She laughed, and coughed another fireball to follow her challenge.
S’Hivez was smiling, as he had been since their return to the Monastery. “We’ll make our own demons to kill them,” he said. “We can make a hundred!”
They had sent a sea of fire pouring along each tunnel they found, letting it find its own level. They listened for shrieks of pain but heard nothing. They melted the air, adding a magical slick of acid from their tongues that expanded and multiplied, flowing through paths of scorched air and disappearing along tunnels faster than a crossbow bolt. The Mages closed their eyes and waited for the psychic waves of agony, but none came. They were not concerned; not yet. Time was theirs. An easy victory would feel like no victory at all.
Angel and S’Hivez formed a machine from the rock of the tunnel walls, giving it drops of their blood and gasps of their fiery breath. It was more powerful than anything the shade had formed in Conbarma. Here they were using their newfound magic to its full, richer and far more potent than the taste they had left with the shade. A mockery of the things they sought to destroy, the machine tumbled down the deepest tunnel, scoring walls with molten blades and parting the thin skein of reality as it went. Its exhaust was a miasma of nonexistence that would wipe any living thing it touched from history and memory. A small tunnel rodent, blind and albino, was caught in the machine’s breath. Elsewhere in the caves, a thousand more rats ceased to exist. Droppings disappeared from corners never touched by light.
And as one rat inhaled, the bite scar on its ear mended itself, a scratch on a protruding knob of fledge smoothed over, and a million lice, worms, spiders and beetles existed again, suddenly uneaten.
The strange machine went on, carrying its new molten body around it, seeking the Nax and preparing to exhale again.
“And more!” S’Hivez said, conjuring chaos from the ground before him. Angel laughed. The air danced with things that should not be. They were back in their old home, more powerful than ever, chasing down the bastard Nax that had driven them out three hundred years ago.
The tunnels were illuminated with the sick light of dark magic.
The Mages paused and listened, touching the rock walls, sniffing the air, searching for the dying agonies of Nax. Still they heard none. They made yet more machines and sent them into the depths. One turned rock to ice, another made fledge unreal, yet another froze moments in time, halting history in small pockets of timelessness.
And then, tired of waiting, the Mages started to descend farther, moving deep on constructs of stone and water. They passed through tunnels cauterized smooth by the machines they had sent before them. Angel pressed against rock and summoned her dark magic, melting her hand inside to feel the beat of the land. She closed her eyes and sought the machines they had sent down, placing them all in a multidimensional map in her mind’s eye. Some had gone so deep that they had almost disappeared from Noreela entirely, while others had stayed shallow but traveled far. One machine-shredding the future and leavings shards of timeless vacuum in its wake-had passed beneath Lake Denyah, probing up and out in case the Nax had tried to escape that way.
“There’s nothing,” Angel said.
S’Hivez spread his hands and crunched his knuckles. “Then we go deeper.”
They felt the weight of the land weighing down upon them. The pressures were great, but the Mages reveled in them. Blue flames danced about them as they moved. The stone around them came alive and died again with each breath, and their dark magic filled them, brimming from their eyes as tears.
They found a fledge seam that had been opened and destroyed by one of the machines. Angel paused and listened at its entrance, sniffing, smelling the peculiar taint of unmade fledge. That was all. No echoes of a Nax’s dying sigh. She frowned-something about the ruined fledge did not seem right. She shook her head and they moved on.
They reached another fledge seam, this one untouched by their machines. Angel saw why: the exposed fledge was stale and rank. She scratched at the drug, snorting a flame so that she could see, and the heart of the fledge was also stale. She cut deeper, stepping on chunks of the drug and cooking it to nothing with the heat from her heels. S’Hivez stood back and watched, still listening for messages from the machines they had sent deep and far. None of them returned; their tasks remained undone.
Angel stepped back and turned to her old lover. “They’ve truly gone,” she said.
“No.” S’Hivez shook his head and blue flame trickled from his eyes.
“Yes. They’re not here anymore. The fledge is stale, and they’ve gone. But wewill find them again.”
S’Hivez closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It came out as iced air. “They’ve denied us our vengeance.”
“Only for now,” Angel said, looking around, trying to convince herself. “We’ve got forever to track them down.”
“They’re the Nax. They could go deep.”
“We’ve more to do than this. There’ll be time. There’salways time. And besides…” Angel touched the rock of the land and let magic flow, turning stone to glass, illuminating it, letting visions flicker within its cloudy embrace. “…we have this. And we can always go deeper.”
The Mages left the machines to stalk and haunt the tunnels forever.
THEY MADE THEIR way back up into the Monastery, emerging into its basements and pressing shadows aside as they climbed up to its ruined heart. There they found a shade cowering in a corner, invisible to those who did not know how to look. Angel conjured it to manifest before them, a silent void of potential.
It came, and Angel frowned. “This shade has something to show us,” she said.
OUTSIDE THE MONASTERY, the Mages’ flying machine flexed its wings and knocked over another tree. It shifted its body across the ground, and the movement caused ripples to rise at the edge of Lake Denyah a few hundred steps away. Eyes flickered open and shut across its torso, and mouths gaped to utter deep, piteous groans.
The first time the machine fell completely still and silent was when it heard the land-shattering screams of rage.
“SO TELL ME,” Lenora said.
They were sitting beside Lenora’s machine, cooking meat over a hastily prepared fire while a thousand Krotes did the same around them. Her force had swept through a village that afternoon, slaughtering almost everyone there and stealing their livestock for food. Lenora had granted an hour’s pause to eat and drink. To her left she heard warriors drinking stolen rotwine from stolen tankards, but she knew that they would not drink enough to dull their senses. War was a sober business.
Ducianne smiled, jerking her head slightly to set her braided hair jangling. The sound was as much a part of her as her voice. “It was easy,” she said.
“So I see.” Lenora took another swig of liberated rotwine and looked into the dead eyes staring up at her.
Ducianne had ridden into their camp with the Duke’s head impaled on the front of her machine. She towed his body behind, though by then it was little more than a hunk of meat and bone. Flies and flying beetles had landed on it as soon as she stopped, eating away the last of the Duke’s flesh. Ducianne had jumped from the machine, prized the Duke’s head from the spike and handed it to Lenora.
Lenora had accepted the offering of war with a smile. Ducianne always had been one of the most bloodthirsty Krotes she knew, reveling in slaughter rather than viewing it as a duty.
Now they sat eating and drinking while the Duke’s eyes reflected firelight. As fiery as he’s been in years, Lenora thought. Lucky for us.
“There were hardly any defenses at all,” Ducianne said. “It was disappointing. Yet Krotes will be talking of the sacking of Long Marrakash for decades. I’ll be in a song, Lenora.” The Krote lieutenant grinned. “They’ll write songs about me!”
The Duke had an unkempt beard, scars across his nose from some old disease, and his teeth were black from a lifetime of rotwine. His eyes were open, cloudy and bloodshot, and Lenora was sure they’d been like that even before Ducianne sliced his head from his body. “I’m sure you had your share of pleasures in Long Marrakash,” she said.