I
The inn looked old, worn down, but it was a palace compared to the places we'd lately been lucky enough to shelter in.
The investigation had been dragging on for months. The exhaustion of endless travel blurred much of what I should have remembered.
But Ecstus didn't complain. His voice stayed gentle and calm, serene even when the gravity of the situation seemed to call for a little more feeling.
He went in ahead of me, carefully opening the inn's double wooden doors. The wind swept sand and dust in from the street, inviting us to follow. Two steps behind, I went in too.
My feet were too sore from all the walking to tread lightly on the cramped inn's worn floorboards. About five round wooden tables crowded the small room, almost blocking the way to the counter on the far side, old but remarkably clean.
Ecstus spoke to the attendant before he even reached the counter: two figures in full armor can be frightening, and he knew it.
"Good evening, young man," he said, almost cheerfully, in a voice he had deliberately made to sound old.
The attendant really was young, with the black hair and brown skin common in Azura. He put on a nervous smile, his eyes wary, and launched into a welcome learned by heart.
"Good evening, sirs! Welcome to the finest inn in the region. Did you have a good journey? Feel free to take off your helmets and cool down with an excellent beer," he said, waving one hand toward the stools on this side of the counter.
As we drew closer, the small lamp beneath the counter cast a pale reflection on Ecstus's black armor.
With his usual elegance, he answered, "Unfortunately, our doctrine forbids us from accepting either offer. But I should like to count myself among the customers who can vouch for the finest inn on this remote frontier! To that end, two rooms, please. One for this tired old man, and another for this lovely maiden." He gestured toward me with his right hand while his left slid four silver coins across the counter.
"In your deepest desires, perhaps. That's the only place I'm that maiden you're presenting," I answered, forcing my voice as deep as it would go.
It was our most familiar joke, and the one Ecstus enjoyed most. Fully enclosed in armor, with tunics bearing our order's spear and axe, we gave almost nothing away about our race or gender. So at every new place he introduced me differently, sowing misunderstandings and suspicions that amused him far more than they should have.
Once he had gone so far as to introduce me as an orc under a strict dietary vow: never to eat meat again. This time, though, maybe to prod the young attendant's curiosity, he'd decided to put the image of a beautiful woman in the boy's head.
Ecstus laughed, genuinely, but timed it to drown out my words, and kept the joke going: "Don't mind her, young man. She loves playing these tricks on people who don't know her," he said, leaning closer to the attendant and lowering his voice almost to a whisper. "Shyness, I suspect. You know how pretty women are, don't you?"
The young man's gaze lingered on me before returning to Ecstus. He let out a small laugh.
Ecstus used that moment for his first test. He tapped the back of his gauntlet on the counter twice and, now in his normal speaking tone, asked:
"What's the freshest food you've got here?" An inattentive observer would have thought it a simple, harmless question. But well-trained eyes and ears could have detected the control enchantment woven into the sounds.
"The figs are very fresh. They only just came in. We've also been saving some meat from a goat slaughtered this week."
A very good sign: the enchantment had taken hold. For it to work like that on the first try, the gap in power had to be enormous. Few would have been confident enough even to attempt it. Two more taps of the gauntlet, making the same noise as before. Now would come what Ecstus really wanted to know:
"And our friends from Teon? Roughly how many days ago did they come through?" The question came in the same casual tone as before.
"Four days ago. They stayed one night and left by the south exit around midnight," the attendant answered, as though it were an everyday matter.
Two more taps of the gauntlet against wood polished clean enough to gleam. A renewal of the enchantment, I think, this time just to give us a little longer to talk undisturbed.
"Two wagons, right? How many of them were there? Are you part of it?"
"Two wagons. Four men. All I get is a few supplies, to pretend I saw nothing..."
Ecstus extended his left hand toward the keys hanging on the wall behind the young man, who turned and handed them over.
"You can send a fig and a bit of the goat meat up to our rooms when it's ready," he said, already turning toward the stairs to the second floor.
We hurried upstairs before the awkwardness, shame and confusion could hit him. It helps not to be around when that happens: in an enchanted person's mind, the conversation becomes a blur, a dream that fades on its own if no one presses them to remember.
II
The sun had barely risen above the horizon and the heat was already close to unbearable. Ecstus had gone out after supplies; finding the trail fell to me.
For an hour I'd been combing sand and dirt for four-day-old tracks, my eyes still gummy from a poor night's sleep.
Two full wagons leave clear tracks. But sand keeps little, even where nobody has stepped since.
The pain in my arm didn't help either: it took my focus from time to time and sent me back to the damned demon that had started this whole search, and to the sleepless nights of the past weeks because of it.
The scene came back, and my mind kept replaying what I should have done.
The creature had come out of absolutely nowhere, attacking my left flank: big as a bear, hideous as a bat.
With so little time to react, I'd reinforced my arm to try to absorb the demon's attack. Now that I'd had time to think, I knew I should have used general defense magic. A lesson for next time.
"Found it!" I blurted out when I finally recognized the pattern I'd been looking for.
"Then I got here just in time!" said Ecstus, a large cloth bundle slung over his worn armor. "At least we can't smell the sulfur waiting for us in the Mistlands yet," he went on, with his usual good humor.
We set off at a quick march. It didn't take long for the desert scenery of Azura to fall behind, giving way to a dry forest of brittle grayish branches, the sand yielding to an almost even mix of dirt and ash.
"Shouldn't we have dealt with the innkeeper who's covering for them?" I asked, without much thought.
"He isn't central to the group, just a piece they could easily replace. Then we'd have to find out who had taken his place."
We walked a while longer in silence.
