War of Wizards (10 page)

For all of Chantmer’s taunts about Darik’s insignificance, the wizard seemed unable to hold back from gloating. “That is magic. True power. Even King Toth’s mightiest spell fell apart before me.”

Darik wasn’t ready to declare victory, and he cast his glance across the plain. The wights had fallen back several hundred yards from the city walls, and while some bled away in mindless flight into the Tombs of the Kings, the bulk of the army had come to a halt. They now began to ooze back together like droplets of quicksilver scattered on a flat surface.

“It would seem,” Darik said, “that you have underestimated the might of King Toth’s spell.”

Chantmer turned with a frown. The other wizards muttered as they followed their leader’s gaze.

The wights continued to move and flow. As different clumps formed larger groups, the gathering accelerated. Soon, there were four large groups, then three, then two. These two larger segments had formed at some distance, and they now groped toward each other, attempting to unify the entire army. At last, they joined and flowed once more toward the city walls. Only a few score wights seemed to have escaped.

“Chantmer,” Roghan said. “We could raise a dust djin.”

“A whirlwind? No. Not powerful enough.” Chantmer had a look of intense concentration.

“The ground,” Darik said. “Can you make it shake? Markal said—”

“Quiet!”

“They’re coming this direction,” one of the wizards said. “Look, they’ve sensed us.”

It was true, Darik saw. The army of wights was bulging and seemed to be pushing its strength toward the tower upon which they stood. They must have detected the origin of the attack that had nearly scattered them, and were moving to eliminate it. Darik still didn’t understand how they would break through the stone walls, but now he was alarmed.

Darik turned to his companions. “Captain, alert the watch, make sure they know where the attack is coming. Ethan, get the Eriscobans, see if you can position them on the ground behind the tower. Find your bravest men, make sure they won’t break lines.”

Darik’s assumed leadership was not only presumptuous, it was possibly misdirected. He had no understanding of how the wights fought their battles, or with what strength they would smash against the walls, but Ethan and Rouhani rushed off to obey his orders without question.

The wizards took up new chants. This time they weren’t speaking in concert, but each exposed a different tattoo, said different words. Roghan moved first. One of his tattoos flared, and a bolt of lightning flashed with an ear-splitting clap of thunder. It smashed into the enemy. The front row of wights glowed brightly, and secondary crackles of lightning passed through the army. But they didn’t falter and kept surging forward. Roghan staggered back with a curse.

Chantmer came next. The ground beyond the city heaved and threw wights into the sky. A rip opened in the earth, and dozens fell into it. The rumbling fury of the ground rolled in both directions until the tower was shaking beneath their feet, as if a great earthquake would knock down the city. Darik grabbed for the battlement to steady himself. The fissure outside the city spread north, and the shaking eased.

It was the very magic Darik had suggested, not that he expected Chantmer would give him credit, and it had greater effect than Roghan’s spell. The army of wights split in two on either side of the rift, and more wights fled the battlefield. But as soon as the shaking stopped, the two sides reformed into a single, pulsing column.

The female mage cast a trio of spinning white hammers that flew forward and crashed into the front of the army. The whirling hammers smashed a gap ten feet wide and forty feet long in the wights before they broke apart in a flash of white light. A number of wights had vanished in their wake, but still the enemy continued.

The wights reached the wall. A hailstorm of arrows slammed into them, and watchmen poured boiling oil, hurled bundles of flaming rags, and fired all manner of other missiles and projectiles. The wizards called up spell after spell, burning off one tattoo after another as they battered the wights with shards of ice, shafts of white fire, and lances of black shadow. Wights broke apart under the repeated blows, and the wizards drove them back several times, but never for long. The entire weight of the undead army pressed against this one spot, with hundreds of them piling against the base of the tower, over, under, and on top of each other.

The ground began to shake again, but this time it didn’t seem to come from any of the wizards. Darik looked down to see the wights hacking at the wall with translucent swords and scimitars, while others clawed with bare hands. The wall crumbled under this onslaught like it was made of desiccated mud bricks. That was how they would enter, he realized, they would literally tunnel through the stone.

