QUARTZ 9.7: FOUR
“The energies contained within the champion are not so easily measured. Shall you speak of the wondrous archmagery, the immensity of their power? Then you miss their true energies. You see afar the lightning, and think you understand the importance of the storm. Mere epiphenomena. You do not know the strength, unless you have witnessed it for yourself.”
– from ‘The Testimony of Prince Deathwyrm’
I was lucky I’d ran away, moved away, before this had happened. Seeing the annihilation of my entire world – once upon a time it would’ve broken me completely, body and soul.
Now it sharpened me. I’d lost it, given it up, and I understood:
I destroyed Mud Lane.
If I’d been more careful with Nighteye – if me and Killstop had towed the Magisterium line, if we had capitulated, told the truth to Timesnatcher and Emrelet – if I hadn’t been drunk on a vampire’s powers, if I hadn’t lost sight of my goals – if I stood my ground, if I refused to leave –
If I had only been here when this – when this senseless destruction had happened –
There were too many hypotheticals. What was done, was done, and there was now only the wreckage of a hollowed-out, empty existence.
And I found I could give it up. I’d already lost it once, when I abandoned this place, these people. Had I really been so naive as to think I could just return, have everything as it was? That was a dragon’s thinking. The final obliteration of my home, my past, every root of my life eaten away, life drained into the earth leaving only a warren of dead sticks…
Yet I couldn’t think about it, the death: about them –
Orstrum, you poor old man –
Xan, Xas, you – you – no –
No.
No. I couldn’t grieve, couldn’t afford to. Firstly, they might not have even been dead. I might’ve been overthinking it – I couldn’t sense corpses inside the gigantic mound of sticks that was Mud Lane’s grave-marker. This itself implied they’d all been able to evacuate… Unless something worse had been done with them…
Secondly, if the demons had been able to pull this off – I really was late, far later than I thought I was. For a moment I almost considered removing the dracolich’s crown from my head – at least that way the city’s defenders would be able to sense me, use me. What good was my freedom, if it came at such a steep price I’d be the only living Mundian left to pay it?
But I’d sacrificed myself once before. No. If their policies meant they were untrustworthy, that would have to be on their heads, wouldn’t it? I couldn’t be blamed for protecting myself, especially when I knew they had every reason to come after me, disable me by the most-efficient means possible: divination, enchantment… I was probably the keenest weapon they had to wield against the demons, and if I gave them the chance they’d scabbard me, even melt me back down to a pool of shining slag.
If anything, Mund probably depended on my freedom. For all I knew, the servants of Mekesta through whose gates these armies of hell poured were well-aware of my coming, crown or no. The crushing of Mud Lane might have been a deliberate distraction designed purely for me.
With an involuntary outburst of noise that sounded to my ears like a groan or maybe a sigh, I angled my carrion-bird wings and spun myself about, reorienting.
Gong! Gong! Gong!
Hightown? Rivertown? Treetown? Which direction was best? Where would they most be in need of my skill-set?
Treetown and Hightown were decadent. All of the Realm’s loveliest terraces and gardens, concentrated into pockets, easily-destructible… The demons would have their way with them, causing property damage that quickly escalated into the millions of silver… But those would be the places to which the Magisterium would devote the majority of their resources. It had always been that way. And as for actual people? The population was sparsely distributed, even the housing districts and dormitory-towers, when compared with the densities here in Sticktown, in the Lowtowns, in Rivertown…
South. I’d go back southwards, and bring the storm of wrath with me as I went. Things had looked worse around Branbecks Bridge than they were up here.
The moment I’d made my mind up, Blandface’s gungrelafor appeared beside me in a sudden cascade of scarlet flame. Jikzamiz, one of the many I’d never gotten around to naming.
“Master!” she croaked. “Master, we have found champions! The Blandface spoke with the man of the magisters. The Mountainslide, the Spiritwhisper, the Nightfell, and one they call the Ironvine, with many burning holy –“
“Where?” I roared, grabbing her with unnecessary roughness.
She didn’t seem to mind much, letting me shake her by the shoulder and never taking her devoted, beady little gaze off my masked face.
“The Oldtown!” Her free arm gestured almost due east. “The arena of sands, in which more blood now flows than ever before!”
Firenight Square.
It was fitting. The site of my first proper public battle, now the site of my reappearance.
I loosened my grip on my poor, silently-suffering imp, and used the hand to reach out across Materium, dismissing my other teams of questing imps.
