The Castrofax (17 page)

“Ah,” Nolen said and raised a finger. “If I
said, I would not get it. So, will you come to Anatoly City with me
like a good pet, or will I need to use force?” He reached into a
coat pocket and pulled out a large copper band. “This is for you to
wear.”

Robyn did not know what the object was, but
by Gabriel’s reaction she knew it was something foul. Gabriel threw
his hand up with a sliver of light between his fingers and hurled
it at the Prince. Nolen jerked his hand back, and it clipped a
smoldering hole in his sleeve. He clenched his jaw and bared his
teeth.

Gabriel stopped and looked around at the tree
line. Calsifer grabbed Robyn’s arm and pulled her up before she
could think to react.

“I cannot leave him,” she hissed and realized
they were not alone in the forest. From the darkness, men in red
coats sifted from shadow to shadow. Some bore a white sash marking
them an Officer, but all had blue-and-gray lariats hanging from
their left shoulders to state Air Guard status.

Calsifer kicked Araybiatt and cut his way
through the men who were not interested in him. Robyn grabbed his
shoulders. “I cannot leave him! Take me somewhere I can see him.
There,” she pointed to an outcropping of rock. “You must.”

She looked behind her and for a moment caught
Gabriel’s gaze.
‘It was him they were after all along.’
The
destrier cut to the right, and she lost his gaze to the trees.

Gabriel studied enough battles to know the
majority of them ended when the leader was killed. He wasted no
time rushing through the flames of the campfire and hurling a
handful Nolen’s way. The slow gather of Spirit energy around him
told him there were thousands of men approached, and he focused
only on the object clutched in Nolen’s hand.

Cordis once told Gabriel of all the Castrofax
and the Mages known to be shackled by them. They were made in half
a dozen materials and had different properties, but all damned a
Mage to slavery and blocked their Elements. Gabriel had only seen
sketches of a few in his books: a black one shaped in a wavy line,
a marble one with a point in the front. This Castrofax looked as
though it could be any of the other four with its straight
continuous line. The fear seized up every muscle in his body. He
knew he had to do everything in his power to escape the trap
forming around him.

“I will kill every man in your legion!” he
yelled as he let the flames encase his body. Men of this Age would
never have seen a Mage do such a thing, and he hoped it would
frighten the less-seasoned soldiers away. “Do you really wish death
on all these people?”

Nolen laughed before he turned to leave.
“Enjoy your last moments as a free man,” he called before motioning
for attack. The camp suddenly became alive with the shouts of a
thousand voices and the ring of a thousand drawn swords.

Gabriel let patterns fly to his hands without
discernment. He began with defensive Earth patterns, drawing energy
from the trees around him, throwing up mounds of soil, creating
barriers and blocks and distractions. Reaching, he found no Water
energy; not a stream or raincloud or spilled mug. Men poured into
the firelight brandishing swords and spears, their faces angry and
determined.

He laid a side-slide pattern and moved the
soil around him sharply. His attackers slipped and fell on their
faces as the ground ripped up like a rug. Dropping the spreader
Fire pattern across his skin, the fire around him shot out in a
circle like a dying star and drew back in. He channeled into the
ground beneath his feet. He formed a web-pattern that recreated the
substance of a spider’s web and set it between a dozen trees.
Lastly, he made a Tarmen-blast that shot rocks and soil from around
him high into the air.

The sharp scream of an arrow passed by his
ear. He ran through the patterns he knew as he fueled another
side-slide pattern to jerk the ground before him, searching for
something to stop arrows. Soldiers bypassed his earthworks, so he
reached far back into his memory for the darker patterns he was
told never to use unless his life depended on them.

‘
May the stars damn me. I will kill them
all to be free of a Castrofax.’

He formed a dozen light-shards of compressed
energy and sent them flying into the crowd. The first man to fall
was but a boy. His gaze lingered on Gabriel’s before death took him
from his knees to his face. Gabriel would never forget the haunting
look. He formed a dozen more with a guilty conscious. They skipped
through the men, passing through a couple before they faded out. A
chorus of screams assaulted his aural senses as smoke and fire
toyed with the rest of them.

