Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (4 page)

The Dhanani were all but gone, hunted nearly out of
existence at the end of the Gods’ Rebellion and restricted so completely by
B’radik’s decree that they would be well nigh useless against Cragen’s forces. 
Besides, they were too far west to be of much use.  The Brymandines, and the
ghost people…  They would as soon fight each other, and they would vie to see
who could sell the other side out to Cragen first in the hopes of surviving
long enough to gloat.  The Anatayans, formidable as they were, were far to the
northwest and could not possibly get to Pyran in time, even assuming they were
inclined to fight Cragen, which was not by any means to be assumed.  Besides,
they were as much a danger to mages as Cragen with their damnable
superstitions.

With no one left to defend them, how long could the mages
hope to last, under those circumstances?  How long before all of Syon was
subjugated to Cragen’s will?

The sentry followed the Guardian’s gaze across the marshes
to where the approaching army stood on the hilltop poised to attack and
nodded.  “The ghost people keep a shrine to Lim’gar in the temple, if you’re of
a superstitious bent.  Otherwise, I say we stay here and do what we must.”

“Do what we must,” Galorin repeated thoughtfully.  He
watched the tiny figures in green and gold racing toward the city walls and the
menacing wall of men filling the hills behind them.  “And so we shall.”

“They’re slowing at the hilltop!”

Damerien nodded and took the brief luxury of looking behind
him as he rode.  Indeed, the army that had stayed right on their heels was
falling behind now, stopped, so it seemed, on the hilltop and not yet spilling
around it to fill the marshland.  No doubt they were bringing up their siege
machinery.  Regardless, whatever they were doing would take time.

“We might survive this yet,” Damerien laughed darkly.  “Do
not slow your pace.  Achieve Pyran.  Everything hinges on that.”

The Guardian felt a chill on his spine and looked out over
the hillside.  He raised a hand to throw more light across the valley but drew
himself up short.  In his view of the world, amidst the threads and strands of
probability and along the certainty trees that overlay everything in the
universe in which this world was but a speck, a grayness was spreading, a
moldering festering change in the strands of power that started on the hilltop
and extended across the valley toward Pyran. 

“No,” he whispered.  The other mages’ eyes grew wide with
terror, and he knew that they also recognized the signature in the power racing
toward them through the strands, racing across the valley behind Damerien and
his men.

Cragen had not only sent his entire army to invade Syon.  He
had sent the Wittister mages with their corrupt, stolen power––a power fed by
those they’d killed.  The sheer amount of force he saw on the strands…the king
must have sent them all.  Without the rest of the Guardians, he doubted even his
mighty protections could withstand the force of their attack.  Not after he’d
spent so much of his strength to get the others to safety.

Do what you must.

He watched the taint in the strands as it moved over the
marshes toward Damerien and felt sick.  At this rate, the corruption would
overtake the Great Liberator and steal his life and his power before he could
reach Pyran.

The strange vision he’d had of Damerien filled his mind.  If
the Wittisters could seize upon power like that…  The Guardian gulped dry air
down his throat, terror filling his heart, not for himself, not for his mages,
but for all the people of Syon. 

He could not wait.  He had one chance to end this and save Syon,
only one.  He only hoped his power would be equal to the task.  “All of you!”
he called to the mages assembled on the wall.  “Ignore the attackers.  Protect
the city.  All your power, everything you have, into a shield!  Do it now!”

The Guardian closed his eyes and raised his hands high over
the battlement walls.  “Forgive me, my Prince,” he murmured as he felt his
power, the full strength of a Guardian, stream through his body, outward, riding
out along the same strands of power that carried the Wittister taint, colliding
with it, clashing with it, feeding upon it, hearing within those strands the
screams of all the mages they had destroyed to get that power.

Peace, he prayed them.  I shall not fail you.

He barely kept his footing from the violent collision of
power that shook the walls of the city with its force.  In the slowed,
seemingly infinite milliseconds of the impact, he felt the Wittister mages
surge their strength against the power he hurled against them, crackling
angrily through the strands, not bending them, not plucking them like a bard
plucks out a tune, but burning them away like so many strands of hair.