This one would be perfect.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
I’d never seen anything like this storm before. The clouds themselves – or cloud, it could’ve been called – it was a malevolent thing, clearly unnatural and hostile in origin. It almost appeared alive, hanging over the city in the way that it did, its many layers folding and unfolding, lightning spearing out and down to blast at buildings from time to time. For all that Mund was the largest settlement in the entire world, this meant nothing to the divine powers on the edge of whose mercy mankind and all mortals eked out their precious lives. The presence overhead – it was a visitation, a reminder of how small we truly were, a mountain of darkness, descending like a boot to snuff out our pitiful existence, grind us to paste. On the far horizon every way I looked I could see the golden line, the ring about the world that told me the sun still hung in the sky, yet this only meant that the shroud of darkness cast over Mund felt all the more alien, this noontide night-time.
I was pretty high overhead by the time I reached the Blackrush, so I dipped down as I crossed it, the river’s surface glistening like the scales of a vast serpent in the dismal half-light. It was only then, hearing the ceaseless song of the river, that I truly felt it: even though my house had been reduced to splinters, my past eradicated, this was still my home. This was still my place. Walls could be built up and torn down, whole apartment-blocks conjured into and out of existence, but the river was unchanging. There could be no other belonging. Here in Mund I would stand, fight, die.
Ismethyl, come! Heed my appeal! Give me the grips of your swords!
There was no answer, but I felt the clamour of the ritual words filling my soul with vigour, anxious, excited shivers rippling up my arms, down my spine.
It’s time.
Rain crashed through my nethernal flesh, violent winds clutching at me with invisible hands in futile attempts to thrust me aside, divert my course. I cut through them, as I cut through all else on this plane. I would not be diverted, not now.
Oldtown was a wreck. There were whole areas where the ancient avenues ran red, the winding streets reduced to rubble. I passed at least three sites of Incursion and there were defenders working to stem the tide at only one of them.
I knew in my heart of hearts it wasn’t enough – we weren’t going to be enough. This would be the end of all things.
And that they would pay for what they’d done, before I passed from the plane.
Firenight Square came into view. The majority of the area seemed clear, any square-goers long-since vacated or slaughtered, but I didn’t spare more than a glance on the farther-flung regions of the district: the arena itself was in the quarter nearest me as I approached, and there was plenty going on here to feast my eyes on. I wasn’t at such an elevation that I could see into the centre of the arena, but I caught the cascades of fire and lightning emanating from within that reached up to immolate flying fiends – I could guess that Mountainslide and the others were probably already inside. But even from this height I could instantly see what my gungrelafor had been getting at.
Many ‘burning holy’ ones, yes – they easily outnumbered the Magisterium task-force that was present. I’d never before heard of an army of the Sisters of Wythyldwyn like this – two hundred or more of them, arranged in squads and units, fighting on the borders of the chaos. Each one of them glowed with a bright white-gold radiance, the light focussed especially about the heads of their maces, their shining shields, recalling the daylight that had been robbed from us. Never mind their numbers, I’d never seen them so individually effective, hammer-blows reducing demon after demon to dust. Their healing auras were no less impressive, stacked one atop the other, such that those who suffered wounds were already receiving treatment before they even fell back from the front lines.
This was way beyond the discipline I’d seen them display in the past.
I bet this is Kani’s doing.
Fiends were pouring out of the arena, dozens of different types, and the followers of Wythyldwyn were fighting all of them, even the ones too powerful for them to handle.
I saw a captain of the Sisters standing toe-to-toe with a vamelbabil, preventing the fifteen-foot demoness from descending on her underlings, but the sapphire blade whose like Dustbringer had once wielded slammed down, shattering the captain’s armour and ribcage at a single blow. I saw a bintaborax enclose a girl’s helmeted head in its giant spiky fingers, ignoring the blows of her glittering warhammer against its armoured elbow as it closed its fist, easily warping its victim’s headgear and bursting her skull. I saw a gaumgalamar come spindling down the side of the arena only to leap off and sail the winds into the midst of an already-beleaguered circle of Sisters, its many thorny stalks catching them in openings in their mail-coats, snagging them and pulling them out of formation, allowing its fellows at the edges of the group of clerics to close in, press them, butcher them…
I had no time to find the leaders of the defence. My priorities were already decided. They could find me, if they wanted. Till then I’d keep myself busy.
I wrapped the gaumgalamar in my willpower and a whole host of its eye-clusters were drawn to meet my gaze, then lowered in submission instantly – before the Sisters were even able to properly react to its presence I had detached its bristles from their equipment, bringing it wheeling over them and throwing it at their other assailants.
There was nothing to be done for the girl whose head had been exploded, nothing but to repay the favour, earn vengeance for her dearly departed soul: I wrapped my five tendrils about the bintaborax’s head, and squeezed, tightening my grip until the black hell-iron screeched and popped, grey sludge pouring from its bovine orifices.
A single swing of the vamelbabil’s pulsing sapphire sword drove back a dozen clerics, breaking their ranks and shearing in two the ones who didn’t evade the mighty blow; I trapped the huge woman’s thick wrist at the back-swing and her purple face turned to me, shock in her eyes – the clerics wasted not a second, recovering quickly and plunging forwards to strike her down with joyous cries, cracking the fiend’s knees and sending her toppling to the ground while the weapon-hand remained pinned in my force-lines.
