Chant’s eyes were glued to the tableau outside. With the twist and lift of a wire, she removed the first manacle. The pawnbroker flinched, and mouthed, “No!” A scream ripped her attention back to the chamber.
Murmur’s grip was empty … It had thrown the boy into the insect pit.
The volume of the swarming insects swelled. The sound of thousands of hungry mandibles, beating wasp wings, rustling carapaces, and scuttling spider legs drowned the sound of someone being consumed alive by insects. Oh gods!
Chant went for the exit, but was jerked to a stop by the manacle that remained around his wrist. His motion nearly knocked the wire from her hand. She hissed, “Don’t move, or we’ll be next!”
Murmur’s voice came, “Eat well, Scour.”
“What are you talking about?” said Demascus. His voice cracked and broke. Whatever front he had thrown up had obviously faltered with the boy’s life.
“You’ll discover that soon enough,” said the demon. “You, and everyone in this chamber, and perhaps everyone in the entire city of Airspur will become food for my slumbering sibling.”
She had to get the Hells out of there. Her hands shook, and she fumbled her first attempt at the human’s restraint.
“I … I see. Why is Scour asleep?”
“Because of you!” Murmur suddenly raged. It grasped Demascus’s cage and shook it like a terrier shakes a cornered rat.
Riltana removed Chant’s remaining manacle. She whispered, “All your stuff is in that chest beneath Carmenere’s cage. See it?”
The pawnbroker rubbed his wrists and nodded. He was pale and battered, but the human’s eyes were dark with determination. He muttered, “We’ll make this demon sorry for what it’s done.”
“No!” she breathed. “What we’re going to do is create a distraction! We free a passel of other prisoners, the ones that look like they still have some kick in them. Then, when Murmur’s busy chasing them down, we free Demascus, and we run from here like greased pig-snugglers!”
“I’ll help free the prisoners,” said Chant. “Then we’ll see.” The pawnbroker glided out of the cage as quietly as she herself could have managed, despite his bulging belly. She followed.
The demon had let go of Demascus’s dangling cell. The deva shook his head to clear it from the rough handling.
“Tell me one thing,” said Demascus, his voice even more strained. “You didn’t cause that spike of power at the shrine? You didn’t summon me with some sort of ritual?”
“No,” said Murmur. “Why would I be insane enough to call forth one of the few beings who ever bested me?”
“A servitor told you of the shrine?” said Demascus. “Who?”
Murmur grated, “I hardly bother to learn their names; they all become food in the end. It was … The one who liked to wear a hood. He told me of the spiritual spike, and how I might profit from it. Hold—I remember. My mind is improving apace with the molting finally complete.
“His name is Kalkan.”
CHARTER TWENTY
AIRSPUR
THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)
ONLY A HINT OF LIGHT LEAKED AROUND THE EDGES OF HIS blindfold, but Demascus could sense Murmur’s presence—a blot of inimical cold, far too close. His battered body throbbed, and the manacles were a torture all their own.
But all that went away as the demon’s words hit home.
“You … you know Kalkan?” asked Demascus.
The leaden voice replied, “Enough talk. I’ve given Scour something to wake its appetite. It’s time for the main course. You, Demascus.”
The pain crashed back down on him, and it served as the conduit for a cold draft of pure fear. He did not want to be eaten alive by a swarm of semisentient bugs!
“Think of it as an experiment,” continued the abyssal voice. “How long will it take the insects to eat through your skin and bone before they get to your heart or brain? Everyone I’ve thrown into the pit lasts at least a song. The screaming usually stops before that, but that’s only because the bugs have eaten the tongue and soft tissues of the throat.”
The bolt on his cage being drawn back scratched his ears. A presence defined by the smell of blood and rot moved closer.
He spasmed in the manacles, forcing his strained muscles to jerk as hard as they could against the restraints. But the metal cuffs only cut deeper.
He panted, motionless again. “I don’t want to go into the pit,” he said. He was amazed at how matter-of-fact his voice sounded.
