65. THE DUEL, AGAIN
Tyentso’s story
The D’Lorus estate, the Academy at Alavel,
What used to be the library
Just after taking the Milligreests to safety
Even without the Crown and Scepter to invigorate him, Gadrith was no pushover. This was, after all, a man who had killed two emperors previously, one of whom was ready for the attempt. Since his second reanimation, he’d taken time to craft talismans for himself, and he wore them now. He was prepared: difficult to hurt magically, and nearly impossible to hurt physically.
Of course, Tyentso was also prepared. And even without the Crown and Scepter on her, she could still draw upon the tenyé of Quur. It was nice to have the upper hand against Gadrith for a change.
Also, she had a few other tricks he didn’t know about. To that end, she tossed out a bolt of lightning to cover a second portal she opened again in the back of the room. It was easier to have one waiting.
“Clever,” Gadrith said, attempting to condense a ball of acid around her head. “How did you open the portal that quickly?”
He wanted to engage in shop talk. How nice.
“Oh see, what I did was—” Tyentso sidestepped the acid ball. “Fuck off. Do you really think I’m going to tell you?” She tossed a ball of roaring fire his way. Her best bet was to cause the bastard enough structural damage that even Grimward couldn’t keep him functional.1
The flame ball sputtered and died a good two feet in front of Gadrith. That was, without a doubt, the largest aura she’d ever seen. Naturally, he was warded against fire; it was one of the first defenses the Academy taught. But sometimes people forgot the small things. She’d made the mistake of not checking the last time they’d fought. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
In some ways, a magical duel was like a game of Zaibur. Both wizards planned their strategies while attempting to predict their foe’s. In the end, it often came down to who did a better job of it: what sort of protections they’d planned. Would they ward against fire or swords? Would they go all offense, hoping for a quick victory, or would they lean toward defenses, hoping to tire out their opponent? Each spell cast, each protection raised, cost the wizard in terms of available tenyé. This was why knowledge of your enemy was important: there was no sense using energy to stop swords if your opponent never used them.
Unless you had simply a ridiculous amount of tenyé at your disposal and could afford to splurge.
Gadrith was playing a defensive game. This told Tyentso that he expected the loss of the Crown and Scepter to drain the elephant’s share of her available reserves. It was a good theory, a logical theory.
It was wrong.
For all his arrogant boasting, he hadn’t held those artifacts for more than a half hour. Tyentso, on the other hand, had made it a point to ferret out the inner workings of her office tools almost from the moment they came into her hands. Research, research, research.
Gadrith launched a blistering shower of molten metal her way, forcing her to throw up a hurried barrier while skipping backward to avoid the barrage. Clearly, he expected her to be distracted long enough for a follow-up, but she didn’t give him time. She turned invisible and then teleported.
He launched a devastating one-two blast of lightning and metal fléchettes through the space where she’d been standing.
He couldn’t see it, but she grinned at the momentary confusion on his punchable face. He hadn’t expected her to vanish. Maybe he thought she couldn’t teleport without the Crown and Scepter. It wasn’t even an illogical conclusion; she hadn’t been able to teleport prior to becoming emperor, after all.
But his hilarious look of stupefaction wasn’t as important as the valuable seconds her stunt had bought her. By the time he pinpointed her new location (she was invisible, not inaudible), it was too late for him; she’d opened another small but extremely important portal just above her right hand.
She caught the large yellow gem that tumbled through.
The rush of tenyé from holding Skyfire made the constant stream from the Crown and Scepter pale by comparison. She almost felt bloated from all the extra energy rushing into her.
“Block this, asshole,” Tyentso said, still grinning. She sent a beam of yellow-white superheated flame in his direction. Gadrith raised a hand to block it, but the plasma burned right through, taking out three of his fingers, the wall behind him, the wall behind that …
Oops. Apparently, she was going to need to be careful, lest she accidentally start incinerating holes through random students walking around the school campus outside.
Gadrith screamed, which was interesting. Tyentso hadn’t entirely been sure how much his undead nerves truly carried pain sensations and how much he just pretended. But that scream sounded pretty real.
Of course, it would be temporary. Grimward held him together, and purple-black energy was already forming finger shapes to fill in the missing pieces. Gadrith turned to face her; Skyfire’s brilliance made concepts like invisibility laughably quaint. It was at that moment that a large cloud of black smoke erupted in the center of the room.
