“Helmont recalled all eleven surviving knights,” Dr. Stan read. “All eleven are now posted here at the Pinnacle, as of the return of the Manifest Destiny.”
“I need to call them.” Orson drew the stolen comm from his belt. It glowed a pale green in his gloved hand. “Warn them. Maybe Enoa can do more to hide herself.”
“Or you’ll scare her, and it will make her more noticeable,” Dr. Stan said. “That is just as possible, unless you know something that I don’t.”
Orson shook his head. “But they should at least know she’s in danger from that Rowan. Can I really just…”
The comm lit up. Lines of writing spread across the screen.
But the writing wasn’t haloed in green like written messages through the Mountain Patrol unit. This writing was ringed in white and labeled with a name.
Quartermaster Silber: “Your team is not present at your unloading. System is running without supervision. Explain.”
“I have to call them.” Orson angled the screen toward Dr. Stan. “This guy gave me permission.”
“Why would they leave the unloading?” She asked.
“I can’t...” He fumbled with the comm’s keypad, hesitant and slow with his thick gloves on. “I don’t know. Even if they’d been found, wouldn’t the quartermaster know it – unless this message is also a trap?”
“What are you going to say?” She leaned forward, as if to see his typing.
“I’ll tell him the truth. I don’t know, but I plan to find out.”
* * *
“Why are you here?” Enoa held steady, kept the staff aimed at the knight’s helmeted head. “You’re double-crossing the Liberty Corps because you’re obsessed with me, but we beat you before.”
Enoa felt the motion in the air around the knight. If she hadn’t been so focused on Kol, would she have noticed him arrive?
Would she feel the mass of other Shapers and other powers at the Pinnacle if she looked, if she really tried to see?
Now Sir Rowan could not be ignored. He floated just beyond the edge of the corridor, his white armor reflecting the still flashing lights from the floating disruptor.
And he was like a gathering weather system, clashing fronts and rain-heavy clouds that had already begun to rotate. The tornado wasn’t imminent, wasn’t inevitable, but the air had tensed at the other end of the passage. Enoa also felt tension in her sinuses, like the barometric pressure change before a sudden summer storm.
“That’s right Sir Pervsalot,” Jaleel said. “And this time, it looks like three on one!”
Enoa felt the tension of Jaleel’s hand on the bow and the tension of the arrow set to the string. In a single motion, he could send the arrow at Sir Rowan.
“I work to free my brother.” Kol stood just behind them. “If you hinder that, knight, you’ll carry the scars from our meeting for the rest of your days.”
Enoa’s sense of Kol only expanded with him standing so close. She sensed the tension in his mind, the way she recognized the tension in Jaleel’s arms. She knew he was a thought away from new shields.
Enoa tried to quiet her expanding senses. Now was not the time to be distracted or occupied by her growing, instinctive knowledge of the world, unrefined and unfocused.
Sir Rowan turned away from them, shifted back toward the mouth of the antechamber. A wet, grinding gurgle came from his helmet. A glob of neon orange flew from the helmet’s proboscis. It struck the floating ball.
The disruptor’s lights went out, its reflectors dark. It listed to one side, angling lower and lower toward the floor.
“Ugh!” Jaleel yelled. “He slimed my disco ball!”
“Clever children to disrupt the cameras,” Sir Rowan said. “I enjoyed what you did with the feeds from the high security block – interfering with the power supply. You’re quite the little inventor, aren’t you, archer? But don’t worry, I’ve already disabled all surveillance in this block. I hate being interrupted.”
“You aren’t prepared to fight us now, Rowan,” Enoa said. “Let go of whatever Shaping you plan to do, and then we’ll figure out where to—”
Sir Rowan let out a sound, almost a whistle, thin and shrill. But the sound grew and changed, the noise of a great rush of air leaving the knight’s helmet. The sound was harsh and inhuman, like the storm-carried whistle between tree branches. The noise wasn’t overpowering, but loud enough that Enoa stopped speaking.
One of Kol’s shields appeared in front of all three of them. It started at the floor and reached above their heads, forming before the gale filled the hallway.
