PART FOUR: MASTER
PROLOGUE 4: NEVER GO BACK
“He was such an idiot! Try to hold onto reality? Oh dearie, I said to him. If you have to try holding onto it, that’s not reality. Give up your place in the opinions of others. Let spiders live in your hair. There is no greater thing than a butterfly emerging from her chrysalis, finally shedding the dross of expectation, the existence doomed to crawl in unending hunger. My friend, what do you think the caterpillars say of her when she struggles forth and spreads her wings? Exactly. It matters not what they say in their crude speech. My friend, she can fly. He said he believed me, of course, but I didn’t believe him. We’ll see how he acts next time.”
– from the Secret Diary of Astra Venefich
“They’re coming!” someone screamed over the link.
Smoke billowed in through the gateway, and the creatures transported themselves in its black waves, sliding across the magicrux threshold as though the sorcerers’ defences were nothing. Three of them, stepping down from the impenetrable mist and stalking calmly across the sacrosanct stones, smiles on their faces. They looked human, but even if she hadn’t just watched them riding the smoke she would’ve known them for the infernal entities they were in truth. The very sight of them made her sick to the stomach, made her want to curl up and die.
Tialya levelled the wand in her right hand and spat the trigger-words, loosing blasts of screaming wind at them, dispersing the smoke. The instinct surprised her as much as it did the demons, and she found herself putting her other hand on her abdomen even as she struck, satiating other instincts which were even stronger.
There were over two dozen magisters and magisters-in-training gathered in the courtyard, over half of them native to Mund; several would surely be veterans of Incursions the likes of which she still might’ve struggled to imagine. Yet her wand was the first to fly up – her will was the first to break the fiends’ nightmare-spell, her blasts the first to strike them back.
She’d been in one Incursion. The Disaster of Treetown Gate, they’d called it in the report. Rated at eight-point-one. She’d seen people she knew, acquaintances and colleagues, swallowed whole by vast chasm-maws filled with tendrils and teeth. She’d fought the blade-demons when they broke the barricade. And, just maybe due to her pregnancy, she found herself capable once more. Capable of combat. She wasn’t stupid-enough to put herself on the front lines, of course, not until she’d given birth – but when the demons came to her place of work, darkening the sky and seeking the lives of the city’s protectors? Her life? Her baby’s?
She snarled out the second incantation before some of her peers had even managed their first. The trio of demons fell to a hail of fire and lightning, their forms becoming those of hags as they toppled, glistening ichor pouring from them, staining the grey walls.
“Get the damn shields back up!” roared a female voice. The authoritative tone was undercut by the sheer terror the speaker was clearly feeling.
Sorcerers skittered forward but Tialya knew it was too late for such half-measures. A wizard on the battlements across from her had been helping out by hurling frost-bolts down into the court; he suddenly started screaming, and she whipped her eyes up just in time to see as a single unimaginably-long, slender finger settled about his throat – then he was pulled backwards off the wall between the crenellations, flung down to the ground outside. It was a thirty-foot drop, but Tialya had little doubt the fall would be the last thing the poor man had to worry about right now. How many devouring-demons were right outside the magicrux? How many would come through the gate, through the walls? How many would come up through the stones beneath her feet? How many over the walls, winged beasts and walkers on invisible webs?
Her eyes found Moav’s face even as the next wave of demons came rushing in. Her best friend was standing near the southern edge of the courtyard in front of the dormitories; he wasn’t looking her way, his glare trained on the smoke, the tip of his wand swaying with his gaze. He was pale and shaking, but his front teeth were pressed into his lower lip – his expression of determination. She’d mimicked it once in jest, and he’d said she was accusing him of looking like a rat. In fact it was probably the time he looked cutest, but she wasn’t about to tell him that, of course.
Maybe if they survived.
So many cowards had fled following Yearsend, but to her and Moav the events surrounding the festive period had been a transformative experience. She’d been sitting with him on his balcony when Everseer spoke to the city, and, at least for the two of them, her words had the opposite of the intended effect. At the time they were still riding the high of their Incursion survival and the tryst that’d occurred between them in the wreckage. She could only really speak for herself, but given his responses she guessed they both felt the same way – the same excitement.
They were going nowhere.
“Victory is an enthralling drug,” he’d mused after the third glass of wine, words that’d stuck with her. It turned out later he was misquoting a passage from a sermon given by the priesthood of Illodin, but that hadn’t lessened the phrase’s impact.
She snapped back to reality –
“Offer guidance!” That was the mind-voice of Sentinel Greensmith, one of the trainers, and his assertiveness hadn’t lessened one jot. “If you are a second-category diviner, plumb the future-lines at once!”