Jarith had returned.
He tossed something in Tyentso’s direction, but given how fucking bright Skyfire was, she couldn’t make out more than one or two vague shapes clattering to the ground near her.
With the finely honed instincts of one who trafficked in demons suddenly seeing a demon that he himself hadn’t summoned, Gadrith made a twirling and pulling gesture toward Jarith. Bands of blue-green energy encircled the demon. Whatever it was must have hurt, because Jarith started screaming.
Most wizards knew basic strategies on how to fight demons. Gadrith, with his predilection for soul-based magic, knew better than most. Jarith would have been in a lot of trouble right then if he hadn’t been ready for exactly this and brought reinforcements.
It was the reason Tyentso had left the other portal open.
Because everything happened so quickly, Tyentso had to reconstruct it later. But what she figured out was this: Jarith had appeared as a cloud of smoke right in front of Gadrith as a distraction, while Kalindra and Jira used the portal that Tyentso had left them to return to the fight.
Gadrith was warded against swords; any long blades that tried to penetrate that two-foot aura would be turned, harming the wielder as a result. But assassins liked daggers precisely because they were small enough to be shielded from that nonsense by the auras of their wielders, allowing them to slip right past magical defenses that would stop a sword cold.
Kalindra slit Gadrith’s throat in both directions, cutting down to cartilage, turning his gloating laugh into a raspy wheeze. She then plunged her blades into his eyes and left them there.
Meanwhile, Jira wasn’t idle. It turned out that for all that she preferred to use swords, she knew her way around smaller blades just fine. As Gadrith reached for the daggers stuck in his eyes, Jira darted forward and slit the tendons under his armpits. If he’d been alive, it would have permanently removed his ability to move his arms. As it was, it slowed him down while Grimward’s magic compensated.
None of this killed him. Grimward saw to that. But it did neutralize his ability to cast most spells for a handful of seconds.
In a wizard’s duel, ten seconds during which your opponent cannot react with magic might as well be an hour. It’s all the time in the world.
“All of you, get clear!” Tyentso ordered.
Jarith, freed of the energy bonds, had the fastest reaction time in the room. He grabbed Kalindra, and they both vanished.
Tyentso telekinetically shoved Jira back through the open portal and closed it. It wasn’t very dignified, and Tyentso was woman enough to admit she took a small amount of pleasure in that, but it also kept the woman safe. Tyentso had promised Jarith, after all.
Even an undead monster like Gadrith needed eyes to see with, at least in the mortal realms. Gadrith must have slipped his vision past the Veil based on his reaction as Tyentso stepped forward with Skyfire in her hand. She’d never attempted to look at the artifact with wizard’s sight herself, but she imagined it must have been like … well, like looking at the fucking sun.
Because metaphorically and symbolically, Skyfire was the fucking sun.
Clenching the artifact tightly in her fist. Tyentso stepped inside Gadrith’s aura. She grabbed the back of his hair with her left hand and pulled his head back, exposing the double slit Kalindra had left across his throat. She then shoved her entire hand, including Skyfire, into that gaping wound and let it do what it did best: burn.
The flame flowed like liquid and gas at the same time. It rolled down Gadrith’s throat, filling his stomach and intestines. It roiled up, into his head, burning away his brain. Light shone through the holes where his eyes used to be, the holes in his arms and ribs. The daggers still embedded in him softened, melted, and then evaporated. It would be poetic to say that his flesh turned to ash and blew away in a wind, but the truth was that Skyfire’s flame was so hot, not even ash remained. A pit in the floor a good five feet across turned to molten rock. If the artifact hadn’t been protecting Tyentso, she would have disintegrated right along with her father.
“Come back from that, you piece of shit,” Tyentso muttered, staggering backward.
She sat down on the floor and just let herself breathe. It felt nice. It would have been nice to just sit there and pretend that all her problems had now been solved.
Sadly not. There was still plenty of work to do.
It wasn’t over.
Tyentso pushed herself back up to her feet and cast a spell. She’d learned a bit of necromancy over the years. Of course she had. Everyone who’d ever had the distinct misfortune to have to survive around Gadrith D’Lorus probably learned at least a little, as a survival mechanism, if nothing else. But in her case, her interest had been more personal, had never involved animating corpses, and had predated her ever meeting her father.
Tyentso’s interest had been ghosts.
