OBSIDIAN 3.1: SWAMP HAG
“When war becomes a game, you have ceased to be a warrior. This malady afflicts both the child whose playground battlefield vanishes into the movements on a fortify board, and the veteran whose long years at arms become a dream when the general’s mantle falls upon their shoulders. The toys atop the felt-cloth table are shaped by the blade, but they do not bleed. Imagination is not reality and remembrance is no key. Only violence sharpens. If you would be shaped by the blade, you must bleed.”
– from the Ismethic Creed
As we crossed over the Greywater and prepared ourselves, Em taught me the trick of using a glyphstone while maintaining my flight – I didn’t know if I could manage it with just my wings, but under her spell it was doable.
Six sites affected and counting. Sticktown among them.
But Sticktown was already in-hand. I had to trust everything would be going smoothly back home, just like usual. The damage would be minimal. The loss of life, minimal. I did my best to not imagine the twins lying there dead, but, just as after the heretic attack, it came to the front of my mind inescapably.
I was glad I wasn’t an arch-diviner right then, because something like that rolling around in my head would definitely suffice to drive me mad.
Sticktown, Rivertown, the two eruptions in Treetown – all four were in-hand. Oldtown, Hightown – those were areas in need of immediate assistance. And the Rivertown occurrence was smaller and far to the south – no closer to us than Oldtown, especially once we’d already gotten started flying north-east.
A miasma of burning sewage hung over the city and the sky was dark, but the clouds were moving fast and the moon was waxing. With my fey-sight the distances occluded little as we approached our destination.
Yune be with us, I prayed as I saw what was going on, and then, needing something more realistic in terms of aid, thought: Zel, it’s happening. The Bells.
“About time, really. If you were into demons, this would be like Yearsend to you.”
I… don’t really think of demons as gifts…
“Even still, you’re going to use them tonight. You have to – or many more of your city’s inhabitants will perish.”
Perhaps she was right.
“Of course I’m right – that’s what I’m here for.”
I missed you, today. I’m sorry, for losing it with you.
“Completely forgiven. Now, how about we just focus on getting you through this, Kas.”
We were still thirty seconds away from the site of the attack in Oldtown. Thirty seconds to study the chaos, decide where to go… what exactly to do.
Under the broken planks and the rubble, dozens of trapped people were screaming – hands and voices were lifted out of the dark, dusty crevasses where buildings had tumbled into piles of sticks and bricks, straining, grasping. Worse were the hands that did not strain, the hands coated in brown-looking blood, lying flaccid against the splintered beams, the shattered brickwork. The broken bodies of at least ten magisters, scattered across the devastation like crushed leaves. And worst – the voiceless, buried alive with little hope of rescue.
I couldn’t help them. Well, I could, but that would mean leaving even more to die in the meantime. I had to deal with the perpetrators.
There were four big demons in the neighbourhood. One was a bintaborax, a ‘hammer of fire’ – vaguely minotaur-type things with orange-burning maces, the creatures which Lord Obliterated and the Cannibal Six had been so fond of. The other three I didn’t recognise. A porcelain doll as big as the bintaborax, complete with painted-on-looking features, frizzy hair and massive pudgy limbs. A many-legged horse with no lower jaw and twelve-inch fangs. And a white-armoured knight with nothing visible behind the bars of his lowered visor, a knight whose gauntleted hands incinerated wood and pulverised stone.
Each of them were currently killing people.
Zel named them in turn: the towering doll was a mekkustremin, third rank; the fanged horse was an epheldegrim, second rank; the white knight was a thinfinaran, tenth rank.
And those were just the big ones. Streams of thick fluid sloshed over the kerbs, slug-like creatures swimming through their own slaver. Gibbering, jubilant cries came from the rafters of half-collapsed structures where imps cavorted in droves. Men and women – normal-seeming to eye and ear other than the fact that they, well, weren’t running and screaming in terror – walked nonchalantly and aimlessly through the clouds of smoke and dust; a look in their blank faces was enough to reveal that something had happened to their minds to make them act this way, but what it was and how to reverse it I had no idea. If it even was reversible. They might’ve been luckier to have been buried alive for all I knew.
“I don’t have enough information for that… get an enchanter to look into it later.”
