The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (89 page)

With the iron ring hanging mangled around him, he flew backward through the gap.  Salandry's elemental horde boiled out in pursuit.

Flying came easily to him.  His current method was a composite of many types: terrestrial repulsion, raptor-spirit traits, wraith-like gravity denial, elemental buoying, air-current control, wards, wings, soulcraft.  He had been at it for so long that switching types was a matter of reflex, shifting from instant to instant as the environment changed.

And so he did not need spells or gestures or more than an instant's warning to dodge the three Artificing constructs that tried to spear him from the sky.

He swung the crimped ring about in response, barely missing the trailing one.  There were three in total, all bright metal and sailcloth and crystalline shock-batteries, their carapaces covered in reflective 'eyes'—actually scrying mirrors linked to their operators in the Artificing labs.  He had seen them in flight before, and even now admired their grace and precision.

Varrol had done much to advance the Artificing discipline.  He would be sorry to kill her.

Well.  Sorry-ish.

The constructs had long saw-edged blades at both ends.  They scythed through the air as the constructs banked, then came in for another shot.

He flipped the ring up at the last moment, batting one into the sky with a crunch of delicate machinery, and dropped out of the center at the same time.  The remaining two cut a scissor path over his head, barely missing each other, and took their distance while the falling one struggled to glide.

“Are the blades new?” he shouted toward the broken wall.  There was fighting still going on in there; he could see the flare of salamanders and phosphors, hear the clash of metal and stone.  The lack of attention irritated him, and he regretted giving Salandry the wink; that stupid man had decided they were starting the revolution and then had thrown elementals at him.

Oh well.  I suppose I did hit him first.

But destroying a few constructs was not his idea of a good fight.  As he evaded another pass, he glanced down at the Citadel he had raised from dust.  Most classes were over for the year, the population perhaps a third of what it usually was, but the balconies were full of staring faces, and the bridges and catwalks and spiral stairs were crowded.  No construct palanquins moved, only foot-traffic: walking swiftly or running.

And there were portals open everywhere.

He smiled.  Snowfoot and Qisvar were doing their jobs.

In the depths, where no one had bothered to whitewash the black rock and no windows opened, he sensed the boiling.  The magma would make quick work of the earthglobs, root filters and janitorial slimes that dealt with the effluvia of the city.  He would have pitied them, but most elementals felt no pain—only Wood, and he and Wood were not friends.

Soon the service Summoners and greenhouse Artificers would be rushing up the stairs, trying to escape.  Soon the Warders whose spells blocked the sewage-stink from the rest of the Citadel would feel their work fray and dissolve.  Soon the smoke would rise to clear the balconies of gawkers.

Soon they would all run.

He beat another construct from the sky with the ring, still waiting on his Council enemies.  More constructs were approaching from below, their silver backs reflecting the sun, and he thought about how he had planned to gas this place in its sleep.  Shunt water into the magma chamber and dissolve it under pressure, build up the volatiles, then seep them into the vents and ducts that webbed the entire Citadel.

Perhaps half a century ago, he would have done it.  He had certainly planned for it when he raised this place over the magma pool.  Its whole structure anticipated it: the narrow passages behind the walls, the fine network of drains and tunnels and reservoirs, the air-tight seals that kept the towers temperate throughout the year.  All were made to trap the occupants, to fill the rooms with poison: to gather the Silent Circle into its supposed place of power and exterminate it in one sweep.

He wasn't sure, exactly, what had changed his mind.

He still felt the rage.  Four hundred years had not dimmed it one speck.  They and their ilk had hounded him, killed his friends and relatives, and ultimately betrayed this land—siding with Altaera over Ruen Wyn in that ancient, devastating war.  He had fought them as hard as he could, those hypocritical bastards.  Those liars and murderers, purported to be above such politics yet willingly chaining themselves to a throne.

Only the names had changed.  Altaera and Ruen Wyn were both gone, but the Silent Circle now huddled under the wing of the Risen Phoenix, and though it had split from the Inquisition, it taught the same blinkered view of history.  Heroic mages; wicked spirits and cults; invaders who civilized those they conquered.

