JADE 2.3: THE HERESY

“When it comes to Heresy, however, we do not advise to err on the side of caution. Many are the dark gods, and many more are the delusions they foster in the secret minds of men, seeking the profits thereof, sowing the seeds of degeneracy and destruction. Whichever form it should take it has the same root, and that root is beyond redemption.”

– from the ‘Magister’s Handbook’ ch. 40

I had to trust that Em, with her elevation even higher than mine, had either already spotted the ensuing disaster, or would at least notice my rapid disappearance and follow. I dismissed Flood Boy as I coursed through the air at top speed, aiming for the absolute middle of the crowd, very close to the point where the two roads crossed and the traffic was thickest. Confused wagoners were shouting at the tops of their voices, and many people seemed unaware of what exactly what was transpiring, knowing only that it was bad and that they wanted to get the Twelve Hells out of there.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

I’ve got to try, Zel.

“And if you can’t cover them all? It’s not going to be fun, you know.”

I have to do what I can. Whether it’s enough or not.

To get to the centre I had to fly over the edge of the crowd nearest me, where it was a constant dance – the crowd condensing, the people doomed to die next pressing in, then dying, the crowd dispersing… Some few escaped merely wounded as they tried to flee in the wake of the nearest spider’s latest attack, but most fell and didn’t rise again. Even a glancing kick from one of those devastating arachnid legs was enough to smash someone’s skull or rupture their internal organs.

I saw the corpses of mages, their robes blood-splattered – those who had been unprepared for confrontation. Perhaps some of them were those wizards who had been employed in clearing the smoke with their breeze-calling spells. Em’s wave of air had served to clear much of the smoke in the Square, but it would soon be back, and it might stay this time if my guess was correct.

The braziers offered little illumination in the gloom of twilight, but it was plenty for me to see by. Where I was intending on landing, the men and women were arguing, panicking, shouldering each other aside to protect their children from the crush – I also spotted the two Northman bards whom I’d been serenely watching perform just a few minutes ago, jostling for position and clutching their lyre-cases.

From above I was able to spy out a wagon no one could climb onto, loaded with sacks, and I settled down on it.

It seemed those below me as I flew had been following me with their eyes, so I had quite an audience as I touched down, already drawing out shields. Those in the immediate vicinity who spotted me must’ve muttered to those around them, because within a moment a hush fell over the crowd. They saw my robe, they saw my mask, and hopefully they saw the reassuring smile I’d slapped on my face to hide my horror.

“Feychilde at your service!” I cried in a flamboyant, slightly-shaky voice. “Now if you’ll all sit tight, I’m going to try something that should stop those things getting to you.”

I might only be able to reassure those in the centre, but that didn’t mean I had to stop with protecting them. I had to see how far I could go.

As a more-pacified sort of murmuring welled up from the crowd around me, I was already up to drawing a hexagon, which was further than I’d ever pushed my abilities before – a shield that stretched out farther beyond my pentagon than my pentagon did my square… It seemed the distance I could extend the protective force was exponential, but the strength of it, the strength was what I needed to test. And these were the worst possible circumstances for a test. Real lives, in danger. Real monsters, coming nearer.

Still, the hexagon didn’t reach the edge of the crowd. Not even close.

Storm clouds washed over the sky, thunder rippling again – above us all Em was hard at work, brewing lightning – I couldn’t lose my focus by looking up at her; I had to perceive my shields, force my imagination onto reality –

Seven-sided shield. Eight-sided shield. Nine-sided shield.

Sweat broke out on my brow suddenly, and I felt the range jumping around each time now, as if I’d reached some cut-off point – six sides gave me thirty-three feet, seven sides gave me forty-nine. But eight sides gave me fifty-one, then nine gave me sixty-one… They didn’t seem to obey any of the principles of geometry this plane was used to dealing with.

My world was a spinning mess of rotating azure lines.

Ten. Eleven. Twelve shields.

Tears of frustration fell down my face, thankfully obscured by the mask.

I couldn’t make the thirteenth. The blue glowing ends wouldn’t join. It didn’t matter how many people were in the way, how many things were going on in between – I could see the snarls at the limits of my shielding with my sorcerer’s-eye, where the last shield just refused to take.

And I could see the people dying beyond.

I felt it the moment one of the spiders crashed into the twelfth shield – away towards the north-west, following the Hill Road up towards Hilltown. A spider had finished off those near it and thrust itself against my outermost ring.

The shield held. I could only sense the attempted-intrusion in the vaguest way, but I could easily imagine the spider slashing with its legs, snapping forwards with its jaws, striking the air in front of the terrified people nearest to it and bouncing back off.

Then I could see it, leaping up a good twenty feet into the air as if to try to surmount or climb the shield.

I always pictured my barriers as if they existed on a horizontal plane, while imagining them to work in three dimensions. My shapes floated roughly around my waist-level, but when something tried to attack from high-up, they still got in the way.

Now I got to watch it in gigantic-scale, as the rippling-blue surface shone like a dome to my eye; the spider was unable to get purchase on the invisible material, and it slid back to the ground at the edge, immediately renewing its assault.

It must’ve looked terrifying to those beneath it, though, the spider seeming like it was about to fall in their midst.

The moment of relief, being glad that it had worked, was replaced by twinges of irritation, weakness:

I felt another impact on the shield. And another. North-east and south-east.

And another. West.

I felt my control slipping.

I redoubled my efforts, forcing myself to see my shields, make them real, hold them in place. This many shapes were hard for a single mind to control.