The section of Oldtown we were nearing had been a big ring of houses, partially built into the side of the hill, with other buildings in the centre. The slope here was gentle, the ground almost level. The ring of houses encapsulated the entire neighbourhood – there was only one way in and one way out by road, so now the inhabitants were penned into the circle by the hellspawn. Unless they were brave enough to try breaking through the already-shattered buildings around the outside of the ring – which none of them were. Those who had survived the initial assault and whose paths had led them into the centre were ripe for the taking – their blood flowed in pinkish strands into the rivers of slaver.
And that blood was being used. I couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear anything to tell me of that fact over the ringing of the Bells – but I could feel it nonetheless. Gates to Infernum were opening everywhere. More and more demons flapped through the air or slouched through the shadows with every passing moment and every time that happened there was a chance another big one was about to find its way through into our world.
Our world, damn it, not yours.
Em headed off, surging towards the white knight with his empty helm – from her fingers she flicked small arcs of lightning that moved at a hundred times even her prodigious speed, slamming into him at a distance even as she closed the gap.
I landed, pointing at the bintaborax.
Slowly, it turned its great horned head to face me. A few of those still alive near it struggled to crawl or limp away, cradling mangled arms or holding their hands to gushing wounds inflicted by its six-inch spikes.
I stared back at the demon; bit by bit, a smile crept over my lips, and by the time I was done it was lowering its head in a gesture of respect –
It’s mine.
I heard and felt something approaching behind me, something heavy but taking dozens of steps, rocking the ground – I span on my heel, instinctively tensing myself – but it was just the stupid lumbering doll-demon. I felt a jolt as it loomed over me, hammering at my super-reinforced circle with a shiny, oversized fist.
I met its eyes now – the big, glittering eyes any little girl wanted on a toy, except these were crimson – and it met mine.
There was no immediate acquiescence.
Drop it, I thought savagely. This is no time to mess with me!
I kept my gaze fixed on the mekkustremin.
A single sudden wail cut the air, high-pitched, like metal scraping on metal – it was emanating from the permanent smile pasted on the doll-demon’s face, not six feet from me.
And then its shoulders sagged, its head drooped, and it too was mine.
It used the bunched-up fingers on its hands to smooth down its tent-sized dress and cocked its head, looking at me through its frizzy hair. Looking at me – if I had to put a word on it – nervously.
It… does my stare always hurt them like that?
“Well done, Kas.” Zel sounded more than moderately self-satisfied. “Mekkustremin are quick. You should consider joining with it, and seeing what powers you can manifest when –“
No.
“Just shut it up like Zab and Avaelar…“
Don’t make me shut you up, Zel! I pleaded.
She shut up of her own accord, at least temporarily.
I eyed the mekkustremin and the bintaborax.
“You’re fast?” I snarled in Infernal at the doll-demon. It nodded jerkily. “Go fetch the wounded, bring them here.” I invoked as much dread as I could with my tone: “Do not suffer any sentient creatures of this plane to come to harm.”
Now I got to watch it move. Its motions were as clumsy as one would expect, but its body seemed to be filled with unnatural energy; it barrelled away, pudgy porcelain legs pumping furiously at the debris-littered ground like the wings of an insect beating, its arms swinging away almost merrily with every step. It covered a hundred feet in a few seconds, and started wading into the rubble.
“You!” I said to the bintaborax, the horned wall of spiky iron twice my height; and it pawed at the ground with one foot in response. “Use your hammer! Smash every demon you find that does not serve a mage within a hundred feet! Then return here and protect those brought by the mekkustremin.” Belatedly, I gave it the same warning: “Do not suffer any sentient creatures of this plane to come to harm.”
It lowered its fiery warhammer and crouched, then leapt with all its hideous force at one of the nearby buildings where I’d spotted imps lurking, grinding the cobbles to dust under its feet before it left the ground.
The brutish demon brought its weapon up as it soared, and span end-over-end before it crashed into the brickwork, meeting the half-crumbled second-storey wall with the flat of its hammer.
The remaining brickwork shattered like old plaster.
The bintaborax disappeared inside the building and the place fell down around it; within seconds I could see flicks of molten light piercing through gaps in the tumbled bricks as my minion started tenderising the lesser fiends that were now trapped in there with it.
