The Pillars of Creation

Chapter 50

Sebastian was on the floor, not far away, leaning to the side, propping himself up on one arm. Jennsen saw blood on the marble floor under him. Since Adie couldn’t stop Jennsen, she intended to finish him as the price. The appalling reality of seeing Sebastian in pain, of knowing he was about to be murdered, shook Jennsen to her very soul.

Sebastian was all she had.

The sorceress was but a blink away from loosing lethal magic on him. Jennsen was a great deal closer to Sebastian than to the sorceress. Jennsen knew she would never reach the sorceress in time to stop her, but she might make it to Sebastian in time to protect him. She could only kill the sorceress if she were willing to forfeit Sebastian to do it. That was the choice Adie had given her.

Jennsen abandoned her attack and instead dove for Sebastian, putting herself in the woman’s line of sight, making a hole in the world where she was trying to aim her terrible conjured fire. The magic the sorceress loosed missed Sebastian, raking crackling lightning across the polished marble floor, ripping it up in a line right beside him. The air was filled with a burst of flying stone shards.

Jennsen scooped Sebastian protectively into her arms as she fell to his side. “Sebastian! Can you move? Can you run? We have to get out of here.

He nodded. “Help me up.” His voice was labored, his breathing shallow.

Jennsen ducked her head under his arm and strained with the effort of lifting him to his feet. With her help, they hurriedly worked their way toward the door. Behind, Adie lifted her hands again, her white eyes tracking Sebastian’s movements, if not Jennsen’s. Jennsen twisted sideways, putting herself in the way. A blast of lightning laced past, missing them by inches, blowing the heavy metal-clad door off its hinges. The door went skittering down the hall.

Jennsen and Sebastian scuttled through the smoking opening and hastened down the wide hall. Jennsen realized, as she watched the heavy doors crashing down the hall, bouncing off walls, tearing out great chunks of stone, that if something like that hit her, she would be crushed. She noticed, too, that her arm was bleeding from small cuts from the stone shards that had struck her. It wasn’t magic that had done it, but sharp stone, even if the sharp stone had been sent flying by magic.

She might be in some ways invincible, but if magic toppled a massive stone column on her, she would be just as dead as if it had been pushed over by brute strength instead. Dead was dead.

Jennsen suddenly didn’t feel so invincible.

At the first intersection, she took them to the right, getting Sebastian out of the line of sight of Adie’s gift, and her weapons of magic, as quickly as possible. Jennsen could feel his warm blood running over the arm she had around him. Despite his injury, Sebastian didn’t ask her to slow to spare him any pain. Together, they rushed through halls and rooms as fast as he was able, crossing the palace, going back toward where Jennsen had left the emperor.

“Are you hurt bad?” she asked, fearing the answer.

“Not sure,” he said, nearly out of breath and clearly in pain. “Feels like there’s a fire burning in my ribs. If you wouldn’t have prevented her from hitting me square on, I’d be dead for sure.”

As they moved through the palace, they came across a squad of their men. Jennsen collapsed next to them, panting, exhausted, unable to hold Sebastian up another step. Her leg muscles trembled from the exertion.

“We’re leaving,” Sebastian told the men, his breathing labored with pain. “We have to get out. The emperor is hurt. We have to get him out of here.” He motioned in different directions. “Some of you go each way. Collect all our men. We need to get everyone we can to protect the emperor and then we have to get him back to safety. You two, you’ll have to help me.”

The bulk of the men immediately rushed off to their tasks. The two remaining behind threw Sebastian’s arms over their shoulders and easily lifted him. He winced in pain. Jennsen led them through the palace, watching for the landmarks she remembered, desperate to reach Emperor Jagang and to get out of the death trap of a palace.

The Confessors’ Palace was a confusion of halls, passageways, and rooms. Some of the rooms were huge, but when they came to such places, they went around, staying to the maze of passageways; Sebastian said they didn’t want to be caught in one of those big rooms where they would be an easier target. Intermittently, Jennsen heard the awful thump of magic. Each time, the entire palace shuddered with the concussion.

