A blue ray flashed across my vision and disintegrated Caldera’s head.
Caldera wavered. Her arm was still raised, but her head and neck were gone, a neat spherical pattern carved out of shoulders and collarbone. Staring down into her body, I could see white bone and spine, red blood replaced with flowing sand. The sand pooled, began to pour upwards as if to try to re-form, but the ifrit had expended too much power. The sand darkened, slowed, stopped. Caldera’s body fell with a crash, yanking the sovnya out of my hand. Something seemed to move at the edge of my vision, a shadow expanding down into the earth, then all was still.
The futures were quiet. I looked towards where the ray had come from.
Rain was lying against the wall, one arm still raised. His finger pointed towards where Caldera had fallen.
Slate hurried to Rain and I turned back to Compass. Somehow, in all the time that Caldera had attacked, fought and died, Compass hadn’t stopped working on her spell. ‘Aether falling back to the keep,’ Thunder reported over the comm.
‘They’re running!’ a soldier called.
‘Vesta,’ Compass said tightly. ‘Now.’
Luna stepped up, touching Compass’s back. The grey mist around her shimmered, turning to gold as she directed the full power of her curse into Compass. The futures seemed to clear, random possibilities flaking away, leaving only one glowing path with slight variations.
I was looking down at what was left of Caldera’s body. It was dissolving into sand and for a moment it was as though I saw a patchwork of my memories of her. Our first meeting in the shop. Drinking in the pub, working in the office. Caldera standing between me and a pack of enemies. Caldera facing me on the roof of Canary Wharf, chasing me into traffic, shunning me in the halls. Caldera in the basement of Levistus’s mansion, bloodied but coming for me one last time.
A flash of pain went through my mind and I forced the memories away. ‘Ozols, set for six seconds,’ I said. ‘Activate on my mark.’
Ozols nodded and hefted the backpack. ‘Twenty seconds,’ Compass said, her voice tense. I could feel the gate taking form.
‘Aether is next to the node,’ I told Landis. ‘Need cover.’
‘Hoarfrost,’ Landis ordered. ‘Aegis.’
The mages lined up behind Compass. The futures wavered one last time, then set, and the golden mist around Compass ebbed. Luna stepped quickly away as a portal formed in the air.
The portal was a circle instead of the standard oval, six feet in diameter. It appeared in front of Compass, revealing a room tiled in dark stone. In the centre of the room was a vertical spike of black metal that radiated power.
But it was hard to see the spike through all the jinn. The room was packed with them, and Aether was hovering over their heads. They’d felt the gate coming, and as it opened death and lightning exploded out through the portal.
A triple shield flashed up from Landis, Aegis and Hoarfrost, fire-force-ice, concentric layers stopping the attacks cold. ‘Mark!’ I told Ozols.
Ozols twisted something inside the backpack.
I grabbed the backpack by one strap, my artificial arm taking the weight, and darted forward. I curved around Compass and the mages, spinning like a hammer thrower, then swung back in and flung the backpack through the gate.
Aether threw up a shield of air. The backpack thumped into it, bounced off a jann’s head, landed flat on the floor.
Aether looked down at the backpack, then up at me.
Behind me, Compass cut the spell. The portal vanished, and Aether, the jann, the metal spike and the room vanished with it. I looked up through the hole that Compass had been using to sight with.
Back when we’d been laying plans for this assault, I’d looked through the contents of Compass’s spatial storage. And just as I’d thought, she packed with an eye to the battlefield. She’d been Landis’s gate expert and space mage for some time, and she’d learned to bring the kinds of things he asked for. Which, apparently, mostly consisted of tea, good food and high explosives.
As it turns out, a hiking backpack can fit a lot of high explosives.
There was a massive hollow whump, as though someone had dropped a sandbag the size of a building.
Halfway up the tower, a section of the keep bulged and cracked. Dust and smoke burst outward in a cloud, and stones came plummeting out of the sky to slam into the courtyard. With a groaning noise, the upper part of the tower slumped, stones cascading down until the collapse stopped.
But for all the destruction, it was dwarfed by what I could see in my magesight. The node that had acted as the anchor point for the keep’s wards was gone. Not damaged, gone. The complex net of wards around the keep was shrinking, collapsing in on itself, the lines of power tearing. It was like watching a massive tower with one of its legs cut away; the remaining nodes held out a few seconds longer, then the second collapsed as well, followed by numbers three and four.
A thunderclap shook the air. Magical energy surged, flashing outward, all the spells unravelling at once. The shields in our room flared, reacting to the discharge. All around us, I felt the ward network dissipate. I could use the dreamstone to enter Elsewhere again, and the Council forces could gate home.
The sultan’s ritual had failed. The battle was over.
18
Landis started issuing orders to the troops. I clapped Ozols on the shoulder, then walked over to Rain.
Rain was propped up against the wall, with Slate kneeling next to him. ‘. . . don’t think I’m walking out of here,’ Rain was saying.
‘We’ll handle it,’ Slate said, then looked up at me with a frown.
I stopped a few feet away from Rain. ‘How the hell are you still alive?’
Rain closed his eyes, resting his head against the stone. ‘Transmutation,’ he said, his voice raspy. ‘Turn the broken bone into liquid, reshape it, turn it back.’
‘I didn’t even know water mages could do that.’
‘There’s a reason they don’t,’ Rain said. ‘Have a guess what happens if you get it wrong.’
‘Well, glad you didn’t.’
There was a moment’s pause. Behind me, the first soldiers were moving out.
‘I’m sorry—’ I began.
‘Not now, Verus,’ Rain said. He didn’t open his eyes. ‘Okay?’
Behind me on the floor lay the pile of sand and tattered clothes that had once been Caldera. Slate was staring at me, his eyes cold, and I could sense a barrier between me and the two Keepers. They’d put their grudges aside, but only for the battle. Now it was over.
There was nothing more to be said. I walked back to Luna and Ji-yeong.
Luna was looking tired but satisfied. ‘Too bad it wasn’t Barrayar in there,’ she said. ‘Remember how he mined my flat with explosives? Would have been kind of poetic justice.’
‘We’re at the endgame,’ I told them both. ‘Any last things you need to do, do them now.’ I bent down to pick up the sovnya from Caldera’s remains and headed for Landis.
Landis was talking with Tobias and Compass. ‘. . . already deteriorating,’ Compass was saying. ‘It’s only a matter of time before the drift is serious enough to collapse the realm’s link to our world.’
‘How long?’ Landis said.
Compass raised her hands helplessly. ‘An hour? A day? Five minutes? There’s a reason no one uses isolation wards!’