by Ari Marmell
Lorum drew himself up, his expression frosty. “Unless you purport to have some evidence to back up these ridiculous claims, I refuse to hear any more of it.”
“Oh, but I do.”
The regent seemed to deflate.
“I’ve already explained why Audriss has to be someone in power in Imphallion. Someone in this room, in fact. He—you—knew too much. You knew of Rheah’s acquisition. You were too well able to avoid the patrols that were put out to intercept you.
“Tell me, how else could Jassion’s team have gotten through Audriss’s forces to attack my little army this morning? I seriously doubt the Serpent’s scouts just happened to miss an entire battalion sneaking past them. Unless they were ordered to let it pass. And Audriss would only have given that order if he knew they were attacking me, not him!”
The stares aimed in Lorum’s direction subtly shifted: less shock, less confusion, and substantially more anger.
“I still see no evidence, Rebaine.”
“How about this?” Corvis ran a finger over the recent scar on his cheek.
“What about it?”
“Look at me, Lorum. You saw me after you and Jassion had me beaten and tortured—”
“Interrogated!”
The warlord scowled. “Beaten and tortured,” he repeated. “I could barely walk. Do I look injured to you at the moment?”
“Magic, I assume,” Lorum spat.
“True. Except this. This one little wound the magics wouldn’t heal. I finally remembered where I got this scar, Lorum. It’s where you hit me. Once. Your signet ring cut me.
“It’s not a deep wound, Audriss. The spell should have utterly erased it. But you see, as I explained to one of your cronies who ‘rescued’ me: Demon-inflicted wounds don’t respond well to magic. Demons, such as Pekatherosh.”
Corvis cast a questioning glance at Rheah Vhoune. “Lady Rheah, I know you’ve no reason to trust me. But a simple detection spell on that ring will prove whether I’m telling the truth.”
The sorceress blanched, her face torn with indecision. And then, with a deep sigh, she nodded. “You’re right.” She stepped forward. “I apologize, Your Grace. I realize this seems disrespectful, but we have to be sure.”
“Of course, Rheah,” Lorum said stiffly, raising his hand so she could see the purple-stoned ring. “I fully understand.”
A burst of power blasted from his outstretched fist. Rheah, her clothes smoldering, slammed into the far wall with a bone-bruising thud.
The entire assembly was on its feet, some crying out, some frozen, some running pell-mell for the door, and others drawing whatever weapons they carried.
Corvis beat them to it. Even before the glow of Audriss’s attack faded from the room, the Terror of the East vaulted the conference table, Sunder in hand. Mere inches from his target, however, an invisible fist knocked Corvis from the air. The warlord struck the floor hard, the breath knocked from his lungs. Doggedly, he dragged himself to his feet, just in time to see Ellowaine advancing on Audriss, hatchets blurring.
“No!” he shouted. “Ellowaine, back off!”
The mercenary snarled, a growl more animal than human, but she obeyed.
And it was Audriss they faced, now, not Duke Lorum. The impossible stone armor was back, the featureless mask once more in place. One hand glowed with a sickening aura of green and purple, the other held Talon low and ready to strike. Sporadically, a flash of purple and green appeared, not around the Serpent’s hand, but in the air around him. It was that, Corvis realized, that thwarted his attack.
“Damn you, Rebaine!” Audriss hissed at him in a hate-filled voice.
Corvis shrugged. “I have to admit, the height thing was a nice touch. You really are shorter when you’re wearing the armor. It must have been a terrible strain, working that kind of magic into the outfit.”
“You’ve no idea.” Audriss shook his head. “You realize you’ve forced me to alter my plans somewhat.”
“That was sort of the point. You can’t win now. The council knows the truth.”
“Indeed. It’s too bad. They would have been useful in the coming months. There’s going to be a great deal of rebuilding to do. But I suppose I’ll make do without them.”
The councilmen who’d attempted to flee had long since discovered that the door was quite firmly sealed against any escape. Many moaned or cried out, now, at Audriss’s horrifying pronouncement. Those with a bit more courage, led by a determined Salia Mavere, hammered away at the infernal shield surrounding their former leader, with no more success than Corvis had had.
