“So you did know,” I snarled. “You tortured your captive enough, huh?”
“On the contrary,” Alzaq sneered, not even looking up from his desk, apparently engrossed in some old tome that I didn’t recognize. “I find torture to be a uniquely ineffective way to obtain information.”
“Surprisingly humane of you.” As I spoke, my eyes roved across the room, searching for the enemies that I knew were present here. I’d never had the element of surprise, so attacking right away was out of the question. I had to assess and prepare for my enemies if I wanted to make it out alive.
Two oathholders flanked William of House Alzaq, standing cross-armed just behind him. At least, I assumed they were oathholders, clad in heavy black plate, the material resembling the kind that Faye had worn. They didn’t carry themselves like mundane soldiers, and I saw no visible weapon, so the oathholder assumption was probably safe to make.
They wouldn’t be the only ones, of course. Even if the noble had never seen my capabilities, I could assume that Orchid would have passed the information along. No noble would be so stupid as to only have two armored guards against a powerful oathholder. Besides, there was a presence to the room, one that I could sense more now that I’d spent more time meditating with my oath. A sense that wasn’t any of the usual five had sharpened, somehow, and while it wasn’t very accurate, I could easily tell that the pressure of the magic flooding this room was too great to come from just two people.
I fired the pilfered shotgun, not even aiming in the general direction of the noble. Even as my finger squeezed the trigger, three or four shields popped into existence, preventing any blast from making it close to the Lord Alzaq. The pellets bounced off harmlessly—unenchanted bullets were notoriously abysmal at even putting a dent in magic.
“Humane? Do not jest with me,” Alzaq laughed, not even regarding the shot I’d just fired. “I fancy a spot or two of base torture sometimes. It is useless for information, but oh it is entertaining indeed.”
“Should we aggress?” one of the armored oathholders standing behind Alzaq asked. “She shot at you.”
“Stay back,” Alzaq ordered, sounding almost bored. “’Twas merely a greeting. Allow her this transgression. Byron child, if you aim at me once more, you will find yourself joining the rest of your family in moments.”
Overconfidence. He still thought he was fully in control of this situation, and to be fair he might. I tossed the shotgun aside, a false gesture of peace, and I continued searching the room with my eyes, looking for the people who’d just blocked that blast.
In the shadows, lining the bookshelves directly across from me. The presence felt stronger when I turned my senses towards that direction. I squinted closer, and I could make out blurry forms, hid by the dimness of the lights here. At least six on the other side. I can assume six more here.
“How did you know, then?” I was going to have to kill everyone here. They all knew.
“I do speak to a dead woman,” Alzaq said, finally looking up from his book. “I suppose one can humor the deceased.”
“Magic?” I asked. “I know that Orchid uses the oathtongue.”
“Nothing so base,” Alzaq said with a disdainful shake of his head. “Orchid is young yet. The boy gained ridiculous ideals of equality and reform…”
So that part of the younger noble hadn’t been a facade, then. “And yet he still works for you to betray the Crown?”
“The Crown would never see itself betrayed by my hand,” Alzaq declared, the anger in his voice so real that I could almost believe he wasn’t lying. “The hand of Alto Tempet’s, perhaps, would be more appropriate.”
I looked back at the noble, my attention captured. Does he always blab about his plans to enemies? How the hell is he still alive?
“You made contact with him, or he made contact with you,” I reasoned. “One of you betrays the Crown, the other provides backup?”
“Alto is a fool,” Alzaq snorted. “A peasant could offer him the Crown itself and he would listen.”
“You contacted him, then,” I said.
“I did,” the noble admitted easily. “Dogs like him slobber for a promised treat.”
“You had him set this up?” I asked. I had no idea why he was still talking. A large part of me itched to give in to the hatred and rage, execute this noble before he could spread word about me, but the more rational part of my mind noted that he was currently explaining his plans and that I should hold off for at least a little longer.
“The commoner rebellion was his idea,” Alzaq said. “Sloppy, but effective in causing discord.”
“Assuming your goal is to destabilize the Crown and raise your own standing,” I said, trying to form magic as silently as possible. “Why not do it yourself?”
