Felun

The keys broke, scattering fragments of metal everywhere.

His hand came back with a few snapped runesigns and a scorch-mark on the bandages. He had only meant to unravel the wards. But the spell-slip stuck to his palm had eaten away at the keys until they had physically ruptured. Iolite understating things as usual, he thought. But no time to ponder that right now.

Behind him came screams. A couple of Glisterian citizens stared and shrieked, casting shields as they sprinted off in the opposite direction.

Scionsong looked at him with wide eyes, still clutching the ring the keys had broken away from. The other mage—who had called herself Carnation, though he doubted that was her actual name—she darted forwards, hands glowing blue-white with spell-light.

He jumped, pivoting away. The cloak moved with him but he stumbled, unused to the extra bit of weight, the slight drag. Her spell caught him in the arm, but it sank harmlessly into the enchanted fabric.

“You have less than ten minutes before the city rabble gets here,” Suria’s voice said into his ear. “Saiph and Thorn are running interference. Winterbird and Curlew should arriving any moment now.”

He grunted assent, even though the speaking spell had switched to one-way. Suria could speak to one source and listen from one source at any given time. There was nothing saying that it had to be the same source; he wasn’t surprised she blocked him out as soon as the trouble started.

Kion-carnation’s next set of spells tried to slip up his sleeves—sneaky of her—but his runes took care of it. He charged up his magic and watched their eyes widen as glowing runesigns flared to life across the entire surface of the cloak. It had taken him hours to prepare, stenciling them on with lemon juice—turned out to be a good thing too, given their illusionist ally. Scionsong gasped; Kion yanked at her arm as she skipped backwards and away.

He flexed his sore, blistered fingers, adjusting to the lighter mental load. Then he attacked, throwing waves of signs for sticking and binding, pre-prepared runes loaded onto the skin of his arms.

Kion had her shield up, was trying to get Scionsong under it. It was a good shield—or at least, far better than his. Her strategy was probably to hide and then make a run for it. Suria had said to watch out for Scionsong but Kion seemed more of the leader, more versatile and less skittish. He hadn’t seen Scionsong throw a single cast yet, nor back at the mock-fight with Saiph and her crew. Perhaps she was simply saving her strength. The thought churned listlessly in his gut; he tried to ignore it. Fight now, think later, as certain people used to say.

He sent more runes after them, keeping his distance. The runes made cracks in the shield, quickly sealed back up. It didn’t matter though, because he was just the distraction.

Winterbird and Curlew swooped in from above, aiming bolts of piercing spellfire at the two mages. The shield shattered, and Winterbird sent her coil of enchanted ironwood out, latched it around Scionsong’s arm, and yanked her away from Kion with an audible crack—probably the sound of bones breaking.

Felun winced. They really could be scary, when they were actually trying. He darted in to deal with Kion and her fresh shield, to take up her attention and soak up spare blows while Curlew wore her down from above. She sent forth glowing darts and sizzling spell arrows; his cloak took it all, swallowed the energy and used it to shore up its own weave.

Kion whipped out her pistol and loosed shots at him, despite the fact that Curlew was the one detonating explosive arrows over her head. It was, Felun thought, complete bullshit.

The first two bullets cracked out, blazing purple and too bright to look at directly. They went wide as he backed up and zig-zagged off to the side.

Her third bullet caught him square in the chest.

The cloak didn’t do too well with that. He shouted, more from surprise than pain, as the shot knocked him a good three feet backwards. He hit the cobblestones, hard. The cushioning runes plastered over his cloak took some of the blow, but he still had all of his breath knocked out of him in a sickening rush. For a moment, he lay there gasping. When he staggered to his feet, he could feel a bruise forming over his chest. He swore under his breath and dashed backwards up the street.

The gun was the problem. If Kion hadn’t pulled it out, they would’ve been neatly funneled down the dead end by now, no need for Felun to act the distraction. Oh, and now he’d gone and failed at acting the distraction. Great, just great. He was in over his head and it was all going sideways. What else was new.

“Go deal with the other one,” said Suria’s disembodied voice. “Curlew can handle himself. And yes,” she added, as if she’d heard the question forming in his head, “I am watching closely.”

He glanced around as he ran, scanning the rooftops, but there was no tell-tale gleam of gold to indicate her presence.

Winterbird fluttered through the air, both hands tugging at her end of the rope. It looked like she was trying to reel Scionsong in like a fish. He swooped in with a disabling rune just as Scionsong used a spell to cut the tightened snare from her ankle. She hissed with pain for a half-second, then lunged at him with an outstretched hand. Dodge. Strike with rune. Dodge again. He heard two sharp cracks—more bullets—and flinched, but they were further away, not aimed at him.

