The Godborn

by Paul S. Kemp

  “The mindmage,” Magadon said. “Yes.”

  Shadows roiled angrily around Brennus. He tried to section off a part of his mind to give him a moment to raise a mental screen or shadow step from the room, then . . .

  “I can’t allow that,” Magadon said.

  “Get . . . out . . . .of . . . my . . . head,” Brennus said.

  “I can’t do that, either,” Magadon said.

  “Why are you . . . here?” Brennus said. Blood dripped from his nose, spattered the floor. He lifted his head. “What are you doing?”

  The mindmage sat cross-legged in the center of the chamber, directly under the mythallar. Long horns jutted from his head. He regarded Brennus with his unusual eyes, the dots of his black pupils floating on otherwise colorless orbs. His face looked entirely at peace. Above him, the huge, glowing crystal pulsed with power, tremulous lines of energy moving along its length at regular intervals.

  “I’m here to stop you and your brother.”

  The words sounded sincere but made little sense. Brennus endured the pain in his head and slowly climbed to his feet. “My . . . brother? Rivalen?”

  “Of course, Rivalen,” Magadon answered, and another stab of pain drove Brennus back to his knees. He felt warmth in his ears. Blood.

  “Stop . . . us . . . from . . . what? I want . . . Rivalen . . . dead!” Brennus said.

  “Liar.”

  “Look for yourself! See if I’m lying! Look!”

  Magadon’s brow creased in a question.

  Brennus felt mental hands moving through his mind, examining, probing. He did not resist. He let Magadon see everything, feel the depths of Brennus’s hate.

  “He murdered your mother,” Magadon said softly.

  “I saw him do it,” Brennus said.

  “I know,” said Magadon, his voice surprisingly sympathetic.

  The polished reflective planes in the chamber showed the meadow where Rivalen had murdered Alashar. She lay among the flowers, a hand outstretched.

  “Hold my hand,” she gasped.

  Brennus averted his gaze. “Please, I don’t want to see it!”

  The images vanished.

  “He showed that to you, your brother. And you showed it to me.”

  The pain in Brennus’s head subsided. He could only nod.

  “I’m sorry,” Magadon said. “You have to leave now, Prince Brennus . . . ”

  Hope lodged in Brennus’s chest. “No, let me help—”

  The shadows deepened to Brennus’s right and the Most High stepped through them, his platinum eyes ablaze, darkness swirling around him. Magical wards sheathed him, so powerful they distorted the air around him. He took in the scene at a glance, leveled his staff at Magadon, and loosed a bolt of black energy that would have withered an archangel.

  The energy slammed into Magadon’s chest and drove him across the chamber. He hit the far wall with enough force to audibly drive the breath from his lungs. But it didn’t kill him. His eyes focused on the Most High and a violet light glowed around his head.

  The Most High groaned, staggered, put a finger to his temple. The shadows around him spun rapidly. Lines of blood trickled from his nose. He leveled his staff once more at the mindmage.

  “Stop!” Brennus said, stepping between them and holding up his arms. He stood directly under the Source. The polished panels showed their reflections over and over again, the three of them repeated to infinity.

  Magadon stood, wobbly. The Most High held his ground, keeping his staff at the ready.

  “What is this, Brennus?” the Most High asked.

  “Show him,” Brennus said to Magadon. “Show him what you saw in my head. Show him.”

  And the mindmage did. The walls of the mythallar’s chamber showed Brennus’s memory of the image Rivalen had shown him: Rivalen’s murder of his mother amid a field of flowers, her extended hand, his refusal to take it even as she died, her final wish, that she be the instrument of his downfall.

  Telemont watched it unfold in silence, the shadows roiling around him the only indicator of his inner turmoil. When it was done, Telemont looked to Brennus, and the light in his platinum eyes had dimmed.

  “That is what you accepted all these years. That is what you were willing to compromise over. Your wife, Most High. My mother. Rivalen did that. Rivalen. He must pay for it, whatever the cost to us, to the empire.”

  “How?” Telemont said.

  He sounded so strange to Brennus, his voice less commanding, more like the father Brennus remembered before Alashar had died.

  “The how is already in progress,” Magadon said.

