Knives in the Night

by Nathan A. Thompson

  I…see…you, the next voice said, slowly and deliberately, resonating as if it were coming around a nearby corner.

  I SEE YOU, yet another voice boomed. This one did not so much echo as it reverberated along every wall inside my skull, it was so close, and so loud. It sounded as if I was standing directly inside a giant mouth, one that was about to crush me to pieces.

  Before any more voices could resound within my mind, I felt the pull on my Blood magic slowly and methodically reverse, as if I was in a tug-of-war match with a person a hundred times stronger than me, who had finally decided to put in an effort.

  With minimal concentration, I was able to recognize a Master Ideal mage for what they were, without any help from Breena or anyone else. One who had mastered the Ideals of Blood, of Darkness itself, and many others—at least as many Ideals as I myself possessed.

  I was also able to recognize that my enemy was a vastly more advanced mage in any one of his Ideals than Peitan had been in his single Ideal, and that I would soon become a shriveled husk if I spent any more time reflecting on my would-be killer’s tyrannical might.

  I ended the connection immediately, returning to the physical world. As I staggered backwards, I retained just enough presence of mind to ensure the giant furry body next to me was really dead. But it was, and so were all the other creatures that had attempted to kill us.

  I sighed in relief, and stumbled, because my feet hadn’t stopped backing away from Raw-Maw, as if they were independently afraid that the dragon I had seen in my mind would reach out of the Dark Icon’s corpse and devour me in one bite.

  Wes? I heard Breena ask in my mind. Are you okay? You’re panting heavily.

  I was?

  Another big gulp of air sucked down my throat.

  I guess I was.

  I’m fine, I said, shaking my head and trying to put myself in order. Breena, Breyn, and Eadric were still standing next to me, watching me with attentive concern. Just got a vision from the Blood spell I cast.

  What did you see? Breyn asked, then flinched a bit, as if he felt he was overstepping Breena’s role.

  To her credit, my bonded familiar didn’t do anything more than twitch slightly in the blond Gaelguard’s direction.

  Yeah, Wes, the little fairy said, what did you see?

  My…I started to say, before the sensations of the encounter overwhelmed me again. Stop it, I told my cowardly mind, you’ve faced down Cavus and the Flood. You can handle one giant lizard.

  My enemy, I finally said. My personal one.

  The tiny pink woman buzzing in front of me made an annoyed face.

  Do you have any idea just how little that narrows it down? she asked in an exasperated tone.

  I meant, I said, wincing again as my brain struggled to process that single instant of contact with the scaled monstrosity lurking within the Lost Deeps. I meant the one that’s made this a genetic war. The commander of the Lost Deeps.

  Eadric looked grim. Breyn looked confused. Breena mouthed a quiet ‘oh.’

  “How much did you see?” she whispered quietly.

  “I don’t know,” I answered back, still trying to focus my eyes. “A lot, but the thing was so large, I have no idea just how much more of his body was hidden. But it was all muscle, shadow, and scales.”

  “That’s him, then,” she confirmed bitterly. “At least, what he looked like in the end, when he was victorious. Volagro. The Lord of the Lost Deeps.”

  It was the first time I had actually heard a name for the thing that had been sending custom-made gods after me.

  And, unfortunately, I now knew why the thing was sending those gods after me.

  Because he could afford to.

  The figure in my vision had rippled with Iconic power I was only beginning to process, now that I was not struggling with comprehending the power of his sheer size and his many different voices. The Icons of the Woadlands had been intimidating—in fact, I probably still wasn’t their match, though with Teeth’s help, it might be close.

  But the power radiating off of the dragon which Breena had named Volagro was greater than the combined might of every Light and Dark Icon I had either met or battled in the Woadlands—the Stag Lord, Mother Glade, Lady Titania, even the Winter Witch. It was greater than the Elder Icon Mither, who had splattered the Nuckelavee with a single clap, once she had become free of the Flood’s imprisonment.

  The Iconic power in the Lord of the Lost Deeps was so great that creating another Raw-Maw would be less of a drain than the weakest Scaleling would have cost the Tidefather.

  Only unlike that single Scaleling, Volagro would gain the lost power back. It would be regenerated easily, on account of the power he received from being venerated by however many multitudes of Horde that dwelled within the Lost Deeps. And that wouldn’t even be his largest source of Iconic income, because an Icon actually received more power from fulfilling the roles they championed, and Volagro’s role was leader of all the Icons in the Lost Deeps, in addition to ruling over the Lost Deeps itself.

  He would be able to slap together another Raw-Mawed wolf in a few days, at most—possibly even a few hours.

  And even if it took longer, he was several worlds away. I wasn’t in any position to take advantage of his minimal drop in power.

  And it truly was minimal, I knew. Even if he hadn’t been an Icon at all, the amount of magical power he had thrown at me from worlds away would have been enough to kill me. He had reversed a Practitioner-level Blood spell that he was only indirectly linked to, and he had done so flawlessly. The only thing I could have critiqued about it was the fact that he had taken so much time to get around to it.

