Retribution, p.39
Retribution, page 39
Like glass shattering, except a thousand times more cutting, the shield began to give way.
Cylrit launched himself toward the breach with such force that the balcony cracked. I threw myself back into the compound just as the supporting timbers shattered, and the balcony separated from the building with a sound like breaking bones.
By the time I had my feet under me, Cylrit had reached the barrier, a pure black greatsword as long as he was tall clenched in his fists.
All I could do was watch as the Legacy’s fingers clawed through the transparent barrier, ripping a hole the size of an outstretched hand. The shield crackled with desperate energy around her fingertips, surging against her power and control as it attempted to reseal itself.
Silently, Cylrit thrust his void wind blade into the gap, aimed right at the Legacy’s core.
“Cecil!” Scythe Nico shouted in alarm, his voice barely audible over the pounding in my ears.
Suddenly Cylrit jerked violently, attempting to pull away from the breach. He was struggling, but from my vantage, all I could see was his cloaked back. Belatedly, I ripped my own blade free of its sheath, but any attack I made would do more damage to my ally than the Scythe and Legacy still on the opposite side of the shield.
The barrier bulged inward like a distorted bubble until Cylrit was outside of it. It was then I realized his hands were empty; his sword had vanished, and the Legacy was gripping him by the front of his armor. The cracked section of shield snapped back into place as she ripped him through it, then shattered with a prolonged crashing like trees being felled in a hurricane wind.
Despite Cylrit urging me to flee, I knew I couldn’t. The shield had been breached. The hole wasn’t large, perhaps eight feet tall and five wide, but it was more than enough for a person to come through, and I was the strongest warrior present aside from Cylrit himself. If I ran, many more might die.
As I stood, considering, Scythe Nico flew through the shield.
I cursed, and his gaze fell on me. Beyond him, the Legacy held Cylrit up with one hand. There was a surging conflict of invisible mana between the two. It was less a battle of spells than a contest of pure control over mana. Unfortunately, I’d seen enough at the Victoriad to understand who would win.
But there was no more time to watch. Scythe Nico was already moving toward me, flying on a shimmering cloud of air.
Leaping back, I slashed with my sword, sending a crescent of black flames clawing toward him, but he dipped below it, narrowly avoiding the soulfire.
I stumbled as I completed the arc of my cut. The floor had liquified beneath my feet, just for the blink of an eye, then turned solid again, and my feet were half stuck. In the moment it took me to wrench myself free of the stone, the Scythe had landed within the open arch in front of the shattered balcony.
A blood iron spike thrust up from the floor, just where my foot had been. I pirouetted away, bringing my blade up to deflect a second spike that thrust down from the ceiling. I was already breathing hard, too hard—much too hard—when I realized each breath brought me only the barest lungful of oxygen.
When I spun around to put my blade between me and the Scythe, the emerald on the end of his staff was glowing with radiant light.
He’s doing something to draw the air out of the room.
My blade burst to life with soulfire flames, and I thrust it into the ruined floor.
The stones shattered as the soulfire ate the floor out from under me, and I fell through to land atop a circular table. The legs snapped like kindling, and I leapt off its collapsing surface, twirling through the air to land on my feet several feet away. Gratefully, I sucked in a lungful of good air.
The room was dark, but I didn’t have time to take stock of my surroundings.
The floor beneath me burst upward, a solid column of stone hurtling toward the ceiling above. At the same time, several jet-black metal spikes grew from the ceiling like so many stalactites.
Planting one foot on the edge of the column, I launched myself away, tucking into a roll and wreathing myself in a halo of soulfire as I went. Behind me, the column exploded, sending knives of solid stone pelting through the room, shredding everything inside.
The soulfire saved me, burning away all but one of the stone daggers, which slashed across my side, leaving behind a line of white-hot pain. As I rolled back to my feet, I quickly checked the wound; it was shallow, not dangerous.
Scythe Nico appeared above, floating down through the hole I’d carved in the floor. I brought my blade up, ready to defend against his next attack.
