Gong! Gong! Gong!
I wasn’t wrong. I did my best to tone down the violence, but there was only so far you could take demon-on-demon combat with regard to keeping it sanitised. The things being annihilated by antlers resembling full-grown trees, or by blows from ridiculously-oversized hammers – those things were still being annihilated, as much as I tried to keep the rending-claws type demons I owned away from the fight.
And, even if they didn’t look precisely (or vaguely) humanoid, a fair number of the unbound demons could still scream.
The shrieking was, indeed, bad – I supposed I hadn’t really been focussing on it before, but it must’ve been there all along tonight, like the Mourning Bells, still ringing in the distance. It went on for thirty seconds before I realised I could do something about it – I summoned Zabalam to walk with us, shielding the children from the sights and sounds of this hellscape, and cursed myself for not realising earlier.
He replaced the chaos with what was, I thought, a lovely rendition of the otherworld – all strange trees and boughs of tall grass, luminescent with fluttering insects – but the kids seemed to want to inspect the gremlin rather than his conjurations. They were amused by his odd clothes, his pig-like face with its green mould and green eyes – and the fact that they towered over him, of course.
While the rest of the kids were distracted, I surreptitiously allowed Jaid and Jaroan to slide under my arms, one walking on either side of me.
“You came,” Jaid said, shoving her head into my ribs and squashing her face against me. “And you’ve got the coolest wings.”
But when Jaroan spoke, he was less complimentary; I could sense the distance about him, hear the accusation in his voice.
“You’re using demons.”
“Got to,” I answered, pressing my hands tight into their shoulders as if I meant to fuse them there forever. “No way to do this without them.” I nodded at the shield’s perimeter – they couldn’t see what I was trying to indicate, of course, but I found myself doing it all the same. “The unbound ones from the Incursion would break through my barriers if they weren’t being distracted.”
I looked down at Jaroan and he looked up at me – the moment held, and then a flicker of a smile touched his lips.
“The wings are cool,” he offered.
“A hundred percent non-demon.”
“I know that.” He squeezed me briefly, almost hesitantly.
We kept on walking. We’d made our way down the stair onto the narrow lane itself, and we moved as a single mass towards the low end of Mud Lane where it met the Spannerwalk alleyways. I didn’t have much choice about that – we couldn’t go up the lane. The uphill route would lead back towards the burning heart of Helbert’s Bend and the desolation of Lord’s Knuckle. Many of the neighbourhood pets, cats and dogs that’d been too scared or loyal to venture from their hiding-places, came out to join our exodus. I’d expanded the shields to accommodate the newcomers, those who burst out of hiding when they saw us coming, or whom Zel sensed and I sent demons to fetch. We went from thirty to fifty to a hundred, but so long as we stayed in formation we were going to save them all. I’d have to invest in some draughts of forgetfulness for some of the kids, though. I sent dog-men into one sick boy’s room, and I could tell when he was brought inside the shield and placed in the care of someone he recognised that the experience had nearly killed him all on its own – and his apartment might never have burned, might never have been invaded.
I choked down the guilt. It was an inevitable price I’d have to pay. How much worse would it have been if I’d left him behind and he had been targeted?
We were close to the dip at the bottom now. Flood Boy was still back there, working on putting out the fires with a kinkalaman and a draumgerel to guard him – both of whom were under strict orders to not allow him to come to any kind of harm.
Just as the Spannerwalk path came into view, climbing up the incline towards the northern stretches of Sticktown, Timesnatcher came through again.
“-childe. Feychilde. Fey-”
“I’m here! Helbert’s Bend.”
“Go to Lord’s Knuckle. It’s going to become another Roseoak if we don’t act fast.”
I ground my teeth.
“I’ve got over a hundred civilians under shield.”
“I… Leave your shield on them. Leave your demons. By the time you need them they’ll almost certainly be safe.”
“Leave my shield? And fight?” I’d gotten a bit of practice using my wings to evade the attacks I could see coming, but attacks could also come from unexpected, imperceptible vectors. Zel would be working overtime to keep me alive and if I missed a warning… “I can get them to safety first. You –“
“You’re going to have to learn to trust me some day, Feychilde. If you’d be so kind as to allow that day to be today, you’d end up doing us both – everyone in Sticktown – an unrepayable favour.”
“You’re speaking in your capacity as an arch-diviner?”
