OBSIDIAN 3.3: RED RAIN
“There beside the River Wylion the final battle was joined. The archmages Lorquaine and Yisildegrath slew one another in the skies as, far beneath, the wand-armed soldiery met on the field. Thrice the Leopards of Senteli surged forwards, driving in the van the host of fiends they had dared call upon; the legions of undead were destroyed, and the Wort fell back into the trenches, whereupon they were slaughtered most bloodily.”
– from ‘The Latter Mage Wars: A History’, ch. 18
I awoke.
My first thought was that I’d fallen from the sky and landed in bed, but no, that couldn’t have been right. I felt warm and safe and comfortable.
I opened my eyes.
I was in an airy pavilion, a triangle of white canvas lit by globes floating near the apex above me. The radiance of the spellbound balls had been set to a dim level, what with the daylight streaming through the tent fabric all around. The air smelt fresh, and I could hear soft voices, the distant singing of birds.
My fingers gripped the soft bedding beneath me.
My robe. My mask. Everything still in place.
How…?
I should’ve been a corpse. Or, at least, I should’ve been paralysed, or wracked with agonies. But as it was, all I could feel was a weakness in my legs. There was the odd jolt in first one leg and then the other, a clamp of pain taking hold of me somewhere around my heel, making me curl my toes, tense up my calf muscles as it trickled upwards, shooting slowly towards my knees…
But I could sit up, see, think… The pain was little more than an irritation.
I cast about myself – there were about two dozen low to the ground, wood-framed beds in the pavilion, each with thick white mattresses and woollen blankets, and a white canvas partition at the other end of the tent. Most of the beds were occupied with magisters but there were other champions too, going off the masks and the lack of Magisterium sigils on their robes – most were lying in repose, but some were sitting up quietly, and one turned his or her face towards me –
I turned my head away, looked farther to my right – the bed next to me on that side was empty – I looked back, to my left –
I immediately forgot my own condition – I surged from the bed, staggering, falling onto the edge of the bed next to mine.
My fingers took Em’s, lacing our hands together, as I knelt up beside her.
“Em!” I wanted to take her shoulder and shake her but my hand froze halfway there, the realisation burning into my brain that I had no idea how damaged she was, what was actually wrong with her – I could make things ten times worse with such a simple action, such a simple mistake –
As if I held a hot iron I quickly let go of her hand, hoping that I hadn’t already made things worse.
Lord Suffering…
But no, there were no gods to blame for this, save perhaps for Mekesta, who’d allegedly spawned the forebears of the demons many ages past; but no one sent the demons. They had come of their own accord. And we had sent them back, casting them out with our own power.
It’d been good to play my part in defending against the Incursion, but I’d been taken out too early. Two summoners, that was all I’d stopped.
I almost wished I’d had more of a chance to slay demons, now they’d done this.
“Em,” I said more softly, “I’m here. It’s me. Can you wake up? Can you hear me? Why don’t you open your eyes, tell me you can hear me, eh?”
Her parents. I’d promised Atar and Linn that I’d keep her safe. And now… this.
“What… what happened to you, Em? Can you hear me? Please tell me you can hear me.”
A highborn voice, young and masculine, came from behind me: “Hm, well, she shouldn’t be able to tell you she can hear you yet, Feychilde, see, she’s still asleep, and I don’t know how things work where you come from but here sleeping people don’t usually tend to answer questions like that, though, hm, sometimes they do, so –“
I turned to see Nighteye right there at the foot of Em’s bed, his dark-green, short-sleeved robes now clean of mud, the gold avian eyes on his robe clearly visible. He was speaking from behind the same owl’s-beak mask he’d been wearing when he’d ended my episode as a rat.
“– maybe you could carry on, but you could just wait for her to wake up, which should be in, hm, eighteen minutes or so –“
“Nighteye!”
I was so glad to see him, so glad to hear his words – it explained so much of what’d happened since my fall – I actually teetered up on my feet and threw my arms around him in a hug.
“My good man!” He seemed momentarily at a loss for words, and then, “You really shouldn’t be up out of bed yet, you do heal awfully well for a human, but, it’s going to be, hm, at least another twenty minutes before you can walk again, and if I could prevail upon you to spend the next twenty-four hours in bed I’d –“
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Okay? Oh yes, you aren’t to know, are you? – she’s fine, not even scarred, don’t you go worrying yourself! Lucky she had that, hm, healing philtre. Just a spot of blood loss, she was only technically dead for a minute or two – not real ‘death’ death, you know – it was nothing I couldn’t replace in a jiffy…”
I broke off the embrace, breathing deep as I lowered myself back onto my bed, half-turned so that I could still watch Em.
She died?
“Your mask is still in one piece,” he was saying, “but your robe’s rather ripped I’m afraid – got caught on some rubble, Starsight said, and he needed to get you free –“
I looked down, checking out the long tear up the right side of the robe. It was barely enough to expose my trousers.
It didn’t matter one bit, anyway. I was getting a new one soon enough.