“Lady Caera of Highblood Denoir.” His voice was as quiet and cold as a tomb. “I’ve enjoyed reading your many missives. Seris has really kept you busy, hasn’t she?”
“If you’ve come to arrest me, I refuse,” I shot back, more to buy myself time than anything else.
There was a closed door to my back and an open arch to my right. I needed to move, to keep him occupied and hope that some of the other servants or guards managed to reach Seris. I had to be considerate about how and where I fought, though. The machines far beneath us were well protected by wards and thick walls of metal and stone, but a battle here would still be dangerous.
And that’s not even taking into account the fact that I’m facing off with a Scythe, I thought.
Still, unlike the other Scythes, I could sense his mana signature and its potency. It was being distorted somehow—my eye was again drawn to the strange staff in his hand—but the signature was there, and it wasn’t as strong as I might have suspected.
“You still aren’t recovered from your battle against Grey, are you?” I prodded. Although I wasn’t ready to place bets on whether or not I could defeat even a weakened Scythe, the fact that he had started talking worked in my favor. The longer I kept him occupied, the more of our people could escape the compound.
His pale skin flushed, and his dark eyes narrowed into a scowl. “If you take me to Orlaeth or the source of power for the shield around this dominion, Cecilia—the Legacy—has agreed to spare your life. Refuse or stall for time, and I will immediately send word to our soldiers in Cargidan to begin exterminating your blood.”
As his face flushed, I felt the color drain from my own. I bore little love for my adopted blood, but that didn’t mean I wanted them all butchered. “Why bargain from a place of strength? Obviously the Legacy expects your surprise incursion to be countered. Perhaps she is not as strong as—”
The staff whirled in Scythe Nico’s hand, and the entire wall to my left was ripped free and came crashing inward. Channeling mana into one of my runes, I conjured a burst of wind that threw me sideways through the open archway to my right. The walls collided as I slid to a stop. The sound of collapsing stone and furniture swallowed everything else as the floor of the room I’d just escaped collapsed inward.
I found myself in a small chamber occupied by nothing but a few tiered benches and a beautiful harp that dominated the center of the room. Moving with a speed born of desperation and wind-attribute mana, I conjured a fistful of soulfire and blasted through the outer wall of the compound, then dove through the opening as the walls behind me began to unfold. Bullets of liquid fire hissed passed me as I arched out into the open air.
All motion—the whole world—seemed to slow down as I fell.
I had rotated so that I could see where the hole in the barrier was. Beyond it, the Legacy was turning, her turquoise eyes snapping to the motion of my fall. Thirty or so feet below her, Cylrit was tumbling end over end, freefalling toward the rocky base of the cliffs.
I locked eyes with the Legacy.
The world lurched into motion again. I pulled in my body to turn in the air and grabbed a broken support from the balcony above, spun around it, and launched myself toward a lower balcony cut into the side of the rock.
I collided with something, an invisible wall keeping me from the balcony. At the speed I was moving, my legs crumpled, and I bounced off the surface before falling straight down. Stretching until my shoulder popped, my fingers just brushed the top of the balcony rail but skated off them. I scrambled to grab onto the bars, failed, but then caught the bottommost ledge of the balcony itself, jerking to a halt, my fingernails scoring lines into the wooden boards.
Heaving, I pulled myself up and over the railing in one smooth motion. Behind me, something blotted out the light. I spun around.
The Legacy had reached the hole in the shield. It had shrunk down to the size of a window, but she was gripping the sides and pushing outward, forcing it back open.
But a dark cloud was growing in front of her and the hole, billowing up from nowhere, condensing and dragging in the mana all around it. It seemed to leech the color from everything in sight, turning the whole world shades of gray.
Awed, I watched as the mist rushed out through the gash, boiling over the Legacy. She shot backward, abandoning the shield as she defended herself from the spell. With each wave of her hand, parts of the cloud were wiped away as if they were nothing more than soot smeared on the sky, but I could sense the raging mana pushing, ripping, and pulling from both directions.
