Authors: Edward Lazellari
Symian went from sullen to stunned in the blink of an eye. He was in open disbelief that this was actually happening.
“You may take Lhars with you,” Dorn added, satisfied with his own generosity.
Lhars closed his eyes in silent deliberation. Symian turned to Hesz and Kraten—both men looked at the floor solemnly and said nothing.
Dorn grabbed at his head again as though someone hammered an invisible spike into it. Cat didn’t know enough about magic battles to tell if it was something Lelani did or if Dorn’s headaches were reaching an all-time new pain threshold.
Symian put on his coat slowly, as though waiting for a last-minute reprieve—but Dorn was focused on his own pain, holding on to the wall to brace himself. Symian looked like a dog that had been kicked and banished by his master—waiting for Dorn to remember how loyal he truly was and see the error of his strategy. He shuffled to the elevator with Lhars, flipped his hoodie, and pressed the button for the lobby. And they were gone.
Dorn sounded like a man tortured on the rack. His eyes were wild—his breathing in perfect rhythm with Cat’s Lamaze method when she had Bree. He took off his suit jacket and tossed it on the duffel, loosened his tie, and rolled up his designer shirtsleeves with their fancy French cuffs.
Cat studied her captor’s strong profile, thick wrists and blond hair tied back—a Norse god come to earth. Dorn chanted in a foreign tongue again that sounded very much like German, but wasn’t—around his balled fists blue electricity snaked like St. Elmo’s fire around a ship’s mast. Cat could feel the static charge in the room … her arm hairs stood on end as power borrowed from the lay line hummed through the building to this hidden aerie.
Dorn stood at the edge of the newly formed precipice and let loose a drum-shattering war cry as an arc of intense hot light crackled from his hands and whipped across the darkening sky like an angry lash, colliding violently at its terminus—the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building.
CHAPTER 49
RIDE THE LIGHTNING
The lay line energy that enveloped Seth in the lobby of the Empire State Building was the purest magic he’d experienced to date—it charged him like refined sugar juicing a man that never eats sweets. The building was a conduit, a long metal pole in a lightning storm drawing power from everywhere. The magic was familiar—imbued with a presence similar in that way a scent can bring back long-ago memories and transport a person into yesteryear. The magic filled him, pouring into reservoirs he had long forgotten existed within. He was different in that way … it was what Magnus Proust most liked about him he now recalled—a rare talent. Not all mages could store magic within themselves the way that Seth could. One teacher called him “the camel”—an anomaly among anomalies.
Elevators were only bringing people down. Seth found an idle lift at the end of the hall that would take him toward the observation deck and tapped the control board with his staff to activate it. As the elevator climbed, he wished he’d brought some gum to pop his ears against the pressure change. On eighty, he transferred to a second bank to take him to the eighty-sixth floor. Staff at the ready, he didn’t know what to expect when he stepped onto the deck lobby. Strong gusts buffeted him when he walked out of the car. Normally the lobby was enclosed by thick glass walls and filled with tourists, but the floor was empty and the east-facing windows shattered, broken glass pushed by the wind skittered around the floor, glittering weakly under the waning sun.
The smell of soldered metal and ozone saturated the air. A four-foot-high stone wall marked the perimeter of the outside balcony, topped by a suicide-preventing steel and iron grate that curved inward at its highest point like a breaking wave with jagged tips. Lelani huddled on the New Jersey side of the deck, farthest from the Chrysler Building. She crouched behind the concrete slope of a handicap ramp that led from the lobby to the balcony. This side of the deck was in better shape—windows still intact. Burns, cuts, and smudges all over Lelani told of a long, harrowing day.
“Hey,” Seth said.
“Hey,” she responded. She looked glad to see him—something Seth had little experience with overall.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Distraction.”
“How’s that working out?”
“Not well.”
Lelani reached up, grabbed Seth’s lapel, and pulled him down on top of her just as a streak of lightning shattered the windows above them and electrified the metal fence surrounding the deck. Electricity sizzled and spat off the fence in pieces where the bolt hit, like white-hot embers off an industrial welder. Seth and Lelani brushed the hot sparks off their clothes quickly and crawled to the southern side of the deck.
“Holy crap!” Seth cried. “We’re going to fry up here! Who’s doing that?”
“Dorn.”
