INTERLUDE 9E: SIGNIFICANT LOSSES, PART II
“They will tell you that a road is built by laying one stone at a time. That is a lie. No one builds a road alone.”
– from the Yunic Creed
Gong! Gong! Gong!
The powers of an arch-enchanter were next to useless. He might as well have tried to stop the lashing rain as stop the massacre. At some point he’d lost control of the crowd, and he fought to get it back, only for the panic to spread like wild-fire, beyond his ability to rein it in. Bor cast out telepathic lines like a starving fisherman, but nothing out there was biting, none of them transforming into the link that he could leverage to pull them all free from this mess. No champions answered the call.
Just him. Useless him.
He experimented with all the usual tricks. Sending streams of illusory Mundians out from the crowd, as though some of the terror-stricken citizens had decided to try to make a break for it. Creating the illusions of bigger fiends, making them threatening to the real ones, teeth and weapons bared in outright hostility. He even went so far as to create the glamours of champions, wizards and diviners coming down the storm-shadowed stands to aid the trapped crowd.
None of it was enough – none of it was ever enough. The false Mundians were quickly discovered to be insubstantial; no matter how he tried, he couldn’t trick the tactile senses of an infernal eldritch without the keys to their twisted minds. The greater demons were ignored, even when he got them to bellow in the snippets of Infernal that were known to him. And the ‘champions’ coming to the rescue, for all the alarm they caused in the back ranks of the demons, were simply overrun. For all that he could imagine a blast of lightning, a gout of flame – for all that he could make that imagination real, bring fantasy into seeming – he couldn’t bestow it with that last elusive element. His tricks did no damage if they didn’t believe. He wasn’t a wizard. He was just an enchanter.
He squeezed Dorya’s hand – he couldn’t tear his eyes from the demons to look at her, didn’t want to look at her, see her face, the reality of death reflected in her eyes…
Damn this!
Ciraya moved in at a sharp angle, reinforcing a second layer of shielding. Bor recognised only moments before it happened that the outermost barrier was about to fail.
But… but it can’t –
Then it happened. Dozens of kinkalaman moved three steps closer, slicing deeper into the crowd, cutting down man, woman and child alike. Human and dwarf. Even a few elves and gnomes were here. The sword-tips at the ends of the demons’ legs slid effortlessly in and out of the corpses of the fallen as they stalked inward, their clock-faces ticking rhythmically. Some of those serving as a carpet for the fiends were still alive, and their anguished cries as the kinkalaman advanced were nauseating.
Bor hid his mind from those of the dying, and crushed in towards the centre with everyone else – what else could they do? He had no idea how things were going on the other side of the crowd, where the long-tongued gobbling fiends were attacking. He was too scared to search, to find out.
If he was being honest with himself, he was secretly glad. He’d far rather be chopped in two than eaten by one of those things.
“Where are the champions?” a kid was howling.
“Terrell! Oh, sweet Yune, Terrell where are you?”
“I knew it, I knew it, I knew it…”
“Merciful Mortiforn, take my poor Garald into your arms. Please, please take him…”
“Where the drop are the champions!” a man bellowed in anger.
Bor was starting to have trouble in distinguishing verbal sounds from their psychic counterparts.
He checked the minds of his brothers and sisters. Too much terror. He soothed them, settled them. Their minds, at least, were like open books. Open books with blank pages and an ink-well and quill.
We can’t die bleating like animals. There has to be a better way…
There was only one thing he could do as the kinkalaman formed a killing-circle around the screaming crowds of innocent arena-goers, slowly constricting them, hemming them in. Only one thing he could do to help. And it would represent a breach of the law… The law, and, more importantly, the vow the Bor had sworn to himself almost a year and a half ago, when he came into his magic. Not to meddle. Not to get himself neck-deep in fish-guts by making himself the Magisterium’s enemy.
He could refine the sorceress’s shields.
He’d only done it a handful of times before, and those had been champions with whom he was linked, no barriers to break, no lines to cross. Once with Shadowcloud, when the wizard was duelling three Hierarchs simultaneously and was about to be overpowered. Once with Fang and Glimmer, when they were trying to save Dimdweller from the avatar of Vaahn. A few other occasions…
And now this.
