Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) (42 page)

While Danica and the Handsman were engaged in their
stalemate Bryn had recovered and shrugged off the stunning pommel blow. She
rolled into a combat crouch and reentered the melee, the Handsman never feeling
the sleight-of-hand that unburdened him of the kris than hung at his left hip. She
buried the wicked, curved dagger in his stomach, and then somersaulted between
his legs and hamstrung him. The Handsman fell to his knees and without ceremony
Danica crescent kicked him in the side of the head with the heel of her boot.

Agnar had been hard pressed by the two Handsmen he had
engaged, both of whom were expert swordsmen. After the initial volley of blows
he launched to buy himself some space, he retreated to the throne dais to gain
the advantage of high ground and discourage flanking. His enemies fought in
tandem, attacking either simultaneously or in a syncopated rhythm, which forced
him to squander his stamina for he had to constantly feint, riposte, and
counter attack to hold them at bay.

Agnar Vundi, however, was born of the bloodlines of the
warrior kings of Ittamar and thus no mere adept with a blade himself, though it
was his custom to fight with two swords. With this in mind he lunged forward
with a wild half-moon swing to push his enemies back and then leapt further up
the dais, onto the very seat of the queen. The first Handsman rushed him with a
low slash to cut out his legs. Agnar jumped over the stroke and down from the
throne, landing close to his quarry. When the Handsman retorted with a
back-hand blow Agnar caught his hand and promptly head-butted him, followed by
a thrust to the abdomen with his short-sword. He cast the impaled Handsman off
the dais with a kick, but held onto his scimitar. “Well,” he said around a
broad grin to the remaining Handsman who had to leap the tumbling body of his
fellow, “it looks like the two swords to one advantage now belongs to me.”

The Handsman responded with a ferocious feint and remise,
but Agnar read his shifting stance and turned the attack with his scimitar and
sliced his opponent’s forearm with his short-sword. The Handsman withdrew a
step and adopted a two handed grip on his sword, but Agnar was quick to
capitalize on his advantage and pressed his wounded foe’s sword aside with a
heavy downward stroke of his scimitar and then landed him a blow to the head with
his short blade, ending the Handsman, and the skirmish.

Agnar dashed from the dais and glanced about the throne
room. Against all odds the queen’s party had prevailed over the Scarlet Hand,
but Elias and Mirengi still fought, a bloated mass of magical energy suspended
between them. He took a deep breath, finally having time to process the
maelstrom of activity that had occurred in the last few minutes. Elias Duana,
defying all reason, had managed to survive the wilds of the Renwood and stole
back into Lucerne Palace to thwart his nemesis. On the day he joined his fallen
comrades in the halls of their fathers—which might well yet be today—he could
say that he had lived.

Agnar cautiously made his way to the rest of his party,
giving Mirengi and Elias a wide berth. He clapped his hand on Danica’s shoulder
as she stood, heaving, over the body of a fallen foe. The young woman offered
him a grim smile, but then her eyes suddenly went wide and her mouth dropped
opened, a curse on her lips. Instinctively, Agnar wrapped his arms about her,
and bore her to the ground in a headlong dive. He rolled over as they skidded across
the floor to see a cone of ragged black fire rush toward them.

With what he thought was his last thought, Agnar cursed
himself, for the Handsman he had run through yet lived, and had risen to his
feet, one hand staunching the hole in his guts while the other discharged the
blast of fell magic. Agnar, however, did have another thought, and it was to wonder
how the mass of writhing flame bent back upon itself as if it had struck a
wall.

Ogden stepped over Agnar, his hand outstretched toward the
fell arcanist. “Your final lesson, whelp, is to never leave an Archmagus alive
when you have him at an advantage.” Ogden’s thick brow drew down over his eyes
in concentration. He shaped his shield from a flat disk into a concave basin of
arcane force and then into a sphere, which contained his enemy’s spell and then
snuffed it out.

The Handsman reacted at once and formed a ball of black
lighting in his hand, but Ogden proved the faster. He threw both hands open and
a volley of blue energy bolts shot from them. The missiles lifted the Handsman
from his feet and hurled him against the wall behind the throne. He was dead
before he hit the floor.

Danica stood and spared Ogden a nod before turning her
attention to her brother’s fight with Mirengi, but the curtain of dark fire
stymied her.

The shuddering mass of magic pendulumed between the two
wizards as each took turns yielding ground to the other and then taking it back
in a brutal tug of war that left both men teetering on the edge of collapse. Elias
knew that if they continued like this for much longer they both would surely
die. The body and mind were not designed to withstand infinite amounts of
arcane energy, and the sheer volume that he and Sarad had channeled would have
burnt lesser wizards to a cinder.

