War Maid's choice

Chapter Forty-Two

" Vaijon!"

Walsharno’s silent, agonized cry echoed Bahzell Bahnakson’s pain. A golden strand, as much a part of him as his own pulse, snapped, its broken end whipping away even as he grasped vainly after it. It was gone, vanishing between one breath and the next, and he felt the anguish of its passing even through the focus of his Rage.

Yet there was no time to let themselves feel it fully, for even as Vaijon fell, taking one of the remaining focuses of the Dark with him, a screaming battering ram of ghouls smashed into the hard-pressed battleline in front of them. The line bowed, stretched, began to break…and beyond it, striding towards them, wrapped in its own sick green fire, came the last and greatest of their foes.

Anshakar snarled as Zurak was blotted away as thoroughly as Kimazh had been. The wizard had lied to them, he realized. Even as he’d whined and warned them that these were no ordinary champions Tomanak, he’d never once suggested they were soul-killers. Perhaps he hadn’t realized it himself-not then, at least-but Anshakar knew it now. He’d never seen it before, but he recognized what had happened. It wasn’t the same as the Dark’s soul-killers, for Zurak and Kimazh had simply been obliterated, not consumed, but the difference mattered little in the end. In theory, this Bahzell and his courser companion could destroy even Anshakar the Great.

But only in theory, for he was more than close enough now for his senses to confirm the way in which destroying Kimazh had drained both Bahzell and the courser. They were recovering quickly-more quickly than he would have believed possible-but it would still be many minutes, probably as much as an hour, before their mortal frames could once again channel and generate enough power to destroy one such as him. Hurt him, yes; they could do that. But actually slaying him would be beyond them, and so he whipped his slaves on before him, eager to grind his way through the defending infantry and reach his prey.

Bahzell’s brown eyes were bleak as yet another monstrous shape loomed up amid the gradually thinning ranks of the ghouls. He knew as well as Anshakar how killing the first devil had drained both him and Walsharno, and this one was far stronger than the first had been. Its power reached out towards them like a strangler’s hands, battering at them, trying to crush them with the fear of its coming. That same fear reached out to the defenders in front of him, causing even the hardiest hradani to quail, despite the buttress of the Rage. They stood their ground, their Sothoii allies with them, but the ferocity of their defense faltered, and in that moment, Anshakar launched his own final reserve at their throats.

“They’re coming through,” Brandark said at Bahzell’s side.

“Yes, they are,” Sir Kelthys agreed.

The human wind rider tossed his bow aside, something no Sothoii would have done except under the direst of circumstances, to swing his shield into position. Walasfro stamped one forehoof under him, and Kelthys drew his sword.

Bahzell glanced at his two companions, then back at the oncoming Anshakar as one of the huge javelins from the ballistae-armed barges struck him squarely. It drove two feet into the naked devil’s side, but he only plucked it out, licked his own blood from it, and then hurled it back at the barge from whence it had come. It struck the arbalest which had launched it, shattered its windlass, drove through the vessel’s deck and completely back out the other side of its hull below the water line.

“Stay behind us, the pair of you,” he said harshly. “Just you be keeping them off our backs.”

“Are you sure about that?” Brandark asked quietly, without a trace of his usual banter, and Bahzell smiled grimly.

“You’d best be taking my word for it this once, little man,” he said. “You’d not like what would happen if you were to be finding yourself betwixt us and that bastard yonder.”

The Bloody Sword took one look at his friend’s expression and nodded soberly. Then he looked at Kelthys, and the Sothoii nodded back.

“We’ll keep them off your back,” Brandark promised.

The frenzied assault smashed into the front-line infantry just as the terror radiating from Anshakar struck the defenders. The weight of that double blow was too great, and the decimated battalion holding the front crumbled. It didn’t break, didn’t run, even then; it simply disintegrated into dead bodies and isolated knots of still desperately fighting men as the ghouls drove them back by sheer force of numbers and suicidal ferocity. Fresh bugle calls sounded, sending two thirds of Trianal’s remaining reserve thundering towards the breakthrough under Sir Yarran Battlecrow. But once again, it would take precious minutes for the reinforcements to arrive, and those were minutes Bahzell Bahnakson and Walsharno didn’t have.

