Troy Denning - The Cerulean Storm

Sadira looked past his leg and up the stairway. Her magical hammer had disappeared with the two wraiths it had destroyed. The two who had escaped the blast were nowhere in sight, but the sorceress could see her own feet lying five steps above. They were as pale as ivory, clear down to the toes. She had used the last of her mystic energy.

“No more spells,” hissed the leader, following her gaze.

His purple eyes flashed malevolently from behind his visor, then he tossed the dagger aside. He grabbed Sadira by the shoulders and started to rise.

“Now you go to the Gray.”

“Hardly!”

The sorceress drove the heel of her palm into the bottom edge of the leader’s visor, forcing it up and away from his face. Sadira lashed out with her other hand and grasped the wraith’s withered visage. She began to pull, as though she were drawing mystic energy from a field of Athasian plants. A warm, stinging sensation rushed up her arm. Had the wraith been alive, it would have been impossible for her to draw the life force directly from her foe. But the creature was not alive, and the energies that held him together were not bound into the gemstone nearly so tightly as they would have been fastened into a true body.

The wraith screamed, and his leathery skin began to flake away beneath Sadira’s fingers. He tried to push her away, his arms already trembling from the loss of vital energy. The sorceress wrapped her free arm around his neck and held tight. The leader stepped toward the Gray, gathering himself up to leap off the tower edge.

Sadira thrust her hand deep into the papery mass of his dissolving head and grasped the dark amethyst inside. The leader’s flesh turned to dust. He jumped, but the sorceress felt her feet drop onto the coarse rock of the tower and knew she would not be carried with him. The wraith drifted past her in a dun-colored cloud, which quickly dissolved into hazy wisps as it drifted out into the Gray.

When the sorceress saw no sign of the other two wraiths, she quickly picked up her dagger and used the pommel to smash the leader’s amethyst. This time, there was no storm of escaping energy. She had already drawn all the life force from the stone and could feel it tingling in her flesh, which had assumed a faint purplish cast.

Keeping a watchful eye, Sadira started up the stairs. She began to sing again and pulled a small lump of green clay from her pocket. After she dribbled a few drops of saliva onto the mass, it began to hiss and pop, burning the palm of her hand with tiny droplets of corrosive fluid. The sorceress did not care. She had not yet destroyed the last two wraiths, and when they attacked, she intended to be ready.

By the time Sadira reached the open gates of the bastion, a crevice of crimson light had appeared above the minaret’s crystal cupola. Magnus’s voice sounded clear and pure. There was no sign of the wraiths on the path anywhere between her and the center of the citadel. Nor did she see them in the blue pool that filled so much of the bastion, but she knew that did not mean much. Her enemies could be hiding anywhere beneath the water, and the shimmering waves would make it impossible to see them.

The sorceress started to step through the gates, then thought better of it and stopped. Borys’s servants had not become wraiths by easily forsaking the tasks he assigned to them. If the survivors had not yet assaulted her, it was because they were lying in ambush inside the bastion itself.

Using the life force she had drained from the leader’s gem, Sadira cast her spell. The purple sheen faded from her skin, and a caustic-smelling mist began to rise from the lump of clay in her hand. She waited until the green fumes condensed into a hissing stream of vapor, then she stepped through the gate.

The first thing she noticed was the quiet. She could not hear Magnus’s song, the hiss of the vapor rising from her palm, or even the sound of her feet shuffling over the limestone cobbles. Then she glimpsed a wraith pulling himself out of the shimmering pool beside the path. The water dripped from his armor without making a sound, and the sorceress realized that a magic pall of silence had been cast over the area-no doubt to keep her from voicing the incantation of her own spells.

Congratulating herself for avoiding the trap, she held her hand out toward her ambusher and blew a stream of green vapor into his face. The wraith’s visor dissolved instantly, and she saw him open his mouth to curse before his head was swallowed in the green fog. Without waiting for the magic acid to finish its work, Sadira spun, fully certain that the last of Borys’s knights was behind her.

The sorceress found a pair of mailed fists reaching for her neck. The wraith at the other end of the arms wore the armor of a broad-shouldered female, with yellow rays of light pouring through the eye-slits of her visor. Sadira twisted to the side, thrusting the hand with the magic acid toward her attacker’s face. At the same time, the sorceress protected her vulnerable throat with her shoulder.

The tactic succeeded only partially. Sadira planted her hand squarely in her foe’s visor, which instantly began to dissolve beneath a billowing cloud of green vapor. The wraith switched her attacks at the last minute, however, smashing one mailed fist down on Sadira’s collarbone and bringing the other around in a vicious uppercut to the ribs. The blows landed with such force that the sorceress felt bones crack in both places.

Sadira’s body erupted into such agony that she barely noticed when her magic acid dissolved the gem inside her first ambusher’s head. She felt the path buck beneath her feet and saw streaks of ruby-colored light flashing past in the silence, then she dropped to the cobblestones gasping for breath. The wraith reached down to pick her up, attempting to carry out Borys’s orders even as the sorceress’s green fog ate away the repository of her life force.

One mailed hand clasped onto Sadira’s wounded shoulder, and the other reached for her throat. Then a silent yellow flash flared from inside the acid cloud. The wraith dissolved. A tremendous shock wave crashed down on the sorceress, spraying her with droplets of acid vapor and driving her tormented body into the unyielding cobblestones.

The sorceress did not care. Pain would not stop her from escaping the Gray. She forced herself to her hands and knees and turned toward the minaret. Sadira slowly crawled forward, the syllables of Magnus’s wind-ballad pouring forth from her silent lips.

As the crimson sun slipped behind the purple crags of the Ringing Mountains, long streaks of shadow stretched across the valley outside Pauper’s Hope. The sheen slowly faded from the glassy plain that Sadira’s magic had created earlier. The smooth field of rock slowly reverted to its true nature, filling the air with a soft murmur as orange stone crumbled into orange dirt.

To half the titans who had attacked Pauper’s Hope that morning, the change no longer mattered. The one that Rikus had wounded, Tay, lay motionless and blank-eyed at the edge of the field. Three more, including Tay’s comrade Yab, had succumbed to the searing heat of the Athasian day. They were slumped over at the waist, the tips of their thirst-swollen tongues protruding from their blue lips.

That left only four living giants to rejoice in the disintegration of their magical prison. Bellowing in gleeful, thirst-parched voices, they began to dig their hips and legs free. They hurled each handful of rock-filled dirt to the ground just out of arm’s reach, where a company of dwarven warriors had surrounded each of them only moments before.

Despite the steel breastplates and helmets protecting the warriors, the giants’ barrage savaged through their disciplined companies, opening great holes in their neat ranks and sending armored figures rolling away like tumbleweeds. The dwarves countered with a volley of crossbow fire. Their iron-tipped bolts were about as effective against the thick hide of the titans as cactus needles would have been against mul gladiators.