Machinations. Plans and plots and guiding hands everywhere. Everyone wanted something from her. Everyone promised and cajoled and tried their damnedest to get her to move.
She’d dealt easily enough with the other channellers, but this thing calling itself a goddess was beyond reach. It was all Tallah could do to hold herself back from reaching out and grabbing hold of Panacea’s throat. Not that it would do much good. The goddess would probably let her, just to prove the point. On and on the thing went, while outside her bubble men and women died stupidly.
She only hoped Anna’s construct hadn’t disintegrated. The blood doll was still drawing power from her, so it was still kicking about, moving on its mission. Anna and Christina were muted in this space, but she could sense them working furiously behind whatever enchantment held them at bay.
Every vile curse she could think of came to mind as Panacea talked. For all the power they’d discovered since Grefe, this thing still had her outclassed in grand fashion. And it was trying to bait her.
I am not going to stand back and let the people here be slaughtered. Be ready to move the moment the shell goes down.
She had no way of knowing if her ghosts could hear her, but she repeated the thought regardless.
It kept her from thinking on what Panacea offered. If she could find a way to shove the words back down the goddess’s throat, preferably followed by a full-force Disintegration casting…
How dared she?!
How dared Panacea trot out news of her sister?! Offer the impossible to buy the unconscionable? Tallah already knew something of Rhine endured, else Catharina couldn’t have established contact in the first place. She knew that clearly enough and had closed herself off from it.
Her sister was dead. Tallah had dug that grave herself, laid the body to rest, made her peace with her loss. She’d build her mission around those final moments, hardened her heart against false hopes and wishful lies.
How dared a goddess of healing seek to open wounds so deep? Just to further her own murderous goals?!
Tallah’s chest gave one jerk as her muscles locked rigid. Every bit of her hurt, curled tight into a ball of incandescent rage.
Unlike her alliance with the ghosts, what Catharina held within weren’t spirits but only broken souls. Tortured past the ends of their resilience and sanity, they were little more than shells of their former selves, ethereal batteries meant only to serve. The Rhine within Catharina was nothing but an echo, if even that.
There was nothing Panacea could offer that could tempt.
A flash of Rhine’s ghastly state under the mountain, the wraith dogging her steps ever since the Crags. Tallah had no memory left of the Rhine before. She didn’t need any to stay the course.
“I can restore her, you know,” Panacea said, as if reading her damn mind. “Not to who she was in life, no. But enough that she could grow to be who you knew. You could get your sister back. This mission of yours doesn’t need to end with both of you dead and scattered to the winds of illum.”
Tallah’s stomach knotted so tight that acid scorched the back of her throat. She couldn’t answer and was unsure if that was the enchantment holding her mute, or her own incredulous fury.
Panacea sighed. “I see that my proposition only made things worse. What must I do, sorceress, for you to obey? There is much more at stake than a few lives in this citadel.”
Tallah grabbed hold of the burning spectre fighting to come to the surface. Panacea was too powerful to face head-on. Tallah couldn’t afford a test like this, not when there was a battle to survive. She slowed her breathing. Eased her jaw. Licked her lips. Opened her fists.
Tension bled out of her as Bianca’s words guided her back into the moment.
“You are not your anger. You can’t achieve your goals if you can’t control yourself. You are not a tool to your desires.”
Panacea had released her grip, though Tallah tracked the tendrils of that alien power lingering in her veins. Such an insidious use of illum, so subtle and powerful in its application, almost undetectable if not for her training with Christina and Anna.
Christina sucked in the dregs of power, reaching out through the very paths Panacea had abused. The ghost placed an unseen hand on Tallah’s shoulder, and squeezed gently. ‘We’re here.’ The words were implied in the gesture.
“You want my compliance,” she heard herself speaking. Sil gasped by her side, released as well. “And you won’t lift a hand to stop what’s happening.”
Panacea shook her head. She was growing translucent already. “I cannot risk discovery. And what happens here must happen.”
Tallah licked her lips. A look at Sil revealed her friend in mute horror. Little wonder she’d sought to redefine herself when faith began to shatter. Wracking sobs shook the healer, though that was likely the news of Mertle.
In that, at least, Panacea had no reason to lie.
The earth shook beneath their boots. Something, somewhere, was happening. She’d been kept from the battle for too long.
“Let me go,” she said. “If I survive here, I’ll come to you. I still have to deliver your thrice-cursed seeds.”
Panacea flickered back to full coherence, as if her attention was wholly on the moment again.
Before the grin on the goddess’s face grew to be unbearable, Tallah went on, “I’m not done fighting. If they want the Rock, they’ll bleed for every life they claim.”
