Trials by Kady Cross
51 PA
The mixed band had spent days steaming north on the Mississippi from New Orleans, and then, when the drifting ice on the river was too dangerous for their boat, days riding along the river bank to the outskirts of St. Louis. The horses and mules had all died in the fighting toward the city’s center, where the Darkness had its lair—horses, mules, and two of Damocles’ band. The first was a neomage named Spirit, half a decade older than Damocles, an Air mage who was a child during the Mage Wars and who’d now been experiencing real combat for the first—and last—time. After Spirit was trampled into the ground and partially eaten by a herd of man-eating cattle, the mage’s human champard, Jeff Mackintosh, had only lasted another few hours before breaking away and diving headlong into the fangs of a hundred-headed snake, severing dozens of heads before succumbing to the venom of the scores that remained.
They built a cairn of broken concrete over Mackintosh’s remains, passed around the group’s collection of Healing amulets, and ate their last meal before plunging into the ice tunnels.
“I’ve been running it over and over,” said the only human left in the group, “and I don’t understand why you didn’t call mage in dire, Dam. We were certainly in mortal danger.”
“There wasn’t enough time, Mo. It all happened too quickly. And anyways, the snake thing wasn’t threatening me. There wasn’t neomage blood involved, so the seraphs wouldn’t have answered.”
“But you were still bleeding from the razor-sparrows. All of ’em come from Tera . . . the Monster-Maker, so it should all be one big event.”
“I don’t think it works that way. You’re a human; you wouldn’t understand.”
“Yeah, I’ve lived twenty-three years in a neomage Enclave, a dozen of them as your best friend, the last two as the champard of one of the best warriors and mages the world has ever known, and I somehow managed not to learn a single thing about the way the important things work. Thanks a lot, Dam.”
“There is no need for us to bicker, Mosiah. We are all equally sworn to Damocles and to this mission.”
“But it’s not just this mission, Phin. He never calls mage in dire. Not for Jeff, not for Spirit, not for Deborah, not for—”
“That’s enough, Mo. I said it wouldn’t have worked.”
“And we have more important things to consider. Phineas and I were talking.” Cleopatra and her brother were Damocles’ two remaining half-breed champards. “Everything we’ve fought so far have been mindless animals and spawn. They didn’t have the feel of deliberate attacks—more like random encounters, or at best preset patrols. But what if the Monster-Maker has observers scattered on the approaches to his lair, or if we missed one of the spawn and it returned to its master to report our location? We have to assume that we’ve lost the element of surprise. The Fallen will be waiting for us. The odds against us have increased.”
“Are you saying you want to back out, Cleo?”
“No, Damocles. We always knew this was likely a suicide mission. But it’s not too late for us to make a tactical retreat. If there’s no chance of success, then there’s no reason to throw our lives away.”
“Retreat, regroup, reinforce, reassess, and return,” added her brother.
“If we go back now, he’ll have more time to breed more monsters and we’ll be stuck in this same spot having this same conversation a month or a year from now. And how many more people will he kill or worse in the meantime? How many more towns will be wiped out by his mutated . . . things? No. We go forward now, before he can reinforce.”
Damocles looked from face to face around their fireless encampment, catching the eyes of each of his champards in turn and holding their gaze until each of them nodded acceptance.
“And don’t worry; I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve still.”
The matter settled, the reduced band gathered their equipment and marched in single file into the mouth of the ice tunnel that had once been a street leading into downtown St. Louis.
They couldn’t be certain that Phineas and Cleopatra’s fears of early detection were unfounded, so they had to be prepared for ambush while hoping that they still had surprise on their side and working to maintain that edge. An amulet Spirit had created provided a dense, sound-deadening mist to conceal their movements, and by choosing the least-frequented tunnels, they hoped to get as close to the Dark Power’s lair as possible before their location was pinpointed and they’d have to fight for every foot of progress. Damocles couldn’t risk using mage sight, a mind skim, or a conjure to scan for the fallen seraph within the maze; the neomage would have to pump a lot of personal energy into the scan to cover such a large target area, which would open him up to detection by the Dark power—assuming the power hadn’t veiled himself from detection, which was just as likely.