I couldn’t sense gates opening under the rubble anymore. I cast my gaze around. The slug-creatures, swimming in the pools of slime permeated by strings of blood, had noticed me. They were fleeing.
The effing-grim thing – the horse with what looked like seven legs and wicked barbs hanging down from its upper jaw into empty air… It had noticed me too.
Before it could join the exodus I raised my hand to it.
“Eff-ell-duh-grim!”
That’s what I said.
“No you did not!”
Zel sounded a trifle testy.
“No I do not!”
But that was nothing new.
“Yes it is – I mean, if I were being testy – which I most certainly am not!”
As I wound up my faerie queen I beckoned the seven-legged hell-horse over and it trotted to my side, instantly obedient. It could’ve been a normal animal at a distance, without the three extra legs hanging in a line from the centre of its body. The missing-lower-jaw stuff was pretty horrid close up, if I was being honest with myself – the black fur which covered its body stopped at the neck, then there was just an opening from which the awfully long-looking tongue dangled, flapping around like a big wet chunk of knotted rope that had a mind all of its own.
All the same, it just had to be done.
“Down. I’m getting on, boy.”
It stuck out its three forelegs and leaned back on its four hind legs, thrusting its backside and long black tail into the air – it achieved a pose no horse from Materium would’ve been capable of, almost distending in an effort to execute my command.
I swung my leg over, and sat astride it as it rose back up to its full height. It was a little bigger than most horses, and certainly bigger than any horse I’d ever happened to mount. The horses used to pull wagons tended to be broad of shoulder but stocky, and this fiend was broader of shoulder but taller too, and somewhat longer than an ordinary steed.
I used Em’s flight-spell to steady myself as we charged the fleeing slime-creatures. I’d kept my wings out just in case, and felt the wind rushing through them, their transparent essence buffeted as we galloped.
The seven legs not only allowed the hell-horse to move as fast as an arrow, they allowed it to change direction in an instant. At my orders it lowered its head and stomped its hooves in the slush; I guided it with the merest pressure of my heels in its flanks.
We slew dozens, pulping the slug-things into masses of jelly and broken antennae.
What are these things?
“Unranked, insentient. Think of them as, I don’t know, the gnats of the Twelve Hells. They aren’t even demons, technically. I think they’re parasites.”
Then what’s actually been doing the summoning here?
Zel drew my eyes across what was now a rubble-strewn clearing, to where Em was still struggling with the white-clad knight.
Seriously?
“Thinfinaran are truly evil. A tenth-rank might be too much for you. Be careful.”
I let out a little sigh, then muttered to the epheldegrim: “Keep up the good work – do not suffer any sentient creatures of this plane to come to harm.”
I let myself rise up off its back, watched for a second to make sure it was still giving me a hundred percent, then, satisfied, I sped off across the clearing.
Em was keeping a fixed distance from it, speeding away each time the knight approached her, and was hurling attack after attack at it – but again and again it raised its hands as it walked, blocking or absorbing the energies she unleashed. In a matter of seconds I watched the bone-white substance of its gauntlets deflect lightning, sear-away ice, and swallow fireballs. She’d raised at least two elementals from the wood and stone littering the ground, but, even as I approached, the pair of elementals she was currently employing both got blown apart by a single strike from the white-plated fists.
At first I’d thought it odd that the demon, being arrayed in full battle regalia, didn’t carry a weapon.
Now I knew better.
The armour definitely had some unusual properties. I could see the bloody slop spattering on his boots and lower legs, but the armour didn’t stay discoloured for long – it was like it was drawing the mixture in, supplying him with its potency.
It’s moving like it knows what’s coming. It’s a diviner too?
“I don’t know… I… I think you’re right.”
Em had at least been able to distract it, I supposed – it’d been awhile since I’d felt any gates opening in the vicinity.
I came silently to a stop near the thinfinaran, coming closer to it than Em, and called down at it, a simple, irresistible order:
“Agar!” ‘Halt!’
It did indeed stop moving in response to Em’s attacks, instead turning the awful void of its helm up at me, as if to look upon me with its eyes of nothingness.
The arch-wizard’s incandescent missile of pure explosive fury streaked through the air, striking the demon in the side of the head, detonating with a force that rippled out at me, driving me away slightly.
When I blinked away the sudden wetness in my eyes I saw it was shaking its head. Not in pain, or grogginess. Not even in anger. No, it was shaking its non-existent head slowly, luxuriously.
