1163rd Year of Blaze’s Slumber
105th Year of the Nazalam Empire
9th Year of Empress Lasean’s Rule
Give the Leading Sorcerer credit, Taterztayl thought. There was Tynell, standing on the first hill, almost inside the Satellite’s shadow. They had arrayed themselves into three groups, each taking a hilltop on the plain outside Liet’s walls. The cadre’s were the most distant, Tynell’s the closest. On the centre hill stood the three other Leading Sorcerers. Taterztayl knew them all. Darknip, raven-haired, tall, imperious and with a cruel streak the old Emperor used to drool over. At her side was her lifelong companion, Crusherskull, an insane killer, an Asgardmen giant who would test his prodigious strength against the Satellite’s portal, should it come to that. And A’bsi, fire-wielder, short and round, his burning staff taller than a spear.
The 2nd and 6th Infantries had formed ranks on the plain, weapons bared and awaiting the call to march on the city when the time came. Seven thousand veterans and four thousand recruits. The Darkness Anisoptera legions lined the ridge to the west a quarter-mile distant.
No wind stirred the midday air. Biting midges roved in visible clouds through the soldiers waiting below. The sky was overcast, the cloud cover thin but absolute.
Taterztayl stood on the hill’s crest, sweat running down under her clothing, and watched the soldiers on the plain before facing her meagre cadre. At full strength, six mages should have been arrayed behind her, but there were only two. Off to one side Furbolt waited, wrapped in the dark grey rain-cloak that was his battle attire – looking smug.
Kalo nudged Taterztayl and jerked his head towards Furbolt. ‘What’s he so happy about?’
‘Furbolt,’ Taterztayl called. The man swung his head. ‘Were you right about the three Leading Sorcerers?’
He smiled, then turned away again.
‘I hate it when he’s hiding something,’ Kalo said.
The sorceress grunted. ‘He’s added something up, all right. What’s so particular about Darknip, Crusherskull and A’bsi? Why did Tynell pick them and how did Furbolt know he’d pick them?’
‘Questions, questions.’ Kalo sighed. ‘All three are old hands at this kind of stuff. Back in the days of the Emperor they each commanded a company of Talents – when the Empire had enough mages in the ranks to form actual companies. A’bsi climbed through the ranks in the Falgari Battles, and Crusherskull and Darknip were from before even then – came down from Shysa on the Guan mainland during the unification wars.’
‘All old hands,’ Taterztayl mused, ‘as you said. None have been active lately, have they? Their last campaign was Seven Metropolises—’
‘Where A’bsi took a beating in the Hol’basday Wasteslands—’
‘He was left hanging – the Emperor had just been assassinated. Everything was chaotic. The Ta’an Oclump refused to acknowledge the new Empress, marched themselves off into the Foam Naevan.’
‘Rumour has it they’re back, at half-strength – whatever they ran into out there wasn’t pleasant.’
Taterztayl nodded. ‘Darknip and Crusherskull were told to report to Latog, left sitting on their hands for the past six, seven years—’
‘Until Tynell sent the Asgardmen off to Puerlos, to study a pile of ancient scrolls, of all things.’
‘I’m frightened,’ Taterztayl admitted. ‘Very frightened. Did you see Drin’s face? He knew something – a realization, and it hit him like a dagger in the back.’
‘Time to work,’ Furbolt called.
Kalo and Taterztayl swung around.
A shiver ran through her. Satellite’s Offspring had been revolving steadily for the last three years. It had just stopped. Near its very top, on the side facing them, was a small ledge, and a shadowed recess had appeared. A portal. No movement showed yet. ‘He knows,’ she whispered.
‘And he isn’t running,’ Kalo added.
Down on the first hill, Leading Sorcerer Tynell rose and lifted his arms out to the sides. A wave of golden flame spanned his hands, then rolled upward, growing as it raced towards Satellite’s Offspring. The spell crashed against the black rock, sending chunks hurtling out, then down. A rain of death descended into the city of Liet, and among the Nazalam legions waiting in the plain.
‘It’s begun,’ Kalo breathed.
Silence answered Tynell’s first attack, save for the faint scatter of rubble on the city’s tiled rooftops and the distant cries of wounded soldiers on the plain. Everyone’s eyes were trained upward.
The reply was not what anyone expected.
A black cloud enshrouded Satellite’s Offspring, followed by faint shrieking. A moment later the cloud spread out, fragmenting, and Taterztayl realized what she was seeing.
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Ravens.
Thousands upon thousands of Grand Ravens. They must have nested among the crags and pocks in the Satellite’s surface. Their shrieks grew more defined, a caterwaul of outrage. They wheeled out from the Satellite, their fifteen-foot wingspans catching the wind and lifting them high above the city and plain.
Fear lurched into terror in Taterztayl’s heart.
Furbolt barked a laugh and whirled to them. ‘These are the Satellite’s messengers, colleagues!’ Madness glittered in his eyes. ‘These carrion birds!’ He flung back his cloak and raised his arms. ‘Imagine a lord who’s kept thirty thousand Grand Ravens well fed!’
A figure had appeared on the ledge before the portal, its arms upraised, long silver hair blowing from its head.
Crown of Disorder. Caladan Libertine. Master of the black-skinned Cest Velle, who has looked down on a hundred thousand winters, who has tasted the blood of dragons, who leads the last of his kind, seated in the Seat of Sorrow and a kingdom tragic and fey — a kingdom with no land to call its own.
Caladan Libertine looked tiny against the backdrop of his edifice, almost insubstantial at this distance. The illusion was about to be shattered. She gasped as the aura of his power bloomed outward – to see it at such a distance … ‘Channel your Warennes,’ Taterztayl commanded, her voice cracking. ‘Now!’
