Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,81
Evergard began. Biantha took her place on the parapets without saying any farewells, though some had been said to her, and watched while archers fired into the demons’ massed ranks. Not long after, magefire rolled over their hastily raised shields, and she prepared her own spells. Only when the demons began to draw back and prepare a second attack did she call upon powers that required meticulous proofs, held in her mind like the memory of a favorite song—or a child in her arms.
She gathered all the shapes of pain that afflicted the demons and twisted them into death. Red mists obscured her vision as the spell wrenched her own soul, sparing her the need to watch the enemy falling. Yet she would have to use the spell again and again before the demons’ mathemagicians shaped a ward against it. Those who shared her art rarely ventured into battle, for this reason: it often took too long to create attacks or adapt to them. A theorem needed for a spell might take years to discover, or turn out to be impossible; and inspiration, while swift, was sometimes unreliable. She had seen mathemagicians die from careless assumptions in spellcasting.
By midday Biantha no longer noticed the newly fallen corpses. She leaned against the wall’s cold stone—and glimpsed black and red and gold in the distance: the demon emperor, carrying the serpent-eyed scepter that she remembered too clearly. For a moment she thought of the Blade Fidora and cursed the Prophecy’s inscrutable symmetry. “No,” she whispered. Only if the emperor were certain of victory would he risk himself in the front lines, and a cold conviction froze her thoughts.
Marten. He’s counting on Marten to help him.
She had to find Vathré and warn him. She knew where he would be and ran, despite the archers’ protests that she endangered herself. “My lord!” she cried, grieving already, because she saw her fair-haired son beside gray-haired Vathré, directing the defense. “My lord! The emperor—” Biantha nearly tripped, caught herself, continued running.
Vathré turned, trusting her, and then it happened.
The emperor raised his scepter, and darkness welled forth to batter Evergard’s walls. In the darkness, colors moved like the fire of dancing prisms; silence reigned for a second, strangely disturbing after the clamor of war. Then the emperor’s spell ended, leaving behind more dead than the eye could count at a glance. Broken shapes, blood, weapons twisted into deadly metal flowers, a wind like the breath of disease.
Biantha stared disbelievingly over the destruction and saw that the demons who had stood in the spell’s path had died as well; saw that the emperor had come forward to spare his own soldiers, not—she hoped not—because he knew he had a traitor in the Watchlanders’ ranks. So much death, and all they had been able to do, she and the other magicians, was watch.
“Mercy,” Vathré breathed.
“The scepter,” Marten said harshly. “Its unspoken name is Decay.”
She looked across at the gates and sneezed, dust stinging her nostrils. Already those who had fallen were rotting, flesh blackening and curling to reveal bone; Evergard’s sturdy walls had become cracked and mottled.
Marten was shouting orders for everyone to abandon that section of wall before it crumbled. Then he looked at her and said, “We have to get down. Before it spreads. You too, my lord.”
Vathré nodded curtly and offered Biantha his arm; Marten led the way down, across footing made newly treacherous. The walls whispered dryly behind them; she flinched at the crash as a crenel broke off and plummeted.
“—use that scepter again?” she heard the lord asking Marten as she concentrated on her footing.
“No,” she and her son both said. Biantha continued, “Not so far from the seat of his power and without the blood sacrifices. Not against wood or stone. But a touch, against living flesh, is another matter.”
They had reached safety of sorts with the others who had fled the crumbling section of wall. “What of the Prophecy?” Vathré asked her, grimacing as he cast his gaze over the morning’s carnage.
“Prophecy?” Marten repeated, looking at them strangely.
Perhaps he had not heard, or failed to understand what he heard, in the brief time he had been at Evergard. Biantha doubted he had spent much time with the minstrels. At least he was not—she prayed not—a traitor, as she had thought at first. Breath coming hard, she looked around, listened to the cries of the wounded, and then, all at once, the answer came to her, one solution of several.