The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (81 page)

“It didn't work so well on the white-armors, though.”

“What other tools do we have?  The silver sword is for killin' him, not cuttin' the wall down.”

Fiora shrugged.  “If Ilshenrir was here, I'd say blast it.  Or—oh!  Maybe we can call Enkhaelen out somehow!  Challenge him!”

“Right in front of the Emperor?”

“Nowhere else to do it.”

“That's assumin' he's—“

Cob blinked, the words stuck on his tongue.  In all this time, he had assumed that Enkhaelen's use of corpse bodies was to keep himself safe and the Ravager locked within him.  That his real body was tucked away purely as a defensive measure.

Now, remembering the rage Geraad had sensed in him and all the times he'd shown up to fight their mutual enemies, plus the aid Dasira had reluctantly admitted he'd sent...

Plus the mentalists' needles Geraad had seen in his mind...

He looked from the silver sword to the arrowhead, both so conveniently found or returned to him, then closed his eyes. 
Erosei.  Show me what happened at the Seal.

Silence.

His temper flared.  He understood the Guardian vessels' sensitivity toward their deaths, but to hide vital information from him... 
Erosei!  Don't make me come after you!

Nothing.

Very well.
  Concentrating, he found the sense of depth he had cultivated throughout this long possession: the presence of the ruins and the forested shore, the lurking pressure of the water.  He felt cold breath but ignored it, fixing instead on reaching into the murk and groping for the snaky evasive shape of Erosei.  Trickles of sense-memory rose as he closed in on it, of rust and wet stone, blood, steel...

His hand closed around a rasp of scales.  He pulled.

—and the light was warm yellow, tropical, the sand crunching under his boots.  His palms sweated against the leather-wrapped hilts of his paired blades.  Ahead, at the curve of the beach, stretched the meager sandbar that guarded the Seal of Water from the full presence of the Lisalhan Sea—perhaps the only reason Enkhaelen could be there under his own power.

Erosei reached out with one hand and beckoned to the waves.  Immediately they mounted to wash over the Pillar's edge and infringe upon Enkhaelen's work, but a yard from the mage, they struck an invisible barrier and divided harmlessly.

A curse rose to Erosei's lips as Enkhaelen raised his head, aware now.  But he didn't look back, just focused on the Pillar floor, and where his hand passed, another bloody swath marked the pale material.  Next to him, a black-bladed sword lay unsheathed.

“Enkhaelen!” he shouted, needing to draw the man's attention—needing to disrupt this last spell.  He knew nothing of magic; he had been too late at Howling Spire, too late at Du'i Oensha to witness the rite the man used to undo his predecessor's work, only fast enough to be smote by the aftermath.  If he could not end this after being thrown down a mountain, nearly burned to death and many times evaded on the tempestuous summer sea, then—

The mage gained his feet.  Was he done?  Was this the end?

He held out his hand, and the hilt of the black sword jumped into his grip.  The runes of blood around his feet looked incomplete.

A fight, then.  Baring his teeth, Erosei grabbed hold of the sand beneath him and heaved it forward in a wave, riding its momentum as it crashed against the landward edge of Enkhaelen's wards.  Blue sparks filled the air as grains annihilated on impact, but there were too many for the spell to hold back; the churning mass ate holes through the panes of magic and began spilling in, with Erosei at its crest.

In one fluid motion, the mage released the wards and thrust out with both hands.  A scorching wind smacked into Erosei, briefly lifting him off the sand-wave and kicking it backward.  White-hot gobbets flew from it; when he dropped, his feet sank into molten glass.

He only barely managed to fling himself free.  The sand he hit was fortunately unaffected; as he rose from a crouch, he saw his wave hanging before Enkhaelen, heat-blasted solid.  The mage turned toward him, not even scowling—just staring from a hollowed face, dark hair a mess of knots, bony chest withered by deprivation and carved deep with concentric circles.  A tattered robe shrouded his shoulders but couldn't hide the seeping gash on his right arm.

