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Chapter 11

It was clever of Ensharia, then, to let go first, and take the moment to strengthen a new hold elsewhere on the magus. One hand entangled his beard, another closed around a spindly arm, both were vices. The two of them spun, Walriq desperate to shake his enemy off, his enemy more desperate still to deny him. Every moment saw them moved another dozen metres one way or the other, velocity such that a normal man might have died to the acceleration alone.

Ensharia simply withstood the strain, but Walriq’s undead flesh was no harder than it had been in life, and Silenos was beginning to think his magic did not allow for protection of his innards the way others might. He saw blood begin to leak from the magus’ orifices, veins popping in his eyes, heard the strain of bodily tissues against their own multiplied weight. Bit by bit, he was coming apart.

Finally, Ensharia’s grip surrendered, but by then her enemy looked like a straw doll thrashed by the hands of a clumsy child. She had not cleared the man’s path by so much as a metre before Silenos fired, loosing both cannons at once, and deliberately overcharging them past even their newly reinforced capacity for pressure.

Paladin magic had weakened Walriq’s magic, Paladin power had split his focus, and the wind magics of Fall raced ahead just before impact to further dash the magus’ shield. When the projectiles hit, his body simply came apart. Like watching the straw doll struck by gunfire.

Giblets of pulverised flesh rained down while Silenos healed himself, restoring his body to its standard template, undoing the burned and ruptured flesh resulting from his excessive attack. By the time his ears had stopped ringing, the room’s air still danced with the residual displacement of an impact akin to artillery this world would surely not know for another five centuries.

He looked around, seeing Ensharia slowly climbing to her feet amid crumbling mortar and dancing dust, then Fall standing and trembling as his eyes held themselves wide with disbelief. Aside from them, the chamber was empty. Silenos might have known, casters were known for courage in much the same way that barbarians were known for their skilled rhetoric and complex philosophy.

“Walriq.”

Silenos glanced back at Fall, who seemed to have substituted his trembling for a sort of dazed incomprehension.

“Walriq…” He echoed. “I…He…Fuck…”

The number of better things Silenos had to do than watch an idiot develop post traumatic stress disorder numbered in the literal millions, and actually compiling and ordering such a list was among them, so he moved past the drooling primitive and headed for Ensharia.

She was handling the conflict better than the magus, which shouldn’t have been entirely surprising. Most casters, Silenos had heard, tended towards less stressful training methods than House Shaiagrazni. Indeed, from the stories he’d been told, some didn’t even threaten their apprentices with vivisection at all. Such a coddling, patronising environment could hardly have been expected to encourage the growth of strong spines as were needed to truly pursue magic, and so it was no surprise that the windmage was a trembling wreck behind him.

Combat, evidently, had left the Paladin’s composition more hardened than that as well.

“We won.” She breathed, as he came to stand before her. The woman sounded actually questioning, so Silenos answered her.

“We won.” He confirmed. “Mostly me, however. I would likely have won without help, but you accelerated the process of my victory, which was admirable in and of itself. Your courage in charging a superior foe is worthy of praise.”

Surprisingly, her eyes seemed to glow with joy at that.

“I…Really?

Silenos decided to forgive the abject tedium of asking for confirmation, and instead nodded.

“Yes, usually it takes hours of effort to carefully lobotomise a flesh construct into such an extreme of suicidal fearlessness, finding a creature who possesses it simply innately is rare and extremely convenient. You will make a very helpful diversion in future conflict.”

Oddly, the woman’s face fell at that, but a new voice rang out across the room before she could say anything.

“Necromancer!”

Silenos turned again, growing rather exhausted with how often he’d been doing it recently. His eyes fell onto the first of many magi now piling into the room, eyes bloodshot with rage, face twisted with resignation.

“That was magus Walriq, resurrected, you did this didn’t you, you foul creature?” Another one snarled. Silenos recognised the faces of them both, council members, and he recognised their flowing power even more vividly.

It was a taller magus who stepped forwards, and Silenos needed only a glance to know he was stronger than any other present. His power fell short of Fall, nonetheless, but backed by so many allies he would prove a threat, and his eyes were dangerously alert as he spoke.

“We’ve heard stories about you and your dark magics.” He spat. “From Elkatin. Looks like they’re all true, eh?”

As it happened, they were, and Silenos didn’t see convincing them that it actually had been another necromancer to resurrect Walriq as a winning proposition. Particularly when his presence had already been sighted by the magus’ corpse.

Slowly, subtly, he shaped what little remained of his body’s redundant cells into a probing strip of nervous tissue barbed in nacre and wrapped in muscle, letting it burrow through the heel of his foot and deep into the ground. He spoke while it happened.

“Hold on!” Ensharia’s voice rang out, interrupting Silenos’ own and projecting a characteristic confidence and steel across the room. “The Saviour is no dark mage, and this reanimation was not his doing.”

“I would never be stupid enough to lose control of something I reanimated.” Silenos added, helpfully.

