Defilers curse, p.19
Defiler's Curse, page 19
part #8 of The Magician's Brother Series
“Sound like Black Magic,” I said.
He shook his head. “Black Magic can bend and break the rules of nature, sure, but Behemoth simply makes his own rules.”
“Why Behemoth?” I asked. I knew that name.
We stepped off the bridge and moved along a path made of cut stone, just as old as everything else. It was perfectly straight, vanishing into the side of the hill, through an archway held up by pure, white columns.
“Not his actual name, of course. Someone tried to learn his real name, once. I believe the man’s brain transformed into carnivorous tentacles.”
I winced. We all did.
“He was summoned for the first time not very far from here, about a mile that way,” he said, gesturing at open ocean, “that was about three thousand years ago.”
“What happened?” Lexi asked, her voice tiny and afraid. I didn’t blame her.
“Well, let’s put it this way, this island? It’s all that’s left of what you would know as Atlantis.”
I staggered and nearly tripped over.
“What?!” I said. “That’s a thing?!”
“Not as you know it, but yes. There isn’t a lot of accurate information, for reasons I think you can probably guess: city, Magic, sunk into the ocean... what wasn’t torn apart and sucked into a dimension of unending horror, anyway.”
“Lovely,” I said.
Orpheus stopped in front of the archway. It looked like the facade of a Greek temple; columns and a pointed top. Again, the carvings had faded, but the marble was still bright.
“Not good,” he said, gesturing at the opening, “the gates are always supposed to be locked. Even when the Maintenance Team is in there. They lock it behind them.”
He moved forwards again and into a roughly-cut passage with uneven floors. There was even less light in there. I switched to Mage Sight; I’d been trying to conserve energy, but there was no helping it, now.
The passage was... odd. I could see the stone alright, but noting beyond it. There didn’t seem to be Magic repelling the Sight, but something sure was. It wound downwards and back on itself, spiralling deeper into the earth. I didn’t like that much. The place seemed too rough-hewn to stay solid, and yet it obviously had.
“If Behemoth is as powerful as you say, how was it imprisoned?” I asked, to break the silence more than anything else.
“The Archons of the day fought it until it was a broken wreck of a thing, at which point they were able to place massive Wards on its mind and body. They wanted to finish it off, but they didn’t know what would happen if they did. It might have been drawn back into its realm, it might have exploded, it might have evaporated and reformed in another part of the world.... they didn’t know, so they bound it.”
“I’d have taken the chance,” Lexi said, “rather than leave something like that lying around!”
“It was not ‘lying around’,” Orpheus shot back, “it was carefully and painstakingly bound, Warded and guarded. As long as you top up and renew the Wards every few hundred years, everything is fine.”
That sounded like a terrible plan to me. I actually agreed with Lexi. When in doubt, kill it with fire; that’s my policy on extra-dimensional, realty-warping horrors.
“Why did nobody tell me about this?” I asked as we passed through our third complete turn downwards.
“Would you have wanted to know?”
I had to think about that.
“Well, I need to know now. How many more of these problems are there?”
“Things the Archons were monitoring? Lots; dozens, certainly. If you’re asking how many things like Behemoth are around... well, if you recognised the name, at all, I think you can guess.”
I sighed.
“One other?” I offered.
He nodded.
“Huh?” Clarke asked.
“Behemoth is from the bible. One of two creatures of primordial chaos. Leviathan is the other,” I explained.
“Not quite what they are, and that’s a problem for another day. But yes, we have two. And so you know, Behemoth is the cuddly one. Pray nobody ever wakes Leviathan.”
“Thanks, Orpheus, I didn’t need to sleep ever again, really.”
He snorted.
“Don’t worry about her. Her Wards are good for another millennium or so. If you want to worry, worry about Tiamat. We don’t even know what that thing is, and those Wards only have a few decades left in them.”
“What’s that, now?”
“Nothing. Here.”
He stopped at a patch of wall in the middle of the corridor and placed a hand on it. Magic pulsed in a very peculiar frequency, and then a chunk of the previously solid rock just vanished as if it had never been there.
“Easy as pie-“
“Look out!” Clarke roared, yanking Orpheus out of the way... which gave the reanimated corpse that would have slammed into him a free run right at me instead.
Chapter 26
Now, I was wearing my Mirror Belt... but it wasn’t on. Thus, the creature barrelled right into me and knocked me over, its teeth clacking shut as it tried to gnaw on me.
Instantly, I could feel that I was in far worse trouble than I’d first thought. This wasn’t any normal Reanimate (if you could call such a thing normal), it was a Host to the Hunger.
The Black Hunger.
Now, leaving aside the imminent threat to life and limb, this was bad news. It almost certainly meant the Snakes were responsible for this, and it definitely meant that things had now become far more complicated.
Because I highly doubted that the Maintenance Team were all Pureborn.
It was all I could do not to scream in terror, and only a supreme effort of mental control prevented the complete panic that would have turned me into a human-shaped explosive.
