“I have a good memory,” he warned.
“And mine is perfect,” said his grandmother. “It will be exactly as we have said.”
He nodded and took to his feet. “Farewell then. I still have another task ahead of me.”
“William,” she called, her voice suddenly tentative.
“Yes?”
“My body and my power are exhausted from the wounds I’ve taken. I’ll need help to return to my realm,” she admitted.
He smiled evilly. “Not my problem.”
“If I die here, our agreement will fail.”
Will shrugged. “You should have included that in the terms then. Are you saying you bargained in bad faith, knowing you couldn’t get home on your own?”
Aislinn sighed, then smiled faintly. “No. I was merely tired. It was an oversight.”
As if—you never make mistakes, he thought. Then he held up three fingers. “Three unbound favors if you wish me to make sure you return safely.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s ridiculous. You expect me to pay for my life with something worth my life—three times over?”
He nodded. “I should profit from it if you expect me to cooperate.”
“Two unbound favors.”
“Deal.” Will shook her hand a second time. Then he chanted Tailtiu’s name under his breath three times. He felt the connection strongly, for she was still close by, with his army. She returned, with the trolls, a few minutes later.
“Tailtiu, take your mother home for me.”
She gave him a rebellious look. “I don’t want to.”
Aislinn sneered. “Fool. Her debts don’t bind her any longer. You must do it yourself.”
Will eyed Tailtiu, then said, “By the debts you owe me, take her safely home.”
His aunt looked from him to her mother, then back again. After thinking for a moment, she answered, “Yes, Master.” She held out her arms for Will to hand Aislinn to her.
Will had decided he needed the trolls, though. “I want you to transform and take her yourself.”
Tailtiu frowned. “My power is almost gone—unless you will permit me to share in yours.” Her lips pouted almost imperceptibly.
You’d like that, wouldn’t you? he thought. He held out his hand instead. Seeming disappointed, Tailtiu took it, but when she began to draw on his turyn, he matched his frequency to hers so that her body could easily assimilate it.
“Oh!” she gasped, her eyes lighting up. She continued to draw from him for several minutes, and Will began to think she might be a bottomless well. Eventually, he pulled his hand back.
“That should be enough.”
Tailtiu stared at him with hungry eyes. “Never.” Before he could argue though, she transformed into a massive doe and knelt so Aislinn could mount.
Will breathed a sigh of relief when they were finally gone. Then he stared at Myrsta, where he could see void turyn continuing to spill out of the city. Gan looked at him questioningly, then asked, “More kill?”
“More kill,” he affirmed.
Chapter 62
The first hundred yards into Myrsta were uneventful. The broken wall opened up to a street crowded with buildings and shops—all empty. It ran parallel to the city wall, so they had to turn and follow it until they found a cross street that led toward the center of the city, and it was then that Will’s misadventure began.
A group of demons stood around the corner, and Gan and the other trolls wasted no time leaping forward to attack them. While Gan had been fairly careful while he carried other passengers, for some reason he thought Will was different. Rather than holding back, he surged forward to attack with the other trolls.
Will was pressed down by the force of his sudden charge, but a moment later, when Gan came to a sudden stop, he shot up and out of the basket to sail over the heads of the demons. One red-skinned brute looked up in curiosity as he flew by, until Gan forcibly regained the creature’s attention by ripping its throat out.
It was probably for the best that none of his human allies had been able to accompany them, because Will’s landing wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to be immortalized in story or song. In fact, if it hadn’t been for his helmet, the adventure might have become more of a tragedy than comedy. He struck the corner of the nearest building, confirming that it was indeed built of stone, then slid awkwardly to the ground, bruising himself even further.
He didn’t lose consciousness, but he was too stunned to assist while the trolls clawed, ripped, and bashed the hapless demons into their graves. Reinforcements soon arrived, and the battle expanded. Will was still trying to get his eyes to focus, and things seemed much worse than they were, until the figures fighting in his vision condensed into just half the number he had seen moments before.
The ferocity of the trolls was such that he decided to take his time. “Don’t mind me,” he mumbled. “I’ll just sit over here and try to pull myself together.”
The next demons to show up came in small groups, which merely excited the trolls. Lrmeg in particular seemed to enjoy lifting the smaller demons and using them as missile weapons against the larger ones. With absolutely no concern for their own safety, the trolls moved outward, forming an ever-larger circle.
They didn’t try to keep the circle unbroken, they just spread out, allowing the demons to pass around them as they punished and sometimes ate pieces of the ones they caught with their long arms. The trolls simply had no fear and no need to engage in defensive tactics. Whether their numbers were two or twelve seemed to make no difference. Will could easily imagine just one of them happily fighting until the city had been completely depopulated of demons.
Physically, the demons had many advantages over humans, especially in the toxic turyn that permeated Myrsta. They were stronger, sometimes faster, and they were incredibly tough. Many of them could regenerate in a similar fashion to the trolls, although it was slower and they required turyn to do so.
