than Solyr’s Council Chamber, the rocks enormous and pitted with age. Charred silhouettes burned into the walls showed her where the Mavoureen had incinerated the Terras elders. The first casualties of thousands in the All Province War.

Behind them rose a pair of great oak gates, shut and sealed with blood glyphs. The gates of Terras. Beyond those gates the Mavoureen hungered.

“Cantrall.” Kara forced her lips to move. “My friends have come for you, haven’t they?”

Cantrall stood them up. “This doesn’t change anything. It just means I’ll be forced to inflict more senseless pain.”

Kara examined the ring in which they stood. It was an immense, multi-tiered circle of glyphs, painted in glowing magesand. Demon glyphs, but more complex and powerful than any she had ever seen. Were these the glyphs of the Mavoureen themselves?

“They didn’t even realize what they were doing,” Cantrall whispered. “The Terras elders were fools toying with gods. What did they expect would happen?”

“They’ll kill you,” Kara said. “They’ll kill me!”

“My life is meaningless, but yours is not. Very soon now all this suffering will end. All the suffering in the world will end.”

Cantrall didn’t know how true his last words were. “Damn you, listen—!”

“Silence.” Cantrall snapped his fingers, and then Kara could not control her lips or anything else. She was his.

“I have to concentrate.” Cantrall sang.

Kara recognized the words of his quiet hymn as the ancient language. It shocked her. No one had been able to sing the ancient language since Torn. It was an art lost to their world forever, far more powerful and flexible than simple glyph magic.

The words Cantrall sang were almost impossible to comprehend. They didn’t sound like they could come from any human tongue. Kara could not understand a word of it, but the closed oak gates in the side of the tower trembled.

When Cantrall finished, thunder rumbled ominously. The gates flew open with a massive crack. That revealed a yawning maw of swirling purple clouds and unleashed inhuman screams.

They stared as a dot burst from a distant purple cloud, growing rapidly in size and sound. A spectral worm lined with spinning spikes. As it sped toward the tower, it made a sound like a thousand butchers sharpening knives at once. Kara couldn’t even scream.

The entire tower shook as the worm slammed into the far side of the open gates. How could those gates have stopped such a beast? The worm reared, three joined flaps peeling back to reveal a hollow throat. It latched onto the archway like a leech on a wound.

Glowing yellow eyes flared inside the worm’s gullet. They drifted forward as the space between the gates crackled with green magic. A shield of spectral energy threw them back, and then Kara saw Torn.

She caught a glimpse of a thin, naked man with short gray hair, a hard chin, and a web of bloody scars across his body. They would have torn any normal man apart. He stood inside the open gates and held that green shield strong despite his wounds. His torture.

Kara felt sick and cold. Her great-grandfather, the High Protector, had held these gates shut with his blood glyphs and will for over seventy years. He had endured torture far worse than anything she could imagine and he had never faltered, never broken.

Now she was going to make all that mean nothing.

“Cantrall!” Trell shouted.

They spun around at the fierce challenge to find a man covered in icy armor. He charged into the room and Kara struggled with her lips. She tried to shout, tried to scream.

“Trell, no.” Cantrall raised her hands. “Stop.”

Trell pointed his sword. “Release Kara. Now.”

Her sleeve thrashed as Cantrall threw out her hand, scribing a glyph faster than she could follow. Her Hand of Breath tossed Trell into the wall like a cork in a massive wave. Kara screamed, silently.

Trell hit the bricks hard enough to send chips and powder rattling across the floor, yet Life’s Champion struggled to his feet with one determined grunt. A collision that would have smashed any normal man into paste had barely fazed him. Perhaps Life
was
going to save her!

“Fall.” Cantrall threw out both hands. Trell snapped his sword up as Life froze the glyphed air. It split Cantrall’s strike around his raised sword in a giant, glittering snowflake, and then Trell charged.

Kara felt her lips move and realized Cantrall was distracted. He blew her body into the air with a thick Hand of Breath, flipping over Trell’s next swing, but he couldn’t keep that up forever. If Trell distracted Cantrall, could she seize back control of her body?

“Make him glyph!” Kara shouted. “Do that, and I can—“

Cantrall shut her mouth. “What is your plan? To murder her?”

Trell halted. “No.”

Kara wanted to scream at him, but Cantrall wouldn’t let her. She tore at the walls of her mind and found another opening, another few words. “Kill me! Please!”

Trell raised his sword. He bared his teeth and dashed forward, blade coming around. “Forgive me!”

Cantrall scribed and stars flashed before Kara’s eyes. Astral glyphs. They spun, now behind Trell, and tossed a massive Hand of Breath into Trell’s back. It was so powerful it lifted his whole body and slammed him into the wall. He dropped his sword.

Kara gasped. “Stop!”

The Hand of Breath dropped Trell and then caught him again, spinning him and smashing him against the wall. Over, and over, and over. Cracking ice and bone. Blood splattered the stones as Kara finally managed to jerk her own hand to the left, mussing Cantrall’s glyph. Far too late. Trell’s broken body fell.

“Useless.” Cantrall stalked forward and scribed a Hand of Heat. “I didn’t want to kill you, swordking—”

Gouts of massive flame roared from the doorway. Kara’s fingers scribed rapidly and raised a wall of ice. The flames cut right through it and then they were backing up, stepping inside the circle of Mavoureen glyphs just in time to avoid incineration.

“The power of the Five,” Cantrall said. “How inspiring.”

A blistered human form stomped into the Terras glyphing room with both its black-charred hands lit with flame. “That’s not the half of it.” The demon launched another fireball. “It’s time for you to burn again, respected elder.” That charred corpse was Aryn Locke.

