The Book of Deacon: Book 03 - The Battle of Verril

by Joseph Lallo

  “Is everyone all right?” Ivy said as she helped Myranda to her feet.

  Ether was slowly returning to her human form. As massive as the battle had been, she was not much worse for wear. The animal forms that were so often forsaken in favor of her elemental ones had been virtually effortless to assume, and as most of the attacks had merely damaged her physically, the injuries were whisked away with the form. Lain had once scolded her for squandering her abilities. Now it seemed that he may have been correct, she could have been more efficient.

  The special equipment provided by Desmeres had taken the brunt of the damage directed at the others with barely a mark to show for it. Lain slid the ring of his sword to the position Deacon had indicated would heal him. Within a few moments, at the cost of the remainder of the sword's stolen power, Lain's injuries were nearly gone. Myranda put her mind to repairing the damage she'd taken, then turned her attentions to Ivy. Of all of the heroes, she'd fared the best, barely requiring more than a moment of the healer's ministrations. The king was another matter.

  “Your majesty!” Myranda cried, rushing to the throne.

  The burst created by the closing of the portal had struck him unimpeded; the elderly monarch was slumped across the arm of the throne. Myranda ran to him. It was the work of a few moments to revive him, but to restore him was another matter entirely. The D'karon magic had a cruel, almost poisonous quality to it. It wrapped about one's soul and remained long after the injuries were closed.

  “Enough. Leave me,” the King said.

  “You are my King and I will not allow you to die,” Myranda said.

  “See to the city. They deserve what little time you can give them,” the King said, pushing Myranda away.

  “The city is fine. I don't think we knocked down a single building,” Ivy said, a hint of disappointment in her voice. “The streets are pretty much clear. I think the Undermine are mopping up the rest. And Deacon, I suppose. I don't know, I missed most of it.”

  “Still, it doesn't matter. It is over now. Perhaps my ancestors truly thought they were saving the kingdom. I was still a boy when I learned the truth, that they had all of the power. This kingdom ceased to be ours the very moment one of those things wore the colors of the north. I knew I couldn't take it back, I could only delay the awful realization from hitting my people. I never would have thought that it was the world I was failing,” the king rambled.

  “Be still, your majesty. You are out of danger, but you will need to rest,” Myranda said.

  “Your majesty . . . Your majesty! I am no king. I am barely a man. My name, my kingdom, my bloodline is tainted forever,” he raged, throwing his crown to the ground.

  “We are wasting time. We need to find and end the generals while Bagu is still wounded,” Ether insisted.

  “The generals don't matter. The sand has run out. The gateway is open now. They have succeeded, you have failed,” the king muttered.

  “Gateway?” Myranda asked.

  “Their world to ours . . . indeed, their world to theirs,” the king said vaguely.

  “A gateway is open? Where?” Myranda gasped.

  “I think I know! There was light on the clouds to the north. That has to be it, right?” Ivy said, her voice radiating the simple joy of being helpful.

  “Let us go! That gateway must be closed,” Myranda said.

  Lain was already padding swiftly down the hallway. The others quickly followed.

  “Myranda! You have to hear what happened! These things that Desmeres made, I think they woke me up! And . . . “ Ivy began.

  “Ivy, we've still got a job to do. You can tell me later. If there is a later . . . “ Myranda said solemnly.

  “There'd better be. I have a lot to say,” Ivy stated.

  Myn leapt alertly to her feet when the heroes arrived. Myranda, Ivy, and Lain climbed to her back. After a few words, Myn began to charge along the courtyard, building speed and spreading her wings. The load was half again heavier than she'd been used to, and she was lifting off with a day of flight and a night of battle between her and her last real rest. The wings caught the air and pumped experimentally as she made a few successively longer hops. Then, with a final leap, she launched herself into the air. After a few powerful flaps of her wings it was as though she carried no weight at all. She wheeled and set off toward the piercing point of light on the horizon to the north.

