Traitor Savant (Second Seal of the Duelists) (33 page)

Soon the dome overhead was filled with a dozen
enormous bats, swooping and crying out, targeting witten Oost with their eardrum-rending cries. The headmaster fell to his knees and clapped his hands over his ears. A moment later, he stood again. Bayan could see what looked like clay plugs in the man’s ears.

“Bastard won’t give up,” Taban muttered.
His arms flashed through green mist, and Bayan’s bats hurled vine balls from their mouths instead of sound attacks. The balls bounced around witten Oost and entangled his body. The man formed a platform beneath his feet, which lifted him away from the vines, followed by a spherical metal cage around himself. The sharp-edged cage began to spin, slicing through the questing vines.

And then, while Bayan and Taban
were still ankle deep in chill water, witten Oost brought back his thundercloud. Its surface crackled with electric energy.

Taban glanced down at the water in alarm. “Sints preserve us.”

Tala got separated from Doc Theo in the running crowds spilling from the Temple’s hallways out into the lower bowl. Altons led the way, drawing gaggles of students behind each of them. They sang away the snow in great swaths as they hurried to the Full Choir assembly pit. Tala found herself running next to Tonn, and she stuck with him as the altons pressed everyone into curving rows around the raised platform in the center of the pit.

Heart racing, Tala
remembered her only other performance with the Full Choir. Choralist Cedric had directed a song to ameliorate a vicious typhoon west of Pallithea. Then, Tala had just mouthed the words so no one would notice her hiccups. Now, she knew she could sing with the other members of the choir. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to.

She finally
spotted her father standing outside the circled singers. He lined the far wall with all the other brown-robed chanters, and he didn’t look pleased. In fact, the expression on his face, with his jaw tight and his brows drawn, made her think he was actually frightened.

“Let me pass
!” The First Singer heedlessly pressed her way through the circle and stood on the small round platform. She made sure every eye was upon her. “Singers, we have been misled, manipulated, and abused. Our magic has become a crutch to support the greed of a man who believes he is the next emperor of the Waarden by sheer right of magic.”

Cries of confusion, outrage
, and fearful denial rose around Tala. She looked at the First Singer’s hard features and dared not guess what the woman would order her singers to do. Outright murder seemed to be very much an option. Tala wasn’t entirely sure it was a bad option.

“Now that the Octet
and I are aware of the full truth, I demand instant action. We must cleanse the empire of this man, his designs, and his every influence. Let none recall who he is! Let his vile plans and his wicked schemes fall as dust to the earth, to die on barren soil, and find no fruition! Let the Full Choir of the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies sing the vanishment of Ignaas witten Oost!”

A raw cry of assent erupted around Tala
. She tried to see Doc Theo through the fist-pumping crowd of singers, but could not.

“Akrestan minor scale, singers.
Kleon, hold the basses on a low first note. Gennadios, your baritones a hollow fifth above. Give me a repeating return scale of five notes. Tenors, follow Cedric. Altos and contraltos, you will follow Cigwe with the scale melody. Sopranos, you shall echo my song measure by measure.” She lowered her head, eyes fixed to the south. “This ends now.”

The First Singer raised her hands.
Though her heart pounded in fear, Tala lifted her chin, along with her classmates on either side, and took a deep breath. At the First Singer’s gesture, the basses and baritones began their trundling tune up and down the minor scale. The pressure of the magic built around the choir, echoing out of the assembly pit, bouncing off the curved towers and the far walls of the Temple bowl, reaching up to the sky itself. Tala could feel its reach extending, feel the magic growing, spreading across the face of the empire. Its seemingly endless reach left her dizzy.

The ten
ors launched into their tune. Cigwe led the altos and contraltos into a bitter harmony. The song took on an angry, raging tone. It screamed to the sky of injustice, of the unfair triumph of evil. Palms sweating, Tala swallowed the saliva that pooled on her tongue and waited for her cue to sing with the sopranos.

The
First Singer flung her white-sleeved arms out to her sides and shrieked a raging melody to the sky. Tala and the other sopranos echoed its raging rhythm. The bitter woman sang again, a haunting melody of loss and deception. Tala echoed that, too.

