Chapter 137: A Pocket Army Opens (2)
The fae spread across the fortress like a flood with a purpose.
For a few heartbeats they only swarmed — hundreds upon hundreds of glowing fist-sized souls wheeling through the gray air, pouring down stairwells, streaming through arrow-slits, spilling into every hall and corridor of the castle inside and out, a cold luminous tide trailing ribbons of spirit-fire.
Then, all at once, they found their purpose. Each one peeled off toward a body, and dove.
They went in through the mouths.
Every monk in the courtyard, on the walls, in the towers — the silent child-bodied horde and everything else that drew breath in that fortress — opened their jaws as a fae forced its way down, and the soul slipped inside, and the body went still. It happened everywhere at once.
And even the bearded old man, who a moment ago had radiated enough terror to flatten his own soldiers against the walls, flinched — actually flinched — and tried to bat the little spirits away from his face, swatting at the air with both spotted hands as they came for him.
He was fast. He was not fast enough. Two of them found the gap and went down his throat, and his eyes rolled white, and he froze where he stood like all the rest.
Silence fell over the whole mountaintop. Hundreds of figures stood paralyzed, swaying faintly, occupied.
Then, here and there, a few of them began to move — jerky, puppet-stiff, the lower-ranked souls already wresting full control of their hosts.
"Everyone who can move," Ebony bellowed across the courtyard, "kill everyone who can't!"
The fae obeyed with horrible enthusiasm. The fortress turned on itself. Possessed monks fell upon their paralyzed brothers with their own weapons, and the courtyard erupted into a civil war of the damned — exactly the chaos she'd been promised a pocket army could buy.
"(Seconds. Minutes if I'm lucky. Don't waste a single one.)" She grabbed Hrazfel by his giant arm. "The prisoners. Now, while they're busy killing each other."
They ran for the lower door — the same black throat the bearded old man had shuffled out of — and plunged down into the cold dark of the mountain's heart. Stairs, then more stairs, the air growing damp and foul, until the passage opened into the dungeons.
The cells were a row of iron bars set into wet black stone, and behind them were her friends.
Lucian. Veronica. Hrazfel's missing dwarves, several of them, slumped against the walls. All of them beaten, bloodied, filthy — left in the muck and the dark with the rats, the way you leave things you intend to break rather than keep.
And Daniel was not with them.
He'd been set apart — apart even from Lucian's cell — laid out on a kind of low stone altar at the far end of the chamber, and he was frozen, encased to the chest in a shell of pale ice. His hair, which had been dark, had gone bone-white. He didn't move. He barely looked alive.
"(They were doing something to him. Something different from the others.)" The sight of it put a cold weight in Ebony's stomach that had nothing to do with the dungeon air. "(Why him. Why singled out.)"
Hrazfel didn't wait. He slammed both giant palms against the cell bars and loosed his thunder, and the magic ripped down the entire row at once — locks bursting, hinges shrieking, every cell door blowing open in a cascade of sparks and tortured metal.
But the doors opened, and nobody inside moved.
The dwarf let the giant form bleed away, shrinking back down, and stepped into the nearest cell. He crouched over his own men, then over the elf, and Ebony heard his breath catch. They were breathing — but only just.
Lucian lay in the filth with one eye swollen shut and a dark crust of blood down the side of his face, his fine clothes torn and stiff with it, and he did not so much as stir at the noise.
"Girl." Hrazfel's voice came out rough. "They're alive, but barely. Your elf's the worst of the lot — they worked him hard." He looked up at her, and the bluster was entirely gone. "Heal them. Quickly. You can fix this, can't you? Fix it."
Ebony knelt beside Lucian, and put her hands over him, and reached for her magic.
And there was almost nothing there.
"(No. No, no, not now.)" She'd burned through everything — the long fight in the courtyard, the concentrated detonation, the surgical bursts, all of it stacked on top of a well that had never had time to refill.
The flame guttered weakly at her palms and died. A trickle. Less than a trickle. Enough, maybe, to close one shallow cut. Nothing close to enough for this. "(All of them dying in the dirt in front of me and I have nothing left.)"
"I can't," she said, and hated every syllable of it. "I'm — there's nothing left, my mana's gone, I burned it all upstairs—" Her hands were shaking over Lucian's broken body. "(I have never, never hated this stupid broken magic as much as I hate it right now.)"
