Jonathan Moeller - The Ghosts 09 - Ghost in the Surge (27 page)

“Yes,” said Talekhris. “My lord Emperor, I urge you to make a decision quickly. Uncounted lives are at stake.”

Corbould snorted. “And just who the devil are you?”

Harkus frowned. “Even a high lord of the Empire should speak respectfully to the Sage of the Venatorii.”

“The Venatorii?” said Corbould. “Are we surrounded by secret societies now? Gods! My lord Emperor…”

“Enough,” said Alexius. Though his voice was quiet, the others all fell silent at once. The Emperor looked at Caina, and she forced herself to meet his gaze.

“I believe,” said the Emperor at last, “that…”

Caina gasped and stumbled, and would have fallen had not Corvalis caught her arm. 

She felt sorcery in the air, powerful sorcery, stronger than anything she had ever encountered before. Every single sorcerer in the plaza, whether the magi or the stormsingers or the stormdancers, looked at the towering stone mass of the Pyramid of Storm. 

The ground trembled beneath Caina’s boots.

A moaning wind rose up, blowing dust through the Agora. 

“What is happening?” said Corbould.

“Too late,” said Talekhris. “The great work.”

A column of raging golden flame erupted from the apex of the Pyramid.

Chapter 18 - A World Reborn

“Now,” said Jadriga.

She took a deep breath, her stolen body’s lungs filling with air. After two thousand years, she was ready. Two thousand years of torment, of study, of constant struggle and experimentation and fighting. Two thousand years spent acquiring the most profound knowledge of sorcery ever collected upon this world, knowledge that surpassed the Great Necromancers of Maat, or the Imperial Magisterium during its height in the Fourth Empire.

Knowledge that she could at last put to use.

“Do not do this, I beg,” said the Surge, all three of her voices filled with fear. Her priestesses huddled behind her, watching Jadriga with wide eyes. She felt a slight twinge of amusement at their terror. The priestesses of the Surge were so haughty when dealing with the lords of New Kyre. Yet the sight of the Bringer of Ashes herself, the dread sorceress of legend, unnerved them so terribly. 

How would the priestesses react, Jadriga wondered, if they knew that she had been younger than they when she died the first time?

It mattered not. Malifae had been dead for centuries…but the Moroaica, the Bringer of Ashes and the Queen of Crows, would throw the gods from their thrones. 

“You need not do this,” said the Surge. The silver pool flickered with images, showing cities wreathed in flame and falling into chasms, the oceans rising to break free of their shores, mountains falling and the plains burning. Sometimes the face of Caina Amalas flickered across the pool. Jadriga wondered if Sicarion’s distraction had succeeded.

It matter not. If Caina tried to intervene, Jadriga would kill her. 

“You need not do this!” said the Surge, fresh urgency in her voices. “Can you not see the folly? The world will burn and drown and freeze if you wake the elemental princes! If you enter the netherworld and tear open a gate to the heavens, you shall shatter the barrier between the mortal world and the netherworld. Our world shall be torn asunder!” 

“You are wrong,” said Jadriga, forcing her will into the Staff of the Elements in her right hand. Fires wreathed the staff, but the metal felt cool beneath her hands. “Perhaps the storm of the world, as you term it, grants clairvoyance, but it does not grant you an understanding of the underlying principles of sorcery. I will do this, and I will succeed.”

“No,” said the Surge. “You shall not.”

“Why even attempt to dissuade me?” said Jadriga. “If you are right, I am an undead thing, and can no more change my course than a river can choose to alter its bed.” The rage burned anew in her, the rage that had blazed in her heart every day for millennia. “I will remake the world, I shall set it ablaze and reforge it. I shall rip the gods from their thrones and make them pay for…”

“Yes,” said the Surge, closing her silver-glowing eyes, “yes, you have said it all before. I am sorry for all that has befallen you. But your will was lost long ago. All that remains of you is your rage, and you will continue your path of destruction until you destroy yourself at last.” She opened her eyes. “Or the Balarigar stops you.” 

“No one will stop me,” said Jadriga. “Leave the Sanctuary. Or stay if you wish. But the amount of power I am about to summon will be lethal to anyone standing nearby.”

“So be it,” said the Surge, and she led her priestesses from the Sanctuary.