“This way,” she said, recognizing the yawning breach in the wall at the corner of a passageway strewn with rubble. That gaping hole through the outer wall, looking out to daylight and overlooking the lawns far below, was where the wizard’s fire, meant for her and Emperor Jagang, had blasted through.

Five soldiers made their way down the hall from the other direction, climbing over the tangled debris, bringing a Sister of the Light with them. From behind, nearly a dozen more men appeared. Two Sisters, their faces streaked with soot, came through a nearby room to the side, followed by yet more of the assault force. Half the men were bleeding, but all of them were able to move under their own power.

Emperor Jagang was sitting up against the wall where Jennsen had left him. The deep jagged gash was partly being held together by the curtain Jennsen had wrapped around his leg, but the meat of his muscle wasn’t aligned properly and the terrible wound clearly needed attention. It appeared that the healing magic performed by the Sister, just before she had been killed, still held, and at least the emperor wasn’t still losing blood the way he had been.

The blood the emperor had lost left him weak-looking and pale, but not as pale as the faces of those who for the first time saw the seriousness of his injury.

One of the Sisters knelt down to check his wound. Jagang winced when she tried to better align the two halves of his split leg.

“There’s no time to heal it now,” she said. “We’ll need to get him to safety, first.”

She immediately set to tightening the bandage of blood-soaked curtain that Jennsen had started to apply. She snatched up more cloth from the rubble.

“Did you get her?” Jagang asked as the Sister worked at pulling the injury closed with the filthy strip of cloth. “Where is she? Sebastian!” He used a board to lever himself upright, peering this way and that around the company of soldiers as they helped Sebastian make his way through to the emperor. “There you are. Where’s the Mother Confessor? Did you get her?”

“It isn’t her,” Jennsen answered in his place.

“What?” The emperor glanced around angrily at the people watching him. “I saw the bitch. I know the Mother Confessor when I see her! Why didn’t you get her!”

“You saw a wizard and a sorceress,” Jennsen told him. “They were using magic to make you think you were seeing Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor. It was a trick.”

“I think she’s right,” Sebastian put in before Jagang could scream at her. “I was standing right beside her and while I saw the Mother Confessor, Jennsen didn’t.”

Jagang turned a dark scowl on her. “But if the others saw her, how could you not . . .”

Understanding seemed to come over him. For some reason that Jennsen couldn’t exactly fathom, he suddenly recognized the truth in her words.

“But why?” the Sister tending the emperor’s injury asked, looking up from her work of bandaging the wound.

“Both the wizard and the sorceress seemed to be in a hurry,” Jennsen said. “They must be up to something.”

“It’s a diversion,” Jagang whispered, staring off down the empty hall littered with rubble. “They wanted to keep us occupied. Keep us away, and busy thinking about something else.”

“Keep us away from what?” Jennsen asked.

“The main force,” Sebastian said, catching Jagang’s line of thought.

Another Sister, casting surreptitious glances to the other Sisters after inspecting Sebastian’s wound, worked quickly at pressing a padded bandage against his ribs and then wrapping a long strip of cloth around his chest to hold it in place.

“This will only help for a short time,” she muttered, half to herself. “This is not good.” She glanced again to the other Sister. “We’re going to need to tend to this. We can’t do it here.”

Sebastian winced in pain, ignoring her, then spoke. “It’s a trick. They keep us here, puzzling over where they could be, kept us chasing after illusions, while they attack our main force.”

Jagang growled a curse. He looked off out the hole the wizard’s fire had blasted in the wall, peering out toward the army they had left a long ride back down the river valley. He clenched his fist and gritted his teeth.

“That bitch! They wanted us busy so our main force would be sitting in place while they attack. That filthy scheming bitch! We have to get back!”

