Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  "I think we've seen enough," Ascaros murmured. He took out a knife and slashed through the bubbles, one by one, methodically dismembering the spawn inside the eggs as they flailed in their bloody fluid and Copple screamed himself hoarse.

  When the last of the bubbles had been eviscerated, Copple lay insensible in a pool of his own blood and clear ichor. His breathing was rapid and shallow, and his color was somehow worse. Even the tattoos on his arms looked like plague corpses. Isiem stooped to help him, but Ascaros pushed him away. Taking one of Copple's limp hands between his own, the shadowcaller invoked a thread of Zon-Kuthon's power to pull the pudgy man back from the brink of death.

  It was only a tiny fragment of healing—not enough to repair Copple's ruined insides, barely enough to bring his eyelids fluttering back to awareness—and it seemed almost crueler than letting the poor man die. But the spark of life stayed in him.

  Ascaros stood, wiping his hands clean. "Are you ready to finish this?"

  Isiem took his eyes off Copple with difficulty. The tunnel where Ganoven had presumably fled would have been obvious even without the pudgy thug's help. Its plants were crushed and broken, and unlike the ones he and Ascaros had trodden on their way here, they were not healing. Florid yellow-red sap, uncannily evocative of bloody pus, dribbled from their snapped stems. It was as if the labyrinth itself had chosen to show them which way Ganoven had run.

  The sight did not inspire confidence. But still he said: "Yes."

  "Good." Ascaros raised his boot to step over a dying fetal monster, then changed his mind and crushed it under his heel.

  "You're going to leave Copple?"

  "Of course." The shadowcaller never paused. "He'll serve as a useful delay if anything else comes down this way, and his screams may serve to warn us."

  "He might also incubate more demons."

  "I'm not sure those things inside him were demons. I think there's more going on here than we know. But semantics aside, I don't think he has that much blood left. The egg-laying will likely kill him, in which case the problem solves itself. Now, are you coming?"

  Isiem didn't answer immediately. He looked at Copple again. The man seemed to have stabilized, although it was hard to be sure. He drifted in and out of consciousness, twitching his fingers toward the wound in his belly sporadically. That ugly seeping slash remained mostly open, exposing torn flesh and fat, and no doubt causing crippling pain.

  If anything came for him, Copple would have no chance to flee. Even if nothing did, he wouldn't be able to walk away alive. His wound was incapacitating, and Isiem could see torn bowel spilling out in its depths. Without additional magic, Copple had no chance at survival.

  Kyril would have healed the man, Isiem thought. Ena would have killed him, quick and sure; the dwarf was a more pragmatic sort, and in this place, surrounded by so much danger, she'd keep her healing for herself. Moreover, the Aspis agents' betrayal deserved no greater mercy.

  But killing him would be a kindness, and it was for that reason, as much as any claims of cold-blooded pragmatism, that Ascaros had healed him. He wanted Copple to suffer. That his suffering could be useful was only a happy accident.

  And in another life, Isiem would have let him. Copple had earned his misery.

  Mercy, however, meant giving men better than they deserved.

  Isiem drew his knife and cut Copple's throat. There was hardly any blood, but it seemed to be enough. Sheathing his blade, he followed Ascaros away.

  "That was a waste of time," the shadowcaller said when Isiem caught up. "He would have died soon enough anyway."

  Isiem shrugged. A three-way intersection branched ahead of them. The light was weaker down both of the new corridors, with only one faltering glow-globe illumining each of them, yet the wild tangles of Abyssal flora seemed even more rampant in the gloom. In Fiendslair there was no wind to stir them, but all those snaking vines moved sinuously along the walls, like the tendrils of jellyfish sieving for prey. None of these appeared to be broken. "Which way?"

  "You tell me. You're the one with the compass."

  Isiem slid the compass into his palm but did not prick his finger to feed it. "Is it so important to hunt down Ganoven? You saw what happened to Copple. There's a fiend loose here, and it took him without a fight. You told me that if there was obvious peril, we'd turn back."

