Azmon spent hours kneeling in the town square and casting his thoughts out into the world, trying to sense if his enemies were closing in on him.
“You’re not that strong yet.”
Azmon recoiled at the voice, the first he had heard in many weeks. He stumbled and flailed in the dirt before bolting upright. A large angelic creature stood a few feet away, but the wings were dark and the skin cracked, with black ichor oozing underneath.
Mulciber studied him. “You act like your daughter, playing with things you do not understand. Why would you draw so much attention to yourself?”
“I was seeking out my enemies.”
“By shouting at them?” Mulciber stepped closer, and his nine-foot frame cast a shadow across the town center. “I had such high hopes for you, once. The way you traveled the Nine Hells was inspiring. I doubt Gorba Tull, when he was a mortal at least, could have done the same. Now, I wonder how someone so foolish is not dead.”
Azmon bowed his head and sought to change the subject. “I sense powers in the Underworld. Do you send the legions against the dwarves?”
“You will leave the Underworld alone.”
“But Master—”
“I’ve told you that another leads my armies.”
“Shinar fell because my daughter is a prophet, and—”
“She’s being dealt with.”
Azmon wanted to ask questions but caught a dangerous glint in Mulciber’s eyes. The demon hungered to lash out, and Azmon lowered his head in defeat.
He asked, “What must I do?”
“Continue building your army. And do not lose any more of my cities.”
“As you wish.”
“After we’ve bled the nephalem, we’ll invade Argoria again.”
“I can help break the Ward.” Azmon flinched at his own idiocy. He should have kept his mouth shut but hurried on. “If I were to attack from the surface while the legions attack from the depths…”
Mulciber grabbed him by the neck and lifted him to eye level. Azmon dangled in the air as Mulciber snarled in his face. Azmon reached out to his beasts, begging for help, but they did not move. Mulciber not only sensed the exchange but laughed in his face. One gut-twisting twirl later, Azmon’s face slammed into the ground.
“You will do as you are told.”
“I wish to help.”
“You had your chance and failed. Once we break the Ward, the slaves will be unleashed on the surface, and the seraphim will be stretched too far to contain them. That’s when your army marches on the mountain.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Make them bigger. Big enough to fight angels.”
“And my daughter?”
“What of her?”
Azmon grimaced. “She could control the beasts. She turned them against me. How do I march on the mountain if she is in the way?”
“She is a problem for Gorba Tull.”
Azmon bowed to hide his anger. The dark blood coursing through his veins was furious at being replaced. He wanted to find Gorba and rip him apart. The mortal world was his world, and if he must cast the overlord back into the Nine Hells to reclaim his territory, he would. The anger faded a little, and with a clearer head, he knew he wasn’t strong enough to face an overlord.
Azmon smiled though because he knew how to grow stronger.
Mulciber sneered at him. “Did you think you were my only student?”
“Of course not, Master.”
Mulciber said, “Ithuriel is busy defending the Ward, but you should watch yourself. Your clumsy attempts to use the Sight could draw a cohort of seraphim down on you.”
“I understand.”
“You only think you do.” Mulciber flexed his claws. “This is your last chance, my emperor. Few of us can walk this world unmolested. If you should draw attention to yourself again, if you should lose another of my armies, I will hurt you until you die. And I’ll bring you back and do it again and again until your mind is shattered. You won’t remember your own name when I’m done with you, and then I’ll feed you to the overlords.”
“Yes, Master.”
“You want to know what real damnation is?” Mulciber pointed at the yellow faces on Azmon’s forearm. “Consider what it is like to be the soul trapped in the shell. Your power comes from their pain. You do not want to be harvested by an overlord. Whenever they fight, you will suffer. And they fight all the time.”
Azmon flexed his claws. He studied the faces in his arm, and when he reached for sorcery, he watched them wince and groan. He tried to imagine what becoming a barnacle attached to a demon would be like, and he thought about one demon cannibalizing another until they assumed one of the lordships of the Nine Hells.
He wanted to know how demons died. The circle must break eventually—when one of the seraphim killed an overlord. Fear kept his head bowed, but he had so many questions.
The town felt different, abandoned. Azmon looked up and found Mulciber had left. He stood and glared at his monsters. None of them had tried to help him, and they seemed oblivious to his anger.
Azmon snarled at them. “Bring me more people. I need them alive.”
The beasts hurried away from him, but his questions remained. He asked himself how he was supposed to remain quiet. What had he done to draw Mulciber’s attention? As he thought about Gorba Tull hunting his own daughter, he hungered for more power. He would not be replaced, and when he met the overlords, he refused to be harvested.
III
Marah clung to Tyrus. Her eyesight had never been good, but the Underworld was impossibly dark. She could hold a hand in front of her face and not see it. She clung to Tyrus, who became little more than hard mail and a scruffy neck. She never caught a glimpse of him. Only when she used sorcery had she seen the strange circular shape of the tunnel and its ruffled texture. It looked as though thousands of animals had clawed their way to the surface, and they had big claws that left deep rents in the dirt.
