Nicci faced him in only a bloodstained black dress. She lifted her soft chin, and her blond hair flowed freely around her head. She ignored the rest of the soldiers, didn’t even acknowledge the painted sorceress at his side. “I wasn’t certain you would be brave enough to face me, General Utros.”
The horses shifted on the broken stones, but the escort riders forced them into rigid ranks. The men looked gaunt, their skin pale except where it was streaked with blood, particularly around their mouths.
Utros tilted his horned helmet down at her, and she could see his eye blazing through the hole in the gold half mask. “It takes little courage to face the vanquished.” He gestured expansively behind him. “The city has already fallen. There is nothing you can do but surrender. I am glad you realize that.”
Nicci remained silent.
Mrra growled low in her throat. Nathan, Bannon, and Lila stood ready to protect Nicci, but they looked insignificant surrounded by Utros’s escort guard. Even in the isolation of Halsband Island, the sounds of continuing battles wafted from the main city, but Nicci heard only the blood rushing in her ears, felt her strength rising.
Ruva glared from her bay horse. Much of the pale sorceress’s carefully applied paint had flaked off, leaving only muddled messages. Her shoulders jerked with anticipation. “I want her, beloved Utros.”
A flitting spirit appeared in the air, Ava’s glowing shadow. “We want her!”
Ruva laughed. “Send her to the Keeper, and then maybe he will leave us alone! My sister can stay with me.”
Ava’s shimmering form swirled close, overlapping with her twin. “We will stay together. Always together.”
General Utros swung out of his saddle and dropped to the ground in front of Nicci. His boots crunched on the loose stones of the Palace of the Prophets. The escort guard sat motionless, as if they had turned to statues again.
Still she said nothing, merely faced him with a stony expression.
Utros loomed over Nicci. “Nothing you say will change the outcome of this day. No concessions you make will alter my victory. I came here to destroy you. There will be no surrender terms. My army will enslave any people still alive in Tanimura. We will rest in this city and rebuild, and when I have restored my army to its full strength with thousands of new recruits, we will march north and conquer all of D’Hara. I will achieve even more than what Emperor Kurgan demanded of me. I will rule both the Old World and the New.”
Nathan stepped closer to the implacable Nicci and defied the general. “Emperor Kurgan is long dead, just as you should be.”
Utros looked at the wizard as if he were an annoying distraction. “Iron Fang is the past. I am the new emperor.”
“Your allies are defeated,” Bannon blurted out. “Look out at the harbor! The Norukai navy is destroyed. King Grieve is dead—I killed him myself.”
Utros showed little surprise. “That saves me the trouble of doing it. Grieve was unruly and uncontrollable. I would have had to be rid of him sooner or later.”
Knowing that people were dying every moment, Nicci snapped, “Enough talk, Utros! I brought you here to end this.”
The general glared at her. “It is already ended. I will accept your surrender, but my army will continue to ransack Tanimura. You have lost, Sorceress. Your Old World has lost. There is nothing you can do.”
Still in the saddle, Ruva pulled her lips back to expose her teeth. “We must have Nicci. She needs to die. My sister and I will accept no other terms. She is ours!”
Ava’s mocking spirit flickered in an invisible wind. “You can rip out her heart, dear sister, and I will rip out her soul.”
Utros looked to the twin sorceresses, then back at Nicci, and he smiled with half a face. “Agreed. That is our only demand. Your life is forfeit, and if I watch you die with enough pain, then I might call off some of my troops. That is what true surrender looks like.” He nodded. “Are you a leader, Sorceress? Will you give your life to save all those people in the city? Choose now!”
Bannon crouched in a fighting stance, and Lila stood beside him with her sword raised. Nathan extended his hands, ready to call on his gift.
Nicci felt glad for their loyalty, although she didn’t need it. She touched the coldness in her heart, and her voice came out as hard as black ice. “You misunderstand, General. I did not call you here to give my surrender. I came to defeat you. I came to send all of you to the underworld, where you are long overdue.”
The escort troops shifted in their saddles, amused by her bravado. Standing in front of his stallion, Utros cocked his head back. Her comments seemed like braggadocio, but Nicci was deadly serious. She could feel the bone box in her pocket.
General Utros drew his sword and advanced on Nicci, ready to strike her down where she stood. Ruva slithered out of her saddle and approached, while the pale remnant of her sister hovered beside her, glowering. Because Nicci’s demeanor was so completely confident, the twins showed a flicker of uneasiness.
Nicci said, “Thanks to Lord Rahl, the only war wizard born in many centuries, the underworld was sealed forever and the veil was made impenetrable. The dead could no longer return to the world of the living.”
“We know this,” Ruva sneered.
“You and all of your soldiers should have been dead fifteen centuries ago. Your souls have been on the wrong side of the veil for all this time.” Nicci looked beyond Utros to the escort soldiers. “When you were petrified, the Keeper did not know he had lost you, but now you are flesh again … and your souls are forfeit.”
“We are here,” Ava snapped. “I am with my sister.”
From the general’s troubled expression, Nicci could see that her words were no surprise to him. She said, “You know this in your heart, General Utros. You should be long dead.”
“My empire is here in this world,” Utros said. “Today we have sent enough souls to the underworld to satisfy the Keeper.”
“But they are not the correct souls. I was once a Sister of the Dark, and I was allied with the Keeper.” Her expression hardened. “I no longer serve him. He is no friend of mine, but I will happily give him what he is owed.” Her gaze traveled out to the city of Tanimura, where countless ancient soldiers continued fighting. “All of your souls. Life to the living. Death to the dead.”
Utros did not seem amused. “You are arrogant and powerless.”
Nicci snatched the bone box from her dress and slid aside the delicate lid, which was now stained with blood from her hand. Inside, the small glowing pearl rotated, shone brighter.
Seeing it, the twin sorceresses recoiled. Ava’s spirit shrieked, and Ruva lunged forward, realizing the danger even if she did not understand what the object was.
Utros raised his sword to kill Nicci, but Bannon and Lila both dove in to drive the big general back a step. Knowing he had to give Nicci whatever time she needed, Nathan shoved with both hands, palms outward. The blast of solidified air ripped harmlessly through the spirit of Ava but slammed Ruva backward, disrupting the spell she was trying to work.
Nicci had finally realized what Richard’s constructed spell truly was—that Subtractive Magic, her Subtractive Magic, was the necessary component to unleash the devastation. Nicci herself was the key, the foundation. Richard had known she would figure it out.
Life to the living. Death to the dead, written in the language of Creation. This spell would heal the frayed threads in the veil. What had once unraveled would be tied up again.
She called upon both sides of her gift. Holding the bone box in her palm, she summoned lightning, and an arcing bolt of pure white energy, braided with an opposite bolt of black Subtractive power, struck the bone box and vaporized it in a blinding flash of pure elemental power. The dual elements twisted together and struck the glowing orb, delivering the required element to ignite the internal protocols of Richard’s constructed spell. The magic began to unfold around her and run toward its terminal objective.