  "I did say that," Ascaros replied. "But turning back would be a grave mistake. If this ‘mother' is using living men as incubators, it's even more important that we find and finish Ganoven. The fiends in this place won't kill him. They might even help him escape, if they can fill him full of eggs like Copple and spread their filth into the world that way." He gestured to the compass. "Sometimes vengeance has a practical purpose, Isiem."

  Resignedly, Isiem pricked his finger. As he forced the blood out, he whispered: "Ganoven."

  What he touched through its enchanted mist, however, was no living mind.

  He wasn't sure it was a mind at all. There was a fleeting sense of confusion, reflected and refracted through a million different angles like an emotion somehow tumbled through a kaleidoscope, or felt by a linked hive of minds at once. A vision of infinite eyes stretched out before him, like a field of daisies where each flower was a disembodied eyeball standing on a stalk of slime. Overhead was a whirling, chaotic sky, stained a thousand different shades of sooty red. Below, he sensed—although he could not see, could not know—a sluggish sea of ancient, primordial poison.

  Then it was gone, so suddenly that Isiem wasn't sure what he had seen. In its place was the image of an elven woman in gray-green robes, standing outside a summoning circle and shielded by a dome of distorting glass. A black knife flashed, red fire along its edge. The weight of his—its, their—body changed. The sea of poison vanished, replaced by a cold glass dome and a floor of rippled stone rings. Different, but no less cruel. New thoughts crept into his head, new magic thrummed in his flesh. Remembered pain wracked him, over and over, an infinity of garbled suffering compressed and imperfectly translated into memory.

  In a flash, that was gone, too. Time slid by, an eyeblink, almost nothing. Shattering glass broke its silence, a tall figure striding away in a black cloak, and then—

  —freedom, and a sudden surge of remembered hate like vomit coming up hot and corrosive and unstoppable in his throat.

  Usurpers usurpers hate find destroy usurpers

  The black blade flashed before his sight again, limned in crimson flames. In that red, serrated fire, the faces of fiends screamed and burned.

  the knife will kill them all

  "Isiem. Isiem." A stinging slap awoke him. From the burning on his other cheek, he realized it hadn't been the first. He'd fallen at some point; he lay on the floor, his boots tangled in Abyssal vines. They bit at him ineffectually with deformed flower pods and left stains of nectar—or saliva—on the leather.

  Ascaros scowled down at him, his face dark with worry and fear. "Why were you babbling about usurpers?"

  Isiem wiped his mouth, kicking the vines away and pulling himself into a sitting position. A sour stickiness coated his tongue. His throat was raspy and tight, as if someone had tried to strangle him. "I think Ganoven is ...not possessed, exactly, but something close to that. There's something else in his mind. Some things. But the compass found him. I wonder if whatever is in him wanted me to see."

  "See what?"

  Isiem closed his eyes and rubbed his temples helplessly. "I'm not sure. It's old, whatever it is. Very old. The time from its summoning to this world until its escape from Fiendslair was nothing in its mind. And it hails from the Abyss." Unable to bear the taste in his mouth any longer, Isiem spat on the floor. Ascaros raised an eyebrow, and the wizard knew why. Children were taught very early in Nidal not to spit in public, unless they wanted to be spitting blood. It took a great deal to overcome that training.

  "So it is a demon."

  "Maybe." Isiem scrubbed a hand through his hair, then tied the loose ivory locks back again. The memor
y of hate was burned into his mind, but he didn't think that hatred had been directed at Eledwyn, despite the torture that strange mind had endured at her hands. Its loathing had been aimed at ...what? The other caged demons? Mesandroth? Someone else? It was all an impossible blur. Frustrated, he shook his head. "Do you still want to find him?"

  "Did you see his location?"

  "No," Isiem admitted. He cast his mind back through those alien memories. "But Ganoven, or whatever was in Ganoven, was fixated on the nightblades." He paused as an idea occurred. "Ascaros—how much location magic do you know?"

  Ascaros looked at him in puzzlement for a moment, then understanding dawned. "The nightblades."

  Divination magic was rarely reliable, but the ease with which Ascaros had employed Sukorya's diamond to find Fiendslair's entrance suggested that he might have some facility with it. Even the best caster couldn't find an item if he didn't know what he was looking for, which is why he hadn't simply led them straight to the nightblades upon entering. But now that he'd had time to study one properly ...

