COBALT 7.8: PAYING THE PRICE
“Where have I been all these years? To see only the sin, never the sinner! How did I continue? Not even once did I truly see a face. Now? Now that’s all I see! A decade of faces! So many names. So many memories. All washed away in the name of righteousness.”
– from ‘Ghost Interviews: the Assistant’, to a Mrs. Mrin of Belton Bend
Almost two minutes had passed by the time Netherhame and Zakimel figured out what had happened to the twins. The rest of us were three streets over, fighting her halfway up the Tower of the Lidless Sun, a minor fire-mage college. Some of the students had been forced to take an impromptu break from their Yearsend revelries (and, in some sad cases, Yearsend studies) when the twentieth-rank demon burst through the wall into their dormitory. Most fled, but some stayed and tried to fight despite their lack of preparations.
The majority of those who stayed died, and we screamed at them to run, stop feeding her whip, taxing our healers’ focus. We were already on the edge. Killstop, Timesnatcher, Starsight and Dimdweller had all been fixed after a concerted effort – but apparently Doomspeaker, the old gnome diviner whose head had been smashed apart, was taking all of Sunspring and Petalclaw’s attention, even just to keep her on this side of the shadowland. It didn’t help that Copperbrow managed to get himself tangled in her flail at one point – the small guy was a newbie to this kind of thing and was, so to speak, way out of his depth. While his courage shone through, he had no combat experience and his archmagery was still relatively new to him. Glimmer was having a hard time fixing him too, his little body having been exposed to the whip’s devouring magic for longer than most.
I was still struggling to keep a lid on Gilaela’s anger before it got me killed – certainly the infusion of spite, a kind of rarefied indignation, helped me concentrate my offensive skills. I was forming and thrusting out my force-blades with greater speed and strength than ever before, attacks that somehow managed to strike home on the odd occasion, slicing open the fur on her back, forearm, thigh… There was a level of brutality to my actions that was only in part my own, a cold fire in my mind, guiding my hands. I wasn’t possessed; this battle-frenzy was just one aspect of the power belonging to the dark unicorn with whom I was now joined – the most useful aspect, right now, given that Gilaela’s newly-transformed weaponry couldn’t actually harm the demon.
Whether I was fighting like a savage or not, I found I didn’t care. The eolastyr deserved brutality. Finally, here was Dustbringer’s slayer, a foe against whom I could marshal all my murderous instincts. I enjoyed lacerating her; I enjoyed fighting her. I just had to keep applying judicious amounts of satyr-reflexes to my situation, ensuring Gilaela’s animosity didn’t overwhelm my survival instincts. Once or twice I caught myself grinning and lowering my head when the eolastyr prepared to charge me, and had to forcefully remind myself to dart aside. The dormitory had plenty of cover, with its plethora of (now spell-shattered) furniture, its piles of broken internal walls.
It didn’t make me any less angry when Netherhame and Zakimel’s reports came in. They’d returned to the small room and curving corridor where we’d waited with Orieg and Arxine. Shallowlie was missing, along with the twins. Kani had been found unconscious, far from the scene, covered in blood that was not her own – blood whose origin the arch-diviner could not perceive. A few healing potions were used to get the cleric back up on her feet, and apparently she couldn’t remember a thing.
“Heretics,” Em snarled over the link, shaping and reshaping wind elementals, hurling them towards our enemy.
“After everything we’ve seen lately, I don’t doubt it,” Timesnatcher said grudgingly. He was barraging the tigress in hail of spellbound daggers, thrown at ear-splitting speeds. The blades punctured her flesh, sinking in deep – ankle, jaw, armpit – then were spat back out again almost as quickly, leaving barely a clot of ichor matted in her two-tone fur, never mind a wound.
“This is all my fault,” Killstop muttered.
I was about to reply in the negative, about to take on the burden as Irimar had told me I must – but then the weight grew heavier, and even my mind-voice was left speechless.
Withertongue stepped up, the elf wizard pouring a cone of heated air at the demon, but when a whip-crack rang out her evasive action proved too little, too late – the elf’s delicate skeleton was stripped, and the tigress’s claws scored through her spine at the fleshless neck, separating her head from her body.
Dead, I knew, watching the spirit separate from the flesh, fade away.
She didn’t even do her the dignity of stealing her soul. Withertongue was, what, deemed too weak to bother with?
And Everseer played me. Played both of us.