“– and that funny Ilitar fellow was here when you came in, and he told them to place you in the bed beside her – I gather, hm, you know her? – and you –“
“How long was I here?” I interrupted. “Out, I mean? Unconscious? I already feel like I’ve had twenty-four hours in bed.”
“That’s my magic,” he said smoothly, “but I’d say you were actually unconscious only for three or four minutes – Starsight was able to deliver you – what was left of you, haha – here very quickly – and I put you asleep for, hm,” he looked up as if trying to remember, “about fifteen minutes, while I worked on your bones…”
A cold feeling settled in my stomach.
Zel! Are you there?
“Kas! Oh Kas – you are alive. I thought so.”
You were banished?
“Twelve Hells, what happened?”
I think Nighteye’s fixed me. What’s going on out there?
“I… ah, you mean beyond the wall of enchantments? It’s hard to say for sure.”
That was enough to confirm it for me.
“… didn’t think that there’d be enough beds, but – what do you know? – we only had fourteen survivors to deal with, the rest were, hm, rather too flattened for me to h-“
“Nighteye, is the Incursion still going on?”
He looked at me blankly. “Still going on? Why, yes, of course –“
I started to rise.
“But you can’t walk, you certainly can’t run, and –“
I manifested my wings.
“I can fly,” I grated.
* * *
It was difficult to use these fey wings to hover above the ground, but Nighteye was quite right – standing without any support for more than a few seconds quickly exacerbated the pain I’d been feeling in my lower legs, and walking more than three steps was out of the question. So it was that I was forced to fly out through the pavilion opening, beating my wings rapidly and minutely, moving as carefully as I was able.
The arch-druid strode beside me, looking at me dubiously. I very much doubted the healer wanted a patient up and about before he could stand steady on his own two feet, but it wasn’t like Nighteye was getting much of a choice in the matter.
Using just two wings for lateral movement, I slipped through the parting between the fabric-flaps that served as the screen at the end of the tent. The moment I crossed the threshold, I must’ve passed through the enchantments keeping us tranquil while we recovered. It was then that it hit me.
We were in the open porch of the pavilion, right on the edge of the battle.
Gong! Gong! Gong!
Fires rose up everywhere in front of me, the kind that spewed smoke and the kind that spewed demons. Waterspouts from bands of magister-wizards soon dealt with the first, but the latter were not so easily dispatched. Roseoak, whatever this place had been before, was now a stony field of blood, lit by light-balls and radiance-spells set in place to aid those mages with need for them.
Archmages all had their different ways of seeing in the dark, I suspected.
I looked up first, marvelling despite the dire situation – here in the pavilion we were shielded by a blue dome of force not altogether unlike the one that protected the Maginox, though far, far smaller.
How – who –
It was a sorcerous barrier of such force that it looked tangible to my sorcerer’s-eye. Doubtless invisible to others, but to me…
“Why am I guessing Dustbringer?” Zel commented.
Ranks of skeletal warriors stood completely motionless, their backs to us, forming a defensive wall. There had to be two hundred of them, kitted-out with real equipment – swords that were sharpened and gleaming, not rusted; padded armour and mail that had none of the signs of the grave. They wore identical heavy iron helmets. I supposed their heads were their weak-spots.
Beyond them, Mother-Chaos reigned.
The diameter of the affected area had doubled since I was last here. There had to be more than a dozen neighbourhoods under attack now.
Attack was too weak a word for what they were doing. This was bombardment. I couldn’t have counted the amount of towers that’d been toppled, trampled under fiery feet into cinders.
Some demons were eating magisters whole, while others were chopping them up first. There were demons that seemed altogether disinterested in killing right away, and were instead puppeteering whole groups of mages, their prisoners’ faces devoid of expression as they mouthed incantations and aimed wands, raining death down on their colleagues.
Their faces might’ve been blank, but their eyes were wide in horror.
Yet there was cause for hope: I could see the champions at work. The enchanters were probably all busy – I couldn’t see Neverwish, and I hoped he’d made it out of Upper Tivertain in one piece – but some of the others were all-too-visible.
A druid had changed themselves into a white-furred wolf at least sixty or seventy feet at the shoulder. There wasn’t a demon that could do significant damage to the giant beast, seemingly, and the druid was getting their own back on the hell-spawn in like fashion: chewing them up by the dozens.
Timesnatcher in his black robe with its white hourglasses, each with a different level of sand; Lightblind in her white robe with its black eyelashes, the sigil of a closed eye – the two arch-diviners fought back-to-back in a whirling flurry of ensorcelled steel that simply didn’t stop, careening across the battlefield unimpeded by any obstacle. They flitted up the impossible ramps made by the spilled innards of buildings, slicing hordes of demons into piles of crumbling parts, moving like the scythed wheel of a chariot with a life and violent will all of its own.
