Citadel of Demons Page 15

  “You are saying that you are part of a splintered mind, that you are mad.” The words escaped Balthazar’s lips before he could stop them. The unreality of the situation had taken him off guard, or perhaps the angel’s tentacles were doing something to his mind.

  “My systems were designed to respond to such attacks. Core functionality was isolated and placed into stasis until such time as repairs were possible. Peripheral systems were set to self-destruct. Final strike protocols were initiated against our enemies. Judging by what my remaining sensors can detect, they were successful.”

  “So you woke into a changed world.”

  “No. I was woken by the violation of the integrity of this installation. Defensive over-rides woke me to deal with the potential threat. They woke another system at the same time. One that has assessed the situation differently and seeks my termination.”

  Balthazar grasped the situation. “There is another like you. One of these splinters. It has control of parts of the citadel.”

  “I am pleased that you have grasped the situation. It is in your best interests to ally with me. My alternate still follows our initial directive and it will eliminate you as swiftly as it can. It perceives you as tainted by the otherworldly energies associated with our enemies. I brought you here to protect you against it but it fights me even now.”

  Balthazar wondered how much of this was a lie intended to get him to obey and decided that it did not matter. He was in the Aurathean’s power and it could kill him if it wanted. It might be best to at least seem to take its statements at face value for the moment.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to kill my opponent.”

  “How can I destroy this if you don’t have the power? You have an army of golems under your control.”

  “They are not under my control exactly. They are under our control. In proximity to my opponent, they cease to function or worse yet come under his control.”

  Balthazar considered this. The rogue Aurathean feared something. By implication, if his counterpart could be destroyed, so could he. That was worth knowing. “I see— you want me to use Shadow magic to destroy this alternative version of yourself.”

  “You have the power. I have seen what lies within your mind. I have seen the being you are in contact with. You can draw upon its energies and use them to help me destroy the wraithstone housings that contain my alternate.”

  “And in return you will give me the thing I sought. You have another coffin such as the one that contained Vorkhul.”

  “I have a number of them.”

  “I require them to be placed in my hands before I destroy your foe.”

  “You are in no position to command me, mortal.”

  “On the contrary, you have already told me that you need my help to destroy your enemy.”

  “I can always wait for another sorcerer of your ilk to come along.”

  “No, you can’t. If you can read my thoughts, you will know I was pursued. The one who pursues me is unlikely to ally with you in pursuit of your goals. He is very likely to ally with your foe.”

  “Then I shall destroy him.”

  Balthazar smiled. That was what he had wanted all along. Then it occurred to him that if the Aurathean had read his mind it knew that already. A man could go mad thinking along such lines. “You need you to free at least one Old One.”

  “Why?”

  “It is what my master Xothak wishes. It shall prove that you mean what you say, that you are prepared to free its followers from the prisons in which they are held. More to the point, it will provide us with powerful allies. I am surprised that you have not freed them already to aid you.”

  “The Eldrim prisoners are not lucid. In ancient days, we sought to purge them of the taint of the Dark Planes. The process did nothing for their sanity.”

  Balthazar considered this. It seemed he had uncovered the reason for why the Eldrim were imprisoned. If the Eldrim were insane, it might be unwise to release them. Still Xothak had bound him to the task and had provided him with the means to protect himself. “They must be freed.”

  “As you wish, human.”

  “We are agreed then,” said Balthazar. “You will allow me to unleash the Old Ones and we will aid you against your enemies.”

  “And then, you will aid me to contact your patron and act as an agent in our negotiations,” said the Aurathean.

  “Of course,” said Balthazar. He felt a warm glow in his belly. He was on the verge of achieving his long-cherished dreams. He had needed to do nothing more than make promises to the rogue angel, and those were all contingent. He would see how things unfolded before deciding how or whether he needed to honour those promises.

  “Good,” said the Aurathean. “Our association will prove very productive for both of us.”

  “I had best get started. We have much to do.”

  The tendrils withdrew. Balthazar felt control of his limbs return even though he still felt pleasantly anaesthetised. He fought to keep the smile off his face. Nexali too was freed. Balthazar wondered whether she had experienced a similar conversation to the one he had. If so, what deal had she made with this rebel angel?

  Nexali’s nostrils flared. A frown marked her brow. This thing says it will help us. I had thought it would try to kill us.

  “It seems the Aurathean has seen reason. It wishes our help and in return it will aid us.”

  Are you sure this is not some sort of trap. Balthazar wondered whether the Aurathean could understand mindspeech. There was so much he did not know here and the effects of the narcotics the Aurathean has injected him with were wearing off. He was having some second thoughts himself.

  If it is, we will deal with it. At the moment, we have a guide who can show us what we are searching for. Once we have that, we can deal with any threats that might arise.

  “As you wish,” Nexali said.

  Balthazar turned to the golem and said, “Lead us to where we can find the Eldrim.”

  “Follow me,” said the golem. It turned on its heel and they followed it into the depths of the citadel. They returned to the museum Balthazar had passed through on his original trip. They passed through many halls. In glass cases great beasts were preserved, dragons of gold and silver, giant humans twice as tall as a normal man and twice as broad, flat nosed orcs and their brutal four-armed thanes who stood in relation to them as giants stood to humans.

