She Who Has No Name (The Legacy Trilogy) (72 page)

Eric followed in quick succession and Samuel came behind.  They cleared the palace walls on their first leap and followed each other, leaping through the streets
—
to the alarm of the city folk beside whom they came bounding.  In five more leaps
,
they were into the pastures and Samuel began to draw ahead.  He filled his efforts with snippets of the Flying spell he had gleaned from the Paatin Queen, improving it with each attempt.  It could not keep him completely airborne
,
as he had hoped, but he stayed aloft much longer than the others, surging ahead of them
,
with his cloak flapping wildly behind him.  It took
only
moments before they had left the rich lands beside the river and entered the simmering desert.

‘Samuel!’ Balten called out as he sprung upwards from the sandy dunes, leaving a puff and an indent behind.  ‘We can’t keep up with you.  Try to slow Om-rah down.  We will not be far behind.’

Samuel nodded silently.  He could feel the current burst of magic waning and, as he fell to earth, he reached into the ring for more magic.  As he struck the desert sands, he released the next spell and the magic of the ring flared out, throwing him forward so that the air stung his face.  Eric and Balten were quickly left far behind. 

He judged that Om-rah would have easily reached the Well of Tears by now, but he could not give up.  He drove himself desperately forward, the Argum Stone burning its magic into his marrow with each leap.

It had not been long
before
he spied the lights of Yi’sit rising above the dunes.  About halfway between him and the town, he noticed a magical glow upon the sand and he knew well the corrupt look of the magic.

‘Om-rah!’

He looked behind, but Eric and Balten were now too far behind to be seen. 

The Paatin arch-wizard seemed to notice him approaching
.
Long
before Samuel could
draw
near, Om-rah had taken flight and risen above the dunes on his flitting wings, making a beeline directly for the settlement.

Samuel landed where the arch-wizard had been waiting and he saw what had delayed the man for so long.  A camel lay dead
,
with most of its head missing
,
and the remains of two Paatin nomads lay beside it, amidst a flurry of blood splattered all over the sand
.
M
o
st
of the
nomads’ bodies was
missing.  It seemed that Om-rah’s penchant for fresh meat was fortunate, as he had stopped for a snack along the way. 

With barely a pause to take all this in, Samuel bound
ed
away, leaving a cloud of sand erupting in his wake.

He gained quickly on the Paatin arch-wizard, for Om-rah was reliant on the beetle-like wings that extended from beneath his dark cloak and they could only carry him so quickly.  It would only take another leap to reach him, but Samuel was already gritting his teeth with pain. 

At the apex of his next leap, he sent
out
a Holding spell.  He had hoped to bring the hulking wizard to ground, but Om-rah sensed the spell’s approach and deflected it easily.  In response, he made a great trilling call that carried far and wide.  It was a sound that no human throat should be able to make, yet Samuel sensed no magic in its utterance. 

Almost at once, the lights of other Paatin wizards came flooding out from Yi’sit
—
first a few
,
and then more and more, as wizards swarmed from the town like angry wasps. 

The final orange
streaks
of the sun had now drowned into the west and night itself had fallen. 
T
o the east, the pale scar of the Star of Osirah was just climbing out of the sands, looking like a fiery white serpent flying atop the dunes.

Samuel landed and yelled with pain as he released his final jump.  His magic felt as if it was tearing at his insides, but he could not stop now, so close to stopping the infernal wizard. 

He aimed himself towards Om-rah as well as he could and he flew swiftly, crashing into the giant in mid-air.  It felt as if he had struck a wall of granite and both of them tumbled from the sky, careening down onto the desert sands.  Samuel managed to soften his fall with spells, but Om-rah dropped like a stone, sending up an explosion of sand where he struck.

Samuel hoped the wizard was dead, but he was taking no chances.  He ran up the soft
side of the
dune as quickly as he could
,
shields firmly in place.  He had just reached the crest of the dune when a great black form loomed up at him and a claw snapped out.  If not for his
lightning
reactions
,
it would have taken his head off, but the impact still threw Samuel tumbling back down from where he had come. 

Scrambling back to his feet halfway down the dune and spitting sand from his mouth, Samuel spied the Paatin arch-wizard hobbling away as fast as his legs would carry him.  He seemed quite inefficient at running, but it was a boon for Samuel to have damaged the tyrant’s wings.

Samuel scrambled around the side of the dune and began
to scramble
up and after Om-rah on the next.  When he climbed to the top, however, what met his eyes made him stop in his tracks.  To his magician’s
sight
, it seemed as if a thousand burning torches were flowing up and over the sands towards him.  He knew what it meant—the wizards were coming to the
aid
of their leader, and more continued to stream from Yi’sit by the second.  Whe
nce
they had all come, he could not guess, but their numbers were overwhelming.