When they reached a creature they couldn’t slay, one of the rolling hills of fat that swallowed men alive, I saw Winterprince soar past them. He was moving at an uncanny speed, clearly operating under the effects of a diviner’s chronomantic field – the icy wizard fixed the demon in place with the sudden conjuration of a vast wall of ice, ice that kept growing, appearing out of nowhere to form a great vault over the demon. Once it was completely covered, he watched it for a moment, futilely thrusting its vile tongue against the freezing dome… then, as he flew off, darting towards his next target, he nonchalantly waved a huge fist at the demon –
Instantly it was pierced with a hundred icicle-spears, growing down simultaneously from the inside of the barrier.
Dustbringer’s legions walked behind him through the chaos, the powers of his spectres just as lethal to the creatures of Infernum as they were to creatures of the Material Plane. Starsight’s daggers blazed. Shadowcloud’s lightning disintegrated foe after foe. Smouldervein’s sword of living fire, more whip than blade, could not be withstood.
Even the mage-champions were here – I spotted the Binding Brothers in their matching masks that looked like five big chain-links arranged in a loop, erecting barriers on the southern edge of the battle. The Rainbow’s Edge, the seven mages who’d apparently all studied different aspects of their mageries, were fighting near them – I could only see Red, Yellow and Indigo; I guessed their druids were off somewhere healing, and so on…
They were not the only lesser healers who’d shown their faces. The Sisterhood of Wythyldwyn were out in force, half the sisters protecting the other half with hammer and shield as they went to lay their hands on the injured, sealing open wounds and easing pain. And the servants of other deities were thick of the fray too – most visible were the Knights of Kultemeren clad in burnished armour. They were devotees of an ancient sect who were sworn to everlasting silence, now laying about themselves with broadswords that glimmered with a pallid radiance, their fervour palpable even from here.
It was Redgate who most caught my attention, though.
He was over to the north, a crimson-shrouded figure with the face of a spider, floating seemingly-unaided through the melee. The sorcerer was preceded into battle by a host of thirty or more big demons, no more than two alike – I saw a pair of white-armoured thinfinaran at his sides, a couple of yithandreng serving as their mounts, flanking him as he hovered along, like his honour-guard. But there was no way he was going to be under attack anytime soon. Whenever he left the protection of his nearest and dearest eldritches, it was because something in the crowd seemed to catch his eye – even as I watched he soared over to the front-line of his fighters and bound a new demon, some kind of two-headed lion that appeared to have taken his fancy.
So Redgate was awesome.
There were a dozen or more other champions – some still just arriving to the confrontation, looking fresh as they waded into combat – but none looked so fearsome as he.
The perimeter was being covered, at least for now, but as I looked out across the battleground I could easily pick out three of the Incursion’s summoners. Shadowcloud had been hurling lightning at an unbound thinfinaran, to little effect, but Dustbringer and his legions were on their way, scything through whole hosts of demons. There was a beautiful woman standing in the midst of the destruction, screaming, howling at the top of her lungs – she would’ve looked like a victim of the demons in her torn clothes and with her ravaged visage, were it not for the fact that, as she wailed and wept, the blood of the fallen was coursing towards her over the rubble, running up her skin, rivulets of redness streaming over her pale flesh and into her eyes, her nose, her mouth.
Redgate was the closest to her. Perhaps I’d just let him handle that one…
The third summoner I could see was a stick-man, quite literally. Its body was a single black rod six or more feet in length, and its limbs were made from the same material – it had no apparent head, and it teetered and tottered like a drunk, staggering about the place seemingly aimlessly, waving its long, rigid arms. I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was a summoner if it hadn’t been leaving red flames shooting up out of the slime-puddles in its wake.
No arch-sorcerers near it. I guessed that was my target.
“You’ll stay with her?”
“The magister?” Nighteye replied, looking at me curiously. “Of course, hm, that’s my job – strictly on healing duty, after, hm, last time…”
There was a part of me that wanted to stay. I was injured, I could sit with Nighteye in the healer’s pavilion, listen to him ramble on as I waited at Em’s bedside for her to awaken… forget the Incursion, I’d done my part…
But I knew I couldn’t. Couldn’t leave the job half done. Couldn’t abandon Mund, abandon Mundians, to the mercy of these foul creatures. Even if I only saved one more life, it’d be worth my every effort.
There was some part of me that recognised I was thinking like that because I couldn’t bear the thought of a champion thinking any other way, especially if that champion had been sent to Sticktown, had been sent to protect my loved ones…
“… but you aren’t going back out there, hm… You shouldn’t, Feychilde, they –”
“When the magister wakes up, tell her I’m sorry… Tell her, I had to get back to work.”
I saluted the spluttering druid as I soared away with a single flap of the sylph’s powerful wings.
I speared at the stick-man, not casting a backwards glance.
It was doing its level best to reduce a regiment of skeletal warriors to a pile of old bones, and it was enjoying a fair bit of success from the looks of things – the area looked like a dire mole had just exhumed an entire graveyard’s worth of corpses onto the ground. The earth was bursting with tongues of red fire and hordes of scuttling imps.
