Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  Kyril couldn't breathe. She'd killed the demon, but it was killing her, too, with poison that gnawed at her gut and dug into her ribs like a hungry parasite. Ena was a lead weight on her back, insensible and maybe dead. She couldn't let go of the dwarf, though. She didn't have any other companions left in this hellish place.

  Teglias was gone, and she worried that he might not have fled of his own volition. He'd looked right at them as he ran from that fight, and there had been no recognition in the cleric's blue eyes. She feared the worst: that his will might have been dominated by some fiend's. Because that would mean not only that they'd lost their friend and ally, but that there was another demon in this place they had not slain.

  Praying to Iomedae to grant her strength, Kyril kept running down the glass-strewn corridor. With one hand, she kept a tight grasp on Ena's wrists around her neck, holding the unconscious dwarf onto her back like the world's least practical cloak. In the other, she held her gore-smeared longsword, even though she knew she didn't have another fight left in her.

  She had to try, though. That was a paladin's duty: to always try.

  The demonflesh door was before her. The seraptis's white flesh was fused to the walls and showed no signs of recent maiming, so either none of her companions had fled this way, or they were far ahead of her. Whichever it was, she and Ena were alone for the time being.

  Perhaps Iomedae had smiled on her servant, and they were something close to safe.

  Carefully, she lowered Ena to the ground and pressed the back of her hand to her companion's bloodied brow. The dwarf was burning with fever and chattering in delirium, but she was alive. Kyril allowed herself a sigh of relief before she scanned the hallway one last time, then heaved down on the seraptis door's handle.

  As the blade whirred out, cutting the seraptis's flesh free, Kyril folded her hands over her wounded abdomen and prayed to the Inheritor to force the demon's venom from her body.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Isiem severed the link, shuddering. Torture rarely fazed him; since childhood, he'd mortified his friends' flesh and his own. But having endured that burning venom's reaction to healing magic himself, he found that he could not bear to watch Kyril suffer the same.

  "Ena and Kyril are alive," he told Ascaros, staring at the compass's scarlet-speckled face. "They've just reached the seraptis door and are about to pass through. The dwarf is badly wounded, and the paladin not much better, although she was preparing to heal herself when I broke the connection. I believe they killed the fiend that injured them, although Kyril seemed to fear that others might be in pursuit."

  "And the others? Did you see any sign of Ganoven or his minions?"

  Isiem shook his head. "No, nor of Teglias. Kyril seemed to think they were alive, though. She was worried that Teglias might have been possessed. They slew the demons that they freed, but there may yet be something in this dungeon with us." He steadied the compass in his palm and, steeling himself, pricked his finger again. "Ganoven."

  Blood-spawned mist swirled over his sight, and through it he entered the Aspis agent's mind.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Ganoven was furious. And afraid.

  Pulcher was dead, and it had been an ugly death. He didn't know where they were in this infernal labyrinth, and he didn't know how to get out. He didn't even know if they were alone in this place. Maybe the paladin had killed that last demon, and maybe it had killed her. He hadn't lingered to find out.

  Everything was wrong here. The halls were more like tunnels, twisting and unexpectedly cramped and overhung with dripping vegetation. It was nothing like the neat, orderly corridors and symmetrical arrangements they'd passed through previously. He'd followed Teglias out of the demons' chamber, assuming the cleric must know something he didn't about the layout of Fiendslair, but now he was beginning to think he'd made an awful mistake. The Sarenite had vanished long ago, and Ganoven was entirely lost.

  And now this.

  "What do you mean you've lost the skeletons?" he shouted at Copple. His voice echoed longer and louder than it should have in the plant-choked halls. The half-elf scowled, crouching slightly in discomfort. He hadn't intended to make quite that much noise, and he didn't like this place, with its alien fungi and predatory vines. Greenery should stop sound, not amplify it—but everything was wrong in these halls, so why shouldn't the plants be, too? One of those plants, he was fairly certain, had actually tried to bite him. That rip in the shoulder of his coat hadn't been torn by thorns.

  Of course, Copple didn't notice, fool that he was. The pudgy man quailed, dropping the quilted sack and covering his head with his arms. "I'm sorry! It must have happened in the panic while we were running!"

  "Did you open the sack?" Ganoven hissed, venomously soft.