The small force moved quickly through the halls. Jagang was carried with a man under each arm, as was Sebastian, so that they could make quick progress back out of the Confessors’ Palace. Sebastian was looking worse.

Along the way, they gathered up more of their men. Jennsen was astounded that there were still any others alive. Compared with the force they had come in with, though, they had been cut to pieces. Had they all stayed together, rather than the way the emperor and Sebastian continually divided them up, they might have all been killed at once. As it was, the Order would still have to leave behind a great many dead.

Once on the lower level, they worked their way along service halls, toward the side of the palace, Sebastian advising that it would be best not to go out by the main entrance, where they had entered, for fear that such a move might be expected and they very well could be struck down before they could get away. Everyone moved as silently as possible through the empty kitchens, emerging to a gray day in a side courtyard. It was secluded, with a wall screening it off from the city.

The sight as they came around the side of the palace was horrifying. It looked like the entire force had been cut down, that none of the cavalry could possibly still be alive. Jennsen couldn’t stand the sight of so much carnage, yet it was so overwhelming that she could not look away. The dead, horses as well as men, lay tangled in a ragged line down the hillside, fallen in the place where they met the foe head-on at a full charge. In the distance, near the trees, a few scattered horses, their riders no doubt dead, nibbled at the grass.

“There are no enemy dead,” Jagang said, surveying the sight as he limped along with the aid of a pike a soldier had handed him. “What could have done this?”

“Nothing living,” a Sister said.

As they moved quickly down the hill, making their way past the silent battle line, not far in front of the heaps of corpses, others of the cavalry, far down the slope on the other side of a wall in an area among small garden buildings and trees, spotted the emperor and raced out to protect him. Soldiers on horseback—numbering less than a thousand out of the over forty thousand they started with—swept in to surround the company returning from the palace. A number of the Sisters rode in, pulling in close to the emperor to provide an inner circle of defense.

Rusty, trailed by Pete, trotted across the lawns, accompanying the tattered remnants of the cavalry. When Jennsen whistled, Rusty recognized the call and rushed in to be close to her. The mare, nuzzling Jennsen’s shoulder, voiced a plaintive whinny, eager for comfort. Rusty and Pete weren’t cavalry horses, trained to be accustomed to the terrors of war. Jennsen ran a soothing hand over the horse’s trembling neck and rubbed her ears. She gave similar comfort to Pete when he pressed his forehead against the back of her shoulder.

“What happened!” Jagang called out in a rage. “How could you let yourselves be taken like this?”

The officer leading the men on horseback looked around in dismay. “Excellency, it was . . . out of the clear air. It wasn’t anything we could fight.”

“Are you trying to tell me it was ghosts!” Jagang bellowed.

“I think it was the horses the scout smelled,” another officer said. His arm was bandaged up high but soaked in blood.

“I want to know what’s going on,” Jagang said as he glared around at the faces watching him. “How could this have happened?”

As men brought extra horses, Sister Perdita dismounted close by. “Excellency, it was some kind of attack involving magic—phantom horsemen invoked by wizardry is the only explanation I have.”

His menacing eyes were leveled at her in a way that made even Jennsen quail. “Then why didn’t you and your Sisters stop it?”

“It wasn’t anything like the conjured magic we ordinarily encounter. I believe it had to be a form of constructed magic, or we would have not only detected it, but been able to stop it. At least, that’s what I assume. I’ve never actually seen any constructed magic, but I’ve heard of it. Whatever this was that attacked us would not respond to anything we tried.”

The emperor was still frowning darkly at her. “Magic is magic. You should have stopped it. That’s what you were here for.”

“Constructed magic is different than conjured, Excellency.”

“Different? How?”

“Rather than using the gift on the spot, constructed magic has already been made up in advance. It can be preserved for a great period of time—thousands of years, maybe even forever. When it’s needed, the spell is triggered and the magic is loosed.”

