THE HULKING FIGURE OF LORD FORSYTH emerged from behind the Inquisitor, shaking his leonine mane of hair to reveal the missing ear. Neither wore their masks, but both were dressed in their pompous dress uniforms: Rook’s a silver-laced cassock of dark cloth and Zacharias’s a tasseled black uniform, sewn with epaulets and golden buttons.
“It was foolish of you to come here,” Zacharias Forsyth said, his voice booming and deep. “When my children told me there was an elf at the ball … well. We kept an eye on you. It didn’t take us long to work out who you were, or see what you were up to.”
He took a step closer, into the light, and the scarred remnants of his ear gave his head a lopsided appearance.
“You’ve got courage, I’ll give you that,” he said, smiling at them. “Here for the staff, I assume.”
He nodded toward the staff behind them.
“Stealing it won’t do you any good. The seed is sown, and you shall reap the consequences. Preventing a few more speeches won’t make a damned bit of difference. Not that you’ll be around to see it.”
Fletcher let his hands drift behind his back and slowly eased the gloves from his hands. The two men before him were master battlemages, and Zacharias was a tried-and-tested veteran of a brutal war. The odds were stacked against him.
There was a ripping sound, and Fletcher saw Sylva out of the corner of his eye, tearing the excess fabric away from her dress, then slitting the side with a stiletto blade to free up her movement—and revealing the journal strapped to her thigh.
“What’s that?” Rook demanded as Sylva took it and backed away, the thin booklet swiftly stowed behind her.
Fletcher whipped his hand up, billowing out a wall of shield energy. It was broad enough to protect both himself and Sylva, but the two men simply smirked and watched them through the opaque barrier.
They didn’t understand that he and Sylva weren’t trying to steal the staff, but get a message out to the people of Hominum. They both thought they had all the time in the world.
“The question is, do we kill them here or do we have them arrested and wait for the trial and summary execution?” Rook mused. “A trial might be more public, sow more dissent.”
His voice was low—they were close to the staff now, and his words might be heard across all of Hominum if they were any louder.
“We kill them,” Zacharias replied, crouching slightly and sweeping his hands apart, ready for a potential attack. “If we arrest the she-elf, that fool Harold will step in and protect her, to prevent a war with the elves. As you know, trials are … unpredictable.”
Fletcher heard a flutter of cloth as Sylva removed the staff’s cover. There was a glow of blue as she etched in the air, then a beam of pale light from a ball of white wyrdlight, a spell rarely used because it drained so much mana. The bright rays cast a long shadow in front of Fletcher, his black outline stretched between him and his two enemies.
“Yes, that’s right.” Zacharias laughed. “Turn the staff this way; let the world get a clear view. When the elves see us kill their precious princess, we’ll have another war, a real one this time. The dwarves tomorrow and the elves next.”
“And you’ll line your pockets with blood money,” Fletcher snarled.
“If it’s elven or dwarven blood, it will make it all the sweeter,” Rook said, a cruel smile playing across his sallow face.
Sylva began to speak. Her voice was low, for she was muttering right above the frozen Mite’s head. Fletcher allowed himself a glance behind and saw her brandishing Zacharias’s letter in front of the immobilized demon’s eyes, her finger pointing to the Forsyth seal at the bottom.
“Stop that,” Rook snapped, taking a step forward. “What are you saying?”
Then Zacharias’s eyes lit up in recognition, seeing the scrap of paper through the opaque shield.
“Stop her!” he bellowed, and suddenly his fingers were scoring the air and a blast of lightning crackled across the room. It slammed into the shield, cleaving and rending the wall of white, the surface snapping and fracturing like broken ice on a lake.
Rook added a vortex of fire a moment later, the billowing flame flattening against the shield and dissolving the surface, layer by layer.
“Hurry, Sylva,” Fletcher yelled as the shield disintegrated before his eyes. “Show them the journal!”
He needed to summon Ignatius, but all he could do was pulse more and more mana into the shield, reinforcing it in ribbons of white light where it was weakest. His right hand etched the fire symbol desperately in the air, but even as he fixed the spell to his finger, Rook and Zacharias formed their own oval shields using their free hands.
Now Sylva was shouting, the words lost before they reached Fletcher’s ears against the roar of the spells battering against his shield.
Fletcher hurled a ball of fire into the air, arcing it over to burst on Zacharias’s shield, cascading around the edges in a waterfall of flame to singe the noble’s clothing. Still the spells battered at Fletcher’s barrier.
He could feel his mana draining, and the consciousnesses of Ignatius and Athena desperate to be unleashed. He forced through a last burst of mana into the shield and then let it hang without his reinforcement, shaking and shivering beneath the onslaught of blue lightning and orange flame. His mind twisted as he forced Ignatius through his hand and into existence.
It was harder now, for Ignatius was much larger and the pentacle on his hand was small, but within moments the Drake was roaring beside him.
The two men’s spells ceased at the sight of the Drake. A piece fell from the shield and dissolved on the smoldering red carpet beneath. All was silent but for the gentle sizzle of burning fibers and Sylva’s muttering as she read another page from Jeffrey’s journal.
Rook and Zacharias must have known they were in trouble. They had no summoning leathers, and Fletcher’s demons could easily tear through their shields.
Fletcher used the time to bolster his faltering barrier, draining the last dribble of mana within him to add a reparative layer across the fractured surface. He had been low on mana to begin with, for his reserves had not recovered from his time in the ether. But Rook and Zacharias didn’t know that.
Now all he needed to do was wait for Sylva to finish. Whatever Cress and Othello had done, it had worked—no guards had arrived yet.
“Why don’t you come face me, man on man?” Zacharias called out from behind his shield. “No demons, no Rook. Just me and you.”
“Sylva, how much longer?” Fletcher asked over his shoulder, ignoring the offer.
“A few more minutes,” Sylva called out. “I need to tell them what happened to Rufus.”
Fletcher smiled grimly and turned back to his opponents. He stared at them with what he hoped was cool confidence.
“Are you scared, Fletcher?” Rook said. “The great Fletcher Raleigh has a chance to duel with his worst enemy on equal footing, and he refuses. I always knew you were a coward.”