Richard Baker - The City of Ravens

"What of the mythal?" Jack cried. "You are destroying it!"

"I am taming it," Jelan replied. "Within its domain, I am the arbiter of all magic, I am magic. My kingdom will be unassailable!"

"Who gave you the right?" Jack demanded. "We have no need of an overlord. We do not desire a tyrant to decide who may use magic and who may not. You broke your curse-good! You have righted an ancient wrong, but you have no legitimacy here, no claim to rule Raven's Bluff!"

Jelan met his eyes evenly. "I do not ask for the right, Jack Ravenwild. I take it! I once offered you a chance to serve me. This is your last opportunity to reconsider your answer. Will you swear allegiance to me, serve me as one of the rulers of this city? Or would you rather remain a street rat for the rest of your days?"

Jack studied her face. He could see death waiting in her eyes if he answered wrong. He glanced behind him, where Illyth, Anders, Tharzon, and Zandria waited and watched, hemmed out by the green fields of magic. All of Jelan's lieutenants and swordsmen were down, as were the Hawk Knights. I didn't even see the end of the battle, Jack thought to himself. What happened?

"Well?" Jelan demanded.

Jack's allies were silent. Perhaps they'd already tried to make themselves heard through the wall of power surrounding the stone and failed; they simply watched him now, their expressions unreadable. Hope, despair, anger, compassion-it didn't matter what they wanted. It was up to him. He turned back to Jelan and smiled.

"I decline," he said.

Jelan raised her hand and struck him with a bolt of icy green lightning. Jack howled in pain and collapsed in a seizure of pain, arms and legs flailing against the stone. He bit his tongue hard. Blood filled his mouth. After an eternity of pain, the seizure relaxed, and he moaned aloud. Awkwardly, he turned himself over and levered himself to his hands and knees.

"Your spells lack subtlety," he gasped, pushing to his feet. He picked up his rapier and advanced on her.

The Warlord stepped away from the stone and drew her own sword. "Blades, then," she said.

Without hesitation she darted forward and slashed high at his head, a graceful and deadly arc that would have decapitated him with ease if he hadn't thrown himself to the ground to duck beneath it. Jack managed to get the point of his rapier up fast enough to back her off a step when she moved to finish him on the ground. Then he scrambled sideways until he gained his feet again.

The Warlord laughed and came at him again, offering him no chance to rest. She slashed and whirled like a dancer with a baton, impossibly swift and skillful. Jack deflected her blade from his heart by a lucky parry, blocked another by retreating behind a corner of the mythal stone, and then took a long, shallow cut along his ribs as he barely twisted away from a thrust that would have impaled him at the navel. He gasped in pain and backed away again. Already his limbs trembled with fatigue. I can't beat her, he realized. In a minute, maybe two, I'll slip or miss a parry and she'll run me through, and that will be it.

"You are not much of a swordsman, Jack," Jelan said. "You might have been a good one, with some training. You've got good reflexes and an excellent eye, but you're not there yet."

"I'll work on that right after you kill me," he snapped.

Angrily, he called upon the power of the stone ring and felt new strength flood into his limbs, toughness imbue his flesh. Fueled by the ring's power, he counterattacked with everything he had, thrusting and riposting and lunging. Jelan simply laughed again and danced back, using graceful turns of her blade to deflect his stone-strength attacks. Jack overextended, dropping to one knee to reach her, and she slapped the rapier out of his hand with a wicked cut that would have laid open his right forearm if not for the ring's defensive enchantment. Jack cried out, stung, and staggered back.

"You've made a lot of poor choices recently," Jelan said. The smile faded from her face, replaced by something cold and deadly. "Time to face the consequences, Jack." She stalked closer, the tip of her sword unwavering.

Jack reached for his belt to draw his poignard, futile as it was. But he'd already thrown the weapon at her; the scabbard was empty. The dwarven knife! he remembered. As quick as thought, he stooped to his boot and threw the knife with a wicked underhanded motion using all his marvelous skill and the strength of the enchanted ring.

Jelan almost dodged the throw, twisting her torso with speed a cat would have envied and raising her sword point to deflect the dark knife. She wasn't quite fast enough. The dark blade took her on the left side of the torso, just under her breast, and pierced her fine armor as if it didn't exist. Myrkyssa Jelan grunted in pain and surprise, shuddering, and reached up to grip the knife handle.

"A treacherous blow," she gasped. "Hard struck… but not enough, not now."

Blood running through her fingers turned to green fire as mythal magic played over her wound. Jelan's mastery of the mythal permitted her to draw on the stone's magic to seal her injury and preserve her life.

"Mask's eyes," muttered Jack. "She's unbeatable." He had to do something unexpected, something extraordinary.

Impelled by desperation, Jack took advantage of Jelan's distraction and raised his left hand. The stone ring glowed with power as he willed it to life, this time calling on the impossible, seeking to shape the mythal itself. The mythal stone shrieked energy as the ring's magic fought to change it. Jelan must have felt the change through her connection with the device. She whirled and stared at the stone, trying to gauge its effects on her sorcery.

Jack threw himself forward and pushed her into the mythal stone. At the last moment Jelan sensed her danger and started to turn; cold steel kissed Jack's ribs as she struck out at him. But his momentum was enough to carry him into her, and she staggered back into the wild mythal itself. He sprawled to the ground at the foot of the stone, as the Warlord vanished into the rune-carved rock like a drowning woman sinking beneath black water.

Jack released the ring's power and allowed the stone to heal itself around her.

In an instant, the space Jelan occupied refilled with rock. He caught one last glimpse of Jelan as the stone walled shut, and then she was gone in a green flash of energy. Thunder shook the entire column, and the aurora scoured him like the blast of a furnace. The rings of energy barring access to the stone fell like curtains of water as Jack slumped to his knees, hand jammed against the cold dull ache under his rib cage. Then the maelstrom itself began to waver and collapse, the mythal's magic no longer sufficient to sustain it.

"Jack!" cried Illyth from a great distance. He turned to look behind him; the noblewoman and the others sprinted toward him, even as water began to cascade from above and darkness swirled up from below. He thought that Zandria was trying to work a spell-and then the dark waters swallowed him entirely.

White gauze danced over his head.

He was lying in a soft bed, surrounded by a thin curtain of translucent white that shifted and sighed in a warm wind. He ached all over, but his pain seemed very distant.

"Am I dying?" he wondered aloud.

"Do you wish to die?"

A dark-haired woman in blue sat beside him, her face impossibly beautiful. Wisdom gleamed in her eyes, and compassion, and strength, and a hundred things more that he couldn't begin to describe. She was completely serious in her question, and somehow he knew that dying would not necessarily be a bad choice now.

Since she asked in seriousness, he tried to answer her the same way. "Only if I have to," he said. "I am not certain that I am done living yet."