If this carried on, the outermost shield was going to drop, and all the people between my eleventh and twelfth shields were going to get slaughtered.

I had my fists clenched, my jaw set, and I could feel the icy sweat sliding down my back, even my toes curling up in dread and fear and focus.

Have to hold… have to maintain…

I thought about all those people who were going to die if I failed, all those children, and I realised –

Fool! I cursed myself.

“You!” I tried not to snap, but it simply came out that way, pained, with all my concentration going into shoring up the shield.

I hadn’t been picking out anyone in particular, and I noticed I had the attention of at least ten of the people nearest me.

“Get – message – to edge – move – children – inward!”

I didn’t even allow them a moment to hesitate before growling, “Now!”

That got them going.

I had to trust them to do their part, returned my focus to my shields.

Lightning struck. One bolt, then another, then another… nine bolts.

I couldn’t tell, didn’t dare risk my focus by trying to fly to get a better vantage point – but if each of Em’s attacks destroyed a spider, that was nine more of the monsters gone.

Or if they didn’t… Had the lightning-bolt she used on the first spider done the work all on its own? Or did it need to be blasted with the thunder-wave, turned to ash, in order to be destroyed? It was impossible to tell, the way the latter had immediately followed the former…

Then the wave hit, indiscriminate. We all felt it, but down here on the ground it was little more than a sudden gust of wind.

It was impossible to tell if it had done the job on the spiders she’d hit, but I knew one thing for sure – the rest weren’t stopping. I could feel their aggression, palpable against the wards.

I grimaced, trembling, control wavering.

Another impact on the shield. And another. And another.

I loosed an animal scream of rage as the tridecagon shattered.

It was no good – there was no time for me to release my anger and grief – I had to hold, had to keep a grip on the eleven rotating rings that remained to us or so many more would perish.

I heard the shrieks, the despair as those on the edges of the crowd realised their defences had fallen, left them vulnerable.

The shrieks as they started to die.

“Crush in!” I roared, as loudly as I could. Damn it, people might die from trampling, but they would definitely die if the giant spiders got to them…

Where’s the back-up? I roared almost as-loudly, internally.

I could feel my glyphstone almost burning in my satchel under the robe, hear it shrilling away, had been able to feel and hear it for some time now, but –

“They’re there. Two bands of magisters. Third just arriving. But they’re of limited use. All they’ve managed so far is to draw some attention.”

Champions, then!

“I’m sure they’re coming. Hold on.”

I’m doing my best!

“I know you are.”

Already, I felt the first impact on the dodecahedron. The one to the north-west again, the giant spider pressing, straining against me, like an itch burning in my brain, the feeling of an unattended problem, a niggling doubt, seeking to slow the rotation of the shape, chip at the twelve sides…

The design of sorcerous shielding could be a two-edged sword, I realised. The shields rotated, and though they weren’t ‘real’ they were somehow realer than ‘real’ – I suspected that the attacks on my shields could land on any part of the shield at any time. This could mean a single determined attacker couldn’t punch a hole through in a single location. But this could also mean assailants on either side of the shield could just so happen to hit it in the same place at almost the same time. And while I could happily walk off without moving the shields, I was certain that I wouldn’t be able to reinforce them by my sheer force of will if I did so. As soon as enough pounced on Shield Eleven, it’d leave my control – then the tenth, ninth… I was stuck here, rendered otherwise useless while I held the structure together. I couldn’t just go to an edge myself and help whittle down the numbers of spiders pressing in on the shielding.

It looked like Em had given up on the lightning-bolt strategy – I noticed her swoop down from above, platinum hair and red cape streaming together in the fury of her descent. She plucked one of the spiders off the ground with her air-control, forcing it to fly twenty feet in front of her. She repeatedly pummelled it with great fists of wind as she flew on, swinging past another spider, forcing it to join the first.

Once she’d gathered together five or so, she halted, fifty foot up, clear of the crowd.

I snarled under my breath, using only a fraction of my attention to keep an eye on the arch-wizard, the majority devoted to feeling the burden of the impacts. They were coming more regularly now. Where were the other champions? Surely an arch-diviner could’ve got here by now?

The spiders had to be heavy, and she was forced to utilise her own awareness to move them rather than letting them direct their own course like she could with me – I had no idea how many she could lift like that at once. Perhaps five was her limit.

“Bury them?” I cried. If she’d been focussing on me she could’ve moved the words to her ears over the cries of the crowd, I was sure, but she was engrossed in what she was doing.

She pointed one hand at them, and smashed them down into the pavement, repeatedly battering them into the ground – they rose high enough for me to see them, a hideous clutch of spindly legs.

Meanwhile, Em’s other hand was drawn back, forming an intense orange-white ball of flame.

As she threw spiders into the ground, I could feel spiders throwing themselves into my ring.

Impact. Impact. Impact.

Shield Eleven was wavering.

That only meant everyone beyond it was dead.

My failure.

“Don’t you think that way,” Zel whispered with a fervency in her voice that I hadn’t heard in my head before. It was like the way she’d whispered underneath the Red Hart, before I’d rejoined with her. As if… as if she cared about me. “You’ve already saved hundreds, maybe thousands! Keep it together, Kas!

“And of course I care about you,” she added, in a hurt voice.

Em levelled her other arm at the bundle of spiders she ‘held’, and in the same motion let the fiery nimbus gathered about it fly free.

There was a single heartbeat as it travelled, the course preternaturally-unerring, blasting into them at just the right spot.

