QUARTZ 9.6: BY MURDER BE HIDDEN

“How can you hate your foe? How can you feel this anger? You know they are the result of unconscious transformation. You know they are a victim in their own right, their soul moulded by uncaring hands. Yet the anger persists. The hate will win, in the end. Because you too are a victim in your own right. Your soul has been moulded by the same hands with the same end in sight. When will you submit to the violent urges that ripple through you? Now? Or later?”

– from the Yanic Creed

It’d taken a whole lot longer than I’d been anticipating for me to reacclimatise to the eggy aromas of Sticktown, the pervasive stench of drop. At least ten seconds. Perhaps it helped that the stink was being whipped about by the storm, diluted by smoke and the reek of charred wood, bodies… blood. I stifled a retch, mocked myself, and carried on with my business.

Which was killing things.

I went by a house where the front wall had been simply torn down and tossed aside. The family had been huddled against the far wall when they’d been killed, and they were left there perfectly in place, a man and a woman and two boys, the four corpses embracing, all sunken and shrunken and white. They’d been completely exsanguinated, every drop of the red stuff drawn from their bodies by some dark spell or some blood-sucking demonic appendage. No folkababil or similar harvester-demons were nearby, but I found a roost of weird yellow birds in a nearby roof, creatures I didn’t recognise with fly-eyes and humanoid hands for talons.

They squawked in clear Infernal as I tore off the tiles, pleading for mercy, before they were reduced to a huge red smear across the rooftop, a cloud of pus-coloured feathers whipped away by the wind.

There was no time for a calm before the storm. The storm was here already. I rode it, releasing the controls on my rage.

Gong! Gong! Gong!

Too many sites. Too many points of Incursion. The crown of Mekesta was blocking me from being reached by any interested parties, separating me from the Magisterium’s defence plans, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Once they calmed down about my sudden reappearance they would’ve sent me elsewhere, of that much I was certain. The demons always seemed to focus their efforts on Hightown, and it was likely I’d be needed there far more than I would here.

I didn’t care. I took them as I found them. People were hurting all up Funnel Mile, and it was my job to make sure that came to an abrupt end. The hellspawn in this area were largely weak, but they were assembled in great numbers, presenting a different kind of challenge. Whole hives of massive wasps owned the air, buzzing through the rain in swarms a thousand-strong, and it took some effort with my slowly-forming shields to sweep the skies clear of them. Covens of imps crowed in the shadows, pooling their gathered blood, and when I struck their meeting-places they always scattered, forcing me to loop about in pursuit. Bug-demons with tough carapaces were sliding and burrowing through the drop, and even though I set my ascended ancients on them, I knew I was missing some as I soared up the roadway, my host of elven ghosts dragged along beneath me. After a couple of minutes of experimentation I decided to keep a permanent Nethernum aberration about fifty yards to my rear, a whirlpool vortex that would dismiss those who fell too far behind, allow me to re-summon them without over-stretching through the planar gates.

Anything bigger than a dog, I took it on myself, indulging those instincts I’d so long held at bay. The first was a kinkalaman digging through the wreckage of a shop for the survivors in the basement, and the moment I stared at it, it halted in its task, swing its clock-face around and pressing its blade-arms to the sides of its head. I smiled to see it exhibit pain, and drifted closer. It acted as though every fibre of metal in its body was a nerve, a cacophony of torment that didn’t erupt into physical wounds but merely built, built, built as I approached, trembling overtaking it, quivering that became vibration, knee- and elbow-joints flapping like a buzzard’s wings.

When I got within striking distance it did its best, bless it. The sword it put inside me fell apart like wet paper, rusting and degrading in half a second.

It pulled back its arm but it couldn’t look even though I could tell it wanted to. I held its eyes, and it simply waved the broken limb, flailing it piteously.

“Tick tock,” I said, reaching out with my hand.

I gripped behind the quivering metal tongue, taking it by what should’ve been the throat, the spine, and flexed my strength along my wrist as I shifted my thumb, tearing its head off. I tossed the unmoving chunk of hell-steel into the muck behind me, streaming north once more.