Give me another taste of victory, please, Tialya prayed, turning her back on the hell-stained court and entering the nearest door. It was the lesser guardhouse, in which suspect interviews were conducted at less-trying times. Dorel and two other trained diviners were hurrying after her, so she held the door just for a moment to let them catch it, then rushed to the cabinet. Thankfully the round room at the base of the building was well-stocked with provisions. She wrested a handful of werethistle from the tray and crushed it in her palms, lifting them, releasing sparkling vapours which she inhaled deeply.
“Insafri, tinshalastor,” she said solemnly.
She knew Illodin was the wrong god, that his sermon’s wisdom was to be found in his rejection of victory as a goal to be sought after… and she didn’t care. Whichever god heard her prayers – Ismethyl, Yune, Kultemeren – even the dark gods – she didn’t care anymore. All she wanted was to live, and to win, and to feel the same feeling she’d felt that last time, buried beneath the rubble, unharmed and uncaring of the future.
She took one last deep draught and opened her hands, letting the crumbs fall between her fingers – then she pressed her right hand against the table-edge to keep from falling. One of her fellows helped steady her with a hand on her left shoulder, but her own left hand went back to her baby-bump.
I never took the wombworm because I didn’t want to know, and now I know. Now I know!
Potential life – inside her. It made her come alive. It made her want and need again, as if she hadn’t even known the meaning of desire, didn’t know what it was to sense the desperate drive of necessity, until now.
It’s abandoning the future-lines, she thought in fever-pitch, abandoning them that brings actualisation!
The trance had never come over her so quickly. Time itself greeted her as an old friend, taking her under its arm.
Oh… oh, Chraunator…
Her colleague had released her, swept up in the throes of his own spell-casting, and Tialya toppled to the ground in a heap next to the cabinet. There was no prayer or spell that could protect her from the savage assault of second-sight this time. In a series of flashes she saw it all.
Too much.
Extracting relevancy from vision was an art-form to which she had slowly become accustomed and there was nothing, nothing in here that told her how to survive the Incursion. Only nightmares from beyond the chaos.
Have I seen this before?
The sense of recognition was strong. The boy’s boot landing solidly against the side of the gravestone, the letters etched there unreadable at this angle. The same boy, clad now in what she recognised as Feychilde’s garments, standing in the hallowed council chamber… standing there and growing. The other champions failing to stop him.
I have seen this!
But there were some things she didn’t recognise, some things she anticipated that had changed. Now he didn’t reach for a flaming sword at his hip; he had no arm with which to do so. Now the antlers atop his head were smaller than she’d expected and yet more fearsome – at one point Tialya got the impression it was the glittering spokes of an onyx crown that she could see, exuding a repulsive aura, forcing even her third eye to blink and weep, turn aside in dismay.
Where have – when did I –
The trance broke as the wall caved in and she flung herself backwards, away from the shower of debris, away from the chaotic rending rumble that screamed of death.
It made no difference, she saw, as the ceiling groaned and gave way. The last thing she witnessed was the black antlers pushing their way through the masonry, the beams above her tilting down. For a split second, before the stray timber struck her in the back of her head and sent her into the tranquil silence of unconsciousness, she thought it was Feychilde coming through the wall.
But Feychilde is dead…
Then there was only blackness.
* * *
When she came to it was like climbing out of the depths of the ocean, a mile-deep pit of drowning darkness. She found herself rising, hands clawing at nothingness in their desperate instinctual desire to bring her back, back to the light and the world of the living. Distant voices echoed down, swimming at her from above the surface.
Clawing hands somehow found purchase in the nothingness and the light broke over her mind in waves as leaden eyelids began to flutter – as she suddenly became aware of pain, the throbbing ache that strobed across the rear of her skull.
“Stay quiet, and still,” said a woman’s voice. The tone of the strange, accentless voice wasn’t exactly soothing, and Tialya tried to focus her eyes on the shadowy shape looming over her. “At least another fifteen minutes. Preferably twelve hours, if it can be managed. The bleed on your brain was severe; the bone was easy to fix but the swelling less so.”
Tialya felt fingers probing the back of her head, far more gentle than the voice.
“Yes,” the woman went on, as if confirming the answer to a question Tialya hadn’t heard. “The discomfort will increase, before it diminishes again. I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry. “I have to hold something back for the others.”
The fingers were suddenly gone, the shadow turning aside and vanishing. Tialya reached up and gingerly touched her skull, then continued with more confidence as she realised she was fully-intact, the pain-level remaining steady no matter how thoroughly she scrutinised the druid’s work.
Then, in sudden halting horror, she reached down. The magic of anaesthesia had dulled her reflexes.
She couldn’t feel anything…
Terrified fingertips found the bump, then swiftly she pressed her hand against it, almost too scared to voice her request.
“M-my baby?” she gasped.
“He’ll be fine,” the druidess snapped from somewhere to her right, behind her. “No talking, for the Five’s sake. At least a few minutes!”
A… a boy?
