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One Throw of the Die

A novelette from my Three Worlds Anthology, A Wizard’s War and Other Stories, available in ebook now, and in print late this year, hopefully.

Spoiler alert!

If you haven’t read my epic fantasy quartet The Well of Echoes, and intend to, you should do so before reading One Throw of the Die, since it begins immediately after Chimaera, the final book of The Well of Echoes, and necessarily gives away the entire ending.

1

When Jal-Nish, shockingly burned though he was, reached Gatherer and Reaper first, Flydd knew it was over. The two enchanted tears were too powerful. The war, and perhaps the world itself was lost, and all the allies could do was run for their miserable lives.

‘Come on!’ Flydd ran, his cloak trailing smoke, for their one hope of escape – Jal-Nish’s air-dreadnought.

Yggur, a very tall, lean man, took off like a hare through the smoke. Klarm raced after him, the dwarf’s stubby legs making three strides to Yggur’s one. The others followed, not looking back.

As Flydd reached the air-dreadnought, a huge craft with a sausage-shaped cabin sixty feet long, suspended by cables below three long airbags, Sergeant Flangers came running around the edge of the crowd, carrying the pilot, Chissmoul. She was a small, painfully shy young woman who became a laughing extravert at the controls of a flying machine, but she was not laughing now.

Yggur blasted down one of the guards with jagged white fire. Fyn-Mah, a slender, black-haired woman in her thirties, killed the other with a backhanded blow to the throat. She and General Troist scrambled inside. Klarm was not far behind.

Flydd took the weapons from the dead guards – two swords and a stubby, red-handled knife – and panted up the wobbling plank. ‘Chissmoul! Can you fly this thing?’

‘Nodes dead,’ she said dully. ‘Fields gone. No power!’

‘I’ve got a charged crystal,’ said Klarm, producing it. It was two inches long and half an inch through, yellow-green at one end grading to red at the other. ‘Will it do?’

She snatched it as if it was a lifeline, and it was, for flying was life and soul to her. She tied the crystal onto her forehead with a brown bootlace. Her hands were shaking. She took hold of the control levers and closed her eyes, drawing power from the crystal and, in a process no one but pilots understood, funnelling it to the triple rotors at the stern. They began to revolve.

Flydd handed one sword to Flangers, buckled on the other and gave the knife to Troist. The general, a stocky, handsome man, was slumped in a canvas seat, head in hands.

‘You all right?’ said Flydd.

Troist stared at him, frozen-faced, then nodded stiffly.

Flydd did the count and came up short. ‘Where’s Nish and Irisis?’

‘Taken!’ said Klarm in the tone a judge would use to pronounce sentence of death.

Pain sheared through Flydd’s scrawny chest. ‘We’ve got to go back –’

‘No, we agreed,’ said Yggur. ‘Anyone who falls behind must be abandoned to give the others hope of escape. The struggle is going to be a long one.’

Flydd knew it, but bridled at the lecture. ‘But Irisis – Nish! Without them, none of us would be here.’

‘If we go back, Jal-Nish will take us and all hope will be lost. Besides, he won’t harm his own son …’

‘But Jal-Nish hates Irisis more than anyone in the world.’ The thought of her in his hands was unbearable.

‘They’re coming!’ yelled Klarm. ‘Pilot, get this thing up! Flangers, Troist, cast off the rear ropes. Yggur, you take this side, I’ll do the other.’

Everyone ran to their posts. Flydd stood beside the pilot, looking back at the town square of Ashmode and its litter of bodies, people he’d fought beside for years. In the middle of the square, Jal-Nish was doubled over in agony inside the protective barrier he had conjured around himself. But the moment he recovered, all the power of the tears would be at his disposal.

And only Flydd, a small, skinny, ageing man, to stand in his way.

He could see his distorted reflection in the curving binnacle around the controls. Deeply sunken black eyes, shaded by a continuous eyebrow. A face that appeared to have had all the meat pared from it, leaving mere bone, skin and sinew. Fingers twisted as if they had been broken in a torture chamber, then set by someone who knew nothing about bones. And they had.

How was he to stop Jal-Nish? With the fields gone, Flydd could not use the Secret Art. Yet there had to be a way to save Nish and Irisis. Think, think!

