Prodigal Steelwielder (Seals of the Duelists Book 3) (16 page)

Kiwani ran the sharp edge of her fingernail across her forearm again, then watched the blood that oozed from the wound.
If my parents had never lied about my blood status, I wouldn’t have been punished by being sent here as Head Duelist. Does that make my new Waarden blood further punishment or reprieve? Is finding that imprisoned presence a blessing or curse?

The heavy, humid air made the distant canyon maze ripple like a mirage. A portal sprang into existence behind her and to the left, and frantic sounds of elemental battle collided with her ears—splintering wood, trembling earth, roaring fires, and voices shouting in pain and anger. Instinctively, she jumped off the arena rim and caught herself on her wind disc, then turned and rose back up, ready to fling Flame and Shock.

Through the portal, Tala huddled against the side of a building, protected somewhat by a slender topiary from the chaos behind her. Her hands shook so hard around her brass rods that Kiwani was surprised the black crystals didn’t tumble to the ground and snap the portal shut. Heart thumping, Kiwani glanced to the right side of the portal at the sliver of the battle that she could see and recognized the broad courtyard and its particular hue of brick.

The Kheerzaal. Again.

Her eyes snapped back to Tala’s, and she leapt through the portal. Her wind disc faded, and she landed on the ground before the singer. She pressed against the wall right beside Tala, who touched her crystals, shutting off the portal. “Tell me what’s happening.” Her voice was a whispered demand.

Tala turned to look through the shrubbery, then summed up the events that led to the initial attack. “The Corona casters followed us through Eward’s escape hole—I don’t think any of them were ever negotiators—and now he and the imperial duelists are trying their best to kill them, but it seems more of a race across the rooftops right now. I have fetched Tarin and Taban to help him, and now you, but I think someone’s Wind blast caught me in the head. I’m a little woozy.”

Kiwani eased Tala into a sitting position against the wall, then studied the battle. Eward had hexed out all of his avatars at once and was doing a slow but passable job of fending off four Corona casters. Tarin and Taban circled the skies, trying to pick off the casters who had taken to the roofs to attack Eward. Kiwani caught a glimpse of her former personal chanter, Azhni, dashing to Imee’s aid beneath the damaged eaves of a building. For all Azhni’s faults, fear was never one of them.

It hasn’t been one of mine for a long time, either. Only one strategy will give us a chance at winning this fight. Sints help me.

She turned back to Tala. “Listen to me very carefully. Get Bayan. Don’t think. Don’t question. Just get him. I’m going to go help Eward; he’s out there in the courtyard by himself. And we need battle chanters. Get your father. He’s the best there is.” Tala nodded, and Kiwani gave her arm a final squeeze.

She slithered around the edge of the rounded topiary and leaned against the shadowed side of a broad stone staircase. Eward and his avatars faced away from her, but they were not more than a stone’s throw away. She tried to number the enemy, but some of them seemed to be flying under their own power, and they were all dressed alike, confusing her count. Somewhere around a dozen was the best guess she could make.

One of the Corona casters landed on a roof some distance behind Eward and gulped from what looked like a hip flask. Then instead of swallowing, he spit into the air, and the droplets became gleaming steel arrows that flew directly at Eward’s back.

Kiwani lunged forward and cast a vertical plane of lava in the air to melt the steel. The caster’s face wore a brief look of surprise before Kiwani urged the roof tiles under him to seal themselves around his boots and then flee in opposite directions. As the man toppled and began to scream, Kiwani formed her wind disc and let it carry her into the courtyard.

Eward spared a brief smile for her as he scanned the remaining rooftops. “Knew you’d come.”

She spun, hovering behind him, back to back. “I can’t resist anything with this miniscule a chance of success and survival. What’s your assessment?”

“Some kind of elaborate trap. The emperor assigned me to guard this last diplomat all the way from his ship at the Renallen docks, but the little Corona weasel was planning this from the beginning. The gift he brought was to be his suicide as well as the emperor’s death, and he knew how to manipulate the emperor into letting him use it.”

Tarin soared by in a rush of wind, trailing a smoking screen that obscured her from any pursuers. She gave Kiwani a brief and brilliant smile of greeting. A pair of Corona casters appeared from an alley between two Kheerzaal buildings and spewed their concoctions simultaneously. Kiwani felt the air sucked right out of her lungs and along with it her next question to Eward. She slammed Stratus in place around her and Eward, took a deep breath, and yanked the ground out from underneath the enemy casters’ feet. They tumbled into her sudden chasm, mouths wide in cries she couldn’t hear.

