Heart of Black Ice

CHAPTER 84

Although she could see only half of his face, Nicci could tell that General Utros already believed he was victorious. Resplendent in his leather armor, he rode toward her like a supreme conqueror. His escort soldiers clustered close, ready to defend their general, and his standard-bearers raised Iron Fang’s ancient flame symbol, which he now claimed as his own.

Nicci faced him in only a bloodstained black dress. She lifted her soft chin, and her blond hair flowed freely around her head. She ignored the rest of the soldiers, didn’t even acknowledge the painted sorceress at his side. “I wasn’t certain you would be brave enough to face me, General Utros.”

The horses shifted on the broken stones, but the escort riders forced them into rigid ranks. The men looked gaunt, their skin pale except where it was streaked with blood, particularly around their mouths.

Utros tilted his horned helmet down at her, and she could see his eye blazing through the hole in the gold half mask. “It takes little courage to face the vanquished.” He gestured expansively behind him. “The city has already fallen. There is nothing you can do but surrender. I am glad you realize that.”

Nicci remained silent.

Mrra growled low in her throat. Nathan, Bannon, and Lila stood ready to protect Nicci, but they looked insignificant surrounded by Utros’s escort guard. Even in the isolation of Halsband Island, the sounds of continuing battles wafted from the main city, but Nicci heard only the blood rushing in her ears, felt her strength rising.

Ruva glared from her bay horse. Much of the pale sorceress’s carefully applied paint had flaked off, leaving only muddled messages. Her shoulders jerked with anticipation. “I want her, beloved Utros.”

A flitting spirit appeared in the air, Ava’s glowing shadow. “We want her!”

Ruva laughed. “Send her to the Keeper, and then maybe he will leave us alone! My sister can stay with me.”

Ava’s shimmering form swirled close, overlapping with her twin. “We will stay together. Always together.”

General Utros swung out of his saddle and dropped to the ground in front of Nicci. His boots crunched on the loose stones of the Palace of the Prophets. The escort guard sat motionless, as if they had turned to statues again.

Still she said nothing, merely faced him with a stony expression.

Utros loomed over Nicci. “Nothing you say will change the outcome of this day. No concessions you make will alter my victory. I came here to destroy you. There will be no surrender terms. My army will enslave any people still alive in Tanimura. We will rest in this city and rebuild, and when I have restored my army to its full strength with thousands of new recruits, we will march north and conquer all of D’Hara. I will achieve even more than what Emperor Kurgan demanded of me. I will rule both the Old World and the New.”

Nathan stepped closer to the implacable Nicci and defied the general. “Emperor Kurgan is long dead, just as you should be.”

Utros looked at the wizard as if he were an annoying distraction. “Iron Fang is the past. I am the new emperor.”

“Your allies are defeated,” Bannon blurted out. “Look out at the harbor! The Norukai navy is destroyed. King Grieve is dead—I killed him myself.”

Utros showed little surprise. “That saves me the trouble of doing it. Grieve was unruly and uncontrollable. I would have had to be rid of him sooner or later.”

Knowing that people were dying every moment, Nicci snapped, “Enough talk, Utros! I brought you here to end this.”

The general glared at her. “It is already ended. I will accept your surrender, but my army will continue to ransack Tanimura. You have lost, Sorceress. Your Old World has lost. There is nothing you can do.”

Still in the saddle, Ruva pulled her lips back to expose her teeth. “We must have Nicci. She needs to die. My sister and I will accept no other terms. She is ours!”

Ava’s mocking spirit flickered in an invisible wind. “You can rip out her heart, dear sister, and I will rip out her soul.”

Utros looked to the twin sorceresses, then back at Nicci, and he smiled with half a face. “Agreed. That is our only demand. Your life is forfeit, and if I watch you die with enough pain, then I might call off some of my troops. That is what true surrender looks like.” He nodded. “Are you a leader, Sorceress? Will you give your life to save all those people in the city? Choose now!”

Bannon crouched in a fighting stance, and Lila stood beside him with her sword raised. Nathan extended his hands, ready to call on his gift.

Nicci felt glad for their loyalty, although she didn’t need it. She touched the coldness in her heart, and her voice came out as hard as black ice. “You misunderstand, General. I did not call you here to give my surrender. I came to defeat you. I came to send all of you to the underworld, where you are long overdue.”

The escort troops shifted in their saddles, amused by her bravado. Standing in front of his stallion, Utros cocked his head back. Her comments seemed like braggadocio, but Nicci was deadly serious. She could feel the bone box in her pocket.