"Sometimes it's better to keep an eye on a mischievous boy and know what he's up to than to frighten him into hiding it from you," he said in a schoolmaster's tone.
After a couple of hours of hard walking, we began to need a wind spell around us.
Sulfur and smoke burned all the way from nose to lungs with every breath. The armor became a dry sauna, sweat streaming over my body and making the heat feel worse, worse even than in the desert.
We couldn't keep up the pursuit from here without spending a little more mana.
Ecstus took that on. The air inside the dome changed: cool and shaded like the air that runs close to the ground deep in a wood, even with a little chill from the sweat evaporating. He had brought the air of his own woodland into that land of sulfur.
In the end, traveling with a thousand-year-old elf who knows how to do almost everything has to be good for something.
I smiled at the thought, trying to stay focused on the tracks. Not that Ecstus could see through my blue helmet, but I wiped the smile off my face as soon as I caught myself.
The end of the day was drawing near, or at least that's what it felt like marching through the thick mist of the region.
Beyond the edge of the dome of cool air, filtered by the magic Ecstus sustained, it wasn't possible to see more than a step ahead or upward.
Even at noon, the valley lay in the half-light of late afternoon. You could tell it was day, but never what time it was.
It was in that hourless half-light that the tracks began lying to us.
Up to the mouth of the valley I'd been spoiled. A full wagon leaves a pair of ruts that a first-week recruit can follow, and on the first stretch of dirt and ash they ran deep, clean, obedient as a column on the march. Then the dead trees opened onto a long strip of packed ground, and the two ruts became six. Then ten. I counted fourteen before I gave up counting.
I crouched at the nearest line and ran the thumb of my gauntlet along the edge of the rut. The soft ash yielded; the rut's edge was worn and rounded.
"Company?" Ecstus asked behind me, in the tone of someone asking whether it's going to rain.
"We've had it. Months of it." I ran my eyes over the ruts crossing, parting, vanishing one by one into the mist. "It's all the same road, used many times. Full wagon in, empty wagon out."
"And which of the trips is ours?"
That was exactly the question.
Ash settles out of the mist all day long. Slowly, a fine dust in no hurry at all. An old rut keeps losing its edge, going shallow, rounded, until it's only a memory of itself on the ground. A new rut cuts sharp. That's what I had to work with: live edge against dead edge, on ground where everything was the same gray, under a light that flattened everything.
I picked the pair that looked liveliest to me and pointed. Ecstus followed without arguing, which I still mistook for agreeing.
Half an hour later, the ground rose into a slab of dark stone, smooth, and my ruts died at the edge of it like a river drying up. I crossed the slab end to end, bent over, reading with my thumb what my eyes could no longer make out in that light. On the other side, dead brush and still ash. No wheel had come down there.
"They didn't come through here," I said, and the words went down bitter.
"Not today," said Ecstus. "But notice: somebody, some day, wanted a road to die on a stone. That's an answer too. Keep it."
We went back. The way back cost the same half hour as the way out and weighed twice as much. My legs were making me pay, my arm throbbed in time with my steps, and I was chewing on all of it in silence when I noticed Ecstus had slowed his own pace to fall in beside me: me, who out of habit marched the same two steps behind him.
"When I was your age," he began, and the sentence was so absurd in the mouth of a thousand-year-old elf that I laughed without meaning to. He carried on over it, satisfied: "I lost nine days on a trail a stream had carried off. Nine. On the tenth, I found out that the thing I was hunting slept just three bends away from my first campfire."
"Is that supposed to console me?"
"It's supposed to teach you that haste is the only trail we leave for free."
To this day I don't know if that story happened or if he made it up right there, tailored to me. With Ecstus, the two things weighed the same.
Back at the fork, I crouched again. Two sets of tracks were still worth following: a pair of deep ruts, sharp-edged, heading south, and a second, narrower pair, recent too, slipping off southwest. I laid the handle of my mace across the first rut and marked with my finger where the other wheel ran. I repeated the measure on the other pair. Different axle widths. Different wagons.
"Ours is this one," I said, thumping my fist on the dirt beside the deep pair. "Wide axle. Deeper ruts than the other one. A heavy wagon, the kind of weight you get with bound people in the back."
Ecstus crouched beside me, and the cool breeze of the dome came down with him, drawn tight around the two of us.
"Well read. Now tell me what the other one is carrying."
I looked at the narrow pair for a while. Supplies. Firewood. Twenty answers came to me, nothing to support any of them.
"I don't know."
"Neither do I," he said, in a satisfied tone that irritated me more than any scolding. "But now the two of us know that we don't know, which already puts us ahead of nearly every hunter who died of being sure."
He stood, shook the ash off his knee and set off along the deeper tracks, as if the lost half hour were a thing you leave on the ground along with the dust.
The mist closed behind us like water behind a boat. I marched for a good while taking that in, the world ending an arm's length away in every direction, until the question came out on its own:
"You've been holding this dome up all afternoon, sir. Couldn't you open it up here?" I turned my hand in a wide circle. "Just enough to see the road all at once, instead of licking the ground rut by rut."
"I could." The tone was light. "And then every creature in the valley would see a hole walking through the mist, the exact size of two fools. It takes a toll on our eyes, but on theirs too." A small pause. "And there's the price. Whatever I spend here, I won't have later."
We walked. The rut went on. At some point he spoke again, in the tone of someone picking up a lesson I hadn't seen begin:
"Tell me something. Why pain?"
"How do you mean?"
"The cult. It serves pain, harvests pain, marches with it into the valley." His gesture took in the whole mist. "Why not fear? Fear is cheaper. Any dark inn produces fear."
I thought about the question as best I could, with my feet aching.
