Arm Of Galemar (Book 2) (105 page)

He had mastered four new shields during the winter
under Tollaf’s tyrannical rule.  The chief mage had also drilled him on his
speed, so even with the new additions it still took less time to erect every
one than it once had, layered together, the feeder channel pulsing through each
to maintain the sandwich.

Marik felt it hit, stronger than any attack he’d ever
taken before.  Fire burst around him.  It blossomed in a flaming rose.  The
explosion released a concussive blast that flattened the surrounding men,
Galemaran and invader alike.

He kept his feet.  The physical shield deflected the
concussion force.  Half his shields had been demolished.  Marik set to
rebuilding them furiously while adding new layers, realizing as he did so that
the shield around his sword still held.  Not only that, but his blade had
become as enmeshed in layered shields as he.

All morning he had concentrated on maintaining the
dual channels, holding them far longer than ever before.  Fierce focus had kept
him maintaining them, and his frantic mental state had sent the workings down
both channels at once.  The second channel caused no problems for the moment so
he let it be.  If he allowed it to snap into the other feeder channel, it might
disrupt the careful layering.  Any attempt to carefully let only that single
channel collapse might cause them both to give way.

His reserves were thin.  He could only keep this up
for so long.  Yet without the strength working he could gather from the mass
diffusion while he held the shields.

Behind the guarding soldiers, he spotted the magic
user sitting on a horse.  He glowed with etheric power. 
So he is an actual
mage then.
  Small help knowing the specifics when his repertoire was so
limited.  Damn Henodd to the lowest hell for this, putting him into a mage
duel!  Celerity better strip off more than his skin!

Oh, hells!  He’s a mage!  If he starts drawing on
those lines I saw earlier…

The thought chilled him to the bone.  With that much
power at hand, the invader mage could burn Marik away without trouble.  His
shields would be worth less notice than if they were made from parchment.  He could
draw from the lines as well, but his skill at such had never been tested to
this extreme.  Better to end this as fast as he could.  If he could end it at
all.

Marik readied to send a barrage of etheric spheres
against the man, intending to press him without quarter.  Giving a mage a
chance to find his balance was never a good idea.  He started forming the first
orb when he felt the shields around him vanish.  Not sheered away by an
attack.  Just bloody vanish!

At the same moment, a second attack sped toward him
too fast for thought.  Different somehow.  In what way Marik had no time to
analyze.  Instinct ruled him, making him raise his blade while he ducked behind
it as much as he could.

The working struck his sword and blasted it backward
to strike his head.  It hit hard.  Colors danced across his vision.  Not a fire
attack.  Simply a raw blast of force meant to break every bone in his body.

It knocked him to his knees.  Still confused, he
rolled aside.  Most of the shields around the sword were gone, their absence
felt rather than seen.  Seeing anything at the moment was sketchy.

A third working ripped through the snow where he had
been.  It tore up earth as if it were water thrown up by a stone pitched into
its depths. 
Don’t give him time, fool!

Marik formed spheres, no larger than his palm, afraid
to waste time by infusing them with greater power.  He launched them at the
horses where the mage had been. 
Speed.  Speed.
  Three at a time, the
first striking as the second reached the midpoint, the third finishing its
construction.  One after the next.  A relentless barrage, fast as his mental
hands could form them, three in one second, six in two, nine in three.

The first several flew wildly and tore into the
soldiers guarding the officers.  Marik watched as men were knocked aside or
took grievous injury.  After the tenth orb flew, he altered their path to the
mage.

Damn him! It!  Him!  Damn it all!
  He gritted his teeth.  Orbs flashed off the mage’s
shield, most shattering into energy shreds, others bouncing into soldiers
further away.

The mage neither grinned nor smirked, yet Marik still
felt the man’s amusement.  He raised his hand theatrically.  Under the
magesight, Marik could see the mass of fire-tinged energy forming, ready to be
launched.

Before he could, a deflected orb burned into the
horse’s flank.  Screaming shrilly, the mage’s horse reared on its hind legs,
dancing in pain.  Its fore-hooves split a soldiers head.  The startled mage
clung to its neck.

Marik saw his chance.  With hardly any energy left, he
directed his last orbs into the horse’s neck, its underbelly, its chest.  He
pummeled the horse up and back.  It screamed loud enough to be heard across the
entire battlefield.

He felt his eardrums throbbing with the painful
noise.  The horse toppled backward off its hooves as flesh and hair was blasted
away, the mage going with it, shouting incomprehensibly.

Men flattened by the first blast had regained their
feet.  Kings continued to fight hard, for which Marik was glad.  He felt weak,
drained.  No chance he could hold off an onslaught by the black soldiers at the
moment.  Not until he spent several moments regaining his wind and his
strength.  Hardly enough energy remained to maintain the surviving shields
around the sword.

The mass of fiery energy, invisible to everyone except
him, still hovered above the clustered horses.  Why hadn’t it dissipated when
the horse crushed the mage beneath its weight?

It should have, unless—

So fast.  It happened so fast Marik hardly understood
what happened.  He saw the mage behind an elite soldier, leaning on the
fighter’s shoulder.  His hair stuck out awkwardly, traces of blood and melted
snow glazed his face.  Marik raised his sword instinctively.

The attack came as a constant wave, a single beam, as
of sunlight shining through a hole in the clouds on a gloomy day.  Rather than
striking at him, it deliberately struck his sword.

The mass is still there!  This bastard’s no stranger
to dual channeling!

He felt his sword vibrating.  Before he understood
fully, before he could draw enough energy to counter whatever this bloody mage
was doing, the steel glowed brightly.  Nearly too fast to register the changes,
it shone red, then blue, then brilliant white.

