“Now!” commanded Usara.
The nexus burst outward into a sheet of flame. It ripped through the room to set Olret’s men alight, sending them screaming from the doorway even as the first to be hit burned to fragments of charred flesh and naked bone tumbling to the untouched floor. The spell left Ryshad and ’Gren happily unscorched and free to rush at Olret who was also somehow proof against the magic.
Olret raised a hand and unseen power threw ’Gren backwards into Ryshad. The two of them fell hard among the litter of the ruined door and wrecked cages. The Elietimm advanced, menace plain on his face. In the curious double vision of Artifice, I saw he considered himself a good deal taller and more handsome than a mirror would ever show him. Every detail of the simulacrum was precise, his skin smooth and freshly bathed, a brown cloak richly patterned with orange weave slung back from his shoulders to show a livery of grey leather ornamented with copper studs.
Every instinct screamed at me to move, to run, to draw dagger, darts, even throw the filth from the floor at the man but with Guinalle in control of my body I couldn’t move. I would have wept with frustration, if I’d still had the use of my own eyes.
Shiv and Sorgrad moved to stand between Olret and the circle of motionless women. He snarled something, hands moving as if he were swatting flies but a swathe of white light wrapped around them both and nothing happened that I could see.
Olret’s remorseless advance slowed. He looked like a man struggling through a bog. Sorgrad raised a hand and lightning cracked out like a whip. Brow twisted with fury, Olret waved it away but a blackened score appeared down his sleeve all the same. Sorgrad lashed him again and again and, for the first time, consternation shadowed Olret’s eyes.
Shiv squared his shoulders and now Olret’s boots were all but sticking to the floor. He could barely manage to scrape his feet across the boards, struggling like a prisoner shackled to a dragging weight. But that was only the real Olret. His simulacrum came storming onwards, brushing through Shiv and Sorgrad and the light surrounding them as if they weren’t even there.
The aetheric embodiments of the women whirled round to form a new circle, faces outward, elbows linked, expressions determined. Olret’s arrogant opinion of himself marched through the ring of their physical forms, plainly no barrier and slapped Gyslin’s simulacrum hard in the face. She screwed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth and this time he punched her full in the mouth.
“You will not!” Frala’s fury earned her Olret’s hand twisting in her hair and wrenching her head sideways with a violence that would have snapped a real woman’s neck.
“Curse you,” she gasped. “You and your seed to the ninth generation!”
“I’ll kill you!” he roared, wrenching her head to and fro and hammering at her with his other fist. With her arms pinioned, Frala couldn’t defend herself. I watched with mounting horror as her image didn’t bleed or bruise but began to blur and fade beneath this onslaught.
“You will not!” This was not one new voice but three. The people I’d seen Frala and the others asking for help suddenly appeared. Now Olret was surrounded. The younger man seized his raised arm, twisting it behind his back as the older baldpate unwound the bastard’s fingers from Frala’s hair. They pulled Olret away, forcing him round to face the hesitant woman who slapped him full in the face.
It wasn’t a hard blow but whatever power lay behind it did more damage than a broadsword through the side of his head. Olret’s face was ripped askew, left twisted like a child’s clay model crossly squashed for not coming out right. The woman slapped him again and the colour began to bleed from his clothes, brown, grey and copper running together into dull and muddy uncertainty. She struck him a third time, no harder than before and now he began to fade. Not all at once, not like an evil dream as you realise you’re waking but with great rents appearing in his head and body, soon big enough to see through to the room beyond. His simulacrum tore into sinking fragments that vanished as they hit the floor. His distorted head was the last to disappear, eyes rolling wildly, lolling tongue lashing.
The bald-headed man looked down then turned to Frala. “We come,” he said simply and all three of them vanished.
“I can’t stay,” Guinalle gasped and her image fled into nothingness, leaving me collapsing. I ripped my hands free of the grandmother’s merciless grasp and from the girl on my other side. As soon as the circle was broken, everyone fell to the floor, panting like animals. The only one left standing was the little girl, bemused as she looked at the crumpled figures around her.
“Mama?” She knelt to push at Frala’s shoulder.
I was on my knees and couldn’t have got to my feet if Saedrin himself had asked for it but there was still the noise of fighting in the corridor. I scrubbed at my eyes so fiercely it hurt but I was determined to clear every vestige of aetheric blurring from my vision. I fumbled at my belt, reaching for darts, dagger, anything to use against whatever might come through the door.
I forced my head up, blinking furiously as tears filled my eyes. Olret stood just beyond the doorway; the real Olret. He was held stock-still and from the flickering patterns of many hued light wheeling round him, this was some magical coil worked by the nexus of wizardry. His remaining men were doing their best to reach him but Ryshad and ’Gren stood on either side, barring their way with lethal effectiveness.
That bastard wasn’t dead yet no matter what had happened to his aetheric counterpart. I took a deep breath and reached carefully for a dart, reminding myself that poisoning myself by accident would be a monumentally stupid thing to do. I need not have troubled.
Sorgrad threw a handful of lightning at Olret and this time it scored him from head to toe, raising blisters down his blackened face and shattering his forward foot. If wizardry hadn’t held him up, he’d have collapsed. Even with the magic pinioning him, he cried out in agony.
“Nothing to save you now, shithead,” crowed Sorgrad.
“Let’s just kill him,” said Shiv wearily.
The wheeling light closed in around Olret and he burst into flames. The fire burned odourless and so hot I could feel it on my face and the brightness of the ruby, emerald, amber and sapphire in the flickering blaze was too painful to behold.
Ryshad and ’Gren stumbled in through the door as everyone fighting them fell away, fear more potent than loyalty for Olret’s men. Both were bleeding or covered with someone else’s blood, I couldn’t tell which.
“Burn him, burn every bone in his body. Scatter him on the winds to be lost in the trackless ocean.” It was the grandmother, crouching on her hands and knees with more of the poised cat than the whipped cur about her. The white fire consuming Olret reflected in her hungry eyes.
Ryshad staggered towards me, falling to his knees, bleeding from a handful of shallow nicks on arms and legs. I clung to him and together we watched Olret die. The old woman got her wish. When the flames closed in on themselves to finally vanish, all that was left was a twisting column of ash. Shiv shattered the windows with a rattle of hailstones and Sorgrad swept all that was left of Olret out to oblivion on a rush of icy air.
“Are we done?” I was shaking so much I could barely get the words out.
“Dast’s teeth, we’d better be.” Ryshad wrapped his arms around me, cruelly tight but I didn’t mind as his strength damped down the tremors wracking me. I could do without breath for the moment. He pressed his head close to mine and whispered words for me alone. “It’s all right, it’s all right. I know, I know.” That was no meaningless reassurance and I clung to the distant promise of calm. Ryshad knew. I heard the truth of it in every beat of his heart hammering beneath his ribs. He’d been imprisoned by Artifice, used by another’s will. I’d never be impatient with his distrust of enchantments again, I vowed. I should have stuck to my old beliefs; all magic brings is trouble.