COBALT 7.8: PAYING THE PRICE

“Where have I been all these years? To see only the sin, never the sinner! How did I continue? Not even once did I truly see a face. Now? Now that’s all I see! A decade of faces! So many names. So many memories. All washed away in the name of righteousness.”

– from ‘Ghost Interviews: the Assistant’, to a Mrs. Mrin of Belton Bend

Almost two minutes had passed by the time Netherhame and Zakimel figured out what had happened to the twins. The rest of us were three streets over, fighting her halfway up the Tower of the Lidless Sun, a minor fire-mage college. Some of the students had been forced to take an impromptu break from their Yearsend revelries (and, in some sad cases, Yearsend studies) when the twentieth-rank demon burst through the wall into their dormitory. Most fled, but some stayed and tried to fight despite their lack of preparations.

The majority of those who stayed died, and we screamed at them to run, stop feeding her whip, taxing our healers’ focus. We were already on the edge. Killstop, Timesnatcher, Starsight and Dimdweller had all been fixed after a concerted effort – but apparently Doomspeaker, the old gnome diviner whose head had been smashed apart, was taking all of Sunspring and Petalclaw’s attention, even just to keep her on this side of the shadowland. It didn’t help that Copperbrow managed to get himself tangled in her flail at one point – the small guy was a newbie to this kind of thing and was, so to speak, way out of his depth. While his courage shone through, he had no combat experience and his archmagery was still relatively new to him. Glimmer was having a hard time fixing him too, his little body having been exposed to the whip’s devouring magic for longer than most.

I was still struggling to keep a lid on Gilaela’s anger before it got me killed – certainly the infusion of spite, a kind of rarefied indignation, helped me concentrate my offensive skills. I was forming and thrusting out my force-blades with greater speed and strength than ever before, attacks that somehow managed to strike home on the odd occasion, slicing open the fur on her back, forearm, thigh… There was a level of brutality to my actions that was only in part my own, a cold fire in my mind, guiding my hands. I wasn’t possessed; this battle-frenzy was just one aspect of the power belonging to the dark unicorn with whom I was now joined – the most useful aspect, right now, given that Gilaela’s newly-transformed weaponry couldn’t actually harm the demon.

Whether I was fighting like a savage or not, I found I didn’t care. The eolastyr deserved brutality. Finally, here was Dustbringer’s slayer, a foe against whom I could marshal all my murderous instincts. I enjoyed lacerating her; I enjoyed fighting her. I just had to keep applying judicious amounts of satyr-reflexes to my situation, ensuring Gilaela’s animosity didn’t overwhelm my survival instincts. Once or twice I caught myself grinning and lowering my head when the eolastyr prepared to charge me, and had to forcefully remind myself to dart aside. The dormitory had plenty of cover, with its plethora of (now spell-shattered) furniture, its piles of broken internal walls.

It didn’t make me any less angry when Netherhame and Zakimel’s reports came in. They’d returned to the small room and curving corridor where we’d waited with Orieg and Arxine. Shallowlie was missing, along with the twins. Kani had been found unconscious, far from the scene, covered in blood that was not her own – blood whose origin the arch-diviner could not perceive. A few healing potions were used to get the cleric back up on her feet, and apparently she couldn’t remember a thing.

“Heretics,” Em snarled over the link, shaping and reshaping wind elementals, hurling them towards our enemy.

“After everything we’ve seen lately, I don’t doubt it,” Timesnatcher said grudgingly. He was barraging the tigress in hail of spellbound daggers, thrown at ear-splitting speeds. The blades punctured her flesh, sinking in deep – ankle, jaw, armpit – then were spat back out again almost as quickly, leaving barely a clot of ichor matted in her two-tone fur, never mind a wound.

“This is all my fault,” Killstop muttered.

I was about to reply in the negative, about to take on the burden as Irimar had told me I must – but then the weight grew heavier, and even my mind-voice was left speechless.

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Withertongue stepped up, the elf wizard pouring a cone of heated air at the demon, but when a whip-crack rang out her evasive action proved too little, too late – the elf’s delicate skeleton was stripped, and the tigress’s claws scored through her spine at the fleshless neck, separating her head from her body.

Dead, I knew, watching the spirit separate from the flesh, fade away.