Tialya rolled her head to the right, following the direction her saviour had walked. She had to stifle her voice once again when she realised it was Glimmermere who’d healed her, Imrye herself, a champion of renown who’d been missing for months. The lost mask Tialya could understand, but the heretic garb? And the rag-clad druidess hadn’t gone far. It took Tialya a minute or two to bring her surroundings into focus and, heretic or no, in that time the healer brought a corpse back to life. At least that was how it looked to her. The big man’s torso was a red blur, his skin chalk white. Before Tialya could even identify his facial features the unmoving chest suddenly burst into life under Imrye’s ministrations, rising and falling with deep-drawn breaths.
They were in a healing-tent, soft birdsong rising above the babbling voices of chaplains and magisters. A dozen of her fellows occupied the beds scattered around her. It was only as she returned her gaze to the bed containing the big man that she realised it was Moav. His ochre robe was unrecognisable, torn in two up the middle and stained almost black with blood. The once-cheerful face was finally discernible; his eyes were closed and his breathing was restful, but she knew she would never forget this day for so long as she lived. He was changed in her mind forever instantly. She’d never seen him so… vulnerable.
A boy.
Her hand still on her bump, she ignored the quiet voices of the druids and priests, letting present reality melt away. Lying there with her neck at a funny angle, keeping Moav in her line of sight, she found herself coming to some decisions. It was the future she contended with – the future, and the past.
She wasn’t in love with him – that had always been the problem. He was her best friend, and she loved him – of course she loved him, but there was a big difference between the two kinds of love, wasn’t there? She’d grown up expecting the man who swept her off her feet to, well, sweep her off her feet. In her imagination, the man she gave herself to would be a powerful, tall mage, silver-robed and rich, swooping down on a pesasus-drawn chariot to take her away from Mund, steal her off to his wide, exotic domains. Or if not both handsome and rich, at least one or the other. She never saw herself getting with someone so… normal. She’d shared an apartment with him for months, but never her bed. She now caught herself deeply regretting the way she’d held him at arm’s length all these weeks, extending the tension between them. It’d always been obvious they were going to raise the child – the boy – together. One salary wouldn’t be enough to support even a small family, but they could mirror their shifts so someone would always be home, and…
He said it would work. Now that she was looking at him in this state she knew that it wouldn’t. What if the tension between them burst the banks, spilling into some other canal? He wasn’t entirely undesirable – her responses in that timeless time beneath the rubble had confirmed that much, when they’d been brought together by fate, pushed together in a moment of desperation. He was just unremarkable. But how remarkable was she, really? Tialya suspected she was painfully average. Would the silver-robed prince really want her when there were other, more attractive girls around to be scooped up and swept away? Girls without a child, without that added complication? What if another woman came along and took Moav? Another woman more remarkable than her? What if she wanted him the way she wanted him in the secret hours of the night?
The way she’d wanted him after – during – the Battle of Treetown Gate…
The way she wanted him now.
“Stop twisting around like that,” Imrye said curtly, walking by again on her way to the tent-flap. “He means something to you?”
“Yes,” Tialya replied, rasping.
“Stop talking.”
“But y-you –”
“It was rhetorical. You want my advice?”
Tialya moved her gaze to meet that of the archmage, looking up into the gaunt, grim face of the black-skinned druidess. The famous seaweed-coloured hair framed the elfin face, hanging in tousled locks that Tialya couldn’t help but envy.
“Healing puts things into perspective. Don’t think things through too much. I loved a man once, and I said nothing. It was only when he was dying that I realised the truth. Sometimes you should just act.”
With that the striking woman turned and stalked through the exit.
Awed stares followed her; Tialya caught most of the people in the tent gazing at the flaps as they fell back into place.
She lowered her head back onto the pillow and closed her eyes, once more caressing her bump through the soft fabric of her robe.
Just act.
* * *
Dawn broke before she had chance to catch some shut-eye, and she did so in a corner of the barracks with four other exhausted magisters-to-be, having been dropped off on a creature known as a yithandreng. She only got a few hours – the sun wasn’t yet high in the sky when she arose, shuddering out of her sleep, dark dreams already fading. The captain sent her with a team to an area known as Sigrand’s Rise, and she spent most of the remainder of the morning executing pointless divinations, rituals that burnt out within minutes of her completing the triggering-incantations. Other than a meaningless vision of the giant marble angel, which she kept to herself out of spite, the trance brought her nothing but the same sights and sounds of misery that were already all about her.
If they aren’t even going to tell me what I’m looking for… why should I tell them what I found?
