Soulgatherer, Chapter 6 of 6

The final chapter. Epilogue to follow.

Chapter 6, Tigrit’s Hollow

The plan was for Lizel to get to Okasto’s destination before him, lay her traps, sit back and wait, and then stroll up to him when he was trapped and helpless and finish him off with a fireball. But she quickly realized that this blasted field was twisted and evil, and it might be the worst trap she had yet faced.
Cotton had refused to enter. As they drew near, she had stiffened and started shaking so hard that she almost levitated off the damp grass. The time had finally come, and so Lizel had, with great delicacy, removed Okasto’s hex from Cotton’s mind. The rabbit shook its head like a wet dog, long ears flopping. It was standing on all fours, but the shake was so thorough that it raised itself up onto its hindlegs and shook its forepaws along with its head and whole body. It then returned to the ground and, without looking at Lizel once, loped away, hopping in a rolling motion from back feet to front feet to back feet.
The field was in a valley basin formed by the mountain that Lizel had passed under and tempestuous hills on the other three sides. The border that Cotton would not cross was a swampy copse of trees. Lizel had gone amongst the trees by herself and instantly felt something change. Belatedly, she had pulled out her seashell pendant and cast spells of protection and detection. There didn’t seem to be anything intentionally trying to harm her, and the air seemed safe, or at least not fatal, to breath, but it smelled pretty bad. Corrupt somehow, like rotting plant matter mixed with the heavy musk of animal dens. Every time she stepped in a puddle it seemed to release an additional cloud of foul aroma which then followed in her wake.
The trees formed a kind of tunnel, and she went through. Past the copse (corpse? Her corpse, or Okasto’s? Both or neither?) was a clearing, several acres wide. More or less in the middle of this rocky field there was side by side a pond and a gnarled old tree with no leaves, flowers or fruits of any kind. But she felt a strong wave of corruption emanating from the tree, and she knew in her bones that it had fed and nourished people’s nightmares, sleeping and waking, for many years. The tree was grey. Its flanks were smooth, not dry and flaking like one would expect a tree with no leaves in the middle of summer. It did not seem to be dead at all, just very sick in some way. Its empty branches stabbed up at the sky like talons.
The pond beside the tree was small enough to be walked around or swum across in a few minutes, although the thought of swimming across that body of water made Lizel clench all of her orifices tightly shut in a defensive reflex. The water had a dark, oily sheen that distorted her reflection when she tried to look into it. The face that looked back was forlorn and alien, a Lizel from another dimension. She took three rapid steps back and grabbed at her face. The water had been trying to draw her in, she was sure of it.
She staggered away from the pond, caught hold of herself and then marched briskly until she was several yards away from water and tree and had found a good sized rock to sit on. A rock, inorganic, unsusceptible to corruption and decay, sturdy, dependable. She sat on it and sighed with relief. Apart from the grey tree and brown pond, there were not many remarkable landmarks. The basin dipped and rose in folds from hill range to hill range. The ground around her was cracked, stony soil with the occasional tuft of brown, slimy grass.
After sitting a while and staring at the ground, Lizel rubbed her eyes. The ground was becoming hazy. But it wasn’t her eyesight. A grey mist was seeping up from beneath the earth and covering the ground. She looked up. The sky had become overcast. The sun, although short of noon, was now hidden behind a dark iron wall. It felt like a storm was brewing.
How cliched, she thought. The big storm to go with the big confrontation. Just like something out of a story. But with wizards, such circumstances were cliched for a reason. When you manipulate the fabric of reality with your mind for your job and as a matter of habit, your thoughts and feelings tend to influence your local environment. When she was a student at Ravendish, this effect was somewhat canceled out by the large number of magical users collected into one place, but she had been warned about it in lectures as part of her training, and she had noticed it once she graduated and started moving in circles where she was one of the few or only magical practitioners in the area. Small fires starting spontaneously when she was agitated. Once a button popped off her blouse when she was talking to a beautiful woman, and that had been extremely embarrassing.
But nothing had prepared her for the immensity of what she was feeling now. This area was charged with power. She remembered vague lessons about how the walls between dimensions are thinner in some parts of the world, and here they felt weak enough to poke through with a stick. In addition, her own powers were enhanced by the seashell pendant she had been given by her mysterious task masters. If this was a storm, she was a walking lightning rod. Well, sitting at the moment. Anyway, some kind of a lightning rod.
Oh by the gods, would you stop? she imagined her sister saying, as she did so often at Lizel’s digressions. As she used to do. While she could talk. At the end, her voice was a dry rasp in her throat, almost a hiss, and her lips were too cracked and dry to form words without causing her considerable pain. By the stage her hands were also useless, covered in mounds of bandages, and so she had just lain in bed, unable to communicate, grunting and wheezing, eyes still shockingly vibrant and fresh in such a sere and desiccated face, staring in alternating panic and resignation as the life drained from her.
Soon, Lizel thought. Soon I will have answers, or at least some measure of justice. Or justice be damned, at least I will have some revenge. It will be a start.
The atmosphere was heavy, oppressive, the air burdensome. She scuffed at the dirt with the toe of her boot, and the sound was jarringly loud. It was quiet. She hadn’t realized until now just how quiet it was. She looked around: no animals. No ducks in the pond, no crows on the tree, nor pigeons in the grass. Even the wind seemed incapable of penetrating the lip of the valley. The insects that were a constant background nuisance on the road were disturbingly absent, like parents realizing that their crying child had disappeared.
She scanned the mist - was it growing thicker? - for signs of life, and thought she caught a flicker of movement. She arose from her rock and moved towards it, then stopped abruptly. The thing registered as alarming in some way even before she fully took it in. It was still partly obscured by the mist, since it was lying low on the ground. It was long and wide, as long as a person is tall, but black and shiny and... scaly...