Maybe she knew Tanra’s name from the beginning, lulling me into a false sense of security. Maybe she knew there’d be five of us, not four, to face the tigress a second time. Maybe she knew precisely where and when she would be able to kidnap Orieg and Arxine all along.
When I recovered from the shockwave, my next spear went right through her back, through her heart, out the front of her feline chest.
Pain. A second time. I saw the wince, the startlement crossing her face before she sprang away, pulling herself free of the force-spike.
A whole gout of ichor hung there in the air for a moment, dripping from my invisible weapon, before a wind-blast from Stormsword scattered it, following up my attack with one of her own that smashed the wounded fiend into the wall –
Through the wall –
Then we were out in the air again, coursing after the arch-demon towards the next building – she landed on a roof in a spray of tiles, rolled and came to her feet, leaping again –
She was still bleeding. It streamed behind her in the air as she fled us, black gobbets of liquid void-stuff.
She hopped laterally off tower-walls and drove her unstoppable body through brick and stone, entering other structures and tearing through them – she bounced from roof to roof, climbed impossible heights in the matter of seconds – she cracked her whip, she screamed at us in defiance and tried to retaliate when we struck her.
Yet we kept up. We hammered her together. The diviners were there but it was me and Em chasing her down. A wizard’s aeromancy wasn’t supposed to work properly on a demon like this, able to bend and twist through tornados without hassle, but Stormsword’s fists of wind were powerful enough to buffet her, letting me work my own magic. Timesnatcher and Killstop were veritable fonts of ensorcelled daggers but it was me that was hurting her, me that was driving her on as she cut her way through Lower Tivertain’s opulent buildings.
Me that delivered the last blow, the one that caught her mid-leap and bisected her head, splitting her open from the space between her shoulder-blades to the crown of her weird scalp.
Her hand shook as it raised the flail, a spasm of motion that betrayed the extent of her injury.
And then suddenly the whip was in Tanra’s hand, the frowning face looking down at the eolastyr in judgement as the demon fell.
Fell hard, thanks to Em pushing her down, slamming her into the road.
It only started to sink in as she toppled from the sky, landing with a resounding crash in the centre of a cobbled street full of wagons, that there were ordinary people around. It was Yearsend, meaning some areas were empty, but not so much that the events of the past five minutes had gone unnoticed by the general populace. Hundreds of victims of the tumult, some merely injured, some fading from this world, all of them moaning for aid; shivering crowds of onlookers with terrified eyes and high-pitched voices…
I didn’t care who was crying out, who was watching… didn’t care who cared.
I was going to finish this right in front of them and if they wanted to look, that was their business.
She’d landed on her back, a dying tigress opened up in a perfect line. My spear had got her good. The eolastyr tried to use her claws to hold herself together, but it was futile at this point – she looked like a disconsolate child pressing two halves of a broken toy together. I’d cut her from her sternum, up through the middle of her sunken nostrils, between her black-hole eyes, splitting her forehead – inside the yawning cavity between the two sides of her face, only darkness flowed, like a bottomless ocean of evil.
Still, as I approached the scarlet shield flickered back into being. Timesnatcher’s last knife was repelled, flying off to stick in a nearby wall.
I sneered as I descended, and dismissed her shield with the wave of a hand, stealing away its essence for myself.
“A powerful eldritch, to be sure,” I scoffed.
I drew out an axe-head from blue force-lines, reinforced it by habit, then double-reinforced it.
I looked down at the broken white prism on the ground before me, the triangle of flesh that had been an arch-demon’s face. The black eyes swam in the nothingness – the clawed hands raised in a supplicating gesture – the arms jerked spasmodically –
I understood the message, as only a sorcerer could:
She would join me! Be mine. Be a slave.
But I could never trust that again. Not from such as she.
I shook my head softly, and when I said the words she surely knew were coming it was with every ounce of scorn, every shred of contempt I could muster.
Which was hardly a meagre amount.
“Powerful, but not infinitely so.”
Whatever she truly had in mind for me, it was close enough to ill-will.
I let the axe-head fall, Em brought down the lightning, and the whip in Tanra’s hand dissipated away.
It was over.
* * *
I lifted a half-ton boulder, flapping hard with my wings and straining with Em’s flight-spell – the satyr-strength could’ve managed it if I had my feet on the ground but that was impossible up here. Some of the eolastyr’s victims were pinned halfway up ruined towers like this one, towers whose upper levels had been constructed by wizards with little concern for ordinary physics. While I shifted the massive stone, my imps scurried beneath into the wreckage, working the three dying people free. I felt it would be in exceedingly bad taste to reanimate their dead friends for extra assistance in their recovery, so I did it the slightly-longer way.
