Chapter 9: Total Annihilation
"Hexagram formation — now!" Yalta shouted. The other five moved to their positions without hesitation. The cross-star reliquaries at their chests blazed white, and the six of them locked into a single structure.
"We walk upon the earth in service to the Maker's will, as those who dwell within his kingdom. Our words and deeds are his words and deeds." The chant rose from all six voices together, and Holy Light descended from above and poured into them, gathered itself, and discharged forward in a great fan-shaped wave. Skeletal mammoths, skeleton soldiers, and Hell's bats were swept out of existence in a single instant.
The Holy Light drove forward until it reached the castle gate, where it faded out some three or four yards short, leaving a wide stretch of cleared ground. Allen had been caught in the middle of it, certain for a moment that he was about to die, but the light passed through him without harm. A weary-looking Bob said, "You're our ally. The priest gave you a protective charm. Holy Light won't hurt you."
Allen let out a breath. The black fog was already gathering again, but nothing moved to attack. The lich had apparently decided there was no point sending more constructs to be destroyed.
Inside the castle, Evan watched from the tower and felt a chill that had nothing to do with his body temperature. If he had been standing in that, he would have been erased just as cleanly as the skeletons. He added a far-sight spell to get a better look at the group — and saw Allen among them. A feeling rose in him that he didn't immediately identify: not quite betrayal, not quite anger, though it carried both. He pressed it down. He thought about what he actually knew: he had done nothing wrong by Nicholas Andrew's standards, and the memories confirmed it. Allen had made his own choice. The anger was understandable, but acting from anger right now was not.
At least he had dismissed everyone before setting his preparations. Allen knew nothing of how the castle was actually arranged.
The group advanced to the gate and stopped at a precise distance — just outside the range that would activate the gargoyles. They knew what they were doing.
Yalta looked up at the roofline. "Nicholas Andrew." His voice carried easily across the gap. "You have attacked the Church repeatedly and killed the Maker's servants without number. Today you answer for it."
"Ha!" Evan let the voice come out wrong — too sharp, too hollow, a lich's laugh. "A pack of lapdogs, come to die. Don't plan on leaving."
Fog rose as he spoke, wraiths moving through it. The Inquisitors' expressions changed. Evan didn't give them time to prepare — he launched the sound attack immediately, a Terror Aura that hit the ear like a blade and immediately produced disorientation, a rising nausea, a sense of wrongness that was hard to locate or resist.
The Inquisitors responded quickly, murmuring the Maker's name and gripping their cross-star reliquaries. A layer of Holy Light steadied around each of them and the worst of the effect receded. Allen had no such protection. The sound hit him like a physical blow — his head rang, blood rushed to his eyes, and for one instant his mind simply stopped. He screamed and ran straight at the castle wall.
He crossed the gargoyles' activation threshold.
Stone eyes opened. The nearest gargoyle dropped on him before anyone could move.
"No —!" The shout came from multiple directions. Too late. The gargoyle's claws came down. Allen had raised his staff and a wisp of black fog was just forming at its tip when his head came apart.
Kencheli's spear and Bogge's chain-flail arrived almost simultaneously and the gargoyle shattered into rubble.
The six remaining Inquisitors said nothing. They went straight through the gate. They hadn't particularly valued Allen, but watching him die in front of them like that — watching a gargoyle kill someone under their protection in seconds — was an affront they couldn't ignore.
More gargoyles dropped from the roofline. They lasted only a few minutes before they were in pieces. At the gate itself, Bogge's chain-flail connected solidly — and to his surprise the gate flew open. It wasn't broken; it simply wasn't barred. Evan had never replaced the crossbar after Dyna cut through it, having decided a long time ago that he wanted enemies inside where he could deal with them.
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The Inquisitors were past wondering about it. They poured into the corridor.
Yalta kept them together. They were facing a lich, and the lich had just killed their guide by manipulation — using a sound attack to break Allen's reason and let the gargoyle do the work. The cleverness of it was infuriating.
They opened a small room and found a bronze cannon sitting at an angle, barrel pointing away from the door. Nothing else of note. Strange collecting habit, they assumed. They moved on.
Behind them, smoke curled up from the floor and three skeletons materialized, one of them carrying a lit torch.
