The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (87 page)

They had all been positioned the same, and so moved as if choreographed, their soulless husks sitting up on elbows then swinging legs off the slab, sliding down, gaining balance and straightening.  He had placed the garments the same as well, in the same order, so making them dress themselves was no difficult task.  Bodies remembered their routines, and by keeping them on a loose rein, he allowed them to compensate for their own differences in height and build.

Their garments had been pared down from what he had collected: tunics, breeches, underthings, boots.  None of the weapons and armor these soldiers had worn in life, or their Gold insignias; just enough to cover the autopsy marks.

With his free hand, Enkhaelen reached back to reactivate the portal-frame behind him.  It remembered its last destination: a bare basement room that could have been anywhere.  Once his puppets were all dressed, he tugged them toward it, and they obeyed.

It took a bit of finesse to get them into single file, but he put them through until they were standing in ranks like mannequins, facing the far wall.  From his pocket he extracted a string of black beads, examined it, then frowned and slung it over his shoulder before pulling out another.  And another, and a fourth, fifth, sixth.

“Always the last one,” he muttered.  Bunching it up in his hand, he reached through the portal then clenched hard.

The thin glass shells of the beads crunched against each other, releasing streams of dark smoke that streamed up from between his fingers to swirl together in a moaning, shivering mass.  A twitch of the wheel made them separate, and they shot down the threads to seek their bodies.

As the first corpse began to cough, its thread shuddering with the confusion of its reseated soul, Enkhaelen loosed them all.  He wanted to watch—to see how well his spells had worked—but he couldn't afford such vanity.

More coughed, and one lifted its head as if to look toward him, so he popped the portal.

It took only a few moments' work to dismantle the frame and stuff it into one of his dimensional pockets.  Then he triggered another arm of the puppeteer's wheel, pulled another subset of the Gold company to its feet, and delivered it to a destination of its own.

And so for the third, and the fourth, and the fifth.

Lastly, the lower left hand.  He paused to dismantle the final portal-frame first; it wouldn't be necessary.  Then he stood the corpses up and put them through a different routine, since robes required more effort than tunics and trousers.

Gold robes.  The same ones they had come in with.

This was the delicate part.  He had stripped mages' souls from their bodies before, but putting them back in was tricky, and the alterations he had made might prove troublesome.  As he looked them over, their eyes glassy as they swayed on their feet, he wondered what he could have done with more preparation.

But, considering that this had been an unexpected windfall, he was content with his work.

Still holding them in place, he backed toward the door, which irised open in response to his proximity.  A last glance showed him the laboratory bared to its bones, his office a mess of torn black rock, the casting-chamber scoured clean.  With his free hand he snapped the last spells, and the cooling-runes went out, their faint ambient light dimming to nothing.

In darkness lit only by his crackling wheel, he stepped across the threshold and released the last threads, crushing the last beads at the same time.

As the door pinched shut, he heard the first gasps of awakening.

Quickly he unmade the spell that animated the door, returning it to solid basalt.  Then he ran up the hallway, canceling the lights in his wake.  His prisoners would not follow; with the laboratory sealed, their only way out was to call Sanctuary or make a portal.

Once the first one escaped, this would become a race against time.

He sprinted past the dark cafeteria and gathering-rooms, past the halls to the dormitories, sweeping up the remnants of his magic as he went.  His wheel had faded as its last threads were cut, still there but inert; he did not have time to fold it away.  It lit his path until the orange radiance of the magma chamber overwhelmed its thin blue glow.

Still at speed, he aimed for the balustrade that edged the out-thrust balcony and leapt atop it with birdlike ease.  The heavy wards that protected the complex from the magma's heat and fumes tried to resist him, but he opened his channels and drank it in, ending the spells that had made this place habitable.

A breath of Primal Fire rolled in around him, making the wards on his combat gear light up.  He ignored them; his eyes were on the pylons that rose from the magma, their sides inscribed with the foot-deep runes that channeled the hot-spot's energy to the Citadel above.  Without this vast power-source, the concentrated presence of the Citadel's magi would have turned the land around Valent to sand and dust long ago.

Enkhaelen stamped his heels on the balustrade to trigger the runes in his boots, then used their force to spring across the thirty-yard gap.  Thin ward-wings snapped out at the top of the arc to let him glide, and he landed near the pylon's peak, where a huge shard of pinkish wraith-crystal protruded from the shaped stone.  He had stolen it from fallen Anlirindallora in the Corvish forest, along with many others—some of which were now tucked beneath his minions' robes, fused into their daggers.

Bracing his feet, he pulled at the crystal, drawing off its heat and light to empower his efforts.  His gloves smouldered even through their wards, and by the time he managed to free the crystal from its setting, several silver threads had vaporized.  He balanced it at the edge of the pylon for a moment, wanting to keep it but aware he couldn't fit a two-foot-wide object through the opening of his dimensional pocket.

“Pike it,” he muttered, and pushed it off to tumble into the magma.  Just removing it would be good enough.

Quicker now, he did the same to the other five, his leaps taking him further and further from the balcony.  He had cut all of the sensory spells that had allowed him to track people through the complex, so did not know if the Gold mages were here or gone, but prudence said,
Bet on gone and tailor your behavior appropriately.

No time, no time.

With the crystals removed, the equilibrium between magma pool and Citadel began to shift.  How this would play out naturally, he did not know, and a part of him itched to step back and observe.  But he had more to do—so much more.

As the depowered pylons began to sink into the magma, he sketched a door in the air and said the words, his portal-anchor rings lighting up as they connected to the frame in his upstairs office.  The air around him shimmered, clarified, and he stepped on through.

*****

In the glow of bobbing mage-lights, the remaining Gold-robes argued.