It was at Knuckle Market that I finally found the resistance. What had happened to the place, I had no notion, but it had been wiped off the Sticktown map for the umpteenth time. Innumerable bodies had been built up into bunkers of dead flesh, low walls to enclose huge trenches, brimming with blood like overflowing baths. The rain had failed to wash anything away, merely adding to the fluids puddling here, there and everywhere across the open area. The remains of the market itself had long-since been reduced to kindling, along with many of the buildings that’d loomed around its borders, and imp-fire flared in a hundred places. Slime-slugs festooned the redly-gleaming pools. Bigger fiends raced about the shorelines, flinging still-screaming or recently-dismembered citizens into the centre for the lesser demons to feast upon, work upon…

But it wasn’t a slaughter. It was a battle. I couldn’t see or sense anything truly dangerous. If something more terrifying had been here, as I would surmise given the extent of the devastation, it was either already dead, or long-since departed from this zone of the city. And Sticktowners were here, somehow, going to war with the armies of the Twelve Hells. They’d been supplied with magic of various kinds – there were wands in dozens of hands, and the inkatra-heads were out in force. At least ten teams of magisters were hard at work around the perimeter, and I paused above one of the still-standing buildings on the edge of the area, watching them for a few moments in stupefaction.

The Magisterium weren’t just fighting demons. Some of their agents were putting up a paltry effort to stem the tides of Infernum, yes, but more than half were engaged with living targets. I did a double take, just to be sure, and I watched a male magister in red trimmed with gold, raising a fist in victory after scoring a shot on a Sticktowner with a fire-bolt.

I inhaled, and the rage wasn’t just an emotion. I found the boiling orange oceans beneath the world. I found the hell inside me I carried with me wherever I went, the rabid hound with slaver dripping from its lips, so long caged.

The key was no longer in my hand. It was in the lock, and the hutch erupted, such was the beast’s fury as it was loosed.

I wasn’t even conscious of the fact I entered the fray. I wheeled down at the three or four magister-bands on the western edge, and it was all I could do not to strike the murderous mage – I gripped the man in red by the hood, then hefted him up into the air with me.

I hovered there for a second. I realised I had a handful of his hair twisted into my fist along with the fabric of his cowl – I could tell from the way he reacted, yelping like an animal and grabbing for my arm. However, only my hand had a corporeal aspect. His fingers went right through my wrist, leaving him nothing to hold onto, no purchase to stop himself from swinging, every minute motion tearing at his scalp.

I yanked back, tipping his chin up at me so that he could take me in.

The magisters all around me were shouting up, telling me to let him go, warning me… The inkatra-heads and rebellious residents actually started applauding, cheering, jeering. The fighting died down, at least near me, our altercation drawing everyone’s attention.

Rain spattered the magister’s face. I saw cringing, terrified eyes trace my vast wings, absorbing the robe… the mask…

The terror in his eyes crystallised into recognition, the look of the man who sees a nightmare walking the cold hard earth of the material plane, a figment of imagination made real.

“Y-you!” he gargled against the pain.

“Me,” I boomed at him.

My reflexes were operating at peak efficiency now, almost like Zel’s old danger-sense; they were triggering on the magister’s fellows behind me, planning to strike at me, and they begged me to raise my shields.

I shrugged the instincts away. I didn’t have any patience left. It would be on their heads.

I shook the magister like a rag-doll in front of my face. “Do you not see the demons? This is an Incursion! Why are you killing people? Do you not see what you are doing!”

The temptation to just decapitate him with a single swing of my arm was overpowering.

The choice was made for me. Lightning flashed through me, and I flinched against the limited damage it offered my altered form. I was too nethernal now in physical state for a single burst of electricity to cause me much harm, even of the temporary sort.

The same wasn’t true of my captive. The white fire leapt eagerly from my insubstantial flesh to his, and I was forced to let him go, wrinkling my nose against the roasted scents that arose from his blackened corpse.

The cadaver fell, the smoking robe fluttering, and landed with an unceremonious plonk in the puddles.

I should’ve just killed him myself, I thought, the tide of anger ebbing.

“Are you happy now?” I roared at the magisters, in disgust more than fury, refocussing myself on them, their many-hued uniforms, their frightened faces staring up at me in shock. “Have I returned only to protect you from yourselves? Or is this what you seek?”

They couldn’t see my second arm, my nest of glowing blue snakes, so the gesture was probably lost on them as I threw my arms wide. They certainly saw the infernal doorways, however – Khikiriaz and the bintaborax needed portals the size of small dwellings, and the ruby-hued rings they appeared from dwarfed all the others to be found in this sorry place.