"Because fear passes," I ventured. "The person runs, hides, the body gets tired of being afraid. Pain you can... keep."
"Cultivate," he corrected, slowly, tasting the word before handing it to me. "Pain is a harvest that doesn't depend on the season. And what does that say about what we're going to find up ahead?"
"That the hostages are worth more alive." The answer came out before my stomach understood what it cost. "Alive, and feeling."
Ecstus nodded, and for a good stretch of road neither of us found a reason to speak.
He was the one who picked it up again, softer:
"That's why the order teaches you to ask about the people before asking about the beast."
"Those nights listening to villagers complain about the harvest and the road."
"Exactly. What a region has been feeling tells you the appetite; the appetite tells you the strategy." He pointed his chin at the ground. "The rest is axle width."
"And when we find it?" The question was bigger than the tone I used for it. "You bring down the body, the tenant walks out, looks for another house. In the end, what do we deliver?"
"Time." No hesitation at all, like someone answering with his own name. "A beast without a body can take years to find another that will do. Decades, sometimes. The village that paid the contract sleeps, plants, raises its children, buries its grandparents in the right order. As far as they're concerned, the beast died, and for the lives those people are going to live, it did die." He settled the cloth bundle on his shoulder. "We're among the few in the world who know the list price of all that. I still call it cheap."
"And there's no way to kill it for real."
He took a moment.
"The whole order would tell you there isn't." Another moment. "I've long suspected the flesh is only what the thing wears. That, under the hide and the teeth, a demon is nearly mana in its pure state behaving like a beast. If that's ever proven, boy, it changes everything we do."
"Changes it how?"
"Seal." He let the word hang for a full step. "Sealing something with a body takes a ritual. Materials consumed on the spot, and the right ones for whatever you're binding. That's what defeats people who try, not the mana."
"And if there's no body under the hide, there's no body to bind."
"No material to burn, either." He settled the bundle on his shoulder. "Touch, and close."
I walked a few steps with that.
"So it's easy."
"It's cheap to start." His tone barely changed, but I'd learned to listen for that small difference. "A seal isn't something you cast and forget. You have to sustain it. Stay awake, stay focused, pay the mana every day that dawns. Sleep too deeply, faint, die: it opens."
"Until when?"
"Until." He shrugged, and the gesture was worse than the word. "There's no end date written anywhere. Seal a beast like that, and it's yours to keep."
"And if you're wrong, sir?" The question came out before I'd measured its size. "If there's a body under there, and someone tries anyway without the materials. What happens?"
"Nothing, probably." A small pause. "It fails, and that's it."
The probably stayed with me. If the ritual asks for material and there's no material, something goes in its place. I didn't ask what. I already knew enough not to want him to confirm it.
"And what do the Silvers make of the suspicion?"
"That I've lived too long for my own health." His laugh was sincere. "Maybe they're right."
The trail went down through a dry ford and up again. The deep rut held firm, now with footprints over it, many, all going the same way as we were.
"How many have you done, sir?" I asked. "Hunts like this."
"Like what?"
"Like this." I looked for the word and only found the truth. "The kind you tell about afterward with your voice lowered."
Ecstus walked some ten paces before answering, and I knew him well enough by then to know the delay was a choice. The answer he gave was smaller change:
"I lost count somewhere in the first hundred, and made a point of losing it. Keeping count is the vice of someone who intends to stop."
They say those of his race kept withdrawing into their own forests, century after century, until the world outside became the business of people like me, and there he was, chewing ash with me on a frontier that doesn't show up on any decent map, serving an order he himself had helped to found before anyone I've ever known was born. All of Santius knew it: one of the eighteen who wrote the laws that determined which color each of us wore. I wanted to ask why someone would write the rule about retreat and spend centuries choosing not to follow it. I swallowed the question along with the dust. I called that respect.
But thinking it over, I believe it was fear of the answer.
"I'll tell you what I ask myself," Ecstus said suddenly, as if I'd thought out loud. "Every night before I sleep: if I stop tomorrow, who stumbles over what I leave undone?" He tapped the back of his gauntlet on my shoulder, twice, the same gesture as at the inn's counter. "I've yet to have a night when that question lets me stop."
"If that was the first question of an enchantment," I answered, "the second is going to cost you dearly."
His laugh rang too loud for that place, and even so I caught myself smiling inside the helmet for the second time that day.
"Our maiden learns quickly," he said. "In the next town, I think I'll introduce you as my heiress."
"You don't die."
"A detail that makes the inheritance all the more interesting."
From there on the trail stopped lying. The double rut ran deep and sharp, the footprints over it thickening, and with every step the valley seemed more interested in us: the smell of sulfur a little thicker, the dark deepening shade by shade, the silence holding something back. I tightened the strap of my shield without even noticing I'd tightened it.
"We'll push on into the night. How are you holding up?" Ecstus asked, glancing at my arm, still healing.
"I'm alive, and they say that's a good thing! We can go on."
To spare Ecstus the strain, I sustained the light magic myself. A soft glow hung above our heads. The other light, more focused, I kindled directly in my eyes, enough to make out every wheel mark in the dirt and stay on the wagons' trail.
The two travel lanterns hanging from our belts stayed lit, and their light faded within an arm's length of the mist surrounding the dome.
Even with the reinforcement, my legs were begging for rest. Just a few minutes, a swallow of water, a small meal.
"I need a moment," I said, my voice hoarse from the long silence.
Ecstus just veered off toward a tree on our right and sat down, without another word.
He was already scanning the surrounding woods for anything alive nearby.
He took a jar of sweet figs out of the cloth bundle he carried, opened it, took a few for himself and passed me the jar.
