Nathan took off his shoes, the last of his old clothes, and crept barefoot. His feet immediately began complaining about the cold but the sneakers were not living up to their name: they'd clapped softly with every step, sending faint echoes down the stone hallways.
According to the duchess, any men or women not of fighting age were gathered in vaults beneath the fortress, taking shelter from the coming siege. The rest were either Alcrin's personal guard or a handful of servants. Unarmed and dosed with lich root, Nathan was in no hurry to attract attention.
The jumbled craze of images Maggie had planted in his mind slipped away whenever he tried to remember the way to the keep's guardroom. Eventually he gave up, trusting the almost instinctual urges that came to him: to take a left turn, to take the stairs down two flights. Time and time again he would come to an intersection and not hesitate, simply taking the one that he knew in his bones was right.
My gear should be there, Nathan thought. And then... then what? Nathan pondered as he walked. His plan had sounded good in practice but needed time, and even if it worked he would be stuck in a castle under siege until it did, surrounded by trained soldiers and at least one cobbling. Nathan still found the betrayal hard to believe.
It doesn't matter. He told himself. I can't do this without my stuff. Even if it isn't there there will be something sharp, and that's a start.
Voices echoed from up ahead and Nathan ducked into the shadows of a doorway. After several seconds he crept forward again, eventually coming to a sharp turn in the hall. Just around the corner were two guards flanking a door, talking quietly. There it is.
They sounded much closer than this... huh.
Thinking quickly, Nathan crept back until he was a good distance back down the hall. He set one of his sneakers on the floor and set the other about fifty feet further away. Sneaking back to the doorway, he put his fingers to his lips and gave a piercing whistle that echoed madly down the hall. A few moments and startled whispers later the echoing clatter of iron-shod feet came up the hall, and one of the guards hurried past.
"Oi! Oi, Bill, come look at this."
The second guard hustled by, grumbling.
"What is it?"
"Issa boot. Nice boot, too. Lumme try it on, Tom."
"Get yer own, Bill! Whatcha gonna do wif just one boot, anyways?"
"Oi, the other!"
"Mine!"
This is stupid, Nathan thought. There's no way... But to his disbelief the guards started arguing over the shoes. He shrugged and slipped down the hall, finding the guardroom door unlocked. Nathan slipped in, then locked the door behind him. A moment later he could hear the guards stumping back, grumbling. Apparently Bill got both shoes, but Tom got himself a shiny new black eye.
"That was too easy," Nathan whispered.
Someone gave a polite cough and he turned. The guardroom wasn't a room after all: it was a long, low-ceilinged hall, the walls so narrow that two men could barely walk side by side. The room a third man might have taken was filled with racks of weapons and armor. A few yards away the hall widened into in a small room centered on a small table. An occupied table. Nathan had interrupted what looked like a poker game.
There were four guards, one of whom had both hands wrapped around a large pile of coins and trinkets, some of which Nathan recognized as his own. His pack and guitar case were discarded on the floor nearby, clearly rummaged by the men seated at the table.
"Figures," Nathan sighed, and then dove for the nearest weapon rack. The guards were on their feet in a moment, swords free as they rushed him. One man, the winner of the poker match, held Nathan's own Morseran blade.
Nathan took stock of what he'd heedlessly grabbed; a round oaken shield and a short spear with a wide, barbed blade. Crap, this stupid thing is going to need two hands! How do I... oh.
Bracing himself, he held the shield up and brandished the spear as though meeting their charge. Just before the first man reached him, Nathan threw the shield at his feet. The guard went down and the next man stumbled, his feet tangling in the first guard's legs. Nathan lunged forward, bringing the spear down in an artless chop that drove the second guard to his knees. His next thrust sank into the man's chest.
The third man hung back for a moment and Nathan killed the first guard to fall, driving the spear into his temple before he could push his fellow's corpse away and rise. As he did the third guard leapt forward, hoping to catch Nathan while his hands were full. Nathan ducked back, abandoning the spear and snatching another weapon from the wall before his pursuer cleared the dead men. This time he made sure to watch what he grabbed, picking a battered sword.
