Mordecai

  As I made my circular pass around the castle, I reduced my speed. I couldn’t afford to make a mistake and get myself killed, and I was already beginning to tire. The stress of maintaining such a powerful shield and flying at that rate took a lot of power. When I completed my loop and came back around, I was still moving fast, but it was a speed I could survive, something close to the speed of a stooping falcon.

  I sent my two iron bombs ahead of me as the tortuses opened fire on me. The force of their barrage was too much for me and I was forced to land, braking as hard as I could to avoid doing their work for them. One of the iron bombs was struck in mid-air, exploding before it could reach its target, but the other made it.

  Lacking the insane speed of my first attack, it didn’t destroy the tortus it hit, but the explosion knocked the machine sideways and did some visible damage to its outer shell. Its companion was slightly closer to me, less than a hundred yards away, but still too far for me to do very much to it directly with my magic.

  That was fine for the tortus, though. It continued to hammer me with fire from its spinning gun. What did Gary call it? A gatling gun. The attack was so intense it was hard to maintain my shield, and I was almost at the end of my strength.

  Opening my mind slightly, I called on the earth, feeling its power surge into me, from my feet upward, and then I did something unusual—for me, at least. I used it to strengthen my body, increasing my speed and physical power. It wasn’t something I liked, but my fight with Tyrion had been educational, so I had done some practicing.

  Reinforcing my shield, I ran toward the tortus, chanting in Lycian. The spell I used was the same one I often used to make my hands impervious to fire when dealing with metal in the forge, but this time I included my entire body.

  There are good reasons not to do that under normal circumstances. The spell essentially caused the flesh to become almost entirely non-conductive to heat, but the skin still radiated heat outward. If done to the entire body, the limbs could slowly freeze while the body’s core grew increasingly hot. In short, user beware, proceed with caution.

  A minute or two wouldn’t kill me, though. I raced toward the tortus, altering my personal shield as I ran, until it glowed with an intense heat that, thankfully, I couldn’t feel.

  It stopped firing, and its torso rotated, bringing its railgun in line with me. Shit! I swore silently. I was still thirty yards away, and from what Moira had described, no shield I could create would be enough to save me if it fired.

  I zigged to one side, but the weapon tracked me perfectly, so I flung out my power and grappled it directly, forcing it out of line with my body just before it fired. Seconds later I had reached it.

  Matthew and Moira had both told me they were all but invulnerable to ordinary blasts of flame and even some focused lines of fire, but I was going to put that to the test. The shield around my body was glowing an intense white, and my footsteps had left burning patches of grass behind me.

  Jumping forward, I gripped one of its massive metal legs in my hands. At the moment, I was strong enough to lift it slightly, forcing the tortus to adjust its other legs to maintain balance. But other than that, nothing happened. If the machine had been made of iron or steel it would have begun to smolder and melt beneath my touch already. What the hell is this thing made of?

  Drawing on the earth, I pumped more heat into my shield, with the exception of the part covering my head, otherwise the glare would have made it impossible to see. Squeezing, I felt the metal under my hands begin to buckle. It collapsed, bent and useless long before I could melt through it. Shifting my stance, I pushed at the edge of the platform that supported its upper portion and tipped it over. Then I pressed myself against its underside and began to burn my way through.

  What felt like an eternity passed before the metal began to sag slightly and I was able to dig my fingers in a little, gaining a grip on the smooth surface. Using my now considerable strength, I pulled at it, as though trying to tear the metal apart with brute force.

  Despite the searing temperature and my strength, I failed. Mostly. Partly, I was hampered by the thing’s thrashing legs, forcing me to continually wrestle with it to keep it in place. All I had accomplished was to create a small crack in its under-plate.

  My first instinct was to reach into my pouch and get more of my iron bombs, to shove them through the small opening, but I stopped myself a second later. If I touch them as I am currently, there won’t be enough left of me to scrape into a slop bucket. I felt like an idiot.

