Instinctively, Grace backed inside, trying to hide in the dark. Doing that probably worsened her situation, because immediately she heard someone shout, «Down there! Intruders, get them!» and there weren't many doubts about who was talking and who the intruders he was talking about were.
The shout echoed in the cave, shaking Amanda from her torpor and allowing her to focus her gaze on the people who had, suddenly and carelessly, abandoned their job to mechanically move toward them. Loads of stones that had been halfway through the well were abruptly let loose and fell on the bottom. Judging by the noises they made, they didn't just hit the rock below, but even if anyone inside the well had been hurt – or worse – no one seemed to care.
«We must go!» Amanda grabbed Grace from an arm and started going back quickly along the corridor. The necromancer didn't move.
«Leave this to me, don't worry», she said right before starting to chant some unintelligible words, moving her hands in the general direction of the cave.
Some of the corpses laying on the ground shook suddenly, as if they had been hit by an electric charge, then stood up and started to walk, though stiffly and awkwardly. Grace was quite amazed and really disappointed by that. She couldn't understand why the rest of the cadavers was still lifeless, and none of the skeletons had even tried to move.
Her disappointment got much worse when the first of her zombies got close to the well and suddenly seemed to shut off, as if someone had taken away the fake life she had just infused them. Their flesh shivered, then at once it dried and turned to dust, as their bones fell on the ground in crumpled heaps.
«OK, let's go», she said in a tone which was anything but calm. She didn't have the time to take a step before a hand tried to grab her, barely missing her harm and clenching the sleeve of her suit. The assailant was an aged woman wearing a dirty dressing gown and with an enormous quantity of curlers held on her head by a hairnet. Looking at it from the outside, that scene should have been quite funny.
Amanda turned swiftly and kicked the woman in the face. She let go of Grace and stumbled back. Amanda was sorry for having been so violent with someone who clearly was not in charge of her actions, but she hadn't had much choice.
She grabbed Grace in turn and puller her along, as fast as she could, towards the portal.
Their pursuers didn't seem able to run, they rather walked at a fast pace, and this could have allowed them to reach the passage and run through it before they could reach them.
They came out of the tunnel, almost falling into the room rather than entering it, and stood still for a second, looking at the empty space where the disc of light which would have brought her back to the clinic should have been. The portal had been closed.
«That way!» Grace shouted. There was a quick change of parts when she started running toward the other branch of the corridor, grabbing Amanda by one of her wrists and forcing her along.
They ran for less than ten meters before coming to a halt in front of a heap of rocks, where part of the ceiling had collapsed a long time ago.
From the topmost part of the wall, from a hole not larger than a human fist, a rivulet of water quietly flowed down, with a soft gurgle that seemed to make fun of them, as if to stress the fact that it could go freely, but they wouldn't.
Trying to cast the rocks aside was unthinkable. They were trapped.
Amanda turned her back to the wall, while Grace seemingly wanted to keep examining it for the rest of her life, which was probably going to be a ridiculously short time considering the situation. Several people had already started to come out from the passage they had taken, and soon they were all over them.
Amanda regretted the lack of her wand, even thought it would probably have been of little to no use against that number of opponents. She did her best to keep them at bay using whatever she could: kicks, fists, bag... She kicked, she scratched, she shrieked, she wriggled, in the end everything was useless and she succumbed to the sheer number of her assailants, who soon surrounded and immobilized her. Someone hit her on the head with something hard, and she slipped into darkness.
With Grace all was easier. She had only backed as much as possible against the wall, arms folded around her chest, in a completely useless defense attempt. She wasn't used to physical confrontations, and her powers gave her no way to fight that silent horde. She could have killed a few of the people there, but in the end what help would that have been?
At least, her defensive stance allowed her, if not to avoid capture, to spare herself some bruises and contusions, since the crowd just blocked her and pushed her back towards the well, not even bothering to knock her out like her companion.
CHAPTER 9
When Amanda reopened her eyes, she found out she was sitting against a rock wall. Her wrists and ankles were tightly bound – the former behind her back – in a less than comfortable position.
Grace was next to her, in a similar pose. She was awake and looking in her direction, still she didn't seem to see her as much as look through her. She didn't seem to notice that she had awoken, either.
Amanda was about to say something when she noticed a movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to look ahead.
The black cat was there, sitting and looking at her.
Before she could do, say, or even think something, it moved a step towards her and seemed to stand up. Not on its four legs, it actually stood on its hinder ones, and in doing that it seem to be lengthening, starting an unexpected transformation. Its fur became almost transparent, then disappeared completely, everywhere but on its head, where it was becoming longer and longer. Its paws grew longer and changed shape, its ears receded from the top of its head to the sides of its face, while its muzzle became flatter and thinner. The now hairless skin became clearer in seconds, as well as extremely smooth.
