And the apprentice who'd escaped had promptly locked himself in the incinerator.
"I think, perhaps, it might be wiser not to venture down this hall," Ascaros murmured from the back of the suddenly silenced gathering, as Teglias withdrew the key and passed it mutely back to Isiem.
"Seconded," Ena said.
But Teglias shook his head, and Ganoven was already beginning to wade through the bones with his underlings in tow.
"We will not go back unless we must," the Sarenite said, although he extended a hand to stop the Aspis agent's progress. "Kyril, do you sense any evils ahead? Anything that might pose an immediate threat?"
"No." Tension hardened the paladin's shoulders, and she kept her gaze riveted on the smoke-veiled distance, speaking in clipped tones. "But you already know I have great difficulty picking out individual evils here. This entire place is so permeated with malevolence that it fogs my prayers. If it's not a demon, I'm not likely to see it."
"Happily, it's demons we're concerned with," Teglias said. "Ena, do you see any tracks?"
"In the bones, you mean? Do I see any tracks of huge hideous monsters trampling through the rubble of these poor dead souls? Well, obviously something stomped them pretty thoroughly. But somehow I'm guessing that's not what you meant." The dwarf scowled as she moved to the fore, kicking a papery-skinned skull back toward them. Its withered nose and leathery scalp bumped across the shard-strewn floor, stuttering its course to the side. The skull came to rest against Teglias's boot, staring at him with gaping sockets and a lipless grin. After a moment, the cleric pushed it aside gently with a toe.
"No," Ena growled as she crunched across the bone pile. She stopped at the edge of Isiem's light, partially engulfed by the sweet white smoke that fell placidly from the ceiling, and peered into the gloom ahead. "No, I don't see any tracks. But there are demons up this way." The dwarf paused, then added: "They're behind glass, like the people and animals in the other rooms. I don't think these ones are dead, though."
"But they're trapped?" the Sarenite pressed.
"Far as I can tell."
"Then they should pose no danger to us. Let us proceed." Matching deed to word, Teglias continued into the experimentation room. His robes whisked through the weak white smoke. Ganoven hurried after him, while the others followed with more foreboding.
Ena was right: the room at the end of this hall mirrored the others, with an enormous glass dome at its center and smaller tanks recessed in the walls, save that these walls were pierced by multiple dark archways. About half the tanks were cracked and empty; the others remained intact. But where the previous chambers had held the skeletons of cats and sheep and humans, these were filled with fiends. And they were not just bones.
Demons plucked from every layer of the Abyss sat in those glass bubbles, caught in stasis like so many monstrous flies in amber. Isiem didn't recognize all of them—the Abyss spawned an infinite variety of abominations—but he knew enough to be awed and horrified by the scope of Eledwyn's collection.
Goat-horned spite demons and blue-gray brimoraks were caged next to squat froglike demons with lopsided secondary faces grinning toothily from their midsections. A swarm of ostovites were imprisoned around the partly consumed body of a gaunt, black-bearded man; the little fiends, caught in the act of extracting and reshaping their victim's bones, flurried around the corpse like misshapen, pink-tinged snowflakes. Beside the ostovites was some hideous thing that resembled a gigantic, gas-bloated corpse, its greenish skin bulging with pockets of effluvia. Fanged tentacles coiled around its swollen body.
Many of the imprisoned fiends were not whole. Like the human and animal skeletons in the previous chambers, they showed the scars of grisly experimentation. While the denizens of the Abyss had always been unpredictably horrific in their forms, Isiem was sure that some of the bodies he saw were grafted together from multiple fiends. Some had human heads and limbs—deformed, discolored, or boiled smooth in acid and lye, but unmistakably pieces that had been human once. Their bodies were crisscrossed with lines of white scar tissue angled in ways that no mere needle and thread could manage.
"How many of these do you think it supped on?" Ascaros asked, walking down the line of enchanted cages. The distorted reflection of his face, ghostly over the bodies of trapped fiends, followed him down the row. "How many of these bled for the nightblade?"
"Of these?" Isiem canted his head to one side, studying the swarm of ostovites. "None, presumably. These appear to be alive. Those Eledwyn took for the nightblade did not survive."