It was disappointed in us.
“Vhat do ve do?” Em cried, giving up her assault, for now at least.
I was still staring at the thinfinaran, and then I realised –
Is the pain-gaze, you know, on? Is it –
“Enduring your pain-gaze, yes, it is. I told you. It’s out of your league, Kas. You’ve got to develop your mastery before you’re going to take on the heavy-hitters. If you won’t join with more powerful entities, you won’t get used to dominating others, hurting them –“
I don’t want to do that!
“You’re an arch-sorcerer. That’s who you are.”
I – I –
“You’ve a good heart, Kas, but your soul? Is that what you care about? I don’t think whatever powers granted you your abilities will grant you redemption for using demons like you’re currently using them, but condemn you for simply using them properly.”
Come on, Zel. Being possessed by a fey is one thing, and not strictly advisable, but all the stories say being possessed by a demon –
“Only if you left them awake could they attempt to possess you, and you’re an arch-sorcerer – try it, see how it goes. I’ve only possessed you a few times, and with your consent. If you could control it then you could join with it and then you’d know that it wouldn’t rule your actions.”
The white knight was still glowering. The arch-wizard was still floundering.
I didn’t know how to retort any further, or, more importantly, what to do – so I went with my gut. With my default plan of attack.
“Disappointed, are you?” I cried in Infernal. “Well, you’ve seen nothing yet!”
I stuck out my tongue as I summoned Blodg and Gradagh – or was it Glodb and Graggag? – not twenty feet from him.
The demon didn’t break eye contact with me. Why did it feel like he was smiling?
But when I asked the goblins to imprison the thinfinaran, they both gave me a despairing look.
“Come on, boys! There’s free wine in it for you!”
“Just command them, get it over with!” Zel hissed.
Yet it looked like my offer did the trick – they extended their unbreakable parchment, and then, in a flash, started to encircle the white knight.
The white knight who stood silent and still, implacably staring up at me, as though he were just listening to the Bells and waiting.
Gong! Gong! Gong!
There were the few seconds in which my hopes rose, seeing the way he was bound already, fixed tight in the ever-plentiful material… then there were the few seconds in which those hopes were dashed, as the gods-cursed armour swallowed the parchment, leaving the goblins with two trails that seemed to terminate inside the armour –
They slowed, seeming disarrayed momentarily – perhaps he’d somehow done something to their ability to move in their eerie fashion, but –
He took a handful of parchment on either side and pulled, yanking the goblins in.
And then the thinfinaran was holding my two minions by the throat, one in either hand, hefting my little grey-skinned helpers effortlessly into the air.
There was a moment of consideration, a pause for effect; and then a cold voice rang out from the void behind the bars of the helmet. The words were simple, but they sent a chill shiver through my heart.
“Khashal, ugrel abarax akkar.”
‘Tonight, your city falls.’
Some kind of force rippled through his gauntlets; and then he held nothing but clumps of not-yet disintegrated ashes in his hands.
My goblins fluttered away in a billion pieces.
They – in Materium – they’ll come back from that –
“Yeah, but still, in like two hundred years. Kasssss –“
Okay. Serious-face, officer.
Suddenly the thinfinaran crouched, leaning forwards and putting his hands down, as if to wash his gauntlets in the slime – I looked on as ribbons of blood crept like mould up his armour, thin, red-pink cords lacing their way around his gloves, his bracers, and onto the greaves protecting his forearms. Even as they appeared there, the spatters of red webbing started to fade, disappear, drawn into the demon through the bone-white shell protecting him.
So he was absorbing the blood – absorbing it so that he might open another gate? Had he tired of us so quickly?
Em struck out at him several times in desperation as he hunkered down, but the demon largely ignored her – she staggered him slightly but she wasn’t going to stop him from completing the task at hand.
“Wind!” I cried. “Lift him!”
“I’ve tried zat already!” Well, of course she had. “I can’t even get his feet off ze ground!”
“Flood Boy!” I said even as the little faun stumbled onto the scene in a green flash. “Try to freeze the slush this thing’s standing in! Do not get close to him!“
I was not entirely reassured by the way he staggered, and the way I thought my augmented hearing caught him hiccuping, and muttering, “At last, a real fight,” under his breath.
