Arc 5: Chapter 27: Moth

    For a moment, fear gripped me. Would we be swarmed by an endless legion of crawling, biting insects?

    But I soon realized the swarm emerging from underground wasn’t hostile. They were fleeing, escaping in every direction. Not just them, either. Trees rustled in the near distance as bats and birds took wing into the night in flocks. Even the shades scattered like startled fish. For once, the absence of their cacophony did not comfort me.

    Catrin had drawn Yith’s attention, and he was near. Quelling my nerves best I could, I walked back to the grave and positioned myself at its edge. Closing my eyes, I focused on the already stirring flame within me.

    Whatever threat might emerge outside, the help I’d brought would need to deal with it. Penric, Beatriz, and Mallet might be ordinary, but supported by a trained knight and two adepts they shouldn’t be dead weight.

    As I called on my aura, it started to appear in the world as visible gilt phantasm. Dim tongues of flame wreathed my shoulders, then flickered along my fingers. I did not burn it hot enough to shape into any weapons, not yet. Like tossing a small log onto a campfire cooled down to mere embers, I stoked it to easy readiness with murmured words.

    When it surged hotter than I’d intended, enough to let out an audible fiery growl and scald me along my left forearm, I grit my teeth and clenched that hand into a fist.

    I had not used my powers since the fight against Laertes. Was this because of the High Art I’d forced out then? There had been a shift in that moment.

    “That looks painful.”

    I turned to the crypt’s door. In it stood the slender, amber robed figure of Emil.

    “You should be with the others.” My voice was hoarse from concentration and pain.

    Emil’s large, sad eyes drifted down to the pit in the floor. He clicked his tongue once, a disapproving noise. “You told all of them that you don’t truck with the occult, yet here you are helping an undead witch employ her powers. No wonder your own magic bites you.”

    I stared at him, confused by his tone and words. This didn’t sound like the shy, nervous priest I’d known the last several days. In the distance, I heard a shout. It might have been Mallet or Penric, judging by how deep the voice sounded. Something was happening out there.

    And Emil remained in the door, framed in pale moonlight, watching me.

    “I have been trying to figure you out for some time now,” Emil said in a conversational voice. He’d tucked his hands into his robe’s sleeves, looking for all the world like we were just engaging in pleasant banter. “It took me longer than I would like to admit to recognize you.”

    “Recognize me?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

    Sliding his hands apart, the clericon held one finger up toward his chin. “Your face. I recognized it that day, but I could not decide from where. I’ve never been much good with faces, you see. They tend to blend together in my mind, but your scars, and those eyes... then you strode right up to that old Forger orc, and tossed the red prophet’s head at his feet. Oh, it came back to me then!”

    His own ordinary brown eyes met mine, then narrowed as he winced. “Ah, that burns. Must make it hard to have conversations. Or to fuck. Do you have to take your whores from behind so they don’t go blind?”

    No, he didn’t sound at all like he had before. There was mockery in his voice, and underneath it lay a bubbling humor, almost sickly-sweet in cadence.

    But that wasn’t the only reason I turned and tightened my grip on my axe, or opened my eyes wide to fix him with the full weight of my golden gaze.

    My eyes only cause people pain when they lie to me. Emil hadn’t met them once since we had met. He did not meet them now.

    “Who are you?” I demanded.

    The man’s grin widened into something ghoulish. “So your eyes aren’t infallible! I heard so many stories about your order growing up, but you all went mad and burned out before the war had barely begun, so it was all just that. Stories. I’m so tired of hearing stories. Much more fun to make my own.”

    Another shout, and a piercing metal shriek. I felt a shudder in the air, my aura’s senses rather than my body’s. Emma was using her Art.

    “Oh, a conundrum.” Emil tutted and shook his head, looking aggrieved on my behalf. “Go help them and abandon your bitch, or stay here and wonder if they’re all dying. I don’t envy you that choice, Headsman.”

    The voice was male, but I did recognize it. Not as Emil, the holy scribe, but from someone else’s lips. The reason he couldn’t meet my gaze without pain was not because he told a lie, but because he was a lie.

    Glamour. A very good one.

    “Hyperia.”

    The priest’s face went still, all humor fleeing from it as I spoke the name aloud. The voice was different, but the way the false cleric spoke, like he were suppressing sweet laughter with every breath, I had heard before. At Caelfall in Orson Falconer’s keep, and when the Vykes had introduced themselves to the court.