  Copple blinked at him through the absurdly garish tattoos that decked his arms. "No. I—I don't think so. We were running, I couldn't have."

  "Did you take them out?"

  "No. No, I didn't. You have to believe me!"

  No, I don't, Ganoven thought, but he didn't gloat about it. That would have been unbecoming. Instead he contented himself with a sneer. "Then how could they have been lost, hm? Do you mean to suggest the skeletons got up and walked out of your sack of their own accord?"

  They could have, a small treacherous voice whispered in his mind. They did walk. If they could do that, why couldn't they have climbed out of the sack?

  The Aspis agent pushed those thoughts aside. "Never mind. You say you didn't open the sack, yet the skeletons are gone. Very well. We will correct your mistake later. Do you have the gems, at least?"

  "Y-yes." Copple began to fumble for them, but Ganoven cut him short with a wave.

  "No, no, leave them as they are. I should hate for you to lose them as you did my skeletons." Ganoven used his thumbnail to crack the wax seal on another potion and downed it with a grunt. Healing magic flowed through his veins, erasing the last of the bruises and burns he'd suffered from that horrible fiend in the tank. Copple watched him hungrily. The idiot had squandered all his own potions on minor ailments earlier in their journey, leaving him with insufficient magic to cure the wounds he'd sustained in that scrap. But at least he had the sense to keep his mouth shut. Ganoven had no intention of rewarding the dolt's shortsightedness with more potions, and even Copple wasn't stupid enough to ask.

  "Come," Ganoven said, tossing the empty bottle aside and peering around. The eerie jungle that had swallowed these halls was quiet; there was no indication that any imminent threats approached. This was their best opportunity to escape, before whatever had eaten their former comrades came looking for another meal. "Let's go."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Again Isiem extricated himself from another mind. A sour taste filled his mouth; he swallowed it with difficulty. He felt dirty after having been immersed in Ganoven's thoughts, a sensation he hadn't felt after leaving Kyril's.

  "I think they're in our part of Fiendslair," he told Ascaros. "Or close to it. They're surrounded by the same tainted, overgrown plants. It's only Ganoven and Copple who are together; I didn't see any of the others. Pulcher is dead. Ganoven panicked and chose the wrong archway during the fight in the dome room, and now they can't find their way out again."

  The shadowcaller stretched his arms lazily over his head. "Good. They'll be easier prey on their own. Could you tell exactly where they were?"

  Isiem thought back. These hallways were a maze, and he had only a guess as to the Aspis agents' relative position ...but some of the plants had been familiar in their monstrous deformities, and there was a skull he thought he'd seen before. Beyond that, one of the overgrown statues he'd glimpsed through Ganoven's eyes had looked distinct enough to serve as a landmark.

  It had been a curiously ill-defined sculpture, as the Aspis agent passed it, Isiem had wondered if the stone had been deliberately carved into those sagging and shapeless lines, or if the mat of slimy moss growing atop it had dissolved its original form. Only the single central eye in the thing
had been clearly drawn—and it was that eye, filled with strikingly intense malevolence, that he remembered most distinctly.

  "Maybe," he told the shadowcaller. "They passed a statue that I would recognize if we found it, and I think I might be able to get there."

  "Good," Ascaros said. "We'll hit them soon, before they have time to move. So. That leaves only Teglias unaccounted for. Even if Ganoven is wrong about Pulcher being dead, he doesn't have a compass, so it's no use looking for him to make sure. Teglias, however, does."

  Isiem nodded and drew a third drop of blood from his finger. "Teglias," he whispered to the compass.

  But this time, when the bloodsmoke rose off the speckled stone, it did not clear. The fog lingered for several moments, swirling around his sight, and dissipated without revealing anything beyond its own opaque eddies.

  "Strange," Isiem said, wiping the compass clean and returning it to his pocket. "There's nothing there."

  "What do you mean, ‘nothing'?" Ascaros asked.

  "When I tried to spy on Teglias, I saw only mist."

  The shadowcaller's dark eyes narrowed. "But you did see the mist?"

  "Yes. Is he dead?"

  "No. Attempting to contact a dead target causes the magic to fail. The needle doesn't move, and the mist doesn't come. If you see the mist, and it doesn't clear, your target is alive, but he's using magic of his own to hide his thoughts." Ascaros paused. "Or something else is hiding its thoughts in him."

