Jennsen swung back to the old woman. She stood immobile, her head cocked, listening. There was confusion in her manner, and a curious kind of awkward helplessness.
The sorceress wasn’t looking at her, but instead had an ear turned to her. Being a little closer, now, Jennsen noticed for the first time that the old woman had completely white eyes. Jennsen stared, at first from surprise, and then with sudden recognition.
“Adie?” she breathed, not having intended to say it aloud.
Startled, the woman cocked her head the other way, listening with her other ear. “Who be there?” the raspy voice demanded. “Who be there?”
Jennsen didn’t answer, for fear of giving away her exact location. The room had gone silent. Worry wore heavily on the old sorceress’s weathered face. But determination, too, set her jaw as her hand lifted.
Jennsen gripped her knife in her fist, not knowing what to do. If this really was Adie, the woman Althea had told her about, then, according to Althea, she would be completely blind to Jennsen. But she was not blind to Sebastian. Jennsen crept a step closer.
The old woman’s head turned to the sound. “Child? Do you be a sister of Richard? Why would you be with the Order?”
“Maybe because I want to live!”
“No.” The woman shook her head with stern disapproval. “No. If you be with the Order, then you have chosen death, not life.”
“You’re the only one intent on bringing death!”
“That be a lie. All of you came to me with weapons and murderous intent,” she said. “I did not come to you.”
“Of course! Because you defile the world with your taint of magic!” Sebastian called from behind. “You would smother mankind—enslave us all—with your wicked ancient ways!”
“Ah,” Adie said, nodding to herself. “It be you, then, who has deluded this child.”
“He’s saved my life! Without Sebastian I would be nothing! I would have nothing! I would be dead! Just like my mother!”
“Child,” Adie said in a quiet rasp, “that, too, be a lie. Come away from them. Come with me.”
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you!” Jennsen shrieked. “My mother died in my arms because of your Lord Rahl. I know the truth. The truth is that you’d love to deliver the prize plum to Lord Rahl, at last.”
Adie shook her head. “Child, I don’t know what lies be filling your head, but I do not have the time for this. You must come away with me, or I cannot help you. I cannot wait a moment longer. Time be in short supply and I have used all I have.”
As the woman spoke, Jennsen used the opportunity to take small quiet steps forward. She had to take this chance to end the threat. She knew she could take this woman out. If it was only a matter of muscle and skill with a knife, then Jennsen would have the distinct advantage. A sorceress’s magic was useless against someone who was invincible—against a pillar of Creation.
“Jenn, take her! You can do it! Avenge your mother!”
Jennsen was still only a quarter of the distance from Sebastian to Adie. Knife held tight, she took another step.
“If that be your choice,” Adie rasped at hearing the whisper of the footstep, “then so be it.”
When the sorceress lifted her hand out toward Sebastian, Jennsen realized with horror what she meant: the price of her choice was that Sebastian would be forfeit.
Chapter 50
Sebastian was on the floor, not far away, leaning to the side, propping himself up on one arm. Jennsen saw blood on the marble floor under him. Since Adie couldn’t stop Jennsen, she intended to finish him as the price. The appalling reality of seeing Sebastian in pain, of knowing he was about to be murdered, shook Jennsen to her very soul.
Sebastian was all she had.
The sorceress was but a blink away from loosing lethal magic on him. Jennsen was a great deal closer to Sebastian than to the sorceress. Jennsen knew she would never reach the sorceress in time to stop her, but she might make it to Sebastian in time to protect him. She could only kill the sorceress if she were willing to forfeit Sebastian to do it. That was the choice Adie had given her.
Jennsen abandoned her attack and instead dove for Sebastian, putting herself in the woman’s line of sight, making a hole in the world where she was trying to aim her terrible conjured fire. The magic the sorceress loosed missed Sebastian, raking crackling lightning across the polished marble floor, ripping it up in a line right beside him. The air was filled with a burst of flying stone shards.
