“Hi,” I offered. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear you’re on the way.”
“Lord’s Knuckle mean something to you?” Shadowcloud asked – or at least I guessed it was him, given the male voice. He did sound like a Sticktowner, if I had to put money on it, but it wasn’t a local accent. He was probably, as I’d formerly guessed, from one of the south-westerly districts I’d never even been to.
It was strange how our mind-voices so completely captured our normal voices; it was far harder to fake an accent telepathically than it was out loud. Or perhaps it wasn’t all that strange – I had no idea how the spell really worked, after all.
“Erm, sort of,” I thought in reply. “I meant I’m glad because I’m kind of facing something I’ve never seen before, more than anything else.”
“Right,” he replied, dripping scepticism. He surely recognised my accent too.
“We’re coming up on your position,” Glimmermere said, her voice youthful, and highborn to the hilt.
I looked behind me, and upwards – I was still low to the ground, and they were coming in from a great height.
Shadowcloud was only leading slightly. He was thin and tall, his robe grey and yellow, like an overcast sky split by a fat zig-zag of lightning. The mask covering his face was topped with a swirl of mist, such that one might think it was just a patch of fog fixed there by his power – my eyes were capable of picking out the scintillation of metals in the covering, but I doubted someone without my augmentations would even get an inkling there was a real, cunningly-designed mask beneath the mist. He had yellowish leathery gloves covering his hands.
As for Glimmermere – I had no idea what she actually looked like. Behind the arch-wizard came a blue-feathered condor, the vast span of her pinions framing him as they fell together towards the battlefield of Lord’s Knuckle. She had to be thirty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip.
They would be looking at me as they approached… I hastily turned back and ripped to pieces a group of multi-coloured headless ostriches that I’d trapped in my diamond, then soared after another batch of creatures.
I’d had to keep many of my minions back – my bintaborax, kinkalaman and draumgerel were busy, as was Flood Boy; and my sylph, gremlin and fairy were joined with me at the moment. I didn’t want to put most of the weirdest things I’d accumulated, like the atiimo-thing with its pouring entrails, back on this plane even if they were under control. Even still, I fielded a force of minor fiends that I could replenish at a moment’s notice by simply stealing the unbound demonoids which slew them; my six epheldegrim were supporting Aunty Antlers in roaming the borders and my mekkustremin was standing right in front of the warehouse gate already, turning imp after imp into winged paste.
But they were gushing out of windows, flooding out, like we were trying to dam up a river. A river of claws and spite.
The champions paused, assessing the scene below. As Glimmermere hovered, her absurdly-large wings clapped the air; Shadowcloud was silent and completely unmoved by the choppy wind, while I was buffeted around, forced to regain my balance.
“I’m barely slowing the demons,” I thought.
“That’s why we’re here,” the arch-druid replied, her disdain so rich that it almost sounded as though I’d already managed to offend her.
“I’m going to take over on this spot,” Shadowcloud said. He was already bringing water up out of nowhere to quench the burning fires. “It’ll take some time to bring the whole building down piece by piece, and that won’t help us contain them. I’ll swallow it instead, and we can work our way down into it.”
I didn’t quite follow, but it sounded pretty impressive.
“You want to stay out here,” he continued, “or go inside, Feychilde?”
“No!” Zel rustled.
“Not particularly. I’m good here.”
“You don’t want to chase demons?” Glimmermere spoke in an overtly-incredulous tone. “I know you’re supposed to be new to this, but –“
“We haven’t met,” I replied. “Name’s Feychilde.”
“Name’s Deadchilde –” she hit back.
“That’s –” Shadowcloud began.
“– Good-For-Nothing-Childe –”she continued.
She was adept at making friends, this one.
“– enough!” Shadowcloud finished with a roar. I didn’t need Zel’s help to sense that there was some history between these two. “You’re going to force a new champion to go in there, Glimmer? You want to volunteer?”
There was silence in the telepathic space we shared – the air in which we floated was filled with the ringing of the distant Bells and the howls of demons, but the inner silence still stood out.
