Midnight's Mask

by Paul S. Kemp

  Not now, he thought, and waited what seemed like an eternity for it to pass. When it did, he put it out of his mind and withdrew a small leather bag and a wax candle from his component pouch. He lit the candle with a mental command, tossed the bag to the floor amidst the immobilized soldiers, and cast a powerful summoning. The candle flame turned black as he spoke the words. He completed the summoning by pronouncing the name of the gelugon devil he was calling. “Emerge, Kostikus.”

  The candle flared out in his hand and the leather bag squirmed, expanded, opened like the mouth of a beast. The bag’s opening became a gate, a portal to the Hells. Screams emerged from it, the agonized wails of tortured souls.

  “What is happening in there?!” shouted a voice from behind the door.

  The bag’s mouth grew until it was as large as one of the tower’s doors. A silhouette filled the opening.

  Kostikus stepped forth.

  At his appearance, ice crystallized on the floor and walls of the room. Warded and incorporeal, Vhostym did not feel the cold radiated by the fiend.

  The ice devil towered so high he had to duck to step out of the gate. His head nearly touched the ceiling of the room. Skin the color of old parchment wrapped a hairless head that looked like an exposed skull. Bow legs and overlong arms jutted from a thin, humanoid frame. The devil was naked. In one hand it held a spear as long as Vhostym was tall.

  Vhostym knew that devils could see invisible creatures. Kostikus looked around the room until his gaze settled on Vhostym. The black holes of the creature’s eyes flashed recognition. And fear. Vhostym could have annihilated the powerful devil within moments and Kostikus knew it.

  “How may I serve?” Kostikus asked, nodding his head in a bow. The devil’s voice sounded brittle and his respiration formed clouds in the air.

  Vhostym indicated the immobilized soldiers and projected, Kill all of these where they stand and return to your Hell.

  Vhostym did not want to waste time killing each of the soldiers himself. Besides, he took no pleasure in killing. For him, murder was a purely utilitarian exercise. He needed the tower empty and he wanted no survivors with loose tongues spreading the tale of its destruction.

  The devil seemed surprised at the simplicity of the request but asked no further questions. Presently the towering fiend set to his work. His spear pierced the flesh and organs of one of the soldiers, then another. The devil laughed as he killed—a high pitched sound like the squeal of a delighted child.

  More shouts from behind the door, then silence.

  Vhostym turned his back to the gleeful fiend and cast another spell, summoning to his side a sphere of nothingness an arm’s span in diameter. The void sphere would disintegrate whatever it touched. Another spell summoned a magical eye that, like Vhostym’s incorporeal body, could travel through solid objects and project his vision whither it went.

  Vhostym sent the eye, invisible to all but him, through the sealed door and into the room beyond. He transferred his vision to the sensor and saw the stairway and main corridor on the other side of the doors crowded with defenders. Few were fully armed or armored, and many still wore nightclothes. They must have poured out of their bedrooms at the sound of the alarm. Perhaps two score soldiers, three of the temple’s priests, and two wizards waited there. All of them stood ready, the priests in front with their silver holy symbols in one hand and their blades in the other. Magical wards, visible as distortions in the air, shielded both of the wizards, who flanked the priests. Both held wands at the ready.

  They were hoping to ambush Vhostym the moment he walked through the door.

  Vhostym turned his sight from the sensor back to his body. With the devil still impaling soldiers behind him, he spoke the words to a powerful evocation, infusing some of his mental strength into the spell to maximize its effect. Just before he pronounced the final phrase, he mentally commanded the void sphere to touch the door. It did and the wooden slab disintegrated instantly into dust.

  Vhostym completed his spell at the same moment the wizards beyond fired their wands through the door.

  Energy streamed forth from Vhostym’s hands, saturating the room beyond, and the tower’s defenders began to scream. But not before a ball of flame, a bolt of lightning, and a wave of negative energy streaked through the door.

  The flames, lightning, and life-draining energy passed through Vhostym’s incorporeal form without harm or dissipated into nothingness on his wards. Only the flames from the ball of fire reached Kostikus, and the devil, immune to fire and heat by virtue of his fiendish flesh, stood in the midst of the inferno and laughed.

