Chapter 27 Fifteen Years Ago #2
Diadems and broadswords, ancient scrolls and enchanted portraits and treasure chests stuffed with Irisian gemstones, bolts of goldspider silk and an elmwood staff and a vial rack labeled Worst Nightmares, more ascens than he’d ever seen in his young life, more ascens than he knew existed, great pillars of them towering higher than most grown men.
The wild riches shifted and vanished as Lorissa Rezaran rifled through them.
Over the clatter of objects and the faint sound of the fallowwolf’s sniffing, the boy strained his ears.
The door separating the vault from the rest of the bank was thick, reinforced, but through it he was almost certain he could hear footsteps, shouts, that Saints-damned wailing.
Backup was arriving.
The wardholders must have been alerted of the breach.
Lorissa gave a muffled yes as she finally stumbled upon the weaverwick wand. One moment there was a slender gold wand case perched atop a stack of rare tomes, the next it was invisible, tucked into Lorissa’s pocket or waistband.
The vault door opened, and the boy slipped out behind his mother and the fallowwolf.
Every banker’s lamp burned bright gold. A dozen mages in all manner of robes—blood-orange Wielders, violet Healers, navy Enchanters, a handful of black Practers, and even a bronze Foreseer—sprinted across the atrium floor, over stone bridges, and between fountains, toward the sweeping staircase.
“Asoine,” one of them called to the others, a brash male voice, stippled with fear.
The boy’s heart faltered. They were vastly outnumbered, but they did have the advantage of invisibility—albeit the lurching, fragmentary kind.
Amidst all the chaos, he lost track of his mother’s footsteps.
And there was no sign of her, no swish of red, no slice of pale cheekbone.
He inwardly muttered a cuss he was not supposed to know.
The front doors were the only way out of the bank. He’d just have to make his way there alone.
Unless…
No. With the deminite bracelet around his wrist, there was no way he’d be able to compel so many people at once.
So he ran. Toward the staircase, toward the flurry of bodies, terror ripping through him like a fever.
On the stairs, the wardholders passed him in a gust of scent—myrrh perfume and lavender soap and Bellandrian bitterale—and a cloak hem fanned over his invisible face. A hand brushed his small shoulder. Clutching the banister, he bit down hard on his tongue to keep the yelp from escaping.
Four mages stood stationed by the front doors, wands outstretched to block any exit attempt. An emerald Brewer’s cloak, two black Mage Practers, and a navy Enchanter. The latter yelled, “Sel—”
Before the mage could finish the curse, his heart was torn from his chest by an invisible beast. A blur of white fur flashed and then vanished.
The guard next to the Enchanter, open-mouthed with uncomprehension, fell next, their chest cavities gaping holes, their hearts disappearing into thin air as the wolf swallowed them whole.
“Rasso, no!” Lorissa hissed. “No!”
Horror rooted the boy to the spot, unable to stop staring at the fallen, their eyes wide, the life gone from them so suddenly that he couldn’t make sense of it.
“Tempavicissan,” he heard his mother murmur, plead, but the very fact of his hearing it meant she had not been able to wind back time, to undo the wolf’s brutality and find another way out. She was too depleted.
The dark chasm behind the boy’s ribs ruptured into a canyon. He was at once absolutely certain they would both die here.
Where was she?
There.
Just beyond the giant wyrmwood, slumped by an arched stone bridge. The flash of red, the dark braid, here one second and gone the next.
This time, the boy did not run for her, only stayed frozen at the foot of the sweeping staircase.
“Sel effigier,” one of the sentinels bellowed, casting a statue curse straight at her. It missed.
The invisible fallowwolf must have lunged for the sentinel, because she too fell dead, ravaged, a bloody chasm where her heart had beat mere moments ago.
Tears prickled behind the boy’s eyes, then fell in warm rivulets down his round cheeks.
Why had he wanted this?
Excitement? Adventure?
What he wouldn’t give for his safe, warm bed, for the feel of his brother’s body pressed against his.
