The Silenced Tale, стр. 99

“I . . . what?” Elgar says, and it’s a sob. He touches his face, and yeah, he’s crying. He is actually crying.

“You can’t control who loves you, or why,” Bevel says gently, as if Elgar is a foolish toddler who’s never been taught this before. Maybe he is a fool. “And if they choose to put themselves in peril for love of you, you can’t control that, either.”

“But I don’t want . . . I don’t want them to!” he protests.

“And yet, there your army stands. There it battles, in your name.”

Elgar wrings his hands, desperate to make his heroes understand. “But they’re not an army!”

“Of course they are—look at them,” Kintyre orders with a scowl. He draws Elgar up to his knees, so the three of them can look out over the convention hall floor together.

The cosplayers have spread out from their knot by the door. Lucy and Forsyth are still in the forefront, generals directing the fighting. Those with offensive weapons are doing their best to damage the monsters and creatures that keep springing up, hydra-like, from the sediment of papers, cards, figurines, comics, posters, and anything else the Viceroy can draw from. The attackers have ranged into a semi-circle, protecting what appears to be several staff-wielding wizards, witches with house-robes and wands, a whip-thin Asian boy dressed in some sort of red, Chinese-inspired armor making elaborate hand motions and tumbles, and a masked video game character.

For those in the center of the circle are making fire.

And in the middle of all, Ichiro, the blue-shirted liaison, tosses something up into the air, catching it repeatedly. When it lands, he checks the item, and produces a puff of flame from his hand, burning whatever is nearby. Some of the tosses and flames are large, some are whimperingly small.

“He’s rolling dice,” Elgar breathes, stunned by this realization. Ichiro Eiji is literally rolling for their lives.

Flames shoot from futuristic pixilated guns, from the tips of wands, from the ends of staffs, and, in Ichiro’s case, his bare hands. As the offensive circle inches forward, the flame-wielders follow behind, spreading out so they cover not just the floor in front of them, but moving toward the sides of the hall, too, picking out whatever paper they can see and reducing it to ash. With each step, fewer and fewer monsters spring to life. The ones that have been slain dissolve into swirling, ink-splotch smears of acid-green magic as the Viceroy clearly abandons sustaining their existence, now that they are no longer any use to him.

“They do this for you,” Kintyre says gravely. “Do not tell them their valor is for nothing. Do not make yourself worthless in their eyes.”

Elgar wipes at his face with his abused cardigan cuffs. “I am, though.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Bevel intones. “They believe you worthy. They believe in what you Wrote—in heroes, and magic, and fairy tales that always end with laughter and the victory of good over evil. The very least you can do is respect that.”

“I respect my fans!” Elgar hisses, indignant.

“From one storyteller to another,” Bevel says, clapping his shoulder. “It sure doesn’t sound like it. Now, get ready to move.”

All three men rise to their feet, crouching, watching the byplay of the monsters and the magicians.

“Ready? Now!” Kintyre says, and sprints toward the next convenient pile of rubble and furniture to hide behind.

“Why are we sneaking if I’m supposed to be bait?” Elgar says when they’re crouched again. His shoulders are burning, the pain radiating down his arms, squeezing at his lungs, pressing at the bottom of his skull.

“Bait for the Viceroy,” Kintyre says, pointing at the nearest creature—something out of the black lagoon, for all Elgar knows. “Not bait for a hungry behemoth.”

“Fair enough,” Elgar chokes.

“Move toward the flame-wielders,” Kintyre says.

But before they can move again, Ichiro calls out: “Natural twenty!”

As one, the flame-wielders run toward the outer walls of the hall, and the offensive rangers duck behind pillars and tables. Only Forsyth and Lucy stand their ground, swords drawn and faces grim as they become the sole focal point for a dozen horrible beasts. Forsyth raises a hand, and though Elgar can’t hear the Words of Shielding, he can see the air waver and glimmer around the two of them, like a thin layer of ice overlaid by spring-thaw water.

Ichiro holds out his hands, palms pointed down at the floor, and, screwing up his sweating face, screams: “I cast Fireball!”

“Duck!” Bevel shouts, hauling Elgar back behind a jagged outcropping of concrete.

“What’s he going to do?” Elgar gasps, eyes watering from the sudden jerk on his ruined arm.

“Don’t know, but everyone else is ducking, too, so it must—”

The rest of whatever it was Bevel was going to say is lost in the roaring fa-woosh of every piece of paper in the room catching fire, explosively, all at the same time. The remaining monsters squeal and screech and keen, shriveling up into charred nothingness before scattering like fireflies in the smoke.

The papers pop and snap, yet none of the broken wood or abandoned cloth around them catches. The flames surge, dancing red, and orange, and white-hot at their very hearts. And the moment their fuel is spent, they snuff out in curling black clouds that has everyone coughing and hiding their faces in their sleeves and collars.

Bevel and Kintyre are on their feet and halfway across the room before Elgar has even managed to get a clean breath. He trundles after them, limping, his shoulders burning.

“Impressive!” Kintyre calls out as they jog closer to the ragtag army.

“Oh, thanks, bro!” Ichiro pants, flexing his fists and grinning fit to burst. “But man, it’s easy if you’re a level-five Evoker. It’s a wizarding sub-class, see? And you get a special ability called ‘sculpt spell,’ which lets you blast or burn things without causing as much collateral damage. I mean, yeah, a big old Hollywood-style fireball would have been just as effective, but not if we wanted to, you know, not