Compared to the trolls, however, the demons’ physical advantages weren’t really enough to make them any different than if the trolls were fighting humans. The trolls punished them, played with them, pulled them apart, and if any demon seemed too hard to kill, or regenerated too fast, the trolls simply ate it.
The void turyn was no problem for the trolls either, though it did irritate them to some degree. Their bodies were incredibly tough and resistant to turyn in general. What little irritation the demons’ environment caused them, they simply healed it. So long as the trolls popped a few juicy pieces of whatever they were fighting into their mouths now and then, they could continue battling and healing indefinitely.
The one big advantage the demons had, though, was that they were intelligent. They quickly realized they were in trouble and soon stopped running in willy-nilly. A pause emerged, and then a line of human-sized demons marched down the street, holding the long, metal tubes that Will had once seen when he had taken a trip to hell with the goddamn cat. Each tube held a metal rod with a sharp, barbed point, and behind the line of demons with bolt-casters, there was a massive, four-legged monstrosity with two arms. It held a massive iron sword in one of them.
Already bored by the brief delay, the trolls charged at them immediately.
A series of loud cracks filled the air as the bolt-casters discharged, sending dozens of sharp metal missiles ripping through the trolls—to little avail. One or two of the trolls were hit in the leg and stumbled, but the rest ran on, and once they reached the line of fiends, they continued doing what they had been doing all along.
The giant, quadrupedal demon brought its iron sword down in a motion that neatly bisected one troll, but two others simply grabbed their unfortunate companion and used the halves as weapons to bludgeon the other demons. A second swing cut several others apart with one blow, but by then Gan had leapt onto the giant demon’s back. He swarmed over the huge demon like a spider, and it was forced to drop the sword and use its hands to try and stop the troll tearing at it.
To
avoid the arms, Gan simply tore the demon’s belly open, and as the guts spilled out, he crawled inside.
Will watched in horror, unsure whether his nausea was a result of his head injury or simply the sight of so much gore. The giant demon died, and after it fell over, Gan stood up inside its torso then playfully grabbed the demon’s limp arms so he could swing them around. It looked like a grotesque puppet show. Will’s stomach heaved, and he finally lost his most recent meal.
He felt better after that. Briefly taking off his helmet, Will saw a dent in the steel, but when he probed his skull beneath his padded coif, it seemed to be solid. Without the helm, his skull would have undoubtedly cracked like an egg. He put the helm back on and made sure to buckle the strap. Standing up, he experienced a mild wave of dizziness, but it passed quickly.
Just to be cautious, he took the time to put a new iron-body spell on himself. Then he stepped back into the street and called out to the trolls, “Gather up!” He also used a few force-lances to finish off the odd demon here and there. His allies hadn’t been very thorough. Some of their enemies were still alive, even though a troll might have gnawed off an arm or a leg.
It took a minute to rein in the trolls, but once they had all gathered, Will noticed that some of them were considerably smaller. A quick headcount informed him that he now had sixteen allies, rather than twelve. Oh, right! The big demon had cut several of them in half, resulting in more trolls than they had started with.
“Stay close so you can see me,” he warned the trolls. “Some of them may use fire.”
That got their attention. Fire was the one thing they were scared of—well, except for one of the smallest trolls. He simply ignored everything, picking his nose obliviously. Apparently there hadn’t been any brain in the piece of troll he had regenerated from, so he hadn’t learned anything yet, much less how to talk.
From there they proceeded in a much more orderly fashion—assuming that one’s definition of ‘orderly fashion’ was extremely loose. Will wondered what the name for a collection of trolls was. “Maybe a pandemonium of trolls?” he muttered to himself. “Or would a bedlam of trolls sound better?”
After a few more blocks of watching them create a bloody mess of partially eaten demons at every corner, he made up his mind. Someone had assigned the proper term to crows, when it rightfully belonged to trolls. “This is definitely a murder of trolls,” he decided.
Their advance went unimpeded for another quarter of a mile, until they encountered a well-organized and disciplined group of massive humanoid demons. These were nearly the size of the trolls and wore heavy iron armor. They carried large, curved swords and square shields. Most significant of all, the slender demons marching behind them wore armor that seemed to be composed of pure fire.
The trolls charged forward, as usual, but the moment they spotted the burning demons in the rear, they split and scattered. All except the small, ignorant troll. He simply stopped, and when the front row of demons split apart, the small troll stared mutely at them as a wave of flames swept over him.
The little troll would have been roasted, but Will stepped in front of him. Since entering the city, he’d been steadily absorbing void turyn and converting it to keep it from poisoning him, but as a result he was practically bursting with power. He reflex cast a wind-wall and put everything he had into it, creating a tornado of pure destruction that destroyed everything within thirty feet.
While the spell kept the flames away from Will and the small troll, it also fanned them, and now everything in the area around them was on fire. The demons had also been just far enough back that only two at the center of the front line were killed. The rest were still perfectly fine.
His troll allies didn’t appear to be returning, not with the blaze around him, and if something wasn’t done soon, Will guessed that the fire could spread and engulf the entire city. The little troll next to him still didn’t understand fire, though, and the spunky beast tried to charge forward.
