Prodigal Steelwielder (Seals of the Duelists Book 3) (21 page)

Kiwani spoke, her voice slow and rich as honey. Bayan loved the feel of her mind, sated with power, against his. “That was delicious. But let’s free the emperor and the other hostages before they start thinking we’ve abandoned them. That wouldn’t do. ”

As Aleida directed the wind disc back toward the damaged forum, Taban added, “Aye, we havena officially done anything until the emperor tells us we have. I’ve been aching for another battle pennant for a while now. But if His Shiny Gloriousness is gonna try to toss Bayan over the border again, I say we leave him down there.”

Calder’s mind blanked. No sint-stopping ideas came. He absently patted his pockets and found a bulge in one of them. He pulled it out and stared at the lumpy brown walnut shell.

One element, Wood, encasing another, Earth. Wood was dense enough to block the combination of elemental and anima ingredients—iron and bone—the Karkhedonians used in their steel. Blocking the mixed magics negated steel’s effect on focused magic. He turned to Tala. “Do you have any purifying spells, something that can cleanse an element?”

Tala tipped her head toward the floodwaters. “We use them to create clean water after disasters like this. What are you thinking?”

“What do you do with the dirt you filter out?”

“We sing a kind of filter that catches it, and we sing the water through it. It’s very pretty to watch. Arches of bright, clean water. Children love it.”

Calder held up the nutshell and shook it. “Can you use the steel ball inside my nutshell for your filter? Without actually opening the nut?”

Tala lifted her chin. “I’d have to alter a couple stanzas of the melody, but yes. It’s a magical filtration process, not a physical one.” She looked thoughtful. “All this time, the Godsmaw’s used bonding to a single element as his advantage, but it’s also a weakness.”

“Aren’t I always nattering on about moderation?” Calder gave a satisfied nod. “If you wouldn’t mind, Trio Singer Tala, I need you to bind the Godsmaw within a nutshell.”

She rubbed at her forehead, shoulders slumping with the effort she’d already expended. “I’d better get my own holiday for this.” She turned her face toward the array of crystals hovering above the Godsmaw. Her abdomen flexed impressively as she took a deep breath, and she began to belt out notes, turning this way and that, directing them into the various crystals.

The walnut lifted off Calder's palm and shot downward. Calder tracked its progress through a wind lens. It came to a halt a few strides above the surface, which had begun to boil with enraged resistance. Murky, twisting loops of water arced past the nut, first singly, then dozens at a time, until Calder could just make out the silty bottom of the seafloor past the hundreds of leaping streams of water. The flying rivers calmed as the spell continued—their edges smoothed to mirrors, reflecting the blue sky and glints of sunlight. Calder was reminded more of the drowned fountains of Muggenhem than a raging, sentient evil.

Tala had spoken truly: the sint bound himself to one single thing—the waters of the Godsmaw—and they became his weakness as well as his strength. He and the water were at each other’s mercy.

The floodwaters pulled back into the Godsmaw’s basin. The sun wheeled overhead. And still Tala sang. Just listening made Calder's throat seem dry. Finally, the leaping waters stopped. Wind rippled across the sea, making delicate waves. Tala’s last note echoed long across the crystals and finally faded away. She sang another small melody, and the nut leapt up and landed in her hand.

She gave it to Calder, and he gathered her close, letting her rest against him. “We did it. We did it. You were marvelous.”

She brought his head down to hers and kissed him sweetly. “That’s my hexmage. Always with the clever ideas.”

“Aye, well, that’s what happens when you read useful books.”

“A pocket-sized sint. What should we do with him?”

Calder studied the nut. “I havena any idea. All I know is that I’d best not crack this shell. Remember what the Godsmaw showed us? All those other forces in the distance, waiting to converge on us? I canna let that happen.”

Calder let his hex crystals dissipate, then dived his wind disc toward the nearest shore, a sandy beach along the edge of the Spineforest, riven with massive erosion runnels. He offered a hand to Tala as she stepped from the disc to a shiny, wet plane of black stone left behind when the Godsmaw had snapped off a spire.

