by John Bierce
One of the other mages nodded as she handed out the tokens that proved they’d been to the second floor exit.
“Zzh… Zyzzi… the big spider didn’t show up at the third floor exit this time,” she said.
“Zzthkxz?” Hugh asked.
“Right, her,” the mage said. “She usually lurks below the shield we set up and asks riddles of the students before we let them have their tokens. She’d eat them if she could, but she enjoys the riddles for their own sake, and we usually leave her a goat or two as a token of thanks. She just didn’t show up this year, and it’s been at least a decade since she’s missed a Midsummer test.”
Talia exchanged serious glances with her friends.
“Ah can’t keep yeh, or ah’d get in trouble, but be careful,” Artur said. He gave them each another hug, but Talia couldn’t help but feel that Sabae had been right— Artur knew Bakori was somewhere down here in the labyrinth, but he wasn’t acting nearly as nervous or stressed as he should be.
An unpleasant suspicion came over Talia— what if Bakori had been meddling with Artur’s head?
She promptly dismissed it, since there was no way the demon could also have successfully done the same to Alustin, Sabae’s grandmother, and Kanderon, but she couldn’t manage to entirely dismiss it from her head, unfortunately.
At least, she couldn’t dismiss it from her head until something else showed up to distract her.
About ten minutes into their trek back, a single one of Bakori’s imps was waiting for them in the center of the hallway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Imps
Next to him, Hugh could see Talia getting ready to attack the imp, so he reached out and touched her shoulder. When she gave him a questioning look, he just shook his head.
“Hugh of Emblin,” the cat-sized creature said, in a voice deeper and more resonant than Godrick’s.
The imp looked like a miniature version of Bakori, bat-like face and all. The only things missing were the protuberant belly that looked like a transparent sack full of tadpoles and the tail with the venomous stinger.
“Or should I call you Hugh Stormward now?” the imp said with a chuckle. It didn’t look at him, idly inspecting its finger talons.
Hugh didn’t respond, just eyed the imp warily. None of the others said anything.
“It’s been an entertaining year, for me, I must admit,” the imp said. “Watching your desperate, doomed little hunt for the traitor.”
Hugh could see Sabae stiffen at that, but he didn’t say anything and just kept his focus.
“Ah smell a lot more a’ these things,” Godrick whispered. “In every direction.”
The imp tilted its head, focusing on Sabae. “You were so desperate to figure out why your little investigation seemed so strange, Sabae Kaen Das. Why apprentices would be put on such an important investigation. Why they’d be given oh so little support. Why nothing seemed to add up.”
Another imp wandered around a corner, trailing its fingers through the streams of water running along the walls.
“Would you like me to tell you?” the second imp said. “It’s a much less complicated answer than any of your theories.”
“I wouldn’t trust anything you have to say, demon!” Sabae snapped.
A third imp chuckled from behind them in that too-deep voice. Hugh didn’t turn to look, though, keeping his eyes on the original imp.
“Everyone always speaks of demons as creatures of lies, as though we live for that, but that’s hardly an accurate depiction,” it said. “I won’t claim that I don’t lie— it’s a necessary talent for any sophont— but in all my centuries of life, I’ve found that the truth can so often be far more devastating than any lie.”
Hugh noticed Sabae clench her fists at that, but he just kept his eyes on the first imp, focusing intently.
“The reason the investigation seems so strange to you, Sabae? I hate to break it to you, but it’s because no-one who matters actually cares about it. Kanderon, Alustin, your grandmother— they’re all focused on events of far greater import. The world’s changing, and you’re all just a side-note.”
“You’re trying to sell us painted crap and call it gold,” Talia snapped. “Alustin never would have spent as much time and effort on us if he didn’t care.”
Several more imps had casually wandered into the corridor around them, but Hugh paid them no attention.
“I never claimed they don’t care about you, little weapon,” another imp said. “I claimed they didn’t care about your little investigation.”
“Are yeh trying to convince us it was just somethin’ ta keep us busy and nothin’ more?” Godrick asked.
Two different imps chuckled, then spoke in unison. “No, I think they would have been quite pleased if you’d solved things. I’m saying there are bigger things in play than poor, innocent Bakori. They’re just not worried about little old me, and I can’t say I blame them.”
At least twenty imps had wandered into the corridor at this point. One imp, who had been picking through the fur of another for lice, found one and held it up for inspection. “The world’s about to change in a big way, and everyone wants their piece of the pie,” it said, then ate the bug.
The original imp spoke up then. “More fool them. It’s truly astonishing to me how foolhardy the mighty can be when they feel safe. Do you know why Kanderon never took on a warlock pact before, Hugh?”
He didn’t respond, just stayed focused.
“It’s because, in the right hands, a warlock pact is a point of vulnerability. A weapon to be used against its signatories.”
The imp chuckled as it slowly approached them. “Now, it would be truly absurd to think of someone using Kanderon as a weapon against you through your bond, but the other way around? You’ve put a chink in her armor that can be exploited. Admittedly, those who have both the knowledge and ability to do so are rare, but you have the luck of speaking to one of those few. What an interesting coincidence, isn’t it?
