About an hour after the Bells stopped pealing, deep into the night (or, more likely, the next morning), Ibbalat returned at last. She saw him walking down the pier towards the Dremmedine’s mooring, his distinctive magician’s hat with its bent, pointed tip and wide brim hiding his outlander features from the torchlight – except of course the thick, tangled beard. He was too young to grow a proper beard but he hadn’t had a shave since they left Warthia, and although the facial hair made up of scruffy curls did nothing to hide his youth no matter how long it grew, she approved all the same. Wythyldwyn was all about change, and growth, and understanding.
She’d approve even more when he finally decided to shave it.
She felt she understood the mage, why he’d grown into the man he had, what had changed in him. It’d happened to all of them after all – maybe not in the same way, but it’d still happened. She’d never so much as swatted a fly in her life – she’d been the kind of kid that swore off meat at an early age, and fought other kids when they stepped on ants or pulled the wings off moths. Yet she’d hesitated for less than than a second before clutching one of the lantern-rods in the shrine, taking it down to beat the dire wolf over the head and neck, again and again, doing everything in her power to stop it eating the children – before Anathta arrived and lodged her dagger hilt-deep between its eyes.
Ibbalat was no different. He’d been a meek little apprentice, once. Now he was probably one of the most-experienced adventurers and battle-mages in the world, veteran of dozens of skirmishes and more than his fair share of dragon-slayings.
“You got back fast,” she called across the water, once he was in earshot.
“It’s quick downriver,” he replied as he plodded across the gangplank. “Plus, you know,” he waved his hands dramatically, “magic.”
“So what was it like?”
“Worse than you imagine. Worse than Derezo told us. I see now why they need so many archmages in Mund.”
He slipped through the bits of rope and netting separating them, crossing the deck to come and stand beside her.
“Really?”
“It’s Miserdell all over again, except it’s happening in ten places at once and there’s no way to tell if you’ve got them all. I was practically useless.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“You should see it, Kani. They’ve got these champions – I can hardly believe how powerful they are, any one of them could just take over the city in a single night if there weren’t fifty others all ready to stop them – and even they weren’t enough.”
“Maybe some time, I’ll get chance,” she managed to say in a voice that did actually have some hope in it. “Once this dragon-hunt’s over… Do you think Phanar’s gone far enough, then? Will one archmage do?”
“Do you remember who it is that he’s hired?”
She pursed her lips a moment in thought. “Redgate? Red-something, anyway…”
She stopped, seeing the flare of recognition in the shadowed eyes beneath the hat’s brim.
“Oh, yes,” Ibbalat murmured. “Top-tier arch-sorcerer. I saw him, and he’s got his own personal army of demons. Two thinfinaran. If any archmage is going to have a shot at Ylon for us, it’s him.”
“Thinfinaran?”
“I’d only read about them before tonight –” as he spoke his voice rose, going ever-more rapidly as the excitement took hold of him “– but they’re tenth rank and that makes them hard to command – they can summon more demons, all by themselves, and their armour’s totally impervious to most attacks – ideal for fighting a dragon –”
Kanthyre let his voice fade out as he waxed eloquent about one of his favourite topics, careful to give the correct verbal nods whenever he paused – half the reason he was saying this stuff was because he wanted to impress her with the depth of his demonology, and she never passed up an opportunity to help someone feel important, especially when it came at such a meagre cost: feigning interest.
“Oh, really?” she murmured, watching the masts of the other ships docked at Salnifast sway in the dark, a seaborne forest bending in rhythm with the endless waves. Recalling the scents of Phanar’s hair as it blew in the wind, memories that easily overpowered the salt and smoke in her nostrils.
“Yes, the gauntlets are inscribed with the Fifth Condemnation of the Broken Earth, so when they’re struck, anywhere on their armour, they redistribute forces like a shield that…”
Whatever Ibbalat thought, Kanthyre decided she’d reserve her judgement of the champion till she saw him in action.
Sorcery.
It still seemed wrong to her, but she wasn’t one to kick up a fuss. Demons and undead were tools, useful in their ways, expendable in others. But they were always abhorrent. Every priest – well, every priest of a decent deity, at least – knew that much. Whenever Ibbalat had raised something from the dead she’d been sure to give it a proper burial afterwards, Mortiforn’s rules be damned – and Ibbalat had never dared try to bind a ghost in her presence, never mind a fiend.
Then something caught her attention.
“Wait, what was that?”
“I said, I can show you, if you like? It’s quite a simple illusion; I prepared a couple this morning, and it’s a waste of hippogriff eyes if I don’t – most of it’s shaped by my memories, so –“
“Show me the Incursion?”
