Destiny (Heroes by Necessity Book 3) Page 25

  A bolt flew passed Ermolt’s head, close enough to sting his ear.

  On the dais, a familiar-looking crossbow was being reloaded.

  The bolt cracked against Elise’s shield behind him. It hesitated her step for but a moment. Enough to let Ermolt fall out of sync with her and get a half step ahead.

  Ermolt met the line of Priests first and swept his hammer over Elise’s head and into their ranks.

  The room they were in was wide enough that the dozen Priests had spread out to form a line only one rank deep, with the sides already closing in to encircle their enemies and angle around to pursue Athala.

  Priests were, in general, no slouches when it came to combat, since most of them had spent time as Conscripts previously. But without their divine magic, they were no match for a graduate of Celnaer Hold.

  The heavy head of Ermolt’s hammer smashed through the narrow quarterstaff of a Priest who had presented his weapon to block Ermolt’s strike. The weapon bowed and then snapped right between his outstretched hands. And then carried through into the Priest’s chest.

  The man crumpled under the impact, a burst of blood spraying from his lips.

  Without a press of bodies behind him, the Priest went flying into the bottom step of the dais, where he laid still and didn’t move again.

  Ermolt continued the momentum of his swing into the next Priest in line. The hammer landed squarely against their shoulder with a sickening cracking noise. The Priest dropped his staff in shock and pain, but only a breath before the force of Ermolt’s blow knocked him into the next Priest in line. Both men staggered, but the injured Priest fell to the ground, clutching the ruined joint of his shoulder.

  The line of Priests broke and they descended on Elise and Ermolt as bolts flew into the melee.

  One of the Priests tried to set his staff like a spear against Elise, but she swiped the weapon aside with her shield and opened his guard before lashing out with her sword. Ermolt noticed her strike was sloppy, however. The Conscript had taken a nasty hit to the head, and so instead of slicing her sword across the Priest’s throat in a brutal and quick end, she instead sliced across his collarbone in a deep, but not fatal, cut.

  Ermolt turned to lend his assistance but Elise just growled in frustration and lashed out at the Priest’s knee with a kick. The man’s leg turned and he let his foot slip behind to try and absorb the impact, but it was too little too late.

  There was an uncomfortable popping sound that made the hairs on Ermolt’s neck stand attention, and the leg gave out immediately. The Priest fell to the ground and Elise drove her sword between his shoulder blades just to be sure.

  Ermolt turned sharply when a Priest brushed past him. The man was determined, focused on closing the distance between himself and Athala. So much so that he ignored the barbarian who growled in frustration and swung his hammer.

  It would be the last mistake he ever made.

  Ermolt’s hammer landed between the man’s shoulders and, with some follow through, drove him into the unforgiving stone floor with the force. His unarmored rib cage shattered under the impact, crackling like a poorly tempered sword.

  Another Priest battered her quarterstaff against Ermolt’s back as he was turned, but the heavy stone armor absorbed most of the blow and took the bite out of the attack. Ermolt hefted his hammer and whirled.

  Before the woman could regret the life choices she made that led her to this exact moment in time, Ermolt smashed the butt-end of his hammer into the side of the woman’s head. Her eyes unfocused and she hit the ground only slightly before she lost consciousness.

  Ermolt swept the ankle of another Priest out from under him with the head of his hammer, shattering the joint and likely taking the man out of the fight. With a moment to breathe, he looked to check on Athala.

  The wizard was ignoring all else, and instead had her focus on Ibeyar. Which was good. He was too large of a threat to be allowed to participate in the fight before they had thinned out his goons. If all she could do was keep his attention while Ermolt and Elise dealt with his forces, that was a winning exchange.

  She cast a spell with words Ermolt couldn’t hear over the sounds of combat around him. But despite the concentration clear in her face, it seemed to have no effect, other than making Ibeyar blink a few times in confusion.

