Mages path 3, p.30
Mage's Path 3, page 30
The Devourer’s head was wreathed in smoke and flame. He had lost his black iron club and only his right arm was working. He limped toward Jack, bellowing like an injured beast and tracking flames across the roof of the tent as he did.
He stuck his iron, flame-wreathed fist out toward Jack. Jack knew that if that hand got a grip on him the Devourer’s dungeon-eating magic would burrow into his soul like a parasite and suck the life and the power out of him at a stroke. All would have been for nothing.
There was no time to plan, no time to wonder what would happen. In the moment he had left before the Devourer reached him, Jack used a blast of raw power from his mana pool to smash through the barrier spell that held the entrance to the demon realm closed.
Demons rushed into the tent through the opening. The demons hurtled into the small space, colliding with Jack’s monsters and smashing into the Devourer. The Devourer turned his head toward the demon realm entrance, roaring with frustration at being held back from Jack.
Jack leaped backward. He sprang to his feet, preparing a blast of stone magic as he directed his summoned monsters to form a barrier between himself and the Devourer.
The tent was well ablaze now, and through the choking haze and the bright flames it was hard to see what was going on. Jack readied his blast of stone elemental magic and peered through the press. The Devourer was being swamped by the demons!
Jack’s monsters formed an impassable barrier, holding a semi-circle around Jack and smashing the demons back if they tried to come that way. Not caring what they attacked, so long as they attacked something, the demons went for the easier target—the Devourer.
The Devourer’s huge form was suddenly crawling with demons. They didn’t care about the scorching flames of Hellfire that burned them, or about the Devourer’s massive right fist that grabbed and crushed them. For every one that was destroyed, two new ones leaped onto him, tearing at his armor with teeth and claws.
Jack conjured Stone. A wall of rock leaped up next to the Devourer, and Jack swept his hand through the air, directing the wall to slam into him.
The impact sent the Devourer tottering onto his damaged left side. He staggered and fell. Jack leaped forward, taking the opportunity. With all the strength of his potion-boosted limbs, he leaped past his own summoned monsters, grabbed the Devourer’s foot and shoved him toward the demon realm entrance.
Claws, long tongues, and ravenous mouths reached through the entrance and dragged the Devourer in.
Jack’s spear was in his hand and his monsters leaped to his side. He spun, cutting down demons on every side and herding them back toward the entrance with Fire, Water, and Stone spells that blasted from his hands.
On the other side of the entrance, there was a space. Beyond the crowded demons Jack could see the sulfurous yellow sky and the red mountains of the demon realm. The demons had stopped coming in. They were busy with the Devourer for the moment which bought Jack a little time. With a blast of magic and a sweep of his spear, he took out a few more of the demons in the tent. Once the tent was clear of demons, he would use his mana to blast through the entrance and destroy the demon realm as planned.
Suddenly, there was a shout from behind him and he looked over to see Melinda racing into the burning tent, her flaming sword in her hand and her red and black hair plastered with sweat to her forehead. She stabbed her blade through a nearby demon and then leaped forward.
“Jack!” she cried breathlessly. “Is it done?
“Almost!” he said.
He glanced around. Four of his monsters had been killed, but five remained. Jack passed his spear through a demon and hit another with a blast of fire, then glanced around. For the moment, the tent was clear.
“The mage?” he asked.
“Dead,” Melinda said shortly. “I killed him. But Spark is wounded.”
Cold fear cut through Jack’s belly at her words, but there was no time for that. He had to gather the harvested mana and blast the demon realm asunder. He reached for the dungeon aspect of himself and accessed the store.
The mana rushed toward his hands, but it took a moment. There was so much of it that it didn’t leap from his hands with as much ease as a regular spell—he had to stabilize the flow. He caught his breath and forced himself to slowly calm down, and soon found his equilibrium. Fire raged around him and the mana finally flooded toward his hands.
“Noooooo!” screamed a voice. Jack looked toward the tent flap. It was the Black Hand mage!
The mage staggered in, his right hand clutching at his chest and his left extended. A spell crackled around his fingers. His face was pale and drawn and covered in blood.
“I killed you!” Melinda said.
“Apparently not, fool!” the mage cackled. “Your evil plan has been revealed, but you’ll never succeed! Elimination!”
A crackling blue and white spell flared from the mage’s hand. Jack braced for impact—but the spell was not meant for him. The Black Hand mage’s last purpose was not to hurt Jack, but to close the demon realm entrance so that Jack could not destroy it.
The spell flashed toward the entrance to the demon realm. Jack had a last glimpse of the demons crawling over the felled form of the Devourer, and then the entrance knit up and closed. It was as if it had never been.
“I’ve done it!” the Black Hand mage croaked. “You will never destroy the demon realms now!” The Black Hand mage fell forward on his face and lay still. With a wrenching effort, Jack stopped the flow of mana from his dungeon, forcing it back down into storage. The effort made his head spin and black specks dance before his eyes.
He blinked to clear them.
“Let’s get out of here!” he cried to Melinda.