Om-rah used his wings to clear the next gap in the dunes, but Samuel could see he was having difficulty carrying his weight, with his black cape torn and trailing behind him.  Looking down, Samuel was aware that the footsteps of the arch-wizard trailed ahead—but they were not the marks of feet or boots.  Rather, the sand was patterned with the strides of great claws.

Spells began to whizz past him and Samuel called again to the ring
—
first putting up some initial defences, then rallying himself for an assault of his own.  He could not let the arch-wizard get away from him.

Om-rah met the first of his underlings and continued through the sea of wizards without a pause, intent on reaching the settlement.  There were too many wizards to deal with individually and so Samuel would need to find a way to deal with them all quickly. 

Wizard-spells
tinged
and
whizzed
from Samuel’s shields.  The attacks were steadily growing in number and strength
,
and would soon start taking their toll upon his defences.  He needed to find a way to disable as many of the wizards as quickly as possible, and so, unfettering his poised and readied power, he set the sands to tremble. 

The Paatin spells ceased at once as the wizards sensed his magic approach.  They felt the threat of his spell looming, and they readied themselves to meet it. 

The dunes shuddered and the sands began to shift.  Some wizards ran, while the stronger ones set their defences in place.  A hissing sound began as the sands swept over them and the dunes began to waver.  Up and down
,
the hills of sand began to heave, rolling like waves in the sea
,
and wizards screamed and fell as they lost their footing or were swallowed from sight entirely.  Many of the wizards were more skilled than Samuel had expected, and they remained balanced, protected in shells of magic and safe from harm. 

In response, Samuel called for his ring to give him even more. 

The pain buckled his legs and he fell to one knee, but he could not relent yet.  The spell was doing its work and
,
moment by moment
,
the dunes raged higher, crashing down upon each other with a thundering roar
,
accompanied by the
scream
s
of Paatin men and women. 

Around Samuel, the sand shimmered and danced as the vibrations rattled it,
and
when he could take no more of the magic burning in his bones, he quenched
the flow
and the tempest before him immediately fell flat.

Almost at once, a dozen spells flew in all around him, and Samuel was aghast to see so many blazing spots of wizards still speckling the flattened sands.  He struggled to re-open his channel to the Argum Stone and re-establish his defences.  His head throbbed and his temples felt skewered by needles. 

Struggling to his feet, he began casting out streams of lightning to the nearest of the Paatin wizards.  Some fell, but others withstood his blows and responded with savage spells of their own.  Striding forward, he began to pick them off one by one, but his body
c
ould not last
at this rate
.  This was far more than he could manage alone.

Two blazing balls of magic seemed to heed his call and they came crashing down beside him
:
Eric and Balten—charged with power and readied. 

Eric released his magic first and a jet of desert sand erupted from beneath a nearby wizard.  The man went flying and the spell continued away, forming an arch of churning sand that then dived upon another hapless wizard.  The wizard had prepared a shield of magic, but the unstoppable weight of the sand drove down upon him and he disappeared beneath it.  Moments later, the torrent of sand sprang up beneath the next wizard
—
and it continued like that, leaping from the desert like a serpent, picking out its prey and thundering down upon them.

Balten clenched his fist and streams of sand flew up from beside them, glowing hot and raining down
in the form of
spears of glass upon the wizards.  Dozens of Paatin went down, pierced and shattered by the missiles, yet so many still remained to bar them from reaching Yi’sit.

‘Rest a moment, Samuel,’ Balten called beside him.  ‘Calm your spells.  You are overspent.’

‘He
is
nearly to the city!’ Samuel said, desperately trying to recover his breath.  He quelled his defences and
,
at once
,
the cool night air felt refreshing on his skin.  ‘We must stop him.’

‘These wizards are proving stubborn,’ Eric said, continuing to wreak havoc with his sinuous spell of magic and sand.  ‘There are too many of them.’

Balten continued his work, but raised his eyes to the heavens.  ‘Your spells have upset the elements,’ he said and Samuel followed his gaze a
-
high, for the stars had disappeared and the night sky had become impenetrable blackness.

‘What is it?’ Eric asked, but a shimmer of lightning answered his question.

‘Clouds?  Here?’ Samuel asked.

‘The balance is broken,’ Balten told them.  He sniffed the air and looked surprised.  ‘I smell rain upon the wind.’

‘Is that possible?’ Samuel asked.

‘It does rain sometimes, even here, although the season is not correct.  Our magic has drawn the storm.’

‘Somehow, I don’t think the Paatin will thank us,’ Eric said.

‘Not when they are all dead,’ Samuel said.