Terry Brooks - Antrax

In response, Walker flattened the palm of his hand against one of the extraction ports and sent the Druid fire hurtling inward.

Antrax was caught by surprise. Walker’s magic pumped into the intake lines like floodwaters down a dry riverbed. The shock was enormous, so much so that a backlash ripped through Walker, as well. He stiffened against the pressure and pain and thrust the magic forward again, deep into the lines, feeling it build anew. Antrax was throwing up defenses in a wild effort to contain him, but it was too little, too late. He was all the way inside the feeding system, breaking from the main lines into all the little channels, all the little tributaries, everything that kept Antrax running. He could feel conductors fusing, melting, and falling away.

Fire threads ripped into the room from behind, burning into him like heated metal. He contained his screams, and blocked what he could of the counterattack without lessening his own assault. Ryer screamed anew, but he could not look to see what she was doing. Every part of him was directed toward continuing the assault. Antrax was racing down its central lines, patching what it could, closing off what it could not. Its internal systems were imploding, one after the other. Walker chased it through its central nervous system, through its bloodstream, into its heart and mind. Everything he touched he savaged with the Druid fire, carrying himself with it, feeling himself burning up, as well. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t separate himself from what was happening sufficiently to stay whole. Bits and pieces of his own body were collapsing, as well.

Then abruptly, he felt Antrax convulse. The fire threads that raked him lurched wildly, spraying out of control. Creepers, disoriented and mindless, twisted like bits of paper caught in a wind. He felt Ryer clutch at him, still screaming, pulling at him, trying to wrench him free of the ports to which his hand was fused. Ahren Elessedil was beside him, his face a mask of horror. Walker had only a moment to register their presence, and then a backlash of magic burst through the extraction port through his hand and arm and into his body and blew him across the room.

The attack on its internal systems was so sudden and powerful that Antrax was burned halfway through before it could manage to respond. It blocked the intruder’s advance, turned his own power back on him, and counterattacked with its lasers. It began closing down damaged areas and calling for repairs. But in spite of its efforts, the intruder’s fire raged all through it, and for every section of itself it managed to salvage, it lost two more. All of its central lines were invaded and contaminated, riddled with power so destructive that it was eating through the circuits and conductors. Antrax felt pieces of itself cease to function as feeding lines deteriorated and collapsed. It could not maintain its various functions, its complex operations. It lost control over its mobile defenses first, its probes and lasers. Its maintenance systems stalled. It kept intact the defenses surrounding the power source, but the protection devices at Castledown’s surface ceased to operate. It threw everything it had left into fulfilling its prime directive—to protect the knowledge it warded in its memory banks.

Nothing worked. Everything was failing. Bit by bit, it felt itself slowing down, losing control, and slipping away. It retreated to its stronger positions to gather strength, to reconnect. But the fire tracked it as if it were a living thing and burned away its faltering defenses. Antrax was forced all the way back through its collapsing lines to the chambers that housed its power source.

There it found itself cornered, unable to move outside the twin capacitors that had fed it all these centuries. The capacitors were all it had left, and their power was leaking away through a thousand ruptures. Its charge from the creators was no longer possible to fulfill. Already it could feel the central memory banks dying.

Then Antrax could no longer move.

It began to have trouble thinking.

Time slowed, then became barely noticeable to it in its newfound state of immobility and dysfunction.

Its last conscious thought was that it was unable to remember what it was.

Walker blacked out from being hurled against a wall, but he woke again almost at once. He lay without moving amid the debris, staring dully into the smoky haze that enveloped him. He knew he was hurt, but he could not tell how badly. The feeling was gone from much of his body, and his hand was soaked in a wetness that could not be mistaken for anything other than what it obviously was. Somewhere close, in the swirl of the battle’s aftermath, he could hear Ryer Ord Star sobbing and calling out his name.

I’m here, he tried to say, but the words would not come.

Sparks spilled like liquid fire from the broken ends of wires, and wounded machines buzzed and spat in their death throes. Tremors rocked the safehold as Antrax thrashed blindly down its lines of power in search of help that could no longer be found. By turning his head slightly to the right, Walker could just glimpse the fractured cylinders that housed the power source, the metal skin leaking steam and dampness, the protective fire threads fading like rainbows with a storm’s passing.

Then the pain began, sudden and intense, rushing through him with the force of floodwaters set free from a broken dam. He gasped at the intensity of it and fought back with what little magic he could muster, shutting it away, closing it off, giving himself space and time to think clearly. He did not have much of either, he knew. What had been promised had been delivered. He had not known from the visions that Death would come for him then, at that moment, in that place. But he had known it was on its way.

A figure moved in the gloom, and Ahren Elessedil materialized. “He’s here!” he called back over his shoulder, then knelt in front of Walker, his face ashen, his slender body razored with burns and slashes and streaked with blood. “Shades!” he gasped softly.

Ryer Ord Star was beside him a second later, small and ephemeral, as if she were no more substantial than the smoke from which she appeared, no better formed. She saw him, and her hands flew to her mouth in tiny fists that only partially muffled her anguished scream. Walker saw that she was looking below his neck, where the pain was centered. He read the horror in her eyes.

She started for him at once, and he brought up his hand in a warding gesture to keep her back. For the first time, he saw the blood that coated it. For the first time, he was afraid, and fear gave power to his voice.

“Stay back,” he ordered her sharply. “Don’t touch me.”

She kept coming, but Ahren reached out for her as she tried to push past, and pulled her down next to him, holding her as she thrashed and screamed in fury and despair. He talked to her, his voice steady and soothing, even when she would not hear him, would not listen, until finally she collapsed in his arms, sobbing against his shoulder, little birdlike hands still clenched in defiance.

Walker lowered his bloodstained hand back into his lap, still not looking down at what he knew he would find there, forcing himself to close off everything but what he knew he must do next.

“Elven Prince,” he said, his voice unrecognizable to him. “Bring her close.”

Ahren Elessedil did as he was told, tightening his features in the way people do when they are brought face-to-face with sights they would just as soon never have witnessed. He held her possessively, shielding as well as restraining her, his own needs revealed in his determination to see them both through whatever would happen next. Walker was surprised at the resolve and strength of will he found in the youthful features. The Elven Prince had grown up all at once.