We were invisible, to the zombies at least. It was a joke.

A few of the druids became enlarged animals, bowling through the ranks, raking the zombies with claws and talons, while the pair of arch-druid magisters waded into the combat in humanoid form, obliterating the undead with disdainful blows of their hands and feet. Rosedawn successfully puppeteered a zombie, so Spiritwhisper, not to be outdone, made sure everyone was aware he had managed to puppeteer a ghoul recently. (Not that he managed to repeat the trick here in Zadhal.)

Meanwhile, wizards smashed dozens of undead with rippling waves of light or withered them with flame – even Winterprince was wielding fireballs here. Diviners raced along the rows, ensorcelled weaponry beheading ten with each stroke – Zakimel seemed to be less speedy than Timesnatcher, but not by much more than Lightblind. Starsight and Dimdweller were visibly slower, but were still ripping and tearing through everything they could lay their blades on.

We sorcerers did far more damage.

Spikes on spinning shields mowed down zombies like wheat, and even the diviners couldn’t keep up, rushing to slaughter rows of undead that were already falling in many pieces, force-shredded. I sent my eldritches out in a bone-crushing stampede, ikistadreng and bintaborax thumping along at the tip of the spearhead, imps riding epheldegrim on the flanks launching little burning missiles from their clawed hands. My vampires managed to get some action, but the ghouls were too slow to the front of the battle-line, and we so-relentlessly overpowered the opposition that I couldn’t even get my horrid laughing-man killed – I merely had to sigh and wave him back to Infernum again. Lucky sod.

I barely even got close to the front-lines myself, to be fair – my unicorn-horn didn’t seem to react particularly, other than to emit perhaps just a little more embarrassing glitter into the air than usual. Yay.

As for the undead lords at whose command this army of zombies had confronted us, whatever they had actually intended to achieve, it surely was not this. An easy victory, so early in the campaign? This was something one or two of us could’ve surmounted without any help – as it was, with twenty or more of us, we were done in under two minutes. The knowledge we’d reduced our foes’ forces by such a large number without any significant impediment was reassuring, even heartening, as we crossed over the junction instead of turning right up the road towards the Green Tower and statue of Vaahn.

This isn’t so difficult. That’s what they really want us to believe, isn’t it?

“I wasn’t going to, you know, say it, but now that you mention, it does sound like rather a good plan, doesn’t it? Are you going to stop checking every shadow now? Do you feel like your paranoia has run its course?”

I get it. Stay cautious… I’ll get to off my atiimogrix at some point… So, you can’t sense anything?

“Imminent? No. Constant, background danger? Since the moment we came through the Door.”

It’s perfect isn’t it?

“What is?”

It’s like, ‘someone’s gonna shoot an arrow at you at some point in the next two hours, and I’ll give you one-and-a-half second’s notice’, you know what I mean? It doesn’t exactly make for a comfortable two hours.

“Better one-and-a-half second’s notice, though, right? I mean, okay, Kas – someone’s gonna shoot an arrow at you at some point in the next two hours, and I won’t give you one-and-a-half second’s notice – how’s that? Better?”

… Fine, Zel, have it your way.

“Oh, now who’s the grumpy one?”

I didn’t dignify that with a response. Zakimel ordered Valorin to dispatch a demon back to Mund, to make a report on the progress so far to the magisters assembled on the far side of the Door – the glyphstone network was tied to Mund, as I understood it, and they couldn’t be used to transmit a message from here. I took the opportunity to summon my white messenger-imp and gave him instructions, ensuring he would do his best not to terrify any children when he showed up at my house with his reassurances that all was going smoothly.

“And I must… I must let the human girl pat me on the head, Master?” the imp sounded confused, wheezing at me in Infernal.

“That’s right, as much as she wishes,” I confirmed. “Now be off with you.”

He and Valorin’s minion winged their way back the direction we’d come. I could only hope they weren’t destroyed by something before they made it through.

We were going with more speed now – not as fast as we could have gone, yet, but twice as fast as before. Less than a minute after clearing the crossroads, we halted again, and the diviners led us up the smaller streets on the right. We were heading west, now, as we’d earlier intended to travel on the main road from the junction. If they’d planned an ambush on the other side of the main road they would now have to cross it, divide their forces in search of us, come at us piecemeal as we soared towards our goal.