Then Scythe Nico drifted down in front of me, interrupting my view of the battle.
“You’re good at running,” he said, feigning a casual air. But I could feel him flinch every time the mana burst behind him, and every muscle in his face was taut as a pulled bowstring. “But I was hoping—”
Suddenly he twisted around, and several blood iron spikes appeared, weaving together to form a shield. In the same heartbeat, a pure black jet of energy struck the shield, ringing like a giant gong. The blood iron burst apart, and the Scythe was sent tumbling down out of my sight with a yelp.
A figure, little more than a liquid pearl-and-black streak, flashed past my vision and through the shrinking hole.
On the other side, I realized the black mist was gone. The Legacy was flying fifty feet from the shield. She appeared unhurt. The pretty elven face she wore glowered, and a horrible aura shivered out from her that made the mana itself tremble.
Seris hovered before the closing rift in the shield, glimmering like a gemstone in her black scaled armor. Although I could hardly fathom it, she maintained her usual businesslike nonchalance as she said, “It’s rather rude to show up at my home unannounced and uninvited, Cecilia.”
“Nico?” the Legacy shouted, her gaze flicking past Seris to the compound. “Nico, are you all right?”
Remembering the Scythe, I glanced down from the balcony, but there was no sign of him.
When there was no response, the Legacy’s expression hardened, and she drifted toward Seris. “This is over, Scythe. I control mana. All of it. And I can pull down your barrier. Submit and take me to Orlaeth. Now.”
“You’re winded,” Seris said, and although I couldn’t see her face, I could tell she was smiling. “You don’t have the strength left to fight me. Leave. Go back to Agrona and tell him you failed, that everything he’s sacrificed to bring you here was for naught. Tell him I’ll be waiting right here if he wishes to speak to me.”
A ripple passed through the space between them, and Seris’s mouth snapped shut. Her body leaned into whatever the Legacy was doing. Dark lines of void wind banded around her, flexing outward against the invisible force assailing her.
Then, starting with Seris and rapidly expanding outward, a sphere of pure inky black obscured them both.
A ragged gasp slipped uncontrolled from my lips.
“She can’t win,” a voice said from behind me.
I spun, bringing up my blade and wreathing it in soulfire, but Scythe Nico held up his hands placatingly.
“I’m not going to attack you again,” he said sincerely.
I waited, watching closely for any sign of aggression. His mana was still, his movements cautious and steady. There was a spark of curiosity in his eyes—or was that victory I sensed emanating from him like an aura?
A sudden jolt of panic surged through me, and I glanced at the shields. They were still operational. Surely he couldn’t have breached the complex below in such a short time, and even if he had, the shields would already be showing the effect.
“Maybe not, but what is to stop me from attacking you?” I asked to fill the silence, unsure what he could want from me or why his attitude had suddenly changed.
“This,” he said, drawing an item from an inside pocket of his battle robes.
It was a rough-surfaced sphere larger than his hand, transparent except for a light purple shading. I’d seen cores before and felt certain this was one, but it was larger than any mana core I’d ever seen. There was something almost magnetic about it, as if it were calling out to me, pulling me to it.
“I don’t care about this rebellion,” the Scythe continued, pulling the core slightly closer to him as my gaze clung to it. “I don’t give a shit about Orlaeth or any other Vritra.” He focused past me, into the black sphere. “If you’ll do something for me, I’ll leave. I’ll even buy you time.”
I hesitated, then dragged my attention from the core up to Scythe Nico’s face. Everything I'd ever heard about him framed him as some kind of monster. A cold-blooded killer, careless as a sharpened blade, eager to cut anyone who Agrona targeted. But now, looking at him, his black hair clinging to his forehead, his dark eyes simultaneously furious and pleading, I could see he was hardly more than a boy.
“What?” I finally said.
“Take this core.” He held it back out to me. “Give it to Arthur Leywin—Grey—on the other continent. Tell him…” He paused, and a pained look crossed his face. “Tell him he has to save her. He owes her a life.”