Three or four hammers landed in the back of the demoness’s melon-like head, shattering the huge infernal skull. I released the now-unresisting wrist, letting the hand and sapphire blade fall, and moved on my way, stampeding at low elevation through a flock of feasting folkababil and rending them wing from breast.
Then I was passing through the stone walls, penetrating this place which had become a hell on earth, sliding up through the arena steps and entering the ring of seats, the circle of sand.
Too many. Too many. I came up through the slabs into the midst of what had to be ten thousand fiends. Magic and mayhem was everywhere.
Four nabburatiim, a quartet of summoners right in front of me, blocking my field of view.
Four tall stick-men, falling into twig-like pieces as, with a flick of my non-existent wrist, I brought my whips through the stone and into the air about me.
Four less to worry about. Just nine-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-six left to deal with.
A few things with heightened senses started to notice me, turning their attentions on me with what seemed to me like lethargy – the fact I wasn’t using shields seemed to baffle them, tricking their senses, using their expectations against them. These close-by demons I dissected without much thought, simply swiping in lazy circles with my whips while I focussed on my true work. Before the full complement of fiends about me came to recognise my presence, I already had my portals opening, disgorging my own armies.
“I summon you here once more, in the face of the storm where we all lay low together!” I screamed in Netheric. “Touch no mortal, but suffer not a single denizen of the Twelve Hells to live!”
My trophies from Northril sprang forth, elf-wights of considerable physical prowess, and the so-called ascended ancients went streaming before them, the sifted-out souls of their former selves now brimming with nethernal potential. The dark elf wights were easily a match for the low-ranked hellspawn, and the ascended ancients piled in amorphous masses onto the larger demons, suffering no injuries but drawing out the hidden energies of their victims all the same, tapping the fiends of their strengths and converting them into fuel. I could see it happening with my sorcerer’s-eye, cords of crimson light snapping away from the hulking behemoths of hell, the ribbons of planar matter purpling on the air as they sank and settled onto the forms of the eerie elven ghosts. Even a thinfinaran fell under their weight, its white gauntlets incapable of clutching its attackers as they bore it under, draining it dry.
The crowds of fiendish forms thinned slightly about me – the hordes of the Twelve Hells were in constant motion, charging over the edges of the walls or down to the floor, and the small circle in their hosts extended by me and my army finally allowed me to peer down the steps, out across the open area.
The champions were in the centre of the arena, not so far-off that I couldn’t pick out details. Although no arch-sorcerer had been listed by my messenger, perhaps the magister Blandface consulted had missed someone; I saw the fierce gleaming of a shield there, a small but firm circle-shape, defended from waves of attackers by a short, female arch-diviner clad in black.
Tanra?
She was scissoring back and forth erratically, clockwise and anticlockwise, meeting every attempted intrusion on the wards with an explosive reaction. Her blades emitted trails of light that looked magenta to my sorcerous sight, painting the azure sphere with pinkish lines as she moved to and fro.
Inside the gleaming boundary, the others were hard at work protecting a group of terrified people. Presumably they were just innocent arena-goers trapped in the centre of this infernal visitation. Mountainslide and Ironvine were using their wizardries to help Tanra, picking up the slack where thicker wedges of demons came surging at the borders. The dwarf was the source of the fire, ice, lightning; his power looked to have doubled since I last saw him, and he was acting and reacting like he was under the effects of a time-sphere. However, the wizard Ironvine, whoever she was, seemed to have adopted a truly unusual combat technique. The female wizard was garbed in featureless folds of grey material, drapes of linked chains covering her face; she was tall, heavy, long-limbed, stalking about like a gladiator born to the sands. A dozen concentric rings of crude, silvery metal floated lazily around her, spinning at differing heights, spiralling through each other as she called upon them. Sections of the metal sharpened themselves at her unspoken command, twisting into barbs along the extruding lengths, or forming razor-loops like nooses, then plunging out with finesse to snag and snare those foes whose weaponry came closest to impacting the shield. It was a process of continual, deliberate precision; from what little I understood of wizardry, working with metal was the most difficult of its disciplines, and yet Ironvine seemed to have refined the mental controls to the point where she was capable of the most delicate actions.
A fact of which I was certain the dozens of powerless Mundians huddled just behind the whipping rings of metal were very appreciative.
