AMETHYST 5.2: NO COMMUNICATION
“Just in this last week – three reports of zombies malfunctioning in Hightown. Customers are becoming too frightened to shop. One poor little girl had her ear bitten off, and if the security detail hadn’t stopped it she surely would’ve had her brain slurped right out of the side of her head! How has this happened? How are we to maintain a reputation of reliability and trustworthiness under such circumstances? These are the problems with which I have been wrestling. I suspect well-hidden interference, on behalf of the Circle Watchers or the Society of Summoners; these lesser colleges have ever envied our position. I wish for three volunteers to open an official investigation in my name. Any evidence you discover in support or defiance of my hypothesis, bring it to me and know it will be fairly considered, whatever the outcome. I intend to take this to the Magisterium myself.”
– from Mistress Arithos’s Seminar with the Purple Adepts
Fire and frost flowed over my skin, a caress almost luxurious in its delicacy, its tenderness of application – but that sensation was buried, clamped down beneath the agony reverberating inside my brain. It was akin to getting my head busted open with a stonemason’s drill the size of a hammer. I almost would’ve preferred that, quite honestly, because at least getting your head busted open with a drill the size of a hammer would leave you dead in a split-second, mercifully free from pain. This was like getting your head busted open, without the possibility of relief, the escape offered by unconsciousness, death. It left me crawling, skittering on my elbows and knees on the cold, cracked stone, Shadowcloud’s buoyancy spell keeping me from actually smashing my skull on the floor.
But I knew I had gone through. I knew from the way that, even despite the wizardry setting my veins aflame, I was shivering, panting from the iciness of the very air about me.
I struggled to open my eyes, and saw the shadow I cast on the charred grey rock – the blue light was behind me. I was through. I drew out a circle straight away, reinforced it with instinctive motions.
I looked up, using a faltering burst of flight to float myself upright; as the spell settled down, coming back under my control, I felt warmer again. My breath still misted on the air, and I didn’t like being this close to the Door – I hovered forwards hesitantly, cradling my throbbing head in one hand as I beheld Zadhal.
Lyanne had shown me the illusory replication in her glyphstone the last time we’d met for training, but it hadn’t even come close.
My first time leaving Mund… and it’s to see this…
The Winter Door stood in the centre of a wide plaza, like a fraction of Firenight Square. Far off, ruins of buildings ringed the area. A single roadway before us led off towards the shattered towers at the centre of the city, a cluster of broken teeth jutting into the pale white sky. The sun was too low to illuminate anything except the air itself – for all the sky’s apparent brightness everything was dim; everything was bathed in shadow.
Where are the undead? I wondered.
“You might be better at finding them than me, now,” Zel replied with a sniff.
Before I had chance to test my sensory abilities I heard Min softly call to me. I looked over to find that Shallowlie had already spun a thread of power; as she threw it I caught it, added to it, and looked to Direcrown…
Either Valorin had been through an intensive training-course like me or he learned damn fast – by the time the enchanters followed us we’d split up, heading in rough approximations of the cardinal directions, maintaining the weave between the four of us. Direcrown was more than keeping up his end, and having a whole quartet of arch-sorcerers maintaining the shield with our power just trivialised the ordeal. It didn’t even feel like I was spending of my power to keep it in place. Hopefully my shields were stronger now, stronger than they had been when I was warding the doorway to the assassin’s guild. Would they fare better against elite undead creatures?
If not – well, I had my new allies to try out.
Waiting for the rest of the expedition to arrive, I flew around the edge of our defences and almost passed out from pure bliss as the humming finally faded to a low background buzz. We continued carefully building the weave, but as I worked I took the opportunity to study the buildings in close-up, the vacant windows and blasted walls of what must have once been shops, offices. This probably would’ve been the city’s bustling trade centre, what with it being the way to Mund and all. (Certainly what I’d heard of Habburat, the city through the still-operational Spring Door, indicated as much.)
I could almost imagine the people who’d lived their lives here, who’d died here when something beyond their knowledge or control went catastrophically wrong and they paid the unending price.
But I could sense nothing in the ruins, nothing I could touch with my magic. Not even corpses.
“No time like the present,” Zel piped up.
For what?
“To test your present…”
My… oh.
I halted, caught and tied the next section of shield, then summoned my unicorn.
“My, this is a pleasant change of scenery,” she commented dryly, looking about, her glittering horn seeming to leave a trail of sparks in the air as she tossed her head.
“Stay still a second, will you?”
Joining with Gilaela was the weirdest transition yet – I floated through her like she was made of thin air, to me at least, and it was only once she was half ‘in’ me that the rest of her got sort of sucked in.
Thanks awfully for your help, I thought at her, and looked down to check I hadn’t grown two extra legs.
“For Nentheleme,” Gilaela replied, in a tone of acceptance.
I saw sparks out of the corner of my eye as I swished my head and it took me a minute to realise that they were coming from my head.
“Uh…” My mouth went to the trouble of commenting on my situation. There was no one else to hear.
I passed my hand over my forehead – I felt nothing.
I got Zab to pop out and take a look, then the green-eyed gremlin confirmed:
“You’ve got a great honking horn sticking out your head, Feychilde.”
He drew a reflection of me in the air before I rejoined with him, lasting only a few seconds – long enough for me to memorise the ridiculous sight.
The glittery horn thrusting through my mask was almost a foot long, and despite its incorporeal nature it was brighter and far more glittery than when it was atop Gilaela’s head. It angled upwards as much as it did forwards, and –
“What’ve you done to yourself, Feychilde?” someone said – Glancefall, I thought.
A bit rich for someone in a jester-mask and a gold wig.
“Ha! Someone looks happy,” Spiritwhisper commented.
I endured a minute or two of the world’s most obvious jokes, and did my best to laugh along with them.
I didn’t care. It was funny, after all, and power was power. Once I learned how to use it…
I busied myself with summoning my satyrs, Sarcamor and Sarminuid. It transpired I could only join with one of them before I once again felt ‘full’, and Sarminuid suddenly wasn’t insubstantial under my hand like his fellow had been.
I dismissed him back to Etherium. I had better eldritches to use in a place like Zadhal, and I had a grand total of five eldritches inside me, bound to the flesh. Five would do, for now.
Zel made no comment…
“I’m busy. What?”
