IGS #4, Chapter 59

Leonis

Shock, amazement, hope, awe.

Leonis backed away from the bier as the older man scowled at him, then focused his gaze at the fight taking place around the Archspire.

“I—we’re in the Tomb of Sadness, and—”

“Shove it, lad.” Plassus inhaled deeply and placed his hand over his heart. “Ah, but that’s better. Well then. Let’s get this sorted, shall we?”

A great gout of lava burst into the air, a thick, glutinous vertical wave that blazed as it fell toward them, one of the red triangular constructs spinning back and away from it to avoid being immolated.

Leonis jerked back, but he didn’t have time to react. To tackle Plassus off the bier. But instead of collapsing all over them, the great lurid curvature just froze in the air, to hang still and suspended above them both.

“Interesting, interesting.” Plassus was ignoring the lava to gaze, eyes unfocused, into the near distance. “Huh. Well. Enough of that.” He extended one large knuckled hand and slowly closed it as if squeezing an apple into pulp. “Because I. Have. Dominion.”

Leonis’s Heart was guttered, but even so he could feel the very air shudder and crack. It felt nothing so much as if Plassus had stomped on thick ice that lay sheeted over a lake; the ice buckled, shattered, and for a moment the clash of wills was tangible as the three constructs backed away from Xandera to focus on the Charnel Duke.

Who grimaced as he found the task more challenging than he’d anticipated. With slow, deliberate movements he swung his legs off the bier, rose to standing beside it, and squared his shoulders. “How many of the bastards are there?”

The blockheads were pressing in close once more, scores of them in a great ring, just barely visible in the Silver-mana light.

“There are—”

“Rhetorical question,” rasped the older man. “It doesn’t matter.” He grimaced, clenched his hand into a fist, and wrenched it to the side.

The effect was immediate: the three flying constructs dropped to the ground, and mana was suddenly available to Leonis, who swept the Silver into his reservoir and Ignited, instantly summoning his cordon of Nezzars, one in his fist, and clothing himself in his bulky gold armor.

“The gods damn it,” Jova said from one side, and then levered herself into view, her body already mending. Her eyes burned feverishly in the gloom, but widened when they locked on Plassus. “You.”

“Aye, me.” Plassus dusted his hands off. “Now. Who the hell are these bastards, and where are we?”

Having lost Dominion meant the constructs could no longer unleash their ranged attacks, it seemed, but—

Great swathes of virulent crimson light flared from scores of blockheads, sweeping in from all sides. Only to slow to a glacial crawl as they hit Plassus’ protective sphere, so that they hung there, perilously beautiful and eerie to the eye.

“Tomb of Sadness,” said Leonis. “I have to check on my friends.” And he ran low to where he’d last seen Kelona. Heard Jova explaining the situation briskly to Plassus, but paid that no heed.

Kelona.

She lay bifurcated upon the floor upon a lake of gleaming blood turned black by the poor light. Cut from left hip to just under the right ribs, the two parts separated just enough for organs to glisten in the interstice. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted, her face turned to one side.

Leonis grimaced as a shaft of remorse, pain, and dull horror slid into his breast. For a single moment he gazed upon the corpse, knowing the sight would be seared into his memory forevermore, and then he shoved off the bier to lope around a half-dozen more in search of Druanna.

Xandera reared up on her massive coils, and now, left alone for a moment, she took the opportunity to fashion a great trident from lava, extending it with both hands, shaping it with a pass of her fingers, so that in seconds she wielded a weapon as tall as Leonis, its three pronged tips barbed and burning white-hot.

The sight reminded Leonis of Scorio, which only compounded his pain.

Druanna.

She’d been clipped. A large segment of her brow had been shorn clean off, along with a clean cut through her right forearm. Leonis couldn’t help but grimace again at the sight, her body tumbled down bonelessly, limbs tangled, wounds blackened, the smell of cooked flesh or something worse in the air.

“Damn it,” said Leonis, backing away.

“All of you,” roared Plassus. “However many you are. Get over here. Inside my bubble. Now that I’ve ended my nap I’ll suffer no more of you to die.”

