Nemeniah looked down at Salim and his friends with sad eyes. "One day soon, we'll reveal our plans, and everyone in Heaven will understand. But we can't afford to be exposed prematurely. I'm so sorry." She raised a hand.
"Wait!" Salim shouted. "You're already too late—killing us will solve nothing. We already sent a messenger to the authorities. They're on their way as we speak."
Nemeniah smiled gently. "You mean this messenger?" She pointed, and Salim followed it to the violet-winged angel stepping out from behind a column at the top of the forum. "We always have people at the gates, watching for our...special souls. They were also watching for you, to make sure you didn't try to contact Faralan on your own."
So the hound wasn't involved after all. Salim filed that away for later reference and groped desperately for some other argument. "But—"
"Now," Nemeniah said.
Something hard and cold closed tight around Salim's throat, locking with a quiet snick. As it did, he felt a second sensation inside his chest—a sharp snapping, like a bowstring being cut. In its wake, he felt...smaller. Hollow.
Maedora screamed. Salim looked over and saw the psychopomp struggling in the grip of her own captors, tearing at a palm-wide bronze collar locked around her throat. Her back arched, and her clothes exploded into clinging spider webs as she grew several feet, back into the masked and eyeless giant he first met. Yet even as she changed, the collar changed with her, expanding to keep from beheading her, remaining just as tight around her new throat.
Maedora put her head back and howled, a sound of pure, furious loss.
Nemeniah advanced on Bors and Roshad. The larger man went for his sword, only to have an angelic hand close around his wrist, stopping him as easily as if he were a child reaching for a hot stove. Another angel pinned Roshad's arms behind his back, a blade hovering at the sorcerer's throat.
"You going to do us too, then?" Roshad challenged. "We're not afraid of you."
"No." Nemeniah smiled, then reached out a hand and cupped the man's veiled chin. "There's no need. You two are innocents."
Roshad's eyes widened. He turned to Bors. "Did you hear that? She called us innocents." He sounded offended.
Nemeniah looked to Bors as well. "In the Library, when the boat submerged—you gave what you believed to be your last breath to Roshad, without a second thought. Your love, your dedication, your willingness to sacrifice—these are things that will purify your hearts and make you worthy of Heaven's glory."
Roshad laughed. "I heard you'd lowered the entry requirements. But if you and your brother are what count as angels these days, I think we'll pass."
Nemeniah's smile faded. She looked to the men's captors. "Take them home."
"We're not—" Roshad began, and then both the Iridian Fold men and their attendant angels disappeared.
Salim ground his teeth. Just like that, their strength had been cut in half. Roshad and Bors might have been out of their league here, but some help was better than none.
Then again, if he didn't have to worry about keeping them alive...
He slammed his head backward, catching the angel behind him in the nose with a satisfying crunch. His captor shouted in surprise and pain, and before the creature could react further, Salim dropped, his face blistering as it grazed the edge of the flaming sword.
Then he was loose, spinning to keep all the angels in view, his sword sliding free of its scabbard.
To his right, Maedora followed suit, slamming a now formidable elbow back into her captor's stomach, then grabbing his flaming blade with both hands, heedless of the way her webbing blackened and smoked, and slamming it down into the angel's thigh. He screamed and fell backward, and she moved to put herself back to back with Salim.
Around them, angels drew shimmering weapons and advanced.
There was no way he and Maedora could take them on their own. Salim's sword, the Melted Blade, was enchanted to damage even something as powerful as an angel, but he was still only one man. Maybe if they could cut their way through, they could run far enough to attract the attention of someone unrelated to Maedora and Nemeniah's scheme. Would the twins kill another angel to protect their secret?
There was no time for squeamishness. Salim reached out to the Lady of Graves—
And found nothing. Pharasma's taint, that dark pool that was always there inside him, waiting to be drawn up into his veins, was gone.
Not good.
"Don't kill them here!" Nemeniah shouted. "She'll know if you kill them here!"
She? It took Salim a moment to realize they must mean Pharasma. Of course—how better to alert the goddess of death to something than by killing her servants?
