by J. Langland
Heron nodded in agreement. “I am sure they would have been given a lenient sentence; perhaps only a decade or two in prison.”
“What is wrong with the criminal mind?” Sir Samwell shook his head in disbelief at such irrational behavior.
“I suspect it is something intrinsic to their naturally disordered state,” Heron said. “So this Lord Edwyrd not only prevented the execution of the warrants, he sank our vessel, killing the entire crew with the exception of Assistant Vice-Constable Pyromancer Fiernon.” He shook his head.
“They were truly asking for the Writ of Law to strike them down,” Sir Samwell said, once more shaking his head.
Heron nodded. “Fiernon was miraculously able to follow them to Hoggensforth, which is where this Lord Edwyrd and his crew disembarked—”
“Wait!” Sir Samwell interrupted. Heron paused and looked at him. “You are saying that this assistant vice-constable pyromancer, whose ship was lost at sea, was able to follow the smuggler’s vessel the remainder of the way to Hoggensforth?”
Heron nodded. “It was truly inspirational. Apparently he had minored in aquamancy at the university.”
“A pyromancer with a minor in aquamancy? Those two skill sets are antipodes! While I know that master wizards must study all disciplines, starting with such a combination is very unusual,” Sir Samwell exclaimed.
“Not as much as it used to be.” Heron shook his head. “There are now several naval pyromancers who have studied aquamancy, pretty much for this sort of situation.”
“Interesting. Times, they do change.” Sir Samwell grinned.
Heron smiled back. “Sometimes too quickly.” He shook his head and continued, “Fiernon contacted our local field protectator, Wylan Wynterford. The two pursued the party to Freehold.”
“Wait—what did they do about the smuggler?” Samwell asked.
“Unfortunately, the Rod arrived and seized the vessel before Wylan and Fiernon could execute Justice.” Heron shook his head in dismay.
“Unfortunate,” Sir Samwell remarked.
“In any event, the miscreants and our two agents arrived in Freehold and sent word to the Constabulary, and I marshalled the Sky Fleet, and long story short, we ended up laying siege to Freehold, along with the Rod of Tiernon.” Heron sighed.
“You could not convince this Freehold to relinquish these uninvited guests?” Sir Samwell asked with a tone of disbelief.
“Freehold is the home of the Council of Wizardry, and the capital of the Council States.” Heron said. “Invading the city would have been an act of war. All we could do was camp outside and demand their return.” He frowned. “Unfortunately, the Rod also wanted the same party.”
“So what happened?” Sir Samwell asked.
“Well, the city put up these magical wards that would have been very difficult for either us or the Rod to penetrate, and took the matter under consideration,” Heron said.
“And their eventual response?” Samwell asked.
“Well, it turns out they somehow discovered that their city was infested with a bit over a thousand demons.”
Samwell blinked rapidly in shock. “A city of wizards infested with demons?” He looked questioningly to Heron. “I’m not sure what that means. Wizards often have lots of demons.”
“No, these were invisible demons that the wizards had been unaware of,” Heron answered.
“Invisible demons that the wizards were not aware of?” Sir Samwell repeated questioningly.
“Yes—a bit embarrassing, if you ask me.” Heron grinned.
“Indeed. So what was the resolution?” Sir Samwell asked.
“Well, the Sky Fleet and the Rod came to us with this plan to violently expel the demons—mostly sprites, shadows, imps and a few fiends—and asked us to slay them as they fled in panic,” Heron said.
“This worked?” Sir Samwell asked.
“Actually, yes, quite well, until this greater demon emerged along with a few others in its retinue. Apparently Sir Talarius had managed to capture a lesser greater demon that looked remarkably like the greater demon and was about to slay it when the greater demon landed and offered to duel Sir Talarius in single combat in exchange for the life of the smaller greater demon.”
“Well, not ideal, but better than having your army severely damaged by the greater demon,” Sir Samwell remarked.
“Yes. And it was a very close battle,” Heron added.
“This must be a very impressive Knight Rampant,” Sir Samwell observed.
