Into The Abyss (Demons of Astlan) (16 page)

"No, you're going to have to get rid of me the hard way, asshole.  That lightning trick ain't gonna work on me either.  So you'd just better be prepared for a long fight."  As he spoke the demon marched closer.  As he finished speaking, Tom judged that he was just at the right distance.

"I don't think so," as fast as he could, Tom spun and landed a spinning back kick to the demon's stomach.  The demon moaned in surprise and bent over.  As he bent, Tom quickly repositioned himself.  Breathing as he'd been taught, Tom began a series of quick punches to the other's face.  Using the full force of his body, but keeping his shoulder's fixed, he jabbed as quick and hard as he could at the demons face six times, kiyaing each time.  Shifting his balance, he then executed a right crescent kick.  Unfortunately, because of his leg construction, he didn't coordinate it properly to get it as high as it should go.  He'd intended to hit the guy's chin, instead, Tom's hoof impacted on the demon's shoulder, spinning it around and to the ground. 

Tom backed up as far as he could.  As he did so the other demon slowly got to its feet.  Tom charged through the air.  He was attempting to do the double flying back kick that he'd used so successfully on the dragon.  Unfortunately, he realized as he flew by, this demon wasn't as large as the dragon, and it was a lot more mobile.  The demon had simply seen him coming and leap
t out of the way at the last second.

To his surprise, Tom kept going.  He tried to slow himself down with his wings, but before he could decelerate appreciably, he found himself plowing through soldiers.  Only vaguely did Tom he
ar the screams.  All he could really note in those few seconds, was the thumping of bodies against his hooves and body.  Hardly recognizing what he was seeing through the blood that was spurting everywhere, he came to a stop, about a two hundred feet from where he started.

Standing up dazedly, he unthinkingly looked at the mangled corpses around him.  Uncomprehendingly, he noted calmly that at least one man's head had been popped off.  Some soldiers were missing limbs and many just had their guts hanging out.  How could he have done this?  Slowly he realized that at least some of the damage had come from the fact that they'd been tightly packed and had weapons drawn. 

So in reality, the only ones he'd really mangled, were those in his hooves' path.  The other's had just been jammed aside as he plowed through, and they'd accidentally sliced and diced themselves and their fellows.  Wanting nothing more than to get away from the death he'd caused, Tom took the only open path out, back the way he'd come.  As he emerged from the bewildered and wounded soldiers, he saw the other demon laughing at him.  This was almost too much.  "What the hell is your problem?  It was your soldiers that got creamed!"

"I am laughing at you.  You're nothing but a fool."

Tom was getting annoyed, this jerk was laughing, and now he'd noticed some fool wizard chanting something at the periphery of the clearing made by the soldiers.  Tom couldn't tell what the guy was chanting, but a black cloud seemed to be forming in front of the wizard.  Tom didn't know what the man was doing, but he imagined it wasn't for Tom's benefit.  Angry, and lashing out, Tom once more charged the laughing demon.  Again, the demon was ready, except that this time Tom didn't do quite what was expected.

Instead of trying to physically throw the other demon, or punch it, Tom simply attempted to grab one arm and spin the demon around.  He was simply trying to throw it off balance and make it stumble.  His ploy worked.  The demon stepped aside as Tom charged up and in the process added to the momentum that Tom needed to grab its arm and jerk it off balance and away.  Stumbling on its goat
-like legs the demon accidentally backed into the mumbling wizard and his black cloud, just as Tom had hoped.

However, the results were more than Tom had bargained for.  The demon ran into the wizard, thus throwing off his concentration. 

~

Now
, distracting a wizard in the middle of casting a spell is never a good idea.  If a wizard loses control of a powerful spell, bad things can happen.  This is especially true when the wizard is casting a Cloud of Disintegration, as this one was doing.  Unbeknownst to Tom,  C.o.D's are one of the few spells that can permanently discorporate demons.  It also happens to dissolve anything that gets in its way.  Including casters that lose control of it.

Thus it was that Tom heard only a very short yell, as the cloud expanded and completely engulfed the demon and the wizard.  C.o.D's are very efficient, the victims feel only a momentary instant of infinite pain as their cells are ripped into their component molecules, which are in turn disassociated into their constituent atoms.  At this point the victims feel absolutely nothing as the atoms are stripped of their electrons, and then the protons and neutrons are ripped apart.  Suffice to say, one need not even mention any thought of pain as the nucleons are split into quarks and so on it goes down to the primordial energies and particles which may make up quarks.  Naturally, a theoretical magic student may wonder at what happens to the incredible amounts of binding energy that are released in this occurrence.  Unfortunately, the best theories simply state that this energy goes into feeding the cloud, allowing it to grow.  After all, it takes an awful lot of energy to rip things apart on this scale in the first place.

It is also fairly easy to see that it would be nice to have a wizard controlling said cloud, otherwise it would disintegrate things, grow and eventually eat everything.  Unfortunately, in this case, the controlling wizard was eaten by the cloud.  Now, actually, Lenamare, who was observing from the castle wall, wasn't too concerned.  He wasn't positive, but he was pretty sure that the cloud couldn't get through his wards.  After all, the wards were pure energy to begin with.  Thus at least he and his school would be safe.

