Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (48 page)
Read Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Online
Authors: John Daulton
The flying creatures swooped down after a body vanished into the goop, and they hovered with their leathery dragonfly wings over the smoke that rose, breathing it in. Their long, toothy beaks opened, and Black Sander was sure the sound must have been awful to hear as well.
He watched two of these creatures suck up a patch of smoke, then fly away again, rising up to join the circling of their fellows. He allowed himself to watch them as they flocked together above the swamp. That’s when he noticed
Citadel
. The flock of flying creatures gave it away, the swarm of them wheeling like a dark cloud around some unseen object in the sky, shaping the perfect sphere of its invisibility as they bounced, rebounded, and ultimately avoided it, a bubble of vacant sky in the dark cloud of their circling mass.
Citadel
hovered over the ring of fortresses, and yet it wasn’t doing anything.
The conduit saw it as well, and he took Kalafrand’s magic and pushed it up to where
Citadel
was. Black Sander knew he would not be able to push a seeing spell through the space fortress’ magical defenses, though. That was the most impenetrable possession of the War Queen. The attempt was a waste of time, though he could not say it now. He half expected to hear the marchioness shout the conduit down for not going inside anyway.
But the seeing spell pushed right through the birds and right through
Citadel
and plunged into the darkness of the stone.
The vision slid through its many floors after, light, dark, light, dark, up they went. Wanderfrond guided the concert’s vision right through to the core of the place, right to where he knew the mighty concert hall was. The heart of the War Queen’s own giant, it too encased in stone.
The room burst into view, and Black Sander faithfully rendered it for the marchioness, the rings of plush red stools around a plush red-and-gold ottoman. The concert hall seating spread all around the outer edge, stadium style, wedges of seats filled with robed wizards from every guild. There were supposed to be eight hundred of them in there, and rumored to have the yellow Liquefying Stone, every one of them, if the Queen could force herself to give them out again.
At least, there were
supposed
to be eight hundred. That’s what Black Sander had heard. But there were not. Not exactly, anyway.
At least half of them were dead. Perhaps more than half. Blood ran down the stairs between the sections of the concert hall, dark red smears on the Queen’s bright crimson. Black Sander rendered it all exactly as Kalafrand’s spell revealed, the conduit handling it well, for all his sanza-sap haze.
The War Queen and a handful of soldiers were beating back the last of what appeared to be an invasion force. There were perhaps eight of them left. The invaders looked human.
The conduit squeezed Kalafrand some more and chased the retreating scene through the massive bronze doors, out into an area filled with Prosperion plants. It was bright and lit up like a Crown City park in the middle of the day—all illusions, of course—and the battle crashed through the illusions, revealing the untruth of them all. One by one as they watched, the illusions failed, and soon they were simply watching the Queen and her entourage slaughtering what was left of the enemy.
Four men, and they were men, human in every way and in leather breastplates, hard leather, and draped with bronze chains. The leather was dark, dyed the color of wine, and the men wore helmets that looked as if they were made from some kind of animal shell. They fought with hooked swords and pole arms, bardiches made from something blue like glass.
But they didn’t fight long, and finally the last of them were gone.
The War Queen stood panting over the bodies. Black Sander watched as she spat on one of them.
She turned and reentered the concert hall, having to step over the dead as if wading through the swamp below
Citadel
.
Black Sander guessed there were at least as many dead invaders as there were dead wizards. Many of the invaders held wands rather than weapons in their dead hands. The holes in the walls, and the gaps in the red coating of the ceiling with its strange, twisting golden tentacles, all suggested a long magical fight had taken place.
The Queen’s assassin, the elf called Shadesbreath, appeared beside her.
“There!” shouted the marchioness.
The conduit stopped chanting, locking the perspective of the seeing spell in place. The Queen and the elf moved through the injured, picking up the dead invaders’ wands.
“That’s him.
Now
. Now is the time.” She turned to Jefe, who was watching with eyes wide. He’d obviously never seen a concert before. “Now! Do it now, the stunning device. Quickly.”
Jefe turned to El Segador, who pulled two objects from a pocket of his jacket. One was a stun grenade. The other a flash. He went to the conduit and held them out for him to see. “Tell me when.”
“Now,” hissed the marchioness. “For gods’ sake, do it now.”
The conduit nodded. “Now is when.”
Black Sander watched expectantly. This was the whole plan, the core of its success. Neutralize Her Majesty’s two deadly pets, and she had nothing left: with the Galactic Mage gone well over two weeks now—eaten up by a hole in space, the reports on both worlds had said—he would not appear, and the elf was standing there in plain view. This was the time.
El Segador handed the conduit the grenades. Wanderfrond took one in each hand, as he’d been told to do before the spell began. He held them up, gripping the triggers, and let El Segador pull the pins. “Be ready, Gangue; be ready, both of you.”
He picked up the cast where he’d anchored it, staring up into Black Sander’s illusion just before he began. He smirked at the image of the War Queen and her assassin, and then he was lost in the magic again.