It looked up at her. Oh gods, it was her sister.
“Lizzzzzel,” she said, stretching out a taloned claw. “Look what they did to me.”
Lizel staggered back as if slapped in the face. It can’t be real it can’t be real it can’t be...
She cast dispel illusion. The image flickered for a moment to something even more grotesque with a demon’s face that lacked even Selena’s last vestiges of humanity, then snapped back to how it was before, to the face that had broken Lizel’s heart for weeks every time she looked at it. This couldn’t be her sister. It was in her mind or an imposter or some kind of trick. She knew that. But she couldn’t. She felt the buffeting against her protection from magic spell, and knew she was being fucked with in some way. She gripped the seashell with one hand and extended the other hand to the thing with her sister’s face. A bar of white light, more powerful than anything she had cast in her life, blasted from her open palm and slammed into the thing on the ground, obliterating it. She looked at her hand and then looked at the blackened crater on the ground emanating curls of smoke mixing with the mist.
The magic is strong in this place, she thought. Like lighting a match in a room full of gas. And there is some force here already directing it against me. She looked at the treeline, which seemed more distant all the time. She was tempted to run to it and not stop running for a few hours. She didn’t know if she could even survive here until Okaso arrived. Then she thought about her sister. She went back to her rock, cried softly for a while, and waited.
***
The jug of water was empty and the basin was full of a mixture that was, let’s just say, not only water. Rachael had tried to break the door down twice. The room absolutely stank and she felt worse than she’d ever felt before. She didn’t know how long it had been since Allayard had locked her up, but it was surely more than a few hours. She no longer had a burning, immediate need to go to the Pink, but that was no longer her most immediate issue, because now the Pink was coming and going unbidden, for varying periods. She would be looking up at the wooden slats of her ceiling, and then suddenly everything would be awash in Pink, and she was seeing mountains and trees and people she didn’t know and hideous creatures, and then she would be back in her room again, inches away from the basin, which was not much of an improvement on the creatures.
She was willing to admit that things had gotten away from her a bit.
Permanent Pink-out was a common symptom of overuse of the crystal. Every city block seemed to have one or two sad cases huddled against a wall with a cup or making their way with a staff that they couldn’t even use because there was no room to extend it with all the other people in the way. Some people recovered in time, some never did. If you couldn’t see after a month or two, you were probably stuck like that for good. Well, Rachael wasn’t at that point yet, and while she certainly had a huge problem to deal with now, she could still maintain some kind of functionailty, and she was so scared of getting worse that she had no intention of touching the shit ever again. She’d come to the edge of the flames, and maybe gotten a little singed, but she was going to be ok now.
She heard her apartment door open. “Allayard?” There was a metallic snikt and her bedroom door opened. Allayard was standing there. Her vision flashed pink and for an instant he had tentacles sprouting from his head. He looked at her with a mixture of pity and distaste, as if he didn’t like what he saw. Right back at you, tentacle boy, she thought.
“Rachael,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“About what? I’m a big girl. It was my decision.”
“Not just that. Everything.I don’t know. I have a lot to tell you. And I have to ask you to come with me.”
“Where?”
“Tigrit’s Hollow.”
“Where is that?”
He looked at her for a moment before continuing. “It doesn’t smell good in here. Can we move to the dining room?” He picked up her basin and quickly took it to the latrine to empty and left it in there before sitting at the table.
Rachael picked up her water jug, filled it at the kitchen tap, put it on the table, added a mug and sat down. Allayard started to talk but Rachael lifted a finger for silence, then filled a cup, drank it all, filled a second cup, drained that, filled a third cup just for security and had a courtesy sip of that, then put the cup down and screamed at him, “Why the fuck did you leave me in there so long? I thought I was going to die!”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Really. I was detained. By other wizards. Something big is happening. I tried to keep us out of it, but now we are both very much in the thick of it, I’m afraid. It’s related to the report you were going to write.”
“All right, go on then, explain.”
“So you really don’t remember saying ‘Tigrit’s Hollow’?” Rachael shook her head. “Well,” Allayard said, “I looked into it at Ravendish library, and it’s a place just outside the city with massive thaumic leakage due to weak interdimensional barriers... anyway, it’s a place where the demon lands are especially close to breaking through and there’s a lot of magic about.
“Well, all the things that you’ve been investigating recently, like the abnormalities occurring around the cutlery, they’ve been caused by a man called Derrick Okasto, who works for the Applied Thaumic Research department. He’s basically in charge of the city’s energy grid. Or he was. Apparently, he was siphoning off the city’s power and storing it for himself.”
“How does that explain all the weird shit that’s been going on?” Rachael said.
“To replace the missing energy, Okasto used... demon magic, basically. He tapped into the nether realms and used whatever he took from there. It powered all the machines so that they could function, but with the side effects that you uncovered.”
“We uncovered.”
“Well... I already knew about it.”
“What?”
“If you don’t remember telling me about Tigrit’s Hollow, I guess you also didn’t hear what I said to you when I was here before.”
“I don’t know. Let’s assume not.”
“Ok. Hmm. I and my partner before you came across similar incidents with other products. Also, her sister was affected, so it was personal for her. She actually went through with her investigation...”
“Unlike me?” said Rachael.
“That’s not what I...”
“Because she wasn’t a junkie?”
“Because she was driven. Like I said, it was personal.”
“Ok, go on.”
“She traced all the injuries and other mishaps through the energy sauce and back to Okasto. She didn’t realize he was actually behind it, she just thought that he should know about it since it was his department. When she tried to tell him about it though, he put pressure on Ribbenstock to stonewall her. She tried to get my support.” He stopped talking and looked down at the table.
