The Awakened Mage (73 page)

Veira tripped, went sprawling. Orrick lunged and thrust his makeshift weapon into the creature’s gaping maw. It bellowed, gouting blood, and crashed to the ground—

—crushing Veira beneath it, and Pellen Orrick too.

Asher cried out and dropped to his knees, hands clawing at his heart, his head, oblivious to the battle raging round him.

“Veira!”
Dathne shouted, and started running. Children forgotten, Matt ran too.

They reached Veira and Orrick together. Flung themselves to the blood-slicked street and reached for her hand—a way to free her.

No use. She was dead. Her eyes, half-open, stared at the red-hazed sky. Spilled from her fingers a shard of crystal, cracked now, its beauty charred.

“Veira!” Matt whispered. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry—”

A groan, then, filled with pain and confusion. Grief-struck, Dathne looked over the lumpen carcass of the demon-bull and there was Orrick, leg-pinned and living.

Matt pushed to his feet. “Help me, Dathne. I’ll lift this monster—you drag him free—”

But they couldn’t do it unaided. She looked back to the shelter for Gar, who should be helping—

“Dathne! Watch out!” Matt yelled, and knocked her brutally sideways. She fell across a pile of rubble, feeling her skin tear and blood spill, crying out as her head struck something cruelly hard.

Matt had leapt forward, waving his arms. He danced himself sideways, away from her, shouting like a madman. What—
what—

An enormous armored-winged demon, snouted and bestial and no longer human, was lumbering towards them.

“Here! Here!” her crazy friend shouted—her compass—her anchor—her candle in the dark.
“Here,
you evil bastard!”

“No, Matt! Run!
Run!”

But her voice was reduced to a whisper and around her the world was fading fast… ... but not quite fast enough.

Morg’s giant, dagger-clawed monster seized Matt in its massive arms and tore him limb from limb. Hot blood sprayed in a mighty fountain, splashing the cobblestones scarlet.

On his knees and devastated by the sundering of the Circle, Asher heard Matt’s desperate cry. He looked up. Through blinding pain saw the demon. Saw Dathne, in danger. Saw Matt shove her to safety—confront the monster—and die in blood and futility.

Time stopped, and the whole world with it.

When it started again he was back on his feet. Raging, weeping and lusting for death. War-beast after war-beast boiled into existence around him. He set them loose to rampage—and then leapt forth to join them.

Kill—kill—kill—

His first victim was the thing that slaughtered Matt. When it was over, and all Morg’s monsters were slain or destroyed, there fell a silence, shot through with the sound of someone sobbing and someone else groaning. The Square was drifted with sulphurous smoke. Slicked underfoot with pools and puddles of blood, thick black and red, looking like a slaughterhouse with the sundered carcasses of demons and the broken bodies of children and then elders. Tired beyond imagining, Asher raised a hand as heavy as lead and banished his surviving war-beasts to nothingness.

Then he staggered to Dathne. Gar was with her, seemingly unhurt, helping her sit up. He didn’t give a rat’s arse about Gar.

“I’m all right, Asher,” she insisted, though there was blood on her face and her eyes were unfocused. “Leave me.
Finish
this. Destroy Morg and end the nightmare.”

It nearly killed him, but he left her. Ignoring Gar, who shouted his name.

Morg the sorcerer lay still as death on the steps of Justice Hall.

Brimmed with pain Asher walked to join his fallen enemy. Looked down on him and considered his opulent clothing, burned in patches by the scorching warfire. Considered too the way the intact rubies across his chest winked and flashed with every indrawn breath. Reaching down, he rolled Morg over.

Conroyd Jarralt’s unmarked face was as handsome as ever.

On his belt, neatly secured in its lavishly jeweled sheath and barely flame-touched, Conroyd’s knife. Asher slid it free and hefted it in his palm, admiring its weight and balance. Admiring the Olken craftsmanship. Odd that

Conroyd chose an Olken-made dagger, given how he despised all things not Doranen.

Odd… and immensely gratifying.

He felt the merest flicker of sorrow, then. Conroyd Jarralt was a bastard but it was unlikely he’d asked to be consumed by Morg. And now he was going to die. Had to die, so Lur might live.

He shook himself.
Don’t think on that, don’t think on it. It’s him or you and everyone else. You’re savin’ lives, remember?

And not by spending his own, after all. When he wasn’t so tired and full of pain, and this day’s doings were a good ways behind him, he might crack a smile about that.

