OBSIDIAN 3.4: IMPATIENCE
“The Arch-Diviner represents finding out. The moment of revelation. A new discovery. Reversed, he represents secrecy. The hiding of that which should never be hidden. Not just the lie but the liar himself.”
– from ‘Tarot for Beginners’
I stayed low this time. I’d had problems going too high, so I skirted the roofs of the lower buildings. It would’ve been quicker to go over the towers as the ground dropped away beneath me but I had enough sense left to take the less risky route, drop down with it.
No druid here now to catch me, to put my bones back together.
“I think this is a phenomenally bad idea.” It was Timesnatcher’s deep voice. “Let us finish up here; we’ll come with you.”
“My brother and sister.”
“I understand… We’ll be three or four minutes behind you. Just one more summoner to go, and the smikelliol.”
“Can’t you get someone else to go with me? Just one or two?”
“I’ll try.”
“Leafcloak’s going to be so mad with me, the way I left her…”
“Her bark’s worse than her bite. I’ll talk to her. You’re – you move fast. You’re about to exceed Lovebright’s radius.”
“Not Neverwish’s?”
“He’s down. Recovering. Almost spent himself fighting some snow-illusionist. You keep your wits about you. Reinforcements will -“
The arch-diviner’s voice faded between one word and the next.
I reached the cliffs at the Westrise. Below me a narrow, steep strip of Hilltown separated Hightown and Sticktown. I halted above the rooftops of the buildings standing at the edge and looked down – the swooning nausea returned almost instantly.
Far off in the distance, my home was in flames.
“Take your time, Kas. You can do it. Take a deep breath.”
Even hovering here was filling me with chagrin. I was annoyed at myself, sick of my weakness. I settled down on the corner of a tiled roof, folding my wings.
I crouched there in my torn robe. If anyone saw me from the street they’d doubtless think me a demon – a dark shape but for the soft blue curvature of the wings at my back, perhaps a glint where the mask caught their unnatural radiance…
Every second I wait, people there will die. And it’s my fault! Red rain fell from the sky – it was from the rhimbelkina in Tivertain! If I’d found them sooner, if we’d had better luck – they were throwing hell-fire into the breeze…
“Stop. Close your eyes.”
I took a deep breath, and did as she asked.
“You cannot smell the smoke of the fires, cannot hear the Bells, cannot feel the tiles beneath your feet. You are a feather now. You can feel the wind in your wings. That is the only thing you can feel now. You feel nothing else. You are a leaf. A leaf on an invisible night wind. You are floating on an endless surface with no up or down, no right or wrong.
“Just lean forwards. Spread your wings now and lean forwards.”
I was pretty sure she gave me a push. Whatever happened, I was now falling.
But I opened my wings as I opened my eyes, and already I was halfway down. It wasn’t so bad from here.
I spread my wings farther and then I was swooping across the wooden labyrinths of Sticktown’s neighbourhoods, circumventing all their loops and twists. The streets were empty of all those who had homes to go to, and even most of the road-dwellers were nowhere to be seen – only the most inebriated, depressed or stupid stayed out when the Bells rang. You’d be better off digging yourself a hole in the mud and breathing through a reed than sitting there in the open.
I was doing a good job of quashing down my panic, my doubt, my gut-feeling that everything had gone awry. But as I saw the destruction I was approaching, it came hurtling back, making my spine tingle, my blood surge with excitement and terror.
Helbert’s Bend – Mud Lane – Jaid and Jar –
Just to chase the panic, there was a shot of guilt, as I remembered Morsus, the one who was well-and-truly dead, gone, departed from this plane forever.
I remembered what it was to see his body.
I imagined how much worse it’d have been if it was one of the twins.
Both of the twins.
How much worse it could be if they didn’t even leave bodies behind.
They won’t take my brother and sister. They won’t get to take them away.
I will burn them in flames they cannot withstand.
“Yes,” Zel hissed.
I looked down, and it took me a second to realise what I was seeing – Knuckle Market was gone. It’d been two years since it’d taken a hit in an Incursion, but this went beyond last time – now it was just a muddy square, blackened with ash and charcoal.
I will make them suffer for this.
“Yes!” Zel crowed again.
With the exultant agreement of my trusted advisor ringing in my psychic ears, I coursed across to the bridges spanning Mud Lane and surveyed what they had done to my home.
Most of the people were gone. Gone, dead. But there were still people who needed saving.
I wanted to tear at my hair.
I started fighting before I really saw anything, without even stopping. It was too much to take in. It didn’t look like there were any summoners right here, but that was a mixed blessing – we’d have to find the summoner to stop the flow.
My red-shimmering ikistadreng met three bintaborax with her vast black antlers. They were bowled over, and as they arose, two gripping her antlers to allow the third to smash in her face with its hammer, two of my bintaborax, bigger in every way, took that third up and ripped it in half between them.
The Incursion hellspawn were killing things whilst trampling the block directly opposite my apartment. It was nothing more than black sticks and charred bodies now. My view from the main room window would be forever changed, even after the rebuild. They never built the same building the same way twice, and even if they managed a miracle I’d still have the memories of the corpses on the ground, pulverised under the cloven feet of my demonic minions as my pets drove away the actual killers.
