Retribution, p.54
Retribution, page 54
The light immediately dimmed, but it didn’t go out. The flames were in every board and beam, and I could already hear parts of the building coming down, although I couldn’t see beyond my immediate vicinity.
Enola was stumbling to her feet, and only by the grace of good luck did the scything tendrils around her miss as they swung blindly.
Twisting to avoid one such slash, I grabbed the girl in both arms, wrapping her up and pulling her close without slowing down. I had only a bare instant to glance along the back of the bar for Sulla, afraid I’d see his burning body among the wreckage of the bar’s stock of alcohol, but he wasn’t there. I could only hope that, in all this madness, he had somehow escaped.
Leading with my back, I collided full force with the already weakened wall, bursting right through it and nearly tumbling over backward. This saved us both, as one of the tendrils thrust at us through the hole, but only scraped my arm instead of pinning Enola and me both through the chest.
With no time to nurse my wound or admire my continued good fortune, I sprinted down the short corridor with Enola in my arms. It ended in a window, but a pulse from Aural Disruption, this time formed into a condensed blast, caused the glass and most of the frame to burst apart, and I leapt through without slowing down.
Although I didn’t dare look back, I could hear the ceiling of the bar collapsing into the inferno that was the building.
There were people all over in the street, people dressed in purple uniform robes, half which were wearing masks. I’d had masks in the desk, too, but hadn’t had the chance to hand them over. Oh well, I thought wryly. Hardly the worst of our problems now.
The crowd, which must have stopped to watch the fire, was now whipping itself into a panic. Finally, I glanced back and realized why. The retainer had floated up out of the blaze, her impassive face now marred with an irritated scowl as she searched the street. It only took a moment for the onlookers to surge away, pushing and shoving and screaming.
Feral yellow eyes met mine, and I cursed.
The retainer's hand lifted, her fingers outstretched toward me like claws.
With Enola supported in one arm, I slipped a hand into my jacket and tossed several capsules up into the air, which shivered under the effects of Aural Disruption, ripping the casings apart and activating the contents.
Thick smoke began boiling out into the street, instantly swallowing most of the crowd.
And then I was running again, dragging the highblood girl along beside me, waiting for the ax to fall. Unfortunately, I knew the fear of collateral damage wasn’t going to stop Mawar from unleashing her worst, and I was all out of tricks.
My hand went automatically to the flare hanging off my belt, but I had already made up my mind not to use it. There was nothing my people could do against the retainer except get themselves killed.
Instead of the crashing sound of magic ripping the world apart, though, Sabria’s unexpected voice screamed out into the night, piercing the rising noise of the frenzied crowd. “Hey, is that really the best you’ve got, bitch?”
On the roof of the building next to the smoldering bar, barely visible through the smoke, Sabria stood with a curved blade in each hand. She was listing to the side slightly, and I suspected she was badly injured—probably several broken ribs, at least—but I couldn’t help but feel a flush of pride as I saw her stare the retainer down.
Then, with both blades facing down like two long fangs, she jumped off the roof, arcing through the air toward the retainer. I expected the tendrils of shadow to come to Mawar’s defense, but the retainer brought her raised arm around and caught Sabria by the throat. The blades drove home but only glanced off the powerful layer of mana cladding the retainer’s body.
With nothing but an irritated hiss, Mawar squeezed, ripping out Sabria’s throat. With a casual flick, she tossed the body down into the fire.
A bolt of fire shot from a nearby window, striking the retainer in the chest. Then a spear of ice launched up from the crowd. Spells flew from other buildings as well, from a half dozen different directions.
I felt something inside me go numb. “I didn’t send up the signal, you idiots.”
None of the spells managed more than a scratch, but it was all I needed. Giving everything I had left to the Myopic Decay crest, I surged into the third phase again, extending the effect to Enola. I needed to find one of my people, someone disguised in the crowd who could help her disappear. Even through the smoke, it didn’t take long; they were already looking for me too.
A man with long blond hair and angry dark eyes came up beside me, looking dour. “Sir, we got Highlord Ainsworth and Ascender Drusus out already, but—”
I shoved the semiconscious girl into his arms. They both had the purple uniforms and could blend in with the escaping crowd. “Get her the hells out of here, now!”
“Sir, what about you—”
“Go!”
He didn’t waste any more time but scooped her up and fell in with the rest of those escaping. An ill-timed breeze was kicking up eddies in the smoke, pushing it away from the ruined bar and down the street after them.
I came to a slow stop, and the pain of the last couple minutes caught up with me. My skin, I realized, was blackened and blistered all over and was weeping blood in places where it had burst open from the heat. My joints felt like the flames were in them, too, and every muscle was complaining with fatigue.
A dull ache was working its way into my skull. Unsheathing my flask, I turned around and looked up at the retainer again. She sent a missile of dark energy through the window of a nearby building, and the entire upper floor detonated. The explosion sent shrapnel raining down into the street, falling like deadly hail among the stampeding bystanders.
I tipped back the flask, draining it to the last, and then threw it on the ground.
