They – in Materium – they’ll come back from that –
“Yeah, but still, in like two hundred years. Kasssss –“
Okay. Serious-face, officer.
Suddenly the thinfinaran crouched, leaning forwards and putting his hands down, as if to wash his gauntlets in the slime – I looked on as ribbons of blood crept like mould up his armour, thin, red-pink cords lacing their way around his gloves, his bracers, and onto the greaves protecting his forearms. Even as they appeared there, the spatters of red webbing started to fade, disappear, drawn into the demon through the bone-white shell protecting him.
So he was absorbing the blood – absorbing it so that he might open another gate? Had he tired of us so quickly?
Em struck out at him several times in desperation as he hunkered down, but the demon largely ignored her – she staggered him slightly but she wasn’t going to stop him from completing the task at hand.
“Wind!” I cried. “Lift him!”
“I’ve tried zat already!” Well, of course she had. “I can’t even get his feet off ze ground!”
“Flood Boy!” I said even as the little faun stumbled onto the scene in a green flash. “Try to freeze the slush this thing’s standing in! Do not get close to him!“
I was not entirely reassured by the way he staggered, and the way I thought my augmented hearing caught him hiccuping, and muttering, “At last, a real fight,” under his breath.
Beneath a nearby pile of bricks and bodies that had until recently been someone’s home, I could sense the flickering of scarlet flames, heralding the arrival of another fiend. Below ground – in a cellar, perhaps?
I wondered what had come through. Something small, hopefully.
I grasped for something, anything to distract my foe.
When I looked back at the white knight he was still ignoring Em’s blasts, still seemingly digging around in the slime.
Something in me snapped.
It was like a red drape was pulled across the clearing, but the crimson ripples were nothing more than my portals, near-silent scarlet flames coming into view, floating atop the ruddy water.
Flames twenty feet in height.
“Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks! How nice of you to join the party. There’s plenty of entertainment to be found. How about we start by ripping this chap limb from limb?”
My flames faded, revealing the pair of behemoths.
These bintaborax weren’t walls of spiky iron; these were hills. This was the first time I was seeing them since the night I acquired them, and it daunted me to think of how I’d taken them into my service – if it hadn’t worked, if they hadn’t submitted, I’d have been turned into human paste right then and there. The heads at the ends of their hammers were each as big as a dwarf, and probably even heavier.
It daunted me too, to think how quickly I’d broken my secret promise, how quickly I’d started falling back on my demonic arsenal.
“You’re doing the right thing – for everyone. You complete fool…”
Tell me that when this is over.
But there was nothing to be done for it. I had to use them, or I wouldn’t just be letting down the Magisterium – I would be letting down Mund.
They towered above everything in the clearing – would’ve towered above some of the buildings, even if they’d still been standing.
I pointed at the white knight. “Destroy him!”
The thinfinaran didn’t start running immediately, which probably wasn’t a good sign. He solidly planted his two blood-drinking boots in the filth, and waited for them.
He didn’t have to wait long. Whipping their huge orangey warhammers back over their heads, they rushed him, accepting my invitations to battle and closing the distance with startling alacrity.
When the first hammer fell right at his helmeted head, he simply side-stepped, and reached up both hands in the air to catch the second in his palms.
Em didn’t stop pounding away at him, lashing him over and over with lances of energy that left trails of colour in my vision. Flood Boy had a constant beam of ice slamming into his back.
No effect.
The two hands he had on the bintaborax’s hammer seemed to claw into its material – he hadn’t destroyed the weapon outright but I didn’t doubt it’d soon happen. The hammer wept a fiery substance from the grooves his fingers made, splashing down around him and smoking blackly where it fell into the slime.
All the while he continued heedless, increasing the pressure of his clutch on the hammer, expanding the cracks that spread through the demonic metal. His own garb seemed completely impervious to any form of attack.
The bintaborax pulled back on the haft, attempting to release it from the thinfinaran’s grip, but it was a futile effort, despite the bintaborax being nearly three times his height and surely something like thirty times his weight. The feet of the white knight were inexorably fixed to the ground, and he wasn’t letting go now.
The other bintaborax swung again, and again. The one holding the hammer released one of its hands and used it to strike while still pulling back on the shaft, rending at the white knight’s face.
And each time the white knight moved the minimum amount to evade the attack, sometimes twisting to avoid the swipe of a spiky knee or the stomp of a gigantic foot. Barely moving his legs.
I recalled the way he’d pursued Em as she’d retreated from him – always slow, methodical. I had little doubt he had the kind of strength he’d need to hurl himself into the air at her. No, staying in the slime was his victory condition.