“I can’t see everything. I know by the time you need them you’ll be saving ten times the lives by taking your shields, your demons back.”
I shook my head – he couldn’t see it, but I did it all the same.
The twins exchanged a look.
“That’s not good enough for me, Timesnatcher. And if I leave my shield here and then get killed, they’ll all die. Not good enough for me.”
“Damn you idealists!” He didn’t sound angry – only exasperated. “Get them moving up that hill at the bottom of the muddy road you’re on, and leave them the bintaborax as a guard. I guarantee their safety after that.”
“But you can’t see everything?”
“What’s wrong?” Jaroan asked me in a hushed voice.
“Is it the shield?” Jaid asked in a less-hushed, more-panicked voice.
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“No,” I managed to reply firmly, “nothing like that.”
“They’re building something in Lord’s Knuckle. If we don’t take it down now, you can kiss them all goodbye, even if you’re planning to sit there with them till Yearsend.”
I sighed, patted my brother and sister on the shoulders, then softly pushed them away from me a little.
I lifted my chin, raised my voice. “Everyone! Pick up the peg-legs and tiddlers, hitch up your skirts! We need to jog to the end of the lane! Okay?”
“What’s going on?” Ciraya called back from where she and Fe stalked, near the front edge of the shield.
“I’ve got to go! Knuckle Market makes Mud Lane look like the Noxway!”
There was a trickle of laughter from the Laners. Local rivalries died hard, and even in the midst of an Incursion I felt safe calling on them to help lift the mood. It wouldn’t harm these people to remind them that others had it even worse.
“Come on, everyone, together now!” Ciraya shouted.
I gently picked up the pace.
Most of the kids were excited to be running, but the old men and women had trouble – luckily the community spirit was alive and kicking on this terrible night, and dozens of able-looking chaps came forward to carry the feeble. I even spotted a couple of Peltos’s Gentlemen who’d evidently been trapped in Mud Lane now doing their duty.
We perhaps saved a minute, but at least it was something.
The crowd bottlenecked as we hit the end of the lane. We got the kids and women and elderly into the Spannerwalk first, and I bade the twins a hasty goodbye before watching as Jaid and Jaroan, Xantaire and Xastur and Orstrum all disappeared in the crowd.
“Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks – young Master and Mistress Cuddlesticks – please stand here, and make sure no unbound demons follow the humans.”
“’Zanthanin-agrim-mahlet’?” Ciraya asked, approaching me with Fe at her side. “Oh, man. Do you know what you’ve named them? … I suppose you’d call it ‘Embracespikes’?”
“Cuddlesticks,” I protested, pointing at the nasty spikes protruding from their fully-enclosing armour. “I don’t think Infernal differentiates between, you know, sharp things and non-sharp things. They’re all about the sharp things.”
The sorceress sighed. “Why did I bother asking?” She straightened up, assuming a serious expression. “Lord’s Knuckle,” was all she said, then she held a hand out over Fe.
The yithandreng swelled up, closer to the stature to which I’d become accustomed, and Ciraya perched on her back, rising into the air.
I flicked my wings, matching her elevation so that we would cut beneath the lowest remaining bridges that still spanned the roadway.
Yithandreng were disconcertingly fast for ground-mounts, and Ciraya clung to the demon’s back with her black robe whipping about her, the overlarge sleeves peeling away from her arm to the elbow and streaming out behind her like two wings. Fe made a noise like a stampeding elephant as she propelled the sorceress back up Mud Lane, almost filling the space. Flying at their side, I couldn’t make my eyes focus on all five of the demonic legs I could see in profile – not at once. It was uncanny how the dragon-like creature always had a couple of feet in the dirt, surging forwards without cease.
Flood Boy had been busy saving us all from having no home to return to – our apartment seemed unburned! – and it looked like Aunty Antlers and a cadre of lesser fiends had dealt with ninety percent of the threats in the area.
“Keep it up! I may call for you again in a minute!” I cried as I sped past.
Ciraya cast me a sideways glance. “You said that in Mundic.”
“The ones I was speaking to are ones who speak it.”
That doesn’t sound quite right.
“Duh,” I added.
That sounded better.
She glared at me scathingly, and I actually chuckled.
“What? I don’t know if they speak each others’ languages… So how did you end up here?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Was it – I want to say Hasslepuff?”
“Do you do that just to be annoying?” I made a shocked ‘o’ with my mouth at her insinuation, and she sneered before continuing. “It’s Haspophel, and no, it wasn’t him, actually. It was a diviner, though.”