  Hadn’t her spells been knocking people off their feet left and right with her newfound power? Was Ibeyar’s somehow more? Her spells affected him no more than they affected Sirur.

  Realization dawned on Ermolt. Perhaps that was why the dragon was missing. He could have absorbed its power, somehow become a dragon himself.

  Athala growled in wordless frustration and tried again, but Ermolt didn’t have the ability to witness what happened. Instead he was drawn back into the melee by a Priest who was dual-wielding quarterstaves in a way that was ridiculous and somehow overwhelmingly effective.

  Her swings and strikes were easy enough to dodge, but they pushed Ermolt back. Which, incidentally, saved him from a bolt of blue-white fire from Ibeyar.

  Ermolt stepped back out of the Priest’s reach and brought up his hammer. In a long swing from his shoulder, he lopped the last two fen or so off the top of her weapons, splintering them and rendering them useless.

  The Priest cried out and threw her broken weapons at Ermolt, but they bounced off his armor with little more than a scratch.

  In return, he stepped forward and carried the momentum of his first attack into an underhand swing on the rebound. The head of the hammer caught the Priest under the chin. Her head exploded in a ribbon of gore that turned Ermolt’s stomach.

  Originally he had expected her to dodge. He was only trying to scare her away. But she stood strong and fast and took the attack like a person who knew they had nothing else to live for.

  Her headless corpse crumpled to the ground, and Ermolt felt the last of the chill of his rage leave him.

  His eyes swept across the battlefield.

  The remaining Priests were fighting as the dead woman had—giving it their all, but submitting to their obvious deaths where they could. This wasn’t a victory. It was an assisted suicide—a ritualistic murder of a people who had been lied to and then cut off from their God. They had no more to give, and so lived to have it end in the glory of combat.

  Had he thought to speak on their behalf before the fighting had begun, he might have been able to save them. To turn them away from their destructive path. But now it was too far gone, and Ermolt felt hollow.

  All he could do was assist his friends so they could take out Ibeyar. And if that meant he had to kill people who wanted to die, so be it.

  Ermolt stepped forward to help Elise, who seemed to be struggling. As the fighting wore on her attacks grew sloppier and less accurate. Ermolt knew she had lost a lot of blood before Sieghard had cared for her, and the crude bandage around her head was already soaked through with more of it.

  And the Priests who weren’t completely prepared to die saw her as the weakest link. She was already bloodied. Nearly five of them had surrounded her, bashing their staves against her back and shoulders as she tucked her head down and accepted the blows.

  Ermolt charged to her rescue, but was distracted along the way.

  A Priest turned into his charge and Ermolt swept the man’s legs out from under him with the head of his hammer. The weapon connected with his shin and shattered the bones, knocking him from his feet. Ermolt kept moving past, but before he could get to Elise, a crossbow bolt whizzed past his arm.

  It was the only warning that the mercenaries had been ordered to fill in the ranks of dead or dying Priests.

  One of the mercenaries stayed behind, winding their heavy crossbow. But the other three moved to encircle Ermolt and cut him down.

  His hammer whirled and twirled, parrying attacks as he looked for instances to land a debilitating or deadly blow.

  A mercenary got inside his guard, wielding a hatchet in each hand. Ermolt managed to catch both blows across
the haft of his hammer, just above his knuckles. He turned the attack aside as his instincts screamed at him. With barely enough time to react he leaned back and the head of a spear flew past his face, right where his head had been just a moment before.

  Ermolt stepped back from the spear-wielding mercenary to avoid the follow up, but the third of Ibeyar’s remaining mercenaries rushed at Ermolt’s side with a claymore. The unusual weapon forced him to reorient rather than counterattack, and Ermolt raised his hammer to meet her attack before it cleaved into his shoulder.

  Another crossbow bolt shattered against the stone scales covering Ermolt’s chest. He turned his head to avoid splinters from flying into his eyes. The impact was hard enough to push him off balance, and the three mercenaries took advantage of the opening.