Jadriga gave them no further thought. They had no weapons that could harm her, no spells to penetrate her wards. Soon enough, when the new world arose from the ashes of the old, they would understand.

She cleared her mind, performing the basic mental exercises of sorcery that Rhames had taught her so long ago, and pointed the Staff of the Elements at the floating Ascendant Bloodcrystal, the hieroglyph written in phoenix ashes glowing with golden light.

And then she began the spell.

She spoke the intricate phrases in Maatish, summoning the power and pushing it into the elaborate designs she had carved into the walls and floor and ceiling. The hieroglyphs glowed brighter and brighter, until as one they erupted with pale green flame, sheathing the Sanctuary in emerald fire. The lines of green light danced, growing sharper and brighter as she summoned more sorcerous force.

And still Jadriga drew more power.

Suddenly thousands of lines of green light stabbed into the staff’s dark metal. A ribbon of fire erupted from the Ascendant Bloodcrystal and wrapped around the Staff of the Elements, augmenting the staff’s power. Jadriga now held enough power to shatter the Pyramid of Storm in a heartbeat if she chose.

But the final spell was just beginning. 

She let the power flow into the staff, its flames turning a ghostly green. Jadriga raised the staff, and the tremendous might of the Ascendant Bloodcrystal poured into her. The bloodcrystal’s sorcery filled her mind, and it extended the reach of her thoughts, until it seemed as if her mental vision could encompass the entire world at once.

And the dozens of hibernating elemental princes that dotted the surface of the world.

The elemental princes came here to rest between the endless, eternal battles they waged in the netherworld. A short respite from their eternal perspectives, though their sleep could last tens of thousands of years. The Stone in Cyrica Urbana was one such elemental lord, and Ranarius had foolishly tried to awaken it as a weapon against her. Had he succeeded, the elemental would have killed him, Cyrioch would have been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands would have perished in the resultant earthquakes. The power of one awakened elemental prince beyond mortal reckoning. 

And now Jadriga would wake them all up at once.

She sent the command through the staff, and power flooded through her. Jadriga gasped and caught her balance, leaning upon the Staff of the Elements as a vortex of green flame blazed around her. The staff had been designed to awaken one elemental at a time. But with the Ascendant Bloodcrystal’s sorcery to fuel her spells, Jadriga could use the staff to draw upon the power of every hibernating elemental lord at once.

Giving her power enough to crack the world in half, to rip open the barriers between the mortal world and the netherworld.

But still she had not yet finished gathering power.

Jadriga screamed another spell, her head resounding with the words, and lowered the barriers she had erected around the Ascendant Bloodcrystal. 

The crystal came to life at once, burning like a sun of green fire. It had been designed as a weapon, constructed to kill every living thing within five hundred miles and transfer the stolen life energy to its wielder. The crystal had a mind and will of its own, and its purpose thundered inside her skull.

It spoke to her using the voice of Rhames, of course. 

“Use me,” said the Ascendant Bloodcrystal in Rhames’s familiar, dry tones. “Use me and become a goddess. Use me and lay this wretched world waste! Fulfill my purpose, and fulfill yours!”

Jadriga smiled. “You shall not fulfill your purpose…but you shall achieve mine.”

Vengeance for her father. Vengeance for all who had suffered in this dark world of misery. 

Wielding the might of the awakening elemental princes, Jadriga absorbed the power of the phoenix ashes and poured them into the Ascendant Bloodcrystal. The crystal loosed a hideous, strained screech. It had been built of blood and death, and was a tool of necromancy. The phoenix ashes were life. Raw, unrestrained life, regeneration and rebirth. 

Immortality, if wielded properly.

Jadriga shoved the power of the ashes into the crystal, cracks spreading across its facets. The bloodcrystal glowed golden, not green, and its power reached out, touching everything for a thousand miles. But instead of seeking out the living and offering death, the crystal’s power, overwhelmed by the phoenix ashes, sought out the dead and offered them life.

The crystal’s shrieking grew louder, and Jadriga flung out her hands.

The Ascendant Bloodcrystal exploded in a pillar of golden flame. The Sanctuary shattered into glowing stone splinters, a firestorm raging around Jadriga. The pulse of golden fire poured out from the pyramid, spreading across the earth and the sea. 