It was an interest that she found grimly helpful at that moment. She even found no small amount of satisfaction in the idea that the only reason she knew how to do this was because of a ghost that Gadrith himself had created.2 She removed a small crystal sphere from inside her agolé, the stone not much bigger than an eye. It wasn’t a tsali stone, and it wouldn’t keep Gadrith’s soul trapped for more than a few days.
But it would do it for long enough. She’d never personally learned how to make a tsali, but if Caless didn’t know the trick of it, Tyentso would eat the Crown and Scepter of Quur.
The crystal began to glow, and she double-checked to make sure he was trapped. Gadrith had killed too many damn people in this house for her to take it as assumed that any lingering ghosts here would automatically be his.
But it was his. She smiled to herself as she tucked the crystal away. That was when she noticed that the Crown and Scepter of Quur were just lying there on the floor. She had a feeling that those were the items that Jarith had tossed at her while she’d been fighting her father. She scooped those up, setting the Crown at a jaunty angle over her cloudcurl hair and tucking the wand into her raisigi. Wouldn’t have done to forget those, now would it?
Then she opened a portal back to the Capital. She just needed to check in on the Milligreests, and then she could …
She ducked to the side as a Khorveshan sword bounced off the magical shield of talismans she wore. It would have been a nice hit too.
“Do you mind?” she spat at Jira Milligreest.
The woman didn’t look like she minded at all. Nor did she look even the slightest bit guilty about taking a swipe at the first person to step through the gate. She did, however, lower her sword and take an awkward step to the side.
Awkward because of all the pillows.
“Since it’s you,” Jira didn’t make that sound like a compliment, “I’ll assume that means we won.”
Tyentso didn’t think she needed to dignify that with an answer. The room was a mess. Someone—probably Jarith, but who knew really?—had broken the furniture to free the whole family. Eledore was awake and fussing over her father, which made sense, what with the severed hand and all. Kalindra was checking on the children, whom Tyentso was pretty sure were about to start building pillow forts.
Everyone was very quiet, and it didn’t take Tyentso more than a second to realize why.
Jarith also stood there.
He looked like Jarith too. Well, he mostly looked like Jarith. He still hadn’t completely gotten the hang of not leaking shadows around the edges, but nobody would look at him and not think it was Jarith. Or a demonic variation of Jarith.
Tyentso couldn’t blame his family for staring in shock. Qoran would probably have been shouting, but he was still under the effect of that silence spell, and he might have been going into real shock besides.
Jira just pointed at him, while still staring at Tyentso. “Explain. I’m going to assume this is your work, and it’s not funny.”
“It’s not her work, Mother,” Jarith said.
Jira wouldn’t look at him, but tears started welling up at the corners of her eyes. She visibly swallowed. Her finger shook.
“Daddy!” A shout of pure glee came from under a gold-embroidered red velvet cushion.
“No, don’t go near—” Jira started to say, panic in her voice.
“Please, it’s fine.” Kalindra raised her hands. “Don’t upset him—”
“What the hell?” Oh good. Eledore must have looked up.
“Get away from my grandson, you monster!”
“Oh, would you all just shut up!” Tyentso yelled. She threw up a magical wall separating the adults in the room. “Everyone be quiet. I seriously do not have time for this shit.”
Jarith picked up his son, who was wide-eyed and hid his face against his father’s chest. Tave started crying. Kalindra, who was still near the boy, picked him up. Evidently, he was only upset that Nikali was getting picked up while he wasn’t, because he quieted immediately.
Thankfully, everyone else stayed silent.
Tyentso pinched the bridge of her nose. “First, yes, Gadrith’s dead. Thanks for your help on that. It’s appreciated. Nice team effort there. Second, yes, that is Jarith. Believe me, I have spent enough time with him in the last twenty-four hours to guarantee you that there is no demon in the history of the empire who has ever been this well behaved. Thanks for your help on that as well.” She lowered her hand. “I swear by all the gods, Qoran. Maybe he is ‘technically’ a demon, but he’s still managing to be the fresh flower of any room he’s in.” She glared at Jira. “I can’t imagine where he gets it from.”
Jira made a rude gesture at Tyentso.