General Utros drew his sword and advanced on Nicci, ready to strike her down where she stood. Ruva slithered out of her saddle and approached, while the pale remnant of her sister hovered beside her, glowering. Because Nicci’s demeanor was so completely confident, the twins showed a flicker of uneasiness.

Nicci said, “Thanks to Lord Rahl, the only war wizard born in many centuries, the underworld was sealed forever and the veil was made impenetrable. The dead could no longer return to the world of the living.”

“We know this,” Ruva sneered.

“You and all of your soldiers should have been dead fifteen centuries ago. Your souls have been on the wrong side of the veil for all this time.” Nicci looked beyond Utros to the escort soldiers. “When you were petrified, the Keeper did not know he had lost you, but now you are flesh again … and your souls are forfeit.”

“We are here,” Ava snapped. “I am with my sister.”

From the general’s troubled expression, Nicci could see that her words were no surprise to him. She said, “You know this in your heart, General Utros. You should be long dead.”

“My empire is here in this world,” Utros said. “Today we have sent enough souls to the underworld to satisfy the Keeper.”

“But they are not the correct souls. I was once a Sister of the Dark, and I was allied with the Keeper.” Her expression hardened. “I no longer serve him. He is no friend of mine, but I will happily give him what he is owed.” Her gaze traveled out to the city of Tanimura, where countless ancient soldiers continued fighting. “All of your souls. Life to the living. Death to the dead.”

Utros did not seem amused. “You are arrogant and powerless.”

Nicci snatched the bone box from her dress and slid aside the delicate lid, which was now stained with blood from her hand. Inside, the small glowing pearl rotated, shone brighter.

Seeing it, the twin sorceresses recoiled. Ava’s spirit shrieked, and Ruva lunged forward, realizing the danger even if she did not understand what the object was.

Utros raised his sword to kill Nicci, but Bannon and Lila both dove in to drive the big general back a step. Knowing he had to give Nicci whatever time she needed, Nathan shoved with both hands, palms outward. The blast of solidified air ripped harmlessly through the spirit of Ava but slammed Ruva backward, disrupting the spell she was trying to work.

Nicci had finally realized what Richard’s constructed spell truly was—that Subtractive Magic, her Subtractive Magic, was the necessary component to unleash the devastation. Nicci herself was the key, the foundation. Richard had known she would figure it out.

Life to the living. Death to the dead, written in the language of Creation. This spell would heal the frayed threads in the veil. What had once unraveled would be tied up again.

She called upon both sides of her gift. Holding the bone box in her palm, she summoned lightning, and an arcing bolt of pure white energy, braided with an opposite bolt of black Subtractive power, struck the bone box and vaporized it in a blinding flash of pure elemental power. The dual elements twisted together and struck the glowing orb, delivering the required element to ignite the internal protocols of Richard’s constructed spell. The magic began to unfold around her and run toward its terminal objective.

As Nicci ignited the spell, the backwash levitated her into the air. Glowing lines grew and lengthened, crisscrossing to form a cylinder around her, as if a two-dimensional spell-form had become three-dimensional in order to be viable in such an extreme circumstance. With a roaring sound that reverberated across the flat expanse of the island, those patterns of lines, angles, and arcs continued to grow outward, extending away from the cylindrical spell-form. Lines of light raced through the air to support triangles and intersections. While orange light spiraled outward, the lines of power braced complex angles of pure white.

Nathan staggered backward, shielding his eyes with the sleeve of his frayed ruffled shirt. The lightning bolt had been powerful, but it was no more than a whisper compared to the constructed spell she had just triggered. The magic continued to grow.

As the lines expanded and branched ever outward, thorns of light sprouted in needle-sharp points. Their patterns and flow interacted and connected, giving the entire web of lines their intended purpose—to open the torn veil wide enough so the Keeper could seize all the long-overdue souls and drag them to where they belonged.

Life to the living. Death to the dead.

After Nicci set the constructed spell in motion, the routines continued to grow through a rhythm of intersections and routes that arced out in all directions. Suspended within the web, lifted off the ground, she felt each new line as if some cosmic needle were taking a stitch through her soul to draw the thread of light out of her and into the fabric of the spell. She experienced profound pain and pleasure at the same time.

The spell would encompass General Utros and the entire ancient army.

Nathan watched the unfolding, increasing lines of power, knowing that this was beyond anything he could do. Richard had created the spell, but Nicci was the engine driving all the destruction. Encased in her web of expanding, invincible magic, the beautiful sorceress wheeled in the air.