Jennsen scooped Sebastian protectively into her arms as she fell to his side. “Sebastian! Can you move? Can you run? We have to get out of here.”
He nodded. “Help me up.” His voice was labored, his breathing shallow.
Jennsen ducked her head under his arm and strained with the effort of lifting him to his feet. With her help, they hurriedly worked their way toward the door. Behind, Adie lifted her hands again, her white eyes tracking Sebastian’s movements, if not Jennsen’s. Jennsen twisted sideways, putting herself in the way. A blast of lightning laced past, missing them by inches, blowing the heavy metal-clad door off its hinges. The door went skittering down the hall.
Jennsen and Sebastian scuttled through the smoking opening and hastened down the wide hall. Jennsen realized, as she watched the heavy doors crashing down the hall, bouncing off walls, tearing out great chunks of stone, that if something like that hit her, she would be crushed. She noticed, too, that her arm was bleeding from small cuts from the stone shards that had struck her. It wasn’t magic that had done it, but sharp stone, even if the sharp stone had been sent flying by magic.
She might be in some ways invincible, but if magic toppled a massive stone column on her, she would be just as dead as if it had been pushed over by brute strength instead. Dead was dead.
Jennsen suddenly didn’t feel so invincible.
At the first intersection, she took them to the right, getting Sebastian out of the line of sight of Adie’s gift, and her weapons of magic, as quickly as possible. Jennsen could feel his warm blood running over the arm she had around him. Despite his injury, Sebastian didn’t ask her to slow to spare him any pain. Together, they rushed through halls and rooms as fast as he was able, crossing the palace, going back toward where Jennsen had left the emperor.
“Are you hurt bad?” she asked, fearing the answer.
“Not sure,” he said, nearly out of breath and clearly in pain. “Feels like there’s a fire burning in my ribs. If you wouldn’t have prevented her from hitting me square on, I’d be dead for sure.”
As they moved through the palace, they came across a squad of their men. Jennsen collapsed next to them, panting, exhausted, unable to hold Sebastian up another step. Her leg muscles trembled from the exertion.
“We’re leaving,” Sebastian told the men, his breathing labored with pain. “We have to get out. The emperor is hurt. We have to get him out of here.” He motioned in different directions. “Some of you go each way. Collect all our men. We need to get everyone we can to protect the emperor and then we have to get him back to safety. You two, you’ll have to help me.”
The bulk of the men immediately rushed off to their tasks. The two remaining behind threw Sebastian’s arms over their shoulders and easily lifted him. He winced in pain. Jennsen led them through the palace, watching for the landmarks she remembered, desperate to reach Emperor Jagang and to get out of the death trap of a palace.
The Confessors’ Palace was a confusion of halls, passageways, and rooms. Some of the rooms were huge, but when they came to such places, they went around, staying to the maze of passageways; Sebastian said they didn’t want to be caught in one of those big rooms where they would be an easier target. Intermittently, Jennsen heard the awful thump of magic. Each time, the entire palace shuddered with the concussion.
“This way,” she said, recognizing the yawning breach in the wall at the corner of a passageway strewn with rubble. That gaping hole through the outer wall, looking out to daylight and overlooking the lawns
far below, was where the wizard’s fire, meant for her and Emperor Jagang, had blasted through.
Five soldiers made their way down the hall from the other direction, climbing over the tangled debris, bringing a Sister of the Light with them. From behind, nearly a dozen more men appeared. Two Sisters, their faces streaked with soot, came through a nearby room to the side, followed by yet more of the assault force. Half the men were bleeding, but all of them were able to move under their own power.
Emperor Jagang was sitting up against the wall where Jennsen had left him. The deep jagged gash was partly being held together by the curtain Jennsen had wrapped around his leg, but the meat of his muscle wasn’t aligned properly and the terrible wound clearly needed attention. It appeared that the healing magic performed by the Sister, just before she had been killed, still held, and at least the emperor wasn’t still losing blood the way he had been.
