Branbecks Bridge must’ve been so named for the multiple layers upon which the neighbourhood was built. The slums extended into a dip in the earth covered with walkways, not unlike Mud Lane or a hundred other such areas in Sticktown, but wider, enclosing a marketplace and a tavern down there in the drop. When I caught sight of Em, it was as she rose up above the buildings to evade some attack before diving down again. Her fists were coated in a living stone or metal compound, seeming to be constantly growing, and they were each already the size of a man’s head.
She was wearing the new winter magister’s robe she’d picked out – still white but far fluffier, less revealing but no less amazing-looking on her with its trailing sewn-in scarf and high collar around the hood. But it was strange, now, to see her fighting without her mask on.
By the time I arrived, speeding down into the slum marketplace, it looked like the battle was almost finished. Eight or nine mud elementals were tangling with a variety of lesser demons around the perimeter, none of the fiends any greater than fifth rank, and the locals had, for the most part, wisely chosen to watch from their shutters rather than the balconies. Only a few buildings were damaged, only a few bodies lying amidst the wreckage of the market stalls.
It was just the two arch-darkmages themselves that were cause for concern, now, though as I swiftly processed the details my concern diminished and my jubilation rose.
She was actually holding her own, even winning. They didn’t look like heretics; they were too well dressed for that – the diviner in purple velvet with a clock-styled mask, the sorcerer in burnt red-ochre with a spike-covered mask.
The arch-diviner wanted to get close to tangle with her, but lightning cascaded down about her, pulsing rhythmically from the storm-clouds lingering high above; it seemed to crackle even from her hair as she swung her head, white energy seeking him out like searching fingers, driving him back as he danced outside its range. He was relatively still, standing as if deep in thought; he moved only in momentary bursts to evade the burning ribbons of white fire that came closest to him, his ponderous stance never seeming to change. Meanwhile, she flew in, pressing at the dark sorcerer’s shields, absorbing the shock of his attacks and beating him away all the while, battering him back – her ever-growing gauntlets were now spreading down to her elbows, the speed of her blows only seeming to increase along with their strength as more time passed and they swelled, bigger and bigger. I could make it out now that I was closer, the tiny chips and grains of material being drawn in instant by instant, coursing through the air to add themselves to her weaponry.
If this were happening a few hours later, she’d be getting a fair few plat as a reward, but no – as Wyrda’s way would have it, the darkmages had to come along during her work hours.
Smiling a little, I leapt down upon the arch-sorcerer, my blades withering his outermost defences in a way that Em’s blows couldn’t achieve.
“Get the diviner!” I yelled.
“On it!” she cried back with satisfaction.
“It’s Feychilde!” the spiky-faced sorcerer beneath me grunted, turning his head to seek out his comrade.
He didn’t sound rich.
Eldritches formed inside his shimmering blue rings, red flames opening up to disgorge demons.
I recognised the shapes of two ikistadreng there, and met them with Khikiriaz and Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks.
“Keep destruction to a minimum!” I growled in Infernal.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Em’s crackling sphere, her shield of all-too-visible, all-too-tangible lightning, bending and sweeping across the debris in pursuit of the diviner, moving too quickly for me to perceive. I threw out a gust of blood-coloured fire, casting my mekkustremin in their general direction. If anything could aid Em in this fight it was going to be the speedy doll-demon.
Zel, use the Shadowcrafter tactic! Here, take the scorpion!
“It’s not going to work. You’re on the offensive – he’s going to move! Look out!”
The sorcerer didn’t fly, but seemed to climb up into the air, effortlessly stepping onto nothing but the cold breeze and somehow pulling himself up with his hands, clambering higher than me in the span of a second –
He whipped around, twirling, as though he had a satyr or something even more graceful aiding his movements – and then he was somersaulting down at me, a tremendous sword of glowing amethyst appearing in his grip, one of those babil-something blades.
Curse the King of the Yellow Flowers, I thought, sliding aside more clumsily than I was used to, so that his massive swing only struck my barriers a glancing blow.
“At least you’ve still got me…”
Whatever would I do without little old you.
“Want to find out?”
I grinned. It’s just an expression.
“So is cursing people, but if you cursed a lord of the fey in the otherworld you’d end up in a bucket of trouble.”
I parried a series of blows aimed at my face, adjusting the rotation of my shielding to turn aside the pulsing demonic weapon the darkmage was using to chop away at me like a man hewing at a tree-trunk.
Kind of in a bucket of trouble already.
“Exactly. And this would be a deeper bucket. A much deeper bucket.”
It was only then that I noticed it, the movement beneath the shattered tables, the stirring under the remnants of wood that had been strewn across the space by the carnage.