Horror was on her face, but she obeyed. Together, they rushed from the burning tent with Jack’s remaining monsters in tow. As they exited, the tent collapsed in on itself in a heap of burning wood and canvas. There was a whoosh and a shower of flame and sparks rushing up into the sky.
Jack looked around. Nearby, Spark the dragon lay on the ground. His flank was bloodied, and there was a long wound there that oozed ominously. He lay with his head on the ground, breathing heavily.
Jack rushed to his side and dropped to his knees, putting his hands out and cradling his giant head.
“I’m all right,” Spark said to him in his mind, trying to reassure him.
“I don’t think so,” Jack said. The wound was deep and long, and the rocky ground was soaked in blood.
He reached to his belt and found what he was looking for—a potion that he’d noticed earlier called Extreme Healing. He glanced at the bottle. It was big, almost filling his hand, and the liquid inside was a livid green.
“Take this,” Jack said to Spark, and the dragon obediently lifted his head and allowed Jack to pour the thick, glowing green potion down his throat.
He was such a big creature, and the magic that had created him was so unusual, that Jack was worried the potion might not work on him. Relief flooded over Jack as Spark’s wound glowed green. Light ran up and down the edges and glowed from inside it. As he watched, the ragged edges of the wound closed up. There was a last flash of green light and all trace of the terrible wound was gone.
“Jack,” Melinda said, “look down there.”
Not far from the bottom of the hill, a large group of soldiers were gathering. They were organizing themselves into units, blocks of men with shields and spears, and units of archers taking their places behind the spearmen.
“Spark,” Jack said. “How do you feel? Can you make yourself small again?”
The dragon grunted. “I feel exhausted,” he said in Jack’s mind, “but I can make myself small. What will you do?”
“I’ll carry you,” Jack said firmly. “Melinda and I have the power of flight now, so you don’t need to worry about the burden.”
Jack didn’t mention that though they had the power of flight, they might not be able to match Spark’s speed, and speed might be crucial. But there was clearly nothing for it—Spark was no longer in danger, but he was in no fit state to carry Jack and Melinda.
With a rippling wave of light across his body, Spark shrunk himself to the size of a kitten. Jack picked him up and placed him inside his armor. The tiny dragon slipped down into his shirt, settling down with all his dragon’s heat next to Jack’s chest and his tail wrapped around Jack’s shoulders to keep him securely in place.
Together, Jack and Melinda looked down over the hillside. Jack narrowed his eyes and chewed his lip.
“They’ve diverted their troop movements,” he said. “Look over there, it’s one of the transport carriages we saw earlier. They’ve moved their whole army over here to tackle us now. We can use that to our advantage.”
“How?” Melinda said disbelievingly, staring down at what were easily hundreds of soldiers taking up position.
“We need to get back to the Noonlands. Our only hope is to return to the port town where we started, find the machine that generates the Grand portal, and activate it. I’ve still got the key, so there should be no problem doing that.”
“But then what?” she asked. “We’ve failed in our mission, and the demon realms still exist!”
“There’s still the elf’s entrance,” Jack said.
She looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“Don’t you remember? The renegade elf we fought, when we rescued those adventurers. He had opened a gateway into the demon realms. There’s no reason to think that it’s closed between then and now, but we can say almost for certain that the Nightvale mages don’t know anything about it. That’s where we’ll finish the job.”
Her face lit up with sudden hope. “And that’s how this can be turned to our advantage!” she said. “They don’t know what’s happened here, and they’re waiting until they have their full forces gathered before they attack. If we leave here now, they won’t know where we’ve gone for some time.”
“Exactly,” Jack said. “And because we’re not flying on Spark, we can slip off unnoticed and buy ourselves a little time. Come on.”
They jogged away from the burning tent and off to the other side of the hill. Then they activated their wings and flew low to the ground, heading north. After they’d covered some distance, they started flying higher, so they could get a look around.
“That looks like the place,” Jack said, pointing. “See there, where there’s a cluster of lights by the coastline?”
Melinda shaded her eyes with her hand. “Yeah, I think you’re right,” she said. “Come on, let’s get ourselves over there.”
They flew in that general direction. It was dark and gloomy, as it always was in Nightvale, but there seemed no sign of pursuit so far.
“I wish Lachlan had taught me the trick of opening demon realm entrances,” Melinda said with a laugh. “Then there would be no need for any of this.”
Jack chuckled. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Now that the Devourer has been ended, I feel easier in my mind. If we can find this portal machine, that’s the most important thing. Come on, let’s see if I can boost our speed, then let’s get through to the Noonlands and finish what we’ve started.”
Chapter 21
Jack drew on his own mana while he reached for a potion. There was a Speed potion here, but instead of swallowing it he reached out with his magical awareness and absorbed the spell infused in the potion.
The Speed Enhancement was a simple one, not requiring much mana to cast and lasting for a good long time. Jack poured mana from his pool through the spell and applied it to Melinda and himself.
It took immediate effect. Melinda let out a whoop of sheer enjoyment as she lowered her head and folded in her wings, extending her arms out ahead of her like a swimmer. Jack did the same, and together the two of them blasted forward through the air.