“ Stand clear! ”

The sheer, ear-stunning volume of Bahzell’s thundered command roared out through the bedlam of battle. Walsharno’s fierce whistle came with it, and the mounted Sothoii armsmen between them and Anshakar obeyed that double command without even thinking about it. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d wanted to hesitate, not with Walsharno’s will fastened upon their warhorses with all the ruthless authority of a courser herd stallion and a champion of Tomanak. Those horses scattered to either side, and Walsharno, son of Mathygan and Yorthandro, chosen companion of Bahzell Bahnakson of the Horse Stealer hradani, came through that gap like thunder.

Anshakar’s eyes widened in surprise as the mounted troops in front of him scattered rather than advancing to meet the ghouls. He hadn’t expected them to break that quickly, that easily, and the ghouls who’d broken past the still resisting knots of infantry howled their own astonished victory-and vast relief-as the armsmen in their path dispersed.

But then a single horseman erupted from that opening, and the ghouls’ relief vanished in wailing panic as they saw him.

He came at them in an earthshaking, rolling, mud-spattering thunder and a dreadful corona of blue fire. It crackled about him, streaming on the wind of his passage, running down the mighty stallion’s legs, pooling around his hooves and splashing outward with every booming stride. It reached out to either side, that fire, and stretched out before him, and wails of panic turned into shrieks of agony at its touch.

The ghouls enveloped in that glittering wave of power twisted and contorted, writhing and burning like grass in a furnace. It consumed their flesh, seared their bones, dropped their scorched skeletons into the mud and the blood and the grass. Bone crunched under the surviving infantry’s boots as that same glaring tide pushed them none too gently out of the horseman’s path, as well, and a mighty sword appeared in his hands.

“ Tomanak! ”

Bahzell Bahnakson and Walsharno thundered toward Anshakar, and that blazing blue bow wave came with them.

Anshakar was taken aback by the fury of his puny foes’ charge. He would have expected even one of Tomanak’s champions to have played for time, tried to stay away from him long enough to recover the strength to face him. Yet it seemed this Bahzell, this Walsharno, were even more foolish than their fellows, and he spread his arms and loped to meet them with a hideous smile. That blue stormfront might terrify ghouls-might even be deadly to such contemptible creatures-but it held no terror for Anshakar. It was far too weak to so much as injure one such as him, far less destroy him.

Bahzell felt Anshakar’s searing power rise higher and fiercer as he and Walsharno hurtled towards it. He’d known this enemy was stronger than the devil he’d already vanquished, yet its sheer, stunning potency was even greater than he’d feared. He and Walsharno were no fit match for it, not in their present state, and both of them knew it.

Few of my champions die in bed.

The warning Tomanak had given him so long ago, the night he explained why he wanted a barbarian hradani as a champion, echoed in some deeply buried corner of Bahzell’s mind. He couldn’t pretend he’d ever known or thought differently. Yet all men died-even men as good as Vaijon-and it was given only to a few of them to choose their deaths. To know beyond shadow or doubt that that which they died to save was worth the saving, the evil worth the fighting…the death worth the dying. That was what drew a champion to Tomanak-that knowledge, that understanding — and neither Bahzell Bahnakson nor Walsharno could see this evil and refuse to fight it, even knowing they must die in the doing.

There were no words from Tomanak. Not this time. There was only his hand at their back, his warcry in the thunder of their hooves, and his bright, fierce determination welded to their own wills like steel.

“ Tomanak! ” Bahzell bellowed yet again, and the sword in his hands turned into a glorious cascade of azure flame.

Anshakar flinched from that hated name, but he sneered at the hradani who’d dared to utter it.

“ Krashnark! ” he bellowed back in a voice fit to break the heavens themselves, and the ghouls cowered down, covering their ears’ with their talons. “Come to me, Bahzell! Come and die! ”

Bahzell heard Anshakar’s challenge, heard the hunger and the confidence in it, and knew that confidence was justified. He could sense the vast tide of Tomanak’s presence and power, feel his deity’s willingness to offer all of himself that he and Walsharno might channel, but they were still too spent. They couldn’t reach deep enough, channel enough of it, to defeat this enemy. Yet perhaps they might at least wound it badly enough to drive it back from whence it had come, badly enough for the remainder of Trianal’s army to survive. It was a threadbare hope, but all they could give their companions.

Anshakar was a towering inferno of sick emerald fire, consuming the world, straddling the horizon, and they arrowed straight for the heart of it with one heart, one mind…one soul.

And then, suddenly, there was another soul, another presence. It flared deep within them, like a sudden streamer of golden flame, part of them and yet apart, and they recognized it.