Listening to the tunnel didn’t help either. Tyrus spoke to her inches away from her ears, but his voice was muffled by the wailing of the dead. Many of them begged her to return to the surface. They told her she would never see the light of the day again if she didn’t abandon her quest. Others begged her to avenge them. They pleaded that she must save the Deep Ward or the shedim would burn all the nations of the surface. Many other voices laughed and claimed they would be there when she was punished for her arrogance.
Their taunts filled her mind:
You’re going to die…
Nothing dies well in the Deep…
Every prophet who challenged the Black Gate was torn apart by demons…
Marah squeezed her eyes shut, struggling so hard to ignore them that it scrunched her face. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth, and her arms trembled from grasping onto Tyrus.
Several times, she broke down and used runes to shield her mind. A moment of joy—silence—was quickly replaced by sheer terror. The blackness became heavier. She lost her sixth sense, leaving her crippled in a place of monsters. She could not warn Tyrus, which meant he could not protect her.
She took a few deep breaths, braced herself, and released her ward. The dread of that moment was like the pain of marking the thanes. She hated using the knife to cut her hand, and each time, she fought down the urge to fling the knife away from her. The voices returned. They all thought they knew more than she, and many of them did, but parsing the useful bits from the noise was almost impossible.
At some point, the column rested for food. Marah remained in darkness, but the texture of the sounds shifted from the clomp of boots to a large group of warriors dropping their packs to eat and drink. She could ask the dead to see through their eyes, but she feared engaging so many of them. Provoking them with questions would make the howling worse.
“I’m sorry.” Tyrus leaned against a wall. “The floor is too disgusting to put you d
own.”
Silas brought them bread. “You should try to eat.”
Marah wrinkled her nose. “The smell.”
“I know, but we are days from dwarven tunnels.”
Tyrus took the bread and shoved some in his mouth. He handed a piece to Marah and told her to hold onto it. Tyrus and Silas talked about the battle with the tribesmen and the supplies lost in the confusion. Many of the packs that had been dropped before the fight started were lost.
Silas said, “We have to double-march to get out of here.”
Tyrus asked, “You would sleep in this filth?”
“We can make a camp, dig it out a bit, but the smell won’t clear up until we find stone tunnels. Hopefully.”
“Hopefully?”
“For them to dig something like this, they must have breached several of our tunnels, and they had a large scouting party, so our tunnels might be fouled by now, too.”
“Well, that’s glorious.”
“As I said, a few days to our territory.”
Marah asked, “How do you know where we are going?”
“That’s a dwarf trick. Comes from a lifetime underground. We can feel the pull of the Lost City, and that becomes down. We still use the points of the compass, and we know the landmarks of the tunnels, the rock types, the roots of Paltiel, the underground rivers.” Silas pointed down and to the left. “That is my home, but it is much deeper than our first sanctuary.”
Tyrus said, “If it hasn’t been overrun.”
“Yes,” Silas said. “Soon, we will be in the warrens, and we will have stone under our feet and over our head. You will feel better then. I promise.”
Silas went to check on the others. He moved along the column and seemed to vanish into the darkness, as far as Marah could tell. His shuffling was swallowed by all the other sounds she fought to ignore.
She said, “I don’t think I’ll feel better.”
“Neither do I.”
“Is it too late to go back?”
If you run away, the tribes will burn Shinar.
Tyrus shifted his weight, pushing away from the wall. He jostled her a bit, and she got the impression that he was holding her up so he could look at her. She still couldn’t see anything, but his breath washed over her face.
“Say the word,” Tyrus said, “and I’ll carry you back.”
“But the tunnel caved in.”
“I’ll find another one.”
Marah wanted to run away. She wanted to see green things again and breathe fresh air. Her mouth worked while she struggled to say the words. She couldn’t abandon Dura, though. Somewhere in the Deep, she could find the secrets to talking to her grandmother again.
She said, “We should stay.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I do.” Marah’s eyes watered from more than the smell. She was trapped in a place that terrified her, and she feared telling Tyrus the truth. “We have to save the Ward.”
The dwarves kept a punishing pace. Marah didn’t notice as much because Tyrus carried her the entire way. He never complained, and the ghosts claimed he was as strong as an ox. The rangers fell behind a little, and Silas fretted about wasted time. Marah was present, in her way, when Klay, Nemuel, Tyrus, and Silas discussed the pace. She heard their worries—people wanted to sleep when they found a better camp site—but her mind reeled with the voices.
The trudge continued, with intermittent breaks for meals. Tyrus wondered aloud at the stamina of the dwarves—they never let up, and they grew grumbly when the elves and rangers slowed them down. After what felt like weeks but might have been only a few days, the Norsil thanes grew weary too.
Marah clung to Tyrus, oblivious. In his arms, she lolled into a fitful sleep that never left her rested. When she craved a distraction, she asked him about their homeland on Sornum, and when he tired of telling stories or when he withheld stories, she focused on the hundreds of runes etched into his flesh.