Then there was only the explosion.

Torn-off shreds of giant spider hurtled through the air in a nauseating sphere, sections of leg and smoking chunks of huge abdomens; she caught them in a brief tornado, throwing the remnants aside towards clear ground but not leaving them in a single mound – probably out of fear of them regenerating.

Suddenly Em wasn’t alone in the air – there was an ice elemental floating next to her.

It was nine or ten feet tall, a featureless humanoid shape of glinting blue, arms tipped in frosty-white blades.

Something seemed to pass between Em and the elemental – had she conjured it? – and then they began circling the edge of the crowd in opposed directions, each of them raising aloft more giant spiders –

So no, this was another arch-wizard. There was a dark core in the centre of the ice, a humanoid shape.

A champion?

Winterprince!

Until now the impacts on my eleventh shield had been just as severe; the shield still wavered, though it hadn’t worsened since my conversation with Zel. But with Em taking another five spiders out of the equation, and Winterprince taking – eight? ten? he was powerful! – for himself, the impacts suddenly diminished. I felt better. More confident.

I drew a breath, and forced a grim smile onto my features.

With the right combination of confidence and concentration, I fixed the eleven-sided shape.

Why stop there?

“Why indeed?”

Shield Twelve came back into place, a sudden burst of force that, I could sense, threw each of the remaining thirty or forty giant spiders back a short distance.

They still hacked at the shield, but I had it pretty securely anchored in my thoughts by this point. They’d only barely broken it before. Now I had a smile on my face – they weren’t breaking it again.

I could imagine the relief of those just inside Shield Eleven’s borders, upon seeing the gigantic arachnids scratching an invisible surface in front of their faces finally being pushed back – even if only by six feet.

I could sense the flight still there beneath my feet. I rose a few yards into the air.

“Play a Song of Soothing or something, won’t you?” I asked the two musicians loudly. “Give them a bit of room, everyone.”

I didn’t stop to listen to their retorts, but headed out to where I could see Em beyond the shield, preparing another fiery explosion of doom for another clutch of spiders.

I’d have to trust in the flying-spell to evade attacks if I exited the barrier; I was leaving my circle behind, and it was the lynchpin of the whole structure.

“Perhaps it’d be best to just not leave the shielding? Let Em and Winterprince deal with them?”

She was right, but I couldn’t just stay there in the centre.

Just once, I caught Feychilde in the murmuring of the crowd as I soared over it.

I reached the edge and hovered there, low enough to be floating within the curve of my shield, studying the nearest spider. Doing my best to ignore the carnage beyond.

Its body was roughly the size of an adult horse’s, its abdomen a fleshy yellowy colour but black-veined. Two rows of four glossy brownish eyes, each as big as glyphstones, were suspended above the extended mandibles. The convulsing swarm of weird legs had it repeatedly flailing its underbelly and ‘feet’ at the shield, striking over and over again against the glowing barrier with a savagery that was unnatural. At times it would leap up against my barrier, getting a few feet closer to me in relative terms, but of course it could find no purchase on the dome of force, always falling back down again in a tumble of hairy limbs.

Near me there were scores and scores of panting, sobbing, wailing people. There was a group of dwarves, four feet at the shoulder and leather-clad, several of them tearing at their long beards and bellowing in impotent rage.

I felt their pain.

Out here I could apply some finer work, put spikes on the outside, flickering blue daggers attached to the glowing tridecagon – but that would only serve to wound them, which would in turn only make the detached limbs grow back bigger and better than before…

These were foes I was allowed to hurt, foes I wanted to hurt. I knew roughly how many innocent Square-goers had died – I’d felt their deaths in my own peculiar way; I could see their bodies merely by letting my attention linger on the red obliteration strewn across the Square all around us. There was this pulsing desire for vengeance flashing through my mind – yet there was no way for me to kill them outright. I just didn’t have the firepower.

“We have to apply ourselves to the problem. I’ve been thinking.”

Darkmage, druid, lots of firepower.

“But not much fine control, Kas. Notice they’re all doing the same thing?”

It doesn’t matter, does it? My mind-voice quavered, shook with raw emotion. He’s given them all dropping regeneration. This was intended to be a… a bloodbath.

“It implies he’s new.”

Seriously?

“I know. But think of the preparation. This took time to set up.”

“Feychilde!” came a girl’s voice from the crowd near me, ten feet deep in the mass of pressing bodies.

I recognised the voice – I looked down, and was surprised to see the brown-haired, freckle-nosed assistant from the mask shop, now with her locks hanging loose about her shoulders, wearing a mid-priced blue dress and cloak. There was a young, gawping man hanging off her arm.

So it’s not just me and Em having a date from the Twelve Hells, then.

“You,” I replied amiably, drifting slightly closer.

“Athaline,” she supplied, then, with a stricken look on her face, said, “Can’t you do something?”

I bristled a little at that, though she couldn’t possibly know what was really going on, I supposed.

“I am,” I grated. “Why do you think they’re stuck on the outside?”

“That’s you?” she blurted.

I nodded, and noticed quite a few of those around staring at me too, now.

“I – I’m sorry,” she said. “Your friend is a champion too?”

So she’d recognised Em.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“A magister.”

“Is she –“

I didn’t have time for twenty questions. Zel was right. We had to knuckle down in getting to the bottom of what was really going on here.

“Just sit tight,” I said in a somewhat-louder voice, cutting Athaline off and rising up a few more feet into the air, trying to catch the attention of everyone around. “We’re okay in here for now – my shields aren’t going to break now there’s less of them – and the wizards are doing clean-up. Look.”