Over a few seconds, she was looking at a slender and long-limbed girl, whose skin, as white as alabaster, almost seemed to shed light on its own. Long and soft black hair wrapped like a cloak her graceful naked body. Her thin lips where so lightly pink that they almost seemed white, and her eyes were like two emeralds set in her face.
People metamorphosing in animals where no news to Amanda – she would have really been a poor compared biology teacher otherwise – but the being in front of her was. She had heard rumors about werecats, a very rare breed of lycanthrope, but she knew enough about them to know that she wasn't seeing one. The transformation of a lycanthrope was a physical act, a gradual transition between two shapes, quite far from the fast metamorphosis she had just observed. Moreover, the human shape of a lycanthrope was, indeed, human. The girl in front of her wasn't, although she wouldn't have been able to say what it was.
«I have some explaining to do», the girl said, kneeling so that she could look at Amanda in the eyes. Her voice had sort of a physical quality, as if it were made of velvet, soft and warm.
Amanda resisted the temptation to answer that explaining was the least she could do, considering that it was her fault if she was in that situation.
«It's always been you, right? The cat, the dreams...», she managed to ask instead.
«Yes. I am the guardian of the obelisk. Only now that you are so close I can talk to you freely. And even now I can only do this in your mind, as long as you are not awake.»
«I'm not awake?» she asked, unbelieving, although she could imagine the answer she was about to receive. At least that explained the weird behavior of Grace.
«No, you only think you are, but let me explain now, time is running out.»
Amanda just silently nodded.
«The obelisk has been created centuries ago to imprison a demon, so powerful and terrible that even saying his name brings catastrophes.»
«Nice, I just missed the jinx demon», Amanda remarked, but her comment was ignored.
«Not long ago, a magician of your world came to know that name and tried to use it to summon and bind the demon». Immediately Amanda's mind visualized the naked and lifeles
s body of Marsten... was he the magician she was talking about? According to Shim, his books concerned demon summoning. «The obelisk held the demon but couldn't stop the summoning to awaken him. Even though he was still trapped, he was able to send a fragment of himself to the summoner, a kind of... projection. In such a form his power was but a fraction of what it would be if he were free, this is why he wants to extract the obelisk from the stone prison where time buried it, and destroy it.»
«And... all this people? Why are they helping?» Amanda asked, quite confused. What had really happened to Marsten wasn't clear to her, if he really had summoned a projection of this mysterious demon, and not the succubus she had fought.
«They are his third try», the cat-girl explained. «In his current form, his only power is binding to a mortal and amplifying his powers. That he did with the magician who summoned him, allowing him to call a being of the dreamworld through which he hoped to seize the crystal of dreams, which would have allowed him to call forth an unlimited number of slaves. An item that no one but an incubus could use. But his attempt failed».
Amanda nodded. She knew that part of the story, even though it was the first time she heard about the crystal.
«The magician died. He looked for another mortal with the same lust for power, and found him. A necromancer. He hoped that he would be able to raise legions of undead for the job. He didn't know that the power of the obelisk would destroy them as soon as they got close, and when he realized that, he had to hatch a new plan. He explained to the necromancer how to create a new breed of undead, powerful enough to resist, and with them he started digging the well, but fortunately the necromancer was killed before his army was large enough, and even the few creatures he had made were destroyed along with him.»
«So now he's using living people. But how can he control them like that?»
«Through that man», the girl answered, not adding anything to indicate who was the man she had mentioned. Then again, it wasn't difficult to understand. «He bound to him as he had done with the previous two, and increased his powers. He's a healer, but not just that. He started by plagiarizing the minds of a few persons and using them to bring others to him, using the clinic as a deceit. His power spread like a virus, whoever came in touch with any of his victims was induced to go to him, and once there they were controlled like the others. These people have been coming here after dark for several nights to work on the digging, then they go back to their homes before dawn and forget everything».
«If they survive», Amanda remarked, thinking about the corpses around the well, and about how those people had let go of their loads of rock without stopping for a second to think to the diggers in the well.
«If they survive», the girl confirmed. «But so far there haven't been enough deaths to create a turmoil. Most of the bodies you saw are ancients, others belong to the undead who started to dig, or tried to.»
«But if this has been going on for some time, why are you seeking help just now?» Amanda asked again, renouncing to ask what she really wanted to: why she had gone to her of all people. She still remembered the words of that odd woman she had met some time ago in the Underdark, who told her she was like a beacon for such creatures due to their uniqueness. And she had to admit that most likely there wasn't in the whole world another daughter of a fairy who wasn't a fairy herself.
«I couldn't. I'm bound to the obelisk as much as the demon. Only now that its door is out of the stone, at least in part, I have been able to leave it.»
«The door» Amanda murmured. «In my dream I saw it... bleed.»
The girl nodded, swaying her head in a fluid movement which created light waves in her hair.
«The obelisk cannot be destroyed. There is but one way to make it fall, thus freeing its prisoner; a sacrifice of immortal blood in the room at the base. Until now the door was still buried and could not be opened, but it will not take much longer.»