Ena looked from one to the other in confusion. "What are you talking about?"
"Speculations. Only idle speculations." Ascaros stopped in front of a spider-faced fiend whose chitinous body was surrounded by a ring of fleshy, suckered tentacles. While a demon could easily have such a chaotic form on its own, the ridges of scarring at the base of each tentacle indicated that these had been added by other hands. "This place really is a marvel of cruelty. All of it."
The dwarf stared at him. "Don't dodge the question. Did you learn something about the nightblade from Eledwyn's books? You're talking like you know something we don't."
"We have a nightblade," Isiem admitted. "At least, we think we do."
The dwarf's eyes bugged out. She gave a sharp, humorous laugh. "I'm glad you saw fit to share that information with the rest of us." She held up a callused hand as the wizard began to open his mouth. "No, don't make excuses, I don't want to hear them. Just tell us what you know about the thing. What is it? What does it do? Is it as deadly to demons as we'd thought?"
"Not directly," Ascaros said. "I'm not entirely sure what it is or how it works."
"Well, what do you know?"
The shadowcaller motioned to Isiem. "What did the book say?"
"That it ‘slices through the flesh of space.' That it's ‘a lodestone whose call and creation is blood,' and that its purpose was ‘to summon to feast the spirits that have no souls.' There's more, but those are the lines I recall."
"That's lovely," Ena snarled. "Practically poetry. What does any of it mean?"
"We're not sure," Ascaros answered. "What we are guessing is that Eledwyn crafted her nightblades using some of the same magics that Nidalese arcanists have used for centuries to make nightglasses—magical mirrors used for testing students and summoning shadowbeasts—and that she imbued them with the blood of fiends. Her writings indicate that she collected the essences and effluvia of the fiends she tortured and killed in this place, concentrated them into this blade, and used it to draw out powers that demons feared. A combination of lodestone to find them and sacrifice to entice them, I believe. Ultimately, it's a tool of summoning."
The shadowcaller paused, glancing at the nearest glass cage. A clean-shaven woman's head leered back at him, dangling from the chest of a raw-fleshed demon like a grotesque pendant. "That much I'm fairly certain we have right. What's less clear is how, or if, the nightblades were connected to the rest of this work. She told Mesandroth that demons were too inhospitable for human souls, no matter how their bodies were altered in attempts to accommodate. But other creatures, she claimed, might serve better."
Ena followed the shadowcaller's look and grimaced at the grafted demon. Deliberately, she squared her stance away from it so that she wouldn't have to see so much as a reflection in the corner of her eye. "What other creatures? These ...hybrids?"
Ascaros shook his head. "I don't think so. I think these are her failures. Eledwyn's notes say she was looking for something that preexisted demonkind—the embodiment of some ancient, ancestral memory of fear she found lurking in the most ancient fiends' thoughts—and she used sacrifices of demons' blood to lure them out. But what was she luring? On that, your guess is as good as mine."
"She went looking for the enemy of her enemy," Isiem added, "but we don't know what she found. Her writings came to an abrupt end soon after she used the nightblades to summoned it—whatever it was."
"Because Mesandroth dest
royed her laboratory, or because of what she summoned?" Ena asked.
The Nidalese shared a look, and then Isiem cleared his throat uncomfortably. "It could be either. Or both."
"Monsters used to slay monsters," Kyril said. She surveyed the ranks of horrors around them with a slow shake of her head. "We can't use that."
"No," Teglias agreed. A shadow seemed to pass across his clear blue eyes. "That particular folly has led men into ruin too many times. If summoning more monsters from the Abyss's bowels is truly what the nightblade does, it's useless to us."
"Maybe to you, but not to me," Ganoven said. He turned a black glare on Ascaros. "I'll overlook that you apparently found a nightblade and didn't see fit to tell the rest of us until now. I'll even overlook that you make all these claims without offering to let us test the artifact ourselves. But I came here to retrieve a nightblade on behalf of the Aspis Consortium, and I mean to have one."
