Кейт Новак - Azure Bonds

“Akabar!” Nameless shouted. “Throw the wand into the disk!”

Dragonbait whirled about anxiously. It made the best tactical sense to remove the wand from their enemies’ reach, but would it ultimately prove their undoing? What effect would it have on Alias?

Akabar swooped low to evade the lancing bolts of the staff of power. One caught him in the leg, and he almost lost concentration and flight. He reached his goal, however, pulling up at the last moment and flinging the wand into the silver and red disk.

Three screams went up at once. Phalse shouted and barreled toward the disk. Olive stood blocking his path, but he leaped over her and tumbled into the vertical pool. He was swallowed without a ripple.

Zrie Prakis screamed and in screaming fell apart. With the wand thrust into another plane of being, he could not tap the energy bound up in it that kept him from death. He crumbled to dust. But in the moment before his spirit fled from the bones that Cassana had “cherished,” the lich cried out, “Die, Cassana!” His hideous laughter was carried away on the breeze.

His staff of power fell to the ground. Dragonbait felt a sharp pain in his chest, just as he had when Moander had died. Without checking, he knew that a sigil had disappeared. He glanced at Alias, who was wielding a sword two-handed, but if she felt Zrie Prakis’s mark burn away from her arm, she did not let it disrupt her combat.

Lastly, Cassana shrieked, for much of her own magic was locked up in that wand. She, too, began to decay—her shoulders stooped, her skin became more torn and ragged, so that she looked dressed in the tatters of her own dead flesh. The sorceress’s chest wound began spurting blood.

Akabar swooped down and plucked the staff of power from the battlefield. Some of the Fire Knives, uncertain whether or not the mage could wield it, began to move toward the perimeter of the circle. Dragonbait stood guarding the rear, as Olive and Alias backed toward him. The saurial paladin now bid Hill Cleaver to swallow any magic cast.

And not a moment too soon. The hag form of Cassana pointed toward the saurial paladin and muttered. A bolt of zigzag lightning shot from her finger, only to dissipate into a harmless shower of sparks.

“Kill them!” the sorceress shrieked to the remaining assassins, as she struggled to her feet.

The Fire Knives regrouped and began driving the party back. Akabar could only use the staff of power to strike their foes. Alias had lost her weapon, and Olive stumbled as she moved. In the chaos and frenzy of the sword fight, no more of the assassins had chosen to poison their blades. That was fortunate for the adventurers; Alias was bleeding from half a dozen cuts, and Olive was clutching at a jagged wound running down her side. Dragonbait risked taking his attention from parrying a sword thrust long enough to look for Nameless. The graying man dove into the silver pool. Like Phalse, he disappeared without a trace.

The saurial felled an assassin closing on their left flank and chirped to gain the swordswoman’s attention. When Alias met his eyes, he jerked his head toward the silver pool. She jerked her head back indicating he must go first. He growled. If he went first, Cassana could again use her magic to attack them, but he couldn’t explain this to Alias. He jerked his head indicating again that she must go before him, but she shook her head seconds before she launched a kick at an assassin’s chin with her boot.

Minutes ago, she had no will power of her own, he thought with grim amusement. Why does she pick now to be so stubborn? He caught her attention with another chirp before he spun Hill Cleaver about and tossed it to her.

Alias caught the weapon, reclasped her hands about the grip, and spun to decapitate an assassin who had lunged forward when her attention was focused on the saurial. Dragonbait snatched up the halfling and loped to the planar disk.

The silver pool had already shrunk to half its original size. The swirls had become solid rings and the portal now resembled the bull’s eye sigil of Phalse’s master.

Dragonbait plunged in, taking Olive with him. Alias and Akabar blocked the portal. The Turmish mage brought the end of the staff up hard, cracking the jaw of an assassin.

Then two withered hands, strong as steel, closed around the staff. The aged face of Cassana, drooling and twisted beyond the limits of humanity, confronted the mage. “You use it as a club,” she lisped. “Now feel its full force.”

Alias slew another assassin with Hill Cleaver, but there were more than a dozen left, and the effects of her wounds were taking their toll on her reaction time. “Into the portal!” she ordered the mage.

“But the witch,” Akabar protested, as Cassana began to intone words of power.

“In!” the swordswoman cried.

Alias put her foot on Akabar’s stomach and shoved the mage through the disk. Akabar would not loosen his hold on the staff, and Cassana was dragged toward the bull’s eye. Akabar was lost to sight beyond the silvery glow of the portal, but the haggish sorceress managed to plant her feet firmly on the ground and hold her position. With the tendons of her arms popping from the strain, Cassana began to pull the staff back from the portal.

Alias stepped halfway into the portal, straddling it with one foot on each side of the planar gate. She brought Hill Cleaver down on the half of the staff of power that jutted out from the disc hovering over the Hill of Fangs.

The blade cut through the ancient wood like an axe, and a multicolored fireball blossomed out from the broken staff. Alias felt heat wash over her body as the force of the explosion pushed her through the gateway, into the lands that lay beyond. The shock wave caught the last pieces of Cassana’s body and the fire-ravaged forms of the remaining assassins, carrying them from the top of the Hill of Fangs. The last curved and pointed stones toppled from their moorings, and, for the second day in a row, a new star burned over Westgate.

“Alias, are you all right?” Olive asked, bending over the swordswoman.

“I feel like I’ve been taken apart and put back together, with lots of pieces missing,” Alias moaned.

“That’s a pretty sick joke,” Olive chided. “Apt, but sick.”

“What do you expect?” A throbbing pain had filled her head, her flesh stung from half a dozen cuts, and she felt badly sunburned. She opened her eyes, then shut them instantly, growling, “Well, that was a mistake.”

A bright white light seared her eyeballs, leaving blue dots dancing before her mind even after she’d squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her hands. This was not the icy white of sun on snow or the ivory white of silk, but the hot, burning white of coals in the center of a forge.

Shielding her eyes, she ventured another look. The sky above was convoluted whirls of white-whites and off-whites—hot matter and even hotter matter swirling and twisting in a vain attempt to combine.

“This is where the gods roll across the sky like storm fronts,” she muttered.

“What?” Olive asked.

“Nothing. Just a line from an old tale.”

“Right,” the halfling said, realizing just who must have told her the tale. “You going to lay there all day?” she asked.

Alias sighed and sat up. Beneath her were gray flagstones shimmering in the light of the white-on-white sky overhead.

Olive knelt beside her. The halfling’s glittering white dress, a copy of the one Cassana had worn to last evening’s midnight dinner, was covered in mud and blood.

To Alias’s right, Akabar and Dragonbait were kneeling over a fifth figure—the stranger who’d helped them fight the battle on the Hill of Fangs. Alias felt a momentary twinge of jealousy that they were looking after the stranger before they did so for her.