Sir Vaijon Almerhas, commander of the Hurgrum Chapter of the Order of Tomanak, touched them. It was fleeting, that touch across the wall of death, impossible for anyone to sustain, but in that instant, it opened another conduit to Tomanak, and fresh strength-more strength than any mortal could ever have channeled-scorched through them.

“Tomanak! Tomanak and Vaijon! ”

Sudden fear stabbed through Anshakar’s confidence as he heard the terrible joy in that thundering voice. The presence and power coming at him doubled, then re doubled, roaring up with all the roiling fury of the sun itself. His taloned feet skidded in the Ghoul Moor’s mud and bodies, but it was far too late for that.

Bahzell and Walsharno struck him like a typhoon.

That bubble of blinding blue brilliance was a battering ram. It bowled him off his feet, hurled him backward for a dozen yards. Nothing had ever done that before, and the sodden ground erupted in a spray of steaming mud as he landed on his back and the impact blasted an enormous crater. He reached out to either side, like a man fallen into deep snow, claws scrabbling as he tried to thrust himself back upright, but there was no time for that, either.

Wind rider and courser, champions both, souls linked, Bahzell and Walsharno loomed up, impossibly vast, impossibly huge, enormous enough to dwarf even Anshakar the Great. A flaming hoof, vaster than a boulder, crashed down on Anshakar’s chest, and he screamed as flesh burned, ribs crumpled in crushed ruin, and an agony he’d never imagined tore through him. He reached up, clawing desperately, talons raking through Walsharno’s chain barding, but the stallion only brought his other forehoof down like Tomanak’s mace, and Bahzell leaned from the saddle. That flaming sword sheared one treetrunk arm at the elbow, and Anshakar screamed again as the stump of his arm gouted blood. His other arm rose, almost feebly now, batting at Bahzell’s blade in futile self-defense, and Bahzell lopped it off as well even as Walsharno rose high on his back legs.

The stallion towered there, an immense, fiery sapphire sculpture, looming against the heavens, and then both forehooves came down as one. They landed in a holocaust of blue fury, and Anshakar the Great’s head exploded in a fountain of flame.

“ No! ”

Varnaythus of Kontovar brought both fists crashing down on either side of his gramerhain.

“Fiendark fly away with their souls! Krahana lick their bones!” he snarled.

So close-they’d come so close! First the failure against Markhos, and now this!

Trianal’s army had hovered on the brink of defeat. A quarter of the supporting barges had fallen to the ghouls. The riverbank had been littered with the bodies of Sothoii and hradani, and the ghouls’ unrelenting pressure had been driving the remaining defenders back from the water’s edge step by step, despite the barges. That interfering busybody Vaijon of Almerhas had been crushed- crushed! — and Bahzell and Walsharno had been too weak, far too weak, to stop Anshakar by themselves! He’d seen it, been able to taste it himself through the gramerhain, and yet, somehow, at the last moment, that bastard hradani had slipped aside and avoided destruction yet again. Again!

He made himself straighten, made himself inhale deeply, and looked up from the crystal as the ghouls scattered like windblown chaff. Many of the creatures, maddened by battle and blood lust, continued to attack, but they were less than a tithe of the original horde. No power on earth could have stopped the rest of them from fleeing now-not when their new gods had been slain, for the compulsion those gods had wielded had vanished with Anshakar’s death, and the terror of his destroyers was upon them.

Malahk Sahrdohr looked back at the older man, gray eyes stunned. He’d watched the same battle, seen the same signs Varnaythus had seen…and now this.

“Well,” the senior wizard said finally, his voice harsh, “it seems Anshakar and the others aren’t going to kill Bahzell after all.” He showed his teeth. “And Vaijon by himself isn’t going to be enough to keep Them happy.”

Sahrdohr shook his head in mute agreement, and Varnaythus’ nostrils flared as he contemplated the act he’d hoped so desperately to avoid.

Well, at least you’re in an even better position to lay the blame on Anshakar and his idiots than you thought you’d be, he told himself. And you’ve got even better reason to rip out that bastard Bahzell’s heart with his wife. Yes, and Yurokhas, as well! His eyes glittered like shards of ice. Let’s see how the pair of them deal with this.

“It’s time,” he said out loud. “We’ll take Chergor first, then Sothofalas.”

Sahrdohr’s expression was acutely unhappy. Obviously, he’d hoped as strongly as Varnaythus that it would never come to this, and he had a few reservations about the strength of their wards. They’d be dangerously close to the blast that would gut the city, and the wards in question were Varnaythus’, not his. No wizard truly liked to trust his own precious skin to the craft of another, but he only nodded and murmured a command into his own gramerhain.

