The beam had left a neat one-foot gash in the wall and past the red-hot edges I could see the upper body of the fire mage silhouetted against the flames. He’d only have to bend his head slightly to see us too, so before he had the chance to realise that I pulled what looked like a marble from my pocket and hurled it. I’ve picked up a few unusual ways to use my divination magic over the years and one of them is a way of accurately throwing small objects. All in all it’s probably one of my more useless skills, but it does occasionally come in handy. The projectile flew neatly through the centre of the gap, past the fire mage, and shattered against the opposite wall.
The object I’d thrown was a sphere of glass with a fingernail-sized bit of mist swirling inside it. The mage who makes them calls them condensers but I think of them more as instant cover. A cloud of fog rushed out, enveloping the hall, the flames, the fire mage, Meredith, and me, cutting out all vision beyond a few feet. The mist was totally harmless, but the fire mage fell back reflexively, probably wondering if the thing was mind-fog or poison or worse. I felt the surge of a protective spell as Meredith rolled over and sent another strike at her would-be killer, making him stagger again.
The fire mage seemed on the back foot but I didn’t expect that to last, so I pulled Meredith to her feet and hurried back to the bedroom, my magic picking the path that my eyes couldn’t see. As we made it through the doorway there was a roar and another red flash, but this time the blast didn’t come near us and I slammed the door.
My heart was racing as though we’d fought a full-length battle, though looking back on it the whole thing couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds. I dug through my pockets, vaguely taking in the look of Meredith’s bedroom: fluffy pillows, dresses tossed carelessly on the bed, a big window. “Can you hold him off?”
Meredith shook her head. “He’s too strong!”
The floor juddered and there was a boom from the other room. I pulled out a pair of gold discs and dropped them on either side of the door, saying a command word. There was a faint thrum as an invisible vertical barrier sprung up, barring the door and reaching almost to the edge of the room. Meredith looked at it in surprise. “What did you do?”
“Forcewall.” It wouldn’t last long but it would buy us time. I pulled the window open. Already the air inside the bedroom had heated to uncomfortable levels; hot air rushed out as cooler air was drawn in. I pulled out my glass rod, channelling a thread of magic through it. “Starbreeze.” The focus tingled, carrying my words away into the night. “I need help. Please come here, and hurry!” Starbreeze could pull us out but there was no guarantee she’d arrive in time. “There’s—”
We must have been speaking too loud. Meredith ducked as another searing beam slammed into the wall separating the bedroom and living room. It looked like fire but cut like a razor; I didn’t want to know what it would do to living flesh. The beam sawed left to right and the wall melted into flames, but the force barrier behind it held. Through the red-hot gash I could see mist and smoke. The temperature shot up.
“Alex!” Meredith called, and I turned to catch something glittering as it flew towards me. It was cold against my palm. “Ice crystal!”
I pulled open the door to the bathroom. “Anything that’ll get us out of here?”
Meredith shook her head. She was rummaging through a bag that had been under her bed and as I watched she slung it over her shoulder, hurrying past me to the bathroom. As she crossed the threshold the fire mage hit my forcewall with a wide-angle blast, setting what was left of the wall behind it alight.
The bathroom was tiled in green, with a spacious bath, and would have smelt nice but for the smoke. So far we’d survived by giving ground, but we were quickly running out of places to run, and as I stuck my head out the window my heart sank. The back of the building was a sheer wall, opening into a doughnut block of enclosed gardens, and we were on the fourth floor. “Tell me there’s another way out.”
Meredith shook her head with a cough. “Gate stone?”
“He’d rip the building apart before we got halfway.”
The fire mage struck with another of those white-hot beams and this time he’d obviously figured out about the forcewall. The beam carved upwards, reaching over the force barrier and slicing into the ceiling and the attic beyond. Burning fragments showered into the bedroom, landing on the carpet and the bed. The beam cut off and I leant around the corner and threw the ice crystal. A hundred possible trajectories flickered through my senses and I released the crystal as they merged with the target. The crystal arced through the air to drop through the gap the fire mage had opened up with his beam. “Now!” I called.
Meredith said a word in a harsh-sounding language, and on the other side of the force barrier, the ice crystal detonated. I ducked back into the bathroom. “How good are you at climbing?”
Meredith looked at the window and back at me with wide eyes. “Out there?”
“There are two ways out of here—out there or past him.”
Meredith took a look over my shoulder and went pale. Forcewalls are great at holding off direct attacks but there were still plenty of ways for the heat to get in, and most of the flat was either on fire or getting that way. The living room was blazing and licks of flame were starting to spread around the bedroom, the dresses on the bed smouldering and catching alight as embers tumbled down from above. Even with the windows open, the air was growing thick with smoke, hot enough that it was getting hard to breathe. Smoke kills more people than flames; in a regular house fire you’re in more danger from asphyxiation than you are from burning to death, though having a pyromaniac throwing magical napalm around changes those odds a bit. But if this went on much longer, it’d be a race to see which killed us first—the smoke, the fire, or the mage.
A patient attacker would have backed off at this point and let the smoke and flames do his work for him. Apparently the fire mage wasn’t very patient because he chose this point to smash a curling blast of flame through the side wall and around the force barrier, igniting the whole far half of the bedroom. Meredith ducked back with a yelp as a wave of searing air rolled in. It was so hot I could barely stand to look through the doorway, but as I did my heart jumped. The part of the floor holding up the left disc was burning fiercely. The gold discs needed to stay steady to maintain the barrier; as soon as that patch burnt through, there’d be no more forcewall.
But it gave me an idea. If this fire mage was so impatient, maybe we could lure him in. “Got another ice crystal?”
Meredith placed it in my hand. This one was bigger, a blue-tinted gem of cold glass. “Last one.”
I leant around the door frame, ducking my head against the scalding heat, and tossed the gem. It rolled to a stop a couple of feet behind the door. An instant later a piece of ceiling fell in with a crash, taking a patch of floor with it.
I felt the forcewall go down and the fire mage did too. I ducked back into the bathroom and slammed the door as a red light flashed and the wood of the door heated as the fire mage hosed down the bedroom. A second later, over the roar of flames, I heard the tread of footsteps. I waited until the fire mage was on top of the crystal, then signalled to Meredith.
The timing was perfect. The crystal exploded into a hundred tiny shards of jagged ice, throwing the fire mage from his feet and stunning him. “Come on!” I called to Meredith as I pulled the door open.
But as I looked out into the bedroom I realised with a chill that we’d left it too late. Everything in the bedroom was blazing. The bed was a bonfire, a wall of flame separated us from the living room, and the living room itself was an inferno. A wall of heat hit me, crisping the hairs on my arms, and choking smoke rolled over us, setting us ducking and coughing. I slammed the door again.