But as she
continued to repeat the First Singer’s enraged melody, her discomfort rose to a cloying level, nearly choking her. The rage behind the First Singer’s plan sickened her. The woman wasn’t just out for justice, the song said. She was out for murder. And not just Ignaas witten Oost’s murder, but the cold-blooded destruction of every man, woman, and child who’d helped him make his bid for emperor.

She was going to
erase Ignaas witten Oost, everyone who knew him, and every reference to his existence. He would vanish from the empire’s history as surely as if he had never been born.

Behind Tala,
Doc Theo cried out, clutching his head. So did a few of the Octet. Their singing turned to cries of pain. Even the First Singer clapped a hand to her forehead, but did not stop singing. Grating out her notes, she kept raging, screaming her magic to the heavens.

Tala lost her place in the song. Her voice stuttered to a stop
. She scrambled past the solo students and thrust her way through the duet and trio circles, racing to her father’s side.

“
What is it? What’s going on?”

“I told him,”
Doc Theo groaned. He pressed his long fingers over his eyes.

“Told who what?”

“I helped Ignaas. Didn’t mean to. I told him Kiwani’s secret after he dosed me.”

“But what’s happening to you?”

Blood leaked from Doc Theo’s nose and ears. He slumped to the floor. “…Vanishing… ”

Tala’s
eyes widened. She looked at the First Singer. The woman stood in the midst of the Full Choir, which still chanted and sang. Sang the death of her father and countless hundreds of others who had ever aided Ignaas witten Oost in any way.

“No! Stop
! You’re killing him!” Tala screamed. She launched herself back through the swaying choir. The music itself seemed to thicken the air, dragging at her progress. Whimpering in frustration, she shoved her way through the enthralled singers. Without slowing down or worrying about where she would land, she hurled herself at the First Singer, toppling her from the small dais. Tala had one glimpse of surprised eyes rimmed with tears of blood. Then she and the First Singer crashed into the first row of the choir in a tangle of limbs.

~~~

The lightning never fell.

Witten Oost screamed, a long, drawn-out cry of agony. His metal cage and platform vanished. The water cover
ing the dome’s floor disappeared just as he fell, and he crashed to his knees on the hard stone. Dragging in a second breath, he screamed again, writhing.

Taban spun a quick Flame spell, providing light.
Bayan looked at him, confused. “Not I,” the Dunfarroghan said.

Bayan
spun to look at Eward, but his wounded hexmate was barely able to cling to his ledge, let alone cast. Kiwani shrugged and shook her long, tangled hair in denial.

Not wanting to waste a perfectly good opportunity, Bayan ran to
witten Oost and pinned him within the stone blanket of Tegen’s Grave to halt his agonized rocking. He racked his brain for a way to ensure that the man couldn’t cast any more spells.

Nothing came to mind.
Even if he immobilized the man completely, the very act of breathing was a perfect example of the in-and-out wave of Water casting. “Bodies move,” he muttered. “The only way to stop him is to kill him.”

Taban and Kiwani helped Eward make his way toward Bayan.
Within his spell-coffin, witten Oost spasmed against the stone and moaned. Taban gasped and tumbled to his knees, clutching his head. Kiwani clutched at the wobbly Eward as half his support fell down and groaned in agony.

Kiwani looked as helpless as Bayan felt.
“What’s going on?”

Witten Oost’s
screaming stopped suddenly, petering out into panting sobs. Taban’s did too. Bayan turned to face the stone mound that encased his opponent, arms ready to spin out another spell.

“Save me,” came
witten Oost’s broken, muffled voice. “She’s trying to kill me.”

“If
you save him, you’ll save me too, like as not,” Taban said from his fetal position.

Bayan shot him a look.
“Greedy Dunfarroghan.”

“Aye
,” Taban panted. “Got it in one.”

“Taban, Kiwani, I think I can handle him alone.
Leave Eward with me. Can you two go find Aleida? She’ll need looking after.”

“
Aleida
?” Taban blurted, sitting up straight despite his recent agony. “
Where
?”

Lifeseeker
clarified her position relative to his. Bayan pointed to the right, not taking his eyes off the stone mound. “That way.”

Kiwani and Taban turned to look, as if Aleida were standing just behind them.

“How are you doing that?” Kiwani asked.

“
Go find Aleida, hurry.”

“No, I know
you’re using an anima spell. But
you’re already using elemental magic
.” She pointed at the stone covering Ignaas.

Bayan blinked.
So I am
. “Just go get her.”

Taban and Kiwani jogged
to the wall and spelled their way through the stone. Eward worked his way onto his knees and pressed a hand to his bleeding head. “What are you going to use if he wakes up? We tried everything we had—and it sounds like you tried a few things we probably shouldn’t have.”

Bayan forced his jaw shut. The less Eward knew
—the less any of them knew—the better off his hexmates would be. Bayan’s final option would guarantee victory over Ignaas witten Oost. And it would probably ruin Bayan’s life.

