Necromancer Awakening (51 page)

He summoned a penitent.

A fraction of a second later a six-foot tall skeletal warrior materialized, unarmed and unarmored.

Kagan took a step backwards, and the newly-summoned penitent dove for him.

Kagan was more adroit than Nicolas imagined he would be. The older man side-stepped many attacks and countered with his own. Nicolas concentrated on the shield, probing the mystical fibers that wove together into an unbreakable bond. His penitent wouldn’t last long against Kagan. If he planned on accomplishing more than a diversion, he had to bring the shield down.

No. He needed to
untie
it.

He sent tendrils of energy around the shield’s interior, examining its properties and looking for weaknesses. The shield surrounded him, but there was something different about the portion that covered his chest, as if it weren’t as solid as the rest.

It made sense. When the shield first went up, it hit him from the back and wrapped around to the front. He concentrated his efforts directly in front of his heart.

The necromantic link vanished, and his penitent along with it. His time was growing short now. He had attacked Kagan, who was climbing to his feet. There was no going back.

He started manipulating the fibers of energy in front of his chest, freeing threads of vitapotency from what felt like tangles.

Touching the vitapotency was odd. Unsettling.

Necropotency felt like a footprint, much the way Lamil and Mujahid described it. But vitapotency felt like the foot. And there was something else…something disturbing. The power seemed
aware
of him.

Foot and footprint. Can’t be a coincidence.

A cloud of smoke appeared in front of him. It transformed into an enormous ghost-like hand that inched its way toward him.

“I had hoped you would be happy here,” Kagan said. “You defied the odds and somehow managed to find your way back after so many years. And the first thing you do is attack me? Unprovoked?”

Foot and footprint.
This has to mean something.

“It was in this room, forty years ago, that I learned of your kidnapping,” Kagan said. “It seems fitting that future generations will know this place as the room where I found you dead.”

The ghostly hand inched closer to him.

He remembered back to his time in the Plane of Death, back to his first experience of vitapotency. Why had it targeted children?

Foot and footprint. No. It can’t be.

The energies were two sides of the same coin. Both channeled life. Necropotency channeled life after it had passed away from this world. So vitapotency must channel life
before
it enters the world.

He understood. And it was so simple. If a necromancer channeled necropotency into death…then maybe a life magus should channel vitapotency into life.

My god. Is that why there are so few children and so many stillborn?

With great effort he concentrated on the pregnant woman he saw in the Grand Hall. He formed an image of a spark igniting a blaze and willed the vitapotency toward the woman’s unborn child.

A sense of giddiness emanated from the threads of vitapotency, and for a moment he thought he heard a child’s laughter.

The vitapotency rushed away and the shield evaporated. Kagan backed away with a dazed look.

The ghostly hand was less than an inch from his chest.

Something caught Kagan’s attention at the entrance of the room.

“You’re no god.” The voice came from behind him, and it was a voice Nicolas had never heard before.

Whoever this guy was, Kagan looked as if the man was the last person he expected to see.

“You’d do well to watch your words, Tithian. I’ll forgive the—”

“If you’re a god, then this paltry display of the arcane should pose no challenge to you,” Tithian said.

The ghostly hand struck an invisible barrier in front of Nicolas. It struggled to penetrate but couldn’t.

Power flooded back into Nicolas’s well, and he expelled a wall of force that struck Kagan, lifting him off his feet and tossing him back against the far wall.

He turned his mind inward once more and fashioned a blanket of necropotency identical to the shield Kagan had created. Except this one was compressed into a ball no larger than the head of a pin. He hurled it at Kagan and the compressed energy struck the archmage in the chest, connected to Nicolas by a small tendril of energy. Nicolas willed the ball to expand, and as it grew inside Kagan it spawned smaller, microscopic versions of itself that shielded every cell in Kagan’s body.

Kagan was powerless. There would be no way out of this shield.

Nicolas faced the Orb of Arin. The swirls of light danced across its surface in every color imaginable. He’d experienced what it was like to use the Orb of Zubuxo. All he had to do was release a small amount of power and touch it. His greatest desire would come true. He would hold Kaitlyn in his arms again and never think about this place. They’d get married and be happy together for the rest of their lives. He would finish his degree and become an archaeologist, as he always wanted, and honor the memory of Dr. Murray.

The dead Dr. Murray.

The dead.

Countless dead stood upon the Field of Judgment, waiting for purification from necromancers who were being hunted like animals. Nicolas had seen them. He’d stood with the dead and spoken with them. He’d watched as they were defiled by life magic, made dirty even after they were purified. He remembered the cries of the children as the hellwraiths carried one away. Was Dr. Murray standing somewhere on that Field of Judgment destined to face the hellwraiths as well?

