In the temple beneath the palace, the king raged. He used his anger to draw all the emotional power from his victims that they could produce. He used his anger, and the anger of his lord to fuel the ceremony’s remaining potential.

  Victory had turned to near-defeat, and success had fallen barely short of disaster. With the wizardess’s disappearance, their plans were on hold.

  “But we will find you,” he promised the vanished woman. “This poses only a temporary delay…”

  As he drained the final shreds of terror from the last sacrifice, he turned to the blood pooling in the trough beneath one of the pillars and began to chant. It was a new spell, one given as a reward for capturing the wizardess…and he was grateful his god hadn’t seen fit to revoke it.

  With this spell he would not only be able to see what had become of those who’d escaped, but he would have a chance of retrieving them. He ignored the serpentine shapes that grew out of the floor behind him and looked over his shoulder.

  The blood cleared, becoming a window that showed the night sky and the cloud that was his master’s presence. In it, the king saw the elemental that was not an elemental, break free of the cloud and pass the city walls. Who, or what, it was, he could not tell. It was cloaked in magicks that did not let him see its true identity.

  With a sigh, he gave up trying to divine what it might be and searched for the others. There were at least three more, and if he found them, he could prevent their escape. Rather than try to find them, he focused on the face of the girl he’d first seen in the wizardess’s home.

  When he found her, she was curled in the arms of one of the airy raiders, being borne safely from the temple’s confines and through the darkness of his master’s presence. The king reached for her, and missed.

  With a snarl of frustration, he fixed her image to the pool and turned to the beasts that had come to aid him.

  “Form a circle,” he ordered, and they dipped their heads in acquiescence.

  They slithered apart, before coming back together, again, their bodies turning and twining to form a stone circle through the temple floor. When they had finished it and grown still, the king began another incantation.

  The sound of his magic made the accumulating terror seem clean by comparison, and the evil haze now gathering in the scrying pool appear clear. Within the circle, a similar haze formed, swirling and thickening. The twisted beasts of earth watched from the circle they had created with shining eyes.

  The king finished his chant with a clap of his hands, and turned to glance, once more, into the pool. With a muttered word, he erased the image it held, and replaced it with the sight of a second elemental tearing free of the cloud.

  This creature carried another of the wizardess’s apprentices, but he could not recall her name. His attempt to do so was derailed by a fierce hiss from the circle in which he’d cast his second spell.

  The beast he had summoned, now towered in the center of the circle, stretching and reaching as though it had been imprisoned for more than a thousand years. Knowing his master as he did, the king considered that, perhaps, it had.

  “Serve me,” he ordered.

  The creature swiveled on the spot, surveying the temple, the twisted elementals forming the circle that contained it, and returning its attention to the king.

  “I will serve you while Walshira holds sway,” it told him, and the king did his best not recoil from its response.

  He wondered how a creature that had not fed, or needed food, for one thousand years, had developed breath so foul. It returned his gaze, and stretched once more.

  “What vow do you require?” it demanded, when the king did not immediately respond. “Or is there some other reason that you keep me confined within the stone walls of your circle?”

  “No reason, save the one of preoccupation,” the king replied, absently waving his hand to dismiss the stone elementals intertwined about it. “Release him.”

  The twining bodies unwove themselves, with the graceless movements of lovers well-sated from the night. The creature of smoke…or mist…or polluted air, waited with an aura of regal disdain, until they had become separate entities once more.

  When it was free, it approached the king.

  “What service would you have me perform?” it asked, making mockery of the bow it directed toward him.

  The king indicated the image in the pool in the base of the pillar.

  “Fetch me the prisoners that have escaped,” he ordered, “And destroy those who gave them aid.”

  The creature swirled its way to the king’s side and looked past him to the picture of Xanthia being borne through the cloud in the elemental’s arms. The king scrolled the picture to show it Sindra, and the creature rewarded him with a hiss of annoyance.

  “They dare?” it exclaimed, turning its foul-breathed maw toward him. “They dare defy the Master? The One?”

  The king dipped his chin in a brief nod.

  “They dare,” he confirmed, “And I would have the insult avenged.”

  “Avenged it shall be,” the beast shrieked. “Summon my little brothers, Master, and send them to my aid.”

  It paused, looking into the trough.

  “I will strike at the one nearest to prevent it aiding its comrade.”

  The king swung, half to face it, and half to point to Sindra.

  “See her?” he demanded. “Since her mistress is beyond our reach, it is she who is the greatest source of the power our master seeks. It is she who must be re-taken at all costs.”

  “To please our master, I will make it so,” the foul elemental replied, and threw itself toward the cracked dome in the temple ceiling.

  “Make it so,” the king growled as it faded from view. “Make it so, or your first imprisonment will seem a paradise compared to your fate if you fail.”