  He was able to duck under the first thrust of the spear, and he danced away from the hatchets as they once again came within his guard. The claymore passed barely a rhen away from his right knee, and Ermolt lashed out with a shout.

  His hammer slammed into his attacker’s chest. She rolled with the impact, preventing it from crushing her chestplate, but she was still forced back from the blow.

  Ermolt leapt at the opportunity and dashed to Elise’s side.

  He bellowed and whirled his hammer in high.

  Elise ducked to let the weapon smash through the Priests that surrounded her on cue.

  The hammer landed solidly in the face of one Priest. The follow-through drove the head against another man’s neck with a crunch that Ermolt felt up the haft of the hammer.

  When they hit the ground, they didn’t get back up.

  The others fled the murderous weapon.

  Elise shouted a battle cry of her own, weak as it was, and lunged at the retreating Priests. She was able to take one down before the other two turned on her, but Elise was a skilled combatant against two. She would be fine.

  Ermolt, on the other hand, paid for helping her.

  A crossbow bolt lanced across his knee. The distant impact didn’t hurt, not yet, but it did drop him to the ground. He struggled to pull himself to his feet, but the claymore came down and Ermolt was forced to instead raise his hammer to block it. The impact forced him back down and the bolt wound across his leg flared in pain.

  His instincts screamed once more that another attack was coming, this time from the spear, but he was unable to get away from the claymore to deal with it. He had no leverage, no force, to push away the descending weapon, and he couldn’t move without the blade coming down on him.

  Ermolt snarled and faced his death like a barbarian from the northern lands. If only he could feel the chill of his homeland once more.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Athala’s Hesitance spell wasn’t working.

  Whatever Ibeyar had done, whatever power he had obtained, it meant he shrugged off her spells like Sirur had.

  Just a little blinking and shaking of the head.

  In her heart of hearts, she knew it was impossible for him to become a dragon. So what else could have happened before they arrived?

  Blue-white flames streaked at her across the room, interrupting her thoughts. Athala once more ducked against the wall beside the door frame Ermolt had ruined. The fire splattered against the stone where her foot had been a moment before, fizzling out ineffectively.

  Athala’s friends were struggling with the mercenaries and Priests, and it was Athala’s job to keep Ibeyar distracted away from them. But she was barely able to keep up. He seemed to be toying with her more than actually fighting her. Gloating. His spells were inaccurate and her own fire was blocked by whatever defense he was able to muster.

  And his own magic was flowing easily and smoothly from him. Athala was already feeling fatigued from the magic she spent over the course of the last bell, but Ibeyar seemed fresh and relaxed, despite whatever he had used against the dragon previously.

  The dragon he had beaten them to.

  Frustration blossomed in Athala’s chest and she thought hard about what to do. Her current tactics were getting her nowhere, and Ibeyar seemed to be enjoying toying with her. If only she could just—

  Athala stopped and ducked her head back into the room.

  She couldn’t stand still long enough to observe the area, to make a mental note of the situation. Ibeyar just kept lobbing bolts of fire her way.

  So she’d just have to improvise.

  Athala muttered a smattering of draconian words and leapt back into the room. With the final rune spoken, a dozen illusionary Athala’s burst from her being, each one going a different way. They scattered, darting around as she took stock of the battlefield. She hoped the illusions would buy her enough time to figure out what was going on.

  Ibeyar laughed loudly as if he recognized the tactic as similar to his own. He flung more of that blue-white fire at her illusions. The unique magic disrupted the illusions when the two forms of magic collided and they burst into motes before dissipating.

  Athala felt more and more exposed by the moment, but she kept moving forward. Eventually he would run out of illusions and if she was in the middle of the room, she’d be dead. So she focused.

  Ibeyar’s dais was around fifty fen from the door. The platform seemed normal, other than the streaks of blood and bile that were splattered across. But the closer Athala looked, the more she was able to see.

