Chapter Twenty-Seven

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It was a smaller group, now, that was pushing on through the forest. One of the wolves was dead, and as I understood it the escorts watching our collective back had also suffered losses, a wolf to a silver bullet and two of Audgrim’s people to constructs. Richard’s shoulder was cut badly, and also dislocated. He had to retreat; there was just no point in dragging him onward, he’d get killed without accomplishing much. Similarly, Melissa was in no state to be fighting, and while the wolf who took two silver bullets in the chest was still alive, they’d be lucky to stay that way even with treatment and rest.

So, we were down people. Losing Richard, in particular, was an issue; the pyromancer was our biggest single threat after Jack, I was pretty sure. At least against groups. I wouldn’t bet on him in single combat against, say, Andrew or Capinera, but when it came to wiping out whole swathes of people in an instant, it was hard to beat fire magic. It was going to be harder to get through the swarms of constructs without him.

Andrew and Cassie conferred briefly, then had another two wolves join us. That left the rear guard rather sparse, particularly given that the group of wounded needed an escort to get out of the forest safely. Audgrim had wanted to have them chance it, arguing that Richard was still capable of defending them and most of the constructs behind us were already destroyed. Then he saw the wolves, Jack, Capinera, and me all just staring at him in a very unimpressed way. He knew better than to keep pushing at that point.

So, there were two more wolves with us, both in fur. I recognized one but didn’t know her name. Several other werewolves, two of Audgrim’s thugs, and the Tribe wizard—her name was Alice, I remembered suddenly—were all retreating as well. They would probably have needed to anyway, most of them. My understanding was that they’d run into a group where both of the humans supervising the constructs were minor mages, and while Alice had dealt with that, it hadn’t come free.

I was almost glad for that. I’d been getting increasingly creeped out by how much magic wasn’t being thrown at us. Those two were still mercenaries, almost certainly; Alice said they were nowhere near strong enough to be the ringleaders, and the wolves didn’t recognize their scent. But it was at least confirmation that not all of the magic out here was concentrated at the tree.

So, overall, it was a smaller group pushing on. We were almost there, the wolves were certain of that from how fresh the scent was now. But the cannon fodder had done their job. We’d lost some people, and more than that, the ones who were still present were tired. We’d been hiking through the forest with intermittent fighting for an hour now, and that was exhausting. I could feel the fatigue in my back and shoulders. Jack hadn’t thrown any punches quite as hard as that first blast that took out a whole stand of trees at once, but he’d still been doing some heavy lifting, and it showed. He looked strained. I’d sprained my wrist fairly badly, all of the werewolves had minor but noticeable injuries, Audgrim was tired, and Saori was getting worn out from all the hiking. We found one more group of constructs as we went, and while the kitsune was still dancing through the melee and reveling in the violence, she wasn’t quite as quick or graceful now. Some of the constructs actually connected, and she had to rely on the armor to stop the claws.

This was, I thought, probably all that the mages had been expecting. They’d thrown a hundred and fifty constructs and at least a dozen trained, well-equipped human mercenaries at us. And all they’d even been trying to do was slow us down and wear us out a bit. Both the resources and the callous disdain for the lives of their employees this plan implied were disturbing to me.

The sun was out of sight and we were walking in the dim, grey forest twilight when I felt magic and stopped. The wolves and Jack stopped too, and we were all turning to face the same direction. We were walking next to a hill; up ahead, that hill became a cliff face, impassable. But I could see a small opening in the rock, likely leading into a pocket canyon. And from that opening, I could feel corrupted human magic. After a few moments, I also heard voices from inside, faint but noticeable.

“We’re here,” Andrew said. It wasn’t necessary, but I guess sometimes there are things that someone has to say even though everyone already knows. “Get ready.”

I dropped my backpack with some relief. I was glad I’d brought it. The medical supplies had been handy, the water had been helpful in this heat, and while I hadn’t needed the wilderness survival gear, it was good to have on hand. But I was tired, and it was heavy, and it would just get in the way now.