The images in it changed, focusing tightly on the smouldering ruin where the kairsalhain lay buried. The crystal itself burned crimson in Sahrdohr’s stone, despite the wreckage and tumbled stonework hiding it from any mortal senses, and as Varnaythus gazed into the gramerhain over his companion’s shoulder, he felt the kairsalhain’s potency beat against him like waves of heat even through the intermediary of the scrying spell.

“All right, let’s-”

Varnaythus never completed the sentence.

It was like being locked in a cage with a bolt of lightning. In one shattering instant, a cataract ripped through the warded chamber’s defenses as if those formidable workings were so many cobwebs in an autumn storm. Varnaythus cried out in torment as the collapsing wards backlashed through the wizard who’d erected them in the first place. It was only a trickle, only a minute fragment, of the total power he’d poured into them, far less the brutal fist of wild magic which had just torn them asunder, yet it was enough to blast him off his feet and hurl him bruisingly into the chamber’s wall. His head hit stone, hard enough to stun, and he slid down as a white-haired man with eyes of flame appeared in the middle of his sanctum in worn Sothoii leathers.

Sahrdohr threw himself out of his chair, eyes wild with shock and fear, but he was a wizard lord, and despite his total surprise, his hands came up. A wand appeared in them, swinging to point at the apparition, but the flame-eyed man simply reached out towards him, closed his hand into a fist wrapped in a nimbus of wild magic, and made a ripping motion.

Sahrdohr shrieked. He rose on his toes, his body arched, and something flashed from him into that clenched fist. Then his eyes rolled up, his knees collapsed, and he crumpled to the stone floor like a discarded puppet.

Varnaythus pushed himself shakily to his feet, staring at the intruder while he tried to force his stunned mind to function.

It wasn’t possible. Even for Wencit of Rum, this simply wasn’t possible. He’d set those wards himself. Yes, wild magic could break them, but not without probing them first, sampling and analyzing them, learning who’d erected them, how he’d woven them. Not without employing enough power to destroy every living thing within a thousand yards, at any rate! Not even Wencit of Rum could have tested them thoroughly enough to avoid that without Varnaythus sensing him at it. And even if that had been possible, this chamber hadn’t so much as existed before Varnaythus created it, and no one- no one! — could simply teleport himself into a place he’d never been before.

Yet there Wencit stood, and Varnaythus felt terror shiver through him as he found himself face-to-face with the last white wizard in all the world. He reached out in the desperate hope that he might somehow have time to activate one of his own teleportation spells before Wencit annihilated him, but his shoulders slumped as he encountered a fine-meshed barrier, stronger even than his own wards had been, enclosing what had been his sanctum in a prison of wild magic.

“So,” Wencit said finally, his voice soft. “I’ve been looking forward to this, Varnaythus of Kontovar.”

Varnaythus twitched, although why he should be surprised-especially in the wake of everything else that had just happened! — that Wencit knew his name eluded him at the moment.

“I suppose I should be flattered, then,” he heard himself say, and Wencit smiled. It was a cold smile, and his witchfire eyes blazed.

“A professional courtesy first, if you please,” that voice which sounded like his own continued.

“What?” Wencit asked, with a complete calm and assurance Varnaythus found more terrifying than any threat.

“How?” Varnaythus waved at the chamber about them, and that cold smile grew even colder.

“You aren’t the only one who knows how to create a kairsalhain. But you were kind enough to build your working chamber on top of one of mine.”

Varnaythus’ eyes flickered in shock. Then he shook himself.

“That’s not possible,” he said flatly. “I created this chamber myself. No one else-not even Sahrdohr-knew its physical location, and even if you’d found it, no one could get a kairsalhain inside its wards without my sensing it!”

He heard the outraged professional pride in his own voice and knew vanity was a foolish prop at a moment like this. But professional pride was all he truly had, here at the end of things, and he glared at Wencit, daring even a wild wizard to dispute him.

“You weren’t listening,” Wencit replied. “I didn’t get anything ‘inside its wards.’ I didn’t have to. You built it on top of my kairsalhain. It’s been waiting here for over seven hundred years, Varnaythus.”

The Carnadosan’s eyes didn’t flicker this time; they bulged. Seven hundred years? Wencit had been here-buried a kairsalhain here- seven hundred years before? That was…that was “I said I’ve been looking forward to this,” Wencit said. “As it happens, I’ve been looking forward for quite a long time. And speaking of time, it’s time for me to deliver a message to your colleagues back in Trofrolantha.”

