Read Online Changing Of The Guard (Book 6) by Ron Collins - Free Book Online

died. I can’t afford to do it again.”
    “So it’s
won’t.
”
    “I don’t understand you, Garrick.”
    “That’s not my concern.”
    Braxidane turned slate gray, and dipped a row of gaseous cilia to flow freely in the currents.
    Then Garrick was alone.
    He smiled to himself. It felt good.
    Then he turned back to the gate.
    He had been letting the Koradictine dictate their path and set his traps. The first had drained his life force, the second had dealt a blow to his psyche. Both had caught him by surprise. That couldn’t happen again.
    He used these last few moments to absorb what strength he could. Then he set his gates and gathered life force within him. The two magics folded in upon each other. He trembled with their forces as he wrapped them around himself to create a protective covering that shone brightly throughout All of Existence.
    Then Garrick stepped through the portal.

Chapter 6

    Garrick landed in a blazing ball of fire.
    This place had once been a city, but was now charred and blackened. Buildings, tall and of architecture that spoke of an artistic people, were fallen in shambles, bricks crumbled, stones cracked and splintered to expose their coarse, rugged innards.
    Bodies littered the ground.
    Men and women. Children. Dogs, and horses, and mules, and cattle. They all lay shriveled and decaying, leaving the city to smell of burnt flesh.
    His stomach churned with bile. Garrick had seen this before.
    He felt a presence behind him at the same time as he heard the moan, a low, familiar cry that grew to a high-pitched wail.
    Garrick turned.
    “Alistair,” he said.
    His old mage superior stood on a platform of charred stone with an ugly blue energy swirling about him like a bruised cloud. His staff was in one hand, his arms outstretched. Ettril had loosed Alistair on the people here, letting him feed upon the whole of this world’s citizens—a foul trick, given Alistair’s inability to draw real sustenance.
    Garrick pushed his senses outward, hoping to see where the Koradictine superior had fled, following the single thread of power that led toward Ettril and toward Will.
    The path went directly through Alistair.
    He wondered how Ettril had found his old superior, but in the end, perhaps that didn’t matter at all. Perhaps it was Hezarin’s doing. Perhaps not. What mattered was that Garrick had created this thing that was now Alistair, and that Alistair had done this wicked deed. And what mattered was that he had to find a way past Alistair if he was going to get to Will.
    “I’ve made a mess of you,” Garrick said. “Of that, I’m sorry.”
    Alistair’s voice screeched in the wind. He waved a staff that glowed ugly green. An aching need grew from nowhere to draw on Garrick from every direction.
    A woman’s arm moved, flaking with skin of ashes and oozing with dark fluid. A man stood up, his face peeling from his skull. They rose like that, more and more of them, tens of the dead at a time, then hundreds, bones clattering, teeth against teeth, wailing with dry, creaking screeches.
    Alistair waved his staff again and their eye sockets filled with need.
    These people were damned, their life forces destroyed in some obscene fashion. Their cold desire snaked between them as if they were a single thing.
    Garrick set gates and drew on his link to Talin. He leaped to the tallest pedestal of stone and fire flared from his fist. Lightning flashed from Alistair’s staff. The explosion of their meeting rocked the ground.
    A bony hand wrapped itself around Garrick’s ankle with a touch that burned so cold he thought the flesh had been flayed from the bone.
    Garrick turned his fire on it.
    He couldn’t hold back and expect to survive, so he channeled life force to form a long bladed sword of pure energy built of Existence itself, and he rained it down on anything close to him. Everything it touched burned, and everywhere it went Alistair’s zombies gave their final screams.
    His foot throbbed as he