Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) (41 page)

Reckoning

The doors to the throne room reverberated under an
explosive crash with all the sound and fury of a catapult delivering a payload
of burning pitch. Eithne strained her neck against the arcane ropes of puce
energy that bound her fast. The granite doors buckled again with a ringing,
concussive clamor—THWANG! A sly smile tugged up the corners of the queen’s
mouth as she swung her head forward and locked eyes with Sarad Mirengi.

Bryn straightened against the magic that fixed her in the spell-circle
and raised her head from her shoulder as a small, bright seed of hope blossomed
in her heart and lent her battered mind and body a renewed strength. She licked
her lips and forced a laugh from her cracked throat. “He’s come, Sarad,” she
rasped. “Elias has come.”

Sarad kept his eyes fixed on the spellform featuring a six
sided star that he had drawn on the throne room floor. He said nothing, but the
color drained from his face. Sarad refocused on his work. He raised his hands palm-up
to the sky and chanted in the spirant tongue of his masters. An inky clot of
energy formed above the spell-circle as a beam of mottled light shot down from
the moonless night and through the skylight.

The crackling, opaque cloud descended.

THWANG! The doors shrugged on their hinges.

The six Handsmen who stood at the points of the six sided
star, each behind one of the sacrifices—Ogden, Phinneas, Agnar, Lar, Bryn, and the
queen—whose very essence was to be harvested to power the fell ritual, joined
their voices to Sarad’s incantations. The star and the sweeping characters and
sigils that Sarad had fastidiously etched into the marble of the throne room
floor emitted a scarlet light.

“You best hurry, apostate,” cried Ogden, “your death is
behind those doors!”

“Lords of House Senestrati,” Sarad screamed. “Undying shades
of the utterdark, I invoke thee!”

THWANG!

Six rays of black light erupted from the center of the cloud
and speared each member of the queen’s party in the solar plexus. “May the
vitalis
of these six usurpers break the geas that binds you and bars your get from
these lands, for nigh is the House of Denar no more!” The six sacrifices
levitated toward the engorged miasma of fell magic.

THWANG!

All eyes turned to the entryway as the doors blew into the
throne room in a burst of cerulean spellfire. Through the heart of the
detonation rushed Elias Duana, Danica at his side, his duster flapping in the
preternatural wind. Without breaking stride, Elias hurled his sword, aflame
with a blaze of white magic, like a javelin into the pulsating mass beneath the
skylight.

The two arcane forces repelled each other with such
vehemence that the glut of dark magic exploded back through the skylight,
vaporizing the stained glass, while the sword spun to the floor in a ring of
white fire, sundering the spell-circle and showering all occupants of the room
with powdered marble before skittering across the throne room and ricocheting
off the wall.

The queen’s party dropped. Likewise, the Handsmen behind
them were heaved from their feet in an arcane backlash as the spell they used
to immobilize the queen’s party broke under the torrent of arcane forces that
tore through the chamber. The queen’s party and their fell wardens alike lay
stunned, while Sarad Mirengi and Elias Duana stared each other down as the
marble dust settled like lazy snowfall.

“Impressive,” said Sarad, standing firm in the center of the
star, where all lines of the spellform intersected. “But tell me, Marshal, how
will you turn aside my magic, now that you are bereft of your father’s precious
sword?” The necromancer spun his hands, one over the other, shaping a stain of
black energy veined with crimson lightning between his palms.

“Protect the queen,” Elias said to Danica, although his eyes
never left Sarad’s. “The necromancer is mine.”

For perhaps the first time in her life, Danica wasted no
time on words and sprinted for the queen, short-sword and dagger in hand. She
slid on her knees, barreling aside the stupefied Eithne, who swooned on her
knees at the bottom point of the spellform, perpendicular to Sarad’s position
in the center, even as his sphere of dark magic shot overhead. Agnar, she saw,
was the first to recover having risen to an unsteady crouch. Acting on
intuition she cried his name and tossed him her sword, before whirling about
and burying her dagger into the stirring Handsman that had held Eithne captive.