He knew Ciraya was good at what she did. He’d seen her in action – for her age, she was probably top in her field. But he’d never really had much cause to go rooting around in the minds of sorcerers, especially those of the non-arch variety. He wouldn’t have typically had reason to intrude in a magister’s magic, but when the only thing between you and hundreds of walking swords was an invisible wall, you could be forgiven a minor misdemeanour. Even if it were to be determined a major one… the alternative was death.
Death. Not just for him, but them.
He placed a psychic hand about the spells set on Ciraya’s mind, and clenched his fist.
She wasn’t the only prodigy here. He shattered the Magisterium’s protections without even trying. Right now, it was like they were made out of twigs.
It was only then that he realised: even she couldn’t see the shields she was crafting with her words and gestures and handfuls of reagents. He could follow the patterns of her thoughts, even translate the sorcerous language she was thinking in. But none of it helped. He couldn’t really understand the motives for her actions – why in one moment she was heading clockwise about the shield’s perimeter, then in the next digging out a packet of shredded wyvern-wing and turning her demonic mount sharply, heading anticlockwise… The majority of her actions and decisions were instinctive, ingrained by long hours of painstaking practice, reflexes borne of cold nights out on the streets getting hands-on experience. He could override those instincts, crush them, replace them – but understanding them? There wasn’t time for that kind of work.
However, he didn’t have to understand what she was doing in order to aid her. Now he had access to her mind, he could shift the weights, increase her efficiency. Slide the opaque sheet of his power between her awareness and her emotions.
He’d been expecting any number of things getting in her way. Even Shadowcloud had feared for his life, when Hierarch Thirteen caught his spells and turned them back on him. Certainly everyone in Zadhal had been drenched in fear, till the stink of it filled Bor’s psychic nostrils, even in memory.
Ciraya, essentially working alone against a literal army of fiends?
No, there was no fear to be found in her. None of the exhilaration that so-often soaked the souls of the battle-drunk, either. Just an icy professionalism. She’d already accepted that they were all going to get slaughtered. She’d accepted it, and moved on to do her job.
He withdrew the enchanter’s-hand from her mind, almost stung at the contact, with her still none the wiser.
Not five feet from him, a kinkalaman broke through, stalking straight over the falling men and women it slew with its first devastating blows. Their blood was still splashing through the air when the blade-construct started slamming its weapons into the next layer of the shield, ignoring the people to its left and right staring upon it in horror.
Two feet from him.
Less than twelve inches from Sestreya’s little head.
This was it. It was over.
“Squash in, curse you!” he heard Ciraya yelling. It was strange, hearing her yell. Even now, it was like she couldn’t quite muster the enthusiasm. “Move! Khalor!”
The yithandreng reached the kinkalaman –
The clock-tongue missed a beat, the kinkalaman swinging its strange face around to point at the sorceress’s mount –
Had it had some last-second premonition about what was going to happen to it? Bor had no idea, but even if the thing did, it was too late.
Feast snapped her vast jaws shut about it, twisting. Many of the hell-steel joints connecting the body-parts of the smaller fiend together – little hooks and bars and cogs – were rent apart, showering down as she ground her teeth together.
Only for a sword to stab upwards, piercing the big demon’s snout from inside her mouth – then a second sword joined it, tearing clean through her nostril –
Feast toppled.
Ciraya was shouting something, but Borasir couldn’t hear. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t think.
Kinkalaman fell on Ciraya’s mount, and at first she didn’t abandon Feast. She pulled a wand from her sleeve, spraying the fiends with a bright-green acid that seemed to eat away at their surfaces, causing them to rust rapidly, constricting in what could almost be forgiven for pain. The one that spindled free of Feast’s lolling head, rolling awkwardly on its half-dismembered blade-limbs – that kinkalaman took a full blast directly in the midriff and toppled aside, almost seeming to dissolve into itself.