She couldn’t have been that new, if the twins had been right with their guess. Saff and Tarr came into their archmageries months and months ago – Ironvine had likely been someone who’d hidden her power for a long time, perhaps carrying on with her day-job for years before deciding to take on the champion’s mantle. Or maybe she’d been a heretic? The way she used her archmagery did look particularly brutal, and she seemed to have no experience with the other aspects of her power. I’d have to keep a close eye on her. She didn’t augment her silvery wires with elemental effects in spite of her targets’ various vulnerabilities, didn’t electrify or freeze or heat the metal as she wielded it; both her feet were on the ground, no hint of levitation about her. It made for a strange juxtaposition with the dwarf, whose fierceness in battle had him standing atop four feet of empty air, twisting like a tornado in place as he met fire with ice and ice with fire.
Spiritwhisper was clad in a glamour which Blofm’s vision only partially pierced, confusing my eye as to what exactly he was wearing; I was certain that ninety-nine percent of the observers were seeing his champion’s raiment. Despite his power-level I could still spot the occasional flicker of his true features, the strong jawline contending for an instant with the bluish flames of his wrought-metal mask, the cuff of a thin jacket appearing momentarily where the broad sweeping sleeve of his turquoise robe was supposed to hang. He was probably distracted – when I caught a glimpse of it I noticed that his face was red, flushed with exertion, and there was a whole crowd of citizens huddled down inside the sorcerous fortifications. He would’ve been keeping them calm, relaying linked messages with the other defenders of Mund…
I was still a bit angry with him, I realised. I could mostly understand, at least. Him, I could mostly understand. There was a part of me, seeing him there in the midst of the battle, that longed to hear his voice once more inside my head… To feel the companionship, to joke and jest, to know I had competent friends at my back, people in whom I could place all my trust…
Never again. Not with him.
He’d thought I’d taken Tanra from him, not romantically but spiritually, and in his head he probably still blamed me for the fact she was no longer Killstop. She was Nightfell now. A harbinger of doom, ‘faithless and alone’, according to rumour.
Then I spotted the yithandreng, Feast not quite at full-size, Ciraya at her side rather than on her back; the pair of them had been in the midst of the huddled-down citizens, and it was only now that the sorceress was moving out to inspect or repair her handiwork, black sleeves flapping as she scattered reagents, that I recognised her.
Doing my job for me. Protecting the people. Filling the role Feychilde had filled the last time I’d been here fighting – that first time, Fintwyna and her abhorrent spider-creations… Things were different now. If I thought Ironvine deserved a watchful eye on account of her fighting in an unusual style, how much scepticism should’ve been afforded the sorcerer who chose to enter a life-or-death situation without an active shield? The barriers created by Ciraya in my absence would crumble in seconds were they not protected by the archmages, but it was my task to be… to be Winterprince in this equation.
I understood my power better than ever before. I beat my wings and swooped down from the steps, speeding to aid Mund’s finest.
The creatures who attempted to intercept me found me a permeable membrane, all save the glittering tendrils reducing them to twists of smoke, parcels of flesh, flurries of sparks. It wasn’t difficult to surge through them, taking only the strongest to fill out my ranks. And as I moved at an oblique angle, spiralling ever inward towards Ciraya’s shields, I stretched out with my other hand – my real hand – to build upon the wards.
Line by painstaking line, it came into being. Having a sorcerous pattern already there helped immeasurably. There was no way to effect a complex pattern at this distance, but I constructed a pentagonal barrier all the same, then flew over the heads of the civilians and champions, tugging the glowing defences up into place like one might lift the peak of a tent.
Lines snapped into place. My pentagon rotated freely, ready to fend off attack, and I drew on the threads, lengthening them even as I plastered over the weak points with azure nets.
The pentagon grew. The hordes charging at the points of Tanra’s blades had been thinning, but now the last demons were thrust back, hurled bodily away from their prey by my wards. At last, I’d swept the area about them free of enemies. My undead elves had won the day, and I could tell without looking how few of them had been destroyed in the assault; those rare demons with weaponry which could injure my elite soldiers had either been added to my collection, or had been targeted and brought down with sheer numbers.
I didn’t quite know where to look. I could only float there and stare after my host of minions for so many seconds before the stunned silence would be broken.
The contradiction of the moment gripped me. I knew what I had to do. There were no more immediate threats in the vicinity. I’d been pleased to see everyone was safe, that I’d succeeded in casting back the legions of the Twelve Hells… but I wished there were more demons nearby so that I had an excuse to fall back on. A reason not to do what I knew I must. If the threat had intensified, I could’ve left again…
I couldn’t. I had to face it.
Face them.
I maintained my elevation but I wheeled in place, looking down at my former friends and colleagues, and the innocent men and women and children whose gazes were glued to me.
I glanced across at Mountainslide, the only one floating like me, and nodded to him.
It was impossible to read his true reaction behind the mask, of course, but the stocky dwarf acknowledged me, an almost-imperceptible dipping of his bearded chin that couldn’t even be called a nod.
At least it was something… a recognition, that wasn’t accompanied with a lightning-bolt.
This could still go my way.