The rumours were spreading like stickfire. Imyre wasn’t the only champion to have come out of hiding – Winterprince was back, along with Shallowlie and Netherhame, Fangmoon and Dimdweller… perhaps more. Many others had perished. Dozens of heretics had been spotted, moving openly about the city. The infamous Nightfell had seemingly somehow revealed herself as both Killstop and Everseer, whispers reporting two Nightfells. Not one such sighting was officially confirmed. Not one report was denied, either. Even Tialya’s superiors seemed to find it hard to maintain their discipline, descending into their own frenzied whispering whenever they thought they were out of earshot of the rank-and-file.
Mistress Henthae spoke to the city, using that fancy piece of Maginox apparatus to transmit her voice to every nook and cranny of Mund, but her words served to settle no one, nothing. In the aftermath, the most chilling part was the rumour that Feychilde was back amongst them. The boy-sorcerer himself, returned from death or eternal exile or whatever the exact fate of heretic archmages happened to be. And no one was expressing any doubts. His reappearance seemed to be taken by all as a simple matter of fact.
“Monster!” she overheard one of the elder seeresses saying. “He’s what? Using the demons he gained from the Incursion, to curry favour with the people?”
“He deserves whatever’s coming to him. Took Mr. Valorin’s hands, in single-combat, and laughed like it was a joke!”
“That wasn’t the worst.” Tialya was forced to loiter just on the edge of her ability to hear, the perception-spells currently enhancing her senses pushed to their limits. “He massacred all of Ardiko’s cohort. Twelve bands, taken down in seconds.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“No, no!” hissed another, louder. “It wasn’t him. It was his demon-women, the eolastyr. I heard he has three of them, and they’re only too eager to shed blood for him.”
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that she ran into Moav back at the base. They were granted permission to take lunch together. Nothing fancy – cheese and pickles with a lump of bread, and a single cup of watered-down wine – but it was the first time since the Mourning Bells started up that she’d had a moment just to sit and think. The benches lining the courtyard had been split and splintered by the demon attack, so they walked a little ways outside the compound, finding a patch of grass unwithered by the Incursion’s flames.
Even Moav had been stricken silent by the ferocity of the previous night’s assault. She knew he knew all the rumours too, and that he’d bottle it all up for her benefit. She needed the silence. She needed the space. And he understood.
They munched and slurped. She found her eyes being drawn to the toppled street just fifty yards away. The dispossessed had gathered in a crowd at the edge of the rubble, discussing something heatedly, gesticulating with increasing agitation.
“Less destruction here than most places,” she said at last. Her voice sounded tiny, tinny to her own ears. She instantly regretted speaking.
“Thanks to the giant target we made,” Moav replied, jerking his head backwards as if to indicate the blackened magicrux walls looming behind them. “Heard every one of us got attacked. It was like they wanted to bottle us up, keep us trapped while they had their little party.”
He seemed to sense her withdrawal and reciprocated, falling silent again immediately.
The argument at the edge of the rubble suddenly became violent, two dust-coated men going at each other with their fists while observers pulled them away from each other.
Tialya lowered her head and sighed. “I’ve been thinking.”
He didn’t answer, and when she eventually glanced at him he too was staring at the grass. Her words had caused him to pale; he was clearly uncomfortable with the heat, and tired beyond belief just like her.
“I think we both made the same mistake,” she said.
“No, please,” he whispered. “Don’t… I know the Incursion’s too much, and they want you to go home, but I –”
“Stop.” She looked into his pleading face and couldn’t help but smile, true happiness coming over her despite the chaos all around her. Her decision was made. “I completely forgot about that letter. No, Movaine. I’m not going back there –”
“But our baby –”
She put her hand on his.
“That isn’t my home anymore,” Tialya went on, her voice firmer now. “This is. But it doesn’t have to be. I want to find a new home. I shouldn’t have stayed, Moav. I should’ve joined the exodus months ago. And I am leaving. With our boy.”
His face. He still didn’t get it. It almost made her laugh.
“But if you come with me, I will marry you. I’ll be Mrs. Idelmas. If you’ll have me.”
She felt the blush crawling up her ears, spreading outwards from her cheeks.
Then he smiled. He laughed, and she found herself laughing with him.
When he didn’t kiss her she immediately leaned in to kiss him, and, beyond her knowledge, in the fastness of fate where only the gods and their chosen few might tread, the future-lines of Tialya Grover locked into place.
* * *
She knew when she reached the barracks that she should never have gone back. She should’ve abandoned her satchel, her day-to-day belongings. What started as a pinprick of warning at the back of her mind became full-blown premonition as she swung open the door. Tialya turned on her heel before she even looked up, not letting it close behind her but spinning on the threshold and striding right back out again. She’d told Moav to give her five minutes, to meet her just beyond the gates and they’d be out of the nightmare, absconding together like the boy and girl out of a children’s story –
“Her. That one.”
The voice of Mistress Henthae cracked like a whip, and Tialya could already sense the eyes turning to her, affixing themselves to the rear of her head even as the door closed again, cutting off the stares.
Sheepishly, she pushed the door open once more and took a half-step back inside the room.