The figs really were fresh: relief for the body, a breather for the mind. Hours of sustaining several spells at once took more of a toll on my head than on my muscles.
I was still turning that over when Ecstus sprang up, his eyes fixed on something to the south.
His eyes glowed a pale blue behind the visor of the black helmet: reinforced sight, reading movement a few hundred paces from there.
"Found them," he said in a whisper, without turning my way.
"About time," I whispered back, pushing more mana into my own eyes until they burned, searching in the direction Ecstus was staring.
It did no good. I wasn't that good at eye reinforcement. All I could do was trust my superior and follow his instructions.
With a wave, Ecstus put out the lights I was sustaining, and the lanterns with them. The light obeyed him, not me. And something about that bothered me.
He began picking his way through the low brush and uneven, branch-strewn ground, using air magic to keep any sound from escaping.
I concentrated and felt the mana running to my muscles, my body bracing for whatever came. I channeled a bit more into the blue metal and felt the armor harden against my skin, heavier, more present, careful not to drain my reserves too soon.
The tracks began to change. I could clearly make out the large paw prints of the demon that had started this whole investigation.
Alongside them were ordinary footprints, and another set of beastlike prints. Another demon was here.
"Two demons of unknown Magnitude and maybe dozens of people! We're going to need help here," I whispered.
"We're already at least a day behind, they have hostages who are very probably at death's door... we have no time or means to get help now," Ecstus said in a serious tone, unusual for the elf.
A hard decision, and it wasn't mine. My chest tightened just weighing the choices. Wait, return with a larger force, wipe out a cult this big and organized, but lose innocent lives. The very people we'd been hired to protect and rescue.
Or act now, risk leaving the cult intact, perhaps even die trying to rescue the hostages.
Ecstus had chosen before I'd finished weighing the options. I swallowed what I was going to say and went after him.
We crept toward the figures, steps quiet and measured among the fallen branches, bodies bent low behind the trees.
The mist was still treacherous. Trees looked like people, and a careless glance could mistake either for the other.
Still at a safe distance, but with a clearer view, we slipped behind a big rock to draw up a plan of action.
The cultists were entering a shallow cave with a small temple carved inside. The two wagons rested side by side near the entrance, and the narrow-axled wagon's load was in plain sight: split firewood, a barrel of oil, sacks of salt, coils of rope and a bale of clean cloths, all in good order. Outside, circles of blood were drawn on the ground with almost artistic care. My stomach turned just from understanding what that meant, even before I saw the rest.
Several cultists were whipping themselves on their knees, the blood from their own backs feeding the lines of the circles. Two of the circles had demons plainly visible at their centers.
The first was an old acquaintance: the same mix of bear and bat, of twisted flesh, that had caught me off guard weeks before. Recognizing it tightened something in my chest, anger and fear fighting for room at the same time.
The second had thick legs, feet like an elephant's, the rest of its body almost humanoid: Second Magnitude, by the look of it.
"I'll work up something large enough to hit both circles. When the chaos starts, let them see you running east. I'll go into the cave and get the hostages out," Ecstus said, looking into my eyes from behind the helmet.
"Ecstus, our laws tell us to fall back and call for help at moments like this!" I said, half ashamed of what was coming out of my mouth, knowing exactly to whom I'd just had the nerve to quote the laws of Santius.
"Don't you dare quote to me what I wrote myself! What is worth more? An innocent life, or letters on a piece of paper? We don't have time to follow the protocol. Not here."
The words were sharp, but his tone was measured, almost sad.
My eyes were drawn to Ecstus's right hand, resting on the pommel of the sword at his waist. It was trembling.
I got control of my breathing, which had gone ragged without my noticing. I gave a small nod, accepting the plan. Everything seemed muffled. I channeled more mana into my muscles in a final preparation for the action to come.
The world around me slowed. I tightened my grip on the leather strap of my shield. My right hand tightened around the war mace. I slowly fed mana into both weapons, which seemed to breathe out a faint, almost imperceptible whitish glow.
Ecstus nodded at me. It was time.
To my astonishment, Ecstus whispered a long incantation. Too low for me to make out the words, but something I'd never heard him do in all my years under his tutelage.
An involuntary shiver answered the incantation, raising every hair on my body. The air thickened, heavy, almost palpable.
The world stopped for a second. For that brief moment, the sounds of the cultists whipping themselves and chanting their worship of what seemed to be pain itself fell silent.
First came the light, red, enormous, forming what remained burned into my vision as an inverted cone that swallowed the whole area where most of the cultists and the two demons were.
A moment later came the sound. Thunderous, terrifying: air expanding at an unnatural speed in the searing heat of the electricity tearing through it.
I bolted from behind the rock toward the east as soon as I understood what had happened. I beat my mace against my shield while the smell of burnt flesh hit me so hard it overwhelmed the sulfur in the mist.
Mist and dust obscured my view. A silhouette rose in front of me, and I struck with the mace. Blood flew onto my visor. I kept running.
I could hear pursuers behind me. I rounded a tree and turned to face whatever was chasing me. Still a lot of them, it seemed.
I got behind the shield and channeled mana into the earth under my feet. The ground packed itself into seven spheres, and they answered my throwing motion, crossing the mist at my pursuers.
I pushed off the edge of one of the holes I'd made and resumed my run east.
Heavy footsteps closed in as I ran between the trees, veering from side to side in the hope of shaking off at least some of them.
Heat rose at my back, too fast. I turned to find a fireball already a hand's breadth from my face. I felt my body burn with the effort of channeling mana so fast into the air around me, and the air held the blow.