Ironvine didn’t spare me a glance; I hadn’t noticed her in flight, but when I look after her she’d moved fifty feet, engaging the foes pressing in at my pentagon. I was grateful and annoyed at the same time. Here was someone who took the situation seriously, so I didn’t have to – so that I couldn’t. Either way, she was relieving just a little of the burden on my shoulders.
I moved my eyes across to this ‘Nightfell’, the depressed diviner who had, in spite of her personal circumstances, saved my brother from an early death on some thug’s knife. I’d expected Tanra to have words for such an occasion as my return to the city, but nothing. Just a silent black mask.
I could tell just from the way she was standing that she’d changed. It wasn’t anything to do with her change of clothing – it was something about her poise… the way she held her daggers… It was impossible to pinpoint and yet there was just a casualness to her which was screaming at me that something, everything, was wrong.
She’s a killer now, Kas. Like you.
Like me.
Then I understood her silence, and it tickled me; I almost laughed, and the grin must’ve touched my lips because the crowd suddenly leapt to their feet, roaring and rejoicing.
The clamour was incredible, especially when they realised they were safer than they’d been for a long time, free to move at last – at least twenty people ran over towards me and raised their open hands towards the ragged edges of my robe, rain falling clean through me into their uplifted faces.
They didn’t care.
“Feychilde!” “Oh, Feychilde!” “Liberator!” “Liberator!”
I didn’t take my eyes off my old arch-diviner friend, and I gave in to the laughter, even as I augmented my voice to chortle over the crowd’s cries.
“Oh – hahahaha… Oh I get it. You can’t read me, can you? For the first time since the first night we met y-you don’t know what to say. You don’t – hahahaha – you don’t kn-kn-know… what…”
“Really, Kas.”
It was her. Her voice. Her everything. I’d touched a nerve.
“Really,” I boomed, laughing some more. “Oh, it is good to be back. I did miss you, you know.” I turned my gaze away with a trace of regret. “For those who don’t know me…” I focussed on the ones who hadn’t come to gather beneath my feet, and I waved, beaming down at them. “Hi, everyone… I’m Feychilde. Pleased to m-make your acquaintance –“
“That will do,” Tanra said icily, “or you’ll be doing without me.”
Her retort struck me a deeper blow than any I’d sustained since arriving home. I floated over to her, sinking down and solidifying.
“That’s not on the cards,” I said in a voice that came out low, almost choked.
I was aware that I was being closely examined, not just by the civilians, but by my peers, archmages that were variables both known and unknown. I noted the way Bor’s fists were clenched at his sides, the way the crowd seemed to hum as I came into their midst.
I was aware, and I didn’t care. I would speak from the heart, and they could all listen if they really wanted to. What difference would it make in the end?
“You… you did it,” I went on. “You kept them safe. Whatever happened to you, to both of us… I owe you for that.”
“It looks like you paid already,” she said softly, an uncharacteristic quaver to her voice. “Wh-what happened to you?”
“Dragon.” I shrugged, which only served to focus everyone’s attention on my absent arm, as if they expected it to grow back suddenly when I needed to gesture. “But I mean – I get it. It’s okay. I won’t judge you. I’ve done the same. I’m… We’re the same.”
I didn’t have words for it and, for once, neither did she.
I put my arm out, solidifying, and she didn’t hesitate.
She reached out to hug me, a hushed sigh of relief escaping her hidden lips.
I couldn’t even remember the last time someone had hugged me, properly hugged me. Everything with my brother and sister had been so fraught with drama since Zyger that I hadn’t known the simple bliss of a friendly embrace for so long.
I clung to her the way she clung to me.
But there was no moment of relief for me, no way back from this battle-mood. I couldn’t even hug properly. The sorcerous limb was restless.
I released her, stepping back and turning to Bor. Close-up, the power of my goblin gave me a good look at his flustered face, his wet eyes.
“So,” I said. “If you stole my girlfriend from me like you promised, well done. You got her killed.”
“I just lost three members of my family,” he said hoarsely, shuddering suddenly as he repressed what had to be a more-violent spasm, “and I’m just about done tryin’ to stop these people from goin’ mad so if you don’t – mind –“
He was getting angry, and that did it.
“What if I do mind?” I shouted. “Hypocrite! Their lives – your life – worth something, are they? What about my life? What about my brother and sister? If not for… Nightfell! If not for Nightfell, they would be dead, and you! It would be your fault, Spiritwhisper.”
“My fault? For huntin’ a damn heretic? Don’t you dare, Feychilde. Don’t dare!” The ragged rawness of his voice made me cool down suddenly. For all the power differential between us now, he wasn’t afraid of me. “You know how it looked! You ain’t thick, you have to know! And now what – you blame me for Stormsword too? If you think she needed protectin’, if you think I could’ve stopped her goin’ where she wanted, doin’ what –“
“You could’ve trusted me.” The words were the opposite of hot – all the ice of Northril was in my voice. “Why do you think she wouldn’t need protection, help? We all need it, every one of us! Have you learned nothing? I never once asked for apocalypse. You were my friend, the same as Nighteye! He trusted me. Why didn’t you? You could’ve, should’ve, would’ve… If not for him.” I couldn’t hide my contempt when I thought of the real instigator of this waking nightmare I’d lived for months. “Tell me, where is Timesnatcher?”
