The room suddenly swarmed with tornados.
In an eyeblink, as if a nest of giant wasps had been smashed, tornado beings spun around the room, a dozen or more. They were impossible to see clearly, for they rotated like buzzing tops, spinning cones of gray stone except for diamond-tipped tails that winked with a thousand facets in the meager daylight.
The mad scene grew crazier as the tornados bobbed and weaved and spun. Then, before the watchers' eyes had barely focused, the Phaerimm bounced into the air and converged on Karsus.
The huge glowing mage shrieked once, a word Candlemas and Sunbright and Knucklebones and Aquesita finally understood: "My enemies!"
Chapter 22
Shrieking, Karsus flung out his arms and fired spells at random to protect himself. Black bolts blew holes in the walls. Frost seared floating corpses and extinguished flaming books. Pulses of rainbow light threw wild colors over spinning splinters of wood. Water jets filled the air with steam and rain.
At the same time, wrenched apart by the planar stress of passing from their dimension into the dimension of humans, four of the twelve Phaerimm exploded. Tremendous, punishing blasts, and chunks of rock-like bodies gouged craters in the stone floors, ripped holes in walls, and shattered the furniture that still whirled and fluttered around the room like demented birds.
Candlemas stood dry-mouthed, unable to believe the raw power he saw displayed. Karsus was close to becoming a god, and not a minor deity, either, but a god who could rule a world for millennia. Yet this ongoing, disastrous battle between godling, goddess, and ancient evil couldn't last. Someone had to win, and live, and someone to lose, and die.
Whatever the outcome, it was no safe place for mortals.
Candlemas barely ducked before a hunk of rocky flesh slammed the corridor wall, shattering plaster into crumbles and dust. Wildly, the mage grabbed Aquesita, Sunbright, and Knucklebones and pulled them close. The fighters had staved off the berserkers, now reduced to a gory pile in the hallway. They hunkered close to the mage, the source of their only salvation. For with the Phaerimm attack, Karsus had been distracted, and the city's floor was tilting once more.
Candlemas yelled, "Hang on to me! I'll only have one chance to read this spell!"
Aquesita stared into the room at her battling cousin, the almost god. "I don't-"
"You must!" The mage screamed and clutched her hand. In a loud, clear, shaking voice, he began to read, enchanted words vanishing as he passed them by, magic crackling in the wrinkled paper. "Realms of fire! Clouds of air! Help us mount the silver stair!"
Despite the blistering defense, the animate tornados crashed into Karsus from all sides. Magical beings themselves, they easily penetrated his personal shields, and stone-like bodies brutally crushed his bones and smashed flesh. Flailing, Karsus fell heavily, half on, half off a workshop table. The Phaerimm kept after him, driving close to sting with their tails, batter with spinning bodies, and bite with granite-edged mouths.
Yet Karsus drove back the whirling bodies, striking with lightning-laced fists as pure star magic crackled and spat. The Phaerimm whirled faster, pounding the mage in desperate fury, as rocks on the shore slam a ship run aground. But Karsus was infused with super heavy magic and star-metal and genius, and gradually he beat them back, until they whirled harmlessly, buzzing in angry frustration like bees. The room smelled of ozone and brimstone, molten metal, charred wood, and rain.
Flaring like a new star of white-hot energy, Karsus hoisted himself into the air and drew the city back level and flat. With a shrug, Karsus brushed the spinning Phaerimm back dozens of feet. With another shrug, he cast the outside walls away, so they toppled out of sight to let the day in, as if Karsus had outgrown their confines, like a moth shedding a cocoon to become a butterfly. The walls tipped and shattered into stones and beams and plaster.
The heroes huddled close around the chanting Candlemas, shut their eyes in anticipation of being crushed in rubble, but found the corridor and the rest of the building intact, the flagstones solid under their feet. A neat trick, almost a miracle, the first by a man almost a god.
Floating past the ruined walls and shorn roof, Karsus boomed his challenge, "Mystryl! I'll have your power!"
High above, covering the sky from horizon to horizon, the goddess manifested as thunderclouds was in full retreat. She drew back, still remote, calm-faced, with dark, staring eyes wide as mountain lakes. As her retreat continued, Sunbright and Knucklebones and Aquesita wondered where she'd go, where she'd hide from the power-stealing Karsus.
Only Candlemas couldn't see, for he doggedly read his scroll. He was almost to the bottom, and the four humans sensed the magic take effect. Sunbright felt lightheaded and ethereal, as if he dreamed awake, the same as when he'd been drawn into the future by that long spell of not-time. Knucklebones hugged Sunbright's arm as her bones and heart went hollow. And Aquesita, one hand trapped by Candlemas, was torn between a distant other world she'd never known, and her familiar homeland that was falling apart before her eyes.
"Look!" cried Knucklebones. "Lady Mystryl is-"
"Gone!"
Sweeping her arms wide, closing her volcanic eyes, Mystryl, Lady of Mystery, Controller of the Weave, ceased to be.
In a flash, the sky was clear.
Where clouds had been stacked thick and dark and roiling, there was suddenly nothing, only blue sky so vast and deep the heroes thought they saw stars. A brilliant sun, sharp and hot as if rainwashed, glared overhead. It was high noon on a spring day. The heroes' shadows lay almost directly under their feet.
But their feet were lifting from the ground, for the city was dropping.
Sunbright scooped Knucklebones, Aquesita, and the still-chanting Candlemas into his brawny arms and kicked out a foot to wedge himself between corridor walls. Already debris was sliding out the doorway into the ruins of the workshop.
Half clinging, half pushing, Aquesita pointed mutely at a craggy lump in the distance. The sister city Ioulaum dropped like the rock it was.
Tiny objects like shed feathers could be seen trailing upward, left behind: pennants, tents, banners, awnings, anything that might float on a breeze. The enclave built on an inverted mountain tipped, spun, capsized, then struck the side of a mountain. A corner burst off, a hundred buildings tumbling free like ants spilled from a hill. The face of the city struck, an entire culture destroyed. The enclave skipped sideways like a flung rock and exploded into fist-sized chunks of white and yellow and red. In three seconds, buildings, universities, streets, homes and tens of thousands of people were wiped out.
As would happen now to the enclave Karsus.
In a second, the heroes understood what happened, for the goddess's act had been clear, had communicated itself to them so that all people-all survivors-might comprehend. And remember.
Rather than allow herself to be usurped, rather than have her powers stolen, rather than let Karsus become a god, the Mother of All Magic sacrificed herself. With the last powers of this greatest of gods, she wished herself out of existence, and vanished.
And took all the magic in the world with her.
The Phaerimm, who were magic to their core, disappeared.
Karsus was left alone in the room, hovering, struggling to keep the magic within himself. But the might of the fallen star was gone, vanished, as if it had never existed. The mage clenched his fists and cried in rage and frustration and sorrow. For the first time in his life, Karsus was denied something he wanted, and he would destroy his world to get it.
Having seen none of this, Candlemas had hurried, barked the last of his spell just in time. His enchantment had taken root in the past, and already the four people faded. Exhausted physically and mentally, the pudgy mage dropped the empty paper and tightened his sweaty grip on his lady's hand.