by Tom Lloyd
Creeping forward, Toil gave a wide berth to a tall bush with flowers that pulsed open and closed. Here the paths were narrower, the visible ground in any direction no more than twenty yards. It made for a nerve-shredding journey through winding avenues of plants that rustled at their approach – sometimes as small creatures fled, sometimes for more sinister reasons.
A great flat-topped hump of ground loomed ahead of them. Beyond that she could just about see the deepgod’s twisting horns and double sets of eyes currently narrowed to crescents. It was only fifty yards away, but for the moment its attention was focused elsewhere. The huge creature stood out in the gloom despite its dark hide, but as she looked Toil realised it was more than just the strange iridescence.
There was a presence too – one that tugged at her, mind and soul. Standing there, unmoving, it overshadowed anything else in that vast cavern. It drew her attention, demanded notice, and more than that too. It reminded her of all those dark days she’d spent underground before.
Days when she’d been triumphant, or at her most desperate. She’d felt it before, but only now did she realise that. There was something on the air, like a note that had been ringing out on the edge of hearing for so long she no longer noticed it. But now she was closer, now she could hear it.
We can’t leave this thing alive, she realised, certainty hitting her where once there had only been assumption. It called to me underground – Sotorian Bade too, I’d wager. Imprisoned by the gods, sleeping or whatever, it reached out across the miles and now it’s awake. Now it’s free. It won’t just run and hide. Not for long.
She reached another corner and paused, one hand raised for the Cards behind to stop. Ahead of them were three maspids, crouched low in the shadow of a tanglethorn. The sleek creatures were focused on what lay beyond. There Toil could just about make out the white quarters of a Charneler uniform. The soldier clearly had no idea maspids were so close, waiting to ambush anything that got near.
Toil backed off, motioning for the others to be quiet. She chose a different path that led towards three tall bushes with a spray of glowing white fronds. Crouching to look beneath those, she could see more maspids, all poised to ambush. Toil nodded to herself. She didn’t recognise the plant, but experience taught her not to pass underneath it and she hoped maspids wouldn’t either.
Carefully pantomiming, she set a guard at front and rear, ready to spark any marauding creatures, then gestured to her grenade throwers. They had a short run-up and a clear space to aim at. Toil assigned a direction to each then took a grenade for herself. Joas went first, a burly Jarraziran woman who revealed a surprising burst of speed. With a grunt she hurled the grenade up and away, far into the gloom where it was swallowed by darkness. Darm ran forward next and launched his own, higher and further to the right. Safir came last, aiming for the pillar where the half-seen golantha had lurked.
The first boom rang out as he started his run-up, the bright stuttered flashes and hiss of a crackler lighting up the cavern. A deep bellow echoed out in its wake, a sound Toil recognised from Shadows Deep. Then the sound was overlaid by the greater roar of a roaster – the fire grenade bursting yellow and orange high into the air an instant later. Safir lobbed his own grenade and, as the light of the first faded, the cavern was illuminated by a huge spray of lightning that burst across the pillar.
The darkness there was thrown back with savage force. Through watering eyes. Toil saw a shape revealed – thirty feet tall with a slender, stooped back and long arms that seemed to reach down to the ground. Its hide was dark and gnarled like the bark of a tree, but all shot through with veins of greenish light. There was what looked like fury on its face as the lightning raged. It had a blunt, tusked head with large glowing eyes and dozens of twisting knotted trails that hung like hair down its back.
Toil felt a manic grin appear on her face. She turned to her left and hurled one last crackler in the direction of the Charnelers she’d seen. It landed short of where the deepgod stood, but it hit the soldiers. A boom and flash lit up behind the rocky outcrop, followed by screams and more explosions as the cartridge cases of close-packed soldiers blew up.
The one maspid she’d kept in sight darted away in a dark blur. Instinct told the creatures when to exploit any moment of confusion, just as she’d hoped. More explosions came from further away. No doubt the Sons of the Wind had seen some threat in the crackler’s light. Cries and the whipcrack of icers from nearer to hand showed the maspids had attacked. Toil could almost taste the change in the air – that shocking switch from anticipation to violence.