It was her turn to grin as she allowed Christina to channel through her. The ghost’s touch slithered past the layers of protection, to coil lightning around Tallah’s fingers. It buzzed and broke the eerie stillness of the shell. Even the daemon was subdued, finally broken down to a quarter of its original size.
The display punched off Panacea’s good cheer, her eyes widening in shock.
Tallah spoke, more calmly than she thought herself capable of, “If you ever try again to use my sister to gain my compliance, I swear on the marrow in my bones that I will find you, kill you, and tear down everything you’ve built. I will give myself entirely to the task and I will find a way to hurt you. Are we understood?”
It took several heartbeats of them staring one another down before Panacea’s chin inclined just a fraction.
“I can’t dissuade you from fighting this battle, can I?” she asked.
Both Tallah and Sil shook their heads. Panacea threw up her arms and looked away from them, groaning in frustration.
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“Be it. Do what you must, as long as you survive. I need the two of you.”
Tallah allowed Christina buzz to disperse, then she stretched and twisted. This audience, as far as she was concerned, was over. If the goddess wouldn’t help, then she was only wasting their time.
“Increase Sil’s healing allotment,” she said, working to limber up. She’d tensed up so hard that her bones ached and her muscles screamed.
“Forget that,” Sil said, hefting her mace. “Give me a way to survive channelling your power.” She showed the tight scars on her arm. “Soon I won’t be able to move my arm anymore if I keep healing myself.”
Panacea shook her head as she put a hand on the black, oozing mass that remained of the white-faced daemon. “The fate of humanity, in the hands of two women gripped by insanity. If I ever reach the bottom of my fall, I may have to start digging.” She sighed and made a complicated gesture with her free hand, as if tapping on something in the air. “Request aid, daughter, and you will receive a trickle. Demand it—we will talk of your tone later—and you will have the power of the sun in your palm. It was a shock to me when you requested the first time. I gave you what I thought would help. Since you made the request again, I assumed it was sufficiently safe, logged the parameters and put it out of mind. I did not believe you would use this tool when it could effectively kill you.”
“What about Vergil?” Tallah asked.
“He’s the reason I couldn’t communicate. Him being near you—as you’re so protective of him—meant he was a security risk. From what I saw of him just now, he’s got a handle on his situation. I do wish you hadn’t sent him off. I would’ve liked to see how he managed it.”
Tallah made a mental note to check up on Vergil if they all survived the night. She’d been too far gone in her own plans and worries to deal with his, and it seemed things had developed.
“Let me out there,” she demanded. “Sort the rest out with Sil since you won’t help. I have business to attend to.”
“I can’t—”
“Yes, yes. Like all gods, you’re useless when there’s any real need of you.”
Already she was feeling power flowing into her, her stores drinking in the death-scented illum pooling at the Rock. She’d tarried enough. Fire danced across her fingers as she forced her way past Panacea’s block. It wasn’t quite that hard, now that Christina had found the gaps in the weave.
The barrier collapsed with a sudden pop. Smoke and ash burst in. Noise like the end of the world filled her ears.
She drew a deep breath and took quick stock of their surroundings, trying to orient herself in the chaos.
The line at the mouth of the tunnel still held, valiantly fighting and pushing back the daemons. Some soldiers were trying to push closed the mangled gates. They roared on broken hinges.
Vilfor burst out of the healing ward, followed closely by Liosse. They were bellowing, leading a rather large force of soldiers to ram into the daemons’ flank. The clash of weapons on soft, naked bodies sent a boom of anguished roaring throughout the beleaguered fortress.
So, the Anvil had been cleared. That was one worry off her mind.
The earth shook again. For a second she worried it might have been some other calamity crawling out of the Cauldron. Then Anna spoke in her ear. ‘I’m bringing my children,’ the ghost said, a note of smug satisfaction in her voice. ‘Try and not get in my way.’
Vergil emerged from the main keep, looked wildly around, then gestured to something behind him. He drew his weapon, raised it, and screamed something Tallah couldn’t make out, before dashing towards the daemons. Behind him, a red tide errupted from every crack, gap, door and window on the battered old building. At first it looked like a tide of blood come to wash the world. Then it resolved into hundreds of figures, running after the boy, howling in mad symphony. Claws and fangs formed out of the red tide. Soldiers dove out of the way as Vergil urged them all aside.
Tallah gaped at the tide of blood dolls. Why do they all look like me?
‘Because I chose them to,’ Anna replied, the girlish doll appearing by Tallah’s side. ‘You’re easy on the eyes, and quite simple to replicate.’
