It was difficult to use these fey wings to hover above the ground, but Nighteye was quite right – standing without any support for more than a few seconds quickly exacerbated the pain I’d been feeling in my lower legs, and walking more than three steps was out of the question. So it was that I was forced to fly out through the pavilion opening, beating my wings rapidly and minutely, moving as carefully as I was able.
The arch-druid strode beside me, looking at me dubiously. I very much doubted the healer wanted a patient up and about before he could stand steady on his own two feet, but it wasn’t like Nighteye was getting much of a choice in the matter.
Using just two wings for lateral movement, I slipped through the parting between the fabric-flaps that served as the screen at the end of the tent. The moment I crossed the threshold, I must’ve passed through the enchantments keeping us tranquil while we recovered. It was then that it hit me.
We were in the open porch of the pavilion, right on the edge of the battle.
Gong! Gong! Gong!
Fires rose up everywhere in front of me, the kind that spewed smoke and the kind that spewed demons. Waterspouts from bands of magister-wizards soon dealt with the first, but the latter were not so easily dispatched. Roseoak, whatever this place had been before, was now a stony field of blood, lit by light-balls and radiance-spells set in place to aid those mages with need for them.
Archmages all had their different ways of seeing in the dark, I suspected.
I looked up first, marvelling despite the dire situation – here in the pavilion we were shielded by a blue dome of force not altogether unlike the one that protected the Maginox, though far, far smaller.
How – who –
It was a sorcerous barrier of such force that it looked tangible to my sorcerer’s-eye. Doubtless invisible to others, but to me…
“Why am I guessing Dustbringer?” Zel commented.
Ranks of skeletal warriors stood completely motionless, their backs to us, forming a defensive wall. There had to be two hundred of them, kitted-out with real equipment – swords that were sharpened and gleaming, not rusted; padded armour and mail that had none of the signs of the grave. They wore identical heavy iron helmets. I supposed their heads were their weak-spots.
Beyond them, Mother-Chaos reigned.
The diameter of the affected area had doubled since I was last here. There had to be more than a dozen neighbourhoods under attack now.
Attack was too weak a word for what they were doing. This was bombardment. I couldn’t have counted the amount of towers that’d been toppled, trampled under fiery feet into cinders.
Some demons were eating magisters whole, while others were chopping them up first. There were demons that seemed altogether disinterested in killing right away, and were instead puppeteering whole groups of mages, their prisoners’ faces devoid of expression as they mouthed incantations and aimed wands, raining death down on their colleagues.
Their faces might’ve been blank, but their eyes were wide in horror.
Yet there was cause for hope: I could see the champions at work. The enchanters were probably all busy – I couldn’t see Neverwish, and I hoped he’d made it out of Upper Tivertain in one piece – but some of the others were all-too-visible.
A druid had changed themselves into a white-furred wolf at least sixty or seventy feet at the shoulder. There wasn’t a demon that could do significant damage to the giant beast, seemingly, and the druid was getting their own back on the hell-spawn in like fashion: chewing them up by the dozens.
Timesnatcher in his black robe with its white hourglasses, each with a different level of sand; Lightblind in her white robe with its black eyelashes, the sigil of a closed eye – the two arch-diviners fought back-to-back in a whirling flurry of ensorcelled steel that simply didn’t stop, careening across the battlefield unimpeded by any obstacle. They flitted up the impossible ramps made by the spilled innards of buildings, slicing hordes of demons into piles of crumbling parts, moving like the scythed wheel of a chariot with a life and violent will all of its own.
When they reached a creature they couldn’t slay, one of the rolling hills of fat that swallowed men alive, I saw Winterprince soar past them. He was moving at an uncanny speed, clearly operating under the effects of a diviner’s chronomantic field – the icy wizard fixed the demon in place with the sudden conjuration of a vast wall of ice, ice that kept growing, appearing out of nowhere to form a great vault over the demon. Once it was completely covered, he watched it for a moment, futilely thrusting its vile tongue against the freezing dome… then, as he flew off, darting towards his next target, he nonchalantly waved a huge fist at the demon –
Instantly it was pierced with a hundred icicle-spears, growing down simultaneously from the inside of the barrier.
