I was unsure if it’d been specifically organised between them – I’d ignored some of the background chatter earlier – but they each tapped into a different element. Em abandoned her favoured lightning to Shadowcloud, who probably had less chance of erroneously striking one of us with a lightning-bolt in this confined space than the relatively-inexperienced magister. She was spraying what looked like liquid fire instead, for all that that was better. Winterprince emitted a white beam of pure cold energy from his ice-encased hands.
The glossy obsidian walls reflected the various sources of radiance in muted shades, so that it seemed we were hanging there within the boundaries of an ever-changing rainbow of colour, only edged in darkness.
At first it seemed the creatures were regenerating from the damage that’d been caused to them, but after a minute it was obvious – they were just being replaced. Roasted, frozen and fried demon-parts were floating on the surface of those pushing ever more-eagerly up at us. Rancid vapours spiralled up past us, slipping around us to ensure none of us were choked.
“Dropping demons,” Winterprince said, again eschewing the telepathy, evidently preferring to grind out his curse with his maw of ice.
“They’re just trying to tire us out,” Timesnatcher said.
“It’s working,” I replied; the psychic link seemed to perfectly copy the voice I’d have used out loud, effortlessly capturing the through-gritted-teeth quality of my words.
“I’m descending,” Redgate said, even as he started to move towards the extremity of my barrier. Frost rays, gouts of flame and fingers of lightning all danced about him, seeking targets beneath him.
“Don’t go too far,” I gasped. “I’m about to be reduced to five shields. They’re going to ascend!”
“I will support your shields down here.” The moment he said this, I felt the burden instantly diminish to half what it had been. “It will be better for all concerned if we can keep them as far from us as possible.”
Looking down, I could now see his shields, barely stretching from wall-to-wall across the tower interior.
“Agreed.” Dustbringer didn’t move to support him, though. I guessed the more sorcerers were down there, the more careful the wizards would have to be – barriers warding off ill-intent weren’t going to defend against accidental attack.
So things continued, another whole minute ticking by, hundreds upon hundreds of the gaumgalamar perishing, withering away under the brunt of the elemental attacks.
We didn’t even need to bring twelve or thirteen champions. A couple of sorcerers and wizards could’ve handled this.
“Let’s hope you’re right.”
After a bit, I realised the ringing in my ears had stopped – I could no longer hear the Bells. I was uncertain as to whether I should feel reassured or not. I decided to keep my mouth shut.
The group of us descended, bit by bit, careful to stay as far from the walls as possible as we worked our way through the foes. The one time I came close to a wall I felt a current of air, gently but forcefully moving me away from the obsidian.
One of the wizards had us covered.
After about two minutes of our slow descent I was sweating, despite the temperate conditions. At first I tried to deny the truth to myself, sought out excuses… Perhaps the wizards were accidentally heating the air; perhaps the atmosphere in here was changing the deeper we went…
But soon it was obvious to me that I was flagging – and after a double-boost of the arch-druid goodness, too…
What must’ve been another couple of minutes passed – how far down did this tower go? It was then that I once more felt as though the hexagonal shield were about to break, and warned my fellow-sorcerers. Dustbringer moved down to take over, careful to stay out of the main line of fire, and I soared back up through the group with my shields relaxed. I seemed to ascend effortlessly – half of my relative speed was, of course, due to the others descending at the same time. I came to a stop a bit above Em then slowly reversed my motion, following her down again.
She was breathing hard as she spewed flame from her hands, directing it into those demons which were closest to the shields.
She wasn’t short of targets.
“You okay?” I murmured.
“Zis is quite something.” She managed a wolfish grin, not breaking eye contact with her targets as she continued her work. “And you?”
“Tired,” I said, wanting to rub at my eyes.
“Come on, arch-sniveller,” Glimmermere chided from over my left shoulder, “we put enough of our energies in you to stop a dead horse needing flogging.”
“You’re almost at your limits for the day, Feychilde,” Nighteye cut in before I could respond. “Aside from the obvious – a bone-shattering fall, a number of serious lacerations – you’ve not slept in over thirty-six hours –” (I saw Glimmermere’s bright eyes widen momentarily, and heard a faint “ahh” escape her lips) “– and you’ve pushed your magic further today than ever before, I can, hm, get a good sense of that just from having touched you, and it usually takes –“
“Okay, Nighteye, I get it.” I smiled and patted him on the arm. “No more rejuvenation. It’s alright – I can manage.”