The bluish fire swallowed the protective barrier of general defense magic around me. I couldn't feel even the heat of it. I raised my shield just in time to parry another attack. A heavy war hammer cracked against it.
Before me stood a human with legs like an elephant's. His gleaming black eyes betrayed the demon sharing his body. He spun the war hammer and settled into a fighting stance, watching me.
I didn't want to wait, much less trade words. I kept moving: a quick step, the mace coming down from above, and behind it the stones I tore from the ground at my back.
The demon threw himself in a superhuman leap to my left, dodging the blow and countering with a blow of his own. His glowing war hammer swung toward the left side of my helmet.
I put the shield in its way and poured more mana into it, waiting for the impact. The hammer exploded against my defense in a great flash of pale-blue flames, tinted by the sulfur the region breathed. My body burned from channeling mana so quickly.
My already-injured arm gave way. Pain tore a howl out of me.
The demon fed on my pain in that instant, using his free hand to channel a new blue explosion aimed at my chest.
My armor buckled under the impact. I was thrown backward and slammed into a fallen trunk.
Air came in thin, the dented metal biting my ribs at every pull. I poured mana into the metal, chanting the incantation as fast as I could, and the armor unfolded back to its original shape.
I was still coughing, trying to expel the toxic gas from the burnt sulfur I'd breathed in. But there was no time.
The mist in front of me moved wrong: it all ran at me and stopped a few steps away, as if against glass. The world went mute. My ears popped, hurting inside, and my chest rose, empty, as I tried to draw breath. The demon had torn away the air itself around me, and without air, general defense magic can't form.
I stamped down and the earth spat me out of there, a crooked push of stone under my feet. The sulfur-tainted air went down as sweet as fresh water.
When I looked back, I understood what my air was for.
He stood with both hands open at chest height, and the mist for twenty paces around ran into the void he'd opened, winding in a spiral, squeezing, squeezing, until it became a brownish-gray ball the size of an ox that was already glowing inside. He'd torn away my air to make room to compress it all.
He threw it with both hands.
I raised my hands and the ground rose with them: a barrier of earth closed in front of it.
What came next was a punch to the chest of everything around us in that forest. The barrier held and cracked top to bottom in the same instant, and over it passed a tongue of blue fire that boiled the mist well behind me.
The tunic over my armor caught fire, and what was left of it was rags with half an axe embroidered where before there had been a spear and an axe.
I sprang up to the left and struck the freshly raised barrier itself with my mace. The shards flew at the demon and cracked against the defense he threw up in a hurry.
But not all of them: one shard went through it, in through the leather jerkin at his belly and on until it struck a tree farther back with a crack.
Without giving him time to think, I stamped hard on the ground, and the earth gave way and swallowed him. I put the last scrap of strength in my body into it and closed my two hands, one against the other. The earth repeated the movement, crushing and burying the demon completely.
The demon passed through the matter of the ground in his true form: a spirit black as darkness itself, fast as an arrow, which in an instant vanished from my sight into the mist.
My whole body burned, and I knew that burning: I'd burned myself with my own mana in my eagerness to finish the creature. Mild, the kind that fades in days. But a burn is a burn.
And I still had no time. Silhouettes appeared on the horizon, running toward me, before I could even take stock.
More careful with my mana now, I stamped down again. Spikes of stone rose from several angles against my pursuers' feet.
Screams came from their direction. Good sign. I didn't stay to enjoy it.
I kept running flat out to the east, from where I could already hear the great river of lava running down below in the canyon.
I had killed only the host; the demon itself was still out of my reach. The certainty left a bitter taste in my mouth. I shook my head to get rid of the thought.
Exhaustion began to collect its due. My arm, which before had probably only had a cracked bone, was now broken outright. My mana veins stung without respite. I fought the dizziness and the nausea from the burnt sulfur I'd inhaled.
In one last effort, I released mana into the air around me, trying to keep it cool just long enough not to pass out. It didn't hold.
III
I woke to the metallic taste of dried blood and sulfur filling my mouth. It took me longer than I'd have liked to remember where I was: my whole body throbbing in unison, the broken arm pulsing louder than the rest, the internal mana burn still stinging under the skin like an ember that refuses to go out. I couldn't say how much time had passed. I only knew the mist around me was unchanged, and that, somewhere to the east, the silence from before had given way to another sound.
I got up limping, my body protesting at every step. I needed to help him. How many cultists the lightning had killed, how many had followed me, how many I'd shaken off or brought down: impossible to know, and the time I'd spent unconscious had helped no one.
I gathered the courage I had left and ran toward the sounds of the battle.
The way there was longer than I expected, and the closer I got, the clearer it became that this hadn't been a matter of minutes. Whole trees lay fallen across stretches of ground too wide for a brief exchange of blows, the ground churned up in layers, as if the earth had been turned inside out more than once. Ecstus had been fighting for a good while, and I had no idea how much fight he had left.
As I drew near, a tightness grew in my chest before anything appeared in the mist: Ecstus was facing something beyond the remaining cultists. My eyes confirmed it soon after.
Where the circles of blood had been lay just under twenty bodies, some charred by the lightning, others passed out, maybe from some desperate defense. Burning fragments of trees cast a soft blue light on the only two figures still standing amid the chaos. Their duel held the entire clearing in its grip.
Near the mouth of the cave, a small group shrank against the rocks: the hostages, hurt, already freed from their bonds, but trapped there all the same, too paralyzed by fear to even try to run.
Ecstus held a broad sword glowing with heat, shedding sparks like feathers. He stepped forward quickly and brought it down at the creature, which stepped left even faster: blood ran up the seams of his armor against its own weight, climbed the crimson plates to his left palm and shot out in a taut strand as fine as suture thread, too fast for the eye to follow. My face burned in a line, from chin to temple. Nothing had touched me.