He was a walking scroll of sorcery. She felt the power of the spells covering him. She could visualize them in her mind’s eye, and she could use sorcery to explore them and understand what they did. A few of the dead voices helped her decipher her father’s complex weaves and matrices, but not many of the dead had that kind of talent. Marah found the rune that gave Tyrus his vision, and she seized sorcery to use it herself.
The tunnel went from pitch black to shades of gray. The depth of the tunnel, on either end, still ended in impenetrable darkness, but the thanes marching around her were recognizable again. After so long in the inky blackness, the gray images felt like a sunrise. She wanted to see them all the time but had to release the source. Prolonged use gave her headaches.
Darkness washed over her again.
When they stopped for another meal break, she asked Silas for his inks.
Silas fished them out of his robes. “Would you prefer me to paint the ward?”
“I’m not interested in wards.”
Marah used sorcery to paint herself with the rune for seeing in the darkness. Her world illuminated, and she could place the sounds with their owners. She turned to see Silas cringing.
“That is not a rune for brushes. It is very dangerous.”
Marah asked, “Why?”
“The slightest change can hurt your eyes. If it smears, if part of it fades or smudges, very bad things can happen.”
“I won’t touch it.”
Tyrus asked, “Should she remove it?”
“I don’t know.” Silas muttered to himself and clenched his fists. “I was taught some runes are for etching, not paint. She breaks rules. She paints herself, which no one will believe until they see her do it. I just don’t know.”
“Marah,” Tyrus asked, “can you take it off as easily as you put it on?”
“Yes.”
Marah enjoyed her eyesight while Silas and Tyrus talked about runes. She took pride in her trick, which she had devised without any help from any of the ghosts. Silas made it sound dangerous, but she didn’t see how.
A voice whispered, If you drew a fire rune on yourself and empowered it with the source, it would blister and scar.
Marah froze. She had been looking at the elves, which were tall and beautiful, and their ashen skin took on a complex texture in her new gray world. The warnings about runes disturbed her, though. Her tiny hands tightened on Tyrus’s armor.
Marah whispered, But why would you draw a fire rune on someone?
Torture.
That’s awful. Marah hadn’t realized the paints could be used in such a way. Is Silas right? Is this too dangerous?
The voice replied, Not that rune, but it is trivial to blind a person for life. Another form of torture, blinding one eye at a time.
Marah chewed on her lip. Could I heal that kind of blindness?
Perhaps. A few masters were rumored to have undone such a thing. Such skill is rare. Scars are often forever.
Marah whispered, I didn’t know.
Nor did you ask.
IV
Klay stayed in the rear of the column for most of the journey. He and his handful of rangers marched beside hundreds of elves. The smell and the cramped space and the unthinkable amounts of stone above their heads were all unnerving, but the worst part of the trip was how useless he had been during the ambush.
Marah and the Norsil had ripped apart the tribesmen that hit the center of the column. The nephalem knew how to fight underground, but Klay’s bow was a clumsy weapon in the confined space, and without that or his bear, he was just a guy with a couple of runes and blades.
As they traveled deeper, he felt like a burden.
Days became a memory. All his tricks for finding his way in the dark and keeping time were useless in the Underworld, and the weight of the blackness slowly took its toll. He flinched at minor sounds. He lost his appetite. When he managed to rest, he had nightmares about suffocat
ing in cave-ins. He had thought of Ironwall as a stone prison, but the underworld was one long tomb.
They were buried alive. Oh, Klay told himself they weren’t dead or in a grave, but if they didn’t survive the Deep, they had volunteered to bury themselves.
One day, the sounds echoing through the tunnel changed. They became harder, boots on stone instead of freshly dug dirt. Klay listened as the column reached the dwarven passageways. The change was immediate.
Two tunnels intersected, like a crossroads. The stone passage was crafted with beautiful masonry like the vaulted ceilings in the palace of Ironwall. It also ran horizontal to the dirt passage, which had fallen into the tunnel, and continued down past it. The stone passageway was filled with dirt that spread out for dozens of yards, and many tracks covered the floor. The claw marks spread outward from another foul tunnel. When Klay began to inspect the breach, he saw it was more than one. The tribesmen had tunneled into the passageway several times.
Klay found Silas standing beside Tyrus and Marah. Silas and several of the wardens talked about their location. Klay didn’t follow most of the conversation, but it sounded as though they were guessing at the breaches deeper in the Ward to understand how the tribesmen had made it as far as the surface. They mentioned several names—cities, Klay realized—that might have fallen to allow the tribesmen to tunnel to the surface.
Silas said, “They couldn’t make it this far unless Ros Kalrodum has fallen.”
A warden’s voice rumbled as he spoke. “That would give them most of the Argorian Defense. There would be dozens of tunnels to the surface by now.”
“Unless Warlord Blastrum took it back.”
Silas said, “We should make for Dun Berthal and see if the warlord sent word.”
Marah said, “The tribesmen attack it now.”
“What did you say?”
Marah pointed down the corridor to their right. “The ones who attacked us. They went that way. And there are more of them.”
Dance of Battle: A Dark Fantasy (Shedim Rebellion Book 4) Page 29