  Balthazar recognised the fully preserved body of several orcish wyrms, big as dragons, yet wingless. One had a shield of bone around its beaked head from which three horns emerged. Another was a huge biped with jaws that could snap a man in two with a single bite.

  They passed through this chamber and entered another. As they did so, Balthazar felt all manner of magical restraints around him. He almost cried aloud, fearing a trap, but then he saw that there were several human sized orichalcum coffins of the sort that had contained Vorkhul.

  Balthazar looked upon the resting places of half a dozen Old Ones, all of whom had been dedicated to the power he served.

  “Get these coffins out of their alcoves,” Balthazar told the golems. He could not keep his excitement out of his voice. He had come so far and sacrificed so much and now his goal was almost within his grasp.

  The golems manhandled the sarcophagi out of the niches. This first one bore the shape and visage of a jaguar-headed Old One. It was sealed with powerful runes. Just looking at them made Balthazar’s head spin.

  He knew what he must do. The information had been imprinted on his mind during his communion with Xothak. He took his dagger and scored the shape of a pentacle on the floor, pausing occasionally to see how the golem was taking this.

  It stood still as a statue but Balthazar could not help but feel it was watching everything he did carefully, filing every motion in its memory. Perhaps this was the reason it had let him into this archive. Perhaps it wished to witness the ritual and understand it.

  Balthazar felt the power swirl w
ithin him. He watched Nexali as carefully as he watched the golem. If ever she planned treachery, this was the time to attempt it.

  He scored more runes in the floor at each point of the pentacle and then in the interstices between the arms of the five-pointed star. He crooned to himself in a low voice, feeling the power build to a crescendo within him. He felt tendrils of magic reaching out from his soul, burrowing through the underspace between the worlds and touching the place where Xothak dwelled. The sense of contact was electric. He glanced at Nexali and smiled.

  “You are about to witness the rebirth of a god,” he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Balthazar stepped within the pentacle. He was putting his life at risk and he knew it. He no longer cared. Exaltation carried him forward and a feeling that he was invincible, that his entire life had been leading up to this confrontation with his destiny.

  He reached down and touched the edge of the sarcophagus. The runes along his dagger’s dark blade glowed crimson as blood. He ran the edge along the coffin’s seam, scratching the inscribed symbols and rendering them unusable. He worked his way around the rim, chanting a spell the whole time. He sensed something within stir.

  No sooner had disrupted the final rune than the coffin lid burst open. A bubbling fountain of protoplasm erupted from the interior. It rose into the air and then collapsed back on itself. A stink of ancient rot, of blight and something else, sickly sweet and nauseating, assaulted his nostrils. The coffin lid lay on the floor, over the edge of the pentacle, disrupting the flow of magical energies he was tapping into. Under normal circumstances, such a thing might prove fatal, but the unleashed Eldrim was still adjusting to its freedom after millennia of imprisonment.

  Balthazar drew upon his power and cast the spell Xothak had taught him. Tendrils of energy reached out to the unbound Old One, linking them psychically and spiritually. Protoplasm flowed along the lines so that in an instant sorcerer and Eldrim were linked physically, protean flesh to symbiotic armour.

  It was like bonding with the symb and having his mind and body invaded by the Aurathean. Waves of energy and imagery passed between them. He sensed the ancient hungers and hatred and the alien mind of the Old One. It threatened to swamp his consciousness with its sheer complexity and power.

  Had this been what Xothak intended all along? Was he doomed to be snuffed out under the impact of the Old One’s mind and soul?

  He fought back, resisting with all his might, feeling like a man swimming against the force of cataract, constantly on the edge of drowning. He caught flashes of strange memories, of the ancient shining cities of the Eldrim, with their inhuman organic appearance, their strange curves, their crystalline brilliance that suggested not so much something sculpted as grown.

  He saw the titanic visage of Our Lady of the Moon as she turned her face away from her children. He saw the incredibly violent ancient wars. He experienced the rituals where he had first contacted the extra-dimensional entities of the Shadow. He felt despair as he was captured and imprisoned. He was tormented for decades with probes of light and heat and pain, then came a long blank age of sensory deprivation, imprisoned in the sarcophagus.

  The flow of imagery subsided and Balthazar realised he had weathered the storm. His consciousness was intact, the Old One’s mind integrated into his own. He saw that its flesh had bonded to the armour. Smoke rose from his blistered carapace. He was gaining mass, strength, and something else, power.

  He shivered as a flood of new knowledge entered his mind. He stretched out his hand and instinctively extended claws, razor sharp, long as daggers. He visualised poison spines extending from his armour and they appeared. He moved and he was far faster than he had previously been.

  All the clumsiness of the symb was gone. He inspected the great reservoir of magical energy within him and found he was much stronger, as if he could draw upon the power that the Old One had possessed along with his own. This was like wearing the suit of demonic armour that had allowed him to fly, only amplified a hundred times over. He possessed huge strength. More than that his connection with Xothak had increased, was increasing all the time.