  In the room beyond, the high-pitched, agonized screams of the defenders rose to a crescendo and ceased. A wet gurgle sounded for a moment, then nothing.

  Vhostym floated through the doorway and into the room beyond.

  From behind, the now euphoric fiend shouted, “Roasted manflesh!” and impaled a partially immolated soldier on his spear. The smoke from burning flesh chased Vhostym through the doors.

  Every living creature within the room lay dead. Many were scattered over the stairs, but most lay in a heap on the floor of the main corridor. Vhostym’s spell had left the corpses thin, pruned, desiccated. Night clothes and piecemeal armor hung from the dead as if they were skeletons. A layer of cloudy, pinkish water soaked the stairs and the floor. Vhostym’s magic had sucked the water from all his victims’ bodies, drawn it through their eyes, ears, their very flesh, and left little more than husks.

  Vhostym started to float upward but remembered that he needed to kill the prisoners the Cyricists kept in cells below the tower. Leaving behind for the moment his magical sensor and his void orb, he floated down through the now-empty first floor to the dungeon level, blind for a moment until he reached the open space of one of the dungeon’s hallways. Numerous cells and several torture chambers filled the level. Moans and whimpering sounded from down the hall.

  Vhostym would put them out of their misery.

  He took a small black pearl from his component pouch, weakened it with his mind, and crumbled it between his fingers. As he cast the fine powder before him, he recited the words to a necromancy spell whose power snuffed out all life forces but his own within thirty paces in any direction.

  One of the prisoners must have heard him pronouncing the spell.

  “Help us,” the man cried, his voice plaintive and broken.

  Vhostym finished the spell. The moment it took effect, the dungeon fell silent. Vhostym glided down the hallway, looking from side to side, and saw naught but corpses, all of them of prisoners. They had died instantly and painlessly, better than their captors. He floated up through the ceiling.

  Nothing moved on the second floor. Vhostym was alone with the dried corpses. Kostikus was gone, as were the bodies of the soldiers Vhostym had immobilized. Vhostym had as yet seen only a few mages and priests. He assumed the temple’s remaining forces had realized that they were trapped within the tower and were organizing a stand on one of the upper floors. Probably they had assembled around Olma, the highest ranking priestess in residence, perhaps in the sanctum itself. Vhostym would get to them soon enough.

  Methodically, he moved through the rooms of each floor one by one. He easily countered the defensive wards cast on the doorways of important chambers. He found a few guardsmen and a wizard seeking to hide, and two guards trying and failing to squeeze out of an arrow slit. He touched them all with his void orb, reducing them to dust. He also used the void orb to disintegrate the various religious icons and statuary that he encountered. Slowly but inexorably, he was effacing Cyric from his own temple.

  When that work was done, he floated through the ceiling and found the next floor abandoned. As he had surmised, the survivors had gathered on the fifth floor, in the sanctum of Cyric. Again, he took time to destroy the Cyricist iconography and ensured no one was trying to hide from him. He found no one.

  Only a single stairway led up to the fifth floor, into a foyer with double doors that led into
the sanctum. Vhostym hovered near the base of the stairs. He could hear chanting leaking down from above. He studied the stairs, activating a permanent dweomer on his eyes that allowed him to detect and analyze magical dweomers.

  The surviving priests and mages had been busy. Several glyphs warded the stairs, as did a firetrap. Should anyone ascend, they would cause an explosion of fire, lightning, acid, and cold, and trigger an unholy symbol that would wrack the body with agony. Of course, Vhostym did not have to ascend the stairs. He could simply float through the floors. The tower’s defenders had not anticipated that.

  The wizard concentrated for a moment, took control of the arcane sensor he had created, and sent it up through the floor.