  Several moments passed before Ascaros answered. His mouth twisted as if the words were bitter as lye between his lips. "Yes. Yes, if the others are close enough to the one we found earlier. They should all have Eledwyn's signature in their magic."

  With a slow, reluctant hand, Ascaros drew the spiked chain up from the front of his robes. The silver case containing Sukorya's diamond dangled from its end, revolving in the air. As the case entered its third revolution, a shudder passed through the shadowcaller's body, and the chain vibrated in response. When the vibration reached the egg-shaped case, it split open like a blossoming flower, revealing a slash of crimson light that widened and grew until it surrounded them both in its nimbus.

  From it emanated the same overpowering evil Isiem had felt during the opening of Fiendslair, yet it seemed that the pull it exerted on his soul was slightly—very slightly—less. He glanced at Ascaros, wondering if the magic had changed in this place ...but the question died unspoken, for clearly the shadowcaller was not experiencing the same thing he was.

  Sweat stood out on Ascaros's brow, and the illusion that masked his real face faltered, allowing glimpses of the withered man beneath to show through. His breathing fell into the measured, deliberate pattern that students of the Dusk Hall were taught to use when their control began to fail.

  The red light shone steady, though. Then, suddenly, it narrowed into a crimson beam, flashed down one of the branching paths ahead, and vanished.

  Ascaros wiped his forehead with a sleeve. He did not put the case away, but he lowered the arm that held it. "It isn't far," he said, starting down the path that the scarlet ray had shown. "By the Midnight Lord's small mercy, it's not far."

  "What happens when you use Sukorya's stone?" Isiem asked as he accompanied Ascaros down the weed-choked hall. Rivulets of murky water ran alongside their feet, leaving strange curling tracks of slime in their wake. The wizard's sphere of light was beginning to dwindle, so he summoned another, causing a multiplicity of overlapping shadows to cavort amid the poisoned plants around them. "It looks painful."

  "It is," the shadowcaller said tersely. He slowed as they reached the end of the hall. A marble archway carved with flute-playing satyrs and dancing nymphs framed the room ahead. Stains from rotten fruit and oozing flowers covered the carvings, causing the nymphs and satyrs to look wounded and leprous. Gloom filled the archway itself, and from its depths came the sound of creaking chains.

  Isiem sent his light ahead. The floating sphere illumined a garden of decay. Bulbous mushrooms covered every available surface, sprouting sideways from the walls of bookshelves and frilling the walls with gilled layers of fungus. Most of them were an unhealthy whitish color, splotched with slimy yellow or green, and resembled nothing so much as curling maggots with disturbingly humanlike faces.

  Underneath the overgrowth of mushrooms, he could make out the contours of a bed, a desk or eating table—it was impossible to tell which anymore—and a few collapsed chairs. Only one of those chairs remained intact, and it alone was untouched by so much as a spot of mold. A five-foot circle all around it was perfectly preserved and clean of dust. The floor was rich cherry, smooth and freshly waxed; the wisteria vine carved into the chair's wooden back was perfectly preserved, vibrant down to the veins in the leaves and the belled petals on its flowers.

  A skeleton sat in that chair, long silver hair flowing down its back like a cascade of cobwebs. It wore gray-green robes in the same hue as the apprentices', although these robes were of finer cloth and interlaced with silver thread. Three jeweled rings glimmered on its bare bone fingers: ruby, emerald, and a great clear diamond with a speck of fractured crimson in its heart. Under its jeweled hand, a pair of black blades rested.

  "Eledwyn," Ascaros breathed. From the reverence in his voice, one would have thought it was the elven woman, and not Mesandroth, who was his legendary ancestor.

  "It looks like a trap," Isiem said.

  "It probably is," Ascaros said. "The question is, why would she leave a trap for us? I'm betting she's keyed it to respond to this ‘mother' creature, rather than blowing the charge on the first mouse to nibble at her corpse. I'll bet it knows it, too. Why else would the blades still be here after all these years?" The shadowcaller picked his way through the fungal clutter, avoiding as many of the sprouting mushrooms as he could, until he reached the skeleton's side. Bracing himself visibly against an expected magical assault, Ascaros reached into the clean space to lift the treasures from the skeletal elf's hand.