  Stupid never dies, I reminded myself, but I’m really putting that motto to the test. My entire strategy had been stupid, using fire and heat when I had already been warned they were almost useless. Penny must have rubbed off on me over the years. I was being more stubborn than I was smart.

  I had an opening, though, so I sent a slender lance of fire into it, probing its interior until smoke began to billow outward. An ominous crackle and sizzling white sparks shot out, causing me to back away. Then I ran, cursing my own idiocy. I really am as dumb as I look. A battering ram of air struck my back and tossed me like a leaf through the air as the tortus exploded.

  I wound up lying flat on the ground, twenty yards away. Miraculously, my shield had weathered the blast and I had managed the landing without breaking any bones, at least as far as I could tell.

  My shield was no longer glowing—I had given up wasting my energy on that fruitless endeavor—but it began to shudder as the other tortus, which had been circling around its fallen friend, opened fire. Since I hadn’t yet anchored myself, my body began sliding across the green turf. The fight had started so well, but now I was getting annoyed.

  It was time to switch tactics. I had played around enough, trying things I had been warned wouldn’t work well. Matthew and Moira had both recommended lightning against these things, so I stretched out one hand toward the oncoming machine and sent forth a thundering stroke of actinic blue.

  The hammering assault on my shield stopped, but the tortus looked fine. Its weapon spun down and the other one, the railgun, began rotating into position. It was twenty yards away and I didn’t think it would miss.

  For a second, I wished I’d had the forethought to take out my staff earlier. Using it as a rune channel would have made my lightning much more effective. Part of the reason I disliked using lightning was that it was so difficult to control. Unlike fire or pure force, it tended to branch and seek other directions than the user intended for it to take. But it was too late to try and pull my staff out now. Drawing a six-foot length of wood from a belt pouch was an awkward enterprise under normal conditions; trying to do so now would just make me a stationary target.

  So I used an old trick. I drove my will into the ground, flinging a large mass of soil into the air and whipping it into a dirty brown cloud that obscured the space between and around us. Then I got to my feet and leapt into the air. The tortus fired at some point, but the confusion was enough that it failed to hit me.

  I had often heard Cyhan warn Penny about jumping during combat, since it robbed the person in the air of their ability to dodge, but that wasn’t a rule that really applied to me. Off the ground, I was more mobile than I was on it, and my magesight enabled me to see the tortus just as easily as I could have if the dirt cloud hadn’t been in the air. Grasping the wind with my power, I guided myself down to hover directly above the tortus.

  And then I proceeded to slam successive bolts of pure electric force into it. It continued to move without trouble after the first two or three, raising its railgun toward me, but by the fourth strike it started to twitch. I didn’t stop until it was shaking and smoking, gradually raising my elevation in case this one decided to explode as well.

  It didn’t, which I couldn’t help but feel was slightly anticlimactic after all the effort I had put into it. Oh well.

  Once it had stopped moving entirely, I glided toward the castle, setting down softly just twenty feet from the shield barrier where the wall had collapsed.
A line of people, mostly guardsmen, stood just inside the shield. My fight had attracted a crowd of onlookers. I scanned the crowd, looking for two faces in particular, Penny and Irene.

  I saw neither, and my chest tightened. The destruction of the main keep had my gut twisted into knots. Where were they? Had they retreated to our mountain home? Were they safe? I didn’t want to think about the worst case.

  No, Irene must be alive at least. Someone activated the shield barrier. I spotted Carl Draper at the front of the crowd and I called to him through the shield, “Captain Draper! Tell Irene to open the shield for me.”

  He moved as close as he could, since the shield muffled sounds slightly. “No one can open it, my lord. We’re trapped inside.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I protested. “Where is my wife? Where is my daughter?”

  The guard captain’s eyes drifted downward to stare at the ground.

  Chapter 37

  No, no, no, no, it can’t be! I struggled to restrain myself. I wanted to pound the shield down, but powered by the God-Stone, it was impervious to anything I could do.

