by Nick Harrow
A pattern emerged from the inky darkness, and silver arcs speared from the edges of the web to a pentacle surrounded by interlocked circles. I seized hold of the coordinates Kez had identified and willed the web to open.
Before the way was fully prepared, I guided Kez’s body through the portal and into a world I hadn’t imagined. Unlike the place of platforms and strange hidden spiders, this new realm was filled with cyclopean jade pillars that seemed to have sprouted from the very earth. Lizards the size of horses curled around those columns and watched us with faceted, jewel-like eyes.
“Stay,” one of them said. A cloud of emerald smoke oozed from its nostrils and flowed down the length of its pillar. “We have much to teach.”
Kez’s body sagged as her flesh yearned to obey the lizard’s offer. Her mind spun itself into a cyclone of desire, a thirst for knowledge that surpassed any emotion I’d ever experienced.
“Fuck off.” She pushed her desires away. “Not now.”
Disappointed, the lizard flicked its tongue to pluck a spark of light from the air. It smiled at the dark elf, shrugged its bony shoulders, and then retreated to the top of its pillar.
“I don’t mean to be a nag, but they’re very close.” Nephket’s voice was rough with tension, and her panic blossomed through my thoughts like a poisonous flower.
“Already working on it.” Kezakazek plucked the solution to equations I couldn’t understand from the storm of her own mind. She showed me the twisted helix of the next pattern, and I spun through the web as fast as I could in search of the portal that would save my people.
Ten seconds passed. Nephket’s fate was stuck in my mind like a thorn. It was hard to concentrate when I knew she was so close to death.
Fifteen seconds.
There.
The web spun open, and Kez plunged through the portal.
We emerged under a red-stained sky, less than twenty yards ahead of the raiders. The motley group of treasure hunters ran on pure adrenaline, their reserves of energy exhausted long ago. They stared at Kez with wide eyes, their mouths open to scoop up every bit of air to feed their oxygen-starved muscles.
Del and Neph were at the forefront of the group. Faster and stronger than the raiders, even Charlie, my guardians would reach the portal first. If they didn’t falter or stumble, they would be safe in thirty seconds.
“What the fuck is that?” Kez gasped.
The metal sides of one of the strange carts we’d seen in Lexios’s camp exploded away from the vehicle. The enormous beasts that pulled the device screamed in terror as something hideous unfolded from the cart’s bed.
A misshapen orb covered in spikes like a ten-foot-wide gum tree ball inflated itself with a hideous gulping sound. Where a seedpod had holes to release its seeds, this fucking thing had dozens of eyes surrounded by toothed lids that clacked together in terrifying bursts of hellish chatter.
“Run!” I shouted through Kez’s lips. I didn’t know what that thing was, and I didn’t want to find out.
A sluggish wave of rainbow light poured from the hell seed’s gaping eye and rippled over the bodies of the collector’s army. Horses shrieked and reared, their riders frantically struggling to stay in the saddle. For one moment, I glimpsed Lexios standing in the stirrups of his enormous steed, and then he vanished behind the oily radiance.
Nephket and Delsinia lowered their heads and pumped their arms and legs furiously. They sprinted toward Kez for all they were worth, but I knew it was hopeless. They could outrun the army. They might even outrun the cavalry to the Solamantic Web. But they’d never outpace that hellish light.
The slowest raiders fell to their knees when the light hit them and drained the strength from their bodies. The treasure hunters’ mouths opened wide, but they lacked the energy to even scream.
Misshapen shadows materialized next to each of the fallen fighters. Deformed things stepped out of the darkness, their twisted limbs raw and oozing droplets of ichor that hissed and sizzled where it struck the ground. The monstrous mutants latched onto the raiders with suction-cup-tipped fingers and wiry tentacles. In the space of a heartbeat, the fallen treasure hunters were torn to pieces and their flesh devoured.
“Oh, no,” Kez moaned. “No, no, no.”
My guardians were ten feet away from the Solamantic Web when the rainbow wave crashed over them.