Even with the protection of the Magician-cloak, he wasn’t comfortable with combat. He’d never been. Back when he’d been a dungeonrunner, he’d had teammates to take care of that, and in turn—well, he would sit down and unravel locks for them. That kind of work experience wasn’t proving to be a lot of help right now. He couldn’t anticipate her movements, the occasional feint that he should have seen coming and only missed by a hair.

Scionsong wasn’t as fast as Kion, but Suria had said be careful and don’t let her touch you with an awful lot of emphasis. Worse yet, she didn’t seem to be using any visible casts that he could unravel; whatever it was, it seemed limited to the surface of her skin, passed on by direct contact. The cloak was good, but his shielding runes were specialised for the sort of thing that locking wards threw at him. These mages were…not that.

“Who are you?” Scionsong yelled as she tried to claw at his face. “What the hells do you want?”

A fair question. He didn’t really know, himself. He fired off more runes.

Winterbird dove and lashed out with her rope. There was a fresh noose tied on the falling end and this time, it latched onto Scionsong’s outstretched arm. Felun took the opportunity to dash backwards, put more distance between them. She cast something that cut Winterbird’s rope once more. Then—with a sudden rush of energy, as if she’d been saving her strength for this one moment—she dashed off down the street, towards the struggling Kion.

Winterbird abandoned her rope and took up her bow, circling around and firing off a wall of arrows that kept Scionsong from getting closer to her companion. Which worked, but—there was a problem here, Felun realised. Winterbird was allegedly good with immobilisation spells, but she’d groused about how it took her a while to charge up. She couldn’t do that if she was spending all of her energy on a barrage of lower-tier casts to keep Scionsong in place. So, they had to slow her down enough for Winterbird to charge up and to get a clean shot.

His pre-loaded runes were running low. He pulled out his runequill and drew out a string of symbols that made his hands and temples ache. For fuck’s sake, he’d spent most of last night forming runes and scribing spell-slips. That he hadn’t covered all bases, that he needed to write even more was just rubbing salt in the wound. He scribbled a hasty stabilisation-ring to hold the runes, before he plucked it out of the air.

“Winterbird!” he called, and lobbed the rune-bomb up into the air, where it arced towards her.

She caught it, then flung the shining projectile into Scionsong, hard. It made a popping sound as it sliced into Scionsong’s arm, opening a deep bloody gash. The fabric of her sleeve fell away. Scionsong screamed, but then she turned and ran—the wound knitted itself up before his eyes as she went.

Well, that was unnerving. He didn’t want to kill her or to maim her or anything, but Suria had said to be aggressive, and under the circumstances, he supposed she was right. The back of his neck prickled. She was probably glaring daggers at his lack of fighting ability right now.

Scionsong couldn’t shield well, he thought. Scionsong could, however, withstand an awful lot of shots. Winterbird was trying and failing to pen her in with arrows. If only Saiph were here. Saiph’s arrows could punch clean through a human body—not that Saiph didn’t make him nervous and yeah, the idea of putting an arrow through someone’s stomach made him queasy, but that might actually be what they needed to slow Scionsong down. But Saiph was busy—the City Watch, Suria had insisted. He had to move faster.

He started drawing more runes, enough of them to start tasting blood in his mouth. He bound them together into a great shining ball and stabilised them just enough so they wouldn’t blow up in Winterbird’s face.

“Catch,” he called again, and she did.

He didn’t bother watching her drop it onto Scionsong’s head—just started on writing the next set of runes.

“City Watch estimated to arrive in about five minutes,” Suria said into his ear. “You’ll have to try harder than that.”

“You could come and do it yourself,” he muttered under his breath, and threw the next two rune-bombs up in quick succession. The blisters on his hands were starting to bleed, little dots of blood and clear, weeping lymph-fluid seeping through the bandages.

The rune-bombs arced up and away on magical trajectories, using vaguely impossible physics to fall directly into Winterbird’s hands. Scionsong was barely shielding and some of the disorientation spells and slowing signs must have made it through, because she was stumbling around as if knee-deep in a snowdrift. In moments, she came to a sluggish stop.

He glimpsed a flash of light above—Winterbird. She drew her bow back slowly, as if struggling against a great weight. The arrow nocked there glowed and crackled blue-white, like the scorching heart of a star. She dove down in an inverse arc and let fly at the vertex of her parabola; the arrow slammed into the struggling Scionsong. False-frost bloomed over her skin like a mat of feathery white mold. She froze in place, arm outstretched. Her mouth twitched as if to scream, but no sound came out.