  “Lady Irene is tending to the Countess in the barracks,” said Captain Draper after a moment.

  All the air left my lungs in an explosive sigh of relief. I had been afraid of the worst.

  “Your wife was badly wounded in the attack, my lord. I do not think she will survive,” he added.

  I had an entirely different opinion on the matter, but I had to get inside first. “Why can’t Irene lower the shield for me?”

  “The control chamber was destroyed during the attack. She has no way to control the enchantment,” explained the captain.

  “Oh, I see,” I said, nodding. Well, there was more than one way to skin a cat. Reaching into one of my pouches, I pulled out the cloth stencil for a teleport circle and laid it on the ground. With my aythar I burned a temporary circle into the soil and then picked up the cloth and folded it, putting it back in my pouch. With my finger, I burned a new key into the empty section of the circle and then stepped into it. Seconds later, I was inside the transfer house in the castle yard.

  There was no one there, and when I stepped out, I saw that the rest of the people in the yard were working steadily. Some moved and organized bodies, while others cleared away rubble and stone from the courtyard. They were surprisingly calm.

  Captain Draper reached me a moment later, as I marched toward the building that housed the barracks. “Did you organize all this?” I asked him, impressed by the degree of order they had achieved so soon after such an enormous disaster.

  “In part, my lord, as is my duty,” said the captain. “But I credit most of it to Lady Irene’s orders. She has been a steady rock for us since the attack.”

  My chest swelled with pride at his words. “Give me a quick summary of what happened,” I ordered.

  “They attacked in the night,” began the captain. “The outer wall was down, and part of the keep was destroyed within seconds. The shield barrier came on moments later, but two of those iron monsters were already inside. They cut our men to ribbons and continued the bombardment of the keep. Everyone inside would probably have died if it weren’t for your daughter.”

  “What did she do?” I asked, stopping. We were at the door to the barracks, but I wanted to hear the rest before entering.

  “According to Alyssa, she held the keep up. I don’t really how your magic works, of course, but the walls were collapsing and then they just stopped. She kept it together for a good long while, until most of the people inside had managed to get out. Those things,”—he pointed at the damaged remains of the two tortuses—“were attacking her the entire time. Then, the Countess got here and went after them like a rabid wolf. She managed to injure one and destroy the other. Lady Irene beat the wounded one to death with a rock from what I’m told. I didn’t see that part.” Draper paused before continuing, “But your wife, she was hurt quite badly.”

  My throat constricted, and I had trouble choking out a response. “Thank you, Captain. Return to your duties. I will check on her.” Then I opened the door and stepped inside the barracks.

  The interior was well lit, with lanterns glowing. Most of the beds held wounded men, the survivors. As I had seen, the dead were out in the yard. My youngest daughter was kneeling beside one of the injured, her eyes closed as she turned her attention to things that couldn’t be seen with her eyes.

  She had almost certainly sensed my entry, but her focus didn’t waver. I couldn’t fault her dedication, though. Healing was delicate work and she had never had any training in it. Irene was still very new to her power.

  Of course, I wanted to interrupt her. I was desperate to see Penny, but rather than spoil her effort, I examined the nearest wounded soldier with my magesight. He had suffered several nasty wounds, and though there was considerably more that could be done to assist him, I was proud of what I found. The skin had been sealed and while his ribs were still broken, at least one damaged blood vessel had mended. With this many, she didn’t have a lot of time to spare, I figured.

  Still, I was impressed that she had learned the trick for sealing skin so quickly. Irene had witnessed a lot of my discussions with her older siblings on the topic of wound healing, but she had never been able to see what we were doing directly, much less practice it. She had done well with little more than the information gleaned from those lectures.

  Then I noticed the patient on the next bed over, Alyssa. She was asleep, but a quick sweep of her body told me she had a broken leg and extensive bruising. “Father?” came Irene’s voice from behind me.