Beneath a nearby pile of bricks and bodies that had until recently been someone’s home, I could sense the flickering of scarlet flames, heralding the arrival of another fiend. Below ground – in a cellar, perhaps?
I wondered what had come through. Something small, hopefully.
I grasped for something, anything to distract my foe.
When I looked back at the white knight he was still ignoring Em’s blasts, still seemingly digging around in the slime.
Something in me snapped.
It was like a red drape was pulled across the clearing, but the crimson ripples were nothing more than my portals, near-silent scarlet flames coming into view, floating atop the ruddy water.
Flames twenty feet in height.
“Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks! How nice of you to join the party. There’s plenty of entertainment to be found. How about we start by ripping this chap limb from limb?”
My flames faded, revealing the pair of behemoths.
These bintaborax weren’t walls of spiky iron; these were hills. This was the first time I was seeing them since the night I acquired them, and it daunted me to think of how I’d taken them into my service – if it hadn’t worked, if they hadn’t submitted, I’d have been turned into human paste right then and there. The heads at the ends of their hammers were each as big as a dwarf, and probably even heavier.
It daunted me too, to think how quickly I’d broken my secret promise, how quickly I’d started falling back on my demonic arsenal.
“You’re doing the right thing – for everyone. You complete fool…”
Tell me that when this is over.
But there was nothing to be done for it. I had to use them, or I wouldn’t just be letting down the Magisterium – I would be letting down Mund.
They towered above everything in the clearing – would’ve towered above some of the buildings, even if they’d still been standing.
I pointed at the white knight. “Destroy him!”
The thinfinaran didn’t start running immediately, which probably wasn’t a good sign. He solidly planted his two blood-drinking boots in the filth, and waited for them.
He didn’t have to wait long. Whipping their huge orangey warhammers back over their heads, they rushed him, accepting my invitations to battle and closing the distance with startling alacrity.
When the first hammer fell right at his helmeted head, he simply side-stepped, and reached up both hands in the air to catch the second in his palms.
Em didn’t stop pounding away at him, lashing him over and over with lances of energy that left trails of colour in my vision. Flood Boy had a constant beam of ice slamming into his back.
No effect.
The two hands he had on the bintaborax’s hammer seemed to claw into its material – he hadn’t destroyed the weapon outright but I didn’t doubt it’d soon happen. The hammer wept a fiery substance from the grooves his fingers made, splashing down around him and smoking blackly where it fell into the slime.
All the while he continued heedless, increasing the pressure of his clutch on the hammer, expanding the cracks that spread through the demonic metal. His own garb seemed completely impervious to any form of attack.
The bintaborax pulled back on the haft, attempting to release it from the thinfinaran’s grip, but it was a futile effort, despite the bintaborax being nearly three times his height and surely something like thirty times his weight. The feet of the white knight were inexorably fixed to the ground, and he wasn’t letting go now.
The other bintaborax swung again, and again. The one holding the hammer released one of its hands and used it to strike while still pulling back on the shaft, rending at the white knight’s face.
And each time the white knight moved the minimum amount to evade the attack, sometimes twisting to avoid the swipe of a spiky knee or the stomp of a gigantic foot. Barely moving his legs.
I recalled the way he’d pursued Em as she’d retreated from him – always slow, methodical. I had little doubt he had the kind of strength he’d need to hurl himself into the air at her. No, staying in the slime was his victory condition.
I looked over at Em, floating there fifty feet away from me, and caught her eye between the rays of arcing light she was launching.
“He’s a Swamp Hag!”
She stopped, stared at me. “I have tried controlling zis… zis!” She gestured down at the slop. “It von’t respond to me.”
The analogue of the fortify-move you’d make against the Swamp Hag wouldn’t work here…
“Try the ground,” I called. “Drain it!”
With furrowed brows, she stared down at the morass beneath her hovering feet, looking deep in thought.
It barely took ten seconds for the change she’d wrought to make itself evident.
She must’ve opened sinkholes somewhere under the bog, and it was swiftly receding – the infernal slobber had been nearly twelve inches deep in the places where it’d found paths and other indentations in which to well-up, but it was visibly lowering now – eleven inches; ten…
The thinfinaran finally pulled apart the hammer-head he was holding, dark, shredded chunks of metal exploding in a cascade of lava, drenching the bone-white armour.