“Well, yes – it’s just what I rem-”
“Ibbalat!” she blurted. “Why didn’t you say?”
“Do you think… Ana, and Phanar would like to see?”
“Of course.”
Ibbalat smiled, and started moving his hands, fingers wiggling as though he were trying to play a musical instrument whose strings changed positions between the strokes. She watched for a moment but the patterns described by the motions of his fingertips were indecipherable. His beard flowed in the wind as his lips moved ceaselessly, almost soundlessly.
Kanthyre loped to the door to the cabin – despite the long journeying and harsh rationing she’d endured over the past months, she still carried quite a bit of excess weight, and anything faster than a dash was out of the question. She descended half way down the short stair (more of a ladder, really) into the ship’s hold.
“Ibbalat’s conjuring the Incursion, if you want to see?”
She spoke softly, so as to not wake those struggling to sleep in the hammocks.
Phanar looked over at her from his chair by the table; his eyes narrowed slightly, but she knew this was the way he looked when he was intrigued, not irritated.
Anathta, short and slim but in every other way her brother’s lookalike with her raven hair and deep, bronze-red skin, looked back and forth between Phanar and Kanthyre – then, loosing a sigh, she placed her cards down on the table face-up.
“I was totally going to win, then, Kani,” she complained. “Look – four Divinities, and only one Slimer.”
By the time they’d gotten back to the foredeck, Ibbalat held a swirling sphere of dancing lights between his arms. He was no longer chanting; he stared into the huge, weightless globe of glamour, as if studying its meaningless contents.
Then, as Kanthyre and the others halted, it suddenly steadied, resolving into discernible shapes.
Demons. Fallen buildings. Mages in the sky.
Fading in as if from a great distance, sounds started to trickle through. Screams, real-seeming enough that she could hear the raggedness of the throats that produced them. The cries of battle-commands from desperate captains. The interminable Bells.
“This is the battle at the place they called Roseoak Way,” Ibbalat said. “You can see the destruction.”
“Roseoak?” Phanar repeated with an unusual degree of trepidation in his voice. “That’s where the Tower of the Guardians is located.”
“Whereabouts?” his sister asked curiously, coming closer to Ibbalat’s illusion and tracing lines through it with her fingers, as if through empty air.
“There. Opposite that group of magisters on the roof…”
“You mean… that pile of rubble?”
The rogue pointed out a large mound of blasted stone, and Phanar didn’t reply, lowering his head in thought.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Then Kanthyre saw something that caught her attention.
“Hey! Go back, can you? Was that – are they the Sisters of the Maiden?”
She walked closer to the glamour, studying the images of the warrior-priestesses, aglow in the majesty of their goddess.
“Yes. A powerful force on the battlefield, to be sure, although I’m not sure how much of a difference they made, considering the sheer number of demons. I’ll spare you the times I saw them fall.”
The illusion whizzed on before her eyes, showing now a trio of champions destroying some putrid monstrosity.
She turned her gaze back to Ibbalat.
“The other sisters didn’t heal them?”
“They did. They… tried. Sometimes it wasn’t enough; you know how these things go…”
The same way I couldn’t heal Nulveren when he took that chest-wound, she thought. She remembered the look on Derezo’s face, the feeling of failure flushing her skin…
“And what, pray tell, were you doing all this time?” Anathta enquired airily. “Watching from a safe distance?”
“For some of it,” Ibbalat answered at once, unabashed. “I had a number of warding spells prepared, and some elemental magic. I killed over a dozen of the lesser fiends, and helped bolster the defences. Not much I could do, really, except… you know.”
“Stay alive,” Kanthyre supplied.
“Yeah. That.”
Phanar had his big arms folded across his chest, and was still looking perturbed.
“You think our helpers are going to be too busy with the rebuilding efforts to come with us?” the cleric asked him.
The warrior shook his head slowly. “Perhaps… Mund has plenty of archmages beside those willing to fight. Beside the champions. Reconstruction is industry here. And yet…” His mysterious, smoky eyes glinted in the flickering radiance of Ibbalat’s illusion. “I met them. The Night’s Guardians. They treated fairly with me, unlike the Magisterium representative I met with, and many others of Mund’s mages besides.” Phanar clenched a fist. “I do not wish them to suffer – nor their assistance to be depleted. They said they could loan or sell us spellbound artefacts.”
“We already have ensorcelled weapons,” Anathta pointed out.
“But armour? I know I would not mind some magical protection.” Phanar looked down at his midriff momentarily. “A shield or breastplate. Or something we don’t have – a spear… Even some more missiles…”
He looked at his gut, where the orc stuck him with the trident, she remembered. Where I touched the iron-hard stomach, prayed over the wound… wept upon it…
That had been the last time Phanar had taken off all his armour when sleeping in untrustworthy surroundings – and the first time she’d ever cured anyone’s injuries with her own power.
