Levitator, page 34
Behind me, I heard Raza shout and the ground began to tremble as he summoned pillars of rock from the earth. The first erupted too close to Teaks’ vortex and was quickly obliterated by the spinning debris. The second thrust up short of Teaks’ barricade amid a spray of water and cracked concrete. Another miss. But the third and fourth punched through the ground beneath the conjured treeline, ripping up two burning trunks by their roots to send them toppling backwards, witch-enchanted branches still flailing.
My turn.
I tapped my phone again. While Teaks was busy countering Helena and Raza, he wouldn’t have the headspace to counter me. He couldn’t hope to hold two active spells at once. As I understood it, nobody could. With battle lines drawn, there was a strong argument for throwing everything we could at Teaks, not giving him time to think.
Yes, I know I should be casting, not chatting.
Deep breath.
In… and… out.
Concentrate.
Pick a suitable target. Test yourself this time.
So, I chose something bigger. Heavier. The old car, rusted and busted, lying on its roof. I focused on it, willing the knackered motor to rise, reaching out with my free hand as if to pluck it from the ground. To my surprise, it rose sharply, as if yanked up by an invisible hook attached to an invisible crane. I almost lost control of it, still astonished at how much easier it was to cast and control spells with the extra power the sword gifted me. I could feel the magic flowing from the charmed blade, surging through my body and out through my fingertips. I held the car in mid-air for a moment, just because I could. I assumed Teaks was still hiding behind his wooden shield. So, I pushed my hand away from me, positioned the car beyond the flaming treeline, then let it drop.
I didn’t hear the car land, but the vortex collapsed almost as quickly as it had appeared, dirt and debris shooting outwards. Small stones crackled against my Deflector like a sudden shower of hail.
“Did we get him?” Ashley asked, joining me behind the air shield. She wasn’t alone. Lyla had tagged along with her, a bow in her hand, arrows clenched in her fist.
The dust and dirt continued to settle, the air slowly clearing.
“I doubt we’re that lucky,” I said in reply, suddenly feeling a little shaky. I reached out to steady myself against the thickened air. Perhaps the spell had taken more out of me than I’d anticipated.
Ashley looked concerned. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Really.” And I was. The feeling quickly passed. More importantly, I was glad to still be alive. Glad too that Raza had forced me to practise Fitzgerald’s Trajectile Deflector over and over again until I hated him, the sound of his voice, the spell, the Fortress Records rooftop, and magic in general.
“Can anyone see Teaks?” Raza stood to my left. He’d raised two of his rock pillars to form a small defensive shield of his own. Now, he leaned up against them, peering out at the apocalyptic parking lot beyond.
“Unclear,” trilled Yellow Cloud, as she swooped past. “Will see. Will ask.” The faerie spiralled up into the air to get a better view, chattering away to herself, perhaps talking to the wind as she had done before.
Raza looked over at me next and I shrugged back. “Maybe he retreated inside the buildings?” I said, trying to be helpful.
The earth wizard looked unconvinced.
“Helena!” Raza yelled out. “Can you see him?”
Across the parking lot, Helena crouched behind the corner of the garage, watching the burning trees. She glanced back over at us and shook her head.
Raza sighed. “Lyla? I don’t suppose…”
“Even with my superior vision, no. And that worries me.”
“Dammit.” Raza slapped his palm against a rock pillar. “Be on your guard. He’s here somewhere. He hasn’t got what he came for and he is not so easily beaten.” Raza turned back towards the warehouses. “Get Ma’haganonoma inside!”
Behind me, Clive stood in front of the dragon with his arms out wide, trying to urge her through the loading dock and into the relative safety of the larger warehouse where the witches waited. Outside, the ground was littered with empty chicken buckets and greasy paper bags.
As for Bosco, he still clung to the weakened wyvern, frantically stabbing at it with his knives until it crashed down into a tangle of abandoned shopping trolleys.
Lyla applauded.
That was everyone accounted for. No casualties, which was an achievement in itself. But where was Teaks?
