The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1)

by Andrew Macmillan

  He punched the other gauntlet out, aiming for the bridge running across the chasm to the doorway he had entered from. He had no idea how he would get the Anvil into the Pit, but the floor was one step closer. He punched out, trying to twist like It had, when he had thought it had skewered him in the shadow world. The portal exit manifested as a tiny white fleck on the ledge in the distance, and he plunged his black-hole gauntlet into the Anvil’s gleaming surface.

  The universe blinked, and he was on the bridge across the chasm, balanced precariously. The Anvil teetered next to him, its gleaming shape partially over the edge of the bridge, and he tried to haul it safely on. It howled as Cole struggled to keep his balance. It struck out at the walls of the mind-prison. The sheer volume of corrupt power washing over him pinpricked his skin; It seethed.

  While they fought, the Anvil slowly tipped, balanced on the edge of the bridge, tilting into the abyss beneath them. Cole was being pulled toward it. He worked with his legs, trying to haul himself away from the Anvil’s gravity, but the density of the Anvil dragged him.

  It kicked out, sensing weakness. He reeled as It hammered in. Beneath him, a chasm yawned. He was going to fall without time to make a plan. He punched the air with his hand and punctured a juicy seam of thin reality. At the same time, from beneath him, he siphoned the smallest trickle of black magic. This time, It detonated on his mind-prison walls. He reeled and a wave of exhaustion followed, a portal entrance spinning on the end of his gauntlet.

  He staggered, and the Anvil, balanced finely on the knife edge of the ledge, slid into the abyss below. His legs buckled, and he plummeted, freefalling into nothing. The Anvil’s light pushed back shadow as he fell, showing nothing at all beneath him. Seconds ticked by, his heart pounding, tearing a hole in his chest. How long was the drop? How far down was the ground? Was there ground, or would he fall forever?

  His mind raced; maybe he could open an exit to take him back up onto the safety of the ledge above. Solid ground suddenly bloomed in front of him, the Anvil’s light illuminating the bottom of the abyss. The bottom, solid and real.

  ‘We’re in the sky, go through it, ye grave-hole!!’ It was totally mad. But in the flash of a second, he had left to live, he had to try something.

  He punched a hole in the cracks of reality with one hand and punched and twisted his other hand, hoping to come out on the ground where he could gather his thoughts.

  The ground flew toward him like a hammer.

  The universe blinked.

  A second’s elation passed when he realised he was still alive. Relief gave way to terror as he fell, free and fast, the wind roaring in his ears, down into the black vastness yawning beneath. Below, the lights of the city bloomed.

  The Anvil tumbled, dragging him down at increasing speed, its impossible weight a jet engine which pulled him in its wake. Directly below, in a dark patch among the city’s brightness, shone a bright ring of lights. Ant-like figures crawled. They clustered around what could only have been the Pit. He was accelerating toward it, toward the wound the god would erupt from. Pain and suffering cycloned into the air above the Pit, setting the thermals alight.

  The rope of the Anvil streamed down, taut, toward the Pit. His face felt new wetness, probably blood. They would fall right into the Pit, and it would be done. Blood streaming from Cole’s face, he was held by the horror reaching up, his skin crawling with fear as the god’s violet eyes pierced him. The First saw him fall.

  ‘We’re drifting, ye have tae concentrate, shagger!’ Brude’s panicked blaring broke the spell. Dazed, paralysed, he watched the ground swell, the ants suddenly gaining the shapes of men as he fell toward the city.

  The roaring air blasted all noise away, but he could imagine the chatter of gunfire that would accompany the tracers he began to see lacing the Pit mouth. As he watched, the Anvil’s flight began bending away from the Pit mouth, like the Anvil was a magnet repelled by an opposite force.

  Gods be damned, they should have fallen right into the Pit, job done. But instead, they sailed, curving away from it – a hundred metres, a hundred and fifty, the ground coming up to meet them.

  ‘Dae something!’ The sharp crack of Brude’s voice was like a punch in his grey matter.

  The ground filled his vision; they were a hundred metres up. Fifty. Tiredness like he’d never known fogged his brain. He could barely contain It. If he siphoned now, he might lose his control completely. He reached deep, holding onto his mind-prison walls, and pulled a spark of power form the swirling mass in the air. It slammed into its prison, gouging. He jabbed and twisted with his free hand, opening an exit for the portal entrance still spinning on his other gauntlet. Where they’d come out would be sheer chance.