“Oh, dear.”
The moving limbs, pale faces, roving eyes. Their types still indeterminate, according to my sorcerous senses.
Undead Sticktowners.
If he’d been trying to make me mad…
I swung a blade of force the size of a wagon, a blade with an edge no less keen than that of the world’s sharpest razor. I struck the blow home and wedged the blade in, expanding it instantly and heaving on it, using it like a crowbar – I sensed rather than heard as it slowly, inexorably started to crack his second-to-last shield.
The faster undead, ghouls or wights, started moving towards me.
“Kas – over there – look!”
At first I had no notion what she was indicating – there was no trace of undeath or even corpses emanating from the tumbled tables she drew my eye towards – but then I saw them.
Not dead or undead. Alive. A family of four. Parents, doing their best to stand.
Two boys, not struggling to their feet. Floating instead.
Twin boys, sallow-skinned, dark-haired. Surely no older than twelve. What they’d all been doing out here in the middle of this, at this time of night, I had no conception.
For the briefest moment I thought the arch-sorcerer was doing something to them, but the suspicion was fleeting. All I got from this was a sense of serenity.
Dream? I asked uncertainly.
“I – Kas – no. This isn’t Dream.”
I glanced about, but Em was nowhere to be seen; from the detonations echoing up the street and the fading sense I had of my mekkustremin, I guessed the arch-diviner was fleeing and they were hot in pursuit.
Even my enemies had faltered, staring at the two kids as they slowed, stopped, hanging there thirty feet up, one slightly lower than the other.
I hadn’t noticed that the kids’ eyes were shut until they opened them, but it was impossible to miss once they did.
Eyes, like balls of magma, glowing a fierce orange, broken by no pupils.
Both of them, two sets of eyes, glaring back at the sorcerer.
They raised their hands – not with any uncanny simultaneity, but with the hesitant, uncertain trembling of boys, scared boys who didn’t fully know what they were doing – the consequences –
Jerkily, one after the other, the frightened new arch-wizards pointed their fingers –
Their parents stared up in horror –
“Plane step, fool!” I cried, realising what was about to happen, flinging out my shield to protect them from what would follow –
My shield – my enemy’s shield – nothing mattered.
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The fire in their eyes was unlocked by their gestures and it flooded out of their faces, its roots congealing to form a single wide beam of twisting heat, a battering-ram of pure power.
I winced as it smashed the shields, smashed into the nonplussed sorcerer. The force of it was violent enough to hurl me through the air, its energies hot enough to make my hair smoke even through my rippling circle.
I turned up my wraith and watched as the darkmage’s demons vanished and his undead dropped to the ground; and the archmages lowered their arms, the light in their eyes slowly sputtering and dying.
There was nothing left of my opponent.
Such power…
“I was having fun there,” Khikiriaz said from somewhere over my left shoulder, clearly disappointed at the fight’s abrupt cessation, his voice soft and strangely solemn.
“Hm.” My eyes were on the twin boys, who seemed to have only just realised that they were standing on air; I waved a hand at my three eldritches in dismissal. “Thanks for your time, guys.”
I felt the anticipated fluctuation in my power as they vanished.
Even as I floated towards the wild-eyed wizards, my hands held out in a gesture of peace, I knew from the sounds what was happening behind me – what was arriving. There were crowds of people coming forward, moving debris, searching out the bodies that had been left untouched by the dark sorcerer’s power; men and women and children were sobbing, cheering, clamouring in general – but the yithandreng’s footfalls were impossible to miss.
“You do realise,” Ciraya called, “I’m gonna have to report this?”
I turned in the air, looking down at her, noting the bird-shaped druid perched on Fe’s shoulders before her.
“Can’t you just give me five minutes?” I asked, hopefully in a plaintive, pathetic voice.
But when I flicked my gaze across her other companions I could see that Haspophel, seated near the base of Fe’s tail, was already utilising his glyphstone, and from the twisted, sympathetic smile on the sorceress’s face I immediately realised what she was getting at:
Hurry up.
“Hey, guys.” I approached the two scared, mega-powerful boys a little more furtively. “Can we have a quick chat?” I looked down at the weeping mother and paralysed father. “Do you mind?”
The mother managed to shake her head and moaned something that sounded like Feychilde, which I took for permission, so I trained my hopeful gaze back on the young arch-wizards.
“Guys – do you know what you are? What you’ve become?”
The one on the left cast the one on the right a pained look, desperate for guidance – the one on the right was staring at my robe and mask, moving his eyes up and down, taking it all in.