Utros’s escort soldiers screamed and backed away. Their horses reared in panic. Ava and Ruva cried out in challenge and terror, trying to defend against what Nicci had unleashed. The general strained to stagger forward, struggling to lift his sword so he could kill Nicci, but the weapon seemed as heavy as a mountain.

Bannon and Lila were buffeted by the surging power. They tried to stand their ground, holding their swords to defend against powers they could not imagine. Halsband Island shook and shuddered, and the settling rubble underfoot made the ground unsteady, while Nicci hung suspended in the air as light showered around her.

With impossible speed, the dazzling lines spiraled across the landscape and rolled past the island, beyond the bridges to the lowtown, then across the harbor. The spell raced like an ill wind through all the districts of the city to the outlying hills and beyond. Unstoppable, it swept up tens of thousands of the invading army. The underworld was now open and ravenous, demanding to have these souls.

Men in ancient armor screamed as the glowing green lines overran them, netting some, while impaling others on the thorns of orange light, slicing others with razor black energy.

Tendrils flew out beyond Tanimura, far down the coast, racing across the Old World to reclaim all the souls of the ancient army, wherever they had been dispatched. The very line between life and death was at stake, now torn open.

As the veil to the underworld tore to allow passage of all those souls, Nathan felt his heart rip as well. The darkness within him hammered outward, struggling, trying to hold on. He clutched his chest as pain exploded like a battering ram inside him. He had not experienced agony like this since Fleshmancer Andre had split open his breastbone to pull out his old, weak heart.

Now the remnants of Ivan strained and struggled. That evil man’s spirit resisted, but the raging constructed spell demanded every scrap of his tainted soul as well. Searing green light blazed around Nathan’s eyes, inside his mind, and he used his own gift to push the hated presence out of him.

With a last dull saw blade of pain, the poisonous vestige of Ivan slipped out of him and fluttered away like scattered raven’s wings. The chief handler’s spirit was sucked down with all the other screaming souls as the world and the underworld yawned open.

Nathan realized he was at last free.

Green mist swirled like a sudden fog, rising from a world that did not belong to the living. Across the battlefield in the hills and the city streets, the ground shuddered open. Countless ancient soldiers were yanked screaming into the underworld, their souls reclaimed, their centuries-old bodies crumbling to dust.

From the center of the storm of magic, Nicci realized that elements of the spell patterns were themselves in the language of Creation, a design that transitioned into an elemental language that hummed with the rhythm of life itself and also called to the dead.

Ava’s shimmering spirit tried to flee, pulling against the invisible claws of destiny. Her intangible form stretched and tangled, then was whisked away with a fading shriek. Leaping after her dead sister, trying to catch her, Ruva struggled with the limitations of her physical form. Their connection was too strong, and the Keeper demanded them both. Ruva’s soul tore away, inexorably following her twin to the underworld. Empty, her body dropped lifeless, disintegrating into grains of dust and fragments of yellowed bones.

Suspended in the air as the magical holocaust continued, Nicci knew that this spell-form was complex beyond her comprehension. She gazed in awe at the network of light woven into a fabric of forms around her, motifs and unfathomable emblems. She was not surprised that Richard had been able to conceive such power. Caught in her own web and also shielded by it, she watched the very stuff of creation and annihilation.

By using the interior perspective of the constructed spell, by being the initiating element, Nicci was more than an observer, but also a participant. It was her very will, her fury, her nature that became an empowering element to annihilate the vast invading force in one stroke. It was Nicci herself who laid waste to the ancient army and cast them tumbling into the world of the dead.

Strong and defiant, General Utros resisted until the last minute, but even the legendary commander could not withstand the call of the Keeper, the obdurate demands of mortality. As he shuddered and struggled against the pull of the constructed spell, the gold mask fell off to show his stripped face.

Knowing he could not win, Utros raised one gauntleted fist, shouting a final vow. “Now I can conquer the whole underworld!” His massive body disintegrated as his spirit vanished into the whirlwind of green mist.

As the spell finally wound through to its terminus, its task accomplished, Nicci felt more alive than she had ever been. Embraced by Richard’s spell, she had dealt out death, once again becoming Death’s Mistress. Richard had written the message for her in the language of Creation on the bone box. In that moment, neither world—the world of the living nor the world of the dead—seemed entirely real to her. She was the Grace. She was life. She was death.

Only then was Nicci released from her prison of light, exhausted and exhilarated by the experience. She drifted back to the ground and slumped in the rubble of the Palace of the Prophets.

More than ever, she ached for Richard. It was bliss to have been held in the embrace of his spell, but now it was gone. That moment of love and protection evaporated as the last few lines of light went dark.