Retribution, p.67
Retribution, page 67
Conjuring a new sword and fixing my footing, I waited as heavy, thumping footsteps resounded down the corridor.
Except it wasn’t the squat bestial silhouette of an ebon scourge that appeared.
It was a hulking statue of a man that stepped into the low light, flanked by a bearlike mana beast easily twice Boo’s size with rich mahogany-colored fur and black markings like scars down its face.
Avier relaxed. “Evascir. It is good to see you.”
The statuesque figure, I realized, was actually wrapped in a layer of stone, like a pilotable golem. As I recognized this, the stonework manifestation crumbled away, and a muscular man stepped out. His head was bald, his skin the color of gray limestone. Inside his earthen armor, he had towered to ten feet tall, but even without it he was still over seven. The weight of his aura would have been enough to crush most people to the floor.
This man was an asura.
“Good timing, Avier,” the man said, his gaze landing on the wyvern’s injury. “Since you weren’t back yet, I decided to clear the dungeon. Guess I missed one.”
“Regardless, you have saved us much needed time,” Avier answered. “Thank you for coming.”
The asura gave the wyvern a nod before eyeing me speculatively. “This is the one you were sent to fetch? Hopefully he is as powerful as he is pretty.”
“There’s a reason I call him princess,” Regis chimed in with a lupine grin.
“Is your initial judgment a formal test or an ignorant observation?” I asked, matching his unblinking gaze.
The asura—a titan, I thought—let out a booming laugh, pure and joyful. “No, not a test, and perhaps a bit biased rather than ignorant, lesser.” He gestured to his oversized bear companion, and it moved aside, making way for Avier, Regis, and me to pass. “Come. Let us leave the stinking wretchedness of these dungeons and return home.”
424
CHANGING THE NARRATIVE
CECILIA
“And here we are, once again,” I said, glancing to my left.
Nico was flying next to me as we hovered just outside the protective barrier surrounding the western half of Sehz-Clar. Behind us, twenty thousand loyal Alacryan soldiers filled the streets of Rosaere, the city spanning the two distinct halves of the dominion. The translucent shield neatly bisected it.
It was nearly dawn. A cool breeze blew in from the Vritra’s Maw Sea, tugging at the steel-gray hair I’d never gotten around to dyeing.
The shield itself seemed different to my eyes now. Whereas before it was an inexplicable monolith, now I could see it clearly. The signs of basilisk mana were obvious as a blood stain, and its underlying structure was easily observed.
On the other side of the shield, I could sense only a meager resistance. Pockets of traitorous rebels were dug into defensible positions throughout the city, but we outnumbered them five to one.
“Seris knew I was coming,” I told Nico. “She’s pulled her forces back.”
Nico was quiet. We’d barely spoken since he ran out of my bedroom after our conversation. I purposefully avoided thinking about the lie we now shared, and the truth that I was keeping from him. But I wasn’t ready to take the risk of divulging what I’d learned. Not yet…
Turning suddenly, I flew up higher so all my forces would be able to see me. When I spoke, my voice came from everywhere at once, each molecule of atmospheric mana my bullhorn. “Warriors! Today, you fight for the spirit of your continent. This isn’t a war, but a reclamation. These traitors have attempted to fracture Alacrya itself by sowing lies and discord. But look!”
I waved at the opposing half of the city. Mana flared as it peeled away from the giant shield and drifted toward the pockets of resistance, making those few thousand men and women glow and highlighting the small size of the force. “Even they know the fight is already lost; the bulk of their warriors have already fled!”
A distant but thunderous roar came back to me, twenty thousand voices raised in a deafening battle cry.
With a flourish, I twirled and pressed one hand against the barrier.
The power of a Sovereign was laced through hundreds of miles of protective energy, pushing out against the rest of the world. My consciousness traced the lines of it, all the way back to Aedelgard, down the network of mana-conductive material to the heart of Seris’s machine, to Orlaeth Vritra himself. I could sense him—the battery on which all this operated—but that was all; I had no sense of what they had done to him.