Still, that meant the angels weren't fighting to kill, while Salim and Maedora had no such compunctions.
"Go," he said, and launched himself forward.
This time, the angels were ready for them. Salim didn't try for Nemeniah and Malchion—there'd be time for them later, if he managed to escape. Instead, he chose the shortest two angels, creatures both roughly the size of humans. The Melted Blade flashed out—once, twice—and was met each time by the angels' flaming swords. He spun, bringing his sword up just in time to catch the wrist of a third angel bringing her pommel down on his skull. Bright celestial blood sprayed as she fell back.
Nearby, Maedora continued to howl her fury. She held no weapon, yet her fists were far larger than Salim's own now, and at least one of her angelic attackers caught a blow to the chin that sent him reeling backward. Out of the corner of his eye, Salim saw the spider-silk wrappings that made up her garment writhe and split, forming long, thin tentacles that flailed around her like whips, slashing at eyes and wrists.
Something hit Salim in the side of the head. He spun, catching the second blow of a huge angel's hammer-haft on his blade's basket hilt. The force of it knocked his arm wide, numbing his hand. A foot shot out and caught him on the inside of his ankle, and he stumbled.
That was enough. A split-second break in his guard, and then they were on him—hands everywhere, bearing him facedown onto the ground.
One such hand wormed its way under his chest, into his robes. There was a sharp jerk on his neck, and then the leather cord he wore snapped. His amulet.
Another hand found the lump of the lintel stone in his pocket and drew it out. "Look at this—he's got a lintel stone as well!"
"So you're adding armed robbery to your list of sins now?" Salim asked. "How angelic."
He couldn't lift his head to see them, but it sounded like Nemeniah standing over him. "We're not thieves, Salim. We're only confiscating what's necessary to keep you from interfering further."
"You could have fooled me."
Malchion's voice broke in, cold and disgusted. "We're wasting time. Get them out of here."
The ground vanished.
paizo.com #3236236, Corry Douglas
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Desert of Nothing
There was a flash of cold and darkness, and then the sun-warmed stone beneath Salim's cheek was replaced by what felt like smooth glass. The hands that held him down disappeared, along with the rustle of feathers and the sounds of angels in motion. He took a moment, listening to the silence, then sat up and looked around.
There was nothing. Not the nothingness of blindness, nor the freezing void of empty space, but something else. He was in a place almost entirely devoid of features, like a landscape an artist had begun to rough in but never completed. Far away in every direction, a horizon line stretched perfectly flat, unbroken by any obstacle. Overhead, the sky was the same silver as Heaven or the Boneyard, but the color rippled and pulsed, as if great amorphous shapes moved behind a silk curtain. No angels or other creatures flapped against that empty expanse. The land beneath it was a matte yellow-brown dotted here and there with protrusions suggestive of stones, none more than a few feet high.
Salim examined the ground next to him. That ochre color wasn't completely
uniform—there were slight swirls and gradients—yet his hand slid smoothly over its surface, picking up no dirt or dust. There weren't even any pebbles. It was as if an entire desert had been fused into a single, perfect sheet of glass.
A low gasping to his left made him turn. Maedora, still in her masked and giant natural form, stood clutching at her throat, fingers scrabbling at the collar's edges.
"Gone." Her voice was brittle, panicked. "She's gone." Her words heaved and hitched with another of those strangled sounds, and Salim realized the psychopomp was crying.
He thought of how he'd tried to reach for Pharasma's magic in the plaza, only to find it missing. "You can't touch her either, can you? The Lady of Graves."
Maedora whirled on him. "I can't feel her. I've always been able to feel her, no matter where I was, and now I can't feel her." She stretched out a hand and made a fist, pale knuckles turning white with the force of it. "My magic won't work."
Salim nodded. "It's the priest collar."
"What?" Maedora's eyeless mask stared at him.
