Centyr Dominance (18 page)

“How?” asked Gerold earnestly, worry etching a frown
on his visage. “How would you do that?”

The smile she gave him chilled his heart. Holding up
one hand, a glowing firefly appeared on her palm and then began to grow before
his eyes. It changed as it grew, becoming a small cat and then a lion-like
creature with fierce claws and long teeth.

“With an army,” she answered as the lion beside her
grew steadily larger. Responding to her emotions, it raised its head and a
gave voice to a low growl that seemed to roll down the hillside.

“This isn’t right,” said Gerold as they looked down
the road. The main gates of Halam were only a mile or so distant now. “It’s
treason for me, at the very least.”

They were sheltering in a gentle dip in the landscape
that hid them mostly from view of the city walls by virtue of distance and a
slight rise in the land between. It wasn’t a good hiding place for a large
force or an army, but for a few people, and even a dragon in their case, it was
sufficient, so long as they didn’t approach any closer.

“The thing controlling your nation isn’t your king,”
said Moira. “I agree, though. This isn’t right. I finally understand what my
father used to tell us.”

“What was that?” asked the baron.

“War is never right. It’s a double edged blade that
cuts both ways, destroying the lives of the innocent and the wicked alike—an
instrument that kills the patient as often as it rids the body of disease.
It’s a product of our failure to find a better solution, but sometimes—it is
necessary,” she told him.

Gram grunted, “That sounds like him.”

Gerold nodded, “He must be a wise man, but my meaning
was different. As a peer of Dunbar I hold my power in trust—in good faith to
the people. Your assault today will likely result in many civilian
casualties.”

Moira reached up, patting the rough stubble of the
conflicted nobleman’s cheek, “Dear Gerold, you are a kind hearted man. You
don’t have to do this. In fact, it would be better if you stayed out. They
will need you after this is done, and you only risk death by accompanying us.”

“They…?” asked Gerold, “… or you?”

She caught the romantic overtones in his remark easily
enough, in fact the man’s entire being was shouting them at her. Any woman
would have noticed his infatuation, but as a Centyr wizard she nearly had to
wall up her mind to find peace in the face of his swirling emotions. The time
for kindness was over, and she would do him no good service by allowing his
feelings to grow. Her tone was cold, “
They
. I am here to save my
father and since his enemy is also oppressing your people, I will eliminate it
for you both. You are here to save the people once I have accomplished that.”

“From what?”

She looked at him archly, “From me.”

“That makes no sense,” protested the baron.

Gram coughed, catching his attention, “I think I see
what she means. We are foreigners, and if things go well, your country will
soon be leaderless. They will need someone to unite them afterward, against
their common enemy, someone familiar.” It was just the sort of thing his
mother would have understood instantly.

Gerold frowned, narrowing his eyes, “I am not that
man. As I told both of you yesterday, there are at least seven men and three
women in line for the throne before me.”

Moira reached out, putting a hand on his arm while
simultaneously stroking his aura, reinforcing the nobleman’s confidence and
smoothing his fears. It wasn’t the permanent sort of mental alteration she had
made the week before to some of the prisoners when they were escaping, merely a
temporary form of emotional support. It just happened to involve a tiny amount
of aythar. “I trust you more than any of those strangers, Gerold,” she told
him.

Chad had remained silent throughout the conversation,
but his jaw clenched then, “Stop that.”

Moira felt the condemnation behind the ranger’s words
as an almost physical rebuke, but she kept her features smooth. Removing her
hand from the baron, she glanced back at Chad, “You have some misgivings about
our plan?”

The hunter glared at her, letting his eyes drift to
the baron for a second before returning to settle on her hand, “That ain’t what
I’m talking about, and you know it, so just stop it. It’s disgustin’.”
Turning, he walked away before she could respond.

“What’s wrong with him?” wondered Gerold.

“I think it’s just tension,” commented Moira.

That didn’t feel quite right to Gram. He didn’t like
seeing Moira show such familiarity with a foreign nobleman, and he reasoned
that Chad might well feel the same. “He just feels protective of you,
Moira—since your father isn’t here,” he told them, letting his eyes drift
toward Gerold. “No offense, my lord.”

The baron could understand that reasoning easily
enough, “None taken, Sir Gram. I assure you I have no dishonorable intentions
where Lady Moira is concerned.”

Moira growled, “I’m standing right here. If you apes
want to talk about me, kindly go elsewhere or feel free to speak directly to
me.”

“Shouldn’t we be doing something besides arguing?”
interjected Alyssa, pointing toward Halam.

“I think this is close enough,” said Moira. “We’ll
wait here.” Raising one hand, she snapped her fingers, and her ‘army’ began
moving, a hundred spellbeasts trotted forward. Well, most of them trotted, ten
of them had eagle shaped forms, and those flew ahead.

The hand gesture was purely for effect of course,
Moira was connected to her magical allies mentally, which obviated the need for
verbal or gestured commands. She had spent the last week constructing them and
filling them with aythar. In the past it would have taken that much time just
to construct their spellminds, but that wasn’t a problem for her anymore.
Instead she had devoted her time to feeding her new creatures as much power as
she could manage, until there were so many that the daily cost of maintaining
them was as great as what she could put into them.

She didn’t bear Illeniel’s Doom, as her brother did,
so she couldn’t be sure whether her tactic had ever been done before, but she
doubted it had ever been attempted on this scale by any Centyr mage. She
wondered what the shade of her original mother would think of what she had done.
Over the past two weeks she had broken all the rules she had been taught
regarding the special abilities of the Centyr lineage, and her army today was a
flagrant abuse of them.

But if I follow the rules, a lot of people
will die.

