The way of courage, p.43
The Way of Courage, page 43
Any combination of colours was a possible signal to invade, depending on the orders of those who commanded the fleets. Three lights held meaning; only seeing one or two was not considered a signal. If all three were red, Marina was dead, and the invasion was inevitable. Two red and one green meant she was alive but still a slave, and there was no feasible way to rescue her; both Stone and Bess thought the invasion would continue regardless. Two green and one red signified Marina was alive and free, and she would be kept hidden until Tarlonin had control of Kishmeld. Three green indicated she was alive, freed and headed out to meet the ships.
In Fort Kishton, those on duty lit fires to signal an invasion. The signal travelled along the coast faster than the signal sent by the mages. Two signals were sent to Lord Kish, one via riders and the other using a string of mages he’d left along the way; each mage sent a flare of light into the sky. Lord Kish knew an invasion was happening within ten minutes of Stone’s flares.
Marin was asleep in her quarters when the call went up that a flash of flares had been seen. She was dressed in the robes of a Seafarer Fleet Battlemage and on the quarterdeck several steps ahead of her father. The sighting was being repeated around the ship. “Two green and one red.”
His deep voice called out for the fleet to set sails. Turning to Marin, he acknowledged her attire with a nod, then said, “For Arden, Marina and House Seafarer!”
“Yes! For Arden, Marina and House Seafarer!”
Flags and communication spells spread from those who’d seen the signal. Within the hour, hundreds of ships along the entire coastline of Kishmeld headed for shore. The Heptatic fleets and the ships belonging to Karnhold went to full battle stations but did nothing to hamper the Tarlonin fleets. The ships of Kishmeld pulled closer to shore, and most of the men on board would have preferred to dock and get off the water; invading Tarlonin fleets had not been effectively repelled for several hundred years.
The day before, the small, highly skilled Kishmeld army had moved steadily throughout the first day and then paused to set up camp at sunset. Lord Kish had grown enraged at the seemingly unhurried, almost jovial manner that most of the elite soldiers showed as they settled in for the night. He’d ordered the camp struck and instructed the spartans to move at double their usual walking speed. The oxen on the wagons with slaves were unharnessed, and his mages ordered to drag them behind the sentinels. The wagons which carried all the supplies had been left behind as the army raced ahead.
At midnight, the first of the Kish battlemages reached the start of the six-league causeway Bess had created. Lord Kish had been told of its existence. Still, the short messages by bird had not described it in enough detail for him to appreciate the strength and scope of the road, nor the spells locked into its construction. He left his carriage, and after ordering for his horse to be saddled, he rode forward to view the road before discussing the options with his three best tacticians.
Ten minutes later, four decades of battlemages merged with the millennium of spartans as the foot soldiers stepped onto the causeway before breaking into a jog. Next were five centuries of sentinels, each with a decade of battlemages. Lord Kish was next, surrounded by his most skilled decade of battlemages. Behind him were two centuries of sentinels followed by the mage-slaves, then the last three centuries of mounted sentinels.
Even before his horse stepped onto the aether-constructed roadway, Lord Kish had surrounded himself with defensive shields, probing the spells locked into the stones. He searched for anything of an offensive nature. While he was, without a doubt, the strongest and most educated of all the mages in Kishmeld, his primary education had been the scramble to reach naming day followed by an apprenticeship where he had had to fight for every scrap, every day, just to survive. He’d been a mage for over a century and Lord Kish for half of that.
Everything he’d read and experienced since overthrowing the last Lord Kish had been laid over the already deeply established mindset that only brutal and unrelenting force overcame the weak. Strong shields and overpowering fire, lightning, wind, and ice were his strengths. In these areas, he was possibly as accomplished as any mage alive when it came to sheer domination. The roadway, to his thinking, was something the cowardly worm Orbstone would have put together. It had taken skill, but the spells could be quickly shattered with strength, and none of them was attacking in nature.