“There!” With a flick of his spell-player, Raza raised up a clump of earth and launched it like an artillery shell. I followed its flight towards the roof of the storage shed, over the parking lot and beyond the defeated wyvern, where a dark figure seemed to lurk.
“Wait,” Lyla said.
“There!” Ashley pointed to what looked like another figure, skulking behind the shipping container. It was difficult to see clearly. Not only had Raza’s earth spell ripped up two trees, their branches were still bewitched, thrashing wildly, and still partly on fire.
I prepped my levitation spell again, tapping the shortcut.
“Stop,” Lyla whispered, moving closer. “Teaks is playing with you. He’s using a shadow spell. Making echoes of himself in statues made of mud. It’s a distraction to confuse and divide us. Look. There are others…”
Lyla pointed to a man-shaped shadow in a fourth floor window, high in the old mill. Then at another vaguely human shape in the alleyway between the office and the adjacent storage shed.
“What does it mean?” Raza asked.
“Teaks could be anywhere.” Lyla stared through the air shield, surveying the battlefield with cold and unblinking eyes. “A shadow spell is used to buy time. It means something’s coming. Something…”
‘Big’ was probably the word Lyla didn’t get to say. Or possibly huge, massive or gargantuan. She didn’t get to say any variation of the word, because the ground beneath us suddenly rocked, knocking everyone off their feet. I heard Helena cry out. The garage where she’d hidden had started to collapse, old brick walls caving in. I watched the young wizard scramble away on her hands and knees to avoid being swallowed by a tide of rubble.
“Crap.” Ashley pointed through the Deflector. For a moment, I couldn’t see what she was looking at. But then I saw them. Dark shapes, moving fast. Flashes of fur. A pack of wolf nagual on the run, bounding between the debris, howling as one, teeth bared.
My Deflector would be useless against them. They would just go around it.
Ashley raised her shotgun.
“Run!” Lyla hissed, backing away.
I considered that the vampire might have a point. I considered that if Lyla was scared, maybe I should be too. The wolves were advancing quickly on both sides of the parking lot. What should I do? The levitation spell would be too slow and imprecise. The Electric Twister would take too long to cast and I still wasn’t very good at manifesting it.
Prismatic Rifle?
Allen’s Unstable Aero Crystal?
I froze. Just for a moment. Thank God the others didn’t.
Bosco stood his ground near the downed wyvern and met a leaping wolf shifter with glinting knives.
Raza launched another muddy missile, but his intended target, a grey wolf with a white stripe down its side, dodged it easily. Damn, these things were fast.
I saw Helena lash out with a whip of fire, catching one of the charging nagual around the foreleg. She yanked it howling to the ground and the more it struggled, the more it became entangled in the flaming cord, burning alive. Raza was right. Helena was a much better wizard than me.
Blam! Ashley’s shotgun spat fire and buckshot, making me jump.
Get a grip, Nate.
Focus.
Fight.
With a high-pitched cry, Yellow Cloud dived down from above. She let fly one of her poisoned darts at a wolf that darted towards Raza. Moments later, purple and red blurs buzzed over my head as Indy and Pincushion Starship joined the fray, blowpipes shooting — phut, phut.
With the snarling wolf almost upon him, Raza held up his palms and cast a wide-angled blast of sand, forcing the nagual into a stumbling retreat. I followed up with my levitation spell, throwing the disoriented creature high into the air.
Blam! Another blast from Ashley’s gun stopped a wolf I hadn’t even seen coming, striking it right between the eyes. The nagual skidded to a halt just in front of the Deflector, blood smearing the thickened air.
There were other nagual not far behind it, moving quickly. Three. No. Wait. Five of them, all seemingly undeterred by the death of their wolf brother. If anything, it had only angered them more. Worse, they would reach me before I could cast another spell. I thought about running, but the wolves would easily chase me down.
Ashley ejected her spent cartridges with a loud click and started to reload.
As I’ve learned, wizards don’t do duels. But right then, I didn’t have much of a choice. I raised dad’s sword as a large wolf rounded the Deflector and sprang straight at me, maw gaping wide.