They kicked and elbowed him, gored at him, threw all their weight at him – every motion missed, every attack evaded. And out of the confusion and ferocity of their assault he ended up clutching the hammer-head of the second bintaborax.
The gauntlets started to bite into the black metal once again. I could sense the sudden hesitation of my bintaborax; I could sense the gloating of the thinfinaran.
The slime, particularly the pool of it around his feet, was half what it’d been a minute ago, but he either hadn’t noticed or didn’t particularly care – I got the impression it was the latter.
I waved a hand, dismissing my nearby summons… those who’d survived, that was. I’d never see my goblins again, and that stung, worse than I’d thought it would. I wasn’t going to risk Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks and especially not Flood Boy.
Green and red lights stole them away from the battlefield, and I drifted towards my enemy.
He looked up, noting my approach, and seemed bemused, cocking his head at me.
“Kas, what are you doing?”
Ending this.
Zel gave me one of her patented you’re-about-to-die sighs.
Now it was Em’s turn to get in on the action – she’d noticed me approaching him, and cried: “Feychilde!”
I flew closer. Closer.
I knew this had to end now. We could leave him there in his gory sludge, letting him summon more and more of his brethren by the minute – or we could clear the sludge, as we were doing, in which case he’d soon lose interest in the two archmages distracting him; he might leave, seek out more blood to spill – or seek ours with his full efforts.
I couldn’t let him go after Em.
At ten feet away he still stood there, unmoving, emptiness watching me from behind the slatted face-guard.
I closed nearer. I could almost sense the tension in Em’s body even from here.
Five feet away, four…
Through the blur I saw as he burst into motion, gauntleted hands slamming out to fix themselves about my throat, take and choke and disintegrate me –
Hands that recoiled from a circle so heavily reinforced I could barely make him out through the whizzing lines surrounding me.
I gave him a slow, sad shake of my head.
“Time to bow,” I said to him.
“I shall crush thee!” he roared, all pretence at superiority suddenly stripped away, his hell-fire anger coming right to the fore.
I watched him clawing at my shields with fingers that’d torn through bintaborax-iron. Watched him clawing at my shields and laughed in his face.
“Ha! Pathetic,” I said, and now when I stared into the darkness behind the bars of his helm he recoiled, turning away, refusing to meet my gaze even as his gloved hands slapped haphazardly against the wall of force protecting me.
Moment by moment I drove him backwards, forcing him to give ground, submit… acquiesce.
And then, he raised his face to mine.
The moment his unseen gaze met my eyes a shudder seemed to pass, not through his invisible flesh, but rather through the armour itself. The white plates shifted uncomfortably. White-enamelled mail shivered. The gauntlets seemed to vibrate nervously.
I felt it, the very moment the connection was made.
“You’re mine,” I said softly.
“I… I…” The cold voice sounded distracted, choked, as though the demon were expending every effort to avoid responding to me.
But those efforts were in vain.
“I am thy bondsman, Master,” he finished lamely.
“Feychilde!” Em cried again, but happily this time, floating up to me. She couldn’t understand his words, but the body language probably made his subservience clear enough.
“Think of everything you could achieve with a thinfinaran! Protection from most elemental attacks, absorption effects…”
Zel sounded extremely pleased as she started wittering on with herself, immediately coming up with ideas for how to use him, how to make the most of him when I joined with him –
I ignored her. “Can you dismiss the things you’ve summoned?”
He only shook his head slowly.
“Then you’re of no use to me. You’re dismissed.”
The explosive dagger was narrow enough that when I stabbed him in the head it completely bypassed the armour, slipping between the bars of his face-plate and expending its charge right in his invisible face.
A whoosh of air and a hollow boom – the rear of his unbreakable helmet contained the explosion, and he toppled backwards onto the ground.
The ground that was now almost slime-free.
I had a moment’s reprieve, and then –
“Couldn’t ve have done something viz it? Zese demons are…”
“Why do you always have to make things so morally-complex? If you…”
“… just like tools, really, aren’t zey? I can…”
“… actually had the guts to try it out, I’m sure you’d find…”
“… see vhy you vouldn’t vant to use it on people but ozzer demons…”
“Ladies!”
Em and Zel both stopped.