“Enough!” I shouted. If I brought her attention back to me, the loyal, foolish mages who had been stupid enough to fire on her might get away. “I’m right here, you scarecrow. I’m the one you want!”
Her head slowly turned around as she searched the street for me. The crowd had moved past me, and only those moving slowly due to injury or dragging along the injured were still nearby. Whirls of smoke blew here and there, obscuring parts of the street, but not me.
Heavy, clanging footsteps moving in time suddenly became audible over the rest of the noise, and I turned. Through the gloom and the smoke, a force of loyalist soldiers was approaching. Quickly, I searched their number for any prisoners. They had a few, mostly people in purple uniforms, a couple of whom were indeed members of my network, but Ector and Enola were not among them. I let out a deep sigh and raised my hands.
“That one is for the High Sovereign,” Mawar said, her voice like ice water down my spine. “Bind him with mana suppression cuffs and hang him somewhere uncomfortable. I’m not done here.” Then, like I didn’t matter in the slightest, she turned away and drifted toward another building where spells had been fired from earlier.
A strong hand grabbed my shoulder as an armored boot took my feet out from under me. I went down hard on the cobblestones. My arms were yanked behind my back, and cold steel bit down around my wrists. I realized just how close to empty my core was when I couldn’t even feel the effects of the mana suppression.
“I’ve got this pile of wogart dung,” a woman said. Someone, I assumed the same woman, jerked me painfully up by the cuffs. “Keep looking for the others, the ones he was meeting with. They couldn’t have gone far.”
The other soldiers moved aside as she marched me through them. From the shadowed doorway of a nearby shop, the vision of my prior commander was shaking her head, her disappointment quite clear despite the dark, the smoke, and the distance.
“Not sure what you think you’ll get out of me,” I mumbled as we moved out in the open, away from the rest. My heavy eyelids kept trying to drag themselves shut, and I wished very much to polish off a bottle of something hard and bitter before crashing into a deep, drunken unconsciousness. “I’m just an old, washed-up ascender.”
The back of a steel gauntlet caught me hard across the ear, making the world tilt on its side. “Shut up.”
The pain of the strike was little more than a tickle considering the chorus of agonies currently screaming for attention across my body, but the sound of the woman’s voice piqued my interest. It was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it, and that rarely happened to me.
Turning slightly, I caught her rather striking profile. Horns grew out from her forehead to sweep back over her blue-black hair, which was pulled into a tight, all-business sort of ponytail. Her burgundy eye turned toward me, and she bared her teeth. “Need another one?”
“Lady Maylis of Highblood Tremblay. What brings a lovely young woman like you to a dive like this?”
She leaned in, almost close enough I could feel her lips moving against my ear. “If you want either one of us to get out of this alive, I really need you to shut up.”
416
THE THIRD RUIN
ARTHUR LEYWIN
The zone trembled as its behemoth protector collapsed, its chest pierced with translucent mana arrows and stone shards, its final piteous roar choked with black blood.
Mica, sweating and caked with dirt, nudged the behemoth with a toe, making the massive fur-covered corpse rock slightly. Its tiny black eyes were staring sightlessly past me from above the piggish snout and tusks.
“And…another one…bites the dust,” Mica said, flopping down on one huge forearm like it was a shaggy couch.
A shiver ran through the aether in the zone, and I scanned our surroundings.
We stood atop a column of dry, crumbling rock. We’d had to cross from column to column, fighting various monsters of increasing size and power, to reach this final battle. The ground was an indistinct sandstone wasteland a mile below, so far that the columns blurred together before reaching the bottom. The zone seemed to go on forever in all directions, with the columns slowly fading out into a heat haze where they met the soft blue of the sky on the horizon.
Boo moaned, and I glanced in his direction. Ellie was standing beside him, giving him comforting pats.
Regis chuckled. “Who would have guessed that an asura-bred guardian beast could have a fear of heights?”
The shiver happened again.
Ellie had started to give Regis a dirty look but stopped when she saw my face. “Brother, what’s wrong?”
“I’m not—”
The stone at my feet cracked. All eyes turned to the crack, only a few feet long at first, but even as we watched, it began racing across the rough surface of the column’s flat top. Boo and Ellie jumped to one side as the crack split the column’s face nearly in two. Then, with a guttural grinding that vibrated in my bones, a dozen other fractures split off the central crack, and the stone beneath our feet began to shift.
All around us, the zone exploded with the avalanche cacophony of shattering stone, and a thick cloud of dust choked the air.
The exit portal, which was inset into the floor and had been guarded over by the behemoth, flared to life, offering us passage to the next zone.
Lyra sprinted for it, her feet hardly touching the crumbling surface as she ran.
“Don’t go through!” I shouted, and she slid to a halt just beyond the square frame. “Stabilize the platform if you can!”
As Mica and Lyra hurried to follow my order, I scooped Ellie up and leapt half the width of the column’s top to land by the portal, the Compass already in hand.
Setting Ellie down, I channeled aether into the Compass and focused on the portal. If my mental map from Sylvia was correct, the third djinn ruin was just on the other side, but since we didn’t have simulets, the others might not end up there unless I stabilized the portal first.