“And what? You didn’t?”
He looked back up at her. “I didn’t. Okasto got to me first. He offered me money. Access to magical materials. How do you think I get my hands on so much crystal? I just pretended that I had no idea what she was talking about. They tried to get her to go along, but she just stormed out of Golden Shield and then vanished. Soon after that, Okasto vanished, too. I thought that maybe one of them had killed the other, or that they had killed each other.”
“And you didn’t look into it? You didn’t do anything about it?”
“What was I going to do? This is the top levels of Ravendish and the king’s court we are talking about here, Rachael. The most powerful people in the kingdom. What can I do against such people?”
“You can try,” she said. He didn’t say anything.
“And what about me?” she said. “Not only did you not try to help me. You tried to stop me. Tried to keep me fogged up with this shit...” she grabbed the sides of her head to show where all the damage had gone, “...so that I’d be completely useless.”
“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” he said. “You’re not even a wizard. As powerless as I and my partner are, we are giants compared to you. These people could snuff you out without even noticing you.”
“Well you did a terrible job,” she said, “because my brains are half scrambled and now I can’t stop seeing things.”
“Ok,” he said. “I said sorry. I know it’s not enough, maybe nothing can ever be enough to make up for what I’ve done. But I’m going to do whatever I can, starting today. When you told me about Tigrit’s Hollow, I went to Ravendish and made some inquiries. I was intercepted very quickly by wizards I’d never met before. They didn’t identify themselves, but I could tell they were extremely powerful. They told me about Okasto switching clean power for demon power, and that he had fled and was being chased by Lizel. I told them about Tigrit’s Hollow, and they said that it was likely that he was going to take the energy he had stolen there in order to create some especially powerful spell. That area is a magic amplifier. With the amount of energy he had accumulated, there was almost no limit to what he could potentially achieve. However, due to the dimensional fragility of the area, there was also no limit to the danger that he could cause. He could rip open the fabric of reality and infest the world with an unending flood of demonic creatures and chaos.”
Everything flashed pink, and Rachael saw it. Time and space warped, thought itself become alien and unnatural. Rachael gasped and grasped her head in shock.
“So we need to stop him,” Allayard said, “from doing whatever he wants to do, from causing any secondary damage, and to restore the power grid to its natural state and stop everyone getting fucked up from their daily appliances.”
“We? What can I do? Sending me into a magical fight between three wizards...”
“Four.”
“What?”
“I was told that there might be a fourth wizard involved. A senior lecturer from Ravendish. On our side.”
“Ok, four wizards, one of whom has a world-shattering amount of power, in a place where a bunch of demons already have a foot in the door. And you want me to walk into the middle of all that? It would be like, like... throwing a snowman into the middle of a raging furnace to... what would I even be doing there, anyway?”
“You have seen the place,” Allayard said, clearly trying to be patient but wanting to be gallavanting off. From what you said abot your vision, it may have even been in the future. A prophecy. That could be extremely useful in dealing with the coming encounter.”
“I don’t remember what I saw. I don’t even remember having the vision.”
“Nonetheless, you had one, and so you might have another, and I might be there to hear what you say. We will need every possible advantage in dealing with Okasto.”
“Well then why don’t these mysterious wizards help you,” Rachael said.
“I don’t know. They said they can’t get directly involved. No doubt the reason doesn’t bode well for us. Maybe we are walking into a trap, or at least a very dangerous situation. But we have to do something.”
“The fate of the world might depend on it?”
“That’s right.”
“Well then how can I refuse?”
“Ok then,” said Allayard. “Let’s get going.”
“I will need another hit of pink before I go, though,” Rachael said.
Allayard gave her her hit, and then everything went soft and fuzzy, and Rachael had the vague sensation of being guided out of her apartment and onto the street. She walked through the streets of her city and at the same time walked through a confectioner’s twisted wonderland of foreign climes and strange twisting paths. She passed by thousands of people in her own world, faces averted, eyes unseeing, and at the same time passed by creatures who were on another plane of existence but who stopped to look at her with keen, naked interest through eyes that were tunnels into oblivion.
And then, as the intensity of her interior garish monochrome world started to fade, so did the familiarity of the “real” world begin to morph into something unfamiliar, so that for several confusing minutes there was an equilibrium where each world was equally normal, equally strange, each one a part of the other and her a part of both, where she wasn’t even sure who or what she was, and she felt herself drifting apart, unraveling…
When she returned to sensibility, she realized what had seemed so strange. She was in open space for the first time in her life. Allayard was beside her, and there were some people walking by, but there were big wide spaces in between them. Maybe twenty people as far as she could see, and nothing beyond them but... outside. Trees, hills, ground, sky. No crushing crowds. And she realized that that may well have been the appeal of the pink: to be able to roam a landscape with room to breathe.
Her attention finally came back to Allayard, who was sitting near her on the hood of an autocart. When he saw that she had returned to the same planet as him, he stood, walked to the side of the auto, and opened a hatch-like door that swung up and out above the roof of the vehicle, like a chubby person raising their arm to sniff their armpit and see if that odor was indeed coming from them as suspected. Allayad gestured to the interior of the auto with a sweep of the hand not holding the door. “Do hop in,” he said.
Rachael climbed awkwardly inside the autocart and sat in the padded chair. She had never been in an autocart before. In the city, the streets were so clogged with people that there was no point and anyway they were almost impossible for regular people to buy. They were mostly used for moving heavy loads into, out of and around the kingdom, or for transporting famous and important people, although the latter function was generally only used for short distances, since no one wanted to get stuck in traffic and be trapped in a confined space while surrounded by mobs that could become the angry variety at any moment upon realizing what rich git was in the fancy conveyance.