Oh?
“Looking at the future for –” She halted, as Timesnatcher asked:
“Can I get confirmation, the undead have withdrawn from the area?”
I agreed, and Min too – Valorin might not have mastered that aspect of his powers yet and didn’t reply, while Direcrown reported a single ghost. He brought it up to the edge of the shield where it crossed the road, and I couldn’t quite make out what it was saying under his questioning – something about being lost and alone, the typical stuff you’d expect to hear I supposed…
He sent it out again, and it flickered and vanished into the city beyond the plaza, leaving only a faint purple trail in the air to my sorcerer’s-eye.
I started summoning demons into my vicinity, one by one so as to not overexert myself. I got the feeling they weren’t overly comfortable, this close to a bunch of champions and arch-magisters, even those with enough intellect to know they weren’t in any danger of being collectively annihilated. The lesser things all looked positively subdued – the few diseased folkababil birds and the dog-faced obbolomin guys, the various imps, even the seven-legged epheldegrim herd.
In contrast, my bintaborax clan and Aunty Antlers all stood straight with pride. Khikiriaz, my other ikistadreng, looked far more afraid of me than of anyone else in the vicinity as he kept his head bowed, his strange pupil only focussing briefly on me after I summoned him.
I called my atiimogrix into Materium, the thin, near-naked laughing-man with the endless entrails already starting to dribble out of the hole in his gut. I would put him at the front, let him get destroyed first.
“Agar salithak,” I snapped at him. “Neleb gharar onn sa kasagren.”
‘Stop laughing. And don’t make a mess.’
He immediately pressed his lips together, pressed his hands against his belly – his glowing eyes, his cheeks, his torso, they all puffed up, swelled almost immediately beyond his ability to contain.
Sighing, I rescinded the commands and just waved him away again. I’d have to settle for bringing him out when the battle began. I’d caught onto the fact that more than a few of my fellow archmages had turned their heads, hearing him barking laughter, exuding a truly unique stench.
“Sorry,” I said. “I, er, didn’t realise just how bad that would be…” I seized on the opportunity to change the topic. “Can we be sure the invisibility covers our eldritches?”
I received several assurances. It looked like sorcerers weren’t the only ones who found it easy to cover large numbers with their spells when gathered in force.
“So, does this mean they were expecting us?” Shadowcloud was asking. I could make him out, floating higher than the others, looking out across the city towards those broken-tooth towers in the centre. “There are normally some critters around here, aren’t there?”
“Them expecting us was never beyond the realms of possibility, Shadowcloud,” Lightblind’s measured voice responded.
“Indeed.” Zakimel’s urbane drawl. “Everything going according to plan.”
“If you say so.” The arch-wizard still sounded dubious.
“It’s possible that the last expedition earlier this year cleared the locals out for good,” Lightblind explained in a patient voice. “It takes time for them to wander back in, or get sent here.”
“And we were just dying for a welcome party,” Glimmermere muttered from somewhere.
“I don’t think our palates have much in common,” I said. “I tend not to eat places where the waiter wants to serve you your own leg as the main course.”
“Whatever. We all know what sorcerers get up to, don’t any of you deny it.”
“We wouldn’t dream of it, my dear,” Direcrown practically purred. “What would remain of our reputations, should the common folk think our tastes ordinary?”
I was surprised at the amount of sniggers that were elicited into the shared telepathic space by the back-and-forth, the lack of reprimands from the leaders. Or perhaps I shouldn’t have been – the laughter was comprised of tight, terse sounds. Maybe they wouldn’t have found it amusing if we were elsewhere, under the bright light of the sun, where it didn’t feel like your death was waiting for you just around the corner…
I realised then that it couldn’t just be the previous expeditions clearing the place that’d left the area free of undead.
If that was the case, why had a vampire-lord been waiting on this side of the portal for the moment in which the defences were dropped, when the demons struck the Box?
But before I voiced my doubts I realised the further truth: there was no way Lightblind had missed this. She was just hoping to hide it from the others. What could be the point of such a deliberate deception? Unless she and Timesnatcher knew that things would go worse if they mentioned it…
Zel, have I ever mentioned how much I detest foresight?
“I think it’s come up once or twice,” she said with just a touch of spite.
“I still feel cold,” one of the arch-magisters was saying, and I thought I could hear Winterprince grinding out a chuckle as he soared past.
“Is the weave in place, Shallowlie?” Timesnatcher asked. His voice just seemed to be getting tenser and tenser every time he spoke.
“We ah ready, Tamsnatcher,” she said. I could see piles of ghosts surrounding her, a swirling ring of greyish figures, moving through the air but frozen in place, like transparent portrait-people rotating in the pattern of a shield. I started opening my own nethernal portals, producing the handful of ex-assassin vampires and rag-draped ghouls I’d taken after the Gathering.
“Okay, pin it in place. We’ll leave it as a warning system – the moment you feel pressure against it, you let me know… Zakimel?” Timesnatcher prompted.
The gaunt old magister in blue and gold was near Shadowcloud before the Door, surveying the scene.
“Yes,” he answered the champion. “Let us begin.”
* * *
As we flew along the road, our senses – magical and mundane – fixed on our desolate surroundings, the enchanters started dropping information into our heads.
Previous missions had prioritised vaults. Libraries. Laboratories. Small, privately-funded teams exploring the ruins in search of discreet areas mentioned in three-hundred-year-old texts, seeking legendary treasures to bring home to their paymasters, tomes of incredible value, artefacts of proud heritage. The Magisterium had been content to preserve the status quo, given that such expeditions gave no better than fifty-fifty odds of ending up with a team going ‘missing’. They couldn’t justify the loss of their assets the same way as a financed group of bounty hunters. And never before had a champion stepped forward, in concert with their fellows, and volunteered their services like this. Never before had the recognised high-diviner of Mund, surely the true scion of Arreath Ril himself, said that the time was right.
Until Timesnatcher.
Not that the enchanters’ lore-dump actually put it that way, but I could read between the lines easily enough. It made me wonder – and I could hardly be the only one – what had changed? Why now? There wasn’t a chance he was doing this to make up for missing the vampire-lord during the Incursion, was there?
