Thora felt despair. “Why won’t they pay the cost? There must be some way.”
Damon and Quentin turned to her, exhausted, soaked with blood. She was so furious she failed to notice the desperate gleam in their eyes. With hardened expressions, the two wizards approached her, holding knives in their slick red hands. “There is a way, Sovrena, and you know it yourself,” Damon said.
“Everyone must pay the price,” Quentin said.
“We can complete the bloodworking,” Damon added with a glance at his partner, who nodded. Both of them closed in on Thora. “And you know the magic it requires. We have already sacrificed hundreds, and the magic is building. It only needs the nudge to push the bloodworking over the limit.”
“It’s not enough,” Thora said, shuddering with anger and frustration. “You know it’s not enough.”
“But you can do the rest,” Quentin said. “You said it yourself. Gifted blood is so much more powerful. You are the sovrena, the most powerful sorceress in Ildakar, and the blood magic is stronger in you than in hundreds of ungifted victims.”
Damon added, coming even closer with his knife, “You can finish this. One sacrifice. You said we must each be willing to pay the price.”
Thora felt cold inside. “You are fools if you think you can do this without me.”
“Not without you. We need you. We need your blood,” Damon said. His mustaches were caked with gore that had splattered his face.
Quentin tried to sound reasonable as he also closed in with his knife. “You were found guilty and disgraced. You said you wanted to buy your way back into history. In this way, you can atone for everything.”
Thora lashed out, calling upon her gift. She sliced through the air with another invisible razor, but both Damon and Quentin raised shields and blocked her. “You are powerful, Sovrena, but we are both wizards, and you aren’t strong enough to fight two of us.” Damon lunged with the sacrificial knife, and she drew upon all her strength to blast him backward, a fist of air mingled with threads of lightning.
The blow knocked Quentin reeling, but Damon, the shaper, summoned the soft arena sand at her feet, which writhed up around her legs and waist like a smothering blanket, trapping her. Thora flailed, glared poison at him. “Stay back!”
Quentin pushed toward her. “Your blood can save the city. You know it. Don’t fight us—we have no more time.”
“No!” she shouted as both wizards rushed her with upraised knives. With her gift, Thora shattered the sand that cemented her legs, but a blast from Damon knocked her backward. She collapsed into the blood-soaked sands, paralyzed as she tried to get up.
Quentin and Damon fell on her, using their gift to hold her down despite her struggles. She was almost powerful enough to hurl them away—almost—but Damon stabbed the point of his knife into her throat, pushing hard, breaking through her tough skin.
She clawed at his hand, tried to drive the dagger away; then Quentin’s blade also cut into her neck, sawing. Her scream was muffled, then drowned out in a gush of blood—the potent, gifted blood they needed.
As her vision faded, she saw the red river flowing toward the center of the symbol. Though her rage built hotter even as her life faded away, she knew with smug satisfaction that her powerful blood would indeed be enough. The warm spray spilled into the channel, completing the spell-form.
With her last thought, Thora felt the bright and triumphant magic surge in the air.
Damon stood exhausted. He had already seen so much blood and death today, but this was the last. This was the most important.
“Hurry!” Quentin said. He grabbed Thora by the shoulders, tilting her head, bending her limp body forward so the last of the crimson liquid gushed into the trough. It flowed together, filling the giant pattern, and pooled like oil crawling toward the central point.
Normally, all the members of the wizards’ duma would be here. Damon had hoped that Thora herself would guide the magic, but he and Quentin knew what was required. When the blood of the powerful sorceress mingled with the other sacrifices, they called upon the magic scattered in the air, through the lines that ran throughout the city of Ildakar.
Still fleeing, many of the volunteers paused, staring up into the sky as the air shimmered. The wave of magic flowed out of the arena, rocketing upward from the crucible and the rotating prisms. The expansive and complex spell-form glowed across the blood-soaked sands.
“The shroud!” Damon said, his voice an awed whisper.
“The shroud…” Quentin repeated.
The air around them changed as the entire city folded out of the flow of time into a protected bubble of its own, away from everyone and everything.
CHAPTER 83
With the release of transference magic, the inferno swept toward them across the battlefield. The thunderous explosion of heat appeared out of nowhere, and General Utros threw his arm in front of his gold half mask, but the concentrated blaze was more intense even than dragon fire. Utros sucked in a breath to shout his defiance, refusing to believe that he would lose so completely, so abruptly.
Ava and Ruva flung themselves on him, wrapping around him, each holding out a hand. Their scream was a raw sound of desperation in unison. The sound rippled the air, and their magic formed a shell of emptiness like molten glass, a curved shield that covered them at the last instant. The bubble clamped down and sealed with a suddenness that made the general’s ears pop, but even so, a tendril of superheated air was trapped inside with them. A single gasp of breath scorched his mouth and lungs.
Utros crouched beneath the fire that rolled as if someone had poured a crucible of molten iron over the top of them. He fell to his knees, squeezed his eyes shut, and clenched his fists. As the heat thundered on and on, Ava and Ruva strained next to him, weeping, their lips drawn back to expose their teeth. They clutched at each other as if each twin had to steal energy from her sister just to survive.
He didn’t understand what had happened. When he had seen the six small groups that rode out from the gates, each led by a gifted wizard or sorceress, he knew the Ildakarans had some desperate plan. Utros had stayed by his command tent, assuming this was another foolish sortie that could be easily defeated.
When they saw what the Ildakaran groups were doing, though, Ava and Ruva had grown frightened. Ruva said, “They are laying down runes! This is part of a larger spell. Look at the positioning!”
Ava pointed out the knots of fighting, then the flare signals sent into the sky from where the gifted raiders made their mark. “It is a spell-form of some sort! They could encircle and cut off a large part of our forces.”
After the destruction caused by the Ixax warriors and the gray dragon, Utros knew he had to stop the Ildakarans. “Keeper and spirits, come with me. We will block that foremost group.” After he armed himself and wore his horned helmet, Utros had marched brusquely through his troops to meet the nearest strike force. He saw the wizard Nathan among them, as well as an older sorceress wearing purple robes.
Nathan and numerous fighters defended the sorceress while she marked a prominent rune on the ground. Utros had rushed toward them, but before he could get there, the older woman used her gift to blast Nathan and all the other defenders into the air, flinging them far away and leaving her to stand alone.
“What is—” Utros began to say as the sorceress completed her magic, triggering the spell. Transference magic.
Ava and Ruva screamed and held up their hands. So much fire came out of nowhere.…
When the inferno finally died down, Utros pushed himself to his feet again and stared through the rippling haze of the protective shield. The air was hot and scorched inside the bubble. He desperately needed to see what remained of his camp, his army. “Set us free. Let me out there!”