Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  The fiend spilled out of its broken cage in a spreading halo of slime. An overwhelming aura of evil, as palpable as a cloud of poisonous fog, engulfed the room as the creature unfurled its writhing tentacles, opened the fang-filled maw that slitted through its swollen belly, and slid toward the explorers with astonishing speed.

  That tide of crushing malevolence hardly seemed to touch Ganoven or his underlings, but it washed over the rest of them like a physical malaise. It wrenched at Isiem's stomach, besieging him with an overwhelming sense of spiritual nausea. Jeweled wands spilled from his nerveless fingers, clattering across the floor.

  From the corner of his eye, he could see Ascaros hitting his own head with the heel of a hand to drive it out, Kyril clutching her midsection and gagging, and Teglias grinding his teeth desperately against the sensation. And even as they strove to overcome the disorienting wrongness of the creature's presence, it closed the scant distance to the group.

  The fiend was a thing of horror. Its bloated flesh was a kaleidoscope of unholy pregnancy and disease. Each bulge that rippled across the fatty dunes of its midsection contained a new half-formed infection: some malformed spawn or living disease that wriggled in a yolk of orange pus.

  As he gazed upon the fiend, reeling from the skull-crushing grip of its aura, Isiem was filled with the dizzy certainty that what he saw swimming in its flesh would soon be slithering through his.

  Hadn't the thing looked different in its cage? More ...human, somehow? He couldn't seem to grasp any solid memory, but the general sense of it had been human, surely. A face, an arm, an ear. He had seen those things. Hadn't he?

  And hadn't this entire stronghold been dedicated to warping mortal flesh? What writhed before him, Isiem was suddenly sure, was not some alien creature summoned from the poisoned seas of the Abyss, but the remains of a once-ordinary person. He knew it—and he knew that he was doomed to join it. Its spawn would wriggle through his flesh like worms, consuming him while he lived and transforming him into a mindless host like the thing now pulling toward him.

  Paralyzed by the thought, Isiem could do nothing but stand frozen as the fiend snaked a tentacle around his knee and dragged him toward it, or itself toward him. The grotesque maw in its middle opened into a saliva-stringed smile, and he couldn't even flinch at being devoured.

  Then fire roared past him, slapping his face with its heat and singeing the ends of his loose white hair, and Isiem snapped out of his daze.

  Ascaros's fireball struck the fiend with incandescent fury, burning through the purulent coat of ichor that protected the thing. Smoke and slimy vapor filled the air, shrouding the creature's monstrous form and breaking the hypnotic horror that had paralyzed Isiem.

  The wizard scrambled away, yanking off the tentacle that gripped his leg. Blood soaked his robe where the tooth-lined tentacle had torn at his skin, but he hardly felt the pain through his adrenaline. The creature's skin was unpleasantly fibrous and knobby with tumors under its coating of viscous slime; Isiem wiped his hands frantically against the floor as soon as he'd gotten loose, preferring to scrape off his own skin rather than leave it coated with that foulness.

  Through the smoke he could see Kyril charging at the fiend, sword ablaze, and Ena racing to reload her crossbow. Behind them, Teglias huddled on the ground, clutching his head against some unseen assault. Ascaros's staff, raised high in one hand, was limned with the incandescent beginnings of the shadowcaller's next spell.

  But Ganoven was nowhere to be seen. A blur in the smoke on the far side of the room might or might not have been Copple—it was impossible to be sure through the faltering light and the distorting reflections of the room's myriad glass cages—and Pulcher was backed up to block one of the archways, his hammer held level before him as if he were covering someone else's retreat.

  They're abandoning us.

  The realization came with a sting of anger almost strong enough to block out the fear. Of course the Aspis Consortium agents were abandoning their erstwhile allies. They had their jewels, their scavenged skeletons; they had enough of a profit that they didn't need companions anymore. So they'd flee back to safety, shed false tears over their allies' sad sacrifice, and keep the extra shares of the treasure.

  If they lived. Isiem was abruptly disinclined to let them. Already on his hands and knees, he rolled into a sitting position, grabbing desperately at the wand that had fallen closest to his fingers. It was made of cloudy white glass banded in bright gold, and although Isiem wasn't sure exactly what it did, he recognized Sarenrae's sun emblazoned on those gilded bands and hoped the Dawnflower's holy flame would prove lethal to this fiend.

