Sorcerer Rising (A Virgil McDane Novel) (31 page)

To make matters worse, the goblins were wearing down the elemental, and the ones with guns were taking pot shots at our side.

I loaded in another shell and shouted over my shoulder. “Sam, get Lambros out of here, get the convoy away from this! We’ll catch up!” The only hope we had was to get them away from this. Me and Dorne could hold them off and then-

A strange humming sounded behind me. Quite, but so deep it made my teeth itch. Then a beam of scarlet light lanced toward the Sorcerer, cutting through his shield. I covered my eyes against the resulting explosion, and when I looked again, the Sorcerer was lying on the ground, a weeping pile of smoking meat.

I looked over my shoulder. Lambros was holding her little gun of glass and chrome, its red hot barrel smoking an odd grey vapor. She set her feet in a marksman’s stance, took aim again and sent another beam lancing into one of the goblins. There was a flash of light and the creature disappeared in
a pop of ash.

“I have the situation under control,” Lambros said, taking aim again. “Please help Conrad.”

Dorne was driving back the fairy, who seemed to be distracted trying to get her thrall back in order. Gulo was crawling to his feet, his skin knitting back into shape, scabs peeling away, burn marks disappearing as if they’d never been.

So I shot him in the head.

He roared, half his face taken off by the buckshot. My heart sank as the skin began to knit back together. And now he looked pissed to boot. I fired another shot and broke the gun again.

I fumbled through my shells, plucking two from the bandoleer. The goblins had heard me and were ignoring the elemental, trying to get to the three of us. I shoved two shells into the gun and fired them both. Once at a diving goblin, who wouldn’t worry me or anyone else again, the second time to drive another one back. His armor shrugged off the blast and I juggled two more shells into the gun.

Gulo leapt through the air, landing on Dorne’s elemental and driving it to one knee. He was hunched over it, powerful arms bulging as he drove his claws deep into the things head. There was a sickening cracking followed by a satisfied growl, and the construct’s head broke off with a thundering snap. It fell apart, the Aether holding the earth together spilling out, and Gulo rode the rubble down, chunking the boulder at me as he did

I narrowly dodged out of the way and tried not to think about the tree that exploded behind me. I didn’t have time to fire another shot before the lycanthrope was on me. I saw another beam arc through the air from Lambros’ toy, this time impacting on Gulo’s back, but he shrugged it off, barely registered it. In a lightning quick motion, he snatched the gun from my grip and offhandedly tossed it at Lambros, knocking the gun from her hand and driving her to the ground.

Uh oh.

He leaned in, bearing down on me with a wide mouth full of sharp, jagged teeth. I pulled the derringer from my sleeve, jamming it into the creatures chest. I focused, putting together a quick spell from my mind. Normally I would need the gun to be loaded to do anything with it, the spell stored in a glass bullet. But I didn’t have a choice. I summoned up the spell, snatching together memories as I went. The ammo had always been anguish. I had ample fuel since Nidia.

And this monster had been in the Walter Cloud. His team had sabotaged everyone. It was his fault we had been put in that situation, that Tiffany had been on that hill. That she had died. The barrel lit up as I poured energy and focus into the enchantment.

I screamed, pulling the trigger and casting the spell.

The gun roared, a barrage of sound and force slamming into the lycanthropes chest, enough to deafen everyone within twenty feet.

And nothing happened.

He shrugged it off like so much wind, a wide grin playing across his crooked snout, revealing row after row of serrated teeth. He leaned in and said in a horrible, nightmarish voice, “You have nothing, Sorcerer. Nothing that compare to the curse that flows through me.” Then he dove forward to rip out my throat.

A
dark shape, like a shard of night, leapt from the trees with a feline scream. A shiver of primal fear, intense enough to hurt, traveled down my spine to the tips of my toes. I had a fleeting glimpse of long, white fangs digging into Gulo’s neck and burning, golden eyes, and then the lycanthrope was ripped away from me.

The totem wrestled Gulo away, powerful jaws clamped around his neck. Somehow the lycanthrope managed to twist away from the panther, delivering two deep slices as he broke away. I watched amazed as the creatures slashed at each other. There were thousands of strains of lycanthropy but I had never seen one this powerful. Gulo was taking on a full blown totem, in the creature’s own turf, and was hardly worse for wear.

He was losing steam though. Blood oozed from his neck, his wounds knitting together slower.

Dorne was still locked in combat with Discord, his clothing in tatters from the hits she had landed. He was losing steam as well, and she didn’t have a mark on her.

Gulo backed away from the panther’s claws, tail tucked between his legs. He was losing and he knew it. Suddenly, he leapt over me, landing next to Sam. For a moment our eyes locked. He was beaten, but this was a man who always had a backup plan, and in those sickly, red eyes I saw laughter. He grabbed Sam, spun, and flung him through the air.

Straight into the cloud of Aether.

There was a whisper of power and the fairy, her prisoner, and the lycanthrope disappeared, leaving me staring in horror at the cloud.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

“We have to go in there!”
I shouted, inches away from Dorne’s face.

He was calm as usual, his face a slab of granite.
“You know as well as I, if he hasn’t come out already, he is more than likely dead.”

Lambros was awake, a cool rag over her head. James had made it to our position and was ordering the men about, cussing and shouting the whole time. A couple men had been lost in the attack, and the ambush in particular had been a blow to his pride. He was setting up a perimeter, getting everyone sown back together by a now leaderless medical staff.

“All I know is that he’s in there and I am not about to abandon him,” I said.