"The collar." Salim ran his fingers over the metal around his own neck, feeling how perfectly it conformed to his throat, neither pinching nor offering the slightest gap. "It's called a priest collar. I saw them a couple of times in Rahadoum, when the Pure Legion had to take a particularly powerful priest without killing him." He closed his eyes and explored the mysterious absence of Pharasma's weight inside him. "It cuts you off from the divine, keeping you from contacting your goddess or calling on her magic. As far as the gods are concerned, you cease to exist."
Maedora's expression faded from rage to horror. With a howl, she began scrabbling at the collar again, fingernails tearing long furrows across the smooth skin of her throat.
Salim stood and took a prudent step backward, watching the display with a mixture of pity and disgust. Poor Maedora. Salim had never wanted the goddess inside him, had actively resisted the touch of her magic, yet even he felt suddenly naked without that familiar presence. Grotesque as it was, Pharasma's magic was useful. Without it, he was an ordinary man again. But Maedora was a psychopomp—a creature born of the Boneyard, created specifically to serve the goddess. Her magic was as much a part of her as Salim's hands were to him. To have it suddenly ripped away...
Just an ordinary man. Salim let out a chuckle.
Maedora's head snapped up to focus on him again. "You."
Suddenly she was looming over him. Salim hadn't even realized the angels had let him keep his sword until he found it between them, its slanted blade seeming a very thin wall between him and the furious giant.
"You think this is funny?" she growled.
Salim kept his face blank. "I've spent my entire life trying to escape the gods. Now that I have, I find myself wishing I could undo it. How is that not funny?"
Maedora glowered down at him for a long moment, then stepped back. "Where are we?"
"I was hoping you knew." Salim kept his tone light, but in truth, the issue was troubling him as well. He spun in a slow circle, taking in the strange pseudo-landscape. "I thought I had at least a passing knowledge of all the planes, but this..."
"It looks unfinished," Maedora said.
The description was so similar to Salim's own thoughts that it made him shiver. "Wherever we are, I'll bet it's a long way from anything. I think that was the angels' plan—to throw us away in some backwater." He touched the raw patch above his collar where the leather cord had been ripped away. "That's why they stole my amulet, and hobbled our magic. They wanted to make sure we couldn't shift away or contact anyone."
"Why not kill us?"
Salim shook his head. "Think it through. Pharasma's the goddess of death—if they killed us, she'd know."
Maedora brightened. "Of course!" Her spider-silk wrappings unraveled into tentacles once more, stretching toward Salim. "I'll make it quick."
"Whoah—what?" Salim took an involuntary step backward, yanking his sword up to keep the psychopomp at bay.
Maedora gave him an irritated look, but she stopped advancing. "Don't be a child, Salim. It's the obvious solution. We kill you, and your spirit flies straight back to the Spire to tell Pharasma what happened. Maybe I can even follow you."
"You want me to kill myself, so that maybe you can follow me home?"
"It's a calculated risk." She smiled. "I'm willing to take the chance."
Salim laughed. "Of course you are. And when exactly did we decide that I should be the one to die?"
Maedora snorted. "I'm a psychopomp, Salim—I'm already a spirit, more or less. If I die, I simply cease to exist. You're the only choice." She moved forward.
Salim took another step backward and held up a hand. "Just wait a second, alright? We don't know exactly how these collars work. If they hide us from Pharasma, they might lock down my soul as well. I could end up stuck in this exact spot for eternity. She might not even notice I'm dead." He sobered. "And actually, even without the collar, I'm not sure it would work. I...well, as far as I can tell, I'm not allowed to die."
Maedora's head quirked sideways. "Not allowed?"
Salim shrugged, embarrassed. "I kind of tried the suicide route back when Ceyanan first recruited me. Trying to get out of the deal. The goddess wasn't too pleased with that." He pointed to the collar. "I'm not sure if it would hold true when the old crone can't see me, but if past experience is any indication, I can suffer absurdly large amounts of pain, but not actually die."
"You tried to kill yourself to spite the death goddess." Maedora studied him for another long moment. "You're an exceedingly strange human, Salim."
"Tell me something I don't know."
