Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) (37 page)

Ogden felt the pressure of seasons of repressed anger and
fear push up in his chest, and with an inarticulate cry of challenge he
channeled his boiling cauldron of raw emotion and hurled a ball of golden fire
into the charging Handsmen. The spellfire detonated in a blast that was twenty
feet across, instantly incinerating the two Handsmen in the lead, but the
others, having longer to react, either leapt clear or raised energy shields to
ward off the flame. He gestured with his other hand, reaching out with his psychokinetic
powers. With a flick of his wrist he freed Bryn’s dagger from the dying Handsman’s
throat with an arterial spray and sent it spinning toward the brazen red-head.

Bryn snatched the dagger from the air with a wolfish grin. “Thanks,
old man. Good to know those robes aren’t just for show.”

The remainder of the two Hands reorganized into a crescent
formation and advanced on the queen’s party. Each party numbered seven souls,
but the queen’s had two unarmed combatants, Eithne and Phinneas, and lacked ranged
firepower other than Ogden’s magic. Acting in unison, the Senestrati pummeled
them with volleys of energy bolts swollen with puce, fell power, each the size
of a cannon ball.

Ogden’s offensive was short lived for he soon had to turn
all of his attention to deflecting the Hand’s arcane assault.

Phinneas provided little help, as offensive, dynamistic
manifestations of the arcane was not his specialty. Still, he lent what
strength he could to his friend by bolstering Ogden’s magic with his own raw
arcane energy, which he passed to the wizard by laying a hand on his shoulder,
as if he were performing a healing. Likewise, Bryn’s knowledge of the arcane
was primarily limited to utilitarian spells she had picked up from tutors from
Arcalum, so she settled for erecting a weak shield around herself and shouting
curses at the enemy.

Ogden deflected bolt after bolt. At first his strategy was to
reflect them back at his enemies so that they would have to deal with the
return fire and thus slow their assault, but many of the returned magic
missiles flew wide, and since the Handsman presented a syncopated volley, he
soon lost ground.

The sinking realization crept over him that he could not
hold off the Senestrati indefinitely. Their only chance lay in scattering. Summoning
the remaining dregs of his power, he focused on the primary shield he had
constructed and willed it to widen, fueling his effort with the wild gestalt of
emotion that tore through him. After the final expulsion of his power a near
diaphanous wall of energy, peppered with scintillating sparkles, lay from one
side of the clearing to the other. The wall wouldn’t withstand the Scarlet Hand
indefinitely but he prayed it would buy them the precious time they needed to
escape.

“We have to take to the deep wood!” Ogden cried. “Break them
up, minimize their ranged attacks!”

“Bryn, take the queen and flee, we’ll hold them off at the
perimeter,” Blackwell roared.

Bryn required no more encouragement and grabbed her
sheet-white cousin by the arm and sprinted for the treeline. Yet, nor did the
Hand squander a moment either, for as soon as the wall went up they split off
into two man teams so as to run around it while the other three held fast and
pummeled Ogden’s wall with blasts of fell magic.

Fever’s Break

How can we be home? Am I a ghost, haunting my own
room?
Elias looked about his modest bedroom, glad to see his childhood home
once more, but it was coupled with the bitter sting of having failed in his quest.

Don’t look at me,
Padraic said coyly, though his lips
didn’t move. Elias realized communicating in spirit would take a little getting
used to.
You took us here, Elias, and you did so for a reason. The question
is why.

Elias began to form a retort in his mind when the room began
to change. Furniture rearranged in an instant and he realized that he looked
upon his bedchamber as it was when he was a child. He then saw himself as a boy
of about Seven’s age propped up in bed with a tattered book resting on his
chest. His mother sat by his side on the edge of the bed.

She looks so young
, Elias thought. He could feel his
father smile beside him.

She always seemed that way to me. Edora had the aspect of
the forever young, the ever new, because of her joyful, vibrant nature—like a
wood sylph.

Have we traveled back in time?

In a manner of speaking. We are seeing the echo of what
once was. Listen.

“Did you fall asleep reading a scary story and have a bad
dream?” his mother asked Elias’s child self.

The boy looked up at his mother with dark, saucer eyes. His
bottom lip trembled. “There’s a bad man in the corner watching me when I’m
trying to sleep. I’m afraid of him.”

Edora Duana pushed back a shock of black-cherry hair and
turned to face the far corner. She turned back to Elias. “That poor lost soul?”
Elias nodded and his mother rolled her eyes. “Sheesh. He’s nothing to be afraid
of. Do you know why?” Little Elias shook his head. “I’ll tell you why, silly. Deep
in here—” she poked his sternum “—is a little white light and it’s part of
every other light in the whole universe, and it’s inside everyone.”

“Even the bad man has one?”

“Even him, he’s just forgotten it’s there. Now, whenever you
feel afraid or in danger, Elias, you let that white light of yours shine, and
nothing can hurt you. Not a thing. So let that little light shine, let it push
right out of you.”

