Chapter 13

“You need to work on your aim with your portals,” the Black Guardian grumbled as Mandalee helped the sorceress to her feet.

“I’ll make it a top priority,” her White counterpart promised. “Right behind stopping Ulvarius, getting the fragment, putting history back on track and saving all these people.”

In the interests of the last part – once they had reclaimed their clothes and other belongings from Cat’s pocket dimension, and got dressed – the Red and White Guardians set about healing the captives they had brought with them.

“You saved us!” Petra gasped incredulously.

“Of course we did,” Mandalee replied, matter-of-factly.

“Even me. Even after I betrayed you.”

“You were supposed to betray us,” Cat assured her. “Anyone would in your place. After being tortured for weeks, we dangled a lifeline of hope in front of your face and then snatched it away, threatening to abandon you and let your torturer finish the job. No-one could blame you for what you did, and you should feel no guilt.”

“You betrayed us; we used you,” Mandalee put in. “I’m willing to call that quits if you are.”

*****

Apart from the moral perspective, there had been a strategic element to their rescue. They knew Dreya’s plan: she wanted Ulvarius to come out of his Tower and attack. For the moment, she had a small army of wizards lying in wait in Compton, but the longer they waited, the higher the chance that some might think better of it and leave the group. Therefore, the sooner Ulvarius attacked, the better. The trap was set. Cat and Mandalee’s job had been to push him into it.

The Guardians had known that Ulvarius would automatically distrust anything they told him, so they took the decision to use the captives he already had. The ones he had broken. Petra was the obvious candidate, so they played their parts well, sharing a version of their plan. The version they wanted Ulvarius to believe. Through Petra’s act of betrayal in the name of self-preservation, they had baited Ulvarius to attack Compton quickly, ‘before they were ready’ when the truth was, they were ready now.

Moreover, while the Forum building in Walminster was being used as a refuge, Ulvarius believed it was a trap, so he would stay away from it. That made it the safest place in Elvaria right now.

The Guardians moved aside and allowed other healers to take over. There would be no clerics involved with the Council for another three centuries, of course, but there was the occasional druid who offered their services in exchange for protection.

Finding a secluded corner, Mandalee quickly warned her friend, “He’s definitely learned how to tap into the power of that fragment, Dreya. He used a beam cannon type blast.”

Cat nodded. “I managed to deflect it, but I don’t see how that army of yours is going to survive powers like that. I know I say power isn’t everything, but in this case…” she trailed off.

“Don’t worry, Cat,” her fiancée reassured her. “Mandalee has a ridiculous radical plan to deal with that.”

“I do?” Mandalee frowned.

“Better to show you than tell you,” Dreya replied.

“You’re being enigmatic again,” Cat pointed out.

Dreya nodded. “I know, but trust me, if I just told you, you’d never believe it.”

“Well, as Jessica would say, you can colour me intrigued,” Cat remarked. “Shall we go?”

“Yeah,” Mandalee agreed. “We don’t want the fight to start without us.”

“Alright,” Dreya agreed, “I’ll make the portal – make sure we get to the right place and don’t hit anything. But you two have to promise me something you’re not going to like: stay out of the fighting.”

“Jessica’s right,” Cat remarked. “You are starting to sound like Daelen.”

“Normally, I’d never hold you back,” Dreya promised, “but you studied the Battle of Compton at magic school, didn’t you?”

Cat nodded.

“Well, did you hear about the red-robed mage with her amazing druid powers? Or the cleric-assassin dressed all in white?”

Cat had to admit she hadn’t. Therefore, if they were to preserve history in any way, those elements couldn’t be a part of the story this time, either.

Even Mandalee could only agree, much as she hated it.

“Look, I’m planning to keep a low profile in the battle myself,” Dreya told them. “I have someone else who’s only too happy to take both the lead and the credit. If you can help from the sidelines, discreetly, that’s fine, and healing will be welcome, but unless things go horribly wrong, on the sidelines you must stay. For history’s sake.”

Having said that, however, she did have a particular job for Mandalee. “Where’s your combat suit?” she asked.

“Still in her pocket dimension,” Mandalee answered. “She told me it was anachronistic.”

“It is, but the wounded aren’t going to care what you’re wearing, and as long as you’re too fast to see properly, it won’t matter to anyone else. But when Ulvarius throws everything he’s got at you, it’s going to matter to you.”

Cat opened her pocket dimension, and Mandalee quickly changed as Dreya outlined her plan.

*****

There was nothing in the Compton of this era that Catriona recognised. It was farmland, home to only a few families who had agreed to evacuate in exchange for compensation by the Wizards’ Forum and preferential terms in the future. Perhaps this was the origin of the close ties between Compton and Walminster in her time, Cat considered.

The Three Guardians had discreetly portalled in on the outskirts. Too many people had seen their preferred method of travel already. They didn’t want to compound that any further. Besides, startling allies on the battlefield was never a good idea.