The stick-man was a massively-overpowering threat – a single kick from its thin but heavy leg was enough to wreck a whole column of skeletons, smashing the one in front into those behind and leaving none of them so much as twitching where they lay in pieces. Its swinging arms weren’t fast but its opponents possessed neither the reflexes nor the musculature requisite to evade its swipes. Then they had a small army of imps to deal with on top of that. The skellies weren’t going to last long.
Not that any of us were going to be complaining – the skeletons were doing what they were summoned for, taking the blows, diverting the attention of the demons from those who still had some internal organs left. Even in death (undeath? no, re-death) the skeletons were playing their part.
Now it was my turn.
I came up closer to it, gazing down upon it.
Rank?
“Fifth. Nabburatiim.”
Nabburatiim, I’ve heard of these. They lie down in the dark, pretending to be pieces of wood, then ambush passers-by?
“That’s the one.”
Does it have eyes?
If it was going to ambush people, it’d have to have some way of knowing they were there…
Just then, its ‘head’ (or at least the top end of the vertical ‘body’ stick – completely indistinguishable from its ‘foot’ or ‘hand’ except by its position) tilted towards me.
“You tell me.”
It was staring back at me, a hundred percent.
Eerie. It was a big black stick, but it was staring at me, and I could feel it.
I maintained my gaze – perhaps even glared.
It suddenly lifted its arm, and swung its hand right through the space I’d just been occupying. A brief burst of activity from my wings took me all-too-high into the air, and I had to control my descent again, hovering now just a little farther from my enemy.
I had my reinforced circle up, fingers moving by instinct from the moment I’d left the tent, but I had to know that I could move by instinct with the wings. This was good practice.
While it was distracted by me, skeletons hacked at its metal-hard legs with their dull blades – these summons weren’t outfitted with proper gear like Dustbringer’s – and achieved nothing more than breaking their weapons on the black substance.
It was still meeting my gaze with its featureless thin face, spinning in a little circle and wheeling its arms at me. I slid out of the way. All the while, it traced scarlet flames across the pools of filth that mired this section of the battlefield, dozens and dozens of imps spawning at its feet.
It wasn’t going to give in easily. My power – was at its limit?
“I suspect you may be out of room for now, Kas.”
That’s a very cup-half-empty way of looking at it.
I realised what I’d done before my… swift sky exit… back in Upper Tivertain.
A reminder that my capacity for new demons was low was in itself nothing more than a reminder that I had so many I could bring to bear. When I checked with my inbuilt sorcerous instincts I could feel them there, see them.
Hundreds of them.
“I’m sorry, no vacancies,” I told the stick-man, slipping away from another clumsy strike. “You’re gonna have to get banished the painful way. Painfuller?”
It ‘looked’ at me blankly.
“Whatever.”
Bit by bit I summoned them – I didn’t want to get so weak I’d pass out, and if I now summoned my entire retinue I had the feeling it would hit me twice as hard. And to think I’d wondered at first why I couldn’t take the nabburatiim on as my minion, when Zel had instructed me to take four rhimbelkina just moments before my… sudden course-change.
Firstly, “Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks! Come cuddle a stick.”
The bintaborax held its arms and legs instead of their hammers, splaying the demon out.
Then, “Let’s up the ante, with Aunty Antlers!”
The ikistadreng cast me what looked like an amused, sidelong glance – it was hard to tell, what with the strange, blurry red fur covering its body – then sprang down head-first upon the pinned nabburatiim, shattering it into twigs with the sound of rending metal.
I looked down at the teeming sea of imps it’d spawned in its last moments, sandwiched now between the remaining lines of skeletons, the towering demons I controlled, and me, the winged, masked, simply unbearable arch-sorcerer.
Lastly, “My legion.”
I let my lesser fiends loose.
Men with the faces of dogs, red eyes aglow, biting with their maws as much as they clubbed with the crude, improvised weapons they carried – chair-legs, bricks, cutlery. Huge, leathery-winged bats with heads at both ends and no legs; they had no eyes in their twin faces, just nostrils and a wide, fang-lined hole.
And my imps and folkababil, my flock of birds.
That was what I’d been forgetting – binding well over a hundred things to my will just before I…
Before I fell.
My legion tore the unbound imps apart, and after a few choice commands from their master went off looking for bigger prey.
My forces spilled out across the battle, contributing to the vast, varied slew of attacks that was now somehow stemming the tide of unbound demons.
We were winning.
I saw another summoner, a thin man who ran around laughing with his entrails endlessly pouring out through a savage rip across his torso. Already there was far too much intestine draped around the surrounding landscape for any mortal to have produced, yet he kept on running, kept on laughing, his innards kept on pouring. And from time to time, another demon came tearing out of his midriff fully-formed, a fact that just seemed to make the laughing-man laugh harder.
I whipped about in pursuit of him, crushing those he’d spawned before they managed to get their bearings. He passed right beneath the seventy-foot-tall druid-wolf, and I had to tuck in my wings and twist them as I barrelled between the druid’s huge forelegs, snatching up the gang of imps he’d spawned in the process.