  Still, when I reflected on his size, magical power, and the fact that he had a literal planet’s worth of Horde, Dark Icons, and other resources to draw from, I couldn’t help but admit that no matter how much I had grown, I was still painfully outmatched.

  Which probably meant that so were Rhodes and his cronies.

  In fact, everything short of Cavus at full power was probably nothing more than a laughable annoyance to this being, and I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t already overrun all of Avalon’s worlds on his own.

  Breena, I sent privately through the mindlink, why is that thing bothering to work with anyone else at all? Are any of the Icons strong enough to oppose him if he leaves the Lost Deeps?

  I don’t know, Wes, the little fairy replied worriedly. If he hasn’t grown stronger since his imprisonment, and if they all worked together, then… possibly. The former Icons of the Lost Deeps, together with their champions, had all worked together in the last war in a desperate attempt to bring him down, and failed. Mercifully, their failure had given Stell time to work out the barrier that enabled her to seal all of the Pathways leading out of that world, and the barrier has held for at least a thousand years.

  Until now, I pointed out grimly, and she nodded her tiny head.

  Until now, she agreed. Our guess is that the Dark Earthborn have undone the wards somehow. And either they can’t undo them further, or they’re refusing to, because they recognize the depth of Volagro’s power. But either way, this is trouble, Wes. I’m sure the Horde dragon has been studying those wards the entire time he’s been sealed down there. Now that they’ve been partly undone, he’ll find a way to finish undoing them himself, one way or another. The only option I can think of is to have to Stell find time to rework them, and we won’t be able to do that until we can drive the Horde and Malus Earthborn away from that location, and we probably won’t be able to do that until we’ve saved the rest of the worlds.

  I knew that wasn’t going to be good enough, not for long. If the seal could be undone once, by outsiders not even native to any of Avalon’s worlds, then it could be found and undone again.

  And considering the Horde dragon’s vendetta against me, that was an almost certainty. Something about my link to Aegrim threatened his claim to power.

  Whatever else happened, I knew this creature would continue s
ending false gods after me until I finally died.

  Or I became strong enough for his worst fears to be realized.

  “Is the Horde Pit destroyed?” I asked out loud, putting the matter out of my mind for later, when Teeth and I had time to try to speak to the fragments of either Aegrim or Vinclum.

  For now, though, we had accomplished our objective, despite the surprising new developments. The Horde had been defeated, and if the Pit was destroyed, that meant their victims were now free.

  “Val sicced Ball-ee at it while you were doing your Blood magic thing,” my bonded familiar explained, while Breyn and Eadric nodded. “The rest of the group is helping the victims recover while we wait for the Wealthwalkers outside to dig us out.”

  “Do we have a way to contact them?” I asked, but Breena smiled triumphantly.

  “That was another thing we thought of while you were busy,” she announced in a proud tone. “Salima and Weylin’s Air and Song magic couldn’t quite get through the cave-in, but fairy whisper magic could! We can’t get a reply back, but Petal and I can tell our magic reached them! I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to dig us out eventually!”

  “Or we can just use Shaping and Ideal magic to help create our own tunnel,” Eadric rumbled, “now that we have a break from dealing with your bloodthirsty fan club.”

  Fan club was about as inaccurate a term he could have chosen, and he knew it, but that was beside the point. I walked over to the edge of the giant, now-empty pool in the center of the room.

  I winced when I finally realized how big the pool was. I hadn’t given it more than my peripheral attention, on account of the monsters and the Dark Icons I had to battle, but now that the conflict was over, I realized that this last Pit had been at least twice as wide and twice as deep as the largest Pit I had encountered before now.

  And it had far more victims.

  There were well over a hundred people beneath me, in various stages of trauma. I saw Val, Salima, and Weylin move from person to person, throwing blankets over their bodies and offering comforting words for as long as they could. Karim was working some kind of Script magic that covered the floor in runes that let out a soothing light.

  Petalbell had somehow fluttered between as many people as everyone else had combined, sprinkling dust over them and whispering something that seemed to soothe them into a kind drowsy, sedated state. When one dusk-skinned fairy with golden hair started wailing, Petalbell immediately halted her next spell, flew over, and embraced her fellow sprite, mumbling to the tiny, screaming woman in a soothing, but determined tone.

  Beyond them, was the blue little blob Val had snuck into her pack before we left for this world—back when I hadn’t made it clear we needed to bring at least one of the heal-jellies with us every time we went out.

  Said heal-jelly had now grown much, much larger, almost double the size of a basketball. Next to it was a new, original-sized jelly, that was letting out the healing blue mist I had seen these things make. As it did so, the larger jelly squeaked encouragingly at it, and then let out its own blue mist, until every Pit victim was bathed in soothing blue fog.

  That included the number of victims that had been reduced to tiny black balls. I saw those orbs, almost numbering in the hundreds themselves, roll over to the two Ball-ees and form a ring around them.