The hill rumbled menacingly beneath their feet, the
beginnings of an obvious if impotent attack.  The soil rippled and liquefied in
patches, and he could imagine the Wittister mages nodded almost smugly to each
other.  Such a simple attack would be almost disappointing to them, surely not
worthy of a Guardian.  A pathetic jab like that must surely mean he was
weakened, and why not?  He had just used a good part of his power to port the refugees
away.  He was perhaps still stronger than any one of them––this, they would
know from the collision of power––but together they would believe they could
overwhelm him easily.  They would focus even more of their power…he smiled. 
There it was.

He withdrew his strength and felt their control over the
strands coming closer still to Damerien and his men. Damerien, whose death
would surely feed the greedy Wittister mages for generations to come.  By now,
he imagined he would almost be an afterthought to them.

Suddenly his shout ripped outward over the marshland, over
the hill, over the valley beyond, over the Lacework and to the very edge of Byrandia
itself, releasing with it every bit of energy he’d taken and every bit of his
own that he had stored, and the land answered, shuddering, bucking. 

He felt their power falter on the shifting ground, felt his
control of the strands become stronger as theirs weakened, but he also knew
they were regrouping for a different attack.  Now the rest of the army was
surging over the boiling ground, their horses stumbling but racing down the
hill into the marshes and toward the city walls.  Catapults aligned themselves
to attack the city walls.  No, they were targeting a specific point on the city
walls.  They were targeting him.  Worse yet, the Wittister mages had redirected
their power into the catapults.  Whatever would come his way would be
devastating.

He grasped the vast body of threads that bound the
landbridge.  He had to hurry.  The catapults let loose their burdens, and at
once, giant white-hot boulders flew through the air toward him.

Steady, he told himself.  Around him, the other mages
understood, at least on some level, and took what control they could to
redirect the incoming shots away from him, but at great cost.  Some of the
stones slammed into the already weakened walls of the city, breaching them wide
and dropping militiamen and some of the mages themselves to their deaths below.
 Others fell amidst the houses and shop stalls within.  Explosions and shrieks
of agony pierced the night around him but still he kept his focus.

Slowly, so as to retain control, he lowered his hands and
closed his fists around the strands of power he had gathered, concentrating his
will tightly upon the land that had surrendered itself to him, the whole of the
landbridge, the thousands of square miles of inns and shops and roadways, the
travelers, the vast armies, the siege weapons, the Wittister mages who only now
began to grasp their danger.  He felt a few of them port away, not daring to
come forward, only retreating backward into Byrandia.  He redoubled his
effort.  He wrestled the great mass of land free, raised it high into the skies
above and slammed it violently into the gaping wound in the world below so hard
that the water rose hundreds of feet high to each side in astonishment, then
collapsed into a crushing maelstrom of whirlpools and giant waves that buried
it to a depth no man could survive.  Not even the Wittister mages.

Not even Damerien, he thought, as he collapsed against the
broken battlements, shaking uncontrollably.

The sea and land thrashed violently for a time, clamoring
against the great shield of protections the mages had raised.  It claimed and
subdued its new realm between the continents, then quieted to a brooding calm
in the settling darkness.

No bodies rose, no debris floated to the surface, not yet. 
Within the tenday, the sea would be foul with those of the hundred thousand
bloated corpses that were not eaten by sea creatures.  He only hoped they would
be able to recover Damerien and his men and bury them with honors.  Their lives
had gained him the time he’d needed.  At last, Duke Ildar Damerien truly was
the Great Liberator of Syon.

Around him, no one spoke.  No one even breathed as they
digested what they’d just seen.  Behind them, shouts of people searching for
their loved ones in the rubble, the cries of the wounded rose over the silence
of their strange and sudden victory.