“Dorn? Why are we up here?”
“I miscalculated. I thought with enough power I could deflect his attacks and draw his focus until his mana depleted at the Chrysler Building.”
“You picked a fight on purpose?”
“We need to draw the bulk of his ire here to stop the spread of the golems and to distract him from the captain and Malcolm, who are even now storming his position.”
“Jeezus! I’m gone for a few hours and we’re suddenly on the offensive.”
Another bolt came through the lobby of the observation deck and hit the grating. The smell of ozone permeated the air and the hairs on Seth’s arms stood on end.
“We got to get off this deck,” he said. “We’re going to die up here.”
“Seth…,” Lelani started. She paused a moment looking uncharacteristically uncertain. “I have to go to the Chrysler Building. I have to take on Dorn directly.”
“Are you nuts?!” he scolded.
Far from it, her look said she was deadly serious. Seth gained a little insight into the lives of wizards at this moment. They all lived in fear of one another … like the era of mutually assured destruction before the Berlin Wall fell, wizards inherently understood there was no sure way of telling who was more powerful than whom, what tricks the other had, what the other knew that you didn’t, and that the only certain way to stay alive was to always strike first and strike hard. Even during the best of times, they were like college professors perpetually in fear of the competitor’s paper that would disprove a life’s work; only in wizards’ cases there were temporal powers involved—means to control and manipulate the universe.
What a mad way to live,
Seth realized.
The sky darkened from more than the setting sun. A true cloud had formed over Manhattan, above the collective black haze from all the fires and explosions, to block the few stars the city laid claim to. The breeze picked up, cool droplets fell intermittently chilling Seth’s cheeks, threatening to become a steady drizzle. A flash in the clouds startled them, thinking another bolt had landed on their deck, but it was nature’s power, outlining the ceiling’s linty bulk, like blue-gray balls of cotton crushed in a bag.
“Powerful magic affects weather patterns,” Lelani said. “It’s never good to draw out so much in one place. Dorn has used a lifetime’s worth of spells against us.”
“What do you need me to do?” Seth asked.
“Stay up here and throw anything you can at him … anything that will make him believe he still battles me. By the gods’ good graces, I may make it there in time to engage Dorn when Lord MacDonnell assaults his stronghold. If he can dispatch the remaining henchmen and escape with Catherine, it would dispirit Dorn—perhaps enough to give the malady that ails him time to run its course.”
Seth grabbed her arm. “Wait. Why don’t you just kill him? You sound … like you don’t expect to be around to see Dorn go down.”
She gently put her hand on his and forced a smile. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, and headed into the lobby. Seth followed her with a million questions. He couldn’t very well throw hard air or turn things into flowers across a city. Before they reached the elevators, one dinged and its doors opened. Symian and a large heavily armed henchman stepped onto the deck.
Lelani grabbed Seth and hurdled them both through the broken panes back out onto the southern balcony. Bullets whizzed overhead, flying out over the unsuspecting city. Lelani whipped up two phosphorus balls and chucked them back into the lobby. She didn’t have time to put too much energy into them, but they flashed brilliantly. The trick worked because the henchman now shot wildly, and like a blind man with a gun managed to hit everything except what he wanted to. They heard Symian yowl in pain. Seth recalled that the troll’s skin was flammable.
Seth worked up the spell for hard air. “Get behind me,” he said to his partner, and swung his staff toward the lobby intending to blow both assailants completely off the deck. A spray of glass and rubble, souvenirs, pamphlets—everything not nailed down—blew out the eastern side of the building in a cloud of debris that looked very much like the sky over a ticker tape parade. The lobby was emptied.
“Well done,” said Lelani, impressed. “You must teach me that.”
They entered the lobby again, slowly. The henchman was on the floor of the east balcony, moaning, saved from flying off the building by the suicide grate. He reached under his coat. Lelani approached, and as the pistol emerged from the coat, she kicked him in the head, caving in the henchman’s skull like a ripe melon.
Symian was still missing.
They looked at each other, wondering if the troll now lay splattered on some lower rooftop. They walked through the lobby, carefully searching.
Suddenly Lelani waved her arms in a pattern and the air around them flashed brightly, crackling like a bug zapper in summer. “You’ll not catch me twice with that spell, troll!” she shouted.
“What’d he do?” Seth whispered.
