Chapter 30

Nalani and Pryshia split up, forcing Dreya to choose which one to target. She decided on Nalani and brought things to a head by throwing out a blast of air from the opposite direction. Nalani felt like she’d slammed into a wall, stunning her long enough for the fireball to catch up with her, but the fire attack fizzled harmlessly on contact.

Dreya couldn’t understand it, until Mandalee croaked, “Bodysuit.”

The sorceress realised she was right. Her fire spell had had some effect after all: it had burned a patch out of Nalani’s brown leather, revealing another, pristine layer of fabric underneath. Fabric that looked a lot like one of Mandalee’s magically resistant combat suits.

“Are those things available in shops now?” Dreya snapped, irritably.

“Why?” Nalani shot back. “Afraid that your magic’s useless now and I can do anything I like to the great Dreya the Dark?” She brandished her knives as if to attack, but Dreya wasn’t fooled. She was just trying to distract her while Pryshia crept up behind her and sprang.

Dreya didn’t have super-speed, but she could manipulate Time, especially with a second Guardian there. She slipped quickly aside, focused her will on the flying lioness and unfolded her power word, “FREEZE.” The so-called god’s muscles locked, unable to change her momentum as she flew past and collided with a tree.

The Black Guardian’s eyes never left the lioness as she said, “PAIN.”

Pryshia roared and whimpered in agony.

Returning her focus to Nalani, Dreya finally answered her. “No, I’m just afraid I’m going to have to hurt her to get to you, and I do hate cruelty to animals.”

But on a day of surprises, there came one more. Nalani appeared wholly unaffected as she healed her ‘god’ and numbed her pain, unfreezing her in the process. She may call herself a Cleric of Nature, Dreya thought, but it was quite clear that her link with Pryshia was nothing like Mandalee’s bond with Shyleen.

Windell had once again regained consciousness by now but was wisely staying out of things this time.

Dreya was considering her next move when rain began to fall in their otherwise sunny surroundings, and a rainbow appeared.

“Wheee!” cried a familiar voice, sounding for all the world like she was thoroughly enjoying herself.

Nalani and Pryshia didn’t know what to make of it and just stood there as the rainbow curved sharply down to the ground. They continued to stand there as the red-robed form of Catriona Redfletching hurtled down, Crystal Mage Staff in her hand, sliding on her backside and acting like she was at a funfair. The woman and lioness, sensing danger, acted on instinct and tried to run, but a mighty wind gusted up, slowing them down and accelerating Cat even further. The druidess gathered momentum, as gravity and propelling wind worked in concert to make her faster than her enemies. The rainbow road on which she slid, flew around and up and over until the pair were inside it.

Nalani didn’t know how, but the walls of the rainbow appeared to be solid. She tried hacking at them with her dragonclaw daggers that could cut through anything, but they had no effect.

Catriona’s slide finally took her down to the ground.

“Wow!” she cried, exhilarated. “That was awesome! I am so doing that again.” With a slight stagger, however, she qualified, “But not just now. Bit dizzy.

“‘Ello!” she segued, addressing Nalani, “I hear you’ve been giving my friends some trouble. Well, now I’ve got you neatly giftwrapped, so we’ll have no more of that.”

Nalani pounded futilely on the walls of her multicoloured prison. “What the hell is this?” she demanded.

Cat nodded. “Neat, isn’t it? Pretty and functional. You’re fast, I’ll grant you that, but with a bit of help from the power of nature, I could be faster. OK, just briefly, I admit. As for your prison,” she explained, “sunlight through moisture gives us a rainbow, but that’s mostly just for show. Literally. It’s so I can see the walls of air I’ve wrapped around you. Your suit protects you from direct magic, but not from nature, and your daggers can cut through anything solid, but guess what? Air’s not solid. It just feels that way when it’s pushing against you. So, there’s nothing for your daggers to cut. Now, you just wait there,” she told Nalani, as if she had a choice. “I’m busy.”

Seeing that Mandalee’s forest fire was beginning to spread, she made it rain harder, but it wasn’t enough. Turning to her fiancée, she asked her to use her magic to form a dome shield around the flames and extract all the oxygen. Dreya complied, and in a moment, the fire was extinguished.

“You might want to think about doing the same to Nalani if she gives us any more trouble,” she suggested, casually. “Her suit doesn’t physically protect her head,” she pointed out. “It just generates an anti-magic field, and I know how you are with those.”

Dreya drew her close and kissed her. “I love it when you’re ruthless.”