“Triggered by what?” Sebastian asked.

Sister Perdita shook her head in frustration. “By just about anything, as I’ve heard it told. It just depends on how it was constructed. No wizard now is able to construct such a spell. We know little about those ancient wizards or what they could do, but from what little we do know, a constructed spell could be something kept dry that comes to life when you get it wet—for example something to help fertilize crops when the spring rains come. It could be triggered by heating, like a cure taken for a feverthe cure carries a construction in and the fever triggers it. Others are triggered by a little magic, some by an elaborate application of incredibly intricate wizardry and great power.”

“So,” Jennsen reasoned, “someone with magic must have unleashed something so powerful as these phantom horsemen? A wizard, or a sorceress, or something?”

Sister Perdita shook her head. “It could be that kind of constructed magic, but it could just as easily be a spell—albeit an incredibly powerful one—kept in a thimble, and triggered by exposing the construction to . . . anything—horse dung, even.”

Emperor Jagang waved off the very notion. “But something that small and easily triggered wouldn’t be this powerful.”

“Excellency,” the Sister said, “in this, you can’t equate the apparent material size of the construction or its trigger with the result—they have no relational value, at least not in the terms in which most people think. The trigger has no bearing on the power of the construction. Even the construction and its trigger are not necessarily relational. There is simply no rule by which to judge a construction.”

The emperor swept an arm out before the tens of thousands of men and horses tangled in death. “But, surely, something of this magnitude had to have been something more.”

“The army of phantom horsemen who carried out this attack might have been triggered by a wizard drawing spells in magic dust while speaking an incredibly complex invocation, or it could just as easily have been a book containing a cavalry counter that is simply opened to the proper page and held out before the attacking force—even from miles away. Even the simple fear of a person holding out such a construction could be the trigger.”

“You mean, anyone might accidentally trigger one, then?” Jennsen asked.

“Of course. That’s what makes them so dangerous. But from what I’ve read, that kind is exceedingly rare. Because they can be so dangerous, most are layered in complex precautions and fail-safe mechanisms involving the most profound knowledge of the application of magic.”

“But,” Jennsen asked, “once a person—a wizard—with that advanced knowledge removes those layers of precautions and fail-safe mechanisms, then they might be set off by one final, simple trigger?”

Sister Perdita gave Jennsen a meaningful look. “Exactly.”

“So,” Jagang said, gesturing around at the thousands of bodies, “this force of phantom cavalry might be sent out again at any moment to finish us off.”

The Sister shook her head. “As I understand it, a constructed spell is usually good only once. It’s used up by doing what it was constructed to do. That’s one reason they’re rare; once used, they’re gone forever, and there are no longer any wizards alive who can make more.”

“Why haven’t we encountered such constructed spells before?” Sebastian asked with growing impatience. “And why now, all of a sudden?”

Sister Perdita stared at him for a moment, a picture of bottled anger that Jennsen knew she would never have dared direct at the emperor, even though the attack on the Confessors’ Palace, which he ordered, against her warning, had resulted in the deaths of many of her Sisters of the Light.

With a show of deliberate care, Sister Perdita pointed up at the dark Keep hard against the mountain above them. “There are a thousand rooms in the Wizard’s Keep if there’s one,” she said in a low voice. “A good many of them will be stuffed full of nasty things. It’s likely that when we drove them here for the winter, that wizard of theirs—Wizard Zorander—finally had the good long time he needed to search through the Keep, looking for just the kinds of things he hitherto lacked, so as to be ready for us when spring arrived and we advanced toward Aydindril. I fear to think what catastrophic surprises he yet has in store for us. That Keep has stood invincible for thousands of years.”

Sebastian’s glare turned as dark as Jagang’s. “Why haven’t you warned us about this? I never heard you say anything.”

“I did. You were gone.”

“You’ve also advised against many other things, as well, and we’ve overcome them,” Jagang growled at her. “When you fight a war, you must expect to take risks and to take casualties. Only those who dare, win.”