Elias lost ground to Sarad for his focus ebbed as he wracked
his brain for a solution to end the stalemate and turn the tide against the
necromancer. An intuition came to him then as he remembered the first law of Arcanum
that Ogden had taught him: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only
transmuted. He couldn’t extinguish Sarad’s original spell, but if he could find
a way to redirect or transmute it he could at long last defeat the dark lord of
the Scarlet Hand. The doorway to the infinite energy of the tapestry lay inside
each person—he was sure that someone had told him that once. Thus it stood to
reason that energy could pass both ways; as the wizard could draw on the energy
of the cosmos, so could he absorb it by sending it back through that door.

As Elias worked through these thoughts, the sphere had
pressed close to him. Sarad, believing that his victory was at hand, pushed
with all his will and drained the final dregs of his power. Elias observed this
with stoic resolve and drew his magic back into himself and probed within his being
for the gateway he hoped dwelt there.

“Oh, God,” cried Danica, “he’s losing! Ogden, can you dispel
the barrier?”

Ogden surveyed the magical barrier and the boulder of energy
oscillating between Elias and Mirengi. He knew at once that to set his will
against that much power would only incinerate him and quite possibly the entire
chamber. He was unable to look Danica in the eyes when he told her he could do
no more to help his student. “I cannot,” he said, hearing his own hollow words
echo in his head as he reeled with the thought that all hope was lost to them.

As Sarad’s spell closed the final feet between them, Elias
gathered his own repelled magic into a disk of white fire and then shaped it
into a funnel, his eyes half closing with the exertion. He reached desperately
into the void, delving deeper into that mysterious chasm between thoughts,
between worlds, than he had ever dared go before.

He opened his eyes and they gleamed with an otherworldly
light.

The fiery funnel churned and at its base formed a vortex
that had the aspect of a bright and starry night. Elias relinquished all
resistance to Sarad’s magic and poured all of his effort and power into
widening the vortex. The pregnant sphere of fell magic discharged into his
funnel and disappeared through the gateway at the vertex.

Sarad, who suddenly had no force to push against, fell to
his knees. “Impossible,” he said. “It cannot be.” No one could absorb magic,
and certainly not to that magnitude. His spell would have rendered an entire
household to ash.

The queen’s party stood dumbstruck, stunned to a man. Bryn
was the first to break the silence. Overcome with emotion, she broke out in an
outburst of laughter as tears streamed down her face. Danica took the courtier
in her arms and hugged her tight. “Wha…Wha…What?” Ogden said, mouthing the word
over and over again, while Phinneas pressed a knuckled fist to his heart and cried,
“By God, he’s done it!”

Elias conjured an arc of purple energy with a chop of his
hand that dissolved Sarad’s wall of black flame. His boots clacked on the
marble floor as he closed the distance to Sarad. The necromancer’s face
contorted in rage and he pressed himself to his feet, hands splayed in a final
act of resistance. Bolts of puce energy fired from his fingertips. Elias
deflected them with hands wreathed in violet-white light, and willed them to
return to their source. The repelled missiles gained momentum and the gravity
of Elias’s magic, and Sarad, who had tapped the final drop of his power, was
unable to mount a defense.

The magic bolts lifted Sarad from his feet and bore him to
the ground. Even as Elias closed the last steps between them, and the final
remnants of the wall of fire fizzled, he spoke solemn words of power,
incantations of the Deep Arcanum, and drew symbols in the air with fingertips haloed
with silver fire.

His boot-heels clicked to a stop.

A shining, faceted sphere drawn in lines of golden light
formed above Sarad, its many faces lambent with fiery runes. The arcane
spellform descended onto Sarad and caged him before collapsing into him in a shower
of golden sparks.

Elias stood over the felled wizard. Skeins of black smoke
rose from his ruined face and hands. In his final act of defiance Sarad had
drawn the energy to power his spell from his very life force, and the resulting
arcane backlash left him burnt and blistered.

The queen’s party drew around Elias. Danica stood by his side.
“You’ve done it.” She held out his sword. Elias wrapped his hands around the
familiar hilt, and felt the leather braids press into his hand. He held his
sword over Sarad.

“Go on then,” Sarad spat. “Finish it. Death holds no fear
for one such as I.”

Elias peered down at the man who had been the perpetrator of
myriad evils; the man who had brought a nation to its knees and who had very
nearly eradicated an entire bloodline and fathered a dark age from which the
world may never have emerged. Yet for all that, when Elias looked down at him
he saw only the child from the vision he had when he and Sarad had linked minds
during his imprisonment. That same child who cowered in fear as his father bent
his dark will and that of his benighted order upon him. Sarad’s legacy and that
of his fell masters was one of vengeance and of fear. Elias refused to enter
into that same dark legacy and become its new sire by letting his hand be moved
by the same black motives.