  There was a series of runes, written in chalk, running around the dais. A few of the draconian runes looked like familiar fragments of a shield spell. It was likely that Ibeyar had intended for it to be a safety net against the dragon, but he had simply stepped inside the protective shell to guard himself during the fight.

  A simple spell would have blocked everything, but this was something more.

  The unfamiliar components of the spell gave him an additional advantage. From her cursory examination—as well as her personal observations of how her fight had been going so far—the shield was attuned to his personal magical energies.

  He and his magic could penetrate the barrier. Mostly all else would stay out. So there was little she could do against him, unless she or her friends could disrupt the chalk runes and open Ibeyar’s defenses.

  Halfway across the room, Athala had very few illusions left. Time was running out.

  A sharp cry drew her attention to her friends, and a stab of panic filled her throat.

  Ermolt had been forced to his knees and was being held in place by a plate-wearing woman with a giant sword. Another of Ibeyar’s mercenaries had a spear to the back of Ermolt’s neck.

  Elise was engaged with the last two Priests, and didn’t even seem to be aware of the other mercenary behind her, approaching with twin axes. Intent on burying them in the back of her head.

  Athala stopped moving forward.

  There was too much.

  They were outmatched, even with Ibeyar solely entertaining himself by turning the false images of Athala into sparkling motes, instead of contributing to the fight. If he decided to turn his attentions on them in earnest, they would already be dead.

  Even without, two out of the three of them were about to breathe their last.

  There was only one way out.

  Athala began to speak Sirur’s spell.

  The words came, melodic and sweet, with little effort. Once more her additions sounded like she was trying to speak with a mouth full of rocks in comparison.

  Athala was aware of Ibeyar yelling something, but she gave him no mind. She threw herself into the spell, as if she could force it out faster if she focused.

  The spell flowed. She knew the song now. It felt more natural. This spell was hers now, and she unleashed it against Ibeyar and his defenders.

  A red shade filled the room quickly, spreading first over the mercenaries around her friends and then running along the ground. Athala watched in horror as it enveloped her friends as well, holding them in place only moments before death. The iridescent redness began to climb the steps. Her eyes followed it. Up the dais.

>   To where the last mercenary was leveling the crossbow at her.

  Athala cried out as the bolt was fired, leaving the weapon before the mercenary could be taken by the spell.

  A wind passed before Athala and there was a grunt of pain. Athala was surprised it wasn’t her own.

  “Hold the spell,” a pained, disembodied voice said. “As long as you can. We can get out.”

  Sieghard.

  He shimmered into existence. There was a bloody hole through one of his forearms and a crossbow bolt jutted from his shoulder. His robe was darkening with blood even as she watched.

  Athala felt a pulsing in her head as the spell drained her energy, but it wasn’t as crippling as it had been earlier. She looked past Sieghard’s shoulder. To her friends, who were still in danger. To Ibeyar, who was trapped under the power of Athala’s dragon magic.

  “I can’t,” she said, her voice strained. She turned back to Sieghard and looked at him with wide eyes. “I can’t leave. My friends. I won’t leave without them.”

  Sieghard looked back over the spell that enveloped the rest of the room, and then to Athala. “Alright. Hold the spell. I can save them. But I can’t guarantee we can all escape. If we leave now, we both survive. If we save them, we may die in the attempt.”

  Athala thought about that for less than a breath. Life without her friends wouldn’t be a life worth living. It was her fault they were here anyway. “I won’t leave them. I would rather die with them than live without. Please. Help me.”

  With a frown, Sieghard nodded and turned from her.

  He rushed into the room, into the red. Athala cried out, for a moment afraid that he would be engulfed by the spell and doomed. But Sieghard danced over and around the swirling red iridescent mist. He was always where it wasn’t, even when that seemed impossible.

  His first stop was Ermolt. The old wizard grabbed the mercenary’s spear, frozen in time, and brought his knee up to the wooden haft. There was an echoing cracking noise, but nothing happened to the spear. Sieghard then began moving to Elise.