The Fall to Power (9 page)

             
He looked to his side, the green recruit – what was his name? Marlyn! – stood, knowing he should run but not knowing whether forwards or back. The Lieutenant grabbed the horn, thrusting it into the young soldier’s hands, giving him a job to do.

             
“Sound the retreat, lad – we fall back to the main hall and protect the shamans at all costs.”

             
The youth nodded, placing the horn to his lips and blasting out a clarion call to signal withdrawal.

             
The officer snarled as his men streamed past, through the heavy door behind him and into the hall proper, the stragglers being cut down like animals as they were overtook by the pursuing assassins. Behind the carnage, Memphias himself, striding calmly down the hall, eyes and smile fixed on the glowering lieutenant.

             
He backed his way through the door as the last of the survivors piled in.

             
The corridor was lost. But, with a little luck, they might hold the hall just long enough to get their Lord – and his spiritual allies – to safety.

             
With the help of his men, he slammed the door to and slid the heavy iron bolt across.

             
And prayed that it would hold for long enough.

***

The defenders of Pen-Tulador were gathered close about the shamanic circle in the centre of the hall, shadows cast long and stark in the light of the candles and the torchlight from the walls. The hall was large – though not Pen-Merethia large – and the soldiers had a good distance between themselves and the door which they eyed with suspicious eyes and trembling sword arms.

             
“How much longer?” hissed Arbistrath, eyes never straying from the door.

             
“Shh…” bade the flame-haired shaman, as she stood, hands holding, together with the woman stood opposite her, a bowl of water that gently rippled in time to some unseen rhythm.

             
About the circle, around its edges, other shamanic novitiates knelt, eyes closed, humming a strange and dreary chorus that seemed to resonate in the echoing hall, coming from everywhere at once. The air was greasy, filled with static that prickled the skin and raised the hairs on the back of the neck. The tongues of all gathered about swam with a strange metallic taste, like they were sucking the blood from a sliced finger.

             
Without warning, the heavy wooden door, banded with iron, blew to pieces, spraying the room with sharp splinters of wood and causing soldiers to raise their hands to protect their eyes, before a howling gust of wind swept about the hall, blowing out in quick succession every candle and torch, plunging the hall to darkness and causing a wave of commotion and nervous muttering to sweep over the guards.

             
“Steady, men!” roared the Lieutenant, his unwavering voice instilling a modicum of discipline and bravery in every heart.

             
“Yes,” mocked another voice, this one cold and creeping, sending a shiver up every spine as it echoed about the pitch-black room. “Stay still for us… will make it easier…”

             
The scuttling of metal on stone clinked from all about as the soldiers strained in the gloom to pick out any hint of their enemy. First it seemed to be coming from the left, then the right. Then…above?

             
A scream as a guardsman was flattened by an impact, stabbed in the throat before the assailant fled again into the gloom, like a ghost. Then another. Then another.

             
Marlyn span in fearful circles in the dark, sword held out in front of him to fend off any foes, though knowing in his heart of hearts that he was already dead, for the enemy were dropping from the vaulted ceiling like invisible spiders, his comrades in arms dropping to the floor like flies.

             
A hand on his arm caused him to start and he span, sword raised to strike his attacker, but a female voice cut him off mid blow.

             
“Come with me, now!”

             
He allowed himself to be led by the voice, past the semi-circle of blinded soldiers until he reached the middle of the shamanic circle.

             
“Hold this!”

             
He dropped his sword at the command, reaching out his hands and feeling the cool ceramic sides of the bowl of water.

             
He stood, confused, wondering why he was here, when a searing light erupted, driving all shadows from the room in an instant.

             
He craned his neck, turning to look at the source of the illumination whilst still holding the bowl level as instructed.

             
The red-headed shaman girl stood, gazing up at the ceiling that crawled with now-revealed Khrdas, her raised hands sheathed in gloves of crackling blue-white lightning that left after-images with every blink of the eye.

             
A Khrda dropped from the ceiling, poised with daggers to hand to end her life, but she raised a hand towards him and the room resounded to the booming blast of thunder as a bolt of lightning reached out like the finger of a wrathful god to snatch the Khrda out of mid-air and hurl him, smoking and broken, a hundred feet to the far wall.

             
“Gwenna!” shouted Arbistrath over the fading echoes of the boom. “Get back to the circle!”

             
She went to reply, but a Khrda dropped down directly behind her. She felt his presence, ducking just in time to avoid his grasping arms, before spinning and delivering a blow to his chest with the palm her hand.

             
The Khrda convulsed, steam billowing from his ears, before collapsing to the ground.

             
“Go,” she shouted to the young Lord. “I can hold them off.”

             
Hofsted appeared at her side in the flickering light of her lightning, making to grab hold of her arm but recoiling, realising that to do so would be death.

             
“My lady…” he implored.

             
She looked to him with empathy in her  eyes, for the old lieutenant had been good to her the last weeks.