Yet he hadn't lied when he'd told Geraad of his time as a student.  From the moment he set foot inside the Citadel at Darakus, the rage had been balanced by wonder—by the sense of a whole new world opening up before him.  Screw the politics: there was art too, and wisdom, and literature, mathematics, systems, symbology—all unpacked and argued at length by people as fervently in love with magic as him.

For a mage trained via brief apprenticeship and violent self-study—for a man who still felt like a boy, lost, unmoored, uncultured—it had been like a punch in the gut.  This was why the Circle thought themselves superior.  Because, in many ways, they were.

Perhaps, if he hadn't been bound to the Emperor, he would have surrendered to his intellect and been subsumed into the way of the Circle.  Perhaps he would have been happy.

But Aradys was always there.  Demanding.  Reminding.

And every time he was pulled from his studies to see the grander Imperial pattern, the rage swelled up again.  Nothing had changed.  Four hundred years and these people still repeated the mistakes of their ancestors, antagonized the world around them, and believed all would be well as long as they meant well.

He'd tried crippling them.  Stealing knowledge, erasing it.  Killing innovators who would have given the Empire an edge on its neighbors.  Fomenting and crushing internal conflicts to keep the organization in line.

It wasn't enough.  The Emperor had kept him on too short of a leash to really quash the Circle's advancement, and though they were handicapped in comparison to mages of the Gejaran and Yezadran schools, they could still hold their own.  And as his plans had faltered, so had his focus.  What could have been a revenge for the ages was now a shoddy victim of the game he played with the Emperor.

He wanted to enjoy this.  He needed to.  Yet, looking down upon the scurrying ignorant masses, he felt nothing.

Shake it off.  It's not over.  Anything could happen.

Trying to trick himself back into the mood, he focused on the distant people.  They were escaping him, and he liked that.  As much as he yearned to chase and kill, he also appreciated the clever, the tenacious, the pragmatic.  The survivors.

And sometimes it hurt to see someone die, like a fist around his windpipe.  He didn't know why.

He was about to wave to some gawkers when a new torrent of air-serpents knocked him into a spin.  Easily corrected, but he lost his grip on the iron ring, which dropped out of reach and punched through the dome-ward of a balcony six floors down, scattering students in all directions.

“Sorry!” he shouted.  Then a flying rock phosphor splattered against the side of his head.

Aggravated, he detached the ward that it had hit, its radiant fronds expanding across the pane like quick-time moss.  As Salandry emerged from the hole in the wall, he flung it back.

Unsurprisingly, Salandry was surrounded by aerial servitors, which brushed aside the hapless phosphor before it could get close.  They were less effective against the bolt of blue-black energy Enkhaelen flung in its shadow, and three serpents screamed their teakettle death knells as it rent them apart.  Then it glanced off an aquamarine ward—Farcry's work—and Enkhaelen wondered what he had missed.

“So you've switched sides?” he said as Salandry flew toward him on borrowed wings.

The summoner's face twisted incredulously.  He was coated in his own armor now: a shell of rock and ropy vine that reminded Enkhaelen of the Guardian, except not as impressive.  Only his face remained uncovered, because if there was one thing Trivesteans could not do, it was to place something between their eyes and the world.

“What?” he said, pausing to hover amid his cloud of servitors.  More were rising from below, either summoned from his chambers or belonging to his students—whom Enkhaelen could see ascending toward the fray, their bracelets glinting with power.

He wondered where his own students were.  Through the portals, if they were sensible, but the Energies discipline did not attract sensible people.

“Farcry.  Did you make a deal with her behind my back?”

“You just tried to kill us all!”

“Yes, but so did you.”

“It was a...miscommunication between myself and my servitors.”

“Oh, so the ladies were too tough for you?”

“You betrayed me.  We had a deal.”

“And you expected me to keep it after I said I was the necromancer?”

“I was open to the idea.”

