Guild Mage: Apprentice

Keri circled, placing his body between the dowager queen of Lucania and Liv. Now that her cane was gone, he didn't see much of a chance the old woman would launch a lightning bolt horizontally, instead of calling one down from the clouds above, but the last thing he was going to do was take the chance she could take Liv in the back. He widened his stance, settling down, and raised his Næv'bel into a high guard, with the haft back over his right shoulder and the blade pointing up to the sky.

The dowager hunched forward without her cane, both arms spread out to her sides, with her knobby, arthritic fingers wide, as if ready to grasp at any wisps of magic that came within range. Her authority was lapping them up hungrily - not a technique Keri had spent much time practicing. Golden rings set with pearls and white mana stones glittered above her knuckles.

"Protective of the kitchen wench, are you?" Millicent Loredan asked Keri. Her eyes were vicious, bloodshot and somewhat cloudy. "I've found that bastards breed bastards. Hoping to try your luck?"

Rather than engage with her taunting - he'd trained with plenty of soldiers who liked to try something similar - Keri watched her hips and her shoulders for the first shifts in balance that would signal an attack. Bheuv, the word of power he'd imprinted from Beatrice Summerset at Whitehill, let him read every tremor in her wrists, every breath she took.

If the fight had been purely physical, he had no doubt that he'd be able to cut down a single elderly woman without substantial effort. Once magic was taken into the equation, however - well, she'd already shown knowledge of at least three words of power. He couldn't afford to be distracted by what was happening on the rest of the battlefield.

"I warned the barons there'd be a cult of Ractia in Lucania," Keri said, finally. The exchange of words should have given Liv enough time to get over to where Julianne was fighting Genevieve Arundell. That was as much help as he could give her - that, and seeing to it that the dowager queen was pinned down, or better, killed right there and then. "I never suspected it would go right up to the top. How many members of the royal family serve the Lady of Blood?"

"She's told me of the scourge of the north, you know," the old woman taunted him. "How many years you spent hunting her worshippers through the frozen forests. I expect you've killed more of your own people than the Great Mother ever did, Inkeris."

Keri began to circle. It was a test - he wanted to see how mobile the dowager was without that cane. "If I'd been allowed to hunt in Lucania, this entire war might have been averted."

"No." Millicent Loredan shook her head. "My husband's bastard could never be allowed to live. So long as Julianne or any of her children draws breath, they are a threat to my son. And I will never permit that."

Keri noticed that, rather than circle with him, she simply shifted her footing to face him, moving as little as possible. Mobility was indeed one of her weak points, then. Fighting with Bheuv active was a revelation: he no longer had to guess what an opponent was going to do. The only limitation was his own reaction time, and he suspected that if he could learn Vefta - Keri cut the thought off. He couldn't afford to be distracted in battle.

"What a poisonous woman you are," he muttered. "Did it ever occur to you that if you'd simply raised a child with kindness, you would have had her loyalty for the rest of your days?"

When the dowager opened her mouth to respond with a taunt of her own, Keri lunged forward, swinging his blade down. People who'd never practiced against a polearm often underestimated just how much distance a soldier could threaten, and the old woman was no exception to that. In fact, from the way she moved, he doubted that she'd ever drilled in hand to hand combat, at all.

The old woman dissolved into a cloud of raptors, once again: northern owls, red tailed hawks, eagles and gyrfalcons. It was what she'd done every time he'd attacked before, and it was exactly what he'd expected.

"Savelet Aiveh Fleia o'Mae!" Keri shouted. He flooded the spell with mana, throwing an entire seven rings of mana into the casting. A bar of white light thicker than he was tall burned through the center of the flock, and a dozen birds crumbled into black ash in an instant. It was only because he'd imprinted the word himself that Keri wasn't blinded by the light, and it was with a certain amount of satisfaction that he saw her reform, blinking her eyes and burned.

While the old woman seemed to have avoided the worst of the assault, her skin was red everywhere he could see it, with burst blisters weeping pus. In several places, swathes of skin were actually blackened or burnt away entirely, revealing weeping red flesh beneath. The pained wail Millicent emitted might have been enough to give Keri pause, if he hadn't known exactly what sort of monster she was.

But he couldn't keep up that sort of spellwork for long. He had only seven rings left to work with now, and maintaining the use of Bheuv would slowly drain that away. If he ran out entirely, not only would he feel the exhaustion that came with being emptied of mana, but he'd lose the advantage of that spell. Keri leaped forward to press the assault, stabbing the blade of his Næv'bel out in a thrust.

"You stupid, stupid boy!" the old woman raged, half in anger and half in pain. As Keri came in, the word of seeing showed him, in exacting detail, how blood welled up from within her scorched flesh, covered the wounds, and reformed a layer of new, pink skin.