I gestured, and dozens followed my finger with their gazes as I pointed to Em swinging past this section of the crowd, the spider I’d just been staring at thirty seconds ago now caught up, tumbling with others in the tempest that was thrust out in front of her.

Dozens more were ignoring me, of course. The terror and despair had overtaken many, and they did little more than cry out for those they had lost – their loved ones dead, or simply misplaced in the crush? – whichever it was, it seemed many simply didn’t know, and their anguish was plain to hear.

I rose higher, leaving the crowd and its various distractions behind, getting to a solid hundred feet of elevation before I felt safe from the leaps of the remaining giant spiders. I was outside the shield’s dome now, vulnerable, but with the ability to see, and the freedom to think.

From up here I could spy the now-four groups of magisters on the scene, farther out across the Square, doing their best with their five-strong bands to distract a single spider apiece. Their sorcerers had summoned a few imps capable of holding the spiders in place momentarily, but it wasn’t enough, and half of the demons had already been shredded, sent back ‘dead’ to Infernum for a swifter recovery. They couldn’t just pop their imps around the battlefield like I could’ve done. Three of the wizards were casting fireballs, probably aiming to copy the two arch-wizards soaring around the crowd exploding the monsters, but unlike Em they couldn’t use their wind-spells at the same time, and they had a limited, precious supply of magic. As such, many of the fireballs were missing, striking the ground and detonating the paving-slabs, or even sailing off into the sky. As I watched one mage stopped throwing them, perhaps having run dry. I saw a pair of what I could only assume to be druids, each double man-height, wrestling with one of the spiders; I imagined the magister-diviners were coordinating the various groups, making sure no one got killed, but what the enchanters were up to I simply couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see any illusions. Maybe they’d tried those tricks already and found them useless, or maybe I was just missing something; even the faerie-sight didn’t let me see every nuance at a glance, through the smoke, in the gloom of twilight.

So you’re a darkmage druid, and you attack Firenight Square for… no apparent reason? What would someone have to gain from this?

“A distraction?”

Let’s check the glyphstone, find out what they’re actually saying.

I fished it out from my satchel and gingerly held the radiant, almost-too-hot-to-touch chunk of crystal up in front of my face. Its blaring filled my ears, then cut off abruptly the moment I let my consciousness slip into it, seeing what it wanted me to see, hearing what it wanted me to hear.

This was different to before. Where Em had been contacting me in real-time, this time I witnessed a message that had probably been left awaiting my attention, like the images and sounds had somehow been recorded by the glyphstone for me to view later.

A thin, bald-headed magister with a neatly-combed, iron-grey moustache and a red-and-silver robe appeared before my eyes, standing before a milky-black wall, like those found in the Maginox – he wasn’t holding a glyphstone up, but I still got the impression I was floating there in front of him like I’d been with Em. Perhaps another glyphstone had been upraised by a colleague or subordinate while he spoke.

His voice was cold, matter-of-fact.

“All champions,” the man nodded strangely, then continued, “we have entered a state of general alarm. Firenight Square, the Sunset Keep, and Openway are under attack.”

My eyes widened.

“Jurisdictional authorities in Oldtown, Treetown and North Lowtown have been notified and magistry dispatched. Future-lines suggest this is a concerted effort on behalf of the Srol Heretics. As such, each location is to be treated under code thirty-two as a killing-zone. Expect extreme danger, employ extreme caution, and execute any heretics on sight. The usual reward policies are in place. Thank you for your service.”

The message shimmered, then faded out – I was left clutching a cold, silent piece of dark crystal that reflected nothing.

Execute on sight? That’s the rule?

What in the Twelve Hells did that mean?

The Srol Heretics were only the latest form of magical anti-Magisterium revolt. There’d been the Five-Fold Rebellion, back when I was a baby, and the Chaosmakers in the time of my parents’ adolescence. There was little said about them by the news-writers, and that little was never good. They committed dozens of atrocities a year. The arch-heretics topped the most-wanted lists – they never presented their own names, and no one had wanted to glamorise mass-murderers. Thus the authorities had merely numbered them, from Hierarch One to Hierarch Thirty-Something.

Some of whom had been killed. And I understood that.

Still, I wasn’t comfortable with the rule as presented. How was I to judge a heretic from a champion? And what if I caught a heretic running? Was I supposed to just summon demons into his path, watch him get shredded by a pendulum-tongued freak, instead of getting the goblins to wrap him up and, you know, arrest him? Was this how things were really done?

An image flashed into my mind, of Em holding a family of trolls under the water until they stopped moving.

I thought of all those dead people, mindlessly killed right in front of me, all those I had failed to save…

Perhaps I could do it. Perhaps I could send demons after the perpetrators of this senseless slaughter, forsaking my intention, my unspoken oath, to be Feychilde in more than just name, to be the one sorcerer who was… different.

I swooped back down to earth, coursing over towards Em. There were only a few spiders left now, and we’d soon be able to release the crowd and move on.

Three attacks? Where do we go next? I couldn’t have kept the fury from my mental voice had I tried.

“I’m not so sure it’s a distraction now.”

Distraction isn’t how the heretics do it. They’re just in it for the slaughter.

“Humans,” she thought dismissively.

That’s your assumption.

“You think they’re, what, elves?”

How would I know? I don’t know anything concrete about them. Just that they come out, they kill people, they hate the Magisterium.

