Darkmask (Pharim War Book 5)

by Gama Ray Martinez

  “What in the name of the seven is that?”

  Osmund walked up next to Jez. “The product of a bygone era.” He shifted into Ziary and held his flaming sword forward. “At your signal.”

  Jez stared for a few seconds. He could feel the transport shield wavering under the constant assault. It had never been meant to move around that much energy and was buckling under the strain. He hadn’t expected them to move so quickly. This wasn’t the time.

  The mages waited next to him. In spite of what Osmund had said, they weren’t really waiting for his signal, though they would go if he gave it. If they attacked before Balud was in position, however, they would be overwhelmed. Of course, if the demons breached the defenses, they would be just as dead.

  The contingent glared at him, their eyes glowing pale blue. Jez tightened his grip on his sword and sent a trickle of power into it, causing it to shed a blue light of its own. If the demons drew any meaning from that, they didn’t show it. The transport shield surged as its magic waned. They would be through any second.

  “We can’t wait any longer.” Jez pointed at the contingent.

  The words had scarcely left his lips when the sky erupted in fire. Demons fell out of the sky. The ground opened beneath the land-bound forces as the mages of the Carceri Academy poured into the caldera. Though still over a mile away, the mages among the newcomers struck as soon as they saw their target. The workings shone like a second sun as power surged forward and crashed into the unprepared demons. The hagine contingent faltered as it turned its attention to the new attackers.

  It was a mistake. There was a veritable legion of demons between them and the attackers, but only a handful of dozens stood between them and Jez.

  “Charge!”

  Before he’d even finished the word, the beast form of Horgar surged forward. The great cat crossed the hundred feet between him and the nearest chezamut in the space of a breath. His fangs crunched through the demon’s neck, removing its head before it collapsed into a pile of dust. The other animals crashed into the demons a second later.

  Ziary struck with wind and flaming sword even as the beast mages mowed through the demons with tooth and claw. The years had honed Jez’s skills at battling demons, and he barely had to slow as he cut them down. They’d only covered half the distance when the contingent looked up at them. Jez could almost hear the hagine hiss. Jez’s sword cut down a wolf-like demon that had gotten too close. Then, he crisscrossed his arms and launched the black fire binding. Two of the demons lifted their arms, and a wall of blinding white flame rose up in front of them. The black fire crashed into the wall, releasing a thick cloud of smoke as the two workings canceled each other out, but Jez had started running the moment he released his binding. He leaped through the smoke, his sword moving in a blur. He didn’t even see the first demon before he cut it down. The second fell a heartbeat later. Then, the bubble binding hit him in the back.

  Jez had been expecting it. He’d spent his enforced rest in the library reading, and it hadn’t taken him long to find a way to counter the binding. Power welled up inside of him. He interlaced it with thin strands of aqua magic and sent it out in all directions. The bubble binding froze. For a moment, he couldn’t move. Then, it shattered.

  The hagine stared at him, shock evident in its features. It hadn’t quite recovered when the black fire binding rolled over it. It vanished. The other two screeched and began weaving workings of their own, but Jez’s binding had been specially crafted. It hadn’t dissipated as such workings normally did. He twisted his hand, and the black flame turned and headed toward the nearest hagine. It washed over it before the demon had noticed. The third tried to counter it, but it was too slow. The black fire didn’t leave so much as a pile of ash.

  The beast mages had formed a circle around Jez. They struck out at the demons with all the ferocity that the animals of the wild could bring to bear. If Jez had been asked a week ago if mere animals could stand up to an army of demons, he would’ve said no. Master Horgar and the beast mages disabused him of that misconception as they tore into the otherworldly beings. The ground would have been soaked in blood if demons bled. In a surprisingly short time, the attack quieted.

  “Did we win?” Ziary asked as he landed gently next to Jez.

  “It can’t have been that easy.” Sounds of battle wafted to them from within the Academy grounds indicating that most of the demons had retreated to meet Balud’s attack. Jez pointed with his sword. “We need to press our advantage.”