“When all is said and done, the court seeks a hand behind the knife,” the noble stated, picking his book up again. “They shall find Alto of House Tempet’s dripping with blood.”
A setup, then. One that would enable them to increase their own standing somehow—I wasn’t clear on the details of that, and I was already pushing my luck with how much I was asking—while also pushing down their greatest competition. Even though it’d been years since I last seriously studied political theory, I was pretty sure that disgracing House Tempet would be a critical blow to the power structure of nobility.
“Going back to Faye,” I said. “You said you didn’t use magic. Then what—“
Oh, I realized. Oh, I’d been so very stupid.
“I see you noticed,” Lord Alzaq said, his lips curling up into a cold smirk. “She lives in my service. A minute adjustment to her mind was beyond simple.”
“And Orchid?” I asked, more than a little shaken. Gods damn it, I’d been played like a fucking fiddle. “Does he know?”
“Of course he knows,” the noble snapped, slamming his book down with some force. “The boy is reluctant, but with time he will learn necessity.”
I was so very tempted to mouth off to him, but I controlled myself. None of the presences in this room had shifted, none of the oathholders giving any indication that they had noticed my manipulation of magic. I just needed a little longer…
“Does anyone else know who I am?” I asked, my voice hard.
“Not yet,” Lord Alzaq said, extracting a folded paper from his breastpocket. “Soon, my dear. It matters not when, for the truth will inevitably come.”
Fuck. This was both bad and good, though the former certainly outweighed the latter. If he was planning on revealing that I was a Byron, then that might imply that I would be able to escape with my life.
“The body of the last of the Byrons in my possession? Oh, that will make for a worthy story.” William of House Alzaq looked like a scholar in normal conditions, but now he looked hungry, a predator licking its lips in search of its prey. “William Alzaq, the Traitorslayer. That does have a rather nice ring to it.”
Or not.
“Two more questions before we finish postponing the inevitable,” I said. “First. Why like this? Why now?”
“The dead girl begins to get comfortable,” Alzaq said, flashing me a smile that looked more like a grimace. There was malice in that smile, but I knew malice better than anyone else. Was that a hint of annoyance behind those glinting eyes?
“Humor me,” I said, refusing to let him provoke me. I'd killed more dangerous men than him before, I reminded myself. He was nobody to fear.
He rose to the task, irritation clear in his eyes. The noble must have grown used to easily spooking those beneath him. “Since you deigned to ask so kindly. There’s a new god, rising in the east. He is a mortal yet, but he has given me much power and knowledge in exchange for a simple task.”
Great, he was a fucking cultist. Not just any cultist, either—I faintly remembered the oathholders I’d slain at the Sinlen Pass referring to a similar ‘rising god’ in the east. This didn’t make things any easier, but it did recontextualize a lot of things. “That being?”
Alzaq’s grimace-smile widened. “Create chaos.”
“Sure, sure,” I sighed. I’d been expecting more than that from someone who seemed to be dead set on ruining my life. “Second question. Why am I hearing this? You realize how big a tactical mistake you’re making, right?”
“I am bored,” Lord Alzaq said, the grown man managing to sound surprisingly childish. “My guards never entertain, my servants too simple. I had wished you to be a more receptive audience, but instead I found one worth taking the effort to break. Soon enough you will either be dead or mine.”
“And if I’m not?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “You seem to have failed to account for that.”
“Nobody will believe a peasant,” he laughed. “Over the words of the great Lord Alzaq? One who has weathered being assailed by traitors?”
And that was that. Given his extreme confidence as well as the fact that he’d been the one holding the paper that I presumed had critical information on it, I was going to bank on him not having further contingencies.
I had squeezed enough information out of him, and gradually I stopped pushing back the curtain of hate, allowing it to flow over me. My magic came freely, almost too easy, my reserves flowing out of me like water. It felt like there had been a leaky dam in place before, limiting what could spill out, and now that dam was well on its way to being gone. The flood of magic that poured forth was almost too much to handle.
