33. The Sorceress and the Incubus

33

The Sorceress and the Incubus

Chapter 1: Falling Stars

T he summoning circle of Barixeor Spire burned with abyssal power as I leaned into the strength of the volcano beneath it. Standing more than five thousand feet above the peak of the caldera island, at the very apex of the Spire, I called the swirling flow of the ley confluence together, feeding it through the complex lines of my diagram until it narrowed to a beam of focused power collared by the seven rings of the circle. The burn-off of my spell filled the massive room with blinding light that I could see even through the layers of black silk over my eyes, as bright white as starlight.

I kept my eyes closed and focused on my mage-sight. The invisible world of magic blazed into life in every direction around me for hundreds of miles, appearing as rivers and coronas and filaments of light. From this height I could see the curvature of the Material Plane in which I lived, the home of nearly a billion people who I'd sworn to protect. It was my home, too, a beautiful place I couldn't bear to see scoured to the bedrock by the fury of the stars.

Near Kamenhe , I reminded myself. To the southwest.

With a steadying breath, I turned my attention to the great spells written deep in the ley of the Spire, a curling lattice-work of magic through which the power of the Tsirisma Confluence flowed. The spells stretched across space in a way that hurt my mind to think about, so I didn't try to comprehend the how, instead following the entangled ley-lines of the Spires to Kamenhe Spire halfway across the world.

My mage-sight twisted into incomprehensible shapes for three heartbeats before snapping into the patterns around Kamenhe. In the same instant, my spell connected to my friend Jace Songdog, who stood in the matching diagram in Kamenhe's pinnacle.

The pattern of her magic was as familiar to me as her smile, a steadying sight in the face of what felt like an endless task. Pale light gleamed in her soul, as if the seed of a star glimmered in her chest, and for a moment guilt pinched me. I pushed it aside. The damage of the past couldn't be allowed to ruin the future.

"Over Ibexen," I murmured dreamily, examining the drifting flow of power in the sky. The strands of ley energy curved around an eddying current of celestial power. As I watched, the pool started pinching outwards, like watching the funnel of a tornado form. When it touched the ground, a meteor would follow in an instant, a broken piece of the celestial firmament falling between the planes, drawn towards the opposing Abyssal Plane through the world that sat between. "It's broken into three parts. They'll come through in a two-point-one-three second timespan. Are you ready?"

Jace's power shifted, twining through the world. The tiny motes of magic in every particle of chalk-dust in her diagram glittered in my vision as they drifted up off of the floor, held in the patterns she'd drawn by the flow of magic through them but affected by the gravitational negation of her power burn-off. Even in the state of meditative calm every mage maintained during complex spells, the sheer magnitude of Jace's magical strength left me feeling awed, as if I stood in the presence of a goddess. I was the sixth-most powerful sorcerer on the Material Plane, and I couldn't hold a candle to her.

"Yes," she said, her sweet voice calm and clear. "Trigger the spell whenever you're—"

My connection to Jace and Kamenhe cut out.

"Shit!" I yelped, tearing off my blindfold and wincing as the light made tears spring to my eyes. Something was disrupting my diagram. Something was on my lines—

A mouse worked its way along one of my carefully-chalked marks, sniffing along it, chalk dusting its whiskers. Panic flared beneath my calm. No time, no time—

I called the first thing I could think of to my hand – a heap of rock salt – and flung it at the mouse. It fled, bolting for the stairs. With my eyes squeezed shut and the world seen red through my eyelids, I flung myself back into the spell, grabbing for Jace.

"Rain!" she cried when my power slammed into hers. "Rain, what's happening?"

There was no time to answer. I threw my focus out towards the city of Ibexen, desperately hoping that I could get in place before the pieces of the Celestial Plane broke through into mine. As I raced for the line of power, it touched down in the Ibexen market.

In desperation, I triggered the spell before I reached it, hoping against hope that Jace would be able to compensate. In the blink of an eye, the three pieces of star-iron broke through the sky. For a moment, a rippling patch of the beautiful blue of the material sky showed the velvet black of Celestial's eternal night, before the meteors turned into flaming death streaking towards the city.

Jace's power flared into light far more blinding than even that of the confluence. It washed over me like a physical force, a blast-wave of magic flung into the breach.

The meteors stopped midair, glowing red-hot from their passage through the atmosphere, three little pieces of the broken sky drifting so peacefully in the air.

With a sweep of my hand, I finished the summoning, capturing the burning firmament and dropping it into my summoning circle, leaving the sky over Ibexen clean blue once more.

Heat beat out at me from the star-iron as I swayed in place, fear-exhaustion hitting like a hammer as I released my grip on my emotions. I stared at the pieces of the Celestial Plane with something that felt too close to despair, tears prickling at the corners of my eyes. This was the third capture Jace and I had to do in the past four months, and we'd almost failed because of the stupid mice in Barixeor Spire—because of me . We would have failed, if Jace hadn't been the most powerful sorcerer in the world. It had been a fucking decade since Tarandrus had fallen, and if anything, the situation was getting worse.

Her voice slammed into my mind— What the fuck was that?!— the words slung through the connection between us in a sting. Jace could do it because she was so damn powerful, putting the force of her power behind it.

But I could do it, too, because I had the most precise and fine-scale mage-senses ever documented. I found the slender ley-thread that marked our friendship and stung my response through it. Mouse on the line.

The response came a heartbeat later, a scared-sounding, Fix it.

I focused – stinging was difficult, even for people like me and Jace, and especially at these distances – then sent, I will.

I didn't know how I'd keep the promise, but I chewed on the problem as I linked to the diagram I had chalked in one of the storage levels deep beneath the earth, where the volcanic power seared through the Spire's spellwork. Mice and rats were notorious for their ability to evade warding spells by following ley-lines places, an obnoxious characteristic shared with cockroaches and cats. Short of summoning every mouse in Barixeor Spire and dumping them in the lake before every meteor-snare I cast, I wasn't even sure what I could do. I didn't have a skillset particularly conducive to mouse extermination.

With care, I settled the newest chunks of star-iron in the basement with the rest of the pieces of the celestial firmament we'd captured, letting the power of Tsirisma bathe it. The abyssal strength of the volcano countered the celestial power of the meteors, keeping the Material Plane from warping around the pieces of the Celestial Plane, but if it kept on like this we were going to start overwhelming the volcano.

I sighed, trying not to think too hard about it. I had to report to the Triumvirate soon on the situation, anyway, and I could let the three of them come up with bright ideas for trying to keep the echoes of the void from destroying our whole world. There weren't a lot of options, when it came right down to it; if any other material magic-users touched the firmament, the stars would show us no mercy. It was me and Jace, or no one.

Feeling weary, I trudged down the stairs, my mind churning. I didn't see the fucking mouse until it darted out from underfoot, startling me enough that I stumbled and fell, crashing onto my hip on the stone stairs and smacking my head against the wall hard enough that I bit a chunk of my cheek off.

Rage spiked under my skin.

Fuck. This.

I shoved myself up, spitting blood onto the steps for the stupid Spire's cleaning spells to deal with, and stalked back up the stairs to the summoning circle. I was done dealing with the fraying wards. There was one thing guaranteed to keep mice out of my working spaces, and I was going to summon it.