There had to be at least fifty or sixty imps in the corridor with them now, and Hugh’s spellbook was letting him know it could sense hundreds more within its range.
Hugh didn’t respond to Bakori’s taunts, though. He just stayed focused.
He was not, however, focusing on Bakori or any of his imps.
“If you’ve got anything to say, Hugh, I might suggest you…” the original imp said, and then stopped.
Not a deliberate stop, or even a surprised stop. No, it stopped in the way that a bird does when it runs into a pane of glass it didn’t see.
Hugh let a slow smile spread across his face. “You talk too much, Bakori,” he said. “You could have had us if you’d tried to surprise us, but you’re a gloater.”
The four of them might have thought they could escape entering the labyrinth again, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t spent any time planning, and one of the foremost possibilities they’d foreseen was an attack on them by Bakori or his imps after the demon gloated over his victory. It wasn’t just their previous encounter that made them expect this, but every known encounter others had had with the demon.
Bakori seemed constitutionally incapable of not monologuing.
Hugh had spent the entire conversation focusing not on Bakori, but on the ground around them. More specifically on the crystal structures in the rock around them. He’d put his crystal training with Kanderon to good use, crafting intricate wards running through the entire hallway around them and arch above them. The ward could probably hold out against Bakori’s imps for hours. Not that Hugh intended to use it for much longer.
Bakori was saying something through one of his imps— probably something menacing and knowing— but Hugh ignored it. He also ignored the dozens of other imps clustering around the ward, testing and pushing at it.
“Ready?” he asked the others.
“Ready,” said Talia with a grin, a dagger in one hand and a shard of bone in the other.
“Ready,” said Godrick, as
his stone armor closed back around him, and he slipped the warded faceplate Hugh had made him into place.
“Ready,” said Sabae, as streams of water were absorbed into her new water armor.
Hugh detonated the ward he’d just built.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Race to the Top
Godrick had used his affinity senses to watch Hugh grow the ward just below the surface of the floor, and it had been a genuine pleasure to watch him work. Hugh’s wardcrafting skills had been impressive even when Godrick had first met him, but over the last year and change Hugh had grown preposterously skilled with wards.
Even for a ward only meant to last a couple of minutes, Hugh didn’t take any shortcuts. His ward lines were elegant, clean, and immediately recognizable as his work, even for someone as relatively unversed in wardcraft as Godrick. (Though, being friends with Hugh, you couldn’t help but pick up a few things.)
Watching Hugh detonate the ward was a pleasure of an entirely different sort. Rather than the side of him that appreciated skilled craftsmanship and scholarship, it was the side of Godrick that still held onto a childlike love of fires, explosions, collapsing structures, and other such destruction that found joy in the ward detonation.
His da claimed that everyone had that side to them to one degree or another, but Godrick liked to privately call it his Talia side.
The physical part of the ward exploded a fraction of a second before the magical part. There were, Godrick was sure, more precise names Hugh would use for them. Shards of stone and crystal spellforms blasted out of the ground and into the air around the four of them, and a fraction of a second later the shards were met by an expanding wave of force that sent them blasting out into the ranks of imps.
It was messy, to say the least. The imps that weren’t shredded immediately by the shards of stone and crystal were sent hurtling back by the blast, splatting against the walls, floor, and ceiling.
Talia was laughing maniacally next to him.
“Let’s move!” Sabae yelled, charging forward.
Godrick followed her with a broad grin.
Moving in his stone armor was a singularly impressive experience. He’d always been big— huge, really, just like his da— but with the armor on, he couldn’t help feeling like a force of nature. His foot came down on a still-moving imp, and he barely even felt any resistance. Godrick might be strong, but his sledgehammer was still no small burden— in his armor, it was as light as a feather. When the four of them turned at an intersection, rather than slowing down, he just reached out and sunk the fingers of his armor into the corner of the wall to let him corner more easily.
Godrick could hardly imagine what his armor would feel like to wear when he was able to construct it as large and effectively as his father could.
Hugh still struggled with his self-esteem, but, if he had to admit it, not with his wards any longer. When it came to his battle magic, though, he counted himself entirely outclassed by his friends.
Considering the situation they were in, however, Hugh was quite happy his friends were so dangerous.
Godrick’s hammer slammed into a dog-sized imp, hurling it into the wall at the same time that his massive armored stone foot came crashing down onto another imp. When a whole pack of imps charged Godrick, the stone at their feet softened, letting them sink into it, then hardened, trapping the imps up to the waist in solid stone.
Talia sent finger-size bolts of dreamfire scything through crowds of imps. They boiled, dissolved into liquid musical notes, and in one memorable case, turned into a pinecone. When they rounded a corner, Talia hurled a shard of bone from her necklace back around it. The whole corridor shuddered from the detonation, and burning oil shot out into the intersection behind them, blocking it off.
That had been the whale bone, Hugh assumed.
