The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) (36 page)

“Stand fast,” Grace said, readying herself for an attack. She let her earth wyrd slip loose, rooting the fallen to the ground as she had rooted the verax-acis. But she wasn’t powerful enough, despite being the Moonchild, to hold all of them.

Rough hands grabbed Grace from behind, but before the rephaim could sink teeth into her neck, Laphrael spun, his flaming blue sword streaking over Grace’s head and dispatching the fallen. She felt the embrace of the beast slacken as it turned to dust around her and tumbled to the ground at her feet.

“Watch my back,” she told Laphrael.

“Good idea,” he said, taking up a place behind her.

Grace reached back out with her earth wyrd, trying to hold more and more fallen in place, but the thinner she spread her wyrd the less effective it was, until she was only slowing their approach, not halting it.

The dead were still pouring in on the fallen, but as more and more of the legion took to the ground, drawing ebony blades, the dead were nothing more than another means of slowing them.

But the angels had wings, and not all of them dropped from the sky.

As Grace was distracted by those that were coming from in front of her, and Laphrael was amusing himself with those coming from behind, dozens fell from the sky all around Grace.

“Moonchild, is it?” a dark-haired fallen said to Grace’s right.

“Yes, I believe it is,” a male said to her left.

“I will enjoy stripping the flesh from your bones,” the woman on the right said.

They sped at her, but a pulse of light from Laphrael vanquished them where they were, dropping their ashes to the ground. The only thing left behind were a points of light that spiraled up to the heavens.

Mag could feel the coming of the angels in the thrum of her alarist power. Her eyes fluttered closed as the intoxicating power of Arael flowed through her.

The legion approaches,
the voice spoke into her mind. It wasn’t the voice she was used to. This one was more feminine, but it was her old master all the same.
If you help me, if you obey, I will forget your little relapse to the whore goddess. If you help me, I will spare your family. If you deny me again, you will be among the first to be destroyed, and you know how we like to destroy traitors.

Mag remembered like it was yesterday; the young woman who had betrayed her group of alarists had been strung up on a tree, stripped naked, covered in honey, and the bees were allowed their victim. She had been left out in the weather, with no food or water, until she was near death and too weak to fend off whatever scavengers came to pick her bones clean while her heart still beat.

Mag clung to her throat, feeling the swell of her heartbeat thundering to her brain.

The host comes behind them. You must strike now, or all might be lost for the legion.

“Astanel,” Mag called, opening her eyes. Across the room the blond-haired boy straightened with a start. Outside they could hear the onslaught, the battle which she had been denied. “The time has come.”

“Now?” Astanel asked. “Shouldn’t we wait?”

“Why wait?” Mag asked. “We are needed now, before the tide is turned.”

Astanel rubbed nervous hands on his trousers and came to stand before Mag. He gripped his hands around the shackles that bound her and looked into her cold blue eyes.

“Just a little pulse of darklight, directed at the shackles,” she told him. “That’s a good boy.”

He did as instructed, the power of Arael swelling up inside of him, leaking out through his fingers and into the iron of her bindings. The shackles vanished. Mag rubbed her chafed skin where the cuffs had dug into her. Her wyrd sang through her body. She had felt it before when she was inside the bindings, but she hadn’t been able to use it. Now it greeted her like a long-lost friend, embracing her in its warmth.

She held her hands out before her and let a little bit of the green wyrd leak from her fingers, illuminating a space before her face. She sighed, and closed her eyes against the wash of relief. Part of her had imagined she would never be able to cast again. She smiled.

Gathering Astanel behind her, she made her way to the cell door. She listened for a moment, and when she didn’t hear movement directly outside the cell, she unlocked the door with a pulse of wyrd. As she expected, there were no guards in the hall outside her door; they were already out of the house. Defending or attacking, whatever they were doing, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was serving the one who ruled her.

“Stick close to me, and do as I do,” Mag told Astanel. She reached behind her and took his sweating hand in her own. Where her fingers latched around his wrist, she could feel the hammering of his worried heart. She tried to will strength into him, unsure if it was helping or not.

There was a sickness in her stomach from the combination of her alarist wyrd and the wyrd of the Crone that infused all of the buildings, but she pressed through the cramps it caused. She turned left and through a doorway up into the unnatural night above the Votary House.

The door hushed shut behind her. The sky was alight with wyrd, with fire, with the burning wings of the legion, and the darkness of a blacked-out sun. Her breath caught. Never before had she felt such power from her old master as she did just then, staring off into the corrupted sun. His awesome power shivered through her.

High above, black wings soared, coming close to her, but once they sensed her chaotic wyrd they left her alone. Even the legion recognized the power taking root within her. Mag closed her eyes and felt the Crone energy in the mortar beneath her booted feet.

She opened her eyes again and stared off to the west, through the carnage of the night and into the darkened sun.