“But you’re the perfect sacrifice,” said Murmur. Demascus turned his head from its stagnant breath. “Of all the creatures I’ve collected to feed my sibling, your spiritual presence is the most vital. It radiates from you like a fire. When Scour eats you, it will finally wake, I’m certain of it!”
Cold, rubbery fingers brushed Demascus’s face.
Demascus cried, “Let go!” and wrenched at the restraints again, on the edge of complete panic. So much for his matter-of-fact voice, part of his mind observed. Fresh daggers of pain shot down his wrists and arms.
Murmur chuckled.
Demascus remembered the alley and Inakin, where he’d walked through shadow. He tried to push away his distress and concentrate, imagining himself setting foot on the gloomy road as if it was any other path … Nothing. Because he couldn’t see where he was going!
This is it, he thought. I’m going to be eaten. His mind felt sluggish, fevered.
Murmur’s grip enveloped him. And still he couldn’t see a godsdamned thing! Only a mocking shimmer came through the blindfold.
Wait. The texture reminded him of … Was it his Veil? It was.
“Help me, Wrath and Knowledge!” he screamed. “Or all you’ve revealed ends here!”
The Veil flexed, unknotted itself from around his head, then settled around his neck like a simple scarf.
Murmur’s oily arm, veined with scarlet crystal, gripped him tight with hideously flexible fingers. The monster’s visage blocked the open cell door. Its mouth was agape, and its scarlet eyes swirled like twin views into the Abyss.
And beyond, Demascus saw the cavern, striped with light and dark. Each stripe of gloom was, from a certain point of view, like a shortcut. A path. An escape!
Demascus imagined walking down a darkling lane …
A cool wind tousled his hair as he stepped out of the manacles, out of Murmur’s grip, and to the far side of the cavern into a pool of shade.
He was free, and he could see. His mental inventory of his situation bloomed in his hindbrain as he subconsciously noted the details of the horrid chamber, where each cell was embedded or hung, how many steps from where he stood to the edge of the pit, and the location and distance to—
A howl of anger lashed the room. “Come back here!”
—the exit to the chamber of horrors; it was on the opposite side of the room, across the pit from where he’d appeared.
Murmur lifted its hands as if beseeching the roof to collapse. Demascus felt some disregarded terror stir in answer behind his eyes. He mentally clamped hold of the diaphanous wight, until it settled again into the place where forgotten night terrors go.
Others were less successful. A miasma of tumbling color and shapes streamed from the mouths, eyes, noses, and ears of a swathe of manacled captives.
The turbulent mist of bad dreams flowed to Murmur. They lapped over and layered the demon. It turned around in the the torrent as if luxuriating in the flow, and a ghastly second skin materialized around it. A skin of twining arms and gaping mouths, undulating worms and exposed viscera, transforming Murmur’s already horrific bulk into an unspeakable nightmare.
The captives who retained their sanity screamed. Demascus whispered, “Lords of shadow, preserve me.” Murmur was an enemy beyond his strength, he knew it. He should flee, immediately, before—
The slap of bare feet on rock pulled his eyes from the awful visage. A black-haired halfling and a watersoul wearing just scraps of clothing were running, free of th
eir cages and manacles, to the exit. On the opposite side of the room, another handful of unshackled captives variously ran, limped, or crawled from their cages.
Demascus blinked at the escapees, who were like the embodiment of hope that life might go on. At least for some. He blew out his breath as the panic Murmur’s countenance had blasted straight into his brain subsided.
“No one escapes,” said all the nightmare’s mouths at once. The massed voices were like a toll of doom.
A limb of hands and arms and red worms snapped up the black-haired halfling and hurled him directly into the pit. A squirming limb swiped at the fleeing watersoul but missed.
The next escapee was not so lucky; a woman with only one boot and scars running down her arm screamed when Murmur caught her. Her eyes found its own, desperate for succor. Then Murmur tossed her into the pit.
“No!” he yelled.
Murmur bellowed from a dozen mouths, “Demascus! Time for you to meet your destiny!”
“I don’t remember what you are or who,” he yelled. “But if I beat you in some past life, I can beat you in this one too.”
