Prodigal Steelwielder (Seals of the Duelists Book 3) (30 page)

Liselot’s expression cleared. “No, they can’t be there. No air to sing. They must be close!”

Calder leapt backward onto a new wind disc. “Sing them down if you can. I’ll find the traitor.”

Though her choir numbered three, Liselot issued urgent directions to her exhausted singers. Calder left them to it, veering across the landscape, scanning for anyone trying not to be seen.

He flashed past a couple dozen sheltered spots from which it would be safe to sing a sucking portal and not become its victim but found no one. Frustrated, he belatedly activated Lifeseeker.
Bloody Tala, bloody disappearing on me. Distracting wench. She’d better not be dead, or I’ll sic Aleida on her.
Behind him, the First Singer had begun wrestling singers out of the sky, though a few landed lifelessly thanks to the interfering efforts of Corona casters.

Three orange glows lit in Calder's mind: two strong, one weak. Deep foreboding rattled his soul, though he had no conscious explanation for it. Exercising an unusual level of caution, Calder sheltered on the leeward side of an uneven granite spire.

He bored two small holes through the stone and filled their far ends with wind lenses. The three figures on the far side of the giant spire sprang into near focus, and Calder's guts clenched.

Tala lay on her back, her face a grimace of focus and pain. A man crouched over her, his hand positioned over the center of her chest, yet he seemed to ignore her, looking instead toward the third figure, a young, raggedy woman who cowered on her knees beside him.

The scar on Calder's cheek twitched. He should go to Tala immediately and kill everyone else. But the group’s unfamiliar dynamic gave him pause. He snaked a small wind tunnel around the crystal and across the grass.

The first sound to reach his ears was Tala’s humming.
She’s alive, thank the sints, and she’s doing songwork.
But her breaths were thin, panting.

“Refresh again. Stop your blubbering. You know what happens if that portal closes. I’ll pull it out.”

A pair of notes graced the air, but they didn’t come from Tala. Calder still heard her humming. A shiver shot down his spine, and he extended every magic he possessed toward the group on the far side of the crystal.

Sensory details such as clothing, stomach contents, and jewelry paled in comparison to the fact that Tala had a steel dagger jammed in her heart. The tiny bursts of Shock that kept her heart beating were erratic and weak. His beloved was humming herself back to life with every breath she took.

And the scum crouching over her was threatening to let her bleed out.

I reject this situation.
The thought slammed into the back of Calder’s eyelids as every bead on his necklace went molten. The man’s body crystallized into salt, desiccating and shriveling in on itself until there was no palm to touch the throbbing steel blade. The enormous granite crystal that hid Calder disintegrated into dust, and he darted to Tala’s side, lifting her ever so gently on a bed of Wood and Wind, preparing to whisk her to the First Singer.

The huddled figure at his feet belatedly drew his attention. Heavy shackles bound her wrists together using a single metal bar that held her forearms at shoulder width. Sickly pink crystals balanced atop thin metal shafts that seemed permanently attached to the shackles. Her dark hair hung tangled and matted, obscuring her face, but something about her seemed terribly, horribly familiar.

“Sanaala?” Calder breathed.
She dinna die… This is far worse.

The girl twitched and cowered lower. “I serve, I serve. Good singer serves, master.”

Tala’s humming hitched, and her body spasmed with a cough.

Calder splintered Sanaala’s rose crystals, and the sky produced a loud whump as the vast portal overhead snapped shut. The wind died. “Stay here, Sanaala. You’ll be safe, and someone will come for you soon.” Shaken, he aimed his wind disc toward the First Singer.

Dozens of tumbling bodies plummeted earthward as Calder flew across the battle-scarred Academy landscape. He sensed the weak air-thickening spell Liselot and her two singers were crafting and slammed a crystalline hex avatar in place at the spell’s origin point. Instantly, the air around him thickened to a custard-like consistency.

You’re bloody welcome.
His teeth ached from the bunched muscles in his jaw as he forced the air ahead of him to thin and speed his passage. Not nearly soon enough, he lowered Tala to the ground beside the hem of Liselot’s torn, grass-stained robes.

