The Black Book, page 28
part #2 of The Cycle of the Scour Series
"Just as I said. The Mallish don't understand what they've gifted us. Their armies will never stand in our land again."
"All right, sir," she breathed. "I'm ready."
She closed her eyes. I should have moved then—it's all so obvious afterwards, but in the moment of it, when you don't yet understand what you're seeing and your options are infinite, it's never ever half so clear.
Shadows wreathed Wate's hand. He raised the knife once more. Then lowered it. Nether flowed from him into her. The blade pierced her belly. She jerked, her toes twitching, and inhaled, her gasp as sharp as the knife. But the nether numbed her, and she made no other sound as he did his work. She only went limp after several parts of her were lying beside her.
The two nethermancers resumed painting. Their work was quick and precise. I could feel Rowe getting impatient beside me, but anything we might learn about the process of the ritual could have been invaluable, both for defeating it there in the cavern, and for doing so elsewhere, whether it cropped up in another city in Collen, or somewhere else many years down the road.
But maybe I was also curious. It's always been a weakness of mine.
The nethermancers rose again. Instead of moving onto another body, they turned toward the center of the cavern, where the giant icon of the demon emerging from its portal lay upon the floor. Great clouds of nether boiled up from the ground and down from the ceiling. The nethermancers sent flocks of it to each of the six bodies and across the vast icon they surrounded. Most of the shadows sank into the flesh and blood. A fraction continued to dart erratically above the remains, as if angry they weren't allowed to partake.
Wate reached into his robes and withdrew a rod as long as his forearm. At first I would have sworn it was taken from the White Tree, but it was bright red, and while it looked like nothing of this earth, it didn't look to be made of bones, either. But it drew the eye in the way the White Tree did. It didn't appear to be a normal tree branch, either, yet I was certain it had been grown from something. If so, it had grown in a kingdom far, far away from here.
He held it high, more like he was hoisting a flag than wielding a tool. Black tendrils rose from each of the six bodies. At first the tendrils were no thicker than yarn, but they twisted and wove together, growing as thick as my thumb.
The six strands moved to the center of the room, swimming like abstract eels. There, they joined together like the initial tendrils had done.
The space above the bloody icon wavered. The two nethermancers were chanting away in a language I'd never heard, which was strange in and of itself, but also because I didn't know of any force of nether or ether that required words to go with it. Praise for, or prayers to, whatever was about to appear?
The entire chamber seemed to tilt forward. I braced my hand on the cold wall. I was staring across the room, but it felt like I was looking downward, down into deep waters or a bottomless crevasse. The air rippled. Visions swam up from the depths: four close-set eyes, bulging but blind; a leaking wound; a human figure, but where its head should have been, a groping hand. These and a score of others cohered as if from a mist and then vanished in the same way.
Still holding the red rod aloft, Wate reached into the front of his cloak and withdrew a book. Adeptly, he flipped it open with one hand and began to read. The language was Mallish, I was almost sure of it, but I couldn't make out one word in ten.
The nether flared like fire in the wind. My sense of vertigo grew stronger. New shapes moved within the floor. Larger than the others. Indistinct. One was near the edge of the design, the other at its center.
A huge hand rose from the floor.
It was as black as coal and reflected so little light that it looked perfectly smooth. Its fingertips were tapered, suggesting claws. Several feet to the left, a face emerged. It was as dark and obscured as the hand, but as lean and angular as a skull. Its eyes opened, narrow, blazing silver in color.
It was just as it had looked in the icon in the book—and in the one drawn in blood on the floor. And it looked moments away from crawling out of its world and into ours.
21
"Enough," Rowe said. "Before it gets out."
I nodded, frozen by what I was seeing. I'd expected something like the wights: roughly human in size and shape, if warped and deformed. But the demon being born in the chamber was much, much larger than a man. And while it might have limbs and a head in similar proportions to a person, its body didn't look to be made of flesh of any kind—maybe pure nether, maybe something I'd never seen before at all.