Out the other side, I caught up. This time the demon – an atiimogrix, apparently – gave in almost instantly, falling into line as one of my bound demons and being dismissed without resistance.
That could only mean I’d already, permanently or at least semi-permanently, lost some of my troops.
Not that this was entirely undesirable – I was Feychilde, not Hellchilde, after all – nor altogether unexpected, as they were fighting demons that were their peers in potency. I saw from afar that Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks and Aunty Antlers were doing fine, each currently taking on a different target. They’d found things close to their own sizes to pick on, and didn’t look to be letting up any time soon.
I left to catch another summoner, a strange rolling ball of hair and nails the size of a horse, with a tree shaped of rust on top – when I came back to see how they were getting on I witnessed a panicked magister throwing a bolt of lightning at one of the bintaborax, thinking it a foe, its onrushing steps a threat.
The unarmed bintaborax took the blast in the chest; the electricity merely crackled between its spikes, and it kept on coming –
The magister-wizard backed away, spreading his hands in a desperate warding gesture, completely bereft of magical intention but entirely human, given the situation he thought he was in –
My bintaborax arrived barely in time to intercept the spiky demon that was about to eviscerate the magister from behind, a hammer forming out of the air to smash the jagged demon’s trident into lava-like sludge.
“Feychilde.”
“Neverwish! You made it.”
“Hold on. I’m linking you up, Timesnatcher.”
“I’m Feychilde…”
“Good evening, Feychilde.” A new voice – rich and rolling, somehow familiar. “I’m Timesnatcher. In about ninety seconds something really big’s coming through. Titan-class. Maybe eighteenth rank.”
He knew his sorcery, it seemed, for an arch-diviner – and eighteenth rank sounded way beyond my capabilities.
“Yeah, drop on that,” Zel observed.
“Leafcloak’s going to pin it.” I cast my gaze upwards at the looming form of the titanic wolf-druid. “She’ll keep it busy. I’m getting Redgate and Netherhame to hem it in. Dustbringer, Shallowlie and Direcrown are going to hold the perimeter. I want you front and centre – not to fight, but to watch. We’ve long-since learned that the Incursion is the best training-ground. Keep a close eye – your sorcerer’s–eye – on what they do.”
“I – I’ll do my best?”
How big did he mean?
“I’m sure you will,” Timesnatcher returned. “You’ve performed admirably already. Keep it together for the last act, yeah?”
The last act. Okay.
I started yelling in Infernal at my minions, drifting here and there (protected from any number of projectile attacks by my shield), marshalling them into a single force. I shepherded them towards the pale shape of the towering wolf, her flanks gleaming in the mingled moonlight and spell-flame. They followed.
And those they met were left as pulp and bone in their wake.
Two bintaborax, one ikistadreng, and thirty miniature minions. That’d have to do for now. I wanted to keep my wits about me and I was starting to feel the weight of my fatigue again, something miraculously alleviated by Nighteye’s ministrations that was only now returning. I no longer felt like I’d had twenty-four hours sleep – I felt like I’d had no sleep for days and nearly died and then went straight back to fighting.
This time when the red flames erupted, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
A circle of blood near the centre of the battlefield rose up, up, like a wall of deep red wine. A hill, a mountain of crimson that resolved itself into a thousand tongues of hell-fire, flickering, pulsing skyward.
It didn’t quite match the wolf-shaped Leafcloak in height, when it appeared, but it had to be close.
The behemoth wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Not humanoid; not even bestial. It resembled more a piece of internal architecture, the struts and bars that could be found supporting the roof of some colossal structure. But it was alive, ever-shifting, a complex web of metal poles – some thicker than my body, some thinner than my fingers. Even as I watched, it rolled, screeched, clanged, and rearranged itself, forming several limbs – three massive metal-mesh arms, and four legs, or six if you counted the free-swinging ones that weren’t planted in the rubble, resembling tails more than anything else.
Before the red flames even vanished Leafcloak plunged forwards, taking hold of one of the arms in her giant mouth, clenching down on the metal with her teeth.
The high-pitched squeal of bone on steel filled the smoke-choked air.
She yanked back, straining, drawing on the strength of the titanic wolf-shape to pull the behemoth off-balance – but she failed, her pale paws digging into the ruins again and again as she desperately tugged, trying to leverage her superior stature.
It was to no avail. Perhaps the titan-demon had absolute control over its weird body and its positioning through some eldritch power; perhaps it was simply too heavy to lift. Whether the explanation was something supernatural or something mundane, she couldn’t pull it hard enough to make its legs move one inch.
But it didn’t matter. Leafcloak had restricted its initial movement, preventing it from leaping away or committing whatever other nefarious deed it was planning – and now Redgate and Netherhame were there, floating around it in a clockwise circle, their hands working on barriers. Redgate’s method of flight was still unfathomable to me – he had no wings, no stream of wind, nothing I could see – but Netherhame was drifting ghostlike through the air, her flesh and robe semi-transparent and purplish.
