“At least it’s not as bad as it could’ve been,” I said to Glancefall and the others, while I gestured at a gang of loping creatures, stealing the allegiance of a dozen demons I didn’t know the powers of and sending them against their former comrades. “If we’d given her more time to prepare, who’s to know how many more locations might’ve been hit?”

“Let’s not count our demons till they’ve been summoned, please,” Doomspeaker chided me gently. The tiny blurred form of the arch-diviner went spinning like a bladed wheel through a clot of imps, spraying their body-parts all around.

“I won’t argue with that,” I replied.

Our foes had opened their portals inside the central support structure of the longest bridge in Mund, secreted in the hidden stony hollows beneath the river’s surface. Presumably the eolastyr had visited the site at some point in the last forty-eight hours, bringing with her sufficient blood-sources – sufficient captives – to maintain a number of summoners once the Incursion began. The pedestrians and wagoners following the Hill Road all crossed the Greywater here, the river’s cold waters shouting along in the darkness beneath their feet and the hooves of the horses. Drunken revellers cargo-carriers, strolling families and store-suppliers – the lot of them were taken unawares when a horde of gibbering fiends came erupting up through the central struts of the bridge, pouring along it in either direction, killing and consuming everything in their paths.

Doomspeaker was already here before we arrived, and the wizened old gnome had taken charge of the situation, organising a team of champions at each end of the Greybridge, halting the demons’ progress. She coordinated with the closest magister-bands, ensuring those who could be healed were transferred into the care of the druids and the local priests who’d turned out to help. Rudimentary shields had been constructed by sorcerers of a decidedly non-archmage persuasion; I could’ve toppled them with less than a thought.

It was no matter. When Feychilde and Stormsword arrived, arrowing down from the north, everything changed.

A wave of bigger, better demons smashed through the front ranks on this end of the bridge, as flight-spells lifted all our magister and champion allies into the air. The two of us continued past, taking the fight right into the heart of the spawn, to the four summoners at the middle of the Greybridge, surrounded by powered-up obbolomin.

A gangly stick-man, the nabburatiim. One of the agonised entrail-men, the atiimogrix. But two of the fiends I didn’t know the names of. There was an imp, large for his kind at two feet tall; he wore a black robe covered in red stars, a tiny jewel-topped staff in his clawed hand. More impressive was a huge yellowing skull, hovering atop a pillar of fire and cackling away as it scorched everything it passed over, leaving rings of crimson light in its wake. It was roughly the size of the main room of my apartment, its vacant eye-sockets big enough to swallow a child whole, never mind its chattering maw.

I stole the loyalty of all of them save for the skull, and suddenly the tide of fiends was cut off. While I whittled away chips of bone from the floating head, using my new host of infantry as much as my force-blades to effect as much damage as possible, Em helped at the southern end of the bridge, disintegrating whole crowds of hellspawn with bolt after bolt of explosive energy.

In five minutes we were done, moving on.

The demons at Treetown Gate had been dealt with by the time we finished, apparently thanks in large part to the brave sacrifice of numerous mage-guards, but when we arrived at Hidebent Square in central Hightown reports started to come in from Danamir Row, from the shrine of Kultemeren in western Sticktown, from Openway in North Lowtown…

On Danamir Row I ran into Ciraya, mounted on Fe. What she was doing here instead of in Sticktown, I was unsure, but that paled into insignificance when placed beside the fact she was fighting at all. She’d been given the night off, at least, to sit with Arithos while she recovered – I’d talked to Zakimel about that personally after the eolastyr’s death, and he’d been very happy to concede my argument. What the young sorceress had done, even if we’d failed to steal the whip until it was too late – it had taken more guts than anything I’d seen from someone without archmagery or god-power at their fingertips.

I supposed that answered my question as to why she was out on the streets giving it back to the demons. I merely saluted her as I went past, and made her task a little easier by ensnaring a choice handful of her nearby targets, selecting only the strongest.

At one point of the night I flew over Phanar, Kani, Ibbalat and Anathta as they made their way along a Treetown lane. They’d engaged the demons somewhere or other, going off the damaged armour strapped to Phanar’s horse, the stains of hellish ichor on their cloaks. I couldn’t stop to chat, having been sent on an urgent errand by Timesnatcher to trap a lone summoner whose location had come to him in a vision… but as I exchanged a brief shouted set of pleasantries (and endured a dose of Annoythta’s biting wit) I very much got the impression from Kani’s demeanour that she wasn’t going to let me off lightly regarding Orieg and Arxine’s abandonment.

“Goodbye, sorcerer,” was the only thing the cleric chose to say to me, and it would’ve sounded ominous had it been anyone else speaking. Her voice was passionless, uncaring.

It did bother me, till my sorcerous senses found the summoner and the imps it had brought through into the idyllic forest grove. I got stuck inside my pentagonal shield by the biggest eldritch, my force-barriers all wrapped up in black tendrils that refused to stay cut when I slashed them. It took me at least ten minutes to get the demon under my control – the thing was like one of those octopus-creatures, except instead of eight tail-arm things it had somewhere around eight-hundred… and it was the tendrils, possessing no head, no face, no features other than the inky coils. It didn’t trigger on my sorcerous senses. Surely assassin-class.

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Once I snagged the big critter – gods above, it had to be at least eighth rank, the way it weighed in my sorcerous belly – snagging the summoner was easy. The culprit was just another one of those rolling hair-balls with a rusty tree on top, and aside from the octopus-demon it had only summoned demonoids. There were a fair few of them, but those I couldn’t extend my power over got handily destroyed by those I could.

