Promise of Blood

A lightning bolt slammed into Julene. She slid backward, her feet dragging turf. She somehow kept upright, hands raised above her head. A crackle of energy, and the lightning bolt returned to the Privileged. The thunder knocked Taniel backward.

Taniel rolled a few steps before arresting his fall. He retrieved his rifle and dropped a bullet down the barrel, then drew a powder charge from his pack and crushed it between his fingers. He returned to the window, leveled his rifle, and fired.

The Privileged spun about, blood spurting from her shoulder. She caught herself on knees and one hand and looked up toward Taniel’s bell tower.

“Oh, pit.”

She made an angled chopping motion with one hand.

Taniel squeezed his eyes shut. Nothing. He cracked one eyelid. The world was moving. From beneath him, he heard the terrible grinding sound of stone on stone.

Taniel’s heart leapt into his throat. The tower was falling. Clutching his rifle, he leapt from the window.

He opened his mouth, but found he had no breath to scream. The glass panels of the botanical garden rushed to meet him. His feet hit first, legs crumpling beneath him, and then the glass shattered. He fell the last twenty feet and landed on his shoulder. He rolled onto his back and gasped. Shards of glass as big as a man lay everywhere around him. He was lucky none had landed on him.

Powder mages were stronger in a trance. They could withstand far more damage than a regular person, and ignore far more pain. Yet a fall like that should have killed him, or at least broken bones.

The ground rumbled. Taniel felt himself rolled by the shock wave as the entire top half of the bell tower slammed into the building beneath it. Stone ground together, wood splintered. Taniel threw his hands over his head.

When he looked up, the dust was settling. He slowly climbed to his feet.

His rifle lay twenty feet away. He stumbled toward it, stepping over rubble and broken glass. His body ached, but nothing was broken. He checked his kit for his sketchbook. It was still there. He retrieved his rifle. “You and I are surviving far too much these days.”

Another thunderclap made him stagger. He limped out of the garden and into an adjoining building, avoiding the debris from the tower. He found a hall where he could look out onto the quad. The end of the hall had been destroyed—the tower had landed on the administrator’s office. He hoped no one had been inside.

He threw his back to the wall just beneath the window and listened. Another thunderclap. Someone was laughing. Julene. He gritted his teeth at the eerie sound, reloaded his rifle, and stood up.

The quad had been destroyed. Ground was torn up everywhere, more dirt than a hundred men could move with shovels in a day, piled up as if scooped from the ground by a god’s hand and then patted into hills. As he watched, a thin line of fire sprayed from beyond one of the mounds and tore through Banasher’s Hall across the way. Taniel saw faces watching the battle from windows. They were gone in an instant, their final looks of horror frozen in Taniel’s mind as the entire façade of the building crumbled.

Taniel dropped back down behind the wall and took a deep breath. This was no normal fight. No, he’d seen Privileged fight before, on the battlefields in Fatrasta. They tossed fireballs and ice and lightning. But nothing like this. Both Julene and this other Privileged were using forces far beyond Taniel’s comprehension. By the power they showed, they both should have been heads of a royal cabal.

Taniel wondered where Ka-poel was. His head rang after another thunderclap, and his thoughts seemed distant. Hadn’t he sent her off after the Privileged? He hoped she hadn’t done anything stupid. He hoped she was safe.

He peeked out once more. He could see the Privileged. She stood on the top steps of a building kitty-corner to his own. The museum

, he thought. He slowly lifted his rifle.

The Privileged’s fingers danced. She thrust one hand outward, fingers splayed, toward the center of the quad. That thin fire erupted from her palm. Julene was lifted up from behind the newly formed hills and thrown bodily into the remnants of Banasher’s Hall. Stone folded around her as she hit, the rest of the building crumpling like a house of paper.

The Privileged wiped her hands on her academic gown and went inside the museum.

Taniel leapt to his feet. He was halfway down the hall before he bothered to question himself. What was he doing? These were forces above his ability to fight. No sense in going after her. What could he possibly do?

He thought of the destruction on the quad. Privileged got tired. Privileged couldn’t go on forever. She couldn’t have much left in her.