  The grass became individual strands; the universe blinked. He dropped, crunching after a half second onto wet, but beautifully fresh, ground. Grass cradled him. The Anvil bounced and thrummed a short distance away.

  A long trail of thin rope was visible, leading away from the Anvil, two hundred metres or so toward the Pit.

  ‘Yaaassss!’ Brude was elated in his brain and far too alert. ‘Now, shagger, magic this sea-devil into the Pit, and it’s done!’ He could hear Brude’s conflict as the old king finished the thought. Success meant death.

  The Anvil swam in his double vison. He was too weary to think. Shaking his head to clear the blur in his eyes, he levered himself up on shaky feet. He’d never felt exhaustion like this before from fighting with It. But he’d also never used abilities like this, and with the merest trickle of siphoned magic as fuel.

  Ahead, beast vampires crested the lip of the Pit every few seconds. Guns barked, silhouetted by the fury of unleashed magic. Light strobed in a flash bulb of movement and death. Cole saw the thin line of the Coalition’s knights strewn around the lip of the Pit, littered with casualties. The fight was costing them.

  A huge pile of twisted limbs and brutal vampire faces lay a few feet from the tenuous, stretched line of men. The sight swelled his chest with pride. It itched to kill. The men were holding. Many of them might not have seen battle before, and this was a worse fight than any would have seen in their lifetime.

  The chatter of rifles was punctuated by the staccato cough of small arms – ammo ran low. Every few paces along the line, men lay still, gripped by dreadful silence. He would know many of them.

  The hole of the Pit stank of iron and cold, emptiness radiating like hunger from it. The great mass of the First was tearing the fabric of the world above the Pit apart. Cracks and fractures laced the air around the Pit mouth. That the men couldn’t see the truth was a mercy.

  The Pit hawked up the next vampire, a huge thing of tortured and ruined flesh, all scar tissue and muscle. Its greeting was a well-disciplined fusillade. As bullets thundered into its elongated form, it tried to blur forward, but the pounding ammunition tore chunks from the creature, and it staggered. Bones the thickness of a man shattered as it toppled slowly.

  Close by, a mage – familiar to sight – wandered, the vacancy in his eyes meaning he was gripped by the dwam. Behind Cole, the cold, slithering ropes of the Anvil reached out. It quested.

  The notes began quietly. The Anvil’s probing touch and the tendrils of milky, off-white power it exuded found the closest beast vampire corpse a hundred or more metres away, and the song the Anvil sang lilted in a dirge of terrible, low, heart-pulsing sound.

  A white glow filled the fresh-butchered corpse of the creature. Its skin knitted as it untangled its many-jointed limbs in jerky, unnatural movements. It was a predator, waking to find its prey. The rope flared, brief but bright. Cold fear gripped as Cole felt the god-vampire inch closer.

  A shout went up from the men when they spotted the creature getting back up from the ground, their guns roaring with tight, disciplined bursts. Their confusion was echoed down the line with more uncertainty, men calling out in question.

  The beast vampire staggered back as shots hit home. A shower of lead fell from the creature’s flesh, each r
ound jerking it back but leaving it unmarked. It shone with light that seeped through the cracks of its healing body. Then the cracks vanished, leaving only its burning, violet eyes, glowing in the half light.

  Gunfire stuttered and died, impotent. The beast vampire leapt on the nearest knight, the man dying in a crimson shower before he was dragged beneath its low-lying body, for it to feed.

  The men shattered, falling back, near breaking point. If that portion of the line collapsed, it would be over. From somewhere among the men, the Grandmaster strode forward, calling lightning from the sky, sheeting down in huge spikes. The creature exploded.

  The Grandmaster gave a rallying cry. But the dirge of the Anvil droned on, draining hope from the air. The men, battered but holding their spirits a moment before, lost the set of their shoulders, their resolve evaporating.

  Cole staggered. He had to get rid of the Anvil before the men lay down and died. Before the god crested the lip of the Pit. The Anvil’s oily power slid along the ground, spreading like blood into the soil. Its dirge was a death rattle in the dark.