Dustbringer’s legions walked behind him through the chaos, the powers of his spectres just as lethal to the creatures of Infernum as they were to creatures of the Material Plane. Starsight’s daggers blazed. Shadowcloud’s lightning disintegrated foe after foe. Smouldervein’s sword of living fire, more whip than blade, could not be withstood.
Even the mage-champions were here – I spotted the Binding Brothers in their matching masks that looked like five big chain-links arranged in a loop, erecting barriers on the southern edge of the battle. The Rainbow’s Edge, the seven mages who’d apparently all studied different aspects of their mageries, were fighting near them – I could only see Red, Yellow and Indigo; I guessed their druids were off somewhere healing, and so on…
They were not the only lesser healers who’d shown their faces. The Sisterhood of Wythyldwyn were out in force, half the sisters protecting the other half with hammer and shield as they went to lay their hands on the injured, sealing open wounds and easing pain. And the servants of other deities were thick of the fray too – most visible were the Knights of Kultemeren clad in burnished armour. They were devotees of an ancient sect who were sworn to everlasting silence, now laying about themselves with broadswords that glimmered with a pallid radiance, their fervour palpable even from here.
It was Redgate who most caught my attention, though.
He was over to the north, a crimson-shrouded figure with the face of a spider, floating seemingly-unaided through the melee. The sorcerer was preceded into battle by a host of thirty or more big demons, no more than two alike – I saw a pair of white-armoured thinfinaran at his sides, a couple of yithandreng serving as their mounts, flanking him as he hovered along, like his honour-guard. But there was no way he was going to be under attack anytime soon. Whenever he left the protection of his nearest and dearest eldritches, it was because something in the crowd seemed to catch his eye – even as I watched he soared over to the front-line of his fighters and bound a new demon, some kind of two-headed lion that appeared to have taken his fancy.
So Redgate was awesome.
There were a dozen or more other champions – some still just arriving to the confrontation, looking fresh as they waded into combat – but none looked so fearsome as he.
The perimeter was being covered, at least for now, but as I looked out across the battleground I could easily pick out three of the Incursion’s summoners. Shadowcloud had been hurling lightning at an unbound thinfinaran, to little effect, but Dustbringer and his legions were on their way, scything through whole hosts of demons. There was a beautiful woman standing in the midst of the destruction, screaming, howling at the top of her lungs – she would’ve looked like a victim of the demons in her torn clothes and with her ravaged visage, were it not for the fact that, as she wailed and wept, the blood of the fallen was coursing towards her over the rubble, running up her skin, rivulets of redness streaming over her pale flesh and into her eyes, her nose, her mouth.
Redgate was the closest to her. Perhaps I’d just let him handle that one…
The third summoner I could see was a stick-man, quite literally. Its body was a single black rod six or more feet in length, and its limbs were made from the same material – it had no apparent head, and it teetered and tottered like a drunk, staggering about the place seemingly aimlessly, waving its long, rigid arms. I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was a summoner if it hadn’t been leaving red flames shooting up out of the slime-puddles in its wake.
No arch-sorcerers near it. I guessed that was my target.
“You’ll stay with her?”
“The magister?” Nighteye replied, looking at me curiously. “Of course, hm, that’s my job – strictly on healing duty, after, hm, last time…”
There was a part of me that wanted to stay. I was injured, I could sit with Nighteye in the healer’s pavilion, listen to him ramble on as I waited at Em’s bedside for her to awaken… forget the Incursion, I’d done my part…
But I knew I couldn’t. Couldn’t leave the job half done. Couldn’t abandon Mund, abandon Mundians, to the mercy of these foul creatures. Even if I only saved one more life, it’d be worth my every effort.
There was some part of me that recognised I was thinking like that because I couldn’t bear the thought of a champion thinking any other way, especially if that champion had been sent to Sticktown, had been sent to protect my loved ones…
“… but you aren’t going back out there, hm… You shouldn’t, Feychilde, they –”
“When the magister wakes up, tell her I’m sorry… Tell her, I had to get back to work.”
I saluted the spluttering druid as I soared away with a single flap of the sylph’s powerful wings.
I speared at the stick-man, not casting a backwards glance.
It was doing its level best to reduce a regiment of skeletal warriors to a pile of old bones, and it was enjoying a fair bit of success from the looks of things – the area looked like a dire mole had just exhumed an entire graveyard’s worth of corpses onto the ground. The earth was bursting with tongues of red fire and hordes of scuttling imps.