“I have a new master now,” she told the sun. With that she let the alarist wyrd gather inside of her, and shot out a bolt of pure darklight at the amassing black wings overhead. “And it’s no longer you, Arael. Her name is Sara Bardoe.”

Behind her Astanel loosed his hold on her hand and followed suit, blasting out with bolts of darklight, vanquishing the fallen as they came near. Recognizing what was happening, the fallen came for the two of them, bent on destroying them.

Mag had just a moment’s notice to throw a shield around herself when the fallen started dropping to the roof of the Votary House. She pumped her strength into the wyrding, hardening it like a wall around her. Their blows glanced off her ward, but she could do nothing to attack through the shield. It was all she could do to keep it held firm under the attack.

“Astanel,” Mag yelled, but there was no answer. She turned back to see how the boy was holding up in time to see a fallen cleave Astanel’s head from his body. His last bolt of darklight shivered uselessly into the night sky as his body slumped to the roof and pumped the last thrums of his blood out around her feet. His dead eyes stared up at her accusingly.

Pi could finally feel once more. Though Devenstar had wyrded numbness through her body, the numbness she felt in her mind was created by Clara. Over and over, Pi saw the scene play out in her mind. The bloated worm burrowing into Clara’s flesh, the realization in her girlfriend’s eyes that everything was about to change, and then the determination. Pi knew, moments before Clara rushed off, what the blonde sorceress was about to do. She could read it in her eyes.

Pi moaned. As if mirroring her grief, the sounds of battle rose up from outside the window. Steel against steel, the roar of fire nearby, and the moans of the dead.

Fallen,
she thought. Everything seemed to come back to her then, what was really happening, and why Clara had thrown herself into battle. For a time all she had been able to think about was that Clara was gone, but now Pi was starting to remember
why
she was gone. She struggled against the wyrding Devenstar had placed on her. So concerned that she would harm herself, he had wyrded her prostrate. And then forgot about her. But the power of the wyrding was loosening as time wore on. She could still reach her wyrd; Devenstar hadn’t been able to block that, or he hadn’t thought to try. Pi worked against what he had done until finally she could move her legs.

Sensation rushed back into her extremities with a pain that left her nearly breathless. She massaged feeling back into her legs, and then pushed to her feet.

The window was hanging open slightly above her head, and the sounds of battle came through it loud enough to wake the dead. That thought made her head swim with images of Clara running off into the horde of undead, her skin ablaze, to take out as many as she could before she died.

But would she die?
Pi wondered. She had seen the worms slithering into the wound, but would that be enough to kill a sorcerer? She didn’t think so. It would have been enough to kill a mortal, but didn’t the head have to be removed to kill a sorcerer? Her head swam sickeningly with the thought. The death of a sorcerer had been a main concern in the Realm of Earth during the war with the chaos dwarves. Wasn’t everyone concerned that Sara would die from the poison of Wyrders’ Bane?

The thought that Clara might still be alive pushed Pi to her feet, wobbly from the wyrding Devenstar had placed on them. She pushed the window open and saw night had fallen already. Or had it? Most of the buildings between the Votary House and her vision of the western horizon had been vanished with darklight. She could clearly see the sun hanging on the horizon, blackened out as if by a swarm of bugs.

The sight made her stomach churn. Her hands started shaking as fear gripped her body. Pi’s eyes were rooted on the sun, and the blackness that covered it. What could it mean? She shook her head and tore her eyes from the sight. She needed to find Clara. She checked that her sword was on her back and easy to draw. At least Devenstar hadn’t taken that from her as well.
He was probably too distracted, or didn’t think his wyrding would wear off.

Pi slipped out of the window, sunk into the blood-soaked ground, stepped over a headless body, and slipped down the knoll through the legs of undead, stomping around trying to find something to eat.

The undead weren’t something she was really thinking about. Sure, she’d heard them outside the window, but she didn’t expect them to come after her the way they did. They were hungry, and she was food. But whenever they came near her, it was as if they were being yanked away by some kind of wyrd. She reached out with wyrd of her own, and felt a strange power running through the legions of the undead. Whatever the reason for their not attacking her, she was grateful, but these were the monsters that had taken Clara from her.

Pi’s face contorted in a mask of anger. She drew her sword with a hiss of metal on leather and cleaved the head off the nearest corpse. Its head fell to the ground, still chattering as if it didn’t realize it was going to die. The sightless eyes stared up at her, but a lick of fire wyrd combusted the skull, and soon the rotting flesh was sloughing off onto the ground.

Pi continued on, striking out at any undead that were close enough, but not making that her main objective. She was scanning the area, looking for the familiar feel of her girlfriend.

She could feel Clara’s wyrd. She had always been able to feel Clara’s wyrd. It called to her now, and she followed the path to it through multitudes of the undead. But it led her to an old lady, slinking through the group of undead near the base of the knoll. At first she didn’t understand how this ancient women, with the wrinkled gray skin and the wiry silver hair, could possess the same feeling of wyrd that Clara had, but then it sank in. Something she’d heard in passing before.