But it was the work of seconds. The demons closed in, the second rank filling gaps in the first, and, with a look on her face like she’d just been asked to drink a cup of that same otherworldly acid, Ciraya slipped back inside the shield’s border, sliding through the gap between two pale-faced men.
Before the kinkalaman could deliver a series of even more lethal-looking blows to the ruined yithandreng, Ciraya cried, “Kherem!”
At least one of us gets to survive this dropping mess, she thought.
It could’ve bought the people a few more seconds, perhaps, leaving Feast there to distract the invaders. But the sorceress persuaded Bor without even knowing it. She was right. They were all doomed.
Doomed!
He threw out the thought without meaning to, and the crowd wailed in response to his unspoken terror. Even steely Ciraya melted before the force of his unwavering despair. He heard her moaning. Sensed her clutching the sides of her head.
She was no arch-sorcerer. The unseen walls wouldn’t last minutes, or even seconds –
He’d done the exact opposite of his intent. Fractured even the tiniest bit of resolve the people still retained. Broke their sorceress-defender in two…
“Twelve Hells, do you have to yell like that? You really do think you’re doomed, don’t you? Hahahahaha.”
He followed the trail of the thought with his enchanter’s-eye, the unknowing link he’d erected –
And Tanra came down the steps into the arena, almost invisible in this mid-morning night-time. She was following the kinkalaman, a flickering black harbinger of their darkest nightmares.
She’d abandoned the bow, which was nowhere to be seen. In her hands were two daggers, if ‘daggers’ was the right word for the heavy-looking things. The blades of each weapon were forked into saws and hooks, every jagged edge and curving arc glistening with a different spell-shade. The knives were fitted with guards extending down to protect her fingers, the metal sheaths festooned with their own rainbow spikes stretching right down to the pommels.
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‘Protect her fingers’ was the wrong assessment too. The hand-sheaths were just there to increase the ease with which she ripped through her targets. They were blade-mounts, nothing more.
She descended from the upper tiers like a demon from the thundercloud skies, like her namesake: Bor felt a sudden tightness in his chest, and his mind whispered the word even as she started detonating hellspawn. The name of his city’s new dark goddess. His saviour.
Nightfell.
* * *
Gong!
The Sunset Keep was a ruin, the remnants of its dusk-pink walls standing almost at the very heart of Treetown, not far from Web’s Eye, where it seemed like half the district’s canals crossed. To whom precisely the castle belonged was a matter of heated dispute in learned circles, particularly the kind of dispute that occurred over brandy or wine after cheese. House Obaddon had laid claim to it, six hundred years ago, but the last of the Mage Wars had seen to the final scions of that line. Since then it had changed hands a dozen times, and had even been the site of several skirmishes two and a bit centuries ago, when the mage-lords of House Dramergain laid claim to the property. Now it was a relic, an institution, shared and enjoyed by all the highborn folk of Mund alike.
Why precisely it so captured the hearts and minds of so many, Garone had no notion. It was a beautiful locale, of course, but, beyond that, he wondered that everyone had so much free time to waste. Wind and rain had worked their own magic on the ruin over the centuries. Wild ivy clad the bones of broken towers. Moss coated the remains of fallen spires. Within its hidden gardens, hundreds of dilettantes could be found exploring the lost courtyards, the tangled groves. The dusky castle had become a gathering-place for snobs, especially those who fancied themselves historians. There were surely at any given moment dozens of young scholars from the Maginox, each accompanied by a foreign student, seeking a corner in which to woo with poetry or simple silence the exotic prey of their choosing. Tours were often being conducted during the day, along with genuine research-teams in the dig-sites in the wood to the north. At least the three restaurants in the area would be closed at this time of day – one restaurant was accessible only by canal-boat, so dense were the thickets in which it had been constructed. It went without saying, prices on the menus in such places started in platinum, with decimal places to express gold and silver.
It shamed Garone to admit he’d eaten in one of the restaurants more than once, with clients and peers. Not the one with canal-only access. Just Cyan Hound. Probably the least ostentatious of the three. The firm always wanted to wine and dine prospective customers at Cyan Hound. He suspected they had a contract, but the truth of the matter was perpetually hidden from his sight. Even for the arch-diviner, life was still filled with its little mysteries.
