As we flew along the road, our senses – magical and mundane – fixed on our desolate surroundings, the enchanters started dropping information into our heads.
Previous missions had prioritised vaults. Libraries. Laboratories. Small, privately-funded teams exploring the ruins in search of discreet areas mentioned in three-hundred-year-old texts, seeking legendary treasures to bring home to their paymasters, tomes of incredible value, artefacts of proud heritage. The Magisterium had been content to preserve the status quo, given that such expeditions gave no better than fifty-fifty odds of ending up with a team going ‘missing’. They couldn’t justify the loss of their assets the same way as a financed group of bounty hunters. And never before had a champion stepped forward, in concert with their fellows, and volunteered their services like this. Never before had the recognised high-diviner of Mund, surely the true scion of Arreath Ril himself, said that the time was right.
Until Timesnatcher.
Not that the enchanters’ lore-dump actually put it that way, but I could read between the lines easily enough. It made me wonder – and I could hardly be the only one – what had changed? Why now? There wasn’t a chance he was doing this to make up for missing the vampire-lord during the Incursion, was there?
Our goal was to find out what made Zadhal different. The undead here were permanently fixed to Materium, through a power-source of some kind. There were candidates: a statue of Vaahn in a courtyard near the city-centre, a glowing green sphere in one of the towers none had yet dared approach… If we could locate it and terminate it, we could destroy them and they’d stay that way. We could take the city back, and there’d be nothing they could do to stop us.
With the exception of the more potent undead. Vampire-lords, and even ordinary vampires who’d stayed on Materium long enough to be considered ‘elders’, were essentially immune to scrying, and thus were difficult for even diviners to fight. That was to say nothing of liches: lichhood, lichdom, however you said it – it was a phenomenon that was at best only partially understood. The stories went back right into the Age of Nightmares. Those less-than-sensible people who had experimented with the sorcerous practises permitting the continuation of consciousness and power beyond bodily death – they usually ended up hunted-down by their former peers when they were, quite predictably, driven mad (or just driven evil) by the experience… Becoming soul-tainted – whatever it was, it was bad.
Then there were the death-lords, wraith-lords, and so on…
It was rather worrying that there were special terms for those most-terrifying creatures, and that their definitions all contained ‘undead archmage’ in there somewhere, whatever the actual process of undead-ification.
Looking out on the skeletal remnants of buildings, structures which had surely, once, been glorious wonders, I saw no trace of our enemies. Empty, shadowy alleyways. The breeze singing through glassless windows, dustless rooms. There weren’t even any rats, birds, bugs, so far as I could tell. The place was a mausoleum.
Under Zakimel and Timesnatcher’s orders we stayed clumped together, within the boundaries of the shields the other arch-sorcerers had erected – my shapes ranged even farther afield, slipping through the ruins surrounding us without encountering any resistance. Of the three of them, Direcrown alone was able to cast his defences out as far as Shield Seven – and I still had five shields beyond that.
It made me wonder what his speciality was. Dustbringer had spoken as though each arch-sorcerer – perhaps each archmage – had their own propensities, their own unusual capabilities, and nothing I’d seen so far had dissuaded me from the notion. Em and Shadowcloud were air-wizards – Winterprince ice, obviously – perhaps some enchanters were better telepaths, others better illusionists…
But Direcrown, deemed untrustworthy by Timesnatcher and Netherhame, was an unknown factor: he had at least twice as many demons out as I did, a veritable army streaming up the road behind us – could that be it? I kept my eldritches away from his, letting them move ahead of the archmages as a vanguard – I had no idea whether infighting was something to watch out for, and I had enough to concentrate on.
You mind keeping an eye on him for me, Zel?
“How many do you think I’ve got? Look, you’re more likely to spot half the things he does faster than me, you know. I can’t see quite the same as you, remember, and you’ve got other senses I haven’t.”
Weird to hear that works both ways.