Fear paled the face of the last remaining sentinel—the navy-shrouded Enchanter—as she muttered something inaudible. A kind of glimmering shield materialized in front of her, but the boy knew it would not protect her against the fallowwolf.
Most of the wardholders who’d torn upstairs to the vault turned back, realizing that the thief was only one guard away from escaping with her life, but they were hesitant to approach when an invisible, feral beast was stalking the atrium.
“D’or laquissier,” a Wielder yelled. Water rose in thick tendrils from every stream and fountain—then crashed down on the spot he knew his mother to be crouching.
There was no cough, no splutter, no gasp.
Which meant she had gone under.
Every time the water spread shallowly over the concentric flagstones, the Wielder lifted it again and again, thrashing great columns of it down on the stone bridge behind which Lorissa hunched.
A small object materialized from thin air, drifting like flotsam on the surface of the rapidly forming lake.
The gold weaverwick wand box.
Lorissa had let it go, which could only mean one thing.
She was either dead or dying.
“Stop,” the boy pleaded, a primal plea, like the very night his mother and father had found him.
And so the Wielder stopped.
Stood frozen on the staircase, arms raised like a mad cleric mid-worship.
So too did the water, hanging suspended in the air like a liquid tower.
Confused yells in unintelligible Bellandrian chorused through the atrium.
Two more mages sprinted to the entrance, one futilely checking dead wrists for pulses, the other standing squarely with their wand outstretched, as though expecting the drowning intruder to rise at any moment.
Their gaze frantically scanned the room for any white flash of murderous fallowwolf.
The boy thought they were maybe the bravest mage in the world.
For several beats, time seemed to hang suspended like the pillar of water.
Then the boy heard the best sound of his young life.
His mother’s cough.
She was alive.
“Sen debilitan,” she croaked, the words echoing several yards away from the overflowing central fountain, but the curse fizzled and died.
The remaining mages descended on her position.
This was the true purpose of the wards, the boy realized. They did not exist never to be broken, but to weaken the breakers badly enough that when reinforcements came, victory would be foregone.
Lorissa’s invisibility faded in and out, enough to show her stumbling across the room to behind a teller’s desk. Every tiny lamp seemed to flicker with terror. In the brief shards the boy saw of his mother, she was jamming the last remaining button on her masochistic vambrace.
Several mages pursued her—though not the Wielder the boy had compelled, since he had not given permission to move again—but his mother had vanished once more. The wardholders glanced around, terrified, blindly firing stone statue curses.
None hit their mark.
“Sen ammorten,” hissed Lorissa, and it hit a mark, and the boy could not believe it, could not believe she would take a life, no matter how desperate, no matter that she was facing certain death or capture herself.
Rasso leapt back into ravenous action.
Many more mutilated bodies fell.
The boy could not separate the emotions writhing inside him.
Hope, that his mother might still make it out alive.
Dread, that he would never again look at her the same way.
Thoughts more complex still, about who deserved to live and who did not.
His entire worldview eddying, re-forming, but not yet hardening into a final shape.
Only four wardholders remained—the stilled Wielder and three mages who’d regrouped to guard the front door. An Enchanter and two Practers.
At the sight of the newly dead, the navy-cloaked Enchanter screamed the scream of the newly bereaved, then lunged toward the row of teller’s desks.
“Nie, Vielle!” the Practer yelled after her.
“Sel ammortier,” screamed the Enchanter, Vielle, but her own wild killing curse plunged into a dais, splintering the wood.
The boy shook his head wildly, whimpering no beneath his breath—
—and Vielle stopped running.
Aghast, she looked over to where the boy stood at the bottom of the staircase, wandless, afraid, still wearing his pale blue pajamas, and her mouth fell open in a perfect circle.
The boy looked down, only to find that his body was perfectly visible.
The tincture had worn off.
Tears pouring down his face now, he sprinted in the direction of his mother.
“No,” Lorissa moaned, staggering out from behind the teller’s desk, her own scarlet-clad form pale but discernible now. “Son, n—”
Her moment of maternal instinct cost her everything.
“Sel ammortier,” bellowed Vielle.
Lorissa Rezaran fell dead, and the fallowwolf began to howl.