The Mandred Chronicles
Mandred VS Teleb
by zapenstap
Falora's life force beat in the back of Mandred's head, an indicator of how much time he had. If she lost strength and faded, Relena would die instantly. He hadn't much time, but he couldn't afford to be hasty.
"Teleb!" Mandrd called coldly as soon as he was out of earshot of the others. He adjusted the glare of his fire wreath and dissipated the orange flame he had gathered, running its heat into the walls and the floor. Teleb would feel that through his shoes if he was observant enough. A little warning to slow him down. It would make him nervous, if he wasn't out of his mind already, but it would not scare him away. Mandred would not have him try to escape when retribution was in order, not when Heero's cold eyes and the image of the blackened, twisted form of the girl lying at his feet were burned into his memory. Ah, Heero... you weren't meant to get caught up in this. So much work and care had gone into removing that cold defensiveness from the boy, and now the walls were back up, hard and cold as cast iron. "Teleb!" he bellowed again, and then lowered his voice to an insistent call. "I have not been this angry in a long time, but I will control myself if you come to me."
He couldn't kill him, not and stay under the Law. It wouldn't suffice to ease his anger anyway. Of course, there was a lot he technically was not supposed to do. No magic with visible effects, for evil or good; that was the first rule. Heero should never have been exposed to any of this, Relena should never have been used to expose him, and they were the ones who paid the price. That wasn't fair. Something would have to be done, whatever the rules.
The shadowed halls were deathly quiet, but Teleb would respond eventually, posed enough questions and challenges. They always did. As he took firm, deliberate paces down the cooridor, Mandred took note of the shattered stone and broken bits of wood littered about the hallway. One of the walls had a gaping hole in it. He thought it led back to the room where he had left the others, but it didn't look like Falora's work; more like modern explosives. He teleported past it, simply skipping the walk through that space. He didn't want to be seen by the others now, or see them. It was Teleb he must confront now.
"The Crystal Throne has called you back, Renegade," he said in a quieter tone to his adversary. "You would be wiser to seek clemency. You won't escape this way."
"Clemency!"
The word was spat like a curse, and seemed to bounce off every wall, to come from every direction. Mandred frowned. Getting him to talk wouldn't be enough to find him then.
The wall to Mandred's right suddenly lost shape and caved inward. Mandred turned deftly as chunks of wood, paint, steel and stone burst from the insides, flying toward his face. But he had felt the movement before its result, and looked the other way as the objects hurled ineffectively against his shielding wall, falling in a pile at his feet.
"You think I would go back?" Teleb's voice came again, the touch of laughter in his tone a little shaky. "Kneel at the feet of the Queen, seek pardon of the Council? I can not think of a worse torture!"
"Torture?" Mandred repeated mildly, pretending to take him literally. Perhaps being angry was not the way. After all, the devil hated to be mocked. "Oh, I don't think so," he said mildly, "Quenden is in Elneira now. He wouldn't allow such retribution on principal, and Shine would forbid it by law. The Council is not so efficient in their justice. You will be given the Remedy, less you choose death by your own hand." A mild manner for a serious subject. Teleb would catch it, but how would he react? It would not have worked on Nilico, but Teleb was young for a Renegade.
Teleb laughed again, though there was still no face or direction to go with that voice. "Is that something you Masters came up with?" His voice seemed to slide through the air with no direction, a dizzying sensation. "A Remedy, you say? I have heard the rumors. Is it like a drug for a sickness in the head?" He chuckled. "Probably Quenden's idea, that idealistic charaltan! But I am not mad, Master Mandred. I assure you, I know what I am doing. I would have killed the boy next. I was going to bleed his heart in his chest."
Mandred forced down his desire to simply reach out, seize control and crush the mind behind that voice. "Quenden is not idealistic," Mandred replied, and prepared to do a sweeping scry to find the man. He kept his tone light, but his mind manipulated his magic, darting and twisting through a web of complex constructions. Where had Teleb found a perch? "And I never said you were mad," he continued evenly without missing a beat. "That is not how the Remedy works. If it were only madness I might be able to help you, but what you have goes a lot deeper than any distortion of the mind." He set the anchors and prepared the cable winds. "Your soul is twisted, and straightening it is only something you can do, if you want it. The Remedy only clarifies you to yourself." Anchors set, he released his sweep and let it flow, quiet and gentle like a breath of air.
Would someone like Teleb detect such a scrying spell in time? He did not know the man personally. He knew he was from Elenestan, Elneira, had participated in the original revolt and had escaped in the Scourge. The rest of his information was second hand, what analysis of his battle experience General Soronith could give him and what Ranlath had hypothesized about his experience with crystal enhancers, but that wasn't nearly enough to capture him easily. His psychology, other than the usual Renegade sort, was a mystery, and he had covered his tracks well for someone so young. He supposed he was one of very few who considered five hundred years or so a very short life.
