Sovereign of the Seven Isles 7: Reishi Adept (21 page)

Alexander stumbled to a stop
, turning to face the thing. It was too close to outrun to the wall … if that would even stop it. As much as he wanted to avoid drawing undue attention to himself, light was necessary. He raised Luminessence and released a pulse of brilliance. It entered the world from the realm of light like a detonation, washing the demon from existence and penetrating the stone itself, expelling the taint in a rapidly expanding wave.

He couldn’t help but watch the colors of the curse fade into the distance, even as soldiers shouted from be
hind him.

Then the city roared—the battle cry of ten legions shouting
defiance and rage into the sky, the haunted death knell of those who’d long ago fallen into ash.

Al
exander turned and ran again, stumbling and just catching himself before falling headlong into the dirt. Regaining his balance, he ran with speed born of fear. Ten feet from the wall, he felt something lift him into the air, tossing him over the wall and into the midst of a four-man sentry post. Alexander watched an unformed shadow fall against the plane of the wall as if it were smoke blown against a pane of glass.

Alexander landed hard, feeling a bit stunned—struggling to regain his senses.

“Surrender! You’re surrounded!”

He
got to his hands and knees. Four men did indeed surround him, weapons drawn. He took a moment to assess the situation while pretending to struggle at getting up, an easy sell considering how he felt.

He
lurched to his feet, slicing through the two men to his right and slipping between them, turning to face the remaining two men. Both lunged at once. Alexander stepped easily to the outside of the first, cutting him in half as he stepped behind him and snapped the tip of the Thinblade into the skull of the last sentry.

He set out at a light run toward Rake
’s command post. The first pair of soldiers to interfere fell to the Thinblade so quickly that others nearby backed away. Alexander scanned the enemy and saw fear. He slowed to a brisk walk. Someone fired a crossbow bolt. Alexander stopped momentarily to let it pass by him.

T
hree men rushed him. He cut them down with little effort. Five more came. He cut them down, too. A platoon attacked in organized fashion: shield wall, pikes, and swordsmen. Alexander met the attack with violence. More men arrived. Each threat was seen before the enemy even committed to the attack. Alexander was never where they wanted him to be, never where they expected him to be. Instead, he moved toward his target with each step, taking every opportunity to lash out with the Thinblade, cutting men down as they made themselves available.

Until they didn’t.

He swept through a man, scanning for his next enemy but finding only a field of carnage, a hundred soldiers dead all around him, more watching from a distance but making no move to confront him. Killing had become too easy. So many had fallen to his blade so quickly and none had laid a stroke on him. Alexander reminded himself that these soldiers didn’t matter as he began stalking toward Rake. No one confronted him again until he reached Rake’s personal guard. They were waiting for him.

D
ozens of crossbow bolts arced gracefully toward him from Rake’s outer cordon. He opened his Wizard’s Den at a right angle to the attack and stepped inside. A glance told him that his friends’ condition hadn’t changed.

He steppe
d back out and closed the door a moment after the bolts had fallen harmlessly to the ground.

Forty men were fo
rmed up and advancing. Behind them, an equal number were reloading their crossbows. Rake and his wizards were just behind the crossbow ranks.

Alexander momentarily
raised his light, bright enough to mimic the noonday sun, as he swept into the enemy line, slashing and wheeling, cutting and killing. Men fell screaming and bleeding, parts of them cleaved away. Alexander pressed forward with single-minded intent. Rake.

Enemy soldiers attacked, but Alexander saw the moments to come, dodging and moving to avoid danger and then finding just the right moment to strike with deadly effect. He cut through the soldiers
as if they were powerless against him.

When three wraithkin appeared
around him, he pushed his light brighter still, pulsing with a kind of brilliance that the netherworld simply could not withstand. The Wraith Queen’s darkness fled. A look of panic and shock filled the three men, as multiple injuries began appearing, opening and spilling forth their life’s blood. All three slumped to their knees, then toppled to the ground in growing pools of red.

Rake
launched a force-shard at Alexander. He stepped just a few inches out of the way, letting it pass him by as he killed another soldier attacking from his flank. Both wizards tried to cast spells, but he raised his light, blinding them, forcing them to cover their eyes, disrupting their concentration and their spells with it.

Two more men, well
-armed and armored, confident in battle, faced Alexander, shields raised. They attacked, thrusting in unison. Alexander stepped to the side, sweeping up through their spears and taking both soldiers’ hands at the wrist. He lunged into the first, bringing the Thinblade back across his body and cleaving him in half, then swept it back, decapitating the second man.

He was i
nside Rake’s inner cordon.

Rake faced him,
his colors swirling with surprise, then morphing through guile and into calculation. He was flanked by wizards and surrounded by six of his inner circle. His guards were only beginning to register that Alexander had penetrated their defenses.

“Let’s talk about this,” Rake said, with a big crooked smile, all the while tipping the point of the war staff at Alexander.

Alexander ignored him, slipping to the side just as a jet of fire shot forth, passing close enough to singe hair but not near enough to do harm. One of Rake’s guards screamed as he went up in flames.

Alexander
raced closer, snapping the Thinblade out in a whipping motion and catching the nearest wizard with the last three inches of the blade right across the eyes and well into the brain.

R
ake yelped in alarm, bringing up the war staff, a suit of magical force armor appearing around him.

