Blood of Innocents (Book Two of the Sorcery Ascendant Sequence) (77 page)

Amerdan drew out his
trinket
from under his shirt. As his hand brushed Dolly, she squirmed with anticipation, rubbing against his chest.

“I’ll take over the shield. Then you can rest for a few moments, regain your strength before they make it through.”

Bells nodded. “I’ll delay them as much as possible, but I fear it won’t be long.”

Amerdan placed the warm metal
trinket
against the back of her neck, fingers maintaining contact with her skin. Reaching down with his right hand, he drew out his knife.

The black dome shield barely flickered as his multiple wells took the strain from Bells, and with an audible sigh, her shoulders slumped.

“Promise me you’ll present yourself to the God-Emperor after you escape. He needs to know about your wells. Tell him… I forgive him. My real name is Sorche. Use that information to get past the functionaries and sorcerers that surround him.” Her hand reached up to stroke his, which was resting on the back of her neck. “Promise me.”

Amerdan breathed in the scent of her hair and the air around them, fragrant with dirt and sweat and the blood of dead, useless soldiers. He soaked it in, savoring it. A shiver ran down his back as the need filled him.

“I promise.”

He plunged the knife into the vessel’s throat, and it made a gurgling sound. It clutched at him, nails scraping the skin on his arms as they wrapped tight around it. It struggled, as they all did. To no avail. In his hand, the
trinket
glowed bright and hot. A cord of pulsating light grew from it and into the wound in the vessel’s neck.

The vessel uttered a wordless cry tinged with loss.

“Shhh,” he whispered into its ear. “It’s all over now. It’s over.”

He felt Caldan’s sorcery attempt to breach the shield and barely held onto his strings linked to the
crafting
. The man was strong, but nowhere near as powerful as Amerdan was with his two wells. The shield held.

Amerdan convulsed with agony as color leached from the vessel’s skin, turning it a brittle gray. He clamped his mouth shut to avoid crying out as the luminescent cord vanished. He collapsed to the ground, panting hoarsely, still clutching the desiccated vessel.

There was another assault on the shield he barely fended off. Whatever Caldan was doing, he had more skill with shields and how they functioned than Amerdan had and was trying different ways of breaking it. He’d be through soon.

•

Suppressing the urge to punch the shield, Caldan groaned with frustration and wiped sweat from his face. He’d been so close then, the shield had almost buckled. Its structure was new to him; somehow it was cycling through layers, continually renewing and swapping them.

Cel Rau studied him for a moment before speaking. “Whatever you’re doing, you’d better do it faster. The sorcery is still moving through the soldiers. Hundreds more have died since we reached the dome.”

Caldan glanced at the top of the shield dome and felt a weight bear down on him. He drew as much as he could from his well for one last attempt to break through. “This is it,” he croaked. “If I can’t do it this time, I won’t have anything left.”

Cel Rau only nodded. “Do it.”

With a thought, Caldan re-linked to his paper
crafting
s, and instead of trying to breach the shield, he attempted to align them with its forces. They needed to bypass the space inside his
crafting
s rather than struggle against the absence he wanted to create. And he could feel it working. Inside the square space he’d created, the blackness lightened to a swirling gray. The hard barrier twisted as it was sucked into his
crafting
s, leaving a transparent square in the darkness of the dome.

Beside him, cel Rau lifted his swords, but before they could enter, the dome winked out of existence. Red hot needles of pain exploded inside Caldan’s mind as he absorbed the backlash from his broken sorcery. As he collapsed to the ground, he felt and heard cel Rau rush forward. He pried his eyes open to see a cart in which rested a strange
crafting
generating the violet threads. On its back with its top half-hanging over the side of the cart was a desiccated corpse. It had long black hair, adorned with a number of crafted bells. Fresh blood surrounded a puncture wound in her neck.

Cel Rau was rushing a man on the other side of the cart. Caldan’s mouth opened as he recognized Amerdan. Just as cel Rau’s blades flashed at him, the shopkeeper turned black as a shield enveloped his skin. Cel Rau’s blades skittered across the shield causing white sparkles to materialize before they were absorbed. Amerdan slammed into cel Rau, sending him flying into the side of the cart. Swords slipped from lifeless fingers.