  Chapter Twenty

  The Creator's Blades

  Do you think he's possessed?" Isiem asked. It was a sobering thought. Not only would that mean there was some other fiend loose in this hellish labyrinth, but it would mean that fiend was powerful enough to overcome the will of Sarenrae's dedicated servant.

  "Does it matter?" Ascaros was studying the wand Isiem had given him. It was made of hammered copper, dimpled with a thousand tiny hammer blows, and its end tapered to a sharp point. A flat spot along the handle bore a glimmering tracery of Nidalese script, but Isiem couldn't make out the words from where he stood. "We have no idea where he is in this place and we can't trace him with the compass. As we can't find him, and can't possibly influence what might become of him, it's no use worrying about that now."

  Nodding minutely at whatever he'd concluded from examining the wand, Ascaros slid it up into his left sleeve and cinched one of the bands around his forearm to hold the copper rod in place. "We'll go after Ganoven."

  "Do you think that's wise?" Isiem asked. "The Aspis agents are lost, likely doomed. Ena and Kyril need our help—they aren't safe yet. And if Teglias is possessed, then there's something extremely dangerous at liberty in this place."

  Ascaros hissed an impatient breath between his teeth. "What was the first lesson you learned in the Dusk Hall?"

  "To keep my ears open and my mouth closed," Isiem replied.

  The shadowcaller clicked his tongue in annoyance, striding past Isiem into the vine-shrouded corridor. "Fine. What was the second? Never take your enemies' defeat for granted. If you haven't piked their heads and burned their bodies with your own two hands, best to assume they're alive and still threats. Overconfidence has been the bane of many a wizard before us."

  "Demons have been the bane of many more," Isiem objected. The hall ahead looked unpromising. Puddles of dark water and darker mosses, their surfaces slicked with greasy rainbow films, dotted the floor. Squat mushrooms grew from the walls, hemming in the already claustrophobic space.

  "Which is precisely why we shouldn't leave Ganoven to their mercies," Ascaros said, brushing past the lumpen fungi. "Can you imagine what mischief they'd make with him? How easy it would be to tempt him into ruin? Better we should prevent the very possibility. I have no doubt that your friend the paladin would agree. Anyway, if it troubles you so greatly, I'll offer you a bargain. Help me with Ganoven and whatever lackeys he has left to him, and I will devote my utmost efforts to seeing that Ena and Kyril escape this place safely. That's what you really want, isn't it? We'll finish off the traitors, and then we shall see to your friends. Together."

  It seemed dubious reasoning to Isiem, but he could see that Ascaros was not about to be swayed from his pursuit. Better, then, to take what concessions he could. "I'll go," he said, "but if we don't find Ganoven quickly, or the pursuit seems dangerous, we'll break off and go back to the others."

  "Of course," Ascaros said. "Now, where was the path you thought you saw?"

  Hoping he hadn't just made a fool's promise, Isiem moved to an intersection where he could see as many adjoining tunnels as possible. The vision had shown the corridors from a different perspective, and it took him a moment to adjust.

  Apart from the faraway buzz of some unseen, half-functioning enchantment, the hall was quiet. Nothing moved, save for the hungry swaying of the toothy vines clustered around the few functional light globes that shone through the warm fog. It seemed as safe as it was likely to get, yet Isiem couldn't shake the sensation of hostile eyes watching them from somewhere unseen.

  "There," he said, pointing out a three-eyed demon's skull with a wide, curved horn jutting out between its nostrils. With its lower jaw sunk into a murky puddle, the skull seemed to be drooling brown venom through its sickle-shaped teeth. The speckled red flowers around it had grown into bizarre echoes of its shape: they, too, resembled wedge-shaped skulls with scything horns. He remembered the arrangement from the vision, and he remembered the angle from which Ganoven had glimpsed it. "They were above it and to the left. The statue will be some thirty or forty feet down that tunnel."

  "I see it," Ascaros said, abandoning the hall he'd begun to venture down. Pushing aside the damp vines that draped the entrance, the shadowcaller strode down the tunnel. Isiem followed, casting uncertain glances backward. The unnatural plant growth in the corridor seemed to swallow up all traces of their passing, as if the creepers and spongy mosses were hungry for whatever little taste of life might linger in their footsteps.