The wooden store-fronts had long since been eaten away by time, even where the buildings were still completely intact. Roof tiles gleamed with frost where they’d fallen to the street, dimly reflecting the cold light of the sky, only to be trodden and broken underfoot as our troop of eldritches caught up, struggling to keep pace with the rest of us. Not that this was a problem – they’d make an effective rearguard, give us warning if –

“Contact!” It was my turn to hiss the warning, and I slowed, turning back to look –

“Forwards, more speed!” was all Zakimel said.

“We all look like we’re crawling to you?” Rosedawn retorted.

“Stay together,” Lightblind warned.

But I could see my demons at the back, obbolomin, my draumgerel, being set upon by what appeared to be a pack of half-rotten undead dogs that’d come soundlessly streaming out of an alley –

I had no choice. I had to leave the slow ones, the stragglers, behind. They’d have to fend for themselves.

They were demons. I shouldn’t have been feeling guilty, not really, but I did. It was hard to look on them as the spawn of Mekesta, torturers of the souls of the damned, when they sometimes behaved so similarly to, well, people.

My favourites – ikistadreng, bintaborax, epheldegrim, my imps, even my lone kinkalaman – all managed to outpace the melee that was suddenly occurring on the back ranks. My vampires, utilising a little of their incredible physiology, managed to stay right under me. I couldn’t see my ghouls…

“Danger…” Zel said musingly.

“Con-tac!” Shallowlie said for the second time, and I could see them, feel them on the rooftops ahead –

Shapes of tall, upright men, their skeletal bodies arrayed in black armour, amethyst eyes staring unblinkingly from the shadows of their helms and visors. They were mounted upon cadaverous steeds draped in barding of flayed skins, dripping rot. The well-honed tips of the spears they held were each surrounded in the same purple nimbus as their eyes, scintillating in the deathly-white air.

They had to be fast to have regrouped here already, to get ahead of us like this –

In the same moment I wondered just how they got up there a horn rasped a sickening note, and they came down, urging their undead mounts over the edges of the roofs.

For the first and hopefully last time in my life, I witnessed a cadre of deathknights dropping from a building in front of me.

They steered their mounts out onto the breeze that was suddenly thick with nethermist, grey and flickering, as if lit from within by purple lightning. Through the air they charged, levelling their lances at us.

More of them than us.

I knew before it fell that Shield Twelve was doomed, and I watched the ripple effect as they surged into Eleven, turned Ten into blue wisps –

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“Feychile!”

I turned and caught Shallowlie’s weave and almost dropped it, tying my own forces to hers sloppily, looking blankly for Direcrown, for Valorin…

I threw it, but we weren’t going to be fast enough… I saw our enemies riding their death-smog, ignoring the flames of wizardry and the crackling bolts that glanced off their engraved armour and shields. The enchanters were backing up, the diviners conferring with heads bowed grimly –

The weave barely begun, something passed through the four of us, as if a trace of our intent were carried in the barrier-threads we were knotting. We didn’t even have to speak. Together, each of us did the only thing we could.

Battle-cries in Netheric and Infernal split the air.

Before the deathknights struck our best shields at full strength, struck the half-made weave, our eldritches struck them.

I heard Zel groan within me, but it was already happening.

I watched Aunty Antlers spring into the air to headbutt the lead deathknight out of his saddle –

His lance-tip took her in the face, splitting her head open, and her share in my power was so great I actually felt it as she died.

Khikiriaz screamed as he completed his own leap, striking the deathknight’s mount in the side with a toss of his antlers, and through fortune or skill the spears and hooves that sought his skull were jarred by the huge tangles of black horn atop his head.

The lead deathknight twisted in his saddle – for a split-second it appeared he would manage to straighten-up again – then he was tossed, his mount tumbling from the sky even as my one remaining ikistadreng fell, looking back as he landed to prepare a second leap –

But the Cuddlestickses pounced on the deathknight, and the skeletal creature was buried in infernal iron porcupines.