“I know,” she smiled.

Mandalee called up from where she lay on the ground. “If you two lovebirds are quite finished, Shyleen and I have been dying for you to turn up.”

In fact, Catriona knew they weren’t dying at all, thanks to Dreya. As soon as her fiancée had arrived on the scene, she was able to send Cat exact co-ordinates, so she could portal straight there. Rather than do that, though, she portalled a short distance away and observed the action. She could see her friends were out of danger, because Nalani and Pryshia were never going to get past Dreya the Dark. That gave her time to come up with a way to contain them properly. A plan that, as usual, involved making a dramatic entrance. Now she could concentrate on healing her friends.

The damage to Shyleen was easy enough to fix – it was just the result of tooth and claw. As she sent out her druid senses into Mandalee’s body, however, she realised that Nalani’s daggers must have been laced with something that had given her an infection. That would take time.

As Cat ran through the options in her head, Dreya apologised to Mandalee for upsetting her with her ill-chosen comments, a few days ago.

Shyleen suggested to Mandalee, ‘It seems to me that she came when we needed her and saved our lives. I believe those actions are more important than anything she might have said.’

Mandalee agreed, passing on her comments and adding her own thanks. “You’re a true friend, Dreya,” she told her, smiling weakly, “and I don’t really blame you for missing two years. We’re all new at this and mistakes are bound to happen.”

“And you’ve just made another one,” came Nalani’s sneering voice. Cat, Dreya and Shyleen all whirled around to see her free of her prison and holding a knife to Windell’s throat. Pryshia was sitting beside her, looking like the proverbial cat that got the cream. “I had a hunch this one might come in handy if I kept him alive.” Her weapon was one Mandalee hadn’t seen her use during their fight. It was about six inches long with a jagged, zigzag-shaped blade, like an idealised lightning bolt, with a bejewelled hilt.

Dreya realised she’d seen it before in Scarlett’s mind. This dagger, or at least an identical one, had been hanging from the belt of the Black robe wizard that attacked Whealhaven. The sorceress filed that thought away to deal with later.

“Your rainbow showed me where the prison walls were, and therefore where they weren’t,” Nalani pointed out.

As soon as the Guardians’ backs were turned, Nalani and Pryshia had burrowed underneath the cage.

“Cat!” Dreya admonished her. “It’s not like you to make that mistake.” Catriona had once criticised even her for using a dome shield instead of a bubble, leaving an easy escape underneath.

“I was in a rush!” Cat replied, defensively. “And I couldn’t figure out how to get a rainbow to form between their feet and the ground.”

“Oh, I’ve had enough of this!” Mandalee grumbled from where she lay. “Shall we just Freeze Time and be done with it?”

“I really wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Nalani called out. “This dagger is enchanted with a Timeless spell. It protects the wielder from changes to the Timeline and anyone killed with it stays dead no matter what you do.”

“There’s no such thing!” Mandalee scoffed.

“Actually, there might be,” Cat admitted with a sick feeling in her stomach. She had started working on a kind of Timeless spell to protect Calin’s Tower. It was conceivable that it could be turned into a weapon in the future, and the Guardians knew from experience that future events could interfere with their present, just as they could intervene in the past.

“Either way,” Nalani challenged, “can you take the risk?”

They couldn’t, and they all knew it. Freezing Time wasn’t instant. It would take a second or two for Time to grind to a halt. For someone as fast as Nalani, that was plenty of time to kill Windell.

“I should have done what you said, Cat,” Dreya grumbled. Then, with a sigh of resignation, she said, “OK, Nalani. What do you want?”

“What I want is for Mandalee the Murderer to die, but I guess that’ll have to wait, so I’ll settle for getting away. Let me go, don’t try to follow for at least ten minutes and I’ll dump this one where you can find him.”

“How do we know you won’t kill him anyway?” Mandalee demanded.

“Because I’m not a murderer like you!” Nalani snapped back, vehemently. “I’ll only kill him if you force my hand.”

The Guardians had no choice but to reluctantly agree.

Even so, Mandalee couldn’t resist calling out, “Hey, Nalani! Catch you later!”

“No, you won’t!” Nalani shot back. Keeping Windell under close guard, she commanded him to move. Pryshia followed close at her heels. As Nalani stepped into the Eastcliff woodlands, she cried, “I just beat the Guardians!” A fact she clearly found hilarious.

Her cruel, mocking laughter faded as she moved away until she was too distant to be heard.