Cantrall sat the two of them, knees spread and heels crossed, right in the middle of his circle of Mavoureen glyphs. He pressed her hands to her thighs as Aryn’s flames rolled around a protective bubble. A Mavoureen variant of Olden’s shell?

“Aryn!” a woman shouted. “Watch your flames!”

Aryn stopped burning just in time to avoid incinerating Trell’s bloodied, motionless form. As he pulled his fire back Kara watched Trell from the corner of her eyes, willed him to move. Pleaded with him. He couldn’t be dead, not again.

“Stop this,” Cantrall said. “Trust me.”

“Kill me!” Kara shouted. “Now!”

Aryn just blinked at her, but then Sera stepped into view and Kara felt real hope. Sera would save her. Sera would kill her. Cantrall was going to fail.

Sera tossed a burst of
nothing
that shrieked in a way Kara had never heard. It crackled toward them like a whip. It dissipated as it slammed into Cantrall’s bubble.

Kara struggled with her mouth. “Kill me! Now!”

“Impossible,” Sera said. Her voice was deep and strange. Sera hosted Ruin, and even Ruin’s power couldn’t best Cantrall.

“What is impossible?” Cantrall said from inside her. “Worlds beyond our own? The Five resurrecting their pawns?”

More people rushed into the room. Byn! Byn was alive! Yet why was Jyllith standing beside him? And what was Xander doing here?

“It’s over, Cantrall,” Xander said. “Release my daughter!”

“I’m glad you’re here.” Cantrall smiled. “Just in time.”

Kara’s head snapped back and darkness burst from her eyes. It felt like hordes of tiny legs digging into the inside of her skin. Kara couldn’t see and when she could again, Byn tumbled to the floor.

“What?” He twitched. Stopped moving.

Sera fainted, and Jyllith did the same. As Aryn collapsed, he whispered a fervent curse. Then he stopped doing anything.

“They’re gone.” Cantrall rose from his circle. “We can do without any more from those deluded Five.”

“You couldn’t,” Melyssa breathed. She was here now, too, and clutching Kara’s father. “That’s impossible!”

“Banishing the Five?” Cantrall stretched Kara’s sore body. “Oh, it’s very possible. You forget where we are. You forget the power of the Mavoureen.” Her head rolled back.

“Here, at the cusp of their realm, their power knows no bounds. If the Five had factored that into their scramble to seize this world back for themselves, they wouldn’t be the flawed gods that left their world vulnerable to the Alcedi.”

Kara knew she had to do something, stop this. Yet the Five Who Had Made the World had come here in the flesh to free her, to save her from demons beyond imagining. And the Five failed.

What hope could possibly be left in the face of that?

“The Mavoureen will save us.” Cantrall spread Kara’s hands wide. “Now I will prove it.”

Xander lashed out with one spectral blade after another. A green scythe slammed into Cantrall’s shield and broke apart. A storm of knives shattered upon it like drops of rain. A giant mace broke into a thousand tiny marbles that dissipated in midair.

Cantrall turned and walked them toward the gate, his protective shield moving with them. Kara struggled as they walked toward the giant, gaping mouth that had latched onto the hole in the tower wall. The same green energy she had seen earlier flared.

Torn’s bloodied body writhed in that energy, twisting furiously as spikes repeatedly sliced through his body. He held fast even as Kara betrayed him. Betrayed everything he had sacrificed his life to stop.

“
open the gate
,” the things beyond the shield demanded.

Cantrall reached out. Her thumbnails sliced open all four of her fingers as she walked toward Torn’s struggling form. She started to scribe a series of complex glyphs.

“Kara!” Xander shouted. “I’m sorry!”

A dozen spectral blades cut through Kara’s body. She and Cantrall screamed together as they sliced her open. Kara caught herself and realized she had done that, not Cantrall. Whatever Xander had done had stunned him, but for how long?

How had he penetrated Cantrall’s shields? The spectral purple knives offered the answer. They were a new glyph conceived by Xander himself, a glyph Cantrall had never seen. Cantrall couldn’t stop glyphs he didn’t know!

Kara coughed up blood and stumbled to her feet, grabbing a handful of precious magesand from the circle. “Dad, wait!”

“Kara?”

“I can stop him!”

She sensed Cantrall’s spirit stirring as she stumbled to the gateway. To Torn. One trembling hand pulled the pouch from her shirt and ripped it open. She caught the reagents in her palm, and there was no shortage of blood as she mixed them with magesand. As one finger scribed the glyphs she had memorized years ago.

The Thinking Tree acorn burst when she finished, its greenish-yellow glow consuming her hand. That glow was the link, Kara realized. That glow was her soul, and it could take hold of others.

“What are you doing?” Xander shouted. “Kara?”

She reached Torn’s writhing form. She jammed her glowing hand right into his chest, into his heart. She pulled, hard, and the man in that glowing shield blinked at her as they passed each other in the dark. Her moving forward. Him moving back.

“Transference,” Kara whispered, before the doors slammed shut.

XANDER HONURON STARED as his daughter’s stumbling body collapsed. With a terrible, thunderous crack, the gates of Terras slammed shut. The Underside was closed.

“Kara!” He dashed over. Shredding her body had been the most difficult thing he had ever done, but even a death like that was better than eternity in the Underside. A Mavoureen invasion.

Melyssa joined him and together, they cradled Kara’s bloody body. Xander cried out when he saw the damage he had done. He had shredded Kara’s chest with his glyphs, leaving tips of shattered bones poking out. He had sliced her left thigh open to the bone.

Kara’s eyes snapped open, clear and blue. Xander swept her broken body into his arms and cried. “Is that you? Kara?”