Ferez screamed as Leo disappeared beneath a roiling wave of black and red and blue as the surviving battlemages poured everything they had into the breach. The walls around the entrance crumbled and ruptured outwards, whipping away over the docks like sand blown by the desert wind, sharp pricks stinging every inch of Ferez’s exposed skin like a thousand needles. He ran forward to dive into the mess and save his friend, but Ingrid latched on to one arm while Asim’s powerful hand gripped his other.
“I’m sorry, High Mage, but to go in there is death,” his guardsman said, tone sombre.
“We haven’t endured everything for him to die here like this!” Ferez spat, fighting to pull free.
“Don’t be a fool,” Ingrid said calmly. “You warned him, and he didn’t listen. You don’t owe him your death.”
“It’s not about what’s owed or not. My friend is in there.”
“Leo is already gone. Charging off like a reckless fool won’t change that.”
Her tone was unexpectedly soft. He stopped struggling and looked at her. Her grip loosened as she gave him a small, sad smile that, try as hard as she might, looked like it was about to turn to tears. Ferez sagged. Leo had said he would be fine, and against his better judgement, the fire mage had trusted him. Or at least had enough doubt to stay his hand as his friend tore off.
He closed his eyes and was assaulted by a stream of memories. That fateful meeting in Leo’s room all those years ago that set them on the path to DuBois. The chubby mage screaming out of the sky atop Windy to pluck Ferez from Fahroul’s grasp atop the Griffon Rider fortress. Sitting in his drawing room, sipping top shelf whiskey and talking like they hadn’t seen each other for a few days at most, let alone decades.
Ferez shook his head and pushed the memories back down. Now wasn’t the time, they still had a battle to win. Grief must wait. But deep in his soul, Ferez knew he would carry this burden for the rest of his days. Slowly, he rose.
“Alright. We can’t go this way. Ingrid, get your ship up and ready with a contingent of your best warriors. We’re going top down, don’t bother clearing every floor just smash through to the ground level and secure the entrance to the cells. Leanne,” he said, turning to the woman, “I’ll need you to marshal the marines and…”
He had prepared to find her a wreck. Mute. Unresponsive, maybe. He was not expecting to find her staring at him with a cocked eyebrow and a smirk on her lips.
“Lots of people underestimate the Patriarch, but I thought his oldest friend might be different,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, bristling at the accusation.
“I’m just saying, maybe you should look again.”
She nodded at the door, and Ferez spun, staring once again at the maelstrom of magical energy. The intensity of the chaos had subsided a little after the initial onslaught, and the magic had resolved into two fairly neat streams of magic billowing onto the docks. In brief glimpses through the swirling miasma, there were flashes of something, hard and shiny and white.
Like ice.
Gradually, over the roar of the destructive magics, Ferez heard another sound. The challenge of a pissed off privateer. It swelled as the stream of magic dwindled, the opposing battlemages unable to sustain such an intense onslaught. As the energies waned into narrower streams, Leo came into full view, his shield planted before him, splitting the attack down the middle. He laughed as the force arrayed against him faltered, and he took a laborious step forward. Then another. And another.
“Any time you’re ready, old boy!” he called.
Ingrid chuckled and sprinted for the doorway before Ferez could recover from his shock. With a start, he regained his wits and charged after her.
“Make sure everyone is ready,” he called back to the trio of mundane warriors behind him. “We won’t get another chance at this.”
The entrance loomed large in his vision as Ingrid beat him to it. She flung her arms out to her sides and brass blades sprang from within her oversized vambraces. She crossed them above her chest and dived into the leftmost stream of magic, the Resonance swords inhaling the destructive magics as she sailed through, unharmed, before shooting out the other side. Once unimpeded by the Resonance alloy, the stream roared back to life, concealing her from view. Ferez could only hope she would be alright as he angled his own path to the right. He raised his forearm over his face and projected a shield of flame as he dove into the mess of destructive energy.
He was powerful and experienced, and he had learned early the value of a strong flame shield, but even his defence struggled against the onslaught. Lances of magic punched through, fire and ice and darkness lashing his body, tearing chunks out of his clothing and burning the flesh beneath. It was agony, being burnt and frozen and rendered to unmatter all at once, and he screamed, his shield flickering and threatening to fail completely.
And then it was over. He burst out on the other side and skidded to a halt, taking stock of the enemy arrayed against him. As expected, they were arrayed in a firing line at the back of the room, arrows nocked, while the battlemages stood in the centre of the expansive hall. They panicked, dithering between redoubling their efforts or fleeing as Leo continued his implacable advance. Ingrid was already tearing into the archers behind them, scattering men and body parts in a vortex of bloodied blade and whirling braid.