  The beasts growled and Horgar’s long toothed cat crouched next to Jez as it stared into the northern gate of the Academy. The message was clear.

  Jez took off toward the Academy grounds. Ziary flew overhead, and a pack of wild animals followed on his heels.

  CHAPTER 33

  They crossed into the grounds and immediately ran into half a dozen chezamuts. Horgar leapt on the closest one, tearing out its throat as it fell. Jez unleashed the silver binding, banishing a pair of the demons. Ziary’s sword cut down two others while a mage, in the form of a wolf, banished the last. Jez launched himself forward at a bull-headed demon that stood at the end of the street. It had to be at least twenty feet tall and moved with a fluid grace that belied its size. It swung a massive fist. Jez tried to turn aside, but he wasn’t quite fast enough. He twisted enough for the blow to clip his shoulder, but it still hit with enough force to send him crashing to the ground. He sent a surge of terra magic into the stone, causing a crack to open beneath the demon’s feet. To Jez’s surprise, it leaped into the air. He threw himself upward and lifted his sword to meet the demon. The maneuver apparently caught the bull demon off guard because it just stared at him. Jez sheared off a cloven hoof. The demon landed hard. Unable to support its own weight, it stumbled. Jez’s sword dispatched it a second later.

  The others with Jez had been engaged in battles of their own, but everyone seemed to be winning, and before long, they had secured a small section of the Academy.

  “That seemed a lot easier than it should’ve been,” Ziary said.

  “I’ll take easy,” Jez said. “It’ll be a nice change.”

  “Where do we go now?”

  Jez looked at the tower rising up over the Academy, but almost immediately, he rejected the idea. “The summoner’s practice house. Sharim doesn’t have an exploding fire mountain anymore. He won’t be able to use the circle around the Academy. He’ll need smaller ones if he’s going to summon reinforcements.”

  “He might not be able to use it now,” Ziary said, “but we still shouldn’t leave it up.”

  Jez nodded, and they walked to the wall. They formed a contingent and sent surges of power into the circle around the Academy, burning out a small piece of it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best they could manage on short notice. That done, they marched toward the summoner’s practice house.

  They moved slowly, with Jez and Ziary spearheading their advance. It was an almost constant battle, but in spite of that, the resistance was lighter than expected. They never met groups of more than half a dozen, and those often fell before they had a chance to react. There was no sign of the legion they had seen before, and they reached the practice house without even taking an injury.

  As soon as they got close, a sulfuric smell, strong enough to make Jez gag, washed over him. He went to his knees. Ziary knelt next to him, though he didn’t say anything as Jez regained his composure. Jez drew more deeply on Luntayary’s power, growing more sensitive to the presence of demonic energy as he became more able to bear it. His flesh began to burn away as he threw his hand forward. The door was made of wood, but the wall around it was stone. It twisted, and the door exploded in a shower of sparks. Jez stepped inside and froze.

  A hole of pure darkness sat in the center of the room, nearly large enough to cover the entire floor. The smell of sulfur billowed from the opening, and though Jez’s abilities with summoning were limited, he could sense the overwhelming power that had gone into crafting this. />
  “Well, that looks familiar,” Ziary said.

  Jez nodded. It took him a few seconds to find his voice. “It’s a portal to the abyss.”

  “He needed to use a pharim to power that last time.”

  “Maybe he had one,” Jez said. “Maybe he used a demon. Maybe he’s just gotten better. However he did it, we have to close it.” He turned to the long toothed cat. “Do you have any ideas?”

  The golden fur seemed to melt away as the feline form flowed into that of the burly Master Horgar. He walked around the room once before shaking his head.

  “I’m a fair hand at summoning, but this is orders of magnitude beyond anything I can do. There’s not even a circle.”

  “There’s not?”

  Jez looked at the edges of the hole. Horgar was right. A portal like this was one of the things Jez had looked into once he’d brought the library back into the world. It required an extraordinary amount of power to be fed into the working in a steady stream. Something like this simply could not be done without a circle, not for any extended amount of time at any rate. Sharim may have advanced much in his knowledge of summoning, but even he couldn’t do this. There was, however, another type of working the human demon was an expert at.