The First Singer’s eyes widened at the sight of Tala’s injury. “Make me another crystal ring, this wide, right here.” She extended her arms as far as they would go. A moment later, Calder suspended a new crystalline hexling before her, its hollow center framing her face. Liselot and the other two singers broke into a new song, and she gestured for Calder to remove the dagger.

He did so swiftly, then buried the vile thing up to its hilt in the nearby cliff with a flicker of Wind. Tala shuddered and breathed deeply, but the incipient smile on Calder's face faltered at the sound of myriad voices raised in an unfamiliar language. He bolted upward on a fresh disc and searched for its origin. He spotted it to his left: a vast steelwielder army poured through a portal. But to his right, a strange, unearthly green glow swarmed over the landscape.

Sints preserve my sorry arse.
Of the two, the green emanation was by far the most concerning. Calder veered in its direction to track its source.
I intended never to release this sint in my pocket. I hope I don’t have to change my mind so quickly. Tala’d tease me endlessly for such inconsistency.

***

Kiwani circled high above the ruined campus and hissed in frustration. Portals had opened almost everywhere, and fresh new streams of invading steelwielders blanketed the entire campus. Despite everything she and her hexmates had thrown at the Corona army, they were stronger than ever—her latest spell had even bounced off an invisible shield. Her mind was tiring, her focus slipping. As the day rose in the east, she feared the Waarden Empire was sinking in the west, overwhelmed by sheer, ordinary numbers.

How fascinating that I care. I thought that part of me was dead. Perhaps it’s my fresh new Waarden blood. But whether I care or not, we need an endgame.

Her eye fell on a small structure on a finger of land surrounded by a crevasse, smoking pools of lava, and glistening ice stalagmites entrapping shadowy figures in poses of agony.
Eward fought well.
A heartbeat later, her small wind tunnel politely requested entrance at the door to Ignaas’s old office.

“Is the coast clear?” Eward’s voice queried.

Kiwani glanced at the nearby armies spilling around the shattered remains of battle. “For the next short while. The campus is swarming with steelwielders, and the casters have resorted to subtler attacks.”

“Then be welcome, Kiwani.”

She angled her disc downward, letting it dissipate in the doorway. As she landed with a small hop on the crowded floor, she covered her nose at the powerful stench of humanity. “Eward, you couldn’t freshen the atmosphere a little? It smells worse than a duel den shower room in here.”

“It doesn’t smell worse than mine. But you only have three duelists at yours. What do you need?”

Kiwani pointed. “Him.”

Ignaas witten Oost whimpered on his padded chair.

Eward drew closer. “Is it as bad as that? I thought we were holding our own.”

Kiwani matched his quiet tone. “Langlaren’s dead. Virtually the entire campus is destroyed. A good number of singers are dead, as are most of the nonsavant students who fought and some of the Peace Villagers. I’m not sure how many instructors have survived. Lifeseeker nearly blinded me when I tried to count the steelwielders just now. They’re going to take the mountain. A quarter of it has already walked off. With their casters biding their time, we have no idea when, where, or how strongly they’ll strike next.” She met Ignaas’s watery eyes. “Tactics dictate that we must act now. If we don’t, this battle will become a protracted war, and it will spread across two empires. I give our side a one-in-twenty chance of success. But we probably won’t live to see it.”

Dakila stepped forward. “If the situation has gotten that dire, why do you think this prisoner can help? I thought you were more powerful than he is.”

Kiwani approached the potioneered duelist and crouched before him. She ran her fingers along her black beads, feeling the crystal nubs Bayan had infused. “Because Ignaas has a destiny. Don’t you, Ignaas?”

The former instructor’s pasty face shifted through several emotions, finally settling on a burning anticipation that lit his eyes from within. Kiwani raised her eyebrows at him—
don’t let
me down
—and returned to the door. “Dig it out, Dakila.”