And that was the problem with Salandry's type.  Everyone 'knew' what necromancers did, what they were.  Everyone 'knew' that it was essential to kill them on sight.  And yet Salandry had been willing to jump onto that wagon of horrors without batting a lash.  Such cold ambition irritated Enkhaelen almost as much as the smug look that came with it.

“This is why I never took an apprentice,” Enkhaelen said, and primed another bolt.

Grinning, Salandry advanced.  Perhaps he thought he had a better chance up close; most Energies mages did prefer to keep their distance, and Enkhaelen was short, slight.  Grappling a larger, sentiently-armored man was a bad idea for almost anyone.

Enkhaelen shot the bolt, saw it burn through a serpent and a phosphor then be deflected, and put on an alarmed face as Salandry reached out with an armful of vines and bonds—

—only to have his fingertips rebound from the aquamarine pane of a ward.  “Don't touch him, you fool!” shouted Farcry from the gap, where she stood alongside Varrol.  The Artificer was raising a voice-caster to her mouth, the scales of her armor separating before it.

“ALERT LEVEL BLACK,”
she intoned, enhanced voice echoing from the walls like a giant's roar. 
“EVOKER ARCHMAGUS IS ROGUE.  ALL CONSTRUCTS SET OFFENSIVE ARMAMENT.”

Not far below, a set of four porter constructs dropped their palanquin and looked up, eye-holes kindling white.

“All constructs?” said Enkhaelen, surprised and pleased.  “You weaponized
everything
?”

Varrol snarled in the moment before her armor closed over her mouth.  Salandry took his distance, shouting something at Farcry, and in the moment's breather Enkhaelen stripped off his gloves and the rings atop them.  The only one below was the silver ring, his wedding band, and he kissed it absently as he pocketed his gloves.

He could tag people through the leather but it was easier bare-handed.  Flexing his fingers, he scudded backward in midair and watched the three for their next move.

'Stop playing with your food,'
said Kuthra in the back of his mind.

“Shh,” he replied.

Kuthrallan Vanyaris—haelhene visionary, Seal creator and former Ravager—manifested at the corner of his vision.  Pale and radiant, the wraith wore a familiar look of disapproval, those crystalline eyes narrowed to slits. 
'We are not here to indulge in playtime.'

“Speak for yourself.”

'These are not apprentices.  If you continue to take this lightly—'

“What, they'll hurt me?”

'—they might escape before you can eat them.'

Enkhaelen scowled.  It was a valid concern, but he hated it when Kuthra decided to pop up and 'teach' him things.  He had been stuck with the arrogant wraith for four centuries, and though it had been impressive back in the day, now it was just a nag.  The remnants of a great entity stuck in a body it did not own and could not control.

Any time it opened its mouth, Enkhaelen felt himself regress to a five-year-old.

“You know what?  Fine,” he muttered, fixing his gaze on the other Councilors.  They were gathering their own resources: Salandry summoning more elementals, Varrol adding scales to herself that ranged from fingernail- to palm-sized, plus blades that fitted all along her back; Farcry standing in the gap of the wall as she spun wards between her team and Enkhaelen.

Deal with her first
, he thought, and activated one of the hooks he'd set while waiting for them.  Within the chamber, the silver circle popped from its setting and rose aloft.

He saw her squint; she was watching with energy-vision, trying to decipher his behavior.  With his battle-gear and arrays on, he imagined he was blinding, and wondered if she would figure it out before it hit her.

A gleam from below.  Ascending constructs.  He yanked the hook again and saw the silver circle fill the gap behind her.

It slammed into her wards at the same time the constructs hit him.  These were smaller, fist-sized or bird-sized, and the sudden pummeling from several angles pushed him sideways and up as his garments and skin-tights flared in response.  He blew off the outermost layer to knock them back and tried to stabilize, still feeling the hook in his hand—glimpsing Farcry a step or two forward, rebuilding her wards.  Another yank and the silver circle smacked her again, forcing her onto a platform of wards over thin air.