∗ ∗ ∗
In the blank, sunless landscape, it was impossible to tell time, short of counting breaths or heartbeats. They spent the first interminable period trying everything they could think of to remove the collars, which turned out to be remarkably little. Salim was no stranger to manacles and restraints, but even a rank novice could see that these were magical in nature. The collar around Maedora's neck constantly resized itself to cling to her skin, regardless of whether she flexed her muscles or shifted her shape. The bronze itself was a seamless, gleaming solid with no sign of joint or lock, as if it had been cast in place. Salim supposed there was probably a magical command that would open it again, but without something to go off of, the possibilities were infinite. When he gave up in disgust, Maedora studied his in turn, coming to the same conclusion.
After that, they moved to more extreme measures. Holding the Melted Blade carefully, Salim scratched at Maedora's collar, yet his efforts refused to do more than score faint lines which disappeared after a few moments. At Maedora's urgings, he pushed harder, throwing his shoulder into it, yet after the third time the sword's point slid off and drew blood from Maedora's neck, he refused to continue. The last thing he needed was to accidentally slit the throat of his only companion.
They began to walk—not because it was a strategic decision, but because there was nothing else to do. The blank horizon offered no obvious destination, so they simply did their best to move in a straight line. After the first few miles, the unceasing homogeneity of the desert-glass began to wear on Salim, and he took to dragging his sword point-first behind him, gouging a faint line to show where they'd been. It squealed as it scraped across the ground.
"Is that really necessary?" Maedora asked. "Or are you just looking for new ways to annoy me?"
"Don't flatter yourself," Salim said. "Unless you want to unspool some of that webbing behind us to make sure we're not curving and crossing our own tracks, this is the best we've got."
"You'd like that, would you?" Threads of her wrappings began to spring free and wave in the air, revealing flashes of the nude body beneath. "That's what you mortals are good at, isn't it? Mating and fighting?"
"Sorry, but seven-foot-tall manifestations of death aren't my type." Still, Salim avoided looking directly at her until her webbing coalesced again. "And now that you mention it—why a
re you female, anyway? It's not like your kind reproduces, right?"
Maedora shrugged. "Why do angels have wings? Why do proteans look like giant snakes? They just do."
Salim smiled. "You don't question much, do you?"
"And you do nothing but question."
It felt good to banter—anything to break the eerie silence of the desert. At least on the Material Plane, there was always some sort of sound: a gust of wind, a distant bird. Whenever they stopped here, however, only the sound of Salim's own breathing and the blood pounding in his ears let him know he wasn't entirely deaf.
"This is pointless," Maedora said at last. "We could be anywhere—for all we know, this is some discarded demiplane, a self-contained bubble in the Maelstrom, and we're just walking around the inside surface of its shell. Or maybe we're in the wastelands on the border between two planes, so far from anything that matters that the gods got bored and abandoned it. Even if this does connect to something, there's no telling how long it could take us to walk that far. It could be a hundred years. A thousand."
"Three days," Salim countered.
Maedora stopped and turned, staring at him with her blank mask. "What?"
"If we're going to walk out of here, it'll take three days."
The psychopomp crossed her arms. "And how do you know that?"
"Are you thirsty, Maedora?"
She frowned. "I don't have physical needs."
"Well I do," Salim said. "Which means we have roughly three to five days to get out of this half-assed sketch of a landscape and find some water. Otherwise we won't be walking anywhere. You'll be on your own, and we'll find out for sure what happens when someone dies wearing one of these collars."
Maedora looked down at him for a long moment. Then she turned and began walking again. "Best pick up the pace, then."
∗ ∗ ∗
When Salim was too tired to walk any farther, they made camp, which consisted of Salim sitting down and going through the contents of his pockets. True to their word, the angels had taken only the plane-shifting amulet and the lintel stone. With his normal traveling gear still sitting in the inn back in Kaer Maga, that left him with his robes, a purse full of coins from various nations, the Melted Blade and a more utilitarian dagger, and—
Pathfinder Tales: The Redemption Engine Page 29