Spirit said nothing, bleakly lowering his head, his hands shaking at his sides.
“He already found Neverwish,” Tanra offered in a wry tone. “Used him to backtrack Duskdown. I think he’s moving on your pal.”
“During… an Incursion?” I breathed.
“Blind a blind man and he sees again,” she replied cryptically.
“And what about you!” Bor roared, flinging an arm up to gesture vaguely at Tanra. “You, yeah, you!” he continued to shout as she turned to regard him from the mask’s hidden eye-slits. “You left us there to rot, didn’t you? What was it, shame? Is that why you came back? Dragging your heels, after Ironvine saved me? Do you know how many died? How many –“
“As a direct result of our inaction, fifty-four,” Nightfell spat. “Does it matter, when we stopped almost two hundred deaths elsewhere while I was gone? Grow up, Spirit. Take it on the chin. Death is our business. It always has been.”
I could hear a tightness, a defensiveness in her voice, and I wondered at the ways in which my intrusion into her projected path might be irritating for her, warping all her visions. She couldn’t work her magic on this conversation with Bor while there remained a chance I’d interject.
“Two… hundred…” the enchanter said glumly, lost for words.
“Yes, a hundred and eighty-six… seven… Who’s counting? Anyway, how did she save you?” Tanra gestured with a blade over her shoulder at the wizard on the edges of my shield, striding around with her razor lattices swinging. “That thing… It should’ve killed her, easy.”
“The dweonatar,” Bor murmured. “Yeah… I don’t know, really. She covered me in metal, I think, completely, just when I thought as I was gonna die – by the time she let me out, it was retreatin’. It wasn’t like it looked scared, though. More – yeah, a retreat.”
“That hardly bodes well,” the seeress observed, glancing around uneasily.
“Hey. You.”
I swung my head, looking for the speaker. I recognised that drawl.
My eyes found Ciraya, her arms folded, long sleeves trailing almost to the blood-smeared sand. Her hood was flung back from her pale, hairless head, exposing the tattoos, the inked lips.
“Hey right back at yer.”
“We’re just forcing them to leave the arena, doing this,” she said, waving around.
I floated up, tapping the wraith once more. She was right. The majority of the fiends were now choosing to pour out over the walls rather than face my shields.
“The defenders outside are going to be pressed,” the sorceress went on laconically. “I don’t know if that’s what you were intending, Feychilde, but…”
“Everyone, back!” I barked. “Ironvine!”
I reduced my shields in size with a few awkward motions of my fingers, but the wizard didn’t seem to care, heedless of the removal of the defences, moving ever-more rapidly through the ranks of our foes with her whipping spirals of metal.
The demons did seem to respond, moving back into the centre in droves as they realised the wards were smaller now. The citizens started moaning in fear again, a slowly-rising wave of panicked sounds…
“Oh, come off it,” I chided them, waving. “You’re Mundians! Don’t you know who we are?” I turned to Tanra. “Come on. Let’s show them.” I floated up higher, and cried: “Join in if you’ve heard this one.”
The song came unbidden to my lips. It’d stuck in my mind, and I messed up the rhyming a bit, but given my lack of preparation I thought I pulled it off quite well.
Louder than rain, they wail all around
A scream of the worst, most hideous sound
I… float there all killy and what do I see
A packet of demons, all here for me!
I take ‘em and one by one shove ‘em right in
They wail as I do it, a delightful old din
The last one, he says, “You’re a bad one, you’ll learn!
“Deep in the fires of Hell you will burn!”
I push him right down, as deep as he’ll go
I laugh at him, “Listen! I’m Hell’s biggest foe
“I’ll get you back out – when there’s war you’ll be free
“To kill all your cousins, forever for me!”
Ironvine didn’t need any help. Mountainslide, Tanra and I each took a different direction, and as the seeress came careening in an arc towards me, I sped around towards Ironvine, noting her moving away towards her dwarven colleague, completing the pattern. I performed my task diligently, singling out the summoners, breaking their wills, taking the best of them for myself.
Why not?
I thought back to that first thinfinaran, in Oldtown, with Zel and Em egging me on. I’d taken it all too personally back then; I should’ve taken the fiend once I’d mastered it. They were powerful tools.
So I grabbed a thinfinaran, and a trio of rhimbelkina, and every gungrelafor I came across – the little buggers were too useful to pass up.
