She Who Has No Name (The Legacy Trilogy) (48 page)

The endless torrent of Paatin angered him
,
and the endless violence and blood and gore infuriated him.  He realised he was screaming and shaking, for the pain was incredible, but it also kept him squarely focussed on his task.  He bellowed as he struck them again and again, killing one
man
after the other.  Finally, as he dispatched one final foe, he realised he was alone.  A carpet of corpses surrounded him
and their compatriots
had retreated
,
fading off into the gloom to be away from him.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Samuel roared at them, between heaving breaths.  ‘Come and face me!  Come and die!’  But no one returned to meet his challenge.  ‘Come back!’ Samuel screamed at them, feeling blood in his mouth.  ‘Come back and die!’

The men were away in the cloud of dust, but Samuel could still see the energy of their life
,
could still sense them flowing around him, just out of view.  He was too exhausted to move and the thought of the Paatin escaping him and reaching the others made him lose all grip of his sanity.  ‘No!  You can’t get away!’ he babbled, and he began laughing hysterically.

He dropped his shields and gathered the magic back to be used again.  He balled his gore-ridden hands together and started pumping
old
and fresh magic between them furiously.  He made a tiny point within his hands and pressed his energy into it with glee.  He remembered the spell that Goodfellow had released, and he would beat that effort ten, no—a hundred-fold.  He would consume the desert with his power and none of the Paatin would survive. 

He could smell his flesh burning and his fingers blistering, but he would not be slowed.  He fed power into the spell as fast as he could unfurl it from the ring, and it seemed to come to him in endless volumes.  He had never used such power and he had neither care nor forethought for the effect on his body, for he had become a conduit of power and the magic fell through him as fast as he could call it, tearing at his flesh as it passed. 

The monstrous spell sizzled in his hands and it seemed as if the world was bending in towards him, marking him at the centre of a deepening pit down which the ether itself was warping and draining.  A wind sprang up and twisted the smoke and haze into a series of twirling vortices that stretched up into the heavens.  Dry lightning shimmered in the dust, flickering and crackling as if with a life of its own.

‘No, Samuel!’ came a voice from behind him.  It was Balten and the man was then at his side, somehow contorted and wavering, distorted by the pressing field of magic.  He was bloodied, and his clothes were nearly torn from him.  ‘This is too much.  You will not escape the destruction.  Neither will the others.  This spell cannot be unleashed.’

Samuel then noticed the thing that he had created, flickering brightly between his hands, and he seemed to
recover some
sense at Balten’s words.  ‘It has already been summoned.  I cannot return it.’

‘You can, Samuel.  The magic can be returned to the ether.  Slowly, carefully; calm yourself.’

Balten clamped his hands onto Samuel’s shoulders and immediately some of the fatigue and pain he felt was replaced with a reassuring warmth.  His vision cleared and he suddenly realised the madness of what he had been doing.  He thought to dispel the magic, but there was far too much.  The ring struggled against his wish to quell it, fighting to push more magic into him, but he now trembled, struggling to stop the spell from releasing altogether.  ‘I cannot do it!’

‘Then give it to me,’ Balten told him.  ‘I will return the spell.’

‘How can you?’

‘I can do it, Samuel.  Have faith in my abilities.  If I can defeat the Paatin arch-wizard I can disarm this little treat you have prepared for me.’

‘You killed him?’

‘Unfortunately, no.  He fled again.  I’m sure he can feel what you are doing and he will be doing his best to be away from here as fast as he can.  Now, give it to me.’

Balten clamped a spell of his own around Samuel’s, and it bore incredible strength.  Samuel felt the magician’s energies surround him, and allowed his spell to pass over, until Balten was now in possession of the terrible coagulum of power.  Despite his earlier assurances, Balten seemed to struggle with the thing as soon as he received it.

‘I must admit, this is much more than I was expecting, Samuel.  You are quite the magician, as I have always said.  I only wish I was discovering it on better terms.’

‘Can you return it?’ he asked, but Balten shook his head.  ‘So what will you do?’

‘Reach into my pocket,’ Balten said and Samuel reached in as indicated and drew out a shiny silver cylinder.  There was only a slight feel of magic to it, but its very construction marked it as being remarkable.

‘What is it?’

‘
This
is a relic of the Ancients, Samuel,’ the trembling magician explained.  ‘It was to deal with you, if you ever got out of control, but thankfully I have never needed to use it.  This seems to be a perfect time to trial it.’

‘What can it do?’ Samuel said, turning the thing over in his hands.

‘It can swallow magic, large amounts of it—although I don’t believe it has ever been tested to quite this extent.’

‘It destroys power?’

‘No.  It stores it.  The magic can be retrieved later, although I should not think anyone would wish to open
it
once your spell is safely inside.’

‘Like a trigger spell?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘What do I do?’ Samuel asked.

Balten was now shaking wildly, his hands quivering on either side of the brilliant hissing spell as he struggled to contain it.  ‘Drop it gently into the spell.  It will do the rest.’