Nathan raised it to parry a vicious slash that would have carved him like a thanksgiving turkey. The guardsman drew back and swung again. Nathan tried to duck under the blow and almost succeeded, the blade drawing a shallow line across his shoulder as Nathan dropped to his knees. With a yell, he brought the sword down like a cleaver on the guard's foot. The man howled, and Nathan buried the sword in his stomach.
"You've got my sword," Nathan panted as he stood, looking up to find the last guard beyond the dead men.
"Come take it." The guard snarled, blade out as he crouched.
Nathan heard the door rattle as Tom and Bill battered away but ignored it. "Are you sure you want to get between a wizard and what he wants, punk?"
"You... you are not the wizard," the guard replied uncertainly, taking a step back. "He is locked in the dungeon."
"I escaped." Nathan replied cheerfully as he edged forward. "Jorgesen was a nice guy. I was almost sad to turn him into a frog."
The guard's eyes bulged and he moved another step back. Nathan felt his grin widen as he raised a hand, pointing dramatically. "Bippity boppity boo. Supercalafradulisticexpiala-docious. Arglefraster!" With the last word Nathan flicked his hand as though tossing a ball but the man had already dropped his sword and run screaming down the hall.
"Wow..." Nathan shrugged and turned to the door, noting with some satisfaction that he could no longer hear Tom and Bill. That really worked.
His smile faded when he turned back to the dead men. Three, he mused. Another at the bottom of the pool. Those men on the boats. Renal and his goons. I've lost count already.
That most of them had meant him harm or worse, Nathan had no doubt, but that he didn't know... the realization sickened him.
Good. Nathan thought. It means I still care.
And what does that say about Maggie?
The floor quivered suddenly, dust falling in streams from the rafters. Nathan stared for a moment, and then blinked. The siege. It's begun.
Her senses were beginning to return but Maggie couldn't find the strength to will herself away from her captors. Whenever she reached for the concentration needed to move herself away it guttered and died, her focus dulled by the cobbling's drugs. All she could do was wait and watch.
Glitters of memory and perception winked all around her as the war began, hundreds of thoughts and images coming to her like scents on the wind. With so many minds in one place her perceptions began to bleed together, a blurred, fragmentary picture with a single overriding theme: fear. The men and women on the walls, their families hidden in the depths of the fortress, the guards scattered through the halls, all were filled with it. Maggie shivered: Baencroft felt like a cup slowly brimming over with the terror of its inhabitants.
But that was not all she saw. The first stones had hammered into the gates, the first ladders were rising. Though bound and drugged in the courtyard, Maggie saw it all. The sun was just beginning to rise: the host at the gates shone in its light like a garden of sparks. Even tainted by the dread of countless minds the sight, a jigsaw built of a thousand frightened stares, could only be described as beautiful.
In the vaults below the children and the elderly huddled together, the stone shivering beneath their feet as they wondered if they would survive the next few hours. Many wept but just as many comforted, showing bravery no less than that of the soldiers about to die.
Maggie found herself wishing, almost out of habit, that she could share this with Nathan even as she prayed he would stay away.
Alcrin's mind, a bloated, foul stain smeared across the forefront of her mind's eye, pulsed nearby. The duke was kneeling on the stones of the courtyard, his mind lost in the depths of a useless chant, empty words tumbling from his lips with rising panic as nothing happened.
Maggie felt his terror peak and a moment later the duke came to his feet in a rush, eyes raking the tree overhead.
"Slave! Slave, why does it not work?"
Jabberwisp's voice skittered down. "Be patient, lord. All things in their time."
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Maggie felt something familiar approaching, creeping through the garden. No... please, no... She would have screamed if she could.
