The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (88 page)

And she remembered the Master Knot of the Gold Weave down there in its grand chamber.  All those protections, all that pent-up magic, and the first place an Archmagus would take a subordinate who had returned with such a wild tale.

A faint glow caught her eyes.  She looked down to see it radiating up from under her robe, and tugged the collar away to see the stitches that divided her breasts.  Carefully, dreamily, she prodded herself through the robe and felt rivets under her skin, a fine split in her sternum, and something metallic bolted behind it.

It made no sense.  She had felt fine when she woke.  Not even achey.

But then the heat rose, and as her skin charred away before her eyes—as the cobbles cracked with cold, all their energy drawn into her to power the object in her chest—she realized she had been dead all along.

*****

Enkhaelen dropped into his chair and made the opening gesture.  Psycher Archmagus Qisvar came through immediately, trailed by a grey-robed woman and a plain-clothed man.

“I demand an explanation!” he said, jabbing a finger at the plain-clothed man.  His headcloth was disarrayed, his pointy beard fairly bristling with anger, and in his other hand he clutched a long dagger with a pommel shaped like a star.  Enkhaelen was glad to see it; it removed one of his concerns.

“For what?” he said calmly.

“These people burst into my office, claiming to be from you, and demanded that I come with them!  Not only did they breach my wards, but this one does not even wear the robes!  He is a criminal!”

“And yet here you are.”

“Your command of the Inquisition does not make you my master!”  Qisvar waved the blade in his direction, then seemed to notice Enkhaelen's own non-regulation attire.  His eyes widened, desert-brown face twisting with shock.  “You—  You are a criminal too!“

Enkhaelen stood to forestall him.  “Arguments later, Qisvar.  I have to—“

“I insist that you explain yourself right now, and submit to—“

“—introduce you to—“

“—your great Light whose laws you have broken, and—“

“—your new subordinates.”

“—the Council of course...  What?”

Enkhaelen gestured to the grey-robed woman and the man.  “Your new subordinates.  Inquisitor Carnath, my former lieutenant, and Agent Erondry, my former spymaster.  Now yours.”

Both inclined their heads to Qisvar, who stared.

“I realize this comes as a surprise,” Enkhaelen continued.  “Consider it an early Midwinter gift.  As of this instant, you lead the Inquisition—provided you can hold it together.”

“Provided I—  What in blazes is going on?”

Enkhaelen pulled open the top left drawer, removed the wooden case that nearly filled it, and set it in the middle of the desk.  Flipping the latch, he opened it to show the Inquisitor Archmagus' chain of station, which he had hardly ever worn, plus the wristbands and scrying stones that had given him access to every twist of the Psycher Weave.  “Yours now, all of it.  Take it.  Take them.”  He nodded at his former minions.  “They've already been briefed.  You'll have to suss out their loyalties yourself, but I'm sure you expect that.”

Looking dazed, the blade now hanging from his hand, Qisvar drifted closer to run his fingers along the treasures in the case.  The cabochon stones on the monitoring wristband glimmered faintly in response.  “You are...retiring?” he said, examining Enkhaelen's face.  “No, you would not simply step down.  All that talk of revolution that you and Salandry spout...”

“Something like that.  Suffice to say that I have no further use for the Inquisition.”

“But to put it in my hands...  You know that I still think of Padras as my home.”

“Maybe that's for the best.  But I can't jaw about this forever.  Take it.”

“I...  Yes.  I humbly accept.”

Enkhaelen sank back into his seat and watched as Qisvar considered case and blade.  When he finally tucked the star-pommeled dagger away,  Enkhaelen said, “Another thing.  In celebration of your new position, you should take a vacation from the Citadel.  Maybe go visit the Inquisition's headquarters, find yourself a nice suite for a new home.  Oh, and take your students with you.  All of them.”

Horror dawned across Qisvar's face.  “All of them?” he echoed.

“And their friends, lovers, dorm-mates.  Call it an educational outing.  But do it now.”

For a moment the horror remained, and Enkhaelen wondered if that little taste of foreknowledge was too much.  He had never confided in Qisvar, and could not afford a fight now.  But then the Psycher's expression hardened, and he leaned forward to pin Enkhaelen with his stare.  “I will not oppose you.  Not in this.  But once you have finished your nasty game...”

“All the shackles are off,” Enkhaelen said, raising his hands.  “Yes.  Of course.”

Qisvar gave him another long look, and Enkhaelen suppressed the urge to blow a kiss or throw a paperweight at him.  In the back of his mind, the time-candle kept burning.