  Jez’s fingers moved in the precise motions necessary to form a ward against illusion. He felt a slight pressure as his working sliced through whatever magic Sharim had placed, but just before the hole in the ground faded, Jez sensed a slight pricking. He tried to pull back, but it was too late.

  His ward snapped the working that had been built into the illusion itself. Shapeless power shot out in every direction. It wasn’t enough to have any real effect, but Jez was sure it could be sensed from a great distance. He was about to order a retreat when a crack sounded from above. Black dust floated down for a second before the ceiling fell in on them. Jez managed to redirect most of the rubble, but he couldn’t do anything about the chain demons that had, presumably, been waiting on the roof.

  The sharieks fell onto them. Seeming to be people made of thick iron chains, they lost their forms as they fell. One landed on Jez, and the chain entwined itself around him, restraining him. Somehow, not only did the demon bind him physically, it bound his magic as well. He looked up, hoping at least some of his companions had avoided being captured, but what he saw quickly dashed his hopes. There had to have been at least three dozen of the demons, and all the mages had been entrapped. The sharieks were leaching away the magic that transformed them. Ziary had returned to being Osmund, and the animal forms of the beast mages were shriveling away. Slowly, the sharieks took shape, once again to the form of men made of chains. They held the prisoners in their chests and walked toward the door of the summoning house.

  They exited the building to see a sky full of flying demons and streets teeming with land-bound ones. Jez’s heart sank. Though he’d seen them being summoned, he’d never realized just how many there were. They had to have been hiding in the buildings. If Jez and his companions had encountered so many, they never would have had a chance. They had been set up deliberately to be captured and not killed, though Jez couldn’t imagine why. It couldn’t be good, though. He struggled to free himself, but he might as well have tried to stop a storm by blowing at it. The creature was simply too strong, its grip, too absolute. The sounds of battle grew louder, and Jez began to hope that Balud’s forces would rescue them, but the fighting was never close enough for him to catch so much as a glimpse of his allies.

  The sharieks took them to the central spire. Jez shivered as they passed through an invisible wall of energy and guessed that Sharim must have put wards of his own around the place. They entered the spire. Sharim stood in the center of the single room floor. He’d drawn a circle of white sand around the entire room, and runes Jez didn’t recognize had been scattered around the floor. He grinned at Jez.

  “Good.” His voice made the hairs on the back of Jez’s neck stand on end. “All I need from you is a rune.”

  Jez gaped at him. He tried to shake his head, but the chains wouldn’t even allow him that much movement. Finally, he let out a breath. “I won’t help you.”

  The human demon gave him a toothless smile. “I didn’t think you would, but you’ve been bound by a shariek. Your power is beyond reach, and unless you have another memory shadow hidden in your mind, you won’t be able to stop me from getting anything I want.”

  Sharim reached forward and placed a hand on Jez’s forehead. Jez tried to pull back, but there was nowhere to go. There was a surge of power as Sharim’s mind slammed against the wards Jez had set up around his thoughts. Sharim laughed and launched himself at them again. This time, the attack sent pain lancing through Jez’s body. Again and again, Sharim struck. Slowly, cracks began to form. Jez cried out, but Sharim only redoubled his effort. There was a sound like stone shattering. Jez’s barriers crumbled, and the human demon poured into his thoughts.

  CHAPTER 34

  Deep purple fog swirled around Jez in the midst of a vast nothingness. It was almost like Between, only it felt more familiar. No, this wasn’t nothing. Rather, it was the very essence of Jez, so utterly known to him that he hadn’t even noticed it when it had surrounded him. There was a deeper, stronger presence here too. It was not only Jez. It was Luntayary, though the pharim’s mind was restrained by a ward far more powerful than anything Jez had ever crafted, no doubt the working Sariel had set in place.

  “You’ve been training in mental magic.” Sharim’s voice seemed to come from everywhere. “I didn’t think anyone in this age knew how to build a fog maze.”