“No. This time, you’re alone,” said Murmur. Its awful grin widened.
I am on my own, Demascus thought. Just like the woman Murmur threw into the pit. Just as he’d been from the moment he’d opened his eyes on the shrine. He didn’t have a single memory to hold on to. No one who cared about him.
The demon dream gestured, and a storm of pilfered nightmares rolled off the demon’s hide and washed toward Demascus.
He felt as if his feet were glued in place.
“Demascus!” hissed a voice. “Stop standing there like a half-wit and run!”
It was Riltana. In all her vitriolic glory.
Then he saw Chant. The human was hunched over the manacles restraining a mad-eyed fellow who was screaming, “The Lady was here! The Lady! The Lady!” Spittle frothed the man’s lips.
And where …? There! Carmenere crouched behind a large chest, shrugging into armor. A litter of items lay around her. Including the sword he’d found at the shrine.
He wasn’t alone. The thought illuminated his mind like the sunrise.
Time seemed to decelerate.
He tore the Veil from his neck and snapped it like a whip. The scarf came partly alive in his hand. The far end wrapped around the sword hilt at Carmenere’s feet. He jerked the sword to him through the air. The hilt slapped into his palm. A glitter of pale runes immediately formed, hovering over the blade.
Demascus focused on his sword, and on the runes that spontaneously formed whenever he wielded it. Each of those runes was … what? A memory. A very precise memory. One rune blazed, and it contained a recollection of divine light.
Time resumed its merciless march. Demascus cut the air in a downward slash. The sword tip inscribed an arc of swirling radiant energy. Murmur’s nightmare wave bore down on him, threatening to envelop him in fear unending. But the line of angelic fire he’d summoned sliced clean through the cresting miasma. Its tattered edges rolled past him on either side, and dispersed.
“Perish, demon!” yelled Carmenere.
Demascus saw that the silverstar had donned her armor and found her mace. It glowed like the full moon. A shaft of the conjured light touched Murmur’s seething flesh, tearing rents into the shuddering facade.
Three crossbow bolts and two hurled daggers punched into Murmur’s opposite flank a heartbeat later.
Murmur staggered and made an odd sound. Sort of like the sound an overconfident tough would make who’d taken an unexpected shot to the nether regions, Demascus thought. This demon can be beaten! he thought.
He flung himself at the demon. A radiance, like that which he’d just channeled from his sword, flickered around him like a protective nimbus. When the glow struck Murmur, his aura erupted into a flash a hundred times brighter.
The stolen nightmares the demon had plated itself with evaporated like dew in sunlight.
He hewed at what remained: a violet-skinned, crystal-veined eight-foot-tall monster supported by a nest of red crystal tendrils, naked in all its original horror.
Murmur’s spiraling eyes caught Demascus’s. The demon’s mouth unhinged in an unholy grin. Demascus realized the thing wasn’t the least bit hurt; they’d only managed to disrupt its nightmarish facade.
Crystal strands snaked around his waist and lifted him off his feet. Murmur lifted him over its head.
Demascus couldn’t help but glance down into the roiling crater. Biting insects beyond count thronged there. The half-consumed carcasses of the victims Murmur had already thrown in were strewn down the sides, their shapes suggested only by humps of seething beetles, ants, and cockroaches. Wasps and stinging moths darted just above the aperture like a halo.
“Merciful lords,” said Demascus. If he died in the pit, would he wake up some place and some years hence, his memory wiped clear once more? His flesh and bones didn’t believe it. His mortal frame feared for its life.
One end of the Veil flickered as light woke in individual threads. Words appeared in the weave. Without thinking, he spoke them aloud, “I swear, I shall slay you. So long as I breathe, you will not escape me.” As he voiced the phrase, he knew them as prophecy. Murmur would not be shut of him so long as Demascus bent his every thought on fulfilling the oath he’d just spoken.
Murmur reared back, then tossed Demascus into the pit.
Or tried to. The power of Demascus’s avowal bound the demon’s grip.
Demascus’s weight pulled Murmur forward, and it stumbled a step closer to the edge of the bug-swarmed cavity.
