368. Featherlight
Whether the waystone had originally been connected at the root to the deeper enchantments and machineries of the ruins, or whether it had always rested within the shoals of the rift, Liv wasn’t certain. It was impossible to tell, now, where the border of the rift had once been. So much mana was boiling off the immense struts that rose above the lunar surface that she could feel the excess flows leaking off, escaping the enchantments which were supposed to draw them into storage or send them on to whatever purpose Ractia had in mind. The wild, turbulent flows sunk into the shoals of the rift, stirring up the mana which was already there and pushing the edge outward.
It was an eruption, though at least one without a horde of mana beasts driven out in a maddened rage.
While Kaija counted aloud, standing in front of Liv with her halberd in hand, Liv allowed her eyes to half close. She took a deep breath, sucking in the roiling ambient mana, and letting it fill her. Once, doing this would have been dangerous. But that was before she’d consumed what was left of both the Lady of Bones and the Lord of Cold - before she’d walked the greatest rifts in the world, from the Garden of Thorns to Godsgrave.
Mana rushed into Liv’s body, rejuvenating her and refilling her reserves until she felt like it was crackling along her skin, leaping between her fingers, sparking with every breath that left her lips. “You should go,” she told Kaija. “They’ll be waiting for you.”
Kaija met her eyes and set her jaw. “I don’t like leaving you here,” she admitted.
Matthew and Triss had fought their way out into the hall, and it made Liv nervous that she couldn’t keep them in sight until the captain of her guard had left. The bark of an Antrian’s shoulder-mounted weapon rang out through the ruins, and it was only a slight relief that it wasn’t followed by the sound of someone she loved screaming in pain.
At the door to the room, the clang of steel drew Liv’s eye. More of Ractia’s cultists had arrived - an Eld who launched a spray of poison from the edge of his blade with a single swipe, and a hunter who used a hunting spear to parry the thrust of one of Liv’s guards, then shifted into the form of a wolf and leapt for the man’s throat. It was only the presence of his gorget that kept him from dying right then and there.
Kaija fell into stance for thrusting, Halberd aimed at the wolf, but Liv reached out and put her hand on her friend’s back. “I said go,” Liv told her. “I’ll deal with this.” She used the endless, teeming mana of the rift to form half a dozen swords of adamant ice, and then sent them whistling forward, spearing half into the wolf with such force that it was pinned to the wall of the chamber. The Iravatan man managed to parry one with his own blade, then leap back out of the doorway, placing the wall between himself and Liv. With a thought, Liv called the swords back, letting the corpse of the wolf slide down to the floor where it came to rest in an expanding pool of blood. A breath, and all the mana she’d used returned.
“Rust it,” Kaija growled. “Nesēmus.” A flare of light, and the captain of the guard was gone, to appear on the waystone back at Bald Peak.
Liv strode forward, slipping between her guards. “Hold the door,” she told them again, and stepped out into the corridor.
Twenty feet away, Matthew and Triss were darting in and out, around and behind the hulking steel armor of an Antrian. Its bulk only just fit in the hallway, and with every swing of its enchanted blade, great gouges were carved in the walls, floor, or ceiling. As Liv watched, it let loose with the spinning barrels mounted on its shoulder once again.
Triss, eyes leaking brilliant blue mana, raised a hand as if she’d known the attack was coming - and with the word of seeing active, Liv knew that she had. A pane of coherent mana, shot through with veins of gold, appeared directly in front of the barrels. It cracked against the force of the war-machine’s attack, but held, and sparks shot off the walls, ceiling, the long window on one side of the corridor, and even off the armor of the Antrian itself as projectiles rebounded in all directions.
Matthew, his eyes shining the same blue color as his wife’s, ducked past the thing’s leg, found a gap between the armor plates, and slid his sword right in between. When he ripped the blade out, something gave way, and the Antrian’s leg buckled beneath its immense weight, sending it crashing down onto one knee.
Confident that particular fight was under control, Liv turned the other way to see half a dozen cultists, a mix of human, Eld, and Great Bat, wrestling some immense piece of machinery into place. It looked like one of Ghveris’s barrels, designed to stay in place rather than rotate, but also expanded to many times the original size. The outside was lined with glowing sigils, and rather than being simply straight and smooth, was broken up by bands of enchanted machinery moving up the length in sequence, with the fattest at the bottom and the least bulky at the top. Great lengths of cable extended out the back of the thing, and Liv saw that they were connected to the ceiling of the corridor, with the cultists plugging in more while she watched.
The base was crab-legged, with half a dozen or more articulated metal limbs scuttling forward under the control, presumably, a young man sitting in a seat atop the thing. He must have been human, for Liv could already see the veins of his wrists and forehead blackening in the first signs of mana sickness.
