“Oh, you little fools. This is only the smallest piece of my arsenal.”
“How long can you hold the spell?” he whispered to Zaara. When he saw her strained face, his heart sank. “Hold it as long as you can. Every second counts. Let me guide you across the floor, okay?”
She responded with a jerk of her head and walked slowly forward. Her breath dragged into her lungs in shallow, rapid breaths, while Lyle and Justin crouched nearby and shuffled along with her. It wasn’t, he thought, the most dignified thing he had ever done.
On the other hand, he still wasn’t dead.
Sephith must have realized what was going on because he suddenly yelled. A red orb of magic soared toward them out of the black and Justin raised his blade on instinct. The sphere struck it and shattered. Another hissed toward them and he batted it away from them.
“Exactly like baseball,” he said. He had sucked at baseball. For all their sakes, he had better get good, and fast.
They reached the machine and he kicked Lyle to get the dwarf’s attention. “Hey. Stout.”
“What?” The dwarf watched as he dispatched another ball of magic with his sword and fired ice from his hands to spear a fourth.
“Destroy the machine,” Justin whispered.
“How? I’m not an engineer.”
“What do you mean, how?” He spared him an impatient glance. “What do you do with really complicated things to break them? You hit them hard.”
“Oh. I can do that!” Lyle set to work with a will. He grunted continually with pain as his fists struck the ivory repeatedly, but he seemed to care less about the pain than Justin did.
The sound of flesh and bone hitting something hard like that was not a sound he ever wanted to hear again. He was grateful to have the distraction of the wizard’s fireballs.
“I wish I could get in that machine for a little while!” Zaara’s voice cracked. “Oh, gods. Oh, this hurts. Ow. Ow.”
“Only a little longer,” he told her. He felt much the same, although he knew he wasn’t in as much pain as she was. Each time he managed to swing the sword to connect with the balls of magic, he counted it as a lucky coincidence. He had almost taken one directly to the face when he missed and had needed to duck hastily, unable to get a spell off quickly enough.
Still, he had been able to throw a few spells between the balls of fire. Sephith circled them at surprising speed, yelled obscenities, and taunted them, but Justin could hear the fear in his voice.
“We’re winning,” he called to Zaara. “Don’t give up. Please don’t give up. Give Lyle a little more—”
Her whimper of pain came at the same time as the dwarf’s triumphant shout and a crackle of electronics. Sephith screamed, the black cloud disappeared, and twelve people thudded unceremoniously to the floor.
Zaara staggered and caught herself on what remained of the throne. Her face was an unhealthy gray but she looked practically radiant next to Sephith. The wizard seemed to age in front of their eyes. The green and black flames disappeared and his back began to hunch. His hair went white, his skin sagged, and his eyes turned milky.
“No!” he croaked. He fished the key out of his pocket but fumbled with it. He attempted to throw it but his joints gave out and he fell to his knees. “No!”
The people on the floor began to wake up. Men and women rubbed their heads and looked around as if they had no idea where they were. Then, with an ominous rumble, the tower shifted and began to lean slightly.
“No!” Sephith’s scream seemed to resonate in the very stones.
“Lyle!” Justin yelled. “Get these people out of here—and Zaara.” He had to get the key but he couldn’t live with himself if the rest of them died. He pointed to the side of the room where a small box was visible now that the throne had been destroyed. “Put them in that, take it to the ground floor, and get out!”
The dwarf began to usher the villagers toward the makeshift elevator. Zaara clung to him. Her breath wheezed into her lungs and she looked exhausted.
But Sephith uttered a last, triumphant shout. He flung his hands up and vanished in a burst of purple lightning that hung in the air for a moment and crackled before it disappeared into the machine, which hummed to life once more.
Zaara stopped. She looked at the elevator and then