Exador, on the other hand, had no such protection.  Therefore, he quickly decided that instead of messing with more demons to fight
Lenamare’s demon, he would do his best to try to get the cloud under control, before it ate his army.  By the time he got close enough to begin work on trying to control it, it had quadrupled its size and had eaten four horses and five soldiers who hadn't realized the problem in time to get away.  Naturally it was also dissolving the earth below it as well.

~

Tom though, didn't really care about the cloud.  He was simply exhausted and sick.  He was just glad that he apparently had no more enemies to fight.  Without waiting around for further orders, Tom took to the air to head back toward the clearing with the wizard in it.  As he flew off,  his last glimpse of the army was of some new big shot wizard waving his hands, and of soldiers finally having the sense to run away from something obviously dangerous.

It took very little time for Tom to return to the clearing.  By the time he was coming down for a landing he was already preparing something nasty to say to the wizard about the timely backup he'd received.  The words died in his mouth as he quickly noticed the state of the clearing. 

The clearing kind of looked like one of those paintings he'd done at a carnival, where he'd squirted paint onto a rotating piece of cardboard.  The main difference was that the clearing was painted mainly in red, with a little purple here and there.  In the center of the clearing lay the wizard, unconscious, obviously suffering from some relatively minor sword wound.  Over the wizard stood the little demon he'd noticed upon arrival.  It seemed to be standing guard over the wizard, and glaring defiantly up at Tom.

"Stay back!"  shouted the little demon as Tom landed a few feet away.

"Why?"  asked Tom.

"
’Cause I'm not going to let you hurt him," said the little demon, with such seriousness and conviction that Tom had to restrain a bit of smile, despite his sour mood.  Apparently, the little demon considered Tom a serious threat to his master and was quite intent on defending the man.  A rather strange thought, actually, Tom decided, why would a demon want to protect its accursed master?

"Why don't you want me to hurt him?" Tom asked in
curiosity.  "If I offed him, you'd be free."  Not that Tom had any desire to kill the wizard, the guy had been a little paranoid and pretentious, but he didn't deserve death.

"Cause I said so, " retorted the little demon.  "Besides, he's the best master I've had in a long
, long time, and I don't want to give him up and get stuck with someone a lot worse.  So you just back off, or I'll make you sorry."  The little demon puffed.

"Oh, " said Tom with what he thought was an amused grin.  The little demon blanched, so Tom figured the grin must not have worked like he'd intended.  "Very well then, I'll just go back to my cave."  The little demon said nothing, it just glared.

Without wasting any more time, Tom visualized his cave and began to will himself back to it.  As the image of the cave began to superimpose itself upon the clearing, he noticed that the little demon wasn't glaring so hard, but was still extremely vigilant.  As he was almost completely back in his cave, he gave the demon a friendly wave and a nod.

Lenamare shut the door to his study and motioned to Jehenna to take a seat.  She sat down in her traditional chair across from Lenamare's desk.  Lenamare moved briskly around his desk and took his seat.  "So, you wanted to speak?"  He asked with a slight smile.

"Yes, this teleportation trap of yours, what's the story."

"Not much actually, simply that anyone trying to teleport within the vicinity of this castle, without the proper password, will end up in a specific location of my choosing, and not theirs."

"Uh huh.  And the bugs you mentioned?"

"Well
...simply that the standard version of the spell puts them in a stasis field.  Unfortunately, because they rematerialize in stasis, they're kind of permanently stuck in it.  I haven't figured out how to get them out of it.  That's all."

"The
y’re stuck in stasis?  Meaning we can't question them?"

"Or do anything to them.  They're in a complete Vergian Time Stasis, so we can't affect them.  Apparently, materialization into frozen time fixes their reality in a different time frame."

"Why would this be?  I mean, people have been doing Vergian Time Stasis' for centuries, and they always get out."

"I'm not sure, my guess is that it has to do with the entry into Skew Timespace.  Remember, teleportation reorients the individual's energies to perfectly align with new space-time coordinates.  If the teleportation aligns them more perfectly with Skew Timespace than the normal stasis spell, then it could be a hell of a lot more difficult to realign them to normal space-time.

"Essentially, the normal spell method of entry allows a small communication channel between our reality and Skew Timespace.   If this entry isn't made, then the communication channel doesn't exist..."

"And so we can't communicate with them in anyway, especially by magic.  The reversal spell can't find them since no path exists between us and them."

"Precisely.  Now if one could undo their teleportation spell, from outside, one might just be able to pull them out of it, the same way they got there."

"But no one knows how to do that, or even if it can be done."  Jehenna concluded.  Lenamare nodded.

"However, " Jehenna said as she realized something, "if there is no communication channel, then light can't pass between here and there.  You couldn't see if anyone was there or not."