  Deacon's rampage was coming to an end. He'd adopted a spectrum of different manipulations with the swords as his power had waned. Rotating blades that cut through armor gave way to sweeping swarms of swords that he directed as a conductor might direct his musicians. As his strength dropped further, so too did a number of the swords. Those that had remained orbited him in a complex pattern, separating and obeying his whim when the time came to attack. Blades assembled to mimic his fingers clutching and tearing at massive dragoyles. Others swept into place to block blows and keep soldiers at bay. When his mind had weakened further he thinned the cluster of swords to ten carefully arranged about him, floating and striking as though in the hands of invisible warriors defending him.

  Now what swords remained sagged and drifted sluggishly. He carefully made another mental note on the effects of the overdose of nectar. It would seem that the flood of energy escaping him had the same effect as a siphon on a barrel of water. It continued to draw energy much at the same rate even after it had reached quantities he should have been able to maintain. In short, he was far worse off now than before taking the tonic. Surrounding him was a single, badly injured dragoyle and perhaps fifty nearmen, the very last vestiges of D'karon influence in the city. Though it meant he had sawed, slashed, and bludgeoned his way through the vast majority of soldiers, this remaining fraction may as well have been an entire army. He simply didn't have the strength to face them.

  As the final sword slipped back to the ground and Deacon staggered over the heaps of shredded armor, he quietly thanked his good judgment for not offering aid to the others. No doubt Myranda would not have let him die without a fight, and what energy she wasted on his savior might well have cost them the battle, and thus the world. Here, at least, he could be killed without consequence. He smiled weakly as the fate he'd been expecting all along stalked inevitably closer. They were nearly upon him when a chorus of war cries from the opposite end of the courtyard startled him out of his reverie and, more importantly, distracted the nearmen.

  Deacon faintly remembered, an eternity ago when he'd taken the dose of moon nectar, that he'd warned the Undermine to seek shelter. At the time they had been a dozen or so men and women. Unless one of the lesser effects of the potion was to confuse one's hearing, that number had grown greatly. He turned to the church to find, along side the well armed and poorly armored soldiers, were poorly armed and unarmored aristocrats, screaming for blood. His addled mind tried to work out how the terrified gathering of social elite had been stirred into a maddened mob of berserkers. Caya claimed not to be a wizard, so it was not magic that had set their spirits aflame. Regardless, Caya seemed to have a power of persuasion that any wizard would kill for, and she wielded it through words alone.

  On the strength of numbers and frenzied enthusiasm, the D'karon quickly fell to Caya's force. The most skilled of the soldiers spread out, each leading a small band of civilians. Names were shouted, doors were opened, streets were filled. Quickly the city came to life again, this time populated by those to whom it belonged. The air filled with voices passing the tale from ear to ear. Curses of anger, cries of disbelief, and gasps of fear mixed with a universal feeling of relief. Whatever had happened, whoever was to blame, at least now it was all over. Caya and Tus approached the weary sorcerer, the latter delivering a slap on the back that nearly threw him to the ground.

  “Why didn't you do that in the first place? For heaven's sake, my boy, you practically could have taken the city on your own!” Caya cried.

  Deacon did not answer. He was too busy keeping his eyes focused on the retreating form of the Myn, carr
ying the other Chosen north. It wasn't over. Not yet.

  #

  There were few who had ever seen this part of the world. Well outside the curious pocket of livable temperatures that made the capital possible, this mountain range that stretched to the very top of the world was nothing short of suicide to traverse on foot. The mountains had no individual names. No adventurer or explorer had yet to challenge a single summit. A half circle of mountains that stood noticeably above the rest were known collectively as The Ancients. The rest were known simply as The Dagger Gale Mountains, and with good reason. The wind seemed to cut like a knife, as though the air itself was freezing into jagged pointed sheets. Myn heaved a heavy, streaming breath of flame every few minutes and basked in the all too brief warmth it brought. Despite the near fatal cold, though, each hero had a far more pressing concern, and it lay just ahead.