The stick-man was a massively-overpowering threat – a single kick from its thin but heavy leg was enough to wreck a whole column of skeletons, smashing the one in front into those behind and leaving none of them so much as twitching where they lay in pieces. Its swinging arms weren’t fast but its opponents possessed neither the reflexes nor the musculature requisite to evade its swipes. Then they had a small army of imps to deal with on top of that. The skellies weren’t going to last long.
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Not that any of us were going to be complaining – the skeletons were doing what they were summoned for, taking the blows, diverting the attention of the demons from those who still had some internal organs left. Even in death (undeath? no, re-death) the skeletons were playing their part.
Now it was my turn.
I came up closer to it, gazing down upon it.
Rank?
“Fifth. Nabburatiim.”
Nabburatiim, I’ve heard of these. They lie down in the dark, pretending to be pieces of wood, then ambush passers-by?
“That’s the one.”
Does it have eyes?
If it was going to ambush people, it’d have to have some way of knowing they were there…
Just then, its ‘head’ (or at least the top end of the vertical ‘body’ stick – completely indistinguishable from its ‘foot’ or ‘hand’ except by its position) tilted towards me.
“You tell me.”
It was staring back at me, a hundred percent.
Eerie. It was a big black stick, but it was staring at me, and I could feel it.
I maintained my gaze – perhaps even glared.
It suddenly lifted its arm, and swung its hand right through the space I’d just been occupying. A brief burst of activity from my wings took me all-too-high into the air, and I had to control my descent again, hovering now just a little farther from my enemy.
I had my reinforced circle up, fingers moving by instinct from the moment I’d left the tent, but I had to know that I could move by instinct with the wings. This was good practice.
While it was distracted by me, skeletons hacked at its metal-hard legs with their dull blades – these summons weren’t outfitted with proper gear like Dustbringer’s – and achieved nothing more than breaking their weapons on the black substance.
It was still meeting my gaze with its featureless thin face, spinning in a little circle and wheeling its arms at me. I slid out of the way. All the while, it traced scarlet flames across the pools of filth that mired this section of the battlefield, dozens and dozens of imps spawning at its feet.
It wasn’t going to give in easily. My power – was at its limit?
“I suspect you may be out of room for now, Kas.”
That’s a very cup-half-empty way of looking at it.
I realised what I’d done before my… swift sky exit… back in Upper Tivertain.
A reminder that my capacity for new demons was low was in itself nothing more than a reminder that I had so many I could bring to bear. When I checked with my inbuilt sorcerous instincts I could feel them there, see them.
Hundreds of them.
“I’m sorry, no vacancies,” I told the stick-man, slipping away from another clumsy strike. “You’re gonna have to get banished the painful way. Painfuller?”
It ‘looked’ at me blankly.
“Whatever.”
Bit by bit I summoned them – I didn’t want to get so weak I’d pass out, and if I now summoned my entire retinue I had the feeling it would hit me twice as hard. And to think I’d wondered at first why I couldn’t take the nabburatiim on as my minion, when Zel had instructed me to take four rhimbelkina just moments before my… sudden course-change.
Firstly, “Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks! Come cuddle a stick.”
The bintaborax held its arms and legs instead of their hammers, splaying the demon out.
Then, “Let’s up the ante, with Aunty Antlers!”
The ikistadreng cast me what looked like an amused, sidelong glance – it was hard to tell, what with the strange, blurry red fur covering its body – then sprang down head-first upon the pinned nabburatiim, shattering it into twigs with the sound of rending metal.
I looked down at the teeming sea of imps it’d spawned in its last moments, sandwiched now between the remaining lines of skeletons, the towering demons I controlled, and me, the winged, masked, simply unbearable arch-sorcerer.
Lastly, “My legion.”
I let my lesser fiends loose.
Men with the faces of dogs, red eyes aglow, biting with their maws as much as they clubbed with the crude, improvised weapons they carried – chair-legs, bricks, cutlery. Huge, leathery-winged bats with heads at both ends and no legs; they had no eyes in their twin faces, just nostrils and a wide, fang-lined hole.
And my imps and folkababil, my flock of birds.
That was what I’d been forgetting – binding well over a hundred things to my will just before I…
Before I fell.
My legion tore the unbound imps apart, and after a few choice commands from their master went off looking for bigger prey.