I had a modicum of care again, now that I was no longer under the subtle influence of my vampire. The influence of my newly-dark unicorn was far less subtle, and had likewise been dismissed – until I could more thoroughly assess her condition… until I had need of bladed index fingers that would be ineffective against evil creatures…
Gilaela might’ve been improved in the demon’s eyes, but to me she’d been powered-down, her usefulness dramatically decreased. If only that had been the sole price we’d paid, it would’ve been worth it. But we’d lost Withertongue, someone I’d only met a handful of times. I’d hardly said fifty words to the elf in the months since we were introduced, yet a loss was a loss. We’d already been low on wizards. And Vardae had gotten away with Orieg and Arxine… This was a bleak day for our odds in future confrontations.
It could’ve been worse. Em could’ve died, so easily… Tanra almost did… And what nearly happened to Timesnatcher… It’s all on my head.
But the arch-demon died. We killed her, together.
We lost the twins, we lost Withertongue. We lost several dozen innocent civilians, killed instantly by rubble or left to perish when the team of healers had been overwhelmed by the dying champions and arch-magisters.
A fraction. A tiny, tiny fraction of what might’ve been.
She didn’t even get one of our souls, I mused as my imps slid the last of the three crying people free of the debris. I carefully placed the massive block down where it wouldn’t cause an avalanche and tapped my wraith-essence once more, easing my arm-muscles.
When I let Avaelar out to heal their injuries, I floated there above them, light enough that I felt the cold breeze flowing through my flesh.
Jaevette and another arch-druid bearing the Magisterium mark arrived to relieve me, and as I rejoined with my sylph and cast about I saw that it was done. Magisters were crawling all over everything, and officials from construction guilds were already on the scene, assessing everything with minions taking down their words. Most of the champions had left, returning to their homes, their families. I’d just glyphed a message to Jaid and Jaroan to reassure them everything was okay, and continued helping the trapped. This kind of thing was as much my job as the demon-fighting. More, when it came down to it. The whole point of fighting the demons, the darkmages, Evil in all its varied forms, was to save lives. Wasn’t it?
Whether it was just the string of failures and defeats that culminated in an empty victory, or something one of my eldritches had infected me with – I wasn’t feeling the joy in saving lives today. The victory hadn’t felt empty when it was actually happening. Evening had fallen, and I’d dismissed my vampire and unicorn for fear they were causing me harm of the less-easily discerned kind… psychic, mental harm… but even without their malign presences within my body I felt disconnected. I was acting mechanically.
I wanted her back. I wanted to smash her out of the sky like that again.
Damn it, I growled, reliving the fateful moments in my memory.
My eyes met Em’s across the debris-littered streets. She was wrapped in her storm, floating over the ruins to survey the scene like me. Her eyes were radiant, cobalt fire crackling in her irises, visible at a distance of a hundred feet even without my vampire’s sight.
I approached her – she looked over at me as I neared her.
“You feel it too?” she asked me.
I nodded, wordless.
“Let’s get out of zis place,” she said, seeming to suppress a shudder.
I shook my head, then, unable to help myself, gripped her about the waist and pulled her into my arms. She lost her breath in surprise at the suddenness of my motion, but she closed her eyes in submission, crushing herself to me – our lips met, and the fire that had been in her eyes was on her tongue, her energy consuming me from within, the passion scorching every facet of my being.
We weren’t so far from Treetown, not the way we flew, frenzied in the throes of the kiss that took us up, far beyond the gaze of those below. We were there in our secluded spot within a couple of minutes, long seconds of intensity, of craving, of purifying hunger and biting desire such that I didn’t even notice when we arrived, not until she started pulling off my mask.
This time, I knew – I knew what she had felt after the battle at the library. I knew the desire, the blood-heat, the battle-lust. We fought the eolastyr together. We killed her, together. It was me now, and I was it. I would never be the same again.
Evening passed into night, and I didn’t go home, didn’t go to see Jaid and Jaroan before the Mourning Bells started ringing.
* * *
Gong! Gong! Gong!
I’d been slumbering, Em sleeping with her head on my chest, warm despite the mountain wind rippling through the trees’ branches. As the discordant pealing reached my ears I jolted awake – Em raised her head and I sat up.