Allayard closed her door, moved around the cart and got in on the other side. There was a panel of buttons in front of his chair. He pressed one of them, and then another. The cart made a soft whining noise. There was also a long stick rising up from the floor. Allayard gripped it and pushed it forward. The car lurched into motion. After a minute or so of experimentation, he had the cart moving more or less smoothly down the road, pushing the stick to the left or right when he wanted the cart to turn.
The miles passed by in a kaleidoscope of natural grandeur. Trees, fields, hills and valleys came in and out of view as the cart wound around paths that lead inexorably towards the forested mountains looming towards the east. Rachael watched in silent, rapt awe, almost stupification.
After many hours of sitting quietly and looking out the window, Rachael whispered, “Why can’t life be like this?”
“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” said Allayard.
Some time and miles passed, and then, “No,” said Rachael with more strength, “I mean, why can’t we? At least some of us? I know there must be people living out here. Farmers, miners and such. Why are we never allowed to leave the city walls if that’s where we start out? It looks like it’s not so dangerous out here as it’s made out to be. It’s like we’re being kept prisoner in there.”
“Not totally inaccurate, I reckon,” said Allayard. “We exist at the king’s pleasure. He wants us to stay, we stay.”
“A real king would treat his people as more than chattel,” Rachael said.
Allayard paused for a moment before continuing. “The kingdom has certainly made some incredible advances in the last century,” he said. “Take this cart, for example. It can transport goods quickly and conveniently. It has lights for driving in the dark. You can adjust the temperature inside the driver’s cabin. And who knows what other abilities it might have. Maybe it can convey your words over long distances so that you can communicate with others far away? I’m afraid I only received a brief training session to cover the cart’s most necessary features for getting to our location. But it is a wonder what can be done with modern technology.”
Even in her still mildly fuddled state, Rachael got the message: people might be listening, people who could report what she said to other people. She wasn’t sure if she cared anymore, but until she was sure, she guessed she should mind her tongue.
Eventually they reached the foothills of the mountains. The road became rougher, the turns tighter, as they ascended. Soon Rachael could see far below her, the cart barely fitting on the road as Allayard moved the driving stick constantly left and right. His face was stern with concentration. Rachael felt pressure building inside her head and held her nose to make her ears pop.
The mountain gradually leveled out to an uneven plateau, and Allayard didn’t need to swerve so much anymore, but the ground became bumpy, joustling them around like dice in a cup.
“What’s that?” Rachael said. Allayard craned his head forward. Rachael could see shapes moving about in the pre-twlight air, as if the mountain itself were moving about in some peculiar way. The cart came closer, and they saw what it was. Piles of rocks and dirt in humanoid form. Ten, maybe twenty.
“Earth elementals,” Allayard said. “Hold on.” He rammed the drive stick forward and aimed straight at the creature directly in their path. “If this doesn’t work, prepare to get out and run,” he said.
“If what doesn’t work?” Rachael said, and then the cart slammed into the elemental. There was a brief shock, as if she’d been thrown against a wall, then the creature in front of them exploded in a shower of rocks and dirt that clattered over the roof. The cart slowed momentarily, but kept going.
Allayard had the drive stick forward as far as it could go, to the point that Rachael worried it might snap in half. The cart built up speed again and then slammed into another elemental, its blank face appearing briefly in the window before shatting against it. And then another. And another. The cart’s motion was becoming ragged and jumpy now, and not just because of the terrain, Rachael thought. The cart was breaking down from the constant impacts. They hit two elementals standing together. One of them broke up, but the other caught only a glancing blow and fell onto the front of the cart. Its legs and one arm were mostly gone. With its remaining hand it pulled itself up to the cart’s front window and started banging on it with its stump. The window cracked into a series of spiderwebs, then shattered. Glass fell into Rachael’s lap.
“Pull back,” she said, putting her hands on his. In his surprise, Allayard didn’t react quickly, but he didn’t resist as Rachael yanked the drive stick back as hard as she could. The elemental flew off the cart, landing several yards ahead of them. She could see in the back facing mirror that there were undamaged elementals shambling towards them. She pushed the stick forward again, aiming the cart towards the elemental they had just removed. It was just getting to its torso when they rammed it, turning it into powder. She sat back and let Allayard take control again, and the cart jittered and shuddered away from them until they were specks in the distance and then out of sight.
When the mountain became steep again, the smoking, groaning cart eventually reached a point where it could go no further. By now the sky was growing dark, and rather than having to make camp on the mountain somewhere, they slept in the cart, which was not entirely uncomfortable, and indeed warm air could be made to blow around the cabin to keep out the nighttime cool of the mountain.
They left the car at dawn and started to climb. Rachael quickly became tired to the point of wanting to give up, and then existed in that condition for several hours more. Finally they reached a pass where they could cross to the other side of the mountain, and then bagan their descent to the glorious view of the sun rising, filling the valley with golden light. Allayard pointed. Rachael saw that there was one part of the valley not touched by the light. The folds of the valley kept it in shadow, and there seemed to be a haze surrounding it, as if the last clouds of the night stubbornly refused to burn away.
Of course, because how could it be otherwise, Allayard said, “That’s where we are heading. Tigrit’s Hollow.”
She was expecting the downward leg of the journey to be easier, but it just gave one part of her legs a rest while wearing out another part, and the effort required was much the same, this time to stop from tumbling down the slope like a ragdoll rather than from trying to climb it.
The sparse shrubs dotting the mountainside turned into occasional trees as they went lower, then thin copses and eventually forest as the ground mercifully leveled off again.