The blood the emperor had lost left him weak-looking and pale, but not as pale as the faces of those who for the first time saw the seriousness of his injury.
One of the Sisters knelt down to check his wound. Jagang winced when she tried to better align the two halves of his split leg.
“There’s no time to heal it now,” she said. “We’ll need to get him to safety, first.”
She immediately set to tightening the bandage of blood-soaked curtain that Jennsen had started to apply. She snatched up more cloth from the rubble.
“Did you get her?” Jagang asked as the Sister worked at pulling the injury closed with the filthy strip of cloth. “Where is she? Sebastian!” He used a board to lever himself upright, peering this way and that around the company of soldiers as they helped Sebastian make his way through to the emperor. “There you are. Where’s the Mother Confessor? Did you get her?”
“It isn’t her,” Jennsen answered in his place.
“What?” The emperor glanced around angrily at the people watching him. “I saw the bitch. I know the Mother Confessor when I see her! Why didn’t you get her!”
“You saw a wizard and a sorceress,” Jennsen told him. “They were using magic to make you think you were seeing Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor. It was a trick.”
“I think she’s right,” Sebastian put in before Jagang could scream at her. “I was standing right beside her and while I saw the Mother Confessor, Jennsen didn’t.”
Jagang turned a dark scowl on her. “But if the others saw her, how could you not…”
Understanding seemed to come over him. For some reason that Jennsen couldn’t exactly fathom, he suddenly recognized the truth in her words.
“But why?” the Sister tending the emperor’s injury asked, looking up from her work of bandaging the wound.
“Both the wizard and the sorceress seemed to be in a hurry,” Jennsen said. “They must be up to something.”
“It’s a diversion,” Jagang whispered, staring off down the empty hall littered with rubble. “They wanted to keep us occupied. Keep us away, and busy thinking about something else.”
“Keep us away from what?” Jennsen asked.
“The main force,” Sebastian said, catching Jagang’s line of thought.
Another Sister, casting surreptitious glances to the other Sisters after inspecting Sebastian’s wound, worked quickly at pressing a padded bandage against his ribs and then wrapping a long strip of cloth around his chest to hold it in place.
“This will only help for a short time,” she muttered, half to herself. “This is not good.” She glanced again to the other Sister. “We’re going to need to tend to this. We can’t do it here.”
Sebastian winced in pain, ignoring her, then spoke. “It’s a trick. They keep us here, puzzling over where they could be, kept us chasing after illusions, while they attack our main force.”
Jagang growled a curse. He looked off out the hole the wizard’s fire had blasted in the wall, peering out toward the army they had left a long ride back down the river valley. He clenched his fist and gritted his teeth.
“That bitch! They wanted us busy so our main force would be sitting in place while they attack. That filthy scheming bitch! We have to get back!”
The small force moved quickly through the halls. Jagang was carried with a man under each arm, as was Sebastian, so that they could make quick progress back out of the Confessors’ Palace. Sebastian was looking worse.
Along the way, they gathered up more of their men. Jennsen was astounded that there were still any others alive. Compared with the force they had come in with, though, they had been cut to pieces. Had they all stayed together, rather than the way the emperor and Sebastian continually divided them up, they might have all been killed at once. As it was, the Order would still have to leave behind a great many dead.
Once on the lower level, they worked their way along service halls, toward the side of the palace, Sebastian advising that it would be best not to go out by the main entrance, where they had entered, for fear that such a move might be expected and they very well could be struck down before they could get away. Everyone moved as silently as possible through the empty kitchens, emerging to a gray day in a side courtyard. It was secluded, with a wall screening it off from the city.
The sight as they came around the side of the palace was horrifying. It looked like the entire force had been cut down, that none of the cavalry could possibly still be alive. Jennsen couldn’t stand the sight of so much carnage, yet it was so overwhelming that she could not look away. The dead, horses as well as men, lay tangled in a ragged line down the hillside, fallen in the place where they met the foe head-on at a full charge. In the distance, near the trees, a few scattered horses, their riders no doubt dead, nibbled at the grass.