Our goal was to find out what made Zadhal different. The undead here were permanently fixed to Materium, through a power-source of some kind. There were candidates: a statue of Vaahn in a courtyard near the city-centre, a glowing green sphere in one of the towers none had yet dared approach… If we could locate it and terminate it, we could destroy them and they’d stay that way. We could take the city back, and there’d be nothing they could do to stop us.
With the exception of the more potent undead. Vampire-lords, and even ordinary vampires who’d stayed on Materium long enough to be considered ‘elders’, were essentially immune to scrying, and thus were difficult for even diviners to fight. That was to say nothing of liches: lichhood, lichdom, however you said it – it was a phenomenon that was at best only partially understood. The stories went back right into the Age of Nightmares. Those less-than-sensible people who had experimented with the sorcerous practises permitting the continuation of consciousness and power beyond bodily death – they usually ended up hunted-down by their former peers when they were, quite predictably, driven mad (or just driven evil) by the experience… Becoming soul-tainted – whatever it was, it was bad.
Then there were the death-lords, wraith-lords, and so on…
It was rather worrying that there were special terms for those most-terrifying creatures, and that their definitions all contained ‘undead archmage’ in there somewhere, whatever the actual process of undead-ification.
Looking out on the skeletal remnants of buildings, structures which had surely, once, been glorious wonders, I saw no trace of our enemies. Empty, shadowy alleyways. The breeze singing through glassless windows, dustless rooms. There weren’t even any rats, birds, bugs, so far as I could tell. The place was a mausoleum.
Under Zakimel and Timesnatcher’s orders we stayed clumped together, within the boundaries of the shields the other arch-sorcerers had erected – my shapes ranged even farther afield, slipping through the ruins surrounding us without encountering any resistance. Of the three of them, Direcrown alone was able to cast his defences out as far as Shield Seven – and I still had five shields beyond that.
It made me wonder what his speciality was. Dustbringer had spoken as though each arch-sorcerer – perhaps each archmage – had their own propensities, their own unusual capabilities, and nothing I’d seen so far had dissuaded me from the notion. Em and Shadowcloud were air-wizards – Winterprince ice, obviously – perhaps some enchanters were better telepaths, others better illusionists…
But Direcrown, deemed untrustworthy by Timesnatcher and Netherhame, was an unknown factor: he had at least twice as many demons out as I did, a veritable army streaming up the road behind us – could that be it? I kept my eldritches away from his, letting them move ahead of the archmages as a vanguard – I had no idea whether infighting was something to watch out for, and I had enough to concentrate on.
You mind keeping an eye on him for me, Zel?
“How many do you think I’ve got? Look, you’re more likely to spot half the things he does faster than me, you know. I can’t see quite the same as you, remember, and you’ve got other senses I haven’t.”
Weird to hear that works both ways.
I was glad the diviners had asked us to remain so low to the ground, stay hidden below the tops of the ruins that lined the road. Glimmermere had requested permission to fly high in her usual assumptive manner, to better take in the city at large, but they’d quickly shot her idea down in tones that brooked no refusal. There was no guarantee the invisibility would work, and we didn’t want to announce our presence if there were watchers in the towers. They didn’t want to speed us straight into traps, either. Better to move slowly, checking our environment constantly for unbound, or bound undead, keep on the alert for –
“Con-tac!” Shallowlie snarled – I whipped my head about, looking at her as she bent in the air, streamed off to one side, her shield and ring of ghosts moving with her –
“Banshees,” Direcrown sneered, copying her direction but leaving his demons behind.
It seemed Valorin and I were slower, but only slightly so – I could feel what they’d felt, now. Undead under the ground. But it only now occurred to me that Direcrown was right – I could tell the vampires apart from the ghouls, and now the banshees. They each had a different shape in my mind, in the surface of the plane. Vampires were jagged, narrow spaces, while ghouls were like inverted pyramids and banshees, banshees were curved, swirly…
“See, I don’t get any of that,” Zel commented.
I drifted a few feet, intending to follow –
“Feychilde, stay here, keep your shield in place,” Timesnatcher commanded, moving to pursue the arch-sorcerers into the barely-standing structure of ancient, weather-worn wood and mortarless stones.
I froze in place, feeling uncomfortable as the arch-diviner gathered a few others in his wake and went with them to probe the building’s cellars. I’d been instructed to watch Shallowlie’s back around Direcrown, and at the very first opportunity I’d ended up letting the two of them leave me behind.
I sensed the subtle manipulations of sorcery at work down there, the allegiances of the banshees being subverted, claimed –
They no longer struck me as unbound. I could tell, even at a distance, that Shallowlie or Direcrown had taken them into their service.
Wasn’t this my mistake? Binding a lesser undead, making the greater aware of my insolent act? Surely they couldn’t be so stupid…?
I kept an eye on both sides of the road – if it was an ambush, I wanted to be prepared – but nothing leapt out of the shadows at us and within two minutes they were returning, Shallowlie soaring at the back of the group, her five new lackeys in tow.
“Whom did they serve?” Lightblind asked. “They weren’t bound?”
“They were under the thumb of the wraith who made them,” Timesnatcher replied, glancing over his shoulder at Shallowlie and her new minions. “Wraith, not wraith-lord. They look like treasure-hunters to me.”
“Dey know noffing,” the sorceress replied, spreading her hands helplessly. “Dey ah far gone into de madness.”
“Let’s continue,” Zakimel said, sounding thoroughly unimpressed with the results of the diversion. “In three minutes we’ll reach our first checkpoint.”
I knew from the lore-dump that we were moving towards a junction, and I saw that Spiritwhisper was showing those close to him a miniaturised representation of the city, so I adjusted my flight to bring myself alongside him.
It was basically little more than a softly-glowing map hanging in the air before him, no more than three feet across. Still, there was texture to it – the towers and walls did visibly stick up like radiant pins.
“This,” the enchanter was saying out loud, “is the crossroads we’re headin’ for.” A brighter, red marker took shape over one of the places where the tiny paths met, two of the bigger roads by the looks of things. I traced the roads back, and almost immediately realised which one we were on – I could see the Door, the plaza, in miniscule detail behind us. “From there we turn right, head to the target.” A second red light appeared, much farther from us than the Door was behind us, deep in the midst of the towers in the central district. “That’s where the statue of the, ah, the Prince of All Thrones, is it?“
He stumbled over Vaahn’s title; it was Lord of All Thrones, Prince of Chains (as well as King of Kings and Lord of Deathand half-a-dozen other similar epithets) but no one who was listening was going to correct him and I was starting to get the impression he couldn’t easily pick it from my mind – not with Lovebright’s amulet working its magic.