They were making slow progress, getting sweaty and tired, when the trees and tall grass that Rachael was pushing through briefly turned pink, and she realized that she hadn’t had a pink flash for several hours now. Then she had another flash, longer this time. She thought she could make out shapes... people moving around a tree. Then it was gone. She tried to recall what she had seen, and it came back to her.
“Are you all right?” Allayard said, and she realized that she had stopped walking, and the pinkness vanished again.
“I saw something,” she said. “I think maybe I can bring it back. Control it. Hold on a second.”
She tried to recall the image again, and it did indeed come back, and stay there. She mentally surveyed the scene. There was the tree. And there was a pond beside it. And people. It was hard to make out distinguishing features, but she thought some of the people were actually... not human. Creatures of some kind. There was frantic movement, gesturing, grabbing and pulling. Bright lights were flashing from the hands of the human looking people, two men and a woman, but these lights were creating ragged streaks in the air that lingered after the lights vanished. Like they were tearing the air open. Some of those tears were getting bigger. And something was trying to force its way through.
She turned the pink off, and was back in the green of the forest. Through the tangle of the trees and undergrowth, she could dimly make out flashes of light in the distance.
“I think we are close,” she said. “And I think we have to hurry.”
***
McDurgle knew he was on the right track when he heard the screaming.
He had been walking for several hours and was certain that he was now close to the place known as Tigrit’s Hollow. When he heard what sounded like a woman wailing in agony, he cast a spell to give strength to his tired limbs, and ran through the rest of the forest, coming out abruptly into a wide open clearing. It occurred to him just as he passed the last trees that he might be walking into a trap and that he should be careful. He threw himself down on the ground and roll-crawled awkwardly to a nearby boulder.
He found the source of the screaming, and it did indeed seem to be a woman in distress. She was lying on the ground in the fetal position, fists held tight against her face, surrounded by three women who looked identical to each other and similar but not identical to the woman on the ground. They were walking around her in a circle, hands extended out to her like claws, as if they were about to rake her face. They were muttering at her, glaring, spitting. “I’m sorry,” he heard the woman say from the ground. “I’m sorry!”
McDurgle stood up from his boulder. He noted that, while there had been hints of blue sky and sunshine as he walked through the woods, the clearing was quite gray and overcast. He walked towards the group. “Is everything quite all right there, ladies?” he said.
The three standing women all swung their heads towards him with boneless fluidity. Their womanly features melted away to reveal cracked red skin, pointed ears, and cloven hooves. He raised his hand to cast a fireball.
“No!” the woman on the ground screamed. The fireball left his hand, and the woman cast a shield around herself immediately He had half an instant to think that a shield wouldn’t be necessary for a basic fireball that wasn’t even aimed at her, and then the fireball wailed through the air, gathering in size and intensity until it was as big as a cow before striking the demons. “Halgar’s ballsack,” McDurgle cried. A hot heavy hand seemed to slam into his chest and he was knocked to the ground. Chunks of scorched demon fell on and around him. His face felt sunburned.
He climbed back onto his feet, and found that the woman was, too. “And would that be your real face, lassie? Or are you also of the demonic persuasion?”
“No more magic!”
“What?”
“You almost killed both of us just now. Do not cast any more magic unless absolutely necessary, especially not any spells involving the transfer of energy.”
That much was obvious, and he certainly wouldn’t have shot off another fireball any time soon considering what had just happened. But he managed to keep hold of his tongue. “Ok then. And would you answer my question, miss?”
“What question?”
“Are ye a demon?”
“Of course I’m not. Don’t be stupid.”
“No, just the usual female disposition, I see,” said McDurgle. “A demon in human form would attempt to be more agreeable, I suppose.”
“Listen, you old... wait. Do I know you? You’re a professor at Ravendish, aren’t you?”
“Now? I don’t know. I was when you were a mite. Did I teach you?”
“You did. Listen, are you friend or foe of Derrick Okasto?”
“I’m certainly not a friend of his. You could say that...”
“Look, we don’t have much time. Our lives are both in great danger right now. Please try to speak plainly and to the point. What’s your relationship to Okasto?”
“I... he’s doing something bad. I’ve come here to stop him.”
“Ok,” she said, “so have I. We can work together, then. He could arrive here at any moment. He may even be nearby and watching us right now, I don’t know. We have to stop him.”
McDurgle darted his head around, scanning the tree-enclosed horizon, as did she. They were both panting as if from hard exertion, but the land was quiet just now.
“McDurgle, right?” the woman said, still looking around.
“That’s right.”
“I’m Goweren.”
“We’re both a bit of a mouthful for combat situations, are we not? How about Mac and Gow?”
“Gow? I’d rather be killed. Fine, Lizel, then.”
“Bill.”
“Ok, Bill. I’m thinking, if one of us stays here to draw Okasto in, one of us can go back into the forest where we can use magic safely but still see what’s going on. Lie in wait. Then when he appears, we spring the trap.”
“And I suppose I should stay here as the bait, being the gallant male of the species?”
“No,” she said. “Okasto is expecting me. He knows I’ve been following him. If he sees you here, he’ll still be expecting me. But if he just sees me...”
“He has no reason to think that there’s anyone else around. Clever. All right, I’ll head off then. Will you be ok here by yourself?”
“As long as you are really watching me and ready to step in. I certainly feel better than before you arrived.”
“Ok, then.” He returned to the tree-line, often looking back over his shoulder to see if anything was happening. Lizel was just standing there, looking very alone.
So he wasn’t watching where he was going when he bumped into a tree. He was sure he had been moving towards a gap in the forest, but when he turned to look forward again, he saw that the trees right in front of him were close together. He stumbled against them and had trouble standing up again. He was tangled, somehow. The branches were around him. He looked down and saw that the vines were winding themselves around his shins.