Half the magisters were clearly fresh to the job. While some adopted defensive postures, preparing to fight the group of tremendous demons I summoned, the majority of the magisters just froze up, waiting for their death sentences to be carried out.

You’ve no idea how easy it would be.

“Come on, guys and gals,” I called to my favoured demons in Infernal. “Let’s go kill some hellspawn.”

I brought them sweeping around the magisters and flew at their fore, bringing out my good old mekkustremin and a bunch of nethernal eldritches at the same time. The oversized doll-demon went barrelling at the very heart of Knuckle Market, bowling enemies out of our paths, joined by a stream of insanely-powerful ghosts; I heard my ikistadreng growling in frustration.

“There’s plenty more where they came from,” I said, even as I ploughed into a clutch of imps, wielding my whips to deadly effect.

“Not enough!” Khikiriaz cried, lowering his head to charge antler-first through a deep puddle teeming with slimy shapes.

“Master!” Mrs. Cuddlesticks intoned in a hollow voice.

I took a good look at the imps I was massacring, then continued to swing my weaponry as I glanced over my shoulder at my bintaborax. I hadn’t noticed when I summoned her, but the head of Mrs. Cuddlesticks was only halfway back to the correct position, still sitting at a right angle thanks to the hammer-blow of Malas’s minion. The three bintaborax left holes in the ground as they thundered across the battlefield, spiky hoof-prints swiftly filling with swirls of diluted blood – but for all their prodigious size and the strength of their limbs they couldn’t match the speed of ikistadreng, mekkustremin or arch-sorcerer. As such, they were the natural targets for a barrage of magister-fire, the cowards too afraid to confront me directly more than happy to rain magic down at my minion’s backs.

While I stared, a howling green skull struck Mrs. Cuddlesticks behind the knee, almost knocking her off-balance, ruining the pace of her gait as she rushed to help save Sticktown lives; Mr. Cuddlesticks was thundering on ahead of the others, doing his best to ignore the lances of frost striking him between the armoured shoulders; Junior had halted altogether, raising his arms over his head to protect him from the spells slamming down into him.

I noticed Junior peering under his arm at the magisters, and I could sense his hunger, his mindless rage… I could sense it because I felt it too.

A particularly vile fireball struck Junior in the small of the back, and he went down, toppling like a huge heavy tree, throwing up a great spray of liquid and a resounding clang.

It was too much. I remembered seeing my first bintaborax die, pierced through with the bitter Zadhal lances, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. Not like this. Not at the hands of those who were supposed to have my back. It was the rebels who had my back, the insurgents whose spells were even now drawing the fire of the magisters, drawing the attacks away from my bintaborax.

Even the druggies had more common sense, possessed more reason, than the mindless automatons of Henthae and her ilk.

I probably abandoned the last few imps I’d been intent on exterminating; I didn’t care, too unfocussed to even check. Wings beating, I reversed my course, heading for Junior. Every moment kept me separated from my home. I wanted more than anything to check on Mud Lane, check on Xan and Orstrum and Xassy, little Xassy… Each obstacle the Magisterium threw in my path was like a dagger in my back no wraith-form could absorb.

An inkatra-head had morphed themselves into a huge kitty. Not like something you’d see in Firenight Square, no dire jaguar or sabre-toothed cat – just a ginger tabby street-cat as big as a horse. It would’ve almost been cute if not for the extremely lethal look in its eyes.

It was the perfect diversion, leaping into the midst of the magisters and laying about with ferocious intensity. Spells withered the druggie’s borrowed skin but the magic of the transformation had loaned it a regenerative power that let the gigantic cat continue killing despite the horrid chunks that’d been torn out of its flesh.

I stopped to set a shield on Junior as I passed him by and, while I halted, a spear of solid ice caught the inkatra-cat in the roof of the mouth, exploding its head. The distraction was over, ended as quickly as it’d begun.

The drug-user’s shapeshift hadn’t been true, fuelled as it was by a simple chemical process, no real archmagery behind the metamorphosis. As the huge furred head split apart like a coconut, the remainder of the body reverted to its previous form.

A boy’s corpse.

Not much older than Jaroan. Decapitated.

His body, still standing, begins to tremble.

I stare, shivering, and I watch his ghost, twisting in the nethernal wind.

The poor boy’s spirit vanished before my eyes, taken forever into shadow.

Wings? Wraith-flight?