“Anyway, from there it’s not far to what the clever buggers have been calling the Green Tower.” One of the white pins turned an emerald shade and began to pulse, just three inches away from the second red dot. “That’s where most of the magisters –“ he flicked his gaze across towards Zakimel for a moment, as if to check the man looked distracted by something else “– seem to think we’re gonna end up.”
I still felt a bit conspicuous, having complemented my glowing wings with a ridiculous forehead-horn, but I had to speak up.
“Is this really the best way to proceed, then?” I asked. “We couldn’t exit the city, send some people above the clouds then have them descend right on the spot? Not that I’m, you know, volunteering…” Heights make me flip out, I couldn’t quite bring myself to say. “Or split up, or fly in file, move through the smaller streets…” I looked across the group, at one of the turn-offs we’d just passed by.
Dimdweller was one of those who’d been watching Spiritwhisper’s illusion, and the dwarf spoke up, totally unsurprisingly, in defence of the plan: “Don’t think we haven’t worked on this extensively. For years, even… Timesnatcher knows what he’s doing. The idea of doing this is older than me, and I’m ten times your age.”
But we didn’t even discuss it at the Gathering, I wanted to say – but the danger of being overheard was too great; while I had little doubt Zakimel had the clearance to know of the Gathering’s existence, I’d have been shocked if the likes of Valorin had been filled in.
“But Netherhame implied Timesnatcher wanted to see how you acted after the Gathering,” Zel pointed out. “He wanted to see if you’d use your own initiative before he brought it up. It’s – it sounds like it’s something they’ve discussed before. Just not in front of you.“
I was starting to become unsettled, realising just how much time several of the world’s most powerful seers seemed to spend thinking of me.
Not that the time itself actually mattered to them, of course. They probably spent far longer deciding what to eat for dinner than they did pondering the future of Feychilde.
“The vampires won’t be able to move at the moment,” the dwarf was continuing, “and the liches will take longer to draw on Nethernum for shielding, summoning, striking. We can draw out those with the ability to sustain –”
“Halt!” Timesnatcher’s panicked command came through suddenly. “You sense that?”
We summoners exerted our wills, and everyone stopped – champion, magister, eldritch.
Silence reigned – no one answered the arch-diviner right away, then after a few seconds Lightblind murmured, “You care to enlighten us, darling?”
My eyebrows raised slightly at the familiar form of address. Were they together?
“Zombies… mostly. At the crossroads. Waiting for us.”
“At the behest of something we can’t perceive,” Zakimel concluded the thought curtly, then ordered: “Forwards – slowly…”
As much as these prophets made me shiver, I’d have far preferred taking orders from Timesnatcher than this Magisterium fool.
Dimdweller didn’t bother concluding his lesson – it was only ten more seconds before I could see our foes. There was some muttering taking place in the telepathic link, then, as the undead came into view even for those without perception-powers, the muttering died, replaced by a steely silence, a battle-preparedness such as this tomb of a city had never before witnessed.
Levelling the whole street down to the very last stone wasn’t off the cards for a group of archmages like ours, if it’d been our goal.
We stopped again, all of us studying the legion that had been assembled to face us.
They knew we were coming. All three exits at the crossroads were packed with stinking zombies, standing as still and silent as they would’ve been lying under the ground. We would’ve heard them moving – they could’ve been here for hours, days…
Several thousand, at least – they must’ve been pulled here from all over the city. They were tightly packed, and they filled the centre of the crossroads, facing towards us. Many were missing limbs or big chunks out of their heads, their torsos, but that didn’t seem to be bothering them. What hands they did have were being used to clutch weapons, mostly improvised.
I could feel them, all of them that were in range of me. They were all taken, all bound, and I couldn’t steal them away.
“An undead archmage controls them,” I whispered psychically.
“Confirmed,” Direcrown said.
The arch-diviners converged in the air – Timesnatcher, Lightblind, Starsight, Dimdweller and Zakimel; they probably had a two minute discussion which lasted all of five seconds for the rest of us.
Lightblind was the one who reported back to us.
“We will retreat then enter the side-streets, heading west towards our ultimate destination. They will not move to head us off, but will move to block us from behind and then give chase, prevent us from fleeing back once the trap is revealed. Danger lurks primarily in these side-streets.”
Her voice took on a hard quality, and I saw across the crowd as she drew her black and white blades:
“This means we go through instead.”
* * *
We were invisible, to the zombies at least. It was a joke.
A few of the druids became enlarged animals, bowling through the ranks, raking the zombies with claws and talons, while the pair of arch-druid magisters waded into the combat in humanoid form, obliterating the undead with disdainful blows of their hands and feet. Rosedawn successfully puppeteered a zombie, so Spiritwhisper, not to be outdone, made sure everyone was aware he had managed to puppeteer a ghoul recently. (Not that he managed to repeat the trick here in Zadhal.)
Meanwhile, wizards smashed dozens of undead with rippling waves of light or withered them with flame – even Winterprince was wielding fireballs here. Diviners raced along the rows, ensorcelled weaponry beheading ten with each stroke – Zakimel seemed to be less speedy than Timesnatcher, but not by much more than Lightblind. Starsight and Dimdweller were visibly slower, but were still ripping and tearing through everything they could lay their blades on.
We sorcerers did far more damage.
Spikes on spinning shields mowed down zombies like wheat, and even the diviners couldn’t keep up, rushing to slaughter rows of undead that were already falling in many pieces, force-shredded. I sent my eldritches out in a bone-crushing stampede, ikistadreng and bintaborax thumping along at the tip of the spearhead, imps riding epheldegrim on the flanks launching little burning missiles from their clawed hands. My vampires managed to get some action, but the ghouls were too slow to the front of the battle-line, and we so-relentlessly overpowered the opposition that I couldn’t even get my horrid laughing-man killed – I merely had to sigh and wave him back to Infernum again. Lucky sod.
I barely even got close to the front-lines myself, to be fair – my unicorn-horn didn’t seem to react particularly, other than to emit perhaps just a little more embarrassing glitter into the air than usual. Yay.
