Rift in the Races (22 page)

Finally some luck, thought Altin, but before he could spend a moment appreciating it, another explosion followed right after the one he had made. This one washed the room with purple light and carried with it the flung forms of the royal assassin and one of the shamans. They flew across the small space and up the stairs where they crashed into the wall a step below Altin. They struck the stone together, a pair of dull thuds, and then fell and rolled down two steps before coming to a stop. The shaman did not move, but the elf was up immediately. He kicked the shaman over with a black-booted foot and pulled his long knife out of the dead caster’s back. Altin realized as Shadesbreath extracted the weapon that the explosion was the result of an interrupted spell, the magic cut short and concussive energy released.

The remaining shaman began to cast another spell, having recovered quickly from the blast, but the elf hurled his newly-reclaimed knife and put an end to whatever it had had in mind. Two neat rotations marked the knife’s flight before it planted itself firmly in the caster’s head, straight in through the chanting mouth with six inches of steel jutting out the back and dripping a pink mixture of blood and spinal fluid onto the floor. The force of the impact turned the orc halfway around before it fell over dead.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Andru continued to have his hands full with the two he’d tackled, and there were still four orcs with crossbows, all of them reloading and eyeballing their attackers warily. The elf immediately set to work on one of these last, leaving Altin to decide what to do with the other three.

He considered casting another fireball, but there really was no room for one, not with the elf and the lieutenant moving about the room. His mind whirled through his list of offensive spells. He really didn’t have anything suitable memorized beyond the standard stuff every mage that had drilled in the Queen’s service would never forget: fireball, ice lance and ice storm. These were sword, spear and artillery of the combat mage. However, none were decent choices in close quarters like this. He did, however, also know his combat teleport spell, the one he’d come up with while fighting the Hostile orbs in space.

But these weren’t orbs.

There were laws against teleporting living things into objects. Moral and written laws, but mostly moral. He’d sworn an oath. No teleporter could teleport another living thing with the intent to kill. Mainly the law was written to prevent Transportation Guild Services members from sending clean rooms full of travelers into the side of a hill, which had happened, sadly—a love affair gone wrong cost thirteen innocent people their lives, which explained why it had ever occurred to anyone to make such a seemingly unnecessary law. It was said that the goddess Hestra brewed the venom she gave to the black widow spider from the collected tears of all those women whose husbands had abandoned them for the favors of other, inevitably younger girls—if ever an event lent an air of plausibility to the myth, the tragedy at the TGS depot that day was one. So there were laws preventing it, and oaths required. And that was quite aside from the fact that individuals, people outside “the box” as the TGS called it, couldn’t be teleported unwillingly at all.

Intelligent creatures, or frenzied ones, could resist. Altin was certain the orcs were intelligent enough. They’d resist it, the body’s natural defensive mechanism, the sort of reflex that prevents people from falling out of bed at night or that makes things like grasping a red hot iron or intentionally stabbing oneself through the eye nearly impossible to do. It is certainly possible for someone to try such things, and even possible to succeed at it, but the amount of willpower and personal strength—or the amount of absence of it, in the case of suicide and that sort of thing—is tremendous. For most, it just doesn’t work. There’s no thought involved in resisting, the mind simply won’t allow it to happen if it doesn’t want to. Such was the case with direct teleportation of another person, and it was only in cases of extreme emotive states that it had ever been accomplished—animal magic, called raw, uncontrolled, even evil. Animal magic had killed his sister when they were children. Altin’s animal magic. He feared ever doing it again, though he didn’t think it was possible now. Such was the danger of nascent magic in children, a possibility that went away with maturity.

Which meant he really didn’t know what to cast into that milling combat that didn’t have as much chance of killing the elf and the lieutenant as any of the orcs.

The farthest of the crossbowmen got a quarrel loaded and fired a shot that hit Lieutenant Andru in the chest. The clank of the quarrel striking steel plate rung loudly, and the force of it actually drove the young man back a step. The padded armor and chainmail beneath had done their job stopping that shot, but two others were taking aim. Altin wasn’t sure the lieutenant’s armor was up to all that.

“Anvilwrath’s hammer,” he cursed. He had to do something. A second quarrel bounced off the lieutenant’s thigh plate.

Altin had to try. Morals be damned. They didn’t apply to orcs anyway. He chanted the words to the teleporting spell, the same one he’d used on the orbs.

His mind slipped into the mana stream. He could see the drift of it moving toward the door, the Queen’s sorcerers pulling at it in numbers enough to move it that way. He plucked out a sufficient quantity to wrap around two of the orcs with crossbows. He sent a rope of it toward them, winding it around them, binding them together, loosely at first, but intent on drawing it taut and snapping them together as if he were smashing a pair of eggs.

When he had them wound up well enough, the whole of it only taking him a handful of heartbeats at best, he yanked upon his end of the line, so to speak, and brought them together.

Or so he thought. When he opened his eyes, he saw that nothing happened.

The third quarrel cut a gash along the lieutenant’s neck. Blood began running down into his armor immediately.

Stupid! Altin thought. Stupid to even try
.
But he had to do something. The elf was still fighting the fourth crossbowman hand to hand, the orc having drawn a short sword and fending off the elf’s attacks with the blade in one hand and the crossbow in the other.

All three of the others were reloading again.

Altin scanned the room, looking for something, anything that he might use. The torches, one on either side of the cellar door.

He closed his eyes again and began to chant. This time he wrapped the mana cord around a torch on one end and an orc at the other, right around the throat. A moment later that orc fell backwards, the top of the torch protruding from its skull like a wine cork. Altin had merged the length of it with the orc, perpendicularly, on a line down into its body from skull to brains to throat and down into its chest four hands deep.