I knew those corpses. I saw Barticia Browne and Sorbit No-Name. One of the arch-enemies of my past, the hated Renkos Fishface, leeching me of old animosities by simple virtue of his broken body.
More to the point, my own apartment building was on fire. The twins wouldn’t even remember anything this bad ever happening before. It’d been – what – four years? five? – since an Incursion last hit Mud Lane.
Were they in there? Were they dying? Xantaire would’ve gotten them out. But how would I know?
Flood Boy was already putting out the flames from an upper-level walkway; he’d been my first eldritch on the scene. A host of my demons was on the ground, and some were now ranging the lower levels of the apartment blocks, engaging with the unbound fiends. I directed a few into the enflamed sections, probably terrifying any number of trapped survivors as my minions sought to drag them out of the dwellings soonest to collapse.
I flew feet-first at my apartment door and smashed right through it, landing almost on my backside in the entryway. A quick scan with Zel’s senses told me no one was here.
My heels hurt where I’d struck the door with them, my only-recently fixed bones groaning in protest. My favourite books would soon be burning – there were fires on the ground level, imps cavorting through the apartments beneath me.
I didn’t care. I needed to see the twins.
Where are they, Zel? Not waiting – I knew she’d have told me the moment she perceived them anyway – I tore out of there, back onto the balcony, and commanded, Find them! Now!
“Yes, I… There’s a large group, more than thirty people, in the building there. Across Springwalk!”
She drew my eyes to our neighbouring building, not as-yet in flames.
Second floor. A broken door hanging loose in its frame. Unbound imps crowding to get in, three or four dozen of them, their spindly, winged bodies swarming over the smashed windows like bugs.
Something was keeping them back, for now.
“Kids in it! And there’s already a huge demon in there! Kas!”
I’d needed no more spurring, and was already in motion.
The plan was simple. Go right through the horde of imps, snaring as many of them as I could – destroy them, then catch the big thing before it could eat anyone else –
It was going to suffer, for each and every person it’d killed – I didn’t care if it was another eighteenth rank demon, it would pay –
And if it’d harmed one hair on the twins’ heads…
I plunged at the apartment feet-first again – but this time there was no door to kick-in. My ethereal wings passed clean through the ruined door-frame, unlike the imps I pulled along in my wake, smashing their limbs on the jagged edges of broken wood. I landed on the soles of my boots this time, and I took my fiend-filled diamonds of force and scissored their occupants to pieces even as I found my stride –
And I stopped dead.
I recognised the yithandreng whose plate-sized eyes were staring back at me. Her horns had a peculiar curve to them which made her different to the others I’d seen.
“Rhu Thrile,” I murmured.
“Rhu Dwazisen,” she growled back amiably.
The thirty people were more kids than adults. There were no bodies. None that were from this plane, anyway.
My eyes scoured them – it took only an instant to find what I sought.
Jaid and Jaroan were there, Xantaire and Xastur and Orstrum. And the Finnerfells and the Sawdans and Salli Meleine and Omrin and Balasain Beerbelly, the greatest ale-drinker the Gold Griffin had ever suffered – all people I’d known most of my life. They were all safe.
Safe.
Fe was a little smaller than the full twenty-feet size at which I’d previously seen her, but only by a bit. Even at a reduced stature, it was clearly her tail that was responsible for taking down most of the internal walls. The victims of the Incursion were huddled behind the demon, crowded into what was essentially a single space with the ruins of bedrooms in the corners.
It was only then, focussing my sorcerer’s-eye, that I could see the line of shielding protecting everyone. It wasn’t strong, wobbling a little – probably due to the fact that the floorboards on which the dust had been sprinkled didn’t quite line up, rather than any lack of skill on the caster’s part. But it was there, and it was real.
She’d saved all my loved ones.
I saw as Jaid began to move towards me – saw as Jar’s hand went to her shoulder, held her back.
I smiled. There were tears in my eyes, tears of frustration and fatigue, tears in the kids’ eyes too. But it was all okay.
They were safe.
Ciraya stepped into view from where she’d been peering over Fe’s flank. The hood of her too-big black magister’s robe was pulled low over her face, obscuring her shaven, tattooed head – but I could see her blue eyes luminous beneath the brim, her full lips pursed in a relieved-looking smile.
“You sure took your sweet time,” she remarked, none of her emotion showing in her drawl.
“Oh, you know,” I looked around the room I’d just strewn in parts of imp, “saving the city… one just isn’t as punctual as one longs to be. I…” I looked directly at her. “Thank you.”
“Well we’re not out yet,” she said, shrugging. “Fe can’t protect us all from the –“
“Most of the big demons are dead – the ones left are mine. But even without them,” I moved my hands, “we’re going to get out of here just fine. Can you see this?”
She shook her head. “I know what you’re doing, though. Fine. How far do we get on your shield?”
I gave her distances.
