Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  "Give me the blades," Ganoven said. His tongue fell out on the last word. In its place, just for an instant, Isiem glimpsed a wriggling stump of muscle that ended in a hagfish mouth.

  "No," Isiem replied. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a brief shimmer envelop Ascaros, and knew that the shadowcaller had shielded himself with magic.

  Ganoven made a shuddery approximation of a shrug, pushing his shoulders up past his earlobes with a rubbery, boneless ease. His grin was filled with the gleeful clacking of more insectoid legs hanging down from the roof of his mouth behind his teeth. Behind him, the bones of sheep and calves and long-dead men—all the skeletons from the large-animal testing room—shambled into view, held together by more ropy, pulsing tentacles. The cythnigot-infested skeletons that had escaped from Copple's sacks sat astride the larger beasts, clasped onto the backs of their skulls like horrid ivory tumors. Snapping jawstalks rose from their bones in nightmare flowers. "Then we'll take it."

  Any answer Isiem might have given was lost in the roar of Ascaros's fireball. The shadowcaller's spell engulfed the entire archway, blistering mushrooms and reducing toadstool caps to frayed black parasols. Some of the skeletal calves and sheep blasted apart into fragments of superheated bone, their alien innards sizzling and writhing like snails dropped onto hot coals. Their parasitic controllers spasmed a while longer, flailing at the air, and then succumbed to death.

  Somehow Ganoven managed to avoid the fireball entirely. He flattened himself against the floor and shot forward with no apparent effort, dodging the blue-tipped orange flames. Copple made no attempt to do the same; instead, whatever was inside him pulled deep into the corpse's guts, hauling his ripped stomach up behind itself like a castle door raised against a siege.

  The dead man's flesh resisted fire better than the skeletons' bare bones had. His eyes burst in the heat, leaving pockets of raw pink in his skull, but he shambled through the flames undaunted, his clothes smoldering over lifeless skin. The skin and muscle of his fingertips retreated slightly as it cooked, revealing more of the chitinous claws that poked through them.

  Isiem leveled the gold-banded glass wand at him. Sunfire pulsed through the translucent stone and seared through Copple's body, lighting up whatever unearthly creature was in his corpse. For an instant, it stood sharply defined within his flesh, a headless web of thick misshapen tentacles, and then it exploded through his mouth and ruined gut as a gush of pulpy slime. Copple's corpse sank to the ground, mercifully inert.

  The wand went dead in Isiem's hands. Its gold bands darkened to dull brown and its snowy glass turned smoky gray. Its magic was gone.

  He tossed it aside just as the larger skeletons fell upon him. Badly damaged by the fiery blast, they nevertheless held together. Yellowed teeth and deformed claws raked at him; bony tails swept at his legs. A rickety human skeleton grabbed at his shoulder and dragged him forward for a bite with its fungus-stained teeth. Desperately, Isiem smashed his elbow into its grin, knocking its head back, but he couldn't evade all of them. He wasn't a fighter, and he went down flailing under their mass.

  "Who are you?" he heard Ascaros ask over the tumult of clattering bones.

  "How unworthy you are," the thing in Ganoven replied. Its contempt vibrated the man's entire body. "How desperately foolish. You, whose failings gave rise to the usurpers, whose hubris summoned us to this world of weakness. You ask who we are?"

  Isiem couldn't hear what Ascaros said in response, if the shadowcaller said anything. One of the calf skeletons bit him above the right hip with unnaturally sharp fangs. Each of its teeth injected a puff of pale green spores, which sprouted up through Isiem's body with impossible speed. Hairy tendrils and bramble hooks extended from the wound, grabbing at Isiem's arms. Before they could bind him, he grabbed the spore-growths by the fistful and yanked them out of his body, fighting down his own revulsion as much as the wrenching pain. Their roots clutched his fingers, leaving trails of blood and digested flesh across his skin. His blood. His flesh.

  Disgusted and horror-struck, he hurled the clump of twitching foulness across the room. He needed distance, or they'd destroy him.

  With shaking, blood-slippery fingers, Isiem took a pouch of silver dust from his pocket and shook it in an uneven circle around himself. A skeletal dog slammed his shoulder with a tail that had mutated into a three-foot-long chain of oversized vertebrae strung on fungal fiber. It numbed the wizard's arm and forced a dent into his circle of powder, but Isiem held his spell intact.