Eward joined her on her wind disc. “We’ve got about two heartbeats to—”

Kiwani lifted them high into the sky, blasting through the radius of that airless spell. “What in all the sints are they using to cast? I don’t even know how to fight this, except to wait for them to cast, and hope I know how to counter. At least they’re using elemental spells. Do they know anima?”

Eward shook his head. “I haven’t seen any yet, but they could be waiting for a weak moment. I’ve only seen a dozen spells so far, and they all come from those flasks. The first thing I did once the emperor was safe was try to destroy one of the flasks, but it’s immune to magic somehow. I feel like I’m back in my first semester at the Academy. These casters know what they’re doing, and they know our limitations. They don’t know steel is no longer the threat it used to be, though. They’ve been flinging the stuff at me since we all popped out of the negotiation chamber, but I’ve managed to swat it all down.”

Taban, on his own wind disc, came to a halt above Kiwani and aimed a tiny Wind tunnel at her. “What’s the plan, then, aye? I havena got all day before my glorious death at the hands of these exotic and powerful casters. Do you think if I create a snippet of poetry in my own honor and die with it in my hand, you could get the bards to sing it?”

Before Kiwani or Eward could answer, a massive plume of fire from one of Tarin’s spells rose, hot and smoky, between them, and both wind discs veered away. Kiwani and Eward hopped onto the far side of a slanted roof, clinging to the tiles. While Eward scanned the skies for more flying casters, Kiwani studied a nearby, debris-strewn courtyard where half a dozen of the casters seemed to be laying waste to everything in sight.

Her eyes hooded. “We need to think darker, Eward. We’re trying not to destroy anything but the casters, and they know it.” She met his eyes. “The emperor is safe?”

Eward nodded. “For now. A dozen imperial duelists tackled him and dragged him into a doorway a few blocks from here.”

Kiwani nodded. “Good. Time for a little remodeling.” She leapt off the roof and landed atop her wind disc. Her trajectory carried her toward the fire and lightning that shot from the Corona casters’ courtyard. She paused next to the roofline of one of the buildings that faced the courtyard and hovered three stories up. Her eyes flicked to the nice, neat row of powder-blue buildings behind the Corona casters.
One, two, three, four, five
.

A flick of her mind peeled the buildings’ facades off and slammed them to the cobblestones as if slapping a card on the table during a game of Tegen Tricks. The ground trembled, the air filled with dust, and some of the fire was crushed out. The enemy casters staggered and tumbled to the courtyard floor.

Not yet done with her giant playslabs, Kiwani dragged them across the courtyard, forcing the Corona men to flee ahead of them or become paste. Once she had them corralled, she formed the slabs into five sides of a cube with the courtyard forming the bottom.

Taban arced in on the far side of the courtyard, dragging all the airborne magic effects created by the Corona casters—poisonous gas, dust and smoke, crackling fireballs—and tucked them in through the cracks of her cube.

Tarin veered to a halt at Kiwani’s side. “Is that it, then? Are they all in there, do you think?”

Her eyes slid to meet Tarin’s. “You’re the Mistress of Flame. You tell me.”

Tarin’s eyes flashed, but in the breath before she could apply whatever Flame spell she intended, the walls disintegrated into dust that dispersed and smothered the fire within the cube. Half a dozen figures sprang impossibly high in all directions, higher even than Kiwani and Tarin on their wind discs. As one of them shot past, Tarin tilted her disc and gave chase.

Kiwani had seen some kind of green extension to the caster’s legs as he flashed by, as if he had become part grasshopper.
Maybe they do know anima after all.
She veered after another escaping caster, following him until he vanished amidst the wreckage of several blasted buildings at a small intersection. Kiwani arrowed down, didn’t find him sprawled on the ground, and shot back into the air, turning slowly. “Come out here, freakish coward. Let me burn you to a crisp as you properly deserve.”

Rage strained through her, a combination of her frustration at the man’s skill and the distinctive downturn in the arc of the battle compared to the first Kheerzaal fight, when she had been far less skilled and relatively less was at stake.