All around me, people were drawing weapons. Audgrim and Capinera had their swords drawn, his a shorter, heavier blade that looked capable of both slashing and thrusting. It sort of fit their respective looks in general. Her armor was some matte black material, flexible and form-fitting; her weapon was a silvery rapier, light and long. In her own way, Capinera was as much a dancer on the battlefield as Saori, though of a very different kind. The kitsune seemed to favor baiting enemies into overextending and punishing them for it a piece at a time. It was skillful, graceful, and more than a little cruel. Capinera was similarly graceful but her fights were over in mere moments.

Audgrim looked nothing like a dancer. He looked like a large man in heavy steel armor (I truly couldn’t imagine how he’d managed this hike in that) with a sword.

Andrew had what looked like a heavy machete in one hand and a comparably heavy pistol in the other. Jack was holding that tire iron and he was wreathed in magic, a thick aura of shimmering not-light and petrol fumes that was almost painful to be around.

I wasn’t sure what to do, personally. Several of my knives had been lost or broken, which wasn’t unexpected. There was a reason I’d brought a bunch of them. When you hit things as hard as I do, breaking knives is not a novel experience. I still had a few; there was the aluminum-alloy dagger, a cheap plastic-fiberglass knife, and a steel kerambit. But I didn’t really expect any of them to matter here. I highly doubted a knife was going to turn the tide in this fight, and I really didn’t know what I was doing against serious mages. The only time I’d seen one in combat before today was while rescuing Melissa, and I hadn’t been paying any attention to him at the time.

So I just shrugged, and followed them into the canyon. It was a tight fit, forcing us to walk single-file, and I couldn’t see anything past the back of Jack’s head while we were moving through that passage. Once we were through and able to spread out, though, I was greeted by a seriously disturbing scene.

It was a pocket canyon, as I’d guessed. Cliff face on either side, rocky ground with a bit of grass between. There was a single tree at the far end, maybe twenty yards from me or a little more, and it was immediately obvious it was the one we were all here for. It was an apple tree, with golden bark and silver leaves, and not as large as I’d imagined. I could see the hilt of a blade protruding from the tree, though no details at this distance.

As expected, there was a large ritual focus already laid out around the tree. I couldn’t make out details of that either; it was getting dark, and the magic was a muddled, powerful morass. There was too much magic in this canyon for me to get a read on any single signature. But I could feel that the ritual focus was humming with power, an enormous amount of magic being funneled into it.

It wasn’t complete, though. I could feel that very clearly. The target, a tall, golden humanoid figure standing next to the tree, was motionless, sure. But she wasn’t actually bound yet. And I could see, as well, that the sacrifice was not yet complete. They were going to be using both blood sacrifice and geomancy to fuel this, I was certain, and they hadn’t actually killed the former yet. It was stretched out on the ground, looking like a strange hybrid of tree and wolf. It also looked awful, sick and weak. But it wasn’t dead yet.

When I saw that, some absent part of me noted that I now understood the reason the coven had bound a tree spirit near my house. Sure, it had been a way to point us towards the Sidhe, trying to instigate a war there. And it had been practice for this, as well. But it had also gotten them a captive tree spirit that was unable to fight back. Someone bound to nature or to Faerie, the VNC consultant had said. Like to bind like. I expected sacrificing one tree spirit to bind another was about as good a sympathetic link as you could get.

And then, finally, there were the mages themselves. There were five of them, in that little canyon, all human, all stinking of rot and death and power. No constructs here, no hired guns. I wasn’t sure why, but I was glad. It made things…tidier. I didn’t have the time to get any more detailed impression of them than that. By this point, they knew we were here, and they were turning to face us, and the fight was on.

The first few moments were insanely intense, overwhelming really. Saori opened with her rifle, taking precise, measured shots much as the mercenaries had. I was confident her aim was a lot better than mine. The bullets did exactly what I expected, which is to say, jack shit. Her aim was good, but they struck invisible barriers inches from the mages and deflected off, or hit casual clothing that stopped them dead.

I knew very little about serious combat magic, had never seen it used. But I knew a few things. One of them was that mages tended to have put a lot of time and energy into preparation before the violence ever started. It was just necessary in order for human mages to function effectively. Another was that if you were getting ready for a fight in this world, being able to deal with guns was, like, the first thing you worked on. Of course these guys could bounce bullets off of kinetic barriers or otherwise protect themselves.

They were less able to deal with Jack Tar’s opening move.