“For the Great Mother!” he shouted, and a clacking of gears and whirring of machinery brought the open end of the great barrel into line with Liv - and beyond her, Matthew and Triss. “For the Exodus!” The sigils along the length of the weapon lit up in sequence, from base to tip, and Liv could feel a great mass of mana gathering inside the weapon.
Liv raised the stormwand and conjured a wall of mana, stretching to encompass the entire height and width of the corridor. Whatever was coming out of that thing was no threat to her - she could simply dissolve into a snowstorm, and then reform when it had passed - but there was no world in which she would allow an attack to come crashing through onto Matthew and Triss from behind.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, she could see a brilliant light build deep inside the weapon’s barrel, and then a beam of mana exploded outward and collided with her mana shield. Liv felt the wall she’d made crack, then shatter, and with a thought she layered a second one behind the first. This time, the wall held.
When the light of the explosion had faded, Liv saw that it had blown out the walls of the corridor to either side. Corpses floated amidst the machinery and hunks of twisted metal, drifting as if there was nothing at all to tie them down to the moon’s surface below. Even the weapon itself had become detached from the floor, steel-crab legs scrabbling at empty space as it drifted up and away from Liv.
Above and around her, the sigils and strips of mana stone flickered, then died, casting the corridor into shadow. Liv felt suddenly light as a feather, and she nearly panicked. A step back sent her up into the air, her boots losing contact with the floor of the corridor.
“Blood and shadows!” Matthew cursed from behind her, and as Liv’s body slowly spun round, she could see him drifting into sight. Her brother and his wife had systematically disassembled the Antrian war-machine they’d been fighting, Liv saw, and indeed the severed lower arm, still attached to an enchanted blade, gently rebounded off the glass window.
Liv scanned the now-dark sigils that lined the corridor. “Gvere!” She pointed with her wand, and the motion sent her spinning in a motion that nearly caused her to empty her stomach. “The enchantments must have been doing something with our weight, and now they’ve failed.” Her body continued turning, and when she came back around so that the mana shield she’d made was in sight, Liv took the opportunity to layer a more permanent wall of adamant ice behind it, sealing off that end of the corridor completely. Her work done, she allowed the mana shield to dissipate.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Triss grabbed her by the arm and pulled her down so that Liv’s boots were on the floor of the corridor again. “You’ve got to move slowly and carefully,” she cautioned.
“Forget that,” Liv grumbled, and conjured herself a pair of wings out of pure mana.
“I just hope that wasn’t the way we needed to go,” Matthew said.
“We can’t let them keep firing weapons like that,” Liv said. “They’ll destroy the entire place, and we’ll never find Ractia. If you see another one of those things, breaking it before it’s used has to be the first priority.”
A flash of light erupted from the door to the waystone - it might not have been so clearly visible if the corridor had still been lit, but now it was like dawn piercing the last grasp of night. Liv let the light fade, then beat her wings once and flew down the corridor, sweeping around in a graceful curve. Her guards ducked out of the way as she soared back into the chamber, where she found that her friends and companions had arrived.
Keri and Liv’s father had set themselves up at the front, weapons drawn, the two soldiers shoulder to shoulder. Both were in their full armor, and not for the first time Liv wished she could have been with them when they’d fought their way across Varuna. Arjun, Sidonie, and Aira stood far enough back to give the front line room to fight. The Elder of House Keria leaned on a wooden cane, while Arjun and Sidonie each held a wand in their right hand, ready to cast. In fact, the entire group looked ready to leap directly into violence, until they’d had a moment to blink away the last of the light and focus on Liv.
“We’re holding the room,” she explained, using minute adjustments of her wings to hover before them. “Matthew and Triss are in the corridor.”
Keri was the first to step forward, and he inadvertently launched himself high into the air, directly at Liv. She couldn’t help but grin as his eyes widened, his arms pinwheeled, and he careened toward her. Liv beat her wings once, reached out, and wrapped her arms around her husband, so that they spun together for a moment until she had them both under control.
“Well, hello there,” Liv murmured to him, as he clutched one arm around her waist like a drowning man. She maneuvered him down until he’d got his feet under him again, and then let go. The rest of the group were frozen in place, as if too afraid to move.
“The cultists used a weapon that blew out the entire corridor going that way,” Liv said, pointing. “They killed themselves doing it, and they also broke all the enchantments in this whole section of the rift. No lights, and they were using magic to control weight, somehow.”
“The same enchantments are on the ring,” Elder Aira said. She tucked her cane under one arm, and with the barest push of her legs, soared past Liv’s father in an effortless leap that covered nearly fifteen feet. “The moon isn’t large enough to hold your body down on its own,” she explained. “Your body is still the same size, but it’s like you weigh perhaps a tenth of what you’re used to - perhaps less.”
Her slippers gently touched down on the floor again, and the old woman nodded. “I could get used to this. But move slowly - you don’t want to go bouncing your head off the ceiling.”