“So they kill as a protest?”

I… guess so? I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting one.

“Well, get ready, because it sounds like you’ve got an invite to dinner.”

There’s no darkmage in the area, though.

As I thought the words, I realised.

A druid… they could be here, couldn’t they?

“If they’re an arch-druid, which is inevitable given the sheer amount of monsters we’ve been dealing with… they could be right there outside the shield, ready to change shape and fight or flee at a moment’s notice.”

Flea. Given our the telepathic nature of our conversation, she understood the concept to which I was referring despite the identical pronunciation. Like, in a small-enough shape, they’re practically invisible, right?

“You’re getting better at this, Kas.”

And they can still use their archmagery when shape-shifted?

“Probably.”

I grunted aloud – I was slowing to a stop near Em, where she was pulverising three more spiders, and the sudden loss of momentum made all the shrimp and spices and lemon and mead lurch in my stomach.

There were just five giant spiders left in this part of the Square after the ones Em was fireballing, and Winterprince was about to gather the last of them and destroy them, a couple of hundred feet away on the far side of the shield.

She turned to face me, and despite the ruin surrounding us all I could see was her, beautiful and wild: an untamed, implacable queen of magic, swollen in stature here in the centre of her power, orange-blue flames still clinging to the edges of her hands and her fingers.

There was a stupid part of me that just wanted to smile, to take her in my arms, kiss her right there, floating over the destruction. Ignore everything.

There was a larger part of me shaking with rage. Take up arms. Feel everything.

“We have a problem,” I said. “Did you get chance to check the glyphstone?”

“Three locations,” she replied, businesslike.

“We have a druid here somewhere. Powerful but unskilled, apparently.” I tapped the side of my head.

She shook hers. “Zey have vithdrawn. Zey aren’t healing ze dire spiders…”

She was right about that much, at least. Fierce winds had been used to scatter the remaining segments of leg (and other, less-categorisable chunks of arachnid-meat) and they weren’t stirring, weren’t returning from this level of destruction.

“Do you know of any Hierarchs who specialise in giant animals?”

Em looked up for a moment in thought, then shook her head slightly. “Zere are only five Hierarchs viz druid powers, I think… Two; Eight; Seventeen and Eighteen? – or is it Eighteen and Nineteen? And Twenty-Nine. But I… I have never heard of anything like zis.”

I nodded, biting my lower lip, then said, “I think this is a new one, given what Zel’s said. Might be they don’t have a number yet…” I looked up, looked down. “I just wish there was a way to know for sure. They could be out there somewhere, an ant in a crack in the ground… a wasp somewhere up above us… waiting for me to drop the shield.”

The strain of holding it up was like holding a heavy bag of shopping. Sure, I’d have to drop it eventually, but without the pressure of attacks on its surface it was something I could maintain for hours, I was sure. It’d hurt like the Twelve Hells afterwards but it’d be worth it.

I had the notion it’d be really hard to re-establish once I let it go, though. Like doing pull-ups with the arm that’d held the bag of shopping for hours – no chance.

“Vhat does your little friend think vould happen if you dropped it?”

Can you look ahead? Can you sense danger when I plan on revoking it?

“Little… friend…”

Zel!

“There’s too much chaos here for me! The way I read it, you’re in danger all the time. Shield up, shield down. Everyone here is.”

“Everyone’s still in danger,” I reported. “Whatever I do.”

Em frowned. “Maybe you’re right, zen. Ve need back-up. Let’s see vhat ze diviners say.”

It was interesting, I thought as we flew eastwards, towards one of the magister-bands that was dispatching a lone giant spider – interesting that she so quickly turned to get help. It was a good answer, and she got there so quickly because working as a part of a team was ingrained in her already. Now perhaps it’d let us get revenge swiftly, take the fight to the enemy.

“If you aren’t going to join with some more-powerful entities or even come with me to get some, you aren’t going to be doing any fighting,” Zel reminded me again.

The magisters in the eastern quarter were actually fighting on the sloped, pink-and-yellow-canvas sides of the Pavilion of Illusions. Well, their diviner was. The blond-haired, unshaven chap was virtually skipping along the rope ribbing beneath the stretches of canvas, clearly under the benefits of one of those precision-boosting spells which had been enjoyed by Meneda, the drunken dark-diviner back in the Red Hart. Meanwhile, their quarry – the vast spider – chased him, skittering always closer, closer, until he turned and slid down then sprang back up again. It was quite an impressive performance, really.

Their druid was tending their enchanter on the ground – ah – it looked like the enchanter had been taken out of the battle early. Their sorcerer had surrounded the two of them in a wavy shield, its lines visible to me when I focussed, but otherwise they looked like they were out of options.

Their exhausted-looking wizard was a mid-twenties-looking redhead, the only other magister of the band still in the fight alongside the diviner. She was conjuring spears of ice in her hand, but she was forced to – at least partially – launch them with her own bodily strength. Strength which appeared almost-depleted – and the few that’d struck home did nothing but give the monster something to regenerate. Even now I could see the ice-spear currently embedded in its strange chitinous hide wavering as the magical weapon was slowly pushed out of the wound, and noted the way the spider was distorting, engorging.

As we neared the wizard saw us and, with a look of relief on her face, cried in a highborn squeak: “Emrelet! I didn’t prepare any fireballs!”

“Leave zis to me,” the arch-wizard cried back, and bent herself at the spider, arrowing at it where it clung like a spindly shadow atop the highest tent-castle, preparing to leap.