They might as well have been miles away.
Nephket’s feet tangled together, and she sprawled forward. Her body skidded to a stop on the green grass, crushing the emerald blades and staining her armor with vivid streaks. She struggled to raise her head, but the dark magic Lexios had unleashed had stolen too much of her strength. A trio of gangly shadows emerged from the rainbow to surround my familiar, and I ached to incarnate, to stride across the battlefield and pull her to safety.
“We have to go,” Kez moaned. She had also been weakened by the hellish light, and if I hadn’t mounted her, she, too, would have collapsed. Shadows formed around the dark elf, and she struggled to form a spell to combat them.
Nephket had risen to her knees, but the raw-boned fiends were mere moments from tearing the flesh from her bones.
Kez’s voice cracked, and she unleashed a web of black light at her attackers. The sticky strands bound the creatures together and dragged them to the earth, where the arcane web anchored itself. The creatures wailed and thrashed against their bonds, enraged that their prey had escaped for the moment.
Nephket cried out to her ancestors and summoned a small mob of wahket spirits with the same spell she’d used to combat the lamia. The fierce leonine souls attacked the nearest demons with an unnatural ferocity. They plucked the creatures off my familiar with ghostly claws and hurled them into the air, then slammed the fiends into the ground with such force that the skinless beasts burst like water balloons filled with offal.
Delsinia’s chained daggers sang a song of destruction as they whirled around her, deflecting attacks and shredding flesh with every revolution. By some miracle she’d stayed on her feet when the wave passed her and had even driven back the demons who’d surrounded her. The soultaker was a blur of carnage, and she could easily have reached the Solamantic Web if she had just rushed to Kez.
Instead, she’d gone back for Neph.
The rainbow hellions were everywhere. A tall raider with a series of golden rings pierced through his scalp headbutted one of the creatures, then fell as two more tore his arms from their sockets and battered him with his own limbs. I caught a glimpse of Sven raising his axe over his head before he, too, vanished beneath a pile of glistening bodies. Wherever I looked, the demons Lexios had summoned capered and cavorted around the corpses of the fallen raiders.
And the collector’s army was still coming.
The spirits Nephket had summoned blinked out of existence as the demons rallied and counterattacked. Gossamer shreds of tattered soul stuff drifted into the air like wisps of fog, and the roars of the wahket ghosts faded away.
Neph raised her hands to cast another spell, but the demons were too close. They battered her arms and head and stained her fur and flesh with smears of blood.
“We have to go!” Kez demanded. A scorching ray of heat burst from the tip of her index finger and incinerated one of the demons, but three more took its place. Despite my urge to stay, I let the drow step back through the web. The sorceress would never reach my other guardians in time to save them, and I couldn’t sacrifice everyone in a vain attempt to rescue Nephket.
As horrible as it was, I had to think of the battle still to come. If I gambled everything here and lost, there’d be no hope of saving anything that I’d built. It was time to pull as much of my fat out of the fire as I was able.
“Zillah, pull back to the east gate.”
“Boss,” the scorpion queen started to argue, then gave up. She could see the battle as well as I could and knew our position here was hopeless. Our only chance was to retreat, regroup, and hope the few tricks I still had up my sleeve were enough t
o defeat the tax collector and his hellish minions.
Nephket had abandoned her attempts to cast a spell and drew a spiked club from the strap on her belt. She buried the crude weapon’s barbs in the guts of a demon, then kicked her dying foe away to deflect a tentacle from one of its cousins. But as fast as she’d dispatched one enemy, another took its place and wrapped its fingers around her throat.
A spinning dagger severed the demon’s hand, and Delsinia’s clawed foot kicked it away from the priestess. The soultaker turned aside a tentacle that whipped toward Nephket’s face, then drove her dagger through the upturned pig’s snout of another hellspawn.
“Go!” Nephket shouted. “Get to safety.”
“I won’t leave you!” Delsinia howled.