He crafted a pair of new black crystals and handed them to her. “Go to the other hexmates. Tell them I’m going to destroy that threat from the east, the one neither Taban nor I could find.”

Tala’s posture was a mix of concern and exhaustion. “Alone? Right now? What are you going to do?”

Calder let his wind disc rise just out of her reach. “Anything I like. I have the love of a good woman and a sint in my pocket.” He blew her a kiss, grinned at her helpless frustration, and shot through the air with such speed that he needed a shield of wind to block the icy breeze from freezing his eyeballs. He paused over the newly calm Gyre, now separate from its inhabiting Godsmaw, and gave it a speculative eye.
That bloody water owes me.

Soon, trailing a league-long, sparkling river that twisted and flowed through the air like a fluttering procession carpet, Calder veered to the southeast. Though he had drawn real water from the Gyre, he had used it to form a new Water hexling, bonding the water itself to his magic for easier control.
Dunfarroghan see, Dunfarroghan do.

When he’d searched the previous evening—from the shore of the Gyre south for hundreds of leagues along the imperial border—he’d found plenty of evidence to support Philo’s reports of a wandering army sacking villages. The trouble was, they came and went without leaving any evidence of their passage. Eyewitness accounts had consistently claimed that the army had descended upon the villages in broad daylight. Calder scanned the sunny sky.
Excellent raiding weather, methinks.

He slung his wind disc low and slipped across the rolling hills in the direction of Aklaa and the Huku Hills. He cast Lifeseeker ahead of him, sensing the occasional human or small village cluster and untold thousands of small orange flickers of animal life in the broad wild forest. Calder’s Gyre water followed dutifully, winding and twisting and undulating, one fluid current amongst all the air currents. The way it brushed against the air made it obvious where the air currents lay. He normally sensed that only with his Wind magic. He grinned.
Tis the little things.

He climbed higher and pushed Lifeseeker over a wider area, scouring entire valleys from high above before moving on over the next ridge, the next river.

An orange sea struck his mind. Thousands of men, clustered together beneath a thick oaken forest, slunk through the trees, headed for a small village across a low ridge of hills. Calder spread his other elements below, picking up wood, leather, and an alarming quantity of steel.

Steelwielders. The Corona has sent an army of steelwielders.
Calder’s joy at controlling his own airborne river burned away in sudden rage.

Baring his teeth, Calder yanked his seawater hexling into a vast lake that distorted the sunlight. He wrested it into position above the sloping hillside above the enemy’s advancing force. Then he dropped it. Letting go of his control, Calder veered aside as the deluge rained down. It landed with such force that large swaths of the hillside were completely stripped of trees, men, and even soil. Bare bedrock lay exposed in ragged strips. The first water to fall scoured its way across the valley floor and flew into midair over the top of the hills that separated the enemy camp from the neighboring village, hurling screaming men into the forested hillside. And still the water fell.

A few frantic spells shot upward, redirecting or evaporating some of the incoming flood, but none of them found Calder.
Oh, they have casters with them, aye? Even better. Best not let them have a second round of spells.

Calder grasped his hexling seawater with his mind, identifying it, understanding it as an entity of Water. Then he shifted it to Flame. Everything touched by water crisped in an instant, coruscating with living fire that consumed everything it touched.
No pretty orange campfires for these steelwielders, no.
Calder brought searing blue flame—his personal nemesis—to life. The azure death turned the valley to glass and ash in mere heartbeats. Voices screamed in unison, thousands of throats burned out at once. Then, they went silent.

Calder circled the edges of the army and mercilessly smacked escaping soldiers back into the fire with viny Wood whips. Lifeseeker helped him hunt down and kill a good dozen frantic escapees, but once they were consumed—
too quick a death by half
—only the flames remained. Even the casters had succumbed to his infernal blue items. Calder rose above the smoking valley and nodded.
No one beats a Flame Savant at Flamecasting.

He extinguished his Water-to-Flame hexling, but he let the smoke rise into the sky as a warning. The blue fire had spilled over the crown of the hills and burned some of the trees on the slope leading down to the village, but no one had been harmed, and their wood supply was in no way endangered.