It didn’t get the opportunity – a tornado struck it, sending it up, hurtling into the sky far from us.

Em followed it across as it arced back towards the ground, her hand surrounded by the burning nimbus one more time.

I floated there near the tired wizard, and the diviner leapt down and joined us, watching Em detonate the monster away from the crowd in a single sudden clap. Then within five seconds another magister-band, tangling with their own spider nearby, distracted her and she went over to help them out.

“She’s very good,” I commented, forgetting myself for a moment.

“She is highly competent,” the wizard replied in an upper-class accent that made it sound like she was trying to disagree with me.

Despite her best attempt, the wizard’s envy of the arch-wizard couldn’t have been more obvious.

I turned to face the unshaven diviner. The wisps of blond hair on his head were barely longer than the darker fuzz on his cheeks. He had bleary eyes as if he’d not been awake for long, and his blue-grey robe, sporting the ten-spoked Magisterium wheel dead-centre, was spotted and stained. But appearances could be misleading. He’d worked wonders leading the giant spider in circles like that, while Lady Wizard here had failed to do her part. If there’d been one more spider beating on my shield at the crisis point, when the twelve-sided shape had begun to waver, it might’ve tipped the wards over the edge and hundreds more might’ve died. These magisters, this diviner – it might well be that I owed them my victory, as much as one could say it had been one at all.

Such a waste of life…

I snapped out of it. “There’s a druid here,” I grated at him. “We need to find them. Now. Do you have a spell for it?”

The diviner shook his head, wrinkling his nose. “You wan’ Osselor Tyne,” he said in a gruff, true lowborn accent – now how had a guy like him gone and gotten himself a Maginox education? – as he pointed northwards. “Over with the Undernigh’ crew; he’s always scrutinisin’ them future-lines. Always try tellin’ him, there’s more to divvynation than seein’ the future, but –“

“Yes, quite,” the wizard-magister interrupted, “but I’m sure the champion has to be on his way? No?”

She made it a challenge, looking up at me almost peremptorily.

You’re not the boss of me, is what I longed to say.

But she was right. She’d done me a favour.

I flashed a toothy grimace at the diviner. “I bet she’s fun to work with,” I said dryly, leaving it at that as I ascended back up to twenty feet or so of elevation.

She gave a little gasp of affront. The diviner made a quick gesture at his temple, as if tipping a non-existent cap at me in recognition, then I streamed away through the air.

I coursed my way towards the arena, and within moments I was at the Hill Road leading up out of the Square towards Hilltown, seeing bodies here and there, dotted around the landscape. Em was on her way back – she would follow me, help me find the correct mag-

“Swerve!” Zel screamed.

It wasn’t even a decision; I just did as she commanded.

A behemoth of a creature dropped out of the air right next to me – would’ve squashed me right into the road if not for the fairy’s warning. It hit the ground with a shudder and I turned in the air, leaning backwards so I could look at the creature whilst increasing my distance from it.

This spider was far, far larger.

“It’s the druid. They changed above you – it has to be them.”

My eyes narrowed.

Its eight eyes were on a level with me, twenty-five feet up, and the knees of the arched legs were nearly three times that high – it had the vague dimensions of the Pavilion of Illusions I’d just left behind, like the bones of such a structure stripped of its canvas, outlined in its gargantuan limbs. Its mandibles were as long as I was tall, dripping venom in gobbets that would overflow a cup. The white-flecked hairs bristling all over its body were like individual fingers – pale, sharp fingers – tracing incomprehensible patterns at its surroundings.

Those drifting around the area swiftly departed, the men and women and children running or hobbling as fast as the limbs left to them would carry them away, many howling in refreshed terror.

When the spider shrieked, I felt only its rage.

The arch-druid’s rage.

But this had to be some kind of joke.

When it leapt upon me, coiling and uncoiling in an instant to spring at me with the power of what I could only imagine to be a million horses, crashing at full speed into a dangling, unsupported target like me – it was then that I had to trust. Trust Winterprince, trust the Magisterium and their magisters. Trust that the problem had been dealt with.

That I could drop the shield without causing more death.

I didn’t have the time, strength or, to be honest, inclination to reinforce my circle with a star. Instead I just drew out a spike, with the index and middle fingers on my right hand forked at first, then coalescing to point together, right at the colossal onrushing creature.

Why would I defend, when I had such a perfect opportunity to attack?

With the force of an avalanche, the druid-spider bisected itself on me.

The blade of protection sheared away the four limbs and at least a quarter of the total body mass on its left side. I was buffeted around slightly from the sheer weight of the thing landing against the shield’s surface, but Em’s flight-spell held, and I steadied myself.

The sliced-off legs toppled, and landed like hewn-down trees on the paving-slabs, the thunder of their fall resounding across the space.

In the interval before I looked back, the druid – the surviving half – had changed back into a humanoid: short and scrawny, lying there on the ground hooded and slumped-over, fifty feet from me.

A humanoid missing an arm and a leg and, by the looks of the redness pumping into the interior of the robe they wore, a good-sized chunk of torso.

“Defeated by your own ill-intent,” I said, drifting closer. “I hope you know one piece of how it feels for them.”

The hundreds who were wounded, many for whom life would never be the same again. Thousands grieving – and more would be, every minute, as the news spread, as people learned of loved ones perished in the madness.

I imagined Jaid and Jaroan. Imagined them fearing for my safety.

Imagined them lying there, eyes wide and staring, dead on the ground.