As for the undead lords at whose command this army of zombies had confronted us, whatever they had actually intended to achieve, it surely was not this. An easy victory, so early in the campaign? This was something one or two of us could’ve surmounted without any help – as it was, with twenty or more of us, we were done in under two minutes. The knowledge we’d reduced our foes’ forces by such a large number without any significant impediment was reassuring, even heartening, as we crossed over the junction instead of turning right up the road towards the Green Tower and statue of Vaahn.
This isn’t so difficult. That’s what they really want us to believe, isn’t it?
“I wasn’t going to, you know, say it, but now that you mention, it does sound like rather a good plan, doesn’t it? Are you going to stop checking every shadow now? Do you feel like your paranoia has run its course?”
I get it. Stay cautious… I’ll get to off my atiimogrix at some point… So, you can’t sense anything?
“Imminent? No. Constant, background danger? Since the moment we came through the Door.”
It’s perfect isn’t it?
“What is?”
It’s like, ‘someone’s gonna shoot an arrow at you at some point in the next two hours, and I’ll give you one-and-a-half second’s notice’, you know what I mean? It doesn’t exactly make for a comfortable two hours.
“Better one-and-a-half second’s notice, though, right? I mean, okay, Kas – someone’s gonna shoot an arrow at you at some point in the next two hours, and I won’t give you one-and-a-half second’s notice – how’s that? Better?”
… Fine, Zel, have it your way.
“Oh, now who’s the grumpy one?”
I didn’t dignify that with a response. Zakimel ordered Valorin to dispatch a demon back to Mund, to make a report on the progress so far to the magisters assembled on the far side of the Door – the glyphstone network was tied to Mund, as I understood it, and they couldn’t be used to transmit a message from here. I took the opportunity to summon my white messenger-imp and gave him instructions, ensuring he would do his best not to terrify any children when he showed up at my house with his reassurances that all was going smoothly.
“And I must… I must let the human girl pat me on the head, Master?” the imp sounded confused, wheezing at me in Infernal.
“That’s right, as much as she wishes,” I confirmed. “Now be off with you.”
He and Valorin’s minion winged their way back the direction we’d come. I could only hope they weren’t destroyed by something before they made it through.
We were going with more speed now – not as fast as we could have gone, yet, but twice as fast as before. Less than a minute after clearing the crossroads, we halted again, and the diviners led us up the smaller streets on the right. We were heading west, now, as we’d earlier intended to travel on the main road from the junction. If they’d planned an ambush on the other side of the main road they would now have to cross it, divide their forces in search of us, come at us piecemeal as we soared towards our goal.
The wooden store-fronts had long since been eaten away by time, even where the buildings were still completely intact. Roof tiles gleamed with frost where they’d fallen to the street, dimly reflecting the cold light of the sky, only to be trodden and broken underfoot as our troop of eldritches caught up, struggling to keep pace with the rest of us. Not that this was a problem – they’d make an effective rearguard, give us warning if –
“Contact!” It was my turn to hiss the warning, and I slowed, turning back to look –
“Forwards, more speed!” was all Zakimel said.
“We all look like we’re crawling to you?” Rosedawn retorted.
“Stay together,” Lightblind warned.
But I could see my demons at the back, obbolomin, my draumgerel, being set upon by what appeared to be a pack of half-rotten undead dogs that’d come soundlessly streaming out of an alley –
I had no choice. I had to leave the slow ones, the stragglers, behind. They’d have to fend for themselves.
They were demons. I shouldn’t have been feeling guilty, not really, but I did. It was hard to look on them as the spawn of Mekesta, torturers of the souls of the damned, when they sometimes behaved so similarly to, well, people.
My favourites – ikistadreng, bintaborax, epheldegrim, my imps, even my lone kinkalaman – all managed to outpace the melee that was suddenly occurring on the back ranks. My vampires, utilising a little of their incredible physiology, managed to stay right under me. I couldn’t see my ghouls…
“Danger…” Zel said musingly.
“Con-tac!” Shallowlie said for the second time, and I could see them, feel them on the rooftops ahead –
Shapes of tall, upright men, their skeletal bodies arrayed in black armour, amethyst eyes staring unblinkingly from the shadows of their helms and visors. They were mounted upon cadaverous steeds draped in barding of flayed skins, dripping rot. The well-honed tips of the spears they held were each surrounded in the same purple nimbus as their eyes, scintillating in the deathly-white air.
They had to be fast to have regrouped here already, to get ahead of us like this –
In the same moment I wondered just how they got up there a horn rasped a sickening note, and they came down, urging their undead mounts over the edges of the roofs.
For the first and hopefully last time in my life, I witnessed a cadre of deathknights dropping from a building in front of me.
They steered their mounts out onto the breeze that was suddenly thick with nethermist, grey and flickering, as if lit from within by purple lightning. Through the air they charged, levelling their lances at us.
More of them than us.
I knew before it fell that Shield Twelve was doomed, and I watched the ripple effect as they surged into Eleven, turned Ten into blue wisps –
“Feychile!”
I turned and caught Shallowlie’s weave and almost dropped it, tying my own forces to hers sloppily, looking blankly for Direcrown, for Valorin…
I threw it, but we weren’t going to be fast enough… I saw our enemies riding their death-smog, ignoring the flames of wizardry and the crackling bolts that glanced off their engraved armour and shields. The enchanters were backing up, the diviners conferring with heads bowed grimly –
The weave barely begun, something passed through the four of us, as if a trace of our intent were carried in the barrier-threads we were knotting. We didn’t even have to speak. Together, each of us did the only thing we could.
Battle-cries in Netheric and Infernal split the air.
Before the deathknights struck our best shields at full strength, struck the half-made weave, our eldritches struck them.
I heard Zel groan within me, but it was already happening.
I watched Aunty Antlers spring into the air to headbutt the lead deathknight out of his saddle –
His lance-tip took her in the face, splitting her head open, and her share in my power was so great I actually felt it as she died.
Khikiriaz screamed as he completed his own leap, striking the deathknight’s mount in the side with a toss of his antlers, and through fortune or skill the spears and hooves that sought his skull were jarred by the huge tangles of black horn atop his head.
