Nicci knew where to focus her attention.
The hundreds of sacrificial slaves blinked their eyes, raised their hands, and turned to one another, gasping, groaning, and raising their voices in angry confusion. Bannon ran to throw open the first flimsy barricade that held them there. “We freed you—now fight alongside us. We can end this oppression once and for all.”
The awakened slaves did not need further instructions. They cheered, some in heavily accented voices. They had been captured wherever the Norukai raids took place, all across the Old World, and others had been drawn from the ranks of Ildakaran house slaves. Eager to get out, they broke down the corral walls and swarmed alongside the rest of the rebels. Even Melba was with them, shouting.
Bannon flushed. “Sweet Sea Mother, they listened to me!”
“Get them away from the pyramid, my boy!” Nathan called. “I don’t think it’ll be safe up here in a few minutes.”
Concerned for her sister panther, Nicci sent Mrra after them. The big cat was growling and restless, but Nicci did not want to bring her panther up to the top of the pyramid. With a thrash of her tail, Mrra leaped down to join Bannon and the milling slaves.
With Elsa following them, Nicci and Nathan ran up the steep stone stairs of the pyramid. Nicci was the first to reach the top, where Thora stood ready to face her with murder in her eyes. Quentin and Damon remained nervously on either side of the sovrena, near the complex apparatus of crucibles, mirrors, and rotating prisms, all of which sustained the shroud of eternity.
Nicci stepped forward, her eyes locked on Thora’s sea-green gaze. “We will stop your blood magic, as I should have done the first time. We will tear down the shroud.”
The other woman clenched her hands, and her looped, braided hair writhed around her head as she summoned the immensity of her gift. “Not if I stand before you! I defeated you before, and I’ll defeat you again.”
Nicci called on her own magic. “Do I look defeated? I was hoping you would fight back. Just you and me.” She climbed a step higher. “Where is your husband?”
“He is a coward. And a traitor!”
Elsa called to her fellow duma members, “Damon, Quentin, you can’t support her in this. Do you wish to be trapped here forever? Do you want to see so much blood spilled just so we can hide from the rest of the world? There’s no longer any need!”
Nicci called down lightning. Summoning both Additive and Subtractive Magic, drawing on the dark techniques she had learned when she served the Keeper, as well as the power she had stolen from wizards she had killed, Nicci pulled black lightning out of the air, calling it from beneath the barely visible dome overhead. Crackling bolts sliced down to strike the top of the pyramid and splintered into a dozen equally destructive bolts. Woven within the dark bolt, Additive Magic generated more traditional lightning. A second searing blast ripped open the carefully inlaid spell-forms on the top platform.
With a cry of dismay, Thora lashed out with her own writhing mass of electrical energy, which Nicci deflected. A storm of static sizzled up into the sky, spinning out and unraveling until it limned the boundary of the invisible dome.
“You can’t have all the fun, Sorceress.” Nathan raised both of his fists, unleashing his reawakened gift in expanding spheres of wizard’s fire. The flames roared across the apparatus, striking the crystal prisms and splitting, fanning out in multicolored fire that destroyed the contraptions.
Side by side, the wizards Quentin and Damon threw up their own defensive shields to block the onslaught and reflect the fire back, nearly striking Thora. It might have been an accident, but Nicci couldn’t be sure. At the last instant, the sovrena called up wind herself and blocked the destruction. Gouts of flame sprayed in all directions, scattering the angry evacuating slaves.
“Get the slaves out of here!” Nicci shouted down. “Make them retreat.”
As Death’s Mistress, she had sent countless thousands of soldiers to their deaths for a cause that she had believed appropriate at the time. She had enough blood on her hands that death no longer bothered her, but the people were innocents. They had been marked for sacrifice, and if she saved them from slaughter only to let them become collateral damage in her battle with Thora, then that would be no worthwhile victory at all.
Bannon took up the cry as he rushed the slaves in the other direction, joining the panicked nobles who were also flocking away from the pyramid.
Nicci did not want anything to hold her back. She knew she was going to need all her strength.
Quentin and Damon looked over at Elsa, saw the danger in Nicci’s face, and decided they’d had enough. “We want no part of this, Sovrena,” Quentin cried, and he raced down the opposite set of stairs, followed by Damon.
Nicci called down another braided bolt of lightning, and the explosion blasted the top of the pyramid, wrecked the remnants of the spell-form, and shattered the upper platform. The impact hit Thora in an eruption of fire and pulverized stone. The sovrena used her gift to encircle herself in a cocoon of smoke and light, spinning as she tumbled away from the blast, vanishing from the pyramid. Nicci couldn’t see her as the clouds of destruction spread in all directions.
Nathan clasped her shoulder and said, “Together, we have enough power to level this structure once and for all.”
“That would be a good idea, Wizard.”
They retreated down to the base of the pyramid, gathering their magic for a final attack. From the bottom level, Nathan launched more wizard’s fire in a hot fury that ate away the mammoth blocks, sizzling through the stone platforms, breaking the pyramid to the core.
Running backward, Elsa pointed up at the sky. “Look, it’s changing! It’s fading.”
The stars overhead rippled as the watery dome began to thin and dissipate. The crowds below shouted, cheered, or wailed. “The shroud! The shroud is falling!” Others took up the chant.
Nicci was glad. “That is exactly what I intended to do.”
“And we have succeeded,” Nathan said.
Together, she and Nathan—with assistance from Elsa—called down all the fury of their gift: explosions and fireballs, lightning bolt after lightning bolt. For long minutes, the awed crowds on top of the plateau, both gifted nobles and rebel slaves, watched the outpouring of destructive power.
The towering pyramid, one of the most imposing structures in Ildakar, became nothing more than broken, smoldering rubble, veiled by clouds of smoke that drifted away into the tension of the night.
A bright glint shone in Nathan’s azure eyes. “We’re not done yet, are we?”
Nicci turned from the ruined pyramid to the high ruling tower. “No, too much still remains.”
CHAPTER 77
Wizard Renn was astonished when the optimistic Captain Trevor proved himself right—that they would indeed find Cliffwall. Despite his proclaimed confidence, though, the guard captain seemed just as surprised to stumble upon their destination.
Weary, footsore, and hungry, having lost three men along the way, the group plodded along the rocky bottom of a high-walled canyon until they reached a dead end. Ignoring the groans of disappointment from the men behind him, the captain went to the stone wall and leaned against the cool slickrock. “At least there’s shade.” He shook his head. “We’ll rest before we retrace our steps.”
He accidentally discovered a crack that led through the towering wall and into another network of canyons beyond. Renn followed. As the sky opened up above them, they heard running water, saw green meadows, terraced gardens—and buildings erected inside cliff alcoves high above … an actual city hidden here. Farther down the canyon, he saw horses, groups of men, lines of tents, a large encampment of some sort.