A breeze could be felt even through the shield. Enoa felt it brush against her tunic and pants, anywhere her armor didn’t keep her covered.
“I can bring the entire holdfast down on you,” Sir Rowan said. “I can bring all ten knights, our squires, our students, and our lord master. They know my alarm. And if I call so they hear me, they’ll be here.
“I’ll say it again, for the last time. Put your weapons down. I am here to offer freedom to you, Mr. Maros. You and your brother and the archer will leave.
“Enoa, you will stay here as my adherent. Together, we’ll find all facets of your true potential. And mine. We complete each other, Enoa. I’ve been drinking in the scent of Anemos for forty years. I watched Sucora Cloud and her apprentice, Theta, but I was kept away from them!
“And I smelled you too. I didn’t know who I was tasting then, but now I do. Sometimes, from far away, I felt Sucora training you, when the cobalt alloy couldn’t hide you both from me. I thought you were part of her, a divided thought or a dawn technique. You felt so similar, a halved-mind, closer than aunt and niece should be. You’re a real ripening heir, but with no one to complete you.”
“Eeeeew!” Jaleel made a gagging noise in the back of his throat. “Stop horning after Enoa! Shut up right now, or I’ll shoot you just for talking like that to her.”
“Wait.” Enoa raised her free hand.
“I don’t even care about the mission, right now,” Jaleel said. “I just—”
“Wait,” Enoa put just enough edge behind her words to quiet him.
The controlled atmosphere of the corridor was too dry to produce the kind of Bullet Rain she’d used in their last fight with Sir Rowan. That was their best ranged option. Rowan could redirect Jaleel’s arrows or dodge them. She couldn’t know or judge Kol’s abilities.
That left only the transmutation explosion.
“I won’t go with you, Rowan,” she said. “But there are things I need to learn. I have my own wager for you.”
“I’ve presented you with your options already, Enoa,” Rowan said. “Disappointing, I prefer my pupils to be attentive when I speak.”
“We have to shoot him, Enoa!” Jaleel kept his bow aimed ahead, even with the energy in his way. “We have to.”
“Stop!” Enoa didn’t look away from the knight, but she gripped Jaleel by the upper arm. “Rowan, if you explain more about my aunt and her student, I’ll show you the basic Anemos transmutation. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Aren’t the Maros brothers worth learning what you’ve wanted to know for so long?”
“What are you doing?” Kol asked.
“Let me through the shield but follow me,” she said.
“Miss Cloud, please,” Kol said. “This man, these knights are very dangerous. Our best option in defeating him is standing together.”
“I’m with the unibomber,” Jaleel said. “Do we really need to talk about what he wants to do to you?”
“Stay close,” she said. “Kol, let me through.”
“The two of you can stay right where you are,” Sir Rowan said. “That’s what I prefer.”
“No,” she said. “We’re not separating. And if you try to call the baron, he might hear you, but you’ll be gone before he gets here.”
“A threat from you too!” Rowan laughed, shrill and loud like his Shaping whistle. “So many threats from the children, so scared, and so alone. Don’t worry, if you listen to me, no one will hurt you.”
“Kol, do you remember the second time I met you?” Enoa asked. “This will be like that.”
“How could I forget?” Kol’s shield did not waver. “I think I understand.”
“The second time you met,” Sir Rowan laughed. “We’re more alike than I realized! Your own collection, Enoa! But you’ll have more as mine than these boys can give you.”
“I’m not convinced,” Enoa said. “My offer stands.”
“We need a better shorthand,” Jaleel said. “The archers came up with ours on like day one.”
“We will.” Enoa patted him on the arm. “Kol, your shield.” The light retracted from a wall to the size of a true shield. Kol reached out and took it like it was a physical object. He held it, suspended at his left hand, hiding half of him behind the distorted blue wall.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Let’s go.” Enoa led the way, the others just a pace behind her. Jaleel kept the arrow to the string, but loosened his grip.
Enoa waited for Rowan to argue with her bargain or the presence of the others walking with her. But he stayed as he was, still airborne and alert, still watchful and silent.