She’d run out of her stockpile of healing-waters during the skirmish, and she’d been at her wits’ end. Phanar had moved like a snake through the attackers, red ember-light glinting off his topless body, sword literally singing in his hand. It all happened so fast. A paltry orc, in a random night-time ambush, almost killed the one who would end up as the world’s premier dragon-slayer.
But her own tears had supplied the healing, and unlocked for her the gifts she now possessed. The gifts of a second-grade cleric, a true adept.
The goddess blessed my love, that night… She couldn’t help the follow-up thought: Is she not cruel?
“Ah, well then,” Ibbalat said, grinning behind the beard. “Lucky I popped into town and did some shopping this afternoon, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” the rogue asked in a conspicuously-relaxed voice, looking him up and down suddenly – Kanthyre knew that if Anathta didn’t get an immediate answer, she’d soon be ready to search the mage’s corpse for his goodies.
“Let’s see… I’m sure I’ve got something for you…”
Ibbalat smiled at Anathta and waved at his illusion-sphere, transforming it into a moon-like, pearly whiteness. The light it shed only reached ten feet, but it was enough for them to see by as the mage sat on an upturned empty box nearby, producing the demiskin from a pocket and emptying its topmost contents onto the deck between them.
Demiskins were containers which accessed a ‘localised demi-plane’ (whatever that meant) where time and space were suspended; even one the size of a sock had cost them almost the entire earnings from one of their dragon-hunts. Still, it was worth it. Wrapped in the spells of all five mageries, their ‘sock’ was a black, glossy tube of flexible material. For all that it was black under normal conditions, it looked white here, shining in the spotlight of Ibbalat’s luminous moon.
It could only contain objects that would fit inside its aperture, though, which was barely big enough to fit a hand in – but even one the size of a sock trivialised the impracticalities of the adventuring life. Loaves of bread and flanks of meat could be sliced, stored inside, and retrieved as fresh as they’d been when they came out of the fire. Hundreds of small water-pouches, hundreds of spare bits of ammunition, even small articles of clothing… The demiskin held it all.
And Ibbalat’s latest purchases. The only issue with a demiskin was the delay in retrieving the right item – the things you put in first were at the bottom, and ‘bottom’ was relative in a spaceless space; it always seemed to Kanthyre that the more of a rush you were in, the slower the right item came to hand. Still, this didn’t impede the mage as he started showing off what he’d been able to find in the labyrinthine streets of fabled Mund in the hours before the Incursion struck.
There were potions – lots of potions. She recognised the murky-green fluids that glittered with gold specks as the efficacious healing philtres of the druids, at least equal in potency to her prayers and far superior to her own holy water. More importantly, they would be capable of reviving her in a flash if she were to be brought low. She knew Ibbalat had barely delved into druidry – not the healing side, at least – and she couldn’t have relied on his restorative spells to do much good in a desperate situation, even if he’d miraculously prepared them in the first place.
“What are those?” she asked, indicating some blue, transparent potions.
“Potions of Unbound Speech. Lets you speak in any language, think in any language. These,” he tapped a gleaming, pink-purple potion, “are Potions of Visible Sympathy. Makes most creatures see you as their allies. If you’re sneaking into the palace, the guards will see you dressed as another guard; when you slip inside the temple to hide, the archpriest sees another acolyte. The vestal virgins, well…”
“Why do you sound like you’re speaking from experience?” Kanthyre said.
“And why did the palace-guard chase us out of Garawen-Pir, again, exactly?” Phanar added, somewhat more ominously.
Ibbalat merely grinned sheepishly. “Hey, I made sure we got paid first -“
“Paid first, laid second,” Anathta said, almost approvingly.
Phanar glared at his sister, and she smirked back at him in that now-I’m-an-adult-I-can-get-away-with-it way that was annoying even to Kanthyre.
“Anyway, an orc’s going to see you as an orc, but don’t think Ord Ylon’s going to welcome you in as a long-lost cousin or anything – they’re only going to work on humanoid things, and ones that aren’t brimming with barely-understood magic to boot. They’re all guaranteed for one hour of uninterrupted function –”
“Okay, we get it,” Anathta interrupted the mage again. “Taken together, those two potions almost make you half as good at disguising yourself as I am on a bad day… with a cold… when I’m bleeding…”
Ibbalat pulled a face. “Alright, I get it. On to the good stuff.”
He picked out the rings from the pile. Four of them.