“He had no partition,” he said matter of factly. “As far as we know the cloud was fresh, never explored. There is no telling what that world is like, whether Sam is alive or not.” He paused. “You know as well as I, we may not even want to bring him out if he is.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t try,” I said.

“It means exactly that. What’d done is done. I won’t endanger anyone else on a longshot. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but it is my decision and I have made it.”

“I don’t accept that!” I said. I could feel my face heating up.

“I know,” he said coldly. “I know all about Nidia. Do you remember what happened there, Virgil?” he asked, for the first time showing some anger. “What happened then?”

“What’s he talking about?” James asked.

The group was focused on me now, their work abandoned as they heard the Wizard’s voice rise.

I was silent, but Dorne continued. “You lost two people and you tracked them all the way into the Widow Queen’s lair, lead seven others into that hell hole. How many came back out?”

I could hear the spiders again, not skittering through tree branches but down long, dark tunnels, over stone and dirt. Red crept into my vision, my eyes blurring. I flexed my hand, the web of power surging over my fingers. “You want to shut your fucking mouth, Wizard.”

“Not one,” he said. “Not a single one. You took in seven to save two and ended up losing every single one of your people. How many of us need to die so that we can find Sam? How many need to die so that we can track down a mutated creature, a monster, some hollowed out husk-”

I threw my hand up and a wave of force exploded from my palm. It was probably the strongest thing I had thrown at anyone in years and it shocked the hell out of me. It dug ruts in the ground, shattering trees for twenty feet behind Dorne.

He didn’t move one damn inch. He planted his feet in the dirt and the force flowed around him, like wind around a skyscraper. It barely even moved his hair.

Then he took a quick step forward and leveled a punch into my chest. He had put some earthen strength behind it too, because when I woke up several moments later I was twenty feet away.

Dorne was standing over me.

“You overstep yourself, Sorcerer,” he said. “If you want to go in there, you will go by yourself.”

James helped me up moments later.

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

“And if we’re attacked again?” I heard Dr. Lambros ask. “What then, James? You would leave the whole expedition vulnerable?”

He frowned at her. “My recommendation is to make camp, get everyone bandaged back up, and risk losing a few days.”

Her eyes narrowed. “We’ve lost enough time already,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “then with my recommendation ignored, yeah, I’m gonna go in and make sure we don’t leave a sixty year old man in the middle of the jungle.”

The rest of the party continued on their way toward the Arcus, heavily armed and ready for any more trouble. James left several men in charge, so they wouldn’t miss his presence too much. Me they wouldn’t miss at all.

I sat James down right outside the
cloud. Hopefully, this wouldn’t take too long. God willing, Sam was just inside the gateway, unconscious but alright. We would just be able to drag him out. James had commandeered a spare jeep so we would just need to drive a few miles and meet up with the team.

God willing. But then, this was Africa, the Missionary’s Graveyard
. I wasn’t too sure He was paying much attention here.

“You ever had a partition?” I asked, sitting across from him.

“No,” replied. “What’s this about? Why can’t we just go in there like back in Mare?”

“The Walter Cloud was a centuries old cloud of Aether,” I said. “It was a domesticated animal, no more wild than an old horse. That’s rare. This cloud is unexplored as far as we can tell. It’s hungry, a starved wolf. It will try to feed on our minds to take form. We try not to ever let an unpartitioned mind come into contact with a cloud when it’s unexplored. We try to let the world develop naturally, to stabilize. Even after we usually don’t let unpartitioned minds venture in.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” he said.

“It’s not,” I said. “
The Aether feeds of the strongest emotions, usually a culmination of whole civilizations. A single person though, in direct contact, can create anything. You saw what it was like in the Walter Cloud when things started to come apart.”

“You think it might be like that in there?” he asked.

“No telling,” I replied. “I’ve done a lot I’m not proud of. I would hate for a world to take inspiration from my mind. That’s not the worst of it though, not really.” I paused. “It’s a two way street with the Aether. Just as it is given form from living things, it can apply those changes to whatever it comes in contact with.” I pointed to the tree, whose branches had formed a cage around the Aether. “That tree isn’t natural, the cloud has affected it. It changes you too and there’s no rhyme or reason. I don’t want to grow gills just because it happens to be underwater or something worse.”

“What about Sam?” James asked.

“That’s why Dorne doesn’t want to go in there. There is no telling what shape he’ll be in. Literally. Right now, we need to make sure you are protected.

“Take a deep breath,” I said.

He did and I began to instruct him. “We’ll keep this simple. Picture a castle, a huge building, something secure and imposing. It needs to be elevated, with a clear view. You got that image in your head?”

He nodded.

So I slapped him.

“What the hell?” he asked, scrambling to his feet.

“Sit back down,” I said. “Take that, the shock, the anger, the defensiveness, and put the meanest looking gargoyles you can on the walls of that building.”

He sat back down and we continued
. I looked Deeper, continuing through everything we needed. Before long there was no more talking, no more describing.

His structure wasn’t literal, he hadn’t touched the Aether enough for that to be the case, so I couldn’t see it, not really. But as I moved through the process, walked him through the memories and personality traits most essential to his being, I began to make out its structure.

It wasn’t literal, it wasn’t visible, but I could see it in his face, in his eyes. The way he moved, talked, thought. The gun on his hip, the clothes on his back.

A tall skyscraper that reached up from the heart of a city, towering above all other buildings. Great aluminum eagles reached out from the corners, menacing, watching the ground below for danger.

People were filing in from the streets, men and women in suits and day laborers with lunch pails. They mingled and laughed as they entered the lobby, took elevators up to their offices, filling the building with life and purpose.

James was a city boy, born and bred. This was the world he knew, and this was the shape his mind took.