Some last vestige of Orcan’s aeromancy? A planar stumble?

I didn’t know how I did it, but the next moment of which I was conscious I was there, above the magisters.

And there was no resisting the temptation, no course of action that made sense other than to do it, indulge, indulge justice, indulge those entities which hoped and prayed for this, this laying about with whips that carved flesh like they sliced mere air –

“Code thirty-two! Code thirty-two!”

The screamer screamed his last, face cloven in two at the open mouth, the dim glyphstone still clutched in his dying fingers. Red stained the blue of his enchanter’s raiment, looking black in the stuttering storm-light.

The wizard in this particular group was so close-by when he finished his spell and pointed at me, I actually brought up a crude circle-shield just in case. There was no need – the spray of frosty particles that came billowing from his sleeve would’ve barely impeded an ordinary man. He’d expended his best spell.

I converted the shield into a force-spike, jabbing back blindly through the localised snowstorm. The snowstorm soon ended.

A plump sorceress in purple was incanting frantically, and she managed to raise a shield of force far stronger than I’d expected. When I swung at it, there was a single instant of doubt, consternation, before the first of my whips to connect with its shimmering surface caught hold, finding purchase on the frictionless curve.

That initial tendril performed its task, stripping away the mage’s defences with a satisfying tearing sound, and the others arced in to perform their own, stripping her of her life.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I stared down her ghost before it was whisked away like the others’, and spat in Netheric:

“So this was what you sought. I hope it was worth the price.”

She didn’t reply, her spirit trapped in the limbo of its dispersal. I wasn’t even certain she heard me.

I cast about. The other Magisterium targets around here were scattering, many running north-east to regroup with the largest host of their fellows present, at most-northerly corner of the market square. The nearest to me was a presumed diviner in grey, her robe covered in lovely little crescent moons. The spell of enhanced haste under which she was operating was a weak one, barely doubling her speed. I could’ve caught her easily; she had a whole slew of obstacles in her way, even if her augmented reflexes meant she was unlikely to misplace her feet…

I caught myself instead.

What am I doing, exactly?

The rage had lessened, diminishing with every killing-blow I dealt. The sickness – I was only just now feeling it –

I swallowed it down, just like I had to. It was the sourest of all possible tonics, but facing the truth of what I’d done here didn’t kill me. I couldn’t afford to deal with it, think it all through, not right now. So I’d killed three magisters. It wasn’t like I wasn’t going to make any waves coming back here, was it? I’d have to face it, eventually, along with the consequences of all my other actions, past, present, future… But it could wait. Would wait.

Until all the demons were dead.

* * *

Obliteration. By the time I was done in Lord’s Knuckle, I’d taken my fill of eldritches, a stretched sensation I hadn’t experienced in longer than I could remember.

This just meant I had spare to waste.

I held back my big boys and girls and my elven undead, instead tossing endless throngs of imps at their brethren, careless as to the outcome of the various conflicts. The two forces reduced each other to spiny paste, and still I was too full, my sorcerous stomach distended with the weight of hundreds upon hundreds of hellspawn.

I was trying to ignore the crowds of gang-bangers who’d gathered all about the market’s edges. Most of them were quiet and unmoving, simply watching the spectacle – where the imps sought to fly over the perimeter and escape, the thugs would burst into action, wands leaping to their hands, or moss-like bundles to their lips. Their organisation – it was a beautiful thing to behold. Surely it was just that they had their own links set up between the leaders, their own prophets guiding them on the risk-reward ratios of their tactics… It was like nothing I’d witnessed before from a gang. I’d have rather I had to face a squad of Magisterium archmages than this inkatra-enhanced army of born street-fighters.

To that point, my scout still hadn’t checked in.

“Pinktongue!” I hissed, summoning him back to my side in a flash of red fire. “What are the magisters up to? Come on, I need something here.”

“Master, they have retreated beyond the opening of the third street.” The pale fingers of the gungrelafor pointed north, and his fat, barbed tail was swishing nervously as he hovered. “They have called for assistance, and most-pleased did they seem with the results of the conversation. I do not believe it will be much longer before your enemies descend upon you, Master.”

I eyed him sidelong. “And you wouldn’t want me dead? You wouldn’t want to be free?”

Pinktongue seemed to hesitate, then the little bat-face twisted in a savage smile. “I have served many masters, the Feychilde, yet this has been my favourite service. Never before has the Master so upraised or amused me. I shall be sad, should our time together draw to an end.”