By now, Erosei knew better than to think him weak.  He drew sandy armor around himself and surged forward with more sand at his heels, pulling at the sea concurrently.  Enkhaelen held up a hand, but the blue ward that appeared between them split against Erosei on impact, impeding his charge not at all.

Enkhaelen curled his fingers inward.

On the cusp of a leap, blue bands reached from behind to yank Erosei's feet out from under him.  Snarling, he caught himself with one hand and affixed his feet to the sand, forcing the energy-lasso to drain away into the depths.  Sand and water converged on Enkhaelen without him, again hitting dividing wards before they could reach the bloody circles on the floor.

Another burst of air hit him, thick with sand.  He chuckled, unbothered; the grains merely accreted onto his armor, reinforcing its plates.  Two kicks freed him from the remains of the lasso, and then he was approaching again.  Enkhaelen's gestures brought a haze of dust and sea-spume between them, but he did not need sight to locate the bastard.  He could feel him like a hot coal, singeing the skin of the world.

There—pale eyes wild, neck just within sword's-reach—

A force struck him, not searing like the wind but soft, like being smacked by a door-sized pillow.  His heels dredged through the sand as he was pushed backward, and in confusion he struggled to connect with the ground, to arrest himself.  It was there—he felt it—but—

Spikes of agony pierced him at the neck, the wrists, the shins and ankles, thighs and belly.  Still held by the force, he looked down to see glassy patches spreading across his armor, each centered on a red spot: a bloodstained sand-grain.  Raising his gaze, he realized that the ground around the Pillar was stippled with such spots, most dried to inconspicuous brown.

Enkhaelen's bloody hand smouldered as he made another pushing gesture, and Erosei slid further back, his connection with the earth fraying.  The sand he'd gathered became a prison as it fused, and he couldn't shed it.  The glass encasement tightened further.  In moments, the sand beneath his feet had glassed, and his connection broke completely.

The needles of pain became anchors.  Vitreous cords drew him down and bound him flat, more glass flowing to cover all but his face.  He struggled uselessly, spitting imprecations.  Somehow the heat didn't touch his skin, but all his hairs were fused into it, making each twitch a ridiculous agony.  Throughout it, Enkhaelen stood in place, gashed arm blooming with smoke instead of blood, a dull glow emanating from the wound.

“Quit fighting,” he rasped.  “I'll let you up once I'm done.”

For a moment, Erosei couldn't formulate a response, too surprised and furious to think straight.  Then he spat, “Let me up?  I will kill you!  Don't you know what you're doing?”

“You've tried to kill me many times.  It's always the same.  First the armor, then the fists—or staff, or sword, or claws.  You're so afraid to shift that you—“  The mage shook his head.  “I've no time for this.  Just stay quiet.  It will be over soon.”

Turning away, he paced slowly back into his ritual circle.  The smoke from his arm guttered, then dissipated, and as blood began to flow from it again, the glass encasement cooled.

Cautiously, Erosei flexed his hands and felt cracks form in the material.  He was still bound by his short-hairs, so he concentrated on dampening the pain as he turned and twisted, flexed and stretched.  The thick glass beneath him blocked his ability to connect with earth or water, though, so as the mage began adding new sigils to the circle, he fell back on distraction.

“Hoi!” he shouted.  “Hoi, you piker, whatever you think you're accomplishing here, you're wrong!  The Outsider's played you for a fool!”

“No.  I have a plan.”

“We shut it out for a reason!  Jeronek's sacrifice, Kuthrallan's, do they mean nothing to—“

“Do not speak to me of Kuthrallan!”  For the first time in their whole pursuit, the mage's voice held anger—or perhaps pain.  Either way, it was as sharp and thin as his transfixing needles.  “You have no understanding of him, or of—  Gods and spirits,
you left us. 
You knew we couldn't escape our vessel and you left us in the sea to die.  Have you any idea what it's like to see you cast off your victims and escape while I stay behind?  And yes, they are victims.  The way they look at me after you abandon them...  I'm surprised you're still here.  Usually you don't stay any longer than you must.”