My forces spilled out across the battle, contributing to the vast, varied slew of attacks that was now somehow stemming the tide of unbound demons.
We were winning.
I saw another summoner, a thin man who ran around laughing with his entrails endlessly pouring out through a savage rip across his torso. Already there was far too much intestine draped around the surrounding landscape for any mortal to have produced, yet he kept on running, kept on laughing, his innards kept on pouring. And from time to time, another demon came tearing out of his midriff fully-formed, a fact that just seemed to make the laughing-man laugh harder.
I whipped about in pursuit of him, crushing those he’d spawned before they managed to get their bearings. He passed right beneath the seventy-foot-tall druid-wolf, and I had to tuck in my wings and twist them as I barrelled between the druid’s huge forelegs, snatching up the gang of imps he’d spawned in the process.
Out the other side, I caught up. This time the demon – an atiimogrix, apparently – gave in almost instantly, falling into line as one of my bound demons and being dismissed without resistance.
That could only mean I’d already, permanently or at least semi-permanently, lost some of my troops.
Not that this was entirely undesirable – I was Feychilde, not Hellchilde, after all – nor altogether unexpected, as they were fighting demons that were their peers in potency. I saw from afar that Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks and Aunty Antlers were doing fine, each currently taking on a different target. They’d found things close to their own sizes to pick on, and didn’t look to be letting up any time soon.
I left to catch another summoner, a strange rolling ball of hair and nails the size of a horse, with a tree shaped of rust on top – when I came back to see how they were getting on I witnessed a panicked magister throwing a bolt of lightning at one of the bintaborax, thinking it a foe, its onrushing steps a threat.
The unarmed bintaborax took the blast in the chest; the electricity merely crackled between its spikes, and it kept on coming –
The magister-wizard backed away, spreading his hands in a desperate warding gesture, completely bereft of magical intention but entirely human, given the situation he thought he was in –
My bintaborax arrived barely in time to intercept the spiky demon that was about to eviscerate the magister from behind, a hammer forming out of the air to smash the jagged demon’s trident into lava-like sludge.
“Feychilde.”
“Neverwish! You made it.”
“Hold on. I’m linking you up, Timesnatcher.”
“I’m Feychilde…”
“Good evening, Feychilde.” A new voice – rich and rolling, somehow familiar. “I’m Timesnatcher. In about ninety seconds something really big’s coming through. Titan-class. Maybe eighteenth rank.”
He knew his sorcery, it seemed, for an arch-diviner – and eighteenth rank sounded way beyond my capabilities.
“Yeah, drop on that,” Zel observed.
“Leafcloak’s going to pin it.” I cast my gaze upwards at the looming form of the titanic wolf-druid. “She’ll keep it busy. I’m getting Redgate and Netherhame to hem it in. Dustbringer, Shallowlie and Direcrown are going to hold the perimeter. I want you front and centre – not to fight, but to watch. We’ve long-since learned that the Incursion is the best training-ground. Keep a close eye – your sorcerer’s–eye – on what they do.”
“I – I’ll do my best?”
How big did he mean?
“I’m sure you will,” Timesnatcher returned. “You’ve performed admirably already. Keep it together for the last act, yeah?”
The last act. Okay.
I started yelling in Infernal at my minions, drifting here and there (protected from any number of projectile attacks by my shield), marshalling them into a single force. I shepherded them towards the pale shape of the towering wolf, her flanks gleaming in the mingled moonlight and spell-flame. They followed.
And those they met were left as pulp and bone in their wake.
Two bintaborax, one ikistadreng, and thirty miniature minions. That’d have to do for now. I wanted to keep my wits about me and I was starting to feel the weight of my fatigue again, something miraculously alleviated by Nighteye’s ministrations that was only now returning. I no longer felt like I’d had twenty-four hours sleep – I felt like I’d had no sleep for days and nearly died and then went straight back to fighting.
This time when the red flames erupted, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
A circle of blood near the centre of the battlefield rose up, up, like a wall of deep red wine. A hill, a mountain of crimson that resolved itself into a thousand tongues of hell-fire, flickering, pulsing skyward.
It didn’t quite match the wolf-shaped Leafcloak in height, when it appeared, but it had to be close.