“Everyone!” She turned back to the crowd, and they all looked to her, even Jaid and Jaroan whose wide eyes had been glued to me since the moment I arrived. “We are going with the nice archmage. He’s called Feychilde.” It gave me mixed feelings to hear the sighs of awe that rippled through the Mud Laners. They had no idea I was Kas, their next-door neighbour. “The closer we stay to him, the safer we are. That means some of us get to be the lucky ones who walk in front of him – that’s us grown-ups. I’ll stay at the limit – go no farther forwards than me, okay?”
There were nods, murmurs of assent. She’d managed to make them trust her, despite the dragon-like entity at her beck and call.
This was more than just the white Magisterium symbol on her robe. She’d made them trust her, and kept that trust, kept them alive through a literal visitation from the Twelve Hells.
I would be recommending Ciraya for honours or a promotion or something the next time I saw Henthae.
She slid onto Fe, then slid off again on my side. She whispered as she passed me, “That’ll give you some breathing room with your kids?”
I barely had time to gasp another “Thank you!” before she’d exited through the ruined door, Fe shrinking down at a moment’s notice to slip out through the wreckage of the doorway, hot on her heels and now no more than ten feet in length.
A press of the adults and teens surged forwards, and I moved aside to give some room to Balasain Beerbelly’s beer-belly. I smiled and nodded at their murmurs of gratitude, feeling altogether like I’d arrived too late to deserve their thanks.
Xantaire and Orstrum came last – Xantaire wasn’t letting go of Xastur and carried him on her hip like he was a two-year-old rather than a four-year-old.
“Kassy?” the little boy murmured sleepily.
“Kassy was out with his girlfriend,” Xantaire muttered, flashing me a look as she crossed in front of me on her way towards the door.
Orstrum headed past and patted me on the arm.
I turned to the mass of kids and tried giving a reassuring smile. “Who wants to go see some awesome demon battles?”
There were still some dubious looks amongst them.
“Do you want to know the best bit?” I let myself grin. “We win every fight.”
* * *
Gong! Gong! Gong!
I wasn’t wrong. I did my best to tone down the violence, but there was only so far you could take demon-on-demon combat with regard to keeping it sanitised. The things being annihilated by antlers resembling full-grown trees, or by blows from ridiculously-oversized hammers – those things were still being annihilated, as much as I tried to keep the rending-claws type demons I owned away from the fight.
And, even if they didn’t look precisely (or vaguely) humanoid, a fair number of the unbound demons could still scream.
The shrieking was, indeed, bad – I supposed I hadn’t really been focussing on it before, but it must’ve been there all along tonight, like the Mourning Bells, still ringing in the distance. It went on for thirty seconds before I realised I could do something about it – I summoned Zabalam to walk with us, shielding the children from the sights and sounds of this hellscape, and cursed myself for not realising earlier.
He replaced the chaos with what was, I thought, a lovely rendition of the otherworld – all strange trees and boughs of tall grass, luminescent with fluttering insects – but the kids seemed to want to inspect the gremlin rather than his conjurations. They were amused by his odd clothes, his pig-like face with its green mould and green eyes – and the fact that they towered over him, of course.
While the rest of the kids were distracted, I surreptitiously allowed Jaid and Jaroan to slide under my arms, one walking on either side of me.
“You came,” Jaid said, shoving her head into my ribs and squashing her face against me. “And you’ve got the coolest wings.”
But when Jaroan spoke, he was less complimentary; I could sense the distance about him, hear the accusation in his voice.
“You’re using demons.”
“Got to,” I answered, pressing my hands tight into their shoulders as if I meant to fuse them there forever. “No way to do this without them.” I nodded at the shield’s perimeter – they couldn’t see what I was trying to indicate, of course, but I found myself doing it all the same. “The unbound ones from the Incursion would break through my barriers if they weren’t being distracted.”
I looked down at Jaroan and he looked up at me – the moment held, and then a flicker of a smile touched his lips.
“The wings are cool,” he offered.
“A hundred percent non-demon.”
“I know that.” He squeezed me briefly, almost hesitantly.
We kept on walking. We’d made our way down the stair onto the narrow lane itself, and we moved as a single mass towards the low end of Mud Lane where it met the Spannerwalk alleyways. I didn’t have much choice about that – we couldn’t go up the lane. The uphill route would lead back towards the burning heart of Helbert’s Bend and the desolation of Lord’s Knuckle. Many of the neighbourhood pets, cats and dogs that’d been too scared or loyal to venture from their hiding-places, came out to join our exodus. I’d expanded the shields to accommodate the newcomers, those who burst out of hiding when they saw us coming, or whom Zel sensed and I sent demons to fetch. We went from thirty to fifty to a hundred, but so long as we stayed in formation we were going to save them all. I’d have to invest in some draughts of forgetfulness for some of the kids, though. I sent dog-men into one sick boy’s room, and I could tell when he was brought inside the shield and placed in the care of someone he recognised that the experience had nearly killed him all on its own – and his apartment might never have burned, might never have been invaded.
I choked down the guilt. It was an inevitable price I’d have to pay. How much worse would it have been if I’d left him behind and he had been targeted?
We were close to the dip at the bottom now. Flood Boy was still back there, working on putting out the fires with a kinkalaman and a draumgerel to guard him – both of whom were under strict orders to not allow him to come to any kind of harm.
