The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (59 page)

A gust blew through the smoke,
chasing it away to the edges of the room. A clear path opened between us and
the duke.

I saw him and shuddered.

One of his hands was missing. There
were wounds and gouges and burns all over him. His red cape hung in tatters.
One eye was swollen shut. Despite all that, he struck fear deep into me.

He was bathed in an eerie blue
glow. It came from the same sort of alchemic stone that Commander Larue had
brought from Helm Bogvogny. There was much more of it than one tiny little
lump. A giant pillar of it had shattered. The duke stood before the pile of
blue shards. Over a dozen of the stone fragments were stuck into his body,
along his arms, shoulders and his back.

He showed no sign of being in pain.
There was no telling how much power was seeping from the shards directly into
his body. After seeing what one tiny piece had done to Commander Larue, the
sight made me sick with terror.

“
Lev
,” I whispered
fearfully. I wanted to pull him back, far, far away from the duke.        

High Priestess Grimmoix bowed at
the duke’s feet. “If only you could see what I see,” she said with childish
delight. “A prosperous future, a reign like no other!”

The duke looked down at her.
“Perhaps I
can
see what you see.”

She trembled in excitement. “Would
you like to? I could show you.”

“Lev!” I tried again. I tugged his
arm but it didn’t work. He was in one of his prophetic trances. I wondered if
he was seeing the same things as the high priestess.

“Give yourself up to me, faithful
servant,” the duke said. He placed the palm of his remaining hand on High
Priestess Grimmoix’s forehead.

Her eyes rolled back. The veins
stood out on her forehead where the duke touched her. Then her skin began to
shrivel and dry up. Her hair turned brittle and fell out. The duke’s arm shook
as he drew out her life force.

He lifted his hand. The priestess’s
body collapsed to the floor like a wooden dummy.

The duke flexed his fingers and
closed his eyes. Then he began to laugh. It started as a chuckle, but then grew
to fill the room. It was one of the worst sounds I had ever heard. I felt it blasting
through me like an icy wind, freezing anything it touched.

“Yes!” the duke shouted. “It is
true! I will rule these lands as a supreme being! Nobody will ever be able to
usurp me! I shall be the ruler and judge of all things that live and breathe in
Faylinn!”

Lev dropped out of his trance.
Oddly enough, a little smile curled his lips.

“It’s all lies.”

The duke’s laughter stopped. “What
did you say?”

“She was a pawn,” Lev said, pointing
at the dried-up corpse of High Priestess Grimmoix. “You are, too. The future
you see isn’t real. Somebody just wants you to believe that it is.”

The blue shards in the duke’s body flickered
ominously. “You’re lying! I can see it all unfolding before my eyes. Nothing
can stop me. Not you.” He sneered at me. “Not
her
. You’ll both be dead
soon. I can see that, too.”

Lev scoffed. “You’re a fool. You’re
playing somebody else’s game and you don’t even realize it. You can stop it if
you want.”

The duke laughed again. “Stop it?
Why would I stop? These visions! These miraculous things I see!” His voice
reached a hysterical pitch.  “I AM THE SAVIOR OF THIS WORLD! It will be a
perfect place!” Then he snarled. “I’ll start by removing you from it!”

An orb of white energy erupted from
his hand. It shot towards us like a bullet fired from a gun.

I created a barrier, but the duke’s
spell was so strong that it shoved me, barrier and all, into the wall.

I slid to the floor. My limbs felt
like gelatin. All the breath was knocked out of me.

Lev had managed to beat his wings
and create enough counter-force to keep himself from slamming into the wall. He
landed beside me. His face was tight with worry.

“Emma!” he said. “Emma! Answer me!”

I blinked slowly. “I’m okay.” I
gazed past him and saw that the duke was no longer standing next to the
shattered pillar. “Where did he go?”

Lev spun around. The duke was
nowhere to be seen.

We heard laughter from somewhere
above, accompanied by a flash of blue. Then it happened again on the other side
of the room. The duke appeared in one place and then disappeared, only to
appear in another.

Lev flapped his wings in agitation.
“How?” he hissed.

The duke laughed. “Wings. So
primitive. I don’t need wings when I can do
this
!” He appeared right
next to Lev.

