Sovereign of the Seven Isles 7: Reishi Adept (52 page)

Alexander opened his Wizard’s Den, silently thanking Balthazar Reishi for incorporating such a capability into the Sovereign Stone.
Jack and Jataan carried him inside to a cot. He closed the door after everyone was inside and lay back, closing his eyes and probing his injury again.

After a few moments he sat up
with some effort.

“It’s broken right here, and right here,” he said to Lita.
“You’ll have to pull it straight and then realign the bones right after I drink a healing potion.”

“That’s going to be extremely painful,” Lita said.

“I know, but we don’t have time to let the potion fix my bones. If you can get them lined up, I’ll be able to fight sooner.”

She frowned for a moment, seeming to consider counterarguments before nodding
agreement.

“Jataan, I need you to hold him down,” she said. “Jack, he’ll need something to bite down on
and of course a healing potion.”

After a few moments everyone was in place.

“Whenever you’re ready,” she said.

He took a deep breath and drank the healing potion, noting the dull pain in his leg as he put a roll of leather in his mouth and la
y back. Jataan and Anja held him down. He closed his eyes, sending his vision into his leg. Lita got a careful grip on his ankle, clenching her teeth before gently but firmly pulling his leg straight.

Alexander screamed around
the bite piece, pain drowning out everything else for a few moments, flooding into him and momentarily denying him his sanity. He seemed to remember himself just a moment before Lita began to slowly relax the tension on his leg. He caught his breath as another wave of pain jolted him past the point of awareness of anything else. She gently let go. He screamed again, struggling to look into his leg at his bones, but failing to do any more than pass out from the pain.

Chapter
39

He woke feeling groggy, with echoes of agony hovering nearby. He knew that there was a great source of pain somewhere close, but he couldn’t quite remember anything about it. He held very still, measuring his breath, extending his awareness until his circumstances came back to him in a rush … along with an aching throb in his leg.

He sent his vision into his
injury, searching out the places where his bones had broken. He found them mending, but less than perfectly. He would have a limp unless he wanted to deliberately break his leg again—not a prospect that he was eager to entertain. He had to admit though, given the damage of the original break, Lita saved him from a crippling injury by resetting his bones before the potion did its work.

He sat up stretching his leg gingerly, wincing as the dull ache transformed into a sharp stabbing pain. He took a quick breath, easing his feet to the floor.

“You should stay in bed,” Lita said. “Your leg still has healing to do.”

“I know,” he said almost to himself, looking down at the floor between his feet. Try as he might, he couldn’t see a way to proceed without spending more time recuperating. Feeling a great sense of defeat, Alexander lay back down, closing his eyes tightly.

“Lita, would you cast your healing spell on my leg, please?”

“Of course,” she said, coming to his side
. She began with her diagnostic spell, frowning at what she saw.

“I already know,” Alexander said.

She pursed her lips and nodded, beginning her healing spell.

Alexander drifted off to sleep again, waking after what seemed like only a few minutes. His leg still hurt, but it was strong enough to bear weight, especially with Luminessence to lean on.

He got to his feet, testing his strength and balance and finding himself less stable than he would have liked.

“We can wait until you’re fully healed,” Anja said.

“No, we can’t,” Alexander said, drawing the Thinblade. “Phane is nearly to the Nether Gate.” He opened the door, waiting for some enemy or another to present itself. When none did, he ventured forth, sending his sight ahead to search out the nearest threat. He didn’t have far to go. Midway down the long corridor were a dozen sentinels standing in formation across the hall, three rows of four.

He walked to the threshold of the hallway, trying to
ignore the pain of each step and stopped, raising his light. The stone guardians didn’t react. He stepped over the threshold and all twelve of them woke at once, their eyes coming alight with an ember-red glow. They began marching in step.

As they approached, Tasia lit one on fire, a torrent of flame jetting from her hands to the stone guardian. It scarcely even changed color. She raised an eyebrow at it.

“You have to hit them hard enough to break them,” Alexander said, holding his ground and waiting for the enemy to come to him.

Anja and Jataan spread out.

When the sentinels got close, they sprang forward with surprising speed and agility, the first row of four launching themselves at Anja, Tasia, Alexander, and Jataan all at once.