Aye, well, you’re welcome, I suppose.
He gave them a full-arm wave of assurance before veering westward.

With Tala and his hexmates occupied, there was nothing for Calder to do but fly his way toward the heart of the empire. For all he knew, he would arrive too late to help defend the Kheerzaal.
I shouldna have to save absolutely
everyone’s
arses in one day. My hexmates would never live down the shame. Although, like Tala said, I could do with my own holiday. It would be nice to have
one
day off
.

Emperor Baltanarmo stood with the muted crash of the sea at his back and looked down as the horizontal steel panels, already beginning to rust from salt exposure, were winched open. He’d had the heavy plates installed in the seaside prison house to test their durability, but it was not unpleasant to see them used on the father of their creation. Sarantis cowered at the bright sunlight and backed toward the far wall of his rough-hewn cell, where the incoming tide was shallower.

Baltanarmo grinned at the courtiers standing in a row along one edge of the hole, not wanting to risk falling in but avoiding the grimy wall for the sake of their silks. The emperor adopted a hearty tone that echoed in the small upper chamber. “You still live. Good! And how are you enjoying your prolonged stay in the Corona? Your guards inform me that you find our seafood most palatable. Are you partial to our rock-dwelling eels, or do you prefer the feistiness of our spiny crustaceans?”

Sarantis’s voice was raspy from salt and disuse. “Go take a goat horn up your arse.”

“Apparently, a little privation strips the thin veneer of class from even the most dedicated Karkhedonian merchant.” Baltanarmo tipped his head and studied his prisoner, now reduced to filthy, salt-stiff rags, wild hair, and nails ragged from catching his own meals as they wandered into the cell. He fingered his golden silk cape before continuing. “My campaign proceeds apace. It is not without setbacks, for, as you said, the Waarden duelists wield great power. But success will soon be mine.”

Sarantis’s eyes burned in the dimness. “I pray your bitch is amongst the dead.”

Baltanarmo forced a laugh. Zahira hadn’t died in any fighting, but Ly Ronardo and his entire force had been reduced to ash before they could strike their target. Baltanarmo mourned the loss of his friend deeply but privately. His court didn’t deserve to see his grief, and so much less did his prisoner.

He must have paused too long before replying, because Sarantis continued. “She has manipulated you. Perhaps you don’t know. Perhaps you don’t care. Either way, this empire isn’t yours. It’s hers. And you, your court, and all your people are hers to play with. This war you’re attempting to wage is hers. She stole it from
me
! Your bitch is a common little thief. Treacherous man though you are, I warn you to watch your back and your crown. She’ll stab the first and steal the second. I’m only here because she convinced you to hate me and get me out of her way. She has stolen
my
revenge!
Mine
!”

Baltanarmo felt his cheeks stiffen. His courtiers hushed. His heart thrummed with a chant of
Kill him, kill him.
Reluctantly, he refused the Karkhedonian’s bait. “My good Sarantis. Isos, if I may style you so intimately. I hear your pleas for the mercy of a quick death, but alas, I cannot comply. I know what you did, you see. I have always known. And this has always been your fate.”

Sarantis lost control, tugging at his frizzy gray locks and kicking madly as the next incoming wave washed around his shins. “Fool! You blind, bumbling moron! She came to me! She insisted I lie with her, said it was the only way to know if she could trust me and the advice I offered you. I swear it on my life! I thought it was just one more of your insane customs!” Abruptly, he stopped shouting and crouched in the water. He covered his face with his hands and rocked back and forth.

“The poor old man is going lunatic,” a courtier murmured.

Baltanarmo tsked. Madness was half an escape but still better than a swift death. He gathered the delicate folds of his cape in one hand. “I believe I am done being insulted for today, Sarantis. I shall not visit again.” He twitched the fingers on his free hand, and a pair of guards began winching the steel plates together. As the metal rumbled and occasionally squealed in protest, Sarantis’s screams echoed hauntingly before cutting off.