Her dagger spun faster, but she no longer tried to defend herself. Demonic claws tore through the scales on Delsinia’s shoulders and back. A tentacle looped itself around her waist, and the fanged suckers unleashed torrents of blood from the wounds they inflicted.
With a pained cry, Delsinia raised her spinning chain over her head like the blades of a helicopter.
The enemy troops crashed through the remains of the fallen raiders. Spearmen lowered their weapons to impale the few survivors, and cavalry on the flanks spurred their horses to trample the wounded beneath their hooves.
There was nowhere for my guardians to run, no escape from the fate that closed in on them from all directions. Demons slashed their flesh and howled foul curses into their ears.
Lexios glared across the battlefield at the Solamantic Web. His eyes burned with an unholy zeal, and I had no doubt he saw me within Kez’s body. He lowered his sword, a golden blade surrounded by an aura of black runes, and spurred his horse into a charge.
“We’re out of time.” Kez reached toward the surface of the web as if she could close it herself. We’d lost this battle.
It was time to focus on the war.
In the moment that I reached out to close the web, Delsinia’s eyes locked with mine.
“Run,” she mouthed.
The daggers that spun over her head had opened the Room of Bone and Shadow. She grabbed Nephket around the waist and hurled the wahket off the battlefield and into the safety of her special hiding place.
Demons swarmed over Delsinia and buried her in a mound of tearing claws and gnashing teeth. Enraged that she’d stolen their prey, they vented their anger on her battered body.
I had to get to her. No matter the cost, no matter the risk, I couldn’t leave Delsinia to die. She’d sacrificed everything to save Nephket, and I would not let her die like that. She deserved better. I could incarnate. She was so close, it would only take a few seconds to reach her and drag her to safety.
The Solamantic Web closed.
Chapter 24 – Against the Wall
“WE WERE WRONG. WE WERE all wrong.” Kez cursed as we opened the web and jumped back to the fortress between worlds. “She saved Nephket. She could’ve escaped, but she died to save Nephket.”
“There’s no time for that.” It took every ounce of self-control I had to bottle up my emotions and bury them deep inside. Lexios and his army were still coming. I had to concentrate on that, above all else. Above even the fact that I couldn’t sense Nephket or Delsinia. They were gone, as if they’d never existed. “I have to get to the east gate. Get there as quick as you can. If you’ve got any spells left, have them ready.”
“I’ll be there. And I have something a lot better than a spell.” Kez’s thoughts wrapped around mine like a warm blanket. “I’m sorry, Clay. I shouldn’t have doubted her.”
“Later. Maybe.” I peeled away from Kezakazek and bounced into the tower that overlooked the east gate. Lexios hadn’t arrived yet, but the setting sun was minutes from the horizon and the shadows of his army had already entered the narrow valley that led to the oasis.
“We’re in position.” Zillah’s thoughts were a snarl of barbed-wire anger. “Tell us when to kill them.”
The soldiers who manned the tower, startled by my sudden appearance, snapped to attention.
“What would you have us do, Lord Rathokhetra?”
“When I give you the word, sound the alarm horn.” Lexios had entered the gap in the ridgeline that led straight to the east gate. The siege engines had come to a stop, and their crews scrambled to prepare them to fire. Ammunition for the catapults would take longer to arrive, but the battering ram would get to work much more quickly.
This wasn’t what I’d planned, but it was time to improvise.
I clenched my fist and concentrated on the passage filled with Hakhmet’s Blood that I’d created days ago. With a thought, I squeezed it like a pimple, and the width of the tunnel shrank from ten feet to five feet in diameter. The viscous fluid inside the channel strained against the stone walls on all sides but couldn’t break free that way. Pressure from below prevented an escape in that direction, as well.
But the earthen cap at the top of the passage was no match for such tremendous pressure. I compressed the tunnel to its smallest size, a mere three feet in diameter, and the black blood burst free of its confines. The sudden pressure release transformed the thick goo into a dense mist that erupted from the base of the ridgeline and filled the air over the center of Lexios’s forces.