Here in the moment, I could expand. I hadn’t yet allowed myself to feel the relief of letting the stacked-up shields go down, and I pushed it further now, spreading the wards across the intervening space, setting up a diamond-shaped tesseract on their outer edge. It was something I’d seen in the book, and the mingled fury and fear and hate let me draw it out, instincts working on overdrive.

A diamond on the edge of the shield, which encapsulated the fallen form of the darkmage.

A diamond which had its face inverted, facing inwards.

No ill-will could leave it.

Their robe had curiously survived the blow after shape-shifting back, despite its precious contents, its wearer’s body, taking the damage. It was a crude thing – woven of poor cloth, brown-red, almost rusty in hue – even without the addition of several pints of blood.

The arch-druid wept, high-pitched, every sound laced with despair… and even as the heretic sobbed my eyes could pick out the shifting beneath the robe at the shoulder, the hip.

It was regeneration like I’d never seen before.

By the time the pattern of their weeping changed to the snorting, hacking laughter of the insane, a new hand emerged from the sleeve; a new, bootless foot poked from the hem of the garment.

“Defeated?” It was a female voice, muffled, as though travelling through a mask or scarf beneath the cowl that hid her features. “You – killed – them – all!”

The rage once more – a furious scorn seeping out of her in a young girl’s voice.

I understood her now – she leapt up and spread herself on all fours, with all the nimbleness of one who had spent endless days watching and emulating spiders. Already growing in size again, she hurled herself towards me, her robe puffing up, becoming something heavy and hairy all over between one heartbeat and the next –

She bounced off the inside of the diamond-tesseract and fell back on her hindquarters on the stone.

The shapeshift faded, and she looked down to her side –

She dug her fingers into the paving, gouging a handful of stone from the ground, then hurled it at me.

It too rebounded, almost hitting her.

At this point she started jerking her hooded head this way and that, as though suddenly terrified.

“Now now, don’t be testy,” I said.

My voice came out cold, bitter, but even as I spoke I wondered at the way I was going about framing this.

I’m supposed to execute her?

“That’s what they said. I don’t think I disagree, to be perfectly honest.”

We killed all her spiders.

“She killed… she killed hundreds of people, Kastyr! It’s not the same.”

To us. But not to her.

“That is no excuse!”

It’s not. It’s an explanation.

“She’s insane!”

She could’ve run, but we killed all her spiders, and I protected the people, made it all for nothing. That’s why she tried to jump on me, again and again, even when it’d proved futile. Emotion, not cunning. For all I know, she’s been subjected to torture, influenced somehow… Mind-controlled!… and how are we supposed to get answers if we kill them on sight?

“Don’t you think people with a bit more knowledge in this area have set the rules on these kinds of engagements? What if they’re able to enchant you –“

This one’s a druid, and I’ve got you watching my back, Zel.

I looked up. Em was on her way, would be here in seconds. Winterprince was farther away but he was coming too.

Wizards speeding their way closer, passing over the wreckage of the massacre.

I floated lower, nearer to her, keeping the diamond fixed like I’d never fixed a shield before.

I didn’t know how to ask it.

“Why?” I asked, the word coming out strangled.

“What?” she hissed, nothing but animosity in her voice, though there was a catch in her throat. Something coming through she hadn’t intended. Fear. Sorrow. “Set me free, fool.”

“All the death. All the…” I drew a shuddering breath, “…the pointless death.”

“You are all fools.”

She spoke softly now, dejectedly, so that even with Zel’s help I only just caught the words. There was still twenty feet of space between us, and she had the scarf or some kind of mask impeding her voice; there were plenty of other people making noise across the Square not far from us. So it was I drifted closer still, until I was at the limits of my shield.

It was chilling, to hear the gravity in her voice, she who sounded years younger than me.

“You play your games, and call yourself heroes, say you’re saving people. You are their doom! Do you not know? – that Mund is as a sacrifice? ‘And ‘ware the crowning year, and thin the herd, ere the snakes in wolves’ clothing come among the sheep for the slaughter!’”

I wasn’t going to argue with Zel on the ‘insane’ thing.

“Thin the herd.” My voice shook as I repeated the obscenity. “Even the children?”

Most of the children had been saved, it’d seemed, given what I’d observed of the corpses littering the Square outside my previous shield’s barriers – but not all.

Not all.

“Especially the children.” As if she’d suddenly become aware of some course of action previously hidden from her, the darkmage got up on her knees and put her small hands together, fingers with nails chewed ragged clasped together in a pleading gesture. “Please – please, champion,” she said the word now as if it could be used to sway me, “you must believe me. Look at us. You must kill them all. Kill them now –“

“Zat is enough of zat,” Em cried, veering to my side, and unleashing a gust of wind that slammed into the druid, sending her from her current position, upraised on her knees, right down onto her back, all the air knocked clean out of her.

The diamond didn’t prevent ill-will from entering.

“Vhat is zis? Feychilde? You must kill it!” I saw her draw back a hand, wreathed in flame. “It’s a heretic!”

“It’s just a kid.”

I saw the flame in her hand die down a little, the fervour in her eyes dampen.

“Vhat? No, Kas,” she whispered my name, “ve cannot let zem talk, ve cannot hear zem – ve must put zem down before zey infect us!”

Now it was my turn to be confused. “Infect us? With what?”

A terrible, cracking sound answered me, over my left shoulder –

“Infect us with lies.”

I spun to face Winterprince, a jagged seam in the smooth ‘face’ of his towering, icy form, as he floated there at the same height as me and Em.