The onyx figure stepped toward Caldan, and he linked to his own shield
crafting
.

Amerdan’s head jerked to the side, as his attention was drawn to the west. Caldan heard him hiss in frustration, before glancing back toward him. In a flash, Amerdan was gone, sprinting across the dead soldiers to the east.

He mustn’t get away, thought Caldan. But the
crafting
generating the threads was still active. It needed to be stopped.

Amerdan would have to wait. The longer Caldan delayed, the more innocent soldiers would die. But why had Amerdan fled? He looked to the west to see around two dozen people approaching—men and women of all ages. They were surrounded by multicolored shields flashing in the sun like fish scales. The air around them thrummed with sorcerous power, and the hairs on Caldan’s arms stood on end. Through his senses, he knew they wore potent
crafting
s and
trinket
s. They had to be warlocks. Surely they’d know how to disable the
crafting
.

He winced as a number of them joined hands, and again globes of destructive sorcery arced toward him. They weren’t going to disable it, they were going to destroy it now the shield was down and it was unprotected. He was almost spent. So very tired. But cel Rau wouldn’t survive the onslaught, and neither would he, unless he pulled himself together. With a groan of effort, he
reached
for cel Rau and somehow extended his shield to cover the swordsman. There was no time to wonder how he’d managed it without touching cel Rau.

Bells—her body needed to be preserved so they could examine her, to see what had been done to her. Whatever it was, it wasn’t natural.

Caldan felt a rush of weakness as he tried to push his shield toward Bells’ withered corpse. She was too far away. As the globes descended on them, he gave up, focusing on protecting himself and cel Rau.

Power washed over him like a wave on the beach. Hard. Concentrated. Not just an unleashing of pure force from someone’s well, like his raw attempts had been. There was something… containing it, amplifying and directing it.

As the ground shook, and corrosive elements set the cart aflame, he sensed the warlocks pouring their wells across the distance and into the
crafting
. It reminded him of the way a breeze blew a candle flame this way and that, or a strong gust of wind both fanned and directed the flames of a campfire. Amid the annihilation of the emperor’s army, by both Bells’
crafting
and the warlocks’ sorcery, enlightenment dawned on Caldan.

His shield absorbed the punishment the warlocks dished out, and the
crafting
in the cart began to melt. The cart collapsed as its structure burnt from underneath the
crafting
. Metal discs slumped to the ground and spilled, molten, across the dirt. Whatever runes she’d used, and how it functioned, he’d never know.

But now he knew the secret of how focused destructive sorcery functioned. Paper, wood, clay, stone, and metal were too weak to contain such amplified, potent forces. Something else was used as a substitute: a sorcerous barrier much like a shield that could itself contain the destructive sorcery, immune to erosion, to the corrosive forces issuing from a well.

The warlocks’ combined might faded, leaving his eyes smarting from the flashes of light, and his mind aching from the exertion. But both he and cel Rau were alive. Of Bells, there was no sign, her body and
crafting
s consumed by the warlocks’ sorcery.

The threads had fragmented from the strange
crafting
when it was destroyed. They’d broken from its surface, ends still trailing in the air. No longer being renewed, they were still spreading in a circle around the army.

Caldan levered himself to his feet and checked on cel Rau. The swordsman was still breathing. Around him, soldiers screamed in terror, and he forced himself to gaze upon what Bells had wrought.

In all directions, violet sorcerous threads were still pursuing fleeing soldiers, cutting them down mid-step. Some scrabbled on the ground, attempting to cover themselves with their dead comrades in the vain hope the sorcery would pass them by. Impossibly, the deadly threads swayed back and forth, even though the
crafting
was destroyed. Surrounding them was a sea of death: lifeless bodies covered with congealing scarlet splashes; limbs separated from torsos; soldiers, servants, tradesmen, cooks, women. The sorcery did not discriminate. Metal armor was instantly melted through, no match for the potent shaping. Swords that hacked at the threads had their blades cleaved in two. In the end, all that was left was to turn and flee, to trample over those that fell or couldn’t keep up.

