The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (90 page)

Then the piking things swarmed him, and he let go of the hook to bat them away with hard panes of force.  Constructs veered and spun and shattered, and one took a hit to its shock-battery and detonated.  Metal shrapnel peppered his arm and sizzled off his face ward.

“Insufficient venting!” he shouted at Varrol.  She gave him the pike-hand.  He supposed this was not the time for critique.

Then came another swarm, plus the big ones—plus air-serpents carrying salamanders and mistlings into the fray—and he felt a solid ward pop up against his back.  Farcry trying to box him in with all the servitors.

Fighting Summoners and Artificers was annoying.

He briefly skimmed his options.  Learning every arcane discipline gave him too many choices sometimes; if necessary, he could even use Kuthra's probability-sight to gauge the future and then run through this fight like an obstacle course.

It wasn't
challenging
that way.  It wasn't
fun
.  But it was efficient.

Instead, he reached out in the simplest way, snatching up the broken pieces of the construct and whirling them into the next, and then the next, and onward until he stood within a gyre of shrapnel.  It tore apart the ward that blocked him and scattered the elementals, which were too delicate to provide resistance against bronze and steel.  The silver ring came to his call as well, sweeping in to create a whirring barrier with him at its center.

'Get this done,'
said Kuthra.

He sighed.

They were still coming after him: Salandry regathering his elementals, Farcry casting defenses, Varrol attempting to close.  She had wings now, made of runed blades that reflected his glaring aura, and a host of at least two dozen constructs.  It didn't matter.  Those she sent close were torn apart by the gyre, and when she reached out with her energies to attempt to disrupt it, he sent a surge at her.  Metal, magic, charged air.  She was ready for the first two, but the third caught her wings and buffeted her backward, unsteady in the sky.

He turned his eye to the other two and saw that Farcry still stood on thin air, held aloft by wards.  Her face was fixed in concentration, form so thickly coated in wards that it was like looking at her through wavy glass.

Her platform was not so protected.

Reaching out, he carved through it with a whip of glass and grit and steel, and she fell.

Wingless.

Geraad is fond of her
, came an unbidden thought.

He reached impulsively, shedding part of his gyre to extend a hand of soft force beneath her.  His phantom fingers caught, and he saw her sit up, shaken and confused, on a 'palm' of energy a hundred feet below.

Then Varrol was coming at him again, driving an arrow of force before her, and he couldn't spare Farcry the attention.

So he let go.

*****

Hooked to the haphazard student sub-Weave that had formed in response to this crisis, Psycher Archmagus Qisvar saw Farcry fall.  Pinpointing her trajectory, he opened his eyes and reached out.

She reacted to his thought and their spells clasped in midair: her wards slowing her, his cord guiding her in.  Behind him, he heard Drakisa Snowfoot's faint sound of question; she was on the other side of her portal and could not see what was happening.

“What is this?” said Farcry as she landed on the balcony.  Part of the Tower of the Inner Eye, it currently played host to half a dozen portals.  Students, teachers and magi-in-residence streamed in from the walkways, carrying bags and pets and weapons and looking frazzled or terrified.  Snowfoot's scryers sent them through with professional speed.

“An evacuation,” said Snowfoot.  “Come on, quickly.”

Farcry shook her head.  Her dark hair was disarrayed, her sleeves spotted with blood, but she gave the portals a scathing glance then looked up to where the battle still raged.  “No, we have to fight.  He's the necromancer.”

“Cassa, you crazy woman, we'll discuss this later.  Just come.”

“Van and Careil are up there—“

“It's their choice.  No one is making them stay.”

Farcry turned slowly to look at them.  Qisvar tried to project a sense of calm, but by the widening of her dark eyes, it didn't work.  “You two,” she said.  “Don't tell me you're aligned with him...”

“We're getting out of here before he brings down the house,” said Snowfoot tartly.

“We must safeguard our lives, and those of our students,” said Qisvar in support.  “There is more at work here than a single mad mage, and—“

“Is that the Inquisitor Archmagus' mark?”

He clapped his hand over the gold pectoral with its crossed swords and eye, regretting taking it from its case.  Enkhaelen had rarely worn it, but they all knew what it looked like.  “Ah...”

“He bought you with the Inquisition?”

“No, no.  He gifted me with—“

From below came a sound like cracking ice, loud enough to halt every mage in their tracks.  A moment later, a wave of heat hit, gusting robes around legs and tearing leaves from the potted plants, smacking the Midwinter Festival banners upward.  Cinders flickered past the edge of the balcony, borne up on a noxious wind.

Then came the smoke, black and thick.

“The treatment-level wards,” Farcry said distantly, face gone pale.

“Come on, get in here,” snapped Snowfoot.  “Both of you.”

Instead of obeying, Farcry stepped toward the rails.  “How many people are still in the Citadel?”

Qisvar blinked, then sent the question to the sub-Weave and waited as his students cast their own thoughts out—an overlapping effort that swiftly collated all remaining magi.  “One thousand six hundred and six.”  About a quarter of the resident population.

“And you want me to leave?”

He made a 'wait' gesture to Snowfoot and moved after Farcry.  He understood her feelings; the fear and concern she projected matched his own worry for his students.  Too many were still out there.

'EVACUATE,'
he sent to the sub-Weave as Farcry began raising wards around the balcony.  The smoke came thicker and thicker, laden with the stench of a burning cesspit, and he covered his face with his bell-shaped sleeve and sent again. 
'ALL OF YOU.  GET OUT.'

Most confirmed, but some—the brave ones, the fools—were on the move, hunting minds crippled by fear or trapped.  He wanted to force the imperative of
escape
upon them, and with his new Inquisitor Archmagus mantle he had the legal authority to do so.