“Rebaine,” Rheah hissed, limping to his side. A thin trickle of blood ran down the side of her chin from a split lip, and she was clearly favoring her left leg. “You can’t let him do that!”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” he told her. “Between the two of us, we should have no problem taking down his barrier. And then …”
“Droll, Rebaine,” Audriss hissed at him. “But I’m afraid that you’ll do nothing of the sort. Khanda, now.”
Corvis froze. “What?” It was barely a whisper as he glanced, despite himself, down at his left wrist.
/Sorry, Corvis. Change in plan./ And just like that, the armband was gone, fading from Corvis’s wrist and reappearing on the Serpent’s own. The green and purple surrounding Audriss were joined by sparks of deepest red.
The Terror of the East felt a sudden overwhelming urge to sit down on the floor and sob.
“Rheah—” he began through clenched teeth.
“Forget it, Rebaine. Maybe I could have taken down his shield when he had only one of those things. Against both, no human alive today could do it.”
“Rheah,” Audriss said, his voice suddenly silky, “I have a favor to ask you.”
“Go to hell!”
“Now, that’s not very nice. I believe you have something I want. Give it to me, or I kill them all. Now.” He raised a hand, and another great moan escaped from the huddled mass.
“You’ll kill them anyway,” Rheah protested.
“Perhaps not. Once I have the key, they’ll no longer be a threat, no matter what they know.”
“I—”
Audriss snapped his fingers, and a surge of red surrounded his newly acquired armband. Bidimir Vrenk shuddered once, coughed, and then showered everyone around him in an explosion of bone shards and brain matter. The headless body stood upright for five full seconds before landing with a wet slap on the floor.
Several more thumps followed as a handful of councilors fainted dead away.
“Yum, yum,” Audriss said coldly. “A snack for my new friend. Seems with the power of two demons, even a wary soul can be consumed. I think Pekatherosh is hungry, too. Three … two …”
“Here!” Rheah cried, yanking a small ivory scroll case from a pouch at her belt. “Take it, damn you!” Tears in her eyes, she hurled the tube at the Serpent.
It stopped halfway, snagged in tendrils of purple light, and drifted slowly toward him. He popped the cork with a thumb and glanced curiously at the contents. “Ah, yes. This should do nicely.”
“It doesn’t do you any good, anyway,” Corvis snapped at him. “You don’t have—”
And then the Serpent raised his right hand, giving them both a good look at Khanda. “Don’t I?”
“Oh, damn …”
Audriss sheathed Talon and held forth his hand. A heavy, leather-bound tome, steaming at the sudden temperature change, now occupied his fist.
“Careless of you, Rebaine,” Audriss chided him as he wiped a layer of moisture off the heavy cover. “Hiding this in the ice. Why, if this were any other book, the damp would have destroyed it!” Safe behind his infernal protection, the Serpent unrolled the key scroll and flipped idly through the pages, glancing occasionally at the key as he went. The assembled throng gazed in helpless consternation at the man who quite literally held their lives in his hands.
“Oh, Rebaine, you’d have loved some of these,” Audriss cackled. “T
he spells in this book, they’re like nothing anyone’s ever seen before! Shall I curse you, Rebaine? Not just any curse, but one that extends to all your descendants, and anyone they so much as speak with? Or shall I raise up a mountain from the very earth and drop it on you? Summon a storm to wash away a continent? Or this one you’d especially like, my Terror. A charming spell to control dozens of people, so long as you have the proper foci. Or perhaps—” And then he froze, his breath catching in his throat.