Anja turned sideways
when the sentinel lunged at her, his spear cutting her tunic across the front. She added speed to her defensive spin, bringing the pommel of her sword around into the back of the sentinel’s head, shattering the stone into a hundred pieces and dropping the enemy where it stood.

Tasia slipped inside her attacker’s
spear thrust with an annoyed frown, grabbed the stone guardian by the shoulders and threw it forty feet across the floor.

Alexander waited for the strike to come in his mind’s eye, stepping aside
a moment before reality caught up with his sight, bringing the Thinblade across the sentinel and then back again, cutting it into chunks in a matter of seconds.

Jataan met his attacker, shifting away from the spear strike and landing a powerful blow with the ov
ersized war hammer that materialized in his hands. He hit the sentinel’s shield squarely, a wave of hairline cracks spreading out across it, then into the sentinel’s arm and finally through the rest of its body. When it tried to move, it broke off at the knees, toppled forward and shattered into gravel.

Another sentinel stabbed at Anja. She rolled away from the strike but at the cost of her balance. The sentinel lunged in and smashed her with its shield, sending her crashing to the floor and
leaving her stunned as it closed on her.

Tasia seemed on the verge of losing her temper as a
nother sentinel attacked her, followed almost immediately by another. She caught the first by the wrist, throwing it past her. The second struck, leaving a thin red line across her belly. She closed quickly, grabbing it by the throat, picking it up and whipping it around and around before smashing the back of its head into the wall with such force that it shattered.

Jataan waded into the four sentinels coming for him and Alexander, sweeping his war hammer in a great
arc across their legs, taking three down with a single stroke. The fourth lunged at him. He parried the spear point aside with his left hand while bringing the hammer around and jabbing the top of it into the sentinel’s knee, breaking the leg off and knocking the sentinel to the ground.

Alexander lunged, trusting that his good leg would support him when he landed, whipping out the Thinblade and catching the hip of the sentinel raising a spear over Anja. Its leg fell off
with a stroke. Alexander lost his balance and crashed to the ground, rolling onto his back as quickly as he could regain his senses. His leg hurt—enough for the pain to be distracting even in the face of closing enemies.

The one
-legged sentinel hopped for a moment, turning toward Alexander, but fell a moment later. Jack dragged Anja away from the downed but still dangerous sentinel. Alexander managed to regain control in time to sweep the Thinblade through the stone guardian as it crawled toward him.

Jataan made short work of the remaining
guardians, breaking the three that he had toppled before they could regain their feet and then shattering the two that Tasia had downed.

“More rest,” Lita said, kneeling next to Alexander.

He tested his leg, finding it weak and in pain but strong enough to support his weight, so he got to his feet.

“There’s no time
right now,” he said, limping down the hall, leaning heavily on Luminessence. At the far end, a door opened onto the staircase. Peering over the railing, he could see the next floor fifty feet below. He took a step back, resting his hand on the wall to steady himself as he sent his sight down. The stairs opened into a hall nearly identical to the one they had just traveled. It was twenty feet wide, ten feet high and two hundred feet long, ending in another staircase going down.

In the middle of the hallway, three
creatures were floating in giant bubbles of softly glowing green magical light. They looked like they were frozen in time, which was good considering their appearance.

They
looked like insects, similar to a preying mantis, with four legs and two arms. Their light-green exoskeleton looked almost like armor. Two large eyes were lidded with chitin, closing them off from all light while they slept. Antennae sprouted from their foreheads which swept back quickly, covering their oversized skulls with a carapace shield. Each was armed with a glaive. It was hard to judge given that they were each curled up in a ball, but Alexander estimated they would stand six feet tall and weigh two hundred pounds. Worse still, each had expansive and powerful colors.

He
sat down and quietly explained what they faced as best he could.

“We could try and sneak by,” Jack said.

“The hallway itself is spelled,” Alexander said. “One step, invisible or not, and I’m pretty sure they’ll wake up.”

“Any idea what they can do?” Jack asked.

Alexander shrugged.

“If they’re armed with bladed weapons, then they can bleed,” Jataan said.

“There’s only three of them, right?” Anja said. “I say we rush ’em.”