“Yes, he was, but he also cheated. Talarius gave his word to single combat, but ended up getting help from the Rod and priests.” Heron sighed. “Thus, the knight nearly triumphed.”
“I am not one to wish a demon luck; far from it. However, I do have to say that a knight violating his personal oath is, quite personally, sickening,” Sir Samwell said.
“Indeed,” Heron said. “If he were one of ours, he would be in a great deal of legal trouble. However, it gets worse.”
“Worse?” Sir Samwell raised an eyebrow questioningly.
“Indeed. Talarius surrendered, and then the demon shape-changed to a human form and came forward to offer the knight mercy.”
Sir Samwell closed his eyes, suspecting what was coming. Actually, he knew full well what was coming, but needed to be convincing to Heron.
“The knight pulled forth a dark blade, one capable of permanently slaying a demon, and attempted to kill the demon with it,” Heron said.
“He violated the terms of his own surrender?” Sir Samwell shook his head.
“Shocking,” Heron agreed. “I am no longer convinced that our allies have their former moral certainty.”
“But wait...” Sir Samwell shook his head. “Such a blade would have to destroy the demon’s animus very quickly. How did the demon survive such a blade?”
“Ah, that’s what has the Church of Tiernon so upset.” Heron grinned. “Somehow—and no one understands how—the greater demon was able to possess a number of priests and Rod members and turn them on each other, before literally tapping into Tiernon’s illumination streams and harnessing Tiernon’s god pool to reverse the blade!”
Sir Samwell sat back hard, banging his head on the wall behind him. “How is that possible?”
“We have no idea, nor does the Church.” Heron smiled. “But it does make them anxious.”
“So then the demon abducted Sir Talarius?” Sir Samwell asked.
“Opened an Abyssal Gate below the man’s feet and dropped him straight into the Abyss!” Heron shook his head in admiration while grinning.
“Well, I would have to admit, that is justice well served!” Sir Samwell told the Wing Arms Master.
“Indeed. Unfortunately, the demon must face his own high justice.”
Sir Samwell tilted his head. “So, because this demon brought this Lord Edwyrd into Gizzor Del, and led to the constabulary vessel being sunk, you are pursuing it into the Abyss?”
“Well, no; we are not quite that insane.” Heron grinned back.
“That is a relief,” Sir Samwell replied.
“No, we have consulted and compared detailed notes with the Rod and Church. We made a scrying of the battle and have watched it repeatedly. We believe that Lord Edwyrd and the greater demon are the same person. While the human form that approached Talarius is not identical to the descriptions we have of Lord Edwyrd, they are similar,” Heron explained. “In any event, we believe that Lord Edwyrd is, in fact, the greater demon. It is the only explanation we can come up with that fits all the pieces of the puzzle. It also explains the thousands of demons—those were also Lord Edwyrd’s. We do not believe a wizard could safely control that many hidden invisible demons among a city of wizards.”
“Hmm. I suppose I can see that,” Sir Samwell said.
Heron nodded. “We felt that we could use priestly support in serving justice upon Lord Edwyrd. But beyond even that, they have the ability to track and detect Talarius in the Abyss. Something that we would not be abl
e to do on our own. Thus the alliance.”
“Fascinating!” Sir Samwell exclaimed. “I think it is an excellent idea, except for one thing.”
“What one thing?” Heron asked, suddenly alarmed.
“If he were controlling a thousand hidden demons, he would almost have to be an archdemon, if not a demon prince.”
Heron frowned. “You think so? Everyone we’ve spoken with has insisted he is a greater demon.”
Sir Samwell shrugged. “Based on my experience, such as it is”—he gestured around them, indicating his tenure in the Abyss—“it is quite unlikely that a greater demon would command the allegiance of a thousand demons, let alone be able to force them into hiding in a wizard city.”
Heron sighed. “That will certainly make executing the warrants against him more difficult.”
“Indeed.” Sir Samwell nodded.
