It was really big.
Bigger than I’d expected, and it was still growing. While I coughed and hacked and struggled to get a breath, it kept on expanding. It covered a third of the great shield before it stopped, and just hovered there for a moment, its power causing Aeslinn’s watery protection to melt and gush and stream down all around it. Freezing water gushed all around us, pouring off the shield, but not enough. The pentagram, while impressive, wasn’t doing its job.
Had I made it too big? I wondered. Had I spread the power too thin? Why didn’t I make it smaller? We needed a doorway, not a—
And then I heard it—the first mighty CRRRAAAAAACCCKKKKK, like the calving of every glacier on Earth.
The sound shivered through my flesh and into my bones. And then another, even greater crack exploded through the air, like a thousand shotguns all going off at once. This one shuddered my body, made me cry out in pain, and caused Pritkin to shore up his shields, thickening them to the point that the whole battlefield looked blue and wavering. Yet it still wasn’t enough.
What did I do, I thought, writhing in the mud and screaming mentally and maybe physically; I couldn’t tell anymore.
What did I do?
That, I thought, as the massive, mile high pentagram shuddered and shook—and started to turn.
The sound was horrible. The sound was indescribable. The sound was mind bending and earth shattering and the loudest thing I’d ever heard—
And then the great symbol broke free, turning, turning, turning, and then spinning like a top, while it ripped open time and dragged pieces of the great
shield away into other eras, where I didn’t know.
But they weren’t here anymore, and no matter how good those Alorestri bastards were, they couldn’t replace all of that. Not in time. I lay there, shivering and gasping and watching in disbelief as a third of Aeslinn’s protection just . . . disappeared.
Mircea’s army gave a great shout that I saw rather than heard, because right then, I couldn’t hear anything. And poured through the breech, hundreds of them instead of the thousands that there should have been. But maybe it would be enough.
Maybe, I thought, watching them dodge great pieces of the shield, which were falling off the ragged remains up above; watching them wade through waist high water from the ice melt, much of which was still contained by the remaining lip of the shield; watched them take a whole sky full of arrows from the fey defenders. They were fresh; our troops were not.
It was anyone’s game.
At least it was if the other side didn’t get some back up.
I spotted Mircea near the breech, up on a rock with his sword out, rallying the remains of our army. The were his troops, not those of whoever the Senate had dredged up to replace him, and they acted like it. But I also saw the mighty force on across the battlefield, headed straight for him. And he couldn’t fight on two fronts at once.
We didn’t have the men.
I looked at Pritkin; he looked at me; and we scrambled up together, shifting to position ourselves between Mircea’s forces and the oncoming horde.
“Dulcea?a . . .” It echoed in my head.
“Go,” I told him breathlessly. “We’ve got this.”
There was hesitation, but then the validation that I’d never before received from him. “As you wish. Be safe.”
I nodded.
“We have this?” Pritkin repeated, his eyes on the mountains headed our way. Some of them looked damaged, missing arms or ears or even half a head. But they were still viable, and they were still coming.
It was like an avalanche on flat ground.
Literally, I thought, as a hundred giant boulders came screaming our way, all at once.
And were caught by a gleaming, glimmering net that appeared in the sky in front of us, stretching, stretching, stretching, as it strained to contain them all. Stretching so much, in fact, that the nearest boulders stopped all of a foot from our faces. But they didn’t stay there for long. The next second, they were snapped back, the momentum of all those projectiles doubled by the power I’d poured into that spell, and went flying at the enemy like a rocky hurricane.
“Ha!” I said, grabbing onto Pritkin.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, looking a little dazed.
“I could never . . . get that spell right . . . in practice!”