“Oh, yes,” Audriss breathed, and Corvis could have sworn that the man’s hands actually shook. “Oh, dear gods.” Slowly, the Serpent raised his head. “I’ll be leaving you now,” he announced. A sudden blinding flash, a deafening thunderclap, and the building’s roof exploded into hundreds of fragments, showering down onto the panicked populace outside. “I think I’ll kill you lot after all,” he told the terrified council as he rose into the air. “If it’s any consolation, though, you won’t die alone.” Hanging a full two dozen feet above them, he rotated so that he looked down at Corvis. “Enjoy the theatrics, Rebaine. I learned from the best, after all. When this is over, my name will be legend after the very gods have faded in the mists of time! No one will dare challenge me after today!” And then, as though he stood on the thickest stone, Audriss strode through the air above Mecepheum, spellbook and key open before him. His voice rang out in a sonorous chant, audible to those left behind despite the growing distance.
Corvis dashed across the room, up onto the table, and leapt. His hands clamped down upon the top of the walls that once held the ceiling. Hauling himself up, he attained the vantage to watch as his enemy moved across the city. Random citizens collapsed to the ground, heads bursting. Either Audriss was allowing his pets to feed indiscriminately, or …
“He’s fueling something,” Rheah said from beside him, floating easily at his level. “Whatever that bastard’s about to cast, it’s going to be huge.”
“You think so?” Corvis muttered.
“I can probably protect us from having our souls eaten, if he doesn’t catch me by surprise. We have to stop him, Rebaine.”
“I’d sort of come to that conclusion myself, actually. If you have any ideas how to go about doing it, I’d be delighted to hear them.”
Rheah remained silent.
Furniture scraped as several heavy chairs were placed upon the table, and then Seilloah, Ellowaine, Nathaniel Espa, and Salia Mavere stuck their heads over the wall to watch in helpless fascination as Audriss continued his spell, invulnerable and unopposed.
“So,” Corvis said conversationally, though his eyes never wavered from his enemy, “where’s the real key?”
“Pardon me?”
“Come on, Rheah. I’m not a complete cretin. After all the trouble you went through to prepare your little surprise for me earlier, am I supposed to believe you were caught flat-footed today?”
“Excuse me,” Ellowaine interjected, “but what are you talking about?”
“Rheah developed this key through her own research. She then proceeded to create a fake, just in case either the Serpent or the Terror of the East got his hands on it.” There was no small amount of self-mockery in his tone.
“I’m impressed, Rebaine,” she said simply.
“Flattered, I’m sure. So when does the spell fall apart on him?”
The sorceress frowned. “I wish I knew. It needed to be convincing, Rebaine. It had to fool you, Audriss, Seilloah, or even your demon. So it’s not dissimilar to the real key. Just a few pronunciations here and there are a little off.”
“Are you telling me,” Seilloah demanded, voice shrill, “that you’ve just handed Audriss the most powerful spells in the world, with a cipher that may cause them to misfire?”
“Relax, witch. You should know that most spells just collapse in on themselves when they go wrong. Only a few specific types ever actually go awry …”
And then, standing above the city’s center, Audriss halted. His voice rose farther, overpowering the bedlam of the citizens below, and the noise of the war raging beyond the walls. In a single instant, dozens of people on the streets below collapsed in pools of blood, a final burst of power to break through whatever natural barriers prevented the travesty in which Audriss was now engaged. From the nearby alleys, Corvis spotted a flicker of movement amid the shadows. A handful of Audriss’s gnomes—who’d been happily butchering several of the army’s couriers as they carried orders this way and that—glanced upward and then vanished bodily into the earth, fleeing from whatever they sensed building in their master’s magics.
Silence fell, complete and utter. Corvis listened to himself swallow, twice, to be certain he’d not gone deaf. At the edge of town, some miles from where the Serpent stood, the clouds in the sky shuddered, grew dark, blacker than any cloud could ever be. They hardened, as if they formed a solid ceiling above the heads of the soldiers on the ground. And then that ceiling cracked.
From that rift in the world came a furious, freezing wind. It blew across the field, across the walls, across the city, and it carried with it the voices of the damned: not hundreds, not thousands, but millions upon millions of souls shrieking in unwavering, endless torment. It carried on it a charnel air, a draft from the houses of the dead, and strong men and women collapsed, retching and gagging, to their knees.