Appendix III: Introduction to Animus and Mana Polarization
Chapter 127
Mount Doom: DOA + 6, Late First Period
Tom slept soundly, curled in his now-common fetal position, clutching the Rod of Tommus as if it were a security blanket. It had been a long and exhilarating day. After being introduced to everyone in Krallnomton and ensuring that word was going out to the other cities and fortresses on the Isle of Doom, both by D’Orc messenger and shaman spirit message, they had all sat down to a hastily arranged feast. They had spent the rest of the day catching up and discussing plans for the Isle of Doom.
The stories of war, blood and sacrifice faced by those who had been stranded in Nysegard had been incredibly moving. Even though this had all occurred thousands of years before Tom’s birth and he had had nothing to do with any of it, he had somehow managed to feel guilty on behalf of Orcus for having left them with a skeleton crew when he’d gone to war in Etterdam.
Some of that discomfort was most likely due to the mistaken belief among some of the D’Orcs that he was somehow Orcus reborn. It was a belief that, to his own discomfort, Tom had avoided correcting. He supposed he felt some guilt on behalf of Orcus because he was technically pretending to be him reincarnated.
He had never claimed anything like this; the mistaken belief was all due to that silly prophecy from the incredibly suspiciously named prophet, Tis-Arog-Dal. He was more than a little suspicious that he might have walked into some sort of crazy plot of Tizzy’s. The only issue was that Tizzy did not strike him as someone capable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes of time, let alone thousands of years.
Tom shifted uncomfortably in his sleep as his dreams turned to fighting the Unlife in Nysegard. He was leading a charge of D’Orcs, orcs, dwarves and humans through a Storm Lord Fury, as their regiments were called.
The mortals were focused on ghouls, zombies, skeletons and other lesser undead; the D’Orcs worked to seek out and battle the greater undead. Vampyrs, vampires, jiangshi, lich commanders, necromancers and non-corporeal undead, all of which were very tricky for mortals to battle.
For whatever odd reason, they were fighting the battle at night; this seemed very odd to Tom. One would think battling in daylight would have given them a greater advantage. His assumption, as he tried to think about it in his dream, was that they had had no choice for some reason. Greasy smoke and the smell of burning flesh dominated his sense of smell as he ruthlessly smashed lesser undead before him and moved towards a nearby vampire necromancer.
Someone shouted at him from his right. He looked in that direction to see Vosh An-Non, his most trusted general, pointing to the sky. Storm Lords! Two of them were approaching on ice dragons. The dragons were blasting super-cold sleet down on the masses below them; a breath weapon that did little damage to the undead, but was extremely damaging to mortal troops.
Tom grinned in pleasure at Vosh An-Non, nodding in agreement at his general’s plan for the two of them to take the battle to the two liches. Tom twisted to his left and shouted to one of his newest D’Orcs, Vargg Agnoth.
“Vargg! Take the vampire colonel. Vosh and I are going for the ice makers!” He gestured to the two liches on dragonback. Vargg nodded. Fuzzily in his dream memory, Tom knew that while less than two centuries old, Vargg Agnoth was well versed in slaying undead, having grown up and demonstrating great prowess here in Nysegard.
He launched himself into the air towards the two Storm Lords, as did Vosh An-Non. Tom briefly thought of blasting the liches with fireballs from the Wand—no, the Rod of Tommus—but dismissed it as unsportsmanlike. He wanted to feel their icy bones crunch beneath the crushing weight of his Rod.
As happens in dreams, he was distracted by the sight of a pale D’Orc he knew to be Vordek Deathstealer swooping down upon a cluster of vampyrs, the incandescence of his lichtshwert painting their spike-filled maws in an almost surreal red bath of light against the inky blackness of the battlefield.
He smiled in appreciation of Vordek’s skill at slicing off the heads of the vampyrs. The sight caused his dream to jump to Visteroth, a rather dark and forbidding planet orbiting Erdnalla 3. Visteroth had been a world much like Nysegard, overwhelmed by Unlife. However, over thousands of years, the orc clans there had been able to adapt, creating through very risky trial and error, a genetic vaccine against the Unlife.
Unfortunately, not many survived vaccination, but those that did were immune to the predations of the Unlife, as were their descendants. There had been a few unforeseen side effects, of course. The Deathstealer and Soulwrecker clans were both very tall and thin for orcs and were also extremely pale, a dusky gray pallor that was frankly a bit off-putting to most other orcs. That paleness, along with their nearly fluorescent red eyes and deadly hand-to-hand fighting skills, made them some of the most feared warriors in their galaxy after they had driven the Unlife from their world.
