Enchantress Under Fire, page 32
part #4 of Arcane Artisans Series
Geralt glowered at me across the altar. “Don’t you feel it?” he demanded, gesturing wildly to the air around us. “The magic, building, growing more volatile? It worsens every minute so many Voids and enchanters occupy the same room. This must end, or the magic here will become too unstable to fix!”
“So give up,” I shouted back. “We’ll use my plan, and enchant it back into balance.”
“There is no time for that!” He sprang forward suddenly, diving across the white table, his hand outstretched for my chest. His fingertips brushed my tattoo as I twisted away. He landed beside the table, and I hurriedly put its bulk between us once more.
“Look around you!” Geralt shouted. “You’ve brought an unstoppable battle into being. The Voids will fight until every one of us is dead, and we cannot stop defending ourselves. This slaughter will eat all our time until the magic destroys everything!”
I shaped more magic with my thoughts. A moment’s focus, and I’d crafted a new enchantment on the back of one hand. I flung that hand forward, and a ball of air compressed into a bullet screamed toward Geralt. It smacked into his shield, but the magic flickered with the strain. “Whose fault is it that the conflict is this bad? Who oppressed the Voids and paranormals until they had to fight back?” I demanded.
“Who hunted our kind down and executed us for being what we are?” he shot back, along with an arc of lightning. This one I dodged, not trusting my shield to hold up. My heel got caught in the path of the lightning, and the back of my foot went numb. I balanced on the balls of my feet, shaking my ankle to try to get feeling back.
Sam and Axel had taken their battle into the back half of the stage, half-obscured by hanging curtains. In the audience, Desmond was working his way down to the stage. He’d holstered his gun and drawn the longsword from his back. He sliced a path through the enchanters, who were struggling valiantly to hold up their shield while still fighting off the new attackers. He’d made it about halfway down the aisle.
Geralt slowly rounded the table, his hands raised for combat magic. I kept the distance between us, prepared to tap my shield.
Instead of an attack, he flung a broad wave of magic toward the floor beneath my feet. I felt the enchantment seize my already numbed leg, pinning it to the stage.
Geralt sprang forward, his hand angling again to capture my tattoo. I dropped backward onto the stage, landing hard on my spine. Pain shot through my bones. I shoved magic into the stage beneath me, countering Geralt’s enchantment. My leg broke free of its bindings, and I rolled back to my feet just as Geralt reached me.
His broken enchantment recoiled on him. He staggered under the sudden assault. I blasted fire toward his face, but his shield absorbed it yet again. Swiftly he shaped the magical backlash into a translucent silver knife. The blade flashed toward my throat.
Backpedaling as fast as I could to stay out of range, I seized more magic and attempted to enchant a conjured blade of my own. This time the magic resisted. My thoughts felt sluggish, and my head throbbed as I struggled to focus the enchantment. It wasn’t the magic getting unruly, I realized; it was me getting tired. I was approaching my point of overload. If I kept crafting enchantments, I stood a good chance of destroying my mind.
The sword I’d envisioned finally took shape in my palm, and I breathed a sigh of relief. When Geralt’s next slash came, I raised my new blade to block it. “Call your people off,” I insisted. “If we don’t stop, we’re going to drive ourselves insane, and the magic will just burn through us.”
“That will unleash the enchantment on your heart. I only hope it happens before your foolishness destroys everything,” said Geralt, attacking again. This blow had enough force to knock me back against one of the stone walls flanking the stage.
He threw himself at me, knife aimed for my throat. I tried to dodge, but the blade struck home. My lavender shield kept the knife from drawing blood, but then the light flickered and died. I darted away from the confines of the stone wall, backing toward the middle of the stage.
Frantically I began focusing magic on creating a new shield, the one enchantment nobody could go without in magical combat. My brain screamed with pain as I drew in power. Teeth gritted, I forced the enchantment into being. An unbroken line traced a circular pattern on my arm, a shield to replace the one I’d lost. It would be the last enchantment I could craft tonight.
Geralt followed me, eyes gleaming, conjured knife glowing bright in his hand.