With a grim smile, Ferez charged his own flank, arrows disintegrating harmlessly as they struck his fire shield. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a couple of battlemages shift their attention his way. Within moments, a tendril of black shadow crashed against his shield, arresting his charge as shards of ice plunged towards him from above. He swore and dived aside as the crystal daggers thudded into the ground, one lucky blade scything through his leg as he came up in a crouch. He hissed in pain but lurched back into his charge as the bastards prepared another assault. His only hope was to reach the archers before they overwhelmed him. Once he got in amongst the pigeons, so to speak, it would be much harder to target him. Pit, if they had a conscience, they might even hesitate rather than risk killing their own, though he wasn’t going to hold his breath.
He leapt to the side as an ice spear whistled past, a second following quickly on the heels of the first. Swatting it out of the sky with a Flash Bomb, he risked a look at the mages. The Aquis mage was trying to slow him down, an arsenal of spears poised behind his head, floating at the ready, while the Umbrian was summoning darkness around his hands, concentrating it into an attack so destructive not even Ferez could battle through it unharmed.
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“Oi! You’re fighting me, bastard!” Leo shouted as he surged forward. With their two friends distracted, the mages still focussing on the ice warrior couldn’t contain him anymore and he smashed through their attack, shooting forward inhumanly fast and straight for the shadow mage and his Aquis friend.
The Umbrian made to turn, to face the new threat, and made it halfway before Leo’s mace blitzed through his head, smashing it apart in a spray of red gore. The enemy water mage fell back in horror, tripping over his feet and falling in his haste to get away. He held a hand up, a pillar of ice rising between him and Leo as the privateer’s mace crashed down. It smashed a furrow through the middle of the lesser mage’s construct, blood spraying the underside of the ruined barricade as its owner ruptured underneath.
Before Leo could see to the rest of the mages, Nezir crashed into him, both men falling into a vicious duel of raw strength, trading blows that would shatter the bodies of other men. The surviving battlemages rallied, prepared to overwhelm Leo alongside their boss, when Ingrid fell amongst them like a rabid wolf in the henhouse. He hadn’t seen her abandon her wanton slaughter of the archers, but Ferez was glad she had. Seeing her go to work, he realised he was much more in her element butchering mages than he would have been.
Guess I’ll deal with the archers myself.
He closed the remaining distance and launched through the pirate’s ranks like a wounded bull, tossing men aside as he smashed his way forward. They tried to turn on him, but he rampaged on, never staying in one place for more than a couple of seconds. After all, he didn’t need to kill them all, just distract them long enough for the marines and raiders to make it through the doors. His efforts bore fruit as a plucky slaver raised his bow to take a shot at Ferez, only to drop like a stone as a black fletched crossbow bolt punched through his temple.
It was the first of a veritable hail, Leo’s marines tearing into the disordered firing line with professional lethality. Ferez grinned and retreated from the slaver’s line, letting them work as he sprinted towards Leo and Ingrid.
His love was in her element, a ghost of silver, black and red darting about her quarry. An Umbrian cocooned himself in shadow, desperate to shield himself from her attacks. She drove her blade into the darkness, the sword drinking the magic and exposing the Umbrian once again to the light of day. Ingrid’s weapon had punctured through one of his eyes and out the back of his skull. She wrenched it free, her victim crumpling at her feet, and whirled on the two surviving battlemages, pointing the tips of her blades at them as they marshalled their power for a counterattack. Before they could strike, red hot flame spewed from the Jarlessa’s weapons, engulfing them and drowning out their screams.
Leo, whilst not enjoying the same measure of success, was still acquitting himself admirably. He swung his hammer overhead, smashing Nezir to the ground with enough force to rupture the packed earth, flinging spears of stone and dirt into the air. The debris froze in midair, then changed course, smashing into the water mage and knocking him off his feet. Both he and the pirate rose at the same time, wasting no time in charging straight into one another again.
Ferez ran towards the fight, hurling a Flash Bomb into Nezir when the pirate knocked Leo off his feet again. The bolt detonated against his breastplate, driving the earth mage back apace, but failing to achieve much more than that.
With a roar, he turned to Ferez, a spear of stone rising from the ground at his feet. He hoisted it like a javelin, aiming square at Ferez, but before he could let loose, it inexplicably snapped in half, the tip clattering to the floor. Nezir stared down at it, confused, then turned his head just in time for his face to catch the full force of Ingrid’s boot. The blow drove him to a knee, albeit briefly, but his movements were sluggish as he lurched to his feet. He aimed a wild swing at Ingrid with what was left of the spear, but the Skjar pirouetted safely away as Leo smashed his mace into the pirate’s back.