Focusing all the blackness she possessed on her present location, hovering in the middle of the ruined intersection, Kiwani closed her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. Her body tensed and heaved until she thought she might simply explode and loose the physical bonds of her existence, surrendering to all her frustrations and rage in one final sigh of relief.
No! No relief, not yet. I’m not done with this empire yet.
With a primal scream, Kiwani threw her head back and threw her arms and legs wide, blowing a pressure wave of Wind in all directions. The street beneath her cracked into a large depression. Windows and walls in the surrounding buildings shattered and crumpled, tumbling to the ground in dusty clumps. Far above, even the clouds gave way to a small ring of blue from the top of her shock wave.

From out of one of the shattered windows on the fourth floor of a building with nearly no façade left, a single figure staggered forward, bleeding from eyes, ears, and nose. He clasped a flask in his hand, but he didn’t seem to remember what to do with it. Finally, he raised it to his reddened lips, but he coughed blood from his exploded lungs before he could spew any kind of magic effect. The man shuffled to the edge of the building, heedless of the void before him. He hurled his flask futilely in her direction and seemed to be trying to curse her through lungs that couldn’t push air any longer. Then he toppled out of the fourth-story gap and crumpled to the ground.

Kiwani blazed with hatred and satisfaction.
One down, everyone else to go.

Bayan tilted his stool and leaned his shoulder against his hostess’s dining room wall, nearly falling asleep against its solid wooden planks. He knew it was only a matter of time until he spilled his plate of food.

He couldn’t stop glancing out the kind villager’s front window at the strange, pale bulge of the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies resting in the slender red runrock of the mountain. His glance shifted to his hostess’s front door, which lay open, exposing one of the small village’s main streets. The singers who had not suffocated had healed each other and fully recovered, and they were being welcomed, hosted, and stuffed with food by the locals.

I suppose it does the singers good to get out every now and again, meet the people. Though maybe next time, they can find someone else to do the moving for them.

Bayan’s eyes slid shut. His mind veered to one side and tried to fall asleep in an instant, flinging bizarre images against his eyelids as if trying to cram half the night’s dreaming into a few seconds. He saw Sabella dancing and Ordomiro throwing pages covered with ink symbols into the air, and his mind wove around small details of the past day. Ordomiro had painted his symbols onto Sabella at the circus, but had he been casting his magic through her or was she casting through him? Sabella claimed to be weak in anima except when playing intimately with Bayan. Yet twice, she had briefly split herself in two. Bayan didn’t even know how to do that. His exhausted mind leapt to a sudden, sharp realization.

Anima Savant. Two Sabellas. Two Bayans?

A mass of butterfly memories flapped and swirled around him. Most of his memories involving the circus appeared the same on both sides of the creatures’ wings, but each recollection involving Sabella alternated with each flap between what he remembered and something that felt truer, if unfamiliar.

Finally, a single memory fluttered onto one of his fingers. Its papery wings were larger than Bayan’s hands. The creature turned to display its dual wing-images, and its body gleamed like an iridescent jewel. One side of its wings displayed Bayan meeting Ordomiro on his first day at the circus. The obverse image showed Sabella by Ordomiro’s side on the same day.

But Bayan was more entranced by the gleam of the butterfly’s body.
A ring. I had a pearl turtle ring, made of shell that gleamed like the butterfly. Then I didn’t have it, didn’t remember ever having it. Kiwani gave me that ring when I was exiled. Told me to remember her. But I didn’t. Not the way she wanted.
As he studied the unfamiliar details of his forgotten life, an ache grew in his chest. So many of his memories of Sabella were false. She had made him believe they were lovers. He’d trusted her implicitly. But when had he truly met her? Why had she insinuated herself into his memories?

The butterflies rose and swirled, and another flickered its dual imagery at Bayan. Sabella had destroyed the pearl turtle ring right in front of him, and then she’d clutched his head and forced herself into a year and a half of his memories. She’d taken him to her bright golden tent and made him think he loved her.

A bright flicker of light against his eyelids jolted him to full wakefulness, and he dropped his plate. It landed upside down on the clean stone floor and cracked, splattering his uneaten food over his toes. The words of reproach on his tongue died when he recognized his visitor.

Tala’s face was broad with amazement and concern. “Ay, Bhattara! When the First Singer brought Sabella to the Academy with her, it didn’t seem real that you had returned. Yet there you sit. What are you doing in the Waarden Empire, Bayan?”