That was the crux of the problem. Normal spellbeasts
were far more limited in what they could do with the aythar given them, not to
mention crafting that many unique minds, even simple ones, would have taken her
much too long. Using the mind-twinning technique eliminated that limitation
and made her allies’ abilities more versatile.

But mind-twinning was forbidden, at least according to
Moira Centyr, and she should know since she was literally the product of the
original Moira Centyr’s decision to break the rules.
Why
it was
forbidden, she had never made entirely clear, other than the ethical problems
invoked when creating an exact duplicate of oneself. She had been very direct
though, when she had warned Moira of what the penalty for it had been in her
day, execution.

Moira hadn’t made just one, though. She had made a
hundred.

A hundred and one,
reminded
her still resident twin, who she was starting to think of as a sort of personal
assistant.

Right, a hundred and one, and probably
more once things start happening in there,
agreed Moira
silently.

She felt it when her flying allies made contact.
Information began streaming back to her, channeled through her assistant to
help keep from overwhelming her mind. Eight of them dove into the gate guards,
possessed them, and moments later the gates began swinging open. The two other
flying spellbeasts continued on, sharing their aerial view of the city. The
rest of her army kept running, streaming into Halam through the rapidly
widening gates.

Halam’s fall would be bloodless.
It has to be,
she
thought.

“Are we sure this is a good idea?” said Gram, his eyes
swiveling back and forth between the city and Moira. “Chad said you started
having seizures after doing something similar when we escaped—and that was far
fewer people.”

Moira gave him a smile that was more bluff than
confidence, “I was injured then. Most of the problem was the feedback I
suffered when my shield was broken. I’m actually not under much strain from
this, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking.”

There was no resistance yet. The spellbeasts took
everyone they found at first and then began splitting themselves, first once
and then again. Civilians and guards alike were taken, so long as they had a
parasite controlling them. The few who were still free, and so far they had
found only a couple, were put to sleep and then passed over to conserve the
spellbeasts’ strength.

When her spell-twins had divided themselves ten times
they stopped, to avoid becoming too weak individually. There were around a
thousand of them now, and they had taken control of somewhere close to six
hundred people, all of them in close proximity to the city gates. The extras
began working to assist those controlling a host with the removal of the metal
parasites.

Hosts? People, I meant people,
Moira
corrected herself silently.

The minutes stretched out while she worked, but
nothing was readily apparent to those who stood beside her. “What’s
happening?” asked Gerold.

“Everything is smooth so far,” she assured him. “I
don’t think they realize what’s happening yet.”

“Which they, the people or the monsters? How many are
dead?” continued the baron unable to restrain his curiosity.

We need more,
relayed
her internal assistant.
The parasite removals take too long. We need to
double our numbers again, or we risk moving too slowly.

An important part of her plan involved cleansing most
of the populace of their unnatural controllers before the enemy understood what
they were doing. Moira wasn’t sure what the enemy might do once they figured
out the threat, but she wanted to free as many people as possible before they
had a chance to do anything. She began feeding her aythar to her spell-twins,
but she knew her own energy would be nowhere near enough.
Cassandra, I need
your strength,
she said, directing her thoughts to her dragon.

I am ready,
came
the dragon’s steady thought and with it a powerful rush of aythar.

The dragons that Mordecai Illeniel had created were
originally constructed for the purpose of dividing and storing the immense
amounts of aythar that he had taken from Mal’goroth, one of the Dark Gods. Her
father had developed a rudimentary system of measuring magical energy, calling
his first unit of measure a ‘Celior’, that being the amount of aythar he had
originally taken from the Shining God of the same name. Consequently, an
entire celior of aythar was truly a huge amount, and each of the twenty-three
dragons held approximately one celior of power.

To keep his creations from being the same sort of
threat the original gods had been, he had designed them in such a way that they
were almost unable to use their own power. The dragons grew quickly, healed
quickly, they could fly, and had great strength, and then of course, there was
dragon fire; but for the most part their power was not directly accessible—to
them.

The humans bonded to them were another matter,
though. The dragon-bond provided them with numerous benefits; better eyesight
and other senses, as well as the ability to draw upon the dragon’s energy for
enhanced strength and speed, but for a mage the aythar was even more useful.

Moira could, in theory, channel Cassandra’s aythar and
use it to perform obscenely powerful things. A full celior of aythar was
probably enough to destroy the entire city of Halam and possibly much of the
rest of Dunbar, depending on how it was utilized, but as with everything, there
were limits. In particular, the emittance of the mage in question.

Emittance was a term that scholars had at some point
decided to use for the amount of aythar that a given mage, or a channeler,
could use over a period of time. In general, mages never worried too much
about emittance, because their capacitance, or the amount of aythar that they
personally generated and stored within their own bodies, was usually not too many
times greater than their emittance. They ran out of power too soon to be
overly concerned about how much of it they could use at one time.

In this situation, that meant that Moira’s emittance
was of critical importance. It would determine how quickly she could transfer
aythar from her dragon to her magical allies. If she pushed too hard, she
might easily burn out her ability to manipulate aythar forever, or even kill
herself. Moira was slightly behind her brother and her father when it came to
capacitance, but she was definitely a match for them in her emittance. She
just had to be careful.

“Moira?” prompted Gerold, interrupting her thoughts.

“Mmm?”

“I asked how many are dead,” he reminded her, a
worried expression on his face.

The air crackled around her as she began invisibly
moving energy from Cassandra to her spellbeasts within the city. “None,” she
answered. “I’d like to keep it that way, so don’t distract me.” Moira’s hair
moved as if brushed by the wind, but the air was still around them.