  The instant that he closed the circle of silver dust, white light flared within it, and the skeletal creatures assailing him recoiled. They recovered quickly, but now their snaps at him were less accurate, skidding sideways at the last minute as if deflected by an invisible shield.

  It gave him room to breathe. Isiem rubbed the numbness from his bludgeoned arm. His hip wasn't bleeding where the skeletal calf had bitten him. A series of tattered punctures showed in his skin where he'd uprooted the fungal growths, but the wound was pale and bloodless.

  He'd worry about any lingering effects later. If he survived.

  Across the room, Ganoven was engaged in a furious spell battle with Ascaros. Fire and shadow flashed between them, too tangled for Isiem to follow. The Aspis agent was proving far more formidable in this form than he'd ever been on his own. Turning back to the fiend-possessed skeletons in front of him, Isiem tried one of the new spells he'd studied during their journey through the Backar Forest. Murmuring an incantation, he plucked a lump of coal from his pocket and crushed it between his fingers, then tossed the small chunks at the skeletons.

  Heat and pressure gathered around them, and the coal turned to shards of razor-sharp diamond in midair. They hammered into the skeletal beasts, cracking ancient bone and shredding fungal tendrils. When the glittering spray of diamonds vanished, nothing was left of Isiem's assailants but shattered fragments on the floor.

  He turned to help Ascaros. The shadowcaller seemed to be getting the worst of his duel; blood seeped through his shadowcaller's robes in at least three places, and his masking illusion had vanished entirely. The chitinous legs that showed through the rips in Ganoven's face twitched and jerked with something that might have been glee.

  Isiem hit the Aspis agent from behind with a scorching stream of fire, then another and another, all three blurring into a twisted orange braid. This time the half-elf failed to dodge. The fiery rays struck him straight in the back, and although the creature in Ganoven's body seemed to impart some resistance to heat, the spell still burned him badly.

  He turned a dead-eyed snarl on Isiem. Ascaros seized the opening to snatch the hidden wand from his sleeve. The shadowcaller leveled the hammered copper rod at Ganoven and spoke a word of arcane command.

  The Aspis agent froze. His back arched high in the air as he was lifted to his toes by an unseen force, then snapped backward like a rat in a terrier's jaws. The bones in his body cracked in terrible percussion, ripping through his skin from the inside out. Even the insectoid legs in his body stiffened, stretched out rigidly, and snapped apart. When the magic released him, he collapsed to the floor, motionless save for the slow trickle of greenish slime that still spilled from his nostrils.

  Breathing hard, Ascaros renewed the illusion that hid his disfigurement and dropped the wand to the ground. Like Isiem's alabaster wand, it had turned dull and worthless; its magic was spent. Isiem tossed him another, this one of gold-chased ivory adorned with innumerable bright jacinths like droplets of congealed flame.

  The shadowcaller caught the wand easily and slid it into his sleeve, replacing the exhausted one. He fished a small bottle from his robes, cracked its wax seal with a thumbnail, and drank its contents in a single long swallow. Wiping his mouth, Ascaros looked at Ganoven's fallen body one last time, then pushed the Aspis agent's corpse over with his boot so that the man's sightless white eyes and spider-legged wounds were buried by mushrooms. "Let us be gone from this place."

  Isiem nodded. He took out the enchante
d compass and wiped one of his bloody fingers across the speckled green stone of its face. "Kyril," he whispered, holding it steady on his palm as he uncorked a potion with his other hand. Almost before he'd finished swallowing the healing draught, the compass's mist rose around him, washing out his reality.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "I don't believe they would do that," Kyril said. Even to her own ears, the protest sounded weak. "I don't. Why would they betray us?"

  "The obvious reasons, I'd imagine," Teglias answered. "They're Nidalese." The cleric looked tired and wounded, as they all were, but despite the blood and ichor that stained his robes, he was better off than either Ena or Kyril herself. Whatever he'd fought had not tried him as sorely as their own foes had. The dwarf remained unconscious, even after Teglias had forced his last potion down her throat. Her color was bad, her breathing unsteady; Kyril feared for her survival.