“I’ll show you the basics of Anemos transmutation,” Enoa said. “It’s the root of everything I can do. I’m sure a Master Shaper like you can learn whatever you want after that. Then you can tell me about my aunt and her student.”
“You can show me whatever you want,” Sir Rowan said. “I don’t plan to tell you anything until we’ve sent your boy toys on their way, and we can talk in private as…”
He fell silent again when she raised her left hand and a drop of water coalesced out of the processed air. It floated there, experiencing transmutation, shifting from ice to water to vapor and back again.
“This is what you want,” she said. “Letting me go, letting us all go is worth you getting it.”
“We’ll have so much more than that, together.” He reached out his hand toward her, toward her display of power.
Enoa pressed the staff to the shifting droplet. She held it, suspended, floating just above the end of the staff. She held the metal ahead of her and moved it as she walked, like it was the staff that held the water in the air, like it wasn’t just the power of her own will and mind.
“Yes, hold it there.” Sir Rowan floated forward, hand still outstretched. His cushion of dense air visibly swirled beneath his feet. “I can almost feel it. All these years, so close…”
Enoa steadied her breathing. The timing was close, but if she acted when he did, acted when he reached for the droplet – it could be over. She’d catch him, blind from his own desire.
She reached the end of the hall, Jaleel and Kol still just behind, still ready for a fight. But Rowan wasn’t looking at any of them. He looked only at the approaching, transmuting droplet.
The knight pulled back his hand. But it was only to tug his gauntlet and glove free. Then he reached his pale, bare hand back toward the Shaping, naked fingers stretching out toward the droplet.
So close, so close, his fingers touched the outer vapor of the droplet, as it briefly steamed into gas.
He pulled his hand back from the heat, but returned it, cautious, probing toward it, as it cycled to water and to ice.
So close…
One of the guards stirred from the floor, stun arrow still sticking from his unarmored shoulder. Enoa heard the clink of armor-on-armor as the man woke and found himself packed tight, body-to-body with his fellow guards.
He started, reeling. He gasped and let out a gargled yell.
The spell was broken. Sir Rowan forgot the droplet and his desire. He spun away from her, revealing the orbs across his back. Three glowed.
Smoke poured from the knight’s helmet, propelled by the power of his own breath, green and brown. It engulfed the reeling guard, all of the guards.
The man gasped. He struggled and flailed and fell again, flopped on top of his fellows.
Enoa struck.
She’d lost her best chance, but she could not hope for another. The droplet burst against Rowan’s back. Orbs shattered. A small explosion took him in the armor.
Sir Rowan howled. He flew across the room, letting the force of the blast carry him. His armor was blackened, but not broken through.
But the rest of him couldn’t be seen. Gas and smoke poured from the shattered orbs, violet and mustard yellow and ruby red.
Sir Rowan spun with grace, moving in practiced weightlessness like an experienced astronaut in zero gravity. He twisted around so his booted feet landed at the top of the opposite wall. With a push, he flew back at them at the same speed. He howled again and his yell carried more of the green and the brown smoke bearing down on them and at the mouth of the passage.
An arrow flew past Enoa’s right shoulder, arcing above the line of smoke, aimed straight for the knight’s head.
But the smoke shifted, expanded, flared outward. The arrow was sent spiraling away and out of sight.
Enoa fell to the side when Kol shoved her. Before she could shout, two blue fields appeared, at once.
One formed at the mouth of the corridor, blocking it before the oncoming smoke.
The second formed just in front of Rowan. The knight flew bodily into the projection. He struck it, face-first. He yelled and for the first time lost his focus and his Shaping. He dropped to the floor. He struck it and rolled until his back met the side of the desk.
He did not move.
Kol’s second shield reshaped and reformed, moving to the floor. It curved into a dome around Sir Rowan, pinning him in place between desk and glowing blue.
“Miss Cloud.” Kol raised both arms toward the fields. “I can’t hold back his smoke. I’ve tried to hold it back before, but… It’s taking everything, and it will come through the shield. Take Max and save him.”
