Centyr Dominance (23 page)

Something exploded then, and an irresistible wave of
pressure lifted Gram and threw him into Moira. She felt like a brick wall when
he struck her, and he rebounded to land on the floor. Silence reigned except
for a strange humming sound that seemed to envelop the world.

Disoriented, Gram nonetheless leapt back up, returning
his shield to the guard position and hoping he would recover enough to discover
his enemy’s location before it attacked again. Seconds rolled by, and nothing
happened. Glancing back, he could see Moira’s mouth moving; she sounded
muffled, but she didn’t look concerned. Looking over his shield, he saw the
burning bulk of the monster that now looked to be permanently out of action.

The upper portion of its body bulged outward
strangely; sharp pieces of metal protruding as smoke and sparks issued forth.
Most of the creature seemed intact, but it wasn’t moving at all. Moira leaned
in and shouted in his ear, “It’s much worse inside than out. It won’t be a
danger to us now.”

“Are your ears ringing?” he shouted back.

“No, I blocked them before you opened the door,” she
admitted.

“Couldn’t you have done mine too?”

“The armor,” she said, pointing at his head, “it
interferes with my magic.” Of course, after she said it she realized she could
have made something like a sound dampening shield around him instead, but she
didn’t bother telling him that. She’d consider it for the next time.

The others were moving now, coming up to stop their
advance. With her magesight she could see them squeezing their way up the
stairs from the level below. They didn’t have long, but she had an idea.
“Don’t move,” she told Gram. “I’m going to make a wall for us.”

Wall?
he wondered, but
he soon saw what she meant.

She used her aythar to tear at the walls around them,
pulling heavy stone blocks out and piling them in the corridor in front of
them. Moira didn’t bother with niceties like structure and organization, she
ripped timbers and stones free with equal abandon and piled them up in front of
them.

Gram worried that the ceiling above them might
collapse, but when it began to sag, she pulled it down and used the materials
that formed it to add to her collection of rubble.

The wall, perhaps it was better to call it a pile of
heavy debris, grew quickly, and not a moment too soon, for the enemy rounded
the corner fifty feet away and began firing as soon as Gram and Moira came into
view. The monsters’ weapons roared, with a sound somewhere between the buzzing
of hornets and thunder. Bits of stone and wood flew from the barrier Moira had
created.

The two of them ducked below the rim of their defense,
which was annoying to Gram, since it meant he could no longer see, but of
course that was no real problem for Moira. She could locate the foe with
magesight.

She had taken off her belt, and the two lengths of
braided metal had once again become sword-like weapons in her hands. As she
pointed one of them at the barricade Gram was enveloped in silence. Moira had
shielded him from sound this time.

“Thylen pyrren,”
she
intoned, and a vivid line of scarlet fire shot forth, piercing the wall of
rubble and striking one of their new attackers. Unlike the attacks made by her
spell-twins in the earlier battle, this fire was focused by the rune channel
she held, and it pierced cleanly through the metal monster. Moira kept her
will on it, maintaining the devastating beam of fire and moving her arm slightly,
so that it scythed across the enemy.

Well, ‘across’ was not quite the correct word,
bisected was more accurate, for the beam of fire sliced completely through it.
While Gram couldn’t see what happened, he felt the pressure wave as the thing
exploded. He was grateful his ears were protected this time.

The second creature reacted forcefully to the
destruction of its comrade. Seeing the ineffectiveness of its primary weapon
and the possibility of its imminent demise, it switched to its other armament.
Likely they hadn’t used the other until that point because it was dangerously
destructive in an enclosed environment. Moira guessed that her threat had
become great enough to justify the risk.

Time slowed to a crawl as she shifted her line of
incandescent fire to strike the second one. She tried to reinforce the shield
she had built behind the wall of rubble, but she couldn’t know whether it would
be enough.

The thing’s strange weapon lined up with their
position as her line of fire cut across it, but the attack was too low; instead
of hitting the weapon, or its torso, it cut through two of the legs. The
monster’s weapon fired a split second before it began to fall.

Gram had switched Thorn to its shield and one hander
form since there was little else he could do, he crouched in front of Moira
wondering if there were something more he could do and feeling useless, when
something knocked him prone and pain shot through his left side. His vision
was gone, or so he thought, until he realized that the air was full of thick
grey dust and sparkling pieces of metal. His shield had disintegrated into
swirling fragments.

His hearing returned suddenly and with it the sound of
stone and wood fragments pattering like rain to the floor. From the corner of
his eye he saw Moira lying behind him, blood trickling down across her face as
dust seemed to drift down and coat her with a layer of grey. Her eyes had
rolled back into her head.

The stairs behind them were gone, a gaping maw of
stone remained which seemed to be filling up as the upper level collapsed into
it.

All this he absorbed in the time it might take to draw
a single breath. He knew there was little time. If the creature still lived,
it would be able to fire again within a couple of minutes. He struggled to
push himself up, but his left arm didn’t respond. The enchanted shield was
reforming beneath it, but it lay limp and useless. He suspected the arm was
broken inside his armor, or worse, but after the initial shock of pain he
couldn’t feel anything more—it and his shoulder were completely numb.

His right side was marginally better. He could feel
that arm, but when he tried to roll onto it and use it to push himself up, he
couldn’t find the strength, instead he wound up flopping feebly on the floor.
Something
did
hurt then, a strange throb that ached through even the
gauzy fuzziness of shock.
I have to get up!
Gram closed his eyes and
listened to his body for a moment, allowing the steady beat of his heart to
calm him. Concentrating he focused on another heartbeat, that of the red gem
nestled in Thorn’s pommel, his dead father’s heart.
Help me.