She could hardly just run.
“I’m sorry?”
Now she caught a glimpse of her, the Head of Special Investigations herself, standing in the midst of several captains she didn’t recognise. The older lady was hale and haughty of expression up close, with keen blue eyes unrimmed by age or weariness. She dressed like a younger woman in a short-sleeved summer robe, exposing surprisingly-toned arms dripping in bracelets.
A beringed finger was pointing right at Tialya.
“You have something I want. Come with me. It appears I need to inspect your head rather closely, once again, Miss Grover.”
Who was Tialya to refuse? She stepped inside. The door closed with a clang.
“Keeping secrets, are we?” the enchantress crooned. “Oh my. And… ah… running away, indeed. No, we can’t have that. There’s been enough desertion in the last twelve hours to account for the next twelve years. You don’t want to raise some treacherous get in a hovel out there, do you? Make him crawl in the mud with the rest of your filthy brood? No. No, of course not. You want to raise civilised children.” Henthae placed her fingertips on her own forehead briefly, as if to dispel some of the strain she was clearly feeling. “Let’s just remember our oaths, shall we all?”
Tialya saw the captains nodding along with her. It was nice, to be so at home with her superiors like this. They were all so welcoming.
As they headed out of the barracks and the captains gathered their companies Tialya realised why she didn’t recognise any of them. Half the magisters in the courtyard weren’t even from Mund. The markings on their robes were slightly different, the Magisterium symbol often displayed on the arm in addition to the chest. They formed up in a column before marching out of the gate. Someone said there were thirty bands, and there were four or five obvious archmages soaring above the host as they headed out into the streets.
Moav felt into line beside her. Her best friend was wearing an oafish expression.
“What’s going on?” he hissed at her as they trod the broken paving-slabs leading down to the street. “Who are all these other magisters?”
The older man in front of them, clad in sorcerer-purple, span his head about to regard the pair of them severely. His dark glowering eyes and pale olive complexion bespoke an Amranian heritage. They dropped their eyes until he turned back.
“Don’t be like that,” she whispered to Moav fiercely. “Mistress Henthae needs us.”
“But…” Moav’s face contorted as though he wrestled with some dreadful conundrum. “I thought we were leaving.”
She laughed lightly, putting her fingers on his arm. “We just did, silly. Come on, keep up!”
Like usual he mistook the gesture, trying to make it more than she’d meant. Even as he hurried along to stay in line his eyes fell to the part of his forearm she’d touched and once more she rued her own actions. She had to remember to stop leading him on like that. He’d be expecting more of her, holding hands and intimate kisses, just like earlier at lunch, when the stress and overexertion had gotten to her. He was a lovely guy, a true friend who’d make for a decent father – even a great one, with some practice, she was sure – but beyond that?
It wasn’t like she was in love with him, was it? It was preposterous.
Tialya soon forgot all about her banal trials and tribulations, Moav’s childish infatuations, as Mistress Henthae’s voice began filling her mind. Tialya’s jaw clenched, and her hands went to the pockets of her robe, checking for her backup wand and finding it at her right hip.
“You are designated Cohort Five. You will deploy to Knuckle Market in Sticktown and await the call. You will not permit any warning of your true task to come to our quarry. Busy yourselves with recovery operations. When called upon, you will converge on the primary target, the renegade Kastyr Mortenn of Helbert’s Bend, formerly masquerading as a champion, Feychilde. This is our most-recent image of him.” It was a flickering view of him from beneath, the edges of his dark-hued robe just about discernible against a black-storm sky. She noted with interest that he appeared to have lost his right arm. His mask glinted on his upper face, its aspect viler than she remembered. “Further instructions to follow in due course. Check-ins will be hourly. And, please, trust me in this: he is not as dangerous as you have heard. You will be quite safe. Take heart!“
As Henthae’s telepathic voice fell silent the image of Feychilde was replaced by one of Kastyr, the boy behind the mask, garbed in the same dark greens, greys, purples.
Is Feychilde really so young? she wondered, feeling discombobulated all of a sudden. He was tall, and rather battered-looking with the broken nose and scarred cheek, granted – but his youth was evident in the crystal-clear green eyes, the smoothness of his stubbly skin.
So young…
Then her heart hardened, and she actually emitted a light groan. Mental channels were flooded by sensory information she couldn’t account for. Not images. Not sounds. Emotion.
Many of her comrades marching about her voiced the same moans and groans, grunts and snarls, and as one they all picked up the pace, striding now with renewed purpose.
Thank you, Mistress Henthae, Tialya thought in hallowed tones. Everything was suddenly so much easier now, and she felt it as a kind of smile-frown enveloped her face, a feral grimace of battle-hunger.
Heretic. Magister-slayer. Demon-slave.
We’ll take you in, send you back.
Or kill you in the attempt.