“I swear,” I growled, fumbling for my clothing, “I am never going to sleep again.”
“She must have triggered something!” Em snapped, as though suddenly angry at one or both of us, pulling on her robe. “Vot did ve miss?”
“A thousand things – one thing – it doesn’t matter now, does it?” I retorted, standing up, locating my mask. “A dropping Incursion. An Incursion, on Yearsend… If they dare go near Mud Lane again –“
“Kas!” She pulled out her glyphstone.
Rather than wait for her to finish and make her give me a summary, I thought it would save time and energy to just retrieve my own.
I held it up, and was treated to a view of Zakimel. He was standing before a fireplace in what looked very much like a house – his house? It was definitely no Maginox chamber, for once. The mantelpiece behind him was bereft of all ornament, save two extremely expensive-looking crystal decanters, both empty. The old diviner looked weary beyond measure, even more unkempt than the last time I saw him – but he was still going. None of his fatigue showed in his voice.
“All champions,” he began, waiting a heartbeat before continuing, “we have multiple breaches in at least three locations. Preliminary scryings suggest the eolastyr’s former servants were sequestered about the city, waiting for the signal to begin, and her early demise may have moved up the time-table. Expect the typical levels of disorder. We make out a minimum of four summoners at Hidebent Square in Hightown, four at the Greybridge in Rivertown, and two at the Treetown Gate. The Magisterium bids you battle hard, and good luck. Ismethyl and Yune be with us all.“
The very instant he started to lower his glyphstone, a vision of Timesnatcher started to come through.
“Feychilde and Stormsword… I’m assigning you both to the Greybridge. Gods know you work well together… I realise you’re closer to the Treetown Gate but they’re really going to need you down there. Glancefall will be looking out to link you. Good luck.”
I blinked away the trance, lowered my own stone, and looked at Em.
Timesnatcher had extended his apology, even if he hadn’t come out and said it. Just acknowledging me and Em ‘worked well’ together – it was enough for me, for now. Enough to tell me he was on my side.
Stormsword met my gaze, and the electric fire in her eyes reignited.
“The Magisterium didn’t contradict his orders?” I asked, feeling an awful, hollow excitement bubble up within me.
She just shook her head.
Why was it that I almost wanted to smile? Why was it that she looked like she was fighting back her own urge to loose her wolfish grin?
We flew south, riding the tails of the thunder-wave she unleashed before us, as if sending the demons a warning, a condemnation, a prophecy of their doom.
* * *
“At least it’s not as bad as it could’ve been,” I said to Glancefall and the others, while I gestured at a gang of loping creatures, stealing the allegiance of a dozen demons I didn’t know the powers of and sending them against their former comrades. “If we’d given her more time to prepare, who’s to know how many more locations might’ve been hit?”
“Let’s not count our demons till they’ve been summoned, please,” Doomspeaker chided me gently. The tiny blurred form of the arch-diviner went spinning like a bladed wheel through a clot of imps, spraying their body-parts all around.
“I won’t argue with that,” I replied.
Our foes had opened their portals inside the central support structure of the longest bridge in Mund, secreted in the hidden stony hollows beneath the river’s surface. Presumably the eolastyr had visited the site at some point in the last forty-eight hours, bringing with her sufficient blood-sources – sufficient captives – to maintain a number of summoners once the Incursion began. The pedestrians and wagoners following the Hill Road all crossed the Greywater here, the river’s cold waters shouting along in the darkness beneath their feet and the hooves of the horses. Drunken revellers, cargo-carriers, strolling families and store-suppliers – the lot of them were taken unawares when a horde of gibbering fiends came erupting up through the central struts of the bridge, pouring along it in either direction, killing and consuming everything in their paths.
Doomspeaker was already here before we arrived, and the wizened old gnome had taken charge of the situation, organising a team of champions at each end of the Greybridge, halting the demons’ progress. She coordinated with the closest magister-bands, ensuring those who could be healed were transferred into the care of the druids and the local priests who’d turned out to help. Rudimentary shields had been constructed by sorcerers of a decidedly non-archmage persuasion; I could’ve toppled them with less than a thought.
It was no matter. When Feychilde and Stormsword arrived, arrowing down from the north, everything changed.