“Really?”
“Do you know someone called ‘Killstop’?”
I groaned inwardly. “Killstop sent you here?”
“Saved me. Pulled me out of a fight over on Lossen, finished it for me. Gave me a message – said she knew you, that she knew I knew you, and that I knew where to go. I got here just in the nick of time.” I saw her full lips frowning. “She was weird.”
“Tell me about it!”
We wheeled around the Gold Griffin, the three-storey, sloping-roofed tavern on the corner, heading along the main road to Lord’s Knuckle.
Heading towards the orange-red light of conflagration, the walls of smoke that reeked of crisped flesh.
There was no moonlight or starlight in Sticktown on this black-smog evening. Night had deepened, and the fires burned the brighter for it, casting a battle of shadows upon the shifting mists, dark shapes that were the only occupants of the deserted, muck-coated street.
Timesnatcher had been right. They were building something. And they were nearly done.
They’d levelled an area around a warehouse, burning the wooden structures to a crisp and crushing them flat. And they were painting the warehouse with the charcoal remnants. Even now I could see hundreds of imps and their ilk, arduously scrubbing handfuls of the stuff against the brownish surface of the warehouse.
There would be human waste and human remains in that stuff, going off the smells.
And out of the flat roof of the warehouse there now protruded a tower, lopsided and black. It was obviously not a part of the original structure – there were no towers like this in Sticktown. The fiendish builders were still working on it, sculpting it out of the same wet ash they were using to cover the walls. It was only fifty feet high at first but even as we approached it was growing, and it’d borrowed another fifty feet of height from the warehouse which served as its base, so that it already stuck out like a sore, blackened thumb a full hundred feet into the sky.
Weirdly, the patches where the ash had dried seemed to glint, reflecting the firelight as would stone, hues of marbled greens and oily purples dancing across the black surfaces. It was like they were building a dark temple, an unholy shrine to Mekesta.
Demons were pouring out of the warehouse doors. Unfortunately both for us and for them, the locals all seemed to have been slain already – they were being forced to range farther afield, finding victims hiding in the as-yet standing buildings that surrounded the flattened area. They dragged them out into the desolation ringing the warehouse, pulling them screaming back towards the doors…
What the Hells is that place? I asked. I could hear the fear-tinged awe in my own mind-voice.
“Better left unsaid. You don’t want to go in there – not on your first Incursion, at least. Let’s wait for backup to arrive.”
Wait?
“Not that I’m telling you to do nothing. You can stop those demons down there – there’s a small herd of epheldegrim on its way back…”
She drew my eyes to the galloping, seven-legged hell-horses, fangs buried deep in the bodies of their victims, ferrying them back towards the warehouse –
I swept down at them, putting on a burst of speed that pushed me out in front of Ciraya and Fe.
“Engaging at Lord’s Knuckle!” I reported.
“Good! Stymie them! Your back-upis inbound in one minute. Took a while longer to deal with the smikelliol than we anticipated.” Timesnatcher sounded even more exasperated.
As I grabbed myself a handful more epheldegrim, I wondered how the battle against the smikelliol had gone – how they’d defeated it in the end. But it was nothing to concern myself with. I could always ask Em later.
I had the hell-horses’ victims set free, landed to give them a burst of sylph healing (using Zab’s illusion-power as usual to screen the unjoining and rejoining) then went right back into the air. I started hunting down the hell-spawn pouring forth from the warehouse’s gates: weird, abortive animals; roving, rolling spheres of moss and thorns; creatures of living brick with shovels for hands…
Ciraya soon caught up and began evacuating those cowering in the houses on the edges of the destruction, guarded by an eager-looking Fe.
“Most of the champions we could spare from Roseoak have been diverted to Rivertown – resurgence there, doesn’t sound pretty; and I’ve got to go back to Treetown. I’m sending Shadowcloud and Glimmermere to you.”
“Glimmermere… the enchanter?”
“That’s Glancefall; he’s been stuck at home in Rivertown since this all started. No, I mean the druid from the Westrise.”
“So no sorcerer.”
“No sorcerer yet. Shallowlie’s down; we don’t know if she’s going to last the night, never mind fight some more. The others are occupied. We’re stretched thin.” And then, without pause: “Shadowcloud, Glimmermere, converge on Feychilde. Lovebright’s linked you.”
* * *