  Though the eye, he saw that the armored skeletons he had seen in the room earlier now stood assembled around the top of the stairs, just before the sanctum’s double doors. They were designed to slow him, nothing more. Behind them, just within the sanctum, stood nearly a dozen priests and mages, including Olma Kulenvov in a hurriedly donned breastplate and vambraces, and fully two score guardsmen. The priests and mages held wands and staffs pointed at the stairs, and the warriors held bare axes and swords. One of the mages turned to silence a warrior with a glare and his gaze fell upon Vhostym’s sensor. His eyes widened and he gave a shout. Clearly, the wizard had magic that allowed him to see invisible objects.

  Olma whirled around, brandished her platinum holy symbol, the jawless skull, and cast a spell that attempted to counter Vhostym’s sensor. The priestess’s magic met Vhostym’s and was overpowered. Her lips peeled back in a snarl and she shared a look with the other priests and the wizards. All of them visibly tensed. They had an inkling of the power of their foe and it visibly frightened them. Vhostym decided to give them another inkling. Still standing near the bottom of the stairs, he summoned arcane power, pictured Olma in his head, and softly whispered a single word of power. “Die.”

  In the room above, Vhostym watched through his sensor as the priestess grabbed her chest and paled. The other priests scrambled about, looking for the source of the attack. Vhostym expected Olma to fall over dead, but the attack passed and she grinned fiercely. She must have protected herself with a deathward.

  Prudent, Vhostym thought.

  A shout of challenge rang out from the assembled troops.

  “For Cyric!” they called, and “Come up, wizardling!”

  Vhostym supposed he would need to use blunter tools. He softly intoned the words to a sophisticated glamer and crafted a highly detailed illusion of himself. He structured it around his annihilating orb, masking it. He sent orb and illusion up the stairs and into the foyer. For good measure, he caused the illusionary Vhostym to incant a spell as he ascended.

  The entire stairway vibrated with the impact of spells and wand fire as the defenders let fly with wands, staffs, and evocations. Smoke, flames, and green energy poured down the stairwell. A scream suggested that at least one of the defenders tried to touch the illusion, encountered the orb instead, and was reduced to nothingness. Vhostym floated away from the stairs, estimated the position of the middle of the Sanctum, and floated up into the room.

  The illusionary Vhostym advanced up the stairs and through the foyer, seemingly unharmed by the storm of arcane and divine power. The illusion continued to incant a spell that would never be cast. A soldier lunged at him, blade extended. When the blade hit the orb, man and weapon turned to dust. Two skeletons, mindless automatons, did the same and also turned to dust.

  The defenders fell back before the illusionary juggernaut.

  Behind the defenders, the real Vhostym began to cast one of the most destructive spells he knew.

  “A ruse,” Olma shouted, finally recognizing the illusion for what it was. She ordered the skeletons to cease destroying themselves on the illusion and turned around. Her vision must have been magically augmented, for she saw the real Vhostym.

  “There!” she shouted, and pointed at Vhostym.

  The wizards whirled, ignoring the illusion, leveled wands, and fired. Lightning and a green beam ripped paths toward Vhostym. His wards absorbed both as though they had never been.

  “It’s a ghost!” shouted one of the priests.

  “An invisible wizard in ghostform,” corrected a mage. She attempted a spell to counter Vhostym’s incorporeality. It failed.

  As one, the guardsmen rushed in Vhostym’s direction, blades bare, snarls on their faces. Unlike the mages, they could not see him. Still they charged.

  Vhostym finished his spell, adding a final vocalization that allowed him to sculpt the spell’s effect around his person. When he pronounced the final syllable and held forth his hand, four fist-sized spheres of superheated, glowing rock flew forth. Two he directed past the charging soldiers at Olma, and one each he directed at the two wizards who had fired their wands at him.

  The spheres slammed into their targets, knocked them from their feet, and exploded into an inferno of red flames that blanketed the entire sanctum in fire. The explosions overlapped, intensifying the heat. Soldiers, priests, and mages burned in the conflagration. Their screams lasted only moments.

  As Vhostym had intended when he sculpted his spell, the explosions spared the space in which he floated. Clouds of flame circled around him but he stood untouched in the eye of the inferno. Burning men staggered through the island he had created, fell over, and died. Black smoke poured from their corpses.

  Then it was over.

  Vhostym surveyed the smoky room.

