371. Beneath the Moon
Liv tucked her wings and dove, spiralling between waist-thick woody vines that dripped poison from wickedly sharp thorns. The two bats pursuing her followed close behind - close enough that, when half a dozen thorns launched themselves into the air with a flex of Elder Aira’s vine, they had no time to dodge. The arm-length thorns impaled both bats, carrying them off to one side as they tumbled out of the air. In the unlikely event that either survived, Liv knew that the poison would finish them off.
Below, she could see Keri and her father fighting down the corridor which led to the central shaft by which they would be able to descend into the lower levels of the ancient Vædic structure. Valtteri parried the mana-blade of one Antrian using a sword of adamant ice, then slapped a hand against the chestplate of the war-machine. A moment later, half of the Antrian’s plates of armor exploded off its frame, shooting in every direction as spears of ice erupted from inside of the thing. The spell left it looking something like a porcupine in winter, before it tilted slowly sideways and then fell over with a crash.
Keri, in the meantime, simply set aside the slice of his opponent with such precision that the move left his spear’s tip in line with the machine’s helm. A bar of blinding white light snapped into existence, coring the helm straight through, and then faded just as quickly. Liv had to blink away the afterimage.
In the back rank of their small group, Sidonie protected both Arjun and Elder Aira. A dozen mana shields, each in the shape of a disk, orbited the three of them at her command. Liv could feel the edge of her friend’s Authority, and she deliberately did not press against it. Every spear thrust from a Great Bat, every bullet from an Antrian’s shoulder mounted weapon, ever Iravatan Eld who launched a viscous orb of venom, found their assault intercepted by one of those tough little disks. Sidonie’s ability to not only focus on half a dozen enemies at a time, but to actively defend against each of them with the merest whisper of her intent, was astounding.
And whenever one of Ractia’s cultists made the mistake of looking straight on at the disk of mana that had blocked their assault, they discovered why Sidonie Corbett had earned the title of archmage.
Liv had seen it during her friend’s test, and half a dozen times since, so she knew exactly what was happening. When a man or woman looked into those discs, at first glance they saw their own reflection - which was immediately replaced by their worst nightmare, dredged from the very depths of their mind. Some handled it better than others; the most battle-hardened or disciplined might only flinch, giving Keri or Liv’s father an opening to cut them down. Others screamed aloud and ran away in a panic. The worst hit had crawled against the walls of the corridor, their bodies curled up on the floor, eyes squeezed closed while they trembled and wept. One, Liv saw, had actually clawed his own eyes out in an attempt to escape the waking nightmare into which Sidonie had plunged his mind.
For her part, and mostly out of habit, Liv relied primarily on her wings and her swords - persistent magic that she could use to fight against wave after wave of enemies, while conserving mana. It was a fighting style she’d honed over the years, and it allowed her to save herself in case a more powerful spell was needed in the event of some crisis. Her frozen blades swooped and dove through the air above and around the shaft like a flock of raptors, descending to slice throats or ankles.
“Ractia was below when I saw her,” Liv shouted to the friends and family who’d come to fight beside her. “We need to finish up here and get down the shaft.”
“I believe we’re almost finished here, child,” Aira tär Keria said. The old woman crouched down beside each corpse in turn, tucking a seed into their mouth, or sometimes into an open wound, before moving on. Liv had worried, in all honesty, whether the Daughter of Thorns would be able to keep up in a place that seemed to have no soil for her plants to root in, but apparently the Elder had long since created seeds for just this situation. Liv had half a mind to ask her what battle the Eld had fought to prompt this particular experiment, but suspected that she might not actually want to hear the answer.
Aira tapped the foot of her cane against the textured metal of the floor, and a pulse of mana swept out from her. Every seed, in each corpse, burst into life at once, consuming the body in the grasp of finger-like roots, and thrusting thorned vines across the length of the corridor, over the edge of the shaft, and down into the darkness.
“I’ll go first to clear the way,” Liv called out, and dove down into the shaft, tucking her wings. Her cloud of swords arranged itself behind her, dropping point first and ready to impale any enemy that blocked her path. She’d found Ractia’s great chamber of machines by going through solid rock, before, rather than actually using the passages of the half-ruined Vædic structures. It left her with only a vague idea of where she needed to go; Liv couldn’t have said how many levels down they were aiming for.
She passed corridors branching off from the shaft in two different directions, separated by perhaps twenty feet of descent, before she could see the bottom of the shaft. Glowing lines of mana-stone, shining blue in the dimness, ran up and down, lighting her way, but at each corridor brightness spilled into the open space through which Liv flew. She’d just beat her wings to slow her descent and come in for a landing when the pale head of a massive wyrm shot into view beneath her.