I hadn’t actually seen him throwing any big punches. The biggest had been out of my line of sight, and since then he’d been holding back, conserving his energy. Now I saw what he had been saving that energy for. He forced power through the tire iron he used as a focus, an aid to help him shape a specific kind of magic. In this case, it was clearly designed for managing kinetic force. And he put so much power into that spell that just being around it was actually painful for me.

I could tell that the mage he threw that blast of raw force at did something to disrupt it. It was impressively quick thinking, really; the spell only took a second or two to reach him, and he was already working to disrupt it somehow. He also had a barrier already active designed to divert that kind of energy, one strong enough to laugh at bullets.

Because of those factors, Jack’s spell only hit hard enough to pick the mage up and throw him fifteen feet through the air. He hit the wall of the canyon hard enough to break bones, and while I didn’t think he was dead, it sure as hell took him out of the fight for a few moments.

Tired, far from his places of power, through multiple kinds of magical defenses, Jack Tar was still capable of that. There were reasons people were scared of him.

The rest of us were moving forward. Guns were clearly useless, and I didn’t even try to use mine. I just moved forward at a fast jog, and found to my surprise that the aluminum-carbide dagger was in my hand. Saori had given up on shooting, and was also closing distance, as were Audgrim and the werewolves. None of us were really able to do much at range. Capinera was already halfway to the nearest of the mages.

Before we could get there, the retaliation came, and holy shit did I suddenly understand why the people I’d talked to about battle magic were so nervous about it. Jack had taken one of them out of the fight for the moment, but that left four of them still up. That was very bad news for us.

I wasn’t sure what the first did; the spell felt like a spiderweb, and I could sense both the power and malice in it, but I didn’t know what it did. I could see the effects, though. Cassie and both of the other wolves in fur suddenly went from charging full-tilt at the enemy to rolling on the ground in agony. No visible injury, but the pain was obviously incapacitating them. A second gestured slightly, mouth moving to shape a word I couldn’t hear with a rush of shimmering power, and suddenly there were festering, necrotic sores opening on Andrew’s exposed skin.

That was bad. Werewolves were supposed to resist both bodily alteration and mental magic. It was in their nature that these things were hard to use on them. If they were all getting taken out that easily, it meant very bad things for the rest of us.

A third did something much more obvious. Her gesture was more expansive, and she was holding a wand of some kind that literally glowed from how much power she was pushing through it. The effect was obvious, too, a fireball suddenly exploding out of nowhere, catching Saori, Capinera, and Andrew in the blast radius. It smelled awful, rot and corruption and scorched hair and burning rubber, and I had no idea if any of that smell was real.

Nor did I particularly care, because the fourth was looking my direction, and he looked pissed. I noted that he was holding a sickle, presumably the Sidhe artifact they’d stolen. The next thing I knew, a blast of force much like Jack’s hit me head-on.

It hurt. The world was spinning, and I had no idea what was going on, and then I hit the rock wall behind me. That hurt more, much more, agony blossoming all through my body. I fell, and for a moment I was just lying on the ground dazed, watching the fight continue around me.

The fireball had done relatively little. Andrew was scorched, but the necrosis had been the more damaging attack by far. The other two appeared to be completely unharmed by the flame. As I watched, Saori suddenly pivoted away from the pyromancer towards the mentalist, the one who had taken all of the fur-form werewolves out at once.

It was not a surprise that Saori would use fire. I mean, at this point, I’d have to be an idiot to find that startling. But I hadn’t really put much thought into how she went about incinerating her enemies, and on some level I’d been expecting her to use magic.

Pulling out an incendiary grenade and lobbing it in the mage’s direction, less so. The barrier stopped it from actually hitting him, but it went off at his feet in a burst of flame that looked absolutely hellish. I could only see it for a moment before the mage was enveloped in a cloud of dark smoke, which made vision impossible, though in a strange way, not so much completely obscured as rendered dark and scrambled. But from what I could see, the fire was clinging to him like napalm, refusing to go out.

The werewolves were standing up, because apparently this mage was a wimp who let a little thing like immolation break his concentration. A loud crash suggested that Jack had just brought a substantial amount of the cliff down onto the poor bastard he’d focused on. It occurred to me that I should probably get up before I experienced a similar fate, so I tried that.