He put out an icy arm, and formed a serrated blade, six feet long.

“I’ll make this easier on you,” he rumbled.

There was no moment of reaction in which I could reverse the vectors of the shield, or even follow with my eye –

He flew, faster than I’d ever seen Em fly, the frost blade extended.

A flash, and he was crouched on the ground beside the heretic, the edge of his sword biting deep into the paving-slabs at her neck – and the darkmage was decapitated, her head rolling across the stones, coming free of its coverings.

Probably not even my age. Thirteen or fourteen, perhaps. A brown-haired, olive-skinned girl with thin lips and long eyelashes.

I lowered my eyes and lowered my shields, shakily loosing a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. My augmented perception let me sense the way Em did the same, a little horror in the gasp that came from her throat.

Winterprince stood to his full height, pulling his blade free of the ground and flicking the blood from its edge in a practised motion.

“I told you,” I murmured. “Just a kid.”

I hadn’t expected Winterprince would hear, inside that frost armour, but he turned towards me and snapped out words, his lowborn accent plain to hear despite the crunching of the ice.

“You’re new.” The ‘face’ turned slightly, as if to regard Em, then continued, “You hesitated – both of you. Champions don’t hesitate.”

I felt my cheeks flaming.

“You need to grow up,” he went on, voice colder than his raiment. “She might’ve been a druid, but you could both cut her. You make damn sure you cut them hard! Both of you had chance to obliterate her, and you failed. You failed!” He actually roared the words at us, and I felt myself shiver in mingled anger and shock and embarrassment. “You kill heretics – that’s your job. This one,” he looked down at the crumpled corpse at his feet, “might’ve looked fifteen, might’ve looked ten – I didn’t care, and I don’t care. You don’t have to be fifteen to wield power. You don’t have to be fifteen to be a heretic. There’s only one rule – you don’t listen to Heresy. Look what this ‘kid’ did today. Look!”

He was roaring again, and I turned my head almost against my will, forcing myself to look again at the carnage.

She did this. She did all this, at her age, for nothing.

But then I hardened myself.

I could kill in self-defence… I could’ve killed her right then, half by accident, with the spike… But not like this.

Killing is not my job. It might be Em’s… but it isn’t mine.

Don’t distract me by showing me what she did. Make an actual argument. Give me some real facts.

I turned back to regard him.

“What is Heresy? Just – execute on sight? What do they even want? Who do they worship? What was the –”

“The point?” he rumbled. “If you think there was a point, you’re a heretic just the same as this was.”

He stamped his insanely-heavy, ice-booted foot down next to the arch-druid’s headless body, making the limbs jerk a little, stirring the rotten clothing.

I cringed, but I couldn’t deny what I’d heard. “There has to be more to it,” I muttered. The girl been quoting something there before Em arrived, I was sure… Quoting what?

“These pieces of drop believe if they don’t kill everyone in Mund, the world will end. They aren’t Rebels or even Chaos-Lords, friend. They don’t take on hard targets. These are mass-murderers, plain as day.”

Em was silent, looking down on the corpse beside his gigantic icy foot.

With no sign of any gesture the winds suddenly came, lifting him into the air so that he was at our height again.

“I hope for your sake, next time you fight a heretic, you put them down, put them down hard,” Winterprince said. “There’s always a way. Druids don’t regrow heads, just like sorcerers can’t hold shields up forever. As you proved tonight.”

I clenched my fists involuntarily.

“I’ll give you credit on the assist, Feychilde, but not on the kill. I hope next time we meet you behave more professionally.” He rolled his ice-encompassed shoulders, then looked westward. “I’m heading to Openway, but I reckon it’s all going to be over by now. Help the magisters here get things under wraps.”

He darted off into the sky, gaining elevation so he could soar over the buildings around the edges of the Square.

And he was gone, leaving us there, floating in the air like we were presiding over the proceedings. Witnesses to the execution of a mad child.

“Did you know?” I asked.

“Know vhat, Kas?”

“That they think they’re saving the world?”

“You heard zat from her own lips? Not just Vinterprince’s?”

I nodded; the girl had basically implied something like that. Em looked at me, a thoughtful expression on her face.

She wanted me to kill everyone.

Zel summarily dismissed my concerns: “It’s like you can’t believe an archmage can flip-out.”

“Zey tell us it is a secret,” Em said after some consideration. “Zey do not vont zose who vont an excuse to kill to find out zere is a – a philosophy vhich promotes it.”

I considered it. I supposed that made a lot of sense.

“I think I… I understand the execution rule,” I said heavily.

“At last.”

Em nodded solemnly.

“But I don’t think I can do it. Not… not like that. Not like he did it.”

The arch-wizard put her hand on my arm and it took a second for the sensation to stop feeling alien, feeling like an attack.

“You are tense,” she said. “Ve all are. Let’s do as he said. See if zere are any spiders left, and check ze glyphstone, make sure ze ozzer locations are safe.”

I did my best to smile, but I knew it was a wan, sad thing there on my face, curling my lips in a way unbecoming for the wearer of a gleeful mask such as mine.

I flew over Firenight Square, in Em’s wake, hearing the odd, distant whisper of Feychilde – the gratitude, the relief and reverence of those we’d saved together – but feeling none of it touch me, feeling entirely undeserving of their respect or thanks.

Yet it was the life of the champion. They would’ve died without my presence. For good and for ill, I knew I had to embrace it all. It was who I was now, and who I would be, had to be – until the day I died.