by Garon Whited
“There’s no wiggle room at all?”
Gods like absolutes. Oh, sometimes, with permission, you can get away with little things—talking to your god, maybe a little extra boost to something if your deities are allied in a cause, things like that.
“This counts!”
Yes, but that fire-tornado is not minor! I can’t even pretend I’m not noticing it!
“Damn it!”
Working on it.
“Raxan!”
“My lord!” He stood straighter, almost vibrating.
“How would you like to defend me while I smite invaders?”
He unslung the shield from his back, drew his sword, and saluted.
I opened a gate. We went through.
Amber might not be able to do anything pyrotechnic inside the Temple of Shadow, but she helped Firebrand do something while we stood outside it. Firebrand cut loose with its usual flamethrower effect, clearing out everything beyond the front doors. The blast, however, was less like a flamethrower and more like the dragon-fire I remembered. It swelled into a rocket launch, filling the doors. It blasted down the steps, boiled up beyond, and the thunder of it echoed through the city.
The vortex of fire was gone, leaving only a sunny, smoke-filled day, the smell of burnt flesh, and the screams of the dying.
I helped Raxan back to his feet and ripped the burning cloak from his shoulders. He wasn’t harmed, just a trifle shaken. We worked a couple of filtering spells for us to breathe through and we entered the Temple of Shadow.
As I expected, Beltar took it as the signal. When a dragon breathes down your corridors hard enough to make the world shake, you notice. It also neatly solves the problem of wondering if you got the signal. If you have to wonder, it wasn’t the signal.
Raxan and I encountered a lot of men in the midst of coughing fits, trying to get out of the clouds of burnt-flesh smoke. He stayed on my left like a shield and we went through everything would could find as quickly as we found it, hurrying to finish before the choking concentrations of smoke thinned out.
We met black-armored men coming the other way. The cleansing of the Temple went quickly after that. Well, killing the invaders did. Cleaning the place was going to have to wait.
When the smoke cleared enough to make breathing spells unnecessary, Beltar and I did a headcount. Almost two hundred fighting effectives remained in the Temple. Another hundred or so were sidelined from their wounds. Sixty-one were dead, killed in the first assault.
“They raised the alarm,” Beltar told me. “They fought. Unprepared, many of them unarmored, some of them even unarmed. They fought, and they died.”
“I know. Does it make you feel better or worse to know ten times their number are dying in the streets even now?”
“Better,” he decided. “And worse.”
“Senseless slaughter?” I guessed.
“Yes.”
“You’re a better man than I am, Beltar.”
“Am I?” he asked. “I regret the waste of life, but I still wish to kill them.”
“Yes. Yes, you are, because I can’t find it in me to pity them, not even a little. Now bar the doors, set a guard, and follow me into the undercity. We’re going to kill the rest of them.”
“Yes, my lord.”
And we did. Much like the time an army of orku and galgar were foolish enough to come stomping into my briar patch, we moved through the undermountain. Passage by passage, cavern by cavern, only we started at the bottom and worked our way up. I walked ahead with Sir Raxan and triggered the door-opening process while Beltar ran the room-by-room clearing.
When we met up with allied forces, we compared notes, redistributed troops, and methodically rooted out every last one of the Church of Light goons.
I wasn’t the one who found the boy, but I recognized him when I looked over the dead.
The Church of Light soldiers—butchers—killed everyone they could find. I’m not sure they had any real objective other than murdering everyone. Maybe everyone in Karvalen is considered corrupt and irredeemable. I don’t know how they think. I’m not sure they do. But the death toll was astounding.
Caris’ friend, Mikkel, the little boy who ran around with her and played with her, the one I made spell-toys for, was one of the dead. He was split almost in two by a bladed weapon, cutting down at the joint of neck and shoulder to a point below his ribs. He didn’t die instantly. It took a few seconds.
He still had a wooden practice sword in his hand. He was dead, but his fist wouldn’t let go of it, not even after he was killed.