“No, I think he’s right.” Glimmermere’s voice suddenly had a hard note of seriousness to it, and not of the hostile kind. “We’ll replenish you once more – when we get down there.” She eyed the teeming spider-demons below us. “That’ll have to last you. We need something left if we’re going to heal your wounds.”
“I don’t like the way you’re just assuming I’m going to –“
“Guys, please,” Neverwish intruded loudly, “can you talk like this? There’s a reason we’ve got rules, you know. If they overhear us, they’re smart enough to use our plans against us.”
“Ah-h-h, I’ve never been to a meeting.” Killstop had raised her hand, looking around at the other champions. “What are the rules? I wasn’t aware I ever agreed to rules.”
“I’m going to enjoy going over the rules with you personally,” Timesnatcher said firmly, sounding like he intended for her to feel a little intimidated, even if it was well-intentioned.
“Oooh.” Killstop injected a little purring into the sound she made.
“I – I didn’t really consider how that was going to come out, did I? You’re too young for me, kid. Sorry.”
“Never say never, Cradlesnatcher. We grow up, you know. I’ll be an adult soon.”
“Forget what I said,” Neverwish interjected, sounding sickened. “You two take it off-link. And whisper. And find me some good earplugs in the process.”
“You’ve totally just ruined Timesnatcher’s name for me now, you know, Killstop,” Lovebright joined in. “Thanks for that.”
“Don’t say that!” Timesnatcher blurted.
“And you used to sound cool…” the enchantress trailed off wistfully.
A little tense sniggering trickled through the group – except for Winterprince, and the sorcerers beneath us.
“I’m feeling a little less fraught now,” I said. “Redgate, you need to swap out?”
“I shall inform you when I need to… ‘swap out’.”
One could practically hear the inverted commas. His voice carried a little more animosity than necessary, but I got the impression he was simply unused to mangling language in the lowborn manner, rather than there being anything explicitly disdainful in his attitude.
“Fair enough. Dustbringer?”
He didn’t answer my question directly, but answered one that had been niggling at me, probably all of us, for some time:
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“We have now descended three hundred feet. Far beyond the point at which we should’ve reached the storehouse. Am I right, Shadowcloud?”
“I… I can’t explain that,” the wizard replied. “The earth told me how far down it was.”
“The earth doesn’t lie.” Winterprince made a rare telepathic contribution.
“No, but Infernum does,” Redgate whispered.
There was a moment of silence, everyone chilled by his words; then several urgent voices were raised in query and protest.
“Infernum! No one –“
“– actually entered another plane –“
“– was possible to just transplant –“
“– to be joking about –“
“I don’t think we’re actually in Infernum.” Timesnatcher cut through the noise.
“I agree,” Dustbringer said, “but it’s close. The planes have intersected for too long in this spot. It’s changing. We have to move more quickly.”
“We’re doing our best,” Shadowcloud protested. “It’s tiring for us too, you know? Can’t you join in with that big sword of yours?”
“I am conserving my strength – maintaining a shield is a constant drain on my energies. Also, if I got in the way of one of those lightning-bolts, you would slay me outright.”
“Only if I hit you without ill-will, right?” the arch-wizard muttered.
Timesnatcher spoke steadily. “Nighteye, Glimmermere – do your best with the wizards. Shadowcloud, Winterprince… Stormchilde –” his voice twisted in amusement “– back away for a minute. Starsight, Killstop – on me.”
Em didn’t object to the name this time either. Surely this was a good sign.
The wizards withdrew towards the druids, halting their barrage for the moment, while the diviners descended towards my fellow sorcerers.
I had to watch this.
Timesnatcher took the lead, drawing his spellbound blades that glittered with a greenish tincture. He tossed one end-over-end to Killstop who effortlessly plucked it from the air; yet by the time she’d raised her head again Timesnatcher had already plunged into the foes beneath Dustbringer and Redgate’s shielding, literally disappearing into the churning mess of serrated horns.
“He’s gone in!” Em cried aloud, breaking away from Nighteye and starting to descend – but Glimmermere halted her with a hand on her arm.
