Vincalis the Agitator (70 page)

Falcon shields didn’t work that way. They were drawn from clean magic—magic that could touch, could even penetrate, everything
it was set to protect without doing any damage. The Falcon shields had no need to keep anyone out of the Warrens, because
the shields penetrated and protected each object and each person within their sphere. Thus the Dragons carrying their spell-birds
could enter freely. Their mere presence did not harm, so the shields did not expel them, or the quiescent spell-birds. Because
of this, the Dragons thought no shields existed; after all, they only truly understood their own form of shield, and did not
know they were not looking for thin, deadly bubbles that would fight their presence. It was an honest enough mistake, born
of ignorance. It turned out, however, to be the single worst mistake made in the world of Matrin.

For when the spell-birds came to life within each chosen Warren, the living energy of the shields rose up from underneath
each spell-bird and pushed. Gently, gently—but with irrevocable, unstoppable firmness.

The spell-birds seemed briefly to come to life. As their inner workings summoned the spells and set them in motion, and thus
as the spell-birds became a danger, the Falcon shields moved them to a place where they would not pose a danger to Warrens
or Warreners. The spell-birds rose into the air, wings fluttering, and soared in long, curving arcs—over Warren walls.

Out beyond the shields intended to contain the spell-birds’ damage, out into the beautiful glittering white cities, the spellbirds
toppled. They fell into cities beneath the sea. They landed outside the boundaries of the Warrens on each of Matrin’s continents,
and on the island of Glavia that was the cradle of civilization, home to the mother city of the Empire, Oel Artis.

A beautiful white glow radiated from each of the birds, but the glow could only be seen for an instant. Then the hard earth
turned liquid and each spell-bird turned to liquid with it. This thick, crystal-clear fluid spread out and down, silently,
absorbing and converting everything it touched into more of the same. Roads and buildings and people collapsed into each puddle,
which became a pond, which became a lake. In perfect circles, the fluid expanded, devoured, expanded, always adding to the
wave that forced the clear, viscous fluid not just downward, but outward. With each human devoured by the spell, the Dragon
magic increased its strength and its speed.

The force of the magic as it pushed outward lifted mounds—and then mountains—of earth and debris before it, piling ground
and masonry and scrambling people upward and outward in a roiling, churning, screaming mass. As the mountains built along
the outer circle, they dissolved into the liquid on the inner circle. The roar of heaving, sliding earth—the grinding of the
bones of Matrin—and the cries of the people trying desperately to get to safety, signaled the start of the next phase of the
disaster.

The second phase of the nightmare spawned itself from the wash of the first. The
rewhah
birthed from the destruction of lives, the stealing and binding of flesh and bone, blood and will, and most of all soul—
which was never meant to be bound by anything—built into storms than ran just behind the leading edges of the spreading, sprawling
seas.

If the energy of the spreading seas was invisible, the effects of the
rewhah
could be seen by anyone. The
rewhah
storms rose like fiery clouds, upward in billowing, spiraling fury, outward with the crack of thunder and the flash of lightning,
and they transformed all they touched. The cities in the air were no havens, nor were the aircars that floated above the ground,
for the
rewhah
storms hit them, and tore through them, and left everyone within them twisted, transformed, transmuted … irrevocably Scarred.
Those whom the
rewhah
storms did not devour and char into dust outright, they left monstrous. Anyone suspended above the maelstrom, thus changed,
was not even then free—for the shields cast by the Falcons increased in intensity relative to the onslaught of the nightmare
raging around them, and as they protected all those within the Warrens, they cut off all magical power to those outside the
Warrens. The cities fell silent for an instant as every magical device ceased to function at once. So outward, in those portions
of floating cities where the liquefaction spells had not yet hit, the screaming started as the cities dropped without grace
to the ground below. And below, more screaming, as those who heard the whistling wind of the falling cities and looked up
in time recognized the disaster that they could not escape.

No one suffered long in the flesh, however, for the wizard-cast seas grew at a pace far faster than a man could run—faster
even than most aircars could fly. Mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, innocent and guilty, pure and evil, all became
fodder that fed the swelling seas, the blazing storms.

From sea-birth to spell-stop, no spell-set ran for more than half of one hour. In that time, each expanded either to the predetermined
maximum perimeter or to the point where it ran out of human life upon which to feed itself. But though each of the seas came
to a shuddering, careening halt, nothing stopped the
rewhah
storms that the seas fed. Towering now up to the extreme edge of Matrin’s atmosphere, blazing like infernos, these monster
storms blasted outward across the surface of the world, wreaking havoc. In places two of them would intersect, and at the
point where they intersected the storm would die out. In places, the expanding circle would thin out, and so some patches
of the planet were spared. One massive storm tore up to the western coast of Strithia, and the magic of the Strithians diverted
it southward; it met storms coming up from the southeastern coast of Strithia, and the whole blazing nightmare devoured itself.

Each of the greatest cities in the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim—as well as the Empire itself—died in that half-hour hell. Those
cities and the surrounding areas had housed between them nearly three hundred fifty million free citizens. All but a few of
those people, whether instantly dissolved into the mage-spawned seas, or first twisted by the
rewhah
and then tossed down into the crystalline depths, died within that first half hour.

Beyond the circles of first-spell destruction, the paths of the
rewhah
changed or killed every living thing within twenty-five leagues of the edge of any soul-sea. Beyond that, the
rewhah
storms thinned and took erratic paths, so that some places were spared entirely from the devastation, while the storms twisted
others into nightmares beyond recognition.