A crazed scream rang out, “For the Lady!” It was the spittle-flecked captive, running free with one manacle dragging behind him. The madman threw himself at the demon, and struck it from behind with the unrestrained strength of a psychopath.
Already overbalanced, Murmur tottered into the pit.
Sounds took on a base quality as they stretched out, and the light dimmed. Everything moved slowly but Demascus, who flicked the Veil of Wrath and Knowledge up. The Veil’s far end caught a bar of his cage and wrapped three times.
The improvised line nearly jerked out of his hand when it snapped tight. But that was only a prelude to Murmur’s full weight, which threatened to rip his shoulder from its socket.
He screamed, dangling by one hand, his arm a torment of molten agony. He kicked at Murmur, and slashed at the tendrils still gripping him halfheartedly. But his arm holding them over the swarm hurt so bad he could barely think. It was all he could do to not let go.
“Help!” Demascus called. His voice came out a croak. “Chant! Riltana!”
The pawnbroker appeared at the edge of the hole, eyes wide. He leveled his hand crossbow and pulled the trigger.
One bolt went wide. Two buried themselves in Murmur’s arm, just above its elbow. The monster convulsed, lost its grip on Demascus, and tumbled into the pit.
The demon wailed, its voice a howl of such animal supplication and suffering that Demascus just about bobbled his grip.
He allowed his sword to fall, and reached up until he gripped his scarf with both hands. Then he craned his head down to witness the struggle beneath his feet.
Murmur was at the pit’s nadir, flailing with demonic energy. Each time one of its arms came down, it squashed hundreds of bugs. Each time it shook itself like a hound, hundreds of churning legs and mandibles lost their grip. However, the host of tiny insects seemed numberless. In the end, all the demon’s frenzied efforts were hopeless. Demascus’s last sight of the demon’s violet hide was when Murmur bellowed, “Servitor! Kalkan! Why do you just stand there? Help me before—!” A tide of voracious beetles covered the demon and poured into its open mouth.
Demascus looked away, nauseated.
And saw Jett standing near the exit holding a smokeless torch. The genasi was smirking at him.
What in the name of all the dominions? Jett’s lord had just perished, but the servitor looked as smug as someone who’d got
ten in the last word of a monumental argument. Jett caught Demascus’s eye, then flipped a hood over his head, casting his features in shadow.
“Hold on,” yelled Riltana.
He glanced up to see the thief was in the cage where the Veil was secured, then back to Jett. The genasi was gone.
“Hey!” Riltana said, louder. “Pay attention! I’m going to pull you out of there!” She grabbed the length of fabric and started hauling him up. She was stronger than she looked.
I’m going to live, Demascus thought wonderingly, as he cleared the edge of the pit. If his pain-swaddled fingers could just stay clenched around the scarf another few heartbeats.
A babble of voices echoed through the cavern.
Genasi wearing the sign of the Elder Elemental Eye hurtled into the chamber, waving swords and aiming crossbows. A fleeing captive took one crossbow bolt in the leg and went down. Another bolt clattered on the bars of Riltana’s aviary.
“Son of a piss-pickled leech!” cursed Riltana. “Cover me!” The windsoul continued hauling on the Veil, her face pinched.
The pawnbroker, who’d been standing anxiously watching Demascus’s ascent, dived for cover. Carmenere, closer to the exit, charged the cultists. Two bolts ricocheted off her armor.
Demascus tried to summon up a path through shadow to safety, but the fire in his arms was too much.
Then Riltana’s hand gripped his, and pulled him into the cage. Such an enormous surge of relief swept through him that he felt giddy. “Thank you, Riltana.”
“We need to get out of here,” she told him. Her eyes were on the conflict near the exit.
He said, “I lost my sword in the pit.”
She said, “Carmenere just brained a cultist who dropped his sword. Take that one.”
She patted his shoulder, then leaped from the cage, executing an amazing spiral through the air as she flew much farther than a simple jump could have possibly propelled her. She unsheathed her short sword while still aloft. Her booted heels came down on the silverstar’s left, and she immediately stabbed a cultist in the kidney.
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