I almost felt touched, but it wasn’t something I wanted to admit. “You… you don’t value freedom, then?”

“It is not that I do not value it. I do not believe in it. The Harlot’s lies are tools to an end, no more.”

I scowled. “What do you think it means to me, the approval of a demon?”

He closed his eyes, as if fearful, and murmured: “More than you wished, Master?”

I sighed, and nodded.

“Way more, somehow… I killed three people here two minutes ago. Now there’s… there’s no one to talk to.”

I could see the corpses I’d created.

They were corpse-makers!

“Murderers?” Pinktongue enquired in a bit of a condescending tone.

“I never even killed murderers, before… really.” I reached inside my mask to pass my hand across my eyes, then stopped to rub at my forehead. It felt surprisingly good, achieving a sudden alleviation of the pressure inside of my skull I hadn’t even noticed was there, just by pressing down hard above my eyebrows with my fingertips. “Look – return to your post. Keep me informed; don’t just wait for me to summon you. We’ll be at Mud Lane next.”

I saw between my nearly-closed eyelids that he summoned the teleportation-flame, disappearing from my side with a brief gust of heat.

I may have to kill an awful lot more before I’m through, I told myself, steeling myself to the task. I’m not going to stand by while they act like that. I can’t. I won’t.

I replayed the image, repeating it before my mind’s eye. I re-experienced the emotion, less-affecting now that it was just the shadow of its former self, the ghost of a ghost before my mind’s eye.

Even still the anger wrapped its warm arms about me, shielding me from the icy touch of the rain falling unimpeded through my body, reducing the confusion, honing blunt faces into bright, shining edges.

I threw my hand down away from my forehead, snarling at myself for even putting my fingers to my brow, as though I deserved pity for the conundrum in which I found myself, this moral maelstrom of my own making. I stirred the situation into existence. The waves would have to break on me, or I’d have to sink.

I knew the truth of myself. I knew who I was.

I would have come here – would’ve come out of my way to kill them. Shut up and listen. Shut up and listen.

They killed a BOY!

I took my remaining hand and formed the shapes, gating through two dozen hand-picked imps into the air about me, letting them survey the destruction of my home town.

“What magnificence, Master,” Oldbeard chattered.

“Gloriousness,” Funnyfingers said.

“Indeed,” I cut them off coldly. “I want you to take a group of imps each. These ones.” I started pulling companies of demons back from the front-lines, clumping them together into floating spheres with my gestures. “Lead them north. East. South. West. You find more than one champion, one magister-band in a place, I want to know about it.” I added a gungrelafor to each group. “Teleporters to report to me. We’re moving north-east in a minute.” Then I raised my voice, barking commands: “You lot! Follow this one, do as he says, don’t harm any creatures from Materium.” I swivelled: “You lot! Follow this one…”

It took less than thirty seconds, and I had orchestrated approximately a hundred and fifty imps, my minions sweeping the city for me. If I couldn’t use a link of enchantment, a link of eldritches would have to do.

“Is it true?” I heard one of the gang-bangers yell as I soared near, watching the last group of demonoids flapping away, back the way we’d come. “You Feychilde?”

It was good to hear a Sticktown accent, but when I focussed on the man I saw the wildness in his eyes, the splotchiness of his skin – he was soaking, but most of it was sweat, I surmised, rather than rain.

An inkatra addict.

Yet for all I knew, he was one of the ones who’d saved Junior Cuddlesticks from the magisters. I could hardly judge him, could I?

I nodded down at him in response to his question.

“Yeaaaah! ‘E’s back!” someone else cried, turning away to their fellows. “It’s Feychilde! Told yer!”

“Man, lookit ‘im.” That was a Rivertown accent. “What’s dat on ‘is ‘ead, Lem?”

“Don’t look too ‘appy, does ‘e?”

“The Libbrater o’ Zaddal? He’s back?”

“Knew the magisters never got ‘im. Bloody Everseer. Kastyr, that’s what’s ‘is name.”

“Hey – hey where’d yer arm go?”

“Yeah man, Twelve Hells, look! Where’s yer arm, mister?”

I smiled; I knew how fast the rumours would spread if I just told the truth.

“Prince Deathwyrm took it.”

The boy’s jaw dropped.

