Sovereign of the Seven Isles 7: Reishi Adept (49 page)

Zuhl’s forces were pushing against Phane’s line, taking advantage of the damage caused by the drakini attack to
gain ground. Phane ignored them. Isabel started wondering if she might have a chance to strike while he was preoccupied with his spell, but decided against it. Her time would come.

As the battle raged, the air grew colder. Phane stepped up his chanting. The three men in the circle below began to scream, visceral fear and tortured agony bound into one long death knell. When they fell silent, the air began to flow into the darkness swirling in the center of the circle. Phane uttered a
final set of words and the darkness cleared with a clap.

Standing in the center of the circle, amid the three lifeless corpses sacrificed to call it forth
, was a demon of stone and fire, its body a collection of rocks held together by joints of orange-red heat. It stood twelve feet tall and was roughly formed in the shape of a man, but without features or detail past legs, arms, body, and head. Heat radiated from it, drying the air and causing Isabel to break out in a prickly sweat.

“
Destroy the spear at the center of the ice,” Phane commanded.

The creature nodded,
bounding past startled soldiers until it neared the front line where it jumped over Phane’s men, landing in the middle of the barbarians and thrashing its way toward the ice mountain. Each step produced a gout of steam; each strike burned the man struck.

It reached the side of the artificial mountain and stopped, beginning to glow with heat, melting into the ice, water running away in rivulets only to freeze again as it flowed away from the heat. The demon sank
through the melting ice to the ground and then began melting its way to the spear. The whirlwind started to form again as soon as the demon reached it, exposing it to the air, but the demon took it in both hands and melted it through in two places in a matter of moments.

Phane smiled. “Now for some real fun,” he said, extending his hands toward the rapidly melting remnants of the ice mountain, lifting the chunks of ice and the water itself into the air with his magic. Piece
by piece, drop by drop, Phane lifted the water and ice over the barbarians’ heads, forming a large swirling mass, spinning faster and faster.

Isabel stood transfixed, as did most of the soldiers on both sides of the
battlefield. Once the ice had all melted, Phane lowered the huge bubble of water onto the enemy soldiers still guarding the Nether Gate, holding it in a shape large enough that the soldiers were completely and hopelessly submerged. Phane laughed with delight as hundreds of men drowned before him. Once they were dead, he shoved the water into a wave that rolled across the short distance to the main body of Zuhl’s army, splashing into their front line and knocking over the first few ranks of soldiers.

Out of the corner of her eye
, Isabel saw a man sprinting toward the Nether Gate. She frowned, squinting to see better, recognition coming over her, followed by sudden hope. It was Trajan Karth and he was carrying the Goiri bone—bane of magic. He was one of the few people in all the Seven Isles who could actually destroy the Nether Gate.

Phane noticed him,
too, frowning in disbelief for only a moment before fully recognizing the threat. His gaze snapped to a boulder just a bit smaller than a house. With both hands outstretched, he focused his will, lifting the boulder and lobbing it in a gentle arc across the battlefield.

Isabel held her breath, watching helplessly as the giant stone flew unerringly
. It landed squarely on Trajan, burying the Prince of Karth under dozens of tons of stone in an instant. For a moment, it didn’t seem real. One second, he was alive and running with all of the speed and purpose that a man can muster, the next second he was crushed under a boulder, effectively scoured from the face of the world in a blink.

“Oh, Trajan,” Isabel whispered.

“Charge!” Phane shouted to his army, ignoring her.

A horn blew and Phane’s army seemed to spring forward as one, racing toward the enemy with reckless abandon, moving past the Nether Gate and securing a defensive line several hundred feet beyond, facing Zuhl’s army.

“Come,” Phane said, abandoning his tower and advancing with his army, surrounded by several dozen wraithkin. They moved forward quickly, Phane’s eyes never wavering from his goal.

T
wenty pillars of ice formed just inside Zuhl’s line not three hundred feet away. Atop each, a priest began casting shards of ice toward Phane and those surrounding him.

Half a dozen hit, killing a few of his personal guard
s, before Phane raised a shield over his companions. It formed a reddish half shell, flashing with heat as each ice shard hit. The priests turned their magic against the soldiers on Phane’s front line, ripping into them savagely, momentarily shaking their spirit. Zuhl gained ground.

