The wind whipped away, and Isu was gone. Well, she’d given me a plan. After I managed to absorb the power of our dead ancestors, I’d direct that power through a Crusader shield.
As the sounds of battle roared around me, I closed my eyes and pictured the vast white wastes of the Forgotten North, ice and snow as far as the eye could see. I didn’t simply picture this though. I willed myself to be there. With a curious sensation, almost as if my soul was being sucked out of my body, I felt myself flying at incredible speed across the sky. Mountains and oceans zipped past beneath me in a blinding blur, as if an incomprehensibly vast god had slapped the world and spun it like a ball on his fingertip.
In a second, I was above the ice wastes of the Forgotten North and diving, tearing earthward at an impossible speed. I plunged like an unbreakable arrow through the ice, traveling miles downward into the frozen earth, where the old dead had lain in the sleep of Death for tens of thousands of years. Their mummified corpses, black and leathery, lay dead but unrotting in the icy earth beneath the glaciers. As I floated, suspended like an enormous ghost stretched out to blanket the land, I drew the cold out of their ancient, dead bones, sucking it from their shriveled limbs, drinking it in and filling myself to the point of saturation.
Suddenly, with a violently lurching sensation, I was yanked back into my body. I gasped and shuddered, and the icy breath that came out of me formed a puff of vapor in front of my face. Cold that could have shattered steel and stone with its intensity filled every cubic inch of my body. But it was a comforting cold. It was the cold of power. The cold of Death.
I was ready.
I glanced at Elyse, who was holding the rope of golden light, and then waved at Rami. She nodded and straightened up before starting to fling throwing stars at Nabu. I jumped up and scrambled for the shield. As Nabu was batting away the projectiles and deflecting them with his warhammer, I slipped my left arm through the shield straps and brought it up before me.
Rami threw the last star at Nabu, who swatted it away just as easily as before, before she somersaulted over a pew and took cover behind a pillar.
Nabu boomed out a mocking laugh as he aimed his warhammer at me. “Foolish necromancer. Taste my fire!”
As he blasted a torrent of white fire my way, I poured the intense cold of ancient Death into the shield, filling it to the bursting point, and as the river of flames was about to hit me, I released the power.
Crushing cold and destructive rot surged out from the shield in a powerful wall of intense black energy. In a fraction of a second, it blasted through pews, turning them into piles of rotten wood, and it churned a passage through the marble floor, reducing it to rubble and dust. It sucked all light into its inky blackness, rushing forth in a pillar of anti-light.
My horizontal tower of surging darkness met the river of blinding white fire in the center of the cathedral. When they clashed, a great shockwave rippled through the ground and air, bowling over my skeletons and knocking Elyse and Rami to the ground.
Nabu’s fire was stopped dead in its tracks, swallowed up by the cold matte blackness of my wall of death. I felt the force of his fire pushing against me, but I gritted my teeth, focused my concentration, and pushed harder. Sweat poured down my face, and the shield trembled in my hands. My vision was peppered with black, but I continued channeling ancient death.
Then, my wall of darkness began to advance. Like the momentum of a boulder rolling down a hill, it picked up speed. With a sound like a banshee’s shriek, it swallowed Nabu’s fire. Finally free of the obstruction of the white fire wall, my pillar of anti-light rushed toward Nabu. He dashed while my wall pursued him, and he paused when he reached a beam of light coming through a stained glass window in the ceiling.
He bathed himself in the light while my pillar closed in. He raised his free hand when it was a yard away from him and cried out. A fresh fiery white pillar arose, preventing my magical wall from hitting him.
It was enough to halt the progress of my river of darkness, but not enough to push it back. We struggled against each other’s power with all our might, but for the moment, we were at a stalemate. I had now learned something about Nabu and his power: it came from the moonlight. Because of all the stained glass, there were only a few patches in the cathedral the moonlight didn’t touch. I needed to draw him to one such spot.
Elyse and Rami had both taken cover behind a row of pews, and I motioned for them to stay out of the fight. I could tell from their expressions that they wanted to help, but I couldn’t risk them getting hurt; I wanted them to be with me when I took back Brakith.
I kept channeling the power of Ancient Death through my shield, but I was starting to run low, and the shield was starting to buckle. It wouldn’t be long until I couldn’t hold up this fancy new attack of mine anymore.
Peeking out from behind my shield, I saw Fang taking cover near a large marble blessing font. It looked like it weighed a good few hundred pounds. It was too big for even a huge man to carry on his own, but it wouldn’t