When will I be full? I wondered as I chowed down on a feast of excellent eldritches. Is this the crown, or is it me?
The next time I came upon a thinfinaran, binding its gauntlets at its white-plated sides with my tendrils and binding its gaze with my own – that was when I felt it.
Limit reached.
I dragged the force-lines through its hands, stripping not just the enamel from the metal but the metal from the spirit itself. It seemed to have no actual inner body – the armoured gloves fell apart, revealing nothing but empty space filled with shadow.
The shadow seeped out – a cry of desolation went up from behind the visor, and the tenth-rank demon slowly crumpled down into the bloody puddles, writhing in pain.
I swung again and decapitated it, sending the vacant helm flying, streaming darkness as it went.
I looked up. Ironvine wasn’t ten yards off, decapitating her own thinfinaran. I raised an eyebrow behind the mask. I’d never seen wizardry used with such effectiveness against a demon of that ilk, her spellbound razor-wires sawing with just a little effort through its gleaming gorget, sending its head rolling.
Whatever she was doing to the ordinary metal, in order to have it carve through hell-steel so efficiently, I had no idea… but it was impressive.
I cast about. It seemed she’d just slain the last summoner within the bounds of the arena, save for the final nabburatiim behind me – which was about two and a half seconds away from its doom at Nightfell’s hands.
The crowd in the middle were cheering again.
“We’re done,” I called, floating back over. “Where to next?”
I looked pointedly at Bor, but he gestured at the side of his head.
“Doomspeaker talkin’,” he said. “Give us a sec.”
One of the children at his elbow turned her vacant eyes up at the arch-enchanter, her mouth falling agape as if to express some desperate sound; then she slowly closed her lips, the light in her eyes dimming once more as she turned away.
I felt guilty, for how I’d treated him. Part of what he was doing, during an Incursion of all things, was managing the emotions of family members? Family members in grief? Whilst he himself underwent those same emotions?
I could hardly have respected him more, and yet… yet…
The brute force attack – the “ENOUGH” that sent me to Zyger – it was him – it was him, and I could understand but I couldn’t forget, could believe but couldn’t believe what he’d done… I couldn’t express my regret at the way I’d chastised him just minutes ago. I could feel it, but I couldn’t say it aloud – not to him, at least.
I was becoming restless, waiting. Ironvine didn’t bother returning to the centre of the arena – she did something to the sand, a flurry of grains exploding about her, and then she was gone, vanished into the earth: within seconds she reappeared, the smooth stones of the steps crumbling apart as she emerged into the midst of a band of straggling fiends, laying about herself with wild abandon. Tanra was also continuing to engage our enemies, darting out of the arena down either tunnel, returning again over the lip of the wall…
Not being linked was getting annoying.
“What’s that thing?” Ciraya crooned from my right.
I turned to see her smiling wistfully, gazing at the top of my head.
“Oh, this?” I pointed up. “It’s called hair. You could try it. It’s all the rage in the capital, I hear.”
“Har-har.” Her sardonic croak made me grin again. “No, seriously, come on Kas. Who made you king of the shadowland? Did Direcrown bequeath his name? It’s hardly a legacy I’d be trying to live up to.”
“Oh, that’s original.” I turned my gaze down at Feast, smiling into the yithandreng’s huge cat’s eyes. “Daugn ghi grel mordwe, Thrile?”
“Ar dweonlo so thanil, Dwazisen,” came the demon’s rattling purr in response, blinking in a what seemed like a kind of deference.
So even the yithandreng could sense the power in my new crown. Interesting.
I glanced back to Ciraya and it was just the same as the first night we met, when her favourite demon acknowledged me: She’d glanced at Feast, and I saw the same softness on her face swiftly hardening as she got hold of her reactions, shocked lips twisting into a self-oriented scowl. I regarded her smugly, and when she returned her eyes to my face the grimace simply deepened.
“Yeah, well… I don’t mean to show off –“
“Believable.”
“– but I took some fashion advice from Mal Malas –“
“Such wisdom.”
“– and ended up with this pointy thing.”
She cocked her head. “So you fell straight into his trap.”
I took it on the chin. “I guess we both trapped each other. It was a…” I didn’t know how to phrase it. “We had a thing.”
“Dear, deluded Feychilde,” she said mockingly, waving a finger and tutting. “Make the most of the crown while it lasts.”
That’s a curious way of putting it.
I supposed I would have to take it off, sooner rather than later. The twins… when they arrived, if there was anything left of me to be fixed – they’d fix me.
The nearby citizens were staring back and forth between us in a mixture of bewilderment and awe.
“Okay so – Kas.”
I glanced at Bor.
“Yeah?”
“You want to know what’s happenin’?”
He looked pale, when I could glimpse through his fake mask.
“Do your worst,” I replied, floating closer to him. He was tall even by my standards, so I was only looking down on him by a little bit.