Without another word, I fired the magic I’d been building, increasing its size and potency at the last second. I sent forth orbs of darkness nearly as wide across as a child was tall. Alzaq wasn’t a Caël oath, I was pretty sure—there was no way he could avoid this.
Almost before I shot, however, the two oathholders behind Alzaq stepped forward and grabbed his arms, golden lines flaring up and down their armor, and before the shot could hit him, all three of them disappeared. All that remained of them were a trace few golden particles in the air and the afterimage of their spell’s glow burned into my eyes.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
The twin spheres of incomprehensible black kept going, soaring in a straight line through the top of the desk and into the aisle of bookshelves directly behind where the noble had been. They consumed wood and paper and left behind nothing. I winced at the destruction. The loss of potentially irreplacable books didn’t sit well with me.
There had been an oathholder in that aisle, too, their figure briefly revealed as my magic stole the darkness itself from the air, but whoever they were, they were standing directly in the path of my magic. There wasn’t even a scream, my magic passing straight through them. A pair of legs dropped to the ground, gushing blood, and that was the end of that one’s life.
My magic kept going, which I was a touch surprised by. It tended not to go on this far, losing effectiveness and dissipating after killing one thing. Now, though, it continued, punching out two holes in the wall large enough to drive a carriage through. Wind filtered in from outside, the cool night air rushing in to replace the warmth of the study.
Magic flared in response to my move, a number of effects activating at the same time.
Fuck, I should’ve prepared better. The principle of power in numbers still applied here, even more than it had against the mob of commoners. Sure, this time I was going to be able to use lethal magic, but so were the other oathholders, and that was a massive force multiplier that the commoners hadn’t had.
I made the reasonable choice and ran away, sprinting back through the door and leaping over the hole I’d made in the floor on my way in. From the sound of spells activating behind me, the oathholders that had been guarding the noble weren’t content to let that happen.
I tossed up a shield behind me, loose-frame. Not a moment too soon, either. Immediately after I cast it, a spell slammed into it, then another. A thunderbolt, followed by a colorless spell that I couldn’t identify based solely off of its impact on my shield. They both barely made a dent in my shield, the increased flow of my magic allowing me to reinforce it without even thinking.
The space I was in was the opposite of ideal. I wouldn’t be able to hold up my shield forever, even if its efficacy had just increased, and I was stuck in a narrow hallway. I had to rotate out—
And the door at the end of the hallway slammed open, a knight in Faye’s black armor stomping into it. I couldn’t see his face, but his body language looked pissed.
Well, shit. Only one way out of this one. Well, two, actually, but I didn’t fancy dropping the—I glanced back at the hole that I’d sent the black-armored knight through to check—five meters or so to the floor below me.
I wreathed myself in magic, the hate coursing through me making it a simpler process, and I charged the wall to my right.
I met no resistance, the wood and brick falling apart to nothing when faced with Inome’s power. Shouts came from the hallway behind me, and I extinguished the magic on my body immediately, switching my focus to forming a loose-frame shield. It formed in less than a second, sealing the Lily-shaped hole in the wall I’d just made. That shield wasn’t going to last very long, but it would buy some time at least.
The room that I’d done some impromptu restructuring to get into was a sunroom of some kind, it looked like. One of the walls was extravagant, patterned glass from the top to the bottom, and there were a number of reclined chairs pointing towards it along with a billiards table and a few other knickknacks that I didn’t recognize. I was closer to the edge of the manor than I’d thought, I realized as I came closer to the wall-window. If I looked down, I could see the maze of flowers outside even in the dimness of the evening.
I only counted two doors. One of them led back into the hallway that I’d originally entered this floor back from, and the other was across the room from me, leading to the next room over to the left. Both potential escape routes, both potential ways to get penned in. A third escape route presented itself in the form of the window, but I didn’t want to resort to that until I was out of other options.
I found a decently sized chair that I could crouch behind for cover. It was as unnecessarily overdecorated as everything else in this household, but a quick rap on it confirmed that it was solid all the way through. Good handiwork.
My ears pricked at the sound of stomping boots in the hallway, and I formed another loose-frame shield and sparked it just in time, blocking the door off even as it swung in. If I had been stuck with the traditional Ceretian spells there, I would’ve been dead. That Nishi guy had been helpful no matter how cryptic his advice was.