  "Betrayal has been bred into them for thousands of years," Teglias continued. His holy symbol had been torn away somewhere in the labyrinth; he fingered the snapped end of its beaded string as he spoke. "They came here seeking prizes for Zon-Kuthon's glory, and they'll let nothing stand in their way. They've already killed Ganoven and Copple. Both of them are evil to the marrow of their bones, and we have to stop them."

  "I don't believe it," Kyril repeated, but her conviction faltered with each word. The wizard and the shadowcaller were gone. There was no denying that. Sweat dripped from the ends of her hair, spattering on the floor. Some of it took on a crimson tinge as it ran through the crusted blood on her face.

  Was it possible that the Nidalese had betrayed them? She wouldn't have been surprised if it were only Ascaros, but Isiem ...

  She had thought better of the man. She had imagined there was some glimmer of virtue in his soul—a spark that might, with careful guidance and encouragement, be nursed into flame.

  But Teglias had thought the same. Maybe they'd both been wrong.

  "They've found the nightblades. If they leave this place with them, they'll be able to summon all manner of fiends into the world. Creatures worse than demons, worse than anything we've fought here. Worse than you or I could imagine. We have to stop them."

  Kyril was wearier than she could remember ever having been before, but the urgency in the Sarenite's voice could not be denied. Nor could the threat he described. "All right," she said, exhausted. "How?"

  "They'll have to come back this way." Teglias dropped his broken string of beads and looked around the small brass chamber with its demonflesh doors. "This is the only exit from Fiendslair, so they must come back through the seraptis door."

  "It's too tight to fight in here," Kyril said. She started the seraptis door on the slow, bloody process of opening again. "We'll meet them on the other side."

  "Be ready for treachery," Teglias said, falling into place behind her.

  Kyril put a hand to her sword's hilt, positioning herself more squarely between the cleric and whatever dangers might lie ahead. "I am."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The vision faded. A throbbing headache pulsed behind Isiem's temples. He could feel it pushing at the backs of his eyes. It wasn't just the toll of his wounds or the horror of the Aspis agents' deaths, although that was part of what ached in him. It was a deeper hurt.

  He put the compass away slowly, staring at Ganoven's remains amid the charred mushrooms without really registering what he was seeing.

  "Well?" Ascaros asked, straightening from his looting of the goateed half-elf's corpse. He'd reclaimed his compass and added a few other baubles to his collection, along with the dead man's purse. A small, detached part of Isiem admired his companion's pragmatism even as he detested the shadowcaller's cold-hearted greed.

  "They're alive," Isiem answered. "All three of them. Teglias, Ena, and Kyril. They're preparing to confront us."

  "To confront us? Why?"

  "Because Teglias has convinced them that we've betrayed their cause and are taking the nightblades for our own nefarious purposes."

  Ascaros's pale lips twitched upward in a humorless smile. "If I thought the nightblades could be remotely useful for any nefarious purpose, there might be something to that claim. But, as it stands ..." He shrugged, crushing Ganoven's body deeper into the mushrooms as he deliberately stepped on the fallen Aspis agent's back to leave the overgrown room. "You're quite sure it was the nightblades he mentioned? Not my books of forbidden knowledge?"

  "No. Only the nightblades."

  "And he spoke of them in the plural?"

  "Yes," Isiem confirmed. His heart sank as he said it, realizing why Ascaros had asked. When they'd last seen Teglias, they'd only had the one nightblade. Only the qlippoth, and the Nidalese themselves, could possibly know that they'd recovered two more since. And Teglias wouldn't have been able to discount the possibility of other exits deep within Fiendslair. Only the qlippoth, which had been trapped here for centuries, could be so certain.

  "It would be easier to kill them than to argue with them. If, that is, they insist on standing in our way."

  "That wasn't what you promised." Isiem nudged Copple's body with his boot. The coils of the dead fiend in him fell out, slippery with caustic pulp, gray and green and grisly, grafted white. Some of those intestinal curls ended in tiny mouths, some in scar-braceleted claws. The stench was eye-watering.