             
“Go to him,” she told him. “Deliver the message that we have failed this time. I will make my way back to the valley, have no fear.”

             
He hesitated, then gave a curt nod before turning.

             
“Men! To the circle!”

             
The few surviving guardsmen of Tulador stumbled, half-blind into the circle, feeling potent energies enveloping them as they did. A pair of Khrdas launched a desperate assault on the circle, trying to halt the ritual, but a forked tongue of lightning licked out to casually toss them across the room, dead and twitching.

             
Marlyn’s eyes widened as the bowl grew hot in his hands, the once-cool water beginning to boil and steam. The girl opposite, holding the bowl with him, turned to shout at the shaman who defended them.

             
“Mistress!”

             
The shaman named Gwenna turned, casting one last look at the group gathered in the circle, before a searing white light engulfed them all, mouths scorched with the taste of tin, and they were gone.

             
The moment stretched on to eternity, even as the universe shrank down to the size of a pinhead, and Marlyn’s mind, frozen in that everlasting instant, burned with one image; the sorrowful, green eyes of the red-haired beauty who had stayed behind to save their lives.

***

The shockwave of the teleportation spell blasted the barred windows clean out of the building, the mid-day sun streaming in to reveal a grisly scene of battle and Memphias couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow in admiration.

             
A score of defenders lay in a grim semi-circle before the scorched remains of the runic pentagram, stabbed and garrotted in the dark, but so too did the remains of several of his best troops lie, smoking and blackened, about the hall, slain by the hands of the delicate-looking young woman who stood before him now, hands still aglow with coruscating power.

             
Slowly, and with a smile on his face, he began to clap, the sound echoing sharply off the stone walls, as his remaining men surrounded the wary shaman.

             
“Well done, my girl. Five, nay six Khrdas dead. That is the most our order has lost in one battle.” One lip curled up in a slight sneer of annoyance. “Ever.”

             
He began to circle her, sizing her up, seeing that the battle had drained her, that the spirits were already clamouring for a piece of her soul, but not yet ready to assume she was without bite.

             
“Though it was all for nought, you know. It was you that we were after all along.”

             
“Well,” she replied. “Looks like you’ve got me.” She narrowed her eyes. “If you can grab me.”

             
Careful not to let her see, Memphias reached behind his back, under his black cloak, to a throwing star in a small pocket; Somnusroot, was the coating. It would put her out for hours, leaving her with nothing more than a headache.

             
He whipped his cloak, flicking his arm up and sending the star on its way, as fast as lightning.

             
Well, almost. But not quite.

             
A small zap crackled out from an outstretched finger to knock the star off-course, before, almost as an after-thought, the girl lengthened a different finger, a second bolt lancing out to smash the Khrda leader from his feet.

             
Memphias landed ten yards back, his head throbbing with the force of the energies unleashed. He tried to stand, but his limbs refused to obey him. He snarled in impotent rage.

             
He hated sorcery.

             
“Now, now,” came a light-hearted chuckle from behind the girl. “This will all go a lot smoother if we learn to play together nicely.”

             
As Memphias struggled to right himself, Gwenna turned, taking a step back as she saw the tall, smiling figure that marched towards her, arms outstretched, one hand grasping a huge hammer as though ‘twere a toy.

             
“Don’t make me do things the hard way,” he grinned, a hidden yearning for violence crying out from behind his handsome eyes.

             
The shaman girl sniffed, one eyebrow raised.

             
“You’re wearing plate…”

             
“And…?”

             
She raised a hand, electricity arcing between her fingertips leaving the potent smell of ozone in the air.

             
“Oh…”

             
She unleashed the lightning once more, to blow this newcomer away too, but he raised his stone hammer, the runes on its haft glowing with some foul, dark energy. The lightning struck the weapon, the energies flaring as they contested one another, before the bolt rebounded back the way it came, the girl’s eyes widening in confusion as she was blasted clean from her feet to land, unconscious, with a thud.

             
Bavard and the now-recovered Memphias stood over the gently smoking girl as she lay, moaning and dazed, on the cold, hard flagstones.

             
“What now?”

             
“Now we take her to the witch. And she will tell us what we need to know.”

             
“Aye. Whether she wants to or not.”

Chapter Four:

The sound of booted footsteps echoing down stone corridors. The flickering glow of torchlight. The smell of herbs and spices as poultices were applied to her burns.

             
Her head; fie, but it throbbed!

             
Gwenna blinked to clear the blurriness from her vision, before thinking back to what had happened. She remembered the surging hunger of the lightning as she reached out to smite the tall, plated warrior. So easy it should have been, but no. His hammer, raised, glowing with unnatural energy, reflecting the power of the unleashed spirits of air right back at her.

             
She went to rise, but she couldn’t, her hands bound to the bed with coarse ropes that rubbed, her skin red where they had chafed.

             
She looked about, taking in her surroundings, though she knew full well where she was; Pen-Merethia, the Barbarian City, home to a Thousand Slaves.