The behemoth wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Not humanoid; not even bestial. It resembled more a piece of internal architecture, the struts and bars that could be found supporting the roof of some colossal structure. But it was alive, ever-shifting, a complex web of metal poles – some thicker than my body, some thinner than my fingers. Even as I watched, it rolled, screeched, clanged, and rearranged itself, forming several limbs – three massive metal-mesh arms, and four legs, or six if you counted the free-swinging ones that weren’t planted in the rubble, resembling tails more than anything else.
Before the red flames even vanished Leafcloak plunged forwards, taking hold of one of the arms in her giant mouth, clenching down on the metal with her teeth.
The high-pitched squeal of bone on steel filled the smoke-choked air.
She yanked back, straining, drawing on the strength of the titanic wolf-shape to pull the behemoth off-balance – but she failed, her pale paws digging into the ruins again and again as she desperately tugged, trying to leverage her superior stature.
It was to no avail. Perhaps the titan-demon had absolute control over its weird body and its positioning through some eldritch power; perhaps it was simply too heavy to lift. Whether the explanation was something supernatural or something mundane, she couldn’t pull it hard enough to make its legs move one inch.
But it didn’t matter. Leafcloak had restricted its initial movement, preventing it from leaping away or committing whatever other nefarious deed it was planning – and now Redgate and Netherhame were there, floating around it in a clockwise circle, their hands working on barriers. Redgate’s method of flight was still unfathomable to me – he had no wings, no stream of wind, nothing I could see – but Netherhame was drifting ghostlike through the air, her flesh and robe semi-transparent and purplish.
Semi-transparent or not, the barriers she wove were as real as any others I’d seen. As they built a sphere around the demon I could already see its flailing arms being impeded, its movements halted.
They completed the barrier in front of Leafcloak and the druid released her clamp on its arm, stepping back softly on padding paws that still shook the ground with each footfall.
I hovered closer, studying the shield. They were working together – I could see the threads of force where one arch-sorcerer left them dangling in the air or threw them, only to be taken up, connected and reconnected to others by their colleague. Within seconds there was a vast spider’s-web of impenetrable blue lines surrounding the demon. It built up, up and out, in an almost honeycomb-pattern.
I stared at the beautiful creation, trying my utmost to drink it all in.
And I saw the impenetrable blue lines waver, wobble and dim as the demon struck them.
“Feychilde is linked to you,” Neverwish said in my head.
It was a female, Netherhame I assumed, whose voice came through next: “We need Dustbringer, not some newbie. No offence, Feychilde.”
“None taken. I can barely follow what you’re doing.”
Netherhame again: “This is hitting the weave really hard, Timesnatcher. It’s going to break through any moment.”
“We’re trying to help Smouldervein. Wait.”
I could see threads of force that they simply weren’t quick enough to link together, and I flapped hard a couple of times whilst maintaining my upright position, trying to come closer to the huge demon.
But I overdid it, shooting up into the sky.
I hurtled up, suddenly feeling uncomfortable, sick, like last Fullday night when I’d flown with Em for the first time.
Then the gruff voice of Dustbringer, of Endren Solosto: “I’m here.”
It was like he’d spoken in my ear, disorienting me – I cast about, and the motion of my head was dizzying.
I could see everything. Too much detail.
A full band of magisters being eaten by a fifteen-foot cyclops, their shields shattered, defences scattered. One of the Binding Brothers being ripped in two across the diaphragm, imps at either end of him, wrenching and chortling. Smouldervein being rapidly disintegrated by what looked like a dancing old man in rags, alternating rays of white and red light shooting out of the rag-man’s hands, withering the champion away to nothing.
“I’m trying to help, you know. Shut your eyes and breathe.”
Shut… my eyes!
“Just focus on one thing then. Look for Dust-”
Heals were landing on Smouldervein – I could see the arch-druid responsible, wreathing the wizard in green light – but it did no good. Smouldervein became dust.
It was too late. Bile rose in my throat.
Glad that my mask didn’t cover my mouth like my scarf had, I emptied my stomach, even while I floated.
And in that moment I lost control of the wings.
“Feychilde? Something’s going to happen to Feychilde too!”
Timesnatcher only made it worse.
This time when I… I descended… it was all my fault.
And when the huge talons of a giant eagle caught me, ten feet from impact into demons and rubble, slashing into my back and saving my life, it was like I was a rat again, a rat in the grip of an owl.
* * *