A few steps further and the floor went slick — Grease, laid across the passage. They caught themselves, steadied, and kept moving. This kind of trick on this kind of opponent was almost insulting.
Then doors on either side burst open and gargoyles came out.
These constructs weren't particularly powerful, but they flew, which meant the fight moved in three dimensions rather than two — and the floor was still covered in Grease, which limited the Inquisitors' footwork and took something off their usual speed and precision.
Kencheli settled his weight back, lowered his center, and leveled the spear in a middle guard. No particular ceremony to it — technique was technique in any world, and a lower stance was a more stable one. The spear drove forward on a flat line, Holy Light trailing it. The gargoyle stopped mid-air and cracked apart.
Yalta swept both short lances in a deflecting arc, stepped into a gargoyle's lunge, and turned it aside. The others handled their own in similar fashion — not clean, the Grease costing each of them a stumble or an awkward recovery, but no one went down.
Then three bone-walls rose simultaneously, one across the corridor ahead and one on each side, boxing them in. The gargoyles were still coming. They tried to form the hexagram but the Grease was slowing the repositioning, and Yalta had barely gotten the words out — "Hexagram, now!" — when Kencheli heard something behind him and turned.
Three skeleton soldiers were pushing the bronze cannon toward them down the corridor. One of them was already holding the torch to the fuse.
Kencheli went off the ground without thinking. "Get down!"
The cannon fired.
Shot filled the corridor. Kencheli's Holy Light blazed at maximum but it made no difference — nothing was going to stop that at this range, not Holy Light, not the light chainmail under his coat, not anything. Blood burst from a dozen points across his body, his face shredded, and he was thrown backward into the bone-wall behind him. He did not get up.
The others were caught equally unprepared. The corridor became blood and ruin in an instant. Only Yalta survived it, throwing himself flat the moment the cannon fired, and even then the shot found him — several pellets punching through, the bone-wall behind him blasted apart by the overpressure.
He rolled, got a hand inside his coat, and pulled out a scroll. Tore it open. Space warped around him and he was gone — a teleportation scroll, burning in a single use.
Evan hadn't anticipated that. He stood in the passage and stared at the space where Yalta had been, then let out a slow breath. The Creationist Church didn't scrimp on its Inquisitors. A scroll like that would cost thousands of gold coins.
He walked through what remained of the fight. Bob was still alive — barely, one eye gone, limbs at wrong angles, the remaining eye full of hatred as Evan approached.
"Don't look at me like that. I'm a reasonable person. You came here to kill me. This was self-defense."
Bob spat blood. Speaking was beyond him. A reasonable person. A lich, calling himself a reasonable person. Whatever — he had no strength left for arguments. His one eye held hatred and behind it, trying not to show, fear. He had heard what liches did to souls.
Evan hadn't actually thought about that. He was a lich by accident, and back on Earth he had never killed so much as a chicken. He had adapted to this world's violence more than he'd expected, but he wasn't someone who enjoyed it, and he had no intention of doing anything to Bob's soul.
Bob's breathing became a rattle. Blood frothed at his mouth and nose. His eye went still.
The fear had been for nothing.
Yalta appeared outside the Hell's Projection's boundary, wheezing, his body perforated in several places. His muscles had clenched around the wounds to slow the bleeding. He looked back at the fog-wrapped castle, pulled a healing potion from his coat, and drank it.
Something felt wrong. He turned.
A skeletal figure stood not far away. Almost no flesh remaining — skin pulled tight over bone, eyes burning green.
"Lich!" His mind went blank. His body moved before he'd finished the thought, but he was badly wounded, and he was barely into the motion when the figure let out a sharp laugh. A staff appeared in its hand. Black light poured from it, and though Yalta's Holy Light flared up, it guttered out almost immediately. A faint shape materialized — a shadow that looked exactly like Yalta — and was drawn into the staff.
Yalta's body dropped. It began to decay quickly. The lich's frame, which had been nearly fleshless, filled out visibly.
This was Boniface. He had followed Yalta's group from a distance, but stopped at the Hell's Projection's edge — he had transformed into a lich himself and understood perfectly well what a Hell's Projection did to anyone who entered it uninvited. Another lich inside that boundary would be detected almost immediately.
So he had waited outside.