"You promised, slave! You told me to make haste while the stars were right, but the stars are gone and the angel is not yet here! Tell me, slave, what do I−"
"Shut up," a voice rang in Maggie's ears in time with a dull thunk of iron hitting bone. Phantom pain bloomed for a moment at the back of Maggie's skull as Nathan clouted the duke. Alcrin's mind dimmed, the blaze of Nathan's hurrying to her side. "Maggie, come on. We've got to get out of here." Ragged hands, one short a finger, fumbled at her bonds and tugged the gag from her mouth. She tried to speak, to warn him, to tell him to leave her, but the words congealed in her mouth and became a dull moan.
"Come on, we've got to− ow!" Maggie felt it as one of his hands was cut by the glass scattered beneath her. She watched with his eyes as Nathan put the cut finger in his mouth, felt the ghost of blood's taste on her tongue. His other hand rested in hers and her fingers tightened.
Nathan's mind vanished.
Maggie, left holding the fingers of his empty shell and unable to speak, found that she could still scream.
Words.
Ancient, timeless, forgotten, they broke the surface of his mind like mountains rising from the sea only to crash back down. The weight battered against his senses, beneath his skin, along his bones, his very existence crumbling beneath the chant. Somehow, even in the overwhelming darkness that had broken upon his senses Nathan felt a wetness in his ears, blood seeping down as he screamed in pain.
The phrases split the air, not through volume but by virtue of being. It was a language from before the world, before in the beginning, the foundation upon which time and space had been laid. To be spoken now, to be used by a power other than the first... it was a transgression so great that each syllable caused the mind to flare with pain. No mortal could speak it and live, but it was not a mortal who spoke.
The cobbling chanted in the tongue of creation, reality teasing apart and reweaving to conform to the speaker's wishes. Nathan could do nothing as his mind, his body, his very soul was molded into a prison.
This was nothing like the handful of battles he had fought in the depths of his mind. The demon had slipped in like a needle, piercing through chinks in his armor. Maggie had simply pushed, a tide of elemental pressure that saw his defenses eventually buckle and shatter. This was beyond either, beyond them in the way night is beyond a shadow. Reality itself rearranged around him, folding inward to create a world where Nathan simply couldn't fight. He was nothing, had always been nothing, meant only for raw material. He was bait and cage in one, a trap meant for gods.
The first shadows fell across his mind, the now familiar caress of the demon. Tentative, then eager as it took hold of his unresisting spirit and began to pour inward, too late realizing something was wrong. The open gate of his soul drew shut and the demon's alien mind registered something that was almost surprise as it began scrabbling at the walls. Nathan felt himself tearing apart under the assault. He screamed soundlessly, unable to defend himself, and the demon paused as Jabberwisp spoke again, this time in words Nathan could understand.
"By blood are gods born and bound. By blood they are called, and so I bind you to this vessel, having opened his flesh on the altar by his own free will. So you are bound, oh..." As the cobbling chanted he spoke the demon's name, a word that squirmed against Nathan's understanding like an infested corpse. It was a filthy, horrid sound that somehow caused more pain than the words of fire and stone that the cobbling had used to trap him. The language of genesis was beyond mortal comprehension but it belonged, intrinsic as breath and as vital. The demon's name was other, and even as Nathan heard it the tattered remnants of his mind scrambled to blur and forget what it had learned.
"You are bound and enslaved, oh... I have bound you, as my mistress bound you so long ago, and as she bid you, so now I−"
Enough.
Jabberwisp's voice ground to a halt for a moment before continuing, and Nathan found a fragment of himself marveling at the cobbling's bravery. The demon seemed to shake itself before interrupting again, its voice reverberating like the toll of a cathedral’s bell.
Enough. Your Puling Is No Better Than That Of Your Mistress, And Lacks Even The True Nature Of Her Pleas. You Are Nothing, A Scrap Of Wires And Wood Desperate To Grant The Prayers Of Those Long Dead. A Thousand Years Have Passed Since Your Mistresses' Failure, And Yours Serves Only To Compound It. I Planted The Seed, Little Scrap. You Are My Plaything. Long Have I Watched You Scheme To Obey Her Wishes, To Bring Me To Heel And Serve As She Intended. And All That You Have Done, I Began.