  It cried out, lashing his insides, desperate to break free. The sound of the Anvil’s song echoed around the Pit. The knights startled – did they hear the song? From the wound in the earth, an echo of the song was returned, faint but audible. Then, as though a cavernous mouth had opened, the scratching wail – exultation of an ancient god – pierced all sense of meaning from the men’s bodies. The First sang.

  The faces of the men froze as though time had stopped. Cole had moments to get the Anvil into the Pit. He summoned the gauntlets, It rattling in his arms, ready to maim. Sweat sheeted down his back, from even that simple effort. The cracks in reality were large, and he punched forward, siphoning as much as he dared.

  His strike fell weak, gaining no purchase on the fault lines in reality. He had no power left; he couldn’t move the Anvil, not without pulling deeper on the black magic below. And there, It waited. He was so close – two hundred metres. It might as well have been a million. He had to get the Anvil closer, to be sure he’d make it to the Pit. If It won through before he did …

  The men began to withdraw, firing their weapons wildly at the fresh vampires still escaping the Pit. The Grandmaster yelled, trying to keep the cordon intact. They couldn’t stray far from the Pit mouth, or vampires might escape into the city. The men wavered, their discipline dying.

  Cole panted, trying desperately to open a tunnel with his gauntlets. He couldn’t; it was all fucked. He dropped to one knee, recovering his breath. The Anvil’s light soaked into the earth, seeping toward the Pit. It lit upon the pile of vampire corpses. The rope of the Anvil shone with solid brilliance when a hundred pairs of eyes, closed by violence, flared to unnatural life.

  Chapter 29

  Spear shimmering in hand, Natalia readied to face the Mother. ‘Get the other wytches, Nessie. This one’s mine.’ Nessie hovered for a fraction of a second then left, heading after the four wytches who had gone in the same direction as Cruickshank.

  Henry had hidden when the other wytches had passed, but was now skulking around the platform, eyeing the ledge leading back toward the fortress gates. Nessie took the boy’s arm. ‘Come, Henry.’

  The Mother crossed to the platform. They were alone. For the first time, there was a tightness to the Mother’s face, her serene calm close to crumbling. ‘So, she returns to her sisters, her side chosen, and with her she brings death.’

  They circled, the Mother arrogantly not even shielded.

  Natalia snarled and launched her spear, trying to catch the Mother off guard. The Mother cried, ‘Otlachimalli!’ A shield, the mirror of Natalia’s own, flashed up, the spear shattering on its surface.

  ‘You are bonded with Mixcoatl?’

  The Mother snarled, ‘Vemana!’

  Pain erupted in Natalia’s chest, crippling, as the Mother spoke the Nahuatl word for sacrifice. This was not a key of Mixcoatl; it was not of the hunt. These were the words of death. Natalia collapsed to her knees, her heart thrashing, trying to summon a defence as her lungs ironed flat, refusing breath or speech.

  ‘Ximocahcāhua!’ The Mother’s command brought the pain to an end. These were the powers of the undergods. But the Mother couldn’t be bonded to Mixcoatl and be bonded to the undergods. Nobody could have more than one patron, fallen or not.

  That didn’t change what Natalia had just experienced. She focused. The Council taught that combating the power of the fallen needed particular defences. It was uncommon knowledge: Nessie had thought her ready only for the basics.

  Natalia’s pain eased. She invoked the cantrip of the hunter’s spear but infused it with life. ‘Tepoztopilli; ‎Tonaltzintli!’ Her spear shone once more, this time bright as a star, infused with vitality.

  ‘Very good, sister. The puppets of your Council have taught you something.’

  Why hadn’t Natalia felt the Mother’s corruption when they first approached her? The fallen should have stung her senses that close up. She circled, buying time. The Mother’s fall to the undergods must have been recent – she couldn’t have hidden it when Natalia had reached out and wrapped the wytches in her protection, all those days ago.

  The Mother dismissed the shield of Mixcoatl and invoked.

  ‘Yohualli.’ A flat disc of night rolled onto the Mother’s shield arm.

  Natalia needed answers. ‘How long have you been bonded with the undergods?’

  The Mother smiled. ‘You think me lost, Natalia? You, who is cocooned in lies?’