Prince Ethan had arrived on the opposite side of the wall from the enemy, where he formed several dozen Eriscobans into ranks. Darik shouted down to catch the man’s attention, then gestured urgently at the exact spot where the wall would be breached.

He turned back around to find Chantmer clutching the wall, trembling with exhaustion, his face pale. His body seemed stripped of tattoos, with only a few small, unimpressive figures remaining on his exposed arms. The other wizards were still casting spells, but with diminishing results.

“If you have some small spell, some pittance you can throw at the enemy,” Chantmer told Darik, “then I suggest you use it now.”

Darik was already turning over his small stock of spells in his mind. The best he could think of, given the circumstance, was a ball of fire. Its power, Markal had said, came from how much heat could be drawn from the air. It would be of more limited effectiveness in cooler weather like this, and limited further by his own weak skills. But he couldn’t manage the same spell Chantmer had used to shift the earth, and the only time he’d tried to use the magical hammers, he’d knocked himself unconscious.

He gathered his will, focused his mind on saving Balsalom, reminded himself what would happen if wights broke into the city. They would kill and destroy. Thousands would die, perhaps the entire city, barring the khalifa, a prisoner until she gave birth to the dark wizard’s child.

“
Ignis globus percutiens inimico iram et perditionem.
” 

The sense of growing power wasn’t as strong this time as in the Grand Bazaar, but he could still feel it there, tantalizing, a massive pool of energy at his fingertips, ready to be called upon. Some of it dissipated even as he considered, wondering, how he could call up such a thing. But much power remained as a ball of fire formed in front of him. He pushed it with his rapidly withering right hand, and it was as heavy as a stone as it dropped over the edge of the wall.

A ball of fire splashed over the wights. Where it hit, they turned into flaming white-hot torches, like oil-soaked rags tossed into a blacksmith’s fire. Other wights touched them and broke away screaming with a sound like the shriek of metal on metal. The main fireball was gone in an instant, but the devastation continued to spread.

The undead army now flowed away in a dozen individual currents. Wights fled back toward the Tothian Way or into the tombs. For a single, triumphant moment, Darik thought he had broken the attack, that the entire army would go howling into the night. The Harvester’s hunting horn blew in the distance, and Darik wanted to shout a prayer to the dark god, telling him to hunt far and wide, until he had gathered every soul of King Toth’s unholy army.

Chantmer looked at him, eyes widened slightly. There wasn’t precisely respect in his expression, but neither did it carry sneering disdain. “Do it again. Now, hurry.”

Darik looked back down and was alarmed to see that hundreds, perhaps thousands of wights remained, hurling themselves against the wall, tearing apart the stone foundation. He wanted to cry out in despair. Would nothing stop them?

“Quickly, now,” Chantmer urged. “Before it’s too late.”

“I can’t.” Darik lifted his other hand, which was still withered from the tracking spell he’d cast at the bazaar. He eyed Chantmer’s hands; they were undamaged. “You do it!”

“These are my final recourse,” Chantmer said. “To call for the spells that will change us back into birds and fly us away in safety should our efforts fail.”

The other wizards stared at Chantmer and Darik. They were hunched, their tattoos stripped. The fight had sapped their strength, as they’d hurled one spell after another, and now they were drained, defeated, apparently stunned that they had not defeated the enemy. They didn’t take their eyes off Chantmer, asking silently what they should do.  

Ethan shouted from below. “Brace yourselves, men!”

Darik rushed to look. The first wight came squirming through the hole and into the city. More followed, tearing as they came, each new arrival widening the breach. They threw themselves at Ethan and his men.

“By the Brothers,” Darik pleaded with Chantmer. “We almost broke them. You can finish it.”

Men screamed below as the wights tore into them. More soldiers came running to join the fight—Eriscobans, watchmen, young recruits—and they fought ferociously, but they couldn’t hold back the wights.

“Very well,” Chantmer said. He held out his left hand.

“Hurry!” Darik cried. More wights were coming through.

Chantmer had already started to speak, and lifted his eyes to glare at this interruption. Darik fell silent. The wizard finished his spell. It was the same one that Darik had cast.