  His hopes were answered. The power of the gods answered his clumsy call, seizing his fumbling attempts at grasping the wand's magic and forcing them into deadly focus. White light gathered in the wand's core, intensifying each time it passed a golden band until it stung tears from Isiem's eyes. Squinting against the wand's brilliance, he pointed it blindly in the direction of the fiend.

  Sunfire erupted from the wand, punching through the tentacled beast in a searing line. It let out an ululating cry, hammering its knotted tentacles against the ground in fury and pain. The light seemed to hurt it worse than the burning did; the thing's single eye squeezed shut and, weeping viscous tears, pulled back into the soft folds of its body.

  Then Ascaros released another spell, hammering the fiend with a second fiery blast. As soon as the magic left the shadowcaller's fingers, Isiem scrambled toward his friend, grabbing at the remaining dropped wands as he fled. He pushed one of the wands into Ascaros's hands, not bothering to check which it was. "They've left us. The Aspis agents. They've gone with the treasure and left us to die."

  A scowl twisted Ascaros's face. He took the wand and shoved it into his robe, turning to squint at the smoke-shrouded doorway. From the look on his face, Isiem knew exactly what his old friend was thinking: he was gauging whether he could engulf their fleeing comrades in another burst of flame before they escaped. "Not if we kill them first."

  "But the demon—"

  "To hell with the demon. I'll let it drag my soul down to the Abyss if it means I get to spit on Ganoven's bones before I go."

  In front of the doorway, Pulcher had fallen. His head was snapped back at an impossible angle, and his arm had been ripped off at the shoulder. The sluggishness of the blood spilling from that ghastly wound made it clear that the man was already dead.

  Between the dead Aspis agent and where the two Nidalese stood, Kyril had closed on the fiend and was hacking at it with her blue-haloed sword. Isiem couldn't see Teglias or Ena in the confusion, but he guessed the paladin was defending them both. Her blessed blade cleaved through demonflesh with shocking ease, hewing off great steaming chunks of gristle. The wounded fiend let out a shrill, ear-rending shriek of surprise and pain—

  —and darkness descended upon them all.

  Absolute confusion fell upon them with the blackness. It was impossible to see anything. The floor was slick with slime and blood. Smoke and screams choked the acrid air, bouncing erratically off the glass tanks and enormous dome in the chamber's center. And through it all, the fiend's aura of sickening malevolence continued unabated.

  Isiem still had a grip on Ascaros's sleeve, the only point of certainty he could find in the chaos. They had no chance of finding the original entryway in this mess, not while blind. It was on the far side of the chamber, separated by too much distance and danger. To reach it, they'd have to rush past the enraged fiend in the dark. Hoping that the nearer door was where he remembered, and that Kyril's goddess would see to her servant's safety, he dragged his friend along with him as he hobbled toward the unseen exit.

  Before he'd taken more than a few steps, he heard screams and the gnashing of inhuman teeth. The cries were so high-pitched, so shrill with terror and pain, that Isiem couldn't begin to identify them. He hesitated, on the cusp of turning back, but Ascaros yanked him forward. A flare of agony went up Isiem's wounded leg; he stumbled,
gasping in the blackness.

  "Keep going," the shadowcaller rasped. Now it was Ascaros pulling him onward, forcing his unsteady feet over rolling chunks of glass. "Keep going until we're out of the dark."

  "Then what?" Isiem whispered. His leg hurt unimaginably. Worse, he could feel something moving in there, stretching his skin and compressing his muscles as it wriggled hot through his flesh. He put a hand to his thigh and immediately regretted it: whatever was in his wound pressed up against his hand, pulsing violently as if to taunt him with its presence.

  It was alive. He swore, glad that the darkness prevented Ascaros from seeing the tears that stung his eyes. Nidalese did not cry. Above all they did not cry for pain, or fear, or even for having fiendspawn incubating in their bodies ...

  "Then we'll make a plan," Ascaros answered. "For vengeance, and survival."

  They were nearly out of the darkness, Isiem guessed. Hoped. The sickening sensation of the fiend's presence was relenting, and the glass underfoot seemed to be tripping him less often.