"Wate first," I breathed. "Then the other nethermancer. On my move."
I brought the ether as close as I could without making it visible. What was I doing? Why risk my life on this? Why not leave it to the king of Mallon to deal with? But Rowe was staring at me, and so was Myla. So I ran forward.
The two nethermancers and their four assistants were focused completely on the being that Wate was conjuring up from the abyss. It was dark enough in our part of the chamber that they might not spot us even if one of them glanced our way. Once we were too close for them to react to us, we'd put an end to their foul ritual.
The silver eyes of the demon widened—and looked straight at me.
It opened its mouth. Smaller horrors drifted within its maw. It spoke—made some noise, anyway; the language was nothing I'd ever heard—in fact, the sound almost wasn't a voice at all, but more like the opening of a giant door or the blowing of the lowest horn. Hearing it, I'm not sure how I kept the nerve to keep running toward it.
Wate stopped reading from his book and turned his shoulder. He seemed as surprised to see us as I'd been to see the demon.
"The Mallish!" he roared. "Let them get no closer!"
Myla and I had already unleashed our attacks, strings of pulsing missiles all aimed at Wate. He stumbled backward, calling up the shadows from the floor. The second nethermancer stepped forward, putting himself in harm's way. With a backhand swing of his arm, he filled the air before him with swooping darts of nether. The chamber lit up with the two powers smashing into and negating each other.
I rattled off a second volley. But the two enemies were already on the brink of countering everything we'd thrown at them. Myla and I were hardly more than children, certainly in comparison to the two men across from us. Our chance of winning had relied on surprise. That was now lost. After our earlier encounter with the mobs, we weren't at full strength, either.
"Fitting for you to deliver yourselves to me," Wate said. "Your blood should be the first it tastes."
He clenched his fist and threw a slew of nether at us. His partner was defending them from me and Myla, but even by himself, Wate's efforts were enough that both Myla and myself had to go on the defensive against them. I flinched as ethereal sparks glanced across my face.
"We can't beat them directly," I said. "But maybe if we can—"
Something glinted through the air. The second nethermancer grabbed his throat, gargling; Rowe had thrown a knife into it. He threw a second one at Wate, who ducked under it, cloak flapping. Shadows rushed to the wounded man's grasp. He sent them to his throat, which disappeared under a wrap of blackness.
White lights were already whipping between Myla and him. He made a startled noise, spraying blood from the hole in his throat, and stabbed the shadows at the incoming attacks. Most were blown to fading bits.
But one zipped through, punching into his side. He coughed, clutching at his throat, waving his other hand at the ethereal bolts still coming for him. A second and a third strike slipped his guard and punched into his chest. He dropped down to his rear end, arms plopping to either side of him. His chin drooped.
He looked pretty dead. I made sure of it. The coup de grace knocked him on his back. His right leg gave a small kick, dog-like.
"Why would you do such a thing?" Myla's voice quavered, and not with fear. "Don't you know you can't win? Don't you know it will only lead to another occupation? Another pointless destruction of our homeland?"
Wate quirked up his face. "Don't you sense the power of what's before you? Can't you see how this is nothing like any other time before?"
During the fighting, the demon had acted like it had gotten stuck in the doorway, flexing its huge hand on the edge of the design drawn on the floor. Though its face was smooth, and too lightless to see with great clarity, the frustration in its gestures had been impossible to miss. Now, with Wate's ritual interrupted, the light of the demon's eyes was dimmer. If it wasn't my imagination, it had descended part way back through the gate.
"There is still time for you to correct yourselves." Wate's tone was almost gentle. "You, little girl, are clearly a Collener." He motioned to Rowe and me. "And the two of you look like you bear northern blood. Why bear any loyalty to Mallon? If they paid you in silver to get you to fight for them, surely we can offer you as much to walk away."
Myla snorted. "Do you think we're doing this for money? There are much easier ways to make one's fortune than confronting lunatics in caverns."