Once Your Mistress Died To Stop Me From Walking Free. The demon coiled in on itself and Nathan despaired, knowing what was to come even if Jabberwisp did not. She Cannot Help You Now.
The demon exploded outward, a black sunburst that destroyed all before it as it pushed, flexing against the prison that Jabberwisp had sculpted from Nathan's soul and shattering it like glass. Nathan felt the last, crippled remains of his mind coming apart. No longer shackled in place by the cobbling's will, he fled.
Maggie's entire body ached, the world around her still thrumming with the force of whatever language the cobbling had spoken. Jabberwisp had stopped and was now rattling something about gods, blood and binding but she was past caring.
Nathan's body had collapsed, falling over her like an empty husk. She clutched at his hand, desperately searching for something, anything, to tell her he was still alive. She felt the last remnants of the lich root bleed from her system, burnt out by her adopted father's inheritance, but she made no move to escape her bonds. She refused to accept this, could not accept it...
His hand moved.
Maggie gasped and drew away, clumsily marshalling her will and fading from reality. She returned only a few feet away, her bindings crumpling through the empty space she had left behind. His hand... his hand had been warm when he fell, hot with life, but when it had moved again it was cold, a frigidity that felt somehow diseased.
"No!" the cobbling screamed from the tree, and Maggie, alone in the courtyard, shivered in sudden loathing.
When Nathan's mind had vanished only an empty shell remained. Even then, Maggie had refused to believe. Only now, as the empty shell stood, filled with an absence that she could make out as clearly as if a living soul was in its place, did Maggie understand.
The ground shook again, and as if summoned by the tremor a handful of guards emerged from a nearby door. One shouted when he saw the crumpled form of his lord in the courtyard and the barefoot youth and bloody-handed maid who stood above him. Suddenly, through the eyes of those soldiers, Maggie could see.
Nathan's corpse turned, the twitching mockery of a smile creasing bloodless cheeks, and its eyes snapped open. Where before mischief and wry cynicism had been was only a gloating emptiness. More than one soldier met those eyes and felt their minds begin to unhinge under the hungry, remorseless regard of the demon.
"Witness," the demon said, the body's lips splitting under the strain. "Bear Witness, And Despair."
The corpse's skin suddenly tore like wet parchment, a chrysalis that had served its purpose. The demon had been summoned. The vessel had been prepared. And now... now it was time.
The body crumpled in on itself, muscles clenching under the skin as they warped and folded, the tangled ripples of cilia squirming beneath ragged flesh. In a burst of peristaltic motion the demon convulsed, cold meat and splintered bone stretching to form a new, monstrous shape. The creature reared, born again, and roared in triumph.
The guardsmen broke as they looked upon it. They gibbered and howled, tearing themselves apart as their minds struggled for sanity and lost. Some fell dead, others ran. Most simply collapsed, shaking in their own filth. The jagged glimpses of pallid worm-flesh their quivering eyes took in crashed together in Maggie's thoughts, forming a picture that strained the fabric of her reason.
The morning light shied away from the demon's skin as if in fear of touching it, but though darkness coiled about it like a greasy shroud the creature's presence was inescapable, a nightmare unleashed on the waking world. Even hunched in a four-limbed slouch the demon was taller than the great oak in the courtyard's center, skeletally thin and yet built with a hideous, squirming strength. Grasping claws with too many joints to count knuckled the ground, the soil blackening at the creature's touch as the demon moved, a monstrous infant taking its first steps.
Slowly the demon unfolded a lesser set of arms and caressed its misshapen body, the flattened, bestial face, the antlered racks of gore-slicked bone that rattled on its back. Black eyes gleeful as it roared, the demon made a rippling gesture that made Maggie retch. One of the guardsmen flew to its outstretched hand and the demon buried its muzzle in the man's guts. The soldier flailed as he was torn apart, pieces of intestine and spatters of blood looping around the demon's body in patterns that hinted at terrible meaning.