She didn’t even do her the dignity of stealing her soul. Withertongue was, what, deemed too weak to bother with?

And Everseer played me. Played both of us.

Maybe she knew Tanra’s name from the beginning, lulling me into a false sense of security. Maybe she knew there’d be five of us, not four, to face the tigress a second time. Maybe she knew precisely where and when she would be able to kidnap Orieg and Arxine all along.

When I recovered from the shockwave, my next spear went right through her back, through her heart, out the front of her feline chest.

Pain. A second time. I saw the wince, the startlement crossing her face before she sprang away, pulling herself free of the force-spike.

A whole gout of ichor hung there in the air for a moment, dripping from my invisible weapon, before a wind-blast from Stormsword scattered it, following up my attack with one of her own that smashed the wounded fiend into the wall –

Through the wall –

Then we were out in the air again, coursing after the arch-demon towards the next building – she landed on a roof in a spray of tiles, rolled and came to her feet, leaping again –

She was still bleeding. It streamed behind her in the air as she fled us, black gobbets of liquid void-stuff.

She hopped laterally off tower-walls and drove her unstoppable body through brick and stone, entering other structures and tearing through them – she bounced from roof to roof, climbed impossible heights in the matter of seconds – she cracked her whip, she screamed at us in defiance and tried to retaliate when we struck her.

Yet we kept up. We hammered her together. The diviners were there but it was me and Em chasing her down. A wizard’s aeromancy wasn’t supposed to work properly on a demon like this, able to bend and twist through tornados without hassle, but Stormsword’s fists of wind were powerful enough to buffet her, letting me work my own magic. Timesnatcher and Killstop were veritable fonts of ensorcelled daggers but it was me that was hurting her, me that was driving her on as she cut her way through Lower Tivertain’s opulent buildings.

Me that delivered the last blow, the one that caught her mid-leap and bisected her head, splitting her open from the space between her shoulder-blades to the crown of her weird scalp.

Her hand shook as it raised the flail, a spasm of motion that betrayed the extent of her injury.

And then suddenly the whip was in Tanra’s hand, the frowning face looking down at the eolastyr in judgement as the demon fell.

Fell hard, thanks to Em pushing her down, slamming her into the road.

It only started to sink in as she toppled from the sky, landing with a resounding crash in the centre of a cobbled street full of wagons, that there were ordinary people around. It was Yearsend, meaning some areas were empty, but not so much that the events of the past five minutes had gone unnoticed by the general populace. Hundreds of victims of the tumult, some merely injured, some fading from this world, all of them moaning for aid; shivering crowds of onlookers with terrified eyes and high-pitched voices…

I didn’t care who was crying out, who was watching… didn’t care who cared.

I was going to finish this right in front of them and if they wanted to look, that was their business.

She’d landed on her back, a dying tigress opened up in a perfect line. My spear had got her good. The eolastyr tried to use her claws to hold herself together, but it was futile at this point – she looked like a disconsolate child pressing two halves of a broken toy together. I’d cut her from her sternum, up through the middle of her sunken nostrils, between her black-hole eyes, splitting her forehead – inside the yawning cavity between the two sides of her face, only darkness flowed, like a bottomless ocean of evil.

Still, as I approached the scarlet shield flickered back into being. Timesnatcher’s last knife was repelled, flying off to stick in a nearby wall.

I sneered as I descended, and dismissed her shield with the wave of a hand, stealing away its essence for myself.

“A powerful eldritch, to be sure,” I scoffed.

I drew out an axe-head from blue force-lines, reinforced it by habit, then double-reinforced it.

I looked down at the broken white prism on the ground before me, the triangle of flesh that had been an arch-demon’s face. The black eyes swam in the nothingness – the clawed hands raised in a supplicating gesture – the arms jerked spasmodically –

I understood the message, as only a sorcerer could:

She would join me! Be mine. Be a slave.

But I could never trust that again. Not from such as she.

I shook my head softly, and when I said the words she surely knew were coming it was with every ounce of scorn, every shred of contempt I could muster.

Which was hardly a meagre amount.

“Powerful, but not infinitely so.”

Whatever she truly had in mind for me, it was close enough to ill-will.

I let the axe-head fall, Em brought down the lightning, and the whip in Tanra’s hand dissipated away.

It was over.

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