Semi-transparent or not, the barriers she wove were as real as any others I’d seen. As they built a sphere around the demon I could already see its flailing arms being impeded, its movements halted.
They completed the barrier in front of Leafcloak and the druid released her clamp on its arm, stepping back softly on padding paws that still shook the ground with each footfall.
I hovered closer, studying the shield. They were working together – I could see the threads of force where one arch-sorcerer left them dangling in the air or threw them, only to be taken up, connected and reconnected to others by their colleague. Within seconds there was a vast spider’s-web of impenetrable blue lines surrounding the demon. It built up, up and out, in an almost honeycomb-pattern.
I stared at the beautiful creation, trying my utmost to drink it all in.
And I saw the impenetrable blue lines waver, wobble and dim as the demon struck them.
“Feychilde is linked to you,” Neverwish said in my head.
It was a female, Netherhame I assumed, whose voice came through next: “We need Dustbringer, not some newbie. No offence, Feychilde.”
“None taken. I can barely follow what you’re doing.”
Netherhame again: “This is hitting the weave really hard, Timesnatcher. It’s going to break through any moment.”
“We’re trying to help Smouldervein. Wait.”
I could see threads of force that they simply weren’t quick enough to link together, and I flapped hard a couple of times whilst maintaining my upright position, trying to come closer to the huge demon.
But I overdid it, shooting up into the sky.
I hurtled up, suddenly feeling uncomfortable, sick, like last Fullday night when I’d flown with Em for the first time.
Then the gruff voice of Dustbringer, of Endren Solosto: “I’m here.”
It was like he’d spoken in my ear, disorienting me – I cast about, and the motion of my head was dizzying.
I could see everything. Too much detail.
A full band of magisters being eaten by a fifteen-foot cyclops, their shields shattered, defences scattered. One of the Binding Brothers being ripped in two across the diaphragm, imps at either end of him, wrenching and chortling. Smouldervein being rapidly disintegrated by what looked like a dancing old man in rags, alternating rays of white and red light shooting out of the rag-man’s hands, withering the champion away to nothing.
“I’m trying to help, you know. Shut your eyes and breathe.”
Shut… my eyes!
“Just focus on one thing then. Look for Dust-”
Heals were landing on Smouldervein – I could see the arch-druid responsible, wreathing the wizard in green light – but it did no good. Smouldervein became dust.
It was too late. Bile rose in my throat.
Glad that my mask didn’t cover my mouth like my scarf had, I emptied my stomach, even while I floated.
And in that moment I lost control of the wings.
“Feychilde? Something’s going to happen to Feychilde too!”
Timesnatcher only made it worse.
This time when I… I descended… it was all my fault.
And when the huge talons of a giant eagle caught me, ten feet from impact into demons and rubble, slashing into my back and saving my life, it was like I was a rat again, a rat in the grip of an owl.
* * *
Nighteye’s brow furrowed beneath the brim of his hood as he stared down at me with what must’ve been a stern expression. “You really have to stop making a habit of this,” he said, the moment he saw I’d awoken and was watching him, my head on its side, “you have absolutely no idea how exasperating it is to have to see to the same patient more than once in the same battle – a few months off, sure, maybe you forget what it’s like to nearly die – but fifteen minutes? Smouldervein’s dead, and if Leafcloak hadn’t caught you –“
“Nighteye, that’s quite enough,” came another voice from my other side, matronly, warm.
“I’m sorry, Leafcloak, I was just about to get to the fact that he –“
“I’ll take over here.”
There was a shuffling sound as someone crossed the pavilion, heading towards Nighteye: Leafcloak marched into view.
She was white-haired – the kind that came with age – and masked with what looked like oak-tree leaves in different states of decay, arranged to cover most of her face. Her mouth and chin were clear, but other than that the mask left only the slits for her to see through. Her frame was plump and short, her chest on the overly-heavy side, all fastened tightly into a clingy green robe. The robe itself had clearly been a luxury item once upon a time, its hue scintillating between different shades, like a strip of grass blowing in the breeze; but it was frayed at every hem at skirts and cuffs, patched and re-patched in various places with other (plainly lesser-quality) cloth.
She put a hand on Nighteye’s arm. “Go fix Osselor – he’ll need two new eyes, thank you.”
I shuddered. Shivered. Lying there with my head on its side, staring in the same direction, not wanting to turn to look at the man she was talking about.
Nighteye strode out of my line of sight, protesting in an endless stream of inflections under his breath as he went on his way.
“There is nothing medically wrong with you,” the old arch-druidess said once she’d seated herself on the empty bed next to me, “aside from a touch of exhaustion. I think you need the help of an enchanter or a minister, truth be told, rather than a child of the Earth.”
I righted my head, shut my eyes. I knew there was nothing medically wrong with me. They’d clearly reenergised me again – I felt fine, bodily.
“You fell. Twice, in the span of an hour. If I didn’t already know better – it was you chasing that thing through my legs, wasn’t it? – I’d say you needed more practice.”