This time, she collapsed not into a flock of birds, but into a mass of blood. It was familiar - Keri had seen Wren do this in battle, on several occasions. Not only the blade, but the haft of his weapon splashed through the viscous liquid, throwing Keri off balance. Twin lashes of blood, like those which had sprung from the floating orbs he'd faced during the Day of Blood, lashed out. One wrapped around his leading arm, and the other his neck.

Keri struggled against the grotesque bindings; when all his strength proved insufficient to break the grasp of the lashes, he opened his mouth to speak an incantation. An explosion of burning light centered on his body would scour the whips away, even if it nearly emptied his body of mana.

The bloody lash around his neck snaked down into Keri's open mouth. He tasted nothing but thick, hot, coppery blood, filling his throat in an instant. He couldn't speak, and he couldn't get a breath. The lash forced its way down, down, so that he gagged and choked on it, and a wave of blind panic overwhelmed the rational part of his mind. There was only the building desperation to breathe - nothing else mattered.

As a boy, Keri had often thought his father's insistence on learning the basics of silent casting a waste of time. Savel was, after all, a word that excelled at ranged fighting. How often, the young Keri had wondered, would he actually be put in a position where he couldn't speak?

Now, he was grateful for every frustrating moment of practice.

Burning light erupted from every inch of Keri's skin, surrounding him in a nimbus of light that was as hot as the very heart of a blacksmith's forge. Savel cradled him in its comforting warmth, while burning everything else around him. Enchanted sigils etched into the steel plates of his armor, the haft and blade of his weapon, flared to life, protecting his equipment from the extreme temperatures unleashed by his magic.

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Blood blackened and boiled away, whether it was slicking the stones of the parapet beneath Keri's feet, leaking from the bodies of the fallen, or hovering in the air before him. The dowager's lashes were consumed first, and then the outermost layers of her viscous, grotesque form.

The dowager fell back into her human form, the old woman's frail body rolling across the stones like a bundle of dry twigs. Her skirts, bodice and cloak crawled with flickers of flame, having combusted from the sheer proximity to the heat Keri was giving off. She kept rolling, patting at the burning cloth as she went, until only faint wisps of smoke rose from her.

Keri staggered, but swung the butt of his haft down, catching himself on the comforting, study strength of the Næv'bel and using it as a walking staff. A cool wind blew the super-heated air which surrounded him away, and he gulped in great lungfuls of it. Two rings left. He wouldn't be able to do anything now but maintain Bheuv until the end of the fight - if he was fortunate.

"Still alive, there?" Linnea asked, coming up on Keri's right as Olavi joined him on the left. A quick glance showed Keri that they'd both been in the thick of the fighting: the armor plates both Elden warriors wore were scratched, dented, scorched, and covered in half-dried, sticky blood.

"Thank you," Keri gasped. The presence of his comrades at his side, just at the moment he needed them, was a comfort. "The battle?"

"We're pushing them back," Olavi said. "At the cost of a great deal of mana. But we're still outnumbered, and if Livara can't beat that archmage, the lines will break."

Keri nodded. "There isn't much I can do about that," he admitted, as he watched the dowager struggle back to her feet. "I have no mana left, and the old woman's been using a Ract spell to draw blood to her. I think she's using the blood to heal herself and shift forms, like one of the Great Bats." He was certain of it, in fact, based on the capabilities he'd seen Wren display.

"That means if we can deny her blood, we can stop her from shifting forms," he explained. "What I need the two of you to do - and anyone else you can round up - is to scour the blood from the wall, all around us, while I kill her. Burn it away, throw the corpses over the side, whatever you have to do, as long as she runs out."

The old woman muttered an incantation under her breath, and stretched out her hands, like grasping claws. Wisps of mana evaporated from the mana stone rings on her gnarled fingers, and once again blood began to flow toward her along the surface of the battlement, or to lift in hovering drops from nearby corpses, then float toward her through the air.

"Now!" Keri shouted, and twin flickering beams of light lashed out from the warriors to either side of him. Olavi scoured the left, burning away blood wherever his burning ray of light touched, while Linnea worked on the right to prevent anything from reaching the old woman.

"We won't be able to do this for long," Linnea warned him, then gritted her teeth and kept burning.

Keri gathered his strength and charged forward. With any luck, the dowager would be fighting with as little left as he was. Like so much else in life, it came down to a combination of stubbornness and endurance.

Millicent cried out in frustration: barely a trickle of blood made it to her, to be absorbed into her skin, compared to the positive flood that had come when last she'd cast the spell. Keri launched a rising cut, and she splashed into blood around it, but he'd expected that. When she reformed behind him - such a predictable trick - he thrust the steel-shod butt of his Næv'bel backward with brutal force.