  The creature was gone. It did not hear the threat pass through the high priest’s gritted teeth. If it had, it would have had no doubt as to whom he served, for it would have heard the voice of Walshira speaking through it. The weirds remaining behind it in the temple, both heard and recognized Walshira’s voice speaking in his servant’s tones.

  As the echoes of his promise fled beyond the shadows between the pillars and the temple wall, Walshira commanded the king to signal the warped creatures he had conjured from the stone. Lesser brethren the air monster had asked for. Very well, lesser brethren it would have. Walshira gave his king and high priest the spell he needed.

  “Re-form the circle,” the king commanded.

  Swiftly, the stone weirds obeyed. This time they were in the presence of their master, and they knew it. They displayed their skills for his benefit and Walshira smiled as he watched.

  Gross with unsightly lumps of earth and tufts of detritus, the earth weirds pleated themselves into a pattern of greater intricacy than before. They formed the circle and awaited Walshira’s command. The king raised his hands and began another chant. The words of this chant, like that of the one before it, were harsh and ugly, reflecting the outcome of their utterance.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  * * *

  Above the palace, the elemental bearing Xanthia sensed the darkness about it thinning and its heart leapt with hope. Its dangerous task would soon be over and it would be free to go back to playing amongst the mountain breezes that were its home.

  It gave a bouncing skip of joy, tightening its arms about the unconscious girl in its grasp. It had seemed such a trivial thing to do, rescuing this human, but it sensed the power lying dormant within her, and was glad the Old One would not have her.

  Now that it could see the stars shining above the city’s lamp-lined streets, it surged against the remaining dark, and was surprised to feel the cloud suddenly thicken around it. The sensation brought a nagging sense of unease.

  Something was dreadfully wrong, as if there was a danger in the cloud that had not been present before. The young elemental tried to calm its fears, knowing how the cloud and its master could draw on the emotion to make themselves stronger. Even so, it was with a sense of fast-approaching doom that the elemental reached for the largest constellation within sight.

  The darkness thickened, blocking that collection of stars, and all others, from view, and it felt an almost tangible ripple in the coiling smoke. The elemental veered away from it without knowing why, and, again, that unsettling ripple came. The sense of danger intensified and the elemental twisted to avoid it.

  Shrinking away from the darkest part of the cloud, the elemental tried to bore its way through the choking black to the open skies and freedom. The blackness shuddered, parting for a moment to reveal a raking set of talons. The constellation it had aimed for became the white-specked rot of decaying fangs, sharp as the talons that had gone before.

  The elemental shrieked in anguish as the talons tried to tear its burden from its arms, then it screamed in fear as teeth closed around its head. Its grip loosened around the girl it had taken from the temple, and it felt a brief pang of regret.

  After that, the teeth came scything down, and nothing mattered anymore.

  * * *

  The king and Walshira felt its death and rejoiced. The results of the king’s latest spell were still forming within the intricately woven circle, and they were greater in number, if not as impressive as the creature that had gone before them.

  The king felt torn between observing how his first summoning performed its duties, and ensuring the success of its mission by releasing those being created by the second. It took him a moment to remember the girl dropped by the elemental his first summoning had vanquished. When he did, he bent hurriedly over the trench to scry the place she had landed.

  The pool darkened as he descended into the cloud, diving beneath it to search the streets below.

  Fortunately, the apprentice wasn’t too hard to find. She was lying in the palace gardens, her fall slowed by the elder weird who’d tried to catch her, and then broken by the richly flowered vine gracing the wall in his private courtyard. She’d fallen through its vines to crush the ferns and scented blooms of the thickly mulched garden bed below.

  “Fetch her,” the king commanded, directing five of the nearest undead to her location. “And bring her back alive.”

  They moaned an affirmative and began shuffling toward the temple doors.

  “And inflict no further damage on her,” the king belatedly added, remembering their unfortunate appetites and near lack of control. “She is not yours on which to feed.”

  His order would hold them, but nothing else would. The moans he received in reply sounded almost despairing, and he resisted the urge to tell them they’d feast soon enough. Anticipation, such as they felt it, would further blunt their control, and he wanted nothing to befall the apprentice unless it was at his hand.

  Walshira willed it so.

  The king sighed, watching their shambling progress until they’d left the temple proper. How he wished for servants with more power, so that he could replace these poor beginnings with the glory of the true undead. How he wished he did not have to be so cautious with his commands.

  The five he had sent to fetch the apprentice disappeared from sight, and he knew they would take the secret door at the end of the passage to a corridor leading to the garden. It reminded him of the secret door at the temple’s end…and the intruders who’d stolen over half his intended sacrifices.

  Those same intruders had destroyed over half his zombies, as well, and he was daunted by the effort it would take to replace them. Undead and mindless they might be, but his creatures were still able to remember the hidden ways he had enspelled into their minds…and they could move quietly, if not with perfect silence.

  It was a reminder that they were not as feeble as he often thought.