The lead deathknight twisted in his saddle – for a split-second it appeared he would manage to straighten-up again – then he was tossed, his mount tumbling from the sky even as my one remaining ikistadreng fell, looking back as he landed to prepare a second leap –
But the Cuddlestickses pounced on the deathknight, and the skeletal creature was buried in infernal iron porcupines.
Watching their success, I pushed shape after shape out at the onrushing horde even as we worked the weave, using my increased range to my advantage, slowing their advance a miniscule amount.
My imps, my folkababil; they hurled themselves into the tide of black armour pouring across the purple-lit clouds: a futile gesture, a desperate attempt to slow the deathknights, if only slightly. They died in droves, many struck right out of the air.
Not that my demons were alone.
Direcrown’s phalanx of minions was there, comprised of a number of demons I’d never seen before, many of which were capable of flying or leaping in the path of our assailants. Zel named them in turn as my gaze fell upon them, but I was too busy to listen properly, weaving, watching as the undead charge faltered. Shallowlie’s ghosts descended from out of nowhere, flickering into existence to tear at the black armour of the knights with their cold, transparent hands.
Our wizards were hurling waves of lava, seeking to melt our foes, but it looked like they were doing more damage to our eldritches than they were to the deathknights, and there were too many of them. The deathknights on the edges of the wedge simply wheeled their horses through the air around the melee in the centre, effortlessly outflanking our miniature extra-planar army. Some moved around the buildings, zombie-hooves silent on the surface of the nethermist, driving in at our unprotected sides –
The weave was as ready as it was going to be; we set it whirling, and its myriad honeycomb facets glimmered, impenetrable –
Just as they reached us. Just in time to turn aside the wicked-looking lances, send the deathknights on our flanks recoiling off the barrier at an angle.
I could see the way their first wave of attacks had shredded the shielding, though. The four of us had spaced ourselves out, to better mend the weave, and to spread our personal shields across the group in case the weave failed. But I didn’t know if four of us would be enough to maintain this barrier for long. Once the deathknights were done with our eldritches, focussed on slaying us…
They deflected magma with their shields, or caught it on their cloaks and flicked it aside into the ruins, their clothing barely singed – they circled away, and back again –
It was then that I heard it. Another horn note, then another, choking blares of sound approaching us from the north.
Where we’d apparently avoided the ambush…
I’d been a fool before, to think that these deathknights had changed position, had moved here when we evaded their trap.
No, these deathknights… these were just placed to pin us down, as a contingency. The real ambushing force was still on its way from its original position – they would soon arrive…
I pushed out with my power. I could recognise deathknights now.
There were at least fifty coming. More than had been left here to await us. And they were going to strike us almost in the rear.
“South!” Timesnatcher growled. “The road on the left, now!”
We withdrew into the street he indicated, hopefully manoeuvring such that our enemies would bottle-neck in the street’s entrance.
“This mist… it’s impossible to shove it,” Shadowcloud was muttering.
The winds controlled by our wizards were tearing at my robe, but did nothing to disperse the rolling grey clouds the deathknights rode. A portion of their force kept up with us, kept slashing the shields, but we maintained the weave.
Behind us, they were slaughtering our minions.
I looked back in frustration as I lost almost everything. My draumgerel and two obbolomin even managed to catch up, the snot-ball spitting its caustic goo from out of nowhere and successfully striking the flank of a single zombie-horse… before a wheeling deathknight turned his attention on it, struck it a single blow, exploding it into a green acidic sludge.
The dog-men lasted less than half that long.
By the time I waved them all away Khikiriaz was limping, and one of my lesser bintaborax had been skewered by a pair of lances in the collarbone, protruding on either side of its bestial head – the deathknights hadn’t been able to pull their weapons free of its ‘flesh’, and I could see them now, riding with longswords of pure nethernal power in their weapon-hands instead.
No. This wasn’t the time to let my fiends all perish – it was possible the bintaborax was still alive. I gave them back to Infernum.
I had ‘room’ now, so to speak. This was the time to get some reinforcements.
I focussed my will and let it seep out through my shields, finding the nearby deathknights’ shapes in the planar terrain.
They were…
“They’re bound, Kas.”
Bound to what? To who?
“I think – I think we’re about to find out. They’re almost here. I can’t do it – I can’t see them at all.”
Their reinforcements.
My mouth was dry. I listened to the scattered pieces of conversation. The diviners were cut off, talking at their own pace, and they moved at the fore of the shield, eventually turning us right again, correcting our course.
In the centre of the weave, the enchanters had converged and were holding hands as they flew; Rosedawn had said something about a ‘great working’. Leafcloak was doing her best to calm Glimmermere down. I had nothing to contribute.
I thought of Jaid and Jaroan. I thought of Em. I thought of Xantaire and Xastur and Orstrum.
I thought of Morsus. I thought of Mum and Dad.
I was one of the first to see the second, larger contingent of deathknights arrive; their silent stampede across the ghostly air. Some had filtered into the surrounding streets, so that they struck out of nearly every alley and road around us, charging almost simultaneously.
The same extra-dimensional spears. The same dead eyes.
The same – except for the leader. He was at the fore of the lines pouring of the gaps between the buildings on my right. A tall black crown surmounted his helm, and his shape was all wrong.
“You know what he is,” Zel said, a statement of fact.
“Here they come,” I whispered to the others.
I felt the pain in my ribs where one of his brethren had scored my flesh. Not that this death-lord was a vampire – but he was a lord. He too was once like me. Like all of us idiots who’d come here.
Then, as they crashed into my pitiful far-flung shields, every defence failed me – everything but the weave.
Nearly two-dozen archmages, pinned within a moving blue ring, the thick bubbles of force that no one else but the four of us could even see, bubbles that were being popped by the thousands.
Can I – can I do something about the nethermist?
“I don’t know, can you?”
I trained my mind on the clouds coiling about the weave, above us and below us and on every side I looked. I looked deep into it, into the purple lightning that danced within the mist. Pure, unadulterated, nethernal energies.
I could see the way the arcs of light could be warped, transfigured into something else, something that would benefit us. The light was a permanently-open doorway into the plane of death. If it could be moulded into a true portal, a gate, I could use it to push the clouds back through –
In the instant I fixed my mind on a course of action Zakimel blurted out:
“They will break through! Flee for your lives!”
It was like the tension had been held back behind a dam, and the arch-magister’s words were the crack in the wall that set it all loose. Panicked cries broke out instantly, both psychic and physical.