At last, Qisvar straightened and gave him a curt nod.  “I will require a great number of portals for this...educational excursion.  And I do not know where the Inquisition lairs.”

“You have a stone for it now,” said Enkhaelen, indicating the case, “but even better, Snowfoot is waiting.  Give her my regards.”

“Drakisa is with you?”

Qisvar's face showed all: shock, disappointment, anger, yearning.  Enkhaelen sighed.  Like the rest of the Council, he was well aware of Qisvar's unrequited feelings toward Drakisa Snowfoot, and he regretted mentioning her.  He disliked emotional leverage.

“We have an agreement,” he said.  “Once this is over, I have no hold on her.”

Expression firming to one of thought, Qisvar nodded slowly.  Then he turned away, no doubt already reaching out to his top students mentally.

Enkhaelen gestured the door open.  The dissemination of the new order—and the 'excursion'—would be swift, which meant he would have to be the same.  To Carnath and Erondry's last nods, he returned a wave; they had served him ably, but he had no regrets.

As soon as the door sealed, he sprang up and started shoving books, papers and sculptures into his dimensional pockets.

This was it.  The last breath of peace.  His Energies students had already been alerted—though not to the truth, what with his eavesdroppers.  But now that he had kicked over the first tile, the rest of the pieces would begin to fall, and the shape of the game would soon be clear.

He grinned.  The best part came next.

Chapter 23 – War Mage

The doors to the Council Chamber swung open with their usual hiss of magic, but Enkhaelen neither paused in his work nor turned to face them.

“—just went out in the middle of our conversation,” he heard Warder Archmagus Cassa Farcry say.  “I've never had that happen before.  Scrying frames don't just...stop.  And I couldn't reengage it.”

“Perhaps these problems are related,” said Summoner Archmagus Salandry.  “My servitors became agitated about half a mark ago, and the sanitation staff leader came up to complain about the janitorial slimes at the same time.”

“Half a mark...  That sounds right...”

“Enkhaelen!  What are you doing?” came Artificer Archmagus Varrol's sharp voice.

This time he did glance back, though only briefly.  His three co-Councilors stood within the iron ring, the great double doors swinging shut behind them: Farcry in her usual ladylike style of dress, bountiful and puzzled; Salandry's blade of a face already sharpened by suspicion; Varrol pulling a short-hafted hammer from behind her back, her wiry burn-scarred arms tight with the intent to fight.  He smiled.

“This?” he said, indicating the judgment circle he had pulled up from the floor.  It stood on edge before him, its layer of gold slowly peeling away from the iron beneath.  The silver and copper circles were still in place among the dark jade tiles, but their enchantments had been stripped.  “I thought it would be a shame to leave this behind, what with the cost of gold these days, but it seems my contractors shorted me when they made it.  Barely a fingernail's width.”

“Your—what?” said Varrol, advancing upon him.  The hammer, her clenched face and short-shorn hair reminded him, as ever, of Gwydren Greymark, and he struggled to keep his face straight.  He had no doubt that she would hit him if he laughed.  “You thief, you put that back!  Were we summoned just by your tampering?”

“Consider this a Council meeting.”

“For what?” said Salandry, following on Varrol's heels like a coat-tree in pursuit of a barrel.  As always, he wore his short-sleeved robe, forearms bedecked with slave-bonds.  “Light curse you, Enkhaelen, are you up to something?”

Without me?
hung unsaid in the air.  Enkhaelen smirked.  He had led the summoner along like all the ambitious Councilors before him—encouraging them, aiding them, feeding off their experiments, then prompting them into self-destruction.  The upheaval was often immense but the Emperor found his vendetta against the Circle to be amusing, and so allowed it.

This time, it was too late for such fun.  He would have liked to put Salandry at the head of an army of elementals before breaking their chains en masse, but bigger plans required his attention.

“Me?  Up to something?  Throne forbid,” he said lightly.  “No, I'm simply retrieving what is mine.”

“You put that down right now!” Varrol demanded, pointing at him with the hammer.  She had halted at the edge of the copper ring, and he knew she sensed its inactivity; her eyes kept trying to flick down at it, but her wariness would not let her look.  Wise.  “Yours, you idiot stripling?  It was placed by the Great Architect Rivent long before you were born!”

“No, I let one of my Magus candidates do it.  Seems that was foolish.”