More than a billion people died in the
rewhah
storms. And twice that many lived but had reason to wish they hadn’t.

Even in the places spared from the touch of the
rewhah
storms, though, everything changed. Because of the massive and deadly rise of ambient magic, the Falcon shields in every
Warren in Matrin shut the Warrens down tight. Dragon magic, which in the cities untouched by the spell-birds and the
rewhah
storms could have sustained those cities as they had always been, died suddenly and without warning. Cities built on air
toppled, crushing everything that lay beneath them. Cities under the sea drowned, and with those undersea wonderlands, every
free inhabitant. And even those places uncrushed and undrowned suffered, for all magical transportation, all magic-based water
delivery and plumbing, all magic-augmented food services and farms—everything that depended on magic; in short, everything—stopped
dead. In those parts of the world which lay in darkness, the sudden death of light felt absolute and terrifying. Everywhere,
the abrupt cessation of industry, transportation, entertainment—civilization—held in its echoes the whispering death of the
world as it had been.

In the Warrens themselves, the situation was, in most cases, better, at least for a while. The Dragon shields worked in reverse,
protecting the Warrens that were supposed to be the focus of all the Dragons’ destructive power. But those shields could not
survive the universal shutdown of Dragon magic when the
rewhah
storms erupted, and they died. The Falcon spells protected the Warrens, but not the ground beneath them. So the mage-born
seas burrowed under each Warren as well as encircling it, and those Warrens aboveground became in mere moments floating bubbles
in the centers of hellish, outward-racing seas.

The Warrens in undersea cities destroyed by spell-birds floated upward, their Falcon magic protecting them, holding them together.
Those in undersea cities not destroyed, however, stayed trapped beneath the surface of the sea, their inhabitants now awake,
foodless, with dwindling air supplies and the utter, awful darkness of their final grave the last thing any of them ever saw.

Afterward, survivors whispered that half the world had died that day and that half had been changed. It was not so many, but
the civilized peoples had forgotten how to live in hostile places, and of the many who survived the
rewhah
storms as true humans, only a few would live to see the end of the first year after the destruction of the Wizards’ War.

Faregan left the meeting excited. He did not go to the observation of the Warrens’ destruction with the Dragons of the Council—he
didn’t really care to watch what would, from the outside, be a lot of nothing. Instead he went home to his collection, to
his pretty little girls and boys, some of whom he’d kept suspended in time for fifty years. He thought he would take them
out and play with them while he waited for the news that the Warrens were no more.

The blank space in the center of his collection mocked him; he still didn’t have Jess. He would never have Jess. But now no
one else would have her, either. He felt … fulfilled, as if he had accomplished something both difficult and worthwhile. As
if, in guaranteeing her destruction and the destruction of something that had been important to her, he’d won a long and difficult
game.

And such a game demanded a reward, he thought.

Perhaps the destruction of his collection. He could start a new one afterward, and it would never be tainted by an empty space
at the center.

Yes. He would break all of them, one at a time or maybe in pairs— at least for the small, weak ones.

He reached for sweet little Jherrie, who had been nine for nearly fifty years, whom he had healed of lethal wounds a hundred
times, and whispered, “Today we finish our game, darling.”

And then he heard a roar.

He waved a hand and murmured, “Windows clear,” and his spell turned his walls to windows. In three directions he saw blue
sky, and the perfection of the sea, and the Belows in the hazy distance, with a light scattering of clouds racing beneath
him.

In the fourth …

He screamed at the pillar of fire that blocked out the earth and the sky, that exploded out from where he stood in all directions,
that devoured the world. He had time only for that one scream and then the fire was upon him, and pain ate him and tore him
and ripped him to pieces—deformed him and flung him to the ground even as the magic all around him died; and his toys, his
dolls, his playthings, broke free from the prison in which he had held them. They fought toward him— but the
rewhah
that destroyed him destroyed them, too.

Bad became worse, as all magic-driven power in Oel Artis Travia died. With a screech of ripping whitestone, the city toppled
into the soul-sea beneath, and the soul-sea consumed it and everyone in it. To the last atom, to the last soul.

Faregan became aware. Aware of who he was, of what he was, of his death, of the screaming horror of every other soul mingled
with his. And in the instant that he became aware, the souls that had been his playthings for so long became aware of him.

But now each of them was his equal in size, in strength. And all of them together were more than his equal in rage.

People create their own hells. Faregan would have a very long time to regret all the effort he had put into building his.

O
f Oel Artis, and of the glorious island Glavia, upon which the Jewel of Time had been set like a diamond in emerald, nothing
remained. The circle that spun out from the heart of the island devoured it whole, and in its place left nothing but a pathetic
Warren bobbing in the center of a sea of damned souls.

Magic birthed the seas in half an hour, and magic sent the
rewhah
storms tearing across the surface of the world and twisting along the floor of the sea for half a day. Such a little slice
of time, such an insignificant percentage when weighed against the life of the whole of the world of Matrin. Matrin was one
world when it started, and someplace else entirely when it heaved to its dying close.

In the shocked silence that followed the storms, twenty-seven seas of souls cried out to the gods for vengeance. But if the
gods heard, they did not choose to answer. Or perhaps it was that they had worked so hard trying to save something beautiful
of the world they had once loved, and their power was spent.