I looked over at Em, floating there fifty feet away from me, and caught her eye between the rays of arcing light she was launching.
“He’s a Swamp Hag!”
She stopped, stared at me. “I have tried controlling zis… zis!” She gestured down at the slop. “It von’t respond to me.”
The analogue of the fortify-move you’d make against the Swamp Hag wouldn’t work here…
“Try the ground,” I called. “Drain it!”
With furrowed brows, she stared down at the morass beneath her hovering feet, looking deep in thought.
It barely took ten seconds for the change she’d wrought to make itself evident.
She must’ve opened sinkholes somewhere under the bog, and it was swiftly receding – the infernal slobber had been nearly twelve inches deep in the places where it’d found paths and other indentations in which to well-up, but it was visibly lowering now – eleven inches; ten…
The thinfinaran finally pulled apart the hammer-head he was holding, dark, shredded chunks of metal exploding in a cascade of lava, drenching the bone-white armour.
They kicked and elbowed him, gored at him, threw all their weight at him – every motion missed, every attack evaded. And out of the confusion and ferocity of their assault he ended up clutching the hammer-head of the second bintaborax.
The gauntlets started to bite into the black metal once again. I could sense the sudden hesitation of my bintaborax; I could sense the gloating of the thinfinaran.
The slime, particularly the pool of it around his feet, was half what it’d been a minute ago, but he either hadn’t noticed or didn’t particularly care – I got the impression it was the latter.
I waved a hand, dismissing my nearby summons… those who’d survived, that was. I’d never see my goblins again, and that stung, worse than I’d thought it would. I wasn’t going to risk Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks and especially not Flood Boy.
Green and red lights stole them away from the battlefield, and I drifted towards my enemy.
He looked up, noting my approach, and seemed bemused, cocking his head at me.
“Kas, what are you doing?”
Ending this.
Zel gave me one of her patented you’re-about-to-die sighs.
Now it was Em’s turn to get in on the action – she’d noticed me approaching him, and cried: “Feychilde!”
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I flew closer. Closer.
I knew this had to end now. We could leave him there in his gory sludge, letting him summon more and more of his brethren by the minute – or we could clear the sludge, as we were doing, in which case he’d soon lose interest in the two archmages distracting him; he might leave, seek out more blood to spill – or seek ours with his full efforts.
I couldn’t let him go after Em.
At ten feet away he still stood there, unmoving, emptiness watching me from behind the slatted face-guard.
I closed nearer. I could almost sense the tension in Em’s body even from here.
Five feet away, four…
Through the blur I saw as he burst into motion, gauntleted hands slamming out to fix themselves about my throat, take and choke and disintegrate me –
Hands that recoiled from a circle so heavily reinforced I could barely make him out through the whizzing lines surrounding me.
I gave him a slow, sad shake of my head.
“Time to bow,” I said to him.
“I shall crush thee!” he roared, all pretence at superiority suddenly stripped away, his hell-fire anger coming right to the fore.
I watched him clawing at my shields with fingers that’d torn through bintaborax-iron. Watched him clawing at my shields and laughed in his face.
“Ha! Pathetic,” I said, and now when I stared into the darkness behind the bars of his helm he recoiled, turning away, refusing to meet my gaze even as his gloved hands slapped haphazardly against the wall of force protecting me.
Moment by moment I drove him backwards, forcing him to give ground, submit… acquiesce.
And then, he raised his face to mine.
The moment his unseen gaze met my eyes a shudder seemed to pass, not through his invisible flesh, but rather through the armour itself. The white plates shifted uncomfortably. White-enamelled mail shivered. The gauntlets seemed to vibrate nervously.
I felt it, the very moment the connection was made.
“You’re mine,” I said softly.
“I… I…” The cold voice sounded distracted, choked, as though the demon were expending every effort to avoid responding to me.
But those efforts were in vain.
“I am thy bondsman, Master,” he finished lamely.
“Feychilde!” Em cried again, but happily this time, floating up to me. She couldn’t understand his words, but the body language probably made his subservience clear enough.
“Think of everything you could achieve with a thinfinaran! Protection from most elemental attacks, absorption effects…”
Zel sounded extremely pleased as she started wittering on with herself, immediately coming up with ideas for how to use him, how to make the most of him when I joined with him –
I ignored her. “Can you dismiss the things you’ve summoned?”
He only shook his head slowly.
“Then you’re of no use to me. You’re dismissed.”
The explosive dagger was narrow enough that when I stabbed him in the head it completely bypassed the armour, slipping between the bars of his face-plate and expending its charge right in his invisible face.