Elias’s child self looked down at his chest with his brow
furrowed. “I don’t see anything.”

Edora poked his nose. “Don’t worry, you will one day. For
now all you need to know is that it’s there. Picture it in your head, pushing
out of you and protecting you whenever you have need of it.”

With his spectral senses, Elias peered close at his mother
and his child self. Atop the boy’s sternum sat a pinprick of white light, feeble,
like the flicker of a tea-candle. He looked to his mother and saw a rose-pink nimbus
surround her, bright as the corona of the sun, but at its center, at her bosom,
it burned a brilliant white, unadulterated by the barest scintilla of any other
color. Elias turned his gaze to his center and found that his own flickering
light had blossomed from a tiny candle flame to a fist sized star-burst.

Your light has grown, son,
Padraic said to him
telepathically.
Now it’s time to put it to use, for even the smallest flame
can turn back the night.

The perimeter of the room dimmed until all Elias could perceive
was his mother and her star-bright aura. Edora Duana turned to face the
spectral Elias and Padraic. She fixed her cat-like, jade eyes on Elias. “The
seed of everything you have ever needed to know is buried in the primal
firmament of your soul. You need never look anywhere else, for the doorway to
the infinite is inside each of us.”

At those words the vision abruptly vanished as if it never was
and Elias found himself in his bedroom as he had left it before he had begun
his long journey with his father’s sword in hand. Elias felt himself trembling
in his center and it felt as if something inexpressibly fast spun about him, as
if he were at the center of a gyroscope. He looked at his body and saw that he
was clothed in his full marshal regalia, down to boots and gloves.

Are you ready to return?
Padraic Duana asked.

Elias looked up at his father’s beaming face with a thousand
questions whirling through his mind, but his mother’s words yet echoed in his
head and so he said, simply, Y
es
.

Good, because time is different here, and your sister
sorely needs you.

†

Danica passed into a dark, colorless world inhabited
only by shades of grey. Disenfranchised shapes and forms swam around her like
demon fish in a sea of ash.

She still felt like she had a body of sorts, but it was
airy, almost without substance, and was presently being dragged away in an
ethereal tide. She felt a resistance in her bosom and saw that a flickering
silver cord pulled taut against her sternum. She knew instinctively that the
silver cord tied her spirit to her body. As she focused on the cord it grew
more substantial and as she wrapped her fingers about it, it felt solid and
thrummed with primordial power.

She pulled on the cord and found herself slowly making
ground against the current of other spirits and the bizarre, amorphous shapes
that swirled about her in a spectral tide. She rapidly gained momentum and as
she sped along the length of the silver cord the dark world grew brighter and
she felt denser in her core. Then she passed through a kind of membrane
composed of a white film that felt somehow sticky and airy at the same time.

Danica found herself back in the land of the living—so to
speak. She hovered behind her corporeal body, which crouched some few feet
away, held fast by the silver cord, which she couldn’t see as clearly but could
still acutely sense. She felt a chill run through her soul as her body half
turned and transfixed her with alien eyes. To look upon one’s body in three
dimensions was bizarre enough, but to see it animated, possessed, by her
nemesis was almost more than she could bear.

“So, you’ve returned,” Slade said with her own tongue. “I
was hoping you would. Perhaps in time we can learn to share your body together,
love, but first there is work to do.”

Danica trailed behind her body as Slade snuck up upon his
first victim, balanced on the balls of her feet. The hapless sentry never
sensed his impending death as Slade slid a dagger into a kidney and another
between two vertebrae at the top of his spine and into his skull. He died on
his feet, not so much as whimpering. “Opening with a slow thrust to the kidney
is always a prudent choice,” Slade said in a whisper that only she, with her
earless senses, could hear. “The pain is so exquisite that your target will
instantly go into shock with nary a cry.”

Spare me your rhetoric and get on with it
, Danica
said.

Slade took her words to heart and sped around the clearing
in small, quick steps. He soon dispatched the remaining three sentries in the
same fashion as the first, leaving six, two who sat idly by the fire and four
who slept. The two by the fire sat opposite each other, which would make taking
them by surprise difficult and flanking them both an impossibility. Slade
settled for creeping to the edge of the firelight in a deep crouch, dropping to
a knee, and after a deep inhale threw both daggers at once. Each sunk to the
hilt in its intended target’s throat. One died at once, his spinal cord
severed, but the other, though mortally wounded, lurched to his feet with a wet
gurgle and kicked over the open saddle bags at his feet, creating a clamor.

As Slade well knew, the four who were fast in their bedrolls
had been expertly trained to react instantly to any alarm even from out of a
deep sleep. They leapt to their feet, weapons in hand, and fell into a diamond
formation. By then Slade had reached the fire and the dying man who had raised
the alarm. He pulled the dagger from the fountaining wound, and drew Danica’s
short-sword. “Hallo, dear brothers,” Slade purred, “time for a little fun.” Then
he did what they would least suspect, and charged.