Mica jumped to the center point of the crack and slammed her hammer down into it. Instead of sending the column bursting apart, magic raced from the hammer along the spreading cracks, pulling stone back against stone. Lyra sprinted around the outside of the column, a gust of magical wind flowing out from behind her and down around the edge of the lip to stabilize it by buttressing the structure with a supportive band of hardened air.
“It’s like something else is controlling the mana!” Mica shouted, an edge of panic in her voice.
“The landscapes of the Relictombs are immutable,” Lyra huffed as she ran. “They built this place using aether, and their creation resists tampering by even the most powerful mages…”
With the sliver of my attention I’d given to everything except the Compass and portal, I realized I had never considered this fact before. I’d lost my mana core before entering the Relictombs, and so had always relied on aether to survive here. While it made sense that the djinn’s intention would preclude allowing those testing within to simply remake the zones with mana, it also suggested that, with the proper utilization of aether, the fabric of the Relictombs itself could be rewritten.
There was no time for such considerations right now, though. From my periphery, I saw as Mica began to tremble, her biceps bulging as she held onto her hammer with all her strength. The stone beneath Lyra’s feet collapsed, and she vanished into the hole. From somewhere below, I felt the mile-high column shift and twist, the noise of it lost in the cacophonous tumbling of rocks from every direction.
The column shattered.
Lyra and I were standing on the edge of the portal frame, which didn’t move. Ellie was standing right beside me, but one foot had been off the frame. When the surface crumbled, her eyes went wide, and her hand reached for me as she was pulled backward by gravity.
Behind her, Boo, Regis, and Mica plunged down with the broken rubble, the guardian bear giving out a despairing roar as its claws scrambled for purchase against stone no longer capable of supporting it.
I nearly lost hold of the Compass as my hand snatched out for Ellie. My fingers brushed hers, but I had been focused on stabilizing the portal…
Her hair flew up past her face, whipping in the wind like a flag, her hands clawing at the air as if she could take hold of it somehow or catch herself on nothing. Belatedly, a scream pierced the air, pleading and helpless.
Cursing, I leapt off the side after her and activated God Step.
The paths flashed past at a speed that was difficult to process, especially with my heart in my throat. With my eyes on Ellie, I let the rest of my senses focus on the paths.
Aiming my body toward her and making myself as aerodynamic as possible, I sped after her. It felt like it took a very long time. Her body was twisting around in freefall, and when I caught up and wrapped my arms around her, it was with enough force to knock the air from her lungs. She scrambled to take hold of me however she could, pulling my hair and jamming her thumb into my eye. We both began tumbling end over end, locked together by her grasping fingers and my arm around her waist.
“El…Ellie! You have to”—my fingers finally closed on her wrist, and I dragged her around to face me—“calm down!”
She pulled closer and wrapped me in a tight hug, screaming, “Boo!”
About twenty feet to our right, the guardian bear’s huge bulk was rotating end over end. A long, low, mindless growl was issuing from him, and he was trembling wildly.
Regis was closer, nearly straight ahead. He did a kind of twirl and spun to look at me, his tongue lolling from the side of his mouth. ‘I always thought I’d like skydiving,’ he thought. ‘And dodging several million tons of killer rockfall definitely adds to the experience.’ His shadow wolf form melted away, leaving behind only a small wisp, which began drifting back up toward the portal frame.
“We need to save Boo!” Ellie screamed in my ear.
“You’ll have to summon him from the top,” I hollered back over the wind.
Ellie’s brows furrowed in determination as she nodded despite the wind-whipped tears streaking across her cheeks.
My focus turned to the aetheric paths, searching for one that would return us to the portal frame now high above, but then Ellie’s grip tightened on me again. Noticing her horrified gaze, I followed it.
Mica was nearly a hundred feet above us, the aetheric paths shifting and fading as her relative position to us kept changing. I cursed, struggling to calculate how I could get to her and then the portal frame in time.
“Brother, hold me still!”
Ellie raised a glowing white hand as she clutched tightly to my robe, stabilizing herself as she took aim at the Lance. A misty white bolt shot out, barely grazing past a falling rock before finding its target.
With a sudden infusion of mana, Mica stopped falling. She hesitated, looking down at us, but I shook my head. She nodded and flew straight back up into the air.
I spared a second to watch the ground growing rapidly closer, then tried to bring all my focus to the aetheric pathways. When they didn’t immediately coalesce in my mind, I closed my eyes, feeling them the way Three Steps had taught me.
There.
With Ellie firmly in my arms, I stepped into the aether. We appeared atop the thin edge of stone surrounding the glowing portal.
“Boo!” Ellie screamed, her voice shrill.
With a faint pop, a shadow appeared overhead, and the enormous guardian bear crashed down on top of me.
From under a fringe of fur, I saw Mica’s boots land next to us.
“Boo!” Ellie exclaimed, her sobs muffled as she must have shoved her face into her bond’s side.
Careful not to send the mana beast tumbling off the edge again, I extricated myself from his bulk and brushed myself off. Regis drifted into me, humming a tune, heedless of the fact that everyone had nearly just died.
The rest of us all shared a look, but no one had any words.