The shields weren’t going to last forever, though, and I could already sense heavy impacts on the one that covered the hole in the wall. Less than a minute before that one broke, if I had to wager.
That was plenty of time. I started building magic, pulling from my oath, and I drew on the cold hatred to grant my perception clarity. I could almost feel that hidden aspect of communication in the magic now, the manipulation of the magic threads—no, not just threads, these were connections—less of a rough pulling and more of a mutual effort, my will melding with the magic and shaping it as I liked.
I winced as I felt my reserves drain a little, both shields taking hit after hit. The one on the wall would be my first priority, since it was already under half capacity.
I closed my eyes, calmly perceiving the magic I’d produced. Silent but violent, a dense ball of unstructured power the size of my fist was concentrated in my hand.
Was it even right to call it unstructured anymore? I might not be formally creating a frame, but I was enforcing my will on it nonetheless.
That can wait. Another massive impact to the wall-shield shook the entire wall with it, dust falling from the ceiling. There were more pressing issues for me to deal with at the moment.
Rather than wait for them to exhaust my magic and break through, I dropped the wall-shield and lobbed the sphere of ruin at it. It would catch them off guard, the shield disappearing when nobody was hitting it. I peeked around the chair I was hiding behind, catching a glance of two oathholders armored in the same black steel that had adorned the soldiers who’d teleported Lord Alzaq out. Sure enough, they weren’t ready for the path through to be opened so quickly.
Similarly, they weren’t ready when I commanded my magic to explode, my hatred for this fucking snake of a noble made manifest in a nebula of ruin. I couldn’t see the aftereffects of the blast, but the screams that it produced were clear as day. They increased in pitch, the pain of their bodies returning to the void from whence they came catching up to them, and then they reached a climax. I plugged my ears, the shrill quality of the scream a little too high to be pleasant, and then it was gone.
Two more down. I didn’t risk getting out from behind cover. I’d counted at least six earlier, and there were likely to be more than that.
Sure enough, there were still more impacts at the other shield, and heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway where I’d broken in from. Shouting intermingled with the stomping, and I prepared another compacted sphere of power.
Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t given the opportunity to refresh and reset. My other shield broke under the mass of a thousand different impacts. As it did, I felt the air thicken with magic.
Shit. Despite the fact that there were fewer of them alive now, the pressure felt greater than it had inside the room. More spells, more magic, more presence. I cancelled the magic I’d been working on, reallocating my resources to another set of shields. Closer to me, this time, next to a chair that I wasn’t hiding behind. With any luck…
A bolt of lightning hit it, the crack of thunder deafening in this small room. It didn’t shatter, but I could tell that quite a bit had been taken out of the shield. They were ramping up their spells now, and my shields were getting weaker.
The second spell, however, didn’t aim for the shield. A bright blue beam soared straight and true, sailing straight towards me like it had homed onto me through a solid half-meter of wood. Come to think of it, they might have an oathholder that can do that.
The beam smashed into the chair, exploding into a thousand shards of blue-white magic. The area around me dropped twenty degrees in a heartbeat, the chill painfully cold. As I tried to get up and get out of the space, I felt my limbs lock up, succumbing to the effect that clearly wasn’t just a chill.
No. I was not going to end like this. Not when the noble who sought to destroy my name yet lived.
Magic coursed through my veins, and I summoned it to my fingertips, passing it over my body. Where it touched me, it cleansed, permanently ruining the magic effect that had instilled itself in me.
I stood, recasting shields in both directions, keeping them closer to me. I wasn’t quite running low on magic reserves, the recent upgrade to my oathholder class combined with the gains I’d made from meditation meaning that I had quite a bit more left in the tank, but it was something that I was going to have to keep track of. Over a third of my magic had been expended between the magic I’d used at the ball, with the Tempet upstart, and right here with Lord Alzaq.
Well, making it out of here alive took priority. I had no preexisting quarrel with the people attacking me. The fact that they were actively trying to kill me kind of put them on my shit list, but the name at the head of that list was a lot more important to me than some nobodies who were protecting him.