Now we just need to survive what we’ve started.
‘Fall back!’ Toil croaked. ‘Watch the flanks and get the fuck clear!’
Lynx heard the booms and tightened his grip on his mage-gun. They had found themselves in a narrow defile with rock rising on both sides, Aben and Sitain leading the way. The walls were almost sheer which meant there could be no escape, but also little space for lethal horrors to lurk. Up ahead he could see the plateau they were aiming for. Unnaturally level aside from the shell of some large building, it had a mass of creeper colonising the right-hand end.
The defile was tight enough to ensure they went two by two. Behind the lead pair were Himbel and Haphori, keeping close to Sitain’s protection, while Kas and her friend Colet followed a pace behind. Hanva and Estal, as close as lovers, were just ahead of Lynx who’d assigned himself as Atieno’s guardian.
Aben gestured for them to halt. The Cards tensed, raising their weapons. Toil’s lieutenant didn’t look back, he just placed a hand on Sitain’s shoulder and ushered her forward. He had a pistol drawn but he kept his grip on the young mage, ready to yank her back and out of the way if necessary. Whatever was beyond the next turn hadn’t spotted them, Lynx assumed. The pair edged forward and Lynx felt a slow tingle on his skin as Sitain reached into her great reservoir of power. The other Marked Cards began to glow faintly, just enough to make them more obvious in the gloom, Lynx noted.
Sitain did nothing with the power immediately. She and Aben crept forward step by step, as more explosions followed. It was hard to tell how close anything was but, as distant gunfire sputtered into life, he realised Toil had achieved her goal. Chaos had been promised. Now they had to deliver on their end, and quickly.
Aben moved out of Lynx’s sight, around a small bend in the defile. Almost immediately he heard a shout and Sitain unleashed her power. Through whatever link there was between them, Lynx could feel a pulse of night magic surge out in an expanding wave.
‘Move,’ he called, breaking the tense silence that followed. ‘That’s going to be a signal-flare for anything hungry down here.’
No one argued, Haphori and Himbel pursuing Aben around the corner even as the snap of a mage-pistol rang out. A whump of flame cast its orange light over the rock walls as the Cards emerged to see half a dozen angular creatures writhing amidst a pool of fire. Lynx followed in time to see Haphori fire an icer at one remaining creature, a mass of yellow and red striped legs as long as Reft’s foot. It scuttled out of the way, the spines of its back flicking left and right as it darted closer before Sitain gave a casual flick of the wrist. The air shimmered grey and the creature collapsed, falling flat and still.
Haphori cursed and raised a foot to stamp on the stunned insect. Aben yelled and grabbed the man’s arm, yanking him back.
‘Fuck, careful!’ Aben gasped. ‘Those spines will go right through your boot.’
‘Huh? Shit. Don’t wanna be limping round here, eh?’
Aben shook his head. ‘You’d only limp a few steps before your heart burst,’ he said darkly.
‘We’ve just announced ourselves,’ Lynx broke in. ‘Go – quickly!’
‘Just don’t tread on anything,’ Aben insisted, setting off.
Beyond the defile there was an open stretch, a carpet of tiny red plants covering the ground where the flames hadn’t touched. Aben led them across the scorched ground, using his gun-butt to flick one roast
ed insect, now just a blacked mess of spines curled into a ball, aside.
Then he stopped dead and gave a moan of dismay. Ahead of them was a great thicket of tanglethorn, spread across the shallow slope that led up to the plateau.
‘Fuck, we’re going to have to find another ramp,’ Aben hissed.
He looked left and right. There was more gunfire now, the air cut with the occasional streak of an errant icer. Whatever chaos Toil had sown, the two sides seemed to have thrown themselves into it. Lynx could hear the roar of at least one golantha above the noise, punctuated by explosions.
‘Let me try,’ Atieno said.
He pushed forward and the Cards followed him until he was almost touching the tanglethorn. Again Lynx felt his tattoos tingle but this time the light grew brighter. The feeling inside him was strange, alien and shifting, as the crazed nature of tempest magic struggled to escape Atieno’s grip. All around the tall mage there was a strange light in the air. A corona of shifting grey-blue wavered under an unfelt breeze before Atieno swept it forward at the tanglethorn. The strangling plant shuddered as the magic washed across it, contracting as it always did when disturbed.