“Oh, don’t worry – I got him back good! Where’d you think I found this nice new hat?”

The boy didn’t seem to understand, staring at me with a mixture of confusion and terror on his face.

It was only when everyone started muttering that it finally seemed to sink in, his eyes widening. The lot of them started spinning to exchange awed words with their comrades, and suddenly there were whoops and hollers, cries of adulation…

Someone started chanting my name and then it seemed to be everywhere, echoing back at me from a hundred throats.

It had been so long. Too long.

For all that I’d fostered my legend, brought it into the world and then fed on it, gorging my ego on the blind love of the people –

No longer.

That’s not what I want… not what I need. Not anymore.

“Fey-childe! Fey-childe! Fey-childe!”

“No,” I whispered, then, louder: “No!”

They stilled, as swiftly as they’d reached fever-pitch.

“Celebrate the dragon’s death, but don’t start worshipping a killer.” I cast my gaze over them, turning slowly to look at those below and behind me. “I’m the same as you, no different. You all know the cost, don’t you? I’ve done plenty wrong. And there’s more wrongs to be done, before they can be righted.”

“Sounds like you got a plan, Feychilde!” one of the younger crowd-members chirped, looking completely unfazed by my rejection of their admiration.

“Sounds like ‘e’s mad, more like it,” someone older commented.

I sighed. “You should all get out of here, you know. Who is your leader? Who organised this?”

“Zandrina!” at least three people cried instantly, before their fellows openly smacked or pushed them.

“What?” I heard one of my new informants complain sullenly after taking a slap to the back of the head. “It’s Feychilde. He’s gonna know, even if we don’t tell him.”

Zandrina… I remember that name.

Jaroan had only talked about it once or twice. Something to do with the drug wars. She was the importer. She was the mover, bringing it across the city slums, always expanding her influence across the underworld of the poorest districts.

“Great. Just great, guys.” I frowned down at them. “Where is she?”

My informants seemed reticent now, glancing awkwardly at their peers –

I raised my hand and slowly clenched my fist.

“Where.

“Is.

“She?”

I sent my quiet words out, seething across the ground like snakes in the grass. A threat and a promise.

Almost everyone started divulging almost everything, an outburst of noise more than sense: within the space of ten seconds I was given to understand both that Zandrina had left and that she’d returned, that she was back at the base and that she’d return to the base after the battle was done, that the base was in Rivertown but also North Lowtown…

“Ah, enough!” It would have to wait. Tanra would know more, when I found her, surely. “I have to go. Stop being naughty now, head home to your families. All of you.”

“But – mister – the magisters!” the young lad called, sounding scared.

“Leave the magisters to me,” I replied, feeling grim but ready to do what I must. “Don’t any more of you die. Besides, they’ll have to catch me first, if they want me.”

I faked the Feychilde grin, and flapped my wings –

Pinktongue burst onto the scene. “You’re still here! Master, they come! Forty magisters, and there is an archmage with them, the Valorin!”

“Drop,” I spat. If they came here with the gangs still out in force, I’d become locked in a pitched battle to save the criminals from the overzealous magistry. That wouldn’t just be an act of resistance. It would be outright rebellion. They’d never stop till me and all the gangers were dead.

There was only one thing for it. If they weren’t going to leave, I was going to have to. And if I headed straight for home… the magisters wouldn’t know I’d left until they’d arrived here, interrogated Zandrina’s army. That would only mean more bloodshed.

Had I really chosen to side with the drug addicts over the keepers of the peace?

Yes, I answered myself without hesitation. Yes I have.

Throwing caution to the howling winds, I dismissed my eldritches and headed north at maximum speed.

* * *

At least it wasn’t entirely the wrong direction. I was halfway to Cutterwells when I saw them coming around a bend, running through the streaming rain at an athletic pace thanks to their enhancements. There was no one else around, not that I could see at least; the residents were all sensibly withdrawn in the deepest, safest corners of their properties to await the last rings of the Mourning Bells.

No audience…

I sank down into the roadway so even the most perceptive of the magisters wouldn’t get a chance to spot me, and I moved across into the nearest alley. Rising back up above ground, I swiftly released a bunch of stored-up imps, removing their bonds.

The mischievous delight expressed by the demonoids turned to panicked flight as I started killing them, forcing the magisters who first reached my side to aid me on sheer principle.