Gong!
He was fast enough to run on water but the ‘mount’ and ‘dismount’, so to speak, were always a problem for him. Not wanting to risk entering one of the futures in which he simply splatted himself against a concrete-solid, time-bound stretch of water, he stuck to more familiar footing. Chased by the endless stretched sounds of the Mourning Bells, he crossed Fireridge Canal in a single bound, sticking to the trickier land route down the forest paths. Before he even got close to the Sunset Keep, his awareness had completely washed over the area, including the nearby establishments capitalising on the picturesque location.
One thousand and four, was the assessment. A thousand and four, and likely as few as nine-hundred and thirty-nine by the time he actually arrived.
Given the time of morning, on a Starday, that number should’ve been going up, not down, with new arrivals adding to the figure by the minute. He cast a cursory glance over the potential futures his power had calculated, and almost missed his footing in a clump of daffodils.
The number wasn’t going down because people were already fleeing the demons. The number was going down because people were already dying. And just because the restaurants weren’t open to the public didn’t mean the staff weren’t already in there, hard at work in steamy, smoky kitchens. If Garone didn’t play his cards right, Cyan Hound was going to have an opening for head chef within the next few minutes. Never again would the blackberry jam on the venison taste quite the same.
I went there with Neverwish, he remembered. He wore the human-glamour, and some of the industry’s best illusion-detectors didn’t emit a single alarm.
Gong!
How was it that the girl had unlocked the memories the enchanter had hidden away? How had she seen through it? The sheer power she exhibited…
No, she’d implied that the words she’d loosed on him found their origins in Timesnatcher. The seer’s morbid fascination with meeting Duskdown again had permitted him to see through Herreld’s deception, and he’d given Nightfell the phrase, the witch-spell to turn the tumblers in Garone’s recollection, thrusting open the closed doors behind which his recent meetings with Neverwish were secreted.
The pair of them had withdrawn after, permitting him to barely follow as they headed to the Palace. They’d clearly needed nothing more than the expression on his face to back-track his history. Realities had dissolved, leaving one gleaming path stretching off into the horizon behind him, and the fiendishly-powerful pair would divine a way to catch the dwarf unawares. Garone didn’t even have a way to warn his friend. Neverwish carried no glyphstone, had no secret hideout he’d permitted Garone to discern. The dwarf had initiated every contact, removing and replacing the mental barriers before and after every meeting.
Feychilde… Why had the sorcerer done this? To free with the one hand the innocent enchanter, victim of a dragon’s jealousy… and to free with the other the heartless murderer, the destroyer of thousands of lives…
Feychilde… We could do with you now.
He was already going as fast as he could, but he threw aside the scryer’s-sight, ignoring the horrible realities presented by his time- and space-encompassing magic. Past, present, future. It was always going to be that way – full of death. He was more than capable of closing the inner eye on the chronomantic corridors, the library shelves of knowledge only the gods were supposed to possess.
He threw it all aside, and focussed. Somewhere out there across the city, the others who’d stayed, the others who’d fought to live to die – they would do the same.
We can’t fail, Herreld. I hope you fare well in the battles to come.
His awareness was in his lungs and diaphragm, the measured pace of his breathing. The stretch and contraction of tendons in his knees, hips. The light impact of the soles of his feet on soil, twig, bushy leaves. What future-sight he kept he reserved for ensuring his way was clear of obstacles so that he didn’t trip and break his neck, or behead himself on a low branch.
When he stopped, he was crouching atop a mossy wall in the rain, looking down into a broken courtyard through which a trio of demons were scampering. They were taller than men, and could’ve been hairless monkeys in this new darkness, what with their long arms and muscular physiques. Their fangs were green and misshapen, their jaws unable to properly close, gory drool pouring in pints from the corners of their mouths and between their teeth.
There were nineteen people within their kill-range, beyond the surrounding walls and knots of undergrowth. Nineteen souls certain to leave the world forever, if he didn’t act.