Some of their brethren had called Sanctuary as soon as their eyes opened.  Others had done so since, too unnerved by their surroundings to try to figure them out.  Now there were only four, and Risca was determined that they all go as soon as possible.

“But we need to understand what happened to us!” said Vauler, a hefty young man who had been pasty even before this.  Though his deep-set eyes were frantic, he kept looking toward the slabs, not the blank doorless walls like the others.

“It doesn't matter,” said Einla, his short friend.  “We had a mission and we have to report back, not start a new investigation.”

“You're not even curious?” said Feros, the most militant one.  He kept clapping his hip as if expecting to find his sword there, but like all their gear, it was gone.  “The rest of those pissing cowards I understand, but I thought you had some grit, Einla.”

“Don't try to taunt him into this,” said Risca, crossing her arms tightly.  “We don't know how long it's been, and I have no scrying tools.  Wherever we are, we won't figure it out from the inside.”

Feros scowled and gestured around.  “Someone was obviously active here.  Examining the place could give us the clues we need to find the perpetrator—“

“We can always come back.”

“I don't know,” said Vauler.  “This place feels unstable.  What if we can't?”

“I'd punch you out and 'port you with me if you weren't the equivalent of three,” Einla muttered at him.  Vauler looked wounded.

“Look, I'll leave a tracer,” said Risca.  “If our captor is gone, then they can't erase it.  If they're not, then...just as well that we fled.”

“The four of us can—“

“What, Feros?  Do what the twelve of us did, and get knocked out again?”

“Those black-robed bastards won't get the drop on me twice.”

Risca uncrossed her arms and reached out to give his a squeeze.  “And what if they're not here?  What if they've gone on to attack our people elsewhere?  We leave a trace, we check in at the Hawk's Pride, then we come back with reinforcements.  All right?”

He glared at her, but in the mage-light he looked as pale and worn as the others.  Finally his shoulders sagged, and he nodded.  “Drop the trace, then.”

She did: a dollop of energy on a fine thread that would connect to her no matter how far she traveled, the haphazard cousin of a scrying stone.  It felt strange—heavier than usual, her magic flowing less smoothly—but she attributed that to whatever she had gone through here.  Then, though Vauler and Feros hesitated, they all called Sanctuary.

The disjunction was easy to take; before becoming a Gold combat-mage, Risca had been a scryer.  Still, to find her room at the Hawk's Pride dark and dusty, the bed covered in death-offerings and half her books missing, was a shock.  To be presumed dead meant she had lost quite some time.

A week?  A month?

She strode out into the common space, where soft radiance showed her empty couches, a table scattered with cards and cups, an untended pot boiling over on the heat-stone.  Doors stood open into the others' bedrooms, and the door to the hall as well, through which she caught the low murmur of a crowd.

Of course.  The others had returned first, so there was a commotion going on.

Just at the threshold, a wave of nausea went through her, and she caught hold of the door-frame, wincing.  It felt like a hot hand inside her chest, kneading her innards.

Voices rose in the distance, a clamor of surprise.  The came a low, dull thud like something heavy being dropped on a rug.

The following shockwave flung her to the floor.

She bounced, rolled with the suddenly heaving ground, and curled up tight as bottles and furniture and books went tumbling with her.  It was over in mere moments, but when she staggered to her feet she saw the cracks in the plastered walls, the dust sifting down—and heard the screams.

Stumbling, weak-legged and with that hot-iron drag in her gut, she made it to the hallway, past the other dormitory suites, and out to the cold courtyard that fringed the Hawk's Pride.

The sky rained fire.

No, not fire
, she realized as another dull
whump
sounded from the far side of the great central tower—one of its spires exploding into multicolored debris, the pieces falling like meteors to blast holes in the far courtyard. 
Magic.  Burning spellwork.  Arcane shrapnel.

Holy Light, we're under attack.

She staggered forward, the hot fist now actively trying to drag her to earth.  From the gates of the tower, Gold mages streamed out to join the dormitory crowds, and the buttressing casting-chambers had also opened to disgorge their occupants.  All was a cacophony of screams and orders, wards blinking to life rapidly among the rattled crowd.  Some mages fled for the compound's gates, but others stood their ground or tried to organize in defense.

Against what, she could not see.

Are the enemies inside...?

A sudden chill, a sudden tension in the air, and half the crowd cast wards.

The chamber beneath the Water Buttress disintegrated in a wave of sound and heat and force, scything down nearby mages and smacking Risca to the cobbles.  Curiously, she barely felt it, and as her vision cleared she saw broken pieces of buttress and walls raining down from above.  Ears ringing, she raised her arms in feeble defense and looked around; more mages cowered or lay still than those that dared rise, and though the Hawk's Pride still had five more supports, it suddenly seemed fragile, its crown spouting smoke and arcane flames.

The Gold Archmagi lived in those towers, she realized.  And two of the six were gone.

Another rumble, and the entire crowd cringed, but it was deeper—underground.  The courtyard shivered, clinging pieces of the Water Buttress dropping onto the bodies strewn beneath it.  Risca tried to rise, but the heat would not let her; it seemed to sap the strength from her limbs, the warmth from the churned-up air around her.

Beneath her hands, threads of frost expanded across the stone.

Someone was shouting her name.  She turned her head slowly, trying to see through the rushing field of robes, and caught a glimpse of Feros: stripped to the waist, Gold robe balled up in his hands.  Radiance pulsed out from the Y-shaped stitchwork down his chest.

She opened her mouth to call or perhaps scream, but then the radiance lit him up from the inside, showing his bones for the instant before he detonated.  The blast swept the courtyard again, shards of pavings like a rain of arrows on the crowd, and then came another low
whump
from below, another shudder of the earth.