The wings on Jack’s back were vectors for the flight magic, not the cause of flight themselves, and so Jack was able to keep them close to his back, so they wouldn’t catch the air. He zoomed forward like a missile, enjoying the feeling of magic coursing through his body as he followed Melinda toward the village where they had first entered Nightvale.
A rare shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds as they approached the village. There were a few ships in the bay still, and a lighthouse sitting on an outthrust limb of land that jutted out into the rough waters. The houses in the village were strange to Jack’s eyes. They were small, squat buildings of gray stone with flat roofs. The roads that ran between them were wide. Carts—this time with horses pulling them—moved slowly up and down the roads.
A set of gleaming metal rails stretched inland from one side of the town, and there was a yard on the outskirts of the town that looked like it served as a drop-off point for this strange method of transport. To Jack’s relief, there did not seem to be any soldiers there.
“It’s as I thought,” he said to Melinda. “They diverted all their troops to the hill once they realized what our true objective was.”
“That doesn’t mean that they’ll stop pursuing us now, though,” she said.
“It’s true. They’ll still want to catch us, I’m sure. Let’s find this portal machine.”
“How are you going to do it?” she asked.
Jack grinned. “The original and best way,” he said, raising a hand and casting Guiding Light.
The spell flickered quickly into life and immediately a silver line appeared, extending from Jack’s hand down to the lighthouse out on the point. “There,” he said, pointing. “It’s in that lighthouse.”
“I can’t see the line,” Melinda said.
Jack raised his eyebrows. “Interesting. Before, the spell had a line that was visible to both of us, now it’s reverted so that only I can see it. The magic must realize our need for stealth.”
They flew across the town and out toward the lighthouse. According to Jack’s spell, the machine was housed in the top room, along with the lamp that would guide ships into the port. As they approached, they heard a shout.
For a moment they could not tell where it was coming from, but then they saw the source. There was a man in the crow’s nest of one of the ships keeping lookout, and he had sighted them. The shout was taken up by the people of the village, and someone rushed out of the door at the bottom of the lighthouse, looking up at Jack and Melinda as they approached.
“A Black Hand mage!” Jack said as he saw the distinctive black robes and gold mask of the figure below. “We’d better get in there and get to work!”
The lighthouse was a tall, white, circular tower, with a big glass-fronted turret ringed by a narrow fenced balcony at the top. They landed on the balcony and soon found the entrance.
“It’s over here,” he said. There was a small, iron-framed doorway on the opposite side from the sea. It was locked, but a swift kick from Jack’s armored foot broke the lock and he and Melinda strode inside.
The Black Hand mage appeared just as they entered. He stuck his head up through the hatchway and glared at them through his gold mask, but he retreated again quickly enough when Melinda turned on him with blazing eyes and sword drawn.
“I don’t want any trouble!” he squeaked.
“Then keep yourself downstairs!” Melinda yelled at him.
“All right! All right!” the mage replied. “But you won’t find anything of use here. The machine has been deactivated and you need a key. I don’t have it!”
“But I do,” Jack muttered.
In the middle of the space there were two objects. One was an enormous, oversized oil lamp with a huge wick. It was lit, but the wick had been retracted to the point where the flame was nothing but a lick of blue. This was close to the glass and would send a bright light out through the darkness when the wick was raised at night.
It was the smaller object next to it that interested Jack. It was a little box of made of red crystal, and several large golden gears and levers whirred promisingly inside. Gold runes gleamed on each face of the crystal in the pale light of Nightvale’s grimy daylight.
It was the Grand portal generator.
Melinda kept an eye on the Black Hand mage—who was now thoroughly intimidated and was not moving—as Jack hurried to the portal machine and pulled out his silver key. He ran a hand across the gold runes and held the key up to them until he found the right one, then slipped it in.
Immediately, the set of options he had been expecting appeared.
Key Status: Unique
Portal Status: Disabled (temporary)
Portal option: Enable portal
Portal option: Disable portal (permanent)
Portal option: Self-Destruct portal (warning: blast radius)
Jack immediately activated the Enable portal option. The gears whirred inside and the crystal glowed, and then away over the water, perhaps a quarter mile from where he stood, Jack saw a welcome sight—the Grand portal, shining bright red over the gray water.
“What’ll we do about him?” Melinda asked, indicating the Black Hand mage who still cowered on the stairs.
Jack thought for a moment, and then he chuckled. “How about we don’t do anything?”
He stooped and picked up the red crystal box with the whirring gears, tucking it under one arm. “Instead of worrying about him, we’ll just take this with us.”
“Weird things might happen if we try to go through carrying the generator,” Melinda said.
“I think so too,” Jack said. “But I don’t plan to take it through. Come on.”
Melinda nodded, and they launched themselves off the edge of the balcony and flew toward the portal. People on the chock-full ships in the bay pointed up at them and cried out, but there were no flying projectiles this time. They flew toward the portal unchallenged.
Once they got near it, Jack climbed up high above the sea and looked around, gazing back at the land.
“You see what I’m seeing?” he said, pointing back.
“No pursuit,” Melinda said with a nod. “Think they’ve given up?”