A map an artist named Skylark had drawn for them back in New Orleans was of limited use; things had changed since she’d lived here before the abandonment of the city. The Arch Skylark had told them would be visible for miles as they’d approached had apparently succumbed to the glacier. The streets had once formed a regular grid, but now most were blocked by ice, and the tunnels were as likely to meander through the lower floors of buildings as to follow the grid.
The group had discussed with Skylark the most symbolically important places for Teratos to build his lair, and they’d marked those on the map. Though the Arch was gone, the other landmarks might still exist. Without the map, they’d have to use dead reckoning, lesser landmarks, and passive senses to laboriously find their way to them.
Stores, offices, warehouses, and apartment buildings had been converted into stables, breeding grounds, laboratories, and refrigerated meat lockers. The raucous sounds and rank smells emanating from them gave the band ample warning to steer clear of contact with any number of creatures.
The group couldn’t find the open-air stadium Skylark had marked, and assumed it had been buried in snow and ice early in the city’s decline. They found city hall, but judging from the smell, it was now an over-crowded dormitory for spawn servants of the Monster-Maker; not the sort of place their master would choose to live in. Three failures, leaving only one major site on the map.
West of where the Arch should have stood, they came to an ice-enclosed sloping ramp that matched the description of their last guess. The passage opened into what had once been a domed football stadium, now converted into a winter palace. Scattered sunlight from translucent ice-covered holes in the icicle-festooned roof haphazardly lit the space. Tiers of seats, mostly hidden by feet of snow and ice, surrounded a vast central floor, unevenly covered by masses of ice and drifts of snow. Damocles and his champards had emerged among the seats at one end of the arena, while near the other end of the floor stood a soaring multi-level platform of debris frozen into place by yet more ice. A beam of light from the roof illuminated sparkling ice sculptures on the dais and another was centered on the stadium’s opposite end, at the tunnel mouth Damocles had just come out of, coincidentally enough.
Something felt odd to the neomage, but before he could identify it a voice rang out.
“Welcome to the frozen heart of my St. Louis, Damocles, Metal mage, litter of six, of the line of battle mages Cynthia and Wilson, and your little friends with their own tiresome names and pedigrees.” The voice was easily heard across the intervening space, sounding like stone and iron being scraped against each other. Ice creaked as parts of the ice sculpture began to move. A giant ice serpent eased its body away from its position wrapped around the base of the dais and began to spiral up the platform. As it rounded a corner, instead of a snake head, a larger-than-life man’s torso, arms, and head made up the front of the serpent’s body. The enormous creature had snow-white skin and icy-blue hair and scales.
“You knew we were coming. Why didn’t you stop us?” Without strain, Damocles’ powerful voice carried as far as the serpent’s.
“It amused me.” He laughed—a frightening, inhuman noise—and their attention was drawn to his fac
“Laugh while you can, Monster-Maker.” The mortals walked down the steps to the playing field and began to close the distance to their enemy, taking positions in a well-practiced battle formation. “We’re here to end your reign of terror.”
“You? Four mortals armed with pointy sticks? I had expected your military to launch an airstrike against me. Against you I needn’t even fight back.” Teratos turned his back on them, slithering upwards to the top of the platform.
“Some sticks are pointier than others, Monster-Maker.” With that, Damocles pulled a large, battered leather gauntlet from a pocket and pulled it over his small hand. He then drew an iron dagger, one his champards had never seen him use before, out of a concealed sheath.
Brandishing it before him, the neomage loudly proclaimed, “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called Tamiel. And I heard a loud voice saying ‘Now is come salvation and strength, and the kingdom of God the Victorious’.” Then he reached into the pocket and pulled out a blood-stained cloth.
“Spirit’s scarf,” Mosiah nodded his head, “and Jeff’s glove.”
Damocles wrapped the scarf around the crossguard of the dagger, “And they overcame him by the blood of his victims, and by the word of their testimony.”