She felt the fire touch the dead in their graves, uncounted millions of them.

And one by one they began to rise, restored to life by the power of the phoenix ashes.

They would spread across the world, killing and killing as the madness of their new lives took hold…and their victims would rise in turn, reborn by the power of the phoenix ashes. In time the madness would end, but by then the entire population of the world would have been killed and raised again. The power of the phoenix ashes would make them immortal and invincible, free from the ravages of disease and age, immune to hunger and thirst.

Perfected, as the gods had never bothered. 

The elemental princes would lay the world waste as they returned to the netherworld, and reborn humanity, immortal and invincible, could remake the world in a new image, free of war and strife.

Jadriga raised her eyes and looked at the sky, the pillar of golden flame stabbing upward. The barrier between the worlds was thin here, a consequence of the Surge’s powers. A powerful sorcerer could tear open a gate without mirrors or stone arches or any of the other material anchors usually required.

And Jadriga now had more power than every sorcerer in the world.

She made a tearing motion with her free hand, and the gate ripped open. 

It spread across the sky a thousand feet overhead, a massive rift of snarling golden flame and silver light. It opened wider and wider, and through the maelstrom Jadriga saw the gloom and ever-shifting terrain of the netherworld. 

It was far overhead, but Jadriga wielded the combined powers of the hibernating elementals, and the distance was no obstacle.

She stepped into the air, and a pillar of ice formed beneath her boots. 

Step by step Jadriga climbed, ice harder than granite coalescing beneath her. A slender spire of dark, silvery ice ascended from the top of the Pyramid and the wreckage of the Surge’s Sanctuary, rising as she climbed. Jadriga ascended, the Staff of the Elements swirling with frost in her hand, and soon she stood five hundred feet over New Kyre, the spire of ice rising with her.

She saw the rising chaos in the city, saw thousands of the golden dead emerging from the harbor, sheathed in phoenix fires as they screamed the madness of their rebirth. The earth shook and trembled, the seas heaving, and the wind howled overhead, though it did not touch Jadriga. She felt a brief pang of regret. Everyone in New Kyre was going to die. Everyone in the world was about to die, and she regretted the pain she would cause them.

But it was worth it. They would be reborn in new and immortal forms, free of age and disease. The horror spreading below her was the final death of the old, decaying world, and the birth throes of the new. 

Her hand tightened against the staff.

And the gods would not be here to ruin the new world as they had the old. 

Jadriga climbed, ignoring the screams of the city below, the ice spire and stairs rising as she did. The burning rift she had carved into the sky grew brighter as she drew nearer. 

And then at last the spire pierced the gate, and Jadriga stepped through the rift and into the netherworld. 

The noise from the dying city faded away. 

She felt turf beneath her boots, and stepped away from the frozen spire and onto a plain of rippling, knee-high grass. The grass was utterly devoid of color, and waved in a wind that Jadriga neither heard nor felt. Strange things floated overhead. Pieces of land, as if scooped from the earth by a giant hand. Images of stone and obsidian, showing men and women and bizarre, alien creatures. Uprooted trees, some hanging upside down. Towers and stairs that went nowhere, or circled into each other in an endless twisting spiral. Black clouds billowed overhead, moving against the direction of the peculiar wind. An eerie green glow lit everything, and from time to time a burst of silent emerald lightning jumped from cloud to cloud.

The netherworld. 

The source of sorcery, the home of spirits and djinni and elementals.

And from here she would open a gate to the world beyond the netherworld, the abode of the gods, or perhaps the high god that ruled over all of creation. The power of the elemental princes flowed up the spire and into her, and with it she would overthrow the gods.

And then her new world would dwell in bliss and harmony forevermore.

Jadriga began the spell, the netherworld flowing around her.

Chapter 19 - Balarigar

“What is happening?” said the Emperor.

No one answered him. Every eye turned toward the Pyramid of Storm, the shaft of flame stabbing upward, the tear of golden light spreading across the sky. Caina felt an unrelenting wave of arcane power pressing against her skin, stronger than Maglarion’s great bloodcrystal, stronger than Mihaela’s Forge, stronger even than the Ascendant Bloodcrystal in the heart of Caer Magia.