    He — or more precisely she — adopted a much colder smile.

    “So many times I have wondered what your motives are,” the Princess of Talsyn said in a thoughtful voice, her assumed form’s brow furrowing. “I never got the opportunity to learn much about you back at Orson’s gathering. Then we heard he’d died, and not at the hands of the Mistwalkers we left to tie up that loose end. A strange mystery, one left unanswered for a year and more, though I had suspicions when I kept hearing stories about a man in a red cloak. A man who seemed intent on pruning Recusant heads.”

    She pointed at me, her smile widening in satisfaction. “And then you appeared here. Yith warned me of you, and I thought you were a threat that needed silencing. But then you killed the Grand Prior, and I wasn’t certain. Were you an ally, as intent on tearing down this wretched Accord as we? I wanted to approach you and make an offer, but my brother wouldn’t have it.”

    “Your brother must be smarter than you,” I said. As I spoke, I let my muscles shift into readiness. Hyperia didn’t miss the subtle motion.

    “Kill me,” she said without fear, “and my brother will burn this city to its foundations. I have studied you, Alken Hewer, and I know you and the cowards who hold your leash fear war.”

    Her eyes turned hard and sharp as cut glass. “I assure you, we do not. Calerus and I have prepared for it since we were children.”

    “You’re still children,” I assured her. “This sick game of yours ends tonight.”

    “Because you mean to kill my demon?” She asked. Then in a sweeter voice she added, “You believe I will let you?”

    Why had she revealed herself to me now? It seemed such a foolish thing to do, giving up her guise and putting herself in my reach.

    Unless...

    She did it to stall me.

    Hyperia must have seen the flash of realization in my face, because she chose that moment to act. She lifted her right arm so the palm faced me, along with the drooping interior of the clerical robe’s sleeve.

    I thought magic, at first. Then I heard a soft click.

    On pure reflex I slashed, Faen Orgis blurring through the air in a trail of heat to cut the missile out of the air. It landed behind me in two smoking pieces. A crossbow bolt.

    Even still, Catrin made a fight of it. She held her elven dagger, and wherever she found one of the demon’s threads she slashed it in passing. The banesilver cut true, severing the ichor and breaking links in Yith’s complex spell.

    I felt the demon’s anger, but he wouldn’t be baited. He remained at the center of his construct, letting his disciples congregate around the intruder. There were far too many lines in the web for Catrin to do more than superficial damage. It touched near every surface in the city.

    I found the image I looked into was not fixed. Where my golden eyes focused, the city twisted as though on a rotating axis. I saw a succession of halls and streets. Sometimes I even looked down the length of towers, the whole scene unbound by anything like up and down.

    I could tell Catrin was lost. She kept moving about the city, attacking Yith’s nest where she could, but never seemed to draw any closer to the original door she had opened into it, the one where I stood. More monsters gathered, heading her off, surrounding her. Her red eyes grew steadily more panicked by the moment.

    She needed her torch.

    “Catrin.”

    My voice echoed with aura, rippling out into those depths like a bell toll. The dhampir heard it. Though I saw her as though from a great distance, her face turned in my direction. She seemed to focus, and started to run again even as something worm-like and gibbering fell in a writhing heap onto the path behind her.

    She wasn’t the only one who heard me. In a flash, all the scattered images of pain and sorrow in Yith’s insectoid eyes vanished, replaced by the Undercity itself. They changed again, showing Catrin’s sprinting form from a score of angles.

    The demon started to move with terrible speed, its many limbs blurring with motion. I felt its laugh like a shiver in the world.

    Catrin’s meager efforts would not bait it, but the chance to hurt me by taking her would.

    My eyes fixed on a single string of Yith’s ichorous web, then narrowed. I lifted Faen Orgis to my lips, whispered words from my oath, then cocked it back in both hands like a lumberjack.

    If Catrin could injure that substance with her silver, then sacred gold would certainly hurt it. How long had the demon prepared this, I wondered? Months, and more. A year’s constant, careful work, a magic of enormous complexity tended to with every scrap of attention the beast could spare.

    In the moment before I swung, Yith’s eyes changed again to reveal me. To him, and perhaps to Catrin, I looked like a blazing flame standing high above, a beckoning gold beacon in a moonless night.

    Too late, bastard. I swung, and the aureflame swept into that space-defying darkness. It struck a single thread of the enormous abyssal web, and it began to burn.

