Translocating was not a magic Kall-Su thought possible. Not by any creature living. Not without exacting and time consuming spellcraft and effort at any rate. He remembered dimly reading something about slyphs - beings long extinct -- being able to flee through a hole in space when threatened. An entirely defensive mechanism and not one expected from a human sorcerer. He hadn't even been certain that's what had happened until the disorientation of the passage left him and he discovered he wasn't lying on the cobblestones of the cul-de-sac anymore. It was like being picked up by the collar and jerked bodily through a gravity heavy space that compressed a body and dizzied a mind. Blackness and stunning lights at the same time. Cold and warmth that ate into bones -- A static scream that could be heard inside his head, but not outside it.
Then it was gone and so was the star speckled sky, the nighttime sounds of Sta-Veron and the shadowed bulk of the city. All of it was just vanished and he was plunged into caliginous blackness. He was on a surface so smooth and flat it had to be metal. It was cool and dry -- bone dry, as if coated with a film of fine dust. A sound. A scuffle of something very close by and Kall scrambled backwards, ignoring the ringing in his ears, and the wave after wave of chaotic images that pulsed through his head. His back hit a wall close by. He flung out an arm, summoning a witch light. It was hard coming. He felt the magic stir at his invocation, but it was reluctant to do what he wished. It felt -- frightened -- almost.
But it came anyway -- if he couldn't summon a simple witchlight, then he was truly lost, and the cold bluish light illuminated a section of plain, unadorned hallway. Metal walls. Lines cut so straight and precise, so surgical in their design that it seemed no man's hand had made them. There was a low, vibrating hum that came from somewhere, that permeated the floor and the walls and the very air. Not magic. Not anything he had felt before, but it hinted at power.
A movement from the shadow of the hall, which seemed to go on forever and Angelo stepped forward, staff raised as if he intended to strike Kall with it again. Six steps away. Kall hissed out the words of a spell, a summoning spell that would set an ice elemental loose upon the Prophet. The man would probably beat it back, since Kall didn't have time to cast a more powerful spell, but it would give him the moment he needed to get his head together. He spoke the last word of the summons and nothing happened. No trace of the elemental creature that had served him very well in the past. Silence save for the soft slap of Angelo's boots on the floor.
He gaped, thinking, could this be the place without windows? Elemental's wouldn't pass the wards when he'd tried to summon them before. The staff came crashing down, Angelo's face a twisted mask of rage-victory- maniacal pleasure, behind it. Kall-Su held up an arm and blocked it, saved his skull from the impact and with a sickening crack, felt his arm go numb instead. A second later, pain blazed and he cried out, clutching the member close to his body, scrambling backwards, away from the Prophet.
Angelo laughed. A little mad. A little unsteady. Not the very smooth, very in control man he'd been before. "Magic doesn't like it down here. The things here chase it away. But I know magics that aren't afraid. They're not magics at all. I used to think it was a gift given to me by God, but now I think something darker bestowed it upon me. I ruled the souls of half the old world by virtue of them. They bowed to me. They worshipped me as the spokesman of God. Trusting fools! Can you feel it the fingers of it in your head, my pretty sinner?"
He did feel them. Oh, god, god, they crept inside his head like snakes, seeking any slight entry and forcing their way past, writhing and convulsing their sinuous bodies until they widened the gaps of defense. It was repulsive. The serpents had been there before, freely slithering inside his head, let in by hopelessness and pain. They'd brought with them visions of guilt and madness that he still felt the lingering traces of. They told him now to let go, to stop fighting, that there was no prospect of beating Angelo here, in the heart of his lair. His secret place. The place down below, where the Prophet had never let anyone trespass. Where Lily had warned him away from desperately so long ago, when he'd still had the will to seek escape. Kall shut his eyes, clutching his head and screamed out the words to a spell, gathering power with all his desperate will to feed it.