I frowned, uncertain. “I don’t understand.”
He took a quick step forward, heedless of the blade pointing at his throat, and pressed the core toward me. My sword nicked the side of his neck, drawing a thin line of blood on his sickly pale skin.
“Take it, and tell him.”
Slowly, I took one hand off the hilt of my sword and accepted the core. It was cool to the touch. “What does this have to do with Grey?” Arthur Leywin. “Who is ‘her’? The Legacy?”
Nico had taken a step back. His jaw tightened, and his voice was strained when he next spoke. “I’m trusting you with the most important thing in this entire world.”
Before I could press him further or think to refuse and hurl the core into his face, he had slipped the staff from his back and cast a spell to wrap himself in wind, then flashed out of the compound and toward the black sphere, vanishing into its impenetrable depths.
I clutched the core and stared into the abyssal dark. Not only could I see nothing, I couldn’t sense anything either. It was as if Seris—or the Legacy, I thought with a chill—had carved out a piece of the world and left behind only an empty patch of nothing.
Just when I wondered how long anyone could keep up such a spell, the sphere exploded.
Darkness swallowed all light, and for a heart-stopping moment—a breath that felt like eternity—I was utterly blind.
Just as quickly, the black melted back into light and color. I sagged against the wall and stared up to where Seris and the Legacy had been.
Inside the shield, Seris hung in the air, one arm holding the other limply against her side. Opposite her, well outside of the transparent barrier, Nico was supporting the Legacy, who leaned against him, her steel-gray hair hanging down across half her face. One mad turquoise eye glared out. Unlike Seris, though, the Legacy bore no signs of physical injury. Between them, the asura-powered shield was once again complete and unblemished, no sign of the rift the Legacy had torn.
Nico turned the Legacy away, and she let him. At the last moment, he glanced away from her, just for a single instant, and our eyes connected. Then the two were hurtling away at speed.
Seris watched until they had vanished from sight to the east before finally drifting toward me. She looked tired, a bone-deep fatigue I couldn’t have imagined seeing in her even at the very end of her power, and my heart skipped a beat.
“Go down and check on the battery array,” she rasped. “And have the technicians create an opening near the base of the cliffs.” She winced as she looked down toward the water. “I need to go find my retainer.”
406
INTERRUPTIONS
ARTHUR LEYWIN
Golden light again enveloped me, and for the first time since arriving in Epheotus, I felt the tension leave my body. Even though I was returning to a war, the threats I faced here were simple in comparison to the yawning abyss of negative possibilities Kezess presented.
The golden light faded from my eyes, revealing the inner courtyard and surrounding walls of the Royal Palace of Etistin, exactly where I had left. As the conjured stairs were no longer there, I immediately plummeted toward the ground, landing with enough force to crack the paving stones and kick up a cloud of dust.
Shouts rang out from several different sources, and the silhouettes of armed and armored soldiers encircled me. The sea breeze carried the cloud away, and I watched as the hard eyes of the royal guards widened with surprise before they quickly scrambled to stow their weapons.
“General Arthur!” an energetic female voice sounded, conjuring a chorus of chanting from the soldiers.
I focused on the speaker, a half-elven woman that regarded me with a warm smile. “I need to speak to the Glayders. Are they in the palace?”
She jogged forward, quickly breaking free of the surprise that made the rest of the soldiers hesitate, and pointed toward the palace doors with one heavy battle gauntlet. “I can take you to them, sir.”
I nodded and let her take the lead.
The halls of the Royal Palace were much busier than when I’d left Etistin. Dozens of well-dressed people gathered, chatted, and marched about, all of them doing so with an air of importance. Their conversations stopped as we appeared, and wandering eyes began following me.
“The Glayders have been busy,” I mused, more to myself than my guide.
“It’s been a hectic few days, that’s for sure,” she said over her shoulder. “Who would have expected that so much could change so quickly?”