  We had saved people again. And now that we had reclaimed over a hundred lives previously thought gone for good, the inhabitants of Mejem would rejoice, and realize they had something to hope for again, instead of seeing how long it would take for the Malus Order or the next Tumult to grind them into dust. Nothing was certain, but I had every reason to hope that they would fully commit to the fight, to help my people rescue their world, drive out their invaders, and destroy the rest of the Horde Pits.

  But we had a new problem, as well. The last Raw-Maw’s very purpose had been to die, I realized. He had been sacrificed in order to detect my location, assess my abilities, and send that knowledge back to the Lost Deeps, so that the next group of Horde hunters would have a better grasp of my strengths and weaknesses. Their leader had sacrificed him knowing that I would learn these things, and knowing that I would gain a tiny glimpse of his own power as well. He had done so even knowing that my killing and consuming a second Raw-Maw would increase my power again. All of that had been an acceptable risk to him, and even now, I knew he still felt satisfied over the trade.

  Well fine then, I growled to myself. He wasn’t the only one that had reason to feel confident. I might not have been able to grow a demigod every time my fingernails grew too long, but I had retaken three times as many worlds as my asshole stalker-king had.

  And I had done it coming up from a single Rise, overcoming prison, torture, and a mountain of other trauma. I had done so overcoming the block placed in my brain by Rhodes’ cronies as well as the block placed in my genes by the Stellar Council assholes. I had done so battling a slowly growing host of world-killing monstrosities. I had done so while rescuing and re-earning the trust of every worlds’ current inhabitants—and sometimes reclaiming inhabitants that had been lost aeons ago.

  All while this giant asshole lounged about in his underground five-star Transylvanian hotel, working with a host of other powers, sending me the occasional Dark Icon hatemail, and otherwise not doing a damned thing.

  He could try and intimidate me all he wanted.

  But when the time came, I was still going to rip him out of his hole, reclaim his prisoners, and tear open every one of his throats with my bare teeth.

  CHAPTER 14: NEW GROUND

  Davelon’s Perspective

  This place should feel way more hot, I decided, as we ran along the sands. And I should feel way more tired.

  I hadn’t known that much about medieval armor and weapons before coming here, but I was pretty sure that wearing this much armor, for this long, in a place full of reflective sand with a bright sun should have already given me heatstroke back on Earth.

  But it hadn’t, and here I was, wearing chain mail and boiled leather, big long sword and shield strapped to my back, helmet rattling around my head, chasing a bunch of hooded, pointy-eared people leading us to another city that looked like a fancy version of one of the many places Dad had gone to during one of his Army tours.

  And I had barely broken a sweat. Heck, I felt less comfortable back on Earth wearing football padding.

  The woman who finally decided she was Wes’ girlfriend explained that this was normal, though. She said my Ideals of Fire and Earth would help me resist heat and endure fatigue, and something about the Path and woadtattoo I had chosen would make heavy armor more comfortable for me.

  And as soon as she told me that, Rachel had gotten excited, and started telling her the exact kind of armor I would want to wear, and the weapon I would prefer to use (“for now,” she had said, “because he’s going to change his mind when his Strength and Rises hit numbers X and Y”). Stell had agreed with her, even complimented her on the choices I hadn’t made yet. At any rate though, they worked out something they said would be the best for me, and then the best for the other three people in our group, and everyone seemed to have a lot fewer headaches than if we had all tried to figure this out ourselves. Especially since so far, everything she had picked for us had seemed easy and fun to use.

  But my attention was wandering again, so I went back to scanning the sands and nearby city for anything important. I knew I probably wasn’t going to notice anything Wes’ special guides wouldn’t, but maybe I could figure out what I was supposed to look out for in this place.

  I didn’t learn anything, but I saw the Wealthwalkers tense up when we got closer to the city. Then I saw them notice the flag over the gate, the one Wes had said we should look for. The hooded man and woman both relaxed, but not completely. Then as they slowed down, the woman cupped her hands and starting whispering what I recognized to be a spell. A moment later I saw her body relax completely, and she said something to the hooded man next to her, and they led
us right up to the city gates.

  “Do you think everything’s okay?” Rachel whispered to me as she ran next to me.

  I turned to look at Wes’ sister. She actually seemed to be a little out of breath, despite not wearing anything heavier than some thick robes, and having a bunch of different spells on her to help with the heat and fatigue. I need to make sure she stays in shape, I thought to myself, but I chose to answer her question instead of hassling her.

  “Yeah,” I said to her. “They wanted to make sure that your brother had really retaken the city, and that there wasn’t some kind of trap up ahead. So they slowed down to send a message to one of their people that was with Wes, and they just heard back that everything was okay. So now they’re going to take us inside.”

  “Really?” The red-headed girl blinked. “You heard them say all that?”

  “Nah,” I said, shaking my head, “just picking up on the visual cues.”