She stared.  Perhaps she was getting the idea.  The last inch of gold peeled away from the iron ring and he let the latter drop, folding up the former into a neat quarter-circle.  Into a coat pocket it went, the extra-dimensional space tugging it from his grip.

“What are you trying to say?  That you're Rivent?” hazarded Farcry.

“And the Warder takes the prize.”

“That's impossible!”

“The necromancer,” Varrol grated.  “It was you.”

Farcry shot the older woman a look of shock, but Varrol never broke her stare.  Behind them, Salandry's fingers moved subtly, his aquiline face fixed in concentration, and Enkhaelen saw the fine strands of his slaver's bonds being tugged.  He was summoning his servitors.

Enkhaelen pretended not to notice.  Instead he swept a deep bow to the women, fingers brushing the silver circle in which he stood.  “At your service, for all your murderous needs.”

“But you've been here for years!” said Farcry, aghast.  “Decades!  I remember seeing you in classes when we were students!  Did you—  Oh no, you killed the original Enkhaelen, you took his body!”

She looked so distraught that he was almost touched.  They had crossed paths in a few Wards and Energies classes back in the day—her as a young woman, him retaking the courses for the fourth or fifth time and struggling to fake bare adequacy.  They had been no more than acquaintances, but apparently she remembered him fondly.

Then again, she looked upon everyone fondly.  She was a nice person.

“I've always been Enkhaelen,” he said.  “And Rivent.  And others.  I didn't replace them.  They were me.”

Varrol stared at him in disgust and disbelief.  She was not old enough to have been Rivent's student—he had 'died' nearly eighty years ago—but was certainly of an age to be trained in his techniques, to have heard him praised to the rafters.  To consider him the bedrock of last century's artificing.  The greatest mage of his generation.

Such accolades came easy when you cheated.

“You lie,” said Varrol.  “You could not possibly be Rivent.  I've seen you fumble with artificing—Holy Light, I watched you come up through the ranks!  You have no aptitude for this, and you are barely competent in wards—“

He gestured at the walls and their protective runes dimmed, obeying the hand that had shaped them.  Varrol's eyes widened.  She knew as well as any Artificer that the Citadel's base wards were tied to Rivent's signature; only Rivent could manipulate them, and any adjustments or extra layers of protection had to be done on plaster over the original stone.  Though it had always frustrated the Artificing community, they accepted it as practical.

After all, Rivent was dead, his protections therefore tamper-proof.

“No,” she whispered.  Then, with conviction, “No!  You cannot have his signature.  I can see yours, and it is nothing like the one on the walls.  You may have learned some shabby illusion, but—“

“Do you think I'd just waltz in here with the same visible signature as—  No, enough.”  Enkhaelen shook his head.  It had been entertaining to see the horror on their faces but now it was getting nitpicky.  “I'm not here to teach.  I'm here to clean house.”

“You think to threaten us, you static-brained cretin?  You think to take over?”

Behind Varrol, Salandry smirked.  He was still summoning; Enkhaelen's monitoring spells thrummed, telling him of the gathering mob of elementals outside the door.  The art-pieces Salandry had set on display had already separated into their component servitors, a small army awaiting orders.

Enkhaelen realized that Salandry thought their deal was still on.

So he tipped the man a wink, and said, “Not alone.”  Then he reached out and broke the ward that held the doors.

They swung open to slam against the walls of the entry-notch, and both women startled.  Elementals poured in—flying, wafting, crawling, their forms made visible by the bonds on them but blurring into and through each other: translucent air-serpents crossing paths with chained sparks, glowing phosphors, crystal-spined geodelings, bright smoking salamanders.  The mob spilled across the floor and through the air, converging upon the women in conscious waves.

Farcry scuttled backward, fingers flicking out layered wards with the speed of a cardsharp.  Flying elementals rebounded from a hard wedge of aquamarine light, and her footwork kept the tougher crawling ones at a distance—for the moment.

In contrast, Varrol did not retreat.  Hammer in one hand, she yanked a small drawstring bag from her belt and shook it open with a sharp word of command.  Pieces of metal began to spill from the tiny sack—far more than it could fit—and leapt to her skin as if magnetized, assembling into an all-covering scale armor that repulsed every elemental that struck it.  As the last piece flew into place, she dropped the bag and charged Salandry.

What?
thought Enkhaelen. 
I reveal that I'm the nefarious necromancer and instead she picks him to fight?

Granted, he does look fun to hit.

But this was supposed to be his Valent endgame, not a generalized brawl.  So as Farcry dodged the creeping phosphors and Salandry and Varrol traded blows—one with the hammer, the other with half-molten salamanders and geodelings as proxies—Enkhaelen took control of the iron ring that encircled the room.