Phane cast a
nother spell, muttering for several seconds before a magic circle two hundred feet in diameter burned into the ground around the Nether Gate. As soon as his first spell was cast, he began chanting in another language.

His front line collapsed, fa
lling back under the pressure of the barbarian attack. Phane ignored them, the words of his spell tumbling off his tongue, each word given its due attention, each syllable uttered crisply and precisely.

Suddenly, t
he ground shook, stalling Zuhl’s charge. A moment later, the large magic circle rose forty feet into the air, forming a perfect plateau in a matter of seconds.

Hundreds of the men in
Phane’s first legion were trapped between the barbarians’ charge and the cliff that had risen so unexpectedly behind them. The result was a loss of nearly half their number, trapped and slaughtered.

Isabel scanned the surface of the
huge plateau. Phane, four hundred of his personal guards, all of the Acuna wizards, the wraithkin, Lacy, Tyr and a dozen of his men were safely on top while the rest of Phane’s army was spread out below, engaged with the barbarians on either side of the plateau as both forces flowed around it.

A dozen priests rose up on pillars of ice, for
ming shielded battlements to protect them from arrows while giving them windows to cast their spells through. Moments after each tower was formed, the priests began casting ice shards, a foot long and as sharp as glass, into the soldiers on top of the plateau.

Phane picked up a large rock with his magic and hurled it at one of the towers, shattering it and sending the priest falling to the ground. The Acuna began to engage the priests, killing three fairly quickly, before the
rest transformed into blue dragons and took to flight, gaining altitude with a few strokes before attacking all at once.

Six dragon
priests breathed into the soldiers trying to defend the plateau, frost and frigid air leaving scores of men trembling, numb in the fingers and toes, entirely incapacitated with paralyzing cold. Then the priests crashed into the wraithkin. The demonic warriors blinked out of existence to avoid the attack, but that didn’t stop the priests from ripping into any soldiers they got close to with their claws and tails.

Several other priests used their magic to create ice steps up to the edge of the plateau, giving the barbarians direct access. The first five to reach the top of the stairs were blown off the edge by
the High Overseer’s force bomb.

Another staircase of ice grew up to the top of the plateau. Phane’s guard
rushed to defend against the barbarians’ advance.

Phane grabbed a priest
with his magic and slammed him into another, throwing them both, crushed and broken, off the plateau. The remaining four priests launched into the air, taking flight in different directions.

Those priests that didn’t attack the plateau were busy wreaking havoc within Phane’s army, his men nearly defenseless against them. Phane ignored them.

Isabel heard them before she saw them. Thundering across the battlefield toward Phane and the Nether Gate were three giants, easily thirty feet tall and made entirely of ice.

The temperature fell.

A priest on a newly formed pillar directed a white beam of magical energy at the plateau, covering Phane’s shield with a half shell of ice. Phane picked the ice up with his magic and threw it at the priest, hitting his ice tower and breaking it. The priest took dragon form just in time to avoid a fatal fall.

What happened next was enough to challenge Isabel’s sanity anew. A
doorway in the world opened. It looked much like the door to Alexander’s Wizard’s Den, except she knew in an instant that this door led a great distance away.

A man stood
just the other side of the door, holding an ornate staff with a pure white crystal fixed to one end. He was pale and gaunt. His shock-white hair was close-cropped and his eyes were ice blue.

He directed his crystal
scepter at Phane and launched a six-foot shard of ice that shattered against his shield, showering the area with powdered ice. A second shard hit his shield a moment later … and then the door closed, vanishing before Phane could counterattack.

Rage danced in his eyes as he
reinforced his shield, scanning the battlefield for a target. Seeing an ice giant just reaching the top of the plateau and sweeping aside a dozen men, Phane relaxed, looking almost serene as he raised his hands and unleashed a torrent of fire at the huge creature. A coiled jet of flame five feet wide roared forth, rivaling dragon fire and hitting the giant with enough force to blow it off the plateau and enough heat to melt it into steam before it hit the ground.