But not now.

He ripped apart Conroyd’s blackened clothing. Bared Conroyd’s unburned chest to the air. Blanked his mind, his imagination, and plunged the knife through muscle, between bones, deep into Morg’s black rancid heart and twisted with all the might left in him to summon. Flesh quivered. Blood flowed. The sorcerer exhaled once, and died.

Incapable of walking anywhere else, even back to Dathne, Asher let himself slump to Justice Hall’s steps. Dropping his forehead to his knees he let the trembling take him.

It was done, then. Done and done. Prophecy appeased. Outwitted, even, since he still lived. The mad world righted. Now he could go home to Restharven. Start a new life with Dathne. His wife. His beloved.

Eyes closed, shaking like a man with ague, he saw the sun rise over the harbor, smelled the salt air, felt the sea spray wet on his cheeks. A sob rose hot in his aching throat.
Home …

Beside him, Conroyd Jarralt’s body coughed.

No. No. That weren’t bloody
possible . ..

On his feet again and staring, sucking air like a man half-drowned, he watched the knife push slowly but surely out of Conroyd’s blood-slicked chest to fall with a metallic thud on the marble steps. Watched the wound seal closed as though it had never been and the rib cage rise and fall, rise and fall. Saw the eyelids flicker a dreadful warning.

Shit.
Shit.
Morg was proof to killing steel, and now he had no choice: he’d have to use Gar’s bloody spell. Seemed Prophecy weren’t outwitted afterall.

It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair. He wanted to go
home!

The words of the UnMaking spell were in him, and waiting. He called them to the tip of his tongue. Turned his head, just a little, just far enough to see Dathne, on her feet at the edge of the Square with Gar nowhere in sight.

Dathne.
Dathne.

He nearly howled out loud.

This wasn’t bloody fair!

At his feet Morg sighed, and shifted.

Now or never. Time was up.

With a right hand that trembled only a little, with a voice that cracked only just at the edges, he signed the sigils, spoke the spell, and closed his eyes.

Here I come, Da… here I come …

Nothing happened. No surge of power. No flash of light. No death, for him or Morg.

Disbelieving, he opened his eyes. “Sink me bloody sideways!” he shouted, spinning about.
“Gar!”

“This way, Asher!” the little shit called out, beckoning from deep shadows off to the left. “Quickly! Here! Before he wakes!”

Head spinning, rage like a red mist clouding his vision, Asher slipped and slithered down the steps to join Gar in the narrow walkway between Justice Hall and the City chapel. Grabbed him by the shirt front and shook for all he was worth.

“You said it were translated! You said it’d bloody
work!”

Gar fended him off with difficulty. “It is! It will! Let me go, Asher!
Listen!”

“To
you?”
he demanded. “I’m done listenin’ to you! I listened to you and look what it got me! Sink me,
sink
me, what do I do now? The bastard won’t die! I stuck a knife in his heart and he still ain’t dead! And your spell—your damned bloody spell—”

“Won’t work unless it’s channeled through me.”

He took a step backwards, staring.
“What?”

Gar’s face was bloodless, his eyes hollowed and bruised. “I changed Barl’s incantation, Asher. Not a lot. Just a little. Now I’m an integral part of the magic. The power must flow through me before it can kill Morg.”

Was Gar raving? Deluded? Had the past weeks’ strain unhinged him completely?

Reading the questions in his face, Gar sighed and shook his head. “I’m in my right mind, I promise you, Asher. And what I’ve said is the simple truth. It’s what I tried to tell you before you tried to dash out my brains.”

“You altered the incantation?
Why?”

“I had my reasons.”

Stunned almost speechless, Asher turned away. Turned back again, still struggling. “But… but that means you’ll die too, don’t it?”

Gar shrugged. “What do you care, so long as Morg is dead?”

“You are mad,” he whispered, retreating until his shoulderblades met cold damp bricks. “Stark, staring suntouched.”

“You know I’m not. Morg must die and this is the only way.”

“It can’t be!” he shouted. “You’re the smart one, the scholar, the historian! Think of somethin’ else! I’ve already had one man die in my place, Gar, I ain’t about to make it two!”

Gar shook his head. “That choice isn’t yours. It’s mine, and it’s made.”

“Butwrty?”

“Why does it matter? You don’t care about me.”