The hilt burned, searing through his thick leather
gloves.  Marik let go of his sword.  He raised one arm to shield his sight from
the blinding incandescence.

His sword exploded.  Neither in fragments nor flying
shards.  In molten steel.  The liquid metal burst in every direction, a
shattering tankard carelessly dropped.

Marik felt hot steel splash across his raised arm,
eating through his tunic sleeve.  Steel flowed through the air, washing across
his face while he clenched his eyes shut.

His face was being torn from his skull.  The skin
disintegrating, the muscle and flesh beneath boiling off his bones, liquefying
into thick, congealed offal.  Pain whiter than white, beyond burning, beyond
death
!

He screamed and heard nothing.  His shriek ripped
through the battlefield, heard plainly over the noise of other dying men.

Darkness rose, a familiar darkness.  It swelled from a
point beyond life.  He had no recollection of the last time, except he knew it
had reached out to embrace him before.  Cool, clean darkness.  A soothing
relief in oblivion.  A chill to ease the burning by allowing death to envelope
him.

*        *        *        *        *

“And be damned to you!”  Harbon coughed on the last
word.  He felt the shoulder he leaned against shake slightly.

Harbon glanced at the general’s guard.  He would need
to silenced, along with the few others near at hand who had witnessed him
calling on god’s power.  That cursed mage had forced the issue, preventing him
from sitting stately and working unobserved.  Now these guardsmen knew he could
wield the power, decidedly an abnormal ability for an officer in the king’s
army.

Too much knowledge for these particular guardsmen to
be trusted with.  He would need to kill them quickly so their deaths were lost
in the battle’s confusion.  And all for one strangling mage!

That had surprised him.  No self-respecting wielder in
Arronath would parade as a common vagabond, even the ones as weak in the power
as this one must have been.  Pride in one’s talents should come first and
foremost.  This land must be far stranger than he had ever believed.

A pity the Artifact needed to be destroyed.  It had
the ability to defend against his workings.  No telling how far that might have
gone.  Stronger workings directed at its wielder might trigger Sudden Death
presets, such as dramatically boosting its wielder’s strength in the power, or
unleashing a high level Deathblow.  Too much remained unknown about Artifacts
to risk such dangers when facing any, including the ones believed to be well
understood.

Harbon felt the guard supporting him shudder a second
time, obviously nervous about the colonel’s abilities.  As he should be.  He
studied the faces surrounding him, marking who knew too much.  The firecloud he
still retained, despite being thrown off his mount, would make an adequate end
to them.

Most of the guards had scattered during the barrage,
or been killed.  All to the good.  Three remained too close to trust, along
with a dozen who might or might not be trouble.  Five soldiers fought nearby, a
sixth approaching him.  No doubt to ask for orders given that very few must
have been issued with Adrian staring into space.

He ignored the approaching soldier to finish his
appraisal until the solider had the temerity to speak first; a serious breach
of protocol.  Given that the words had sounded like the mangled form of Traders
spoken by these people, the language mutated horribly during their long
isolation, he must be in a shocked state.  Either from an unseen injury or from
the magical displays the strangling mage had forced.

“What say you, man?  Is your report so urgent?”

Harbon waited.  The man stared back at him without
replying.  Cold eyes gazed unflinchingly from behind the helm’s vision slit. 
So like shards of frozen steel.

An angry order that would seal the daring man’s fate
for all time hovered on Harbon’s tongue before he noticed other oddities.  The
man had lost his shoulder guards, and also lacked all arm and leg protections,
as well as the gorget from his neck.  His cuir bouli appeared thrown on over a
white tunic shaggy as a sheep.

“Wh—” he started to demand, realization an instant too
late when he felt the dagger slip into his ribs.

Harbon lurched, burning ice stabbing through one lung,
his strength pouring away through the hole in his torso, departing while blood
gushed over his vest.  He fell as the stranger cut open the guard’s throat with
the dagger, then whirled to face the others with a sword he had concealed
behind his back.

The cold from the frozen ground seeped into him with
frightening speed.  Harbon groped for his strength, for the energy he could
feel draining away.  Wildly he snatched at whatever he could, finding the
slippery essences from hundreds of dead men saturating the snowfield.  Life
forces that had not yet completely dissolved or lost the personal signatures
impressed on them by the men they had once been.

He grabbed all he could.  Most slipped fishlike
through his mental fingers.  The inflow slowed the chilling loss of his own
life, yet as much as he snatched, he could not gather them in fast enough to
match the leak.

Harbon wanted to scream in frightened frustration.  He
opened all his channels, desperate for life, to channel the power back into
himself before he lost it forever.

His control slipped.  Rather than initiating a siphon
loop, he felt all the energy, the wriggling life forces from dozens of men,
escape through the channel still feeding the firecloud.  Harbon’s head slumped,
his last vision showing him the cloud swelling tremendously, rising, dipping,
swaying, and finally begin a descending arc to the north.

Then his eyes glazed over in death.

*        *        *        *        *

Walking in the darkness.  So dark he could see neither
sky nor horizon, could not see how far he had come, nor where he might be going
to.  He could see no ground either, but it must be there.  Logic demanded it. 
How could he walk if there was no ground to walk upon?

Still, with nothing at all discernable, Adrian might
have been traveling a world where ground, sky and everything in-between were
nonexistent.  This must be the space between moments, the place between the
ground and the sky, a space through which the forces creating the world had
worked during that unimaginable creation.

When had he last eaten, or drank, or slept, or
defecated?  He could produce no answer, could not know, since measurements of
time held no meaning in a world where time remained still.