“Swords’ll kill us a cursed sight faster.” Sorgrad was next to the door, ’Gren beside him. “Half a cohort’s on its way.” The tramp of nailed boots echoed ominously up the stone stairwells.
“Shut the door,” Ryshad ordered. “Bolt it, one of you.” He swept his sword at the women.
I heard the bolts slam home as I tried to concentrate on Guinalle’s far-distant voice. “I have to speak to the adepts you’ve found. Join their line.”
I really didn’t want to do that and not only because the girl’s hand closest to me was so filthy, but we were running out of options fast so I grabbed for her.
The room turned dim around me and for one appalling moment I thought I was fainting. Then I realised I was somehow locked in a corner of my own mind with Guinalle’s will controlling my body, my voice, my gestures. I could look out through my own eyes but in a peculiar, cramped fashion, only able to look directly ahead and as if through Ryshad’s spyglass. I did my best to quell the panic rising within me and then realised that it would do me no good to yield to the impulse to scream, to protest, to fight the enchantment. I had no voice to cry for help, no strength to hit back.
“I am Guinalle Tor Priminale, acolyte of Larasion, sworn to the discipline of Ostrin.” She spoke with my lips and raised my hand to the grandmother. “Will you aid me in the name of all that you hold sacred?”
“We will.” The voices of all six Elietimm adepts echoed around me as the grandmother took Guinalle’s hand to complete the inward-looking circle. The room was instantly overlaid with new images; glimpses of Suthyfer and the newly reclaimed landing, Vithrancel and the busy market place, Edisgesset and the no-nonsense realm of the miners. Each place and person within them was as abiding and as ephemeral as the reality I could no longer feel beneath feet that no longer belonged to me. Something froze around me then Guinalle smashed it like someone breaking winter ice to reveal the fast flowing mysteries of the river beneath. My mother had warned me never to play on a frozen river with graphic tales of children carried away beneath the ice and drowned unable reach the light and air above. The fear I’d felt then was nothing to the terror paralysing me now, even as I felt the women of Shernasekke reaching for the aetheric power long denied them with all the desperate thirst of travellers lost in a waterless waste.
I wanted none of it, struggling not to fall into that torrent of mystery and peril, straining to see the world beyond the enchantment trapping me. Ryshad and Shiv were breaking apart the cages as best they could, ’Gren and Sorgrad piling the twisted bars and frames against the door, wedging broken bits of metal under the bottom, into the hinges, under the latch.
All that was less real than Guinalle now standing before me, dressed in the proud elegance of the Old Empire. Rings shone on every finger, a crescent of gold set with diamonds in her hair, more diamonds around her neck brilliant with fire struck by some unseen light shining on the silk of her flame-coloured gown. The soiled faces of the starved women each faded behind some simulacrum of how they wished to be seen. Frala’s hair lightened to the pale gold of sun-bleached straw, piled high on her head with bone pins tipped with blood-red gems. Her full-skirted gown was a maroon rich against her milky skin. Gyslin and the other sister were dressed in the same style, in differing shades of blue, a many stranded rope of curious milky gemstones twisted around Gyslin’s neck. The younger women wore less costly shades of green, dresses cut to display nubile charms instead of matronly modesty. The grandmother wore black made all the more severe by a few silver ornaments. With her thin face and sharp nose, she looked more like a crow than ever. Only the little girl was left in her grubby chemise, still clinging to her mother’s skirts with one filthy hand and her bedraggled animal in the other.
A booming assault on the door helped pull my wits back to the real world where Ryshad and Shiv were bracing themselves against the wood with ’Gren and Sorgrad still reinforcing their stubborn barricade.
“If we are not all to die at Olret’s hand, we must have help,” Guinalle began.
Civility be cursed, I thought furiously. Get on with it!
“Seldviar namayenar ek tal rath,” chorused the Elietimm women and their questing dragged me along with them. Now a third layer of reality or illusion overlaid everything and I knew without question I was in very real danger of being swept away by the currents of aether coiling around me.
“Har dag Vadesorna abrigal.” Frala summoned up a thickset man as bald as an egg, shoulders bunching in anger as she spoke to him so rapidly I hadn’t a hope of understanding her. He turned and stormed off into invisibility, melting like a shape imagined in smoke.
“Edach ger vistal mor din.” Gyslin and her daughter were pleading with a nervous-looking woman whose jaw dropped in shock, shadowy shapes hurrying to cluster round her.
“Olret evid enames Froilasen ral Ashernasen.” The grandmother wasn’t about to stand any nonsense from the well-muscled youth her enchantment had lighted upon. Fortunately he seemed as much inclined for action as her, a spear appearing in his hands in answer to his unspoken wish and his shirt dissolving into a dark cuirass of hardened leather.
Frala turned to Guinalle. “We have summoned aid. They come as fast as they may.”
Was that going to be fast enough? Even through the Artifice clouding my perception, I heard the splintering crash of an axe hitting the far side of the door. I forced a memory of the room before my mind’s eye, picturing Ryshad’s face and Sorgrad’s, Shiv’s lanky frame and ’Gren’s short, wiry one. Thought became reality and I saw the wood splintering as blows came hard and fast, Ryshad and Shiv forced back lest they lose an eye or worse.
“Olret comes!” Gyslin’s simulacrum turned towards the door even as her true form remained locked in the circle.
Even through the wall, I felt Olret’s complete conviction that his intent was strong enough to overwhelm the physical constraints of wood and metal barring his way. He wasn’t wrong. The door shattered into kindling almost as completely as the mill had done, splinters gashing Ryshad and the others. Their swords met those of Olret’s men who could reach through the narrow doorway. Ryshad and ’Gren took on the foremost guards while Sorgrad and Shiv used twisted lengths of metal on the second rank.
Olret’s Artifice slammed into the circle of women but that held. I could see the bastard lurking behind the skirmish in the doorway, face twisted with hate.
“Guinalle! Guinalle!” He sounded as if he were half a league away but that was definitely Usara speaking. “Give me the ring! Temar, put it on!”
“I can only shield you for a short time.” That was Temar’s voice, grim with determination and warning in equal measure.
“That’ll be enough.” I was startled to hear Allin sounding so forceful. “Shiv! Sorgrad! We’re going to form a nexus so make ready.”
A sphere of light appeared between the two of them; long-schooled wizard and untrained mageborn. It burned with a ruddy fire, not the crimson of elemental flame but darker, more ominous, weighted with the power of the earth. Shiv reached a hand out towards it and the colour darkened still further yet paradoxically burning all the more fiercely as his own magelight surrounded him with an emerald aura. Shiv nodded to Sorgrad who set his jaw, no more about to duck this challenge than any other he’d ever faced. He spread his hands in an oddly defiant gesture and blue radiance surrounded him, his fine hair blown about as if he stood exposed to a winter storm. Ducking his head like a bull about to charge, Sorgrad thrust his hands, palm out towards the roiling nexus of power. The spell sucked at the caerulean light and the confusion of colour burned away to leave only an eye-scorching whiteness.