Infantrymen shouted in panic and surprise, but their commanders held fast and restored order. The troopers held formation despite the sticky goo that clung to their bodies. The thick black slime hadn’t killed them outright, and none of them had fallen to the ground from a poison, so they ignored my trick.
Oops.
They hadn’t gone five steps when the Hakhmet’s Blood reacted with the air and ignited. Armored men went up like Roman candles, the metal that had protected them transformed by the furious heat into ovens that seared their flesh and boiled their blood. A few of the cavalry had been caught by the spray, as well, and their mounts reared in blind panic when flames sprouted across their faces and flanks. The flames’ heat was relentless, and under its withering glare the heart of Lexios’s orderly army collapsed into chaos.
My sneaky maneuver had cost the tax collector the lives of at least a hundred men, and twice that many were so badly wounded they would never fight again. The cavalry was hopelessly mired in the chaos that surrounded it, and the officers bellowed orders in a vain attempt to salvage the troops they could from the turmoil that washed over the battlefield.
My trick had wounded Lexios’s army, but it hadn’t been enough to kill it.
The flames hadn’t affected the front half of the tax collector’s army or the siege engines at its rear. Most of the calvary was still fine, though the flames had cut them off from the gate. Lexios himself had escaped harm and personally led the charge toward the gates, the battering ram keeping an unearthly pace beside the collector’s horse.
There was no way men could’ve pushed the massive weapon at that speed, but the collector had already proven that he commanded far more than mere mortals.
“Shall I sound the horn?” the soldier next to me asked. He had no idea what the signal would do, but fear had set its hooks into him. The boy wanted to believe I had all the answers, and the horn would trigger another scheme that would save us all.
“Not yet.” As much as I wanted to put more of my pieces on the board, it wasn’t yet time.
The battering ram slammed into the gate below my position with a thunderous crash. The impact dislodged chunks of stone from the wall, and the heavy rubble tumbled into the city. Cries of panic rose from within the oasis, and soldiers atop the wall rushed away from the cracked and crumbling section damaged by the ram.
“Again!” Lexios roared. He jabbed his sword up at the tower that held me, and his eyes burned with a righteous hatred. “You will not escape me, dungeon lord!”
Whatever monstrosities Lexios had impressed to man the ram were hidden beneath the iron-plated roof that covered the weapon and shielded them from the rain of arrows my guards unleashed from the top of the wall. The ram�
�s heavy weight swung back for another attack. The massive chains that supported the weapon groaned under the strain as its iron-tipped head was drawn to its fullest extent. The operators released their grip on the siege equipment, and it slammed forward with the force of a thousand hammers.
The gate splintered and shards of wood flew in every direction. A soldier inside the wall cried out in pain as a foot-long spear of shrapnel from the broken gate punched through his thigh and sent him sprawling onto his back. His compatriots dragged him to safety, but if something didn’t change soon, there would be no place within the oasis to hide from Lexios and his furious army.
“Boss?” Zillah’s voice sounded small and timid in my thoughts. “What do we do?”
The sun had nearly set, but its bloodied fingers still clung to the horizon with a terrible tenacity.
“We wait.”
“Again!” Lexios commanded.
Time slowed to an agonizing crawl. Every instant passed through the hourglass like a drip of cold honey. The ram’s chains creaked as its crew pulled the weapon back into striking position, inch by inch. The wall groaned as the fractures the ram had driven through its structure took their toll. Children sobbed, and an image of Izel, terrified and wrapped in the arms of a grim wahket, popped into my head unbidden.
The ram hurtled forward with the relentless weight of Death’s own scythe.
The siege engine struck the gate, and the barrier’s massive timbers shattered like balsa wood under a sledgehammer. Tortured shards of wood blasted free of the iron bands that had held them in place and peppered the oasis with deadly splinters. The wall, terminally weakened by the unstoppable impact, gave way, and enormous sections of the parapet collapsed and tumbled inward like an avalanche.
“We’re breached!” the soldier next to me howled. “I’m blowing the horn.”
“No.”
The soldier stared at me with eyes swollen by panic.