I’d only loosed a couple dozen; I caught the ones around the edges, pushing them back at the magisters, begging them to get involved. Right on cue, their wizards unleashed volleys of elemental attacks, reducing the remainder to a rain of ashes and dismembered limbs.

Then I was floating there alone in the mouth of the alleyway, the charred bits of my former imps fluttering down around me, and I could feel the combined gazes of the assembled magisters like an ever-growing anchor – the number of them swelled, swelled, until the street was filled with a rainbow of rain-soaked robes.

“Guess whooooo?” I sang after a few moments of awkward silence.

Valorin was under the effects of a flight-spell, in addition to something that overcame the defences of my satyr-reflexes; he’d manoeuvred around behind me effortlessly, and I only realised he was there when he charged at me, azure shapes bisecting me.

I raised my hand to my chest where his sorcerous weapons were ripping like a sawmill’s blades through my back and out the front of my torso.

Not much blood.

Right on cue, the ordinary magisters started launching ranged attacks at me, rocking me in my place, but I ignored them. I turned to regard my true foe as he sped down from above me, soaring ever-closer on a collision course. I watched the azure spikes tinged with my life-essence wheeling away from me, spinning around and around him, more and more of them hurtling through my body and meeting no resistance.

I raised my other hand, the elongated fingers only he could see.

The arch-magister’s dark eyes shone with fervour from beneath the lip of his lilac hood, glaring at me from behind a shield-matrix I’d have been proud of, even back when I had two hands to work the patterns. He only seemed to realise what was happening when it was too late.

I could’ve ripped his shields from him, but this way would be funnier.

My tendrils snagged his blades, lengthening, letting the momentum of his own forces propel my whips about him, enclosing him in a noose.

He saw it – he brought a blade down vertically to slice through the noose and my tendrils followed, enclosing him now across a second vector, the noose becoming a net…

A fireball exploded inside my body. That one hurt.

“Give it up, Valorin,” I cried. “Call off your dogs!”

I fixed the form of my tendrils, and arrested the motion of his shields; the entire structure stopped still, locked in place, the blades freezing instantly.

The wizardry granting him flight brought him screeching out of his protections.

Not twenty feet from me, Valorin put his hands down at his sides, suddenly halting just outside the edge of his former defences. He cast about in sudden horror, like a man finding himself naked in the middle of his workplace.

I smiled, and shredded his shapes, retracting my tendrils.

“Heresy!” I heard him gasp.

“You should really dress appropriately for the occasion.” I winced against another ripple of explosive flame that detonated somewhere just inside my left eardrum, and cast a glance over my shoulder at the massed ranks of petrified-looking magisters – they were still sticking to ranged attacks, keeping their distance, holding back their shape-shifted druids and the majority of their eldritches for the moment I decided to turn on them, rip into those ranks and cast them to the four winds in uttermost disarray…

Temptation almost took me.

I returned my gaze to the flapping Valorin, who was desperately rebuilding wards about himself, all momentum sacrificed to claw back a thin veneer of his former shielding.

“Last warning. Or you all go away. You don’t get to fight a champion during an Incursion and live to tell about it. Thus far I have been lenient. No longer.”

I said it in a flat tone, using a voice that cut through the pattering of the rain, the whirring of their spells, the crashing of the storm, the ringing of the Bells. It spoke directly into the skulls of the lot of them.

One by one, then in larger and larger groups, the magisters called off their imps, lowered their wands, letting half-constructed masses of elemental energies drip from their hands and dissipate. But before the last of them stood down, I noticed at least half a dozen shutters swing open slightly, the hidden occupants of the buildings peering out to get a better view of what was going on in the street.

Perfect.

“Good call,” I complimented the arch-magister, whose telepathic command had surely been the cause of the ceasefire.

“We do not consort with heretics or negotiate with the Thirteen Candles!” Valorin’s voice had lost none of its confidence; in fact he sounded more fanatical than ever, in spite of his precarious position. “How did you get here, Feychilde? Mr. Mortenn. You’re going back.”

I laughed heartily.

“I don’t want you, I don’t need you,” I replied, rising up through the air to match his elevation. “And I’m not going anywhere. Just stay out of my way. In case you missed it – you do hear the Bells, right? Maybe instead of killing Sticktowners you’ll concentrate your efforts on the armies of hell, now, eh?”

“I do not take orders from you!” he huffed. His eyes were narrowed under the hood, the deep pits of his eye-sockets illuminated by lightning rippling across the broiling sky.