The message warning of the Tarlonin invasion came when he was less than half a league from the mines.
CHAPTER 21
The approaching column of soldiers, mages and wagons stretched for over one-and-a-half thousand paces. It was more than Bess expected, and for her new traps to work, they needed to be within two thousand paces, which meant she needed to let the front ranks approach to within three hundred paces if she was going to catch them with her aether traps. The first mages and foot soldiers hadn’t even paused as they crossed the first of the traps, and Bess would have held her breath if it wouldn’t have messed up her breathing pattern.
Shortly after the second group of mages crossed the traps, there was a surge of aether from Lord Kish that became a brief flash of yellow light and a sharp strident sound that was both seen and heard along the entire column of soldiers. They all came to a sudden stop. Bess almost sprung the traps to catch some of the army but held back. So few dead would mean nothing in the end, so she waited.
After receiving the news of the impending invasion from the mages he’d left along the way, Lord Kish’s spell called the entire column to a halt. He used air and light to look at the mine even as he searched ahead with his senses. Everything was dark; the new thick iron doors were pulled shut with shields of aether covering the entire surface. He could sense no mages waiting; in fact, he could sense no one. He knew Orbstone had never fully accepted that his superiority stemmed from his being a man. If the truth was told, neither had Lord Kish when he’d only been Mage Knox. Over the decades, though, he’d begun to believe his own rhetoric.
Regardless, Lord Kish was confident that even if Orbstone had offered his help to the Tarlonins, they would have refused him. He suspected that Prince Harun might have been willing to work with Orbstone but, then again, maybe not. Harun had valued the power his masculinity gave him but was inclined to deny magery rather than elevate it. No, it was more likely he would have warned Kishmeld. All this flashed through Lord Kish’s mind in seconds, and he realised that he’d been fooled—despite the words on the wall, he’d been pulled away by the upstart Tarlonin mage. A woman! She’d obviously pulled the doors shut and added all the defensive shields to cower behind. She hoped it and her flimsy wall would protect her until her countrymen rescued her. She was mistaken!
Even as he realised this, his aether surged, and he lashed out toward the mine—dropping lightning, fire and ice on the wall, the courtyard and across the gated entrance.
When her traps weren’t sprung or deactivated, Bess slowly grew confident they hadn’t been detected. Now, she just needed the army to come closer. When she felt the aether as Lord Kish examined the mine, she wove her personal shields as tightly as possible, strengthening them and tying them to the protection she’d woven on the upper part of the wall where she’d been standing until she felt his searching aether. Bess tucked herself behind the parapet at the top of the wall, wedging her body into the corner at the base of one of the thick merlons. She’d already added dozens of different shields along the five hundred-pace entryway to where the ex-slaves were hiding and strengthened what she’d added to the gates.
Lightning strikes as thick as her arms ripped into the wall and the main gate as fireballs a pace in diameter pounded the face of the mountain and the courtyard. Spears of ice followed the fireballs, breaking open the huge stones even as another wave of fire arrived. Her shields were shredded almost instantly, and even as she reformed them, pulling away the heat, she struggled to deal with the pain as half her body burned. Only the fact that she’d felt worse in the past pulled her back from the brink.
Bess reformed her skin and healed her muscles and broken bones as the second wave fell. This time she was better prepared, and while she didn’t burn, she did have to think quickly as the block she was tethered to broke loose from the wall and fell fifty paces to the floor of the valley to crash upon the causeway. With all the smoke, steam and dust flying around, not to mention the aether from Lord Kish’s devastating attack, Bess felt confident her much smaller and hidden use of gravity would remain undetected. She quickly pulled herself under one of the fallen rocks and began digging deeper into the valley floor.
More blocks broke away before another ice storm toppled the entire wall. This was covered by falling rocks as the entire face of the mountain above the mine entrance slid loose to come crashing down. It buried the entryway and covered the courtyard under countless tonnes of stone. The rocks continued to fall for several minutes. Fire and lightning continuing until the rocks covering the entrance to the mine had been fused together.