Arjun and Sidonie exchanged a glance, and then muttered an incantation in unison. At their command, Aluth gave them wings. Sidonie was the first to flap off the waystone, and she managed to put herself into a twisting roll that nearly saw her hit the wall before getting herself under control.
Liv raised her eyebrows at her friends. “I thought I was insane for flying around like this, and neither of you was ever going to do something this dangerous?”
“Being ten feet of the ground is different than flying between mountain peaks,” Arjun grumbled, wavering a bit from side to side as he flew past her. “You’re still utterly mad for the way you use the spell, but I thought I might need it one day.”
Liv’s father, on the other hand, slid forward, low to the ground, as if he was lunging at an enemy. The move took him further along the floor than normal, but at least he didn’t go careening off in a somersault. “Come along then,” he said, after a nod of satisfaction. “Let’s clear the room for the next group. Lead the way, Liv.”
She flew backwards through the door, tucked her wings, and shot down the corridor, which curved gently inward. Through the long windows, Liv could see one of the great enchanted struts, rearing up into the black, star-scattered sky, sigils burning.
Sidonie flew up to the glass, and she looked like nothing so much as one of Liv’s children, nose pressed to the window of a carriage in a new city. “I’m amazed she was able to make enchantments that could handle that kind of heat,” she remarked, trying to twist herself to see higher up above the horizon. “That doesn’t even look like proper fire coming down, but something else entirely - magma, perhaps?”
“Later, child,” Aira said, and plucked at the archmage’s sleeves.
Liv, in the meanwhile, with her husband and father close at her heels, soared around the curve of the corridor to find Matthew and Triss halted, face to face with an immense door of enchanted metal.
“Don’t get too close,” Triss warned. They’d both sheathed their blades for the moment, and Liv’s sister-in-law pointed with one hand at a band of darker metal that ran along the floor, then up both walls, and across the ceiling, as well. Sigils shone in an unbroken line along the entire surface. “There’s a ward here, and unlike the rest of the enchantments it hasn’t been broken.”
“Of course not,” Liv grumbled. “That would be too easy.”
“It makes sense.” Sidonie came up on her side. “If I were designing defenses, I’d make certain my wards couldn’t be taken out by accident. I’d have them hooked up to their own, separate mana sources, buried somewhere safe and out of sight.”
“We need to assume that the moment that ward comes down, and we open the door, there’s going to be a group of soldiers waiting to attack,” Valtteri warned. “They’re creating choke points and then defending those points, just like they did at Nightfall Peak.”
“Can you break it?” Keri asked, turning to glance between Liv, Sidonie and Arjun.
“Of course we can,” Liv said. “We’ll just have to work together to time everything right. One person to take the ward down, one to open the door, and one to put up a mana shield against whatever they’re going to throw at us.”
“I’ll take the ward,” Sidonie said, tucking her wand under one arm just long enough to lace her fingers together and then crack her knuckles. “I don’t get to do this often enough.”
“Which means you should break the door,” Arjun said, looking to Liv.
“I have the feeling that I’m being judged,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“Not at all,” Keri assured her. “We all just know there’s no one quite as good at ripping their way through walls, doors, and buildings as you are, my love.”
“I still feel judged.” Liv sheathed her wand, raised her hands, and conjured matching fists of mana, enormous and flashing with sparks of blue and gold, to hover in front of her. “I won’t put them across the ward until you give me the word, Sidonie.”
Arjun, in the meanwhile, raised his wand of neem wood, and pointed it at the door. “Ready to make a shield,” he promised. “Everyone else should probably take a step back, though. It’s too early in this madness for me to be healing someone.”
Sidonie knelt down, so close to the ward that Liv half expected her friend to accidentally brush at the magic and set it off. She held her wand in her right hand, and with her left, adjusted her spectacles on the bridge of her nose. “Nasty work,” she decided, after a moment’s examination. “This band of metal that goes all the way around is iron. When a living being crosses it, the whole thing will spring out into all sorts of blades, spikes and saws. Spinning, circular saws, actually, that’s interesting - I bet they’d cut right through a bone.”
“Turn it off, Sidonie,” Liv grumbled. “Study it later.”
“Of course.” With a wave of her wand, Sidonie lifted ephemeral wisps of gold and blue mana from out of the sigils, which all lost their luster, becoming only etchings in the metal, as dead as the other enchantments in the hallway.
Liv didn’t wait - she launched both of her conjured hands forward. The first of them slammed into the door in the form of a clenched fist, making the whole thing buckle and crack. She let it dissolve, and sent the second surging forward through fading motes of mana.
That second impact ripped the door entirely off its hinges, sending it tumbling through a crowd of cultists. Bodies were thrown aside, blood sprayed in every direction as the hunk of metal pulped a woman’s head, and an Antrian let loose a blast that sparked off Arjun’s conjured mana shield. As soon as the barrels atop its shoulder stopped spinning, the shield dropped.
“Forward!” Liv’s father roared, and then he and Keri charged through the breach, weapons at the ready.