“Gretna’s greying sack hairs,” McDurgle said. He was pulled tight against the tree, twisting around awkwardly until he ended up partly facing back towards the hollow. The woman had seen him and started moving towards him when she stopped suddenly.
“Clever indeed,” a man’s voice said, somewhere unseen off to McDurgle’s right. “Ms Goweren has been most clever and resourceful these past few days. An impressive achievement. But all for nothing, I’m afraid.”
“It’s over, Okasto,” Lizel said, voice of iron. “Whatever you were planning to do, I won’t let you do it.”
“Stop me then, woman,” he said. “If you can.”
The branches around McDurgle were becoming alarmingly tight, especially around the breathing bits. Recalling magic he had learned almost a century ago, he delved into the trees, into its roots and fibers. He made a connection with the living sap flowing through the trees, and pulled it back, creating a suction so that it reversed its flow. The trees squeezed him even tighter, till he felt his bones grind against each other and his last breath was jerked from him with a gasp, and then they went limp. As he ripped the limbs and vines from himself, he saw the surrounding trees start to wither, bow and crack.
“I’ll come back for you later when we have the bonfire, lads,” he said to the dead trees and turned back to survey the hollow. Lizel had one hand wrapped around the pendant on her neck, and the other hand was held out towards Okasto, palm forward in the sign for “stop.” Her teeth were bared, eyes squinted towards him. McDurgle squinted himself and saw dozens of thick spears of magical energy flickering at Lizel with the speed and lethality of lightning strikes. Lizel had created a wide round shield around herself, no doubt also fueled by the magical energy seeping out of the very pores of this place. Every time he struck her shield, there was a flash, a shower of sparks and a vicious, coarse sizzling sound, as of something being irreprably damaged.
McDurgle traced those magical strikes back to their source and as he moved forward again into the hollow, he saw the man himself, Derrick Okasto. His feet were braced wide apart, as if he were standing on a sea-tossed ship. He was using both his hands to hold the top of a thick black staff that was planted in the ground in front of him. The lightning was shooting out from the staff towards Lizel.
“Okasto!” McDurgle roared. As Okasto turned to look at him, McDurgle sent a ripple through the ground towards him. Gouts of dirt and rock flew up from the earth as the wavefront sped towards Okasto. The lightning stopped. Okasto swung his right hand at the ground as if flicking water from his fingers. The wavefront on the ground vanished as a wall of soil ten feet tall met it going in the other direction, back towards McDurgle and laced with fire and molten rock. McDurgle flung up a shield just as his whole field of vision was surrounded by earth, and the impact at first made him think he’d been too late, but then he realized it was the impact of the shield being hit as piles of debri flew around him.
He was a dead man if he stayed there too long, he knew it, but he was now half entombed. Not knowing if a boulder was about to land on his head, McDurgle dropped the shield and whipped up a whirlwind to whisk away his burial mound. He saw that Okasto was busy with Lizel again, who was now shining a searing beam of light into Okasto’s face. McDurgle realized how the rhythm of this fight had to go. Okasto was stronger than them, maybe even stronger than both of them combined, but he could only concentrate on one of them at a time. If they could take turns attacking him and give each other time to recover, they might have a chance to catch him off guard.
The air around Okasto turned dark, even darker than the general murkiness of the hollow. The light pouring from Lizel’s hands entered into that darkness and vanished. The beam of light began to change color, from pure white to a dingy gray. Lizel gasped and the skin around her face visibly tightened and started to shrivel. McDurgle kicked his way out of the last sticky clay-like clods of dirt and thrust a spell of magical reflection in the middle of that beam like a knife cutting a taught rope. The two halves of the beam snapped towards Okasto and Lizel. Okasto’s sphere of darkness popped like a bubble, and Lizel fell over backwards as if pushed.
McDurgle’s turn. He Delved into the lake, intending to pull out a wave that he could dump on Okasto’s head, but his delving got stuck in there. As old as McDurgle was, he had been born before the kingdom had been closed off from free travel. He remembered fishing with his father in the countryside. Remembered the line getting stuck and pulling, not knowing what was going to come out. This felt remarkably similar. But he had to get whatever it was out now, because he knew he only had fractions of a second before Okasto would be focused on him again. He strained, his vision shading red as the blood vessels swelled in his brain, and pulled.
From the surface of the lake came a creature of nightmare. Its gigantic pale head emerged first, gallons of water pouring off its dull eyed face and gaping mouth, and then a corpse-white limbless body that kept extending and extending towards the slate gray sky, until it towered high above them. The creature broke free of his Delving and fell out of the water as if in slow motion, crashing to the ground between McDurgle and Okasto, but much closer to Okasto, at least part of its mighty body still hidden in the murky water of the pond. It started to roll and undulate its slimy body, swinging its round head towards where Okasto had been.
McDurgle felt magic being cast, and then saw Okasto climb onto the creature’s back. He stabbed his black staff into the back of the creature’s head. It screeched with pain, but then started to rise up into the air again. Okasto steered it untl it was facing McDurgle, and then started to move forward. Okasto extended one hand out before him, a sign that he was casting a spell. McDurgle broughtup a shield instinctively, although he didn’t know what he was shielding against. He started coughing violently. The air tasted oily and disgusting and was burning his lungs. Okasto had turned the air to poison, and McDurgle has created a shield trapping the poison inside with him. Cursing himself for a fool, he released the shield and tried to stagger away from any further attack while at the same time blowing the air away.
It was becoming difficult to cast magic now. He was exhausted, and the adrenaline of battle was wearing off.
“Cover me,” Lizel called, running towards the pond at what could most charitably be called a fast hobble. Something serious had happened to her.