He didn’t even seem tired.
He was stronger than me. A lot stronger.
My eyes sought Desmond in the crowd, but when I spotted the flash of his sword, he was still in the front area of the audience, beside the orchestra pit. A good half dozen enchanters blocked his path to the stage.
Dozens of people lay dead or dying between the seats. Battles continued to rage between the Paranormal Underground and the cult. Several cult members seemed to have switched sides. Greg delivered a hard karate chop to the back of another fleshwriter’s neck. One of the college guys who’d played badminton with me held up a magical shield to defend an injured badger shifter. Enrique was fighting back-to-back with Zashawn, whose wide eyes stood out from his dark skin as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was doing. A dozen defeated fleshwriters ringed their feet. Lauren was leading a group of terrified-looking twenty-somethings in a desperate charge for the back door.
“You’re losing!” I cried to Geralt. “Your people are dying or turning on you. Call them off. Enough people have died for us.”
“You want to make peace?” Geralt shouted above the chaos of battle. “Peace between Voids and enchanters? The separations between us are too far gone. The imbalances are too wide to simply smooth them out. We have to reset things completely–destroy the dead zones, strip out the powers of the magically strong, and start over. Why can’t you accept the cost? It’s only one city!”
His last sentence dropped to a hiss, only for my ears.
But someone else heard.
Axel stopped dead, his attempts to seize Sam forgotten. Sam remained tense, her hands up, enchantment tattoos on her pale skin emitting pulses of pink light.
“What?” Axel demanded.
“We have to finish this,” Geralt said. “Grab the girl, Axel. Adrienne is nearly exhausted. She won’t fight for much longer.”
Axel stared at Geralt. Then, in a voice of deadly calm, he asked, “Will this magic kill everyone in San Francisco?”
Geralt stared at him. “No. Of course not. Why would you think that?”
Axel’s eyes met mine.
Geralt had answered. But the microsecond of hesitation, the brief pause as he thought of what to say, had been there.
Axel swallowed. His gaze took on a faraway look, like the stare of a man facing the hangman. He paused for what felt like eternity.
Then he said, calmly, “That’s too many.”
He grabbed the fallen folding chair Cassie had used to club me and swung it at Geralt’s head.
Geralt ducked, cursing, and threw a blast of magical lightning at Axel’s chest. The big man staggered, already wounded by Sam’s slew of attacks. Geralt shot him again, a blast of lightning that would have incinerated a non-Void. Axel went to one knee.
“Elmer!” Cassie’s voice screamed from somewhere in the audience. “No!”
Geralt dropped his enchantments and drew a plain, old-fashioned switchblade from the pocket of his slacks. He flicked it open over Axel’s unprotected neck.
Before he could strike, I conjured my sword and slashed the back of his leg. His magical shield stopped the blade a millimeter from his skin.
Geralt’s shield flickered. He whirled on me.
I slashed again.
The shield flickered again.
Then, at long last, it vanished.
Geralt slashed the blade at my gut, but I spun with him and sliced my sword across the back of his knee. Blood dripped onto the black wood. He deflected my next attack with a blast of magical electricity. Motes of light burst from the clashing enchantments like tiny fireworks.
Sam lunged in, the tattoo on her left hand manifesting into a magical club. She bashed it down on Geralt’s shoulder blades. The club struck a new shield, this one glowing translucent silver. He’d enchanted a new shield in the half-second between attacks.
Axel made it back to his feet. He, Sam, and I surrounded Geralt, attacking and dodging, harrying him from all sides. Axel’s punches and kicks forced Geralt back toward me and Sam, blocking off escape. Geralt’s lips peeled back in a snarl, his normal poise forgotten in the midst of battle. His hair dripped with sweat, and his black shirt had torn. He blocked most of our attacks and absorbed the rest on his shield, but between the three of us we had him on the defensive.
I kept my attention on his shield. Soon the silver light began to flicker when it was struck. Sam’s clubbing blows began to bleed through, their momentum knocking Geralt off balance. My blasts of magic sprayed out across his shield in increasingly large bursts. His movements slowed, and a glaze in his eyes told me that finally, the master of magic was reaching his limit.