"True, but I know where I sent them, and when I go there I can detect the normal warping of space-time that you experience when examining someone trapped in a Vergian Time Stasis.  It also happens to be fairly good size, so I am fairly sure that there are more than one would be
infiltrators there."

"So what do you intend to do about them?"

"I haven't decided yet, there is not much I can do.  For one thing, we don't have a whole lot of time.  These wards aren't going to last indefinitely now that we've lost that student.  Damn him for dying on me."  Lenamare stood up and began to pace around the room, his elegant slippers making a slight whisper as he glided through the deep carpeting.

"Well, what do you plan to do, take them down and start from scratch?"

"No, that would take way to long and Exador would be in and crush us.  I'm thinking of leaving."

"True, with that teleportation trap, we could safely teleport out of here."

"Exactly, as I'd thought.  Except for one problem."

"Problem?"

"Yes, the students and retainers, peasants etc..  I can't take all of them with me in a teleport, and most of them can't teleport  themselves.  We don't have enough people to carry everyone else out."

"Since when did you care about them, let them and the men at arms fend for themselves."  She was gazing at him with a slightly speculative demeanor.

"Normally, yes.  But in order to exact my revenge on Exador, I'm going to have to have Council help, and they frown on School Masters who lose students they're sworn to protect.  So I think, if possible, we should get them out too.  It would make for a much better bargaining position later on, if I still had them."

"Good point.  So how do we get everyone out without Exador knowing about it, and following us?"

"We'll probably have to use the escape tunnels and split up and make our ways separately in small groups to Freehold."

"Right.  And while we're doing this, with the physical shielding nullified so we can get out, Exador comes trashing through, and brings the castle and tunnel down on top of our heads."
  Jehenna shook her head.

"Slight problem."

"Isn't it, though?" She said drily.

"Well, the two of us will just have to think of something, " said
Lenamare as he finally came to rest, leaning on the right hand corner of his desk.

~

Jenn sighed and put her diary down.  What a day, at least it was over, for the moment.  She'd just finished writing up the day's events in her diary after returning from Alvea's quarters.  The poor girl was still practically catatonic over the loss of Rex, even now.  Jenn herself was just numb.  So far the shields continued to hold out, but for how much longer?  Old Ugly had destroyed the offensive attack on the wards, all by himself.  Actually rather impressive; killing three type two demons, a type three, a fairly powerful wizard and somewhere around twenty to thirty soldiers in less than fifteen minutes, overall not to be scorned.  In fact, it just made Jenn all the more nervous about the thing.  Monsters that powerful shouldn't be allowed to wander around freely as much as Lenamare seemed inclined to let them.

Speaking of demon conjuring, she hoped Master Hortwell was all right.  Everyone knew by now that he had been the one to go out and conjure the demon, but he'd never returned.  No one knew what happened to him, and Lenamare wouldn't risk any wizards capable of teleporting out to try and find him.  They had shifted the wards at the prearranged times for him to reenter, but he never had.  She knew the masters were quite worried about it.

Oh well, no use thinking too much on it, it really wasn't worth it; she was powerless to do anything.  All she could hope, as she slowly changed into her nightgown, was that if worst came to worst, she might be able to smuggle of few of the children out, before Exador had his way with them all. 

~

"Come on son, time for your bed now," the soldier patted the boy on the head.  While starting his nightly round about the top of the wall, Herchlion, one of Lenamare’s men at arms ran across the small boy, leaning between two merlons, arms folded on the stone, with his head resting on his arms and gazing intently down at the battlefield where the C.o.D had made the giant hole in the earth. 

"Up with you now," Herchlion said again as the boy was slow to move.  The child slowly pulled back and gazed up at him with a slightly disappointed frown, as if the boy knew Herchlion was all too right, but yet hating to have to leave.  "Come lad, it's too late for you to see anything tonight.  If there's no fighting, mayhaps you can come back another time."  Herchlion smiled knowingly down on the boy.  He knew what it was to gaze out on a battle field, dreaming of the glory.  As a lad, he himself had been much the same way.  Staring in awe at any soldiers he saw, wishing that he too could fight beside them. 

~

The boy got up slowly and made his way hesitantly to the top of the stairs.  He hated to go back to the "Nursery" as he called it.  However, the guard was correct, he certainly couldn't see anything anymore.  The glowing of the
wards lit up the courtyard and the small perimeter outside the wall; however, since it was dark outside of the dome, the glow of the dome prevented him from seeing out. He could no longer see where the demon had fought its battle.  If only he'd been allowed to see it.  But no, kids weren't allowed on the battlements during action.  So he'd had to rely on second hand reports of the mighty exploits of the demon.  He'd hurried up there as soon as the soldiers would let him, hoping to catch a glimpse of where the demon had cast the Cloud of Disintegration on the enemy; he'd seen it, but barely.  The fading sunlight and the distortion of the wards had made it unclear, but there was no mistaking a heavy battleground and the troughs dug by the demons. 
Maybe next time
, he thought,
maybe then I'll get to see him in action.