* * *
It was eerie. Sticktown was strangely quiet, the residents keeping clear of them rather than coming forward. There was no wailing or begging for help to be found here. Tialya knew from the news that the whole district had been fraught with acts of open rebellion and that hidden tensions with the watch were rife, but the extent of the mistrust staggered her. When they arrived in Lord’s Knuckle, things looked far neater than she’d been expecting. A full half of the toppled buildings had been cleared, and no scrying spell had found a body in the rubble, living or dead.
“This’ll be Feychilde’s doing,” one of the captains said in a distinct Hightown accent when Tialya and some other hand-picked diviners gave their reports, his face black in anger. “Taking the corpses for some necromantic army, no doubt.”
The captain turned aside to an enchanter, requesting a link with Mistress Henthae, whose personal attentions had been required for the creation of more cohorts. Tialya clamped her mouth shut but as easy as it was to keep from voicing them, it was much more of a struggle to silence the doubts themselves, echoing within the vaults of her mind. She hadn’t seen any evidence presented by the sorcerers of necrotic energies in the area; there were no glimpses of undead civilians in her trance-visions. She saw plenty of demons, but those she witnessed seemed to have been, incredibly, helping the able-bodied to free the Incursion’s worst-off victims from the traps in which they’d found themselves. It seemed the rumours about Feychilde were true, whatever his hidden, nefarious purpose might’ve been.
I’m confused. She told it to herself, a conclusion rather than a starting-point. I’m just confused. He was probably letting his hordes feed on the trapped, the dead and the dying. Yes. Yes, that’s it.
Knuckle Market, when they finally arrived, was one of the most-abandoned areas she’d yet seen. There was no one to be seen here, except a trio of young boys on the far side who welcomed the host of magisters by lobbing a few stones. After a minute a single band was engaged to disperse them and the street-rats immediately slinked away into their filth-choked alleys.
What is the world coming to? she thought, surprising herself with her sternness. She stood there on the edge of the wasteland watching the sun continue its halting descent, the intensity of the day’s heat barely seeming to lessen. Blue skies burned away to purple, the brilliant streaks of gold-red radiance bleeding out to bruise the heavens. Her left hand was again busying itself with her bump whilst the other gripped a fireball-wand. She’d kept away from the others since her arrival, even Moav, and he seemed to want to keep away from her too.
A strange, fell mood had fallen over every last member of the cohort and she was part of the problem. There was nothing to do here – the cohort’s cover-story was supposed to be that they were assisting the relief-effort, but everything that could be done without the presence of a dedicated reconstruction crew had already been achieved before they’d arrived. Listlessness infected her and a kind of embarrassment seemed to creep over her flesh, coating her in a second skin – a skin which sensed nothing but the imagined eyes of watchers in the buildings still standing about the perimeter of the levelled area.
He seeks to humiliate the Magisterium. Such an affront will not be borne.
But her mind’s instinctive response sounded weaker this time, its protests failing to strike her doubts a mortal blow.
Don’t we deserve humiliation? What are we doing, standing here, waiting to go and kill a single man? A man who… who…
She looked around in the twilight, seeing the desolation with new eyes suddenly.
What’s happened to me? What…
What is that?
A pallid imp had appeared, winging its way across the open area. Its head was lowered, perhaps feigning exhaustion as a way to disguise an assault.
She cried out, both verbally and mentally, at the exact same time as several others. The imp brought its little head up and it plainly saw the assemblage of armed magisters. Suddenly it swerved aside, dropping low to the ground as if in an attempt to avoid further notice and escape now its sneak attack had been foiled.
The temerity of such creatures – to gallivant around like this in the aftermath of the Incursion, seeking a few more drops of blood to sustain its presence…
She was bitterly happy when a series of elemental attacks rained down on its location – but as the smoke cleared she saw that it had somehow evaded the death-zone, flickering out to the edge of the buildings, soaring away.
It didn’t get to flee. A single careful finger of lightning reached down, forking just above it into several threads of white fire that each sought one of its wings. The arch-wizard responsible for its defeat descended towards it out of the sky. He was a young man with a mop of brown hair, by the looks of things a true Mundian and likely a noble-born one at that, going off his handsome, quarter- or eighth-elf blood features. He enveloped the demonoid in a swirl of invisible wind that kept it rotating, remaining appendages swinging about wildly. Twice it tried to teleport free, but in its disorientation it didn’t get far; twice he swept it back up again, carting it off to the centre of the zone where the majority of the captains were stationed.
Tialya didn’t want to look desperate, like those who started sauntering towards the middle, the forced casualness of their motions laying naked their curiosity. No, she didn’t need to head in to hear the interrogation that was sure to follow. She had everything to hand in her pouch. Powdered vampire-bat and a single waxy archadea leaf…
She pierced the leaf with her fingernail before she even withdrew it from the pouch, moving it to her left hand. A single psuedo-Etheric incantation later, whispered for the sake of stealth, and she scattered a tiny pinch of the powder through the jagged hole she’d made in it.