A whoosh of air and a hollow boom – the rear of his unbreakable helmet contained the explosion, and he toppled backwards onto the ground.
The ground that was now almost slime-free.
I had a moment’s reprieve, and then –
“Couldn’t ve have done something viz it? Zese demons are…”
“Why do you always have to make things so morally-complex? If you…”
“… just like tools, really, aren’t zey? I can…”
“… actually had the guts to try it out, I’m sure you’d find…”
“… see vhy you vouldn’t vant to use it on people but ozzer demons…”
“Ladies!”
Em and Zel both stopped.
“You should know, you’ve got a supporter in here.” I tapped the side of my head, and Em smiled a mischievous smile and gave me a little salute, obviously intended for my onboard fairy. “But it’s not so simple. By Zel’s own accounting, sorcery screws with your soul… I’m not having something like him on my conscience. If he broke my control – at least this way he’s dead, and if he’s coming back it won’t be for a long, long time.”
“Don’t count on it,” Zel growled.
Whatever – he’s not going around killing people in the immediate vicinity anymore, is he? I call that a win.
“Shall ve?” Em asked, pointing towards my new bintaborax, which was currently defending a group of shocked- and bloody-looking people in the centre of the levelled area. My mekkustremin was inbound, two (figuratively) petrified kids under its arms, and it kicked its way through slime-slugs and imps as it crossed the rubble.
“Let’s.”
Infernum might’ve been hot, but the imps that were backing away from the slow swings of my bintaborax’s hammer didn’t survive when Em sent gouts of flame shooting from her hands, roasting them. A wave of heat flowed through the already heated air, and they crumbled into twists of wings and tails within an instant, cremated flesh shivering free of blackened bones and falling as ash into the puddles of gloop.
The ones that tried to flap off into the sky and leave the neighbourhood I pursued, looping them with the diamond-like tesseract I’d fixed to my circle – I flew past them by the dozen and trapped them easily. The diamond let them in, but didn’t let them back out, so I could just swing through a flock of the demonoids and carry them along with me. A seething mess of horns and tail-tips and claws and bat-wings, struggling against my barrier like flies caught in an invisible net, coasting along at my side as I coursed through the hot air.
I dropped them off near Em, half-a-hundred at a time, and let her trap them in miniature tornados before dropping the diamond and heading after the next load.
Em refined their traps, locking a portion of them in ice, ready for my bintaborax to smash and my epheldegrim to chomp; the rest she focussed on turning to charcoal.
Within two minutes we had as many of the survivors as could be seen or heard in the destruction all gathered together, seventy or eighty of them; the demons in this place were controlled or banished; and Avaelar walked among the wounded, applying such healing as he could manage to their injuries.
Em was floating fifteen feet off the ground, away from the crowd, doing the glyphstone-thing; before we rushed off to Hightown, it would be prudent of us to get an update. A part of me hoped it was all over already, that we’d done our part, though I knew that was unlikely to be true. It’d come pretty close, in the end. I was pretty sure the only reason my shield held up to his attacks was because I was worried Em would be high on his next-target-list. And I’d wasted my handsome little explosive dagger, again, already… I’d keep the sheath, and get Em to make at least one more with me as soon as we could manage.
So while she hovered, entranced by the glyphstone, I was standing there near the crowd. Thinking. Listening to the Bells, their pealing continuing, incessant, a constant demand on the senses. Watching my sylph at work, worrying that he wasn’t able to do enough. He was good at keeping people alive – not so good at actually repairing the lacerations riddling their flesh, the mashed bones grinding around in their limbs.
I need better healing.
“We’ll see what we can do, tomorrow.”
If there is a tomorrow.
“One little fight, and now you’re despairing?”
One little fight. She was right.
“And your ‘demonic arsenal’ has got something of a boost, no matter what you think of thinfinaran.”
It was true. I didn’t mind this trio so much, I supposed, admiring my hell-horse, my doll-demon, my new wall of iron. They were essentially standing to attention, all looking back at me expectantly.
I diverted my attention to the crowd.
They didn’t look so kindly on the demons. The ones who weren’t wailing in grief, or rocking back and forth in shock, or screaming about their unhealed stumps… those few were staring at my three new minions.
Staring in absolute terror mingled with absolute loathing. An enmity so complete it chilled me.
I hadn’t been seeing this from their side, not at all. I thought of the entities as pets. They were leashed murderers.
I shuddered involuntarily, and waved at the three of them. A few of the Oldtowners started up in surprise as red flames consumed my murderer-pets.