  Nestled in the shallow bowl of a valley half ringed by The Ancients was a trio of triangular columns. The obelisks were gray, wide as a small building at the base and towering taller than the tallest tree. They tapered gradually along their lengths, then suddenly near the top, such that the massive towers were topped with small pyramids. Each tower stood many hundreds of paces from the other, evenly spaced as the points of a sprawling triangle, so large it took up most of the northern half of the valley. A small city could have comfortably fit between the towers.

  Myn circled closer. The towering columns were perfectly smooth, seeming almost polished. Neither a line of mortar nor a single brick marred the surface, as though each tower had been carved from a single massive stone. The only interruption to the glassy sheen was on the inward facing side, where massive runes were embossed into the surface. They covered the entire inner face, and led to a point of intense blue light that floated in mid air just in front of the final rune. Each tower had such a point, and from each point emerged a single shaft of tangible mystic energy, bright as a bolt of lightning. The shaft buzzed and crackled, lancing down through the icy air to a point midway between the two towers opposite it. It came to a stop at a point above the ground precisely half the height of the tower. The point where the shafts crossed was brighter than the brightest sun on the clearest day. Directly below it, paper thin and defined by the points where the shafts ended, was a triangle of pure black. The whole of the structure had a terrible, geometric precision. The thought that something so enormous could be so exact was chilling.

  “What is it?” Ivy asked in awe.

  “It can only be the portal . . . “ Myranda answered.

  Ether, without a word, hurled her windy form to the ground. Myn followed, wheeling gradually toward the only other thing whole of the valley. It was a lone figure, a man, casting a long, black, twisted shadow. Ether took on her stone form, but held firm a few paces away from him. When Myn touched down and the heroes spilled from her back, it was clear why she hesitated. He was standing just within the area traced by the towers, and the power that poured out of the border felt as though crossing the line that separated them would tear flesh from bone.

  “Astounding, isn't it?” shouted the man over the diabolical mix of sounds the portal produced.

  His back was to the Chosen as he admired the monstrous configuration. He continued.

  “The end result of centuries of constant work. Two hundred fifty-five years, eight months, eleven days, fifteen hours. In your time at least. Every moment of it filled with conjuring, sapping, chanting, and focusing. First ourselves, then a few of your own wizards, and finally a veritable army of Demont's nearmen made especially for the purpose. Even so, we'd estimated over three hundred years to get the gateway in place. That is, of course, until we captured you,” he said.

  The figure turned. It was Myranda's father, but his face made it clear that such was the case only on the surface. Epidime looked out from within.

  “Ivy and Ether were the most help, but you all made a contribution. Those crystals. You filled hundreds of them. Each one took months off of the process. In just a few days we made great bounds toward completion. If only you'd been a few minutes sooner, you might have seen it all come together. It is a sight to behold. The towers aren't built, you know. They are summoned. They are utterly impenetrable, every aspect of them carefully shaped in the mind. One moment a shifting mass of focused magic, the next three perfect towers coaxed instantly into existence. They draw the power to hold the portal open from your very world. A marvel. Every detail a marvel. You made it interesting, I can tell you. I had actually begun to believe we wouldn't get the gateway open. Now we have, and only three worlds in all of our experience have ever closed one. None of those worlds exist any longer.”

  “Where are the others!?” demanded Ether. “The time has come. You shall meet your fate, and your creation will die with you!”

  “Bagu went through. He took Demont with him. They are gathering the army,” Epidime said.

  “Your army is destroyed,” Myranda called out.

  “No. Your army is destroyed. Those were Demont's toys. Made in your world, of your resources. The D'karon was a force of four. Three, now that Teht is dead. Ah . . . but then you never did understand that part, did you? I suppose now is as good a time as any. You thought the name for our race, for our kind, was D'karon. You were wrong. D'karon is a military term. It means ‘first wave.’ You thought you'd been facing an invasion. The invasion hadn't even begun,” he explained with a grin that cut to the soul.