The thread met a thin wing of stone feathers that the elf raised between the two in a blink. It scored the surface, veered off to Ecstus's left and lopped off a thick branch farther back.
Ecstus stepped again, putting his whole body into the movement, hurling at the demon the stone feathers that had protected him. The demon raised two fingers, almost bored, and in mid-flight the stones cracked into slivers and fell, dead.
My body was trembling before I understood what I was looking at. The creature was tall, slender, clad in crimson plate armor, a short spear in his hand. Blood ran from every seam of the armor, dripping onto the burnt ground under his feet.
Nobody in the order could describe his face. They knew of the blood that runs without a cut, and they knew of the pain that arrives before the body. Both things were there. Antrazur was there. A legend more than a demon. Some in our order called him King, the only rank Santius itself recognized above the Three Greats. A being so old and so powerful that many no longer even considered him a demon, not even of First Magnitude, but the very incarnation of a feeling:
Of pain.
I wanted to help, shout, run, call for aid, do something, even throw my shield at the demon a few dozen paces away. I couldn't do any of it.
It's all in vain, all of it, all of it, all of it, we're going to die here!
That was all my mind could process. My trembling hands let the shield and mace fall just before my knees gave way and hit the ground. The pain in my body pulsed with joy in the presence of its owner.
Pain, so much pain. What had been almost unbearable became sheer torment. The demon's presence alone pushed the pain past any thought, and my body locked up, curled in on itself.
Even locked like that, I saw Ecstus do the unimaginable. The mist of the whole region dissolved, and the scattered fires with it, when a column of air so dense I could see it came down like a hawk folding its wings. The ground under the demon sank, crushed by the weight the column dumped there.
Taking advantage of his own magic's effect, my master channeled a serpent of near-white flames, which circled him once and hurled itself at the demon.
The heat wave reached me and incinerated the rags of my cloak. Beneath them, my familiar cobalt armor grew painfully hot against my skin, but never hot enough to burn me.
A guffaw came from all sides, through the flames dying away, and the demon was still standing in the same place.
Ecstus backed away two steps and stopped. My skin told me what was coming: the hairs on my arm bristled one by one, answering the same long incantation I had heard behind the rock. The strongest elf I'd ever seen had to ask for that power word by word. And he was asking again.
Antrazur didn't move.
The column of air was still over him, and the weight of his own body, multiplied many times over by the pressure, held him there: the spear planted in the ground like a cane, his whole body leaning on it, the soil sunk in a circle around his feet. I saw in that the only explanation that made sense. My master had pinned that thing to the ground, and now he was going to hit it with everything he still had.
It was the last time that night I felt any hope.
The light came from below this time. Red veins cracked the earth around the demon, running like lightning that had given up on the sky, and everything rose at once: a cage of bolts thick as tree trunks, closing over Antrazur from every side. The glare came through my eyelids. The thunder went on and on, a roar I felt more in my teeth than in my ears.
When I could bear to look again, the demon was holding the storm on the point of his spear. The bolts came down it, obedient, draining to the ground like water from a gutter, and the blood dripping from the crimson armor went up in threads of steam. He was still in the same place, standing at the center of a circle of earth turned to glass.
And then he straightened.
The shoulders came up first, then the head, and the column of air that should have been pinning that thing to the ground opened around him like cloth tearing. The crater stayed where it was, deep, the exact size of the force that had been put on top of him. He stepped out of it, pulled the spear from the earth, rolled his neck from side to side, like someone who'd finally decided to get out of an uncomfortable position.
He could have done that at any point that night.
"Again," he asked.
Ecstus drove his sword into the ground to keep from collapsing. His shoulders heaved with deep breaths; I could see it even from where I lay. The pain in my body pulsed deeper, and for an instant the demon's silhouette seemed sharper against the night.
Antrazur's spear touched the ground, and splinters bristled around it: crooked points, jagged burrs, edges turned the wrong way. The earth took on the texture of his armor and advanced. Before a single stone moved, I felt it coming for my own feet, knew exactly where each point would pierce me. Ecstus stopped them against a stone bear that rose in the blink of an eye.
The elf stepped onto the back of his own bear, and the stone beast crumbled forward, becoming a step. Ecstus leapt up from it, the sword raised over his head.
The demon parried the attack with the shaft of the spear and, in the same movement, drove a punch into the elf's chest. The armor caved under the blow, its edges tearing against the creature's own knuckles, and he pulled his hand back with a rough jerk, taking a thread of blood with it.
I tried to act, to get up, to shout. Nothing. My body wouldn't answer.
My master let go of the broad sword and reached for Antrazur's chest with his palm open. The demon kicked him away before the hand reached him.
Ecstus took off his helmet, flung it to the ground, spat a mouthful of blood in the same direction and smiled at his opponent.
"You really are everything they say," he shouted, and laughed.
"I am much more," Antrazur answered. He raised the spear pointed at the starry sky, and the sky obeyed the wrong way: over the elf's head, the stars turned red and then disappeared.
They fell as blood, all of it at once, the blood of a wound that existed nowhere. It swallowed Ecstus down to the last lock of hair. And I knew, lying there without a drop having touched me: inside that prison, every hand's breadth of skin felt like an open wound.
Antrazur's spear was already flying toward Ecstus, who still floated trapped inside the blood, burning.
Ecstus blew the air from his lungs with mana in it, and the gases expanded all at once, bursting the prison from inside and knocking the spear aside. It went off course by a finger's width, enough to turn a direct hit into a cut across his face, staining the elf's white skin red. What was left of the prison collapsed all at once, a thick red rain onto the churned earth, which darkened where it drank.