Two hours later, I was back with Em and we were at a place known as Shinglemoss of which I’d never heard before, a rocky beach on the Greywater not so far from the Greybridge where we’d started. I’d rejoined with the vampire to help me hunt down the water-dwelling demons that were using the beach as a landing-ground, and with his perceptions I could make out the towering span of the bridge in the distance, not even smouldering now.

I had to focus. We were being overwhelmed; the wizards’ water elementals and my new octopus couldn’t stop them all and there were oh so many. The magisters and watchmen moving through the houses behind us were understaffed, having trouble evacuating so many people at such short notice. Until help arrived, we were the bottleneck preventing a massacre. Me, Em and Copperbrow were mowing through wave after wave of the slimy creatures as they were pulling themselves up onto the rocky embankment, but my fortifications were bending under the pressure of hundreds of attacks, and that was when I felt it.

The shudder of a shield going down.

I frowned, confused. It took me a moment to pinpoint the source of the disturbance. I knew it wasn’t the shield around me – I would’ve been able to feel the gradual effect of attrition if something successfully chewed through the barriers that were fixed to me. I cast about – it wasn’t the shields I’d put on either of the wizards –

Was it the one I’d put on Doomspeaker earlier? No… it was… older…

I looked north-east, towards home. In even the two seconds I faltered, forgetting to form and swing my force-blades, my outermost shield wavered and disappeared, broken by the renewed assault.

I didn’t care. I –

Again. It happened again, and I knew.

Something was taking down the sorcerous protections around my home – around the twins –

“Twins!” I cried aloud, launching myself into the sky, leaving my flickering structures of shielding behind for the others. I looked back –

“Which ones?” Em shouted, her lightning-sword splitting eight or nine demons in two at one swing; the fiends that’d been warring with each other for a spot at the front surged forwards over their leaking corpses.

I gazed back at her, fighting for her life against a whole legion of eldritches. Her grimacing face was never more beautiful, more determined. Her platinum hair streamed free of her hood on one side of her face, and her tempest-wind whipped at her robe as she wielded white fire.

Don’t die, Em, I thought to myself, rapidly flying away from her. Already the shields about her were failing. Don’t die. Not again.

I’m sorry.

“Feychilde!” she yelled over the link.

“My twins,” I replied grimly.

It wasn’t long before I was out of range to hear her replies, answer her questions. I asked for everyone listening to find out what was going on around Helbert’s Bend, but my glyphstone never lit up as I flew, never rang out to signal a scrap of information, or a reassurance that back-up would be on its way.

None of us had died tonight as far as I knew, save for Withertongue at the eolastyr’s hands; but the magistry and watch weren’t the only ones short of a few hands. In truth we were stretched woefully thin. We needed a new crop of archmages to take up the mantle of champion. We needed less darkmages. Had we been too successful lately? Had we stopped people from thinking we needed them to step up? Or had we failed them too often, drove them away from joining our ranks with our ineptitude, our inability to protect them?

I was unable to protect the twins. Our loss of Orieg and Arxine to the heretics should’ve been a warning sign to me, but I let it slip me by, and now it was my twins, Jaid and Jaroan in peril…

Again.

How is it that they’ve come to Helbert’s Bend, twice in a row…?

It could only be the work of a cold intellect, a master orchestrator. Surely the tigress had been able to discern my identity, especially with the way I’d been exposed in Sticktown yesterday… Was this something the eolastyr had put in place especially for me? Did she know in advance it would be my hand that dealt her the death-blow?

And a tiny part of my mind whispered, Could it be that she’s already returned from the Twelve Hells?

I was doing anything, desperately clutching at straws in order to distract myself from the horrible truth – the shields were all down. I’d felt them collapse, one by one. There was nothing left. I would fly close to my home and I would be able to feel their corpses before I saw them, be able to touch –

No.

Sylph-wings had never propelled me faster. Wizard-flight and wraith-form only increased my velocity. There was an insurgency inside my soul, and I didn’t know the shape of the creature that would win. That would claim my flesh and thoughts and identity. The thing that would be Kas, when it was all over.

I heard the air itself screeching in protest as I barrelled down at Mud Lane; satyr-reflexes alone let me approximate the right time to come to a stop, and even then I overshot it, moving like a ghost through the wall into my apartment.

Yes, I felt the death, the not-quite-dead bodies, but not until I was already inside the main room, floating near the door. Not until I could see it with my own eyes.

And it wasn’t what I expected. Nothing so banal as a demon. Nothing so easily-overcome as a target I could shred to pieces without a second thought. Not something I could’ve imagined, even in my nightmares. I’d dreamt of many dark and dreadful things since that fateful day when Tyr Kayn was exposed, when Shadowcloud died, when I tried to kill Zel…

Never anything half as bad as this.

“You!” I panted for air.

I didn’t even have anything beyond my reinforced circle active. He was at the far side of the room, armoured in three shields, their reinforcements heavier than mine, the outer barrier bristling with blades. He had the advantage, in every conceivable way.

“Yeah,” he replied, the Rivertown accent thick, voice deep for someone who had to be my age at most. He grinned wickedly – I could make out the movements of the arch-sorcerer’s chin despite his cowl’s folds. It was dark, almost pitch black in here, but the open eyes in the room could all see perfectly well. “And you. Kastyr Mortenn.

“You killed Fintwyna, Kastyr Mortenn. And now the Liberator of Zadhal himself gets to know just how it feels.”

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