As he closed in on them Slade swung his short-sword in an underhand
swing and a wave of negative energy swept along the earth. The Hand was utterly
unprepared to have their own magic used against them, and the two in the front
facing corner of the diamond were unable to muster an arcane defense before
being consumed by the rushing tongues of fell flame. The spell detonated in a
puce blast with a diameter of some ten feet, but the men in the back rank were
able to dive to safety.

By the time the remaining men of the Hand rolled to their
feet, Danica watched, at once aghast and mesmerized, as her body leapt over the
cold conflagration with an inhuman bound and engaged the enemy. Slade was an
expert swordsman and controlled her athletic body with both panache and
ferocity, but his adversaries were blade masters as well. Danica did not doubt
that he could have dispatched the hand from afar with his not inconsiderable
knowledge of the fell arts, but his rapacious hunger for blood could only find
satisfaction in the close, intimate kill. She prayed that this flaw would not
be their undoing.

Slade and his adversaries exchanged a flurry of blows, steel
ringing on steel with arcanely charged sparks as each combatant funneled his
magic into his blade. Slade used her body and sword well, knowing that neither
was the equal of his opponents in sheer strength, so he slithered around their
heavy scimitar blows, short-sword snaking through the scant holes afforded in
their tight fighting style. Slade continued to dance on her legs, his footwork
the rival of any Phyrian ballerina, and after a minute of pitched battle his
adversaries bled from a dozen thin, shallow cuts, which far from mortal, and indeed
stitchable by any respectable goodwife, each sapped a little of their ebbing
strength, and taxed their resolve.

Presently Slade found the opening he awaited when one of his
adversaries rolled an ankle and took a lurching step to regain his balance. As
his scimitar dipped Slade lunged high and ran him through a finger’s-breadth
below his sternum.
Behind you
! Danica cried, but Slade required no
warning, having anticipated the remaining swordsman. He left the short-sword in
the impaled man and threw Danica’s body to the earth, handily ducking the
scimitar-blow from behind, and reverse somersaulted through his legs and into a
flanking position. Danica watched, horrified, as her hand lashed out, encased
in an aureole of bruise-colored fell magic, and punched through the back of the
remaining swordsman’s neck in an explosion of gore. If she had a body she would
have shivered.

“That was bracing, wouldn’t you say?” Slade said around a
vulpine grin. “Although I am afraid that I’ve soaked through your breeches, and
not just because of the exertion.”

You disgust me
, Danica said as a wave of revulsion
rolled over her.

“Just glad to be back among the living is all.” Slade
smoothed her hands over her hips and sighed. “I could get used to this.”

Danica ignored him, though she fumed to see him handle her
body so, with his smug expression plastered on her face.
Get moving, Slade,
even now Elias is slipping away. Remember our bargain.

“Gladly. I can’t wait until he wakes to find me—” he winked
“—well, to find me inside of you.” Slade jogged to Elias’s resting spot by the
fire. He lay bundled to the chin in blankets, ashen-faced and clammy. Slade
took a knee by his side, pulled back his blankets, and laid a hand on his
sternum. “I’ll need your help. You’ll have to come back into your body to have
power over the physical world.”

But how? You’re in there now.

“We’ll have to cohabitate. Look. Focus on the back of your
neck. You don’t have eyes in your present form, you’re just accustomed to
seeing the world in a certain way. You are able to perceive reality with
different senses. At the back of your neck where your spine meets your skull
there is a spinning disk of energy. See it. Feel it. Enter your body through
there.”

Danica drew close to her body and peered at the back of her
neck, narrowing the focus of her sight. The forest grew indistinct as if
someone had dropped a gossamer drape over the entire world. She saw a brick-red
wheel of energy spinning at the base of her skull. She felt herself drawn
toward the miniature vortex and the silver cord grew taut, pulling her in as
she neared it. Her consciousness spun in kind as she fell into the vortex and
back into her body.

†

Elias looked down onto his body, at first elated to see
that Danica was alive and had found him. His joy proved short lived, however, for
he soon perceived a crackling black cloud of energy swirling about her.
What’s
happened to her?

Slade has possessed her,
Padraic said, the sound of
his voice grim in Elias’s mind.
It is his taint on her aura that you see,
for their energy fields have merged.

How is this possible?

He has been reaching her in her dreams for some time, but
now she’s lowered her natural defenses and let him possess her body.

Why on earth would she do such a thing?

To save you. She knew she didn’t have the strength to
defeat so many single-handedly, so she struck a bargain with him to defeat your
enemies, with control over her physical body the price.

How do you know this?

I saw that it was to happen.

Yet you did nothing to prevent it?

No, because I also saw what happens next.

Elias bent all of his will onto Danica and saw the astral
imprint of Slade’s form overlapping her body. The psychotic fiend had stolen almost
everything from them in life, and he was damned if he was going to let him
harry them from the other side as well.
I won’t let him have her. Not this
time.

Padraic’s eyes glimmered like black coals.
Just so.