  As soon as his fingers touched the obsidian blades, a disembodied, whispering voice filled the chamber. It spoke a tongue that sounded elven to Isiem's ears, although inflected with a strange slurring accent unlike anything he'd heard before. The skeleton did not move, but Ascaros flinched back. "What is it saying?"

  Isiem shook his head helplessly. He reached into a pouch of spell components and hastily drew out a pinch of soot and salt, rubbing them together as he rushed through the words that would bring comprehension to his ears. And all the while, the sibilant message slipped by.

  "—our mistake. Take these cursed relics to the bronze chamber, and flee. Immediately. Bring nothing else with you, for I cannot say where they might hide, and nothing that might free them is worth keeping. We thought we had found the death of demons in our nightblade, in the qlippoth ...but the qlippoth are not simple parasites. They are mad, thinking killers. They cannot be controlled, and all they bring is death. They cannot be allowed to escape. The blades must be denied them. They must. Even my magic is not eternal. Eventually, the wards will fail. The qlippoth are content to wait. When my magic fades, they will take these blades and use them to punch through this complex's defenses, into the world beyond. Take these blades, and the one still in the workshop beyond the brimorak door, and destroy them. Destroy them, if you can."

  The whispered message ended. Ascaros shook off his paralysis. "Qlippoth," he said. "Interesting."

  "You're familiar with them?"

  "Not particularly." Ascaros began plucking the rings from Eledwyn's dead fingers. "Only from brief mentions in ancient Dusk Hall texts. Creatures of primordial evil—the original residents of the Abyss, driven out into the deeper darkness by the rise of demons." Cautiously, he reached out and took the two black knives, then retreated from the silver-haired skeleton.

  "She said not to take anything from this place," Isiem said. "I only caught the second half of the message, but she seemed quite adamant about that. Whatever these qlippoth may be, the nightblade allows them entry into our world, and Eledwyn didn't want to risk them escaping Fiendslair. She wanted the nightblades destroyed, and the qlippoth sealed in this place like a tomb."

  "Then that's what we'll do," Ascaros said, pocketing all three rings. He lifted the flap of his satchel and tucked the nightblades carefully inside. "But I think her personal possessions are exempt from the rule. Whatever holds the mushrooms away from her feet, I trust it also held the nigh
tblade's corruptions from her hands. Besides, I want them."

  "Temptation leads men to evil," Isiem intoned solemnly, summoning his floating light back toward the archway.

  "I'm already there," Ascaros said smugly, stepping over the layered mushrooms as he turned to leave as well. "So I have nothing to lose. Anyway, we have the blades. Let us be gone."

  "No," said Ganoven, stepping into the dim light at the other end of the hall.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Reunions

  Ganoven didn't look much like himself anymore.

  His eyes were vacant and totally white, the irises rolled up to the back of his head. Bloodless slashes crisscrossed his cheeks and forehead, each of them filled with innumerable twitching, mismatched spider legs that flicked back and forth at each other like an ingenue's fluttering eyelashes. The Aspis agent's flesh jumped and bulged with the legs' movements.

  Greenish ichor dripped from his nose, eating away his skin in sloughing red furrows. Ganoven didn't seem to notice. He just stared at them with his blank white eyes, while Copple shuffled over to his side.

  Copple hadn't survived his throat-cutting. Whoever or whatever had animated his mortal remains had enlarged the slash until it nearly decapitated the corpse. His head dangled across his shoulders, flopping to and fro on gristly strings. The wound in his stomach sagged open, dragged wide by gravity now that he was standing. Fat and viscera spilled down his thighs in a gruesome apron.

  But he wasn't a simple zombie. Chitinous claws erupted from his fingertips like the points of spears thrust through dead flesh. Slimy, pulsing muscles like enormous gray worms held his innards together, coming into view occasionally as the corpse lurched between steps. White lines of scar tissue flashed between those ropy muscles: whatever fiend inhabited him, it had been subjected to Eledwyn's reshaping.