This time, when I turned my senses toward the mana, it reacted. Like leaves growing toward the sunlight, the individual mana particles that made up the barrier drew toward me, and the entire structure shivered.
Curling my fingers, I gouged them into the shield. When I withdrew my hand, a fistful of immaterial energy came away with it, sparkling like fireflies in the predawn gloom. I opened my hand and let the mana pour through my fingers, where it dissolved into its base form.
The hole in the shield expanded, the edges flaring with flickering white light. The light crawled over the lustrous surface, and the hole expanded, picking up speed with each passing second.
Even though my soldiers couldn’t see my face, I arranged my features into an expression of calm determination. I was a leader at the head of an army, not a child like Seris thought. Wherever she was hiding, I hoped she could see this. What she had labored for years to create, I had just unmade in an instant.
The gap in the shield grew until it was a few hundred feet wide, opening the way for my soldiers, but I didn’t immediately call for the charge. My gaze followed the receding edge until, with a suddenness that surprised even me, the shield burst like a bubble. One moment it was there, and the next…
“The High Sovereign has proclaimed that any mage, unadorned, or slave who has turned their back on this continent is unfit to live on it. Give no quarter.” I took a deep breath. “Attack!”
The spring-snap noise of catapults firing followed my order like an exclamation as Imbued ammunition arced through the air, past where the shield had been, and crashed among the buildings in the western half of the city. Condensed stones burst apart, sending out deadly shrapnel for dozens of feet. Barrels of flammable liquid shattered and sprayed their surroundings, which ignited instantly, setting the city on fire. Clusters of mana crystals spread out in wide arcs, exploding from the force of their landing and collapsing entire structures.
A shockwave of noise and mana rippled past me.
Enemy shields sprang up all over, and there was a flurry of return fire and counterspells. A blue bolt of lightning shot up from the ground, aimed at me. When I reached out to the mana, it froze, a jagged, dancing line of electricity hanging in the air. A wave ran along the length of the lightning bolt, starting at the end hovering fifty feet below me and racing down toward the ground.
Dozens of smaller bolts exploded outward from the point of impact, and I sensed several mana signatures go dark.
Something squirmed uncomfortably in my guts. Better a quick death in battle than weeks of torture and starvation in the depths of Taegrin Caelum, I thought.
“There’s no reason for us to linger here,” Nico said, drawing me back into the battle. “Our side will have this cleaned up quick enough without our assistance.”
Melzri was leading a force from the west to capture Seris’s base of operations in Sandaerene while Dragoth and the soldiers from Vechor patrolled the Vritra’s Maw to prevent a mass retreat.
Looking down toward the center of my soldiers’ formation on the ground, I said, “Echeron, you’re in command. You have your orders.”
My voice traveled on the wind directly to Dragoth’s retainer’s ears.
“Yes, Legacy,” sounded his response, wispy and distant.
I looked at Nico and nodded. “Let’s not waste any more time then.”
Flying higher up, we sped northward. As we crested the cliffs above Rosaere, several dozen spells—bolts and jets of green, blue, red, and black magic—flew from a series of covered bunkers.
Grunting in annoyance, I grasped the threads of each spell and pulled, dragging the spells off course and forcing them to cluster in the air in front of us.
Nico’s staff flashed with red light, and he slashed it through the air in front of him. Retina-searing balls of blue fire bombarded the bunkers, shattering their shields and collapsing the reinforced structures on the mages within.
Condensing all the gathered spells into a storm of multi-elemental bullets, I sent them hurling back down at the smoldering remains of the bunkers, snuffing out the few remaining mana signatures I could detect.
Nico held his position for a moment, watching for any more activity, but I could tell the substructure beneath was clear. “Come on. These soldiers are unimportant. Our real target is waiting for us in Aedelgard, unless she’s already fled.”
“This is a token defense,” Nico said thoughtfully, as if he hadn’t heard what I’d said. “Even discounting the presence of any Scythes or retainers—or you—such a meager fortification wouldn’t have held for even a day against our superior numbers. So where are her armies?”