"Not all evil knows itself," he continued on his previous train of thought, "but even if you truly do know what you are doing, there are still only two choices you can make, to change or to die, and who knows what choices we have after death?"
"Don't you?" Teleb's voice mocked him. "You who are famed to know everything?"
Mandred smiled as he followed the webbing he had cast over the area. No, not there. No, not there either... there were sixty-four channels, but he ticked them off in heartbeats. "A myth," he replied as he worked. "Nobody really knows anything. I have lived a long time and seen a great deal, enough to have some opinion on some small matters, enough to educate others with less experience, but someday even I will pass, and who can say what my fate will be then, or what my knowledge will come to?" Ah, there he was. The sweep dissolved, except for that last final anchor. A clean line, a clear shot, through walls, past a room littered with bodies (Heero?) and outside. Yes, Teleb was outside. He held on to the line, checking quickly for traps. Falora was still holding steady. Ranlath was right. That girl was a treasure.
"You may pass today," Teleb's voice said smoothly, twice as eerie now that Mandred knew where it was being directed from. A clever trick. He had thought the man closer. What was that vibration? Was he preparing to collapse the building? Teleb had the added power of the crystals to control and enhance his strength; it would not be dificult for him. Even as the thought occured to him, Mandred felt the floor beneath him tremble and dust float down from the ceiling. Shifting his weight to maintain his balance, Mandred sought for the source of the disturbance, for the alterations that could crumble a stone foundation, and found it. He did not wait this time. The pulse of Falora's life force was still steady, but not for much longer. He slashed at Teleb's weave mercilessly and it snapped like a rubberband. The building became still again.
Teleb swore. The backlash must have hit him hard. Good.
"You will die!" Teleb shouted suddenly, and Mandred felt the air stir, raising the hairs on the back of his neck.
"Yes," Mandred agreed calmly. "But not by your hand."
He heard Teleb snarl, but before he could make a move, Mandred locked onto his location and transported himself there, his own body sliding between space, like ducking under a curtain. Teleb stumbled backward as Mandred appeared suddenly before him, a hand flying up in front of his face in reflexive alarm. Mandred caught his wrist and pushed him bodily into the wall of the building. "Desist," he said forcefully, staring straight into Teleb's eyes. The wind from outside blew against his back. He felt exposed in the open, but there was no one in the street; even the buildings were deserted.
Teleb snarled and struggled, but Mandred did not budge. Teleb relaxed then, though the muscles in his face tightened, fear and anger flickering across his gaze. "What?" he breathed almost kindly, a mockery of kindness. "The girl?" Mandred felt his jaw clench. Relena, skin scorched, blacked, her flesh melted and blistered. Heero had watched her every day on the television and pretended he had had no interest her. But Mandred had caught him drawing sometimes, in his room, sketches of the girl's eyes and attempted efforts at her face and body. Heero was not an artist, but they were pretty good drawings, exact to even the most minute details, her fingernails, the highlights in her hair. Once he had recorded a broadcast that featured her giving a speech. But he rarly talked much about her, and Mandred had not asked, knowing how Heero liked his secrets. "Was she one of your projects too?" Teleb mocked, "the boy's lover perhaps? Are you breeding humans?"
Mandred's grip on Teleb tightened. Teleb stared at him, falling silent, swallowing. He began to sweat, gasp and then screamed as his wrists began to smoke and sizzle under Mandred's hands. Mandred held the weave for several seconds, the same he had given Relena, ignoring Teleb's frantic shrieks and pleas for mercy. After a few moments, Mandred released him and he staggered, falling almost to his knees.
"Poor treatment of a fellow creature," Mandred said coldly, looking down on him, "but you would hate anyone that much who has more control over their fear than you do."
Teleb cursed, shaking, laughing maniacally, his arms cradled close to his body. He had not been given nearly the dose he had bestowed upon Relena, but Mandred's hand print was burned into the skin around his wrists and along his arms, an ugly red mark, blistering at the edges. Teleb pretended as if nothing has happened, though his body trembled still. "I am not afraid of them," he growled, rising again, his eyes meeting Mandred's slowly. They looked absolutely wild. "Not even that pet of Ranlath's, Falora Eredes. She is a weak excuse for one of us."
"I didn't say you were afraid of them," Mandred replied, amazed in spite of himself. Perhaps evil could not feel pain after awhile. Perhaps it was too easily confused with pleasure. "But there is goodness in them and you can't abide it. You believe they are worth nothing, that their feelings and intelligence mean nothing because they are ingrained in the superstructure of this world instead of the infrastructure to which you and I are part. You may believe that but you know better, and it infuriates you that they are fuller than you. Their bodies decay, but you are stretched and eaten away as you live longer. You consume yourself, to the soul."
Teleb smirked. "I have never been stronger. You are a fool to think so highly of what can be destroyed so easily. There is nothing about mortality I envy!"