The ground lurched as the quake raged on.

He thought of all the villages he passed through, lying in ruin. Everywhere he went it was as if people were refugees in their own cities. He thought of the death piles that Mujahid had told him about, and wondered how many other cities had become victims of Kagan’s quest for power.

Tears rolled down his face and he thought of Kaitlyn. He reached into his robe and pulled out the picture she had given him. All of his hopes and dreams were in that face. He looked into her eyes and saw his own future.

But it was just another future that would never be, because of the sin of a single man.

This wasn’t his fight. He could walk away. He could go home. He never asked for this.

But if he let this world destroy itself for his own benefit, then he would be guilty of the same sin. How many futures would
he
destroy if he gave in to his desires? How many lives would never be lived? How many children would never be born?

He would never be able to live with himself. And if he became that person—the kind of person that
could
be happy with that decision—then he didn’t deserve Kaitlyn.

The tears flowed freely. Mujahid was right. He knew what had to be done.

Tithian stepped forward, and Nicolas thought he was about to kill Kagan.

“No, Tithian,” Nicolas said. “Please. This is something I have to do.”

Tithian hesitated, and for a moment Nicolas thought he’d misjudged the man. Maybe Tithian wasn’t a friend at all.

Tithian’s eyes moving from Nicolas back to Kagan. He nodded and stepped back.

“What have you done to me?” Kagan asked.

Disgust welled up in Nicolas’s throat like a lump. He wanted nothing more than to summon a penitent who would rip Kagan apart in a shower of blood.

“Do you have any idea what I have to do?” Nicolas said. “What I have to sacrifice to atone for your sins?”

“If you’re going to kill me boy, then kill me.”

Nicolas faced the Orb of Arin once more. He basked in the energy it gave off. It was calming. But peace was no longer possible for Nicolas. His life would never know peace again.

He closed his eyes and opened himself to the power of the orb. Where once his well of power was like a bucket, now it was like the bed of an ocean. He reached out and drew more and more power until that ocean was full to overflowing.

“Gods have mercy, the power,” Tithian said. His hair whipped around his head by a mystical wind.

Necropotency coursed through Nicolas, and his body trembled as he tried to consume even more, but no more would come. He had reached the limit of his abilities, and he would use all of his power to see this to fruition. If he died in the process, then so be it. He was dead already.

He opened his eyes and watched Kagan scoot back along the floor. The archmage’s face had turned ashen.

Nicolas had been right about the gods. The gods couldn’t die. The gods simply
were
. They existed. And he would raise them the same way he had raised so many others.

Blasts of vitapotency exploded all around.

The Tildemen archers dropped two of the five magi, but the arcane volleys increased in frequency, forcing Mujahid and the Tildemen back into the main plaza.

More archers dropped as they retreated. They didn’t have enough people to take out the remaining three magi, and Mujahid would add little value. The transfiguration had left him exhausted, and it seemed as if he couldn’t draw necropotency into his well.

When they reached the main plaza, the four monolithic doors leading into the Pinnacle stood open.

More than one hundred Council magi had spread out on the steps leading up to the doors. The entire Council had shown up for the fight.

Mujahid offered a silent prayer that Zubuxo would show him mercy when he arrived on the Field of Judgment.

Nicolas opened his well and emptied it into the symbol of the skull. When it would absorb no more power, he cast it forward, stretching it over the surface of the Orb of Arin. A great beam of necropotency radiated from his outstretched hands.

“No!” Kagan screamed.

A loud hum filled the room as the beam fed into the orb. When the hum reached a volume that threatened to burst his eardrums, silence descended.

He had heard that mystical silence in Paradise, right before—

The orb exploded into billions of tiny fragments, and the shock wave threw Kagan backward into the stone wall. It sounded as if the entire building would crumble down on top of them. The wave parted around Nicolas and Tithian, however, and a feeling of peace entered his mind.

When the explosion ended, Nicolas looked to where the orb had been hovering in the air. It had been obliterated, except for one small section that now lay in ruin on the floor.

A beam of sunlight penetrated the room through a gaping hole in the ceiling. The ubiquitous yellow glow was gone. The sky was as turquoise as the stones the Native Americans sold at the trading posts near the Grand Canyon, and it was the same shade as the hide of a shriller.

He had destroyed the barrier.

A strange sensation tickled the back of his neck. It was the feeling he’d get when someone was watching him.

The smell of fresh roses filled the air.

A cataclysmic explosion rocked the plaza, and Mujahid had to dive behind the battlements on the staircase to avoid the debris that was raining down. A gaping hole had been torn in the side of the central tower, and several portions of the roof had collapsed. The council magi were a mass of confusion, some running farther out into the plaza, and others back into the Pinnacle.