  The soldiers’ bodies were so consumed by the flames that they were barely recognizable as men. They lay curled on the floor before him, lips burned away to reveal blackened teeth. The skeletons looked like little more than piles of charred sticks. The protective spells on the wizards and priests had shielded them from some of the damage but the inferno had been so intense that it had overcome even their defensive wards. Almost all of them lay prone, motionless. Only the chest of Olma rose and fell, and her breathing sounded as labored as Vhostym’s.

  The pedestal, tiles, and murals depicting Cyric or his iconography had been burned away or reduced to shapeless chunks. The temple was Cyric’s no more. It was Vhostym’s.

  He floated over to Olma, looked down on her blackened face, the charred, tangled mass of her hair. One of the priestess’s eyes was little more than a seared hole, but the other stared out from the charred ruin of its socket. It focused on Vhostym, saw him.

  “What are you?” the priestess whispered. “Why have you done this?”

  Vhostym frowned. Humans, more than any race he had encountered in his travels, always sought to know why things occurred.

  He answered, There is no reason that you would understand. And I am what I am.

  The priestess’s lips peeled back in a snarl. “I go to death with the Dark Sun’s praises on my lips.”

  Thank him for providing me with what I needed, Vhostym answered.

  He dispelled the illusion around the void orb and summoned the black sphere to his side. Olma’s eye twitched when she saw it.

  Vhostym caused it to touch her. A green outline flared around her and she turned to dust. She went to her death not with praises on her lips but with fear in her eyes.

  Vhostym floated back through the temple and caused the void orb to touch all of the corpses, sparing only their magical trinkets. He collected the magical paraphernalia of the tower’s defenders and piled it in one of the side bedchambers. He did not know what he would do with it, but it seemed a waste to destroy it.

  After a short time, nothing remained of the former occupants of the temple but dust. There would be no bodies for Blackwill to resurrect and question. In fact, there would be no temple at all.

  CHAPTER 10

  PREPARATIONS

  The intensity of the sensations and images issuing from the Source lessened. Ssessimyth’s tentacles spasmed slightly in perturbation. The ruins in which he nested shifted. Stone grated against stone. The whole vibrated above him. His startled minions comm
unicated their pleasure and terror to one another.

  Ssessimyth sensed the Source awakening from its long sleep. Something on the surface had drawn its interest. It was trying to climb out of its torpor.

  Ssessimyth linked his mind to the Source’s external perception and sent his consciousness surfaceward. The projection did not allow him to see images or hear sounds so much as it empowered him directly to perceive facts.

  He sensed a calm sea, and in the distance, a ship. Some of the surface dwellers aboard had sensitivity to the Source’s emanations, though they had not yet sensed them. The Source, even in sleep, must have perceived the sensitivity. The presence of other creatures with mental powers was drawing it up from sleep, drawing its attention from Ssessimyth.

  Anger surged in Ssessimyth, ire that a creature other than him might dare draw on the bliss of the Source. It was his, and his alone.

  He tried to lull the Source back into its sleep, failed, then struggled to force the Source to turn its attention fully to him. The Source resisted. Ssessimyth still perceived the images and sensations that he wished, but the experience paled in intensity from that to which he had become accustomed. He was left as little more than an observer, when he long ago had grown addicted to being a participant.

  His tentacles spasmed again, shaking loose a rain of unstable stone and particles. The call went out among his minions for one of the priests to come forth and interpret Ssessimyth’s movements.

  Ssessimyth controlled his anger. Still drinking the mind of the Source, he called upon a power innate to those of his kind, something he had not done in decades.

  A pulse of power went forth from him, powered by his will, and raced for the surface. Even if he could not fully control the Source, he could at least destroy those who were trying to share it with him. Then the Source would again be his alone and he could sleep at the bottom of the sea and dream lives and worlds.

  Far above him, he knew that his magical power was darkening the sky, summoning the wind. Probably the sea already was beginning to surge. He used the Source’s power to send a mental projection to the priests of his minions, ordering them to take to the surface and kill the interlopers. If the storm did not force the ship back or sink it, his minions would kill everyone aboard.