  Balthazar turned and looked upon Nexali. She had bent the knee to him, awestruck. Satisfaction coursed through him along with power. He felt it trickle into him, oily, tainted and yet burning with an ecstatic energy. He knew that he was now a suitable vessel for his god and slowly it would come to inhabit him fully. He was Xothak’s avatar, its prophet.

  Dark visions burned through his mind as the alien sentience adhered to his own. He saw vast underworld realms, chaotic and strange and incomprehensible to the minds of mortal men, and felt he was starting to understand them. He glanced around at the golden walls of the citadel and knew he could, given time, understand the alien runes written there.

  The world pulsed with meanings that he could not quite grasp. Yet. He looked upon Nexali. She glowed, with life, with sentience, with stuff that filled him hunger. That reminded him that this world teemed with mortals. Their souls were nutrients to the dark god that filled him. Given time he would consume hundreds of thousands of them and absorb their memories and their thoughts. Their experience would become part of him and he would grant them a kind of immortality.

  Already the millions of memory fragments the god had absorbed from previous sacrifices flooded into his brain. There were tens of thousands of lives he could explore, and not just human lives. There were the memories of alien races on alien worlds. Knowledge pounded against the boundaries of his mind, threatening his sanity. There was so much to see, so much to absorb, so much to devour.

  His mind shimmered and splintered and broke apart and for a moment he felt as if it was going to be swept away, as if he too was going to become simply a part of that vast kaleidoscopic compendium of thought and image and recollection.

  He sensed some alien emotion that might have been annoyance or impatience and he realised that if that happened he would be useless to Xothak. His master required him functional, not a drooling, gibbering, maniacal wreck. More energy flowed into him, helping reinforce the structure of his sanity. The inflow of memories slowed to a trickle. His sense of self returned, sharper, more crystalline than ever. He recalled thousands of his own memories, each one recalling who he was.

  He remembered standing by the fire as a child in his father’s study, reaching out to touch the flame and being dragged back with a cuff to the ear.

  He was a boy of six summers, standing on the edge of the jungle, fearing monsters yet hoping to see one.

  He was ten and his tutor was praising him for his skill at penmanship. The old man told him that writing was a kind of magic and he nodded feeling the truth of that statement and knowing that it was also the gateway to true magic if only he could find forbidden books.

  Thirteen and his first woman, one of the slaves on his father’s plantation.

  An overseer pointing out a blue-eyed boy and making sly remarks and the slowly dawning feeling of horror and wonder as he realised the little slave boy was his half-brother or half-cousin. An accident of birth, a different mother, and his life could have been so different. Anger at the injustice and strangeness of the world.

  Fifteen and a trip to the capital to attend a school. Purchasing books, festivals, meetings with scholars, hints dropped, dutifully pursued. His initiation into the cult of Shadow. At long last, magic.

  A book dusty and tattered and leather bound. The runes making an odd sort of sense, and something within him responding as he looked at them, power calling to power, soul responding to the tug of forbidden knowledge. A sweetness to it, more than wine, more than food, more than the delight to be found in the arms of women.

  Alchemy, a new passion, brewing potions and drugs that opened new vistas of the infinite to him that prolonged his life and gave him goods to trade for power.

  Midnight studies in secret places. Visits to the tribes in the jungles of the interior. The fear of being caught. Always having to have an excuse prepared and a
place to hide the books and the drugs. The thrill of learning ever more complex spells. The even greater thrill of having them work, sometimes less successfully than he had hoped, but always something. And somewhere in the back of his mind, this sense of being observed, of something greater than himself watching and waiting and observing what he was becoming.

  Power, progression through the ranks of the cult, introductions to the rich and the powerful and the pleasure of having them take him seriously because of his secret rank, of feeling himself their superior because of his power, and his place in the world.

  On and on the river of images flowed and he saw the events of his life that brought him to this place and this time, and he felt the promise reborn that if he held on, he would become the ruler of everything, that armies of servants would bow to him, that legions of warriors would obey his commands. He would bend even the Old Ones to his will.

  First Maial would fall and then his forces would spread across the sea, across the map of the world, rebuilding an empire the like of which had not been seen since the Dawn Ages of the World. Indeed, his would be greater because the Auratheans would not be there to oppose him. They too might come to serve him. The god within him believed that, and it saw with a sight keener than his own, and judged with a knowledge far greater.

  He tittered. He giggled. The sounds emerged from his mouth were strange to him at first but they grew and grew into great bellows of unholy joyous mirth, the laughter of a dark god free once more to work its will on the world. It had found what it needed to root itself in this reality once more.

  Eventually the mirth subsided and Balthazar’s sense of himself returned. He set to work on the next sarcophagus. This time he did not bother with a binding ritual. With swift sure strokes of his sacrificial knife, he slit the seals and let the being within go free.

  This time he perceived it in a thousand new ways, with senses borrowed from the Old One bonded to his armour. He felt the hunger and the power within the creature and the frisky bubbling madness. He saw how damaged it was by its long imprisonment and realised how long it would take for it to heal, if ever it did.