The chants from the two teleporters grew louder, and in a moment after, there came two hissing sounds,
ssst
,
ssst
, and the grenades disappeared.
They reappeared a moment later, a half span in the air before the Queen and the elf. Both flashed before they’d even had time to drop to the bodies lying on the ground.
Both the War Queen and the elf staggered backward. Both tripped over bodies and fell down.
“Now!” shrieked the marchioness. “Send them now!”
Suddenly the draw on Black Sander’s mana was immense. It was beyond immense. The drugged-out conduit seemed to have lost his mind. He sucked mana out of the sky in impossible ways, yanking through Black Sander’s mythothalamus so brutally it burned. He could feel the conduit doing the same to others as well, riding hardest on the Z-ranked Kalafrand. Kalafrand screamed. The teleporters were chanting like maniacs.
Black Sander saw the marchioness’ small clean room in his mind, in the concert mind, a teleportation chamber outside on the grounds. He saw it, and saw it disappear from beside the great house. It appeared in the spell, barely, the seer only just holding on to the view.
But there it was, the marchioness’ teleportation chamber, sitting crooked atop the bodies nearest the central crimson stool. On
Citadel
.
Four mechs erupted through the clean room wall. So carefully built into it as they had been, now they burst forth from it in a spray of bullets. In seconds, half of the remaining wizards in the room were gone.
Two men climbed out of the wrecked stone box after the mechs. Black Sander recognized one to be his big brute henchman Twane. Twane held a truncheon nearly as big as a mammoth leg. With one stroke, he dropped the elf to unconsciousness even as the Royal Assassin was clambering to his feet.
“Hurry, you fool,” Black Sander heard the marchioness say breathlessly.
Twane bound the elf up quickly.
The conduit was casting more teleports; another clean room flashed through Black Sander’s mind, the concept of it more than a vision, larger perhaps, or perhaps just a crate of wood. It all went so fast, he could hardly hold on to ideas. Again he felt as if he were going to have his brain ripped out. He couldn’t understand how the conduit was casting in such a way. The mana wasn’t working properly. It was as if … as if it had turned to water somehow.
Then he realized that the conduit must have Liquefying Stone. Suddenly he understood. The marchioness had one. She’d had it all along. Or perhaps she’d gotten it from the ancient priest. But she had one.
Black Sander knew enough of its power to hope that idiot addict didn’t get them all killed. He considered letting go of the spell. But he was second in the cast. If he did so, the release would whip back through the chain and kill all the rest.
Still, it was better than dying himself.
But the next part of the spell was cast. He still had his life and his magic intact. For now.
The other man that had emerged with Twane was Black Sander’s right-hand man, Belor. Belor looked pale and doughy compared to all the rest. It was obvious the screaming, silent in the seeing spell but apparent in all the O-shaped mouths of the wounded wizards who had survived, unnerved him. It must have been a tremendous cacophony. It embarrassed Black Sander to see how timidly Belor picked his way over the bodies in the concert hall. He held a sack limply in hands that trembled. Perhaps they should have let El Segador go instead, as the man had asked.
But Belor did as he was supposed to, if too slowly for Black Sander or the marchioness, and he gingerly pulled the sack over the elf’s head and handed Twane a length of cord. The burly young sailor, long used to working with rope and tying knots, made quick and secure work of it from there. And just like that, the elf was rendered harmless, a simple anti-magic spell and a plain old burlap sack, the former the invention of the Queen’s own favorite enchanter, Peppercorn.
“Take us up top. Quickly. I need to see.” That, of course, from the marchioness.
The conduit had to fuss with poor, addled Kalafrand, for the seer was terrified. But eventually he managed to get the spell under way, and the vision fed to Black Sander, at first, and once again, lots of flashing light and dark as the sight slid through the floors of
Citadel
up to the battlement. By the time the sight magic emerged, the scene was much the same as it had been in the concert hall, bodies strewn all over the redoubt decks. The tightly packed combat towers were littered with dead wizards and dead invaders from … well, from the alien world they were on, apparently, dead human aliens—again. The remaining Prosperion wizards—having repelled the invaders as had the Queen and those in the concert hall below—had not been so lucky against the unexpected attack of the marchioness. They were already being herded together by ten more mechs, sent in one of the large shipping containers used for freight on Earth. It sat crookedly, bridging the space of two redoubts and looking just as alien as any of the bodies lying there.
The
Citadel
commander, Aderbury in his brown robes, stood among them, looking angry and holding a cloth to an enormous bleeding cut at the back of his head.
The marchioness’ men, Jefe’s men, had done their job.
“All right,” commanded the marchioness. “It’s time to do the rest. Send our friends to
Citadel
so that Master Jefe can claim his armor from the Queen. And Councilman Gangue, get your people at that Amphitrite TGS depot near Earth to send the rest of my mechs to the Palace. Vorvington is waiting for us by the entrance he’s built for us in the wall. The time has come to take Kurr back from the ruinous reign of the War Queen.”
THE END
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