Eward grasped her arm above the elbow. “We get this wrong, the empire dies.”

Kiwani merely nodded.
Maybe I don’t care as much as I thought.

A pair of Dakila’s men clamped their hands on Ignaas’s shoulders, pinning him against the back of the chair. Dakila stood behind him, blade in hand. Soon, the knife’s surface flashed red, and Ignaas tensed with pain, but the fanatical light in his eyes never wavered.

When Dakila moved to place a rough bandage over the wound, Ignaas raised an imperious hand. “Let it bleed. It won’t kill me.” Doubt wavered on the caravan guard’s face, but he backed away.

Ignaas performed the Elemental Revocation, freeing him from focused magic, then approached Kiwani and Eward. He offered an ironic half-bow, never breaking eye contact.

Kiwani heard Eward swallow noisily, but she merely smirked at her reinstated enemy. “Get this wrong, Ignaas, and I’ll turn you into an anima hexling and direct you myself. I’ve puppeted before.”

A cloud of wariness scudded across Ignaas’s eyes. Kiwani and Eward parted, letting him pass between them on his way to the door of his old office. He opened it, stepped onto the lip of stone that bordered Eward’s crevasse, and paused. He spoke without looking back. “Thank you.” Then he was gone, borne into the sky by his Wind avatar.

Eward’s brows were loaded with mistrust. “Do you even know what he’s going to do?”

Kiwani still stared at the empty doorway. “Don’t you remember the prophecy he claimed was given him by a sint? That someday he would shine like the sun? I just gave him a chance at that shining moment. One way or another, Ignaas witten Oost is headed for the history books. He knows this campus better than anyone alive, even us. He’s spent decades perfecting tricks and sneak attacks. And no one can—”

A harsh light flooded the ruined landscape and rapidly intensified. Kiwani glanced up and cast her magics skyward, knowing Eward did the same. Truth blossomed with sudden, terrible clarity.

“That overly literal bastard,” Kiwani whispered.

No time. Exactly no time at all. Her world was ending. Sound ended; all was light.

She knew she was screaming, but she couldn’t hear herself. Lifeseeker dotted the white canvas of her existence with endless thousands of pulsing lives, and she gathered the scattered defenders from the myriad invaders. They spiraled downward after her, slipping amongst the limestone, always a heartbeat ahead of the burning nothingness that devoured her reality.

***

Bayan staggered back in utter shock at the eyelid-ignoring blast that consumed the mountain. In that moment, the master spirits slipped free from Bayan’s mind and faded into peace. He grasped Calder's arm before his friend could fish out that accursed walnut. “No, wait.”

Calder goggled at him. “Aye, sure, the green spirits were your doing, and well done you, but the mountain’s exploding, you great stupid idiot. I need to throw my sint at it.”

“Quit panicking, and use Lifeseeker like a sensible hexmage.”

Calder stared toward the mountain, and his shoulders slumped in relief. He’d seen what Bayan had already discovered: the number of glows deep within the roots of the mountain had nearly doubled, though more than half of its height had gone incandescent.

Alarm painted his face a moment later, and he hurled a shield between the light and him and Bayan. “Need to make this stretch around. Since you won’t let me play with my new toy, I’ll need you to lend me your twinkly bits.”

Bayan obligingly bonded with him. He felt Calder wrap a hexling shield of Wind and Shock around the entirety of the blazing mountain. “What did you sense?”

Calder looked at him as if he’d grown a second head, then his expression cleared. “I forget you don’t have the sensitivity of a Flame Savant when it comes to explosions. There’s something poisonous about that inferno up there. Look, even those hazy clouds are running away from it. Canna let such poison spread through the air or get into the soil.” He gave Bayan a speculative look. “Did you feel the, ah…”

Bayan nodded.

Calder frowned. He squinted up at the inferno. “You think it was, you know…”

Bayan nodded again.

Calder twitched his head to the side. “Good riddance to the bastard then, says I.”

Bayan shook his head and grinned. “Just don’t let him have more pages in the history books than you do.”