"Then get one," Ascaros said indifferently. "There are at least two others in here somewhere. But I'll not give you the one I've found. The Sarenite can have it, if he wants it. You can't."
Ganoven stiffened and puffed up in outrage. Isiem, wanting nothing more than to put the entire conversation behind him, moved on before the Aspis agent could explode.
The shadowed archways all seemed identical, so he made for the one directly across the room, circling around the dome.
That dome had been cracked by innumerable hard blows and smeared with dried blood and flecks of shredded skin. The legacy of destructive experiments, Isiem guessed. Most likely these had been more tests of whether demonic grafts could protect human flesh from various forms of magical assault ...and judging from the residue, the answers had been decidedly negative.
Jeweled sconces surrounded the dome. On the wall behind them, wands of wood and bone and polished stone had been mounted in a display case. Bloody fingerprints smeared the glass cover, and the wands had been knocked loose into a jumbled heap along the case's bottom, but whoever had flailed so desperately at the wands hadn't been able to get a single one free.
The case wasn't locked. It had only an ornamental brass latch, and although its hinges were stiff with disuse and crusted gore, it creaked open on Isiem's first try. The wands tumbled out as soon as he lifted the cover enough to allow them. They filled his hands with glass and copper, fiery jacinths set in gold, pale blue quartz mazed with white lines of frost. Each one was a work of art. A quick cantrip let Isiem see their auras, revealing that, together, they represented enough destructive power to level a small town.
Not a single one of Eledwyn's wands held a mote of protective or curative power. They were all designed for pure destruction. Some of the wands held raw elemental magics; others contained layered spells meant to be released simultaneously or in quick succession, which Isiem could not identify as easily. What little he could discern, though, both raised his estimation of Eledwyn's inventiveness and made him glad that the woman was long dead.
"Ah, finally! Something that might salvage this sorry expedition," Ganoven said behind him.
Isiem started, thinking that the Aspis agent meant the wands, but a glance over his shoulder dispelled that notion. The half-elf was looking past him to the rows of demons' cages—or, more precisely, to the gemstone that gleamed in the center of each one.
Unlike the glass tanks in the other rooms, each of the demons' bubbles was adorned with a single precious stone. The smallest gem was the size of a quail's egg; the largest was bigger than Pulcher's fist. They ranged from perfectly colorless diamonds to chrysoberyls and tourmalines in impossibly vivid shades of yellow and azure. Individually priceless, the collective value of the stones would have stolen the Ruby Prince's breath.
And yet ...
"You can't take those," Ascaros said coldly.
Ganoven spun on his heel. "Why not? I've about had it with your—"
"You fancy yourself a wizard, don't you?" The shadowcaller gestured contemptuously to the cage nearest the Aspis agent. It held a single brimorak, trapped in stasis with wisps of smoke rising from its nostrils. The gem set in its bubble was a radiant blue-green apatite affixed squarely between the demon's red eyes. "Look at that cage. Tell me: what purpose does that jewel serve?"
"I don't know," Ganoven snapped. "I don't care. You say the nightblade is worthless because it's too dangerous to use. Fine. These gems will repay the Consortium for the money we've wasted on this goblin hunt. If they're as valuable as they look, we might even turn a profit."
"Or you might get your idiot self killed. I'd shed no tears over that, admittedly, but it doesn't mean I intend to let you take me with you. Why do you suppose fiends need jewels in their cages when sheep and rats did not? No, wait, perhaps that one's too hard. Let me ask an easier question: why do you suppose these fiends are in stasis, when all the other cages we found had only moldering bones inside?"
"Because the jewels are holding them," Ena said, fingering her crossbow as she eyed the chartreuse flashes of a nearby chrysoberyl.
"Precisely!" Ascaros gave the dwarf a sardonic clap. "The demons are in stasis, and the reason they're in stasis is because the jewels are anchoring that spell. Remove them—if you even can—and you'll break the enchantment that holds them in place. And then, I imagine, we will all be briefly but intensely sad."
Ganoven hesitated, then shook his head stubbornly and smoothed a ruffled hair back into his goatee. "It's a brimorak. Come, have some courage. We came here prepared to fight demons. This is a minor one, and it's trapped. We have every conceivable advantage, and you want to cringe away from this?"