«It won't be easy to find an immortal creature though...» she said hopefully.
«It might not be so difficult. The servant of the demon already tried to lure a fairy, hoping he would be able to condition her and bring her here. Things didn't go as he hoped for. She saw his trickery, but died as she was trying to escape. This is not going to stop them though. And it doesn't take being immortal to have immortal blood, even you have some of your mother's blood running in your veins.»
«Are you trying to say... they could sacrifice me to set the demon free? And you brought me here?»
«That wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted you to see, to understand. I wanted to be able to explain, so you could find help somehow.»
«Not a great plan.»
«It shouldn't have gone this way. I kept the portal open so you could come here and go back freely, but when the obelisk focused its power on the zombies I could no longer use it for the portal, and it closed.»
«Trapping us in here. Brilliant.»
«Still I can open it again. Now that you know everything, I will help you and your friend escape.»
«She isn't really... ah, never mind. Just one thing... I see why they didn't kill me, but what about her?»
«She's special too, in her own way. They will sacrifice you both, to be sure of the result.»
«Splendid!» Amanda said ironically. «How long will it take before they are ready for the sacrifice?»
«Another night of work, not much more. They might officiate it tomorrow night already.»
«So what do you think I can do in such a short time? I will be lucky if I can convince anyone I haven't gone mad.»
«I don't know», the cat admitted. «But that's all we have. You must try. You must try. You must try You must...»
Those last few words echoed repeatedly in Amanda's mind, as if bouncing from one wall to the other of her skull. She was almost sure they hadn't really been said more than once, and that it was only her who kept hearing them as her conscience was falling in a dark abyss, or maybe was raising from it to reach the shores of awakening.
CHAPTER 10
She opened her eyes again and found out that nothing had changed.
She was in the very same situation she had only believed to be in a few moments before: hands and feet bound, sitting against the rock, with Grace on her side. The two substantial differences between the dream – if a dream it had been – and the reality were the absence of the cat girl and the fact that now her companion was aware of her and of her being awake.
«Don't move too much, he's keeping an eye on us», Grace whispered, turning in her direction just as much as needed. «I don't believe he can hear us from that far, but I'd rather not draw attention on us too much anyway».
«Can you free yourself?» she asked in a tone as low as hers.
«Not yet. Trying, anyway.»
«She said she would help us escape,» Amanda murmured to herself, «I hope she thought about the ropes as well».
«What are you talking about?»
Amanda turned to her. Indeed, she thought, it might have been better to inform her of the news, at least the most important parts. So she briefly told her what the girl had said while she was unconscious, hoping for the whole time that she wouldn't reply that she had hit her head too hard.
Grace actually just nodded for the whole time, adding some sporadic remark every now and then, like, "That's why I couldn't raise those bones, you can't revive the same dead twice", or "And they thought it was my fault, just for a change".
When Amanda told her about the fairy that the healer had wanted to capture, Grace interrupted her. «This explains why Lyana’s body was in my garden. Since she was dead, they must have thought of using her to put me out of their way before I could find out what they were doing. They ought to know I would, sooner or later.»
«The same Lyana I know?» Amanda asked.
«Yes. They must have lured her to the clinic with the excuse of offering her a job. Then they found out she wasn't that stupid. Too bad she wasn't that good in hand to hand combat either
.»
«Look who's talking...» the other woman replied in a murmur.
«I am a surgeon, not a boxer. And unfortunately I'm not even an escape artist, these ropes are cutting through my hands and I can't slip out of them, or undo the knots.»
Amanda sighed. She had already tested the strength of the bounds holding her. If the cat didn't help them somehow, they would never leave that place. The wall behind them had several protrusions, all of them polished by the time though, none that could be used to cut the ropes.
«So», Grace started talking again, «now they have to find an immortal for their blood sacrifice. This should give us some time at least».
Amanda realized she hadn't completed her explanation. «No, I think they will sacrifice the two of us».
Grace contained a laughter. «No way! Being sacrificed would ruin the reputation of any necromancer».
«I don't think we're in the position to prevent it.»
«Indeed it's a matter of position. If I were free and standing up maybe I could do something.»
«What do you mean?»
«This cave is ancient. There have been many deaths in here in the past.»
«That doesn't sound reassuring to me.»
«It wasn't supposed to. But for a necromancer such a place is a center of power, it's like having an army at hand, all you got to do is call it forth.»
«What for? You saw what happens to your army if it gets close to the obelisk.»
«Ah, never mind that! Those were zombies, tricks for novices. No, there's better in here, it all takes having enough power to call it.»
«And you do?»
«Probably not. Not without a sacrifice. That obelisk isn't the only one needing blood. And anyway it's useless, I'd have to set myself free first.»
«Maybe...» Amanda tried to say, but she was distracted by something brushing her hands. She didn't need to look to recognize the feeling of cat fur tickling her skin. Finally she had come.
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