Even as Libertine gathered his power, twin balls of blue fire raced upward from the centre hill. They struck the Satellite near its base and rocked it. Tynell launched another wave of golden flames, crashing with amber spume and red-tongued smoke.
The Satellite’s lord responded. A black, writhing wave rolled down to the first hill. The Leading Sorcerer was buffeted to his knees deflecting it, the hilltop around him blighted as the necrotic power rolled down the slopes, engulfing nearby ranks of soldiers. Taterztayl watched as a midnight flash swallowed the hapless men, followed by a thump that thundered through the earth. When the flash dissipated, the soldiers lay in rotting heaps, mown down like stalks of grain.
Dlaruk Nialag sorcery. Senior magic, the Puff of Disorder.
Her breaths coming fast and tight in her chest, Taterztayl felt her Ryth Warenne flow into her. She shaped it, muttering chain-words under her breath, then unleashed the power. Kalo followed, drawing from his Arckom Warenne. Furbolt surrounded himself in his own mysterious source, and the cadre entered the fray.
Everything narrowed down for Taterztayl from then on, yet a part of her mind remained distant, held on a leash of tenor, observing with a kind of muffled vision all that happened around her.
The world became a living nightmare, as sorcery flew upward to batter Satellite’s Offspring, and sorcery rained downward, indiscriminate and devastating. Earth rose skyward in thundering columns. Rocks ripped through men like hot stones through snow. A downpour of ash descended to cover the living and dead alike. The sky dimmed to pallid rose, the sun a coppery disc behind the haze.
She saw a wave sweep past Furbolt’s defences, cutting him in half. His howl was more rage than pain, instantly muted as virulent power washed over Taterztayl and she found her own defences assailed by the sorcery’s cold, screaming will as it sought to destroy her. She reeled back, brought up short by Kalo as he added his Arckom power to bolster her faltering parries. Then the assault passed, sweeping on and down the hill to their left.
Taterztayl had fallen to her knees. Kalo stood over her, chaining words of power around her, his face turned away from Satellite’s Offspring, fixed on something or someone down below on the plain. His eyes were wide with terror.
Too late Taterztayl understood what was happening. Kalo was defending her at his own expense. A final act, even as he watched his own death erupt around him. A blast of bright fire engulfed him. Abruptly the net of protection over Taterztayl vanished. A wash of crackling heat from where Kalo had stood sent her tumbling to one side. She felt more than heard her own shriek, and her sense of distance closed in then, a layer of mental defence obliterated.
Spitting dirt and ashes, Taterztayl climbed to her feet and fought on, no longer launching attacks, just struggling to remain alive. Somewhere in the back of her head a voice was screaming, urgent, panicked. Kalo had faced the plain not Satellite’s Offspring — he’d faced right! Furbolt had been struck from the plain!
She watched as a Cyn’ng demon arose beneath Darknip. Laughing shrilly, the towering, gaunt creature tore Darknip limb from limb. It had begun feeding by the time Crusherskull arrived. The Asgardmen bellowed as the demon raked its knife-like talons against his chest. Ignoring the wounds and the blood that sprayed from them, he closed his hands around the demon’s head and crushed it.
A’bsi unleashed gouts of flame from the staff in his hands until Satellite’s Offspring almost disappeared inside a ball of fire. Then ethereal wings of ice closed around the short, fat wizard, freezing him where he stood. An instant later he was crushed to dust.
Magic rained in an endless storm around Tynell, where he still knelt on the withered, blackened hilltop. But every wave directed his way he shunted aside, wreaking devastation among the soldiers cowering on the plain. Through the carnage filling the air, through the ash and shrill-tongued ravens, through the raining rocks and the screams of the wounded and dying, through the blood-chilling shrieks of demons flinging themselves into ranks of soldiery – through it all sounded the steady thunder of the Leading Sorcerer’s onslaught. Enormous cliffs, sheared from the Satellite’s face and raging with flame and trailing columns of black smoke, fell down into the city of Liet, transforming the city into its own cauldron of death and chaos.
Her ears numbed and body throbbing as if her flesh itself gasped for breath, Taterztayl was slow to grasp that the sorcery had ceased. Even the voice shrieking in the back of her mind had fallen silent. She raised bleary eyes to see Satellite’s Offspring, billowing smoke and ablaze in a dozen places on its ravaged mien, moving away, pulling back. Then it was past the city, unsteady in its revolutions and leaning to one side. Satellite’s Offspring headed south, towards the distant Zaragoza Range.
She looked around, vaguely recalling that a company of soldiers had sought refuge on the blasted summit. Then something had hit her, taking all she had left to resist it. Now, nothing was left of the company but their armour. Always an even trade, Sorceress. She fought against a sob, then swung her attention to the first hill.
Tynell was down, but alive. A half-dozen marines scampered up the hillside to gather around the Leading Sorcerer. A minute later they carried him away.
Crusherskull, most of his clothing burned away and his flesh scorched red, remained on the centre hill, collecting Darknip’s scattered limbs and raising his voice in a mournful wail. The sight, in all its horror and pathos, struck Taterztayl’s heart like a hammer on an anvil. Quickly she turned away. ‘Damn you, Tynell.’
Liet had fallen. The price was Firstbranch’s Troops and four mages. Only now were the Darkness Anisoptera legions moving in. Taterztayl’s jaw clenched, her lips drawing from their fullness into a thin white line. Something tugged at her memory, and she felt a growing certainty that this scene was not yet played out.
The sorceress waited.