Sebastian gestured up at the Keep. “What other things might we expect?”

“Constructed spells are only one of the dangers in fighting these people. None of us Sisters really considered constructed spells a great threat because they’re so rare, but, as you can see, even one constructed spell is profoundly perilous. Who knows what even more deadly things might be waiting to be unleashed.

“What’s more, there’s a whole world of dangers we can’t even begin to conceive of. Their winter weather, alone, has killed hundreds of thousands of our men without the enemy having to lift a finger or risk a single man. That, alone, has done more damage to us than almost any battle or calamity of magic. Did we expect such losses from something so simple as snow and cold weather? Did our size and strength protect us from it? Are those hundreds of thousands any less of a loss because they died of fever rather than some fancy application of magic? What difference does it make to the dead—or those left to fight?

“I admit, to a soldier, winning because your enemy falls ill might not seem very glamorous or heroic, but dead is dead. Our army outnumbers these people many times over, yet we lost those hundreds of thousands to fever because of simple weather—not the magic you are so worried about us protecting you from.”

“But in a real fight,” Sebastian scoffed, “then our numbers really mean something and will win out.”

“Tell that to those who died of fever. Numbers don’t always determine the winner.”

“That’s outlandish,” Sebastian shot back.

Sister Perdita pointed at the line of dead. “Tell it to them.”

“We must take risks if we’re to win,” Jagang said, settling the matter. “What I want to know is if the enemy can be expected to throw more of these constructed spells at us?”

Sister Perdita shook her head, as if to say she had no idea. “I doubt that Wizard Zorander knows much about the constructed spells kept there. Such magic is no longer understood well.”

“He apparently understood one of them pretty well,” Sebastian said.

“And, that might have been the only one he understood well enough to use. As I said before, once used, constructed spells are used up.”

“But it’s also possible,” Jennsen interrupted, “that there are more constructed spells he does understand.”

“Yes. Or, for all anyone knows, this could have been the last constructed spell in existence. On the other hand, he might be sitting in there with a hundred of them in his lap, all much worse than this one. There is simply no way to know.”

Jagang’s black eyes gazed out at his fallen cavalry elite. “Well, he certainly used this one to cut—”

There was a sudden blinding flash off at the horizon.

The world around them lit with the intensity of a flash of lightning, but the flash didn’t die out as lightning did. Jennsen seized the reins just under Rusty and Pete’s bits to keep them from bolting. Other horses spooked, rearing up.

White-hot light flared up from the river valley down over the hills—in the direction of the army. The light was so white, so pure, so hot, that it lit the clouds from underneath all the way to the opposite horizon. It was a light of such power, such intensity, that many of the men dropped to a knee in alarm.

The incandescent glow expanded outward with incredible speed, dwarfing the hills, yet it was so distant that they heard nothing. The rocky slopes of the mountains ringing the city were all illuminated in the harsh glare.

And then Jennsen heard at last a deep rumbling boom that vibrated in her chest. It shook the ground beneath their feet. The powerful, resonant boom stretched out into a growing, clacking roar.

A dark dome expanded up through the light. Jennsen realized that, because of the distance, what looked to her like a spreading dome of dust had to be debris at least as big as trees. Or wagons.

As the dark cloud expanded upward through the light, it dissipated, as if evaporating in the might of that consuming heat and light. Jennsen could see a wave, like the rings made by tossing a rock in a pond, radiating outward, except this was a single wave racing across the ground.

As everyone stood transfixed, gripped in fright, a sudden wall of wind, driving dirt and sand before it, blasted up the hill toward them. It was the shock of the wave that had finally reached them. It was so abrupt and so powerful that if the branches were not already bare, they would have been stripped of leaves right then and there. Limbs snapped as trees shuddered under the concussion of wind.