The death-lord, his skeletal face awash in the sickly purple light of his eyes, reared his steed on the edge of the shield and held out his hand – the light travelled to his fist –
Zakimel sped out of the weave with the furious haste of a diviner in the prime of his power, travelling in the one direction they’d pleaded with us not to go. Up, up into the air above Zadhal.
Not that it really mattered anymore. They clearly knew we were here.
“However did you get that impression?” Zel said through clenched telepathic teeth.
Within three seconds, almost everyone scattered, and Netherhame had been right. It was Direcrown who abandoned us first, giving up on repairing his share of the weave; even Valorin hesitated for a few precious moments before doing the bidding of his leader.
Zakimel wasn’t my leader. I –
I watched Timesnatcher and the other diviners also abandon the weave, fleeing in all different directions.
“Keep moving!” Timesnatcher cried. “We’re faster than them!”
I watched as the web unravelled, and then the lances pierced through the blue lines, rotten horse-heads lowered, plunging into our defensive structure one final time.
I glimpsed Shallowlie, tried to follow her, pushing at the cold air with the ethereal sylph-wings in addition to the flight-spell. There were deathknights all around us, pressing in on our personal shields, making them buzz and whine – the undead wheeled about effortlessly to give chase as we slid between flaps of putrid barding, worse than a Sticktown gutter, making me retch as our defences banged into the stirrups and iron-shod boots that protruded from the horses’ flanks.
It was terrifying.
As we fled into another street I glanced back, and for my final glimpse I saw that the enchanters, submerged in their ‘great working’, had been the last to react – through the clouds and packed ranks of black-armoured undead, I saw them there in what had been the centre of the weave, the heart of the safest place in Zadhal – now the least safe. They were about to be overrun in the most horrendous way possible, and I knew there was nothing I could do. I was barely outpacing the deathknights chasing at my heels.
Spiritwhisper. Rosedawn. Glancefall.
Like everyone else, I abandoned them, left them to their fate, as I twisted and turned down the ruined alleyways, seeking desperately to avert my own.
* * *
The blades surmounting my shields weren’t enough to chew through their armour. I hung in the mouth of the alleyway halfway up the building, fighting for my life. We were still moving but we had slowed, slowed too much. They took advantage of us when the weave around the Winter Door suddenly dropped, sending me and Shallowlie into spasms, almost halting our flight. The deathknights were hacking at my blue lines with swords that streamed purple essence into the wind, striking with their spears that caused even my strongest outer defences to wither away. I was doing my best to stretch my barriers up and down into the empty spaces above and below me, and behind me, her back to mine, Shallowlie was doing the same. Her ghostly eldritches were barely serving to distract the deathknights, and despite their immaterial nature they too were being destroyed when our foes chopped them down.
Sandwiched between the two of us were a male magister-wizard whose name I hadn’t picked up yet, a dark-haired, dark-eyed youth, and Fangmoon, the young druidess panting in my ear.
She was scared – we all were. She’d fought the vampires, the ghouls without an issue. But this was something else entirely.
Maybe we should’ve followed Zakimel – should’ve flown upwards. Within twenty seconds we’d been trapped, and though they couldn’t penetrate my circle, not with seven different stars rotating inside it, I couldn’t harm them either, not much, not enough. In a matter of a dozen explosive heartbeats they’d swarmed around us, stopping us from fleeing again. We were being compacted into a space that couldn’t hold four bodies. This was it, the end – and we had to be faring better than most of our companions. Most of them were probably dead already; we had two sorcerers here, after all. The three enchanters I’d left behind must’ve been the first to go, as the telepathic links had dropped almost instantly…
Even as I prepared to die, I felt the agony in my chest, knowing I’d left the enchanters to a fate worse than death.
Was that what was in store for each of us? Transition to one of them, one of the living dead? Was it not enough that Mund lose a champion, but it had to also gain a powerful enemy at the same time?
Would it be worth testing the reports, attempting to step through Etherium or one of the other planes, seeking escape?
But if I changed… if I found a way to enter Mund, Evil Kas might get up to, well, anything. Might be responsible for…
No. I couldn’t think it. They wouldn’t desire that, anyway, would they? Wouldn’t we be competition? Surely they’d just dispose of us in some ordinary manner, reanimate us as zombies if they really wanted to. Let our souls travel on.
Our souls… the enchanters’ souls… were they spared? Or were their souls bound to the shadowland now, for easy access back to their bodies?
I couldn’t take it, bear it.
This was going to end, right here, and in our favour.
I poured all that hatred and disgust, panic and pressure, into a single force-blade. I brought it sweeping around, preparing to watch it glance off the nearly-impenetrable armour.
“That’s more like it,” Zel said fiercely.
It chewed deep, this time, shearing off a deathknight’s arm at the elbow. He made a sound, then, nothing more than a grunt, echoing horribly through his non-existent flesh, his staring skull. But it was a grunt of shock, of dismay. I saw the way he looked aside, as if to seek assistance, seek a plausible explanation for how this meagre boy-sorcerer had ripped off his limb.
It didn’t matter. I heard his expression of dissatisfaction and it quadrupled my resolve; I was extending the blade with pure confidence now, whipping it around again –
It broke three spear-tips free, broke a gauntleted hand – and buried itself in the neck of Sir Grunty.
Sir Grunty became Sir Headless, helm and skull flying free, his spinal cord left protruding visibly like a fat bony finger in the gap between his shoulder-plates.
The wizard threw a globular gout of searing heat into the path of his zombie-horse, immolating it instantly, sending it crashing out of the nethermist to the alley floor.
Shallowlie loosed a scream of defiance and hurled her own blade into the deathknights hemming her in, achieving some success.
Fangmoon was still panting, still watching, unwilling to enter the fray. A decision I well-understood. It would almost certainly have meant her death, arch-druid or not. Even her bark-like skin and unbreakable bones would be annihilated by a nethernal weapon like those the deathknights wielded. I’d seen what Winterprince had done to the heretical druid in Firenight Square. Fangmoon was vulnerable. All too vulnerable. The shields were her only option.
If we could’ve found time to put a weave together – if we’d had two moments’ respite – I could’ve started working on their nethermist again, finding a way to transfigure its patterns in my mind…
We turned a corner, then another; I was facing backwards, but I doubted even my sorceress colleague could tell where she was going.