The emperor’s forces were decimated. Without a single opponent to face them, they’d been slaughtered. With all he knew of Bells, Caldan couldn’t imagine she’d been the instigator of such an atrocity. She’d done terrible things in Anasoma, but under orders, and on the assumption that killing a few people would allow thousands more to live. This… She couldn’t have known what she was doing. Had Amerdan manipulated her? Or was he also a tool?

Footsteps approached. He was surrounded, and the warlocks looked at him with barely disguised fury.

“We broke through,” Caldan gasped. “But one of them got away. He ran to the east.”

“Silence!” barked a woman with a wrinkled, suntanned face.

Caldan bristled at her tone. “Can’t you stop them? The threads?”

The woman glared at him, declining to answer.

A young man with a beardless face answered.

“No. They have to be left to dissipate.”

Like the other warlocks, he was dressed impeccably in fine black pants and shirt, and a black woolen coat. All the men were dressed similarly, while the women substituted the coat for black shawls. All their buttons were silver, shaped like many-petaled flowers, the same as Joachim had worn. The only sign they were in the middle of an annihilated army was their bloodstained boots.

“They’ll kill hundreds more by the time that happens.”

The young man merely shrugged. “Thousands. We have survived, as has the emperor.”

Caldan’s blood went cold at the man’s insensitivity. He shook his head in disbelief.

Invisible clamps surrounded him, binding his arms to his sides. He struggled, to no avail. Even though he was shielded, it was no use against whatever was holding him.

He had no illusions about what the warlocks would do to him. They knew coercive sorcery and needed to get to the bottom of this disastrous attack in a hurry. They’d try to tear whatever information he had from his mind without regard for the consequences.

A scratching at his consciousness alerted him, and just in time, he linked to his coercive sorcery
crafting
and erected a seamless barrier to their probing. He’d learnt a few things from the coercive sorcery text he’d had copied. Enough to protect himself, but that was all. Scratching became clawing, which in turn became a pounding. He held firm until their attempts subsided.

The young man in front of him snorted in amusement. “It seems you’re more than we thought.”

“Joachim asked me to seek you out.”

“That pignut—” blurted the wrinkled woman.

“Calm yourself, Thenna,” snapped the young man, and she subsided. It looked like he outranked her, young though he was. Curious.

“I was with the Protectors until Joachim found me. He’s… dead, though.”

“Good riddance.”

“Now, now, Thenna. He was one of us.” The young man turned his attention back to Caldan. “What’s your name, and why did our brother Joachim tell you to seek us?”

“I’m Caldan, and he didn’t. Not really.”

“Out with it, or I’ll smash through your little barrier and scoop your mind clean. Believe me when I say I can do it, if I’m so inclined.”

Caldan tried to swallow, mouth suddenly dry. They will find out eventually, probably sooner than later. He would have to tread carefully. Best to make them think he didn’t know the truth.

“I’m Touched. And a sorcerer, as you can see. Joachim tried to kill me for some reason, but I managed to overcome him. The Protectors think he and some associates were killing people for their
trinket
s.” He held out his hand, showing them his own
trinket
ring. “This was passed to me by my parents, who died when I was young.” That should give them enough to chew on.

The young man exchanged glances with a number of warlocks around him. He pursed his lips as he thought.

“We knew he was up to something, Devenish. Don’t tell me you—”

“Hush, Thenna. I don’t want to tell you again. Very well,” Devenish said eventually. “We’ll find the truth eventually, anyway. Stay close to us for the time being, until we work out what to do with you. There’s a jukari horde still to deal with, and a city to defend. You’ll have plenty of chances to prove your worth in the coming days.”

Caldan realized the warlocks were worried, and not about him. With the army decimated, the jukari might have the advantage. And the city had sent Quivers to reinforce them, leaving Riversedge defended by a relative few.

“Why did the jukari arrive at the right moment? And where did they come from?” Caldan wondered to himself.

“Curious, is it not?” replied Devenish. “If I were a betting man, I’d wager they’re part of a complex plan.”

Caldan shook his head. If they thought he had something to do with it, they were mistaken. But it might take his mind being reamed to convince them.