“No.” Elias lowered his sword. “I will not become like
them.”

“He’s too dangerous to be taken alive,” Ogden said.

“His power is broken,” said Elias.

“I can see that,” said Ogden, “though I never taught you the
spell of binding. It is too complicated for most veteran wizards to even
comprehend, let alone an apprentice. How did you learn it?”

“My father taught it to me.” When Ogden arched an eyebrow at
him, Elias said, “It’s a long story. The point is that he’s of no threat to us.
Not now. I’ll not murder him, even for all he’s done.”

Sarad looked up at Elias with wide and cloudy eyes. His lips
trembled as he opened his mouth to speak, but what he was to say would forever
remain a mystery, for at that very moment an indistinct black shape swooped
over him and when it passed all that remained of Sarad’s throat was a ragged
hole of dangling sinew.

Bound

“Talinus!” Elias roared.

“A thousand pardons, Marshal,” the disembodied voice of
Talinus cried, “but the old man is right—Sarad is too dangerous to be left
alive. In any case, you have much more pressing matters at present. Your daring
entrance—impressive though it was—has roused half the city. As we speak the
remainder of the Scarlet Hand is closing in on you! Luck to you, Marshal. Until
we meet again!”

“They’re close,” said Bryn. “I can hear their footfalls.”

Elias knelt by Sarad’s side and pressed a hand over his
ruined throat. Sarad clasped a hand over Elias’s and began convulsing. “Take the
queen to safety, Danica, through the way we came. I’ll hold the hall. With the
head of the dragon gone, Oberon will yield the throne once we make ourselves
known to the other Houses.”

“No.” Eithne stepped close to her Marshal. To Ogden she
said, “Bar the doors, wizard.”

“Elias is right, child,” Ogden said. “We can retake Lucerne,
but not if we die here today.”

Eithne stood tall despite the wracking pain in her back. “No
more running,” she said. “We’ve cowered from this evil long enough. Here we
stand or here we die. There are swords in Lucerne yet loyal to their queen,
once they know she still lives. All we need do is hold until they get here.”

“Your wait will be short!” Bryn cried. “They’re rounding the
corner!”

“You have your orders, Sentinel,” the queen said.

Elias locked eyes with Sarad and wondered at the other man’s
thoughts. The necromancer’s hold on his hand weakened and a wry smile crinkled
his blasted face. Elias held fast as the lights went out of his murky eyes. Sarad
Mirengi, Prelate of the Church of the One God, dark lord of the Scarlet Hand,
exhaled a wet sigh and died.

Ogden said no more and stepped away from the party. He
lifted his hands and drew deep on the final dregs of his power, fueling his
magic with all the raw emotion that had sustained him through the terror of the
last fortnight. With a mighty groan the marble doors that Elias had sundered
from their hinges rose and creaked back into place, even as he saw the first
ranks of the Scarlet Hand racing down the hall. With near mind-breaking effort
Ogden held them in place while he wove an energy barrier to seal them. A powder
blue force field crackling with arcs of lightning formed in the archway.

Ogden turned to Eithne and blinked against the headache
forming between his eyes only to discover that he was sitting on the floor. He
tried to push himself back to his feet but motes of white light danced before
his eyes.

Eithne knelt by his side. “Rest now, old friend,” she
whispered.

“We need a plan and we need one fast,” said Danica. “Lar,
help me gather weapons.” She looked about the chamber. “Lar, where are you
hiding?”

Agnar rested a hand on Danica’s shoulder. “He fell, lass.”

Danica looked up at the northman. “What?”

“He took on one of the enemy barehanded to protect your
flank. Picked him up clean over his head even though the fiend poured enough
black magic into him to kill a leviathan.”

“Lar was a leviathan,” Danica said in a broken voice and
knuckled tears from her eyes. “Now help me gather weapons. We need a plan or
we’ll see him soon enough.”

Agnar complied, gathering the fallen Handsmen’s effects with
Bryn and Danica, while Phinneas and Eithne tended Ogden and Elias absorbed
himself in studying Mirengi’s spellform.

“It’s a pity,” Agnar said when he neared Lar’s body. “He was
a good man, and we sure could use his sword arm now.”

The first hammering of blows fell on the other side of the
doors.

“Angar,” said Danica,” don’t just stand there like a
frightened doe. They come!”

“By Vornac’s axe,” Agnar swore, “I think he’s still alive!”