He heard a different scream behind him. He turned; Kion had uprooted herself from her place behind the shield. Curlew cast something that enveloped her in a cloud of dark smoke. She screamed again, muffled through the dark cloud. Then the miasma of spell-damage was driven back as she snapped a fresh shield around herself and strode out of the wispy darkness. She pulled out her pistol. Her other hand started glowing. For a split second, Felun’s mind froze in panic. Then he started running, gliding upwards by burning up his last paper flight-field, hoping to get behind Winterbird, to let her shield since he was—well, he was terrible at it.

Moments later, fire exploded across his back. He screamed as it knocked him out of the air. He threw out his hands to break his fall; the impact knocked some of the breath out of him anyway. Black spots pulsed in his vision. Something had hit him through the poorly-patched tear at the back of his cloak. It was hard to tell what, exactly, because it hurt so much. He wasn’t bleeding, was he? It must have been the spell and not the bullet. Lucky him. He felt that the warding signs against his skin had cushioned the hit and sputtered out, but mostly, he just felt pain. He got up and kept running.

Fuck. He was supposed to have been shielding that. Must have let it slip back at the coffee shop, too busy trying to keep his warding runes invisible, too busy sweating through the conversation, too busy trying to sound like a real thaumaturge—

Another burst of pain burrowed in through the tear in the cloak and he cried out, falling to his knees. He unraveled the last of it, limiting the damage—but too late, it was already hurting him. He forced himself to roll over onto his back even as it pressed his agony-soaked spine into the cobblestones. He needed to re-shield that crack in his armour, needed to back up Winterbird and Curlew. They had both rounded on Kion and were shooting her shield full of arrows as she sprinted closer to him. He tried to scramble to his feet, but his legs refused to obey him.

As Kion came closer, Curlew dived. She shot at him; the bullet went wide, but he swerved and crashed into the ground with a screech. She didn’t dodge Winterbird’s tackle, though—the shield shattered. For a moment, Felun thought that Winterbird had her for good. But then she twisted, eel-like, and without a moment’s hesitation, jabbed her thumb into Winterbird’s eye.

Winterbird screamed and jerked backwards. Kion tore out of her grip and kept running. Felun twisted round, tried to get up and run himself; his legs gave out from under him. She came to a stop not three paces from him and pointed the gun at his head.

He stopped trying to move. Each heartbeat slammed against his chest and echoed in his skull. He felt both hot and cold at the same time.

The street had long cleared out by now, shop-fronts firmly shuttered and completely empty but for the four of them, plus a frozen Scionsong. Winterbird and Curlew staggered to their feet. Winterbird’s wings were paler than usual and she was trembling all over. Felun realised with a sickening lurch that she was holding her hand over her eye.

“Don’t move,” Kion croaked. She coughed to clear her throat, and her next words were much louder. “Let us go, or I’ll shoot your Magician.”

She was bleeding all over, scuffed and disheveled, one lens completely missing from the round spectacles that perched off-kilter across her nose. Then the mouth of the gun seemed to yawn wider and darker, until it eclipsed his vision and all he could see was the leaden death at its maw.

Panicked thoughts bounced around in his head: the Magician mask offered a bubble of protection around his head, invisible and strongly-woven. But the bullet from before had sent him flying, even at a distance, even through the cloak. He could probably unravel most of the purple spell-components he’d seen in the previous shots, but as for the bullet itself, the physical impact of it alone…he looked at how close she was standing and felt his heart skip a beat. Her arm was shaking, little good that would do him from point-blank range.

“Fool boy,” he heard in his ear.

Something huge and invisible slammed into Kion, sending her sprawling. She crumpled to the ground, every limb going limp.

Felun stared, mouth slightly open in shock, as the air shimmered in front of him and Suria flickered into view. She blazed gold in the sunshine, like a freshly-polished weapon. She had her back to him; the patterns on her wings cycled, fractal-patterns and bursts of colours that looked like a warning. Winterbird and Curlew both paled, probably at the look on her face.

“Scionsong is escaping,” Suria said curtly. “Secure her with the rope.”

Felun glanced over to the other end of the street; Scionsong had an arm free and was peeling ragged scraps of false-frost off her body, piece by tiny piece.

“She can cut my rope,” Winterbird hissed. There was clear fluid leaking out from behind the hand pressed against her face, drip-dripping off the heel of her palm. Felun fought against a crest of rising nausea and tried not to picture the damage to her eye. “She did it with a spell. Specialised for ironwood. Titania knows why she knows this.”

“She is a mage,” Suria said simply. She turned to him and he saw that she was scowling. “We cannot touch her. Not directly. And we are running out of time. Felun, give me the cloak.”