“A message?” Varnaythus felt like a parrot, yet despite himself, he also felt a faint tremble of hope. A message implied a messenger, after all.

“Your friend Malahk will deliver it for me,” Wencit said, watching the hope die in Varnaythus’ eyes. “In fact, he’ll be part of the message.”

“What…what do you mean?” Varnaythus thought of all the inventive ways a wizard’s artistically dismembered body could be delivered-and how long the unfortunate wizard could be kept alive during the dismembering process-and shuddered. Perhaps he was going to be more fortunate than Sahrdohr after all.

“Oh, he’ll be just fine…physically,” Wencit replied, still with that icy smile. “But you and the Council crossed a line this time, Varnaythus. There are some things I will not tolerate, and Malahk will deliver that message. And as an indication that they should take it seriously, I’ve stripped his Gift from him.”

Varnaythus swallowed hard, although he supposed there was no reason one more impossibility should bother him after so many others. Stripping a wizard of his ability to wield the art was the cruelest punishment of all, far crueler than simple physical death, and it could seldom be done without killing the victim. Even when it could, it took weeks of preparation and the shared and focused abilities of at least a dozen other wizards.

“And the message?” he asked.

“It’s very simple.” Wencit’s voice was flat. “You will never- ever — again attempt to attack Leeana Hanathafressa with the art.” Varnaythus stared at him, and there was no smile on Wencit’s face now. “I’ll know of any attack even before it’s launched, just as I knew of this one, and there will be no more warnings. I still control the spells that strafed Kontovar a thousand years ago. At the next attack on her I will not simply destroy the wizard who carried it out, but blast Trofrolantha for a second time. I will leave no stone atop any other stone, and there are no wards so strong, nor working chambers so deeply buried, that I won’t be able to reach them. And should that prove insufficient warning, if any Carnadosan should be so foolish as to attack her a third time, I will lay waste that entire continent in a wall of fire that will dwarf its first destruction. I will burn out my own magic-a wild wizard’s magic-to power that destruction, and it will be ten times a thousand years before Kontovar rises from those ashes.”

Varnaythus was white. It had required the fall of the greatest empire in Orfressan history, the conquest in fire and blood of an entire continent, to drive Wencit and the Last White Council to strafe Kontovar. Yet as he looked into Wencit of Rum’s flame-cored eyes, he knew the wild wizard meant it. Even if it cost his own life, he would scour Kontovar down to clean, bare stone-kill every green and growing thing, every animal-if the Carnadosans dared even to attack, far less kill, a single young woman. What could possibly…?

Those eyes told him that question would never be answered. There had to be an answer, a reason Wencit would make that dreadful promise for Leeana’s sake but not for Bahzell’s or for any other person he’d known and loved in all the dusty centuries of his life. Yet Varnaythus of Kontovar would never know it.

Wencit raised his hand, and a spray of wildfire erupted from it. It reached up, then flowed outward, coating the chamber’s stone walls, enveloping them within a glorious canopy of light that flickered and danced.

“My name,” the wild wizard said in ancient Kontovaran, “is Wencit of Rum, and by my paramount authority as Lord of the Council of Ottovar, I judge thee guilty of offense against The Strictures. Wouldst thou defend thyself, or must I slay thee where thou standest?”

A strange, shivering sort of calm seemed to fill Varnaythus. He wondered, for an instant, how many other wizards had heard that same challenge in that same voice over the centuries. He didn’t know…but none who’d heard it once had ever heard another voice again.

He bowed ever so slightly, then drew his own wand. He raised it, summoning his power, and hurled the most deadly spell at his command. A wrist-thick cable of green lightning that would have given even a creature like Anshakar pause, might even have blasted him back into his own universe, streaked across the scant twelve feet between him and his foe.

It had no effect on Wencit of Rum at all.

The ancient wild wizard simply raised one hand, almost negligently, and that vortex of ravening destruction shattered on his callused palm. It splintered into all the colors of the rainbow, and then it was gone, banished as if it had never even existed.

Varnaythus staggered, sick and emptied of power, and stared at the white-haired old man with the terrible wildfire eyes.

“So be it.” Wencit’s executioner voice was colder than Hopes Bane Glacier. “As thou hast chosen, so shalt thou answer.”

The terrible flash of those flaming eyes was the last thing Varnaythus ever saw.