“We’ll find out soon enough, I imagine,” I answered, speeding forward. I sensed him follow, the wind spell he used to replicate flight pushing him along in my wake.
The countryside north of Rosaere was dotted with small settlements and private estates, but no additional fortified locations. We flew at top speed, north and west, and as we approached Sandaerene, I felt the battle long before I could see it. Nico and I kept slightly east of the city, not intending to involve ourselves in the battle; Melzri and Mawar would have things tidily in hand.
Although Nico and I could have breached the shield near Aedelgard as I had before, avoiding the hundreds of miles flight, the bulk of our army had to attack over ground from Rosaere, and I had wanted them to see me break the shield. In addition, it had been an opportunity to sweep the length of the dominion, making my presence known to the people there, citizenry and rebel mages alike.
Still, I was anxious to put an end to things by the time we reached Aedelgard, where Seris’s compound and the shield’s source of energy were.
Seris was wily, a survivor, and I doubted I would find her standing on the balcony of her estate waiting for me. After all, she had managed to outwit and capture a Sovereign.
When the city came into sight, I was surprised to see smoke and fire rising from several different locations throughout. A potent mana signature radiated from the city’s eastern edge.
“Dragoth already moved in,” Nico noted sourly, glancing at me.
I kept my expression impassive. “Unimportant, as long as he hasn’t let Seris slip away by disregarding his duties.”
All the Scythes—except Nico, of course—were bitter and frustrated with my position. They scrambled for whatever small acclaim they could find, each of them hoping to replace Cadell as Agrona’s right hand and prove themselves worthy of their station. It was no surprise that Dragoth had taken this opportunity to win a victory for himself. But it hardly mattered. Given the scale of the coming war, the Scythes were no longer relevant in my eyes.
As we approached Seris’s estate looking over the Vritra’s Maw Sea, I finally caught sight of Dragoth. He was flying over the estate, his arms crossed, watching us approach. With his sprawling horns and incredible bulk, he looked like a side of beef hanging on the rack.
“You’re out of position, Dragoth,” Nico snapped once we were close enough to speak.
Dragoth floated up a foot or so in order to look down his nose at Nico. “I had a resource in the city before the shields fell who informed me of a rush of activity. Since your tour of the dominion delayed you, I thought it best to lock the city down.” He gave me a sneering nod. “To prepare for your arrival of course, Legacy. Vechor’s ships and soldiers are still patrolling the sea, but if the rats are fleeing their sinking vessel, we haven’t seen them.”
Perhaps that’s because you can’t see beyond the confines of your own ass, I thought.
Out loud, I asked, “Has there been any sign of Seris?”
Dragoth shook his head. “The lower depths of the estate are shielded, however. She may be hiding down there. If I know her, she’ll have some trick up her sleeve.”
“I don’t care what she tries,” I said, not trying to hide my irritation with the Vechorian Scythe. “This is over.”
“Indeed. The fact that I was able to turn one of her own suggests she’s lost her touch.” Dragoth chuckled. “Made weak-kneed by some unblooded nobody from the other continent…it’s no wonder she’s fallen so far.”
Tipping toward the ground, I flew to one of the open balconies of the estate. Dragoth’s soldiers were ransacking the place, dragging out anything of value and tossing it into piles. One particular mage caught my eye; he was standing at attention as if waiting for our arrival.
His appearance was generally unremarkable, but there was a strange duality to him. On one side, he had a red eye and a short horn that stuck up from his black hair, but on the other side, his eye was brown and the horn had been shattered, leaving only a jagged stump half hidden. Still, he didn’t flinch back at our approach like most of the soldiers. Instead, he fell into step beside and just behind Dragoth like he belonged there. Several mages broke away from whatever else they’d been doing and took up formation around the two.
“What have you discovered here, Wolfrum?” Dragoth asked.
“We’ve followed most of the mana cabling down several levels but haven’t managed to bypass the door at the bottom. We presume it leads into whatever is—was—powering the shield,” the Vritra-born man said in a confident, slightly nasally voice.
“Take us to the door,” Dragoth said, then amended, “If that is what the Legacy wishes.”