He sensed the Guardian stirring, and a chill went through him.  It was not often that it acted or spoke or even felt like a separate entity; for all these months he had been chasing Enkhaelen, it had behaved more like memories of lives he'd once lived, with skills he'd once known.  Rusty but easily recovered, fully his.

Now it opened dark eyes behind his own, and listened with alien ears—thought strange obscured thoughts.  Still more chained than free, Erosei snapped, “Don't talk to it, talk to me.”

Enkhaelen laughed curtly.  “You didn't listen to me when I warned you on the mountain.  Didn't listen to me in the forest.  Why should I bother now?  You're not in control, Aloyan Erosei the Younger.  You're just a puppet on a string.”

“And what are you?” sneered Erosei.  “Not the piking Ravager, not even Kuthrallan, just some pitiful widower with a grudge against—who?  The Muriae?  The Trifold?  The world?  You've broken the Ravager's covenant with the Metals, destroyed your own life, killed your wife, and for what?  Some experimental monster you think is a child?“

“Shut up.”

“The Outsider has you by the balls, just like you have the Ravager.  Whatever it's promised you, it lied—and maybe you can survive its touch because of your blood, but there will be nothing left for you to rule over, or avenge yourself upon, or
anything,
if you let it back in!”

“You think I don't know that?”

“Then what in pike's name are you—“

“Hush now.  I need to concentrate.”

Erosei opened his mouth again, but Enkhaelen rose abruptly and stretched his arms out toward the sea and the five distant Seals.  The blood circle around his feet kindled with a weird colorless radiance which somehow canceled out the sunlight to leave him lit as if by lightning-flare.  Great curls of smoke arose from the edges, followed by spiders of electricity that stitched new runes inward until they reached the mage's bare feet, whereupon they meshed and crawled up his legs, bursting blood-vessels under his skin as they went.  In moments, he was held in a nimbus of cold, pallid energy not entirely his own.

And Erosei realized that they were doomed.  If the fire-blooded Ravager vessel had been pushed so far that energy could injure him, then he was down to his very dregs—and yet he would not stop.  Even in profile, his face was fixed like stone, his fingers tremoring their way through the final sigils.  The blood on the Pillar floor, and on the sand, and boiling away from his arm made Erosei wonder how much he had left.

Stop him.  Stop him,
he thought, but no matter how he thrashed, he barely cracked the heavy glass.

Then a seizure took the mage—a single spine-bending jerk, as if some invisible hand had grabbed him by the breastbone and yanked upward.  His arms flailed out; his heels left the ground.  Erosei caught the rictus look of surprise and terror on his face.

A filament of light pierced up from the center of his chest, rising vertically for perhaps three yards then slitting open like a giant eye.  The glare and heat that poured through the new Portal made Erosei flinch; he pressed his mouth shut and squinted hard, the moisture already evaporating from his skin and eyes.  Somehow, the glass encasement stayed cool.

At last,
came the Outsider's voice, more an impression than a sound.

The mage struggled, his robe in flames, hands making brief shadows against the glare as he grappled uselessly at the suspending tendril.  “Let me down...let me down,” he rasped.

Perhaps the entity examined him, or looked around; Erosei sensed motion but it was hard to extrapolate when all he could see was a shapeless blob of light that washed out the entirety of the beach. 
The Seals are not open,
it noted in a toneless manner that nevertheless expressed disappointment.

“...sure they are.”

No.  They have not been removed, merely pushed askew.

“About two inches.”  The mage's mouth twitched in a valiant attempt at a smirk.  “Still counts as open.”

We had a deal, Shaidaxi.  I require entry.

“You have it.  You just...don't have the reins.  I do.”

You think you can dictate terms to me?

“The Seals are displaced by my strength alone.  Kill me and they will snap back into position, and you will be shut out.  No other Ravager will do this for you, and no one else knows how.  So yes, I will dictate terms.”

The incandescent tendril holding Enkhaelen aloft eased slightly, allowing him to stand on his own.  For a moment it seemed he might fail at that, but managed to stabilize by planting the black sword point-down on the Pillar floor.  It was all that remained of his garb and gear, the rest just soot on bruising skin.