“My Lord?”  The sentry’s voice was so quiet the mage barely
heard him.  The boy had climbed atop the rubble remains of the southeast tower,
bloodied, shaken, chilled both with the cold rain and shock.  “You saved us.” 
He laughed weakly, still in shock from what he had seen.  “We were all going to
die, and you saved us!”

“I did not save you.”  He smiled sadly.  “It were better
said that Pyran was saved by the old and the infirm.  By expectant mothers. 
They shielded you.  Not I.”

“An it weren’t for you lot,” seethed a woman in the crowd
who threw a rock at him, “we should never have been in danger at all.  Bloody
mages.  Bloody Guardian!”

“No, no Guardian am I now.”  He sighed, red spots of blood swimming
before his eyes. “No, the Guardians do not do such things.  The Guardians do
not save people.  The Guardians do not stop armies.  The Guardians…do…nothing.” 
A violent sob shook his body, and those near him took an involuntary step
backward.  “No,” he said, looking out over the new waterline below the city
walls.  “I am only Galorin now.”

The Citadel
Northwest Badlands, Byrandia
in the year of Byrandia, 15345
in the year of Syon, 3862

The woman moved slightly, breath filling her lungs in a way
that reminded him of wind blowing through a tomb.  The depth of her lethargy
was such that they would hold a mirror to her mouth from time to time to be
sure she yet lived.  Each time they saw the telltale clouding on the mirror,
and each time they––or at least he––felt a certain disappointment.  But she was
still their leader, such as she was, and just now they had need of her wisdom.

She opened her eyes and stared at him for a time before she
spoke.  “What have you done?” she asked in withering tones.

He looked away from her glare reflexively, hating himself
for doing so.  “The great strands…” he began, uncertain how to continue in
spite of having rehearsed this moment for hours.  Lacking words, he handed her
his peace offering, a goblet of water from the spring. 

“You did something to disturb them.”

He was only momentarily distracted by her sagging wrinkled
form beneath the diaphanous robes she wore.  She had been beautiful once, so
long ago he could barely remember.  Now the sight of her filled him with
revulsion.  He watched her sip the water, and as he did each time, he imagined
her parched tissues greedily soaking it up and life along with it.  The thought
sickened him.

“No, not precisely.”  He kept his tone neutral.  “We saw a
disruption in the strands, and I––we, all of us––thought to forestall it.  But
I fear we may have made matters worse.”

She closed her eyes for a time, and he knew she was looking
over the rich fabric of probabilities and the certainty trees that surrounded
them in this place, trying to see what had happened and what would likely
happen, following the thickest strands of power where they frayed and split off
here and there.  He waited silently while she got her bearings, not daring to
presume to follow.

High in a sheer cliff wall, surrounded by bare rock faces
and steep mountains, and concealed deep within a natural cave stood their
citadel, hewn and chiseled from the native rock itself and nearly as ancient. 
No grand façade marked the location, neither outside the cave nor in.  Shafts
cut into the stone allowed sunlight into the chambers by day for warmth and
light, and a tiny spring filled a pool deep within the citadel to provide
water.

Below the cliff wall, a town toiled from season to season,
unaware of anything beyond its own meager borders and oblivious to the nature
of the Citadel to which it yearly offered up a good deal of its cattle and
crops.  Beyond the town which was called only
G’ragne
––“town” since the
inhabitants knew of no other––the unforgiving Byrandian badlands extended for
hundreds of miles in every direction, guaranteeing that no one was likely to
make the journey, not without dire business one way or another.

 “I still see a turbulence.”  She rubbed her temples.

“Yes,” he answered simply.  “We see the same.  If anything,
it is worse now than it was, though how that could be is beyond our ken.  This
turbulence is why the others sent me to awaken you.”

She laughed, that derisive, irritating laugh that always
brought a flush of shame to his cheeks.  “They fear me, so they send you.  A
clever man might tire of their manipulations and their cowardice.”  When he refused
to rise to her bait, she rose irritably and shook the dust from her robes and
her matted white hair.  “As ever, you wake me to clean up your mess.”