“We came to save both of you.” Enoa felt the moving currents of air, still filling the cell block antechamber. She felt the dense burst of knockout gas, clinging low to the floor, fogging and obscuring everything. The lighter bursts from the destroyed orbs, sifted through the heavier gas and drifted high toward the ceiling.
Enoa felt the shield and Kol’s will too, physically planted between the gas and the corridor.
“We can’t leave you,” Enoa said.
“Yeah, Rowan will just call the other knights,” Jaleel said. “We won’t get away unless we get around his fart flier technique and take him out.”
“I’ll hold back the gas that comes through.” Enoa remembered fighting the unseen, poison clouds in the Crystal Dune Forest. And she’d only become stronger in the weeks since.
“Do we think he could be weak against his own knockout gas, if he was unmasked?” Jaleel walked close behind them and spoke in a low voice, though the trapped knight still hadn’t moved.
“Whatever you’re suggesting,” Kol said. “Do it fast. I’ve never worked this much Shaping and once I lose these projections there will be no more.”
“We unmask him,” Jaleel said. “I have a couple grappling arrows, and I reworked a couple of my newer arrowheads to go through Rowan’s fart shield technique. We just need somewhere to put him. I think one of the doors back there was storage, not a cell. It had a little sign.”
“You’re going to grab him with a grappling hook?” Kol said. “And throw him in a closet.”
“Yep,” Jaleel said.
“Insanity. How are you all still alive? We would be wiser to kill him.”
“Well,” Jaleel said. “If we gas him and it’s deadly, and he kills himself, then I’m not gonna cry over it. But if it’s not, we can’t just kill him. Because, uh, we’re the swashbuckling heroes.”
“Enough talk,” Kol said. “I’m losing… losing control. Whatever you do. Do it.”
Enoa felt the first gas ooze its way through the shield, like trickling leaks in the wall of a dam. She felt them and she stopped them, like pressing her mind tight to the gaps, holding them closed.
But then particles oozed through everywhere, one, two, ten, twenty leaks, then more than she could count. Enoa added her will to Kol’s to hold it all at bay, and she knew his strain, maintaining the protection, keeping it strong, keeping it solid.
“I have the arrows ready,” Jaleel said. “If we can get at him.”
The gas from the shattered orbs reached the ceiling. The sprinklers kicked on, drumming water against the tile floor, the bodies, the desk, and against Kol’s other projection.
Water crept through to the knight. Real leaks dribbled against his armor.
Sir Rowan started awake.
Enoa felt him move, felt his mind, alert. The swirling of unseen forces began again. And Enoa could see the knight truly moving, blurred motion through the two fields of blue.
“I have no ideas,” Kol said. “But we’re running out of time. He’s doing—”
An explosion bloomed under the shield between Rowan and the energy. Kol staggered back. Enoa felt his tight will slacken and she saw the second blue field blur in the antechamber flicker.
The flicker was all Sir Rowan needed. He howled again, more inhuman shouts. He tore himself free of the energy.
Even through the hallway shield, Enoa saw his white armor browned and darkened from the energy field.
“Clever children.” He lifted from the floor again. “I inhaled some of my own mixture. Why didn’t you come out here and kill me? Were you too afraid of my Shaping? Too afraid of me? Too afraid of death?”
“I changed my mind again,” Jaleel said. “I just want to shoot him.” Enoa didn’t look at him, but she felt Jaleel switch arrows. The new arrow had a cable of its own, a long heavy cord of flexible metal that he connected to the body of the bow.
“Shoot me?” Sir Rowan giggled, the same unnerving, shrill laugh. “Shapers are the real power, boy. You’re just one of the little people.”
Enoa still kept her focus on the gas, kept it from reaching them. It was a subconscious thing, simple when just bolstering Kol’s own resolve. But that didn’t solve how to reach Rowan through the gas.
“I didn’t know Rowan was a man’s name.” Jaleel’s voice didn’t waver. Neither did his arm, as he drew a second arrow and held it between ring finger and pinky. “A girl named Rowan lived on my block as a kid, and I know Professor Rowan from Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, but what’s your deal?”
Sir Rowan made a new sound, like the rush of air through bald canyons in a desert storm, moving sand and small, naked stone.