Another arrow shot passed him, clipping his
forearm. The pain was fleeting as he forced it to the back of his
mind. Summoning Fire again, he drew a wide ring around him to hold
off the men getting past his defenses.

The razor-pattern would be enough to take
many soldiers out, so he moved his hands in fluid triangular
movements. He drew the lines of the pattern, connected them, and
fueled it. A faint green light shot out from his chest in a circle,
kissing the edges of leaves in the trees.

“Bring him down!” Nolen’s voice bellowed in
the foray.

Gabriel clenched his fist and abruptly jerked
it down, loosening the leaves from their branches. A sharp pain
exploded from his shoulder and threw him to his back, but the
pattern was already fueled, and he had to wait only seconds for the
fluttering leaves to touch down. Sharp as razors, the leaves cut
through anything they touched. Shouts and screams mixed with his
own as his shoulder shot pain through his torso.

He found a solid arrow buried deep and when
he tried to rise, he realized it had stuck itself in the soft loam
beneath him. He snapped the slender shaft, sending blinding pain
through his body, and left the rest in his back where he could not
reach it. As he rose, an older solider with flame licking his black
trousers jumped over an earthwork and drove the head of his spear
towards Gabriel’s torso. Gabriel did not have enough time to lay
the pattern he wanted, so he rolled sideways as the spear cut
through the soft flesh above his hip and drove itself in
deeply.

A root of the nearest tree shot up at the
man, piercing him in his chest, and he died quietly suspended and
burning. Gabriel pulled the spear free and stood, flicking
exploding patterns into the oncoming soldiers as he kept his cries
of pain inside. He pulled up the fire he sent into the soil, this
time closer to where he believed Nolen to be, and screams filled
his ears. He knew thousands of patterns, but only so many were for
attacking and defending.

He formed a white puzzle he liked to call the
ash-pattern, a pattern he had created. It worked with heat energy
but was not fire, and when it made contact with anything, it turned
the object to ash. He never tried it on a human, but as he sent it
into the army, he remembered the pattern was created to better
carve stone and wood. With it he carved off the faces and limbs of
men unfortunate to follow orders from a man who did not know what
they were dealing with. It sickened him.

He felt something constrict tightly around
his legs and threaten to topple him over, and as he wheeled his
arms to stay balanced, he shot a string of Spirit into the sky and
opened his hand. Dozens of lightning fingers streaked across the
cloudless sky, striking where he directed. It was not enough to
break Nolen’s concentration on the pattern wrapped around Gabriel’s
calves. A man splintered into blackened ash before something solid
struck Gabriel in the face.

It sent him to his back, bloodying his lip
against a tooth and pushing the arrowhead deeper. He saw the flash
of an Air pattern before it struck him again, this time in the
throat. He slammed a fist into the ground and opened the earth up,
sending the fissure in Nolen’s direction. Both patterns vanished
from him.

He stood, gasping, and sent pinch-patterns
out, filtering into the brains of soldiers to pinch nerves and
veins. Some men fell instantly, others took a few strides before
collapsing, while a few writhed in pain and stumbled blindly
forward. Advancing soldiers pushed them aside continuing their
march. It sickened Gabriel deeper.
‘This or the Castrofax,’
he repeated in his head.

Stamping a foot into the ground, he sent the
earth before him launching at a group of soldiers. With his hands
he molded the soil to wrap around them like a cocoon, trapping a
dozen men beneath the mound. Seeing the success of the pattern, he
threw two more to his sides where the men were thickest.

‘
I’ve never fought so many men at once—I
don’t know how this works.’
His mind seeped doubt as
overwhelming feelings sank into him. Soldiers came from every
direction, each one with a purpose to wound him until he could no
longer fight. The sensation turned his stomach.

The smell of blood and smoke rose around him.
Men screamed, and Gabriel resisted the urge to run and heal them.
Instead he sent a ball of blue fire bouncing through the army.

He felt the slice of another arrow pierce
through his leg and collide solidly with his femur. He opened his
mouth in a silent scream and doubled over. Heat rushed up his face
as the pain throbbed with every heartbeat. Grasping the slender
shaft he yanked the arrowhead free and screamed as it broke through
his flesh. A flash of red permeated his peripheral vision, and he
shot a beam of fire into whatever man broke through his defenses,
hearing their sharp exhale of breath before there was nothing
else.