I really needed to get a handle on that fear. It would be easier if it was irrational, but I actually had been eaten alive once, and no matter what I did, the idea of it happening again simply terrified me.
And that wasn’t my only problem. With the monster so close, I could feel the traces of Black Magic within the creature calling to me. It felt like my Magic was being drawn towards the Black, leaking through the gaps in my well, reaching out; longing.
I trembled as I fought back with everything I had, pushing my Magic back inside my mangled Well before everything could go to hell. Naturally, that left me very little in the way of agency with which to fight off the monster trying to eat me. It wasn’t a good moment.
After what felt like an hour, but couldn’t have been more than a second or two, Clarke kicked the Host in the head with a foot wrapped in kinetic energy. The cranium simply came off and went spinning down the passageway. I frantically covered my mouth and eyes before the resulting fluids could land on me, but I could feel the Magically-saturated blood sink into my jacket.
I threw the body away, then yanked the jacket off as quickly as I could without getting any goop on me before tossing it. I didn’t even dare to use my Amulet for fear of Black Magic contamination.
Before I could even think, much less set anything on fire like I wanted, balls of chemical energy and bolts of lightning started flying through the hole in the wall. Orpheus stepped into the path of the chemical energy and just absorbed it. It ate through his clothes, but barely did more than pink his skin a little before his powers repaired the damage.
The lightning bolt was a little stronger.
A lot stronger, in fact.
And my Aura wasn’t what it once was. Before, I’d have shrugged off that attack and laughed.
This time my Mirror Belt was active, but whoever had cast the damned lightning hadn’t been aiming at anything but an opening, and I’d been right there.
The lightning blasted me off my feet (again), and I slammed into the wall (again), this time with a broken collar bone and third degree burns.
“You alright, Graves?” Clarke asked, stepping between me and our attackers, a shield surrounding him in time to take another chemical attack.
“Yes,” I answered simply, gritting my teeth against the pain long enough to cast a Numbing Spell and then a Flesh Lattice that would knit the bone and mend the burns. Thankfully, my own Affinities were still working well enough that my mangled Aura hadn’t affected my casting speed... yet.
I folded my shirt and tucked my arm into the hem to immobilise it while the Wardens returned fire... literally in Clarke’s case. Well, steam, anyway. Fire and Water in one Spell, not so useful against a reanimated body that couldn’t feel pain, but very useful against a living target.
Orpheus, naturally, worked with chemical energy, but not in any way I’d seen before. He wrapped each tiny bolt of energy in a Dispel, weaved through with immensely complex Spells before sending them off in rapid sequence.
I got to see one of those Spells work, and it was tremendous.
There were three more Hosts. They were hiding in the chamber beyond, using the stately columns holding up the roof as cover. Two men and a woman, none in a good state, clothes and flesh torn; one of the men’s guts had spilled, not that it seemed to bother him much.
They were laughing, like the ones in Algeria had, and I shuddered at the sound. It was just... insane, that laugh. No humanity, no life. A cold, hungry laugh; that of a starving man gone so mad with need that he leaps on the first sight of flesh... no matter what it belonged to.
One of them stepped from cover to release a bolt of lightning, but that exposed him and Orpheus’ attacks struck home. Half a dozen over the course of maybe a second; they hit like hammer-blows, tearing the shield apart before sinking into the flesh underneath.
It was... beautiful. Elegant and conservative, but also brutally effective.
One would have done the job. Two would have been overkill for five men the size of the Host.
The Dispel element was the shield killer, but it also greatly slowed any attempt of the target to counter the attack, if they were capable at all. It would have been a matter of seconds. I might have been able to fight that sort of Spell if I knew it was coming and what it did.
Might.
Three of the bolts sank into the Host’s arm and chest, and that was all it took.
The Spells unpacked faster than the mind could follow before travelling up the Host’s nerves and straight to the brain, where the Constructs took effect.
Every nerve cell in the Host’s brain, every one, died. Depolarised, cell membranes disintegrated, proteins denatured, dead. Only glop was left; it was that effective.
I couldn’t help but be impressed.
Not to be outdone, I crafted a Matter Manipulation Spell and sent a quartet of them into the second male Host. He was missing an arm, but I’m sure he drew comfort from the fact that it hadn’t gone very far. The woman had it in her hand. She was apparently a snacker...
Two of my Spells burst through the monster’s shield and sank into his body, where the Constructs sought out the skull and converted the liquid water they found there into gaseous water. A simple matter of atomic vibration... but it sure made a mess.
Pop!
Splat.
Vomit.
Couldn’t help myself. The man’s head exploded. I hadn’t been expecting that, though I probably should have. Physics was physics, after all.
I straightened up to see Orpheus shaking his head, grinning. It reminded me of his matriarch in a manner I found simultaneously annoying and comforting; it was confusing.
“Yes, I know,” I grumbled before reaching into my satchel for a bottle of water which I used to swill my mouth out.
He snorted.
“You were very nearly impressive for a second, there.”
“A second of nearly-impressive is actually a new record for me.”