When she dropped the leaf to the ground while facing the captains, her sensory powers in that direction were magnified a hundredfold.
A sorcerer was moving slowly around the imp, holding out his hands and shifting them carefully as though he were unspooling lengths of some vast invisible fabric, nets in which to bind it. Little trails of sand fell from his fingers. Tialya could hear the Infernal barks, scratchy sounds coming from the sorcerer’s throat. Meanwhile, a captain was interrogating it, thankfully in Mundic.
“… do you mean, safe? Safe with him?” The female captain, a stranger to Tialya, wore a thin smirk on her lips.
“My Master will not countenance this discussion.” The imp’s smile in response was ugly, a recalcitrant little leer. It exhibited no obvious signs of pain following the loss of its wings. “Keep your spells. I am the Feychilde’s, no matter how you seek to wound me or bind me. Ahhh, he will be disappointed in me… but I am so tired…”
It was a stupid deception, a demon trying to milk sympathy on account of its tiredness. The captain was having none of it. “Where is he?”
“I am expressly forbidden from telling magisters his whereabouts,” the imp chortled, “after last time.”
“Last time?” The captain was clearly starting to lose her patience, her eyes half-popping from her head in consternation. “You mean you told a magister where he was?”
“Not I…”
“Who?”
“I know not its true name. The one who shall enter your legends as the Funnyfingers. It’ll know more fame than you, I’d warrant –”
“I mean, the magister! Which magister was told Feychilde’s location?”
“Let me see…”
“I don’t need their name. Male or female? Any distinctive markings?”
“Of course.”
“Well?”
“A ten-spoked wheel.” The imp laughed horribly, as if most-pleased with its puerile joke. “Upon a mage’s robe, too, if you can believe!”
The captain turned her head to one side.
“Shred it.”
The sorcerer snapped words of command, clapping his hands together.
“Praise Mekesta!” the demon squealed, its limbs contorting, pulling apart –
Then it was dissected, falling in pieces to the ground.
“Get me a link to Mistress Henthae,” the captain went on laconically. “Someone’s going to be in for a rough day if they’ve been shielding information this pertinent from the sensors.”
“Traitors in our midst?” snarled the posh, permanently-angry captain at her side. His glowering eyes swept the cohort suddenly, lips fluttering with the opening phrases to a spell of insight Tialya recognised. Before his gaze could cross hers she hurriedly spun about, untethering her scrying.
Slowly, hopefully without drawing any attention to herself, she started picking her way across the riven stones, the puddles of ash-choked mud. She was making her way towards Moav – she didn’t have the first clue what she actually wanted to say to him, but she was propelled along by deep intuitions that had somehow fallen into shadow. It was like she felt she needed him, the comfort of his nearness, even when the thought of taking such a submissive stance towards him and his unvoiced longings appalled her.
She realised it for what it was before she reached him.
Fear.
What am I so afraid of?
Bellows coming in over the general link intruded on her introspections, stopping her wandering feet in their tracks.
“Cohort Five! This is Captain Somerhil of Cohort Four. Crowd approaching your position from the east. Potential diversionary tactics. Our current strategy is to fall back and refuse engagement.”
“Stand down?” She recognised the frustrated highborn captain’s mind-voice, his incredulity captured perfectly by the enchantment. “A crowd of how many? Enough to surround us?”
“Uncertain, but likely. Several hundred… standby. Standby.”
There was no wind. In the still silence, Tialya heard nothing but distant yells, the screams of birds. No one even coughed. Looking about, she saw dozens and dozens of faces, each one blank as their attentions were turned inwards, each straining to ensure they caught the next words uttered by Captain Somerhil.
“Standby…”
A rat scurried across the ground not three feet from her, and Tialya automatically kicked a chunk of wood at it, then backed up a few steps. As she caught her balance she felt the eyes on her, and glanced back up to meet the critical stares of her nearest comrades. It wasn’t accusation in their eyes, however. Just the same fear as had afflicted her.
At least I didn’t squeal.
“Current estimates suggest two thousand civilians,” Somerhil said at last, her voice taut. “Some are armed. Seeking authorisation for the use of force.”
“Speak privately.” That was the measured voice of the female captain responsible for the interrogation of Feychilde’s imp… and it was also the last thing to be communicated over the general link. The buzzing feedback from the open channel dropped away as it closed. Almost instantly, every Magisterium agent in Knuckle Market started muttering.
She went to resume her former course towards Moav, wanting the reassurance like everyone else – to have someone she could mutter to, someone with whom to share her misgivings – but before she managed two more steps the angry captain’s snarl came screeching through:
“Miss Grover! I am reliably informed you are exceptionally skilful. I expect a full future-line reading for the cohort. Immediately!”