Of course, Tom reflected in his dream, it was not just their fighting skills. For some reason, Loki (a vision of the jötunn-god laughing and drinking across the table from Tom came to mind) had speculated that it was related to the mana involved in the Unlife defense. The genetically modified orcs were far more sensitive to animus and mana than most orcs. Nearly all of them possessed strong animage skills of some form or the other. Naturally, being orcs, most of these animages focused on combat-related skills such as body mastery, cell mastery, kinetomastery, spatiomastery and temporamastery. Tom chuckled darkly to himself. And yes, a few of them had branched out and were skilled at telemastery and Mind Reaving; that could be very handy.
In his dream, Tom shook his head suddenly, wondering how he knew all this and where it had come from. But then he chided himself; when you had been around as long as he had been, you were bound to accumulate a lot of information. What? Sixteen or seventeen years? Tom asked himself in the dream. This dream, and he suddenly realized it was a dream, made very little sense. He shook his dream head harder. This caused his physical head to shake, and one of his horns snagged against the headboard, waking him up. What a crazy dream! he thought to himself before falling back to sleep, this time with only scattered thoughts of Unlife mixed in with disjointed conversations with his friends.
Fort Murgatroid: DOA + 6, Early Third Period
Teragdor stood in the doorway to the southwestern tower of Fort Murgatroid, watching the reconstruction work. It had taken a full day for Stevos to negotiate assistance, but he had managed it. Yesterday, they had returned to Fort Murgatroid, where they had welcomed multiple saints from both Tierhallon and Torholden to the fort.
They had left before dawn and ridden to Fort Murgatroid, where they planned to summon the saints by performing rituals that would allow the saints to find them. Stevos had brought a set of marching drums and a trumpet. He had shown Teragdor the beat he would need to play on the drums while he himself would sound the trumpet.
Teragdor smiled at the memory of the dawn summoning. He had belted the drums on, and felt filled with pride as upon them he began to bang, even as the setting of Uropia turned red as blood with the morning light of Fierd and Stevos’s trumpet sounde
d its call. Answering the call, Torean’s horsemen began to ride. With Fierd’s fire beginning to blaze, the stars began to fade from the dawn sky.
Teragdor had lost himself in the music. It stretched across the planes, beckoning the forces of Tiernon and Torean. To think he, Teragdor, had been in the musical number when the saints went marching in to Fort Murgatroid!
There were a dozen saints of Tiernon, and another dozen of Torean. They had quickly organized and began scouring the building and grounds with cleansing and purification spells for both Torean and Tiernon. A team of horses had brought a wagon with rune-inscribed stones that would be used to construct two runic gateways. One would go to a monastery of Torean, where a team of human carpenters and masons would join them; the other gateway would open to a quarry in New Etonia, where they would get stone. Teragdor knew very little of runic gateways, but had never heard of one that could span such a distance. He supposed it was quite literally miraculous.
The saints, apparently, did not actually need to sleep, so they had been working all night. To say he felt in awe would be more than an understatement. This morning there were scaffolds all over the fort, masons and carpenters scrambling up and down ladders and hauling materials. There were probably two dozen masons and as many carpenters.
Teragdor had shaken his head in wonder at everything that had happened while he had slept in town last night. There was a creaking noise behind him as someone came down the very questionable stairs in the tower behind him. Teragdor looked behind him to see a large man with a huge mane of hair and full beard stepping onto the main floor. The change in lighting from the outside to the inside kept him from recognizing the man in the interior darkness.
The man chuckled and nodded to Teragdor, seeing the priest’s expression of wonder at the activity in the fort. “When needed, we can literally move heaven and hell, it seems.”
Teragdor grinned and stepped aside into the courtyard, allowing the large man to exit. As the man came into the daylight, Teragdor gasped and fell to his knees. The prophet himself! The Prophet of Astlan, Baysir Tomgren, was standing beside him!