“So you admit to being a Necromancer!” One of the magi near the back called out. He tried to see which one, making a mental note to destroy them for their stupidity if the opportunity ever arose.

“Of course not.” Silenos snapped. “I am simply saying that if I had then, in that hypothetical scenario, my glorious intellect would leave no chance of such a reanimate attacking me.”

“-Surely you can all recognise his magical power and learning.” Ensharia tried, nervous now. “You must realise that what he says is the truth.”

“If he’s so powerful, why is a whore speaking for him?” One magus called out.

“I heard he assaulted a guard.” Another added.

Silenos felt what was left of his emotional centres spasm in rage at that.

“If you wish for your subordinates to be free from assault, you should cultivate the power to protect them instead of whining to an actually competent caster for being your superior.”

Their fury was quick, and volcanic.

“Enough of this!” The strongest of them roared. “Seize them, and we’ll-”

Silenos finished his fleshcrafting just as the man spoke.

The situation had been spiralling farther and farther from Ensharia’s control, but it wasn’t until the ground erupted into giant, fleshy tendrils that she realised it was finally beyond salvaging. The Saviour moved before anyone else, of course. Even aside from his impossible reactions and quick-thinking, he was obviously the one engineering the eruption of meat, and he turned with a confidence that showed he knew exactly where and how they’d act without the need for anything so trivial as a glance over his shoulder.

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She was not as knowledgeable, comprehending or instantaneous as him, and required a few moments to observe the situation.

Ensharia watched as the limbs thrashed around, each one easily twenty feet long and thick as tree trunks, making the entire floor shiver and sending jagged cracks along its stony face with every impact. None had yet killed a magus, and the entire crowd seemed instantly shocked and driven back by their gesticulations. It seemed obvious to her what was happening.

Behind her lay a diversion, hastily made and aimlessly cast. It was not made to kill or even wound, for Ensharia was sure it would already have done both had the Saviour wished, only misdirect. She leapt on the chance quickly.

Ahead her Saviour was already nearly to the wall, his arms loosing more of those faster-than-sight projectiles that had torn the magus Walriq to such efficiently separated particulates. They were no less effective against stone than flesh, smashing a man-sized hole in quick order, and she reached Falls just as Silenos exited through the opening.

The man was still staring, still stunned. It seemed that finding his master dead a second time had left him insensible, and Ensharia was just about to haul him out over her shoulder when he finally turned, sweeping his arms up in one gesture to conjure a mighty wind that cast both of them out of the building.

In only a few short weeks Ensharia had found herself saved by a Necromancer, told to cook steak by the most gifted magi alive, watched men harassed by some tentacle monster and beheld an undead strong enough to kill five of her have its head bitten off by a scaled monster the size of a smaller war-elephant. She had, naively, come to think that nothing more existed with the capacity to surprise her.

That assumption did not survive the sight of her Saviour hovering, with both of his legs neatly gone, from the bottom of a great, slowly rising sphere of leathery meat.

He did not express anything at all upon seeing her and Falls come to drop down onto the stone, only called out with the same voice he always used, calm and mechanical.

“There are two more holds for the both of you, grab on before the vessel rises beyond reach. Falls, you propel it away.”

Neither of them hesitated in obeying. Ensharia supposed it was just that sort of day.

To her amazement, despite the Saviour’s warnings, the construct did rise. Slowly at first, then faster, until it soon drifted upwards fifty feet or more with every passing moment. Falls was swift in providing their horizontal velocity, sending them shooting along faster even than his master had managed. Ensharia stared at him, awed.

Apparently understanding her confusion, he volunteered an answer.

“Don’t need to lift us.” The man grunted, clearly straining to sustain his hold while guiding the currents. “This machine is doing that, all that’s required of me is pushing us sideways, not upwards. And even that’s easier with the winds already being so strong… Did you predict that?”

The last sentence was a question for the Saviour, who nodded.

“Wind speeds increase with altitude.” He replied. “Tubes will descend in front of your mouths, inhale through them or you will lose consciousness and die.”

As he said it, Ensharia found a cylinder of…Meat, lowering right before her lips. Burying her disgust, she did as instructed, finding a breathable, if musky, air held within.

Perhaps predicting her questions, the Saviour spoke more.

“The device around us utilises complex biochemistry to synthesise hydrogen, a gas far lighter than air. This causes it to rise as it slowly fills the sphere above, which I imagine is nearing full capacity. We will stop our ascent only when the surrounding atmosphere is thin enough for our weight to equalise with the displaced mass. Another section is collecting air from around us and compressing it with muscular contractions to prevent it from being too thin to support your breathing. Any further questions, or can we move onto the more important issues?”

There were no further questions.

“Elkatin had spies within its council, with access to the list of Heroes.” The Saviour stated. “Otherwise the timing of Walriq’s death and our arrival here is too coincidental. I should have considered it myself, already, it was…An error.”

She heard some actual emotion in his voice, at that. A curious mutation of frustration that terrified her more than any previous lack of feeling had.

“We must hurry to the second Hero then.” Ensharia replied, mainly to give herself some distraction in the speech.