A chance finally came. Axel swung the metal folding chair toward Geralt’s head just as Sam smashed her conjured club against his ankle. Geralt ducked, but the second blow took him to the ground. He staggered to one knee.
I inverted my grip on my sword and plunged it into his chest.
Silver light flared across his body as my sword tip struck the shield. The light flickered like a dying bulb.
Then it failed entirely.
My blade drove through the black shirt and lodged in Geralt’s chest, right alongside his heart.
His body sagged around the blade. Blood welled from his mouth. He stared up at me, a deep sadness etching itself into his face.
His hands clawed slowly at the hole my sword had opened in his body. Words choked from his dying throat. “I never ...”
I glanced out at the audience. Desmond was almost to the stage. But in the fighting, some tides had turned. Tamika was crouched over Janette, frantically applying CPR to the shuddering Void. Maribel had backed up against a wall, blood matting her fur. Fael lay draped over the back of a chair, unmoving as Sydney struggled to keep a confused mix of fleshwriters and Voids away from him. I couldn’t see Kendall anywhere.
“No one had to die,” I whispered. The words seemed to inflate in my throat, forcing their way out again in a scream. “¡Nadie tuvo que morir! None of this had to happen. Why couldn’t you see that?” My body was shaking too badly to pull the blade free. I left it there, clinging to it because if I let go I thought I might collapse.
Geralt’s hands kept plucking at the sword. His words were almost a whisper. “... asked you to ...”
No, he wasn’t clawing at the sword.
He was tugging on his shirt collar. “... do anything ...” he wheezed.
He finally ripped open the top layer of buttons, exposing the gash where my sword had entered his flesh.
Right beside it, stained with blood, loomed a thick, dark circle formed of a single, unbroken line.
Geralt looked up at me, satisfied. “... that I wouldn’t do myself.”
His bloody fingers touched the tattoo.
“No!” I slammed my own palm toward that dangerous, sinuous line. My conjured sword vanished the moment I released it. Geralt sagged back against the wooden stage, and I fell on top of him. My hand brushed against his, grasping for the tattoo on his chest that was a perfect match for my own. My fingers found the line, and the KADUM of magic within it almost knocked me on my back.
The tattoo began writhing, the line wriggling on his pale flesh. The tattoo’s magic responded to Geralt’s call, flowing into him. He was going to detonate the magical bomb in his body. When he did, it would also unleash his own innate magical potential. As he died he would shape those two magics into a massive blast of power. He would kill every Void within a thousand miles, and wipe out every living soul in the city.
He was about to complete his life’s work, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.
Nothing except this.
I closed my eyes, focused on the magic beating beneath my hand, and pulled it to myself instead.
At once I felt the power flowing toward Geralt. My call made it waver, caught between our pulls. He yanked, and I yanked back. Our wills collided, wrestling for the power to reshape the world. Though less than a second passed in real time, our battle took place at the speed of thought.
He was stronger, his pull on the magic greater. But he was also mortally wounded. I held the power back from him, dragging it toward myself, scrap by scrap, breath by breath. I yanked it from his body, unraveling the tattoo as I would unravel a skein of yarn.
Finally, my will persevered.
At once the magic reversed direction and streamed toward me. The enchantment on Geralt’s chest unraveled. Dark lines seeped back on themselves, slithering across his skin and into my hand. An enchantment cast by hundreds of enchanters surged into me, more magic than I had ever held. More magic than any one person was made to hold. With it came an even greater surge of magic, Geralt’s own innate power as an enchanter, ripped from his flesh by the tattoo bound to it.
Geralt’s chest sank in one last exhale. He fell back onto the stage and did not move again.
The world fell apart.
My entire body throbbed with the relentless, rapid pounding. Magic swirled within me, a firestorm that burned through my nerves and muscles and ate holes in my bones in the time it took me to inhale to scream. I felt myself coming apart, my body disintegrating under the sheer force of what I was trying to contain. The magic devoured my own tattoos, unmaking them and adding their raw power to its mass. My shield, my sword, my fire and air enchantments all joined the greater whole.