Lev took a swing. By the time his
fist was in the air, the duke was already gone.

Another bolt of magic shot out of
the sky. It was no use bothering with a barrier. Lev grabbed me and we rolled
out of the way just as the spell crashed into the floor. It cracked the tile.
The shockwave hit me like a punch.

I struggled to my knees. We
couldn’t fight the duke. He was too strong.

I began feeling around on the
floor.

“What are you doing?” Lev asked.

“There’s a trapdoor here
somewhere,” I said. “I know there is!”

“How can you deny this power?” the
duke shouted. “I am a divine creature and you are nothing but insects!”

He was everywhere but he was nowhere.
Every time he flickered into our sight, he vanished only seconds later, leaving
us constantly guessing where the next attack would come from.

I felt a raised line in the tile.
With shaking fingers, I brushed away some of the dust. I’d found the edge of
the trapdoor. It was buried under a pile of rubble.

“We have to move this,” I cried out
as I frantically tried to shove away the rubble. “We can escape through here!”

Lev knelt beside me. “Are you
sure?”

“Yes!”

We started grabbing chunks of
debris and tossing them to the side, but the duke fired another spell at us. I
dragged Lev flat to the floor and did my best to shield us with my magic. The
spell smashed into my barrier with enough strength that it nearly crushed us.

The blast had the unintended effect
of dislodging some of the bigger pieces of debris that were blocking the
trapdoor. Gasping for air, we got back to our knees and rapidly worked to move
the rest.

“Oh, leaving already?” the duke’s
voice boomed above us. “Perhaps you’ve grown tired of my parlor tricks. Let me
show you something more impressive.”

The duke teleported over to the
pile of alchemic shards. He grabbed a sliver that was as long and as sharp as a
sword. Laughing, he plunged the shard into his chest.

The floor rattled. A buzzing energy
field enveloped the duke. His eyes were like two white-hot stars blazing out of
his skull. He extended his arms and clenched his fist. His veins bulged.       

As Lev and I watched in horror, the
duke’s body expanded and grew taller. Scales of blue stone pierced through his
skin. He was transforming into some kind of mutant. A new, deformed hand grew
to replace his missing one. His head grazed the caved-in ceiling. His fists
swelled to the size of small trees.

I knew I should keep working to
clear the door, but my fingers were frozen with fright. I had never faced
anything like the duke.

Lev grabbed my hand. “Keep going,”
he urged.

The duke’s voice boomed through the
air. “What do you think? I like this form. I feel like I’ve finally found the
real me!”

I felt around the edges of the
trapdoor. It was almost loose. Lev wedged his fingers beneath it to pry it
open.

“Do not ignore me!” shouted the
duke.

He smashed his massive fist into
the floor next to me. The impact flung me into the air. I tumbled wildly, my
arms flailing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lev spread his wings and jump
towards me.

The duke swatted at me like I was no
more than a fly. My feeble magic was just a small cushion when his hand smacked
into me, tossing me the other direction.

The duke laughed, enjoying his
game.

“Leave her alone!” Lev shouted. He
changed direction in midair to catch me as I fell.

“Thank you,” I said with a gasp as
Lev’s arms wrapped around me. I smiled weakly up at him to let him know I was
okay.

Looking relieved, he smiled back. He
flapped his wings gently so that he could lower me to the floor.

Lev stopped abruptly in midair. The
duke had stretched out his mutated arms and grabbed him from behind.

The smile vanished from Lev’s lips.
There came a horrific tearing sound and Lev’s eyes went unfocused.

We fell. Lev’s weight crashed into
me, dragging us both down.

I hit the floor on my back. Lev
landed heavily next to me. For a moment all I could see was a blur as my head reeled.
Lev wasn’t moving.

“Lev?” I shouted. “Lev? Are you
okay? What happened? Answer me, Lev!”

“E-Emma.”

His voice was barely a whisper. The
duke’s laughter drowned it out.

My vision cleared. I looked up. The
duke towered over us, his deformed body shaking with glee. In each of his
hands, he held one of Lev’s wings.

“NO!” I screamed. “LEV!”