I could feel the weight of her leaf-framed gaze even with my eyes closed.
“So instead I’m saying you need help. You –”
“Where is Em?” I asked. My voice sounded level enough to my ears.
“You mean Emrelet Reyd.” I could hear the smile on her lips. “You seem to spend a lot of time with that magister, don’t you, young man?”
I opened my eyes, turned to look at her. “I’m committed to becoming a champion. I’m not joining the Magisterium. I…” My eyes went to the bedding, tracing the faint lines on the fine white linens. “She can help me fly.”
“But you’re quite capable of flying yourself, aren’t you?” I opened my mouth to protest, but she raised a grimy finger to shush me. “Oh, I quite understand. I was young too, once. Just because I’m the oldest human champion in the city doesn’t mean I didn’t have a dalliance or two back in the day.”
You’re only oldest because you retired, more than once, I wanted to say.
Her smile was sympathetic. “She’s the one who can help you. I do follow.”
I couldn’t say it.
“Just… where is she?”
“She was getting up just as I brought you in -“
I sat, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and started calling on my wings.
“Don’t make me tie you down.” Threats were incongruous with her mothering tone, and all the more terrifying for it. I almost froze. “I can and will, but don’t make me.”
“She’s right.”
Zel, you’re still here?
“You didn’t get very hurt, this time. Your robe and tunic are shredded across the back too, now, by the way.”
“Leafcloak, I’m truly grateful to you for saving my life. I failed.” This time it was her opening her mouth to interject and me holding up a finger. “I failed. I won’t fly up high again. I promise. But.” I drew in a shuddering breath. “Don’t make me defend myself. I can and will, but don’t you make me. I at least need to see it. You can’t just leave me here listening to the fake birds singing while I know what’s going on right there!” I jabbed my hand at the canvas wall at the front of the tent. “I won’t try to help, but I’ve got to understand…”
Damn it, what did they call it?
“The weave?”
“… the weave! I’ll never get a better chance to see it -“
“Don’t be silly!” she said with a snort, clapping both hands down onto her knees. “We’ll get you a tutor, when the moon’s full. I take it that Nighteye or Dustbringer…?”
I met her gaze, then sighed. “Nighteye told me.”
“Good, good. I’ll permit you into the porch to watch – no flying off, or I will force you to defend yourself.”
No sooner had the words left her lips, I was standing up. The pain was almost gone, just the odd sharp twist in my ankles remaining – but I kept my wings out as I walked towards the entrance just in case. As I went past Nighteye, where he bent over a magister’s maimed face, I murmured, “I’ll try not to exasperate you so badly in future, my friend. Thank you.”
He looked up and gave me a nod, but he was tapping his foot as though he were still annoyed, or nervous, or something.
Then I was out in the protected porch once more. I looked out over the iron-helmed skulls of the skeletal warriors, staring into the sky.
Due to Zel I could spot Em within seconds, lightning-lit, platinum hair tempest-swept.
There was a ring of wizards and sorcerers in the air, others under the effects of flight-spells too. The few magisters still in the fight must’ve been archmages. The lot of them were throwing everything they had at the shield-enclosed, living-metal behemoth. Frozen struts of iron were struck by explosive missiles, and the rubble at its feet coalesced into an army of earthen elementals which aided the waves of bound demons piling onto it. The summons had been set to climbing the massive demon’s lattice-like structure, tearing at its weak points with fingers of brick, warping its steely supports with infernal power.
And the barrier-weave still held – Dustbringer was there, soaring around as fast as his Nethermist-shrouded chariot would carry him, helping to fix the lines of force the very moment they were damaged.
The behemoth, for what it was worth, hadn’t given up. It tore through the earth elementals as if they were comprised of dust, and only the very hardiest of the sorcerers’ demons fared any better. Its thrashing blows came simultaneously against various edges of the shield-weave, and seemed to slow the lines’ rotations where it struck them so that they ended up crumpling, the forces folding up into a distorted mess that took the focus of multiple sorcerers to iron out.
Suddenly the skeletons in front of the pavilion, right before me, were engaged in combat. The back ranks were just yards away, occluding the front lines, but I could hear the undead soldiers clanking as they fell to pieces, too slow to respond as swift-moving hell-spawn came clawing and gnashing at them. I even heard the pops of explosions, the screeching of shredded bone.
There were fewer now standing than when I’d last been here, and I worried they might fail to outlast whatever was killing (re-killing) them. We didn’t want to have demons pushing directly against the powerful shield Dustbringer had put over the healing station, surely…
I had a suspicion I’d be able to reanimate the broken bones of the fallen, make them put themselves back together, but I didn’t want to exert my influence over them – largely because I didn’t want to get on Dustbringer’s bad side if I did manage to pull it off. It would mean wresting control of them from him…
I looked across at Leafcloak. “Are you going to help them, or can I go up ten feet just to take a look?” I inclined my head towards the skeletal warriors.
She met my eyes. “Ten feet only, young man. Any higher, I bring you back down to earth the hard way, and you’ll fight again when it’s night in the Twelve Heavens.”