I was glad the diviners had asked us to remain so low to the ground, stay hidden below the tops of the ruins that lined the road. Glimmermere had requested permission to fly high in her usual assumptive manner, to better take in the city at large, but they’d quickly shot her idea down in tones that brooked no refusal. There was no guarantee the invisibility would work, and we didn’t want to announce our presence if there were watchers in the towers. They didn’t want to speed us straight into traps, either. Better to move slowly, checking our environment constantly for unbound, or bound undead, keep on the alert for –
“Con-tac!” Shallowlie snarled – I whipped my head about, looking at her as she bent in the air, streamed off to one side, her shield and ring of ghosts moving with her –
“Banshees,” Direcrown sneered, copying her direction but leaving his demons behind.
It seemed Valorin and I were slower, but only slightly so – I could feel what they’d felt, now. Undead under the ground. But it only now occurred to me that Direcrown was right – I could tell the vampires apart from the ghouls, and now the banshees. They each had a different shape in my mind, in the surface of the plane. Vampires were jagged, narrow spaces, while ghouls were like inverted pyramids and banshees, banshees were curved, swirly…
“See, I don’t get any of that,” Zel commented.
I drifted a few feet, intending to follow –
“Feychilde, stay here, keep your shield in place,” Timesnatcher commanded, moving to pursue the arch-sorcerers into the barely-standing structure of ancient, weather-worn wood and mortarless stones.
I froze in place, feeling uncomfortable as the arch-diviner gathered a few others in his wake and went with them to probe the building’s cellars. I’d been instructed to watch Shallowlie’s back around Direcrown, and at the very first opportunity I’d ended up letting the two of them leave me behind.
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I sensed the subtle manipulations of sorcery at work down there, the allegiances of the banshees being subverted, claimed –
They no longer struck me as unbound. I could tell, even at a distance, that Shallowlie or Direcrown had taken them into their service.
Wasn’t this my mistake? Binding a lesser undead, making the greater aware of my insolent act? Surely they couldn’t be so stupid…?
I kept an eye on both sides of the road – if it was an ambush, I wanted to be prepared – but nothing leapt out of the shadows at us and within two minutes they were returning, Shallowlie soaring at the back of the group, her five new lackeys in tow.
“Whom did they serve?” Lightblind asked. “They weren’t bound?”
“They were under the thumb of the wraith who made them,” Timesnatcher replied, glancing over his shoulder at Shallowlie and her new minions. “Wraith, not wraith-lord. They look like treasure-hunters to me.”
“Dey know noffing,” the sorceress replied, spreading her hands helplessly. “Dey ah far gone into de madness.”
“Let’s continue,” Zakimel said, sounding thoroughly unimpressed with the results of the diversion. “In three minutes we’ll reach our first checkpoint.”
I knew from the lore-dump that we were moving towards a junction, and I saw that Spiritwhisper was showing those close to him a miniaturised representation of the city, so I adjusted my flight to bring myself alongside him.
It was basically little more than a softly-glowing map hanging in the air before him, no more than three feet across. Still, there was texture to it – the towers and walls did visibly stick up like radiant pins.
“This,” the enchanter was saying out loud, “is the crossroads we’re headin’ for.” A brighter, red marker took shape over one of the places where the tiny paths met, two of the bigger roads by the looks of things. I traced the roads back, and almost immediately realised which one we were on – I could see the Door, the plaza, in miniscule detail behind us. “From there we turn right, head to the target.” A second red light appeared, much farther from us than the Door was behind us, deep in the midst of the towers in the central district. “That’s where the statue of the, ah, the Prince of All Thrones, is it?“
He stumbled over Vaahn’s title; it was Lord of All Thrones, Prince of Chains (as well as King of Kings and Lord of Deathand half-a-dozen other similar epithets) but no one who was listening was going to correct him and I was starting to get the impression he couldn’t easily pick it from my mind – not with Lovebright’s amulet working its magic.
“Anyway, from there it’s not far to what the clever buggers have been calling the Green Tower.” One of the white pins turned an emerald shade and began to pulse, just three inches away from the second red dot. “That’s where most of the magisters –“ he flicked his gaze across towards Zakimel for a moment, as if to check the man looked distracted by something else “– seem to think we’re gonna end up.”