He felt it then, a warmth that traveled up his right
arm, connecting the beat of the gem to the steady thrum of his own heart. It
grew stronger, louder, and he devoted himself to its rhythm. When he tried to
roll the next time he succeeded. Pushing himself off the ground, he looked
over the scattered remains of their barricade. The monster was still there,
lying on its side—waiting.

It had its primary weapon pointed at him and as he
stood Gram could hear the whine as it began to spin.

He couldn’t lift the shield. That arm simply wouldn’t
move. Growling, he leapt up and over the scattered rubble. Stone chips flew
in every direction as the creature began firing at the place he had been. The
beast corrected its aim even as he flew through the air, and when he landed
hammer-blows began striking his legs and then his torso.

Some of them struck the shield, but most hit his armor
directly. At close range the pieces of metal it was firing landed with
devastating force. Gram’s armor absorbed the first few hits, but the attacks
came in such rapid succession that some of the scales that made up his armor
flew off, leaving his body exposed. The pieces of enchanted metal would
return, reforming his armor, but there was a limit to their speed.

Gram turned, twisting in place to keep the attacks
from striking the same place too long as he strode forward, trying to close the
last few feet between him and his antagonist. He stumbled and half fell the
last five feet as he closed on the monster’s left side, and it could no longer
point the weapon at him.

The torso swiveled and the other, more deadly weapon
lined up with his chest.

Someone screamed as his sword swept up and across
propelled by more strength than he knew he had. Mindful of the past, he aimed
for the joint where the metal arm met the body. Thorn sheared halfway through
before sticking in the dense metal.

Gram stared down the empty black hole that would administer
his death sentence. Time stretched out for what felt like an eternity, but
nothing happened. A small light on one side of the box-like device slowly
stopped glowing. His attack had somehow disabled the weapon.

He couldn’t pull Thorn free, so he spoke a command to
make the sword shift again, changing from sword and shield to its original
great sword form. When it reformed it was free in his hand again. It was
meant to be wielded with two hands of course, but his arm was strong enough to
use it effectively even if it wasn’t optimal.

The monster was trying to swivel and bring the other
weapon back around to face him, but lying sideways on the ground made that
difficult, and he was close enough to move out of its line of fire. He hacked
at it in a frenzy, sending fragments of the dense metal flying in every
direction. It took almost a minute, but eventually he severed the other arm
and then he started on the central portion of the thing, not satisfied until he
was certain that it was no longer functional in any sense of the word.

When he finally stopped, a wave of fatigue washed over
him and he stumbled, almost losing his balance. There was blood everywhere.
That’s
odd,
he thought,
these things don’t bleed.
The room spun, and he
found himself lying on the floor, staring at the partially demolished ceiling.
He felt his chest fluttering, his heart was beating too fast.

“Take off the armor,” said Moira leaning over him. “I
need to see your body to heal you.”

“I’m fine,” he told her, trying to speak clearly, but
the words were slurred. “I just need to rest a moment. I think I overdid it,
my heart’s racing.”

“Gram, please! You’ve lost too much blood—your heart
is trying to compensate. Take the armor off before you pass out, or I won’t be
able to help you.” Moira’s voice was desperate.

“Oh, right,” he answered, and then he managed to get
the word out to remove the armor.

Moira’s face changed when she saw what lay beneath the
metal, her lip quivered faintly and her eyes grew liquid. A gasp almost
escaped her lips before she suppressed it.

Gram wanted to tell her he was alright, but something
in her look made him stop, so instead he commented idly, “You seem different.”

“I’m not Moira,” she told him. “She’s still
unconscious.” She stretched her hands out, and Gram felt something passing
through him as she began to work.

He had been about to pass out, but the pain brought
him fully awake. “You don’t look unconscious,” he hissed, still trying to
remain casual despite the situation.

A tear fell from Moira’s eye, “Please, I’m trying to
stop the bleeding. Moira will be fine and she’ll wake up soon. The shock of
losing the shield she had up knocked her senseless.”

Gram felt something change then, and his heart rate
slowed. He wanted to look down, to see how bad it was, but he found himself
captivated by her face. He tried to speak, but his tongue wouldn’t cooperate.

Shhh, I can hear you without words, now
that your armor is off,
she told him mentally.

If you aren’t Moira, who are you?
he
asked, curious.

Good question, I wonder myself. As far as
I’m concerned, I am her, but in reality I’m a magical creation, just like her
mother, the woman who married Archmage Gareth.

Oh.
Gram didn’t know
how to respond. Strange sensations passed through him as she worked on him,
and finally he came up with a relevant question,
What should I call you?

Call me Myra, it’s close enough to the
name I remember as my own, and it should help avoid confusion,
she
answered.
You should be dead. You’ve lost so much blood. There are
several terrible wounds and pieces of metal embedded in your body. I don’t
think you’ll be able to walk for several days, and you’ll wish you were dead
for weeks after that. There’s going to be a lot of bruising.

That made Gram want to laugh,
I’m starting to
understand why Father didn’t want me to follow in his footsteps.

Long painful minutes passed while she removed the
numerous fragments of metal from his legs and abdomen. Once that was done, she
closed the smaller blood vessels that had been severed and finished by sealing
the skin. Myra wanted to cry at what she had seen. There was blood all over
the room, and all of it was Gram’s, but she steeled herself, fighting down the
urge. She could feel Moira, the ‘real’ Moira, beginning to stir, but she had
more to tell him.