Meanwhile, Elias strode steadily toward Sarad as he reached
for the spark of the arcane that he knew flickered somewhere within him in the
deep beyond the void. He gathered all of the power available to him as the fell
wizard finished shaping his spell, both men oblivious to the fervent melee that
had begun to rage about them. He had crossed half the throne room when Sarad
heaved the ragged meteor of black magic at him. Elias raised an arm without
slowing his advance. As the gestalt of fell energy, which sputtered black flame
and ball lightning, approached within a few arm-lengths of Elias, a white beam
of liquid fire shot from his palm and into the dark mass.

Agnar struggled to find balance as the world pitched and
swam before his eyes, but then he heard his name, called clear as a clarion
horn, and he found himself transfixed by the jade fire of Danica Duana’s eyes. The
glint of steel whirred at him and on reflex he reached out, feeling each
drumbeat of his heart, and pulled it from the air. With his favored weapon in
hand a lifetime of memory and training returned to him.

Agnar Vundi surged to his feet and went to work.

Danica dragged the senseless queen from the battle as Agnar
guarded her retreat, her sword dancing in his hand like an arc of silver
lightning. A couple of the enemy swung wide of Agnar to recapture the queen,
but Lar Fletcher had joined the fray.

With a roar of inarticulate rage he picked up the nearest of
the Handsmen clear over his shoulder. The agile assassin twisted in Lar’s arms
and black lightning lanced from his splayed fingers. The fell electricity
coursed through him, rippling down his arms, over his shoulders, and across his
torso. The bitter burn of the magic served only to incense Lar further. He
lifted the Handsman above his head and threw him to the floor like a sack of
grain.

With a wet THWACK the Handsman went still, as did his spell.

Lar spared the dead arcanist a glare before moving on to
help Danica, but when he looked up his sight grew dim and when he went to take
a step his legs wouldn’t obey him and only twitched. The last thing he saw
before his sight failed was Danica, pint sized Danica, but large as life. A
wistful smile crept over Lar’s face before the black took him and he knew no
more.

Danica squared off against a scimitar wielding Handsman. Armed
with naught but a dagger she assumed a defensive posture and an inverse grip on
her spare weapon, resting the blade against her forearm. Her opponent sneered
at her and opened with a flat cut at her torso. She blocked the slash with a
twist of her body, but the ringing blow pushed her off balance and she felt
warmth leak down her arm, for while her dagger made solid contact with the Handsman’s
scimitar it did not turn the entirety of the blade.
When you’re in too deep,
that is precisely when you must push deeper yet
, a voice whispered from the
far recesses of her mind, the shard of an ancient memory.

The Handsman pulled his scimitar back and cocked his arms to
launch another blow, but instead of retreating Danica used the momentum that
had unbalanced her and spun low, into the attack. The heavy-handed slice sailed
clean over her head. As she completed her spin she shouldered him and drove her
elbow into his gut. When he pitched forward she punched straight up. He made a
wet exclamation as her dagger opened his throat.

Danica turned her attention back to the queen, but she was
gone. Her heart all but arrested as she looked up to see Eithne lumbering back toward
the spell-circle and the bitter battle between Mirengi and Elias.

Elias pressed his white fire against Sarad’s magic, which at
first slowed the roiling globe and then brought it to a dead stop mere inches
from his hand. He felt the fell power radiating from the dark mass, which his
arcane sight perceived as black concentric ripples that stole the heat from the
air, drained his strength, and threatened to snuff out the very fire that was
his life. With a renewed sense of outrage Elias bent all of his thought into
resisting Sarad and willed the suspended clot of dark energy back across the
room.

Sarad saw his spell return toward him with no small measure
of surprise. There were few wizards in the world equal to an arcane working of
that magnitude. He had never seen anyone use magic quite like Duana. Still, two
could play that game. Sarad flourished his hand and, inspired by his nemesis,
cast a beam of black fire across the room and into his reflected spell. The
spell, which originally had the shape of a comet, compressed into a dense
sphere of warring dark and light energies. The crackling, humming sphere shuddered
to a stop, suspended between the two wizards.

“So, it has come to this, once again,” said Sarad, “a wizard’s
duel between the champions of House Senestrati and House Denar.”