The demon hooted gleefully as it finished its first meal, then lashed out with one massive, clawed limb, raking the oak with barbed digits and snatching something from the branches. A glitter of white light shone through horned fingers as Jabberwisp struggled in the demon's clutches.
Foolish Trinket. The demon's stained muzzle was incapable of speech but nonetheless it spoke, the tainted air around it vibrating with intention and becoming sound that seemed to burn even as it was heard.
I Was Tempted To Grant Your Demand, Foolish Whimsy That It Is, If Only To Let You Learn The True Depths Of Your Arrogance. No. I Can Taste Your Despair, And It Is Sweet As Any Morsel This World Has To Offer One Such As I. In Gratitude For Your Good Service You Shall Be Spared. I Shall Keep You As A Pet And Sup Of Your Ang−
"DIE!" Maggie screamed, her hands wrapped tight around Nathan’s sword. The demon gave a bray of inhuman pain as the blade sank into the meat of its thigh, black, noxious fluid seeping from the wound. The monster fell to its knees, keening as it fetched her a massive backhand. A moment before she struck the wall she vanished, reappearing behind the creature. She raised the sword and charged with a defiant howl.
That the beast she faced was a monster from the darkest imaginings of humanity did not matter. Maggie's rage burned white-hot and she let it sweep her up, desperate to escape the pain of what she had witnessed, that she had caused, by any means possible.
If that meant provoking the beast into killing her, so be it.
A flickering gesture from a lesser claw sent cold tendrils of razored shadow grasping at her but Maggie only disappeared again, the blade in her hands seeming to guide her to the monster as though hungry to feel flesh split along its edge. She danced around the creature, the sword carving into the demon and leaving strips of tainted flesh writhing feebly on the ground.
Be Done With You, Witch. One of the demon's massive limbs thundered into the ground as it gestured with another, fingers curdling the air. Maggie was flung off her feetand before she could recover the demon had snared her in an iron grip that sent agony coursing along her bones, locking her in place.
It straightened, stretching as its flesh reknit, the sword tumbling free. Maggie screamed in pain and denial, lashing out to sink her nails in the demon's cheek and bringing every shred of her will to bear.
Die, she cast into the demon's mind, her thoughts a storm of blades edged in her own poisonous, blazing despair. Die for me!
You Forget, Little Death, The demon purred, raising her to look her in the eye. Somehow she could see it, sketched against her mind like a nightmare made flesh, its presence such that even blind she was forced to see. Yours Is To Take Human Life, And I Am So Much More Than That. I Only Find Pleasure In These Hurts. Foolish Girl, Weakling Child, Do You Not Know Your Part In This, All That You Have Done?
"I know," Maggie raged. "Damn you, I know!"
Good, the demon replied, its mind flensing hers open and eyeing her bared soul with cold contempt. I Will Not Raise A Hand To You, Child. Death Would Bring Your Pain To An End, And I Would Not Have That, Nor Suffer The Consequences. Even My Kind Fears Yours, But I Know The Laws. Where You Are Bound, We Are Not. While I Spare You Your Kin May Not Touch Me, For I Am Not In Their Power Until My End. Instead, Live. But In Sparing You, I Want You To Suffer. Know That Your Betrayal Is Far Greater Than That Of The Craftling. You Alone Are At Fault. You Alone Have Killed The One You Loved.
The demon tossed her aside, discarding her like the broken thing she was, and turned to the fortress walls. The day was young and a feast waited just outside the bounds of this cold shell. After all, the cobbling had promised a spirit would lay waste the duke's enemies. The demon was an ancient creature, manipulative and cruel, but it was not without a certain sense of propriety. It raised a lesser arm, walls shuddered and blew outwards, and the demon waded forward to take its promised place in the hell of war.