"That's a fair point, as far as it goes," Ena conceded. She unhitched her crossbow and fitted it with a bolt.
"Indeed." The Aspis agent nodded toward Pulcher.
With a mighty heave, the big man brought his hammer crashing down on the curved glass tank. It shattered immediately, sending splinters of glass flying. Ganoven scrambled after the chunk with the embedded apatite, while the others tensed, weapons and spells readied to assail the brimorak.
But instead of lunging at them or trying to escape, the demon collapsed. Its striped, bluish hide paled to a chalky, poisoned gray; its crimson eyes went dead black and shriveled into its skull. The sulfurous yellow fangs dropped out of the demon's mouth, replaced by a netting of mold and mildew that itself withered and died in seconds.
Almost before the last chunks of glass had stopped rolling across the floor, the brimorak had collapsed into a pile of dust, fur scraps, and fungus-spotted bone.
"That ...is not what I expected," Kyril said, lowering her sword. Beside her, Ena almost dropped her crossbow in surprise.
"The gem's unscratched," Ganoven announced with considerable relief, holding the chunk of glass up triumphantly. Apatite was a fragile stone, and that impact had been hard enough to chip a diamond. "And it seems that demon wasn't so dangerous after all. Let's do the rest, eh?"
"Demons don't age." Kyril stood staring at the pile of fungus-spotted bones. She spoke as if she were trying to persuade herself of the statement's truth. "So what killed the brimorak?"
"Looked like some kind of disease," Ena offered. The dwarf started toward the brimorak's shattered cage, then hesitated, stopping ten feet away. "A disease that could kill something that wasn't even really alive."
"Something linked to the nightblade?" Isiem asked, turning to Ascaros.
The shadowcaller paused, then nodded reluctantly. "It's possible. The mold does look similar to the cythnigots we saw in the first room. A modified version, perhaps. Or an unrelated experiment in defeating demons by disease."
"Then the bones are valuable too," Ganoven said. He snapped his fingers. "No dreadful blood-lured monsters involved, just fungus. Copple—take those bones and put them in your bag. If there's a plague that can do that to a demon, imagine what the Worldwound crusaders would pay for it. Something like that could drive the demon hordes back to the Abyss without costing a single human life. Why, those bones might be worth more than
all the gems in this room put together."
"I don't want to get a plague," Copple protested, hanging back at the edge of the room.
"It doesn't affect people," Ganoven said impatiently. He glanced at Ascaros. "Does it?"
The Nidalese sorcerer shrugged. "I've only begun to dimly apprehend the outlines of what Eledwyn tried to do here. But a significant part of her work was centered on hybridizing humans with demons. I'd hate to make any promises about what the fungus would or would not affect."
"I'm not touching it," Copple declared.
"Fine. We'll just take the gems. I already have those cats, anyway. I'm sure they'll serve." Ganoven pointed to the next glass cage, which held the flurry of frozen ostovites. "That one next."
Licking his lips, Pulcher moved to the ostovites' tank and shifted his sweaty palms on the handle of his hammer. With a last glance back at the rest of them, the big man hoisted the weapon and smashed it into the glass.
It, too, shattered, and as the chrysoberyl in its center tumbled free, the tank's ostovites blanched to a dead white. Isiem could see the life drain out of them, and it went with breathtaking speed. In the span of two heartbeats, they lost all color, went stiff and brittle, and were covered by a fine fuzz of mold. Then the mold withered, puffed out gray spores, and died, and the ostovites' pock-riddled bones broke apart into gritty fragments around the dried corpse of the man they'd been eating.
Pulcher's jaw dropped. "This is easy," he said, and swung his hammer into the next tank without waiting for anyone else to react.
Again the cage cracked apart under his first blow, and again the binding gemstone—this time a ruby, bright as fresh-drawn blood—went spinning away in a glittering penumbra of broken glass.
But this time, the creature that emerged from the broken tank did not wither or die.
It attacked.
Chapter Nineteen
One of the Lost
Nightblade Page 21