He fell to the knee of his unwounded leg and
swooned against the blood loss. Putting a hand on his side, he felt
it slick with blood, and he saw it had bled down his shirt into his
trousers. The shaft, still lodged in his shoulder, limited his
movement, and now the arrow to his leg gave him a sick realization
that the leg was compromised. Sweat dripped down into his eyes, and
he wiped a hand across his brow inhaling deeply, feeling the drain
the Elements took on his body. Stamina dictated how long he could
continue. It could be built with time, but he had grown soft.

He pulled apart pieces of a fallen soldier’s
coat, and used the red thread to bind his waist and wrap a
tourniquet around his thigh. There was nothing he could do for the
other wounds, so he mustered his strength and slowly climbed back
on his feet, favoring his right leg. Pushing through the screaming
in his head and ears, he continued to battle for his freedom.

The men were closer now, kicking dirt over
his fire barrier and pushing frightened horses to jump over. He
reached out again for Water energy and felt it far away, someone
swirling a canteen. Seizing the energy Gabriel flicked his thumb,
index and middle finger at the cavalrymen, filling their windpipes
with water from their own bodies. Once riderless, the horses
bolted.

‘
Should I bury myself and hold a defensive
position?’
he wondered but knew they would break through
eventually, and he could be trapped. He had sparred with many Mages
while training in Jaden, but this was beyond the pale. No Mage
could consider training for such battle because it was
inconceivable.
‘Then show them what a Class Ten can do.’

Pages of patterns, tomes of movements and
details of new patterns filled his mind. He selected one. People
saw the stars as wondrous and terrible. They cursed by and praised
with their names. Legends said the first Water Mage was born of the
sea, the first Air Mage formed when the four winds collided, but
the first Spirit Mage fell from the stars.
‘Meet those stars you
so love.’

He reached heavenward and extended his hand
to the dark night sky. Ahead the stars twinkled, and the gibbous
moon sat fat in the west. While the stars gave off their own
energy, Gabriel could not feel them, but their pinpricks in the
velvet of darkness were all he needed to create an illusion. He
threw lines of Spirit from his chest through his fingertips and
lost them in the darkness. There were thousands of stars in the
sky, and he chose the most brilliant. Securing thousands of strings
of Spirit to each pinprick, he solidified the end of each thread to
turn it into a glowing orb.

Men stopped to see why the Mage with his hand
to the sky was not fighting, and for a moment even the screaming
dimmed. Gabriel felt the pattern wane on his stamina and was
grateful when it was finished and fueled. To the untrained eye the
night sky looked the same.

Gabriel looked in Nolen’s direction and gave
the man a moment to call his men back, but the Prince did not know
the pattern. He couldn’t have known it; it was Gabriel’s.

Gabriel drew his hand down sharply, feeling
every thread pull on the framework of his body. For a moment there
was nothing. Then one man shouted and pointed skyward as a
glittering star grew closer. As faces rose to see, thousands of
stars fell shrieking to the earth. To an uneducated soldier, it
looked as though the heavens had loosed their hold on the stars,
but a skilled Mage would see little balls of compressed energy.

The stars fell and gained speed before
crashing down. Each orb was the size of a plate and had enough
energy to fall, bounce at least once, and fall again, killing two
if not more before evaporating. Soldiers screamed in horror, some
ran, some bellowed of the end of days. Gabriel found himself on his
good knee again, forgetting when he fell. He listened to the chorus
of screaming and felt he might sick up. Flashes of light hauntingly
illuminated him.

He looked to see if Robyn had gone. She never
left, and she stood atop a cliff shaking a canteen. He made sure
the stars had not fallen near her.

The flows of Spirit energy were slowing down
with each death, but there were still so many more advancing. He
tried to rise to his feet but fell back down to his knee. His
wounds screamed at him, and sweat stuck his shirt to his skin. He
tried to rise again, failing. He would have to continue the battle
from his knee.