Danica dropped the cache of weapons she held in her arms and
rushed to Lar’s side. Upon his face lay the pallor of death—bloodless and ashen
skin spiderwebbed with purple veins. The fell wizard had literally sucked the
life from him. Danica laid a hand on his clammy forehead. “Lar, I’m here.”

“Dan-i-ca,” Lar said wrestling with his black and swollen
tongue to form the word. “Is-it-o-ver?”

“Yes, we’ve won—for now. Mirengi’s reinforcements are at the
doors, though Ogden has barred them.” Tears slid down her face. “We could use
your help, but here you are just lying about and taking it easy while the rest
of us work.”

Something like a smile split his blasted features, then a
dry, hacking cough seized him. “Dan-i-ca. Are my eye-s o-pen?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I-I can-t see.”

To hear the naked fear in the voice of the towering and
indestructible Lar, who never had the good sense to fear anything, was more
than she could bear. Black despair soon burned away under the white fire of her
anger.

“They’ve breached the doors,” Agnar said quietly. “All that
restrains them now is Ogden’s magic.”

“Then we best get Lar up and outfitted for battle.” Danica
kept one hand on his forehead and splayed the other over his sternum. She
closed her eyes and at once felt a peculiar dislocation from her body as she
spiraled down into the void.

Agnar watched, dumfounded, as a veil of green light clothed
Danica’s splayed hand. For all its brilliance, the glow had a gentle quality
that seemed to embody the very essence of spring. The glow fanned out until it
encased Lar’s entire body. Then Agnar had to look away, for the light shined so
bright that it dazzled his eyes. He turned back to see that Lar had sat up and,
aside from an expression of bewilderment, looked as hale as the day Agnar had
met him at the queen’s banquet.

For Agnar’s part, a feeling of wellbeing overtook him and
the fatigue and myriad aches that had plagued him moments before vanished. “If
it is our fate to die today,” he said, “I can go to the halls of my fathers
contently, knowing that I do so by the side of some of the finest people I’ve
ever known.”

“Don’t give up the ghost yet,” said Danica as she helped Lar
to his feet. “Look now, my brother has a plan.”

Elias crouched over Sarad’s spellform thoughtfully,
oblivious to the rest of the party and the thunder of magic on the other side
of the doors. “I’ve seen this symbol before,” he said as he traced the six
sided star with his eyes.

Phinneas looked up from Ogden. “I should think so. It’s on
your badge, and the Denar coat of arms.”

“Yes,” sighed Elias, “I know that. I mean that I’ve seen it
somewhere else as well.”

“How long will Ogden’s wall hold against them?” Bryn asked.

“Not long, I think,” said Phinneas as he peeled back Ogden’s
eyelids and peered into his senseless eyes.

“If you have a plan, hero,” Bryn said with a levity in her
tone that she did not feel, “now’s the time.”

“I bound Sarad’s magic with the spell of binding,” Elias
said.

“And if we get out of this, I’ll be curious to know how you
managed it.” Phinneas looked up again as a particularly loud crash issued from
the other side of the ruined doors.

Elias glanced at his father’s badge and the heraldry of
House Denar, a stag standing before a tree with seven stars caught in its
boughs. “Seven six sided stars. Seven founding houses of Galacia. Draw a line
between the stars and you find another six sided star, with one in the center,
caught in the circle of the tree boughs, just as Sarad stood in the center of a
spellform that was a six sided star set in a circle.”

Elias’s thoughts turned to the vision he had when he touched
the wytchwood and saw Lucerne palace from above. “Of course! How could I be so
blind.”

“What is it?” Bryn said.

Elias noticed that the party had drawn about him, steel in
hand and prepared for battle. He glanced up from the spellform as the doors to
the throne room fell away. Now naught but Ogden’s wall of iridescent, blue
energy stood between them and the remainder of the Scarlet Hand’s forces. “Six
outer towers on the palace walls,” he said, “six inner spires set around the
central dome of this room. Draw lines between the outer towers and what do you
have?”

Phinneas put a hand on Elias’s shoulder. “A six sided star, but
what does it mean?”

“It’s the same with the inner spires—another six sided star
with this throne room at the center, just as House Denar is the central star in
the coat of arms. That’s why Sarad chose this room. This entire palace is a
colossal spellform, set inside another spellform, with the outer and inner
walls drawing the circle, and the throne room is the center of it all.”

“Impressive, professor,” Danica said, “but as we’re all
about to buy the distillery how does this help us?”

“The spell I used to bind Sarad’s magic is based on the
principle of empyrean geometry.”

“Sacred geometry?” Phinneas said, naming the ancient Eurinthian
school of thought. “It’s held as just a myth by modern arcanists.”