It hurt. A lot. The sprained wrist was all but forgotten now, meaningless by comparison. It hurt to move, to breathe. Several cracked ribs at least, I was guessing, and I’d be lucky if there weren’t serious internal bleeding. My whole left arm hurt and was hard to move. I managed to stand and stumble away from the cliff, but the pain was almost blinding. I felt dizzy, dissociated and disoriented. Everything felt strangely dreamlike.

Saori’s incendiary grenade had been horrifically effective, but it had also drawn attention. The same guy who’d slammed me against the rock now caught her with the same sort of attack. The kitsune was fast, but she wasn’t fast enough to dodge that, and it picked her up and threw her back hard. She hit the canyon wall and crumpled, and she wasn’t getting up right away.

Audgrim, Andrew, and Cassie had all closed on the guy with a thing for necrosis, but they weren’t having much effect. The kinetic barrier was more than up to the task of bouncing swords and teeth, even driven by the inhuman strength of a werewolf or the craftsmanship of dvergr blacksmiths. He was falling back a bit under the onslaught, but they weren’t even getting close to actually hurting him. Cassie fell again, and this time it was obvious why, because there was no way her forelegs were capable of functioning now. It looked like she’d lost control of them, and then a mix of some direct effect of the spell and her own momentum had dislocated both of them at the shoulder. One of the other wolves burst into flame and collapsed.

I realized I was stumbling forward, which seemed kind of stupid given how scary these people were and how little I had that could do anything to them. But then I, like everyone else present, paused what I was doing, because Capinera had started singing.

I didn’t know what she was singing, didn’t understand the words. It might not have been words at all. It didn’t matter in the slightest. She had so much raw emotion in that song that language would have just gotten in the way. I was on the other side of the canyon, with earplugs in, and not the target she was aiming for, and it still made me want to bawl my eyes out.

The pyromancer, who was clearly the person she was focused on, had it much worse. I thought she probably did start crying. She definitely was not able to maintain much focus, and it didn’t seem like defense was her strongest suit anyway; fire wasn’t really suited to that. Capinera, still singing, stepped up to her, and the songbird’s rapier flicked out once. Just once. The mage fell.

A moment later, so did Capinera. I wasn’t sure what had happened, who had hit her with what. There was so much magic moving around that I couldn’t track any of it at all at this point. She wasn’t visibly injured, but she was unconscious, I thought. Maybe the mentalist had managed to focus through the pain and tag her with something.

Things were not looking great. Not terrible, but not great. Saori was dead or incapacitated, Andrew was severely injured, Cassie was incapacitated. One of the other two wolves was dead or too badly burned to function. I was badly injured, even if I’d been able to do anything here to begin with.

At the same time, though, the enemy wasn’t doing a whole lot better. Jack had done a lot of damage with that opening attack, and then finished that mage off without the rest of us even being involved. The mentalist had gotten that spell off to drop Capinera, but that was all he was going to manage; I could just barely see him collapsing in flames through the smoke from Saori’s grenade. The pyromancer was dead. The witch who specialized in making people rot before they died was still up, but he was getting pressed pretty hard, and I thought he was tiring. The kinetic barrier was still holding up against Audgrim and Andrew, but he wasn’t counterattacking now, and he was giving up ground fast.

That really only left the one who seemed to be their ringleader, the guy who was holding the sickle. I wasn’t sure quite what his deal was, but he seemed to be good with basic forces, kinetic energy, raw magical energy flow and manipulation. His magic was more abstract than the others, from how it tasted, less visceral. And unfortunately, I was the closest person to him.

I couldn’t take another direct hit. I was certain of that. The first had been brutal, and I didn’t think he’d even been trying that hard. A second would kill me. But at the same time, I could feel him drawing a lot of magic in, a whole lot of energy going towards some working. I wasn’t sure what it would do, but I was sure that letting him finish would be very, very bad.

I was still stumbling forward. I felt like a passenger in my own body, an observer. I didn’t have any weapons that could actually hurt him, and I thought it was probably stupid verging on suicidal that I was approaching him right now.