Sam was screaming my name. Lights exploded overhead, raining shards of hot glass down on the stage and plunging us into near-darkness. Blasts of pure magical energy shot from me in all directions, chewing holes in the floor, the walls, the ceiling. One caught an enchanter from the cult in the back. He ceased to exist, vaporized by the overwhelming amount of power.
Then that inescapable force turned to the great enchantment on my chest. I fought to will it away from that vulnerability, as I had deterred magic so many times before. But this amount of raw power would not be denied. It dug into the metaphysical holds keeping the enchantment in my body, cracking me open like an egg to get at the flesh within.
I held onto the magic with every scrap of focus I could muster, squeezing mental hands around my tattoo and pleading with it to stay in place. But the power of the magic burning through me whittled my defenses to a thin layer.
Desmond made it to the stage stairs and dashed up them three at a time. He slid to his knees beside me.
“I can’t stop it,” I gasped. “It’s going to detonate my tattoo.”
“Let it go!” he urged. “Let Geralt’s magic out!”
“I can’t!” A spasm of pain made my back convulse. “Too much!”
“That much magic would blow up the entire compound,” Sam shouted over the magical explosions destroying the stage. “Maybe the entire peninsula.”
“There has to be something we can do!”
Another row of overhead lights exploded. People screamed. Rancid smoke began filling the room.
I gazed up into Desmond’s face, into the face of one of the strongest Voids alive. One of the few people capable of absorbing raw magic and surviving. “There’s only one option,” I whispered.
Desmond looked down to see my shaking hands probing for his skin. His eyes widened in understanding. “Do it. I can handle it.”
“No,” I said sadly, “you can’t.”
He wrapped his arms around me, as he had once before when I’d encountered too much magic.
Sam crouched beside us and put her hand on my shoulder. “You need a channel. One that can handle a lot of magic. You have to be the focus, so use me.”
Tears filled my eyes. Pain contorted my body into tortured shapes. I reached for two of the people I considered true family, two of the people I had fought so hard to save.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Then I shaped the magic that would kill us all.
Three bodies. Three parts of an enchantment. Focus. Channel. Target.
Me, Sam, and Desmond.
Another blast of magic shot from my back and took out the support cables holding up one of the stage curtains. The metal bar and heavy fabric dropped to the stage with a bang that shook the entire building.
I stopped fighting the magic burrowing into my chest. I let it seize the tattoo I’d lived with for so many years. I let it claw its way into my very soul. Pain became existence.
My battered mind couldn’t form a proper incantation. Instead I focused the magic with a single word.
Go.
It rushed out of me like a tidal wave, channeled into Sam. Distantly I heard her scream. Her hand yanked on my arm. Nails dug into my palm. Somewhere within her, I felt a new blast of power join the flowing magic, building the strength of an already staggering tide. Her own enchantments, stripped out of her body by force.
Then the first wave of magic hit Desmond.
Not even his Void power could withstand such an assault. His muscles went taut under the sudden blast. He jerked behind me and let out a pained groan. Then a scream. It was an unearthly sound, full of terror and confusion. If the feeling of waking in the middle of the night and discovering you were on a different planet could have a sound, it would be that scream.
It was too late to stop. The magic had accepted its purpose and flowed on its own. As Geralt’s magic left me, it dragged the magic of my tattoo with it. I felt an internal ripping. Then the tattoo magic, the oppressive weight of power I had lived with since I was fourteen, began to leave my body. I braced myself for the agony I was sure would follow.
It uncoiled from my skin, detaching from the heart that had housed it for so long. And I felt ... free.
With every curving line that faded from my flesh, a thousand weights lifted from my body, weights that had become so familiar I no longer noticed I carried them. Suddenly I sensed the eagerness in this magic, the raw creative energy it embodied. The magic was singing, dancing its way out of me. There was pain, terrible pain, but the vitality of the world’s life force flowing through me overwhelmed the agony. My own mouth opened in a scream, but it was the scream of a skydiver, an opera singer on the last note of a concert, a mother delivering her first child.
