Nicci was mystified. With the stakes so high, why didn’t Richard just explain clearly? She had told him about the enormous threat of the reawakened army. She had counted on Richard, needed Richard’s wisdom and strength, and now she was upset that he hadn’t given her a plain answer.
Linden was smiling tentatively at her, hoping for good news. Distracted by the puzzle, she issued brusque orders for what she needed now. “I have to ignite a verification web to see what sort of constructed spell Richard created. I need space to work, an empty room where I won’t be disturbed.”
Linden jumped up from his desk and called soldiers. In only a few moments, they had pulled and scraped chairs from a meeting room down the hall. Nicci followed them into the empty chamber, preoccupied with her own investigation.
She knew she needed to do more than a standard verification web on this bone box, but rather an aspect analysis of a verification web from an interior perspective. That would allow her to examine the constructed spell down to its core element. She steeled herself, realizing that casting the web would require her to use Subtractive Magic. She had no other choice.
Nicci stood inside the large empty room in the garrison headquarters and looked around the whitewashed walls, the wooden floor. Linden and the soldiers waited eagerly just outside the door. “This place will do,” she said, looking down at the tiny box. “Make sure I am not disturbed as I work. Much depends on what I learn here.”
Fascinated by the enigma of the constructed spell, she paid no attention to the soldiers, who retreated farther from the door.
Using one of the daggers at her hip, she slashed her palm, interested only in the blood that welled up. She would need a lot of it.
Standing in the middle of the wooden floor, she used the dripping blood to draw a careful Grace across the boards. The Grace was a powerful device, and drawn in blood under only the rarest of circumstances, but Nicci needed that power now. An inner and outer circle represented the underworld and the world of the living, separated by a square, and then at the center an eight-pointed star indicated the Creator’s light, which radiated lines throughout the Grace. The entire process of drawing the complex symbol took her the better part of an hour.
When she was ready, Nicci stood in the center of the magic-infused emblem on the floor. Closing her eyes, she held the bone box in her intact palm, while she lifted the small lid with the other. Then she opened herself to her power.
Surrounded by her thoughts, keeping her eyes closed, Nicci felt nothing other than a kind of weightlessness. She drifted, searching, probing, and reached out with a verification web in search of answers.
Only when Nicci opened her eyes did she realize that she was floating upright and frozen in midair, drifting and slowly rotating several feet off the floor above the blood-drawn Grace. Through the open door to the room, she saw Linden and the curious soldiers watching her, astonished, but they were as still as statues. She heard not a whisper of air, couldn’t even hear her own heartbeat in her ears. As she floated, life itself seemed to be suspended.
Extending her sight further, she saw that she was surrounded by lines of glowing green light that formed an intricate geometric framework tangled around her. Nicci herself was the living core of a verification web for a constructed spell. Shifting her head, she also realized that one of her feet was suspended over the Grace’s outer circle that represented the underworld.
Still not understanding, Nicci used her gift to ignite the verification web, as she had planned. She stretched out, studying all the glowing lines in the air rising from the Grace, ensnaring her own body and the glowing pearl inside the bone box.
But the web offered no answers. No matter how hard Nicci tried, the magic gave her only a blank response, and the constructed spell’s mysterious purpose remained a complete cipher. Richard’s intent was no clearer than it was before.
Frustrated, she withdrew her power and shut down the web, extinguishing the lines of light. They retracted back into the glowing orb inside the bone box. Gently, she drifted back down to the floor and felt solid wood beneath her feet, but her mind still seemed disconnected. She stood still, regaining her balance for a frozen moment.
Out in the corridor, Linden and the soldiers were too hesitant to offer help. After wiping her bleeding palm on her black dress, Nicci snapped the box closed again and pocketed it. She was profoundly heartbroken that whatever Richard had sent seemed useless, or at least incomprehensible. She had hoped for a miracle. Now she had to solve it herself.
General Linden cleared his throat. “What did you discover, Sorceress? Do you understand the weapon Lord Rahl sent for us?”
She turned her cold blue eyes toward him. “I fear we are doomed.”
CHAPTER 55
The wave of rock was like a petrified tide that buried his front ranks, all those loyal fighters who had continued to follow him even though they had lost everything else. Utros stared at the fresh uneven rock that covered the canyon floor, searching for words. Finally, he said, “Our destiny is permanently wrapped in stone.”