Nezir’s armour shattered and fell away as the strike smashed him to his belly. He groaned and tried to crawl away, but his arms gave out and he collapsed in an exhausted, broken heap. With a weary sigh and visible effort, he flopped over onto his back, a pair of new stone swords held in a guard above him. Ingrid swatted them aside with a gust of air and Ferez blasted him back into the ground with a stream of fire, the pressure and immense heat pinning the pirate in place. He kept blasting the bastard until Leo stepped up beside him with a hand on his shoulder. Ferez nodded at his friend and stepped back as Leo hefted his mace, and smashed it down onto Nezir’s chest.
What remained of the pirate’s armour disintegrated, most of it skittering off along the floor, though a few fractured plates remained wedged between the Crimson Blade’s bare chest and Leo’s fierce weapon. The privateer let it rest there as the dread pirate wheezed and coughed, a trickle of blood running from beneath his helmet onto his bare chest.
“Are we going to accept his surrender now?” Leo asked, pressing hard onto the mace and eliciting a groan from the defeated mage.
“You heard Ferez before we started this. No prisoners,” Ingrid replied, raising her hand as a blade of barely perceptible air sprang into life around it.
Seeing him now, Ferez regretted the declaration. The Crimson Blade had been broken. There was no threat anymore. Was there really any honour or dignity in executing someone like this? Nezir looked at him, nothing but his eyes showing behind the slits in his stone helmet. They were wide, his irises rimmed in white. Pleading.
“Tell your men to stand down, and we’ll spare your life,” Ferez said.
“What?” Ingrid said, dangerously low. “You said no prisoners. Are you really changing your mind now because you personally can’t bring yourself to execute the worst of the lot?”
“He’s beaten, my love. We don’t need to execute someone who is no longer a threat.”
“That’s naïve, Ferez. We should kill him now, while he is weak. He almost defeated you and Leo before. We might not be so lucky when he comes looking for revenge.”
“I hate to agree with Ingrid,” Leo said, “but I think she’s right. Would he spare us if the roles were reversed?”
“I don’t expect he would,” Ferez replied. “But that doesn’t matter. We’re better than him. That’s really why we’re here, after all.”
“Are we though?” Leo asked, his voice rising an octave. “You, maybe. Me, quite possibly, I am nothing if not a paragon of class and dignity, after all. The rabid dog here, though? Definitely not.”
“You’ll feel this dog’s fangs if you don’t shut up, fool,” Ingrid barked.
“I’ll leave that to Ferez, thank you very much.”
“Cut it out, you two,” Ferez interjected before it could grow too heated. “We’ve taken losses enough. We can end this without further bloodshed. The pirates upstairs can’t reach the slaves now, they can’t use them as human shields. We’ll put the pirates in irons and hand them over to Emrinth. They’ll see to it they never hurt anyone again. So, what say you, Crimson Blade? Do you surrender?”
Nezir let out a hacking laugh.
“Surrender? Why would I? This battle is going exactly as I planned.”
With a start, Ferez realised the pirate’s fingers were buried in the ground by his side. The Wail rumbled and dust cascaded from the ceiling. Ferez looked up as the roof warped and roiled, gaping holes opening up as the earth rolled back like parchment to expose an array of bristling arrows against taught bowstrings. More troubling than that, though, were the brown-robed figures glaring down at them.
“You didn’t think I would fritter away all my battlemages so thoughtlessly, did you?” Nezir asked as the surrounding earth erupted in a storm of jagged spikes. Ferez danced back, crying out in pain as a chunk of serrated stone ripped through the muscle above his collarbone. Ingrid flew high into the air, executing a flawless back flip and gently alighting a safe distance away while Leo crouched into the onslaught, the stone pushing him a few feet back across the floor but failing to penetrate his armour.
Seizing the opportunity, Nezir leapt to his feet, stone sliding up his body and reforming his armour as he sprinted toward the entrance to the subterranean cells.
He’s going for the slaves, Ferez realised.
But no, it was worse than that. Nezir only thought of them as cargo, cattle to be acquired and bartered away for profit. That’s why he hadn’t thought to use them as human shields before now, he didn’t view them as human at all. Until Ferez had opened his dumb, naïve mouth and put the idea in his head.
“After him!” Ferez shouted, taking a step after Nezir, before his world erupted in a storm of raging magic.