“Thought as much,” the arch-wizard continued. “We build a perimeter out here. Allow none past. I’ll get to work on the heavy lifting.”
“And I do have some demons,” I grumbled, going for exaggerated sullenness. “I just don’t chase them around like a wolf in a pig’s pen, that’s all.”
“Feychilde, they’re escaping into the sky.” Shadowcloud’s voice was patient, straightforward. “Get up there and stop them, and Glim-”
“Beg to differ,” I said, “and sorry for interrupting, but I can’t go high. I f… I dropped out of the sky in Upper Tivertain. I can’t fly high. I think – I hope it’s just the tiredness, and I’m okay down here…”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Glimmermere, you’re up. Feychilde, you’re down. Go!”
The huge bird cocked its head at me, then, despite her orders and her disposition, graced me with a tender touch of her blue-feathered wing before she departed for the sky.
A single touch against my shoulder through the robe was all it took – my being was filled with noise and light.
I felt like my limbs and wings were double their length and throbbing with unexpressed potential, energy that would split my skin asunder if I didn’t find a means of release –
I thrust myself forwards, heading towards the mekkustremin, hurling myself into the fight.
I felt so good that I laughed aloud as I hurtled from one group of foes to the next – I floated above the huge doll and went from window to window, turning them against one another, clogging up the exit-points with my own fighters and with the remnants of the slain.
I spoke Infernal words at the quivering hordes of hell and they feared me. I commanded and destroyed and I still smiled.
I had power, and knew what it was to enjoy it, exert it for its own sake. I wasn’t here saving people anymore. I was here killing things. So they would come back into the fold of existence one day in the far future – so what? It didn’t matter. I was still killing them. Still tearing them apart. And still enjoying it. If anything deserved death, it was this sewerous, fish-like humanoid, more mouth than man, its wings membranous and dripping. This frenzied ball of emaciated, diseased arms rolling and scratching, pulling itself through the air with no discernible means of propulsion other than its flailing, as though it just decided which way it wanted to go and off it went.
Until I arrived to negate its will.
This was revenge. For Mud Lane. For Smouldervein. For all those who’d died, pointlessly, because of some twist of fate that meant demons could slip into our plane, into our city, into our homes. Though I couldn’t bring them back from the dead, I could avenge their deaths to the utmost of my ability.
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But when the windows no longer made for an easy escape route the things teeming in the warehouse simply threw their might against the walls – three, four, five breaches splitting the wood all simultaneously – and I was off again, trying to stem the flow, while Glimmermere picked off the flyers that got around me and Shadowcloud worked on… whatever it was he was working on.
If it was as destructive as he’d implied, I had to let Ciraya know.
A small red flame opened a gate at my command, and an eighteen-inch white-scaled imp was standing there. He had huge white eyes and wings, given his size; his limbs were thin, his tail short. His wide mouth was filled with tiny flat teeth and his bat-like face was crowned with three small, sharp horns.
I quickly relayed the warning I wanted and sent him on his way.
I couldn’t stop for long. The battle wore on, and I fought all around the different sides of the building – but the tides of hellspawn seemed endless.
The next time I passed the door, I posed the question: Why wouldn’t you advise me to go in, Zel? Exactly?
“There’s something in there you can’t handle… I’m not quite sure what.”
Don’t we need to kill it to stop them?
“I… It depends? They might not be anchored. They could all just disappear anyway. Planar openings can’t last forever…”
Is that really likely to happen soon enough, though?
“Just let another sorcerer do it!”
I groaned.
“Shadowcloud, there’s something powerful in there. I honestly don’t know if it’s gonna die when you bring down the warehouse – we might just irritate it.”
“Then we irritate it. We’re going to bring in reinforcements and overpower it. If what you say is true, we aren’t going to want to fight in a small group anyway.”
“Not after what Winterprince said about that museum,” Glimmermere huffed.
I looked up at her over the edge of the warehouse’s roof, the great blue bird wheeling in the night sky like a shark patrolling the ocean depths. Her talons were filled with mewling, dying imps.
