The Sorcerers, the Islandman,
and the Will
Iriphet and Gethmasanar had collaborated on the Rite of Blooming Blood, so they both felt it, instantly, when the Baron Delondeur was destroyed.
Iriphet let loose a loud yell of rage, as unseemly and unexpected a display of emotion as Gethmasanar had ever seen one of the Knowing make.
“GO. Go yourself and deal with this. We have seen nothing of the boy in days. Kill them all. Use as much power as you must. GO.”
Gethmasanar drew power into himself, held up his hand, and vanished in a streak of yellow light.
* * *
Allystaire rolled from his back to his chest and pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. His ears rang, and his vision blurred. Around him, lancets of a hideous yellow flew from the air, striking randomly, killing fully half a dozen of the Delondeur spearmen before the rest, and Chaddin and Landen with them, could fling themselves to the ground.
One of the bolts sunk into Allystaire’s left arm and burned a clean hole through his armor. It was like being stabbed with a hot poker straight through the meat of his arm.
Before he could recover his wits, or his hearing, he saw the bodies of Battle-Wights rising from the ground, twisting themselves back into vaguely man-like shapes. They hobbled and scuttled and crawled awkwardly, and they seemed weak—but there were so many.
And they all came straight for him.
He raised his fists, limping towards them. He felt three shapes go sprinting past him, heard their yelling as a distant roar.
Renard. Henri. Norbert.
The latter two were tossed aside by the Wights, thrown to the ground. Renard swung his spear clean through the first one, swept the spine out of it. He levered it through a second and was bearing that one to the ground when he screamed.
Allystaire could hear the scream only distantly, but he knew the expression on the man’s face. He didn’t want to look, but of their own volition his eyes slid down, from Renard’s face to his chest.
A bladed Battle-Wight hand was punched straight through him, the blade gleaming wetly where it emerged from his breastbone. Then a second. Then the crowd of the beasts surrounded him and Allystaire’s hearing settled and the world realigned itself.
He charged forward and knocked them aside, but he knew he had been too late, had heard the sickening sounds of blades being punched into flesh.
And then the Wights were on him, a dozen of them, more, ignoring every target but him.
Allystaire struggled against the overbearing weight of them. With three of them holding down each of his arms, his legs, and more than he could tell piling upon his shoulders, all the strength that flowed through them didn’t matter. He focused on the robed form with the glowing yellow eyes that approached.
“So, Coldbourne,” the figure began, and Allystaire knew gloating when he heard it. “Or is it Stillbright? So precious, the names you people bestow upon yourselves. You’ve been yelling for me for two nights now, boasting of how you did not fear me, calling me coward.”
The sorcerer made a motion with his hand, and Allystaire roared with sudden pain as one of the Wights slid a thin finger-blade beneath his vambrace and plunged the blade casually through his forearm.
The sorcerer laughed, and with a twist of his ankle, Allystaire managed to get one foot under himself. He gathered himself, lunged forward.
Driven both by the dwindling song, his pain, his cold fury, it was almost enough. He got his knee off the ground and moved perhaps half a pace forward, dragging the mass of Wights with him. Behind him he heard gasps, cries, a startled but hopeful yell.
Then the sorcerer repeated his motion, and another blade slid straight through a seam in his armor, spearing his calf to the ground.
The Arm of the Mother sagged back to his knees, exhausted, gritting his teeth so hard against the pain that he heard them grinding, felt blood trickling inside his mouth.
“So you do know when you are beaten.” The sorcerer took another half step closer, and Allystaire searched for any last reserves of strength to gather for a leap, but he found none.
Behind him he heard a shriek, crying, hysteria. He couldn’t pick voices out. He knew only that he was failing them and they wept to see it.
“And more importantly, they know when you are beaten. As do your fellows—for have they not abandoned you?”
It was only then that Allystaire realized he did not know where Torvul or Idgen Marte were, and he felt a tiny spark of hope flicker to life within him.