Just as the Spannerwalk path came into view, climbing up the incline towards the northern stretches of Sticktown, Timesnatcher came through again.
“-childe. Feychilde. Fey-”
“I’m here! Helbert’s Bend.”
“Go to Lord’s Knuckle. It’s going to become another Roseoak if we don’t act fast.”
I ground my teeth.
“I’ve got over a hundred civilians under shield.”
“I… Leave your shield on them. Leave your demons. By the time you need them they’ll almost certainly be safe.”
“Leave my shield? And fight?” I’d gotten a bit of practice using my wings to evade the attacks I could see coming, but attacks could also come from unexpected, imperceptible vectors. Zel would be working overtime to keep me alive and if I missed a warning… “I can get them to safety first. You –“
“You’re going to have to learn to trust me some day, Feychilde. If you’d be so kind as to allow that day to be today, you’d end up doing us both – everyone in Sticktown – an unrepayable favour.”
“You’re speaking in your capacity as an arch-diviner?”
“I can’t see everything. I know by the time you need them you’ll be saving ten times the lives by taking your shields, your demons back.”
I shook my head – he couldn’t see it, but I did it all the same.
The twins exchanged a look.
“That’s not good enough for me, Timesnatcher. And if I leave my shield here and then get killed, they’ll all die. Not good enough for me.”
“Damn you idealists!” He didn’t sound angry – only exasperated. “Get them moving up that hill at the bottom of the muddy road you’re on, and leave them the bintaborax as a guard. I guarantee their safety after that.”
“But you can’t see everything?”
“What’s wrong?” Jaroan asked me in a hushed voice.
“Is it the shield?” Jaid asked in a less-hushed, more-panicked voice.
“No,” I managed to reply firmly, “nothing like that.”
“They’re building something in Lord’s Knuckle. If we don’t take it down now, you can kiss them all goodbye, even if you’re planning to sit there with them till Yearsend.”
I sighed, patted my brother and sister on the shoulders, then softly pushed them away from me a little.
I lifted my chin, raised my voice. “Everyone! Pick up the peg-legs and tiddlers, hitch up your skirts! We need to jog to the end of the lane! Okay?”
“What’s going on?” Ciraya called back from where she and Fe stalked, near the front edge of the shield.
“I’ve got to go! Knuckle Market makes Mud Lane look like the Noxway!”
There was a trickle of laughter from the Laners. Local rivalries died hard, and even in the midst of an Incursion I felt safe calling on them to help lift the mood. It wouldn’t harm these people to remind them that others had it even worse.
“Come on, everyone, together now!” Ciraya shouted.
I gently picked up the pace.
Most of the kids were excited to be running, but the old men and women had trouble – luckily the community spirit was alive and kicking on this terrible night, and dozens of able-looking chaps came forward to carry the feeble. I even spotted a couple of Peltos’s Gentlemen who’d evidently been trapped in Mud Lane now doing their duty.
We perhaps saved a minute, but at least it was something.
The crowd bottlenecked as we hit the end of the lane. We got the kids and women and elderly into the Spannerwalk first, and I bade the twins a hasty goodbye before watching as Jaid and Jaroan, Xantaire and Xastur and Orstrum all disappeared in the crowd.
“Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks – young Master and Mistress Cuddlesticks – please stand here, and make sure no unbound demons follow the humans.”
“’Zanthanin-agrim-mahlet’?” Ciraya asked, approaching me with Fe at her side. “Oh, man. Do you know what you’ve named them? … I suppose you’d call it ‘Embracespikes’?”
“Cuddlesticks,” I protested, pointing at the nasty spikes protruding from their fully-enclosing armour. “I don’t think Infernal differentiates between, you know, sharp things and non-sharp things. They’re all about the sharp things.”
The sorceress sighed. “Why did I bother asking?” She straightened up, assuming a serious expression. “Lord’s Knuckle,” was all she said, then she held a hand out over Fe.
The yithandreng swelled up, closer to the stature to which I’d become accustomed, and Ciraya perched on her back, rising into the air.
I flicked my wings, matching her elevation so that we would cut beneath the lowest remaining bridges that still spanned the roadway.
Yithandreng were disconcertingly fast for ground-mounts, and Ciraya clung to the demon’s back with her black robe whipping about her, the overlarge sleeves peeling away from her arm to the elbow and streaming out behind her like two wings. Fe made a noise like a stampeding elephant as she propelled the sorceress back up Mud Lane, almost filling the space. Flying at their side, I couldn’t make my eyes focus on all five of the demonic legs I could see in profile – not at once. It was uncanny how the dragon-like creature always had a couple of feet in the dirt, surging forwards without cease.
Flood Boy had been busy saving us all from having no home to return to – our apartment seemed unburned! – and it looked like Aunty Antlers and a cadre of lesser fiends had dealt with ninety percent of the threats in the area.
“Keep it up! I may call for you again in a minute!” I cried as I sped past.
Ciraya cast me a sideways glance. “You said that in Mundic.”
“The ones I was speaking to are ones who speak it.”
That doesn’t sound quite right.
“Duh,” I added.
That sounded better.
She glared at me scathingly, and I actually chuckled.