“What’s that?” I asked.
For no discernible reason Glimmermere chose not to respond to me, but a few seconds later Shadowcloud said, “He almost died fighting the things that killed Mindbreaker and Hellbane. They were the marble-statue men, the same kind Leafcloak saw killing Riverlady.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was carrying on: “Reinforcements didn’t arrive for twenty minutes. We… we assume Mindbreaker and Hellbane were disintegrated. There was nothing left of them and the demons were gone by the time we took the walls off.”
“And you tried to make me go in there?” I used the same incredulous tone as Glimmermere had earlier.
“You hadn’t told us what the warehouse contained,” the druidess said; “if I’d known –”
“You would’ve insisted, we know,“ Shadowcloud growled. “The earth’s ready. Stay back.”
The arch-wizard began to demonstrate his power.
There was a terrible crashing, a rending groan rising from the warehouse all of a sudden. The ground shook, making the debris scattered around start to vibrate. I saw Ciraya and Fe leading a final group of survivors back the way we’d came, keeping them clear of whatever was about to happen.
The demons seemed to know what was going on too, and they made a break for it in record numbers. I filled my diamond three, four times over, and still they kept coming, kept dying, as the rumbling noise only became louder and louder.
It honestly felt like an earthquake was splitting its way through the foundation of the city towards us. I backed well-away as a corner of the warehouse suddenly dipped with a violent clatter – the ashen tower atop the warehouse, now a hundred or more feet in height, started to teeter as the whole structure fell.
The ground groaned again and the tower seemed to swoon, teetering some more in a new direction, almost pointing at me now.
Finally it was left leaning at such an angle that it had no choice other than to topple –
Yet it stayed, standing there at forty-five degrees in defiance of everything I thought I’d understood about structures, about the basic laws of existence. Perhaps it was that the winged fiends clinging to its exterior were helping support it, or perhaps it was just some quirk of demonic architecture – either way, it wasn’t coming down without a fight.
As the earth sighed, a stony rasp filling the air, the warehouse was swallowed up, sunken down into an ever-deepening pit.
Within a minute it was done. The shuddering, the groaning, it all came to a sudden halt.
Shadowcloud was immediately bringing in rivulets of winds to clear the dust-storm that had hidden the results from even my sight.
It only took seconds, and then we were staring down at a flat, levelled expanse, broken only by the very tip of the black tower, still protruding at an angle. Despite seemingly being made from nothing more than congealed ash, the top forty feet of the tower had somehow survived the cataclysmic use of wizardry.
There were no demons to be seen.
“Something’s wrong. That should’ve buried the lot. I was going to open a way down once it was fully sealed.” Shadowcloud sounded more worried than I’d yet heard him. “I can’t put soil or rocks in it, and it’s still on the surface.”
“Then bury it deeper. I thought you were supposed to be smart.”
The arch-druid was still visibly busy, introducing the last beakful of the flying worm creatures she’d been pursuing to her great condor’s tongue – but she found the time to criticise her colleague nonetheless.
“I’ve tried. They’re – they’ve done something to the building.”
As if to test a suspicion, Shadowcloud raised one hand, letting white electricity crackle down from the skies to touch his fingertips. After a moment of what looked like playing with it, he hurled it as a bolt of lightning at the remnant of the tower poking out of the riven ground.
The lightning-bolt rebounded from the glinting black surface with its forest-green and sunset-purple marbling; the wizard reached out and froze the blinding streak right there, letting it burn in the air, then swept his hand back at the tower, propelling it forwards once more.
This went on for several seconds, the champion bouncing the same lightning bolt back and forth, back and forth.
He took it back in his hand, looked at it for a few more seconds, then finally crumbled the lightning into sparks, tossing them away on the wind.
“It’s a kind of ensorcelled obsidian. It should’ve cracked at my merest suggestion… but it registers as alive, or something.”
“Alive?” I shuddered.