The scales looked bleached and almost sickly, like the wyrm was some cave-creature who’d never seen the light of day. There were old scars, as well, Liv had just enough time to notice, where things had never grown back quite right. Those yellow eyes met her own gaze for an instant, and then the monster’s mouth opened, releasing a billowing gout of fire that shot up the shaft, spreading out to fill it from one side to the other and leaving Liv nowhere to dodge.
Instead, she allowed her physical body to fall away, and Liv became a swirling blizzard of snowflakes and cold wind. Only when the flames hit the storm did she realize that the wyrm was actually using magic, and not some rift-grown monstrosity. She flexed her Authority, crushing the spell, and swirled around and away from the wyrm’s enormous coils, out into not a passageway or a corridor, but an enormous chamber with high ceilings. There was machinery here - great shapes of metal and glass, half disassembled and thrown off to one side to rust, like a child’s discarded toy. But she had no time to examine her surroundings.
Half a dozen blades, sweating drops of water from their brief exposure to the fire, plunged down the shaft and hit the wyrm in as many places. Some scraped off scales, little more than an annoyance. One, Liv saw, actually broke a scale in half, piercing the wyrm’s flesh. Blood welled up around the wound and seeped over its coils as the monster turned about on itself, easily pulling its head from the shaft and facing her again.
Liv reassembled her body and called her swords to her. They came at the merest brush of her intent, assembling themselves to hang behind her, three to each side.
“They call you the Lady of Winter,” the wyrm said, its voice somewhere between a rumble and a hiss. “But you are nothing compared to my mother. Less than nothing. You’ll never be one of us without her help, and you’ll never have that, because I’ll consume you here and now.”
“Noghis,” Liv said. Ractia’s son by Nighthawk Wind Dancer had grown so large, in the years since she’d last seen him, that she hadn’t even recognized his wyrm form, at first. “I see you learned a new word of power.”
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From the building blue light above the wyrm’s head, Liv knew that a mana disc was descending the shaft. She needed to keep Noghis distracted while her companions came to them - and ideally, get the thing’s coils entirely out of the way. So, she began to circle, as if they were about to duel with fencing blades. Move with me, Liv silently told the child of Ractia. Come on, now. Away from the shaft.
“More than one,” Noghis said, and Liv recognized the taunting, the bragging in his tone. In that moment, despite his inhuman shape, the son of Ractia reminded her of nothing so much as the spoiled brats who’d looked down on her when she was young - Mirabel Cooper and Griselda Mason, when she’d first begun to learn from Master Grenfell, and then Milisant Loredan at Freeport, and still later Edith Gage, Anson Fane, and Arianell Seton at Coral Bay. They’d all thought themselves better than her, and it was clear that Noghis now thought the same.
“Ten words of power, my mother has given me,” the wyrm boasted. “Every single one that she knows. I’ve learned my magic from a goddess herself, while you’ve been crawling around in the ruins our people left behind on your pathetic world.”
“Blood and fire, of course,” Liv said, continuing to slowly move him away from where the shaft ended. “Those are obvious. And I’ve seen her use Aluth - iron, in the wards.”
“Bheuv,” Noghis hissed, and his yellow eyes sparked with blue. “Healing. Water. Desire. Growth. Wood. And here you are, holding what - half as many?”
“When I became an archmage,” Liv said, watching the mana disc descend to the floor, “do you know what Caspian Loredan told me? What advice he gave me? It was the same I got from the Eld, it turns out.” She kept her eyes fastened to Noghis’s, even as she caught sight of her husband and her father creeping off the mana disc, side by side, weapons at the ready. Behind them would be Aira, Sidonie, and Arjun. She’d bought enough time for them to make it down without being attacked by Noghis - now the only question was whether she could keep his attention long enough for them to launch a surprise attack.
“What stupid thing did they tell you?” Noghis said, looming up above Liv.
“That it’s better to master a few words of power, rather than collect as many as you can without truly understanding any,” Liv told him. “But that’s neither here nor there. It’s also good to have friends. Now!”
Half a dozen spells hit the wyrm at once.
Keri’s magic might have struck just a fraction of a heartbeat earlier than the rest: those blasts of light he used moved with such speed that they could hardly be said to cross space at all, and simply flashed into existence, as if connecting two points. A line of pure white light, thick as the trunk of an oak tree, linked his outstretched hand with the wyrm’s body, burning scales away and scorching the flesh beneath. The stink of it filled Liv’s nose.
Sidonie’s mana shields, each one thin, sharp, and ready to reflect the nightmares of anyone unfortunate enough to gaze into them, turned on their edges and sliced into the serpent’s body like half a dozen individual saws. There was, she and Liv had found after much experimentation, no need to make a mana shield thick in order to make it strong - and so Sidonie had simply gone in the other direction. How thin could she make them? Thinner than parchment, or the blade of a butcher’s knife? It turned out that she could. Gouts of blood sprayed up from six cuts, and fragments of scale fell away, sliced cleanly.
