“Let’s try this again,” Dustbringer said. “Shadowcloud – Winterprince – Miss Reyd – begin moving the earth. Make sure everyone’s got high-acuity flight. Neverwish – Lovebright – the best anti-glamourings and blockers you can conjure. Invisibility to enemies. Nighteye – Glimmermere – performance boosts for everyone. Check we’re all in peak condition.”
I got a double dose this time, and by Enye I felt alive. I could discern nerves in my bone marrow and it seemed those nerves had grown hairs, hairs that individually itched, ached for action, motion. The enchanters approached me next, touching my mask, my robe, my palms; Neverwish stomped along as if he were trying to work off his own excess of energy, while Lovebright was a picture of calmness, whisking about the clearing performing her enchantments without comment, verbal or otherwise.
The wizards were up in the air, sloughing away the clay, the mud, the packed earth. Lucky wizards, having something to do. Em looked thrilled to have been included on this champions’ adventure.
Belestae willing, she’d reconsider not becoming a champion after this.
I caught Killstop virtually dancing on the spot – I doubted inkatra-withdrawal, future-visions and extreme-energising went hand-in-hand. Taking a bit of pity on her, I touched off the ground, flying towards her.
I didn’t want to do it, but I had to express my gratitude properly.
The moment she saw me in flight too, she lifted off herself, moving to meet me.
“Thank you,” I said once we were close. “You looked out for me.”
But I won’t forget you left your own loved one on the pavement, I thought.
“That’s what friends do,” she said, cheeks and eyes going up at the corners in a yet-deeper smile.
That’s what people who want to use you do.
But I’m already used. She had her way in to the circle of champions through me. Hopefully she’ll just discard me now.
“Better cross your fingers and your toes on that one,” Zel said drily.
I nodded to Killstop perfunctorily, then looked across at the hill.
Former hill. The wizards had already moved aside the earth covering a wide section, displaying the sloped surface of glinting obsidian that the demons had wrought with their infernal magic and the ashes of the dead.
Everyone took to the air to some degree, a few showing a little rustiness at flying but nothing worse than the odd wobble.
We all fell back slightly, floating away as Dustbringer floated forwards.
He held out a dark-gauntleted hand, and a wisp of mist coalesced under a purpling light before him.
“Enter the wall,” he said in Mundic; “report back on what you find immediately.”
The hunched woman – for it was a rag-shrouded crone of whom the shade had been called – swept forwards on a breeze that moved nothing but her.
Yet my wings could feel it, a cold wind from another dimension.
She reached the wall before her, and froze in place the very instant her immaterial form intersected the obsidian.
She turned around without moving – one moment she was facing away from us, the next she was smiling a toothless smile at her master.
Or former master.
“Unbound!” Dustbringer grunted, sweeping his arm up.
It didn’t look like she was responding to his commands; she kept coming –
Two fingers on his upraised, metal-coated hand clinked as he pointed them –
I saw as his lance of force drove out and impaled the ghost in the centre of her chest.
She let out a howl, more akin to the shrilling of the winds that came down the mountain in winter than any sound formed by a human throat. Then she seemed to close in around the force still embedded in her chest and dissipated, blown apart to vanish on the nethernal breeze.
“Dustbringer, you have infernal weaponry to try?” Timesnatcher said.
“You wanted to try a demon,” Zel reminded me quietly.
But I was new to this. I didn’t want to interject with my ideas –
“Feychilde, you’re new to this,” Neverwish said. “Why don’t you tell us your ideas?”
“Ha – very funny…” I shook my head. “Let me just check…”
I darted forwards on the air, feeling the eyes on my back, but I had to be sure.
“What’re you doing, Feychilde?” Timesnatcher enquired.
“Experimentation. Redgate’s right.” I brought up an imp in a red flame. “Not using demons in here is going to cost us a lot of our firepower.” I directed the imp to the obsidian shell of the buried tower, and had it touch the surface. “We might as well be sure.”
The imp touched the wall, turned and looked back at me in puzzlement; I dismissed it with a wave.
“I was able to harness a whole bunch of demons that came out of the place earlier,” I explained to my companions. “I didn’t think there was much chance the demons themselves were immune to binding just because they touched the stuff. Whatever it does to souls,” I inclined my head to Glimmermere, “it doesn’t affect demons.”
“Well finally, some good news.” Redgate’s whisper was almost elated.