It was then that a middle-aged woman in a smoke-blackened nightgown, but with no visible injuries, approached me. She stopped ten feet away, then paced a little on the spot as if nervous.
“F-Feychilde!” she called, making it a half-question.
“Madam.” I nodded to her.
“I was… I was there, at Firenight Square. You saved me.”
I couldn’t help but smile a little at that, grim as it might’ve looked. It felt good to know that for all the dead bodies, there was still some measure of success that evening.
“Not alone – she was the one killing the critters.” I pointed over at Em, resplendent in her magister’s robe. I couldn’t take all the credit, even if it meant reinforcing the Magisterium’s role in saving the day when the giant spiders attacked.
But the woman wasn’t interested in Em – she had more pressing concerns.
“Are – are they gone?” She looked around the clearing. There were no more demons in sight – only their smouldering remains, and the odd pool of strange slime here and there.
“I can’t guarantee it, but I’ve done what I can. They shouldn’t be coming back.” I gestured at my sylph and said, “Avvie,” getting his attention, before turning back to her and continuing: “I’ll be leaving soon I think, but I’ll leave my sylph here to protect you until some more magisters or watchmen get through.”
She eyed the seven-foot-tall sylph with a strange mixture of emotions on her face.
“He’s not a demon. He’s not human – but he’s not from the Twelve Hells. You can relax around him. He’s really very polite, but he can protect you.”
Avaelar, regarding us intently, turned and bowed to the woman, his muscles rippling down his legs and back.
“Ah – well – yes, thank you,” the woman breathed, staring at the sylph.
He turned to me, his face sombre, and spoke in the fey tongue.
“Feychilde,” I knew he wanted to say ‘Master’ but I’d forbidden it, “I wish to – wish to speak with thee.” There was a troubled expression lingering about his lips, his eyes.
“You are speaking with me, Avvie.” I used the same tone as I might’ve used when talking with Xastur. “What is it?”
His gaze fell to the floor at my feet. “I apologise.”
“Apologise?” I straightened, looking around at the wounded he’d been tending. “Why?” I heard my voice rise, sharply. “What’ve you done?”
“Nay, Feychilde, ‘tis not regarding these low creatures,” he waved a hand; “I hath done all I might for them, and fewer shall die tonight for mine aid. Rather it is of mine attitude when first we met that I must now speak. In truth I thought thee a knave – not for centuries hath I known a sorcerer akin unto thee.”
I smiled. “So I’m not a… what was it, ‘baseborn scapegrace’, anymore?”
“Thou art surely no scapegrace.”
I regarded him for a moment, doing my best to figure out if he’d just cracked a joke, or if he was so straight-laced he didn’t realise the back-handed compliment he’d just given me.
There was no devious twinkle in his eye, no smirk twisting the corner of his mouth.
I sighed.
“Thank you, noble sylph.”
He nodded, and then assumed a watchful poise, standing tall and turning slowly in a circle, flicking his gaze over the ‘low creatures’ who were now his charges.
At least he’ll make a good watchdog. Can he handle demons on his own, or should I leave Flood Boy here too?
“Unless a big threat comes, he should be okay.”
I drew a shuddering breath. Okay.
Em was coursing back over towards me. I turned to watch her fly closer.
“I’ve told zem vhat’s happened here but zey have great need of assistance in Hightown.” The words were hitting my ears before she even started to slow down. “Four breaches – maybe more.”
“Sticktown?”
“Everyvhere but Hightown is settling down. Ve need to head up zere, fast.”
I nodded, then pushed myself up into the air. “Your spell will stay on me? I’m leaving my wings here.”
Her eyes went unfocussed for just the merest fraction of a second. “I’ve just renewed it. It vill last, and I can do it again if need be.”
I looked down at Avaelar as I rose up into the sky. “Protect them even if it costs you your life,” I called down to him.
He just nodded at me, not even taking his eyes off his surroundings. He was definitely taking his job seriously.
Four breaches. Four more summoners, at least.
If only I’d had less beer and more sleep, I might’ve been excited, given this first victory against the thinfinaran. But a part of me, almost submerged, was screaming that I’d thrown away my explosive dagger again, fighting something that could have torn me limb from limb – the part of me that knew I was emotionally vulnerable right now, exhausted and grieving, running on pure adrenaline. It could’ve all gone wrong, if he’d been able to punch through my circle…
But he hadn’t. I was invulnerable.
Invulnerable.
Not a few of the crowd watched us as we climbed higher, sped faster, tearing away towards the source of the hot wind… the source of the ever-present Bells… the source of the Incursion.