Then he blurred to his feet. “I know now,” he whispered, holding up his hands to look at them, study them intently, fingers splayed – then suddenly he was thrusting them out in my face as though he wanted me to do the same. “I understand! I understand everything… Your dragon! Your damn dragon, Kas. Oh, oh no…”

I reached out for him hesitantly, half-expecting him to just slip out of my grasp, but instead of fleeing he fell forwards into my embrace, making my elbow-bones scrape against one another, making me bite my lip against the pain.

But it was nothing – nothing to what he was feeling.

He killed Lightblind. I was there with Timesnatcher when we found the body.

Yet I embraced him. He understood himself, now – and I did too.

Duskdown was human. Only human, like Timesnatcher, like the rest of us.

“There’s nothing you can do, Rathal. Nothing. Live with it.”

“Live… live with it.”

When he drew away, I saw his eyes, and they were haunted just like Ripplewhim’s, staring into an empty distance. He seemed to operate his limbs mechanically, setting them on some future-hunt, while his mind whirled with new avenues of knowledge.

With Avaelar and Rath’s help I got to my feet – foot – and we made our way forwards once more. There was the same chasm as before, every boulder familiar. But, somehow, it didn’t trouble me. I felt we were finally making progress. We ended up moving far more quickly the second time around – our terrifying host had seemingly taken pains to ensure he made us a perfect replica of the real caverns in the area, so we’d already had a practice run at it.

Once we came to the sheer areas Rathal expended some of his power, and I no longer needed to lean on my sylph. We ascended on the wings of an arch-diviner’s impetus. Blurring at incredible speeds up waterfall-ridden cliffs. Finding secret tunnels where the fungus sang at our approach. Skirting the smoke-webbed pits filled with giant ethereal spiders. Climbing the quartz-fortresses of some friendly magical termites.

Six hours. Just six subjective hours since we left Zyger for Infernum, and on his first go Pinktongue came popping back into Etherium with news of our success.

Three battered men fell out of a dimensional portal into a cave full of bat-droppings, and never before would three people in our condition have looked quite so satisfied to take such a pungent bath. I didn’t even call Pinktongue back and tell him off for the stunt he just pulled. My arch-diviner friend with the distracted expression, my arch-enchanter companion with the haunted eyes – I could see the relief on their faces as Tem raised a glimmering arc of white light about us, climbing out of the sludge.

And me? What was I? Was I haunted, distracted? I’d been broken in body yet not in soul. I was a murderer and betrayer, a pitiful excuse of a human being – but I didn’t feel it. I knew it, for a cold fact devoid of meaning – but the emotion? No.

I felt fine.

Shadowcrafter needed to die. Gilaela needed to be sacrificed. We needed to get home and the blood that was spilt, the blood – it was the price of the transformation.

If the guardian of Infernum hadn’t sensed the murderer in me, would it have let me leave like that?

No. None of it mattered.

The twins…

I raised shields and stars, then raised my fingertips to a looming purple shadow that I consumed –

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“– the laces were white, two of them –“

Silence!

I tapped at the wraith’s essence and the very instant I faded, I started to laugh. I floated up into the air, weightless, the stinging of my smashed bones lessening yet further.

“We did it! Haha!” I threw my hands up, extending shields of greater and greater dimensions, reinforcing them all. “We did it! We’re dropping free! Oh, those idiots. Those idiots!” I descended back to the others on the edge of the stinking pool, summoning my sylph and gremlin into myself as I did so. “The magisters, the cannibals, all of them, all of them idiots – idiots…”

I summoned my satyrs, consumed them.

I summoned my vampire, and cocked my head in consideration. The temptation of the vampiric power was too great.

It had to end.

Do you know what I’m going to do, Tem? Do you, Rath?

My fellow archmages watched in silence as I carried out my business.

I turned aside to summon everything I had left in Nethernum, except the wraith and the undead condor – the former was too useful to be destroyed, and the latter was too big to fit in here. But I called all the rest to Materium and released them from their oaths.

This meant I could chop them into pieces without any complaint from my force-blades.

How differently things might’ve gone, I thought as I went about my grisly work, if I’d known back then what I know now. Release them and chop them up with force-blades. Even if I didn’t have the strength back then to destroy the whole Body Brigade simultaneously, I could’ve done them one by one, if I’d known how. I bet Zel knew all along… little witch.

It’s all linked, isn’t it? If I never went to Belexor – if the mizelikon was never sent for me after the Red Hart… what would’ve happened to me in Zyger?

In the wake of the slaughter I’d just committed, the air was pensive. Both of them were watching me. I looked at Rath.

“Did you see it all?” I asked.

His look was almost disdainful, as though he were disappointed it’d taken me so long to catch on. He was in a particularly bad mood. “Let me fetch the stones we’ll need for our amulets, and then you can prepare them with your spells for Temcar to finish.”

“I can’t carve stone,” I said, then realised how stupid I sounded. I didn’t actually have to carve the shapes myself, and Rath could make a thousand slices a second – I might not even need to direct him, given how powerful he was – could he replicate the runes just from foresight?

He sighed, then vanished.

“Amulets?” Tem said.

“You never made an anti-enchantment pendant before?”

“Uh… uh, no…”

“Don’t worry, I’ve watched it being done a few times – I can give you some pointers.” Or at least, I hoped I could. “Rath probably knows what he’s doing, too.”

“Rath is…” The enchanter swallowed. “I don’t want to touch his mind. R-Rath is dangerous.”

Duskdown laughed from behind him and my fellow Sticktowner almost jumped out of his skin.

“Oh yes, very dangerous,” the diviner said ruefully, grinning. He held out three discs of polished stone in his hands, and they were there already, the runes covering their surfaces. He’d even managed to punch or drill surprisingly-neat little holes in them without shattering them, for us to attach strings. “But not dangerous to you, I shouldn’t think.”

His eyes moved to me. “Are you ready?”

I didn’t even need to relinquish the wraith-form, now that he’d done all the hard work. I laid the glyphs as normal, then had a quick chat with Tem about what he was trying to evoke – I gave him the ability to see force-lines, and demonstrated the patterns of his spells, as far as I could see them adjusting my own.

Once he got the hang of the tricky parts Rath told him to get on with it, and we withdrew to the other side of the cavern, leaving him alone to his task. I hovered about, studying the roof. There were thousands of bats up there, all of them seemingly hibernating; I disturbed a few with my dim light but they weren’t too bothered by my presence.

We couldn’t be far from the surface if there were bats here, could we? The temptation to just go up, soar through the rock and find out where we were, how far from home we were, was overpowering.

“Kas,” Rath said quietly.

I turned back to him and sank down a little.

“You deserve an answer to your question. I’ve thought about it long and hard, and I’m ready to speak.”

I released what felt like a thousand gallons of air in a sigh, the pressure pent-up in my lungs for weeks.

“I hope you take it the way it is intended. I am attempting a full disclosure of the facts. Please, don’t react until I’m finished. The last thing I want is for us to come to blows.”

I made myself lighter still, and crossed my legs up in the air, floating leisurely. “The first time we met, you told me none of my plans to take you down would work. It occurs to me that if you’d been telling the truth, there was no reason for you to visit me in the first place. Am I right?”

“No,” he answered immediately. “There is no way for you to defeat me. I flee, or I defeat you. But there was another reason for me to visit you.”

I stared at him, waiting.

* * *