  Natalia darted forward, testing. She jabbed her spear of sunlight, feinting over the Mother’s shield, and dropped her weight, collapsing and cutting low under the Mother’s guard. The Mother’s shield dropped, barely catching the sun spear. The night shield lit with light and Natalia’s spear darkened, the two – spear and shield – clashing and fighting for dominance.

  Natalia jumped back. Could she take on fallen magic? She’d asked the Commander to give her the Mother, bent on her revenge, ignoring the obvious facts that she’d never seen the Mother invoke, and the rest of the wytches appeared corrupted and fallen.

  ‘I could cut you down with a word, child.’

  Natalia danced in, spear whirling.

  The Mother shouted, ‘Oselotl!’ And evaded, suddenly light on her feet. The Mother weaved and dived in, jaguar-quick, her free hand raking with the claws of the big cat. Natalia’s key only granted the agility, not the claws.

  Natalia dodged and riposted, her spear striking the night shield head on and dying in a splutter.

  She jumped high, ‘Cuāuhocēlōtl!’ She summoned another spear and hurled it as the aspect of the eagle carried her up. She flipped in the air to land behind the Mother who sidestepped the throw and spun around.

  The building shook, the floor cracking and shifting underfoot. They circled on the platform as the ground trembled, that dread presence rolling up from the Pit below, like a tide. A wash of fresh blood spilled from Natalia’s nose. Somehow, the Mother was unaffected.

  ‘How long have you known what’s coming? Did you mean to let the Anvil do this? Did you bring it here, to free the First from the Pit?’

  The Mother’s veneer cracked into a frown, and she lunged, barking an unfamiliar word, a spear of pure night elongating in her hand, replacing the claws of the big cat. Natalia swept in, striking, night and day flashing together.

  ‘What is this nonsense you speak of? You think me damned? Me? There are libraries full of the knowledge your Coalition forbids.’

  Their spears crossed as Natalia struck out. The Mother’s anger poured from her. ‘I came here to save humanity, and I will.’

  Could it be true? Had the Mother not seen the doom beneath her feet? Had the corruption of the Anvil somehow blinded her from the truth? Either way, this woman was guilty of too many sins.

  Natalia lunged in, fast and furious, her spear whirling and sparking from the Mother’s night spear. She struck straight, aiming for the woman’s heart. The Mother slammed her n
ight spear down, collapsing Natalia’s weapon, splintering it into shards.

  Natalia lost her footing, going down on one knee. The Mother’s spear spun, and the tip levelled, hovering inches from Natalia’s throat. She froze. Below, rising through the abyss, she heard the hammering of a gun battle.

  *

  ‘Och aye, Ethan Cole to the rescue, lads. Dinny fret, he’s a regular fucking rabbit’s foot, this one.’ Brude wasn’t helping. ‘Look at ye, straining there like a midge. You’ll shite yerself before you move the Anvil!’

  He punched out, unable to puncture the shredded fabric of reality. It frothed, caged, willing him to sink into an ocean of corruption and let go. He could pull in more power; all he had to do was become the unstoppable force – become It – and move the immovable object. Afterward, the city would burn as It slaughtered. Unless he could get them both into the Pit, he could take no chances.

  Adrenaline injected up his veins while rifles punched all around. The knights fell back, their discipline hanging by a thread. Vast power awaited, if he would just let It out. Could he hold on long enough to reach the Pit? The Anvil’s rope glowed, strong and vital.

  The men were wasting ammo. ‘Cease fire!’ Frightened faces turned to him. ‘Wait until they’re on their feet, then use a few shots to knock them back down.’ His eyes were gritty, the sand from days without rest grating in them.

  The Grandmaster strode to meet him. ‘Form up, protect the armiger.’ A veil of magic dropped around the Anvil, making it invisible. Cole could still sense its vast corruption, even through the veil of the world’s most powerful mage.

  The Grandmaster clasped his hand, face coated in blood, and pulled him in close. ‘Do you have any idea what that is you’ve so casually brought down among the men?’

  The men looked to Cole as they formed up in a wedge, courage returning to their movements.

  ‘Of course I fucking know. I’m trying to get it in the Pit! It’s dragging the vampire progenitor!’