  Behind them the screams had stopped, although the noise of the fight went on. In the relative quiet, Isiem said: "I think it infected me with something. I can feel it moving around inside."

  Ascaros didn't hesitate. "We'll deal with that, too."

  At last they emerged into a lesser gloom. Isiem's little light appeared again, illumining their surroundings in its subdued yellow glow. Empty glass cages surrounded a small open archway ahead. Although the thrashing of tentacles and the thrum of Ena's crossbow continued behind them, and the stench of burned demonflesh still stung Isiem's nose, this little corner of the room seemed almost peaceful. The dust of centuries lay undisturbed on its glass tanks.

  "Give me your leg," Ascaros said. Taking his spiked chain in one hand, the shadowcaller laid the other on Isiem's thigh. The demon's venom pulsed up in response, sending a fresh stab of agony through the wizard, but this time Isiem gritted his teeth and tried to keep the pain off his face. The cloaking darkness was behind them; he had to be Nidalese once again.

  At the end of Ascaros's prayer, a wave of magical cold shivered through Isiem's body. Zon-Kuthon's healing had never been gentle—its chill was akin to a splash of icy water used to revive a flagging victim on the torture table—and yet it had never hurt quite this much in all the hundreds of times he'd been subjected to the Midnight Lord's touch.

  The venom in his body raged against the healing. It burned and fought so viciously that its thrashings were visible through flesh and skin and cloth—and then it ripped through Isiem's thigh, bursting outward in a stinking fountain of poisoned pus and blood. The wizard collapsed on the dusty floor, clutching his mangled leg. He bit his lip desperately against the screams that fought their way up his throat. Ascaros's voice, steady and measured in the cadences of renewed prayer, registered only as a faraway echo in his mind.

  But the surge of healing that accompanied the prayer was very real. It dispelled the fog of suffering from Isiem's thoughts and brought him back to himself. Shakily, he stood, averting his eyes from the mess that the demon's poison had made of his flesh on the floor. His leg was steadier. Not whole—not exactly—but close enough.

  "Can you walk?" Ascaros asked urgently. Somewhere in the darkness, a concussive boom was answered by a hail of shattering glass and a new inhuman roar. One of the other tanks' occupants, it seemed, had been awakened from its long sleep.

  "Yes," Isiem said. The tatters of his robe were wet and unpleasantly sticky against his skin, but that discomfort was of no consequence. "We should go back. They need help. It sounds like something else has been freed."

  "Good." Ascaros spat, wrapping his spiked chain around his hand to tighten it into a neat loop. He tucked it into a pocket and put on the flayleaf bracelet that he'd worn in Barrowmoor, a seeming lifetime ago. "Maybe it'll take care of Ganoven for me."

  "He's not the only one in danger," Isiem said. "Kyril's out there. Ena. Teglias. They're all fighting in that darkness. We have to help."

  "No, we don't. They might all be dead already." Ascaros scowled. "Let's get out of here. Then we can check on them safely."

  "How?"

  "I'll tell you when we're safe," the shadowcaller snapped, striding away from the continuing noises of battle. "Come."

  Isiem hesitated. His companions were still in danger, whatever Ascaros said, and he didn't want to abandon them.

  Yet he could not see how charging blindly into battle would result in any better outcome than it had the first time. The fiend had every advantage in its conjured darkness; Isiem wouldn't be able to see it to target with his more precise spells, and he dared not sweep the entire area with destruction, not while his friends were somewhere in there fighting.

  Suicide is not bravery. It was an old adage in the hinterlands of Nidal, where farmers and fisherfolk quickly learned not to contest the edicts of their shadowed overlords. But as Isiem followed Ascaros, retreating from their comrades' fight, he found himself thinking: cowardice is not wisdom, either.

  It was too galling for him to bear. As soon as they were through the doorway, he seized Ascaros's shoulder and demanded: "How are we going to help them?"

  The shadowcaller pushed his hand away impatiently. The illusion that guised him in false health did not affect touch; Ascaros's shoulder felt bony as a skeleton's under the tenebrous cloth of his robe. But his strength, somehow, was far greater than Isiem's. "The compass."