A wave of bigger, better demons smashed through the front ranks on this end of the bridge, as flight-spells lifted all our magister and champion allies into the air. The two of us continued past, taking the fight right into the heart of the spawn, to the four summoners at the middle of the Greybridge, surrounded by powered-up obbolomin.
A gangly stick-man, the nabburatiim. One of the agonised entrail-men, the atiimogrix. But two of the fiends I didn’t know the names of. There was an imp, large for his kind at two feet tall; he wore a black robe covered in red stars, a tiny jewel-topped staff in his clawed hand. More impressive was a huge yellowing skull, hovering atop a pillar of fire and cackling away as it scorched everything it passed over, leaving rings of crimson light in its wake. It was roughly the size of the main room of my apartment, its vacant eye-sockets big enough to swallow a child whole, never mind its chattering maw.
I stole the loyalty of all of them save for the skull, and suddenly the tide of fiends was cut off. While I whittled away chips of bone from the floating head, using my new host of infantry as much as my force-blades to effect as much damage as possible, Em helped at the southern end of the bridge, disintegrating whole crowds of hellspawn with bolt after bolt of explosive energy.
In five minutes we were done, moving on.
The demons at Treetown Gate had been dealt with by the time we finished, apparently thanks in large part to the brave sacrifice of numerous mage-guards, but when we arrived at Hidebent Square in central Hightown reports started to come in from Danamir Row, from the shrine of Kultemeren in western Sticktown, from Openway in North Lowtown…
On Danamir Row I ran into Ciraya, mounted on Fe. What she was doing here instead of in Sticktown, I was unsure, but that paled into insignificance when placed beside the fact she was fighting at all. She’d been given the night off, at least, to sit with Arithos while she recovered – I’d talked to Zakimel about that personally after the eolastyr’s death, and he’d been very happy to concede my argument. What the young sorceress had done, even if we’d failed to steal the whip until it was too late – it had taken more guts than anything I’d seen from someone without archmagery or god-power at their fingertips.
I supposed that answered my question as to why she was out on the streets giving it back to the demons. I merely saluted her as I went past, and made her task a little easier by ensnaring a choice handful of her nearby targets, selecting only the strongest.
At one point of the night I flew over Phanar, Kani, Ibbalat and Anathta as they made their way along a Treetown lane. They’d engaged the demons somewhere or other, going off the damaged armour strapped to Phanar’s horse, the stains of hellish ichor on their cloaks. I couldn’t stop to chat, having been sent on an urgent errand by Timesnatcher to trap a lone summoner whose location had come to him in a vision… but as I exchanged a brief shouted set of pleasantries (and endured a dose of Annoythta’s biting wit) I very much got the impression from Kani’s demeanour that she wasn’t going to let me off lightly regarding Orieg and Arxine’s abandonment.
“Goodbye, sorcerer,” was the only thing the cleric chose to say to me, and it would’ve sounded ominous had it been anyone else speaking. Her voice was passionless, uncaring.
It did bother me, till my sorcerous senses found the summoner and the imps it had brought through into the idyllic forest grove. I got stuck inside my pentagonal shield by the biggest eldritch, my force-barriers all wrapped up in black tendrils that refused to stay cut when I slashed them. It took me at least ten minutes to get the demon under my control – the thing was like one of those octopus-creatures, except instead of eight tail-arm things it had somewhere around eight-hundred… and it was the tendrils, possessing no head, no face, no features other than the inky coils. It didn’t trigger on my sorcerous senses. Surely assassin-class.
Once I snagged the big critter – gods above, it had to be at least eighth rank, the way it weighed in my sorcerous belly – snagging the summoner was easy. The culprit was just another one of those rolling hair-balls with a rusty tree on top, and aside from the octopus-demon it had only summoned demonoids. There were a fair few of them, but those I couldn’t extend my power over got handily destroyed by those I could.
Two hours later, I was back with Em and we were at a place known as Shinglemoss of which I’d never heard before, a rocky beach on the Greywater not so far from the Greybridge where we’d started. I’d rejoined with the vampire to help me hunt down the water-dwelling demons that were using the beach as a landing-ground, and with his perceptions I could make out the towering span of the bridge in the distance, not even smouldering now.
I had to focus. We were being overwhelmed; the wizards’ water elementals and my new octopus couldn’t stop them all and there were oh so many. The magisters and watchmen moving through the houses behind us were understaffed, having trouble evacuating so many people at such short notice. Until help arrived, we were the bottleneck preventing a massacre. Me, Em and Copperbrow were mowing through wave after wave of the slimy creatures as they were pulling themselves up onto the rocky embankment, but my fortifications were bending under the pressure of hundreds of attacks, and that was when I felt it.