Watching their success, I pushed shape after shape out at the onrushing horde even as we worked the weave, using my increased range to my advantage, slowing their advance a miniscule amount.

My imps, my folkababil; they hurled themselves into the tide of black armour pouring across the purple-lit clouds: a futile gesture, a desperate attempt to slow the deathknights, if only slightly. They died in droves, many struck right out of the air.

Not that my demons were alone.

Direcrown’s phalanx of minions was there, comprised of a number of demons I’d never seen before, many of which were capable of flying or leaping in the path of our assailants. Zel named them in turn as my gaze fell upon them, but I was too busy to listen properly, weaving, watching as the undead charge faltered. Shallowlie’s ghosts descended from out of nowhere, flickering into existence to tear at the black armour of the knights with their cold, transparent hands.

Our wizards were hurling waves of lava, seeking to melt our foes, but it looked like they were doing more damage to our eldritches than they were to the deathknights, and there were too many of them. The deathknights on the edges of the wedge simply wheeled their horses through the air around the melee in the centre, effortlessly outflanking our miniature extra-planar army. Some moved around the buildings, zombie-hooves silent on the surface of the nethermist, driving in at our unprotected sides –

The weave was as ready as it was going to be; we set it whirling, and its myriad honeycomb facets glimmered, impenetrable –

Just as they reached us. Just in time to turn aside the wicked-looking lances, send the deathknights on our flanks recoiling off the barrier at an angle.

I could see the way their first wave of attacks had shredded the shielding, though. The four of us had spaced ourselves out, to better mend the weave, and to spread our personal shields across the group in case the weave failed. But I didn’t know if four of us would be enough to maintain this barrier for long. Once the deathknights were done with our eldritches, focussed on slaying us…

They deflected magma with their shields, or caught it on their cloaks and flicked it aside into the ruins, their clothing barely singed – they circled away, and back again –

It was then that I heard it. Another horn note, then another, choking blares of sound approaching us from the north.

Where we’d apparently avoided the ambush…

I’d been a fool before, to think that these deathknights had changed position, had moved here when we evaded their trap.

No, these deathknights… these were just placed to pin us down, as a contingency. The real ambushing force was still on its way from its original position – they would soon arrive…

I pushed out with my power. I could recognise deathknights now.

There were at least fifty coming. More than had been left here to await us. And they were going to strike us almost in the rear.

“South!” Timesnatcher growled. “The road on the left, now!”

We withdrew into the street he indicated, hopefully manoeuvring such that our enemies would bottle-neck in the street’s entrance.

“This mist… it’s impossible to shove it,” Shadowcloud was muttering.

The winds controlled by our wizards were tearing at my robe, but did nothing to disperse the rolling grey clouds the deathknights rode. A portion of their force kept up with us, kept slashing the shields, but we maintained the weave.

Behind us, they were slaughtering our minions.

I looked back in frustration as I lost almost everything. My draumgerel and two obbolomin even managed to catch up, the snot-ball spitting its caustic goo from out of nowhere and successfully striking the flank of a single zombie-horse… before a wheeling deathknight turned his attention on it, struck it a single blow, exploding it into a green acidic sludge.

The dog-men lasted less than half that long.

By the time I waved them all away Khikiriaz was limping, and one of my lesser bintaborax had been skewered by a pair of lances in the collarbone, protruding on either side of its bestial head – the deathknights hadn’t been able to pull their weapons free of its ‘flesh’, and I could see them now, riding with longswords of pure nethernal power in their weapon-hands instead.

No. This wasn’t the time to let my fiends all perish – it was possible the bintaborax was still alive. I gave them back to Infernum.

I had ‘room’ now, so to speak. This was the time to get some reinforcements.

I focussed my will and let it seep out through my shields, finding the nearby deathknights’ shapes in the planar terrain.

They were…

“They’re bound, Kas.”

Bound to what? To who?

“I think – I think we’re about to find out. They’re almost here. I can’t do it – I can’t see them at all.”

Their reinforcements.

My mouth was dry. I listened to the scattered pieces of conversation. The diviners were cut off, talking at their own pace, and they moved at the fore of the shield, eventually turning us right again, correcting our course.

