Dark Harvest (Darkling Mage 2)
Maybe I was too distracted by the Lorica’s arrival to have missed them, but I saw the newcomers then, stepping out of the foliage, or blinking into existence from expired invisibility glamours, or manifesting from cheaply crafted teleportation spells.
Dressed in all their thuggish casuals, clutching makeshift weapons and baseball bats and what few enchanted devices their mistress could find for them, the Viridian Dawn closed around us in a loose, menacing circle. Among them, garbed in embroidered white robes, stood Deirdre Calloway. She lifted one hand, pointing a wand at our midst.
“Take the Codex,” she said. “Then kill them all.”
Chapter 22
Total mayhem. Utter chaos. A clusterfuck. Call it what you want, but the Viridian Dawn’s arrival heralded more trouble for all of us. I thought we’d taken care of the bulk of them at the infiltration, but one crucial detail about their ranks had slipped my mind. Most of their number had day jobs or other responsibilities away from their safe house. This was their full force, all sixty-something of them, and we were very likely fucked.
Bolts of crackling electricity sailed through the darkness. Shards of ice and hails of thorn whistled in lethal, razor-edged salvos, flying from the wands and outstretched hands of the Dawn’s cultists as they read greedily from ragged sheets of torn notebook paper, reciting hastily scrawled spells provided by their mad mistress.
Romira thrust her hands forward, a gout of flame roaring like the breath of a dragon, melting the frost and burning the thorns to cinders. A little further, my mind screamed at her, and she could burn those scrolls right out of their hands. But the old Lorica training stuck, and I knew she wouldn’t risk maiming or killing so many normals.
I could see the same from Bastion’s expression, his teeth bared as he seethed with frustration. The air before him gleamed, and I knew he had shields ready. Defense first, once more, but Bastion was good with multi-tasking. He’d have no problems setting up an attack, whether using splintered lawn furniture as a barrage of arrows, or a telephone pole as a baseball bat. No poles in the garden, but there were plenty of trees. I flinched when one of them shook, its leaves rustling as he plucked a tree straight out of the earth. Maybe he’d replant it, once we were done with this. If we lived through it, of course.
Gil thought differently, going on a full offensive. He’d already plunged into the fray, talons extended, using his supernatural agility to dodge the arcane blasts and bolts the Dawn’s cultists sent his way. He tore through their bodies as easily as a reaper threshes stalks of wheat, that is, if wheat was known for screaming and bleeding.
It was hard to miss the streaks of azure light flashing alongside him. Prudence launched imbued strikes to snuff out and shatter the Dawn’s wards and magical devices, alternating her blows with perfect precision, switching off the flames to break their faces with good old knees and knuckles.
From somewhere behind me I could hear Carver cursing under his breath, or maybe he was preparing more spells to defend the rest of us. His muttering stopped, and a web of amber fire leapt from his fingertips, cascading across the gardens. The sound of so many bones breaking in unison cracked horribly through the night, and dozens of the cultists fell to the ground screaming. Okay, so Carver was definitely super pissed.
I kept my contribution simple. Night meant that the botanical gardens were my playground, and between the extravagant flashes of arcane power and the lightning arcing from the Dawn’s wands, nobody would have noticed me slipping away. I stepped.
I could only hope that either Bastion or Carver had taken the precaution of setting up an invisibility dome for us, some way to camouflage us from the normals. Night had fallen thickly, sure, but there had to be at least one security guard wandering the premises. For all their talk of casting glamours and bending the light surely someone would have taken precautions.
That was where I emerged, incidentally, by one of those security lockboxes installed around the gardens. We would have to end the fight before someone came by and bumped into a brawl that had already escalated into a full-scale battle. The air was thick with the agonized yowls of the Viridian Dawn’s barely-pubescent followers. This was definitely going to attract attention.
About a dozen of the cultists were already on the ground, if not routed and running for the exits, some clutching at broken bones, others desperately trying to hold in their insides. None of them had spotted me, which was only appropriate since I’d elected to position myself right behind the bastards. I crouched from behind a bush and lifted the flap on my backpack.
“You can bleed them,” I said. “No fatalities, but get rid of them quickly.”
“With pleasure.”
Vanitas hummed as he ripped through the air, the sound of his flight something very much like laughter in the darkness. In a clash of metal coming asunder, scabbard and blade flew apart, then went about their grisly work. Screams, then silence, and just like that, the ranks of the Dawn were further scattered.
My eyes settled on Deirdre, tall and shining in her druidic raiment, somehow still confident that her people had a fighting chance. I focused on the familiar ivory white of her clothing, and it filled me with an unpleasant, immediate anger. Even though I could see nothing of Thea in her – Deirdre was older, her hair a dull gray, her mouth always upturned – it took every ounce of willpower left in my body not to tell Vanitas that he was allowed to kill her.
“Give us the Codex,” she shouted, either ignorant or oblivious to how her herd was so quickly thinning. Where there were nearly sixty now only fifteen stood, if that. Those who weren’t bleeding into the grass had already fled the premises. “Give us the boy, and we will depart.”
That unflagging confidence made me nervous, the steel in her voice very much suggesting that she had something hidden up her sleeve. Yet all she had was her wand.
“Leave this place, woman,” Carver said, his voice ringing even clearer above the din of battle. “Take your children with you. Disperse, and surrender your devices. Do not think to play with forces that you could not possibly fathom.”
Those last words he accentuated by thrusting both his hands forward, the pale fire dancing at his fingertips rushing at the crowd of cultists, very few of whom stood their ground as the wall of flame advanced at their feet.
Just once I found myself wishing that Carver would use something lethal, burn them to a crisp. But I saw the spell for what it was, the amber fire licking up the cultists’ bodies, reaching into their throats and their nostrils with tendrils of living flame. As one they collapsed, dead asleep in the grass.
“Give it up, Deirdre.” Prudence stood stock-still, her fists bathed in azure fire. So she
knew who Deirdre was. Shouldn’t have been a surprise, considering the Lorica’s agenda. Had they known all along? Was stopping the Viridian Dawn their true objective?
Deirdre said nothing, raising the wand above her head, humming something tuneless. The hum turned into small noises, then syllables, then proper song, the point of the wand glowing a pulsing green – viridian, like her cult’s namesake.
The earth trembled, and the trees shook, the flowers across the garden seeming to sing in cadence with Deirdre’s eldritch melody, every petal and pistil giving new voice to her strange song. The gardens stirred, boughs and branches moving in snake-like rattles and rustles. Then the noises stopped.
We should have acted sooner. Prudence went down first, crying out something garbled in a voice that gave me pause for panic. She was hurt. Gil went down next. Shapes slithered through the grass, headless serpents called by Deirdre from deep within the earth. They were vines, their tendrils constricting and ensnaring Gil and Prudence’s bodies.
Gil fought valiantly for some seconds, hacking at the vines with his claws, until two more burst out of the undergrowth to entangle his wrists. He struggled and howled in vain, writhing against the grass.