“What? I don’t know if they speak each others’ languages… So how did you end up here?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Was it – I want to say Hasslepuff?”
“Do you do that just to be annoying?” I made a shocked ‘o’ with my mouth at her insinuation, and she sneered before continuing. “It’s Haspophel, and no, it wasn’t him, actually. It was a diviner, though.”
“Really?”
“Do you know someone called ‘Killstop’?”
I groaned inwardly. “Killstop sent you here?”
“Saved me. Pulled me out of a fight over on Lossen, finished it for me. Gave me a message – said she knew you, that she knew I knew you, and that I knew where to go. I got here just in the nick of time.” I saw her full lips frowning. “She was weird.”
“Tell me about it!”
We wheeled around the Gold Griffin, the three-storey, sloping-roofed tavern on the corner, heading along the main road to Lord’s Knuckle.
Heading towards the orange-red light of conflagration, the walls of smoke that reeked of crisped flesh.
There was no moonlight or starlight in Sticktown on this black-smog evening. Night had deepened, and the fires burned the brighter for it, casting a battle of shadows upon the shifting mists, dark shapes that were the only occupants of the deserted, muck-coated street.
Timesnatcher had been right. They were building something. And they were nearly done.
They’d levelled an area around a warehouse, burning the wooden structures to a crisp and crushing them flat. And they were painting the warehouse with the charcoal remnants. Even now I could see hundreds of imps and their ilk, arduously scrubbing handfuls of the stuff against the brownish surface of the warehouse.
There would be human waste and human remains in that stuff, going off the smells.
And out of the flat roof of the warehouse there now protruded a tower, lopsided and black. It was obviously not a part of the original structure – there were no towers like this in Sticktown. The fiendish builders were still working on it, sculpting it out of the same wet ash they were using to cover the walls. It was only fifty feet high at first but even as we approached it was growing, and it’d borrowed another fifty feet of height from the warehouse which served as its base, so that it already stuck out like a sore, blackened thumb a full hundred feet into the sky.
Weirdly, the patches where the ash had dried seemed to glint, reflecting the firelight as would stone, hues of marbled greens and oily purples dancing across the black surfaces. It was like they were building a dark temple, an unholy shrine to Mekesta.
Demons were pouring out of the warehouse doors. Unfortunately both for us and for them, the locals all seemed to have been slain already – they were being forced to range farther afield, finding victims hiding in the as-yet standing buildings that surrounded the flattened area. They dragged them out into the desolation ringing the warehouse, pulling them screaming back towards the doors…
What the Hells is that place? I asked. I could hear the fear-tinged awe in my own mind-voice.
“Better left unsaid. You don’t want to go in there – not on your first Incursion, at least. Let’s wait for backup to arrive.”
Wait?
“Not that I’m telling you to do nothing. You can stop those demons down there – there’s a small herd of epheldegrim on its way back…”
She drew my eyes to the galloping, seven-legged hell-horses, fangs buried deep in the bodies of their victims, ferrying them back towards the warehouse –
I swept down at them, putting on a burst of speed that pushed me out in front of Ciraya and Fe.
“Engaging at Lord’s Knuckle!” I reported.
“Good! Stymie them! Your back-upis inbound in one minute. Took a while longer to deal with the smikelliol than we anticipated.” Timesnatcher sounded even more exasperated.
As I grabbed myself a handful more epheldegrim, I wondered how the battle against the smikelliol had gone – how they’d defeated it in the end. But it was nothing to concern myself with. I could always ask Em later.
I had the hell-horses’ victims set free, landed to give them a burst of sylph healing (using Zab’s illusion-power as usual to screen the unjoining and rejoining) then went right back into the air. I started hunting down the hell-spawn pouring forth from the warehouse’s gates: weird, abortive animals; roving, rolling spheres of moss and thorns; creatures of living brick with shovels for hands…
Ciraya soon caught up and began evacuating those cowering in the houses on the edges of the destruction, guarded by an eager-looking Fe.
“Most of the champions we could spare from Roseoak have been diverted to Rivertown – resurgence there, doesn’t sound pretty; and I’ve got to go back to Treetown. I’m sending Shadowcloud and Glimmermere to you.”
“Glimmermere… the enchanter?”
“That’s Glancefall; he’s been stuck at home in Rivertown since this all started. No, I mean the druid from the Westrise.”
“So no sorcerer.”
“No sorcerer yet. Shallowlie’s down; we don’t know if she’s going to last the night, never mind fight some more. The others are occupied. We’re stretched thin.” And then, without pause: “Shadowcloud, Glimmermere, converge on Feychilde. Lovebright’s linked you.”
“Hi,” I offered. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear you’re on the way.”
“Lord’s Knuckle mean something to you?” Shadowcloud asked – or at least I guessed it was him, given the male voice. He did sound like a Sticktowner, if I had to put money on it, but it wasn’t a local accent. He was probably, as I’d formerly guessed, from one of the south-westerly districts I’d never even been to.
It was strange how our mind-voices so completely captured our normal voices; it was far harder to fake an accent telepathically than it was out loud. Or perhaps it wasn’t all that strange – I had no idea how the spell really worked, after all.