It took only a subjective moment to find the right book on the shelves in his mind, pinpoint the reference.
Imgabanar, fourth rank. Assassin-class.
Assassins?
He sucked in his breath as context penetrated the filters on his knowledge.
Druids?
The imgabanar had already achieved their first kills. There was a pair of dead boys twenty yards away in a thicket of trees, each of them devoured almost to bones; the redness in the demonic drool belonged to those two victims. Even an ordinary person would’ve been able to tell, given opportunity to study the scene – the frothy red fluid ran down the demons’ chests to the ground, and the trails could be traced back with mortal eyes to the trees’ shadows.
Ordinary people couldn’t have seen the killings, though. Mortal eyes were always spared the true horror of the truth.
He wasn’t going to waste any time. For someone slower than him, a surprise-attack would have certainly been warranted. In less than a second the demon nearest him would detect him, and less than a second after that a number of roots would rise through the moss beneath his feet, growing exponentially about him. Within four seconds the mesh would be too complete for him to slip free, too strong for him to cut loose before new tendrils bound him.
Since they were going to determine his presence anyway, he had no reason not to openly declare the formal challenge. It would still be a surprise-attack; the sounds coming from his mouth wouldn’t reach them before his daggers in any case. Chronomancy was curious that way.
“By my oath,” he called in a clear voice, “I consign you again to the nightmare. May your low road be slow and hard and filled with fire.”
He sprang down faster than the words he’d spoken, weapons drawn, and made a pass through his enemies.
His optimal strategy would maintain almost full momentum, permitting him three blows on the nearest demon, three on the one in the middle, and two on the farthest.
Before he halted he reviewed his handiwork. The first two had already perished; he had successfully bisected their huge, bony skulls with upward strokes, cutting vertically through the lower jaw and spraying their blood-soaked brains into the air. The following two attacks had ripped great gashes in each of their torsos, spilling the gelatinous crimson drool in their bodies all over the place. They no longer possessed sufficient power to heal themselves, according to his sight. Excellent.
The third fiend wasn’t going to perish – not yet. It was going to regenerate to a battle-ready state and regain its urge to feed in fifty-five seconds or less. The ensorcellments upon his daggers would prevent the demon from fully healing its wounds, but it would be able to put its head back together, carry on killing. Potentially even fix its two comrades up before they faded from the plane.
Finally, Garone’s challenge struck its ears.
The remaining imgabanar gurgled in response, getting just an instant in which to recognise that it was doomed before he rebounded from the safe ground on the far wall, fully shredding it with six major incisions.
Then Garone moved on, hunting the next group.
“By my oath, I consign you again to the nightmare. May your low road be slow and hard and filled with fire.”
* * *
Twivona stumbled, her hand on the cold metal rail, descending from darkness into darkness, the cold blue light of the glowing rod in her hand her only ally.
She led the way, pursued by a chorus of nervous whispers, a drum roll of equally-stumbling steps. Despite the sheer number of them crammed into this narrow corridor, none of the High Lords and Ladies of Mund seemed to want to raise their voice, even when the peals of the Bells faded and died in the distance. Why it was that the magical alarm so quickly fell silent as they travelled the Blackway, she had no notion. She knew it for a fact that the sounds of the Bells penetrated many of the city’s subterranean zones, and they even reached Salnifast and out into the bay. It must’ve had something to do with the way the ancient spells had been cast upon the Tower of Mourning…
I’ll look into it, she promised herself, staggering onwards. Once we get out of this… once this is all over and everything goes back to normal… yes… One of the Masters of the Schools will know… Perhaps I’ll find some interesting research on the topic…
One of the few pleasures in which she indulged herself were the long, dreamy moments in which she remembered being a student at the Maginox. Things were different back then. She hadn’t been next in line. She’d still had to maintain a general sense of decorum – she hadn’t been one of the girls who might be caught kissing boys in the library aisles, oh no. She’d been one of the girls you might catch sleeping in an aisle at three in the morning, open books scattered around her.