“There are no enemy dead,” Jagang said, surveying the sight as he limped along with the aid of a pike a soldier had handed him. “What could have done this?”
“Nothing living,” a Sister said.
As they moved quickly down the hill, making their way past the silent battle line, not far in front of the heaps of corpses, others of the cavalry, far down the slope on the other side of a wall in an area among small garden buildings and trees, spotted the emperor and raced out to protect him. Soldiers on horseback—numbering less than a thousand out of the over forty thousand they started with—swept in to surround the company returning from the palace. A number of the Sisters rode in, pulling in close to the emperor to provide an inner circle of defense.
Rusty, trailed by Pete, trotted across the lawns, accompanying the tattered remnants of the cavalry. When Jennsen whistled, Rusty recognized the call and rushed in to be close to her. The mare, nuzzling Jennsen’s shoulder, voiced a plaintive whinny, eager for comfort. Rusty and Pete weren’t cavalry horses, trained to be accustomed to the terrors of war. Jennsen ran a soothing hand over the horse’s trembling neck and rubbed her ears. She gave similar comfort to Pete when he pressed his forehead against the back of her shoulder.
“What happened!” Jagang called out in a rage. “How could you let yourselves be taken like this?”
The officer leading the men on horseback looked around in dismay. “Excellency, it was…out of the clear air. It wasn’t anything we could fight.”
“Are you trying to tell me it was ghosts!” Jagang bellowed.
“I think it was the horses the scout smelled,” another officer said. His arm was bandaged up high but soaked in blood.
“I want to know what’s going on,” Jagang said as he glared around at the faces watching him. “How could this have happened?”
As men brought extra horses, Sister Perdita dismounted close by. “Excellency, it was some kind of attack involving magic—phantom horsemen invoked by wizardry is the only explanation I have.”
His menacing eyes were leveled at her in a way that made even Jennsen quail. “Then why didn’t you and your Sisters stop it?”
“It wasn’t anything like the conjured magic we ordinarily encounter. I believe it had to be a form of constructed magic, or we would have not only
detected it, but been able to stop it. At least, that’s what I assume. I’ve never actually seen any constructed magic, but I’ve heard of it. Whatever this was that attacked us would not respond to anything we tried.”
The emperor was still frowning darkly at her. “Magic is magic. You should have stopped it. That’s what you were here for.”
“Constructed magic is different than conjured, Excellency.”
“Different? How?”
“Rather than using the gift on the spot, constructed magic has already been made up in advance. It can be preserved for a great period of time—thousands of years, maybe even forever. When it’s needed, the spell is triggered and the magic is loosed.”
“Triggered by what?” Sebastian asked.
Sister Perdita shook her head in frustration. “By just about anything, as I’ve heard it told. It just depends on how it was constructed. No wizard now is able to construct such a spell. We know little about those ancient wizards or what they could do, but from what little we do know, a constructed spell could be something kept dry that comes to life when you get it wet—for example something to help fertilize crops when the spring rains come. It could be triggered by heating, like a cure taken for a fever—the cure carries a construction in and the fever triggers it. Others are triggered by a little magic, some by an elaborate application of incredibly intricate wizardry and great power.”
“So,” Jennsen reasoned, “someone with magic must have unleashed something so powerful as these phantom horsemen? A wizard, or a sorceress, or something?”
Sister Perdita shook her head. “It could be that kind of constructed magic, but it could just as easily be a spell—albeit an incredibly powerful one—kept in a thimble, and triggered by exposing the construction to…anything—horse dung, even.”
Emperor Jagang waved off the very notion. “But something that small and easily triggered wouldn’t be this powerful.”
“Excellency,” the Sister said, “in this, you can’t equate the apparent material size of the construction or its trigger with the result—they have no relational value, at least not in the terms in which most people think. The trigger has no bearing on the power of the construction. Even the construction and its trigger are not necessarily relational. There is simply no rule by which to judge a construction.”