  Satisfied that the ones he’d sent would return with the apprentice unharmed, he turned to inspect the creatures he’d just summoned, and was pleased with what he saw. The interior of the summoning circle was full of writhing columns of smoke, each one a separate entity.

  “Swear obedience to me,” he commanded, “And I will free you from my circle.”

  “We so swear,” they replied in a sibilant chorus, their voices combining in malignant harmony.

  The king looked down at the earth weirds forming the circle.

  “Release them,” he ordered.

  Again, the long-drawn grating of stone parting, echoed throughout the temple. Watching them, the king was reminded less of lovers and more of a tortured form of weaving. The smoking tornadoes slipped between their earthen brethren as soon as their hides had parted, gathering before the king.

  He stood at the foot of the pedestal and waited until they had arrayed themselves in front of him, and when they had stopped their shifting and stirring, he waited just a little longer for their silence. Behind him, the picture in the pool shifted and changed.

  Moving from the garden and Xanthia’s still form, it returned to the skies, where the abomination he’d summoned had caught up with the elemental carrying Sindra’s terrified form.

  The elemental saw it barely in time, rearing back in an attempt to avoid the creature exploding from the darkness before it. Only a quick ripple of its body saved it from the attacking weird’s claws, and an equally quick eddy along its length managed to prevent it being caught by the evil beast’s teeth.

  Sindra lay wide-eyed in the elemental’s arms.

  “Sindra,” the king breathed, his waiting earth and air weirds momentarily forgotten.

  He bent closer to the pool, studying it as the waiting weirds shifted around him to peer over his shoulder. The girl’s eyes were still wide with the fear and shock of her ordeal in the temple, but they tracked the abomination rising from the cloud below to attack the elemental bearing her to safety.

  A pity, the king thought. If she struggled, the battle would be over so much faster.

  The sound of a screaming hurricane drew his attention, and he looked more closely at the scene in the blood-filled trough. Now, where there had been two creatures of air, there were three, and the third was at least as large as the creature he had called from slumber.

  “Go!” the king screamed to the waiting air weirds. “Go! Lend your brother your aid and bring the girl child to me. Do not fail me in this. Do not lose the girl. Bring her to me and I will unleash you to destroy those who dared to take her from me!”

  The sound of a hundred whispers greeted his words, similar to the sound of leaves being blown in the wind, and then the air inside the temple was stirred to a frenzy. The newly-summoned weirds lifted from the floor, tearing toward the gap in the ceiling.

  As they left, their earth-bound cousins slithered closer to the trough and studied the picture it contained.

  The newly arrived elemental lord tore through his summoned creature like a storm wind through autumn leaves, and the king snarled a curse at it that would have shattered a mortal man’s spirit.

  The words did not even ripple the ancient being’s form.

  * * *

  Overhead, the elder elemental spun along its own length, turning as the king’s abomination reformed. Below them, almost directly beneath the gathered cloud, the sky grew darker still. The air weirds, the king’s reinforcements were arriving.

  The darkness grew nearer, but the elder elemental ignored it, preparing to face the abomination’s next attack. The being carrying Sindra, had frozen in horror as its older brother, its lord, had drawn the evil beast away. Now, it noticed something spark like golden lightning and saw the advancing mass of darkness had been halted by a net of raw power.

  The elder elemental did not try to seek the source of their aid, guessing it to be a spell cast by their mortal sister, the one considered old in years by her kind, and barely a child by his. It worried that their sister risked too much in her quest to help them.

  It knew the change in form, and the things she had seen in the temple had robbed her of much of her strength, and with this worry clouding its mind, it failed to see the talon that lashed out toward it.

  It did feel the poisoned claw bite deep into the softness of its flank, and knew the wound was mortal, that there was only one thing more it could do in service of the fight. Turning its head to its youngest brother, it gave its last order.

  “Go,” it rasped, adding when the youngster looked like it might argue. “Do not make my death in vain.”

  The younger elemental went, the cry of grieving pain its command and confession tore from its throat echoing in its wake.

  “Fly safe,” it whispered, as it prepared to meet the abomination’s next strike.

  Below it, the golden net flared into a network of golden lightning under a second attack from the abomination’s reinforcements. The elder elemental sensed the spell stretch and snap, and knew its death was closer still.

  The flaring gold helped hide its little brother’s escape, but to ensure he got the lead he needed, the elder elemental gathered itself into a roaring tumult of wind, its hide briefly reflecting the dying gold of the shattered net’s protection, its battle cry echoing through the streets below.

  * * *

  In the temple far beneath it, the king grinned at its rage and its demise. That would teach the elementals to meddle with the rise of his god.

  He watched the air weirds swarm the embattled elemental, and exulted as they scattered its essence to the winds from which it had been spawned. Smiling with satisfaction, he watched as his creatures turned to the lands around the city, searching for those who’d escaped, and whoever it was who sheltered them.