Still, could I really afford to leave killing these people to later? The majority of them had been in the study when Alzaq had revealed that he knew I was a Byron, and that meant that they knew too.
They would have to die, I decided. I could—
A barrage of impacts against my shield stirred me out of my thoughts. Right. That was an ongoing concern.
Assess the situation. Find the enemies. The one who’d fired the slowing-frost beam at me was an Und oathholder, most likely. If I remembered my literature correctly, the effect that I had just escaped was consistent with a high-level ray of frost cast with Und’s influence.
The other oathholders were unknowns, but I knew that at least one of them had Aedi oath-made armor that could tank a lot of hits and speed them up in a pinch. I wasn’t sure what the other black steel had been, but it stood to reason that their armor might also be of Aedi oathmake. Whatever it was, it was either weaker than the other armor or I had gotten stronger, because the two armored oathholders in the hallway had died to my magic the same as anyone else would.
Too many unknowns. I was alright with fighting unknowns, had been as an adventurer, but that was with a party. With Jasmine.
Another ice-blue ray of frost shot towards me from the door on my left, but it didn’t hit my shields. Instead, the shot impacted the floor directly to the side of one of my barriers, the effect spreading across the ground almost as fast as I could run. Simultaneously, from the hole in the wall to my right, I saw a cloud form, sickly green fumes beginning to enter the room and flood it. Where it touched the wall, the wall rotted.
Voci oath.
I’d seen enough. They had a Voci oathholder and an Und one, both of whom excelled in denying area control, and I was currently stuck in an enclosed space.
The door that led to the other room practically flew towards me, and I had to move my shield to keep it from actually hitting me.
Fuck. Another pair of armored oathholders—other than the one with Faye’s, they all wore the same armor, huh—sprinted in the door.
I formed unstructured magic and fired it. I tried creating a vague magic missile frame to help shape it, but that broke, so I just manipulated it myself. There was less magic compacted into this blast, my time to prepare one having been cut short by their sudden appearance, and it showed. It flew no slower than before, but when I had it burst, spraying the magic at the new oathholders, there was a distinct lack of screaming.
When my magic finished dissipating, the armor they were wearing was glowing orange across their torsos. Their armor was magic-resistant as well then.
There was only one real option at this point. I started sprinting towards the window, bringing my shields around me as I did. The room lit up behind me as I ran, any number of magical effects being tossed my way. I tried to move my shields to block them, but even though they were large and flexible, I could not stop everything.
I was almost to the floor-to-ceiling glass wall when something clipped me in my left leg, hard and fast. Pain exploded where I’d been hit, a burning piercing pain growing in my calf like I’d been been bitten and then set afire.
It wasn’t a direct hit, I was pretty sure, because that would likely have taken my leg wholesale. Not a debilitating hit, but still a problem. The pain was already going away, replaced by a thick numbness. I chanced a glance down at it as I ran, half-limping.
Ah. Dark green magic clung to my leg, a band of it roiling around the point where it’d hit my calf. It looked like I’d caught a cloud with my body, and it was spreading.
That explains the numbness. The Voci oath had hit me with some—some spell I wasn’t sure of. I didn’t want to risk learning what it did, so I took a precious second to wreath my leg in my own magic, ruining the oily green substance. It didn’t kill the numbness, unfortunately.
More spells came, and I blocked where I could, forming magic in my hands as I did. The oathholders were storming into the room now, closing in on my position.
Three meters to the window. A bolt of lightning soared over my shield and arced, not quite hitting me but not completely missing either. I grit my teeth at the shock, my fingers involuntarily clenching into fists. I tried to move them but found them unwilling, the lightning temporarily knocking my nerves out of shape.
Fine then. I finished forming the magic, and I took one of my shields down to provide more power to my next movement.
The window was weakened from the impacts of a litany of spells that hadn’t quite managed to land on me. When I hurled my power at it, forming another hole, it shattered, the compromised glass unable to support itself any further.
Even as more spells came my way, dangerously close, I kept going, heedless of the fact that the ground was three floors below.
I leapt, and then I was falling.