“Erm, sort of,” I thought in reply. “I meant I’m glad because I’m kind of facing something I’ve never seen before, more than anything else.”
“Right,” he replied, dripping scepticism. He surely recognised my accent too.
“We’re coming up on your position,” Glimmermere said, her voice youthful, and highborn to the hilt.
I looked behind me, and upwards – I was still low to the ground, and they were coming in from a great height.
Shadowcloud was only leading slightly. He was thin and tall, his robe grey and yellow, like an overcast sky split by a fat zig-zag of lightning. The mask covering his face was topped with a swirl of mist, such that one might think it was just a patch of fog fixed there by his power – my eyes were capable of picking out the scintillation of metals in the covering, but I doubted someone without my augmentations would even get an inkling there was a real, cunningly-designed mask beneath the mist. He had yellowish leathery gloves covering his hands.
As for Glimmermere – I had no idea what she actually looked like. Behind the arch-wizard came a blue-feathered condor, the vast span of her pinions framing him as they fell together towards the battlefield of Lord’s Knuckle. She had to be thirty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip.
They would be looking at me as they approached… I hastily turned back and ripped to pieces a group of multi-coloured headless ostriches that I’d trapped in my diamond, then soared after another batch of creatures.
I’d had to keep many of my minions back – my bintaborax, kinkalaman and draumgerel were busy, as was Flood Boy; and my sylph, gremlin and fairy were joined with me at the moment. I didn’t want to put most of the weirdest things I’d accumulated, like the atiimo-thing with its pouring entrails, back on this plane even if they were under control. Even still, I fielded a force of minor fiends that I could replenish at a moment’s notice by simply stealing the unbound demonoids which slew them; my six epheldegrim were supporting Aunty Antlers in roaming the borders and my mekkustremin was standing right in front of the warehouse gate already, turning imp after imp into winged paste.
But they were gushing out of windows, flooding out, like we were trying to dam up a river. A river of claws and spite.
The champions paused, assessing the scene below. As Glimmermere hovered, her absurdly-large wings clapped the air; Shadowcloud was silent and completely unmoved by the choppy wind, while I was buffeted around, forced to regain my balance.
“I’m barely slowing the demons,” I thought.
“That’s why we’re here,” the arch-druid replied, her disdain so rich that it almost sounded as though I’d already managed to offend her.
“I’m going to take over on this spot,” Shadowcloud said. He was already bringing water up out of nowhere to quench the burning fires. “It’ll take some time to bring the whole building down piece by piece, and that won’t help us contain them. I’ll swallow it instead, and we can work our way down into it.”
I didn’t quite follow, but it sounded pretty impressive.
“You want to stay out here,” he continued, “or go inside, Feychilde?”
“No!” Zel rustled.
“Not particularly. I’m good here.”
“You don’t want to chase demons?” Glimmermere spoke in an overtly-incredulous tone. “I know you’re supposed to be new to this, but –“
“We haven’t met,” I replied. “Name’s Feychilde.”
“Name’s Deadchilde –” she hit back.
“That’s –” Shadowcloud began.
“– Good-For-Nothing-Childe –”she continued.
She was adept at making friends, this one.
“– enough!” Shadowcloud finished with a roar. I didn’t need Zel’s help to sense that there was some history between these two. “You’re going to force a new champion to go in there, Glimmer? You want to volunteer?”
There was silence in the telepathic space we shared – the air in which we floated was filled with the ringing of the distant Bells and the howls of demons, but the inner silence still stood out.
“Thought as much,” the arch-wizard continued. “We build a perimeter out here. Allow none past. I’ll get to work on the heavy lifting.”
“And I do have some demons,” I grumbled, going for exaggerated sullenness. “I just don’t chase them around like a wolf in a pig’s pen, that’s all.”
“Feychilde, they’re escaping into the sky.” Shadowcloud’s voice was patient, straightforward. “Get up there and stop them, and Glim-”
“Beg to differ,” I said, “and sorry for interrupting, but I can’t go high. I f… I dropped out of the sky in Upper Tivertain. I can’t fly high. I think – I hope it’s just the tiredness, and I’m okay down here…”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Glimmermere, you’re up. Feychilde, you’re down. Go!”
The huge bird cocked its head at me, then, despite her orders and her disposition, graced me with a tender touch of her blue-feathered wing before she departed for the sky.
A single touch against my shoulder through the robe was all it took – my being was filled with noise and light.
I felt like my limbs and wings were double their length and throbbing with unexpressed potential, energy that would split my skin asunder if I didn’t find a means of release –
I thrust myself forwards, heading towards the mekkustremin, hurling myself into the fight.
I felt so good that I laughed aloud as I hurtled from one group of foes to the next – I floated above the huge doll and went from window to window, turning them against one another, clogging up the exit-points with my own fighters and with the remnants of the slain.
I spoke Infernal words at the quivering hordes of hell and they feared me. I commanded and destroyed and I still smiled.