The boy leapt over the short wall separating the tunnel area the rest of the courtyard, and dove into the fight with axe and sword. The red tide of Anna’s creatures crested the same obstacle, and spilled down after him.
Then the daemons really began to scream as Anna waded into them. She was drawing on both her own strength, and on Tallah’s, the cost rising to nausea-inducing levels. Each monster she killed created another doll to bolster her numbers.
Christina faded from Tallah’s mind and was replaced by Bianca. Manipulator and Vitalis joined forces in controlling the army of blood, and the effect was immediate. Like a single coordinated force, Anna’s dolls ripped through the daemons with frightening efficiency, swelling in size as the ghosts drove the blood dolls into a frenzy.
“I feel there’s not much for you to do,” Sil said, approaching. “You and yours scare the shit out of me.”
Tallah cast a look over her shoulder. The goddess had gone, taking the black daemon to wherever it was she went. Her answers, as before, had been less than satisfactory, and her attempts at coercing Tallah’s help laughable.
“I wouldn’t be sure,” she said. It was hard not to wait for the other side of the blade, now the battle ran their way. “Where’s the spider?”
“No idea. With Vergil, maybe.”
Tallah snapped her fingers and was wreathed in her constellation of fireflies. Several whizzed away and gored encroaching beastmen. Now the goddess was gone, they were growing bold and stupid.
“I need the spider,” she said. “We need it to try and communicate with a dragon.”
Sil, to her credit, didn’t bat an eye. “What happens if it can’t?”
Tallah shrugged. “I haven’t a clue. But something’s poised to happen tonight.”
“Something already is,” Sil said. She was scanning the fighting, mace in hand, her back straight.
Whatever Panacea had meant to achieve by bringing Mertle into this problem seemed to have failed. Sil, for now at least, was as focused as Tallah on the situation at hand. Worrying about someone half an empire away was foolish at best, disastrous at the wrong moment.
“Not this,” Tallah sighed. She sent more fireflies out into the crowd, dull pops signalling downed monsters. “Something much bigger is happening, and I’d like that dragon on my side when I have to deal with it. Your goddess was, again, less than helpful.”
That was hinging, of course, on the idea that Luna could, in fact, speak to the dragon. It was the best hope Tallah could cling to.
Out among the fight, Rhine’s wraith wandered about, staring at the destruction.
Before Sil had a chance to reply, cries drew their attention. While the fighting had been mostly contained to the main area of the fortress, there were still lines of soldiers holding the entrances into the main cavern. Now they were breaking apart, a tide of civilians pouring out, many of them armed, almost all bloodied.
Something followed them up the stairs. Once out into torchlight, Tallah found the other edge of the blade… and it was headed for their throats.
There had been another tunnel. There must’ve been. Vilfor’s men had searched all of the Rock after Vergil’s explosion, and had found nothing. But that meant little. If the daemons had found a way to dig one tunnel before, they would dig more, and an invasion through the main artery was just the way to hide such an exploit.
Seeing just one of the black daemons from the crater did not mean the others weren’t there, plotting or directing the assault.
What emerged from the cavern below cut sickeningly easy through the guarding soldiers. It oozed out of the gateway and made the world’s colours run together, and the roar of battle turn to a chorus of death keens that pierced the senses. Tallah could taste blood in the back of her throat, smell death encroaching, and hear the piercing cries of monsters and men driven to insanity.
“Look away.” She grabbed Sil’s hand, spun her around, and gave her a shove towards the tunnel. “Go help Vergil. Find the spider. Get safe once you do. Anna will protect you.”
It was too late. Sil had seen. It showed on the lines of terror on her face, and the tremble of her illum spiking in panic. Tallah had to shove her harder, physically interpose herself between the healer’s line of sight and the new creature emerging. Sil had never seen a real denizen from the crater, something past the early stages of infection.
Tallah was protected by the Ikosmenia. She didn’t see the horror clearly, only the blood-red illum it trailed, the rest too mottled and indistinct to register as viscerally as it did to anyone else.
The black creatures—dregs, Panacea and the channellers had called them—had kept the daemons in the crater, boiling alive in the sun, dying and being replaced, on and on. No wonder it had always only been the lesser evils that challenged the Rock’s walls. Beastmen and trolls and their assorted kin, barely a danger if not for how they’d been organised. Never the real horrors that could spill through the portal, those that tore through the fabric of the world itself when they escaped, trailing a skein of gut-wrenching horror.
The Rock had endured because it had been allowed to. Now, that stay on execution had reached its end.
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