I don’t think you can match my speed in your bird form, I thought as I ascended softly, using just the merest twitch of my lower wings.
“She could just turn right back into that massive wolf, though, and almost instantly she’d be tall enough to catch you between her teeth.”
Maybe.
I looked out at the front rank of the skeletons.
A thinfinaran was there, a host of chest-high, flat-horned fiends at his back. And as I reached the angle of elevation required for me to see him, he raised his empty white helm to me, crying out: “Zi nissel grel – khashal, ugrel abarax akkar!”
He didn’t exactly look happy to see me, and his voice had something of a desperate quality to it. He was trying to break out of the perimeter, after all, and knowing he’d ended up losing at the end of our last encounter couldn’t have exactly been filling him with confidence.
But it was him, definitely him. Still thinking the city was going to fall tonight.
“You’re still wrong!” I yelled back at him.
He’s been reborn already?
“He must have friends in high places.”
Low places.
“You know what I mean.”
I looked down at Leafcloak. “You’ve got a thinfinaran coming, the white-knight variety of demon. Summoner. You know the one?”
“The one with the gauntlets. Yes.”
It looked like she frowned, then she was a small hummingbird in less than the blink of an eye. She flapped up to my level, looking out on the tenth-rank foe.
“I’ll deal with this,” she said in an almost sing-song voice.
“Are you sure? I could just saunter over there – I’ve met him before, but this time I could properly bind him for a bit, and you –“
I tried to scrutinise her body-language as she suddenly circled back down to land again in the pavilion’s porch; even after she reverted to human form, saying nothing to me, it was impossible.
Perhaps she was consenting?
I looked out again over the melee, but the thinfinaran was nowhere to be seen. The tide of the battle had suddenly turned, the skeletons pouring over their prone enemies, their swords thrusting mindlessly into hell-flesh bodies.
They were on the ground – all of the demons, in the rubble. It took me a few moments to spot how they were being held down, pulled down, by meshes of roots and shoots that had seemingly sprung up out of nowhere.
I landed next to Leafcloak. “You’re not going to kill a thinfinaran with some plants you’ve just conjured out of nowhere! I –“
“Young man, do you think this is the first time I’ve stepped into the arena?” The aged arch-druid sounded amused. “I set those plants there under the ground before we even set up the tent. As though we druids would take no precautions of our own, and trust instead to the fortifications of sorcery! As –“
“But the thinfin-”
“As for the thinfinaran, you must understand –” Leafcloak approached the back-line of the skeletons, facing away from me – twists and snarls of roots came threading between the legs of the undead soldiers, carrying something through the ranks “– that I’ve been fighting them since before you were born.”
She retrieved whatever it was the roots had been carrying to her, then turned back to me, hefting the items up for me to see.
My jaw dropped suitably.
“They’re basically powerless without their gauntlets, and they can’t just make more on this plane.”
She tossed the two massive white-metal gloves to the ground between us, where they fell with a pair of tremendous, clattering thuds.
Even just hearing their weight, I had to wonder at the strength Leafcloak had in her plump, little-old-woman frame. I doubted I’d have been able to lift one glove with both hands, and suspected it’d take a muscle-bound man to do much better. Hefting both at once…
She was using archmagery, her fine control over her own musculature, to cheat. That was what the heretic druid in Firenight Square had been doing when she’d used her bare hand to rend stone.
Interesting.
I went back to watching the fight against the –
“Smikelliol. I’m sorry, I know you’re fed up of the names, but I’m just as fed up of watching you flounder.”
Smikelliol. Thank you, Zel. And thanks for, for earlier. Making me summon Avaelar. I wouldn’t have thought of that anything like so fast. You saved my life.
“Again.”
Again. I smiled. I do hope those people back in Oldtown are okay…
“They’ll be fine.” And then, almost immediately, “Your glyphstone’s about to go off. It’s something… something important.”
I reached through my robe into my satchel, fishing out my glyphstone – and the very second it was in my hand it started to warm up, glowing and humming.
I held it up, tangentially aware of Leafcloak cocking her head at me curiously – then her hand reaching into a pocket, presumably to listen to her own version of the message.
It wasn’t a champion or magister. It wasn’t even a mage. Instead I saw a bearded man in leather armour, the derided ‘H’-shaped crest of Sticktown embossed in the centre. He had a watchman’s twelve-spoked silver badge on the left side of his chest and three silver arrows on the right – markings of high rank. A Sticktown watch captain.
For most of my youth, men such as him had been the bogeyman. Now I summoned and slew real bogeymen, and I was basically about to take orders from the watch.
How things had changed.
But as he spoke with his thoughts, my mood sank. Dread settled over me.
“All champions.” A pause. “General alert. Red rain fell from the sky after you left. Lord’s Knuckle’s under attack, and Helbert’s Bend’s on fire -“
I broke the glyphstone-trance.
Leafcloak was too distracted to stop me even if she could’ve.
With a single beat of my glowing wings, I was gone.
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