With a flick of his hand, he tossed the other two giants a hundred feet into the air the moment they reached the plateau, shattering them on impact.

Drakini swept in, falling men with their frigid breath, working to incapacitate rather than kill, diminishing Phane’s personal guard quickly.

The next wave came on suddenly, over a doz
en priests rising up on pillars, all firing ice shards at Phane. At the same time, a score of drakini attacked, breathing cold on his shield. Phane swatted at a few, smashing them into the ground, killing them easily, but not enough of them.

A much larger ice shard hit his shield and
collapsed it with a loud popping noise. Isabel watched a perfect duplicate of herself, down to the last stitch of clothing and the smudges on her face, appear not ten feet away. Phane turned, his eyes darting from one version of her to the other. He reached out and lifted both with his magic, when the door opened behind him.

Zuhl stepped through, his crystal
scepter held like a spear. He closed the distance quickly, moving like a trained soldier, reaching his preferred range and drawing back slightly to add force to the thrust.

Isabel began formulating another battle plan. If Zuhl killed Phane
, then she would be in a fight for her life with a very different, though no less dangerous, enemy.

But then Zuhl stopped.

Chapter 36

Abigail signaled to hit them head on. Magda nodded, leaning into her wyvern as she rolled into a dive, thirty witches following her lead. Below was a swarm of drakini swirling over Whitehall. Every tower was manned, some with priests, others with teams of crossbowmen. Many towers were armed with light ballistae on mounts that allowed for a very wide field of fire.

The witches fanned out as they approached their targets, all of them casting a spell capable of direct damage, most relying on a light
-lance or force-shard. Abigail fired five arrows into the drakini before the Sky Knights pulled up, still well above the enemy, leveled off and began to ascend again.

Behind them, Ixabrax and Zora crashed through the drakini, tearing, slashing and killing as they passed. Each dragon picked a large, well
-armed tower near the center of Zuhl’s expansive keep and made a run at it. Both breathed a cone of frost at their chosen target, killing the guards in an instant and freezing the tower solid just a moment before they crashed into it with their hind talons like a raptor catching a salmon. The towers shattered, spraying stones into the courtyards below.

Abigail looked over her shoulder, assessing the damage done to the drakini—probably half had fallen. The priests would be ready for a second run, but she had her bearings now. Alexander had shown her the layout of the giant white marble fortress, pointing out the easiest points of entry to get close to Zuhl’s inner chambers.

“Begin the assault,” she shouted over the wind.

Magda signaled the command
, and the formation began to separate into two groups, Abigail, Magda, Cassandra, Kat, Bree, Dalia and Amelia in one and the rest of the witches in the other.

The larger group lined up behind
Zora and Ixabrax as the dragons made another run, freezing and shattering two more towers before killing a few more drakini. Magda lined up behind the larger group of witches.

Priests fired ice shards into the air,
soldiers fired ballistae targeting the wyverns, and crossbowmen fired wildly into the sky. The witches counterattacked with magic. During the exchange, Magda dove almost recklessly into the interior of the keep, past towers and walls into a courtyard, the rest of her team right behind her. They landed hard, hard enough to knock the wind out of Abigail. She slipped to the ground with the rest of the witches and raced across the courtyard to a stone wall, willing herself to breathe.

The moment the witches were clear, their steeds launched into the sky. Abigail cut into the wall, drawing the Thinblade down through the marble, then across, cutting the outline of a door with four broad strokes. The stone section fell inward, crashing into the hallway with a terrible clatter.

Cassandra’s shield took an ice shard from above. Another shattered on the wall nearby.

Abigail stuck her head through the
hole, looking this way and that. Seeing no one, she stepped inside, sheathing the Thinblade and nocking an arrow. Magda followed, with the rest of the witches right behind her.

“There!” a soldier shouted, pointing down the hall from a hundred feet away.

Magda sighted down her index finger, sending a single force-shard at him with terrible speed and power, ripping through his chest and killing him in an instant. Three more soldiers came around the corner at the end of the hall.

“We have to go that way,” Abigail said, pointing
toward the soldiers.