    The ensuing conflagration was fast, and dramatic. What began as a single arc of auratic power striking a single thread among thousands quickly spread, fast as a candle flame touching a sheaf of dry paper. Golden flames raced down that line, spread to others, expanding, illuminating. The dim, ghost-lit city erupted with light, the Alder’s magic chasing away the shadows.

    Woed creatures, either crawling on their master’s web or still gestating inside its various imperfections, were caught in the blaze. Many dropped rather than cling to that hateful fire, vanishing into the depths of the chasm. Others fled in a mad rush, scores of them, letting out panicked shrieks that echoed through the Undercity.

    It was like an Art, that foul web. The demon had used it to spread his awareness and his malign influence throughout the capital, stoking it toward whatever evil end his masters intended. And, like any phantasmal construct, it was fragile.

    And my magic is particularly potent against all that is profane.

    Yith spread his wings, much like those a fly might have but jagged and leathery. Even as they began to beat, the aureflame caught him. The demon recoiled, one thorned arm flinching away from the fire, only for a second to be touched, then a third.

    Desperate, he launched himself off the web like a missile, ploughing into the side of a temple-like structure. Dust and debris exploded from his point of impact, obscuring him from view.

    My eyes went back to Catrin. Her avenue of escape had narrowed with the spreading fire, and she made a direct line to me. I do not know whether it was my will or hers that formed the path between us.

    From her perspective, she ran down an alleyway between two tall buildings, barely wide enough for her to pump her arms in a sprint. To me, I looked down, so it seemed as though she ran up the sheer wall of a cliff atop which I stood.

    I let the aureflame burn around my figure, giving her something to focus on. It burnt me, but I could endure the pain. It would heal.

    “Alken!” She shouted.

    Almost there. She closed fast, her feet sure and swift. The city filled with dour golden light around her, like the pale rays of a setting sun illuminated it.

    I knelt at the side of the grave and reached out my free hand. “Cat! I’ve got you.”

    A relieved laugh escaped Catrin’s lips, and she picked up her pace. I could hear her shoes striking the stone with each step, echoing off the high walls around her.

    A shadow appeared within the molten light of the city. Huge, winged, with long spindly arms and eyes like broken glass. Yith’s tortured body crawled with sacred fire, the magic forming furrows and cracks in his flesh.

    But he was alive, and enraged. He squeezed himself into the alley, contorting his already twisted mass into a too-narrow space, and began to crawl forward at shocking speed.

    No. “Hurry, Catrin! Faster!”

    Catrin didn’t look back, or slow, but she saw the fear in me and must have heard the demon behind her. Her legs blurred with speed, her teeth baring in a furious mask of effort.

    The whole scene was strangely muted. I only really heard her echoing footsteps, and the growl of distant fire. Worse, whatever door Catrin and I had opened between us was closing, as though it were a breach in the surface of water now rushing to fill itself. Black crawled in at the edges of the vision, quicker by the moment.

    There was still time. I would pull Catrin out, and before this door closed I would deliver the final blow to Corpsefather. His dark spirit would scream down into Orkael, where the pitiless angels of the Iron Hell would have a pit waiting for him. Gilded fire snarled around my axe, eager for that end as I.

    Closer, and closer. Only seconds now. I stretched far as I could, reaching out my open hand. Yith advanced, looking bigger and more monstrous with every step, an oncoming avalanche of hate.

    I stretched just a bit further. Catrin lowered herself into a lunging stride, letting out a shout. Her pale hand, tipped in sharp nails and clever quick, shot out to grasp mine. I wanted to shout with the relief, even as my hate of the thing behind her focused itself into its most lethal point.

    Catrin’s fingers brushed mine, and—

    The aureflame lashed out. It crawled down my arm, my fingers, and struck her. Catrin’s eyes went wide, her expression one of incomprehension, then pain, then horror. The same emotions I felt in that moment.

    That fire, which had been quietly baring its fangs at her since we’d first met, slipped its leash and bit. She recoiled away from me, letting out a scream of shock. The golden fire clung to her hand, quickly racing up her arm, hungrily as it had consumed Yith’s web.

    Catrin stumbled away from me, just as the coiled proboscis beneath Yith’s fractal eyes shot out, punched through her shoulder, and dragged her out of my reach.

    Like a dream ending, darkness engulfed the scene. I knelt there with my hand still extended, but all that lay beneath me was an empty grave.