“The fact that there’s only three of them is what bothers me,” Alexander said.
“That and their colors.”

“So what then, are
we going to turn around?” Anja said.

Alexander looked up at her and sig
hed. “No, we’re going to rush ’em, but I need rest first.”

He opened his Wi
zard’s Den and hobbled inside. He silently apologized to Isabel, feeling like he was letting her down with each delay, though he knew that he would just be a liability in battle in his current condition.

Lita started to cast her spell but he stopped her.

“Give me another potion,” he said.

“You’ll be out longer.”

“I know, but I’ll be stronger for it.”

She nodded approvingly. “About time you grew some common sense,” she said, bustling off to the chest and retrieving a healing potion.

Jataan gave her a stern look that she studiously ignored.

Alexander
woke a few hours later, his leg aching dully, but otherwise strong enough to fight on. He tested it with a few stretches, feeling the limits of his healing with each twinge and jab. Good enough, he decided. He’d certainly gone into battle in worse condition. He just hoped that he hadn’t lost everything with his delay.

“We were thinking, maybe you should ask the
sovereigns about those things,” Jack said.

“Information about an adversary is always welcome,” Jataan added.

“Fair enough,” Alexander said, going to his magic circle and touching the Stone.

He took his seat at the table and spent a few minutes describing everything that had tr
anspired since his last visit.

“Much has
happened that we should speak of,” Balthazar said, “but you expressed a concern for time, so I will offer what advice I can on the threat you face. They’re called Ravathan and they are deadly in the extreme. I only hope that the three you face are males. A breeding female would be a threat to the entire world.”

“Where do they come from?”

“They were created during the shade wars. The legend says that Shivini, in control of a powerful but unnamed magical creature, created the Ravathan to serve as his army. He used them to cause great destruction before they were finally exterminated, or so we thought.”

“Why are they so dangerous?”

“They’re fast and deadly with any bladed weapon, easily outrunning even the quickest person, but their real power rests in their ability to attack the mind. They can reach into an enemy’s mind and render him stunned and confused, unable to react to the attack that invariably follows. Also, they think in a hive mind, so the three that you face see themselves as one collective entity.”

“How do I kill them?”

“They die like anything else,” Balthazar said. “You just have to get through their defenses and their armor.”

“Thank you,” Alexander said, walking away from the table.
After he recounted what the sovereigns had told him, he and his friends formed a plan.

They approached the threshold of the hallway cautiously, staying a foot behind the imaginary line. Everyone made preparations for the battle to come. Alexander tested the weight of the vial of liquid fire he held.

With a look left and right, he nodded and all of them began to run toward the enemy. At the first step into the hallway, the three bubbles burst and the creatures fell to the ground, scrambling to their feet, awake and alert in an instant, much faster than Alexander would have thought possible.

He threw the liquid fire. It flew in a shallow arc, but as it neared one of the Ravathan, its head snapped toward the vial
, sending it into the wall and ceiling as if it had been hit by a force-push.

Tasia
sent a jet of dragon fire three feet in diameter, roaring orange down the hallway into one of the three creatures. It screamed as its antennae singed off, then it curled into a ball, its carapace facing the onslaught of fire. Tasia shouted out in pain, falling backward and losing her balance, her fire vanishing with her focus. She hit hard, rolling onto her side and coming to a stop.

Anja raced to her side with Lita arriving a moment later. Tasia was breathing
, but her eyes were staring off into the distance, vacant and empty.

“Tasia, are you all right?” Anja said.

She got no response.

Alexander and Jataan carried the charge into the enemy, Alexander raising his light to blinding brilliance. The remaining two Ravathan both began to shield their eyes
. Then their chitin outer lids snapped into place, blocking out the light, rendering them blind and immune to Alexander’s light.

He and Jataan were within feet of striking distance when both Ravathan unleashed a force
-push, blasting Alexander and Jataan two dozen feet across the floor. Alexander tried to roll to his feet, stumbling and nearly falling again before regaining his balance just as the Ravathan reached him, whipping its glaive around in a powerful arc and catching him across the back, knocking the wind out of him and causing his muscles to spasm as he flopped face first onto the ground.