“You should know, you’ve got a supporter in here.” I tapped the side of my head, and Em smiled a mischievous smile and gave me a little salute, obviously intended for my onboard fairy. “But it’s not so simple. By Zel’s own accounting, sorcery screws with your soul… I’m not having something like him on my conscience. If he broke my control – at least this way he’s dead, and if he’s coming back it won’t be for a long, long time.”
“Don’t count on it,” Zel growled.
Whatever – he’s not going around killing people in the immediate vicinity anymore, is he? I call that a win.
“Shall ve?” Em asked, pointing towards my new bintaborax, which was currently defending a group of shocked- and bloody-looking people in the centre of the levelled area. My mekkustremin was inbound, two (figuratively) petrified kids under its arms, and it kicked its way through slime-slugs and imps as it crossed the rubble.
“Let’s.”
Infernum might’ve been hot, but the imps that were backing away from the slow swings of my bintaborax’s hammer didn’t survive when Em sent gouts of flame shooting from her hands, roasting them. A wave of heat flowed through the already heated air, and they crumbled into twists of wings and tails within an instant, cremated flesh shivering free of blackened bones and falling as ash into the puddles of gloop.
The ones that tried to flap off into the sky and leave the neighbourhood I pursued, looping them with the diamond-like tesseract I’d fixed to my circle – I flew past them by the dozen and trapped them easily. The diamond let them in, but didn’t let them back out, so I could just swing through a flock of the demonoids and carry them along with me. A seething mess of horns and tail-tips and claws and bat-wings, struggling against my barrier like flies caught in an invisible net, coasting along at my side as I coursed through the hot air.
I dropped them off near Em, half-a-hundred at a time, and let her trap them in miniature tornados before dropping the diamond and heading after the next load.
Em refined their traps, locking a portion of them in ice, ready for my bintaborax to smash and my epheldegrim to chomp; the rest she focussed on turning to charcoal.
Within two minutes we had as many of the survivors as could be seen or heard in the destruction all gathered together, seventy or eighty of them; the demons in this place were controlled or banished; and Avaelar walked among the wounded, applying such healing as he could manage to their injuries.
Em was floating fifteen feet off the ground, away from the crowd, doing the glyphstone-thing; before we rushed off to Hightown, it would be prudent of us to get an update. A part of me hoped it was all over already, that we’d done our part, though I knew that was unlikely to be true. It’d come pretty close, in the end. I was pretty sure the only reason my shield held up to his attacks was because I was worried Em would be high on his next-target-list. And I’d wasted my handsome little explosive dagger, again, already… I’d keep the sheath, and get Em to make at least one more with me as soon as we could manage.
So while she hovered, entranced by the glyphstone, I was standing there near the crowd. Thinking. Listening to the Bells, their pealing continuing, incessant, a constant demand on the senses. Watching my sylph at work, worrying that he wasn’t able to do enough. He was good at keeping people alive – not so good at actually repairing the lacerations riddling their flesh, the mashed bones grinding around in their limbs.
I need better healing.
“We’ll see what we can do, tomorrow.”
If there is a tomorrow.
“One little fight, and now you’re despairing?”
One little fight. She was right.
“And your ‘demonic arsenal’ has got something of a boost, no matter what you think of thinfinaran.”
It was true. I didn’t mind this trio so much, I supposed, admiring my hell-horse, my doll-demon, my new wall of iron. They were essentially standing to attention, all looking back at me expectantly.
I diverted my attention to the crowd.
They didn’t look so kindly on the demons. The ones who weren’t wailing in grief, or rocking back and forth in shock, or screaming about their unhealed stumps… those few were staring at my three new minions.
Staring in absolute terror mingled with absolute loathing. An enmity so complete it chilled me.
I hadn’t been seeing this from their side, not at all. I thought of the entities as pets. They were leashed murderers.
I shuddered involuntarily, and waved at the three of them. A few of the Oldtowners started up in surprise as red flames consumed my murderer-pets.
It was then that a middle-aged woman in a smoke-blackened nightgown, but with no visible injuries, approached me. She stopped ten feet away, then paced a little on the spot as if nervous.
“F-Feychilde!” she called, making it a half-question.
“Madam.” I nodded to her.
“I was… I was there, at Firenight Square. You saved me.”