“Don’t be afraid, magister,” the druidess said. “He likes doing things like that. He’ll be back up in a second.”
“He’s insane,” Em continued; she’d stopped moving but her eyes were still wide, fixed on the place where Timesnatcher had vanished into the demon-spiders.
Killstop had followed Starsight’s example in the meantime, and they were both hanging almost upside down. The winds of wizardry that bore them aloft kept their robes from falling forwards over their faces – and they went slashing at every demonic appendage they could reach without completely abandoning the shields.
They weren’t doing a quarter of the damage the wizards had done, but we were still descending, if at a snail’s pace compared with earlier. How much of that was due to the three ensorcelled daggers at work on the surface, I was unsure, given the one ensorcelled dagger in the hand of the death-defying Timesnatcher somewhere down there beneath the surface of the infernal spiders.
“I’m at – the bottom.” Timesnatcher’s voice came through in bursts; surely ninety-nine percent of his brain had to be occupied with staying alive.
“What do you see?” Dustbringer asked.
“We’re going to – need your – sword again, old friend. It looks like – the roof of the storehouse got – the same treatment as the –“
And silence.
More silence.
“Timesnatcher?” There was an unusual twang of alarm in Dustbringer’s voice.
“W-wait.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, and I wasn’t the only one. For a moment there I thought we’d lost him.
It was two minutes before he emerged, on the other side from Killstop and Starsight’s current location, accompanied by an erupting fountain of demon-horn chippings and severed eyeballs. He seemed to spin like a top as he thrust his way out of the gaumgalamar, skipping across footholds that wouldn’t be there a thousandth of a second later, slipping through gaps that would be filled with jagged protrusions before my eyes could even properly focus on his latest movement.
“Got distracted. Almost disembowelled, beheaded and castrated, all at the same time. Then when I escaped, almost touched the wall. Wow.” He soared free of the demons, almost sagging as he hung in the air. “Hope I didn’t worry you too much… Are you guys ready to take back over?”
“With pleasure,” Shadowcloud said grimly.
It was then that it all went wrong.
It was impossible to say what happened, exactly. Starsight and Killstop were separated, and I looked down at them expectantly, waiting for them to disengage.
A spur of bone raked out and snagged Starsight’s sleeve, pulling him out of the shield.
He moved unnaturally, as arch-diviners were wont to do, slipping out of the spider’s reach and into the buffer of wind separating him from the obsidian wall of the tower.
Yet he somehow didn’t move back in time and a second, a third gaumgalamar sprang upon him. Pushing him into the wind-wall.
Timesnatcher whirled – Killstop too. Though she was the closer by far, Timesnatcher beat her to it, sliding out of the shield and slashing his green-trailing dagger through the demons’ serrated spines.
They fell apart, blackened, and I looked across to Starsight –
His head was bowed and he was bringing his knives, silver and gold, up to attack –
Timesnatcher evaded, a minutiae of motions that let his friend’s daggers miss him by finger-widths.
“Star!” Dustbringer grunted aloud.
“I’m on it!” Neverwish snapped, the dwarf suddenly descending towards the mad Starsight.
“What’s happening?” This from Shadowcloud.
“Look!” I pointed.
“Did he touch the wall?” Lovebright cried. “What’s happened to his mind?”
Starsight was still attacking Timesnatcher, about ten times a second, every stroke a killing-blow aimed at the underside of the chin, the temple, the sternum, the spinal cord…
Timesnatcher said nothing, did nothing except dodge. Every. Single. Time.
Waiting. Knowing he could trust others to have his back in this.
Neverwish got ten feet away and raised a grey-gloved hand –
Starsight instantly slumped over, and floated there on the air.
“Brute force attack.” The dwarven enchanter spoke the words in an incongruously solemn tone. “Takes out any sucker. I always told him. But you just went right through them! We’re supposed to be invisible, inaudible! How did they get him?”
“We are.” Wisps of wind, courtesy of one of the wizards, quickly plucked Starsight’s daggers from his sleeping fingers and drew them across to Timesnatcher, who secreted them away in his robes. “They sense us anyway. How do you think I got trapped myself when I went to the bottom?”
“Dropping demons.”