The choked exhalation told him he'd caught the old woman right in the midsection, and Keri spun around, sweeping the blade of his weapon around in an arc and releasing the haft with his right hand, before catching the wood again higher up toward the blade, to shorten his grip.

Keri's aim was true. He sliced through Millicent Loredan's neck cleanly in a single stroke, separating her head from her body. If he'd expected a gout of blood, he was disappointed: instead, it seemed as if there was hardly any fluid left in her at all. The head dropped down onto the stones of the battlement, rolled a few feet, and came to a stop against the corpse of a Lucanian knight, facing up toward the sky at an angle. The old woman's eyes twitched once, and then were still.

The dowager's body fell away to his right a moment later, with a slight dragging sensation on Keri's right arm. He frowned, as her hand fell away. She'd managed to get a hand on him, perhaps just before his stroke finished the battle.

Olavi and Linnea stepped up to join him; the successive blasts of lightning, heat, and wind had opened up an empty space among the fighting. Keri didn't blame any of the Lucanian soldiers for not wanting to put themselves between him and the old woman; anyone without magic would have perished in a heartbeat, more as an afterthought than anything else.

It gave him a moment to take stock of the battle, before Bheuv exhausted the last of his mana capacity and ran its course.

He had to give it to the enemy commander: the crown forces had executed a clever plan. Days of siege had run the Eld down, leaving many of them far below full mana capacity. Then, a wave of levies and infantry sent to storm the wall had required the commitment of practically the entire northern alliance force. Once the vast majority of Elden magic users were engaged, the besieging forces had launched two strikes, to either flank of the wall, to draw out the elite mages, exposing the Whitehill commanders to a final, targeted assault. The southern commander had even managed to get Liv out of position, though it had cost him one of his most powerful assets in the form of the dowager queen.

Now, all but the last of the Elden magic had been used up repelling the assaults on the wall. Keri could still see the occasional beam of scouring, burning light, thorny vine, or blast of wind, but no longer were hundreds of Elden warriors in ranks launching volleys of synchronized attack spells. It was down to the knifework, so to speak, with armored warriors slipping in puddles of blood and gore that slicked the stones, and tripping over corpses of friend and foe alike.

But the Elden magic, and the courage of the northern humans, had pushed the enemy back. Someone had set the first ram aflame, at some point, Keri saw, and now it burned off to one side of the road. A second ram had been brought up, but Elden archers and northern crossbowmen were pouring the last of their arrows and bolts down on the men who tried to use it.

Not a single siege tower remained standing, though one seemed to have been toppled over sideways, where it pinned a dozen dead or dying soldiers between its wooden frame and the ground. There were still a few siege ladders, but now the sudden shock of the enemy's elite troops hitting the battlements had faded, human and Elden soldiers were pushing them back off the wall easily. Each time, a dozen southerners tumbled down, screaming, into the mass of troops before the wall.

And at the center of the wall, above the gate, two women dueled high above the battlefield. Genevieve Arundell was surrounded in a translucent orb of gold, veined with blue, that circled in great sweeping arcs, at the heart of a whirlwind that glittered in streaks of lights.

Opposite her, Liv dove and climbed on shining blue wings. Six swords of ice orbited her like the ring in the night sky. Bheuv gave Keri keen enough vision to understand what was happening: the two women seemed to be probing each other, having left the rest of the battle behind far beneath. That golden whirlwind was made up of dozens of weapons, each formed of coherent, golden mana.

A golden axe streaked toward Liv's face, only to be batted aside by a sword of ice. The blade executed a riposte, lunging without any hand at its hilt, tip aimed for Genevieve Arundell's heart. Before it could reach her, it was knocked aside by a chain of gold links, which sought to wrap and bind it.

And there were half a dozen such exchanges made simultaneously, all while both women flew through the sky, jockeying for position amidst their respective clouds of weaponry, moving so fast that Keri doubted anyone without the proper words of power would even be able to track the exchanges.

"We can't help her," Keri admitted aloud. "Not from down here. But we can secure the wall for when she's won. Rally everyone left who can still fight - Olavi, go and get them from the medical tents if you need to. Whatever happens, we hold here."

"Linnea," he began, and then stopped. A sudden pain filled his head, so intense that Keri staggered from the overwhelming force of it. He felt the muscles of his face sagging, and he pitched over to one side. Dimly, he was aware that Olavi had caught him before he hit the stones, but he couldn't make his mouth work. His Næv'bel clattered down to the stone, and an image flashed into Keri's mind:

The old woman's hand on his arm.