He lazily threw another barrage of his Spells, ending the engagement in our favour as the last Host fell over, the manic light gone from her eyes, her grizzly meal falling from her hand.
No, I wasn’t going to throw up again...
I threw up again.
“Why do you even eat before you come out?” Orpheus asked.
“I don’t, normally! I was asleep and expecting no trouble until breakfast!”
Clarke rolled his eyes and led the way into the chamber, shotgun out front, tracing it back and forth. It was a mean-looking thing, black and huge; automatic, with a drum magazine. Cassandra would have killed for one, but they were so illegal. Just the ammunition (something called a slug) would have the authorities in a tizzy.
The room where the Hosts had made their final stand seemed too large for something so far underground. The pillars were too skinny for my comfort, more like the columns made when stalactites and stalagmites met, rather than any sort of man-made, structural brace.
Orpheus knelt next to the woman’s body and grimaced as he used his Will to push her hair away from her face. He didn’t want to touch her with his hands, no doubt.
“Christine Cho. She was two hundred years old and had been doing this all her life,” he said, his voice a growl. “I knew her.”
“Sorry,” I said gently, patting his shoulder. I didn’t know what else to say. I’d gone through something similar with regards to a friend showing up with a sudden craving for exotic proteins; it wasn’t pleasant.
He nodded, then stood before setting fire to the bodies. Even the poor soul in the corridor (and out of sight) caught fire and burned to ash in moments.
“Normally I’d just desiccate the flesh with a chemical Spell, but I’m not taking chances.”
“Preaching to the choir, I’d burn this whole place down,” Clarke said as he made his way to the far end of the chamber, where there was a circle picked out in silver on a perfectly smooth bit of floor. At the centre was a smaller circle, this one of some sort of transparent crystal. It glowed softly, the light pulsing gently. Beneath it was darkness, only slightly lit by the energy. I couldn’t see much.
I frowned as I looked the crystal over. The energy pulses were speeding up. Almost imperceptibly, but still. And the light itself was changing, too. It was already considerably less white than the first time I’d seen it. A dark red was seeping into it.
Orpheus ran ahead and stood on the crystal. His Magic slipped into it and it glowed brighter.
“What the hell?!” he hissed. “This is impossible!”
“What?” I asked. “What’s happening?”
“Behemoth. It’s waking up. This makes no sense, the damned Wards are still active!”
He poured more power into the crystal.
Then I felt it.
“Stop! Stop!” I said, darting forwards.
“I can’t. If I do, it’ll wake all the way.”
“You don’t get it! The Wards are waking it. Putting more power into them is just speeding the process!”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, but he did pull back.
“Someone’s put a new construct into the Wards. It’s Black Magic, I can feel it. It’s inverting the effects of the containment Spells. The more power you put in...”
“Oh damn me... but how? That would require intimate knowledge of the damned things, and that’s Grandmother or it’s nobody...” Orpheus said, going pale.
“Not really the pressing issue, just now,” I said. “How do we stop it?”
The chamber began to tremble.
Crack!
The crystal.
Orpheus met my eyes.
We looked down. Deep beneath our feet, the gloom on the other side of the crystal was broken by the opening of a glowing, red eye. One about the diameter of a bus.
“Shit,” I managed.
Orpheus worked so quickly that I missed most of it. He reached back into the Wards and pulled apart certain components, making sure to leave what few containment constructs remained functional.
“Ross, the Jammers are down; open a Portal!”
Lexi, who had been inching her way towards the door in preparation to bolt, swallowed and cast.
“Move!” Orpheus said once it was open.
Didn’t need to tell me twice.
We emerged back on the circle at the edge of the island.
“Not far enough!” Orpheus said as the ground began to shake. There was a tremendous, wrenching crunch, and the hill started to shift.
“Twenty miles south, fifteen miles west, one hundred metres above sea level!” Orpheus snapped.
Lexi obeyed and opened another Portal, which we darted through again.
She bodged it that time, though, and I had a two-metre drop onto a slope that I barely saved myself from rolling down. The others landed perfectly, incidentally.
Orpheus cast another Spell, something Earth-based, a locator of some sort, I thought, then he started walking. I scrambled to my feet and followed. We were near the upper edge of what looked like a green crater. There were farms on the west side of the inner slopes, along with a sleepy-looking village, with some small lakes towards the centre.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Corvo Island. In the Azores,” Orpheus replied as he led us to the ridge. He started looking towards the north, and I adjusted my Mage Sight so I could as well.
“Here,” he said, sending a Mental Probe my way. “You can’t see the Prison without the proper construct.”
I let him in and I saw through his eyes.
The little island was trembling harder and harder. It continued to do so until the hill split in two.
I was horribly reminded of an egg cracking open, but what came out was far more dreadful than anything Mother Nature had ever produced.
The emergence stared with two long, arachnid legs, each tipped with three claws. They thrust out of the rock, spraying pieces of hill everywhere. The crack widened and those legs just kept coming and coming and coming, segment after segment, until there were more than three hundred metres of the things.