“Doomspeaker’s goin’ mad,” he said, lowering his voice, though the blank expressions on the faces of those immediately surrounding us told me he was keeping this chat private. “There are two dweonatar. Four eolastyr.”
My brain melted a little inside my skull. I cast about immediately in spite of myself, noticing only that Ironvine had vanished again – perhaps she’d taken the fight outside the walls now.
“And somethin’ else in Hightown that’s taken up residence in the Fountains of Merizet. What she doesn’t get is, they’ve been movin’ around loads, and there’s no way to tell where they’re goin’ next. Too many Incursion points to count…”
I could tell he was losing it. His voice broke and fell away.
I floated there for a few seconds, just listening to the madness of the storm, the shrill wind, the pitter-patter of rain. This night-in-day that the demons had brought about – there was something beautiful to it, wasn’t there?
Something told me these moments were slipping by, and that there was an opportunity here, a one-in-a-million chance to do some real good.
Shuddering, I raised my arm, and it was a gargantuan effort, like I hefted a tree.
Slowly – slowly – I placed my hand on his shoulder.
He didn’t even flinch.
“We’re going to win,” I said quietly. “Mother-Chaos can go drop off a cliff. Likely most of us’ll die in the effort, but we’ll do it.”
“How? How, Kas? Even… Even Nightfell doesn’t know what we should do.”
“We’ll use her weapons against her, like always. I don’t know how exactly, but…”
We need back up. A lot of back up.
“… I think I have an idea,” I finished.
It wasn’t really an idea, not yet. Just a feeling. Form was still being applied to the sensation, my mind sculpting it out of nothingness.
Something they’ll never see coming.
He raised his head. “What is it? How – how can I help?”
I glanced across the children clustered about him, knowing as well as he did that his place was with them, that he shouldn’t have been looking for adventure during this Incursion. But he needed a distraction from the fact he’d let some of them die – and it was his duty. Glaif and Illodin would ask no less of him than his life. His life, to protect not just those he loved, but those he hated, those whose names were unknown to him – the generations to come after him.
If there are any generations after us, they’ll be some lucky sods, I thought.
I opened my mouth to reply but Tanra came bursting into view next to him, startling the pair of us, never mind the non-magical folk teeming about.
“They’re here!” she screamed, grabbing us by our clothes, her fingers barely getting a grip in my insubstantial robes – but she didn’t care, clenching her fist all the same. “They’re here!”
“Alright – don’t need telling twice,” I grunted, spinning in place, casting out with senses stronger than sight.
“Can’t escape,” she panted through the mask’s mouth-slit, “I can’t escape, there’s no way out, the net –“
I understood what she was getting at. Nausea gripped me.
They’d surrounded us; their whips were swinging softly as they moved closer, and the cacophony was already building in my sorcerer’s ear.
North and south. East and west. They came traipsing down the steps, the four eolastyr. How exactly they’d reached the arena I couldn’t even begin to imagine – I worried that they might’ve simply killed their ways through the defenders outside, decimating the magisters and clerics whose valiance had protected Oldtown from a tidal wave of destruction. There was now no way to tell for certain; only the wealth of flesh-gobbets decorating their whips. I could do nothing but look – left, right, turn, back again – as the quartet of arch-demons approached.
The one coming from the east had a bunched-up bundle of crimson force-lines snagged in her claws. The sorcerous webbing extended fifteen feet behind her where it became bulbous, a gleaming red teardrop, the crimson shield being used like a sack.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Step by step, the contents of the scarlet bag smacked into the stone, again, and again.
She dragged at least six people along behind her, their comatose shapes more difficult for me to discern than to those not blessed with the sorcerer’s-eye.
Two magisters… arch-magisters? Wanderfox, I made out, and Petalclaw. Wilderweird. And…
Star!
The white robe of the arch-diviner was stained with mud and blood; it had been ripped apart, his mask removed. His unconscious face was peaceful in spite of the repeated impacts of his skull against the stone steps.
The nausea caused by the hums of their weapons only grew as they came closer. It’d never sounded this bad before.
Four of them…
I withdrew all my eldritches in the area before they got themselves eradicated like bugs, my thoughts racing. It wasn’t like I could open a portal to Etherium and stuff the innocents all in – I’d have to mark every person in the crowd, and even Tanra’s power couldn’t time-lock so many at once to afford me the opportunity. My only real option was to go up, up and out – flee far from this place, leave them all to die –
So I was out of options. Stand, fight, die.
This was it. The chance they’d tried to rob from me by locking me away, rejecting me.
Why did I have to see Mud Lane in ruins before I die? Isn’t it enough that I’m going to lose my immortal soul? Why do the gods hate me?
Take my soul. Better nothingness than a ghost trapped in a rock under a marsh in the frozen north-lands.
At least I got to come back.
I got to come back home to die.
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