“Never.” He lifted his head in time to see Idgen Marte appear out of the darkness behind the sorcerer, knife in hand. She plunged it towards his robed breast, but with a wave of his hand and a flare of yellow in the darkness, she was flung away, describing an arc several yards upward into the air. Allystaire heard her shriek as she landed, heard the crunch of bone shattering.
“Well, that accounts for one of them. Both of you must be studied, of course, most carefully. What you managed was quite impressive, to destroy so many of our constructs. And your powers show promise. Primitive, but intriguing. Well. It is your body that must be studied.” The sorcerer gestured lazily, and Allystaire felt more cold shocks of pain as the other Battle-Wights slid their blade hands into his flesh, in his side, in his arms, his shoulders, his back.
Gethmasanar opened his mouth but suddenly paused.
A low, deep rumbling sound rose in the night. A liquid sound, but not water. Something deeper.
Something like molten stone given a voice.
Torvul, Allystaire thought dimly, for thought was leaving him as blood trickled from nearly a dozen wounds. But I’ve never heard him sing like this.
The song was thunderous, bone-rattlingly deep. It rumbled through the earth beneath him. It thrummed in his ears with power.
“Ah, the dwarf. And what will be your play? Surely something more subtle than a knife in the dark. A potion, a puff of smoke? Flame? An acid?”
“No.” Torvul spoke through clenched teeth, and though his singing stopped, Allystaire felt the song continuing to resonate in the air and the earth. “Only a talk with my mother.”
“A prayer? If your goddess was going to deliver you a miracle, dabbler, she would’ve done it by now.”
The dwarf stepped into the wan circle of light the few soldiers bearing torches threw, and he knelt. His potion bags and pouches were all but empty, and he had neither cudgel nor crossbow. “Her Ladyship is not my mother,” Torvul said, and Allystaire knew from his tone that his face was twisted with that maddeningly knowing smile as he spoke, though the darkness hid his features.
The dwarf knelt, placed a hand upon the ground, and resumed his song. The power of it raised the hair on Allystaire’s arms and neck.
The sorcerer’s answering laugh was cut off when something flew through the night air and took him in the stomach. He was knocked a step backwards, but recovered quickly.
Torvul lifted his hand from the ground, still singing, pouring forth a song of deep places and old wisdom, and as his hand moved, the very earth rose from behind the sorcerer and wrapped around him, trying to pull him into its depths.
There was a bright flare of bilious yellow, and the earth melted away from Gethmasanar. He stepped forward, his hands completely alight with the yellow fire that normally trickled from his fingertips and eyes.
“STONESINGER!”
Allystaire was slipping ever closer towards the abyss of unconsciousness from loss of blood. Already he could not feel his feet, his hands. His heart was a dull throb in his chest, a faint tattoo in his ears.
But he knew the sound of fear in a man’s voice when he heard it.
Torvul’s song continued to coax stones out of the dirt, to hurl waves of earth at the sorcerer, who continued to cut them out of the air or deflect them with the blunt force of his power.
They were a study in contrasts. While the sorcerer cursed and raged and hurled yellow fire from his hands, his eyes, even his mouth, the dwarf knelt motionless upon the earth, which thrummed to his call.
As bolts of pure energy flew at Torvul, hunks of earth ripped themselves free of the ground and floated into the air to absorb them. Other rocks pulled free and flew at the sorcerer, and some began to strike him.
And then a second robed form materialized behind the first, and the yellow power that filled the air was joined with blue.
Suddenly it was all Torvul could do to keep himself covered. Allystaire could hear, dimly, the dwarf’s voice going hoarse, could see the first bolt that slipped through his defenses.
He felt himself slide another notch towards oblivion. His vision turned grey and faded.
Allystaire heard Torvul’s song grow weaker, and thought, I am sorry, My Lady. I have failed. I am sorry, Gideon. Sorry, my son.
And then just before his mind went blank and his heart stopped sounding in his ears, he heard an answer in his mind. A curious, distant voice, that said three words.
Son?
Allystaire?
Father?