Lynx watched, astonished, as the plant continued to tighten inwards. It curled and squeezed as though trying to extinguish the life from some struggling creature. The movement continued tighter in on itself then Lynx heard a tinkle like broken glass. Soon there was more, cascading and building into an avalanche of glass as the magic turned the tanglethorn into something black and brittle – all the while forcing it to squeeze ever harder against itself. Finally it shattered under the pressure.
When the last few cracks and discordant chinks had faded, there was little more than a carpet of obsidian shards remaining, for a strip seven or eight yards wide.
Lynx turned to Atieno. ‘Shit, remind me not to piss you off, eh?’
‘Have you been able to do that this whole time?’ Himbel demanded.
‘I allowed it to change,’ Atieno said by way of response, looking a little pained by his efforts. ‘I cannot control how it does so.’
‘So it could have turned to steel?’ Lynx hazarded.
Atieno gave him a weak smile. ‘We were going around it anyway, no?’
Lynx looked at the ruined mess before them. ‘Sure,’ he said slowly. ‘What could be the harm, I guess?’
Aben took the lead again, placing each foot with a sideways sweep to clear a space. The others followed in his footsteps and before long they were past the tanglethorn, advancing up the slope to the high plateau. Lynx forced himself not to look back until they had secured the top, but it was largely free of foliage. Underfoot it was rock, not the dust and dirt of the cavern floor, so Aben quickly pronounced the ground safe to walk on. Only then did Lynx turn back to the view of battle behind.
What he saw made his breath catch. The deepgod stood taller now, imperious and terrifying even by the standards of the horrors Lynx had seen. Not quite pitch black, its oily shine was overlaid with light too – white glowing glyphs that had been cut into its flesh. He couldn’t read them, but Lynx knew in his bones it was the four gods which had done that. Somehow the glyphs must have bound it to them until he and his friends started turning bits of the gods to dust.
Atop four great tree-trunk legs, the pair of long spear-tipped arms were held almost protectively wide over the formless groups of Charnelers that flanked it. The deepgod was concentrating on a golantha fifty yards away from Lynx’s group. It looked startlingly similar to the one from Shadows Deep; sinuous beneath heavy plates of armour. Crooked limbs were connected by a wing-like membrane and it was all wreathed in flickering, lightning-lit shadow.
The golantha’s long whip-tongues stretched out as it tasted the air and fire spilled from gill-like slits all down its neck. The monster was half perched on the side of an outcrop, afforded a good view of its prey but also able to retreat behind it if necessary. Despite the fire leaking out of it, it had clearly not consumed so many God Fragments as the first one – not yet driven mad by the power within it.
‘Look! Maspids,’ Aben said, pointing.
Lynx could only see bodies littering the ground between the two great horrors to start with, but then he spotted the dark shapes edging around the fringes. With no hope to take down anything so large, the maspids were lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity when the deepgod’s attention was elsewhere.
A flurry of explosions and gunfire suddenly burst out from further away. Lynx looked over just in time to see one formation of Sons of the Wind, described by the light of torches and mage-spheres, crumple inwards. Something indistinct and dark simply tore into it, the light of icers, sparkers and burners swallowed up by the shifting haze of a long, low mass.
‘The crawler,’ Aben gasped and Lynx realised he was right.
Toil had mentioned a larger version of the elongated tangle of legs and claws, but to see it in movement was something else entirely. Despite its size, the golantha covered the ground with hideous speed, far faster than a man could run and with all the obliterating speed of a rolling boulder.
The Sons never stood a chance as it ploughed forward. Bursts of lightning and fire seemed to be reflected back off its hide, a strange labile quality to what it showed and what was simply absorbed by the darkness. Lynx felt his tattoos flare again as the formation collapsed entirely – some linked mage suddenly drawing vast quantities of magic. With a jolt he realised it had snatched some Sons mages up just as Lastani had been taken. Dark shapes rose beneath the golantha, so hard they jolted it up off the ground as though a giant had kicked it.