~~~

Tala pressed her hands over the First Singer’s mouth as they lay in a heap in the first row of the choir. The singers, leaderless, quavered and hushed. “You can’t kill all those people! Some of them don’t even know they helped witten Oost! Doc Theo has been working against him since he first set foot in the Temple, but your song nearly killed him. You nearly killed your strongest ally. You must stop the song!”

The First Singer
staggered to her feet. She shoved Tala aside and straightened her white robe, now stained with drops of blood from her eyes. When she spoke, her voice was raw, shredded. “I’ll do what I like! We deserve nothing kinder than a quick death for aiding such a monster—”

Cedric leaped to the dais and wiped his bloody nose on his white sleeve. “You’d sing your own suicide and
drag us all down with you? Nae! I demand an immediate coda to this attack! The song must stop.”

Liselot gripped the white cloth of her robe with bloodied hands. “He must be destroyed!
If he is allowed to remain among us, he is a danger to us all!”

“And if none remain to remember that danger,”
Doc Theo said as he joined Tala, “then it can happen again. Let’s learn from our mistakes, from our close calls, Liselot. Let us live, so we can learn. We can warn the next generation of singers and duelists. We can tell the whole empire what happened. Then, after we’ve all passed on, they will still remember. They can still protect themselves.”

He stepped closer to
Liselot and raised his crystal. His toneless chanting healed her eyes and her raw throat. He lifted her chin with a finger and met her eyes. “What else do you think they ought to remember of us?”

Eve
ryone stood in silence, waiting. Clear tears spilled from the shattered woman’s eyes, washing away the trails of blood. “He used me,” she whispered. “It hurts so badly.”

“I’m so sorry
. What he did to you was wrong.” Doc Theo put his arms around the trembling singer and hugged her, letting her weep onto the shoulder of his dirty brown robe.

When her tears stopped
, she pulled back and faced the members of her Octet. She wiped her tears away with shaking fingers. “Margaretha, Kleon, Cigwe, please return the students to their towers and clear this area. The Full Choir is dismissed. Cedric, give me your crystals. You two,” she said to Doc Theo and Tala, “will come with me.”

Tala and Doc Theo exchanged a glance as the First Singer
opened a portal amid the chaos in the choir pit. After everything that had just happened, Tala had no idea where the woman was taking them. She looked through the bright oval and saw a long dining table in an opulent room. A dozen richly dressed people sat along its edges, eating and drinking. Or rather,
not
eating and drinking, but staring in surprise.

Liselot strode through the portal, then looked back and jerked her chin with an imperious gesture.
Doc Theo ushered Tala through, and the portal closed.

The curly-haired man at the head of the table rose from his seat and gave the First Singer a cordial nod, politely ignoring her rumpled, bloodstained robe and her mussed hair. “You seem to need some immediate assistance, First Singer. May I inquire as to the nature of it?”

“Your Majesty, may I present Chanter Theo Willemsen and his daughter, Singer Tala Salunga, who have brought to my attention an urgent matter involving the Headmaster of the Duelist Academy.”

Tala’s eyes widened
. She felt her chest tightening.
The emperor! His Imperial Majesty Jaap voorde Helderaard, right here in front of me!