  Brennus had almost forgotten he was in the room. “Rivalen is mad, Most High. You know this. He wants only to die and take the world with him. He must be stopped and he must pay.”

  “I can’t kill my own son,” Telemont said.

  “Father—”

  “Just leave,” Magadon said. “Take your people from Sakkors and go. You don’t have to kill anyone. We’ll stop him.”

  Telemont stood to his full height and his voice recaptured its typical imperiousness.

  “You ask me to abandon a city of the empire.”

  “Sakkors is already dead,” Magadon said. “The Source—the mythallar—is dying. When it does, its power will go out. The city will fall from the sky. It has hours.”

  For a moment, Telemont said nothing, then, “You lie.”

  “No,” Magadon said, simply, and sadness filled his voice. “I wish I did. But it’s dying. Check if you wish.”

  Telemont’s eyes narrowed. His fingers traced arcane symbols in the air as he cast a divination. When he sensed the spell’s result, he gasped.

  “You see?” Brennus said.

  “You can’t save it,” Magadon said. “There’s nothing to be done. Sakkors will fall.”

  Still Telemont said nothing, and Brennus imagined the thoughts roiling in his father’s mind.

  “Father?” Brennus said.

  Staring at Magadon, the Most High said, “We’ll get everyone off of Sakkors. But I won’t help you kill my son.”

  “Even after what you saw?” Brennus asked, incredulous.

  The Most High hung his head. “Even after that.”

  Shadows swirled around Brennus, mirroring his anger.

  Magadon said, “Go. You have little time.”

  After they’d gone, Magadon returned to his place under the Source and kept deathwatch. He reached out first to Riven, through the mind link between them.

  If you can perceive this, I’m on my way, and I’m bringing Sakkors with me.

  With the power of the Source at his command, he’d be near a godling himself.

  Assuming, of course, that the Source stayed alive long enough for him to make use of it.

  He reached out with his mind from time to time to check on the progress of Brennus and Telemont. Augmented by the power of the Source, he was able to feel it as Sakkors emptied. Shadovar soldiers fled on veserabs. Those who had them fled on magical transport or via spell. Those who had no other way were transported to earth by Brennus and Telemont, by way of spell, by way of the shadows. They moved rapidly, efficiently, and within an hour the entire populace of Sakkors was gone. All but one.

  Brennus Tanthul remained, a solitary figure standing at the edge of the plateau on which the abandoned city stood, the figurehead affixed to the prow of the ship-city. Magadon imagined Brennus looking east toward Ordulin, toward the maelstrom of shadows that darkened the sky, all the while sharpening his anger on the whetstone of his hate.

  Magadon reached out for Brennus’s mind. You’ll remain, then?

  I can’t leave, Brennus said. I must see him pay.

  Magadon had felt the depths of Brennus’s hate for his brother. He did not feel like he could deny the Shadovar what he asked.

  Don’t interfere with anything, Magadon said.

  To that, Brennus said nothing.

  The wraiths and specters of lost Elgrin Fau blanketed the battlefield in a
cloud of darkness. The undead native to the Shadowfell joined them, flowing forward like a dark tide around the towers and walls of the Citadel of Shadow.

  Cania’s armies stood arranged in precise formations, units of scaled and hulking horned devils, lithe, crouching bearded devils clutching glaives, buzzing wasp devils, a horde of spined devils, their bodies covered in a thick coat of long quills, and all the larger, more powerful armed and armored devils who commanded them. Pennons and oriflammes announced the units and their pedigree, and tens of thousands of weapons and horns and scales and fangs made a forest of sharp edges and points against which the cloud of incorporeal undead and Riven threw themselves.

  As the forces collided, the moans of the undead vied with the roar of the devils, the beat of their drums, and the blare of hundreds of horns. Columns of hellfire flew in all directions, beams of baleful energy, clouds of poison. Missiles of bone and steel and magic from fiendish archers rose in shimmering clouds and fell in a dark rain on the undead army.