The fireball looked just as impressive as it came forth from Chantmer’s hand, but not, Darik noted,
more
impressive. It was a childish, selfish, and vain thing to note at a desperate moment, but Darik couldn’t flush the thought from his mind. The fire splashed once more over the wights. More chaos, more fires and wails. This time, when the enemy broke ranks, there weren’t enough left to continue the assault. They were soon fleeing from the city.

“Curse you, boy,” Chantmer said. “You distracted me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Darik said. “You did it.”

The wizard winced and stared at his blackened hand. “Yes, but it cost me double what it should have, thanks to you.”

“If this is how you are in victory, I’d hate to see how you behave when you lose.”

“If that ever happens, I’ll be sure to tell you,” Chantmer said.

Darik could only stare. Chantmer had nearly been killed by the dark wizard during the battle at Arvada, and Markal and Darik had sent him fleeing just a few weeks ago, when they confronted him and one of the tattooed mages on the Tothian Way. He thought the other wizard had been Roghan, the mage with the braided hair and the amulet.

Men cheered all along the walls. Behind, in the city, Ethan’s men were still fighting the wights that had broken through the wall, and didn’t seem to notice at first that the enemy was now trying to escape, not press forward. When that realization passed through the defenders, they lowered their weapons and gave a ragged cheer of their own. Men had fallen—at least fifteen or twenty—torn apart in a horrific mass of bloody limbs and torsos. But Ethan’s forces had never broken ranks, and they’d kept the wights bottled long enough for Chantmer to finish breaking apart the enemy.

The wizard’s companions seemed to be recovering. “What now?” Roghan asked.

“How do you mean?” Chantmer asked.

He was staring across the plain. It was dark, apart from the stars and a handful of glowing blue wights still struggling away from the city, but there was a faraway look in Chantmer’s eyes, as if he could peer through the darkness and across the distance.

“We won,” Roghan said. “They will flee toward the Desolation, with the Harvester on their heels, gathering souls. So what do we do? What do we tell the sultan?”

What did Roghan mean? Was he referring to the army Balsalomian scouts had spotted marching north from the sultanates? Did the sultan of Marrabat intend to seize Balsalom?

“We have not won,” Chantmer said at last. “The wights are not returning to the Desolation. See?”

Darik peered into the darkness but couldn’t see what Chantmer meant. Neither, it seemed, could any of the others.

“They must be falling back toward Ter,” Chantmer continued. “It’s the site of their last conquest, and there they will rebuild their strength.” Chantmer regarded Roghan and the other wizards, then turned to Darik. “We have gained time, perhaps a single day, perhaps longer. But this evil force will return. And we will not be strong enough to resist them.”

Chapter Nine

Markal rose from his bedroll and slipped out of the tent, the shadows of a nightmare hanging over his mind like cobwebs in an abandoned tower. The smell of last evening’s battle still lingered, and he walked past smoldering carts, burned enemy tents, and dead Veyrians, the smell of their charred flesh heavy in the morning air. Here and there, he sensed the aftertaste of magic. A cool breeze blew from the north and eased the pain in his aching hand.

Now that it was daylight, he wanted to gain the hill and look toward Veyre. He was curious to see if his vision of the Dark Citadel matched what he’d seen in his dreams. Sometimes, it appeared as a single tower of gray stone at the edge of the sea, while other times it seemed to be a black, shadowy shaft that repelled all light, so dark that it hurt the eyes.

Yet Markal knew from Veyrian prisoners and defectors that the Dark Citadel was a ziggurat, like one of the desert tombs or the ancient, crumbling temples of the Desolation, only vastly larger and constructed of black brick. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some deeper underlying structure that he would be unable to see with his naked eye. He knew the true form, but what was the sense of it?

A heavy, worried feeling settled into his belly as he picked his way among the bodies of horses and Veyrian soldiers to reach the top of the hillock that had marked the enemy’s last stand yesterday. Whelan’s forces had overrun the hill and sent the enemy fleeing to the safety of Veyre’s city walls. That worried feeling spread until Markal felt as though he’d swallowed a tankard of bacon fat and it had congealed in his stomach. He slipped his good hand into his robe to rest on the smooth, familiar shape of Memnet’s orb. It was pregnant with magic. He’d fed it steadily until it held enough power to burn the hillside to ash and reduce the soldiers upon it, both living and dead, to charred skeletons.