“Ring of Bestial Distress, three charges.” He held up a silvery ring set with a single large emerald and slid it onto his finger. “Maybe I can use this on Ylon’s wolves. Buy us some time.”
He tossed Kanthyre a ring carved out of a pearl, smooth except for where it was studded with five diamonds, tiny enough that it looked as though it would only just fit on her little finger. She caught it, studied it.
“Ring of Timeless Striding. Five charges. Short bursts of amazing speed, unbelievable reaction times. Don’t waste them.”
He knows I worry about being too cumbersome, she realised. Did he read my mind, or am I really just that slow?
She nodded and slipped the ring on her pinkie all the same, twisting it around until it was both secure and comfortable. “Standard passwords? Arcanos, or…”
Ibbalat nodded. “The Arcanos Code. And for our deadly assassin, this.” He flicked a ruby-set ring, formed out of three intertwined golden bands, towards the rogue – she snatched it out of the air easily. “Ring of Unerring Accuracy. Three charges. Three attacks that will not miss their marks.”
Anathta didn’t reply; she was studying her new bauble, and the smile on her face was probably all the gratitude Ibbalat was going to get out of her.
But if he cared he didn’t show it; the mage was sitting there on the box, cheerfully gazing up at Phanar.
The warrior stared back at him for a good five seconds before he finally relented: “Out with it, then!”
Ibbalat grinned, and held up the final band: a wide, unadorned thing of black metal. There were no perceptible jewels set into it.
Phanar took it from him, and held it up before the moon-like illumination, spinning it between his fingers. If Kanthyre was reading his face right, he couldn’t see anything set into the metal either, even holding it close-up while standing next to a light-source.
The smoky eyes of the warrior flicked back to resume their stare at the mage.
“Ring of Feigned Location. Makes enemies think you’re somewhere you’re not, or at least that you’re making a move towards somewhere you won’t. Works better the faster you’re moving.”
The smile stayed on the mage’s face as he started rooting through the demiskin again.
“And?” Phanar prompted.
Ibbalat didn’t even look up. “Hmm?”
“And how many charges?”
“Who said anything about charges?”
“You mean…”
“It’s an always-on.”
At this point Phanar froze in place; Anathta made a sound roughly approximating “Whaaaat” and even Kanthyre felt her eyebrows raise in shock.
“I checked it over myself; it’s the genuine article,” Ibbalat said nonchalantly. “Infinity rune is almost perfect. Damn thing’ll probably last a millennium or more. Cost a teensy bit more than the others…” he chuckled a little, “but it was a bargain even at that price. We’re down to six hundred and seventy P’s, now.”
(They’d adopted the code after being overheard discussing their wealth of platinum in a tavern some time back, which had resulted in one unfortunate death – now any eavesdropper would hopefully think they were just particularly meticulous when it came to their vegetable inventory. Hopefully. Certainly no one eavesdropping was likely to assume that this rag-tag group of youngsters would have the finances to purchase a whole street of their Hightown’s towers.)
Ibbalat had finally found what he’d been looking for – his bag of wane. He popped a leaf in his mouth and started chewing noisily.
Kanthyre span away. The smell of the stuff turned her stomach.
“Ibbalat,” Phanar said reprovingly. “I appreciate the ring, I truly do; but do you want to get us arrested, get Ulfathu arrested, just because you could not wait until we were back out at sea?”
“Hey, a man’s gotta eat,” Ibbalat protested. He licked his teeth, folded up his bag of drugs and shoved it back into the demiskin. “It’s been a very stressful night, and I’ve got enough magic left to stop a simple city-guard from finding –“
“This is Mund,” Phanar hissed, the gravity of his voice startling in contrast with Ibbalat’s genial tone. “You try to enchant a guard, you do not get the run of the city for a week – you get us all executed. We spoke about this, before we came. The rules are not to be thrown aside the moment demons invade the streets… I even said that exact thing to you.”
“Okay, okay,” the mage said sullenly. “Once we’re back out at sea.” He clapped his hands down on his knees, then levered himself back up to his feet. “When do you suppose that will be?”
Phanar frowned, but when he replied he spoke again in his level, cordial voice. “Much depends on Redgate and the Night’s Guardians, now that Roseoak Way has been destroyed. I… I think that they make less of these Incursions than we might, being outsiders. I hope that they will be here. We were supposed to sail at seven. If they do not come, I’ll re-enter the city, and discover what is amiss.”
“How long can we wait?” Kanthyre asked. “I mean, if the archmage ends up not coming, will we have time for you to find another?”
Phanar’s expression darkened. “We might have already been away too long. If Ord Ylon leaves his lair… Tirremuir and all its people might be ashes by the time we return.”
It was the answer she’d expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear.
* * *