  With each step Riven moved through the shadows, covering a spear cast of distance with each stride, appearing and disappearing with the rapidity and rhythm of a heartbeat. He appeared amid a squad of horned devils, a whirlwind of steel and darkness, beheaded six of them, and stepped through the dark. He materialized behind a towering, insectoid gelugon, and drove his sabers into the crease in its white carapace between its neck and the base of its skull. Dark ichor flowed as the devil spasmed, fell, and died. He stepped through the shadows and into the center of a horned devil regiment. With a thought he covered all of them in a cloud of swirling, deep darkness in which not even their fiendish blood allowed them to see. But he could. And he dashed up and down their ranks slashing, cutting, stabbing, leaving scores of dead devils in his wake.

  He rode a column of shadow into the sky and from there took a moment to assess the battlefield.

  Undead vied with devils for as far as he could see, their lifeless touch pulling the otherwise immortal life from the fiends. But the devils, powerful, organized, and well-led, held ranks and responded with barrages of hellfire, beams of magical energy, and organized charges of their ranks. The undead fell by the score, dissipating with a moan into dark, stinking mist. A nightwalker, a faceless undead, humanoid in shape, as black as a moonless night and taller than a castle tower, strode among a regiment of horned devils, crushing the devils in pairs and trios with the weight of its tread. Wasp devils swarmed it from above while a unit of flaming, armored devils on burning horses charged it from below. It fell, moaning, and the fiends cut it to pieces before it dissipated to nothingness. But still the undead came on, fearless, heedless, their numbers beyond count, and fiends fell to the dark earth, their bodies withering as the undead pulled out their life force. Thousands of fiendish corpses dotted the field.

  A flight of shock troop devils—huge, blocky winged devils covered in red scales and dull iron armor, wheeled toward him. Each bore a huge sword and shield in its muscular arms. Riven hung there on his column of shadows and let them close in.

  When they drew near he extended a hand and a wide net of sticky shadows shot from his fingers. The devils, too big to maneuver deftly, could not avoid the dark strands. It caught up all of them, wrapping their bodies and wings in sticky fibers of reified shadow.

  Wings fouled, the devils roared and fell out of the sky. As they plummeted, Riven stepped through the darkness and onto one of the devil’s backs. He drove his sabers into the base of the devil’s skull, silencing its roars, then stepped to another, did the same, stepped to another, killed again. He killed six and stepped away before they hit the ground, their huge forms crushing lesser devils and throwing up clods of soil and grass.

  Around him the battle raged. Devils and the dark hordes of the Shadowfell moaned, shouted, and died. Shadows spun around Riven. A green beam of energy and a column of hellfire shot out at him from his left, struck the shadows that shrouded him, and died in their darkness. He pointed a hand, loosed a line of life-draining energy from his palm, and withered an entire line of flaming devils and their mounts. They squirmed and shrieked and slowly imploded as his power stripped them of animus.

  He’d killed dozens of devils and done nothing to cloak his power, but still Mephistopheles had not shown.

  “Let’s try this, then,” Riven said.

  Spinning and whirling his way through a score of gelugons, his sabers leaving a flotsam of insectoid limbs and heads behind him, he scanned the field for his target. He spotted him in moments, a pit fiend named Belagon, one of Mephistopheles’s most powerful generals. Flames and smoke sheathed the heavily armored pit fiend the same way shadows shrouded Riven. The devil stood several times the height of a man, and his blazing sword and flaming whip slew undead by twos and threes with each blow.

  Riven stepped through the shadows to stand before him.

  “Godling,” said the fiend. He beat his huge wings and they shed enough smoke and flame to engulf a village. Riven stood in their midst, unharmed.

  “Dead thing,” Riven answered, and launched himself at the fiend.

  His sabers moved so fast they hummed, as he ducked, stabbed, slashed, and spun. Despite its size, the fiend answered in kind, its huge blade spitting flames as it parried, stabbed, and slashed. The two of them fought in a cloud of shadows and smoke and flame and power, and any devils or undead caught up in the cloud died screaming.

  Belagon’s whip cracked as the fiend tried to wrap Riven’s legs in its flaming lines, but Riven leaped the attempt and slashed down with both sabers, severing the whip. He sidestepped a stab from Belagon’s sword, pointed both sabers at the fiend’s chest, and loosed a spiraling column of divine power. It slammed into the fiend, driving him backward several strides, tore through his breastplate, and tore a gory divot in the exposed flesh of his chest.

