3 #2
Already, though, he was away. He cut low over the field, wheeling between spearheads and arcanic bolts. Spying an artillery post behind a makeshift palisade, he arrowed toward it.
The heat of his passage sheared the cannons’ mechanisms clean away. One tumbled from its mount and pinned a man beneath it. At the crunch of bone and shout of agony, he turned back and cut off the soldier’s cry in a flash of brutal mercy.
Pax Carintheus. The words drummed in his head as he blazed across the battlefield. It saved more blood than it spilled. It had to.
Already, he could see the Hjelvak shield dimming. Destroy a few more generators, and it would fail entirely. He marked out the nearest machine and dived.
Aurelias. To the north. Do you sense it?
The centurion’s signal sang down his bones.
He pulled up. She was right; an oily shimmer cloaked the sky a quarter mile ahead.
He skimmed nearer, feeling outward. The air thickened and deadened by the yard.
He narrowed his gaze, striving to pick out the substance of the leaden dark ahead. A shield? A curse?
Look out!
Gloriana’s warning whipped across his mind. A heartbeat later, the illusion tore away.
A tide of soldiers swept into view from behind it. Six thousand men or more rolled out before him—and above them, something even worse.
Three cannons towered over the ranks; but cannons was too small a word. Their mouths were wide enough to swallow a carriage, their wheels as tall as ships. He could feel arcanic fuel compressing in the firing chambers with a force that bent his phoenix form like wax.
Disengage! the centurion cried. Dis—
Felix ripped himself loose from the phoenix as the report of the cannons shook the air. His arcana streaked across the dark toward his body, tumbling on the shockwaves as he willed it to outstrip the missile.
It catapulted back inside him so fast that it knocked him to the ground. He scrambled up, heart thudding, then stopped dead at the sight before him.
Three missiles burned through the dark toward the cliff. He knew that sight. Those were Eversor cannons—Carinth weapons. Antique, for certain, but they’d cracked the earth in centuries gone by.
Then, a second will seized his mind. He felt the centurion’s power urging them all together, toward the approaching bolts.
Seize them. Break them against each other.
The company surged into the sky and split in two. Felix had no time to shape a second phoenix. Together with his comrades, he lashed unformed arcana around the leftmost missile and heaved to the right. Across the field, the others seized the central bolt.
They twisted tight around the missiles, dragging them off course, but it was like trying to slow a meteor. The sheer momentum defied him, and the speed threatened to shake his grip with every moment.
Together, came Gloriana’s voice, breathless with exertion. Form a sail.
The image painted itself in his mind’s eye, and instinct moved him. Their powers weaved together, forming a great sheet to the right. It spread and caught the wind.
The punch of air broke his hold, but it was enough. The missile lurched to the right as its twin veered left. They crashed and burst together in midair.
But they were too late for the third bolt. It hit their shields as hard as a falling star. The impact rent the shining curtain and drove spears of copper power into the cliff face. Felix lost his balance as the ground rocked underfoot. The lurch snatched his power back into his body.
He opened his eyes. Light swayed on the horizon. In the distance, molten rivers of arcana ran through the cracked barrel of the far-right cannon. One down—those things overheated like hellfire. Already, though, the other two were blazing with a second barrage.
“On your feet, now! On your feet!” Gloriana shouted. “Again!”
The missiles roared loose.
Felix hauled in one ragged breath, then took flight.
He streaked across the miles and met the bolt.
The heat seared through him, buckling his control.
Pain sang down his bones as he flung out his power in a wing to the right.
The missile began to turn. Atop the cliff, his body trembled and gasped for air.
Then, too soon, a blast of wind ripped him free. He tumbled like a sycamore leaf into the dark.
Fight.
His fingers closed around the stick of incandaeum. Without a thought, Felix swallowed it whole.
Adrenaline ripped through him in a lightning blaze. His arcana shot back to his body, and he opened his eyes to the battlefield.
Twin points of fire blazed toward the clifftop. He looked around and saw his comrades, some unconscious from exertion, some still fighting to divert the killing blow.
The missiles were angling closer together, but not close enough. His stomach plunged as he saw it. They were heading straight for the breach in the Carinth shields. Straight for the company.
His mind emptied. His body moved.
Felix strode to the center of the cliff, stepping over fallen bodies as he went. There, he turned to face the missiles and extended his right hand, as though to catch those incandescent bolts of power in his palm.
Somewhere inside him, mirrors turned, readying to bend that light into an arc. It was foolishness; they’d shatter like the glass they were. Perhaps, though, just perhaps, they could reflect back the blaze before it burned his comrades to ash.
Here. Come here, he beckoned, willing the missiles to narrow to his hand. They obeyed, thinning from twin spheres into a single lance.
Terror should have seized him by the spine. Instead, he felt no more than an irrational vexation. I haven’t finished, something murmured in his head. I’ve barely even started.
Then the bolt struck.
Blinding red eclipsed the world. The agony began at his fingertips, then melted through him in a white-hot river. Light blazed across the mirrors, burning everything it touched. It reached his chest and stole his last breath.
Mirror it. Mirror it. Oh, gods, I’m sorry . . .
But suddenly, inside him, something slipped. The light reflected forward, flashing through his left arm and out into the air. A shockwave blasted back across the clifftop in its wake.
The world was ringing. White light flamed inside his head.
Twin pyres burned high on the horizon, and the black blur of the Hjelvak army disappeared beneath that hungry blaze.
Somehow, he was still on his feet, but his body felt like a shattered pane of glass, held together only by its frame.
One tap would send it cascading down in pieces.
Scenes caught like splinters in his memory. His comrades lay unmoving on the clifftop. The black horizon swayed. That feeling—was it pain? He’d gone too far to tell.
There was a hand on his shoulder, a voice in his ear. Velvet blackness crept in, warm and soft. He let it carry him down—far, far down—and in a moment, everything was gone.
Something was wrong.
Felix’s wits returned to him, slow as the climbing tide. The sounds of battle had gone, swallowed by the howling of the wind. His eyes cracked open. A tent roof billowed and snapped above him. Through a gap in the canvas, snow swirled white against the black.
He came to his elbows. The world felt strangely dull, as though someone had smudged the colors and blunted the edges.
They must have carried him from the battlefield, or he’d have been able to feel the damage—the arcanic fabric raked and roughened by the curses, and sprites coalescing from the spent power settling in the snow.
He was alone. It was dark, but a candle stood beside his bedroll. Felix turned inside, preparing to ignite it with a thought—
And he was empty.
It was like opening his eyes and seeing nothing, like moving to stand and finding that his legs were gone. Thin threads of panic shot through him. He took a breath and tried again, diving deeper this time, turning left and right in an increasingly frantic search for that missing treasure.
No, no, no . . . It’s there. It has to be.
But it wasn’t.
He opened his eyes and crashed back to the world. Horror lurched drunkenly through his body. It had to be a nightmare. It couldn’t . . . His spirit reeled back from the very thought.
Paces crunched on the snow. He’d barely turned before the centurion’s silhouette appeared in the tent flap. He met her eyes with a wild question. She faltered, drawing breath.