Cat sighed, deeply. “Not exactly our finest hour, I have to admit.”

That was when Mandalee’s fatigue, from the battle and the infection, finally caught up with her and she passed out.

‘Don’t worry, Shyleen. I’ll soon fix her up,’ Cat promised telepathically, in her leopard language. ‘Just like last time.’

‘I know you will, Cat,’ Shyleen returned. ‘I am not worried.’

With that, the leopard moved away to give her space. If it was like last time, then it would involve water, and she had no desire to get her paws wet unnecessarily.

Dreya decided to give it precisely eleven minutes and then retrieve Windell.

*****

Catriona’s ministrations purged Mandalee’s infection and closed her more acute wounds, then she waited for her friend to recover naturally.

Her eyes fluttered open, taking in her situation, laying in a shallow pool of water, head cradled in Catriona’s lap, bodysuit folded neatly on the bank.

“Don’t tell me: I was skinny dipping again, right?” she quipped.

Cat gave her a mischievous smile. “Nope. I really am obsessed with seeing you naked every chance I get.”

“I’m telling Dreya!” Mandalee threatened, acting offended.

Cat helped her up, dried her off with her magic and let her get dressed.

A short time later, Windell returned with Dreya’s support. Mandalee immediately went to him, healed him and hugged him – gently for both their sakes as they were each still a little sore and tender in places.

“I’m sorry you got beaten up because of me,” she told him.

“I’m sorry she got away because of me,” he returned. “I felt like a damsel in distress out here.”

Surprisingly, it was Dreya who offered her support. “It’s not like that,” she assured him. “Sometimes you come up against someone who’s just too powerful, and there’s nothing you can do.”

“Not a concept I’d expect you to be familiar with, sorceress,” he replied, a wary look of respect in his eyes.

“Not recently, no,” she admitted with a crooked smile, “but who knows? There could be someone or something out there that even I can’t fight.”

“If that’s true, I pray I never meet them,” Windell declared, solemnly.

Nalani had, of course, been long gone when Dreya found Windell, but at least she had kept her word and let him live.

“That’s because she honestly believes I murdered her father,” Mandalee explained, shaking her head, sadly. “She just won’t accept that he was a terrible man who happily set a Greater Demon loose to maim and slaughter innocent people, and then tried to kill me when I put a stop to it.”

‘I think she’s being used,’ Shyleen offered. ‘Pryshia tricked her into selling her soul.’

That would explain why Nalani was more powerful than Mandalee but didn’t have a bond of empathy like the one she shared with Shyleen.

‘It may have looked like Nalani was running the show, but she is effectively Pryshia’s slave, albeit a willing one. I am also concerned about how Pryshia got here. She mentioned something about cracks in Alycia’s Barrier.’

‘You think other gods might find a way down here?’ Mandalee wondered.

‘There are worse things than gods,’ was Shyleen’s only reply.

*****

Since the Guardians – including Shyleen – were together again, they decided it was time to pay the Council of Mages a visit. Dreya had hoped to be returning there in triumph – their first mission to save the Council’s existence, ensure Ulvarius’ defeat and retrieve the first fragment, a great success. Instead, they had to report that the third fragment was missing from Phitonia and they’d been beaten by a big cat with her pet human.

Catriona disagreed, however, believing instead that it was good for the Council to see some battle scars, to help them get a sense of how much they were putting on the line in their new roles.

“Although my battle scars from fighting Nalani aren’t really anything to do with the Guardianship, Cat,” Mandalee pointed out.

Catriona raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t they?” She counted off her points on her fingers. “Dragonclaw daggers and magically resistant bodysuit, neither of which are available in this world. Possible cracks in Alycia’s Barrier, and a Timeless spell that hasn’t been invented yet. I’d say all those things come under the Guardians’ jurisdiction.”

“As if we didn’t have enough to do, finding the other fragments!” Mandalee remarked.

“Oh, I’d be astonished if those things weren’t related,” Dreya replied.

Cat nodded, saying, “We can’t expect collecting the fragments to be easy. As far as we know, the only person who’s done that job before is Kullos. Who knows how long it took him?”

“Maybe we should pop back in time and ask him?” Mandalee suggested, facetiously.

They laughed at the idea in a much-needed release of tension, until the White Guardian continued, breezily, “Alright then, let’s go and see the Council!” Offering her arm to Windell, she reminded him that she’d promised him a tour of Walminster before Time went wonky. “After more than two years, I think it’s time I came good on that promise.”