Troy Denning - The Cerulean Storm

“Then Borys should come for me himself.” The sorceress pulled a tiny, two-tined fork of silver from her pocket. “You won’t stop me.”

She struck the fork against the wall and pointed the quivering tines at the wraiths. The leader’s purple eyes flashed brightly, and he threw himself to the ground. Several of his fellows followed his lead, but not all were quick enough to react before Sadira finished her incantation.

A shrill, painful screech shot from the end of the fork and blasted over her foes. Blinding flashes of colored light flared inside the visors of the wraiths who had not yet hit the ground. First their helmets, then the rest of their armor burst apart, the shards instantly dissolving into wisps of gray fume. The whole tower shook with the violence of the explosion, and the air erupted into a maelstrom of streaking colors: red, blue, yellow, and all the hues of the prism. Only the leader and four other wraiths, all lying on the stony apron, escaped the destruction.

The blast knocked Sadira from her feet, making her ears ring and sending her tumbling down the stairs. The sorceress dropped the silver fork and clawed at the porous stone, breaking off half her fingernails. As soon as she brought herself to a stop, she reached into her pocket for another spell component.

By the prickling sensation of her skin, she knew that her enchantment, one of the most powerful she could cast, had drained her mystic energy down to her hips. She had expected that, gambling that the attack would destroy most of her enemies in a single blow. But she had not expected so many of them to drop to the ground, where the tower’s stone would absorb the magic vibrations she had sent to shatter the gems holding their life forces.

Sadira came up ready to attack again, the stairs still trembling beneath her feet, and the maelstrom tearing at her clothes. In her hand, she held a small iron hammer, the first syllable of her incantation already spilling from her mouth.

When she looked toward the wraiths, she held her spell. To her surprise, they were not charging. Instead, they stood on the apron between her and the gate, their feet planted wide to brace themselves against the raging tempest. Behind them and directly above the minaret, a faint gleam of pink was beginning to show through the swirling haze.

The sorceress raised her hand toward the light, hoping it came from the sun and that its rays would restore the mystic power to her body, but her flesh remained pale. Sadira started up the stairs again, catching a few notes of Magnus’s song between the storm’s booms and crashes.

The leader of the wraiths held his hand out toward her. Sadira felt her stiletto slip from its sheath. She lashed out, but the dagger was gone before she could catch it. The weapon sailed straight to his hand, coming to rest with the iron handle in his palm.

“I believe this weapon once belonged to Agis’s mother,” he said, lifting the stiletto. He had to raise his voice only a little, for the tumult was beginning to fade.

Sadira scowled and stopped a dozen steps below the wraiths, still holding her small iron hammer. Although puzzled by the warrior’s action, the sorceress was less interested in what he was doing than in selecting her next attack. She estimated that her body contained enough energy for only one more spell. If she wanted to escape, she would need to pick a good one.

“What does it matter who owned it?” Sadira asked.

“You shall see.”

A pearly cloud of haze began to swirl around the dagger, coalescing into the face of a handsome human, a man with even features, a patrician nose, and long black hair streaked down the center by a single band of silver. The rest of his body took form below the dagger, and soon he stood with his sinewy arms hanging limply at his sides and his shoulders slumped for ward.

Forgetting about her spell, Sadira gasped, “Agis!”

The noble said nothing. The pupils of his eyes remained milky and vacant.

“Don’t worry, he’s still alive,” the wraith said in a reassuring voice. “The Gray often disorients the spirits of the living.”

Sadira’s heart felt as though a hand of ice had closed around it. The wraith was lying. Agis’s spirit had coalesced out of the Gray, not been drawn through it. Had the noble come from Athas, he would have arrived fully formed.

The wraith continued his lie: “Your husband valued his mother’s weapon highly. I used that attachment to summon his spirit from Samarah.”

For a moment, Sadira did not move, too shocked to react. Then she cried out and almost collapsed, her whole body convulsing with grief. Samarah . She repeated the name over and over. That one word confirmed her worst fears. The wraiths had found Agis-or Borys had-and they had killed him. All that remained of her husband was the glassy-eyed apparition at the wraith’s side, a spirit that could not remember his own name.

“Go down,” the leader said. “Step into the Gray, or I’ll take your husband’s life.”

“Take him!” Sadira yelled. Her chest suddenly felt constricted and hot. “What good is he to me now?”

The words had barely passed her lips before the sorceress felt sick with guilt. She could not have said such a thing. It had to have been some other woman, a weak woman who had not truly loved her husband.

Sadira knew that she should be sorry for Agis’s death, concerned about the portents it held for the future. She should be worried that Borys had taken the Dark Lens, and that now she and her companions would have no defense against his mastery of the Way. She should be seeing young Rkard, his red eyes blazing with determination, standing before the beast that had killed Agis and a million others. She should be thinking of what came after Borys killed her and Rkard and the others, of how he would raze Tyr and murder its citizens, of how, too soon, an immense pile of rubble would lie where Athas’s only free city had stood.

But Sadira did not feel any of those things. She only felt angry, angry at the husband who gone away and died so far from her.

Magnus suddenly stopped singing, and an eerie silence fell over the tower. The wraiths cast nervous glances back toward the minaret, where a pink band had appeared between the swirling eddies in the sky. The leader motioned to his companions, then started down the stairs, pushing Agis’s spirit before him. The other wraiths followed, taking no chances that Sadira would make a run for the gate.

Magnus’s voice boomed out of the sky. “Sadira, you’re almost out!” he yelled. “Help me. Sing!”

The leader looked up, as if his amethyst eyes could actually see the words booming out of the sky, then he halted two steps above Sadira. “Stay silent!” he ordered. “The time has come for your decision.”

The sorceress opened her mouth and sang, though her thoughts were more on the small hammer of iron in her hand.

The leader stepped back, pulling the hand with the dagger out of Agis. The noble’s spirit looked toward Sadira, his mouth half-open and his eyebrows arched in sadness, then the apparition dissolved into haze.

Sadira stopped singing and threw her hammer past the leader’s head, crying out an incantation. The weapon smashed into the next wraith with a resounding boom . The impact knocked him into the one behind him, and they both fell to the ground.

The hammer hovered over them for an instant, then enlarged to the size of a kank and crashed down. The impact flattened their helmets and demolished the stairs beneath their heads. As the gemstones containing their life forces shattered, a tremendous blast rocked the tower. The explosion hurled the leader into Sadira and blew the other two wraiths off the stairway.

The sorceress and the leader crashed down the steps together, locked in a tight embrace. Each time they rolled, the wraith’s armored body battered Sadira. She fought desperately to throw her attacker off, while he struggled to drive the stiletto into her heart. Finally, they came to rest with Sadira lying on her back, her head lower than her feet. The wraith kneeled astride her, the dagger still clutched in his fist.