I had power, and knew what it was to enjoy it, exert it for its own sake. I wasn’t here saving people anymore. I was here killing things. So they would come back into the fold of existence one day in the far future – so what? It didn’t matter. I was still killing them. Still tearing them apart. And still enjoying it. If anything deserved death, it was this sewerous, fish-like humanoid, more mouth than man, its wings membranous and dripping. This frenzied ball of emaciated, diseased arms rolling and scratching, pulling itself through the air with no discernible means of propulsion other than its flailing, as though it just decided which way it wanted to go and off it went.
Until I arrived to negate its will.
This was revenge. For Mud Lane. For Smouldervein. For all those who’d died, pointlessly, because of some twist of fate that meant demons could slip into our plane, into our city, into our homes. Though I couldn’t bring them back from the dead, I could avenge their deaths to the utmost of my ability.
But when the windows no longer made for an easy escape route the things teeming in the warehouse simply threw their might against the walls – three, four, five breaches splitting the wood all simultaneously – and I was off again, trying to stem the flow, while Glimmermere picked off the flyers that got around me and Shadowcloud worked on… whatever it was he was working on.
If it was as destructive as he’d implied, I had to let Ciraya know.
A small red flame opened a gate at my command, and an eighteen-inch white-scaled imp was standing there. He had huge white eyes and wings, given his size; his limbs were thin, his tail short. His wide mouth was filled with tiny flat teeth and his bat-like face was crowned with three small, sharp horns.
I quickly relayed the warning I wanted and sent him on his way.
I couldn’t stop for long. The battle wore on, and I fought all around the different sides of the building – but the tides of hellspawn seemed endless.
The next time I passed the door, I posed the question: Why wouldn’t you advise me to go in, Zel? Exactly?
“There’s something in there you can’t handle… I’m not quite sure what.”
Don’t we need to kill it to stop them?
“I… It depends? They might not be anchored. They could all just disappear anyway. Planar openings can’t last forever…”
Is that really likely to happen soon enough, though?
“Just let another sorcerer do it!”
I groaned.
“Shadowcloud, there’s something powerful in there. I honestly don’t know if it’s gonna die when you bring down the warehouse – we might just irritate it.”
“Then we irritate it. We’re going to bring in reinforcements and overpower it. If what you say is true, we aren’t going to want to fight in a small group anyway.”
“Not after what Winterprince said about that museum,” Glimmermere huffed.
I looked up at her over the edge of the warehouse’s roof, the great blue bird wheeling in the night sky like a shark patrolling the ocean depths. Her talons were filled with mewling, dying imps.
“What’s that?” I asked.
For no discernible reason Glimmermere chose not to respond to me, but a few seconds later Shadowcloud said, “He almost died fighting the things that killed Mindbreaker and Hellbane. They were the marble-statue men, the same kind Leafcloak saw killing Riverlady.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was carrying on: “Reinforcements didn’t arrive for twenty minutes. We… we assume Mindbreaker and Hellbane were disintegrated. There was nothing left of them and the demons were gone by the time we took the walls off.”
“And you tried to make me go in there?” I used the same incredulous tone as Glimmermere had earlier.
“You hadn’t told us what the warehouse contained,” the druidess said; “if I’d known –”
“You would’ve insisted, we know,“ Shadowcloud growled. “The earth’s ready. Stay back.”
The arch-wizard began to demonstrate his power.
There was a terrible crashing, a rending groan rising from the warehouse all of a sudden. The ground shook, making the debris scattered around start to vibrate. I saw Ciraya and Fe leading a final group of survivors back the way we’d came, keeping them clear of whatever was about to happen.
The demons seemed to know what was going on too, and they made a break for it in record numbers. I filled my diamond three, four times over, and still they kept coming, kept dying, as the rumbling noise only became louder and louder.
It honestly felt like an earthquake was splitting its way through the foundation of the city towards us. I backed well-away as a corner of the warehouse suddenly dipped with a violent clatter – the ashen tower atop the warehouse, now a hundred or more feet in height, started to teeter as the whole structure fell.
The ground groaned again and the tower seemed to swoon, teetering some more in a new direction, almost pointing at me now.
Finally it was left leaning at such an angle that it had no choice other than to topple –
Yet it stayed, standing there at forty-five degrees in defiance of everything I thought I’d understood about structures, about the basic laws of existence. Perhaps it was that the winged fiends clinging to its exterior were helping support it, or perhaps it was just some quirk of demonic architecture – either way, it wasn’t coming down without a fight.
As the earth sighed, a stony rasp filling the air, the warehouse was swallowed up, sunken down into an ever-deepening pit.
Within a minute it was done. The shuddering, the groaning, it all came to a sudden halt.
Shadowcloud was immediately bringing in rivulets of winds to clear the dust-storm that had hidden the results from even my sight.
It only took seconds, and then we were staring down at a flat, levelled expanse, broken only by the very tip of the black tower, still protruding at an angle. Despite seemingly being made from nothing more than congealed ash, the top forty feet of the tower had somehow survived the cataclysmic use of wizardry.
There were no demons to be seen.
“Something’s wrong. That should’ve buried the lot. I was going to open a way down once it was fully sealed.” Shadowcloud sounded more worried than I’d yet heard him. “I can’t put soil or rocks in it, and it’s still on the surface.”