Silenos was about to reply when Falls cut in.

“So my master was murdered?” He asked, voice coated in some tone she couldn’t quite identify.

“Yes, yes.” The Saviour replied, impatiently. “It happens more regularly than you might think, even more so than sexual mishaps in fact. Moving on, we will actually be heading for the third Hero. Assuming this list was devised with some basic concept of travel efficiency in mind?”

Ensharia bristled at the implication of her people’s incompetence.

“Of course.” She snapped.

“Good.” The Saviour continued, apparently not caring about her tone. “Then we will head for the Third, whoever is moving ahead of us to kill them, they like came from close by to Elkatin. That is where the spies were, and with the speed they have shown the agents must have been extremely nearby. Perhaps in the armies we destroyed, perhaps not. I did not detect any individuals of great power among them, but I may have missed one or two among such multitudes of scum, or our assassins may be substituting cleverness for power.”

An air current ran over the vessel, sending cool needles to run along Ensharia. She heard Falls’ teeth chattering suddenly, and the Saviour sighed.

“I’ll lower us.” He said. “Magus, your heart rate is dropping alarmingly fast, tell me if this happens again in the future. I do not want to be forced into the habit of scanning your biology to keep you from dying all the time.”

Falls only nodded, apparently chilled past the point of retort. She couldn’t blame him, any temperature that could make Ensharia so much as shiver would be fatal for a normal body, sooner or later.

When, at last, they touched the ground again, Falls had warmed a shade. Only a shade though. He managed to inform the group, through his chattering teeth, that they were five miles from Magira. Silenos seemed only mildly pleased.

“We shall have to cover more ground tomorrow.” He sighed, speaking even as the vessel melted and flowed down around his body, congealing at the stumps of his legs to reform the limbs within moments. Ensharia almost vomited at the sight.

“For now we will make camp.” The Saviour continued.

“We need fuel for a fire.” Ensharia noted. “I can look for some, it’s dark but-”

So close, she could just see the Saviour as he knelt down and touched the grass, and watched with horror as the blades around them all disappeared into the ground. His arm rippled, as if it were liquefied and flowing just as the previous construct had, then she saw matter drop out of it. One, two, ten, a hundred. Cuboids of wood all neatly stacked and perfectly formed.

It was the sort of firewood pile a person might make only after hours of perfectionism and an ample supply of unhewn branches, produced within seconds. The Saviour straightened up.

“I am not familiar with survivalist skills.” He announced, as if it were as idle an observation as the weather.

Ensharia snapped from her stupor.

“I am.” She hastily noted, kneeling down and withdrawing her dagger. She had a few wood shavings ready, soon, and some searching from the apparently night-visioned Saviour yielded a piece of flint. In only a few minutes they were all basked in the warmth of a fire, seated around it and sighing with relief.

Falls did not speak much before rolling over for sleep, apparently having come to terms with his new, non-optional place in their group. Ensharia decided to let him drift off, doubtless he could use the time to process all that had changed. Doubtless, too, he deserved that small kindness. She hadn’t forgotten the way he lunged forth to protect her so quickly after being freed.

“You did not kill him.” Silenos noted, once Falls’ breathing had grown heavy enough to betray unconsciousness.

There was no accusation in the words, no anger or judgement, but Ensharia felt pricked by all three at once.

“And?” She snapped.

He eyed her, coolly. Not for the first time she wondered what thoughts were flitting behind this creature’s gaze. She was left to wonder, for he betrayed none of them by speaking.

“I had not expected that.” The Saviour said at last.

Ensharia looked at her feet.

“There didn’t seem any reason he needed to die, we’d not have bought more time in killing him, and if the plan had gone well we could have just fled anyway with Walriq. In fact, we’d probably have had him then, too, out of gratitude.”

The caster didn’t nod, shake his head or react to her words at all. Only looked into the fire, still thinking in thoughts too big for her. Everything was too big for her, these days.

“He’s so powerful.” Ensharia breathed, not sure even herself why she was sharing such troubles with the Saviour. “So, so powerful, and so young. I’ve trained longer than he has, I’d wager, but…I don’t think three of me could beat one of him.”

“You dislike your weakness.”

She was so shocked to hear the Saviour speak that Ensharia actually jumped, then nodded with a face flushing crimson.

“I hate it.”

He paused a moment.

“What if I could help you alleviate it?”

Ensharia eyed him.

“You…Know means of training?”

“I know means of strengthening a body, and you fight with a body-”

“-No.” Ensharia snapped, finding her temper hot again. “No, not that, never that. I will not be Fleshcrafted.”

The Saviour studied her, still silent, still thinking. Then nodded.

“It is your choice.” He said, in that way he had of saying everything that made her feel as if he were observing the world from a magnifying glass held far above it.

“Can you take the first watch?” She asked suddenly. “I’d like to sleep.”

“I will watch all night.” The caster said. “I do not require sleep.”

She was too tired to do anything but lie down and enjoy the benefits of that.