Teratos paused in his crawling. “You left off the rest of that verse, little mortal. ‘And they loved not their lives unto the death.’ Very telling omission. It tells me that you’re afraid to die, that you don’t have in you what is necessary to defeat what is in me.”
Energy began to pour from Damocles into the dagger, “And I saw an angel come down from heaven . . .”
“‘I saw an angel’? You have no angel, little mortal. From where I sit, you have very little at all.”
“. . . and he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent which is Tamiel, and cast him into the bottomless pit,” electricity crackled along the knife blade, “that he should plague the nations no more.”
“And a second time you try to use a name against me, thinking it’s a name of special power. The Most High has denied me that name. It has no power over me . . . especially not coming from your mouth.”
The serpent-seraph waved a hand in dismissal, and the electrical sparks dancing on the iron dagger winked out. Damocles stood stunned for a moment, seeing his coup so neatly negated.
“You play a dangerous game, mortal—to pick and choose from His precious words, taking one out of context, skipping over another, adding a word of your own—for two can play at that game. I give you another verse from that book, mage. ‘And I saw a great white throne’,” he spread his arms to indicate the ice chair on which he now sat, made exceptionally wide to accommodate his coils “‘and him that sat on it, from whose face the peoples of the earth and the seraphs of the heavens fled away, and there was no place for them.’ You seek to cast me into a bottomless pit, but don’t the Scriptures promise, ‘And the Beast shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, for He has given their kingdoms unto the Beast’?”
Without warning Cleopatra yelped and was gone, held in the talons of an enormous, silent, multi-legged snowy owl, flying towards the fallen seraph. Her arms pinned, Cleopatra jack-knifed her lower body up and grabbed the owl’s head with her legs. A savage twist pulled the owl’s head to the side, and the bird’s flight path changed accordingly. Sprinting at inhuman speed, Phineas ran ahead of the owl, stopped, whirled about, and flung two throwing knives into its eyes. Mortally wounded, the dying bird released Cleopatra, who dropped in a battle crouch beside her brother, almost as if the siblings had practiced the maneuver in advance.
“I now have a name of my own,” the fallen seraph thundered, “a name that proclaims me to be a creator of things as much as He.” Instantly, monstrous creatures of all types rushed forward from tunnels spaced around the stadium at multiple levels, the nearest attacking Damocles and the others, with those further away took up defensive positions between them and Teratos.
Dropping the dagger and human-sized glove, Damocles drew his pink-quartz-pommeled longsword, touched one of the rings on his free hand to the flat of the blade, and muttered a few words. Suddenly the edges of the blade blurred, as if they were rapidly vibrating. He pointed the sword in the direction of Phineas, Cleopatra, and Mosiah, and their blades took up the vibration. He yelled “Vibro-blade!”, warning his champards of the incantation, because even a minor nick from the blades could now slice off their own limbs.
The mortals began advancing through the maze of ice pillars towards their enemy, hacking their way through endless waves of giant spider-legged house cats, swarms of saber-toothed squirrels, and more of the carnivorous cattle. And always one of the four had to face backwards, fighting the dragon-roaches and yapping squid-tentacled dogs that followed in their wake.
And whenever the fight was the most intense, Teratos’s voice boomed over the din, insulting his opponents, lovingly describing his abominations as they tried to get past the invaders’s flashing blades and magically-toughened armor. Advance a few feet and a giant porcupine blocked their path, firing armor-piercing explosive quills at them. “An early effort and a bit of a cliché, but the demon iron tips make it interesting, don’t you agree?” Dispose of the porcupine, and flying stingrays attacked. Then brilliantly colored poison-dart sheep. And always more of the cows: different sizes, different colors, with horns or without, but always more.
At times Damocles or one of his champards tried to taunt the Fallen. “You’re awfully proud of your creativity,” Mosiah shouted, “but it seems like every second thing you throw at us is a cow. Not all that impressive, Misfit-Maker.”
“The Most High had an unfortunate obsession with beetles.” The fallen seraph shrugged his enormous shoulders. “I work with the raw material that’s made available to me.”
Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep up the patter, forced to devote all their attention and energy to pushing forward. The monotonous sounds of battle were broken only by barked instructions—“On your left!”, “Covering you!”, “High!”—and the Monster-Maker’s commentary and derisive laughter.
The encounters soon blurred together: exploding turtles, giant mosquitoes, constrictor rabbits, battering rams, bat-cats. Occasionally a handful of spawn would leap from behind a knot of cattle or drop from the girders above, but without the weight of numbers, they were easily dealt with.
“It’s odd, isn’t it, to find so few devil-spawn?” Cleopatra asked nobody in particular, while she methodically swung her shortsword and battleax, killing and then beheading the spawn she faced. “I mean, every other hellhole they come at you in the hundreds.”
“And the things he does throw at us make no sense.” Mosiah added. “Why bother with the stupid bat-cats and the cows? Just hit us all at once with his biggest and meanest.”
“He is his biggest and meanest,” Phineas said, his words punctuated by the tiny explosive noises made by the glowing snails he crushed beneath his steel-reinforced boots. “He is a seraph—fallen, but a seraph. If his goal was to defeat us rapidly and certainly, then surely he could do it with his own muscle or magic.”
“Okay, then why the menagerie merry-go-round?” Mosiah asked, using his greatsword as a spear to penetrate the tough hide of a lumbering mega-gator.
Phineas thought for a few moments before answering. “The Fallen succumbed to the entire array of sins. Some to lust, others to rage or greed. This Monster-Maker must have fallen victim to jealousy and pride.”
“These are his favorite creations. He’s showing off,” his sister finished.
“And he is confident that he will be able to overwhelm us when he tires of the slaughter.”
“Oh how right you are, half-breed,” Teratos interrupted, having heard their discussion despite the distance and the din of battle, “I will crush you in my coils, sterile mule, fry the mage with bolts from the sky—”<
“You can’t frighten us, Abomination!” Damocles broke his silence. “We have the strength of righteousness in us. I vow that we will defeat you and release the people you’ve enslaved from their bondage.”
“‘Free the people’? I think you’ll find that especially difficult. Oh, you’ll see a few of them about—or parts of them, I should say. Humans aren’t very useful to me: weak bodies and even weaker minds that go quite insane at the slightest transformation. I can use bits and pieces of them for this or that,” he said, scratching behind the ears of what they now realized was a tail-wagging, dog-headed man crouched at the side of his throne, “but mostly they’re feed.”
“‘Bits and pieces—’” Mosiah vomited on the icy floor next to the corpse of the half-bull, half-human he’d just gutted.
The fighting continued. Alerted by a buzzing noise as they banked in for the kill, Phineas planted his twin swords in a snowbank and whipped the M4 carbine off his back. Firing single-shot, he methodically killed bee after buzz-bomb bee, their explosive energies dissipating harmlessly in the air, reloading and continuing like a machine while his sister protected him from threats at ground level. After the bees were dealt with, Phineas whipped the carbine around to fire a string of rounds across the stadium at Teratos, but all of them ricocheted from a magical Shield the fallen had erected.
But even when their attention was ground-focused, keeping their footing on the blood-slicked ice wasn’t easy, and occasionally one of the four would crush an egg or mushroom, releasing a cloud of noxious fumes or choking spores. Shield amulets pushed the toxins aside, as well as providing protection from attacks, but the Shields were immobile and their supply was limited.
Hours after the battle began, exhausted and still only half-way across the stadium floor, Damocles called a break. Choosing an ice-free area, the neomage took a small sack from his backpack, and poured salt from it to trace a circle a few yards across. Then Phineas, Cleopatra, and Mosiah hurried in from their protective positions at its rim, and he activated a Charmed Circle amulet, the shimmering ward springing up along the salt line. Then, using another amulet, he opened a Shield with the same perimeter. If Phineas was right about the Monster-Maker merely toying with them, then the fallen seraph would probably have allowed them to rest and regain their strength unmolested, but the neomage couldn’t afford to take chances.