When Shallowlie’s shield failed she took a burning blade in the shoulder, and the half a dozen who’d gotten ahead of us grouped up, set their lances and charged her.
“I can do this,” the druidess pressing against my back thought, and I heard her – so the enchanters were still alive…? Why had they dropped the link earlier, then?
I turned my body, still looking at the company of deathknights no more than three seconds from smashing into Shallowlie – and I knew I had no other option.
I drank deep of the danger-sense, swallowing as much of Zel’s power as I could.
Fangmoon had put her hand against the wound in Shallowlie’s shoulder, and I flew around them in a tight arc, bringing up my hardened force-blade –
It foiled the first deathknight, spilling him out of the cloud to the rubble below, wounded.
The other five merely tightened their formation, continuing, aiming for my heart and head. I knew that my shield couldn’t take a hit like that – I started bringing my spike around to break the lances but I was too slow, and –
And the satyr’s power availed me. I felt it surge into me, loosening my limbs, reflexes that were completely separate from Zel’s danger-sense.
I reached through the circle and caught the closest spear-tip between my hands. Fairy-healing reassured me the blood pouring from my palms would stop eventually. Satyr-strength let me hold tight, leverage sylph-flight to flip my body over the lance, turn horizontally in the air to meet them –
Sorcerer’s-hunger drank the amethyst power in the spear-tip – and then it was nothing but sharp iron –
Sorcerer’s-shield arrested their motion – letting the horses continue beneath me, sending the middle four deathknights flying back out of their saddles, snapping their stirrups –
The one nearest me as I hurtled through the air – I surged towards him, screaming – his lance was twelve inches from piercing Shallowlie’s head – thrusting the unicorn-horn into his hauberk at the neck, which gave way like the heavy armour was paper and the insubstantial horn was the world’s sharpest knife.
I followed him as he too tumbled from the saddle, glitter pouring out of his helm, and I knew I had to stop, had to turn back, catch the sixth of the charging deathknights –
Fangmoon had become a huge flying tiger, striped silver and black, and she pounced through the air, hopping over Shallowlie. She batted aside the riderless horses, closing her tremendous maw around the remaining deathknight and wresting him from the saddle.
Shallowlie seemed to have been healed, and she was slowly erecting her barriers once more; as I watched them stutter into life again, I saw over her shoulder that the magister-wizard behind her was about to be taken apart. More deathknights were arriving to reinforce the ones who’d followed our small band as we fled – the ones I’d knocked from their saddles had landed heavily but they hadn’t been dissuaded; they were regrouping, calling their zombie-steeds back to them…
I summoned my atiimogrix down there, heard his ridiculous laughter drifting up to me as he started to engage the deathknights.
“Come on!” I mind-shouted at the others, and we increased our speed.
As we threw together another hastily-constructed weave and the arch-wizard covered our retreat with more lava, I looked upwards, pondering it again.
Where are we even going? Should we go up? Would we be able to see the others do you think?
“I don’t know, but –”
Zel quietened as Fangmoon came through:
“Feychilde! Your hands! Give them to me, quickly!”
I’d hardly noticed – the lacerations were still too fresh, too biting to ache much – but I was dripping blood into the streets as we flew. That could have been a bad idea. Not that the deathknights needed it to track us right now – a horribly-silent swarm of them were only a few paces behind us, following right on our heels.
The druidess flew alongside me, a dropping-massive metallic tiger sailing the chill airs, seemingly with little difficulty.
The wizards’ spells were more powerful than I’d considered – that, or this magister had bolstered her augmentations.
“Press your hands on me.”
“You can’t do this from a distance?”
“Not that kind of wound!”
I’d already been reaching out for a twist of force from Shallowlie – as soon as I tied it and passed it on, I reached out and touched Fangmoon’s fur on her right flank. I felt a tingling sensation, like I’d fallen asleep on my hands and they were just waking up again, and a murky greenness surrounded them.
Suddenly, a voice in my head, whispering:
“Stop… talking… with… minds…”
“Wh-who was that?” the arch-magister asked fearfully, still hurling more fire at the deathknights behind us despite the shakiness in his voice.
I had absolutely no idea – the voice was so low the message was almost indecipherable, never mind identifying the source.
Fangmoon said almost the same thing as the magister.
Then, a little louder:
“It’s… Rosedawn… Just… stop… no!…”
The last word, the ‘no!’, was whispered in a tone of abject terror.
My heart leapt into my throat.
“Stop using the links!” I called to the others. “We have to talk out loud!”
There was no point keeping my voice down, the deathknights were almost on top of us again and we were lost; we might’ve been circling around to the same place we were ambushed for all I knew.
“Damn it!” Fangmoon roared, the daunting feline maw making the sound far more dreadful.
“Dey ha’ been listeni’ to us?” Shallowlie asked.
“Tracking us through the link!” I almost snarled it. “Killed the enchanters!”
“Killed them?” Fangmoon repeated. “What do you mean, killed them! Oh no…”
I suddenly felt an awful anger rising up, like the magma the wizard was throwing, as though my belly were the pit of some vast volcano undergoing a tremendous upheaval, spewing rage up into my chest, lapping higher and higher within me, threatening to burst out of my chest except it couldn’t – it could only rise, climb until I felt I would weep it from my eyes and I –
This was our fault – we should have known, from the way the link stopped working – we should have thought, thought something –
I felt myself detaching my hands from Fangmoon’s fur – the green light was fading and they were healed now, I knew. I had work to do instead.
I halted in the air.
No way to speak, communicate this plan. I screwed my eyes shut.
The others faltered. That was okay.
No need to run. Easier this way.
Zel didn’t say no this time. She watched me from within, a lump of morbid fascination inside my soul.
In the darkness granted by my closed eyes, I sensed the undead. I sensed the unliving horses, the burning weapons.
I let the deathknights reach me, and lowered the unicorn-horn towards them, meeting them head-on.
Even with my eyes shut I saw the tidal wave of golden light that burst from my forehead, the miniature sun that blinded me.
As if from a vast distance I experienced myself screaming, screaming in the air and barely holding myself aloft – then I sensed the furred limbs of the druid curl about me, felt the winds of wizardry bear me away.
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