Chapter 29 : Void Shatter
Sophia dipped into a slight curtsy. "Distinguished lich, let us send him to the Maker's embrace together."
She had read the situation. Raphael was badly wounded. Two uninjured opponents against one who wasn't — the odds were better than they would normally be, and she had no philosophical objections to pressing an advantage.
"The two of you," Raphael said, his contempt unhurried. He raised the lance and leveled it at Sophia.
In that instant, Sophia felt something she hadn't expected — a cold along her spine, the sensation of standing in front of something that hunted for a living and enjoyed it. Raphael's eyes flashed gold.
Evan recognized it in the same moment. The Church had a secret technique — a brief invocation that called an angelic essence into the practitioner, a temporary infusion of sacred power. He had read about it in Nicholas Andrew's memory and never expected to see it. Raphael's presence had changed completely. Whatever injury he was carrying, something had replaced the space the injury occupied.
"Careful!" Evan called, and was already casting. The air around him darkened. Something coalesced in his raised hand — a lance of black energy, formed in a tight spiral, the tip so dark it seemed to absorb the light touching it. The Spear of Hadir. Not the actual weapon of Death God Hadir, but the spell that bore its name, the closest magic could come to modeling the death god's instrument of judgment. Anyone nearby without some protection for their spirit would feel it looking at them.
He threw it.
The lance crossed the space between them as a black streak. Raphael and Shur were already moving — the dragon accelerating, the two of them merging into a single red arc of force. The two impacts met. A detonation, smoke and energy billowing outward, the Spear of Hadir erupting into a massive skull-shape that roared and churned through the cloud — and then a concentration of holy white light appeared at the center of it and swept the black smoke away.
The lapis floor showed a deep gouge where the collision had grounded. It repaired itself quickly, the stone flowing back into place. Evan had spent more than half his remaining magical energy in that single cast. His spirit sea hummed and the ambient energy in the room began streaming toward him, converting as it entered, replenishing him — the benefit of having an opened spirit sea was exactly this, a direct channel to the surrounding elements.
Raphael came out of the smoke apparently unharmed. But Evan could see it in the way he moved: slower. Measurably slower. The Spear had done something.
Even diminished, Raphael was fast. He and Shur circled and then committed, the lance extending a beam of crystalline red light dozens of cubits long directly at Sophia. She spread her wings and pulled back, her movement erratic and unpredictable, but the red light tracked her.
Her body exploded into white bats.
Void Shatter was the only response she had left. The lance's beam passed through where she'd been. Several of the white bats caught the edge of it and burned to ash as the holy energy inside the crystal light found them, but the rest re-formed around Evan into Sophia again, somewhat disheveled.
Evan drew a full breath and cast again. Black cloud poured from him — not directional, not shaped, simply expanding. Undead Calamity. The most feared spell in the death magic tradition: anything living within its range, in the moment of its passing, became undead. Flesh rotted. Souls were severed. Even plants didn't survive it. Even a dragon, caught unprepared, could become a zombie dragon. The range at full deployment could reach dozens of li. Evan had avoided using it. But Raphael was injured and this was not a situation for restraint.
The black cloud rolled outward, and where it touched the lapis floor the stone's surface turned to dust. Shapes moved inside it — wraiths and skeletons and things that had once been something else, driven forward by the cloud's expansion.
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The two forces met with a sound like a wall coming down. For a moment they held each other.
Then Raphael roared and his lance blazed again, and Sophia began an incantation in a language that sounded like it predated the current world. Her voice dropped to a near-whisper and then she said the word:
"Void Shatter."
The space around Raphael shattered. Not metaphorically — the actual spatial fabric fractured, the air between them cracking into facets like broken glass, the pieces drifting and sliding against each other as they propagated toward him.
Void Shatter was a space magic spell. The Windsor clan's deepest inheritance — both Ravages of Time and Void Shatter, the time and space traditions, were theirs alone, the reason that even in their reduced state the Windsor name still carried weight among the Thirteen Clans.
The crystalline red light of Raphael's lance went strange, warping through the fractured space, bending in directions it shouldn't have bent. In the chaos of the distorted geometry, Evan caught a glimpse of something: for just an instant, a thread of black appeared in Shur's red scales. Then it was gone. He told himself it was probably his imagination.
Raphael's expression had gone completely still. He was calculating. His armor's runic arrays hummed with holy light and his lance gathered itself for a straight-force answer — he had realized that under Shur's continuous sub-acoustic output, both Undead Calamity and Void Shatter were advancing at a fraction of their normal speed. He could outlast them.
The floor lit up.
A five-pointed star blazed in the lapis stone, appearing as though it had always been there and had simply been waiting for this moment. Light ran through its lines continuously, too fast to follow. Then three columns of light rose from it, and the room tilted —
Evan's vision went white. He felt himself turning and then stopping, and when things resolved around him he was outside. The castle's outer air, cold and still, the mountains around him in the pre-dawn dark.
Light flashed beside him, and figures appeared: Sophia, still re-orienting herself, and then the Blood Clan one by one, and Windsor. No Raphael.
Evan scanned the distance. A roar reached him from far away, and through the darkness he caught a red shape receding into the mountains and gone.
He let out a breath. The opportunity had passed. Killing Raphael after this would be significantly harder than killing him before it, and now Raphael knew something of what Evan was.
The castle flickered on the ridge and vanished.
Sophia came back to herself and looked at Evan with a smile that showed her teeth. Around her, the Blood Clan assembled — fewer than twenty, but when they opened their wings and let their presence expand into the air, the clouds above shifted. The mountain felt different.
Below on the mountain's southern face, a column of Church Inquisitors had arrived — dispatched after Raphael, who had simply been faster. They saw the Blood Clan and read what they were seeing. After a brief assessment, they withdrew quietly.
Good, Evan thought. That buys a little time.
Sophia gave her father a full account of what had happened inside the tower. Windsor seized her by the shoulders, his injuries momentarily forgotten. "You remembered it? The Book of the Undead — you held it?"
"Every word."
Evan stood to the side and listened, his brow furrowing as the account progressed. Sophia had seen the book. Which meant Raphael had seen it too. Three people had entered the tower and all three had come out with something they hadn't carried in. Whether that was good or not depended entirely on what each of them had received.
Sophia noticed his expression and misread it. "I'm sorry — I didn't see you gain anything. Without you, I think he would have killed me before you arrived."
"Don't thank me for that," Evan said. "I couldn't have managed Raphael alone either. We both came out intact because of the other, and neither of us would have managed anything without your father having already taken most of the fight out of him." He meant it. It was an accurate summary.
Windsor reached into his coat and produced a pendant on a thin chain — a water-drop cut ruby, polished, beautiful, and when Evan looked at it carefully he could feel the faintest pulse of something inside the stone. "You have our friendship. If you find yourself in difficulty, seek Fruit-dew Street in Kansas City, number 203. Show this to the tavern keeper."
Evan put the pendant in his ring.
The Blood Clan said their goodbyes one by one and took to the air. Wings spread, dark shapes rising into the early pre-dawn sky, dispersing into the dark. Sophia turned once before she ascended, gave him a smile, and was gone.
He stood alone on the mountain.
The east was lightening very slightly. The moon was nearly down. The ridge was empty. Somewhere in the castle's disappearing — its thirteen-level tower that he had only seen two floors of, with Sophia and Raphael covering two more between them — lay nine unexplored floors and whatever the original builder had placed there over centuries or millennia.
He made a note to gather more information about Borbert Castle when he could.
There would be other opportunities.