“It’s no myth,” said Elias. “My father’s lessons began and
ended with empyrean geometry.” He stepped into the center of Sarad’s spellform
and raised his sword to the skylight. He hoped that his sword had absorbed
enough power, and that enough remained in his own dwindling stores, to complete
what he had in mind. “Step clear of the circle. I’m going to bind the Scarlet
Hand.”

Elias spoke the words of binding again, the ancient incantation
bubbling up from his subconscious mind. The words at once drove him into the
center of the void, a quasi trance state where all things he had ever learned
were known to him. A beam of white energy erupted from his sword and shot into
the night, where it disappeared into the black, untold reaches of the sky.

Ogden’s wall flickered under an arcane assault from the
Scarlet Hand, even as six lesser beams of white light split from the central
beam discharging from Elias’s sword and lit the stained glass on each of the
six spires of the inner keep of Lucerne Palace. From the spires the beams of
light crisscrossed and returned to the central pillar and thus erected a three
dimensional, six sided star of light. Elias uttered the last word of binding. “Thus
do I bind the Scarlet Hand!” he cried, his voice charged with the otherworldly
resonance of the Deep Arcanum.

Elias lowered his sword, which was now spent of all arcane
energy it had absorbed from Sarad’s ritual. A hush fell over the chamber as the
queen’s party vacillated between gaping at Elias and the monumental, glittering
star of light that hung over the skylight, bright as a midday sun. As one, they
turned their attention to the throne room entrance as Ogden’s wall dispelled
with a crash of sparks.

Elias remained in position in the center of the spell-circle
as the first of the Scarlet Hand stepped into the throne room, motioning for
the others to hold their positions. “That’s quite far enough,” Elias said.

“You’re in no position to make demands, Marshal,” said a
tall Handsman with oiled hair and the caramel skin of the warrior tribes of
Aradur. “There are three-score swords at my back. You are to be applauded for
your rout of Lord Mirengi, but it was no less than he deserved for his lax
judgment. It will go better for you if you surrender peaceably. You cannot hope
to stand against so many.”

Elias glared at the Handsman but remained stock still. He
knew that their fates and that of Galacia hinged on his performance now, even
as he felt so drained from his momentous arcane workings that he could hardly
keep himself from swaying on his feet, for though the Hand’s power was bound,
so many could indeed overpower the queen’s party. “You Handsmen keep on saying
that to me, and yet here I stand. Again.” He opened his hands and snorted. “What
say you, Your Highness? Do we surrender?”

“Not ever,” said Eithne who stood to her fullest height,
and, affecting all the regality of a woman who had lived thirty years under the
royal roof of House Denar, glided across the throne room to stand by Elias’s
side. The rest of the party fell into position and formed a line across the
center of the chamber.

“There you have it,” said Elias. He felt Danica’s
surreptitious hand on the small of his back, for she sensed his faltering
strength and lent him her support.

The lieutenant responded by raising a hand, and, on cue,
four Handsman fanned out behind him and followed suit. Bursts of puce magical
energy formed before their hands and then fizzled into a stutter of sparks. The
Handsman exchanged bewildered glances.

With a casual flick of his wrist Elias cast out a ripple of force
energy, visible in the air like the disturbance in a pond caused by a skipping
stone. The lieutenant was ripped from his feet and sailed through the air and
down the long hallway, bowling over his compatriots and then bouncing off the
far wall, whereupon he went still as a sack of grain. “Your power is broken and
quite beyond your reach,” Elias said with a cold thunder in his voice.

The Hand’s formation shifted and another man took point. He
drew his scimitar and took a cautious step toward the queen’s party, his sword
raised in a high guard. As the light from the golden star above fell upon him,
the black steel of his blade shivered and dissolved into ash.

Elias did not raise his voice but it gathered gravity and
echoed down the hall and through the inner keep with tenacious, insistent
power. “Even your dark-tempered steel will not avail you here, sons of the
Scarlet Hand. Take your lives and flee this land before I repeal my oath to not
put to the sword disarmed enemies.”

The Lieutenant threw down the hilt of his ruined sword and
began to speak. “You may have won thi—” he began before Elias sighed and
flicked his wrist again, and the new point-man followed his predecessor down
the hall on a gale of arcane wind.

The Scarlet Hand’s ranks broke like a black tide upon a
lighthouse dam. Elias stood fast in the center of the spell-circle and watched
as the enemy fled. When the last of them disappeared, Elias exhaled the breath
he had been holding since his father and Asa had died three months ago at Midsummer’s.
His knees buckled, but Danica and Lar were there to catch him.