I rolled to my side and reached for
him. He lay motionless on his back. Puddles of black blood were spreading out
behind him like grotesque new wings. The blood quickly reached me and soaked my
clothes with its fading warmth.

I grabbed his hand. It was cold as
ice. His fingers tried to wrap around mine but they were clumsy. His chest
heaved up and down in ragged, jerking movements.

His eyes sought mine out. He looked
at me steadily. I couldn’t imagine the pain he was in.

“Emma, please don’t think that I’ve
failed you.”

A soul-wrenching sob tore through
my chest. I crumpled and laid my head on his shoulder. “You’ve never failed me.
Don’t go!”

They were the only words I could
think of.
Don’t leave me! Don’t die!
My mind couldn’t cope beyond that.
Every emotion was a new, more painful one.

He reached up with one trembling
hand and stroked my hair. “It had to be you or me,” he said. “I chose me.”

An unexpected burst of anger made
me lift my head. “No!” I screamed at him. “You can’t do that! You can’t choose
this
!
Just hold on! We’ll fix you! It’s only your wings, Lev. Just hold on!”

“I’m bleeding to death,” he said.
“There’s no time left for me. You can still get out of here.”

The anger became rage. I clenched
my fists and screamed at him through my tears. “I’m not going back without you!
You can’t make me!”

His dark eyes stared into me with unmasked
affection. In them I saw all the love I’d always felt for him. He stopped stroking
my hair and rested his hand against my cheek.

“Emma, there’s so much left for you
to do.”

The duke stopped laughing. He’d
grown bored. He tossed Lev’s torn wings aside and made a grab for me.

My grief was so stifling that I
could hardly bring myself to use magic. I managed one thin barrier. It kept the
duke from grasping me, but I was knocked away from Lev. I watched his life
draining to the black puddles on the floor. My own body was battered but I
couldn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything except for my heartache and a new kind
of anger that was as heavy as it was powerful.

The duke’s white eyes blazed down
at me. “There’s no room for you in my new world, Flute Keeper.”  He drew back
his spiky arm. His hand closed into a fist.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I could
let him finish me.
Just let him end it, right here, right now.
What was
there worth going back to without Lev? He was a part of me. If I couldn’t be
whole, why live?

Chloe. Lord Finbarr. The Larues. Anouk.
Valory. Noemi. Robyn, still out there somewhere, threatening their lives. Who
would stop her?

You have so much left to do
.

“Prepare to die, Emma Wren. Tell my
son hello for me.”

I knew then what I had to do. I
took out my flute.

The duke roared his triumph as he
swung his fist towards me. I’d never played the last stop on the flute before.
I’d always been scared to because nobody knew what beast it called. I knew only
a mysterious description spoken by my ancestors and delivered to me via the
fruit of my family tree:
This soul shall not be bound as the others, but
given freely to the sleeping form that lies within—the Nameless Beast inside
all of us
.

I pressed the flute to my lips. A
high, haunting note blasted through the room.

Something happened to my body.
Strange tendrils of warmth streamed from my core. The sensation rushed down my
back, through my legs and down my arms to my fingertips. I could feel every
single atom of my being exploding with hidden energy. I was made up of a
million tiny universes and they were all bursting with light.

All the magic I’d ever felt in
myself was amplified until I was made of nothing else. I was no longer a thing,
but a force. I was an extension of the air and the fabric of the world. I was
every Flute Keeper who’d come before me. I was my father and my grandfather and
all the Wrens before that stretching back to the beginning of time.

I looked down. I had no physical
body. I was made of light and I was floating high above the floor. In my new
form, there were extensions of light that blossomed behind me—my very first
wings. I felt them anchoring me in the air, giving me something to maneuver
with.

The duke’s spiky fist was frozen in
mid-swing. He stared aghast at the unfathomable entity before him.

I saw him as a dark void, an
unnatural scar in a world made of light. I was a part of the light and so was
Lev, who I could see from high above. He glowed like everything else, but his
light was growing dimmer.

“What are you?” growled the duke.

His voice sent cracks of darkness
racing through the threads of existence. I could see them now. I could trace
all the shining lines that broke when they got to him; lives lost, homes
shattered. He was a blight. There was nothing left in him that was good. He
could only spread darkness and hatred.