Lights spun around us as we vanished and reappeared in a room nearly identical to the one which we’d just left, containing a bank of metal and buttons hooked up to the wall and another platform in the centre. The machinery was almost the same, but with one key difference. A cage stood at its side, connected to the machinery by wires, but instead of sprites, it contained a dead body. The man lay sprawled on the floor of the cage. I didn’t know who he was, thankfully, but the living man standing in front of us could only be Hawker, the elusive traitor lich.
Or rather, a lich no longer. His hair hung to shoulder length, his face was faintly lined with wrinkles, and he showed zero signs of ever having been dead.
Facing off against him were the Death King and Liv.
18
I knew they survived. How Liv and the Death King had got here from London, I had no idea, but relief crossed Liv’s face when she set eyes on our group.
Hawker turned his gaze on us. “You weren’t supposed to be able to get in.”
“You didn’t account for all of the Death King’s spies,” said Harper. “Some of us figured out how to operate the transporter.”
“Damn right,” I said.
Hawker scanned our group. “I have to admit, I hoped to minimise casualties.”
Liv stepped in, her hands igniting with spirit magic. “You massacred a roomful of people, you sick bastard. You deserve everything you get.”
Magic blasted from her palms. Hawker dodged her attack, but Ryan’s air magic sent him crashing into the bank of machinery. Recovering, Hawker slammed a button and the transporter ignited.
The platform spun with light, carrying a new group of strangers into the room. Humans, hands aglow with the same white light as the transporter itself. Spirit mages. Ryan ran to help the Death King intercept the new arrivals, Liv on their heels.
“I thought you were supposed to be back at the castle,” she said.
“Like I’d leave you two to deal with this alone,” Ryan responded. “What happened in here?”
“A new node links this place directly to London,” Liv explained. “Not only that, it also links to all the other citadels with a working transporter, and anyone who uses it can get out onto Earth. We have to shut it off.”
Shit. It links directly to London?
I threw a fireball at the spirit mages, which hit one of them in the back. Liv moved to fight alongside the Death King, while the rest of us jumped into the fray. Lights flew back and forth and mingled with the brightness around the edges of the room, a reminder of the pillar of light surrounding the citadel from the outside. Can people on Earth see this, too? The ordinary people, unaware of the magical world, might well think the apocalypse was nigh.
The only way to turn off a transporter, as far as I was aware, was to use an inferno cantrip, but there was no way I’d risk it in a crowded room like this.
“We need to shut that thing off.” I caught up to Miles, fighting spirit mages off with fireballs as I did so. “Can we do it from Arcadia?”
“We can try.” He shoved his fist into a spirit mage’s chest, and the mage collapsed into a heap. Vaulting the body, he made for the platform, while I threw fireballs left and right to clear our path.
Reaching the platform, Miles caught my arm, pulling me up alongside him. Then the pair of us vanished in a flash of light and reappeared in the near-empty room of Arcadia’s citadel.
“Where’s the power source in here?” I looked around the room. “There’s no sprites…”
“There doesn’t need to be.” Miles hopped off the platform. “The machine has its own battery inside it already. Hawker was trying to do something specific in the other citadel, Liv said, something he needed a shit-ton of energy for. The sprites were there to give it a boost.”
“That’s sick.” The humming machine seemed downright quiet compared to the chaos we’d left behind, but my heart continued to pound with nerves. “Was he trying to turn the citadel into a node, like he did in Elysium? He was using… using the sprites’ life force as a battery, right?”
“Yeah.” He looked pale. “Thing is, it didn’t have to be sprites. Those cantrips he used… the infernos… when he killed those people in London, he used their life force to fuel the node linking it up to Elysium.”
Nausea flooded me. “There’s gotta be a way to turn it off.”
But if he’d used those people’s lives like a giant battery and the spirit energy was still flowing back and forth between the two realms… I was in way over my head here. I was no spirit mage. Yet from the disgusted look on Miles’s face, he would never have considered the possibility of using spirit magic in such a way before.
The transporter lit up, lights spinning across its surface. I tensed, conjuring fire to my hands as a lich appeared on the platform.
“It’s only me,” Harper said. “We’re in trouble. Hawker grabbed Liv and took her through the transporter somewhere else.”
“What?” I said. “Why would he take her?”
“Because he wants her to help him,” said Harper. “The Death King went after them, but Hawker used some kind of spell to paralyse everyone else in the room. It didn’t affect me, so I had to run. There was no other way out except the transporter.”
“Because they turned off the other nodes in Elysium,” I said. “Shame we can’t do the same to the transporter.”
Or… could we?
Miles caught my gaze. “What is it? You look like you just had an idea.”
“It’s a long shot,” I admitted, “but didn’t Liv have a cantrip which can turn off a node? If the citadel in Elysium