No, he didn’t, but that weren’t the point. “Pretend I do and tell me
why!”

Gar let outa sigh, and stared at the ground. “I promised Fane I’d not seek her crown, and broke my word. I promised you I’d keep you safe, and broke my word again. I promised Barl I’d protect her people with my life—and that’s one promise I intend to keep. I may be a magickless cripple but I’m still Lur’s king. I’ll not have my legacy a string of broken promises. My father taught me better than that. I told you once, I have a destiny. Do you remember? Well, this is it.” He looked up, then, his face as stony as any effigy. “Don’t try to stop me, Asher. I’ll hate you if you do.”

“And if you make me go through with this,
I’II
hate
you"

A twisted smile touched Gar’s lips. “You hate me now.”

“Then I’ll hate you more!”

Another shrug, uncaring. “Hate me as much as you want. It changes nothing. Asher, there’s no other way and we’re running out of time .. .”

Trapped. He was trapped, with no escape. The bastard. The _bastard. _”I’ll never forgive you for this, Gar,” he whispered. “Never not
ever.”

“I know that already,” said Gar. “Now shut up and listen. We only have moments. Everything I taught you in the wagon holds true. All that’s different is the spell’s delivery. You hold my shoulder and
you don’t let go.
Understand me? If you let go the spell fails and Morg lives
forever.”

He was numb. Dizzy. “Over my dead body.”

“No,” said Gar, unsmiling. “Over mine.” He had no answer to that.

Still unsmiling, Gar reached inside his jacket and pulled out the age-mottled journal that had started this mess. Bits and pieces of ragged paper were slid here and there between its pages. Looking at it, his expression softened to tenderness. “I brought Barl’s diary with me. It comforts me, somehow, though I know that makes no sense to you.” He held it but, his hand unsteady. “Take it. Care for it. It’s the last the world has of a grand and glorious woman who gave her life for something bigger and better than she was. Don’t let her be forgotten. Please.”

Grudgingly, he took the proffered diary and shoved the bloody thing inside his weskit. Gar’s unguarded face was too terrible to look at. “Now what?” he muttered.

“Now you put your hand on my shoulder… and we finish what Morg started.”

“And you’re sure this’ll work? You said it yourself, you’re a magickless cripple, what if—”

Gar’s chin lifted, his face full of pride now and nothing uncomfortable. “You said it better. I’m the scholar. Trust me, Asher. This will work.”

Side by side they walked to the mouth of the passageway.”

“Begin the incantation,” Gar whispered. “But keep us concealed till the very last word. Then we’ll confront him. Don’t forget: you must see his eyes. And for Barl’s sake, Asher—”

“I know, I know, I bloody know! Whatever I do, don’t let go!”

The words of the spell were still there, still waiting. He took a deep breath. Let it. out softly. Tightened his fingers on Gar’s steady shoulder.

“Senusartarum!”

Sketch the first sigil.

“Belkavtavartis! “

Sketch the second, and the third.

“Kavartis thosartis domonartis ed—”

This time it was different. The magic ignited, dark and dreadful, setting his bones on fire. Left arm raised to shoulder level, fingers spread and pointing, Gar stepped smoothly out of the shadows. Shaking, burning, Asher stepped with him.

Morg stood posed at the top of Justice Hall’s steps, clothing mended, immaculate and glittering. He saw them and laughed, burnished with power.

“So
there
you are! And look at you!
Look!
The little cripple and his tame brute Olken holding hands on the brink of death! How poetic! How
romantic]”
He lifted his arms and threw back his head. Baleful green fire crackled around him, igniting the sullen air. “Oh, what a
wonderful
way to die! You two first, then whoever is left. Or should I leave you till last?”

Gar was shivering.
“Finish it,
Asher! Quickly,
now]
Before he kills anyone else!”

Yes, yes, more than time to finish it. He could barely contain the maelstrom within. On a choking breath he lifted his head to look deep into Morg’s mad shining eyes. Opened his mouth and whispered:
“Nux.”

Killing magic seared through his veins. Out of his fingers clutched to Gar’s shoulder, into Gar’s body and down Gar’s arm to burst from his fingertips in a stream of pure gold fire.

It struck Morg hard in his knife-proof heart, transmuting him to a pillar of flame. Gar sagged to the ground, gasping, shuddering. Not loosening his grip, Asher followed him downwards as the spell of UnMaking flowed like blood from a mortal wound.