  The vast field of black above him began to ripple. Whirls of clouds wafted and twisted, revealing whispers and glimpses of things unspeakable. Epidime's grin grew to a smile.

  “Until now,” he added.

  On cue, the whole of the triangular void erupted. Black clouds rushed out with the force of an avalanche, tearing the heroes from the ground and whipping them through the air. The howling of the fetid wind was joined by a rumble and quake. The ground shook as though a landslide were bringing the very mountains down upon them. The wind slowed, not as though it was cut off, but as though the pressure behind it was slowly being equalized. By the time the heroes found themselves on the ground once more, they were scattered to the far reaches of the valley. The blackness was still. It hung like a fog in the air, filtering the light from the obelisks into a pale haze. The stench was a choking combination of arcane odors. In the shifting smoky fog, dark forms moved indistinctly at the threshold of vision.

  A cold wind began to pour into the valley. Ether's windy form rose up, the swirling mass trailing behind her, lifting the black veil that hung over the valley. It revealed a sight worse than any one of them could have imagined. The ground was alive with creatures, wretched beasts that had no place in this world. No two seemed the same, each a mass of spidery legs and lashing tendrils, snapping mandibles and gyrating wings, chitinous shells and glistening claws. The horrid creatures ranged from the size of a large dog to as massive as an elephant, with the exception of three.

  The first was barely a creature at all. In shape it vaguely resembled a root that one might find in an apothecary jar. A leathery indigo hide stretched over a body tapered at either end and massively thick in the middle, studded over its entire surface with spiky barbs. The barbs along the bottom sprouted deep violet stalks, shiny with something the consistency of syrup that dripped from the barbs and tipped with swollen, spherical orange ends. The stalks hoisted its body, easily the size of a house, from the ground like legs.

  Behind it was a creature almost twice as tall. Its body seemed to be composed entirely of three thick appendages joined to a central bulge. The limbs were tubes thick as a man was tall and ending in a ring of flat, pointed teeth that spread like toes as it walked. Its skin was hidden beneath a coat of white fur. On the misshapen bulge where the limbs came together, hundreds of small black eyes scattered across top and bottom blinked randomly.

  The last was a beast so tall it was not until it had come out from beneath the black void that it was able to unfold itself to its full height. The thing was standing on seven narrow legs, th
ick as a tree trunk where it left the boulder sized body and tapering to a point along its segmented length. It resembled a daddy long legs, the body sagging between the upward arcing limbs. While only seven touched the ground, the twisted thing had more legs than could be counted. Most were tiny twitching things that spiked the body like an urchin. Randomly scattered among them were larger ones, a trio of which surrounded a clacking, squid-like beak, the only part of its body not sprouting limbs.

  Standing among the hell's menagerie were the three Generals. Epidime's infuriating look of satisfied superiority stood in stark contrast to the deep, penetrating look of madness that twisted the remnants of Bagu's face. His obsidian sword was joined by a second in his other hand, and his gaze was locked firmly on Lain. Demont was atop the reared up neck of a beast that looked to be a horse sized combination of a serpent and a centipede. He had a distracted look on his face, as though he had more important things on his mind than battle. With a single gesture from this third general, the demon horde washed over the icy ground like a tide.

  The Chosen hurled themselves into the fray. Lain's sword was in constant motion, lightning quick slashes opening gaping wounds on the larger beasts and dividing the smaller ones into pieces. Streaks of silver flashed toward the airborne creatures that strayed to near to him, sending the beasts crashing to the ground with a dagger buried deep in them. The gems of his blade quickly took on a brilliant glow. Most of the creatures were left behind, hopelessly slower than their target. Speed, however, can only overcome so much, and before long Lain found himself facing a wall of creatures too large to avoid and too well armored to strike down. Lashing talons and snapping jaws closed in around him. The assassin tightened his grip on his weapon and angled the blade against their attacks.