* * *
Inside the Temple, Gideon sat up beneath the altar. He stood, his eyes widened, and then he disappeared. He had come and gone so fast that almost no one in the Temple noticed it, so intent were they on the battle that raged outside.
No one, that is, except for the Voice of the Mother, who fell against the altar, crying tears of joy.
* * *
The survivors of the Battle of Thornhurst who saw the Will of the Mother confront the sorcerers agreed that it was a terrible and frightening thing, even if the rest of the details varied.
Some said that he was a giant wreathed in terrible flame. Others, a nearly invisible outline, barely a man. A few said that he was a dragon, huge and terrible and breathing the power of a storm.
Still others said it was just a slim, bald youth in a robe, who looked calmly at the sorcerers hurling their unnatural fire, raised his hands, and said, “No.”
Both of them, the blue and the yellow, ceased to attack the dwarf and turned their full attentions on Gideon, bombarding him with the power they wielded. Blue and yellow light both disappeared before his outstretched hand, as if it never even touched him.
But the two drew on more and more of their power. The skin of the one who wielded the blue energy split and cracked, the light that filled him pouring out, till he was barely in the shape of a man any longer.
And this, it seemed, began to overwhelm the Will, who stepped back, quailing against the onslaught he was trying to absorb.
It seemed, again, as though all might be lost. And it might have been, if not for the Islandman, whose name, and what he was doing there, no story and no song recorded.
* * *
His scream. That’s what got him, in the end. Nyndstir had never been the quiet sort, never been one to sneak and stick a blade in the back. He wasn’t some dumb inlander knight prattling about honor and facing a man straight on, but he’d never been a skulker either, not really.
So he was really freezing tired of skulking. And it seemed like the boy was having a bad time of it once Iriphet had started screaming in a language Nyndstir didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
When he went for Iriphet’s back, raising his axe high, intending to cleave straight through the sorcerer’s unprotected neck, he wasn’t sure what might happen when steel met—well, whatever the sorcerer was becoming. Because it was like the terrible light within him was consuming the flesh around it.
But he did scream, a long and bloody cry for vengeance, and he swung.
And his axe bit deep into something.
But the other sorcerer turned, saw him, and snarled. A beam shot straight from Gethmasanar’s extended finger and pierced Nyndstir in the chest. It took him in the heart.
As he was falling to the ground, he had a vague sense that the battle around him had changed.
And then he felt a vast and awesome presence looking upon him.
Did I right the course?
He was met with a voice that sounded like waves in a storm on the open sea. The rage and the terror in it were so great that he could not make out any words. Then it was as if the storm parted for the sun. The roar of the ocean died, and there was only warmth.
Yes, the sunlight said, in a voice that put him in mind of his mother. You steered true.
Nyndstir Obertsun died a happier man than he ever expected.
* * *
When the Islandman burst from the trees, Gideon got all the opening he needed. Iriphet’s gambit had been unexpected, trying to make himself a conduit for the very power that all the Knowing drew from, pouring it into Gideon in an attempt to burn him out.
But there was still a mortal shell there. As Gideon now understood, there had to be a mortal shell for the magic to attach itself to, for the will to work anything in the mortal world. And a mortal shell, no matter how well protected, how ancient, no matter what power it housed, had little defense against an axe buried in its spine.
Gideon pulled the power straight out of Gethmasanar’s body then. The sorcerer’s yellow eyes winked out and he crumbled to the ground.
Iriphet was a longer time in dying. Gideon had to rework some of his newly absorbed power and use it to build a barrier around the conduit the dying sorcerer had opened. The power Iriphet’s flesh had been hooked to was now a glowing ball of intense blue floating in the air.
Gideon boxed it in, shut it off, watched as it grew smaller and smaller, denser and tighter, until it finally winked out. The backlash against his barrier drove him to his knees for a moment.
Then both sorcerers and Baron Lionel Delondeur lay dead upon the battlefield. The Battle-Wights that held Allystaire’s limp form collapsed, and Gideon rushed to his side.