There was a snipping, snapping sound, then Killstop appeared on the ground between us, a whirl of orange, pink and green fabric.
“She’s fine,” she said to me. “Darkmage down. Someone’s coming. Speak!”
“I don’t know what to say!”
“Just speak!” the seeress insisted.
I grimaced, then looked back at them. “We’ve all been through something –“ I gestured vaguely to indicate the non-existent dark sorcerer they’d vaporised “– through something we shouldn’t have to. They’ll tell you you have to fight for them now. That this makes you killers. This is not true. You can – you should wait. Yes, you’re wizards – arch-wizards – but you don’t have to be what they want you to be. What anyone wants you to be…”
“We could be champions,” said the starer, the one on the right.
“I see the wind,” said the other, suddenly turning his face up towards the night sky. “What is… what is that…?”
I did my best to ignore the boy’s amazed whispers.
“You could be champions,” I addressed the one who was still staring, “but you don’t need to decide that now. Maybe not for years. If you fight, you fight for yourselves, you understand me? Not because someone tells you to. Not me. Not some magister or some highborn. Not even them.”
I cast their parents an apologetic look as I pointed at them.
Has to be said.
Their father tried to interrupt then, a spluttering, abortive attempt at retorting – I spoke over him:
“What’s… what’s important is that you always have someone to turn to. Someone without an agenda. I – I’ll be around the Giltergrove at sundown tomorrow. I’ll wait for you –“
I could buy them a glyphstone – they weren’t that expensive – and then they could contact us if they needed us.
“What is it?” the one on the left demanded, suddenly moving his eyes to mine, then looking down to Killstop. “What’s burning beneath us?”
“I feel it too,” his brother said falteringly.
Burning… beneath us…?
I shuddered. “Is it Infernum?”
“They shouldn’t be able to feel other planes,” Zel reminded me.
I know that! But – twin archmages. How often does this happen?
“I…”
Yeah, exactly.
Killstop was shaking her head slowly. “They sense the oceans of fire in the bellies of volcanoes, Feychilde. They sense… well, listen…”
“I feel it all.” The one on the right turned to the one on the left, flung up his arms, and cried exultantly: “Saff, I feel it all!”
Saff took his twin’s arms, smiling, tears in his quite-normal-looking eyes. “I know, bro,” he muttered. “I’m the same.”
“You’re in this together, young men,” Killstop said, sounding smug. “You’ll do fine, you two.”
“Mum? Dad?”
Ignoring us now, the two boys floated down to their parents and embraced them; I floated down towards Killstop.
“So, what brings you here?” I asked.
She shrugged lightly. “I was out and about. You know, I’m the ship on the sea. The needle in the cloth. I shrink the void and make the future where I used to be. I’m here because I have to be.”
I glared at her and then after a moment she seemed to relent. She giggled. “Fine, Feychilde. I’m here for this.”
Another snipping, snapping sound, and Zakimel appeared not ten feet away, clad in his red-and-silver magister’s robe, moustache quivering in anger.
I noted that, behind me, Ciraya and the other magisters stopped muttering amongst themselves to listen.
“Too late, Tacky Zakky,” the seeress said, not gloating but overly-casual. When I glanced back at her, I saw she was pretending to buff her nails on the front of her ridiculous robe. “You should maybe try, you know, reading the future, some time, you know? You know?”
She could no longer contain it – she tipped her head back and let the cackles come pouring out.
The older man only sneered, saying nothing, glancing over everything here in Branbecks Bridge – the destruction, the corpses, the various onlookers…
“What’s it like, reading the future? Is it half as fun as writing the future? Because if I –“
“Save it, Killstop,” I said. “You’re not doing us any favours.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that –“
“You shouldn’t be – you’re not infallible, remember? Keep it up and I’ll start calling you Pleasestop in public.”
She put her hands on her hips. “You’re the Liberator of Zadhal. People would listen to that.”
“That’s the point.” I gave it a second, but she didn’t move. “Don’t you keep frowning at me like that.”
“Children,” Zakimel hissed.
That shut us both up.
“All of you, idiot children,” he went on. “I shall leave it at this: I am glad our future is not in your hands, young lady.”
“No,” she demurred, “I think we just know how to have a good time.”
“In the midst of corpses!”
“We’re champions, Stab-You-In-The-Backy Zakky,” I said. “We’re always standing on a pile of bodies, hadn’t you realised that? Oh wait, last time the bodies were there because you –”
“Enough!” he cried, drawing himself up straight.
I simply amplified my voice and continued: “– betrayed us. You betrayed us! You’re the madman with the murderous whims. And now you want these guys on your side.” I gestured at the twin wizards. “Making more bodies. Until it’s theirs on the ground.”