Dreya led her companions to where Dagamir and the others were waiting. Close to a hundred mages in total. Before she had a chance to make any introductions, however, the ground began to melt to liquid mud in places, and skeletons began to pull themselves out of the ground in those muddy pools: Ulvarius was creating minions out of the remains of people who had died here in centuries past. As more pools began to form, Dreya glanced at her fiancée, but she was way ahead of her. Ulvarius’ foot soldiers obviously needed soft ground to pull themselves up from beneath. Druid magic could deny him that resource, keeping the land in that whole area hard and dry. More skeletons managed to escape before her magic prevented them, but not many. A few pulled themselves up only to leave their legs behind. Here and there, there was just an arm sticking out, flailing wildly, but otherwise, they were trapped below ground where they could do no harm.

Wizards smashed the skeletons with air moving spells, except Dagamir who preferred to conserve his magic and skilfully hack them apart with his sword. Mandalee did likewise with a pair that got too close, and that was the last of them.

The initial skirmish over, Cat and Mandalee retreated behind the treeline. From there, they would observe at a distance and mostly stay out of it, as agreed. For her part, Dreya had taken no action against the skeletons, instead standing her ground in the middle of the wizard army, silent and still, eyes closed as if concentrating on something. After a moment, she moved over to another Black robe sorceress, Sephora, taking her arm and leading her away.

What Catriona saw made her gasp in astonishment.

“She’s right,” she marvelled, mostly to herself. “If I hadn’t seen it, I never would have believed it.”

“Why? What’s she done?” Mandalee wondered.

But Catriona’s answer would have to wait.

Dagamir stood tall and proud in the centre of a ring of bones and called out in a booming voice that Cat was sure could be heard plainly halfway across the continent, “Enough of these games, Ulvarius! Stop hiding behind your minions and face us yourself!”

The bony form, enshrouded in his Black robes materialised in their midst.

“What’s this, Dagamir?” he sneered. “You and your fan club having an outing?”

*****

“Dagamir?” Cat whispered so only Mandalee could hear.

“Is he some historical figure?” her friend wondered. As a cleric and demon hunter turned assassin, wizards from the past had never been high on her list of interests.

Cat turned to her friend and smiled, sadly, a tear in her eye. “The man who brought the wizards together for the first time. The man who laid the foundations for the Council we know.”

Mandalee was puzzled by Cat’s expression. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Why don’t you look happy about it?”

“Because he never got to see the legacy he created.”

Mandalee’s eyes grew wide in understanding. “Because he dies today?”

Cat nodded. “In the final moments of the battle,” she quoted from her memory of her history textbook, “even as Ulvarius fled the scene, he unleashed one, final, devastating onslaught at the most powerful of his enemies: Dagamir the Third.” She nodded towards the proud figure before them. “Him.”

“History in action,” Mandalee remarked. “Dear gods, I need a drink.”

*****

“More of a team-building exercise, actually, Ulvarius,” Dagamir returned. “Not something you’d understand of course.”

“You’re right, I have no interest in your little team,” the tyrant agreed. “Fortunately for you. Just hand over the one called Darla, and you get to live your pointless lives for a while longer. There’s a game I’ve grown quite fond of, lately,” he told them. “The rules are simple: Ulvarius’ minions destroy a village or town every five minutes until Ulvarius gets what he wants.”

So saying, he sent out his power, but there was no explosion, no indication of damage, nothing.

“While you’ve been playing that old game, Ulvarius, my friends and I have been learning some new tricks,” Dagamir taunted him.

This ‘new trick’ was a boundary spell that surrounded the village in a dome shield. As long as it held, no magic could penetrate, not even mental commands from Ulvarius to his minions. None of the mages there could have accomplished such a feat alone, but between them, it was quickly done.

“Is Ulvarius supposed to be impressed by that?” the bony wizard scoffed. “It takes a hundred of you to conjure one little boundary spell? Your powers are truly pathetic. Now, bring Darla to me. She has something I want. From what I’ve heard, the power Ulvarius drains from her will be such a feast, I won’t have room for dessert afterwards, so your merry little band will be safe. For now. But if you keep Ulvarius waiting, I may have to snack on a few appetisers.”

So saying, he performed a short-range teleport to stand behind a wizard in brown robes. Placing a hand on his neck, Ulvarius began to drain his magic.

Leaping into action, Dagamir charged Ulvarius and plunged his sword through his body, but the tyrant became like smoke on the wind, and the blade swished harmlessly through it. The smoke coalesced back into his physical skeletal form.”

“You dare strike Ulvarius?” he demanded, incensed.

“Why do you think we’re all here? We have something you want, and you have something we want. I’m happy to make the trade if you are, as long as you go first.”

“And what exactly does your squalid little band want from Ulvarius?”

“Your head!” Dagamir cried and channelled a lightning bolt through his sword.

The battlefield erupted, then, as spells of fire and ice, wind and lightning flew at the tyrant. He shielded against everything as they knew he would. They couldn’t win this way. Not while he possessed the control device fragment. Dreya mixed her magic with the other mages, being careful to continually shroud her real power. It was so tempting to use her power words or fire a beam cannon blast, but she knew she mustn’t. It was at times like this that the power of the Dark end of the magical spectrum seemed to goad a mage into unleashing a full onslaught of magic until the magic consumed the mage.