  Ascaros, halfway across the room, turned back and grimaced at the smell. He understood the point, though. "I made that bargain when I thought they might want our help. Not when I thought they'd try to kill us on sight."

  "It doesn't matter. You made the promise. Honor it."

  The black-haired shadowcaller gave him a long look. His thin fingers twitched toward the wand hidden in his sleeve. Then he smiled, not graciously, and offered a second shrug. "You always had more loyalty than sense. Very well. We'll try talking to your friends. Your friends, not mine. If you fall, I will leave them. If they attack us, I will kill them. Do you understand?"

  "Perfectly," Isiem said. "Thank you."

  "You shouldn't," Ascaros said. "You wouldn't, if you had any sense. But, as I said, that never was your strong point."

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Crossroads and Loyalties

  The demons' chamber was in ruin.

  Glass, blood, and ichor made a grisly carpet across the floor, adding an overlay of fresh gore to the centuries-old remains of Eledwyn's apprentices. The only clear space was that trapped within the cracked glass dome at the center of the room. Once the focal point of this chamber's misery, it had become the only place spared from the latest wave of destruction.

  Isiem and Ascaros entered cautiously, both veiled behind spells of invisibility. With quiet, careful steps they skirted over the lumpen remains of fallen demons and the shattered glass that littered the ground like icy caltrops.

  Kyril was waiting for them. She crouched partway behind the cracked dome, allowing her to use it as either cover against frontal attacks or a shield at her back, depending on how her adversaries approached. The half-elf's hair was dark with sweat, and exhaustion circled her eyes, but her posture was alert and ready.

  She was alone. Isiem guessed that Teglias must have remained with Ena behind the seraptis door, leaving the paladin to hold the line.

  That caused him a pang of worry for Ena's sake—what might the qlippoth-influenced cleric be doing with her?—but it also left him a chance to make his case.

  Cautiously, stopping on the far side of the great cracked dome, Isiem let his invisibility slip away. "Kyril."

  The half-elf's head snapped up. Her eyes widened in alarm at the sound of his voice, then narrowed as she spotted him. She rose, lifting her sword and shield. "Where's your friend? Coming around to ambush me?"

  "Waiting to see whether I'm a fool for trying to talk," Isiem replied. He took a breath, wishing he'd had time to rehearse a better speech. "Teglias isn't himself. He's fallen under the influence of the qlippoth—the fiends that Eledwyn's nightblade summoned. They are very old, and very dea
dly, and they hate mortal life as intensely as they hate demons. Whatever he told you, it's meant to serve the qlippoth's purposes, not the Dawnflower's. Not yours."

  Doubt clouded her eyes. Isiem could see the scales shifting in her head. On one side, years of friendship and the shared respect of compatible faiths. On the other ...what? A few weeks of travel together? The tentative beginnings of something that might become friendship? And the nagging sense, buried somewhere deep in her mind, that something might truly be wrong here.

  "How do you know?" she asked. "How do you even know Teglias is here?"

  "Because we've been spying on you." Isiem took the bloodstone compass from his pocket and, resting it flat on his palm, offered it to her scrutiny. "This one is a master to the others. It allows its holder to see where the others are and what their possessors are doing. It showed me that you and Ena were here ...and it raised my suspicions that Teglias was no longer himself. Take it. See for yourself, if you don't trust my word. Whatever is in him guards him from scrying. It doesn't want its steps to be seen."

  "No one does," Kyril retorted, but she lowered her sword and took the compass from him. "How do I use it? To ...spy." The last word earned a curl of her lip.

  "Prick your finger and let a drop of blood fall on the compass face. Then speak the name of the one you wish to see. If he has a compass, and he's alive, you'll see mist. Through it, you'll be able to spy on the lesser compasses' carriers—or not, if they're using their own magic to hide. Try it on either Ascaros or myself, if you wish to see the ordinary result. Or try it on Teglias, if you wish to see what I have."

  Eying him with undimmed suspicion, Kyril sheathed her sword and pricked her finger. "Teglias," she said, keeping her gaze fixed on the wizard.

  He couldn't see what she did. The compass's magic revealed itself only to its user; to his eyes, there was no mist, no vision, nothing but the curls of smoke that rose from the stone as the drop of blood boiled away.