Within an instant a patch of blackness appeared on his shoulder. He spoke to it quietly, and when I saw the white rune form above two gleaming red eyes I knew what it was.
The mizelikon slipped from him, still nothing more than a vague shadow. Blinking in-and-out of existence, it moved rapidly to the tower. When it was a foot or less from the surface, it blinked once more and was gone.
“Hunh. Feychilde, bring out one of those tower-imps again.”
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
While we waited for Redgate’s mizelikon to return – if it would return – I turned one of my imps over to Dustbringer and he questioned it.
It didn’t know anything about the spell that’d made the warehouse and tower impenetrable, just cringing and fawning and drooling some faintly-acidic spittle on the ground. Eventually he turned it back over to me, heaving a sigh of disgust, and I almost felt like apologising to it before dismissing it.
“I vont to go in,” Em huffed as she floated to my side. “How much longer vill ve have to vait, do you think?”
“I could break it.” Winterprince spoke for the first time, ice grinding.
“You really want to go in one of these places again that badly, Winterprince?” Glimmermere asked, also speaking aloud. “Not cheap on entry. It cost you an arm and a leg last time, I hear.”
“… Just a leg.”
It was strange hearing Winterprince’s voice without the accompanying thuds, chinks and hisses. If anything, he sounded colder. His tone was calm, but it was the calm before the storm. The calm that promised the swift onset of catastrophe.
He still hadn’t moved an inch, but Glimmermere appeared to get the message. She didn’t respond further, and put her gaze back on the mound.
The mizelikon reappeared, oily darkness squatting on the slope beneath the exposed obsidian. Then it flickered back to its master, settling in Redgate’s outstretched hands before the shadowy folds of his sleeves seemed to swallow it.
There was a moment of pensiveness, before Redgate said with a tremor in his voice: “The blade of a vamelbabil, Dustbringer. Break it down.”
Dustbringer approached the obsidian, and drew a tremendous scimitar from the air.
I recognised the style – a ten-foot-tall demon-woman had been using a similar weapon earlier on today, but hers had been carved from a pulsing amethyst. This was a pulsing sapphire, shedding a brilliant blue radiance on our surroundings, and was even bigger than hers had been, the curved blade easily as thick as my hand. Nonetheless, Dustbringer swung the seven, seven-and-a-half foot long sword just as easily as he might’ve deigned to swing a twig.
When the blow landed a hollow boom rang out across the wasteland of Lord’s Knuckle, and I could feel the reverberation through the air in which I floated.
The demonic obsidian was caved-in at a single stroke, but Dustbringer didn’t stop there, bringing his blade down again and again, forming a hole big enough to accommodate us.
“What was it, Redgate?” Starsight asked. His voice was still soft, professional, but it wasn’t hard to imagine the kind of fear that a diviner might undergo when facing something that couldn’t be ‘seen’.
“It’s not good,” Zel supplied, tension in her own voice.
“There are… a lot of them,” Redgate said. “And they’re not of what one would choose to call the typical variety.”
Nothing was coming out of the opening Dustbringer made. I ascended slightly to get a better view, a higher angle with which to look right down into the buried tower.
But the inside was black.
“I can’t see anything.” Even with Zel’s aid, I couldn’t make anything out. This darkness was more than natural – if it were, my fey-sight would’ve gone right through it, shown me the hordes of hell lingering in wait. But no – nothing. An impenetrable veil.
I could sense them in there, though, now we’d cracked the uncrackable shell.
“Make it bigger, Dustbringer,” Timesnatcher said. His voice still sounded relaxed. “May I remind everyone, we don’t actually want to touch the rock.” The arch-sorcerer continued slicing away at the obsidian, and I looked back at the edges of the destruction, at the magisters staring at us as we prepared to enter.
“Sorcerers, we’re in first. We don’t need light yet. Best we shield the area off.” I turned and watched as Dustbringer lowered his sword; it vanished away, then he soared ahead without once looking back, moving head-first into the darkness, one arm outstretched, fingers already moving.
So maybe Dustbringer was awesomer.
“I can’t see, Kas,” Zel moaned.
We’re in august company, Zel. Now’s not the time to turn chicken!
I did my best to put a smile on my face as I moved past Em, bowing my head to her; moving past Nighteye, feeling his head swivelling slowly to watch me go –
I beat Redgate, and followed Dustbringer, copying his speed and angle of approach as I entered the darkness, the crimson-robed arch-sorcerer just a couple of seconds behind me.