Bess used a weave to pull air through the small cracks between the rockslide, filtering it even as a second weave carried the carbon dioxide away from her. As she did this, she was working to bring small blocks from in front of her. She slid them behind her as she moved slowly away from the rockfall and toward the surface near the valley wall.
Lord Kish’s breakthrough had come after three years of torment. He’d been barely twelve when his master had sensed the slightest thinning in his barrier when the mage had been examining the throwaways—older boys who’d failed the basic entry standard for the army. Throwaways were usually marched into the wilderness and ‘released into the wild’, as it were. Those who survived earned themselves the right to live as free men in Kishmeld.
In Tarlonin, the Testing Orb wouldn’t have registered the thinning for at least another two years. The mage, however, had been finding powerful apprentices for several decades. He’d discovered that the thicker the barrier when the potential mage was found, the stronger they usually became; that is, of course, if they survived the longer than usual period before their barrier had thinned enough for the breakthrough. It had taken three years of torture before the balance between control and the thickness of the aether barrier was torn open. Three years of abuse and pain before the young ‘potential’ Knox had finally been pushed too far.
His breakthrough, however, wasn’t that of a young man who snapped and lost control. No, his was like that of Dianthe’s. Knox had bided his time until all his tormentors were in the one place and his master was away. One lunch, when the only ones in the room were the older apprentices and other potentials, along with some of the more junior mages who worked for his master, he gathered all his memories of degradation and pain, then let his emotions swell with the hate and anger. Looking around at the ones who’d fuelled the rage, he’d purposefully torn open his barrier and laid waste to the household with fire and lightning.
When his master had arrived home, he’d found his newest apprentice, alive, unharmed and un-singed, standing in a circle of ash over three hundred paces wide. Since then, Lord Kish had always used his tightly controlled anger as a trigger for his most powerful aether spells. As he looked over the devastation he’d caused at the mine, his satisfaction twisted his face into a sneer as he pondered how impotent the upstart woman would be feeling now if she was alive. The thought died almost before it had formed, and he had to force his aether under his control as his anger, now directed inward, threatened to break free.
Usually, he enjoyed the challenge of keeping his surging aether just at the point when it threatened to force itself through his barrier. It was sometimes the only thing that kept him focused. It had the added benefit of gradually increasing the amount of aether being drawn into his body. This time, however, the anger was directed inward as he realised he’d begun to think of the Tarlonin female as a person worthy of anything more than being discarded when her usefulness was over. Alongside the anger, a small kernel of doubt wormed its way into his thinking.
As the sun started to rise behind him, instead of turning his forces around and heading back to Kishton to repel the invaders, he ordered them to continue toward the mine—Lord Kish wanted to make sure that there was no one alive.
Instead of pulling herself out of the ground, Bess slowly shifted rock around her until she’d built herself a small nook behind a boulder that had tumbled from higher up the mountain. She drilled a hole through the rock so she could see along the roadway. As she sensed the column of men begin heading toward the mountain, she sighed with frustration. She’d hoped they’d head back to Kishton.
Bess had been impressed and maybe a little awed by the complexity of the weaves Lord Kish had used. Even the work she’d done with Michael hadn’t prepared her for the ferocity and extent of Lord Kish’s spells. Still, Bess was confident she could have shielded both herself and the mine from the attack if she’d decided to take a stand.
If the size of the fireballs he’d constructed toward the end were any indication, then he was at least twice as strong, aether wise, as she’d been before she’d tried to control the slave-mages at Fort Kishton. Bess suspected that before she’d been remade, she’d been at least three times as strong as before Fort Kishton. This had been multiplied again by the density of her newly reformed aether-barrier. The problem was dealing with his attacks simultaneously with the attacks from the three-hundred-plus mages he’d brought with him—almost half were several times stronger than Dianthe—not to mention the two-thousand-strong army.