Samuel did as he was told, holding the cylinder above Balten’s hands.  It felt like it was made of solid gold, for he struggled to lift it with both hands, despite its small dimensions; although, it could have been his overtired muscles that were to blame. 

He looked to the other magician for reassurance and then let go.  The thing fell between them and thumped onto the sandy ground, gulping up Samuel’s tremendous spell as it passed, leaving the air between Balten’s hands empty and quiet.  The wind and vortices and shimmering lightning around them fell away almost at once and the world seemed deathly silent.  Only the dust remained to cloud the air, and it, too, had begun to slowly settle.

Balten sighed and bent, and picked
up
his relic from the sand.  It had no more feeling of power to it than before.

‘By the gods!’ Samuel declared.

‘Almost,’ Balten replied, wiping his brow and tucking the cylinder back into his shirt.  ‘Now I just have to be careful not to release this thing unexpectedly.  The most I have ever put into it was the odd mage-light and Lifting spell.  This falls firmly into the category of the unknown.’

‘How does such a relic possibly work?’ Samuel asked.

‘I have no idea.  It being a relic of the Ancients, I know almost nothing about it.  Let’s hope it can hold your spell indefinitely.  It could be a nasty surprise if anyone stumbled upon it.  I will have to dispose of it safely when the chance arises.  Now, let’s go
and
find the others.  We will need to keep moving.’

Samuel followed as Balten marched off into the haze and he slipped the ring from his finger as he went and dropped it into his pocket.  He noticed the blisters on his hands had healed and the fatigue he should have felt after struggling with so much power was absent.  He could only come to the conclusion that Balten had saved him just in time, supplanting him with energy and healing his body before the damage had become irreversible.  The man was quite incredible and Samuel wondered how many other surprises Balten had hidden up his sleeves.

They carried on for several more days without incident or
any further
sign of the Paatin.  Travelling on foot was cruel and slow
going, but they had little choice, given that their horses had been lost in the battle.  Walking became even more difficult when the hard stones of the desert gave way to expanses of soft
,
white sand.  Trudging up and down the great slipping hills
of sand
was exhausting, and they clambered over them for several more days, until some hard earth appeared under their feet once more.  Finally, they saw some rock formations in the distance and Balten steered them towards the features, across the shimmering heat haze of the arid waste. 

It was only when they neared
the formations
that they could see these were enormous pillars of pale stone, jutting from the ground.  There was first one here and there, then more, then many—pressing in together—until the party was walking amongst a forest of towering
,
stone columns.  It almost seemed as if a path led between them and some of the stones had markings or engravings on their sides, although they had been weathered away so as to be indiscernible. 

They met an even greater surprise when the dense pillars abruptly ceased and the party found themselves in a vast
,
walled canyon, hidden away from the outside world.

‘What is this place?’ Eric asked, looking around with awe.

Balten replied without emotion, eyeing the high
,
natural walls around them, all formed of pale
,
weathered stone.  ‘This is not our destination, but I wanted to stop here and show you something.  I think you will find it very enlightening.’

They sauntered across the open bowl
of the canyon
, keeping close to the northern-most edge.  Mounds of squared stone blocks were littered about here and there, but most of them had been weathered to the point of crumbling.  It seemed that although the valley was natural, it had also been highly quarried, with sporadic cuttings marking the walls all over. 

They continued on, following the walls of stone and they soon passed another mound of broken stones.  Although this one was only about waist high, it was more than fifty paces wide at the base, as if a platform had been constructed in the middle of nowhere.  And
,
in the distance
,
was another such construction. 

It took them ten minutes to reach the next site but
,
when they did, they found it had been a building at one time, several storeys high in places, but now weathered away to almost nothing.  Following that, they found another such ruin
—
little more than a mass of fallen pillars and dirt that had been blown in by the wind.  These constructions seemed evenly
spaced and each one seemed slightly grander—or perhaps merely more intact—than the last.  Some were vast, still standing five or six storeys high, but all were broken in some way; worn down by the Ages.

‘What are these buildings?’ Samuel asked their guide.

‘This is the Valley of the Ancients,’ Balten replied, but he would say no more and led them on in eerie silence.

It took them nearly an hour before they reached a point where the buildings looked less decrepit.  They rose up like a series of towers that looked out over the canyon walls and into the desert.  Samuel imagined that from the desert these constructions would appear to be only small piles of rock.

A number of black-skinned desert-men were ahead and seemed to be working on one of the structures.  It was taller even than the rest and built up in layers, each layer smaller than the other and tapered together so that the top ended in a narrow point.  Its design certainly seemed sturdier than the others, forming a square pyramid, with each
level
taller than a man. 

The top of the building bore a great carving of an eye, open and staring, looking to the centre of the valley and surrounding the building w
ith
a sphere of shimmering magic.  Inside was something or someone immensely powerful
,
powerful enough to encase the entire structure in magic.