Thorned vines shot out from the shaft, rooted somewhere above in the corpses which had been left behind. They wound about the rear part of Noghis’s body, digging into his tail, where the poison which coated the thorns would enter the massive serpent’s veins. Aria waved her cane about from the rear, directing her plants with a cackle of laughter.
At a flick of Arjun’s wand of neem wood, the bones of Noghis’s spin ripped their way out of his back, tearing out chunks of raw flesh, flinging scales and blood in every direction. The vertebrae twisted, grew, sharpened, each one becoming a weapon of horror.
Liv had decided not to deal with the scales at all. After nearly two decades of practice, she’d long surpassed the limitation of needing storm-clouds to draw from. Luc roared to life in the back of her mind, and a bolt of lightning shot from the tip of her Stormwand directly into Noghis’s left eye, blasting the socket with electricity that first burst the eyeball itself, and then scorched the scales around it.
And just a slight hesitation behind all of that came her father’s spell. Valtteri shaped an enormous wolf of ice, and it leapt forward to take Noghis’s throat in its jaws, tackling the son of the goddess to the ground, where his scaled, serpentine body thrashed, wounded in dozens of places.
For a moment, Liv thought they might kill him there.
Then, Noghis dissolved into a mist of blood. The move left the ice-wolf gnawing at nothing, jaws empty, as the red-vapour drifted away from the shaft, and deeper into the chamber of discarded Vædic machinery.
“He’s not as good as Wren,” Arjun pointed out. “She would have turned into blood right away, without taking half those spells.”
“Shallow foundations,” Elder Aira grumbled. “Too many things to master any one of them in a mere two decades.” At a wave of her wand, two slender stalks descended the shaft and crept out along the floor, each one growing a bifurcated, leafy mouth, like those Liv and her friends had first seen in the Garden of Thorns.
“Ring counts?” Liv asked, taking a place in the front rank with her father on one side and her husband on the other.
“Eight,” Arjun said, speaking first. “I’ve been holding back in case someone needs a bit of healing.”
“Four,” Sidonie said. The number didn’t surprise Liv: her friend had been relying almost entirely on her archmage spell this entire time, but it was a significant investment of mana to cast.
“Eleven,” Keri added, setting his spear in a stance that would let him impale anything foolish enough to charge him head on.
“More than enough for this,” Aira said, and then rolled her eyes when everyone glared at her. “Fine. Twenty-three. You mages and your habits...”
“Twenty-four,” Liv’s father said, once she’d finished. The old woman glared at him, but Valtteri only smiled.
“I assume you can take the mana here safely,” Liv said to Aira, as they watched the red mist coalesce back into the form of a wyrm.
“If I need to,” the old woman grumbled.
Mana pulsed around Noghis as a contingent spell triggered.
“Cail,” Arjun called out, identifying the magic easily. Even if he hadn’t been so familiar with the word of power, Liv would have been able to guess from the effects alone. All along the length of Noghis’s long body, wounds began to first scab over, and then to close entirely. The spell couldn’t erase everything they’d done to him: his eye was still missing, though the wound was no longer weeping blood, and none of the scales that had been burnt away, broken in half, or sliced off reformed. The exposed lengths of bone jutting out of the monster’s back were perhaps the worst of the wounds he’d suffered, and as he moved some of them broke away, while others opened new wounds, tearing flesh on their sharp edges.
“Ium’Aiset Ek Aiveh Novis,” Noghis murmured, and Liv felt her friends bracing themselves for the spell.
But her mind was already spinning, translating the words, and she could tell immediately that the wyrm’s magic was going to affect himself, not them. Just beside and a step behind her, Liv could tell that Sidonie had come to the same conclusion almost as quickly, because she left out a breath and relaxed her stance ever so slightly.
The piles of refuse stirred, all across the chamber. A coil of some kind of metal jerked toward Noghis, scraping along the floor so that it filled the room with a terrible, high pitched screeching sound. It rocked to one side, falling away, and a scrap of dark, nearly black metal which had been trapped beneath it simply shot through the air. Rather than impact the wyrm’s body with any great force, the piece of scrap metal molded itself to him, covering over a wound where one of Noghis’s scales had been broken.
One after another, scraps of iron stirred in the heaps of discarded machinery, flew to Noghis, and then wrapped themselves about his body in a sort of rough armor. By the time the spell had come to its end, Noghis’s pale scales were nearly entirely hidden, his long body now encased by sharp-edged, black plates of overlapping metal.
“You hurt me, Lady of Winter,” Noghis hissed, glaring at Liv with his one remaining eye. “And now I will hurt you. Should I begin with your father, or with your husband? Which one, do you think, would break your heart more - when I rip their head off and swallow it whole? Or should I leave their bloody faces for you to weep over, after I’ve eaten the hearts from their chests?”