“Then bury it deeper. I thought you were supposed to be smart.”
The arch-druid was still visibly busy, introducing the last beakful of the flying worm creatures she’d been pursuing to her great condor’s tongue – but she found the time to criticise her colleague nonetheless.
“I’ve tried. They’re – they’ve done something to the building.”
As if to test a suspicion, Shadowcloud raised one hand, letting white electricity crackle down from the skies to touch his fingertips. After a moment of what looked like playing with it, he hurled it as a bolt of lightning at the remnant of the tower poking out of the riven ground.
The lightning-bolt rebounded from the glinting black surface with its forest-green and sunset-purple marbling; the wizard reached out and froze the blinding streak right there, letting it burn in the air, then swept his hand back at the tower, propelling it forwards once more.
This went on for several seconds, the champion bouncing the same lightning bolt back and forth, back and forth.
He took it back in his hand, looked at it for a few more seconds, then finally crumbled the lightning into sparks, tossing them away on the wind.
“It’s a kind of ensorcelled obsidian. It should’ve cracked at my merest suggestion… but it registers as alive, or something.”
“Alive?” I shuddered.
“They’ve worked a protection into it that prevents him from affecting it directly with his powers,” Glimmermere supplied in an intrigued tone. She’d completed her task and had come over to hover near me. “It’s not alive, though. I can’t touch it.”
I got the impression she knew the way she was flapping her wings and chopping the air was winding me up, but I was determined to ride it out; I wasn’t going to back away, show her she was getting to me.
“… That’s part of it.” The arch-wizard didn’t sound happy.
“Oh, do come on, Shadowcloud; you must know how few things I can use my powers on. If it isn’t alive or almost alive, I can’t touch it. There’s a lot more non-living matter in the world than living, let me tell you that.”
While she was prattling on, I was trying to wrap my head around the situation.
“Do you mean you’ve opened the earth farther down, but it’s not fallen any deeper in?” I asked.
“It’s fallen deeper in,” he replied, “but it hasn’t broken and the top of the structure they were building is still on the surface.”
“You mean… it’s… stretched?”
“I think so. I think I’ve just done some of their work for them, expanded the structure.”
I saw what he meant by ‘alive’ now.
Still, there was no sign of our foes, not even any sounds coming from the leaning black protrusion that now stood in the centre of Lord’s Knuckle.
“Do you think most of the demons are dead?”
“It’s certainly possible,” he said without much confidence, “but we’ll need to check the whole place out once backup arrives. I just don’t want to leave it like this while we wait. I feel like I’m waiting for them to attack.”
I considered it.
“Cover it over? Without trying to lower it any deeper?”
Shadowcloud turned his head towards me for a moment.
“I guess that might work.”
The arch-wizard floated somewhat lower, spreading his arms.
The dirt of Sticktown responded.
I managed to get through about ten seconds of watching him coating the obsidian protrusion with mud, before I finally snapped, speaking aloud: “Can you please stop doing that?”
Glimmermere gave a soft, throaty cackle, but she did move away slightly, angling her wings so as to disrupt me less. She’d been steadily following me inch by inch as I’d tried to surreptitiously increase the distance between us.
“Thank you.” I used some of Zabalam’s talent to increase the volume of my voice so that it carried above the crashing din of the wizard’s soil and stone. He was using heavier elements now, slapping clay on top; it rose up in great wet mounds and rolled forwards at his gesture, adding to the new hill in the middle of the desolation. It was a rough half-sphere almost sixty feet high by this point.
“Don’t tell me you’ve buried it.”
“Timesnatcher!” Shadowcloud growled. “Don’t you do this to me again!”
“They’ve buried it,” the arch-diviner replied, as if to someone else.
“Lovely.” I recognised Leafcloak’s voice. “That doesn’t mean your vision’s going to come true, though, does it?”
“Not necessarily.”
Shadowcloud again: “Vision – what vision?”
“I think there’s a disintegrator in there. It can see the future, and it’s strong. If we don’t go in and get it, it’s going to come out when we least expect it and it’s going to wreak havoc.”
I was beginning to get the impression that a fair proportion of champions who fell during Infernal Incursions were literally reduced to nothingness – which made sense, given that most other injuries would probably prove repairable.
“If we do go in and get it, well… I can’t see what happens, can I?”
“When are we doing this, then?” Glimmermere asked, still an undercurrent of intrigue in her voice.
“Do not proceed without us. Twelve, fifteen minutes. I’m going to get at least one other sorcerer with us. With Feychilde that makes two. You okay, Feychilde?”
“As good as I’ve ever been.” In truth, Glimmermere’s boost was already wearing off, the incredible weariness stealing back over my joints, my eyes – but I wasn’t going to mention that until we were heading in. No point getting reenergised now when I’d only need her to top me up again in a bit.
“Good. We’re going to go in force this time. No failures. No dying. Not anyone else today.” I caught a hint of grief when he said that last part; perhaps he and Smouldervein had been close. “I’ll let you know when we’re nearby.”
Waiting that long… Anything could happen.
I stared across at Shadowcloud.
“Okay, Timesnatcher,” the wizard said. “We wait.”
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