“If your orders countermand those,” I said darkly, “you’ll pay for spreading them to your cohort.”

“Is that a threat?” he cried, sounding outraged.

“Yes!” I screamed back. “Stop killing people, or I’ll put your head on a spike in Knuckle Market and seal it for all the world to see for eternity – I don’t care what your orders are! Submit to me now.” Impatience gripped me. “That’s it! I’m done here.”

I angled myself east, rising higher on the air. A few of the open shutters closed to as I floated by, observers shrinking back in trepidation – but more opened wider, with faces pressed up to the cracks; I heard a soft chorus of breathless voices murmuring my moniker as if it were a prayer to ward off fiends or dark magisters.

A gobbet of draumgerel acid came bursting through my chest, splashing against one of the wooden buildings just above the shutters and eating almost instantly through the wood. I heard a shriek from inside the room, the drum of swiftly-retreating feet.

I barely felt it.

I whirled to look down at my enemy only to find him climbing the air, soaring at me once more as though something had changed.

“What are you doing?” I snapped.

His new shielding was still at a rudimentary point, even the inner shapes looking tattered, as though they’d already sustained attack. Yes, fine, he wasn’t entirely unprepared; his arms had transformed into long swords somewhere just below the elbow… He was wearing the essence of a kinkalaman or something similar.

Whatever. I wasn’t going to risk letting him touch me, in case he was clad in the essence of an unfamiliar eldritch, something that could penetrate my body and actually do it harm. There had to be a reason for this resumption of our duel, for his renewed assault.

Now I didn’t want him to, he didn’t even get to cover half the distance.

I reached out, the tendrils flowing effortlessly through the smoky breeze, and I gripped each of his wide-flung, serrated swords with a loop of the gleaming sorcerous fingers.

Gripped them, at the wrist-segment, and tightened the loops, biting cleanly through the metal with a pair of neat little screeches.

It was probably telling that his underlings didn’t act to support him, watching in dreadful fascination as I took both their leader’s hands from him.

The swords spun as they plummeted, not even transforming back into human limbs; they dissolved like any lifeless dimensional material, vanishing into the wind after a few seconds of free-fall.

Valorin twisted on the air, choking, staring at the raw metallic stumps on the ends of his forearms.

“I don’t know if you’ll find healing,” I told the nonplussed arch-magister. “I didn’t, and I thought it was awfully unfair. Just remember – I only took your hands. You tried to kill me.”

I resumed my former course, and this time I was only pursued by his impotent screams.

It was over.

For now.

* * *

I mostly kept my attention on the streets below me, picking up the odd stray demon with a flicker of will, sending the occasional fear-paralysed Sticktowner running into the nearest house with a few booming commands. The clouds in the sky were unnatural, their vast shadows lying thick like sheets of black oil across the landscape, disappearing only briefly in flashes of lightning. As it was, it only occurred to me just before I turned into Mud Lane that an incongruity existed in the layout of the structures ahead. Never mind missing an arm. This called out to my mind in such a way that even the buried, unconscious processes railed, pulling themselves into the light and calling out for attention. An arm was nothing – I was missing buildings. Whole apartment blocks. Whole…

By the time I brought my focus to bear it was too late; I was there. I slowed to a halt above the opening to my street, looking down into the huge pile of kindling that had been my everything, my everywhere.

There was a contraction in my mind, somewhere just behind my left eye; I felt the ghosts of memories pouring out of my head, suddenly slain by this sight, this awful, unbelievable vision.

What had the demons done? How had this been allowed to happen?

For a few seconds I was possessed by a powerful delusion, that within the scorched pile of beams and planks my apartment would still be intact, whole and neat and tidy, just sunken beneath the surface somewhere, ready for me to go in and find it…

Mum and Dad’s place. It was sacrosanct, inviolable. Even during the Incursion, the first Incursion back in Orovost, it had survived without a single scar, despite the area being under fire. Dustbringer’s attempt to arrest me had almost spelled doom for my parents’ prized possessions, the books I’d consumed voraciously my whole life, but we’d come through it. The appearance of a murderous heretic had only resulted in a single slice taken out of the door.

It had always – it was always the same – it never changed – it couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t – it was theirs – theirs –

Now? Now it was gone.

It was all gone.

In such a way that it was never, ever coming back.