Distracted by the fire, wind, and debris flying behind her, Bayan felt his magic flare in both hands.
Sabella will have to wait.
“It doesn’t matter.” He leapt through the portal and landed beside Tala.

She pressed him back against a dirt-splattered wall in an ornamental garden as her portal winked out. “Several of your hexmates are fighting already, and I brought my father, too. He’s gathering up all the people he can find who are running from this and trying to keep them out of harm’s way. There’s another chanter here, too. She came with Eward. Azhni, I think her name is.”

Bayan’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “She’s good. Who are we fighting? ”

Tala shrugged helplessly. “They’re from the Corona. That’s all any of us really know. They tried to kill the emperor, and now it seems they’re trying to destroy the entire Kheerzaal. Tarin and Taban took down one or two, and Kiwani is chasing one somewhere nearby, but there are still so many of them. Their magic seems to come from flasks, and Eward said he can’t destroy them. If you have any ideas, please tell your hexmates. They’re overmatched.”

Kiwani
. “Then we’d better work at least in pairs until we get a better idea of how their magic goes. And no, I don’t know how it works. I was in a circus with people who did their magic differently. No one’s interested in seeing boring normal magic, not even in the Corona. Which way did Kiwani go?”

Tala pointed, and Bayan flew off on a wind disc. He had almost cleared the top of the nearest building when a shock wave blasted over it, rattling the tiles. He flinched, then scanned the area for its source.

And there she was. Her back was to him, and she watched a single figure topple to his death out of a shattered building façade.
That’s my girl. No mercy.

She spun, and their eyes met. Bayan couldn’t imagine a more perfectly appropriate moment for finally meeting Kiwani t’Eshkin again. Magic raged all around them, the fate of the empire was at stake, and he couldn’t tear his eyes off of her. In an instant, she was hovering before him, then her arms were around him, warm and strong. He embraced her in return and spun them down into the devastation she had just made with her shock wave, out of sight of any casual attacker.

They touched down, and their wind discs dissipated at the same moment.

“You’re here. You’re back.” A broad smile nearly split her face in two, but it didn’t seem at home there as it once had.

Kiwani, what have I done to you?
“I’ve missed you, too.” His eyes traced her features, then dropped to the necklace she wore. “I recognize this.” He ran a finger across the tops of the beads. “Tala said you had all decided to do what I was doing. But yours are all black. Why?”

If possible, her eyes grew larger, darker. He could practically feel her emotions boiling within her mind. “You left us, Bayan. It was like you died. We could never see you again. I honored your memory the only way I knew how.”

Bayan fingered her night-dark sleeve. “How?”

“I got angry.”

Bayan’s heart nearly shattered.
No
, he wanted to cry,
that’s not what I wanted for you. What we might have had could never be. You should have let me go.
“I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”

Kiwani shook her head. “You couldn’t have done anything like this, and we both know that. If you hadn’t hexed elemental and anima magic, Ignaas would have killed us all right then and there. You traded your freedom for my life. I know what was at stake. I understand. But I can’t pretend it didn’t break my heart.” She lifted her chin, glanced aside, and gave him a dark smile. “Now, will you help me kill these leaping freaks?”

Shaken, Bayan took a moment to tuck his guilt and shame away. “How many have you seen?”

“At least half a dozen, but they’ve scattered across the entire Kheerzaal, and there’s no point in casting Lifeseeker with all the refugees scrambling around. There’s no way to separate those casters from all the other people, and they don’t care who they kill.”

The sky suddenly darkened, and Bayan and Kiwani both looked up. A vast sphere of steel fell from the sky like a tear from Bhattara. The air hummed with its passage. Bayan had no time to think. He willed the giant globe of metal to shatter into glittery fragments, then gathered them up in a strong wind just before they pelted him and Kiwani. “Find that caster for me. He has to be close.”

Kiwani cast Lifeseeker then turned, jabbing her finger in the direction of some broken shrubbery at the far end of the courtyard. Bayan drove the sharp metal shards in that direction, and leapt atop his wind disc to chase the caster down.

Furtive movement beneath the shredded greenery prompted him to activate his own Lifeseeker. His target glowed orange. Bayan slammed the metal shards down so hard that they powdered the shrub limbs and pulverized the man’s right arm. The man cried out in agony and stared up at Bayan with fear-streaked eyes.

Bayan tipped his head. “You might favor your left hand. Best to be sure.” He yanked the metal shards up into the air once again, then slammed them down across the man’s neck.