“Anyway, let’s get Qoran to my physickers so we can reattach his hand. And then I want you all … I don’t know … somewhere else. We’ll figure out a safe place. Just not with the army, because I still don’t know what’s causing everyone to act so strange—”
**It’s Warmonger,** Jarith said. **We should return to the Manol and talk to the others.**
“Warmonger?” Tyentso frowned. “You mean the Cornerstone Warmonger? But why—”
Her brain finally caught up. Finally. That nagging piece of information that had been itching at her for well over a day slotted into place, and it all made sense. The Cornerstone that Nemesan had used to keep an entire damn country of raving fanatics under his thrall. The Cornerstone that had made them so hard to hurt, so vicious, so fearless, that the nation of Laragraen had held off both Quur and the Kirpis vané for almost a hundred years. Yes, of course. That fucking Warmonger.
“Right,” Tyentso said. “Thanks for clearing that up.”
“What about your son?” Kalindra said flatly, still bouncing Tave on her hip. The boy was looking at Tyentso with big, black eyes.
Her mother always used to say that D’Lorus eyes were terrifying as an adult and adorable as a child. Now Tyentso understood. That kid’s puppy dog stare was ridiculous.
Then what Kalindra had actually asked sank in.
“Yeah, no,” Tyentso said, waving her fingers at the boy. “You know damn well he’s not really my kid. He was a trap. I figured Gadrith would try to tsali him, and when he did, well. It was going to blow up in his face.” She paused. “Not literally. Magically.” She paused again. “The boy would’ve been fine.”
Kalindra just stared. “You are such an asshole,” she said.
Tyentso laughed. Gods, she was tired. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Guilty. I am an asshole. I blame my father. My mother was a much nicer person.”
Jarith shook his head.
Tyentso raised a finger to the demon. “You’re judging me. I can feel you judging me.”
“Everyone’s judging you but the children,” Jira snapped, “and they’d be judging you too if they understood. Kalindra, darling, I agree that she’s horrible, but you can’t reward that behavior by putting a child in her custody.”
Kalindra was obdurate. “She doesn’t have to raise him. Royals don’t raise their own children, anyway. They pay other people to do it for them. But she claimed this boy was a D’Lorus, so guess what?” She glared at Tyentso. “Congratulations on your adoption. There are now two living members of House D’Lorus. I’m sure Thurvishar will be thrilled to find out that he’s an uncle. Or a brother. Or however that works.”3
“I don’t have time to argue this,” Tyentso growled.
“Is she going to be my new mommy?” Tave whispered to Kalindra. He had a very strange expression on his face. Like he wasn’t quite sure how he wanted to react to that.
Kalindra glanced down at the boy with obvious surprise. Tyentso didn’t think he’d talked a lot, not even when he was playing with Nikali. She’d kind of assumed the kid just wasn’t very good at it yet. Or more likely, too damn traumatized.
“What happened to your old mommy?” Kalindra asked him.
Tyentso rolled her eyes. She would have thought Kalindra knew better than that by now. That was not a question you asked a little kid who’d clearly been through some shit if you wanted him to stay anywhere in the neighborhood of calm. And sure enough, the boy’s face scrunched up, and he started crying all over Kalindra’s agolé.
Kalindra had brought that one on herself.
**She burned,** Jarith said. **He remembers, even if he can’t say the words.**
No.
Tyentso’s breath froze in her lungs. She felt her heart lurch in her chest. For a moment, the whole world stuttered. She couldn’t have formed a single coherent thought if her life had depended on it.
Tyentso’s head was full of fire and screams and the sound of her mother’s voice. It was as if no time had passed at all. As if she were still there. Still watching while those bastards killed her … 4
She snapped herself out of it, breath still straining in her lungs as she stared at the crying child. Jira was right: it was a terrible idea.
She wanted to make it work anyway. Even though she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near children, even though House D’Lorus was not a child-friendly place to grow up. She owed the kid, right? And it’s not like she’d outlawed the Royal Houses, just certain traitors within them. Maybe making him a prince would be apology enough.
Maybe it could work.
Then Tyentso laughed. She had to hand it to Kalindra. She didn’t know if the woman had done it on purpose or not, but damn if she hadn’t managed to pull everyone’s attention away from the literal demon in the room.
Neat trick, that. If only she could figure out how to pull something similar during council meetings.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Tyentso finally said. “Let’s get Qoran to a healer and go visit some vané, and then you all can scream at me about what a terrible mother I’m going to make to your heart’s content. But let’s save the world first, okay?”