Bree, Kat
, and Dalia stepped forward, extending their shields to fill the entire hallway space, protecting those behind them from crossbow bolts. More soldiers rounded the corner but found their weapons to be useless against the witches’ interlocking shields.

“Now!” Magda said.

As her sisters dropped their shields, she sent a blue sphere of force down the hallway. It exploded right in the middle of the soldiers, sending men hurtling through the air, stunned and bruised, some dead or dying.

Racing forward, they reached the corner in seconds. A dozen men were scattered haphazardly on the floor like broken dolls.
Abigail saw a man running away down the hall and quickly felled him with an arrow in the back.

“The end of this hall,” she said, nocking another arrow and heading down the long white corridor.

“We have a platoon coming from behind,” Kat said, sending a string of force-shards back the way they’d come.

“I’ll seal the hallway,” Cassandra said, beginning to cast a spell. Kat and Bree took up positions in front of her while she focused her will. Abigail waited impatiently, scan
ning the long hallway for any hint of a threat. She glanced back as the stone walls seemed to melt, forming another wall that completely closed off the hallway behind them.

“Huh,” Abigail said, leading the way deeper into
Whitehall, killing the first soldier to come around the corner with a snap shot from her bow. The next three fell to Magda’s force-shards. When several more peeked around the corner, Cassandra sent a bubble of liquid fire into the wall opposite them, splattering the soldiers with deadly magical flame. They ran screaming, succumbing to the fire before they could get more than a few dozen steps.

Abigail stopped at the corner, peering around carefully.

“Nothing,” she said, slinging her bow and drawing the Thinblade. Within a few seconds, she had cut a hole in the floor. A section of stone fell into the hallway below, sending a sharp echo in every direction. Kat dropped through the hole, followed by Bree.

Abigail was next
, followed by the rest of the witches. Cassandra was last, closing the hole behind her, smoothing the floor above with magical stone. It looked as if they’d never passed.

Abigail cut her way down another level and then another.

“This way,” she whispered, even though the oppressive subterranean silence had been very recently shattered by a piece of falling stone. For nearly five minutes, they moved without resistance, slipping through dark passages, unseen and unsearched for—until …

“I thought I heard something,” a soldier said
.

“G
o check it out,” said another.

Abigail and her witches were lined up along the wall around a corner
, not thirty feet from the two soldiers. A company of a hundred more soldiers filled the large assembly room just down the hall.

Magda motioned for silence, looking to Kat and Bree. Both women nodded. Magda waited for the two men to get closer, then spelled the area where they stood with silence. Cat and Bree didn’t bother with magic, ins
tead darting in to stab the men, letting them down slowly and then dragging them around the corner.

“We have to go through that room,” Abigail said.

“I can disable most of the men, but I need some time,” Magda said.

“I’ll cast a screen for you,” Cassandra said. “Where do you want it?”

Magda peered around the corner cautiously.

“Another ten feet down the hall will give me the angle I need
to throw my spell through the door.”

Cassandra nodded, turning her attention to the hallway and casting her spell. From where Abigail stood, nothing seemed to happen. When Cassandra nodded to Magda, she walked right out in the middle of the hallway. From where she
stood, she was in full view of the men inside the room, yet they didn’t seem to notice her. The spell had taken over a minute to cast, but as far as Abigail was concerned, it was worth the wait.

A tattered bolt of gr
ey magical energy traveled in a straight line from Magda’s hand to the floor inside the room. For several dozen feet from the point of impact, gravity was suddenly reversed for a single second. All the men in the room fell up to the ceiling, landing on their heads; then they fell back to the floor when the spell lapsed.

Dalia and Amelia
raced to the door, approaching as silently as possible while still moving swiftly. Dalia reached the door first, peering through and quickly hitting a man with a force-push. Amelia rushed through on Dalia’s nod, targeting someone farther away with a light-lance. Dalia went in next, then motioned to the other witches that the enemy soldiers were all down. The vast majority were dead or unconscious. Those few that were alive and aware, wanted nothing to do with anything. They were mostly curled up on the floor groaning.

“Nice,” Abigail said, running on tiptoes to the door across the room. “Looks clear.”