Even then, I was too slow to react and, for a brief moment, I stared death in the face. And death had black fur and three raking scars across its cheek, angry and red. Death was missing one of its canine teeth and its eyes shone like emeralds in the dark. Death stank of wet dog, cigarettes and beer.
But death didn’t take me.
A swing of Clive’s mace halted the wild-eyed nagual in mid-leap, steel spikes taking the creature in the belly, smashing it aside. The hefty shifter yelped once and landed in a heap. Clive then strode forwards and brought the mace down hard on the twitching wolf, crushing its skull.
“Less gawping, more magicking,” he grumbled, before readying himself for another attack.
An arrow zipped between us, thunking into the shoulder of a smaller, light grey wolf as it clambered over a rusted girder. The nagual howled and tumbled backwards. I glanced back to see Lyla, bow in hand, nocking another arrow. She loosed it towards an approaching white wolf, narrowly missing it as the huge animal darted aside. Clive charged forwards, swinging his mace at the nagual, forcing it back. The white wolf snarled, standing its ground, poised to pounce. Then it howled, turned tail and ran. They all did, fleeing the battlefield, slinking away into the night.
Bosco whooped in the centre of the parking lot. But the vampire’s celebration was cut short as huge geysers punched through the ground, splitting the tarmac, spurting steaming hot mud high into the night air. The vampire yelled as he sprinted away from the wyvern, trying to avoid the scalding sludge that spattered down around him.
Wherever Teaks was, he wasn’t finished. As the geysers fell, the middle of the parking lot pulsed, tarmac rippling, shaking the scrap and trash upon it like a miner panning for gold.
Bosco had almost made it to my Deflector when a huge chunk of the parking lot sank behind him, dropping two or three feet before exploding upwards with a deafening roar. I ducked on instinct, hoping the air shield would hold. The ensuing shockwave rattled it and Bosco was blown backwards. I crouched lower as clouds of choking smoke and dirt billowed out from the explosion, enveloping everything.
We thought we could fight Evan Teaks — Congregatio alumni, noted psychomancer, and the man who killed Robert Strode.
How naive we’d been.
How underprepared.
Ma’haganonoma roared in the warehouse behind me and the smoke bloomed orange. Couldn’t see to fight back. Could hardly breathe. But I had the means to change the situation. Peering closely at my phone, I flipped through the spells to find Wind Salvo 1872, remembering that Raza had said it could blow away spell effects and clear the air.
Tapping the play button, I visualised the wind picking up. I imagined it blustering across the industrial estate, howling through the alleyways and around the derelict buildings, flapping discarded tarpaulins, rattling broken windows in their rotting frames. I swirled my hands around to adjust the direction and strength of the gusts. Then I charged the wind into the smoke, blowing it skywards, thinning it, pulling it apart into twisting streamers and wispy curls, repeating the process again and again.
Ashley coughed beside me. “Why hasn’t he finished us off?” She coughed again. “What’s he waiting for?”
As the smoke cleared, I let the spell fade, ignoring the beginnings of a headache. I could see the telephone boxes in the parking lot again, the upended shipping container, the rusted metal staircase, twisted and broken. Beyond, the breached tree barricade still burned and I could just make out the shape of the wyvern, still lying where Bosco had wrestled it to the ground.
Couldn’t see Helena.
Clive had disappeared.
And there was no sign of Lyla or Raza.
But I could see Teaks.
“Your trap is poorly sprung,” the old wizard shouted. He stood at the far end of the parking lot, hands in his pockets. “And, I’m afraid you’ve already lost.”
I noticed Teaks wasn’t carrying his spear.
“Check on Ma’haganonoma,” I urged Ashley.
The shapeshifter nodded and started to crawl back towards the warehouse where Clive had led the dragon. She hadn’t gone far when Raza stumbled out of the loading dock, covered in blood.
“He has a scale…” Raza sank to his knees. “I couldn’t stop him. It was all a distraction.”