Then I realized that Saori had the right idea. Hell, so did Capinera, if I’d been thinking clearly enough to see what they had in common. These mages were terrifyingly strong, but mages needed preparation to function effectively. They weren’t idiots; they would be prepared for a wide range of attacks. But nobody could be prepared for everything. Things like incendiary grenades, or the song of a banshee-lite, were unexpected or abstract enough to work.

I didn’t like using flashbang grenades. They were a risky weapon at best for me. My senses were so acute that they would generally be far more painful to me than to whatever I was fighting, and the best I could hope for was that we would both be incapacitated. But I’d brought one along, just in case, and this was exactly the kind of situation that called for it.

The world went away in a painful flash of light and sound, so disorienting I barely counted as conscious for a few moments. I was able to stay standing, but only just. I could feel more magic moving around, feel a rush of warm air on my face. There didn’t seem to be any pain, though, so I was guessing it wasn’t me who just got set on fire.

When the world started to come back into focus, I saw that the fight was pretty much over. The necrosis specialist seemed to have been dragged into the earth and crushed by something Jack did, only his head and arms left above ground. He was very much dead. The guy with the sickle who focused more on telekinesis was still alive, but only barely; he was bleeding heavily from where Andrew had gotten a hit in with the machete, and stumbling backwards towards the tree. I was following, mostly because I wasn’t sure what else to do. Andrew, Jack and Audgrim were as well. We were, I realized, the only people still standing and functioning. And frankly, even we were pretty fucked up. Jack was visibly, deeply exhausted, and he had a broken arm. I was barely walking, and Andrew looked like an extra from a horror movie, horribly burned and with open, gangrenous wounds over much of his face and arms. The fact that the werewolf was still functional at all was astounding.

He was, though. As we all kept advancing, the mage fell, and Andrew was on him in a heartbeat. His left arm was dangling uselessly at his side, but the right had a machete in it, and werewolves were strong. Now that the mage was too exhausted and dazed to maintain a kinetic barrier, that was much more apparent. One more slash was enough to cut the man almost in half, exposing much of his chest cavity. The idea of him surviving that was ludicrous.

They’d kept their promises, a small part of me noticed with the mental equivalent of a hysterical giggle. Saori had most definitely set one of them on fire, and while Andrew hadn’t precisely ripped this guy’s heart out, I was willing to count cutting him open so that it was exposed to the air as close enough.

I stumbled forward and sat down hard on the grass. Every part of me hurt. We’d won, though, after a fashion. It was a Pyrrhic victory, but they were all dead, and at least some of us weren’t. The sword was still embedded in the tree. The humanoid tree spirit, the one next to the tree, was still motionless, the ritual spell not actually disrupted. The lupine one on the ground was still barely alive, I could see that. I remembered the VNC guy saying that they’d killed the spirit when they cut the tree down. It was not a great memory.

Audgrim and Jack were catching up now. I let myself slump down a bit, next to the dying tree spirit. Sitting up felt like far too much effort right now. I reached over to the spirit, stroking his head gently. It felt like a cross between fur and fern. “It’s okay,” I murmured to him, soft and gentle and every bit of it a lie. “It’s okay. I know it hurts. I’m sorry. Shhh. ’Sokay.”

I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. It was probably stupid. It was just…he looked so sad lying there, sick and dying because of a wound too abstract to heal. I’d never seen him before this moment, but I was sure he deserved better than this. Sitting with him while he died was very cold comfort, but it was all I had.

In front of me, Audgrim reached the dead body of the last mage. He bent down, and with his free hand he plucked the sickle from the dead man’s hand. He still had his sword in the other. He looked at the sickle for a long, long moment. Then he tucked it into his belt and sighed. “Looks like we got them all,” the half-dvergr said, sounding a kind of tired that I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard before, not from anyone. “It’s over.”

The other two men were standing next to him. I frowned a little. This felt off somehow. In a dissociated haze, I pondered that observation while I murmured soft lies to a creature that I suspected didn’t even know what words were.

“Looks like it,” Andrew agreed. He sounded tired, too, and he sounded like the agony of his wounds was finally hitting. Jack was nodding.

I realized what felt wrong, and opened my mouth to shout a warning.

Before I could get the words out, Audgrim took one long step forward, and stabbed Andrew in the back.

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