Dead children are never a good thing. Maybe that, in itself, is a good thing. If I ever grow immune to the effect of a dead child, I’ll know I’m the monster the Church of Light says I am. On the other hand, the things I do are nothing compared to the things I want to do when confronted by a child’s death.
“Dantos!” I shouted. He materialized at my left.
“My lord.”
“Do we have the mountain?”
“The mountain is ours, my lord. I have plans with Lord Beltar to guard it and deploy our forces through the city to contain, control, and eventually crush the invaders.”
“Good man. You two carry on with that. Someone get T’yl over here for me, please, and summon whoever is currently in charge of the local Wizards’ Guild. I’m going to my chambers to check on my armor, wait out the sunset, and go kill things. Please see to it everyone is informed of my intention and knows to stay as far away from me as possible.”
“My lord?”
I took the wooden sword and closed Mikkel’s sightless eyes. They don’t do that, here. I don’t know why.
“There may be collateral damage.”
Dantos didn’t ask. I think he was afraid to.
My armor was still in pieces. It was in no shape to actually be worn, so I let it sit and pull itself together. My armored underwear was coming along much better. It had a lot less mass to sort out and the new repair enchantment was one of my best. I focused on getting it in shape for the evening. I really should ask Diogenes for a rundown of the concealable armor in his databanks. All I have is stuff I could easily salvage. Surely there’s something better. I mean, he found or manufactured something for Mary, even if it’s a working suit rather than a concealed one. Surely he can come up with something for me.
As I thought about it, my cloak rippled and flowed around me, hardening. It did quite a convincing simulation of full armor, but in a deep, unreflecting, absolute black. It didn’t feel like armor—it felt like clothes. Yet, rapping my now-gauntleted hands on it, it felt hard and durable.
I do not understand this cloak thing. I’m not sure I’m capable of understanding it, whatever the psychic-energy-other-me has to say about it. I do know I’m learning to like it, creepy shapechanging weirdness and all.
As the sunset started to tickle, I adjusted the waterfall in my chambers. The armor flowed conveniently into a cloak again and I hung it up as a runner hurried in, genuflected, and informed me of a call from the Church of Light.
“Tell them I’m coming,” I said, and stepped into the waterfall. That was a frightening message, I thought. Let ’em wonder if I was coming to the mirror or coming after them. I’d answer the mirror-call after my transformation and after they had a chance to worry about it.
Once cleaned, dried, and dressed, I walked calmly down to the mirror room and took the call. Lotar answered it.
“I see you’ve been sprung,” I said, quietly.
“I have been liberated from the unjust captivity inflicted upon me by unbelievers.”
“Okay.” I tilted the mirror up to put him on hold and prepared a spell. It looked as though he was using a medium-sized mirror, about the size of a dinner plate, not one of the full-size vanity-table things we generally used for communications.
“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Answer me!”
I ignored this for a moment, finishing my spell. I tilted the mirror down again to regard him.
&nb
sp; “Lotar?”
“High Priest Lotar,” he corrected, “of Karvalen. You may call me ‘Your Grace’.”
“No.” I activated the brand-new gate spell on the mirror and lunged forward. My tendrils snaked all over Lotar, but I couldn’t get through to him. Divine magic or mortal magic, he was shielded from having his life drained. I half-expected that, which is why I lunged at the same time.
The defensive spell against my life-draining tendrils didn’t stop my hands. I grabbed him by the hair and jerked him forward, across his desk or table. When I canceled the gate, the mirror went back to being a mirror instead of a hole in space. His head came off with a satisfactory spray of blood and other fluids.
So that’s what happens. Good to know.
I arranged the head on the table so it faced the mirror. All I could see was a red layer, dripping off the other side. The blood on this side flowed quickly to me, of course, but I whisked a cleaning spell over my mirror to remove other fluids.
“Hello?” I called. “Anyone there? Who’s in charge after Lotar?”
There was considerable commotion and more than a little shouting before they canceled the mirror spell. I waited, expecting them to call back, and they did. Someone had removed Lotar’s body and replaced it with a frightened-looking priest. I doubted he was actually in charge, but I wasn’t too worried about the details.