My heart sank. “Is she…?”
Raza shook his head. “She’s alive. Narissa is tending to her. Teaks needs Ma’haganonoma alive to open his portal. But after that…” Raza’s shoulders slumped, as if all the fight had drained out of him. “It’s useless. He lured us out with the nagual. Bosco is down. Clive is hurt. We can’t win. I was a fool to think we could.”
I gritted my teeth and turned back to Teaks. No. We’d come too far. There was always a way. There was always something you could do. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Helena get to her feet near the shattered remains of the mill’s garage. If we could just regroup, we weren’t out of this fight yet.
“It’s not too late to stop this,” I shouted.
On the contrary,” Teaks yelled back. “I think it’s high time I got started. Why wait? Who needs a formal setting and an adoring audience? I have everything I need to summon a demon right here and ample room to make it work. Just a few loose ends to tie up. Specifically, you.”
I checked behind me. Ashley was helping Raza to his feet. Clive sat propped up against the warehouse wall, holding his side. Lyla carried an unconscious Bosco into the warehouse.
“My friends and I aren’t done.”
“I have friends too. You met one in Canada.” Teaks cast a spell at his feet and I watched him rise to the roof of the storage shed, carried up by a column of earth. “Let me introduce you to another friend of mine.”
“No, thank you,” I shouted back. It was a stupid idea, but I yelled it anyway. “Come face me. One on one!”
Teaks didn’t listen. He stared down at his spell-player for a moment, flicking the scroll wheel, before speaking again. “There was a battle here, long ago,” he announced. “The men who fought knew they might die, as all soldiers do. So, no ghosts linger to mark their passing.”
Good God, Teaks loved the sound of his own voice.
“Unlike poor Robert,” he continued, “their souls are at rest. But battles leave their marks in space and in time. This is still a place of strong emotions — fear and sadness, anger and hate, all mixed together. It is a place forever aligned with violence…”
When Teaks finished speaking, the ground started to rumble, splitting down the middle, a deep crack slowly widening. Little by little, the nearby debris on the parking lot began to fall into it. The shipping container and the shopping trolleys, the telephone boxes and Raza’s rock pillars. Even the wyvern slid into the growing hole.
I took a step back.
A giant hand reached out to grab the side of the chasm that had opened, fingers big as chimney stacks, formed of shattered tarmac and broken bricks. A second hand followed, gripping the other side. I retreated again as a huge creature began to haul itself out of the depths, its monstrous head sculpted from mud and held together by twisted railings and old office chairs. It gazed upon us with a single eye like a lava pool, its mouth hanging open in a silent roar revealing crooked concrete teeth.
I backed away a little further as the earth conjuring rose up, two more hands reaching out to support it.
“Earth golem!” Clive shouted.
“Raza?” I called out. “What the hell do we do?”
There was no reply.
“Raza?” I clutched my phone tighter. “What about the Aero Crystal?”
The earth leviathan rose even higher, mashed together from scrap and trash, traffic cones, empty oil drums and ripped leather couches, with the red shipping container embedded in the middle of its chest.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Ashley. “Raza’s gone,” she said. “He… I can’t find him. I think we’re on our own.”
44
A LAST RESORT
How do you fight a monster of mud and magic that’s taller than a ten-storey flour mill, with four arms like dockyard cranes and fists as big as dumper trucks?
The answer is: with great difficulty.
Raza hadn’t schooled me on the various forms of earth magic and now he wasn’t around to ask. Nor was there time to wonder where he’d run off to. Or if he’d be coming back. Not with a King Kong-sized golem looming over us. A King Kong-sized golem that had picked up the rusted car I’d levitated earlier and was about to—
Oh hell!
I pulled Ashley behind the Deflector as, with a low and rumbling groan, the golem pitched the wrecked vehicle our way. The battered old motor bounced twice as it tumbled across the concrete, before slamming into the air shield.
I grabbed the boiler-suited shapeshifter by the sleeve. I knew what I needed to do. Doing nothing would put everyone I cared for at risk.