Another sharp stab of pain nearly made me dizzy, as though in answer to the mana Antrazur had spent.
The demon opened his arms, like someone stretching.
My pain answered before any light: it moved inside me, pulled, a tide finding its way back. Around the clearing, the wounded who were still breathing groaned all at the same time, and from each body rose a thin thread of red so dark it was almost black, dozens of them, snaking over the churned earth to Antrazur. One just like them rose from my chest. I saw it leave me and couldn't even lift a hand to hold it.
With every thread that arrived, the demon grew sharper. The sharp crimson plates grew more defined, the shoulders widened, the night around him darkened a shade.
Ecstus answered with the ground. The earth began to give way along the edge of a wide circle around Antrazur, glowing bright orange. Stone flowed over stone, and the band of lava widened toward the demon. The heat reached me, the cobalt heating again against my skin.
The ground beside me split before the full wave of heat reached me. Earth and stone rose in the shape of a bird crouched over its brood, and the wings spread as they grew: one came down in front of me, thick as a rampart, the other ran close to the ground until it closed in front of the mouth of the cave, covering the huddled hostages. Behind the wing the air settled, and the cobalt cooled little by little against the skin. I looked for Ecstus over the edge of stone: his eyes stayed fixed on the demon at the center of the ring of lava, and only his shoulders showed the bird's cost, sinking another finger's width.
The lava spread across the ground from the outside in. New bands of stone lit up beyond the first, ever closer to Antrazur's feet. He kept his arms spread, taking in the threads of pain rising from the clearing. When the last band gave way at his feet, the lake lit the clearing like a second dusk. Fallen trees twenty paces from its edge caught fire on their own.
Antrazur walked over it.
Each step killed a circle of lava: the surface darkened beneath his foot, hardened, and he trod on newborn stone. The blood from the armor dripped and hissed. Behind him, the lake died too, the orange retreating in ever thinner veins, until only black stone was left, crackling as it cooled. He came to the edge at the pace of someone coming home. The bird in front of us flowed back into the ground, ordinary earth once more.
It was there that my chest accepted what my eyes had already understood: in a contest of sheer power, the fight could end only one way. Every spell left Ecstus's shoulders lower, and every pulse of my pain left the demon bigger. In the whole night, the only thing Antrazur had bothered to defend himself from was my master's open palm.
The demon opened his hand and made his twisted spear return. It came back faster than sound itself, going through Ecstus's left leg on the way to the hand that called it. The elf fell to his knees at Antrazur's feet.
"You look as though you were made for that position," said the demon, enjoying the scene before him. "Serving me wouldn't be so bad, what do you think? Not on your knees. From inside." And he rested the point of the spear on the elf's head.
I pushed against the ground, trying to get to my knees. Pain cracked down my spine as though it would split in two. I barely raised myself half a hand's breadth before collapsing again.
"I serve the Triad!" Ecstus shouted, opening the ground under the demon's feet. The same earth rose under the elf's good foot and threw him forward, providing the leap his wounded leg could not, until his right palm came to rest on the creature's chest.
Antrazur froze, as though he'd felt something he shouldn't have. He tried to twist free, summoned the earth between them, but only a little rose, loose and crumbling to dust before it could take shape.
Ecstus was passing sentence on them both. A different sentence for each.
"Damnation! What do you think you're doing?" the demon said in fury.
White teeth showed through the blood covering Ecstus's face as he answered:
"We'll be together for a good while, friend. Start treating me better."
The seal was taking hold: the demon was being drawn out of the body he controlled, into a new vessel which, by the look of it, was Ecstus himself.
The seal was still closing when Antrazur screamed, a guttural sound that seemed to come out of the earth itself.
My body, like that of any living thing there that still had pain to feel, contorted at the call of the owner of pain. Screams answered the creature from every side, like wolves howling after the alpha of the pack.
The strength reached him along with the screams, his silhouette sharpening all at once, and in a quick movement he grabbed Ecstus's right wrist, forcing the hand away from his chest. It made no difference.
A laugh I will never forget echoed through the forest, raising the hair on my whole body at once.
"If we're going to be together so long, I'll need food," the demon growled in a voice that seemed to come from inside my own head. Before he'd finished speaking, he dug his nails into the underside of the elf's wrist, with such force that the fingers went through the metal of my master's black armor: the same armor any blacksmith would swear was indestructible, giving way like cloth.
A kind of crimson energy, so dark it was nearly black, flowed from the demon into Ecstus. The elf screamed and grunted in response.
"May The Pain go with you!" said the demon, and then a silver glow came out of Ecstus's palm, a flash that filled the clearing. The seal closed. The body the creature wore dropped slack where it stood.
Ecstus, still on his knees, doubled over, roaring. Blood ran like tears down his face; saliva ran from the corners of his open, screaming mouth. He clawed at his neck, tore away the gorget and flung it far from him, as though that piece of armor were the source of his pain.
The relief came anyway, in the middle of the chaos. I could hardly believe what I'd just seen: his victory over one of the most feared beings in the world.
I sat on the dirt, collecting myself and retrieving the shield and mace lying beside me.
It was only then that I truly noticed them: the four hostages, two couples, nineteen or so by the look of them, already free of their bonds, but huddled near the mouth of the cave. One of the young men held one of the women's hands, the two whispering something I couldn't hear; the other woman cried quietly against the second young man's shoulder while he murmured that it was over, that everything was all right now. I was happy for them. Just for an instant, genuinely happy in a way I hadn't been for days.
It was thinking everything was all right now that killed them.