The air-dreadnought lifted at the stern, drifted towards a patch of trees, then the bow ropes were cast off and the airbags full of floater-gas propelled it upwards.

Yggur yelled at Chissmoul. ‘Get us out of sight!’

She worked her levers, directing the big craft away from the square.

‘Hold it!’ said Flydd. ‘There’s one chance, but we’ve got to act right now.’

‘How?’ said Yggur.

‘Dive at Jal-Nish, full bore, and smash him against the wall of his barrier. I doubt that anyone could survive such an impact, but if he does cling to life we cut him down and grab the tears.’

‘It’s risky –’

‘If we give him the chance to recover he’ll take the whole of Lauralin within a year. What do you say, Klarm? Troist?’

Flydd looked at each of the six in turn. Troist nodded absently. He did not appear to be listening.

‘Yes,’ they said, and finally Yggur agreed.

‘Go!’ Flydd said to Chissmoul.

She let out a wild whoop. The rotors roared and she wrenched on her levers, skidding the huge craft into a manoeuvre it had never been designed for. The cabin wobbled from side to side, tossing Troist off his chair; they shot over the trees, heading back towards the town square.

‘There he is!’ Flydd pointed. ‘And the barrier is down. Fly, Chissmoul!’

Jal-Nish was doubled over, clutching his face and clearly in great pain. Irisis was on her knees, neck bared, her yellow hair flying in the wind, watching him in an attitude of proud defiance. A guard held her down. Nish was several yards away. A second guard handed him a sword, and it was clear what he was supposed to do with it.

Suddenly Nish leapt at his father, swinging the sword in a violent arc.

‘Faster!’ Flydd roared. ‘Brace yourselves.’

The rotors howled. The air-dreadnought dived. Wind whistled past the cabin, which began to shake wildly. A cupboard door flew open; bags of dried peas fell out and one burst, scattering yellow peas everywhere.

But then Jal-Nish stood up, renewed the protection with a single gesture and a luminous blue sphere surrounded him. Nish’s sword glanced off it in a spray of red-hot sparks and he was thrown backwards off his feet.

Jal-Nish turned to face the hurtling air-dreadnought. He raised the tears, two silvery, grapefruit-sized globes, the residuum of an exploded node. Even over the sound of the rotor Flydd could hear a high-pitched hum, the song of the tears.

They were made of nihilium, the purest substance in the world, and it was coveted by mancers because it took the print of the Secret Art more readily than any other form of matter, and bound it far more tightly. The tears were worth the value of a continent – and Jal-Nish planned to use them to take one.

He plunged his hand into Reaper and the left-hand airbag burst with an ear-stinging bang. Chissmoul let out a howl. The air-dreadnought rolled onto its side and hurtled off course; she fought desperately to prevent it from plunging at high speed into the trees.

The second guard, the one with Irisis, drew his sword. Nish ran at him but he was not going to get there in time. The air-dreadnought wobbled again and, momentarily, Flydd lost sight of the scene. He turned to see.

‘Don’t look back,’ grated Klarm, catching Flydd by the arm and trying to haul him away.

He looked back.

2

Flydd was a hard and ruthless scrutator who had done whatever it took to win the war against the alien lyrinx. For thirty years he had schemed, manipulated, threatened and blackmailed. He had sent many a prisoner to be flogged or tortured, had ordered his country’s enemies strangled in the dark, and commanded whole armies to what turned out to be their doom. Most of his friends and allies were dead and he had long expected his own bloody demise.

He had thought himself inured to death, but he was wrong. He could neither bear Irisis’s death, nor accept it. ‘She was the bravest of us, and the best,’ he said brokenly. ‘Why did she have to die?’

The question had no answer.

Chissmoul regained control and levelled out, only twenty feet above the trees. To Flydd’s right, a few hundred yards away, the dry plains of Ashmode ended in a cliff. Below it was the monumental slope, broken into sections by seven more sets of cliffs and incised from top to bottom by gigantic canyons, that descended twelve thousand vertical feet to the greatest gulf in the Three Worlds – the Dry Sea. Until two thousand years ago it had been the beautiful Sea of Perion and, at the rate it was refilling through the recently unblocked Hornrace, it would soon be a sea again.

Klarm, the dwarf scrutator, a good-looking man with a mane of swept-back brown hair and dazzlingly blue eyes, sat Flydd down and put an arm across his shoulders.