He staggered to his feet, undid the clasps, and handed it to her. His back still ached, almost enough to distract him from the blisters that had popped open over his hands.

Suria tossed the cloak over to Curlew. “Encase her in that. Do not touch her directly.”

He chirruped what was probably a nervous affirmation and scuttled off with Winterbird stumbling at his heels.

Suria stalked over to Kion’s unconscious—Felun hoped it was just unconscious—body and used her tail to prod her in the side. The mage didn’t stir. Suria knelt down and plucked the gun out of her limp hand. Felun held his breath and tensed at that, but—no reaction.

“A dangerous device, this,” Suria said.

From further up the street, Curlew screamed.

Suria turned her head. Kion sprang off the floor and launched herself at them.

Suria whipped back round, pointed the gun, and pulled the trigger. The mechanism clicked. Kion crashed into her, sending her stumbling.

Felun leapt, more out of alarmed instinct rather than anything else, and caught an elbow to the stomach before he caught Kion by the wrists. He twisted her arms behind her back, hauling her away from a snarling Suria. Kion stumbled back with scratches raked over her face and shoulder. She laughed raggedly, eyes wide, looking almost feral with terror and elation and something else he couldn’t quite place.

“Six rounds, bitch,” she panted, and laughed again, a sharp, ugly sound. “No good to you now.”

Suria curled her lip. The spines of her head drew back as she tossed the empty gun over her shoulder, where it clattered harmlessly against the cobblestones. “Hold her,” she ordered, and darted up the street.

Further up the street, Winterbird was laying on the ground, unmoving. Curlew hovered in the air, out of Scionsong’s reach, shooting spells down at her. She had gotten rid of most of the false-frost and was attempting to shield and dodge.

Kion took his moment of distraction to try to shoot a spell into him. He unraveled it as it came, a surprisingly weak disabling cast. Normally, he sucked at breaking stuff that refused to sit still. She was slumping over—must be running low. Even so, he was wary now that the Magician cloak was gone. He brought up a shield between them, as substandard as it was.

He looked back over to the fight up the other end of the street. Scionsong was cowering on the ground and it looked like Suria and Curlew had won, though they were standing around hesitantly. Curlew held the Magician cloak but didn’t move to do anything with it. Felun frowned. Hang on. There was a glint of something moving around the corner, something fast and airborne. Was that—

It was Saiph, a streak of silver loosing arrows behind her as she flew. Thorn, too, a darker shape that winged along closer to the ground. A wall of blue smoke roared around the corner after them, an enormous crashing wavefront that sent an inexplicable kick of fear through his chest.

“Hive is here,” Thorn called out, his voice trilling with panic.

And then faeries darted out from the depths of the approaching smoke-wave, led by an opalescent one whose eyes glowed like beacons. Suria pulled a spear out of her thigh and knifed upwards on shimmering wings.

“Felun, you must leave.” Suria’s voice shouted into his ear, far too loud. “I am sending Thorn—” and then the spell cut out.

Felun heard something behind him; just a slight sound, a shuffle. He whipped around and the red-headed illusionist girl was there—Maia, or Rosalie, or something. She fired something at his shield, which broke it. He unraveled the next spell she sent his way, which earned him a worsening of his headache.

Something else hit him, right in the hands.

It was a weak spell. Normally, he would have shrugged it off, but it was on his hands—it sizzled against his blisters and agony bloomed up his arms. Kion had taken advantage of his distraction. He shouted, grip weakening reflexively for a moment. She wrenched out of his grasp and darted away on trembling legs; he tried to turn, but Rosalie was still casting at him and he didn’t have the cloak now, which meant he had to shield and unravel on the fly. Blood started to drip from his nose.

He swore and coughed as the wave of smoke reached them. It was just as thick as it had looked from the outside, and in moments, he could barely see an arm’s length in front of him. At least he could stumble away from where he assumed the Rosalie girl was. Muffled sounds of fighting filtered through to him in what seemed like every direction.

“Felun!” someone called.

A cold, pointy-fingered hand closed over his arm and he shouted reflexively until he realised that it was Thorn.

“Papers?” Thorn asked, as he grabbed his other arm.

“You’ll have to be fast,” Felun warned as he fished out his emergency spell-slips and stuck one to each of them.

The slips were kind of terrible—he’d cobbled them together from scavenged runes; they’d probably both get a monster of a headache once the spells wore off. But, he admitted, grudgingly, Suria had been right to insist. A coolness swept over him as the spell-papers did their work, cloaking them in a field of inattention.

Thorn jolted upwards and then they were flying out of the blue smoke, heading up and away.