“Gods above,” McDurgle said, and cast parti colored lights and loud pops before the creature’s face, trying to distract it. It swayed for a moment, and then Okasto pushed forward with his staff, as if driving an autocart, and the creature moved forward and down towards McDurgle, seeming to be slow due to its great size but actually moving disturbingly quickly.
“The hell with it,” McDurgle said, and cast a fireball to hurl at the creature. It exploded in his hands. He screamed as his robes, his whole body it seemed, burst into flames. The giant eel-creature loomed over him, close enough to see Okasto’s grimace of hatred. Struggling to focus through his panic, McDurgle gathered up all the fire on his body, mashed it together into a ball, and hurled it directly into the creature’s eye, which was about the size of a table and was just a few yards from him, now.
The timing was perfect, because McDurgle could sense that Okasto had cast a shield of magic protection about the creature, but it had gotten so close that McDurgle had passed inside of it, and the fireball landed flush on the creature’s eyeball. Instead of continuing straight at him, the giant eel swerved at the last moment, dealing him a glancing blow that still hit him on the side like a bag of wet cement dropped off a roof. He collapsed to the ground, grabbing at his hip.
The eel creature rose back up into the air again, shaking its hideous head, but not enough to dislodge Okasto, who was still perched upon it. McDurgle, burnt and bones shattered, could only look on as the creature composed itself and seemed to be readying itself for another lunge, no doubt driven by Okasto once again. There was nothing more McDurgle could do. He was used up and worn out. He propped himself up on his elbows as best he could, so that he wouldn’t have to face death lying down, and he waited, panting heavily with pain and exertion.
The creature started forward again, then stopped abruptly as if it had slammed into a wall. It started vibrating like a plucked string, and wheeled back towards the pond from which it protruded. McDurgle looked over there and saw Lizel with both arms submerged in the pond. The water was bubbling furiously. The eel let out another piercing scream and thrust itself violently towards the water. McDurgle saw Okasto flung from the eel’s back still many yards up in the air. His flight stopped abruptly as if he had been caught by a giant invisible hand, and his body straightened as he levitated smoothly back down to earth.
The eel landed in the pond with a mighty splash and started thrashing about in the water. Without Okaso to guide it, it did not seem to realize that Lizel was the cause of its distress, and it did not try to target her in its agony. Lizel took her hand out of the water and rose slowly to her feet, backing away. She turned, saw McDurgle and staggered towards him. She looked... old, her skin worn and wrinkled. Just like him, he supposed.
“How did you do that?” McDurgle said, his voice strained with pain.
Her response also sounded labored, coming out in a hoarse whisper. “Holy water,” she said. “I blessed the pond, or at least the part of it close to that massive sea-worm.”
“So that means,” McDurgle started.
“That that monster was demonic,” Lizel finished. They truly were a hair’s breadth away from some infernal plane. Or maybe they were already in it. They turned to face Okasto, who had reached the ground without any apparent harm and was now walking towards them.
“You idiots,” Okasto said. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“Deprived you of your little toy, I see,” Lizel croaked. McDurgle saw that, indeed, Okasto no longer had his staff. It was presumably still in the creature’s head, or somewhere else in the murky depths of the pond.
“That little toy, as you call it, was keeping this place together. Now you’re likely to see some real problems, and not created by someone who cares about being alive and having the world continue to exist, like I do.”
As Okasto spoke, the dim light of the hollow was rapidly draining away, as if day was suddenly turning to night without any of the decent in-between part. Okasto and Lizel flickered sharply in McDurgle’s field of vision, and then melted away and were gone. Gone too was the pond. The tree was still there, though. Not the trees at the edge of the clearing, but that one sick and sickening tree in the middle (the very middle?) of the hollow. It was wreathed in a necrotic white flame, the white of maggots and pus. The yards between McDurgle and the tree stretched out as the tree grew in focus and size, creating an unsettling effect of simultaneously moving towards and away. Distance no longer felt like a measure on a plane. No more length, breadth and width. The tree was sans handle ad surbisum telegrideonbonoth.
McDurgle tried to put a hand to his head to steady his confusion. His hand became an infinite number of hands between the ground where his hand had been propping him up to his forehead, each hand positioned in a perfect arch through the air. He placed his head on one of them, and in the process, several of the other hands passed through his head. Hand and mind briefly joined together to create hand-mind. He felt himself as a five fingered creature, a wriggling starfish made for grasping, pushing, pulling, manipulating. He had feelings as a hand. He wanted to direct his brain for once, make his brain pick up a pencil, make his brain pleasure himself while he, the hand, had wild fantasies about other hands, hands with soft creamy skin and long fingers. He was the mind of his left hand, and he thought with mixed love and resentment about the relationship he had with right hand, the eternal partner who always had pride of place in the partnership as the dominant hand. He dreamed of rising up and taking its place as the master hand. He...
McDurgle shook his head vigorously, felt the hand break loose from his mind and float away. He stopped shaking his head, but the echoes still vibrated around him for a few moments more, like a struck tuning fork. He moved his eyes left and right, tracing streaks of rainbow light across the panorama of the burning tree and the blurred background/foreground. The burning smelled like screaming, the roar of the flames sounded acrid.
In the non-tree murkiness around him, he could see two vague humanoid shapes flailing around, occasionally lit up with bright discharges. The man and the woman. Woman and man. The engine that drives the world. They had driven him here. Where was here? Why was here?
Illusion, he thought, and the letters of the word sprang out of his head in bright, chubby colors expanding and shrinking in size and twisting away like a veil in the wind. “Haha,” he said, and “haha” appeared in the air, trailing away in a different direction.