  The fiend shouted with rage, the flames that surrounded him igniting into a conflagration. He charged Riven, blazing sword held high. Riven sidestepped the downward slash—the blade put a furrow in the earth—slid to the fiend’s side and drove both blades through his armor and into his abdomen.

  The devil squealed and collapsed, writhing in pain, ichor spurting from his gut. Riven rode the shadows to his side and drove both his blades into his throat. The pit fiend gurgled and his flames died, as did the fiend. Riven crouched atop the dead pit fiend’s chest, an ichor-stained saber gripped in each fist, a cloud of shadows and smoke roiling around him.

  “Come out, come out, whither you hide,” he said to Mephistopheles.

  Vasen, Gerak, and Orsin watched the battle in awed silence. Magical energy and fire lit the otherwise dark air of the Shadowfell, criss-crossed the field in blazing lines and pillars and columns and streaks of killing force. The undead blanketed the diabolical forces, so many and so thick that it looked as if a black fog had settled on the fiendish legions. The sound of shouts and screams and drums and moans was surreal. Vasen tried to keep his eyes on Riven, but Riven moved from shadow to shadow so quickly, covering as much as a bowshot in a single stride, that it was impossible to keep up. But wherever he appeared, the one-eyed man-god left dead devils in his wake.

  They watched Riven fight a pit fiend in a fog of shadows and smoke and fire, watched him fell the devil with as much effort as it would have taken a skilled warrior to disarm a child.

  Orsin held his holy symbol in hand and muttered prayers under his breath.

  Gerak and Vasen stood with their mouths hanging open, waiting for words to fly in and give them something to say.

  A boom sounded, so loud it shook the doors of the Citadel of Shadow, and for a moment stilled the battle. A line of fire formed in the sky above the battlefield, a slit in the fabric of the planes. Smoke and heat and power poured from it, the screams of the damned. The line extended laterally, then vertically, until it looked as if a flaming door hung suspended in the air over the slaughter.

  A shadow filled the door, a towering dark figure of muscle and wings and horns and power.

 
“Mephistopheles,” Vasen breathed.

  Across the battlefield, Vasen saw Riven’s face turned not toward the archdevil but toward the Citadel, toward them. Riven gestured and the darkness around the three companions intensified, fat ropes of shadow swirling around them. Vasen, sweating shadows of his own, closed his eyes, offered a hasty prayer to Amaunator, then snapped them open.

  “Ready yourselves,” he said. “We go.”

  The shadows engulfed them entirely. Not even Vasen’s shade-born vision could pierce them. He felt a tingle in his stomach and a lurch as of rapid motion.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Riven watched Mephistopheles hurtle out of the portal, a dark bird of prey, the archdevil’s body surrounded by dark energy that crackled with each beat of his wings. The bare-chested, muscular archfiend eschewed any visible weapon or armor.

  The devils on the ground roared excitedly at his appearance. A dozen shock troop devils, larger than those Riven had felled earlier, swooped toward their master. Mephistopheles hung in the air and surveyed the battle. His eyes fell on Riven.

  “Let’s dance,” Riven said, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  The archfiend and the shock troop devils beat their wings and flew toward Riven like shot arrows. Riven surrounded himself in a protective cloud of shadows, rode the darkness into the air, and materialized to the side of the archfiend, slashing and stabbing the moment he appeared.

  Mephistopheles anticipated his sudden appearance and pulled up, parrying Riven’s blades with his bare hands and arms, which might as well have been adamantine. Riven’s blades bounced off the archfiend’s skin, barely scoring the flesh. The devil’s fists and claws glittered with green energy as he punched, clawed, and grabbed at Riven. Green beams of power shot from the archdevil’s eyes, vied with Riven’s protective shadows.

  Riven channeled more power into his blades, moved from shadow to shadow around the archfiend, appearing to Mephistopheles’s right, slashing, disappearing and reappearing to his left, stabbing, throughout dodging the blows of the archfiend and the shock troop devils who flew around the combat and tried to get in slashes when they could.