  Jez looked around but couldn’t find Sharim. He had no idea what the demon was talking about.

  “You don’t, do you?” Sharim asked. “No, there is something else going on here.”

  The fog swirled in front of Jez and congealed into the form of a young boy about the same age as him. It was the form Sharim had worn when they’d first met. Jez summoned his sword and leaped at him, but he passed harmlessly through Sharim, who only laughed.

  “Ah yes. There it is.”

  Sharim reached forward as if grabbing something that wasn’t there. He closed his hand and suddenly, Luven was there, his throat caught in Sharim’s grasp.

  “A Darkmask. One who does not fear to interfere.” He grinned. “Of course, your kind always were best at circumnavigating that restriction.”

  “Jezreel, remember how you defeated Marrowit! This is your mind. You are not restricted by flesh here.”

  Jez nodded, understanding. The reason he couldn’t normally draw too deeply of Luntayary was that human flesh couldn’t contain that power. If Luven was right, in this place, that limitation didn’t exist. Instantly, Jez glowed with power and forced his will into the fog. He had never been good at shaping Between, but this was his mind, and it conformed to his desires. He drew on the memory of the battle with Marrowit, and the fog took shape, taking them to the place where he had defeated the demon lord of nightmares. The ground beneath him became the wooden planks of the docks near his father’s home. The sea formed under them. Tendrils of the indigo fog swirled around Jez. It still obscured anything more than a few dozen feet away, but still, he knew where he was.

  Home.

  Sharim wore a shocked expression as Jez threw himself at the human demon. At the last instant, Sharim tossed Luven aside. A blade, six feet long and made entirely of flame, appeared in his hands. He batted Jez’s weapon away.

  Sharim’s flesh fell away revealing arms and legs of black stone, each as thick around as Jez’s waist. Cracks spiderwebbed along the skin. Glowing fire shone from within. The demon grew to twice his normal height, and his face elongated. His eyes became twin points of scarlet light. He opened his mouth to reveal three rows of razor sharp teeth. Jez took a step back as the demon form of Andera took shape before him.

  “In this place, you may not be bound by human flesh,” Sharim hissed, “but neither am I.”

  He swung his massive sword. Jez caught the blade o
n his own weapon. The force of the impact sent him to the ground, the wooden planks groaning beneath him. He rolled to his feet, his sword darting forward as he rose. Andera knocked it aside with an almost casual ease. Jez backed up to the edge of the dock, looking around. He needed help. Even at the height of Luntayary’s power, he had never been a match for Andera, but Luven was nowhere to be seen.

  Andera slashed, but Jez stepped aside. He threw his power at the water beneath the dock. It surged upward, ensnaring Andera’s leg. The flames within the demon flared, reducing the water to steam. Jez struck, hoping the steam would distract his foe, but Andera moved so fast Jez’s eyes couldn’t follow. The demon seized him by the wrist and twisted. There was a snapping sound. Jez cried out as his sword fell from his hand. He tried to pull away, but the demon’s grip was too strong. Andera laughed, and the hand gripping Jez burst into flame. Pain lanced up his arm. Andera raised his other hand, similarly shrouded in flame, but before he could strike, there was a sound like rushing wind. The fog above the demon solidified into the form of Luven.

  The Darkmask dove, holding a blade of black iron point down. The sword crashed into the demon’s arm. It only went in about an inch. Andera winced, and his grip loosened slightly. Jez tore himself free and leaped into the water.

  Instantly, the pain lessened. Aqua magic had always been his strongest school of magic, and even though this ocean was little more than a memory, he could still draw power from it. If Andera wanted to find the secrets buried in his mind, he would have to meet Jez here, where he was strongest.

  “Did you think that would stop me?”

  The voice reverberated through the water. Jez didn’t even have time to look around before a black hand seized his throat. Andera appeared seemingly out of nowhere with an unconscious Luven in his left hand. The glow in the demon’s eyes intensified, and pain bloomed in Jez’s mind. Andera smiled.