More horses panicked, bucking and bolting. Men dropped to the ground to protect themselves from what might come next. Jennsen, staggered by the blast of wind, shielded her eyes with a hand while huge soldiers recited prayers learned in childhood, begging the Creator for salvation.

Jagang stood facing the sight with angry defiant challenge.

“Dear spirits,” Jennsen finally said, squinting, blinking the dust from her eyes as the aftermath seemed to abate. “What could that have possibly been?”

Sister Perdita had gone ashen. “A light web.” Her voice was low and heavy with what Jennsen had never detected from her before: dread.

“Impossible!” Emperor Jagang roared. “There are Sisters down there warding for light spells!”

Sister Perdita said nothing. She couldn’t seem to take her gaze from the arresting sight.

Jennsen could tell that the pain was wearing heavily on Sebastian, but he spoke forcefully. “I’ve been told that a light web can’t do any more damage than”—he gestured back at the palace—“perhaps to destroy a building.”

Sister Perdita said nothing, and with that silence offered the evidence to the contrary that was clearly before his eyes.

Jennsen took the reins to both horses in one hand and put the other to Sebastian’s back in sympathy. She ached for him and wanted him to be somewhere safe where his injury could be tended to. The Sisters had said that it was serious and needed their attention. Jennsen suspected that the wound he suffered at the hands of the sorceress needed the intervention of magic.

“How can it be a light web!” Jagang demanded. “There’s not even anyone here! No troops, no army, no force—except maybe a couple of their gifted.”

“That’s all it would take,” Sister Perdita said. “Such a thing needs no supporting troops. I told you that something was wrong. With the Keep here, in Aydindril, there’s no telling what even a lone wizard might be able to do to hold off an army—even our army.”

“You mean,” Sebastian asked, “it’s like the way a small force in a high pass, for example, can hold off a whole army?”

“That’s right.”

Jagang looked incredulous. “You mean to say that you think that even that one skinny old wizard, in a place like the Keep, might be able to do all that?”

Sister Perdita’s gaze shifted to the emperor. “That one skinny old wizard, as you call him, has just managed to do the impossible. He has not only found what was probably a light web constructed thousands of years ago, but, even more inconceivable, he somehow managed to ignite it.”

Jagang turned to stare off to where the light was finally dying. “Dear Creator,” he whispered, “that’s right where the army is.” He wiped a hand back across his shaved head as he considered the frightening implications. “How could they ignite a light web among our army? We’re warded for that! How!”

Sister Perdita’s eyes turned toward the ground. “There is no way for us to tell, Excellency. It could be something as simple as a box containing an ancient light web from which he removed all the fail-safes and then left it for us to come across. As our men set up camp, maybe a man found it, wondered what was in the innocent-looking little box, opened it, and the light of day was the final trigger. It could be something else entirely else that we could never begin to dream up or imagine, much less forestall. We’ll never know. Whoever triggered it is now part of that cloud of smoke hanging over the river valley.”

“Excellency,” Sebastian said, “I urgently advise that we get the army out of here—move them back.” He paused to wince in pain. “If they’re able to unleash such a defense—with all the gifted and their protection we have—then taking the Keep might be impossible.”

“But we must!” Jagang roared.

Sebastian sagged forward, waiting for a stitch of pain to pass. “Excellency, if we lose the army, then Lord Rahl will triumph. It’s as simple as that. Aydindril is not worth the risk it has proven itself to be.” This was not so much the Sebastian Jennsen knew, as it was Sebastian, the Order’s strategist, speaking. “Better for us to withdraw and fight another day on our terms, not theirs. Time is our ally, not theirs.”

In silent fury, the emperor stared off toward his imperiled army as he considered Sebastian’s advice. There was no telling how many men had just died.

“This is Lord Rahl’s doing,” Jagang finally whispered. “He has to be killed. In the Creator’s name, he must be killed.”

Jennsen knew that she was the only one who could accomplish such a thing.