"If not for money, then why are you here? What lies has Mallon told you to turn you against your own homeland?"
"My two friends are demon-hunters. They've seen the damage such things have done in other lands, and have decided to oppose whoever would do so again."
"I didn't ask about your friends."
"As for me," Myla said. "The Mallish raised me. Trained me. Treated me well. Is that enough on its own? No. But I know them. They're not here to conquer the Basin. They're here to save it from itself. I'd like to do that. Because if it can be saved now, then some day in the future, with people like me there to make it so, we can have more than uneasy peace between the lands. We can have friendship."
Wate smiled with half his mouth. "Every youth is naive. But you are exceptionally so. Until we develop the power to stand against Mallon, we can never be friends. We will always be subjects. Luckily, I am about to forge that power. Consider yourself fortunate to witness its birth. This land is about to become greater than you ever thought possible."
Bone clacked on rock. I knew what I would see before I turned around. A bone golem strode from the mouth of the tunnel. Three others filed in behind it. Two of them had blood splashed up and down their forearms.
"That's why he was droning on like that," Rowe said. "Buying time for reinforcements."
Wate chuckled. "Kind of you to indulge me. If you ever find yourself in a situation like this in the life that comes after, don't try to understand your foe. Just kill him."
The golems moved to march beside each other as they entered the space of the chamber. The four assistants had looked grim during all of this, almost cowering, but they brightened considerably at the arrival of the undead. One of them was almost capering. Oh, it made me want to kill him.
Rowe edged to the left, away from both the undead and Wate. I thought that was a good idea.
"Plan," he said.
"What about it?"
"Do we have one?"
"No."
"Fix that."
I packed the ether into the tightest blades I could and flung them at the toes of the closest golem. They bounced off without doing much that I could see. At least the chamber was big enough that we'd have plenty of space to run away from them. On the downside, the undead were faster than us.
I feared Wate was going to hit us from his side as well, requiring us to divert half our efforts to defending ourselves. But the demon was slowly sinking back through the gate, its eyes getting duller and duller. Wate lifted his rod and his book and resumed reading his strange words. The demon's eyes flickered and brightened.
I synchronized my next assault with Myla's. A score of searing darts pounded into a golem's long bird-toes. It was enough to trip the thing up, buying us a few seconds of running time, but for all the bluster and violence, we only knocked a few chips of bone loose.
"You've kept the chain around our necks for so long you've forgotten what the full strength of the shadows can do," Wate said. "You've only made yourselves weaker!"
I gritted my teeth and fired off another wave of ether, knowing it wasn't likely to do any good. A bone rattled underfoot; I slipped and nearly fell.
"Forget the golems," I said. "We head straight for Wate. Kill him, and the demon goes with him."
"And let the golems rip us apart right after?" Myla said. "I've got a better idea." She drew a knife from her belt.
I frowned. "Stab them? Why didn't I think of that?"
She flicked the tip of the knife across the back of her arm. Somehow I still hadn't gotten it. Shadows ran to her so fast they were practically screaming. She bent them into crescent-shaped blades and launched them at the undead that was closest to catching us. Part of its kneecap flipped to the side. One of its toes snapped in half. The thing limped, veering to the side.
I laughed out loud. Why hadn't I thought of this? Either we were about to be dead, or all our witnesses were: so what did it matter? Further, we hadn't touched our reservoirs of nether at all, meaning we effectively had a second wind! I got out my broken knife, nicked my knuckle, and collected the nether, winging it at a second golem, shaping it while it was still in mid-air.
The undead weren't completely vulnerable to the nether; in fact they were still very tough, if not quite as impenetrable to it as the wights. Yet I was able to knock splinters and chips from the legs and feet of my target, enough to send it reeling, letting us scamper a little further away.
"The shadows!" one of the assistants shouted. "They're using the shadows against us!"