“Actually,” Kol said. “There was also a male Rowan on my high school basketball team.”
“Really?” Jaleel said. “I thought it was just girls, video game scientists, and this creeper.”
Sir Rowan sent more smoke at them, a noxious yellow-green. Then another explosive blast came through his armor, igniting the smoke, burning out from his still-gauntleted left hand.
The yellow gas burned. Fire raced along the gas, down from where Sir Rowan flew, like he’d burned free of Kol’s barrier.
Enoa had time only to process the attack, time enough to understand what was happening, to know that the explosion was coming and know that there was no chance to get away.
The explosion against the shield sent Kol falling away from them, crashing to the wall and then to the floor.
The field held, but it flickered and again the flicker was enough to let Sir Rowan through. The knight flew, carried with the speed and strength of a great plume of white gas. He drove his gauntlet into Jaleel’s shoulder, above the bow.
The young man clutched his arrows and didn’t catch himself when he lost his feet. He slid on his side, away from Enoa and the knight.
Sir Rowan didn’t speak to Enoa or taunt her, but another burst of the heavy brown gas left him with the might of his gale-strong breathing. Enoa let go of Kol’s shield. She turned all her focus toward the knight.
Enoa breathed, and she felt the still-clean air. She held it and turned it, forming a bubble of breathable oxygen at the center of the onslaught, but she could see nothing of Jaleel or Kol. And the intensity of the knight’s attack surrounded her in his thought and his obsession and his desire, as the gas encircled her. She could not feel the others.
Enoa raised the staff. He would not take her, not without her burning all of his gas, burning them both, destroying them both, ending it all instead of letting him have her.
And she could see him, the shape of his helmet, as more of the smoke came from it. He approached her through the gas and floated, just at the very edge of her protections.
“How long can you hold on?” He spoke. “How long? I would have been gentle with you, but not now. Now I’ll take what I want, and I will have it. All these years. Now, you’re mine.”
Enoa didn’t answer. She only raised her staff to burn them both. Sir Rowan’s helmet and chest and shoulders breached the circle of his gas, orbs glowing across his armor.
An arrow struck the knight at the back of his neck. All the orbs’ lights went dark.
Sir Rowan spun toward the attack. He twisted, reached for the arrow, his focus divided, his helmeted head peering through his own gas.
The second arrow pierced the gas and exploded right in his face. The arrowhead released spiked cables and barbed arms that wrapped the helmet in a tight embrace.
Sir Rowan yelled. Even without his orbs, gas in many colors leaked from his armor, gold and green and gray, all muddied together. But he was caught. He wrenched and strained and flew back. The cable from the arrow went tight but wouldn’t yield, and he couldn’t escape.
“I can’t get it!” Jaleel yelled.
A ring of blue appeared through Sir Rowan’s ring of poison. Kol was covered in his shield, all-glowing. He ran ahead of her, ran to the knight. He seized the cable with his prosthetic hand.
The grip was strong. Jaleel and Kol both pulled. The helmet gave. With a long, wet slurp the trunked helmet pulled from Sir Rowan’s head, revealing his face. He had a sickly complexion, yellowed like old parchment, his eyes bulging and red, his face thick, as if swollen, full in a way that did not fit the rest of his armored frame.
“Help Enoa!” Kol yelled.
And when Sir Rowan fled back away from them, a shield appeared around him, a perfect globe that encircled him, trapped him tight in all directions, trapped with his own cloud of poison.
Enoa felt the poison trying to worm its way free. She felt the full weight of the knight’s hold on the air.
She took her own grip of the poison gas. Enoa gave Sir Rowan a full display of Anemos. She held the air in the shield, and then she held it tighter still, held his own gas close to him and his face and his eyes until he breathed it in, until her power forced his own fumes back into his body and filled his lungs.
Sir Rowan gagged and screamed his inhuman wail, his lips pursed, purple and swollen, like his cheeks. He drove more poison from his armor with each breath, seeping from boot and gauntlet and at the neck of his tunic.
And more and more and more poison was driven back, back inside him, until it filled him. He flailed and fought and shook inside the shield.
Then he went still.