After the others headed through the Door, those of us who’d elected to remain steered ourselves towards the distant light of the Green Tower.
The wind and the snow were in our faces, but I’d gotten used to the conditions by now, and in any case Winterprince and Fangmoon’s magic was in us. I could hardly feel a thing. If it weren’t for the impending attack of any number of elite undead, I felt I could’ve found a certain joy in just sailing through those dark, snow-filled airs. And even the inevitability of the coming battles didn’t do much to dampen my mood; the weight of the anticipation was a physical thing, setting my senses aflame, making it so that I experienced each moment in its entirety. Even Em, Jaid and Jaroan were distant, untroubling thoughts. Every one of these moments could be my last, with vampire-lords and worse potentially waiting around every corner…
Not that we let corners get in our way. We flew above the buildings, moving under Timesnatcher’s power so as to get back and get stuck in as quickly as possible. Despite this, I got the impression the arch-diviner was being cautious, moving us along in little bursts of warped time, checking ahead before he did so as to ensure he didn’t drop us into a trap.
In the space of a minute we were almost there, soaring above the dead mansions on the edge of the tower district; it was during one of our brief slowing-periods when Timesnatcher scouted ahead that the vampires struck.
There was no moment of warning anyone but me could provide, and the vampires moved so quickly into range of my undead-perceiving faculty that I had no chance to say anything but ‘Argh!’ before they were upon us.
Dozens, whipping through the air, moving like dancers on the invisible night breeze. They reminded me of the way the eolastyr’s obbolomin had moved, when we fought them far beneath Lord’s Knuckle.
They did not move with the weightless grace of the vampire-lord who’d come to Mund, who’d tried to take me and make me like him. These were still earthbound creatures, though doubtless enemies of prodigious strength, given their ability to launch themselves effortlessly from the rooftops towards us. But earthbound all the same.
This didn’t help them when they crashed face-first into my extended shielding; they spent a moment clawing at empty air, their momentum suddenly arrested; then they fell back lightly towards the ground once more.
Or would’ve done, if I hadn’t scooped them up in a big net of force, a dozen interlinked diamonds of pure sorcerous energy.
My ‘Argh!’ of warning had served its purpose, and the others were ready: Winterprince extended an ice-sword, let his lightning ripple through my trapped vampires; it coursed from one to the next, and they howled as they were incinerated from within. Fangmoon hovered watchfully about Spiritwhisper while me and the wizard tore them apart. Then Timesnatcher returned, and with his blades flashing he descended upon those lucky-enough to have avoided my net of diamonds.
“Trouble ahead,” the arch-diviner reported.
“More vampires?” Spirit asked.
“No – liches, their spells readied.”
I clenched my jaw. “I’m ready for them.”
From across my shield, I caught Winterprince’s derisive snort, snapping its way free of his armour’s ‘mouth’.
I reminded myself not to clench my jaw so hard I’d need druidry to fix my teeth again, and flew on.
We passed between the first pair of towers, then the second, the dark shapes barely visible through the snow flurries –
“Soon,” Timesnatcher said, even his telepathic voice hushed. “When they’re about to attack, I’ll take us up. We’ll descend right at the Green Tower, and most of the spells will go wild.”
“I can take lich-fire,” I thought in response, perhaps a touch sullenly, remembering the ease with which I’d bore the sustained attacks of Shadowcrafter’s eldritches.
“Those liches were young,” he replied, as if reading my thoughts. “You might as well say you slew a hundred men, when they were toddlers armed with sticks. Lords of the undead don’t grow in power over time, not if they just sit around; but liches are like your average vampire or wight. They grow closer in kind to us. Time spent connected to Materium matters to them, and these have had centuries anchoredon this plane. I don’t mean to belittle you, Feychilde, but no – we’ll go upwards I think.”
I tried to contain my embarrassment as Winterprince silently turned my way, inclining his head, a gesture of respect warped into mockery.
Tried to contain my fear, focus on the anger instead, the slowly-swelling hate I was developing where the wizard was concerned.
These liches wouldn’t be like the ones I’d met before. The ones who’d literally been created in order to be enslaved.
And I hadn’t faced hundreds… just a handful, really…
I’d been rash, overconfident, several times before and it had always led to catastrophe. I was determined I’d avert such misfortune this time. I’d follow orders, get the job done.
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Timesnatcher didn’t even speak. He did something to me, his hands on my shoulders, angling me, arrowing upwards with me.
I went with it – not that I had much say in the matter.
We were all there, rising, my shields a series of blue shapes ringing us as we pierced the snowy night sky –
I looked down in time to catch the array of spells arcing up through the snow at us, a barrage of dark fireworks.
Several dozen of them. Maybe over a hundred.
Zadhal housed more liches than it had deathknights, it seemed. Deathknights, liches, the lot of them – even without an avatar of Vaahn roaming around down there somewhere, they’d all eventually come back again if we killed them.
Unless we were successful. Unless we brought this city’s necromancy low.