‘Earth mage,’ Atieno declared in a hoarse voice.
His dark skin was lit up by the tattoos, more than a little reminiscent of the deepgod’s own markings now Lynx looked properly. He put the disturbing thought aside. Questions were for anyone who saw morning.
The battle intensified around the Sons of the Wind. The earth magic subsided. Likely the mage was dead but their last act had been to halt the golantha’s momentum. Lynx still couldn’t see it properly, just the shape of many-jointed legs reaching out ahead of it and whipping tentacles. Earthers hammered at its flanks, icers and sparkers burst uselessly over the haze of camouflage that concealed its long body. It shrieked and crawled forwards, crushing troops that were firing into the maw at the base of those legs and tentacles, but then the other marked mages attacked.
A spear of fire erupted over one, twenty feet in length, and they drove it hard into the golantha’s side. The spear pierced the creature’s veil of camouflage and went deep, making it reel and twist to attack. One sweep of its legs was enough to break the mage and the magic vanished again – drawn in by the power-maddened beast. But the damage had been done and the Sons converged on it, volley after volley smashing into it. Even as they did so Lynx saw maspids and others circling, waiting.
‘No time to enjoy the show!’ Kas yelled. ‘Atieno, get up here.’
They dragged themselves away as more gunfire erupted closer at hand – the rest of the Cards, Lynx assumed. He half-dragged Atieno towards the great staggered stairs set around the pillar. Haphori was already disappearing up them to check there was nothing lurking further on, while the rest formed a loose perimeter at the base to cover all avenues of attack.
‘You feeling lucky, old man?’ Kas asked.
Atieno looked more weary than anything else, but he nodded with a grim expression. In the weak light the grey veins that had appeared around his eyes and tattoos looked all the more disconcerting, like the ritual paint of some terrible ancient cult. ‘I cannot do it all,’ he said by way of response.
‘Make us an alcove,’ Lynx suggested. ‘Bore a hole. Give us something to pack.’
‘Deep as you can,’ added Estal, the company’s self-appointed grenadier and the one carrying the most dangerous burden. She raised a box she’d hauled all the way from the armouries of the valley defences. From the look on her face, even she’d be glad to see the back of it. ‘Let’s get this in as fa
r as we can.’
‘Is this really going to work?’ Himbel asked from his place on the defensive line. The sour-faced surgeon wasn’t much of a soldier, but he had few compunctions about killing strangers. He looked up at the massive stone pillar above, broader than any tree and mage-worked, which meant it was harder than most rock.
‘I can weaken parts,’ Atieno confirmed. ‘It will have to work.’
‘We’re not winning a straight fight,’ Lynx agreed. ‘Is there any way we can make the explosion more powerful?’
‘With a God Fragment,’ Atieno said. ‘But that brings its own issues. The deepgod may sense it even amid the flood of power down here.’
‘Do we have any left?’
‘We’ve got two,’ Sitain piped up. ‘I think they’re our last unless Toil kept one back.’
‘Let’s see how you do first, Atieno,’ Lynx said. ‘You’re the expert – if we need it to take down the pillar, that’s what we’ll do.’
Atieno grunted and started up the slope, Lynx close at hand in case he faltered. Kas – ever sprightly – had danced up the steps, head craned up to plan their attack. She ran her hand over the smooth stone as she went, looking for fissures and faults. Finally, she shook her head and glanced down towards Estal.
‘Here?’ she called. ‘I don’t see much, but there is a seam of colour and this is as narrow as the pillar gets.’
Lynx grunted. ‘Narrow’s a bit optimistic, ain’t it?’ The pillar remained more than ten yards across there, but the picture wasn’t any better elsewhere.
‘It’ll have to do,’ Atieno concluded. He placed his hand on the rock then turned it in circles like a dancer describing some spinning motion. For a moment nothing happened but slowly Lynx saw the mage’s tattoos begin to shine.
It started slowly but Lynx realised there was a haze of jagged light turning around Atieno’s hand, scraping away the rock as his fingers went as though it was just sand. Soon there was enough of a hole to put his hand in, but Atieno didn’t stop – pressing on to drive it further while he had the magic under control.