Elias lowered his hand, though the sphere of magic yet hung
between them, and looked at the grotesque Dark Lord of the Scarlet Hand who had
been disfigured by his hand. A peculiar feeling slid through the Marshal at
that instant and the fire of his anger burned out, and left him feeling spent. “Enough
blood has been spilt in this millennia-long vendetta,” he said. “Surrender the
dark covenant, Sarad. Let us end this.”

“I once asked the same of you, as you may recall,” spat the
necromancer, his face gone scarlet. “And my answer is the same as yours—
never
!”
Sarad threw up his hands and a curtain of black and violet fire drew around
them in a great ring, creating a tidy barrier between them and the ongoing
melee.

“So be it,” said Elias.

Each man lifted an arm and from their hands lanced seething,
liquid beams of fire, which met in a crash of sparks and fiery rain as the dark
sphere shivered under the amalgam of yet more arcane energy.

Thus the contest of wills began in earnest.

Eithne shambled behind Elias, swinging wide of the curtain
of cold flame, and toward Bryn, who had gotten her legs beneath her and squared
off unarmed against the Handsman who had immobilized her during the ritual. Phinneas,
who had played possum while Agnar engaged the Handsmen, pushed his bruised body
from the floor and lunged awkwardly at the swordsman who threatened Bryn,
tackling him about the legs. The Handsman remained afoot, though he stumbled
before kicking free and backhanding the doctor with the pommel of his scimitar.

While Phinneas had failed to take the Handsman down, he bought
Bryn precious time as Eithne, with Danica on her heels, closed in on them, all of
which unfolded around the epic struggle between Sarad and Elias who continued
to pit their magic, and wills, against each other.

Bryn pressed close to the Handsman as he threw off Phinneas
and punched his nose with an upward angling open-palm strike. His eyes watered
and blood streamed from his nostrils, but the veteran warrior retorted without
delay and hooked Bryn on the chin with the hilt of his scimitar, proximity
having rendered the blade useless at such close quarters. Bryn’s head snapped
to the left, the room spun, and she fell to her knees.

Ogden’s first order of business when he regained
consciousness, his brow having been bloodied by a falling shard of cast iron
from the skylight, was to give Elias what aid he could. Elias’s intervention
had dispelled Mirengi’s ritual, sundering the spell-circle that contained the
six sided star, but he still stood in the center of a greater spellform, a ring
of sigils and incantations in the flowing script of the darkspeech, that served
as a gateway to the dark magic of the Senestrati. If Ogden sundered that
spellform he could reduce Mirengi’s strength and give Elias an edge.

Ogden blocked out the bedlam of clashing steel and the crackle
and thrum of arcane energies and activated his arcane sight. He saw the fell
magic harnessed in the spellform as a bruise colored energy field that formed a
flowing circuit. He needed to arrest the current and thus sever Mirengi from
the teat of his fell masters. Ogden collected his own power before him in a
ball of sun-golden light. He shaped his magic into a wedge and with an
exclamation in the tongue of the ancient Eurinthian—
Vahnara Dosh Eroshtya!
—he
thrust his spell through Mirengi’s spellform with an audible
pop
. The
cycling field of dark energy derailed and dissipated into the air like ashes in
the wind.

Mirengi cursed in the darkspeech as his reservoir of power
lessened, but he never took his eyes from Elias, his concentration unwavering. Ogden
had done all he could for Elias, for he daren’t cast his own magic into the mix
which would cause an unstable amalgam of energy that could potentially destroy them
all. Their fate, and that of Galacia, now lay in the hands of his student.

Danica realized that Eithne had broken away from her and
gone back into the fray to help Bryn, but she was damned if she was going to
leave her brother to face Mirengi alone in order to save the queen only to fail
at her appointed task. She closed in on the melee on the other side of the
circle at a dead run just as Bryn fell to her knees. She reacted without
thinking and shoved Eithne out of the way and leapt over Bryn, straddling the
downed woman as she raised her dagger to intercept the scimitar blow that would
have ended the young courtier.

Rather than disengage to mount another attack, the Handsman bore
down on Danica. Her dagger bowed under his heavier weapon and she gave way
under his greater strength and leverage. Danica bared her teeth and tightened
every muscle in her body against him, but the scimitar gained steady ground
against her and descended inch by inch toward her skull. Then, without
preamble, a gout of blood erupted from his mouth.