I still felt a bit conspicuous, having complemented my glowing wings with a ridiculous forehead-horn, but I had to speak up.
“Is this really the best way to proceed, then?” I asked. “We couldn’t exit the city, send some people above the clouds then have them descend right on the spot? Not that I’m, you know, volunteering…” Heights make me flip out, I couldn’t quite bring myself to say. “Or split up, or fly in file, move through the smaller streets…” I looked across the group, at one of the turn-offs we’d just passed by.
Dimdweller was one of those who’d been watching Spiritwhisper’s illusion, and the dwarf spoke up, totally unsurprisingly, in defence of the plan: “Don’t think we haven’t worked on this extensively. For years, even… Timesnatcher knows what he’s doing. The idea of doing this is older than me, and I’m ten times your age.”
But we didn’t even discuss it at the Gathering, I wanted to say – but the danger of being overheard was too great; while I had little doubt Zakimel had the clearance to know of the Gathering’s existence, I’d have been shocked if the likes of Valorin had been filled in.
“But Netherhame implied Timesnatcher wanted to see how you acted after the Gathering,” Zel pointed out. “He wanted to see if you’d use your own initiative before he brought it up. It’s – it sounds like it’s something they’ve discussed before. Just not in front of you.“
I was starting to become unsettled, realising just how much time several of the world’s most powerful seers seemed to spend thinking of me.
Not that the time itself actually mattered to them, of course. They probably spent far longer deciding what to eat for dinner than they did pondering the future of Feychilde.
“The vampires won’t be able to move at the moment,” the dwarf was continuing, “and the liches will take longer to draw on Nethernum for shielding, summoning, striking. We can draw out those with the ability to sustain –”
“Halt!” Timesnatcher’s panicked command came through suddenly. “You sense that?”
We summoners exerted our wills, and everyone stopped – champion, magister, eldritch.
Silence reigned – no one answered the arch-diviner right away, then after a few seconds Lightblind murmured, “You care to enlighten us, darling?”
My eyebrows raised slightly at the familiar form of address. Were they together?
“Zombies… mostly. At the crossroads. Waiting for us.”
“At the behest of something we can’t perceive,” Zakimel concluded the thought curtly, then ordered: “Forwards – slowly…”
As much as these prophets made me shiver, I’d have far preferred taking orders from Timesnatcher than this Magisterium fool.
Dimdweller didn’t bother concluding his lesson – it was only ten more seconds before I could see our foes. There was some muttering taking place in the telepathic link, then, as the undead came into view even for those without perception-powers, the muttering died, replaced by a steely silence, a battle-preparedness such as this tomb of a city had never before witnessed.
Levelling the whole street down to the very last stone wasn’t off the cards for a group of archmages like ours, if it’d been our goal.
We stopped again, all of us studying the legion that had been assembled to face us.
They knew we were coming. All three exits at the crossroads were packed with stinking zombies, standing as still and silent as they would’ve been lying under the ground. We would’ve heard them moving – they could’ve been here for hours, days…
Several thousand, at least – they must’ve been pulled here from all over the city. They were tightly packed, and they filled the centre of the crossroads, facing towards us. Many were missing limbs or big chunks out of their heads, their torsos, but that didn’t seem to be bothering them. What hands they did have were being used to clutch weapons, mostly improvised.
I could feel them, all of them that were in range of me. They were all taken, all bound, and I couldn’t steal them away.
“An undead archmage controls them,” I whispered psychically.
“Confirmed,” Direcrown said.
The arch-diviners converged in the air – Timesnatcher, Lightblind, Starsight, Dimdweller and Zakimel; they probably had a two minute discussion which lasted all of five seconds for the rest of us.
Lightblind was the one who reported back to us.
“We will retreat then enter the side-streets, heading west towards our ultimate destination. They will not move to head us off, but will move to block us from behind and then give chase, prevent us from fleeing back once the trap is revealed. Danger lurks primarily in these side-streets.”
Her voice took on a hard quality, and I saw across the crowd as she drew her black and white blades:
“This means we go through instead.”
* * *