Silence settled. The crowds stilled. Almost every eye was on Zakimel.
“If they’re idiot children,” one of the twins – Saff, I thought – said icily, “what d’ya think of us?”
I noticed out of the corner of my eye as Killstop folded her arms across her chest in satisfaction.
‘You’re not doing us any favours,’ I’d said.‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ she’d replied.
She’s good, I thought.
“And she’s stopping him from knowing what to do,” Zel added.
“I don’t know about Killstop,” said the twins’ mum in much the same tone as Saff, indicating the seeress with a nod of her head, “but the Liberator of Zadhal said a lot of things that… well… some things that made a lot of sense…”
I grinned, realising what bit she didn’t want to admit made sense.
“You misinterpret my intentions,” Zakimel said, addressing the mother, “or perhaps, I should say, my intentions regarding your children have been… misrepresented by those who would seek only to bring chaos into your lives. In fact it is in the Magisterium’s purview to offer you a stipend, simply for keeping the boys safe, and permitting us to enter into discussions with you at a later date…”
I could see the way the mother’s brittle glare was faltering, softening, melting into a look of pacification – the words he was using that were too big for her to understand didn’t impede his meaning: money. He was weaving his own spell, a magicless enchantment, and I –
Before I could open my lips Killstop took my hand, and I felt the lurch as reality staggered and slowed around us.
Despite the chronomantic effect (and probably due to the proximity of Zakimel) she leaned in close to me and whispered: “Don’t fret. They’ll be okay now. You’ve said all you can say, all you needed to say. The parents were always a lost cause, but the boys will remember.”
She released me, allowing the world to resume its normal pace and, not for the first time, I shuddered at being so close to the arch-diviner’s god-like powers – in such close proximity, yet so very, very far away from understanding what it must be like to see the world that way.
Tanra knew so much. It staggered me that the human brain could even access so much information, never mind store it, see the links and patterns between disparate events across time and space…
The next evening, I waited at the Giltergrove for two hours, the spare glyphstone in my demiskin. I sat on a rooftop across from the canvas of unchanging golden leaves flaring copper-red in the sun’s last light, away from the edge, avoiding the eyes of the street-goers below.
I knew from Tanra’s words that the twins wouldn’t come, and that was okay. Everyone important to me had access to a glyphstone now, but I would save it, until I came across someone who needed it. They were too expensive to waste, after all. Instead I passed the time sorting through my eldritches, trying to find out if any of them could bring me a better lead on Nighteye than Tanra’s visions. Short of possessing people, I didn’t have any new tricks I could employ.
Might be time for another shopping trip, Zel. I got to my feet and spread my wings, looking out over the darkening Sticktown.
“Oh goody – but, first, look up.”
I craned my head back –
Against the clouds, I could see the two diminutive dark shapes that were descending towards me.
I met them half way up, shook their hands.
Saffys and Tarrance – Saff and Tarr. They already had a glyphstone, Magisterium-issued – of course they did. Even still, they allowed me to tap my stone to theirs.
“But really, we just wanted to see you,” said one of them – Saff, I suspected, whose mannerisms were slightly softer than his brother’s. “To see you, to say it properly…”
“We wanted to let you know,” Tarr said, looking a bit embarrassed, “thanks.”
“Thanks,” Saff confirmed, nodding.
“No one else there wanted to treat us like people,” Tarr said.
“No one asked you what you wanted,” I said.
He nodded. “We don’t want to become champions – we don’t want to fight.”
“Don’t want to kill…” Saff murmured.
“But one day we will!” Tarr said, defiance in his outburst – defiance of what or whom I was unsure, but it was there all the same. “Want to fight, I mean. Fight the darkmages. And kill them, if we have to.”
“You never have to. Never.”
He nodded. “I don’t – we don’t want to work for them. You’ll teach us – you’ll show us how?”
I nodded back firmly, resolutely – but when I spoke, my voice was grim, my tone as much as my words telling them what they really needed to hear:
“I will, I promise… if I’m still alive by then.”
But the words didn’t have the intended effect, and as I flew away, pondering the awed expressions on their pale faces, I realised that I’d only enticed them further.
Was this it? Was this my agenda? Was I being a hypocrite? Accusing Zakimel of attempting to recruit them with the one hand, while with the other secretly swaying them towards my own side, all along protesting my innocence, even to myself?
I considered going back, insisting that they take me seriously, bide their time and weigh their options before committing to a life of violence; but by the time I resolved myself to do the right thing and turned about, they were already gone.
As I’d suspected.