CHAPTER THIRTEEN
※ AUGUSTA ※
Below, Augusta could see the peasants launching their attack.
Barson and his soldiers were expecting to be teleported, but when it didn’t happen, they began fighting with ferocious determination. Soon they were surrounded by corpses. Augusta’s lover seemed particularly inhuman in his battle frenzy. Realizing his strategic value, the rebels came at him, one after another, and he dispatched them all with the brutal swings of his sword.
Seeing that the guards were holding their own, Augusta tried to concentrate. She couldn’t fly down to retrieve her spell card—not with a bloody battle raging below—so she had to write a new one.
Getting her thoughts together, she took out a blank card and the remaining parts of the spell. All she had to do now was re-create from memory the complicated bit of sorcery code she’d written earlier. Luckily, Augusta’s memory was excellent, and it took her only a few minutes to recall what she’d done before.
When the spell was finished, she loaded the cards into the Stone and peered below, holding her breath.
A minute later, Barson and his soldiers disappeared from the battleground, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and baffled rebels.
* * *
“I am so sorry,” she said when she rendezvoused with Barson and his men back on the hill.
Luckily, no one was hurt; if anything, the fighting seemed to have lifted everyone’s spirits. The soldiers were laughing and slapping each other on the back, like they had just come back from a tournament instead of a bloody battle.
“We held our ground,” Barson told her triumphantly, snatching her up in his strong arms and twirling her around.
Laughing and gasping, Augusta made him put her down. “You’re lucky I was able to replace that card so quickly,” she told him. “If I’d lost some other card, it would’ve taken me more effort to replace it, and you’d have been fighting longer.”
“Perhaps there is something you can do to make up for that blunder,” Barson suggested, looking down at her with a darkly excited smile.
“What?” Augusta asked warily.
“The rebels will be here soon,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “Do you think you could thin their numbers a little?”
Augusta swallowed. “You want me to do a direct spell against them?”
“Is that against the Council rules?”
It wasn’t, exactly, but it was highly frowned upon. In general, the Council preferred to limit displays of magic around the commoners. It was considered poor taste for sorcerers to show their abilities so openly—and it could be potentially dangerous, if it incentivized the peasants to try to learn magic on their own. Offensive spells were particularly discouraged; using sorcery against someone with no aptitude for magic was the equivalent of butchering a chicken with a sword.
“Well, it’s not strictly speaking against the law,” Augusta said slowly, “but it shouldn’t be obvious that I’m doing this.”
Barson appeared to consider the problem for a moment. “What if it looked like natural causes?” he suggested.
“That might work.” Augusta thought about a few spells she could quickly pull together. She hadn’t expected to do anything like this, but she did have the right components for these spells. She’d brought them for different purposes, but they would help her now too.
Digging in her bag, she pulled out a few cards and rapidly wrote some new lines of code. When she was finished, she told Barson to have his men sit or lie on the ground for a few minutes. “It might get a bit . . . shaky here,” she explained.
The peasants were still a distance away when she began feeding the cards into her Interpreter Stone.
For a moment, all was quiet. Augusta held her breath, waiting to see if her spell worked. She’d combined a simple force attack of the kind that might have blown up a house with a clever teleporting idea. Instead of hitting the peasants directly, the spell would be teleported into the ground under the feet of their attacking army. There, beneath the ground, the force would break and shatter rocks, creating the chain reaction she needed—or so Augusta hoped.
For a few nerve-wracking seconds, it seemed like nothing was happening. And then she heard it: a deep, sonorous boom, followed by a powerful vibration under her feet. The earth shook so violently that Augusta had to sit or be knocked to the ground herself. In the distance, she could hear the screams of the peasants as the ground split open under their feet, a deep gash appearing right in the middle of their army. Dozens of men tumbled into the opening, falling to their deaths with frightened yells.
Step one of the plan was complete.
Augusta loaded her next spell. It was one of the deadliest spells she knew—a spell that sought pulsating tissue and applied a powerful electric current to it. It was meant to stop a heart—or multiple hearts, given the width of the radius Augusta had coded.
The spell blasted out, and Augusta could see the peasants who were still on their feet falling, clutching their chests. With her enhanced vision, she could see the looks of shock and pain on their faces, and she swallowed hard, trying to keep down the bile in her stomach. She had never done this before, had never killed so many using sorcery, and she couldn’t help her instinctive reaction.
By the time the spell had run its course, the road and the grassy fields nearby were littered with bodies. Less than half of the original peasant army was left alive.
Still feeling sick, Augusta stared at the results of her work. Now they would run, she thought, desperately wanting this battle to be over.
But to her shock, instead of turning back, the survivors rushed toward the hill, clutching their remaining weapons. They were fearless—or, more likely, desperate, she realized. These men had known from the beginning that their mission was dangerous, but they’d chosen to proceed anyway. She couldn’t help but admire that kind of determination, even though it scared her to death. She imagined the rebels behind the Sorcery Revolution—the ones who had overthrown the old nobility so brutally—had been just as determined in their own way.
All around her, Barson’s soldiers prepared to meet the onslaught, assuming their places and drawing their arrows.
As the peasants got closer to the hill, a hail of arrows rained down, piercing their unshielded bodies. The soldiers hit their targets with the same terrifying precision that Augusta had seen during practice. Every peasant who got within their arrows’ range was dead within seconds. Yet the rebels persisted, continuing on, pushing past their fallen comrades. Lacking any kind of structure or organization, they simply kept going, their faces twisted with bitter rage and their eyes shining with hatred. The futility of all the deaths was overwhelming for Augusta. By the time Barson’s men ran out of arrows, less than a third of the original aggressors remained.
Tossing aside their useless bows, the guards, as one, unsheathed their swords. And then they waited, their expressions hard and impassive.
When the first wave of attackers reached the hill, they were dispatched within seconds, the soldiers’ sorcery-enhanced weapons sharper and deadlier than anything the peasants had ever seen before. Standing off to the side, Augusta watched as waves of attackers came and fell all around the hill.
Her lover was death incarnate, as unstoppable as a force of nature. Half the time, he would singlehandedly tackle the waves of rebels, easily taking on twenty or thirty men. The other soldiers were almost as brutal, and Augusta could see the peasants breaking up into smaller and smaller groups, their ranks diminishing with every minute that passed.
Within an hour, the battle was nearing its morbid conclusion. Staring at the bloody remnants on the field, Augusta knew it was a battle she would never forget.
No, she corrected herself. It was not a battle—it was a slaughter.