They were halfway down the fifty-foot corridor when two priests rounded the corner and launched ice shards at them. The first hit Abigail on the outside of her left shoulder. Numbing pain exploded in her arm. She gasped as Magda’s force-push hit her in the back and side, sending her to the ground a moment before another three ice shards flashed overhead and slammed into Magda’s and Cassandra’s shields, showering Abigail with chunks of ice. She was stunned and chilled and her arm hurt.

She looked up just
in time to see the two priests suffer a barrage of magical attacks from the witches. Magda started with a force bomb that depleted their shields, Cassandra hit them with a second that finished the job and collapsed their shields. Then the other four witches tore the priests apart with a dozen force-shards. The brutal and sudden slaughter did little to satisfy Abigail’s anger.

“Let me look at that,” Magda said, offering her a hand.

Abigail allowed some of her anger to drain away, reserving some for later. She winced as she got up, looking at the bloody gash on her arm and frowning.

“I won’t be able to
aim my bow very well like this,” she said.

Magda wrapped a bandage around
the wound, cinching it tight. “Your sword arm is just fine,” she said.

Abigail nodded. She knew full well that they didn’t have time to stop. She would have to make do. She tested her bow, grim
acing at the pain in her arm from the strain of holding it. Her accuracy would indeed suffer, but she was confident that she could put an arrow in the right general direction, if need be.

“You should stay behind us,” Magda said. “Our shields will protect you.”

Abigail nodded reluctantly, letting Cassandra take the lead. They managed to avoid the increasingly frequent patrols for several minutes, drawing closer to Zuhl’s resting chamber with every cautious step.

“It’s just around the corner,” Abigail whispered.

Cassandra stopped, peeking around, pulling her head back quickly.

“What is it?” Abigail asked.

“I’m not sure,” Cassandra said. “It looks like three apparitions made of frost hovering in front of the door.”

“Fire?” Magda said.

“Seems reasonable,” Cassandra said, stepping away from the rest of the witches. She cast her spell quickly, a cloak of flames igniting all around her, dancing and crackling, yet not harming her in the least.

Magda threw a bubble of liquid fire into the cluster of apparitions. It splattered flame all over and around them,
eliciting a horrible inhuman scream. Cassandra rushed in, targeting one of the creatures with a jet of fire, burning it to steam in a matter of seconds. Another vanished into steam from Magda’s liquid fire.

Cassandra reached the
entry hall to Zuhl’s resting chamber. As she stepped close to the massive doors, the stone floor flashed with a bright, cold white light. Cassandra stopped suddenly, her body entirely frozen solid in an instant.

Magda gasped
as Cassandra broke at the knee and toppled over, shattering into a thousand pieces across the floor.

The Reishi triumvir
put a hand to her mouth and closed her eyes tightly. “Sister, you will be missed,” she whispered.

Abigail closed her eyes and looked down, shaking her head. How many more good people had to die before all of the bad people were gone?

After a few moments of collective silence, Amelia said, “Let’s go kill Zuhl.”

Abigail nodded, scanning the entryway for evidence of more traps, but she could discern nothing. For all she knew, the
magic that had killed Cassandra was still active and deadly.

“What about that wall?
” she whispered. “Zuhl’s chamber should be right behind it.”

Magda nodded, beginning to tremble with rage in the moments before she hit the wall with a light-lance, burning a six
-inch hole through three feet of granite.

“Is the floor between here and there safe?”

Magda cast another spell, frowning to herself. She sighed and cast another spell, this one sending a shimmering wave through the air.

“There
was
something, but it’ll be gone for a few minutes.”

Abigail darted to the wall, peering through the hole. Zuhl’s sarcophagus rested against the far wall of the room. She unslung her bow and drew
her last arrow with red feathers.

“Are you sure about this?” Magda asked.

“This should roast him alive,” Abigail said, nocking the arrow.

Magda didn’t look convinced, but she held her tongue.

Abigail struggled to hold the bow steady, but when she finally let the arrow fly, it flew true, through the hole and into the room. It hit the sarcophagus and exploded. Abigail ducked under the jet of flame that shot out of the hole as the chamber beyond was engulfed in an inferno.