Leonis had passed outside Plassus’ sphere—easily demarcated by the numerous static crimson flashes and the great perpetually falling column of lava. He glanced around, taking in the battlefield. Xandera had done extensive damage to numerous biers around the Archspire—several were smothered under cooling lava, their occupants no doubt truly dead at last.

Should he just start hitting plaques? Wake everyone up? No—he’d leave that decision to Plassus. It’d be just his luck to wake up an Imperator known by everyone but him as a villain.

Crouching low, he bit his lower lip and glanced about once more. The blockheads weren’t attacking; Plassus’ Dominion and ability to soak their attacks no doubt had them momentarily unsure. What were the Charnel Duke’s powers again? Lianshi had reviewed them at length with Scorio back at the Fury Spires before that ridiculous duel. He could march companions at tremendous speeds, could come up with ever-better plans on how to fight a foe, and what was his Flame Vault power?

A concussive wave passed through reality.

The stone floor and vast columns and distant ceiling didn’t shake, but it sure as hell felt like it. The candle-flames streamed, however, all of them suddenly elongating to lie near horizontal as if blasted by a hurricane wind, yet somehow not snuffing out.

Shouts came from his companions. Leonis clutched at the closest bier and tried not to fall over. The floor surged and swayed under his feet, even as he knew it stayed rock still. He felt nauseous, overwhelmed as wave after wave—

“Enough of that,” rasped Leonis, and the man’s Dominion exerted itself anew, causing the violent sensations to cease.

“What…” Jova was still hunched over from her tremendous wound. “What was that?”

“Hell if I know,” said Plassus, staring up and to the side, as if at some invisible source only he could detect. “Never felt the like.” His frown carved deep lines about his mouth, corrugated his brow. “It’s not stopping, either. What in the actual damnation?”

“Look,” said Nyrix, “they’re pulling back—they’ve… they’re gone.”

The blockheads. They’d been milling around as if trying to muster the courage to attack, or debating the wisdom, but now Leonis couldn’t see them at all.

“Forget them,” said Plassus in annoyance. “Stupid toys. You. What are you?”

Xandera had slithered up to the closest line of biers, her trident searing the dark. “You address Queen Xandera Sextus, blazeborn royalty and boon companion of Scorio.”

“Scorio.” Plassus tongued his cheek as he eyed the fiend up and down. “So you’re friendly? Good. Where’s the lad at?”

“The Herdsmen have him,” said Leonis. “Took him a handful of days ago.”

“Huh. Big mistake on their part, I’ll warrant.” Plassus was taking in the environs, scanning the biers, frowning at the bodies, looking around. “Second Archspire. That’s weird. Who are all these corpses?”

“Not corpses,” said Jova. “Sleeping dead. Just like you were. Iulius the Golden, Moravius the Black. All the missing Great Souls.”

Plassus clucked his tongue. “I know corpses when I see them.” He stepped to the closest bier, touched the silver spike that emerged from the woman’s chest, then frowned at the woman it perforated. “Well, isn’t this a nasty little toy.” He raised his gaze and squinted across the other biers. “Let’s put an end to this, shall we?”

“What do you mean?” asked Jova.

Plassus narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips, and for a moment nothing happened. Leonis stared at him in fascination, overwhelmed, unsure as to what was going on but beyond relieved to have the Charnel Duke acting decisively in the face of such horror.

Every bier in the vast chamber abruptly lit up, azure light flooding up from around them so that it seemed they all stood in an endless matrix of bright, electric light, the biers and their occupants glittering islands.

And as one, all the silver spikes retracted.

Leonis inhaled sharply, waited, watching—

Bodies began to stir, the movements subtle, more akin to twitches, and for a glorious second Leonis thought the Charnel Duke wrong, but then he saw the truth of it. They were decomposing at terrific speed, skin turning to paper, muscles withering away, stomachs collapsing. Some turned to little more than bone fragments and parchment-like skin in moments, while others moldered more slowly.

But nobody rose like Plassus had done.

“How long since the Blood Ox?” demanded Plassus.

“Three or so months,” replied Jova, eyes wide as she stared at the ocean of corpses.