Oh, to have so much time. Just the thought that Henthae or one of Twivona’s other experts might direct her attention towards a musty tome of secret lore… It was almost enough to dispel the miasma of anxiety that’d cast its shroud over her, daily dose taken or no.
If anything, it was the metallic quality of this place that was so overbearing, the smooth slope of the descent that had them all stumbling. It was as though a single unbroken needle had been thrust miles into the earth. The footwear of Mundic society was far from suitable on such ground. There were no steps cut into the substance. Were the angle steeper – and were she alone – she’d have been encouraged to employ some wizardry and simply slide on her back to the final destination ahead. As it was, she felt self-conscious, being at the fore and leading in person. It was stupid of her, she knew. The strongest seers in Materium had implied this Incursion was going to eclipse all that had come before. The champions visiting her in such a way was unprecedented – and the gods agreeing with them? It was unheard of.
Hellish damage was being wrought on the streets and buildings she knew and loved, right now – the craft-guilds could remake or even improve on what had been destroyed, but monuments and museums filled with irreplaceable relics would inevitably be lost forever – sacred temples assaulted, despoiled by the abominable paws of loping horrors… and here she was, worrying about missing her footing. Worrying about the political cost of a physical misstep.
But it mattered. Every instinct of her training told her that much. When Litini was taken by the gods, Twivona had thrown herself into learning about rulership as though she were about to undergo a rigorous examination on the subject worse than anything the Maginox had ever thrown at her.
And, just like The Fractured Aegis taught her, the test was still going on. It was every day. Every word. Every expression.
Every step.
I lead. I lead the House. The city. The Realm.
She drew a deep lungful of the tasteless air, glad none of her peers behind her would see the great heaving of her chest.
They followed me in here. They’ll follow me to the end.
Her fingers tightened about the dimly-glowing, dark-blue stick she’d retrieved from the pile beside the entrance, and she raised it a little higher to illuminate the seamless smoothness of the passage. Not so high she couldn’t hold it for long – the moment her arm wavered, the boldness of the action would retroactively become evidence of her weakness. No – she raised it just six more inches. Enough to show those behind her, whose whispering attention she felt fixed upon her, that she was still in the game. She was still in control.
To be fair, most of the High Lords and Ladies had followed her eagerly-enough – the reluctant proportion were soon persuaded to quit their bickering when they realised that the Blackway offered not merely safety, but the opportunity to enter the annals of the Realm’s history. The location of the door to the Blackway was an open secret – but to see the door swinging ajar, tread the paths none before had ever trod? Even those of the Lords and Ladies for whom such intriguing mysteries held little power were swayed when they realised, far worse than the prospect of death, refusing to enter the Blackway carried with it the certitude of missing out. Once they saw the perfect little stack of thirty-three rods, they all became believers. Even Cay-Lehan was back there somewhere near the rear of the group, probably still wearing the same degenerate scowl on her face. She’d been the first to refuse the Blackway summons, and the last to acquiesce.
It was of no moment now. They were all here together, every chief of every House that had attended the High Council of the Arrealbord. If people like Nightfell and Timesnatcher thought Twivona and her peers ought to be here… if the gods thought the door ought to open… who was Lady Osordei to gainsay them?
“How much farther do you think, my Lady?” Wenlyworth gasped.
Her own cohort had been mercifully silent throughout the descent. If she’d thought the passage difficult, she could only imagine the troubles some of the more advanced in age must’ve been putting up with.
She didn’t turn her head, didn’t whisper. Didn’t shriek her ignore as she wished she could permitted herself to do. She replied in her normal speaking voice, its cool cadences maintaining a level of detachment she only wished she could feel.
“Try not to worry, my dear Icaron. I’m sure we’ll arrive soon.”
She wanted to say more, but she had to gulp in more air. Just those meagre sentences cost her much. The whispers immediately behind her seemed to drop away for a few seconds in the wake of her response to her Lord Shadow, and then started up once more with renewed fervour.
She sighed the deeply-drawn air back out and gulped in more to replace it.
At least… at least I managed to keep the fear from my voice.