“Y-yes sir!”
Exceptionally skilful?
Dread spread through her stomach like concrete. She stopped dead.
A full… future-line reading… for the whole cohort?
That was arch-diviner level. Where would she even begin? The instincts that let her draw on the trance had abandoned her, and even if she was back in the ensorcelled star-mist of the Lounges she’d have struggled to achieve the feat he’d asked of her.
The whirling eddies of time eluded her grasp. There were too many here, too many currents affecting the flow –
“Well?” the captain barked in her mind expectantly.
“Sir, I – I –”
Captain Somerhil’s voice overrode her waffling.
“This is Captain Somerhil of Cohort Four! Stand down, I confirm, stand down and surrender your arms to the leaders of the mob. We’re under orders to comply with all reasonable requests, per code one-eighteen.”
Confusion rippled through the assembled magisters.
“I repeat, this is not a drill. Stand down. I repeat –”
“Ignore it.” Mistress Henthae’s voice came through in deafening tones. “That is not Captain Somerhil and –”
“That is not Keliko Henthae, I am,” interrupted another Henthae, even more loudly. Tialya screwed her eyes shut, pressing the heels of her hands to the sides of her head. “That was Captain Somerhil, and you are to stand down –”
“You are listening, ladies and gentlemen, to the voice of Mr. Mortenn’s pet, an arch-demon of some cunning.” The first Henthae was louder still and Tialya’s head throbbed. As if from a distance she realised she was reeling, her body shuddering unnaturally.
“Out of character for you to admit it, but there we have it,” the second Henthae boomed. “Stand down. Surrender to Feychilde.”
“Don’t listen to it!” the first Henthae hissed. “How are you doing this?”
“Too many weak links, Keliko.” Finally, the second voice was revealed as that of the demon. No mortal mind created such silky, insidious sounds. “Stretching yourself, aren’t you? Do you really think you can fight this war alone? That’s how it’ll end up, you know. You can’t hold onto them all forever and then they’ll see the real you. These poor fools in Cohort Five… they don’t know what they’ve done killing Pinktongue. My Master is furious. That imp has saved more lives than any ten of your brave fools at Knuckle Market. Now my Master is coming, and a righteous host follows in his wake. Will you not spare these magisters their lives, Keliko? Will you truly not let them stand down? Will you drive your slaves before you into the very jaws of death?”
It was only as the creature known as eolastyr fell silent that Tialya caught the echoes of Henthae’s cries, shuddering back along warped walls from numerous, all-too-tenuous links:
“Converge! Converge! Knuckle Market! Converge!”
“I don’t know what you hope to achieve,” the eolastyr purred. “But I can tell you this much: it’s not going to work. It’s my Master’s time now. You are old, and a cretin, soon to die or at least be decommissioned for your crimes against your underlings. I am bade to tell you this: do not seek to sacrifice them in your stead. He only has eyes for you, Mistress. You are the main course and, while my Master hungers, he did not order a starter.” Her voice dropped, a flat sound, sharp and cold like a blade. “Yet if one presents itself, I fear he shall tuck in regardless.”
Whatever spell had been left writhing inside Tialya, twisting and turning her in knots both inside and out, it broke like an old shoelace under too much strain.
She snapped back to sanity and within the lifespan of a glance she’d found Moav’s eyes across the wreckage.
Leave… Leave Mund!
“My Master nears!” the arch-demon wailed in an awful blend of triumph and holy terror, as though the wrath of Feychilde might be too dreadful for even such as she to behold. “My Master –”
Her telepathic voice cut off suddenly, warbling, only adding to the panic that lanced right through Tialya and the crowd of elite mages. ‘Elite mages’ were what they were supposed to be, but right now a fair chunk of the people here were half-trained at best, and many others were foreign conscripts from who knew what part of the Realm, unused to Mund and its ways, without personal ties to its people, its fate.
Half the magisters broke, and the links tethering their minds to the mass snapped like overextended spider’s webs, the captains’ futile final orders whistling at the back of her mind as they rebounded from scores of unwilling targets.
She still felt it in her gut, the dread of the mind-control and the demon-fear, but when she put her reassuring left palm on her baby bump a wave of calm flooded through her. There was Moav, already bounding towards her with his weaponless hands raised, prepared to take her by her own, take her and run with her.
His interest in athletics was small and actual participation was almost out of the question, but when he’d been put to the test he’d (just barely) passed all the fitness requirements for entry into the magistry programme. She’d never actually seen him sprint before, but, to her at least, he’d never looked more gallant.
“Coming?” he panted.
“Miss Grover…!” a tiny voice squealed petulantly over the link, falling away before she even had to try to erect a barrier in her mind.
She took Moav’s hand and smiled.
“Let’s go.”