“Three months.” He shook his head. “These poor idiots must have been lying here for centuries. Poor bastards. Well. Can’t be helped. The next class back in Bastion is going to be fucking phenomenal.” He snorted in bitter amusement, then eyed Jova. “This a rescue mission? Don’t tell me you did all this for me?”

“We didn’t know you were here,” said Jova. “We… a previous incarnation of mine wrote about this place. We came to investigate the Herdsmen.”

“The fucking Herdsmen.” Plassus looked like he wanted to spit. “We done here, then?”

“I—”

“Because that?” He pointed up at the ceiling, and Leonis realized he was indicating the source of the temporarily abated disruption. “That bares immediate investigation.”

“What is it?” demanded Kuragin, tone gruff in the manner Leonis had learned meant he was trying to hide his fear. “What’s going on up there?”

Plassus considered the ceiling once more, eyes narrowed. The silence stretched out anew. “Fuck if I know. But it’s not good. How do we get out of here?”

Jova gestured and her black raft rose from the ground to float over to them.

“Not bad,” said Plassus, climbing aboard. His sphere of frozen attacks moved with him. “Sheer that stuff off of me as we go, will you?”

Leonis tapped Nyrix on the shoulder and nodded for him to follow. He led him quickly to where Kelona lay, and together, gingerly, they gathered her remains and brought them to the raft. Leonis feared Plassus would scold them for wasting time, but the older man simply crossed his arms and waited, implacable, observing them as they then fetched Druanna’s corpse.

“Wait a moment,” said Jova, and with a frown she tore a large segment of the ground away, lifting it up beside Xandera. “There you go.”

There wasn’t room on the original raft for her new form, Leonis realized. The blazeborn queen slithered onto the second raft and there coiled her tail about herself to remain inscrutable and watching.

Everybody got on, and the rafts lifted up.

Leonis gazed out over the endless tomb of corpses. So much loss. He felt… hollow, he realized. By Kelona and Druanna’s loss, by the sudden birth and near instant death of his hope of unleashing thousands of peerless Great Souls upon the Pit. By the strange futility of this all.

Why?

Why had the Herdsmen captured and isolated these people? Why deprive the war of their best warriors and sages?

“They have to be in league with the True Fiends,” he said as they sailed silently over the biers. “There just can’t be any other reason to have built this place.”

Plassus stood at the fore of the raft. “It was Imperator Sarana that brought me here. She knocked me out en route, but there can be no doubt. She’s not just a festering, whey-faced hag with the heart of a Chasm Scorpion, but a Herdsman to boot.” He considered. “Just when you thought she couldn’t be any worse.”

“An Imperator,” said Jova. “How are we supposed to…?”

Plassus barked a laugh. “We’re not. Are you mad?”

“Then…” Leonis did his best not to look at the corpses by his feet. “What happens when you return to the living?”

Plassus turned about to grin savagely at him. “I ruin her breakfast party.” He snorted, then shook his head. “Best I can, at any rate. It’ll be up to the other Imperators to decide what to do then. If they do anything.”

“They have to!” protested Nyrix. “This—all of this—they can’t just ignore what the Herdsmen have done!”

“Calm your panties,” chided Plassus. “I didn’t say they’d like it. But Sarana’s an Imperator, and last I checked, we didn’t have a baker’s dozen of them sitting around playing cards. They need her. Long as she’s willing to do her part in the fight, or convince them as much, at any rate, they’ll not have the capacity to hunt her down. Not if it means distracting three or more of them from what they’re doing down at the Twilight Cradle.”

“Damn it,” said Jova, voice low and venomous.

“That’s Hell for you,” said Plassus, sounding amused. “One vast and wonderful playground where all the children play fair.”

Nyrix pushed closer to Kuragin, who wrapped an arm around the slender man’s shoulders.

Leonis gazed back at where Xandera floated on her platform. She’d sunken down into her single thick coil, trident clasped to her chest by her crossed arms, eyes blazing like sinkholes into the sun. He wanted to talk to her, but she was too far behind for him to do much more than call out. So instead he raised his hand, heart breaking at the sight of her mature form.

She’d sacrificed herself for their survival. He knew what this meant. Her instincts would urge her to return north, to the Iron Weald, to found her own hive. Gone was that ashen skin girl with luminous hair. Her sweet smile, her cheer and tendency to laugh at the slightest wonder. It was still her, he knew, but… not.