I stopped, having walked through a large solar and into a connecting corridor covered in fanciful paintings. Instead of replying, I only waved a hand. The young man, Wolfrum of Highblood Redwater, I now realized, hung his head and hurried past me, not meeting my eye. He led us through several more rooms until we reached a steeply descending staircase. By the length of time we followed the cramped stairwell down, I knew we must be deep into the cliffside under Seris’s home.
The door in question was a thick iron square inset into the wall. The only sign of how to open it was a dim mana crystal affixed to the wall nearby.
“Whatever magic is Imbued into this door, we haven’t been able to crack it,” Wolfrum said. “I’ve sent for multiple Imbuers to help us gauge—”
I could sense the mana inhabiting the crystal, as well as the stored mana in a device above the door that would drag it up into the wall, and a series of clamps that held it firm on the bottom, preventing it from being forced. The door itself was heavily warded against magical force, but the attached mechanisms were reliant on the mana input system and so more easily manipulated. By me, at least.
Disbursing the mana forcing the clamps shut, I activated the chain mechanism. The door shifted slightly, making the floor vibrate, then lifted into the recess above it with a gentle hum.
The space beyond, a laboratory of some kind, was lit with cool blue light from huge glass cylinders full of a glowing liquid. Incredible amounts of mana were suspended within the liquid, and it quivered at my presence.
“Wait out here,” Nico ordered the soldiers before stepping warily through the door.
Dragoth snorted. “Don’t presume to give my soldiers orders, where I—”
He caught my scowl, and I saw recognition dawn slowly on the Scythe’s broad face. “Stay here, men,” he said, leaving unspoken the part Nico and I had already figured out: whatever state Sovereign Orlaeth was in, we wanted as few people to see him as necessary.
Glass tubes connected many of these cylinders to each other and a variety of devices and artifacts attached to the walls, none of which made any sense to me. Blank projection crystals dotted the walls like sightless eyes among the other equipment. I glanced at Nico; his eyes were rapidly tracking across the lab, and his mouth hung open slightly. I wished, for a second, that I could have given him more time to enjoy that moment, but there was something much more pressing to take care of.
Beyond the first rows of cylinders, the center of the lab was isolated by a dome-shaped shield. There was a smokey tinge to its coloration, and it was incredibly dense, but I recognized the source of the mana.
Walking forward, I moved between the bright blue, silently bubbling cylinders, and a larger tank came into view, right at the center of the shielded area.
Orlaeth Vritra was floating within it. The Sovereign had a wasted look to him, and his face was vapid and empty of thought or expression. At least, he did on one of his heads. The other was missing entirely, nothing remaining but the bare stump of a neck that had healed over in a gory scar.
Standing next to the tank, her pearl hair standing out against her black scaled battlerobes, was my prey.
“I promised that I would come for you, Seris. And here I am.”
The Scythe gave me the same frustrating, unflappable smile that I’d seen too many times before.
“Hey,” Dragoth said with a nod to Seris, crossing his arms and leaning carelessly against one of the tanks.
Seris spared Dragoth only a passing glance before focusing on the young Vritra-blooded mage. “All this time, Wolf? Did I really teach you so little?”
He raised his chin, glaring fiercely at the Scythe. “You taught me everything I needed to beat you, my mentor. That was all I ever needed from you.”
Dragoth boomed with laughter. “Big dumb Dragoth outplays the dangerous intellect of Seris. Who’d have thunk it, huh?”
Seris picked at her fingernails absently as she regarded the pair from behind her shield. “Hardly. I admit that my feelings are hurt, but it’s better to have trusted and lost than to never have had that potential at all. Besides, I believe that Caera was successful in her escape, was she not?”
“Enough,” I snapped, stepping toward the shield, further irritated that Seris had ignored me in favor of exchanging pointless jabs with an angry little boy. “I thought you were smart, Seris. But you’ve backed yourself into a corner and are now relying on an old trick that I’ve already bested. I’m actually kind of disappointed considering the fearful reverence all the other Scythes seem to hold you in.”