“He tried to place us in stasis.”
A few moments of silence felt like they stretched into years. Unexpectedly, Symian walked out, hands up where they could see them, waving a white handkerchief. He walked slowly past the elevators in full view. Lelani put up her own hands in a defensive posture and Seth raised his staff. The right side of Symian’s jacket and hoodie was burned through. His right shoulder and neck blackened. Apparently, he’d learned how to put himself out when afire.
“I can’t beat you,” Symian said.
“It’s a trick,” Seth said.
“I wish it were,” said Symian. He looked dispirited, like he had no fight left in him. “I returned one faerie silver dagger to Dorn—he believes I still have the other knife and therefore the advantage. I could not tell him that I had lost it to you. I cannot beat you in a fight, fair or otherwise. He sent me regardless, knowing that … to my death.” To Lelani he said, “You offered me mercy once … I choose not to die. I have that right, do I not? To live?”
“Just like that?” Seth said.
“He’s mad,” Symian said fearfully. “The headaches have driven him to desperation. Look at how many of our company are dead. What he did to Tom—to Lord MacDonnell’s wife … We are undone. Even his own childhood friend, Kraten, believes we’re on the path to our doom under Dorn—but who dares confront a deranged sorcerer? He’s too scared to go home defeated. He’s despera—”
Symian fell to his knees writhing in a struggle against an invisible force. He grabbed his head and made choking sounds. “Nooo! Stay out!” he cried.
“Mind spell!” Lelani shouted. “Some of my wards are down!” She shot a phosphorus ball at the troll.
Symian caught it with no effect on him and threw it back at her a hundred times more powerful. Lelani erected a ward just in time, but the blast blew her and Seth back out the other end of the lobby toward the Jersey side. White spots in a white haze filled Seth’s vision.
Symian approached them with a confident swagger. Something was wrong with his eyes … they moved independently, in different directions.
“I thought I’d help my apprentice since he has such high regard for your talents,” Symian said. His speech pattern was different, his voice gravelly and forced.
Seth cast another hard air spell, only to have Symian-Dorn throw it back at him. The force slammed him into the wall and he lost consciousness …
… It was the second time in a day that someone spoke to Seth while he lay in a subconscious state. This time, it was the tree wizard Rosencrantz, who it turned out, was the familiar presence in the magic at the Empire State Building. The lay line that ran through New York also emerged in the tree wizard’s meadow, and Rosencrantz was capable of sending out a tendril of consciousness along the stream. The tree wizard was already familiar with Seth’s mind. It cost Rosencrantz greatly to communicate in real time. The tree had to cast its own time warp to speed its reactions to human levels, and it aged rapidly as it did so. Seth could not tell what language the communication was held in, or what the tree wizard’s voice even sounded like, or even how long the conversation lasted. He just knew that all these things happened. Rosencrantz healed his concussion through the stream as they communicated.
Seth opened his eyes to a throbbing pain clamoring on his skull. A steady drizzle had arrived and its coolness helped revive him. Symian-Dorn had a hand around Lelani’s throat and the other pulled at the dagger on Lelani’s belt. Not long had passed since Seth had been struck unconscious.
“What’s this?” Symian-Dorn asked the centaur.
Despite blurry vision and a throbbing headache, he had to take down Symian now or Lelani was finished. It had to be fast and simple.
The simplest spell.
He got up quietly, moved behind Symian, and cast the spell to separate the bonds between all the salt molecules in the troll’s body. Symian-Dorn screamed and dropped the dagger. Salt was a vital component in any carbon-based creature; Seth didn’t think he could kill Symian quickly this way, but he had his attention.
Seth poured it on.
That’s right,
he thought.
Who’s your daddy? Take your focus off Lelani so she can whammy you into next week.
Instead, the possessed troll called up a powerful gale and threw Lelani into it. The gust carried her over the protective grating around the deck. Lelani reached out at the last minute and grabbed the curved top of the suicide grate with both hands before she went over. Seth thanked God the top of the grate curved inward to create a bit of a platform at the top that Lelani could lay on, otherwise, she would have been impaled by steel rods sticking straight up. Seth continued to wreak havoc with Symian’s salt levels until the troll slumped to the ground dazed. Silvery smoke rose from his body. His eyes were straight, though.
Elvis has left the building, folks.