Ruva raged beside him, a roiling mass of barely constrained magic. “Those men gave their lives for you, beloved Utros. They know you will not falter. They know you will conquer the world, as you swore to do.” She looked at the bodies partially imprisoned in stone. “And their sacrifice will help you achieve that goal.”
“How?” Utros snarled at her. “How does this help me?” He looked at the devastation, the massacre.
The fallen canyon wall had hardened like a mudslide baked in the hot sun, studded with thousands of corpses like insects caught in pitch. His soldiers had worn the best armor; their swords were sharp, their training was excellent, and they could fight against any enemy—but how could they prepare for this? Arms thrust upward still clutching swords, gauntlets and booted feet protruding in the air with the rest of the bodies drowned under rock.
One man’s head, his helmet askew, grimaced and gasped. The rest of his body was submerged in the stone; though he could still breathe, he was trapped, crushed. His mouth opened and closed, and his eyes bulged as he tried to sip air. The dying soldier couldn’t even form words; he had no room left in his chest. His gaunt face turned blue as he suffocated, little by little.
Utros leaned over him. “I can do nothing to help you.” His heart wrenched with vengeance and sadness. “I am grateful for your service and sorry for your sacrifice.” He drew his sword. “This is all I can offer.” He struck off the man’s head, leaving a stump that spouted blood from the rim of stone.
He would order his soldiers to do the same to any other hopelessly trapped warriors. It was the right thing to do, but it made him sick.
Only by a miracle was he still alive. When the canyon first began to melt, Ruva and Ava had saved him, blocked him. After the defenders made their stand at the bottleneck, the general’s soldiers had still pushed past the swarm of poisonous scorpions, the spike-filled pits, the camouflage curtain that hid the canyon itself. Nathan and the other gifted fighters had battled and retreated, battled and retreated, luring them farther inside.
Utros had been fooled, thinking that the rebels had only that one last line of defense. His army had believed in their victory as soon as they saw the cliff alcove filled with archive buildings, and Ruva had hissed with anticipation of all the powerful knowledge stored here.
His army had charged forward in a frenzy, and Utros could not have stopped them if he’d tried. They surged into the hidden canyon, like a rider giving free rein to a spirited horse. Though he wanted to be at the front of the troops, Ruva forced him to stay back. The starving soldiers fell upon the orchards and fields. They ran down the flocks of terrified sheep and tore them to pieces, eating the creatures raw. Before he could revel in his victory, Ruva sensed the resonance of an incredibly powerful spell?.?.?.?and then the cliffs flowed in a molten avalanche.
Ava’s shimmering spirit had swooped in front of him, frantic. “Away! It is not safe! A massive spell! I tried to stop her, Genera
l!”
Ruva mirrored her twin’s motions and used her gift to bowl Utros back against the rocks of the bottleneck as the wave of stone roared down on the front ranks of his army. Killing so many!
Now as he viewed the stark aftermath, the general tried to guess how many more of his soldiers were dead, additional numbers to add to the tally. Fortunately, the bulk of the ancient army had not even entered the hidden canyon and milled outside in the high desert, ninety thousand or more.
First Commander Enoch rode up, his face ashen as he stared across the rippled stone, countless embedded bodies, grasping hands, horrorstruck dead faces. He cleared his throat as if to spit out the harsh words he needed to say. “The Keeper claimed many more, sir. He knows us, and he wants us all.”
“The Keeper will have to be satisfied for now,” Utros said. “This is enough!”
Ava shimmered in front of them, her expression distraught. “He tugs me with greater strength. He wants my sister. He wants me!”
Ruva chimed in, “Thanks to our loyalty to you, beloved Utros, we have the strength to resist him. Loyalty is stronger than love.” She narrowed her eyes. “Loyalty is stronger than death.”
Getting down to business, Enoch said, “We killed a sheep, sir, and we will roast it to feed all the prominent commanders, but the other soldiers still feel as if they’re starving.”
“Because they are starving,” Utros said. “Even if they still move and march.”
Ruva sounded defensive. “No! Our spell maintains them. They keep going even with the hunger inside. They will live until they are nothing more than walking bones!”
Utros watched in disgust as his soldiers spread out like scuttling beetles. They stripped the leaves and tender branches from the orchards, gobbling any fruit they found, ransacking gardens, breaking into the cliffside dwellings to scrounge even the smallest crumbs.