The bolts of pure shadow-energy licked out from the ruined black spires beneath us, and, seeing them coming to sear the flesh from our bones and souls from our minds, it really started to sink in. Fighting was futile. We would have to approach this with cunning, not brute force.
A pair of spells simultaneously struck my dodecahedron, my defence evaporating just like the bolts, but as Shield Eleven and Shield Ten fell to one bolt each, I quickly realised that I was lucky and not unlucky to have two of them hit Shield Twelve at the same time.
The ease with which the barriers had been brought down alarmed me. I rebuilt them as quickly as I could, re-reinforced my circle, and hoped my inner protections would fare better.
I tapped my wraith more and more as we climbed higher. My vision was too good. I could track our movement with precision too acute for my frail human mind…
Then, sharply, we descended.
“More attacks!” Timesnatcher snarled, as even my intangible stomach dropped, the sudden plummet more than I could take –
More fire, trailing purple into the clouds – smashing shields…
The Green Tower ahead, bones rising to meet us.
We’d gone over the plan as to how to approach this moment before we left the others behind at the Winter Door and returned. I would go in alone, check the state of the sphere, then exit to make a report before re-entering and finishing the work. The others would only stay close-enough to keep the link at maximum power, and do their best to draw attention away from the place whilst I remained inside. Looking for Shadowcloud while Zadhal still functioned as an undead-recycling facility would be a waste of our resources, we’d decided, unless I found evidence the spell-sphere would be up and running imminently. We had no invisibility that would work against the calibre of creature we now faced, whose senses would penetrate all but the mightiest disguises, so there was little point in subterfuge.
They knew our target.
I ignored everything, fixing shields about the others, acting on pure instinct as I moved feet-first through the bones, the storm that was recoiling from my barriers.
Even as I approached I could see the sphere’s rune-lines, waving through the tower’s armour.
Tattered. Torn.
Then my barriers bent inwards; I still couldn’t push them through ahead of me into the chamber.
Like earlier, I used the force-circle to cover me as my boots went into the wall of bones, then I shut my eyes, slipped through the all-too-tangible matter, and came within the sphere’s chamber once more.
The sight that greeted me made me sick to the stomach. My guts squirmed in spite of the wraith-form.
There were three things in here with me – I could sense them now – and they’d undone ninety percent of the work me and Direcrown had completed. By the looks of things, we’d soon be back at square one. Newly-sliced ribbons of green energy were appearing here and there and everywhere, such wanton destruction of a beautiful spell that my first instinct as a sorcerer was not to fight, but to get right on fixing it again.
It was with some reluctance that I focussed my attention on the three strange shapes I could perceive.
They hadn’t yet sensed me. They were on the ground; I was up at the ceiling of the room. I had this one chance to surprise them.
I reached out, opening portals.
And nothing happened. No excess magic was permitted here. The power that went into my gateways was drained out of the very air before it could manifest, and the sphere briefly shone a little brighter before returning to its normal hue.
“What was that?” came the rasping, nervous voice of an old man, speaking Netheric.
“It was nothing,” responded another, female, no less rasping but far less nervous-sounding. “Who knows why this thing does what it does…?”
“If she had not buried Saphalar a hundred miles deep –“
“Do you wish to be bound? I should have said, who cares why this thing does what it does! Just get on with it before she comes up. They’re back! There, destroy that…”
I hadn’t heard the third speak but I could tell he or she was down there with them. Liches were like crevasses that went deep into the earth, branching complexes that it would take a great deal of time to fill with my willpower. But the three crevasses were distinct, each with its own ‘opening’ onto our plane.
I let a drop of my power fall into the nearest lich, and felt the way the tiny shred of my essence was pulled sideways into the sphere.
Damn planar aberrations.
I had no eldritches here, and any magic the liches would turn on me might fail too. This presented an interesting conundrum. I still had my shields, even if they felt a bit wobbly, like the flight-spell – would my opponents be able to draw their own shields? They would surely know how to use them as weapons as well as defences.
Resisting my impulse to start repairing the runic sentences that were drifting and whirling about the room, and staving off the compulsion to test myself against the trio of liches, I regretfully pushed myself back through the bone plating to make my report.
I kept my eyes shut but went head-first this time. It was strange, how quickly one could get used to being insubstantial, how normal it could feel after so short a time.
I was still half-submerged in the bones when the link came stuttering back. The nexus of the link, Spiritwhisper, was much closer this time than he had been earlier, and it seemed I didn’t have to be as far from the spell-sphere to get through.
“Three liches,” I said. “I’m gonna have a go at them –”
“Bring them out!” Timesnatcher roared.
He sounded angry; I cast about but I couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anyone or anything in the bone-storm.
“I’ll do my best!” I said, and sank back into the tower.
Not that I had any idea how to do something like that.
What do I do, if following orders and getting the job done are at odds with each other?
The arch-diviner didn’t seem to be in the mood to listen to me extemporise about the nature of magic-draining spheres. Was this really the right time to explain to him how this was the best opportunity to destroy the liches, or was it the right time to just do it?
My choice made, I drifted down towards the floor, lowering my levels of wraithness as I went.
* * *