Another loss.

Plassus interrogated Jova as they quit the Tomb. She sheared off the attacks that hung suspended in his aura by simply passing at speed close to the huge columns, and soon they were quit of the lava and light blasts altogether.

Leonis studied the pair. Jova seemed settled by Plassus’s commanding manner. She answered woodenly, her words precise, her explanations succinct, and she left nothing out. He was understandably interested in what had happened to the Blood Ox, and laughed in outraged delight when she recounted Scorio’s successes.

“That whelp! I’ll trounce him when I see him next. By the gods!” Plassus shook his head in wonder and mock-anger. “Pah! And Bravurn? A Herdsmen?” For a moment the Charnel Duke simply stared out at nothing, then he exhaled, and for the first time seemed wearied. If not physically, then simply by existence. “What a rotten world this is. Black the core, false the rind.”

They reached the shaft and began to climb. Pale, sere light glowed above, expanding with each moment, and then without warning they were before the tunnel mouth, which loomed massive and dark before them.

Leonis forced himself to set his squeamishness aside and hefted Druanna over one shoulder. He’d a vague idea of building a cairn over her, her and Kelona both. Speaking some words. Something. They couldn’t just leave their friends in the dark.

Dark vision banished the gloom, and they moved as one down the hall. Emerged into the goblet courtyard, and stepped one more time onto the raft that awaited them there. Xandera gestured for them to go ahead first, and together the Great Souls arose with their dead, Plassus having grown tense as he stared fixedly through the stone wall before them.

They arose into the clear, and Leonis had thought himself beyond shock, inured by grief from further wonder and horror.

He’d been wrong.

Hanging over the horizon was a weeping Sun, a cataclysm of shifting auras that painted the heavens in heaving, surging waves of mana. Mana that didn’t simply flow according to its nature, but even now obeyed hidden dictates so that they looped and poured in mesmerizing ribbons and patterns, burning bright so that the silver sands of the vast valley were painted in chromatic hues, the entire landscape turned into a fierce enchantment of burning metallic hues.

And the scope of it. The entire sky was scalded by ruinous mana, miles upon miles of living chaos, and in its center, the distant Silverine Sun.

Its face was a riot of bewitching hues, the black and royal purple surface now blazing as it emitted great jets of scalding mana, the lightning that customarily wreathed it leaping forth in great branching forests, only to fade and be replaced by new explosions.

The air tasted of metal and death, and they were all buffeted by the gusts of power that even Plassus’s Dominion couldn’t insulate them from.

“What… what’s happening?” whispered Nyrix.

“The Sun.” Jova stepped off her platform onto the rocky scree of the mountainside. “It’s… maybe it’s evolving?”

“Nah,” said Plassus, eyes narrowed as he continued to study the distant phenomena. “That’s not an evolution. That’s a collapse. A wounding.”

“What could wound a Sun?” asked Leonis, bending to pick up Druanna. Nyrix and Kuragin did the same for Kelona.

Plassus blew out his lips. “Were we deeper in Hell? Any number of terrible beasties. But here, in the Unfathom?” He shook his head slowly. “But mark my words. This is a bonfire, and it’s burning bright enough that all manner of entities will take notice. Take notice and—”

The Charnel Duke cut himself off as he abruptly squinted off to one side.

Leonis gently set Druanna down upon the ground, but paused in the act of straightening her limbs to sight in the same direction.

What was he… oh.

A shape was emerging into view, sliding out of nothing as a whale-ship might emerge from behind clouds.

A vast and complex cube, big as a city, its surface lit up by the mana-storm, so that its many interlocking metal panels burned bright and with all hues.

“Is that…?” Nyrix couldn’t even finish his question.

“That’s the Lost Cube,” said Jova, tone harsh with finality. “It must be. Which means Scorio’s inside.”

“That so?” Plassus placed one hand within the other palm and cracked his knuckles. “Then fetch your fiendish friend below, and let’s go introduce ourselves. There’s not much we can do about that Sun, but cracking some Herdsmen’s heads?” He grinned his wolfish grin. “That sounds down right therapeutic.”