‘I will also give you something of a parting gift, Samuel. I know you want it, and perhaps it can serve to remind you of the tenderness we once shared.’ And with that, almost beyond belief, she wriggled her ring from her finger and set it down gently upon the table. ‘Here, take it. It is yours. Take whatever power it can give you and enjoy whatever happiness it may bring,’ and she slid it across to the middle of the table.
Samuel’s pulse raced and he had to hold himself from snatching the thing up. He weighed up the situation, for it seemed remarkable that his total loss had somehow become a victory.
He leaned forward expectantly and placed his finger on the second Argum Stone. He felt its cold surface throbbing with power against his skin and,at the same time,he noted a smile teetering on the edge of Alahativa’s lips. He did not trust her, but it was too late for her to change her mind. It really was the second relic beneath his finger and victory was now his. She was powerless and he now had everything.
At that thought, something brilliant flashed through the air between him and the ring and, with a mechanical clang, a long arm of steel slammed into place beside the table. Samuel staggered back, disoriented and in shock as he was suddenly cut off from his magic. There was a gasp from the Emperor and a shrill cry from the Koian woman, but,as Samuel looked towards them dumbly, Canyon seemed quite satisfied.
Looking back to the table, Alahativa had already snatched back her own magical ring and had slipped it back upon her finger. She was now prying a matching relic from a severed hand that lay limply upon the table, spilling blood from its elbow across the polished surface. A long,sharpened blade, slick with blood, lay exposed beside the table, sticking out from the wood where it had come to rest. A dark recess ran across the middle of the tabletop and it seemed it was from this that the device had exploded. Seeing the blade and the blood and the arm, Samuel slowly managed to put the meaning of the scene together, as his mind fumbled to make sense of things. He had been distracted in that final instant as the Queen had given him her ring, and his magic had waned enough for the blade to do its work. The Queen had judged him well.
Samuel staggered again and grabbed hold of the nearby chair, still trying to convince himself that the arm on the table belonged to him. He struggled to pick the thing up, then he realised that all he was achieving was waving around the stump of his right arm and spraying more blood.
‘How could you?’ the Emperor cried out, struggling against the guards that held him tight.
‘Take him,’ the Paatin Queen called and a team of her mengrabbedSamuel with rough hands.
Samuel was still looking about dumbly, when a white-hot spray of wild magic spat out and turned the men around him to ashes with a screaming flash. The Koian woman was free, her own guards erased from existence.
‘You cannot do this!’ she screamed,and again she lashed out, throwing her crudely cast spells blindly across the room and a wizard and more guards vanished with a hellish shriek. ‘Run! Run, you idiot!’ she called to Samuel and he lurched intoactionand began staggering down the stairs.
The Emperor and Canyon flailed to be away from the woman beside them as her spells shot out in all directions, blasting stone and chair and curtain, evaporating Paatin left and right as they tried to evade her wrath.
‘Kill him! Kill him!’ Canyon blurted out, pointing to Samuel. ‘Don’t let him get away!’
No sooner had he bellowed the words than the Koian woman had spun and locked her wild eyes upon him. ‘It was you!’ she said. ‘You told her everything!’ Untamed magic still poured from her in blazing, flailing tentacles, keeping the guards fleeing and the Paatin Queen ducked out of sight behind the table and a veil of protective spells. It seemed only luck that Samuel and the Emperor had not been blasted bythe Koian woman’suntempered fury.
Canyon realised his mistake and horror drained his face white. ‘No. No, I did nothing.’ he stammered, backing away, but the raging woman put her palms to his face and he screamed like a girl. ‘Please! Don’t!’
‘Why couldn’t you let me live! Why did you do this to me!’ she cried, and Canyon vanished with a rising wail. His fleshwas incineratedand his clothes fell empty to the floor. In his place was a knot of life energy that only Samuel could see and she called it into herself, pulling it in with her will. Her hair whipped about her as she swallowed his essence and the intensity of her magic doubled, surging about her like a storm of sparks and shattered embers. She turned back to Samuel with rage still in her eyes, but when she saw him still standing there,as if struckdumb, she shoutedindisbelief.
‘Go!’ she implored him.
Remembering himself, Samuel wobbled to be away, but fell on the final step, slipping in his own blood, for his vital fluidhad been pouringdown his legs all the while. Instinctively, he tried to take the fall with both hands, but with one entirely gone, he crashed roughly onto the floor.
Alahativa’s magic then bloomed behind him and the Koian woman’s magic ceased. Rough hands took hold of him andhauledhim back to his feet. As they dragged him away, he could see that the Koian woman was lying still on the floor and the Paatin Queen was standing over her, surrounded by a blaze of her own intense power.
‘Let him suffer!’ the Paatin Queen called after him. ‘A slow death for him! Nothing terrible should be spared!’
Everything after that was shades of grey, flashes of light and dark, and moments of silence and screaming. He felt his body being skewered by agony and he did his best to remove himself from all sensation. Heat and cold washed over his skin, fire drilled into his skull and ice into his bones, crushing pressure filled his joints until they felt fit to burst and his breath felt like molten lead in his lungs. His right arm was not wracked by torturous pain- amazingly-which made less sense than anything,for that was the very arm he had seen quivering on the Paatin Queen’s table.
He remembered being dragged and he remembered the smells of the catacombs. Rough hands pushed and shoved him and then he felt himself beingshovedinto a narrow hole. There was a moment of peace, and then a flash of lightning.
He felt the coldness of death enveloping him, forcing itself into his veins but,as his vision cleared, Samuel found himself lying in a stone courtyard, amidst a wild scuffle. He could see Turians fighting Paatin, but it seemed to make no sense. His arm had returned and he could see his fingers wriggling and flexing at the tip of his hand. Strangely, he could feel warm blood seeping from a wound in his chest, yet the pain of that wound was too distant to bother him.
Some of the Paatin that fought nearby had wings protruding from under their capes, and the Turians that faced them wore the colours of the Ghant defenders. Captain Ravenshood and Grand Master Tudor were there, struggling against their foe, and the battle seemed to begoingin the Paatin’s favour.
Only then did he realise that this was some kind of dream or memory from his past. ‘
Darkness crept in around his vision once more as the blood continued to drain from his middle, until he was blind and the sounds of the battle felt like echoes from far away. He knew the men were still tussling around him, for Turian and Paatin alike were visible to his magician’s senses, even though his eyes had lost their ability to focus. They moved like luminous ghosts cavorting all around, dancing around his dying form.
Grand Master Tudor, brighter than the others, seemed like a god amongst his followers, and the bolts of magic that bloomed out from him twirled in the air like ink in water, swirling and curling all around. Many others already lay dead around the courtyard, and Samuel could see their life energies creeping out around the courtyard like cautious tendrils trying to escape from the scene.
It was these he clasped onto, for the energy felt akin to his own-warm and inviting in the bleak coldness all around. He remembered when Master Glim had died and he remembered the thrill of life he had felt when he had absorbed that tiny mote of his teacher’s energy. So he grasped the dying embers of energy in the room and began calling them towards himself.
As they reached him, he swallowed them into his own presence and they became part of him. It was exciting, rejuvenating. He could taste the very nature of the peoplewhohad died here,feel their final terrified thoughts,see their final blood-curdling visions. It was frightening, yet somehow irresistible, for his only desperate thought was that of his own survival.
He beckoned for all the wasted power in the room to come to him, and obediently the streamers of life did come. Slowly, they crawled through the air towards him, and each one that entered him gave him back a tiny spark of life.