It was neither warm nor cold, the air neither moist nor dry and remarkably scentless given where we were.
This place was a void, a nullity, an annihilation of all that was meant to be.
It was not the Materium I knew, the Materium that was my home. They’d brought part of Infernum here. Somehow, that was what they’d done.
Almost desperately I cast out my hand, trying to shed some light on the surroundings using my gremlin’s power – but the bright whiteness I tried to evoke yielded only a bleak, blank greyness that lasted less than a heartbeat, fading before it even struck the eye.
I already had reinforced shields on the go, up to my pentagon, so I reassured myself by expanding, six-sides, seven-sides –
Oh gods.
And I was already pressing down on demons. Right below us.
The sensation was eerily tactile. Unfortunately, Redgate had been dead right. These weren’t imps anymore. Perhaps the lesser fiends had been cannibalised. Perhaps they’d been… conglomerated. Either way, the things below us weren’t pushing back like first-rank demonoids. These were pushing back like eighth-rank ikistadreng.
And although the tower had given every appearance from the outside of being slanted, almost sloping gently down, this ‘living’ obsidian fell away almost vertically beneath us.
“I thought it when I heard it in the news, about Firenight Square. What’s your range, Feychilde?”
Dustbringer was saying my shields didn’t stretch far? His didn’t look to be…
Ah, no – he was saying just the opposite.
“Seventy-five feet? But I couldn’t get that here. They’re already pressing –“
“Alone? You’ve tested this?” His questions had the character of demands.
“I just… well, I know how far my shields cover. You –” I looked back at him and Redgate “– you don’t?”
“We’re all different, in our ways. I’ve never seen shields cover such distances, not without being built, arc by arc… What do you sense down there? How far down are they?”
“I’ve got forty-nine feet below us covered. I… compacted them down, somewhat, I think. And they’re…” I was already feeling the pressure, as though I were being pulled apart by my arms, my ribcage straining, “… they’re going to break through soon.”
“Let them come closer; don’t overspend your energies yet.” I relaxed Shield Seven, allowing it to ripple away and giving the demons below some breathing room. “Everyone, get in here,” Dustbringer continued. “Don’t pass the deepest-down sorcerer. We need to see.”
Winterprince appeared first above us, changing the shape of his ice to slide through the opening; a natural, ambient white light filled our surroundings as the trio of arch-wizards joined us. It was faint, though it was enough for me at least to see by.
“Best I can do,” Shadowcloud said. “This place doesn’t respond right.”
A lightning-bolt pierced the darkness and froze there – I quickly slammed my eyes shut against its sudden, overpowering radiance.
“Twelve Hells, Stormchilde.” Shadowcloud sounded a little discombobulated. “Where’d you get that from so fast?”
“I’m sorry… zis has been known to happen vhen I’m excited.”
I laughed aloud.
“Give them some warning next time,” Shadowcloud grumbled. “Anyway, the enchanters can handle this.”
Em’s miniature lightning-bolt, pinned in the air silently without even a quiver, had done its job, glowing like a long, jagged white coal – but she didn’t need to bring it down with us. Other luminous shapes appeared, incorporeal threads of light that illuminated the surroundings.
I looked down, and immediately regretted it. And this time it wasn’t due to my apparent height.
Beneath us was a bubbling abyss of creatures, and like a bucket full of lobsters they eagerly teemed over and under one another. They were comprised of intricate masses of curling, razor-sharp horns, all of the fiends seemingly faceless and without dedicated limbs. Some of their growths ended in dangling, lidless eyeballs rather than horns, dark in hue and with red-rimmed, dilated pupils darting freely here and there over their glistening surfaces.
These demons almost looked like bunches of grapes – bunches of grapes, after a highborn was done plucking the fruit from them – except instead of a soft, twiggy frame, these had a frame that consisted of spurs of bone, spike-festooned ribbing, serrated antennae.
“Gaumgalamar. Seventh rank.”
Special powers?
“Look.”
Despite the fact they lacked obvious limbs, they had no trouble moving. They couldn’t quite fly but they seemed able to ‘step’ upon invisible strings with their outermost appendages, climbing up and down and across the tower’s interior without any discernible footing required.
I was immediately reminded of the giant spiders.
They’d climbed up towards Shield Six and were now pressing against that, just thirty-three feet away. Not in such numbers as before – yet – but it would only be a matter of time before I started to feel the strain again.
“Okay,” Dustbringer said. “Light ’em up.”
The wizards began their barrage.
* * *