  I turned to look at her, and it tore at my heart to see her face. In less than twelve hours, my youngest’s face had gone from carefree to worn and haunted. She had been shouldering a tremendous burden by herself, and now her strong veneer was beginning to crack. “I’m so sorry—,” she added.

  I wanted to hug her, to let her cry it out—to do what fathers are supposed to do—make everything better, but I needed her strength still. “Don’t be sorry,” I replied. “You did more than anyone could expect. Bear it a while longer.”

  Her lip quivered a second, but then it firmed up and I embraced her. She squeezed me tightly and spoke into my chest, “But Mom…”

  I cut her off before the words could undo her. “Take me to her.”

  Penny was in Captain Draper’s private room, covered by a thick wool blanket. Her armor and clothing had been removed, and my magesight found no breaks or recent cuts to her skin. I glanced ruefully at the enchanted mail that lay across the nearby chair. It had done its job—nothing had penetrated—but once again, that hadn’t been sufficient. My wife lay on her belly, and when I drew the blanket back I hissed at the sight. Most of the visible skin was black or red; massive hematomas had formed beneath the skin. She looked as though someone had tied her down and beaten her with a small sledge.

  Beneath the skin, things were worse. Some of the vertebrae had been shattered and the ribs near them broken. Her kidneys were beyond help and all the other soft tissues were similarly ruined. If she had been conscious, she have would been in incredible pain, assuming she could feel anything. The damage to her spine meant she was likely paralyzed. It was a miracle she was still alive.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” said Irene softly, her voice filled with guilt. “Can you…? You can heal her, right?”

  My youngest was close to dissolving into tears, and I couldn’t blame her. I felt the same, but I pushed those feelings down deep. Neither of us could afford to give in to our emotions, not yet. What should I say, though? There’s nothing you could have done, I thought. This is beyond anything normal wizardry can heal. If it had been anyone else, I would have just told her it was hopeless and that the best thing to do would be to ease their passing.

  But this wasn’t anyone else. This was Penny. This was my Penny. I couldn’t accept that answer, and if I said those words to Irene, neither of us would be able to do the things we needed to do. “She’ll
be fine,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel. “Give me a few hours. I can fix this. Don’t worry.”

  “Dad, this is my fault,” said Irene.

  “Shhh, don’t blame yourself. This is life. None of us are perfect. If you start taking the blame for every tragic thing that happens, you’ll never be able to move forward. Give me some time with her. Don’t let anyone in until I open the door. Do you understand?”

  My daughter nodded, blinking back more tears.

  “You’ve done well. I couldn’t be prouder of you,” I added. “Go back out there and keep doing what you’ve done so far. Show them your strength. This is the burden we bear for the people we serve. Right now, it’s just you and me, so you’ll have to handle everything while I help your mom. Can you do that?”

  Irene stood with her head bowed, struggling to contain it all. Her shoulders shook slightly, but then she lifted her face and rubbed her cheeks. “Yes, Father.” Then she left, closing the door gently behind her.

  I put the bar in place once the door closed, and then I used a quick spell to lock the latch in place as well. I didn’t want any interruptions. With a few more words and a bit of aythar, I put a privacy ward around the room to prevent Irene or any of my other children, should they return, from seeing what I was doing.

  Moving to the bedside, I removed the blanket and then used my power to gently lift Penny’s body, sliding it to one side, making enough room for me to lie beside her. As careful as I was, she still felt it, and a low moan rose from her lips. Her eyes opened, fixing on me, piercing my heart.

  She tried to speak, but only managed a few hoarse grunts.

  “Don’t try to talk,” I told her, trying to keep my face calm. I was removing my own clothes. Strictly speaking, neither of us needed to be nude, but it simplified things slightly. After a few minutes, I finished and climbed carefully into the bed next to her. With our faces only inches apart, I gazed into the warm, brown depths of her eyes. “I should have been here,” I said. “But you did the impossible without me, as usual. You’re an incredible woman, Penny. I hope you know how much I love you.” Then I leaned forward and kissed her lips, linking our minds as we touched.