But he couldn't.  Not in the face of their determination.  The Inquisition might advocate psychic dominance, but he'd never agreed with it.  As its leader, he would see it change.

For now, that meant supporting and guiding his students in their missions of mercy, even as smoke blotted out the sky.

*****

Enkhaelen felt the wards break—felt the magma surge smoothly up through the lowest levels—and knew he could no longer put the cork back in the bottle.  It was freeing.

His spar with Varrol had broken off again.  He'd beaten her back but more artificers were showing up at every moment, from the balconies and external walkways to the rooftops and window ledges.  Constructs clogged the air and clad the towers: climbers, gliders, leapers; made of stone and metal and wood, resin and glass.  Shock-batteried, direct-powered, and a few unpowered ones like razor kites circling above his head.

And there were summoners aplenty, hands raised to orchestrate their elemental minions.  They seemed to be concentrating on sweeping the sky free of debris—a wise move, taking his toys away and keeping their bonds out of his reach.

He still had plenty of shrapnel in his central gyre, but no targets in range.  Strategy had replaced the brute-force tactics of the earlier fight; they were waiting for him to move.

If they stay cautious, we could be here until the Citadel boils over, and I won't get to watch any of it.

Someone has to be stupid.  It might as well be me.

With a theatrical stutter, he retracted his energy as if it had suddenly run out, packing it so tight around him that it blended in with his aura.  The silver ring ceased spinning and dropped away, and as the sheets of shrapnel began to fall, he saw his enemies react—not the archmagi, but the enthusiastic young-bloods that made up most of the crowd.  That was perfect.

First came a rain of mudlings and rock crawlers, wiping out the last of the shrapnel and battering his body-wards.  In their wake followed hundreds of flying constructs, air-serpents, wisps and mistlings.  He let them rip him from his aerial perch and spin him like a toy, adding to their roil with his own energies until they were a dense, seething mob.

In the press, only a few servitors could actually reach him, their lack of progress against his wards invisible to his enemies outside.  The constant blur and toss and jerk of their assault made it impossible to gesture or reorient himself, but it didn't matter.  His mind was not in that battered puppet; his focus could not be broken.

Lost in the torrent, he searched for a certain signature.

Salandry's.

It was there—the fool!—locked around an air-serpent.  Enkhaelen lashed after it.  The fine gleaming cord of its tether caught in his fingers, and the elemental jerked toward him.  A dozen others battered through his last ward and tore at his clothes, snatching away buttons and hairpins, but he was resolute.  Even as the air-serpent turned to bite at him, he hooked fingers in its bond and stripped it off.

The serpent fled into the sky, free.

He slipped his hand into the bond and felt it cinch tight.  It could hold an elemental, or a spirit, or a soul, though that practice had long been outlawed.  But he was more than either a spirit or a soul—more than any petty bond could control.  When Salandry yanked on the tether, reacting blindly to the change he'd felt, it pulled Enkhaelen from the cloud of servitors like a shark from a fish-pond.

The flaw of Summoning, in Enkhaelen's view, was that the connection between slave-bond and master-bracelet could not be deactivated except by removing the bracelet—of which Salandry wore dozens.  Drawn by the pull, he let the Ravager's manifestation rush across him like bone-white fire and saw the summoner's eyes go wide, saw him snatch at his bracelets as if to identify the one at fault.

Too many.  Too late.

White talons clamped down on bracelet-covered forearms, biting through wards and flesh to hook beneath the edges of the bands.  Claw-tipped hands clamped upon his head, white thumbnails plunging into his eyes.

The scream was gratifying.

Enkhaelen did not linger, but thrust Salandry's head back with his hands while raking his taloned feet in the other directions, peeling the flesh from the summoner's arms along with his jewelry.  Bracelets, rings, blood and fingers fell away into the smoke, and then he leapt free, wafting himself upward on unfurling wings as the Summoner Archmagus' suddenly unbound servitors descended upon him in a frenzy.

In mid-rise, he remembered that he'd planned to dissect the man.  Ah well.

Looking down, he saw elementals and constructs hesitating as their masters gaped.  Below them, the smoke crawled inexorably upward.  The Great Library's doors had been flung open, its servitors streaming out with books and scrolls in their grips; further down, Warders' spheres glowed through the gloom as they struggled to protect others, to reach breathable air.  On the balconies, crowds of students huddled together or filed in ragged lines through portals.

All were in flight, the Citadel broken.

Down at the fifth level, smoke and perhaps lava would be pouring through the tunnel that led to the city, which had prospered from the Circle's needs for nigh on eighty years.  Very little out there was warded, and no one would be making portals for them—the artisans and tavern folk, the cobblers and masons.  The drunks, the dredgers, the laundresses and their children.

Let them die
, he thought. 
They abetted my enemies.

But he was letting mages escape.  Why not them?

Weariness struck.  All these years, all this bitterness, and what did it matter?  These people didn't know his grudge.  They were just bystanders.  His real enemies were long dead, and he was old and petty and not at all in control.

Impulsively, he pulled forward the dying remnants of his connection to the Citadel.  The rising magma had destroyed most of it, but the tunnel was still operational.  Cycling forth the part of his soul that held the energy signature of Morshoc Rivent, he triggered the protocol that closed it; though it would take some time, the magma wasn't rising swiftly enough to intercede.

The city would live.

Then a metal bird arced up past the edge of his wards, and he raised his head, ready for her.  Varrol.  In her completed armor, she reminded him of the Imperial Phoenix—all burnished bright and fiery in the sun.

He winced at the irony.

Then he spread his wings and rose to meet her.

*****