  Something worse than vines had struck the Aspis agents, though.

  Almost as soon as he entered the tunnel, Isiem heard a man's weeping and smelled the tang of fresh-spilled blood. He eased around the curve as quietly as he could, catching Ascaros by the sleeve to slow him. Together, they peered through a curtain of wormy white fungi.

  Copple sat slumped against the statue, shivering violently. Sobs wracked his plump frame. With each heaving breath, bright red blood trickled out through his fingers and spilled across the floor, where the nearby vines stretched out to suck at it with their eyeless pink heads.

  The man looked virtually dead. Isiem started forward, but Ascaros grasped his arm to give him pause.

  "We came to kill him," the shadowcaller reminded him. "It seems someone else did it first. That is a convenience, not a problem. There's no point healing him."

  "I'd like to know who did it while he's alive enough to tell us," Isiem said.

  Ascaros shrugged and pulled back into the shadows. With a final glance back at his friend, Isiem approached Copple.

  The man looked up as he neared. His complexion was ghastly: dead white on his forehead and the upper contours of his cheeks, livid purple and yellowy-green around the neck and the folds of his double chin. Copple looked like a corpse, all his poisoned blood drained low into his body by gravity.

  His eyes were strange, too, their whites stained a pale dirty yellow. But it was when Copple moved his hands, raising them toward Isiem in desperate pleading, that the worst of his wounds appeared.

  A rough crescent had been sliced across his stomach, exposing curdled folds of fat and ribboned muscle. Plump egg sacs, hundreds of them, filled the wound. Inside each sac, innumerable white eggs floated like bubbles in a buoyant bath of blood. Some of the sacs had ruptured, evidently torn apart by Copple's own desperate attempts to pull them out of his body, and it was from their broken membranes that the bright blood flowed out and across Copple's lap.

  "What happened to you?" Isiem breathed.

  Coppl
e raised his head feebly. His red-stained fingers twitched across the egg sacs that bulged out of his body, dimpling their membranes inward. He didn't seem to have the strength to rip them open anymore. He barely had the strength to speak; his voice was a labored whisper that Isiem had to strain to hear. "Mother. Mindfogger."

  "One of the creatures in the tanks? Is one of those loose in here?"

  Copple's laugh was simultaneously dry and gurgling. "No. No, the mother has been free ...long. A long time. Alone in here with her children. Her children and the dust of their victims."

  "The dust of their victims," Ascaros repeated, coming toward them. The shadowcaller's black eyes were alight, burning with intensity. "You mean Eledwyn and her acolytes?"

  Copple shook his head weakly. "The demons. The newcomers. Interlopers. She hates them, she hungers, and I feel it, I hear it ..." Copple dug his fingers into his sparse hair, pulling it outward. The drying blood on his hands made it stick up in wild, red-tufted spikes. Then he slid his hands down again, cradling the eggs that filled his torn belly. "The children sing their hungers to me too."

  "Where's Ganoven?" Ascaros asked, scanning their surroundings. "Did the ‘mother' take him? What about Teglias? Have you seen him?"

  "No." Copple groaned and squeezed his eyes shut. Cloudy tears, yellow with pus, trickled from their corners. "I don't ...I haven't seen Teglias. Ganoven fled. He left me and ran." He tried to point down a crooked hall, its entrance fringed with torn and weeping creepers, but could only lift his hand a few trembling inches before it dropped back with a thud. "Please help me. I'm dying."

  "Yes, you are. How long do you suppose it'll be until those eggs hatch? Not very, I suspect." Ascaros squatted beside the man, observing them intently for several seconds. To Isiem's eye, it seemed that the wriggling threads of life inside the eggs were getting stronger, and that the eggs themselves were growing larger in their sacs so quickly that he could see the swelling as it happened.

  They waited another minute or two, watching those translucent filaments take on identifiable shapes. They were tentacled, writhing things, each one misshapen with some unique deformity but all of a type: four long arms around a podlike body that split down the middle to form a nascent maw. In the span of two minutes, they'd grown from half an inch in length to nearly two inches each, and they spilled out over Copple's lap like an apron of bloody bubbles.