“They’ve worked a protection into it that prevents him from affecting it directly with his powers,” Glimmermere supplied in an intrigued tone. She’d completed her task and had come over to hover near me. “It’s not alive, though. I can’t touch it.”
I got the impression she knew the way she was flapping her wings and chopping the air was winding me up, but I was determined to ride it out; I wasn’t going to back away, show her she was getting to me.
“… That’s part of it.” The arch-wizard didn’t sound happy.
“Oh, do come on, Shadowcloud; you must know how few things I can use my powers on. If it isn’t alive or almost alive, I can’t touch it. There’s a lot more non-living matter in the world than living, let me tell you that.”
While she was prattling on, I was trying to wrap my head around the situation.
“Do you mean you’ve opened the earth farther down, but it’s not fallen any deeper in?” I asked.
“It’s fallen deeper in,” he replied, “but it hasn’t broken and the top of the structure they were building is still on the surface.”
“You mean… it’s… stretched?”
“I think so. I think I’ve just done some of their work for them, expanded the structure.”
I saw what he meant by ‘alive’ now.
Still, there was no sign of our foes, not even any sounds coming from the leaning black protrusion that now stood in the centre of Lord’s Knuckle.
“Do you think most of the demons are dead?”
“It’s certainly possible,” he said without much confidence, “but we’ll need to check the whole place out once backup arrives. I just don’t want to leave it like this while we wait. I feel like I’m waiting for them to attack.”
I considered it.
“Cover it over? Without trying to lower it any deeper?”
Shadowcloud turned his head towards me for a moment.
“I guess that might work.”
The arch-wizard floated somewhat lower, spreading his arms.
The dirt of Sticktown responded.
I managed to get through about ten seconds of watching him coating the obsidian protrusion with mud, before I finally snapped, speaking aloud: “Can you please stop doing that?”
Glimmermere gave a soft, throaty cackle, but she did move away slightly, angling her wings so as to disrupt me less. She’d been steadily following me inch by inch as I’d tried to surreptitiously increase the distance between us.
“Thank you.” I used some of Zabalam’s talent to increase the volume of my voice so that it carried above the crashing din of the wizard’s soil and stone. He was using heavier elements now, slapping clay on top; it rose up in great wet mounds and rolled forwards at his gesture, adding to the new hill in the middle of the desolation. It was a rough half-sphere almost sixty feet high by this point.
“Don’t tell me you’ve buried it.”
“Timesnatcher!” Shadowcloud growled. “Don’t you do this to me again!”
“They’ve buried it,” the arch-diviner replied, as if to someone else.
“Lovely.” I recognised Leafcloak’s voice. “That doesn’t mean your vision’s going to come true, though, does it?”
“Not necessarily.”
Shadowcloud again: “Vision – what vision?”
“I think there’s a disintegrator in there. It can see the future, and it’s strong. If we don’t go in and get it, it’s going to come out when we least expect it and it’s going to wreak havoc.”
I was beginning to get the impression that a fair proportion of champions who fell during Infernal Incursions were literally reduced to nothingness – which made sense, given that most other injuries would probably prove repairable.
“If we do go in and get it, well… I can’t see what happens, can I?”
“When are we doing this, then?” Glimmermere asked, still an undercurrent of intrigue in her voice.
“Do not proceed without us. Twelve, fifteen minutes. I’m going to get at least one other sorcerer with us. With Feychilde that makes two. You okay, Feychilde?”
“As good as I’ve ever been.” In truth, Glimmermere’s boost was already wearing off, the incredible weariness stealing back over my joints, my eyes – but I wasn’t going to mention that until we were heading in. No point getting reenergised now when I’d only need her to top me up again in a bit.
“Good. We’re going to go in force this time. No failures. No dying. Not anyone else today.” I caught a hint of grief when he said that last part; perhaps he and Smouldervein had been close. “I’ll let you know when we’re nearby.”
Waiting that long… Anything could happen.
I stared across at Shadowcloud.
“Okay, Timesnatcher,” the wizard said. “We wait.”