Funny thing. The other mirror was clear, at first, but the blood on the desk crawled up onto the mirror, coating it, as though trying to crawl though to me. Interesting.
“Good evening,” I offered, pleasantly. “I’m Halar, also known as ‘The Undying,’ ‘The Demon King,’ and a bunch of other things. May I have the honor of knowing your name?”
“I… I’m under-priest Faltor, Your Majesty. Uh, I’ve been instructed, uh, to tell you about, well, the fire-witch? The one you call your granddaughter?”
“Oh, good. I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk about her. And relax, kid. You’re in no danger,” I assured him, playing idly with the very surprised-looking head. “Lotar was a criminal who escaped confinement. You haven’t personally done anything that’s a crime—at least, not that I know of. So take a deep breath and relax.
“Now, about my granddaughter. It’s a damn good thing you have her. If you didn’t have her, you’d all be dead. As it is, anyone protecting her—anyone keeping her from harm—gets to live. Of course, you can’t all be doing that. I figure anyone in the same room with her counts as protecting her. I might go so far as the same building. Everyone else is dead. I’m going to kill them all.
“Of course, if anything happens to Tianna, I’m going to kill everyone. More importantly—you do know that, as Lord of Shadows, I can eat your soul, right?”
He couldn’t speak, but he nodded convulsively.
“Good!” I enthused. “I’m glad we’ve got that clear. See, if anything happens to Tianna while she’s in your custody, you will not meet your god. You’ll meet me. You’re in my city, under my power, within my sphere of control, and I will eat every single damned soul from every last one of you. I will devour you like a kid sucking down apple juice on a hot day. Your very existence will cease as your lives feed me and add to my power.
“You go communicate that to your superiors, if they haven’t heard it already. I’ve got to go. I hope to see you, Faltor, when I come to see Tianna. You strike me as a good kid and I’d hate to turn your empty husk of a body into a walking dead.”
I disconnected the call and put my feet up on the table. I expected them to call back again, but I wasn’t sure. Five minutes wasn’t too long to wait. I could cast a defense spell or two in the meantime.
The mirror rippled again. Faltor was on the line. Someone had cleaned the mirror in between calls, I noticed.
“Faltor!” I exclaimed, before he could speak. “Good to see you! I almost forgot to return this.”
“Return…?”
I opened the gate spell again and rolled Lotar’s head through, into Faltor’s lap.
Faltor fainted.
There is such a thing as being a little too effective. Poor guy. He didn’t sign up for this. He probably joined the priesthood for regular meals, indoor work, and a sense of belonging. Possibly all the free hits of divine bliss he could soak up, too. That might have had something to do with it. He didn’t expect to be the go-between for his boss and a monster.
Someone pulled Faltor out of frame and I waited patiently. The gentleman who sat down was somewhat older, probably about forty, and wore chain-and-scale armor with a white tabard over it. He opened his mouth to say something and I hung up in his face.
Let ’em wonder.
In the meantime, I told the person on mirror-duty to say it was impossible to reach me.
“If they insist, look helpless. Make sure they understand you want to help, you want to reach me, but you’re only mortal. Got that?”
“I will have no difficulty with that, my lord!”
I went up the great hall, met Bronze, and we shifted into matching colors, or tried to. She was a mishmash of stripes and blotches, mostly in dark grey and dark green, but my cloak-armor-whatever didn’t look any different. Of course, the color-shifting spell changed the color of the light reflecting from the object… and if it doesn’t reflect any light, there’s no light to alter.
Creepy, but also kinda cool.
I decided black would do. I wanted to be as hard to see as possible. Literally, if they never saw us coming, I would be perfectly all right with it. Bronze is generally the more obvious of the two of us.
Bronze paced out the main doors, went around the courtyard, and I signaled the mountain to swing down the drawbridge door to the Kingsway.