“So he, hm, has a mind, still? because I haven’t got any idea how to fix brains properly yet, not unless they’ve, hm, just been chopped in half or something – and Leafcloak says that Glimmermere shouldn’t fix anyone’s brains anymore because she’ll never be able to do it properly, and –“
It said something of the seriousness of the situation that Glimmermere didn’t give Nighteye a scathing response.
“He’s still got a mind,” Lovebright interrupted the young druid quietly. “But it’s… what would you say, Neverwish? Like he’s lost all his higher functions. It’s the sort of thing you see in the very old, or the very sick, soon to die.”
“He’s not dying,” Neverwish said bitterly. “We’re gonna fix him. Leafcloak’s gonna do it.” He looked around. “Who’s flying him out? We can’t just leave him here.”
“We can,” Winterprince said.
The arch-wizard pointed to the wall slightly above us and created a coating of snowy ice; with his other hand he gently moved the prone arch-diviner up through the group, then settled him down against the whitish substance.
“He’s really gonna be okay in there?” Neverwish said accusatorily.
“I guarantee it.” Winterprince’s tone had a note of finality as he covered Starsight over in more snowy ice, packed deep.
“It makes sense,” Timesnatcher said. “We can’t send someone out now – we need everything we’ve got to do this fast. Has anyone really not considered yet that this whole tower might be growing while we float here chatting?”
Winterprince finished shoring up the block of ice, then the remaining two diviners ascended a bit in retreat; the three wizards moved back down to the front-lines.
We left Starsight behind, slumbering deep in some kind of cold-induced stasis.
I didn’t like it. I’d only known him briefly, but it had helped me – to see a champion who probably hadn’t been a champion for long, taking things in his stride like he had. Now that champion’s mind had been lost, possibly forever.
I clenched my teeth and went on with my work.
Before long I took my turn at the shields again, letting both Dustbringer and Redgate have a break, recuperate. Em, Shadowcloud and Winterprince continued their devastating attacks. And, eventually, we reached the final few gaumgalamar.
A fireball, courtesy of Em, exploded the last of them into bits.
The bits themselves became a problem, next. It took all three wizards another several minutes of concerted fire to reduce a (now twenty-or-so feet deep) pile of demon-parts into dust, then remove it with their wind-control, dumping it back out through the crack hundreds of feet above us.
At last, we were faced with another black wall – well, a floor. The obsidian-covered roof of the warehouse, storehouse, whatever we were calling it.
While Timesnatcher retrieved his second greenish dagger from Killstop and gave Starsight’s weapons into her care, the druids went around with another burst of energy for everyone – my last of the day, if what they’d said before was to be believed – and I felt my focus sharpening, the blurriness of my perceptions receding.
Less effect than before, but much better than nothing.
“Back up a little,” Dustbringer commanded.
Once we were a good twenty feet above him he raised his hands over his head and manifested the sapphire blade on this plane. Holding it in two hands, he brought it crashing down into the ground.
Light.
Soft, yellow light seeped in through the immense crack the vamelbabil-blade had created. Air flooded in – air that smelt fresh enough to breathe, rather than the fetid stink of a demon-pit that I’d expected.
Dustbringer looked up at Timesnatcher, then brought the blade down again, and again.
Once more, no demons came pouring forth – but this time the hole below us led into the light, not darkness.
Yet – here – that light didn’t feel warm, friendly. It felt portentous.
Dangerous.
Dustbringer led the way down into the storehouse, and, one by one, we followed.
It had been a building of moderate proportions for Sticktown, before the events of tonight. The imps bringing chaos to Lord’s Knuckle had definitely chosen for size, and this was the best they’d been able to do – it was a hundred feet or so wide, and maybe half again in length, fifty feet high.
Now – after its architecture had been modified by infernal agents – it was a resplendent throne room, its previous dimensions doubled at minimum. The interior walls and floors were smooth surfaces of gold and brass, lined with thin, silken-looking red carpets and curtains. A dozen huge, flaming hearths cast quite normal-seeming flames over the hall.
And at the far end of the hall, only dimly lit by the nearest hearths, was a raised area, a dais covered in red cushions upon which a number of creatures lounged, surrounding a golden throne that twinkled darkly in the shadows.
“Welcome,” said the thing slouching in the great chair, whip dangling nonchalantly from her paw-like hand. “We’ve been expecting you, as they say. Won’t you come down from there? We have much to discuss.”