Altin was fairly sure that was in violation of the spirit of his oath, if not the actual language of the law—and most likely it was both.

He did it again, not in time to prevent the second crossbowman from firing, but in time to prevent it from a second breath after the shot was away.

It fell, like the other, with a few finger-widths of torch jutting from its head like an odd little cap.

The third crossbowman shifted his aim immediately to Altin, hearing the sound of his chants and seeing the end effects if not understanding the nature of them. Altin saw him swing the weapon his way and threw himself back up the stairs, just quickly enough to avoid a quarrel through the brain. As it was, the iron shaft crossed his brow on its way into the stone wall, cutting a finger-long gash that began trickling blood into his left eye.

He pressed his hand against the cut to stop the bleeding and chanced a look back around the wall. Andru was still in trouble, but the elf had taken down his opponent and was about to finish off the orc that had nearly skewered Altin’s head. That’s when the Queen’s men were able to push through the flames at the door and rush into the room. In moments, all was under control, both the lieutenant’s adversaries cut down in two quick and efficient axe strokes by a grizzled old sergeant of the Queen’s infantry, and the other crossbowmen done for by the elf and a blood-smeared knight.

“Scour the rest of the keep,” Altin heard the Queen command from outside. “Make sure we got them all.”

Tytamon pushed his way into the crowded space.

“How many went into the cellars?” he asked urgently.

“I don’t know,” Altin replied, coming down the last few steps and still mopping at the cut above his eye.

“We’ve got to get down and see.” He sent Altin the most desperate of looks. He’d known the man for well over a decade, lived with him, fought with him, and he’d never seen
that
look on his face before. But Altin knew why.

That’s when yet another loud explosion rocked the tower and brought down thin clouds of dust again.

“Run!” shouted Tytamon upon hearing it, and in the time it took Altin to blink, the old man was sprinting down the stairs, quick as a deer, and quite despite the burns to his leg having been only spot-healed by a medic outside. Altin was after Tytamon in an instant. Only the elf had been faster through the door.

They charged down the stairs, leaping them as fast as balance would allow. Tytamon was amazingly spry for a man of his age and injuries.

The great mage had summoned a lightning charge as he ran. Altin could see it begin to crackle up and down his mentor’s arm, making his whole body glow purplish-blue. A dangerous way to do it, Altin knew. Reckless. Testament to how fearful Tytamon was that he wouldn’t have time before the orcs had got what he feared they might. What Altin feared they might.

The Liquefying Stones.

The blue light of Tytamon’s lightning illuminated the darkness as Altin came to the dusty lowest level, the ancient sorcerer still ten steps ahead. He charged through after him, the thick mat of dust on the floor churned to a nearly impenetrable fog by the passing of the elder mage and that of the orcs that had gone before. Altin couldn’t see a thing other than the glow from Tytamon’s spell.

Then came a flash of blue light, amplified by the dust everywhere to nearly blinding brilliance, and at the same time he heard Tytamon cry out, “No!”

He came to the basement’s far wall in time to see a huge orc leap out of the small room at the farthest end and tackle Tytamon to the ground. The elven assassin leapt on it immediately, knives flashing in the yellow flicker of something burning a few paces beyond the grappling pile that was the three of them.

It took Altin a few moments to get past the flurry of knives and teeth, but he moved quickly, stepping over the burning corpse of an orc shaman whose body steamed from a black hole in its chest where the lightning bolt had scored. He coughed and waved at the foul smoke and the dust as he pushed through the haze, summoning the hissing core of an ice lance as he went, using its blue light to illuminate his way. This was not a place for fire.

He peered through the dust into the tiny room beyond as it became visible. There were two orcs inside. An ancient and frail-looking shaman and one of the brutes, although this one a spectacular specimen, so enormous the breadth of its shoulders nearly filled the space wall to wall. The shaman was in the midst of some savage chant, and the brute held a small leather pouch in its filthy hands. It looked up at Altin and gave a great triumphant roar as Altin sent the ice lance on its way. The last thing Altin saw was its great display of teeth before the shaman teleported the pair of them out, the ice lance flying through the vacated space to crash uselessly against the back wall, its remnants tumbling to the floor, ineffectual and too late, in a miniature avalanche of frost and ice.

By the time Tytamon could be pulled out from beneath the body of the armored orc, the Queen and several more soldiers had arrived.

“Is everyone all right?” she demanded.

“I think so,” replied Altin as Tytamon made his way into the tiny room.

The ancient wizard searched frantically through all the shelves. It was far more effort than he needed, for most were empty and had been all along. But still he searched, though he already knew.

“Stay back,” Altin warned as others moved to see. The stones were gone, for sure. But what else? He went in behind his master and scanned the shelves as well. What was Tytamon looking for?

He had to search his memory for what else he’d seen in there, so long ago it now seemed since the day Tytamon had first shown him the Liquefying Stones. He couldn’t recall much, so focused had he been on the prospects of the incredibly powerful yellow crystals in that brown leather pouch. He remembered a skull. He looked for it. It wasn’t there. There had been a lace-covered box: that was gone as well, but possibly on the floor somewhere. He looked about for it, but there wasn’t enough room for him to move with Tytamon in there. He looked about for other things. There had been a few books, it seemed, but then, there were books everywhere in Calico Castle, so he couldn’t be too sure about that memory.

“They got the stones,” said Tytamon in a vicious whisper that only Altin could hear. “They’re gone, and you cannot say a thing. Not to anyone!” His gray eyes jerked in the direction of the Queen and her men outside, the whole roundness of his irises visible in the white field of his alarming urgency. “
Anyone
!”

Altin jerked back from that. Startled not by the fact of the missing stones, frightening as that was, but by the thought of not telling the Queen immediately that such power had just fallen into the hands of a centuries-old and mortal enemy.