The shudder of a shield going down.
I frowned, confused. It took me a moment to pinpoint the source of the disturbance. I knew it wasn’t the shield around me – I would’ve been able to feel the gradual effect of attrition if something successfully chewed through the barriers that were fixed to me. I cast about – it wasn’t the shields I’d put on either of the wizards –
Was it the one I’d put on Doomspeaker earlier? No… it was… older…
I looked north-east, towards home. In even the two seconds I faltered, forgetting to form and swing my force-blades, my outermost shield wavered and disappeared, broken by the renewed assault.
I didn’t care. I –
Again. It happened again, and I knew.
Something was taking down the sorcerous protections around my home – around the twins –
“Twins!” I cried aloud, launching myself into the sky, leaving my flickering structures of shielding behind for the others. I looked back –
“Which ones?” Em shouted, her lightning-sword splitting eight or nine demons in two at one swing; the fiends that’d been warring with each other for a spot at the front surged forwards over their leaking corpses.
I gazed back at her, fighting for her life against a whole legion of eldritches. Her grimacing face was never more beautiful, more determined. Her platinum hair streamed free of her hood on one side of her face, and her tempest-wind whipped at her robe as she wielded white fire.
Don’t die, Em, I thought to myself, rapidly flying away from her. Already the shields about her were failing. Don’t die. Not again.
I’m sorry.
“Feychilde!” she yelled over the link.
“My twins,” I replied grimly.
It wasn’t long before I was out of range to hear her replies, answer her questions. I asked for everyone listening to find out what was going on around Helbert’s Bend, but my glyphstone never lit up as I flew, never rang out to signal a scrap of information, or a reassurance that back-up would be on its way.
None of us had died tonight as far as I knew, save for Withertongue at the eolastyr’s hands; but the magistry and watch weren’t the only ones short of a few hands. In truth we were stretched woefully thin. We needed a new crop of archmages to take up the mantle of champion. We needed less darkmages. Had we been too successful lately? Had we stopped people from thinking we needed them to step up? Or had we failed them too often, drove them away from joining our ranks with our ineptitude, our inability to protect them?
I was unable to protect the twins. Our loss of Orieg and Arxine to the heretics should’ve been a warning sign to me, but I let it slip me by, and now it was my twins, Jaid and Jaroan in peril…
Again.
How is it that they’ve come to Helbert’s Bend, twice in a row…?
It could only be the work of a cold intellect, a master orchestrator. Surely the tigress had been able to discern my identity, especially with the way I’d been exposed in Sticktown yesterday… Was this something the eolastyr had put in place especially for me? Did she know in advance it would be my hand that dealt her the death-blow?
And a tiny part of my mind whispered, Could it be that she’s already returned from the Twelve Hells?
I was doing anything, desperately clutching at straws in order to distract myself from the horrible truth – the shields were all down. I’d felt them collapse, one by one. There was nothing left. I would fly close to my home and I would be able to feel their corpses before I saw them, be able to touch –
No.
Sylph-wings had never propelled me faster. Wizard-flight and wraith-form only increased my velocity. There was an insurgency inside my soul, and I didn’t know the shape of the creature that would win. That would claim my flesh and thoughts and identity. The thing that would be Kas, when it was all over.
I heard the air itself screeching in protest as I barrelled down at Mud Lane; satyr-reflexes alone let me approximate the right time to come to a stop, and even then I overshot it, moving like a ghost through the wall into my apartment.
Yes, I felt the death, the not-quite-dead bodies, but not until I was already inside the main room, floating near the door. Not until I could see it with my own eyes.
And it wasn’t what I expected. Nothing so banal as a demon. Nothing so easily-overcome as a target I could shred to pieces without a second thought. Not something I could’ve imagined, even in my nightmares. I’d dreamt of many dark and dreadful things since that fateful day when Tyr Kayn was exposed, when Shadowcloud died, when I tried to kill Zel…
Never anything half as bad as this.
“You!” I panted for air.
I didn’t even have anything beyond my reinforced circle active. He was at the far side of the room, armoured in three shields, their reinforcements heavier than mine, the outer barrier bristling with blades. He had the advantage, in every conceivable way.