Normally it was used to skim away the ambient energies that collected on mages like lint.  He had deactivated it upon entry, though, and sunk a few hooks in.  The Primordials of Metal might be his enemies now, but this was dead iron; he could manipulate it with ease.

Now he lifted it cleanly from its setting and set it to a slow rotation two feet off the ground.  Farcry glanced his way, alarmed, and he flashed her a grin as he forced it into a tilt and stepped up into thin air.

The chamber was slightly taller than it was wide.  Perfect for a vertical rotation.

The first sweep of the lower edge took Salandry at the ankles, knocking him backward over the swinging rim with a scream.  Enkhaelen grimaced, but he had seen the flash of a ward, which probably meant no broken bones.  Varrol, who saw it coming, hopped the leading edge like a jump-rope, her plated feet clashing down on the tiles on the other side.  Elementals spun from the ring's way or were whacked clear; Farcry jumped it; then it slammed into the crescent-moon table and the Councilors' chairs, reducing them to splinters.

“Second swing!” announced Enkhaelen, and all eyes locked on him.

He hiked it up just enough to skim the prone Salandry rather than cave in his skull; it was too early for that.  But it made jumping harder; in her layered armor, Varrol got clipped and went down, then rolled to her feet and stagger-rushed him in the ring's wake.  For her part, Farcry took his cue and stepped up onto a platform of wards, and when the ring crushed the lowest one, she rebuilt it before she could drop.

One hand still directing the threads that made the ring rotate, Enkhaelen held his palm up to the charging Varrol and pushed.  Soft force rolled down his arm, powered by the energy he had drained from the ring and the pylons and all his other canceled spells, and struck the armored Artificer like a pillow wielded by a giant.  She staggered back, the scales on her face echoing her surprise, then made a striking gesture of her own.

Six scales spun off her arm to smack into his wards.  He had prepared an absorption ward as the outermost—a layer that would not stop a blow so much as suck up its kinetic energy—but the scales adhered and switched the flow, eating up the spell and threatening to nip into his reserves.  He obligingly dropped it, and they flew back to Varrol.

“Nice leeches,” he said.  She came on swinging.

Another soft-force push—which split in front of her, divided by a wedge-ward Farcry had just cast—and then there was a hammer at his sternum, its enchantments puncturing two strike-wards before rebounding from his skin-tight.  Then Varrol hit him bodily, armored limbs hooking around him to rip him from his midair perch, and he laughed as he went down.

An instant later, the iron ring slammed into the small of her back and flung her to the wall.

Her grip hauled him along for a few feet but then broke, and he rose in the ring's wake only to be bombarded by a stream of air- and fire-elementals.  They tore at his coat, his hair, his jewelry; to anyone else, their burning fingers would have been death.

The silver embroidery on his clothes lit up.  Ribbons of smoke rose from his hair.  Then he reached out with his free hand and sieved it through the rushing crowd, caught Salandry's command-threads between his fingers, and broke them.

Dozens of elementals spun away, dazed by the suddenness of their release.  Others jackknifed immediately to attack Salandry, who had been lifted out of ring range by his air-serpents and was gesticulating with the fervor of an orchestra-master in mid-piece—advancing the creeping phosphors toward stunned Varrol, assaulting Farcry with aerial foes, and pulling another batch together to strike at Enkhaelen.  The turncoats rebounded from his defenses and were caught again, his bracelets lighting up as they resynchronized with their slaves.

Enkhaelen drew a hand back, thinking to strike, but felt an alert from the dim web of spells that monitored the Citadel's status.  They had been there since Rivent's time, keyed to him yet usually dormant.  Now the deepest ones, which corresponded to the construct tunnels and the janitorial systems, were lighting up the back of his mind with warnings.

The magma was rising.

“Time to step outside,” he mumbled, and stopped the ring's spin.  Angling it up at the high narrow windows, he pulled himself into its center on cords of power, then jerked the whole rig toward the wall with all the force he could muster.

Stone, glass and lead solder cracked under the impact, cutting a line across a quarter of the room.  The iron ring dented in places, its inactive enchantments not enough to reinforce it, and he spun it to a fresh section and canted it to ram again just below the window arches.  Air-serpents battered off his skin-tight ward and he ignored them, spun the ring and hit the wall again.  This time the stained-glass windows shattered, sending shards spilling into the sunlight as that part of the wall collapsed outward.