Sabae seemed to be everywhere at once. One moment she’d be launching back a group of imps with a water equivalent of a gust strike— a geyser strike, maybe? He’d have to talk over its name with Talia and Godrick. The next moment she’d launched herself up to the ceiling, using her shield to crush an imp that had been preparing to drop down on them. Then, rather than dropping back down, she stuck herself to the ceiling with her buckler and detonated her water armor, sweeping every other nearby imp off the ceiling as well. By the time she dropped back down to the ground, she’d already spun up her wind armor.
Hugh did his best to keep up, but the others— especially Talia— were killing imps at an astonishingly fast rate.
Still, he wasn’t feeling useless, by any means. He didn’t have unlimited slingstones, but their explosions were effective against dense groups of imps. He’d brought out his trusty chunk of quartz, and was sending it hurtling into nearby imps whenever he got a chance.
Hugh was also crafting quick and dirty— by his standards, at least— wards on the fly, funneling the imps into more manageable sections of the corridor and letting his friends carve through them much more rapidly. Hugh couldn’t be grateful enough for his will-imbuing ability at the moment— it was letting him put exceptions for himself and his friends into his wards far faster than it would have been possible to do otherwise.
Down one corridor, Hugh saw a swarm of imps clambering all over a pair of terrorbirds, and he was more than happy to leave both sides to it.
Hugh had just started to feel like things were going their way when the first of the bigger imps started arriving.
Until then, the only imps they’d encountered had been dog-sized or smaller. This one, unfortunately, was taller than Hugh or Talia, though still shorter than Sabae or Godrick.
It probably outweighed all of them save Godrick combined, though. It was wide and stocky, and its limbs rippled with muscle. Massive plates of chitinous armor grew from its chest and shoulders, and smaller ones were scattered across its body, like someone had haphazardly glued scales all over it.
And, of course, it was charging straight at them.
Talia was distracted clearing an intersecting hallway of imps, so Hugh launched a slingstone straight at its chest. The explosion didn’t slow it at all, and barely fractured its armor.
Which was when Godrick slammed into it.
The impact between the two was hard enough that it actually shook the corridor around them. Chitinous plates and stone armor both fractured.
It was the imp that went down, though, and Godrick’s hammer followed it.
Even as the big imp stopped moving, two more rounded a nearby corner— one armored like the first, the other covered with spines and thorns. The river of imps flowing at them continued to thicken, and the apprentices’ forward momentum began to slow.
“I’ve got an idea!” Sabae shouted. “This way!”
She sent a massive gust strike into a side corridor, clearing a path for them. Hugh sprinted after her, Talia and Godrick close behind him.
Hugh focused his attention towards the end of the short side tunnel they were in. The wards he’d been crystallizing in the stone of the tunnels were effective, even as hastily crafted as they had been, but they simply weren’t cut out to handle the sheer mass of the imp swarm. An explosive ward would take out a big chunk of them, but their numbers never seemed to end. A barrier ward would only hold them back for a few seconds before their weight overwhelmed it.
So Hugh tried something different with the ward he was crafting ahead of him. Something that he thought Talia would quite approve of.
With his affinity senses so focused on the ward he was crystallizing in the stone ahead of them, he didn’t notice the trio of imps plunging down towards him from the ceiling until they were almost on him.
His spellbook, however, did.
It shot up from where it hung at his side, clamping its cover shut around the torso of one of the imps. It didn’t even make a sound as the book bit down.
The book’s lunge dragged Hugh to one side, making him stumble and almost fall. This pulled him out of the way of one of the other imps, which hit the ground
and rolled.
The third, however, landed on Hugh’s shoulder, and immediately bit down.
Hugh screamed in pain— the imp might be the size of a cat, but its teeth were viciously sharp. To make it worse, something in its saliva made the wound burn. Hugh could only think of a handful of things in his life that had hurt worse.
Hugh grabbed at the imp, only to receive a nasty scratch across his forearm. It burned as well, though not nearly as badly as his shoulder.
The imp lunged for his ear, only to have its head dissolve in a shower of wooden coins.
Hugh glanced back to see Talia shoot him a wink.
He was definitely happy she had good aim.
Hugh pulled his focus back towards the ward, and it finished crystallizing just before he passed through it. He skidded to a halt on the other side. Godrick and Talia sprinted through it, the swarm hot on their heels. Several of the imps were actually clambering over Godrick, trying to find a way in through his armor.
Each of them burst into flames the instant they passed through the ward.
It wasn’t enough to kill them immediately, but all of them dropped to the ground, screaming in pain. Several more sprinted through the ward as well before they could stop, bursting into flame as well.
The imps behind them tried to stop in a panic, but at least a dozen more were forced through by the ranks behind them. Soon they were clambering over one another to try to keep from having the weight of the swarm push them over the ward.
“That,” Talia said, “might be the most beautiful ward you’ve ever made.”
Hugh shot her a grin, then turned to catch up with Sabae. He’d only stopped part of the swarm, and if they were really determined they could still make it through.
Sabae pushed her water affinity sense as far as it would go through the tunnels, seeking out what she was looking for.
An entrance to one of the big lakes on this level opened up on her right side. She glanced in, seeing part of the imp swarm engaged in battle with what looked like a school of horse-length lampreys.