"You have not lived long enough to envy it, and you are a fool to believe that they are destroyed so easily."
"I fail to comprehend you. Human beings are not immortal."
Mandred smiled and grasped the other man by the throat, pulling him up and holding him very still, squeezing just enough for him to feel it. "Aren't they?" he said, staring into the other man's eyes.
Confusion and wonder rippled across Teleb's face, but whatever revelation he might have had died suddenly, perhaps is stubborn disbelief, and an aura surrounded him. Mandred hissed as pressure built between them, swelling until he was thrown back bodily. He regrained balance in time to see Teleb slide away from the wall.
Teleb stumbled away from him and his eyes blazed as if filled with lightning. A wind picked up, whistling about their ears as Teleb stood firmly in the street, his aura shining about him like the light of the sun. Great cracks rent the concrete, racing down the middle, widening the split in the pavement. Mandred grunted and moved to one side as the concrete sunk into a hole where he had been standing. The buildings lining the street trembled on their foundations. Windows shattered, glass cascading to the pavement below.
Mandred straightened and drew on his own power, thanking Immilie silently for clearing out the area. Bracing against the wind, Mandred flung his forearm at nothing, but the boost he gave the motion sent Teleb flying. The wind died as the Renegade was knocked off his feet, the colony stopped shaking. Quickly, Mandred repaired the damage, reversing the weave of destruction, reknitting the stone together, smoothing the lines as if they had never been disturbed. Teleb hit the ground as he finished, bruised both from the blow and the backlash.
"How did you...?"
Mandred bounded after him, grasping him about he collar and hoisting him off the ground. "You are not powerful enough for me," he said. "You can not win here. It is in your best interest to yield."
"I expect no mercy."
"Mercy is not something to be expected," Mandred replied, "or it would not be mercy."
Teleb attempted to lash out, but Mandred struck him down again. And again. At length, Teleb cursed and lay still, breathing shallowly, tears leaking from his eyes. "You handle me like a child," he gasped.
Mandred released him forcibly and he fell heavily to the ground. "So you are a child, playing children's cruel and spiteful games." Calmly, he knelt and relieved Teleb of the crystals he had taken from Relena. Without a glance he deposited them in his pocket, having already stared at them a great deal the last few weeks, so much that they gave him a headache. Such small things, trinkets to their maker. Ranlath could produce them by the hundreds if he had the inclination. It was odd that such pain had come from them. Heero was suffering. Relena was dying. Falora was fading. He had the sudden desire to kill Teleb.
"Easy, Master Mandred," a new voice cautioned, "Even you can be called into account before the Council."
Mandred looked up to see another Alfarian step from behind the building--a physically impressive figure--and stood back as he approached. The newcomer stood threateningly over Teleb, but it was Mandred he looked in the eye. Soronith, Head General of Elneira appeared to have been sent by the way he stood expectantly, waiting for permission to intercede. Mandred smiled. Heero would like Soronith, a soldier to his bootsoles, but Heero would never meet him. Mandred had broken too many rules already.
"Take him," Mandred told him calmly. "If that is why you are here." Falora was losing strength.
Soronith bowed to him respectfully, but the gaze he leveled at Teleb could have burned through a brick wall. "You're under arrest," Soronith hissed into Teleb's ear, "for treason, assault and battery, abduction, murder in the first and second degree, attempted murder, cruelty, fraud and theft. Do you want me to go on? You are called before the Council for retribution and have the right to a trial without jury, having already been condemned by Elneiran Law."
Teleb said nothing, but his eyes glowed balefully as he was pulled roughly to his feet. "One day you will all realize what you are and what it means, and then you will regret this. We were not a people meant to serve!"
"No one is made to destroy and torture life, Renegade." Deftly, Soronith blankeded the other Alfarian's consciousness, driving him into a deep sleep. Teleb collapsed against the General without resistence, unconscious. Soronith lifted him without touching him and created a portal by his head, an oval of blue light cut into the air. "I'll come back for you, Mandred," he said over his shoulder, the authority of the Throne behind him. Only the power of the Throne could speak to a Master that way. "This should not have happened today." Mandred nodded in understanding, but said nothing. Soronith would have to take Teleb back and Mandred would have a little while to arrange things here, to break more rules and save what could be saved, to explain what could be explained. When the portal closed after Soronith and his burden, Mandred made his own portal, a direct path back to the room where for Falora was rapidly losing strength, where Relena lay burned and twisted, dead, if Falora had not linked the girl to her own life force and suspended them both. Dead anyway, if he could not save her in time.
For the space of a heartbeat, the time it took to step through a portal,
blue light engulfed everything, sliding across the skin like water.
There was kinetic energy in the space between one place and the next, power
that streamlined through the air at such incredible speeds it was difficult
to detect any motion at all. In that split second of time, Mandred
touched that power, and stepped between space and time to where Heero waited
for him, and he dreaded facing those shadowed eyes.