Kiwani’s warm hand slipped into his and gave it a squeeze. “You’ve developed quite a sense of style after your time with the circus. I shall enjoy following your work.”

The pair rose high into the air to search for their hexmates. Kiwani pointed out Taban zooming across the Kheerzaal campus, trailing a comet of sparking smoke. “He wants us to see him and follow. Something’s wrong.”

Bayan shot after his hexmate and came upon a scene that made him jerk to a stop in midair. “Ay, Bhattara.”

The Kheerzaal’s vast outdoor forum was lined with concentric squares of gleaming pillars and colonnades. In the center, Doc Theo stood with his back to a cluster of more than a hundred cowering, whimpering people, most of whom wore either the cream and green of official Kheerzaal eunuchs or various nobility colors. Around them, atop the columns, stood what were likely the last of the Corona casters, if Kiwani’s count was accurate. And outside their ring of impending doom, Eward, Tarin, Taban, and Aleida hovered above the next concentric square of pillars. Bayan’s heart skipped a beat. “Where’s Calder?”

Kiwani shook her head without taking her eyes off the scene before them. “I never saw him. I didn’t even know Aleida was here until now.”

“Is the emperor down there with the healers?”

Again, Kiwani shook her head. “I don’t know. Lifeseeker doesn’t get specific. It just shows weak or strong.” Then she looked at him with sudden focus. “Weakness.” She sent a look of intense concentration toward the crowd for a moment. Her face told Bayan what he didn’t want to hear. The emperor was indeed below, right where the Corona assassins wanted him. But they didn’t seem to know it.

After a few more moments of study, Kiwani said, “I can see him with a wind lens now. He’s in disguise, dressed as a eunuch. I don’t see any imperial duelists. It’s possible they’re all dead.”

Bayan used his own wind lens to study the Corona casters. Each of them wore a myriad of small vials around his waist and clasped at least two, tucked between their fingers just so, in their right hands.

“You remember our first battle here? How you did that battle spell Instructor Ithrakis tested us on just before we headed to our Talent Tournament?”

Kiwani nodded, jaw tense. “You take the left, I’ll take the right.”

Without another word, he and Kiwani parted ways. Bayan took a dip into his Earth magic and mentally readied four identical, avatar-level versions of Tegen’s Grave. He glided slowly forward, appearing cowed by the enemies’ threatening poses, then slammed his spells into place against the four nearest casters. They vanished within coffin-shaped stone formations, with one exception: their right arms all stuck out helplessly. Unable to balance while encased in stone, the casters fell from their perches and crashed onto the bricks.

On the other side of the forum, Kiwani’s spell snapped into place as well, though her giant coffins locked the
cetechupes
into place atop the pillars where they stood. Bayan breathed out a sigh of extreme relief.

He zipped in closer, intending to land in front of Doc Theo and seek the emperor. But a great wail rose from the crowd, and Doc was already running toward him, frantically waving his arms.

I’ve missed the big picture.
Fear shot through Bayan, and his fear bead burned white hot against his skin. His eyes flicked to his hexmates, who met his gaze with horrified looks.

Taban spoke first. “It was a trap. Their mouths were already full!”

Geysers of lava fountained from half of the casters’ stone coffins, forcing the trapped villagers closer together. Tarin rode her disc down amongst the hostages, even as the others shouted after her not to. Bayan tried to reach in with his magic and pull some villagers to safety, but his elements dissolved, and he couldn’t make contact.
Infuriating Corona magic!
He dashed in after Tarin, hoping to assist in the rescue before it was too late.

Doc’s words finally penetrated. “No, no! Back away, run! Get out!”

Then everything went black. Dozens of voices echoed painfully in the darkness. Someone created a friendly yellow light overhead, but all it revealed was a shiny steel dome. Another voice screamed at the edge of the crowd. “The metal is hot! We’ll roast to death!”

Within seconds, the dome was warping and pinging under the extreme heat of the lava that surrounded and splattered its surface. Tarin tried something Bayan had never seen before, stealing the heat from the dome and forcing it into a tornado of flame that got louder and bluer as the temperature rose. Then, to his horror, the tornado took on a life of its own and roared amongst the villagers. It spawned miniature versions of itself even as Tarin swore and raged at it. Bayan managed to snuff out three of them, but then one descended upon him from behind, and his world turned to blue heat.