A slow, deliberate clapping echoed down the stairwell.
The bearded old man descended into the dungeon, unhurried, fae no longer crawling on him — he'd evidently torn the souls back out of himself the moment the worst of the chaos passed, and left his possessed garrison to finish slaughtering itself upstairs without him. He clapped as he came, mockingly, savoring it.
"Truly remarkable," he said. "The lengths you'll go to. The way you all cling so desperately to the small, mundane, breakable things of a mundane little life." He stepped off the last stair and surveyed them — the beaten prisoners, the shaking healer, the dwarf rising to his feet.
"It's almost beautiful. It's certainly a pity. But this is where it ends for all of you, I'm afraid. Together, at least. There's a small mercy in that."
Ebony's mind raced against the dread. "(He's right. I can't fight him. No mana, no army left down here, everyone behind me half-dead. If I trade blows with this thing I lose, and they all die with me.)"
Her eyes went to the altar. To Daniel, frozen, white-haired, singled out. "(One option. One stupid, desperate option.)"
She lunged for the altar, pressed her palm flat against the ice encasing Daniel, and pushed the last guttering scrap of her purification fire into it.
Green flame bloomed across the altar — and it did not touch Daniel. It didn't catch his clothes, didn't burn his skin. It found only the ice, because the ice was made of magic, and purification fire ate magic before it ate anything else. The shell hissed, cracked, and began to melt away in sheets.
The old man's patience ended.
Between one blink and the next he was simply there — crossed the entire dungeon in less time than it took to see him move — standing at Ebony's side, and he flicked one finger against her ribs.
It felt like being hit by a falling tower. She left the floor, slammed into the dungeon wall hard enough to drive the breath out of her entirely, and stayed there, embedded in the cracked black stone, the world going white and ringing at the edges.
"Such a waste." The old man shook his head, looking up at her pinned in the wall almost regretfully. "To ruin a beauty like you. But you brought it on yourself, child, prancing up my mountain with your dragon and your jokes." He sighed. "You should have run when you had the chance to die elsewhere."
Ebony spat blood, and smiled at him through it.
"You're right," she said, her voice a wet rasp. "On my own? I couldn't save a single one of them. Not the elf, not the dwarves, not anybody. I'm out of magic, out of tricks, out of everything." She let the smile widen. "Good thing I don't do this on my own. Good thing I've got companions who'll handle the part I can't."
The old man laughed. "Companions. You mean the corpses bleeding out in my—"
A fist hit him in the side.
It came out of nowhere, hard and low, and it actually staggered the old man — drove him a full step sideways, the first thing all night to move him without Ebony's name on it. He turned, genuinely surprised.
Daniel stood swaying off the altar, half the melting ice still sloughing from his shoulders, his white hair plastered to his forehead, one fist still extended from the blow. He was barely conscious. He was upright anyway.
"Heard a voice," he mumbled, blinking hard, dragging air into his lungs. "Real annoying one. Yelling orders." A crooked grin pulled at his split lip as his eyes found Ebony embedded in the wall.
"Figured if she was making that much noise, somebody'd better get up and shut whatever's bothering her." He coughed, spat pink, and got his feet under him properly. "...Where are my axes."
"(Daniel.)" Relief hit Ebony so hard it almost hurt worse than the wall had. "(You absolute idiot. You wonderful idiot.)"
The old man rolled his shoulders, and the surprise on his face smoothed into something that was almost delight.
"Well," he said. "Well. Now this might actually be interesting."
Behind them, heavy boots on the stairs — Hrazfel rising back to his full giant height, hammer crackling, planting himself between the old man and the cells full of his wounded men. The dwarf's face was grim and ready. "I'm not done either, you withered bastard."
Daniel cracked his neck and stooped to scoop up a length of broken iron bar off the floor, hefting it like he'd have preferred an axe but would make do. Ebony peeled herself out of the wall, one arm wrapped around her cracked ribs, and forced herself upright on legs that didn't want to hold her — empty of mana, running on nothing but spite, but standing.
The old man looked at the three of them — the bleeding healer, the half-frozen boy, the storm-blue dwarf — arrayed against him in the dark of his own dungeon, and he spread his arms wide, and his ancient face split into a smile of genuine, terrible pleasure.
"Finally," he said, with all the sarcasm and all the pride of a monster who has waited a very long time to
be made to try. "Finally. Now we're on equal footing."