Shadea carefully prodded the corpse with a toe. “We must discover what manner of power enabled these creatures to survive in Setharis, and who is behind it.” She looked to me, troubled.
Eva crunched through shattered crystal, heedless of the shards shredding her boots. She dispatched anything still twitching. “I thought you said this would be dangerous?” she said, re-sheathing her knife. From a shallow scrape a few droplets of her blood pattered to the floor.
The cavern floor collapsed.
I plunged into icy water. The lanterns sank to the bottom, dimming blobs of light leaving me almost blind as the weight of my manacles dragged me under. Something huge barged into me, sent me tumbling with a slash of pain across my side. Bubbles erupted from my mouth as I screamed. The water tasted of salt and iron. I winced as my Gift suddenly wrenched open. I was out of Martain’s range. Awareness exploded. The magi above me radiated panic as they struggled to pull themselves from the water. A mass of ravenous insanity surged up towards them.
Dissever shifted inside the meat of my thigh. The strange numbness blew apart, agony racking me as black tendrils of living iron speared through the bandages. Dissever birthed from my flesh and crawled up my body, leaving pinpricks of pain, its edge slicing though the manacles. The hilt squirmed into the palm of my hand.
A current dragged me to one side of the pit where a hole in the wall sucked at my clothes – the exit to an underground stream that somebody had hastily blocked off to keep the creature contained.
Flashes of light exploded overhead, silhouetting something large and misshapen in the water above me. It was far too puny to be the gigantic thing that I had originally seen.
My lungs burned for air. I kicked upwards, feeling my way along the wall until I broke the surface. I took great heaving breaths and clutched onto the wall, coughing as smoke tickled the back of my throat. One of my guards floated next to me, half his torso bitten off, pink and red organs drifting free. Above, a jet of flame engulfed a fleshy abomination. The formless thing of churning flesh sprouted arms and legs and gnashing jaws as it dragged itself from the water towards a terrified pyromancer. The magus shook with the torrent of power flowing through him, his flames intensifying. The mass of churning flesh rolled over him. His magic cut off with a wet crunch. Patches of rock glowed and burned but the creature’s rippling flesh was undamaged by the magical flames. It swelled as it absorbed him. The man’s horrified face sank into its body, the light of intelligence in his eyes guttering, decaying into feral hunger. He howled at me, jaws snapping.
I shrieked as my Gift clamped shut and something grabbed me by the collar, yanking me up onto the rock floor. I flailed behind me, Dissever slashing. Something grabbed my wrist and held it. “You are going nowhere,” Martain said, spinning me round to face him.
“Is that so?” I replied, smashing my forehead into his face. His eyes bulged, mouth gaping, as he lurched back, blood pouring from his nose. He’d spent too long dealing with magi who relied on magic as the answer to everything. I hobbled away until my Gift reopened.
Eva was down and bleeding, a gaping wound in her shoulder. I missed a step, torn between fleeing or helping. Her skin had been all but impervious to the shard beasts’ legs, how the f… Of course – this thing fed on magic just like its larger sibling. It had eaten straight through her magically hardened skin.
A swarm of green lights buzzed though the gloom to detonate in the thing’s flesh. A dozen conjoined mouths gibbered and cried out in pain, limbs jerking and thrashing. The skin was scorched but showed no other effects. Eyes appeared on its back and bulged out towards its tormentor. Shadea pulled the other pyromancer unconscious from the dark waters, a raised welt on his forehead, and then calmly loosed a lance of incandescent light that could burn a man to ash. All it did was blast a small crater into the thing’s hide. She tutted as her second attack also failed.
A dozen malformed limbs sprouted and it lurched towards her. Shadea grimaced, and then unleashed a dozen different attacks with bewildering speed, globes of fire, bolts of lightning, darts of purplish crystal that solidified mid-air. The thing shrugged them all off.
She paused, confounded for a moment but showing no hint of fear. Shadea was an elder magus, an adept of magics beyond her natural affinity and a magus who had faced down insane murderers, blood sorcerers, corrupted wild beasts, grotesque daemons and heathen god-spirits, and had defeated them all. If she couldn’t take this thing down then nobody could.
“The creature is resistant to direct attacks from magical sources,” she said. “Switch to secondary effect attacks.”
Cillian rose from the dark pool, feet planted firmly atop a pillar of water. A second pillar snaked up into the air beside her, tilting until it faced the creature, then swung forward. The giant fist of water hit it like a battering ram. The controlling magic broke apart as soon as it touched the creature but the weight of water slammed it into the wall in an explosion of dust and debris. The cavern shook, stone rumbling ominously as dust and fragments rained down. The light was growing dim as the pyromancer’s flames died and slagged rock cooled. I gritted my teeth against the pain and forced a trickle of power into my eyes. The darkness retreated. It was all I could manage after the abuse my Gift had taken, but even that damage was easing with uncanny swiftness.
Moans and wails bubbled from the thing’s shattered mouths and torn throats as limbs flopped aimlessly. Cillian started to smile, but it was stillborn. Broken bones cracked back into place somewhere inside its bulk. Torn flesh and spilt blood slurped into the body, reforming. All-too human faces burst from its skin, screaming in panicked animal pain.
I turned to make my escape, found Shadea between me and the exit. Eva staggered towards her, one arm hanging limply but the heavy knife clutched in the other. Her wound was already knitting together and scabbing over. There was no escape that way. Whoever won here, I lost. Or I could take the chance and break through into that underground waterway and hope it carried me out rather than drowning me in the dark or smashing my head open on a rock. It seemed a preferable way to die, and it had to empty out somewhere. If I wanted to gut Harailt I had to risk it.
The creature shambled forward, tentacles darting out at everybody simultaneously. One wrapped round my waist before I could react, small gripping spikes stabbing into my skin. I screamed. Not from torn skin, but from the sudden suction on my Gift. The creature was ravenous for both meat and magic. It hauled me towards gnashing human teeth in inhuman mouths.
I hacked my knife into the tentacle, heedless of the possibility of Dissever’s magic being devoured – but instead of devouring the enchantment, raw power exploded into me. Dissever drank deep and I felt the creature’s life-force pulsing with the Gifts of more than one mageborn. I was drunk on power and riding high on a wave of rage, cutting deeper.
The thing shrieked and broke off its attempts to snare us. Cooling flesh unravelled from around my waist and plopped to the ground. The thing had severed its own tentacle rather than let Dissever feast further. I held up the black iron blade and licked the side, savouring the bloody warmth. Even in my power-drunken state disgust rose up inside, but I couldn’t stop myself. My body felt healthy again, pulsing with a potent vitality.