Alexander caught his balance,
turning to face Rake from an angle that placed the second wizard behind his patron. Alexander met Rake’s eyes.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” Rake said
, bringing the war staff to bear on Alexander. The wizard behind Rake began casting a spell.

Alexander darted to one side, cleaving the war staff in half and taking Rake’s hands in
a single stroke.

He screamed, full throated, head tipped back, rage and pain filling the air.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” he whimpered a moment after his wail had run its course.

Alexander
slipped past him, his focus on the wizard. The man’s hands came up, his colors beginning to swell … until Alexander took his arms off at the elbows with a flick of his blade. The wizard’s shriek of pain was cut short when Alexander brought the Thinblade back up through his torso.

The second wizard
died in pieces.

“Stop!” Rake said, on his knees, holding up his bloody stumps.
“This isn’t—”

Alexander cut
off his head, kicking it into his Wizard’s Den and tossing the fragments of the war staff in behind it before closing the door.

“Rake i
s down!” a man yelled.

The royal guard saw Alexander as if anew, dozens of men turning toward him and attacking from all sides.
He ran straight at the collapsing line, cutting into the men in his way with almost reckless abandon. The dance consumed him, the present moment merging with moments to come, outcomes seen before they happened, enemy soldiers falling as predictably as the snow. He slipped this way, snapping his blade through those in his path, danced that way, cutting down thugs within reach—every movement certain, every strike deadly. Very quickly, he was back inside the main body of Rake’s legion, a massive throng of unruly miscreants and cutthroats.

A glance back revealed a small party of royal guard
taking orders from two of Rake’s lieutenants. They were organizing to both maintain a chain of command and to give chase. Conflicting purposes caused confusion and paralysis among the inner circle for the first few critical moments.

Alexander tried to blend in. Not ten steps later, a
soldier moved to challenge him. Alexander cut him in half in passing, drawing attention from others nearby. He kept walking.

A
few men began pursuing him.

The royal guard caught up and pointed him out, commanding everyone within earshot to attack. Not good odds
, Alexander thought. He started running again, striking only at those who got in the way. Within the first dozen seconds, he’d killed as many men. They came at him with less enthusiasm after that, most seeing that the royal guard was closing the distance and apparently deciding to leave it to them.

A dozen m
en on horse charged from behind. What remained of Rake’s guard had come to exact revenge. Alexander turned to face them, raising his light brightly enough to spook the horses and blind the men, while at the same time opening his Wizard’s Den and stepping inside, dousing his light completely and closing the door.

He leaned the staff against the doorframe and carefully cleaned off the Thinblade before sheathing it.

“They sort of appear to be sleeping,” Chloe said.

“Are their eyes
still open?”

“Yes,” she said, somewhat downcast.

Alexander sat next to Anja, looking at her with all of his sight.

“There’s darkness at work,” h
e said after nearly a minute. “It’s very faint, but it’s there.”

“What do we do?” Chloe said.

“I’m not sure. Maybe Lita will know,” Alexander said.

“Your light should have banished
the darkness.”

“It banish
ed the ghosts … maybe they left something behind.”

“I don’t see anything, and I’m more familiar than most with the aether,” Chloe said, buzzing
up close to Anja’s face. “Maybe you’d better do it again though, just to be safe.”

Alexander shrugged. All it
would cost him was effort. A small price to pay for helping his friends. He lifted his staff in both hands and raised the light, filling his Wizard’s Den with brilliance for just a few moments, holding it for as long as he could, bathing his friends in that purging and healing energy from the realm of light, until his strength failed and he slumped into a bed.

He rested for nearly an hour, letting his mind clear and his body recuperate from the battle and from the strain
of wielding Luminessence. Outside, dawn was coming, and a new battle with it.

Rake’s men would be hit from the
air and from the west at sunrise. An hour or two later, five thousand Rangers would arrive from the south. Alexander had already taken the beast’s head, now it was just a matter of killing the horde with minimal casualties to his people. He could help with that.

After checking his friends and finding them sleeping with
their eyes closed, he tightened his boots, drew his sword and took up Luminessence. The door opened to a camp in chaos. Horns blew in the distance, men were shouting. Dawn was breaking and everyone was moving to meet the attack. Alexander stepped forth unnoticed, the door closing behind him.

A
unit of mixed cavalry, armed with a wide variety of weapons and armor, rode by heading toward the sounds of fighting to the west. They were enlisting everyone in their path.

Alexander sheathed the Thinblade and fell
in behind them, staying a good distance away, trusting that his blood-encrusted clothes would help him blend in. It worked for a while … until he got closer to the fighting and came across one of Rake’s few remaining lieutenants. The man became apoplectic when he saw Alexander, pointing at him with a wordless mix of surprise and fury.

The alarm went up
. Alexander responded with a brilliant flash of light, stepping into the moment of blindness that followed, killing the five nearest men and then slipping deeper into the chaos of the defensive line holding back the Rangers’ initial attack.

A team of four wyverns roared overhead, drawing
shouts of warning from the ground. The Sky Knights dove in unison, casting firepots into the throng, pulling up to wheel around for another pass. Orange light flared in the distance, vanishing into the sunrise, followed by screams.

Alexander st
opped, reaching out with his sight and finding the place in the line where the thugs were weakest. He turned toward that point and started cutting his way there. As before, it didn’t take long before men began to shy away from a fight with him. He walked past those who stood down without even acknowledging their existence. Those that did attack met a counterattack that was faster, sharper and better placed than they could match.