Wate swung his head around. His eyes bulged. "You hypocrites! You would kill any person in this desert who so much as touched the nether!"
"Am I a hypocrite?" Myla said. "Maybe so. But you're about to be dead."
One of the bone golems made a sudden lunge, swinging toward Myla with a hard-knuckled hand. There was no time to attempt to disable it. I sent the shadows under its feet instead. There, I wove tight bonds, sticking the thing's toes to the ground more strongly than any resin. Its feet could no longer move, but its momentum remained. It toppled forward and cracked into the ground. A person wouldn't be able to get free unless I dissolved the bonds, but such was the unnatural power of the golems that it was able to kick and wrench its legs, snapping the bonds one by one.
Myla was busy tripping up the one golem we hadn't touched yet. I spared a glance toward the center of the room just in time to see a second enormous black hand emerge from the design and find a hold on the other side of the gate in the floor.
Myla landed a lucky shot on the undead she'd just dropped, blowing a hole through its skull. "Finish it off! Before it can recover!"
We slammed the wretch with nether, concentrating on the wound to its head. If our target had been some savage animal, or even Wate or some other evil human foe, the brutality of what we were doing might have been disturbing. But it was fully righteous to scour monsters from the world.
The time it took to eliminate it was more than enough for the other three to collect themselves and gallop after us.
Myla motioned to one of the golems. "Hit that one. I'll get the one next to it."
I don't know if I misjudged where she was pointing, or if she delivered different orders than she intended. What I do know is that rather than attacking two separate undead, we both wound up whaling away at the same one. It crashed down with a series of painful-sounding cracks. The others ran onward.
The one I'd rooted to the ground earlier took a special interest in me. With a final bound, it closed on me, swinging its blade-like arm with all of its strength.
I twisted my body away. I don't know what good this was supposed to do. So it would have cleaved through my side instead of my chest? I needed my side just as much as my chest. I braced for death.
Steel flashed through the air. Rowe was swinging his sword—and for all the world it looked like he wasn't swinging it at the golem, but at me. It might have been my imagination, but this seemed to confuse the golem as well, and it slowed its swing, if only by a little.
Rowe rolled his wrist. The blade flipped a quarter turn, putting its flat to me. The golem's forearm clanged into it just as it lightly slapped against my side. It held fast, providing me with makeshift armor against what would have been a fatal blow.
So instead of getting chopped, I merely got clubbed. The impact threw me from my feet. I'd never broken any ribs before that night, but I knew at once what it felt like. I landed. Pain spiked up and down my body. I felt something hot and wet and couldn't tell if I was bleeding or if I'd pissed myself. It turned out to be blood, which I was relieved by, which meant that apparently I was more concerned about being embarrassed than about having been cut open by one of the sword's edges as the flat was driven into me.
The golem stalked toward me. A pulse of nether rocked it back. Flecks of bone struck my face as I swaddled my side in shadows. The pain fled from me like a criminal. Cold sweat popped out on my brow, but it was the sweat of sudden relief. I rolled to my knees and then to my feet.
Rowe grabbed me by the arm and pulled me after him; the other two undead were loping toward us now.
"First rule of fighting giants with swords for arms," he said. "Don't let yourself get in range of their sword-arms."
Myla put the golem that had hit me down on the ground. Mercilessly, she picked apart its head. The other two both had their legs and feet crippled. We ran about the chamber, pelting them with each step, but no matter how they strained to catch us, they didn't seem to be able to get any closer. We broke both of them apart.
I gazed at our work in satisfaction. Myla socked me in the shoulder. "Admire your ability to destroy things later. We've still got a demon to deal with."
It was just us, Wate, his four attendants, and the abomination he was giving birth to. Even so, I felt compelled to advance slowly, Rowe to my right, Myla to my left. Wate circled around the gate in the floor to put more distance between us, glancing frantically between us and his work.
"It's too late for you!" he called. "Your only hope is to flee this place before you lose your lives to the abyss!"