It took the front of the army twenty minutes to cover the last one-and-a-half thousand paces. Bess waited until the last of the sentinels at the back of the column had stepped on the causeway, then triggered the entire two-thousand-paces. The smallest traps sent either balls of plasma the size of small pebbles or spears of stone the length of a human arm exploding upward to disable and kill men and horses. Coupled with the tens of thousands of smaller traps were thousands of the more complex weaves, which sent spirals of crushing gravity, bolts of electricity, beams of high-powered, coherent light and waves of temporal changes across the roadway. The larger, more straightforward traps that collapsed the road base or brought the sides together to crush everything standing on it were less common but almost as devastating.
As she triggered the traps, Bess sent bolts of lightning spearing down toward the various mages, including one half as thick as her torso, which she speared toward Lord Kish. Within moments, most of the army was destroyed as not a single spartan, sentinel, or apprentice mage survived the attack. Of the one hundred battlemages Lord Kish had brought with him, just over half survived, although half of those were seriously hurt. Lord Kish was unhurt, as were the wagons filled with the mage-slaves; he’d been shielding them.
With her devastating attack, Bess had leaked some aether that could be sensed by the surviving mages despite her best efforts to hide it. Lightning, plasma, ice and light dropped or speared toward her. Bess’ shields turned most of it back on her attackers. Bess stepped away from her hiding hole; for, as she’d worked through her katas the night before, she realised that most of the mages she’d fought had struggled when she combined her magery with her martial skills. With this in mind, Bess pulled metal from the dead soldiers, reformed it into serrated discs similar to the shields of the Eighth Way, and sent these spinning toward the surviving mages. She then used gravity and her weaves of time and space to move quickly toward them.
While Bess’ weaves hid her from sight, every mage was able to follow her path as Lord Kish seemed to know where she was and dropped an almost unending barrage of fire and lightning strikes on her. So, as Bess’ katana removed the head of the first battlemage she reached, he simultaneously exploded as the lightning strike from Lord Kish was deflected from Bess’ shields and grounded through his body. Bess grinned as half the battlemages close to her tried to move aside to evade being killed by their own master. The only thing they achieved was that they were even more out of position as she approached.
After several hundred paces, Bess found the attacks from Lord Kish were slowing. In light of her successes, he’d decided to use his aether to form shields for the battlemages as she approached them. As time went on, he and those battlemages near him began working together and varying their attacks. Bess slowed and found herself almost reliving the games she’d played with Leith. Every second she had to counter a range of attacks, each changing in form and intensity; each needed a specific counter. One difference was that each was designed to kill her rather than explode in a noisy, harmless display of light.
Spells that threw metal spears, blocks of stone, or sent twisters of ash and dirt, beams of light, fire, hail, changing gravity, lightning, lava and a dozen combinations of these were used against her. Every few seconds, one of the spells made it partially past her shields. She had to pick herself up and heal herself or dig herself free as she pushed a barrage of similar spells aside. Even so, she moved steadily down the path, a path that no longer resembled a roadway, covered as it was with bodies, gore and rubble.
Bess was glad of her experience of healing the mage-slaves and building the wall at Fort Kishton because she found that she could maintain her concentration as the battle continued, even with the intensity of the attacks. Time and again, Bess tried to destroy the wagons with the mage-slaves, but Lord Kish seemed to have his strongest shields surrounding them. When she approached within five hundred paces of the group around Lord Kish, she sensed the wagons being pulled forward through the mass of dead men and horses. Pulling her shields close and lessening her attacks on the battlemages, Bess drove her next dozen or so attacks directly at Lord Kish. While she managed to kill one of the battlemages with him, she was sent tumbling backwards a dozen paces by the force of spells the suddenly freed up battlemages sent her way. She had to heal a broken leg and a line of deep burns on her torso.