“Yeah,” he replied, the Rivertown accent thick, voice deep for someone who had to be my age at most. He grinned wickedly – I could make out the movements of the arch-sorcerer’s chin despite his cowl’s folds. It was dark, almost pitch black in here, but the open eyes in the room could all see perfectly well. “And you. Kastyr Mortenn.
“You killed Fintwyna, Kastyr Mortenn. And now the Liberator of Zadhal himself gets to know just how it feels.”
* * *
Ilitar and Haspophel. Three other mages I didn’t know. All dead. Zakimel or someone must’ve picked up my message, must’ve sent them ahead of me.
My fault.
But the others were still with me. The important ones. I could save them. I would save them. I had no idea what power he’d used to subdue them, but their breathing was regular, sounding all-too-comfortable in their gentle snoring.
“It’s b-been a very long day –“ I started.
He laughed, barking so loud I couldn’t continue. His five wight-magisters, arrayed behind him in a line, snapped out their own hollow, Netheric laughter as if to echo him.
“Can you shut the drop up, you stuck-up fool?” he spat. “Vaahn’s nails! Can you shut the drop up now?”
He lowered a demonic claw towards Xastur’s unprotected, sleeping face, resting it tenderly on the little boy’s cheek.
I shut up.
He’d thrown aside the table, the benches, and had piled their slumbering bodies atop one another, like he was stacking a fire, in criss-cross fashion – Xantaire and Orstrum on the bottom, then the twins across them, with Xastur spread-eagled over Jaid and Jaroan’s legs.
The foot-long, unclean-looking talon poised on Xastur’s soft flesh was so sharp, so malign in nature… if the heretic even so much as slipped… the child might die…
“Yeah, you sure got a lot of crummy books in here, champion. Not the interestin’ kind. Where’d you keep your spellbooks?”
I shrugged, not taking my eyes off his three huge talons.
He cocked his head, rolled his shoulders, and a little trickle of blood ran down the side of Xastur’s face.
“Fine!” I gasped. “I have – is that why you’re here? My books? I can give –“
“I already told you why I was here. Try to keep up, fool. I’m here to do to you what you did to me.”
His barriers’ latticeworks were structurally perfect, the result of a sorcerer bent on his task to the exclusion of all else. He’d improved in his shieldcraft, since we last met.
I had no doubt, none at all, that he would be quite capable of killing them all before I could get to him, even if I brought everything I could call upon into the fray.
“I k-keep my s-spellbooks in th-th…”
He sighed, and I fell silent, cringing.
Zel. Zel, come back. I need you, Zelurra. B-bondswoman…
But it didn’t work, couldn’t work. She would never heed my summons again.
Never be there to save us, like she always had before.
Gilaela. She was my wild card. It might’ve been that she couldn’t do anything to the shields in her transformed state – but I had to try.
“Move that finger again,” he growled. “Move it, and I move mine.”
He did it anyway, slitting open Xastur’s face.
No no no no no no no…
I watched the blood trickle down past Xassy’s ear, and I slowly changed. Considering the enormity of the change, it was quick, actually, but it felt slow.
“You realise what happens if you kill them,” I heard my voice saying in a dead monotone.
“I die at your hands.” He barked laughter again, his chorus of wights following suit. “Do you think that bothers me? Does dying bother you? Really?” His chin dipped a fraction, as if he indicated my champion’s garb. “You thought you could just come out with your identity, right? You thought you could pay the price alone. But that’s never true, is it?”
I stopped myself mid-shrug, blinked away my tears and stared at him.
“You want to know? Really?” I caught myself sneering. “You say you want to teach me the meaning of loss? How did you get your powers, eh? Aren’t you like me? Aren’t we the same – weren’t we from the moment we –“
“Enough!” he roared. “We’re nothin’ alike! You killed her!”
“I have never,” I said, then choked.
‘Never killed anyone,’ I was going to say. But that wasn’t true, was it?
The magisters Everseer slew when I let her go.
The magisters here, right in front of me, victims of my self-centredness, Haspophel and Ilitar’s pale faces judging me.
Wyre and his cronies. Em’s hand dealt the stroke, but the malice in it was my own.
“You killed her,” he hissed with finality. “You must pay! The price is blood – always in blood!”
He brought back his claw with savage speed, strength, the motion a blur. The three rusty talons glinted.
There were unknown eldritches inside him. When he struck my family, he would likely kill them all in a single blow.
And there was nothing, nothing whatsoever I could do to stop him.
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