Dreya was different. She had her power under tight control.

Of course, Dreya could drain magic. It would be so easy for her to pull that power from this army and throw it all at Ulvarius. Or drain Ulvarius and throw it at the army. The power didn’t care. But Dreya did. In fact, she had already done something she would never have imagined attempting, against her very nature, because tactically it was the right decision. Such was her control. So, no power words, or overt use of higher planar energy; conventional spells only. Although she had used her dagger to surreptitiously break the skin of one finger. Just enough to bleed a little. Nothing noticeable – she’d had worse paper cuts – but enough to facilitate blood magic. Even that, though, she used strictly for shields and other defences. Not for attack. She knew Ulvarius never mastered stable blood magic – as with many aspects of magic, Dreya was the first. She didn’t want to risk him learning it from her now.

Ulvarius was not so restrained as he counter-attacked, lacing each of his offensive spells with what he now knew to be higher planar energy. It would empower each strike five, six, even tenfold. They should cut through ordinary wizards’ shields as easily as paper, but to Ulvarius’ astonishment, impossibly, their shields were holding up against him.

The battle raged for an hour or more without any real progress on either side. There were a few allied casualties, but Mandalee quickly retrieved them from the battlefield using her super-speed. She left most of the healing to Catriona so that she could conserve her energy for these quick rescue raids and for what was to come. Druid magic was enough to get the wizards back on their feet and into battle once more, in just a few heartbeats.

But Ulvarius didn’t get to be the tyrant he was without being adaptable. Instead of trying to fight the whole army at once, he instead focused his will on one sorceress in robes of purple. His gaze fixed on her to the exclusion of all else, relying on his shields to protect him as he reached out, mentally, and crushed her heart. The sorceress collapsed to the ground, unmoving. Mandalee didn’t bother trying to collect her: she and Cat both knew there was nothing they could do.

Three more collapsed in the next five minutes, only one of whom could be revived.

Casualties were inevitable in a battle, however, and this was the moment Dreya had been waiting for. As Ulvarius fixed his exclusive focus on another victim, Dreya turned to Sephora beside her and gave a sharp nod.

“Now.”

The sorceress concentrated her magic to generate a powerful magnetic field, even as Ulvarius focused on drowning a White robed wizard in his own blood. The wizard died with blood seeping out from every pore and orifice, but before Ulvarius could select another victim at random, he looked down in astonishment at the pouch he kept attached to his belt. The pouch that contained the source of his extra power: the fragment.

“No!” he cried in horror. He couldn’t let them take it from him. It had come to him. It was meant for him. It was his to command.

But the sharp metal had other ideas as it cut through the pouch’s resilient leather wall and flew out towards Sephora’s outstretched hand. Seeing this, Ulvarius turned his furious gaze on her, for he didn’t need to be touching the fragment to make it work for him. Proximity was enough, and it was still sufficiently close. He felt the power and pulled it to him. It was stubborn, flying out not in a steady stream but in bursts, as if trying to resist Ulvarius’ will, but he had mastery enough for this.

Forgoing traditional magic, he lashed out with a straightforward energy beam, intending to incinerate Sephora on the spot. There didn’t seem to be an annoying druid girl around this time to reflect it back, so he believed it was a guaranteed kill, but another Black robe sorceress had already stepped between them as if anticipating the strike. The beam shot out and took a sizeable chunk out of the ground, but when the dust settled, both mages were unharmed.

Somehow, this other sorceress had shielded them. He realised this must be Darla. Neither sorceress held the fragment, though. It had been thrown clear by the blast. He desperately scanned the battlefield for it. Already he could feel his power waning. The wizard army had stepped up their attack, sensing his relative weakness, and some of their strikes were beginning to penetrate his shields. He needed his fragment.

He spotted it, gleaming in the middle distance and teleported to it, but someone else had got there first. A figure in white – his escaped cleric captive.

Mandalee had been watching for this moment and tracked the fragment as it flew. Using her super-speed, she ran to grab it. Her anticipation and speed were enough to beat Ulvarius’ teleportation – just. She held the fragment in her hand and began to streak away, but as Dreya had predicted, an enraged Ulvarius threw wave after wave of spells at her back. She was thankful she’d heeded her friend’s advice about wearing her magically resistant combat suit. She could never have survived in her leather. As it was, she wasn’t sure how much of a pounding the fabric could take and used her Guardian magic to squeeze out an extra bit of speed. Ulvarius seemed to realise his direct magic wasn’t working, so switched to indirect magic, throwing rocks, debris and even trees at the White Assassin. Even that failed, however, as suddenly a blast of wind threw everything back at him, instead, forcing an emergency teleport.

Dreya glanced over at the treeline and caught the eyes of Catriona, who sent a sympathic message telling her fiancée that she couldn’t expect her to stand by and do nothing when her friend was under attack. Dreya conceded the point with a smile and a nod.

When he materialised, Ulvarius had totally lost his bearings, and the thief was nowhere to be seen.