The crack widened further, the wind grew stronger. And they were there. They had not climbed from that tear in the sky but simply appeared beneath it, as though carried on the winds. They stood, screaming, towering over the city and battlefield, and both armies threw down their weapons and ran, for they knew the end was upon them all.
The end of everything. The death of the world. Fire and Flood. The Children of Apocalypse.
Maukra and Mimgol.
Maukra, the Dragon, spawn of flame. Hundreds of feet long, it raised its fire-enshrouded head over the buildings it crushed by mere presence, set ablaze through simple proximity. Its serpentine body undulated to the pulsing of some hideous, inhuman heart. Higher that head rose, and higher still. The neck flared, a cobra grown to monstrous proportions, and within that hood, writhing beneath the skin, were the pale and featureless faces of the damned. They reached with ghostly arms toward those who would soon join them, a loving embrace they would never, ever release, and all the while screaming, screaming …
Mimgol, the Spider, child of flood. Smaller than its sibling, yet still over thirty feet in height, more than thrice that in width. Like a tarantula, thick-limbed and furry, it scuttled over the roadways with a sickening, alien pace. From mandibles large enough to crush castles, and from the underbelly of the beast, ran constant rivulets of watery venom, poison and pestilence that trickled over the cobblestone streets. A stray dog, tail curled between its legs, sniffed tentatively at the flowing substance, then howled, pawing at its snout as the entire front of its face simply sloughed off its head. People fleeing the flames of the Dragon splashed through the streams of corruption raining from the Spider. They collapsed, dead or dying, vomiting organs or drowning on internal fluids. Mimgol surveyed it all, head darting back and forth in true arachnid spurts, and in each and every facet of those giant spider’s eyes, a wide and unblinking human iris wept.
“That,” Corvis said, his face gone preternaturally pale, “does not look like the result of a failed spell.” His hands were sweating profusely inside his gauntlets, and his gut curled into a ball and crawled up into his chest.
“He’s mad,” Salia whispered, hands tracing the holy icon of Verelian over and over in the air before her. “He’s absolutely mad!”
“Rheah,” Corvis asked, “what went wrong?”
The sorceress stared over the city, listening as the cries of the dying grew audible over the screams of the damned. “I didn’t know—I couldn’t know …”
“Know what?” Ellowaine demanded, her voice tinged with lurking hysteria.
Seilloah shook her head, though she, too, could not look away from the primal creatures stalking through the city, obl
iterating anything and anyone in their way. “That’s the problem with summoning spells,” she said softly, fists clenched tight. “Actually calling something up is bloody easy. It’s controlling them that takes real skill.”
“In other words,” Espa rasped from behind them, “the only thing Rheah’s false key may have accomplished—”
“Is that Audriss can’t control them, either,” Corvis finished for him. “But since he wants them to tear the city apart until they reach us, he hasn’t realized anything’s wrong.” He swallowed once. “Nice job, Rheah.”
“Shove it, Rebaine!” Rheah snapped, rage blazing in her tear-reddened eyes. “How could I have known he was mad enough to attempt a Grand Summoning? I did the best I could under the circumstances, which is more than I can say for some people involved in this mess!”
“Those can’t be the Children of Apocalypse!” the priestess insisted, still tracing her deity’s rune before her as though she would never stop. “The gods themselves imprisoned those abominations! No mortal, however powerful, could have created a spell to free them!”
“Maybe they’re not,” Corvis told her. “Maybe they’re just demonic essences inhabiting projections of the Twins. And you know what difference that makes to us?”
“None at all,” Rheah acknowledged, her gaze shifting from Salia to the warlord. “All right, nothing’s changed. We have to stop this. The entire city’s dead within hours if we can’t do something.”
Corvis nodded. “Rheah, many spells collapse if the caster dies. Do you think this is one of them?”
“I honestly don’t know.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine Selakrian would have wanted those things running around uncontrolled if something happened to him. So he might have built in a safeguard.”
“Why would he create that spell at all?” Ellowaine shrieked.
“Because he could?” Rheah shrugged. “Rebaine, I have no idea if killing Audriss will stop this or not, but I don’t see any other alternatives.”