‘If I’d got us going ten seconds sooner –’ said Flydd.

‘There’s no point, old friend! Irisis faced her death as magnificently as anyone could. I hope I can do the same.’

Yggur limped up to them: tall, lean, hard, and beaten. His face was grey. ‘We tried.’

Flydd tried to rouse himself from the overwhelming despair. ‘We’ve got to try again.’

‘No, we’ve got to survive so we can fight Jal-Nish when we’re strong again – if that ever happens.’

‘If we let him recover he’ll never give us the opportunity. It has to be now. Chissmoul, go around.’

The little pilot did not move. Her face was bloodless, her knuckles white.

‘Chissmoul?’ Flydd said sharply.

‘Can’t!’

‘Why not?’

‘Crystal – draining. Soon finished.’

‘How soon?’

‘Ten minutes. Five?’

‘There’s got to be a way to get more power. Surely someone has a crystal?’

‘Jal-Nish’s guards took everything we had,’ said Fyn-Mah.

‘They couldn’t take Yggur’s gift,’ said Flydd. ‘And it doesn’t rely on fields. Yggur, can’t you channel power to Chissmoul?’

‘I don’t know how,’ said Yggur. ‘Besides, given that Jal-Nish will soon rouse the whole world against us, I’m keeping my power in reserve.’

‘But we’ve got to attack!’ cried Flydd. Why couldn’t they see? ‘This is our last chance.’

‘If we go near him again he’ll burst the other two airbags, and we’ll all die. Chissmoul, how far can you go before the rotors stop?’

‘Few leagues.’

The air-dreadnought was now tracking east along the cliffs, towards the chasm of the distant Hornrace. With every lurch the spilled peas rattled back and forth across the floor.

‘Once we set down, Jal-Nish’s riders will catch us within the hour,’ said Flangers, a lean, even-featured man with a shock of fair hair and a strong, jutting jaw.

‘We don’t have to set down,’ said Flydd. ‘This craft can stay in the air for days on two airbags.’

‘But without rotors it’s at the mercy of the winds,’ said Fyn-Mah. ‘And whether they sweep us north, south, east or west, we’re liable to end up in the sea. Then, sooner or later, we’ll drown. We’ve got to split up. Some of us might survive.’

‘Never fly again,’ wailed Chissmoul. ‘Might as well be dead.’

She yanked on the left-hand control lever. The suspended cabin jerked wildly from side to side, for the cables, previously taut, had gone slack when the airbag burst. The air-dreadnought plunged down steeply, throwing everyone but her off their feet.

Flydd’s foot came down on several of the hard yellow peas, which rolled under him. He fell backwards, cracking the back of his head on a bulkhead. The others slid down towards the rear of the cabin. White dots whirled before his eyes. He lay there, head downwards, dazed.

Flangers, favouring a twisted wrist, scrambled up the steeply sloping floor towards Chissmoul. She was clinging to the control levers, eyes closed and teeth bared.

‘Chissmoul?’ he said gently.

Flydd was amazed at his self-possession. But then, Flangers, good soldier and all-too-human man that he was, a man to whom duty was everything, often surprised.

Flangers reached her feet. ‘Chissmoul? It’s me.’

Through a porthole, Flydd saw yellow cliffs streaking past, perilously close. Chissmoul had lost it. The wild plunge had taken them over the edge, but even if they survived a crash, on the mostly barren slope down to the Dry Sea the air-dreadnought would be visible for miles.

Flangers caught her ankle. Her eyes sprang open and she tried to kick him out of the way. He leapt up, grabbed the right-hand lever and yanked hard. The air-dreadnought lurched the other way. Chissmoul let out a shriek and began beating at his face with her small fists.

‘How dare you touch my controls!’ she shrieked. ‘Get away!’

One fist caught him on the nose. The air-dreadnought lurched again and now no one was at the controls. Flangers fell, slid across the sloping floor on his back and crashed head-first into the cabin door.

The catch clicked, then the door began to slide open. He slipped inexorably towards the gap, clawing at the smooth floor but unable to get a grip. The door slid a little further open. As he slipped closer, he managed to dig two fingers into a join in the floor, but his injured wrist could not hold his weight on such a steep slope.

He was going to fall out.

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