I couldn’t help but smile a little at that, grim as it might’ve looked. It felt good to know that for all the dead bodies, there was still some measure of success that evening.
“Not alone – she was the one killing the critters.” I pointed over at Em, resplendent in her magister’s robe. I couldn’t take all the credit, even if it meant reinforcing the Magisterium’s role in saving the day when the giant spiders attacked.
But the woman wasn’t interested in Em – she had more pressing concerns.
“Are – are they gone?” She looked around the clearing. There were no more demons in sight – only their smouldering remains, and the odd pool of strange slime here and there.
“I can’t guarantee it, but I’ve done what I can. They shouldn’t be coming back.” I gestured at my sylph and said, “Avvie,” getting his attention, before turning back to her and continuing: “I’ll be leaving soon I think, but I’ll leave my sylph here to protect you until some more magisters or watchmen get through.”
She eyed the seven-foot-tall sylph with a strange mixture of emotions on her face.
“He’s not a demon. He’s not human – but he’s not from the Twelve Hells. You can relax around him. He’s really very polite, but he can protect you.”
Avaelar, regarding us intently, turned and bowed to the woman, his muscles rippling down his legs and back.
“Ah – well – yes, thank you,” the woman breathed, staring at the sylph.
He turned to me, his face sombre, and spoke in the fey tongue.
“Feychilde,” I knew he wanted to say ‘Master’ but I’d forbidden it, “I wish to – wish to speak with thee.” There was a troubled expression lingering about his lips, his eyes.
“You are speaking with me, Avvie.” I used the same tone as I might’ve used when talking with Xastur. “What is it?”
His gaze fell to the floor at my feet. “I apologise.”
“Apologise?” I straightened, looking around at the wounded he’d been tending. “Why?” I heard my voice rise, sharply. “What’ve you done?”
“Nay, Feychilde, ‘tis not regarding these low creatures,” he waved a hand; “I hath done all I might for them, and fewer shall die tonight for mine aid. Rather it is of mine attitude when first we met that I must now speak. In truth I thought thee a knave – not for centuries hath I known a sorcerer akin unto thee.”
I smiled. “So I’m not a… what was it, ‘baseborn scapegrace’, anymore?”
“Thou art surely no scapegrace.”
I regarded him for a moment, doing my best to figure out if he’d just cracked a joke, or if he was so straight-laced he didn’t realise the back-handed compliment he’d just given me.
There was no devious twinkle in his eye, no smirk twisting the corner of his mouth.
I sighed.
“Thank you, noble sylph.”
He nodded, and then assumed a watchful poise, standing tall and turning slowly in a circle, flicking his gaze over the ‘low creatures’ who were now his charges.
At least he’ll make a good watchdog. Can he handle demons on his own, or should I leave Flood Boy here too?
“Unless a big threat comes, he should be okay.”
I drew a shuddering breath. Okay.
Em was coursing back over towards me. I turned to watch her fly closer.
“I’ve told zem vhat’s happened here but zey have great need of assistance in Hightown.” The words were hitting my ears before she even started to slow down. “Four breaches – maybe more.”
“Sticktown?”
“Everyvhere but Hightown is settling down. Ve need to head up zere, fast.”
I nodded, then pushed myself up into the air. “Your spell will stay on me? I’m leaving my wings here.”
Her eyes went unfocussed for just the merest fraction of a second. “I’ve just renewed it. It vill last, and I can do it again if need be.”
I looked down at Avaelar as I rose up into the sky. “Protect them even if it costs you your life,” I called down to him.
He just nodded at me, not even taking his eyes off his surroundings. He was definitely taking his job seriously.
Four breaches. Four more summoners, at least.
If only I’d had less beer and more sleep, I might’ve been excited, given this first victory against the thinfinaran. But a part of me, almost submerged, was screaming that I’d thrown away my explosive dagger again, fighting something that could have torn me limb from limb – the part of me that knew I was emotionally vulnerable right now, exhausted and grieving, running on pure adrenaline. It could’ve all gone wrong, if he’d been able to punch through my circle…
But he hadn’t. I was invulnerable.
Invulnerable.
Not a few of the crowd watched us as we climbed higher, sped faster, tearing away towards the source of the hot wind… the source of the ever-present Bells… the source of the Incursion.
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