  Isiem touched his pocket. The magical compass was there, heavy and unyielding against his thigh. Its needle pricked dully against his palm. "What of it?"

  "The one you hold is master to the others. The Umbral Court created it, and it carries all the hallmarks of their paranoia and lust for control." Ascaros snorted. His hands, curled with remembered hatred, were ivory claws around his staff. "The compasses do more than allow each to locate the others. With the master, you can spy into their carriers' thoughts. You'll know where they are, what they see, what they think." He drew a breath. "If they're alive, and in need of help, we'll go to them. If they're dead, you may thank me for preventing you from having thrown your own life after theirs."

  Unless our cowardice is the reason they're dead.

  It would do no good to say that, though. Taking a moment to collect his thoughts and gird himself for the prospect of drawing upon the Umbral Court's magic, Isiem turned away from the shadowcaller and looked around the hall they'd stumbled into.

  Unlike the stark sterility of the previous chambers, this one was puddled with condensation and choked by strange vegetation. The air was humid, uncomfortably warm, and smelled of vegetal decomposition; the purifying magic that sustained the rest of Fiendslair seemed to be weaker in this portion of the complex. Demons' bones, rotted and yellowed by the passage of time, rose from the surrounding plant life like fossilized nightmares. Few bore marks of violence, but many were spiderwebbed by threads of pale green fungus.

  Ahead, the walls were riddled with the mouths of more tunnels opening onto the corridor where Isiem and Ascaros stood. In contrast to the symmetrical organization of the previous halls and chambers, these sprang out unpredictably, connecting at uncomfortable angles and uneven heights. They looked more like diseased growths than the result of any systematic plan, and they hardly seemed to be creations of the same mind. If there had ever been any sense of order beneath the chaos, it had long since been overgrown.

  "What happened here?" Isiem murmured, even as he withdrew the compass.

  Ascaros looked around as well, grimacing. He drew his arms across his chest, gathering his robes away from their surroundings. "The touch of the Abyss, I'd wager. A gate that was opened too often and too long, a rift between planes, or perhaps something subtler. Some corruptive influence on the mind of this place's creator. I don't know. But something of the Abyss has tainted this place, and its presence is much stronger here."

  "Much," Isiem agreed, stepping forward to get a quick look down the hall. He didn't want to be taken unawares while entranced by the com
pass's magic.

  Where Fiendslair's light globes still functioned, the rampant vegetation was thick and lush. Emerald-green moss covered every available inch, even garlanding the flowering vines that crowded around the lights. In other corridors, the lights had been dead so long that generations upon generations of wan mushrooms and luminescent fungi had grown up over the remains of whatever plants had originally colonized those halls.

  Much of the plant life, whether it grew in light or darkness, had an unhealthy appearance. The flowers on those vines were the mottled pink and purple of badly beaten flesh, and their petals were fringed with tiny green teeth. They swayed on their vines, snapping at any movement in the air. Some of their flower buds had an eerie resemblance to eyeless, wormlike heads. Around them, the other plants seemed to be wilted, or misshapen, or rotting on the stem—and yet they were all incredibly fertile, even denser than the thickets of the Backar Forest, for all that they seemed to be strangling one another with their roots.

  It was hideous, and hideously disturbing. But nothing he saw seemed to pose an immediate threat. Wiping sweat from his palms, Isiem withdrew from the riot of diseased vegetation and hefted the needled compass in his hand. "How do I use it?"

  "The same way that you used the others."

  "Why aren't you doing it?"

  Ascaros sighed theatrically at his suspicion, although Isiem had the distinct impression that the shadowcaller was amused at being asked. "Because you're the one who cares, and you wouldn't believe me if I told you they were well. Or dead. Better you should see for yourself. Don't you agree?"

  "Yes," Isiem answered grimly. He pricked a drop of blood with the compass's serrated silver needle. "Kyril," he said, focusing a thread of magic into the device's speckled green stone, as he had in the Backar Forest.

  The blood sizzled into colorless smoke. It rose around him in widening curls, filling the humid air until it obscured his sight entirely. Within seconds, the dense mist shifted and became transparent. What he saw—and what he felt—through that enchanted haze was not his own reality, but for a moment eclipsed it.