In the centre of the weave, the enchanters had converged and were holding hands as they flew; Rosedawn had said something about a ‘great working’. Leafcloak was doing her best to calm Glimmermere down. I had nothing to contribute.

I thought of Jaid and Jaroan. I thought of Em. I thought of Xantaire and Xastur and Orstrum.

I thought of Morsus. I thought of Mum and Dad.

I was one of the first to see the second, larger contingent of deathknights arrive; their silent stampede across the ghostly air. Some had filtered into the surrounding streets, so that they struck out of nearly every alley and road around us, charging almost simultaneously.

The same extra-dimensional spears. The same dead eyes.

The same – except for the leader. He was at the fore of the lines pouring of the gaps between the buildings on my right. A tall black crown surmounted his helm, and his shape was all wrong.

“You know what he is,” Zel said, a statement of fact.

“Here they come,” I whispered to the others.

I felt the pain in my ribs where one of his brethren had scored my flesh. Not that this death-lord was a vampire – but he was a lord. He too was once like me. Like all of us idiots who’d come here.

Then, as they crashed into my pitiful far-flung shields, every defence failed me – everything but the weave.

Nearly two-dozen archmages, pinned within a moving blue ring, the thick bubbles of force that no one else but the four of us could even see, bubbles that were being popped by the thousands.

Can I – can I do something about the nethermist?

“I don’t know, can you?”

I trained my mind on the clouds coiling about the weave, above us and below us and on every side I looked. I looked deep into it, into the purple lightning that danced within the mist. Pure, unadulterated, nethernal energies.

I could see the way the arcs of light could be warped, transfigured into something else, something that would benefit us. The light was a permanently-open doorway into the plane of death. If it could be moulded into a true portal, a gate, I could use it to push the clouds back through –

In the instant I fixed my mind on a course of action Zakimel blurted out:

“They will break through! Flee for your lives!”

It was like the tension had been held back behind a dam, and the arch-magister’s words were the crack in the wall that set it all loose. Panicked cries broke out instantly, both psychic and physical.

The death-lord, his skeletal face awash in the sickly purple light of his eyes, reared his steed on the edge of the shield and held out his hand – the light travelled to his fist –

Zakimel sped out of the weave with the furious haste of a diviner in the prime of his power, travelling in the one direction they’d pleaded with us not to go. Up, up into the air above Zadhal.

Not that it really mattered anymore. They clearly knew we were here.

“However did you get that impression?” Zel said through clenched telepathic teeth.

Within three seconds, almost everyone scattered, and Netherhame had been right. It was Direcrown who abandoned us first, giving up on repairing his share of the weave; even Valorin hesitated for a few precious moments before doing the bidding of his leader.

Zakimel wasn’t my leader. I –

I watched Timesnatcher and the other diviners also abandon the weave, fleeing in all different directions.

“Keep moving!” Timesnatcher cried. “We’re faster than them!”

I watched as the web unravelled, and then the lances pierced through the blue lines, rotten horse-heads lowered, plunging into our defensive structure one final time.

I glimpsed Shallowlie, tried to follow her, pushing at the cold air with the ethereal sylph-wings in addition to the flight-spell. There were deathknights all around us, pressing in on our personal shields, making them buzz and whine – the undead wheeled about effortlessly to give chase as we slid between flaps of putrid barding, worse than a Sticktown gutter, making me retch as our defences banged into the stirrups and iron-shod boots that protruded from the horses’ flanks.

It was terrifying.

As we fled into another street I glanced back, and for my final glimpse I saw that the enchanters, submerged in their ‘great working’, had been the last to react – through the clouds and packed ranks of black-armoured undead, I saw them there in what had been the centre of the weave, the heart of the safest place in Zadhal – now the least safe. They were about to be overrun in the most horrendous way possible, and I knew there was nothing I could do. I was barely outpacing the deathknights chasing at my heels.

Spiritwhisper. Rosedawn. Glancefall.

Like everyone else, I abandoned them, left them to their fate, as I twisted and turned down the ruined alleyways, seeking desperately to avert my own.

* * *