Will put a point-defense shield in front of his small friend’s face. When he ran into it the small troll fell backward and landed on his ass, staring upward in confusion at his benefactor. “Stay still, stupid!” Will swore.
The troll looked at him, then repeated one word and pointed to himself. “Stupid?”
“Yes, you! You’re stupid! Don’t move.”
The little troll grinned and jumped to his feet while chanting his new word. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
Great, he thinks his name is stupid now, Will realized. From the corner of his eye, he saw the sword and shield demons opening ranks again—another wave of flame would be coming soon. With no time, he caught the thick void turyn all around them and turned it to his own purpose, creating a ring of intense sound with the demon group at its center.
The flames nearest the demons died instantly, as did the flames shrouding the slender demons as their bodies were flash-frozen. The intense sonic boom that followed shattered them into red and black chunks of grisly frozen flesh.
The newly named troll stared at him with huge eyes, obviously impressed, though Will hardly noticed. He’d been inspired. Much of the area was still on fire, but now he used his talent in a gentler fashion, creating a loud hum. Magic was central to his talent, but it used kinetic and thermal energy to create the actual sounds. The temperature dropped rapidly, and in just a few minutes, the flames around them died away and sputtered out.
Will stepped forward to examine the dead demons, but his troll was too busy staring to move. Turning back, he called out, “Come on, Stupid. Let’s go.” The little troll responded then, running forward quickly. Raising his voice and speaking in troll, Will called to his other companions. “Fire gone. Gather up!”
Eventually they all returned, and Will and his murder of trolls were able to resume their journey to the center of the city. They were smarter, more cautious trolls now, all except for Stupid, of course, who still had a lot of brain development to look forward to. Now that they’d seen the demons using fire, they stayed closer to him.
The fighting got tougher from there, as whoever Madrok had left in charge was obviously aware of their advance by then. Will began to wonder if bringing the trolls was the wisest decision. It might have been easier to reach his goal if he’d gone with his original, stealthy plan.
But the trolls were certainly more fun.
They moved down the street, and Will began using light-darts to pick off magic-using demons at a distance, while the trolls ripped apart anything that got within fifty feet of them. Shield walls and other defensive formations failed against them entirely, for the trolls cared nothing for their own safety. They leapt into spears and jumped and bounced off buildings to land inside organized units of demon soldiers.
Anything that gave them the slightest trouble, Will eliminated. The lesser demon magic-users had no hope, for he smothered their spell-casting abilities, and any uniquely powerful physical attackers could be crippled with force-lances and light-darts. Once the trolls got their clawed hands on a fallen opponent, it was over. No matter the demon’s size or power, having a troll tear through your belly and eat its way to your heart was invariably fatal.
Eventually, they came to what had probably been the central square. The remains of an enormous stone building filled the wide-open area with a massive mountain of rubble. The top of the pile of broken stone featured a strange metal cube roughly fifteen feet on each side, and from that emerged a tall metal rod that rose fifty feet into the air above it.
Void turyn poured from the cube and the metal rod, rushing outward from it so that walking into the square made Will feel as though he was standing in a deep stream and trying to walk against the flow. The dark energy was so concentrated at that point that even the trolls were beginning to have difficulty. Their skins bubbled and cracked, flaking off in dry sheets while their eyes burned and healed in an endless cycle that left them mostly blind.
Will led them away, until the ambient level of toxic power was low enough
that the trolls weren’t in constant agony. They ducked into a recess at the front of a heavy stone building that had possibly served as a bank. At the moment, there weren’t any more enemies nearby, so he activated the limnthal and described what he had seen to Arrogan.
“I don’t see the mechanism you described before,” said Will. The spell-engine was supposed to have a mechanical component that was powered by the energy of the ley lines, pounding some sort of demon-steel anvil to create the void turyn before an enchanted linkage drained it away.
“It sounds like that’s the emitter. The ley-lines in Myrsta meet in an underground chamber, similar to the one you found beneath the Arenatas’ home in Cerria. The spell-engine will be there,” said Arrogan.
Will sighed in exasperation. “Great. How am I supposed to find it?”
“Follow the link back to it, obviously,” replied his grandfather sourly. “You need to sever the link between the ley lines and the spell engine to stop it safely.”
He nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then he deactivated the limnthal. Looking at the trolls, he could see they wouldn’t be of any more help. He had originally had a vague idea that they might be useful as muscle to help him disassemble the spell-engine, but they couldn’t get any closer.
Looking out from the stone recess, Will saw that on the other side of the square a huge swarm of demons had gathered. Where do they keep coming from? The army had fought and killed thousands upon thousands of them, and his trolls had slaughtered a substantial number on their way to the middle of the city.
There weren’t many good alternatives left. Or any, for that matter, Will thought. He was going to have to go it alone, and considering the number of enemies, he’d have to sneak. No problem. I’m good at that.
Using stealth, he would have plenty of time to search for the entrance to wherever the underground ley line chamber was, and even more time to figure out how to safely disable the spell-engine.
Disciple of War (Art of the Adept Book 4) Page 56