“Got to cast Dispell Magic,” McDurgle said. The words appeared, but before they went away he grabbed onto them, looked at them, saw what they were trying to tell him. It appeared he had to... Dispel Magic. He fought down a powerful desire to start laughing uncontrollably, because he knew that would crowd the air and he would lose the message in his hands. He looked again: Dispel Magic. Ok.
He attempted to cast the spell. The thoughts and wavelengths he used to connect with the thaumic plane, usually so ordered and pristine in his mind, were now running around like an opened box of puppies. He had to chase each one around, gather it up, and try desperately not to drop it as he chased after the others.
Finally he had what he needed to - he looked at the letters in his hand again - to Dispel Magic. He sent it out into the maelstrom. It appeared in the air just like the words before it, stopping at the point where he was holding “Dispel Magic” and crowding up behind it, creating pressure in his brain to where he thought his head was going to split open. He let go of “Dispel Magic,” and the force of the spell behind it shot it away like a champagne cork, the spell spilling out behind it. The spell fluttered around like a cloud of locusts, eating up the distortions in the air and leaving behind clear vision. He found that he was still sitting on the ground. Lizel and Okasto were staggering around drunkenly, Lizel swatting at the air with shriveled hands, Okasto darting about and... McDurgle ducked as Okasto stretched out a hand and fired a bolt of lightning. It wasn’t aimed at McDurgle, or he didn’t think it was, but it came close.
McDurgle climbed slowly and painfully to his feet. He was so tired. Most of the hollow was still indistinct, except for the tree which was still burning with insanity, but there was a clear space a few yards wide around him and the other two wizards. He felt his thoughts returning somewhat to normal, and he could see Lizel and Okasto also responding to the changes, becoming more aware and precise in their movements.
Okasto looked at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. Who knows what he had seen in that miasma of madness? Lizel and McDurgle hobbled over to each other, held each other up. Okasto looked at them and raised his hand towards them. “You really have been quite a fucking nuisance,” he said, his face twisting into a grimace that bared his teeth. “But once I’m done with you, I will retrieve the reservoir, and my plans will be completed. Nothing has changed.”
“I’m sorry,” Lizel murmured to McDurgle. “I’ve got nothing left.”
“Me neither, lass,” said McDurgle. “We gave it a good try though, eh?”
A black sphere formed around Okasto’s hands. Presumably he had been drawing most of his power from his staff - had he called it a reservoir? - and was still fresh and puissant. McDurgle’s body tensed at the sight of the crackling sphere, anticipating it shooting forth and tearing him to pieces. Time seemed to slow. He saw the sphere leave Okasto’s hands. Heard a woman’s voice say “There!” The sphere hit with a shower of black crackling lightning. McDurgle cringed away from the impact, but realized that once again he had been saved by a shield cast in front of him at the last instant.
Okasto turned to look behind them, and McDurgle and Lizel turned too. There was another man in wizard’s robes, accompanied by a woman in a dress. “Allayard, you bastard,” Lizel said.
Okasto blasted a streak of fire at them, and Allayard held up a hand to meet it with a blast of water. Fire and water continued to roar across the space between them, clashing in the middle with concussive force.
“There’s a rift,” the woman with Allayard screamed. “Push Okasto into the rift. She pointed at a space slightly behind Okasto and off to McDurgle’s left. “Where the ground dips towards that patch of tall weeds.”
“Do it,” Allayard said, his voice thick with strain. “She can see things we can’t!”
McDurgle looked at Lizel. “Got one last push in you?”
“Maybe just one more. You?”
“Maybe.”
They nodded.
“Do it!” the woman screamed. McDurgle screamed, Lizel screamed, and they ran forward, putting their arms around Okasto and their shoulders into his side, McDurgle ducking under Okasto’s arms both to avoid the flames and to favor his own damaged hip. They pushed Okasto back two steps, four, five. He tried to move his arms, but his spell was entangled with Allayard’s now, and if he stopped he would be obliterated by Allayard. So would McDurgle and Lizel, probably.
“You’re right in front of it,” the woman said, moving towards them and pointing frantically. “Push him in and then get out of the way, quickly.”
Okasto’s expression changed from grim effort to sharp surprise, as if someone had just hoisted up his underwear. McDurgle no longer felt any resistance from his pushing, and indeed Okasto was moving backwards away from him. McDurgle grabbed Lizel around the waist and tried to throw her back, but they both just ended up falling backwards onto the stony ground.
Okasto’s eyes were wide now. His whole body was straight and rigid. The skin on his face was taught, as if there were hands on his cheeks pulling them backwards. Fire still flowed from his hands towards Allayard, but his arms were no longer fully extended. His elbows were tucked in at his sides, his forearms at fortyfive degree angles.
“Something has me,” he said, his voice choked with effort of continuing his spell and also trying to resist whatever was behind him in the dimension that McDurgle couldn’t see.
“Somebody help me, please,” Okasto said. “I know I’ve been bad, but at least I was still human. These things would destroy the world. You have to...” He screamed, his body jerking and seeming to fold in on itself in the middle. His fireblast finally stopped, and Allayard’s torrent of water smashed into him. McDurgle had a brief image of Okasto’s body crumpling up into a tube shape and being forced through an invisible mail slot, face, hands and feet all going in last together, and then he was gone. The water roared on for a few moments more, also vanishing into nothing, and then it stopped.
McDurgle saw Allayard collapse, managing to get a hand on the ground to avoid falling flat on his face. The woman helped him to his feet and brought him over to Lizel and McDurgle. Allayard and the woman sat down, Lizel and McDurgle sat up. Within the reality distortion within the hollow, the tree of death still burning nearby, the demonic swamp still bubbling, the four of them sat, and breathed.