A pair of men were already at the head of the Kingsway, inside the tunnel, waiting for us. Bronze saw them first; her head was higher than mine and farther forward. As they pointed jeweled wands at us, Bronze reared, catching me by surprise. I went tumbling backward as she screamed like a banshee escaping from a steam whistle. Fire bloomed like a mushroom cloud as I hit the courtyard and rolled, coming to my feet.
Bronze vanished.
It wasn’t instantaneous, but it was incredibly rapid—one second? Two? The curse of heightened senses is a sort of tachypsychia, allowing me to watch without acting, to see the process without the opportunity to stop it. To take in every detail, sear it into my brain with a branding iron, see it in the eye of mind forever.
Two spells struck her and were already at work by the time I rolled to my feet. Either one would have done, but together the effects were quick as lightning.
She frayed around the edges, scattering in all directions, like a sugar cube dropped in water. Her mane and tail puffed away instantly and her outer hide, what would be hair and skin, followed quickly. Then it was alloy muscles and bones, all the metallic flesh of her, radiating outward as though each particle of her being was shot into the far distance. I could feel it, like being sand-blasted, and I skidded backward from the force of it, almost losing my footing again. With all the metal gone, all that remained was a blazing outline of light.
For an instant, it stood there, reared up, pawing the air just as Bronze had—rearing up to interpose her body, rearing up to block the spells aimed at me.
The blazing, horse-shaped light expanded, growing like an explosion, diffusing, dissipating, vanishing.
Darkness fell.
I blinked madly, half-blinded, and wiped flakes of metal from my face. Bronze-colored, of course, now that spells no longer disguised her. I stood there for a long moment, staring at the metallic snow all over the courtyard, stirred like dust and moon-glitter on the wind. An image of Bronze glowed on my retinas for a moment before fading.
I sank to my knees, scooping up handfuls of flakes. They scattered on the breeze, flickering in the moonlight. My hands clenched, squeezing the metallic glitter as it sifted between my fingers, impossible to hold.
Somewhere inside myself, there was a place where Bronze lived. From that empti
ness, the abyssal gulf of nothing, rose a scream of agony and loss. It ripped the air as it ripped my throat, visibly distorting the atmosphere. Seconds later, it echoed back from the Eastrange, the enraged cry of a wounded beast.
I heard Firebrand, distantly, as though down a long, dark tunnel. I couldn’t make out what it was trying to say and I didn’t care.
I gathered a large chunk of night with my tendrils and held it before me like a shield. The men in the tunnel aimed their wands at me as I advanced, but nothing happened. Discharged, probably. Disintegration spells are difficult and complicated. It’s easier to build a one-shot spell into a talisman, such as a wand, than it is to build an enchanted item to fire successive shots.
Pay for the quality work, that’s all I can say.
I crossed the drawbridge and into the tunnel of the Kingsway. I felt my fangs lengthen and my talons extend.
For an instant, everything stopped.
Inside my own head, there was a great hammering, a pounding, a thumping. I recognized it as the trapdoor leading down to my mental basement. Something wanted out and wasn’t about to take “no” for an answer.
Things in my head happen at the speed of thought. These two dead men were busy praying, so I had a few seconds.
In my mental study, I regarded the trapdoor. It didn’t move, but the thumping was accompanied by a shouting.
“Who are you and what do you want?” I demanded, pointing Firebrand’s psychic equivalent at the door.
“It’s me! It’s you. The better you. We need to talk, and we need to talk right now.”
“I have Firebrand, I’m in a bad mood, and if anything is with you, I’ll set fire to the whole damn stairway.”
“Understood. I’ll come up alone.”
I unbolted the trapdoor and stepped back, Firebrand already lit and flaming. I noted, with some surprise, my other hand still held Mikkel’s wooden sword.
“Come out, close the door, and bolt it,” I instructed. The lid lifted, he peeped out, and then he climbed out. He moved slowly, carefully, always keeping his hands in view. Once the trapdoor was closed again and the bolts in place, I gestured him back up against the wall. He kept his hands up.