Fear was the last thing holding those four against the rock, and the fear had ended. A few steps away, the man in black armor who'd fought for them the whole night was on his knees, roaring. One of them got up to do the most human thing there is. The other three followed, like people who'd spent days waiting for permission to help someone.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I didn't even know what to shout yet.
First came the screams. My eyes, which no longer sought the duel, looked for what was causing so much pain.
None of the four reached him. The first woman froze in place some five steps away, like someone hitting a wall that isn't there, and something inside her tore all at once. Her hands went up to her throat to rip her own pain out of her body. Her nails dug deep, digging, searching for something that would ease it, until they broke the skin and kept digging even so. The sound that came out of her wasn't a scream anymore, it was only air escaping where it shouldn't.
I looked away too late.
The young man beside her fell to his knees first, his whole body twisting as if every muscle had decided to tear at the same time. He screamed: a pure sound without a word in it, only raw pain. It lasted long enough for me to think maybe that was all, only the pain passing.
It wasn't. The scream turned into laughter midway, broken, his tear-streaming eyes empty of understanding, as if his mind had decided laughing was the only answer left for that much pain. He collapsed, still laughing, beating his own head against a rock beside him, once, twice, three times, and a fourth, the sound no longer laughter or anything that could be called a human voice.
I didn't look at the other two. I didn't have the courage. I only heard, and it was already too much to carry for the rest of my life.
Four. They were the four we'd been hired to rescue, the same ones who'd brought us here, and in less time than it would take me to get up off the ground, they were four bodies.
"Master... what do I do?" came out first in a whisper. Then in a shout, the same sentence, choked with tears.
"Go! Report to the Silvers what happened here. If anything can be done, they're the ones who'll know," said Ecstus, his voice choked by the pain he was trying to swallow.
"I won't abandon you. You're coming with me!" I struggled to my feet with what strength I had left.
"Stop right there! Couldn't you see what happened here?" the elf shouted. "This curse is contagious, I can't come near anything alive. Go..." He choked on another stab of pain that got through his own reinforcement. "That's an order! Go."
Some surviving cultists, probably the ones I'd shaken off or wounded during the chase, appeared and hurled spells of every kind at Ecstus. Even in that state, he blocked them all and went after them.
"Go, boy, don't be sad. When you come back, I'll still be here to listen to the laments of the lovely maiden who's kept me company all these years," said Ecstus, forcing his voice into the usual joking tone.
Those were the last words I heard from him, and they pulled a smile out of me without my noticing. I turned north and started running, with the sounds of the last skirmishes behind me.
The mist was already settling over the clearing again, gradually covering what the fight had exposed. Ecstus would stay there, grunting in despair, pushing his own reinforcement to the limit to bear what would be unbearable for anyone else. An open-air prison, in the middle of that mist-covered clearing.
Sentenced to live alone with pain no one else could bear, and still having to concentrate on the seal that held a demon whose release would cost countless lives.
That was the thought hammering in my head as I moved away, and it came with another, worse.
I could go back. The order was his, but the legs were mine, and no law of Santius could reach me there to hold me back. I could go back and stay beside my master, and he wouldn't have the strength to stop me. I knew exactly what that would cost, because I'd just watched four people discover the price. Staying beside him meant dying like that, without helping him at all.
So I kept walking. And it was mine, that step, as much as anything I've ever done in my life, and that is why it has never let go of me.
That was when the half-bear, half-bat creature ambushed me out of the shadows again, on the same left flank as the first time.
My body answered before I could hesitate: the same flesh that minutes before had refused to obey now moved on its own, as if it had been waiting for the pain to turn into enough anger to finally give in.
Every mana vein burned in answer to the general defense magic I threw up in fright.
The demon was much bigger than I remembered: it must have fed on that night's pain too. And it was wounded: the whole right side marked with burns, lightning running down the rotten skin.
At that moment I was no longer the one acting. It was my frustration, my regrets, the words stuck in my throat, my weaknesses, my...
Pain.
I acted. I shoved the creature back with my shield, and the fire came out of my own mana through the face of the shield, a sheet of flames that caught the beast's rotten fur; my body burned. I poured into the shield and the mace everything I still had left. The usual whitish glow, the almost imperceptible one, brightened until it passed the point I knew by heart, and the metal gave a warning, a thin wail traveling up through both hands. I didn't stop. My mace swung from right to left, catching the demon in the jaw, and on impact both weapons gave out: the shield split from edge to edge, and the mace head crumpled out of shape as the blow ended in an explosion of blood, flesh, bone and brains.
I was thrown backward. The last thing I saw was the headless creature collapsing, and then everything went dark.
I woke, I don't know how much later. The smell of the creature's rotten flesh and blood was stronger than the sulfur, which I could no longer smell by then.
Only the body was there. Once again I had killed the house and let the tenant walk out, and somewhere in that mist it was already looking for another. I swallowed the anger. Next time, I thought, knowing that, for it, next time was at least a few decades away.
I walked, I don't know how or for how long, but I walked, until I thought my body couldn't go any farther, and then it appeared.
The inn looked old, worn down, but it was a palace compared to the places I'd lately been lucky enough to shelter in.
I shoved its double wooden doors open. I couldn't even feel my feet anymore against the worn floorboards of the cramped inn. I sat at the first of the five tables that crowded the small room, almost blocking the way to the old counter.
I took off my helmet right there and set it on the table, and only then noticed the dried blood covering it.
The young attendant with black hair and brown skin was still staring at me from behind the counter, almost in shock.
I looked straight at him and called out:
"Get me a nice cold beer, please." I paused, on instinct. "Osgar. You can call me Osgar, since I'm going to be a regular."