An energy blast the width of the hall answered. It was weaker than it might have been, considering all the power he poured into it. It lit the hall like a wash of lightening, swallowing Angelo, blasting him backwards. Kall knew he wasn't down. Felt it in the shimmering response of shields, in the insistence of the invasion inside his thoughts. He climbed to his feet, using the wall as support -- his arm throbbed torturously, broken perhaps, and retreated down the hall into shadow, his witchlight a feeble support at best.
No wards down here. They would have repelled that energy blast and that had not happened. So what was making magic so hard? He couldn't think. He tried to insert mental blockades to stop the inward seepage. What should have been simple for a mind trained in the highest sorcery, he was finding impossible. He should have been able to protect himself from this assault. He should have been able to at least shut out the worst of it, but it had him staggering, vision tunneling. With distance it became more bearable, though. He could focus again.
The hall went on forever. There were indention's where smooth, handelless doors were, faded, peeling numerical symbols stenciled on the walls next to them. Everything was made of the same metal. Blue gray and seamless. No bolts, no welded seams. Like something from the old world. Like something seen within the wreckage's of shattered cities, inside the shells of buildings that had seen less damage than the rest. But nothing in those graveyards had ever been this unscathed by the Final Destruction. Nothing had ever been this whole. Occasionally there were strips of light along the wall near the floor which still faintly glowed. Occasionally some of the doors stood open and inside those dark rooms were things from another time. Dust coated memorials.
What was this place where Angelo had built his fortress atop? Kall stretched out his senses, and felt the weight of a world resting above him. He could not even begin to feel the air above the stone and rock and earth.
There was an intersection ahead. He took a turn without pausing to think, rushing into darkness with the witchlight threatening to abandon him at any moment. He could not hear sounds of pursuit, but he knew Angelo was there. Waiting for the moment to strike.
He had not been prepared for this. He had blocked all possibility
of Angelo's existence out of his mind. Easier to convince himself the
man was dead than think the creature was out there waiting to strike.
Easier to let himself slide into the mundane reality of Sta-Veron and
the unexpected discovery of Lily and all she represented than prepare
himself for this. Fool. He should have known. He should never had let
his guard down. Had he ever even built it back up? So here he was
now, with a madman who knew the byways of his mind better than he
did, who wanted his magic and his body to house it and would
destroy
He paused and put his back against the wall to catch his breath. The featureless facade of a door was next to him. A panel beside it with its faceplate hanging by exposed wires. The humm was an undertone that drifted through this place like a ghost.
A vision slammed into him.
Lights and bright halls. Men and women striding purposefully along, all in similar cut clothing. Uniforms with shining brass buttons and various marks of rank. A few others among them in more casual, civilian clothing, all of them looking as if they had great business to conduct. The world outside, hundreds and hundreds of feet above flared with nuclear explosions. With the far more devastating biological menace that was ---- Ansasla. Yet these people were safe from it. Shielded while the rest of the world writhed in torment. A thousand people in this place. Miles of bunkered hallways and stored supplies. Nuclear power beneath them that would feed life into those halls for a millennia. A place of safety for a thousand souls that would support them and their offspring for as long as it took for the world to regain its composure. Only the world never had. Not the way it used to be and they weren't alone down here, for they had invited a serpent into safety among them. He walked down the hall in the company of privileged men and decorated soldiers, his white robes and gold trimmed skull cap making him seem angelic and holy. An old man, white haired and frail, with kind eyes and a benevolent smile. The oldest man here. He wouldn't live to see the day when the shielded bunker doors were opened to let man once more walk the upper earth. He hadn't the strength to endure so many years. Not of his own, at any rate.
Kall-Su drew back against the wall as the insubstantial figures passed, the old man staring blindly through him, but the others -- the soldiers and the officers and the aides and the priestly attendants that trailed the old man -- their eyes found him. Looked at him as they walked with longing and dread. As if they recognized him or wanted something of him.
The darkness came tumbling back, taking the witchlight with it. Kall remained against the wall, bracing his legs to keep from sliding down it. Beginning to shake from reaction. Had Angelo slipped that into his head or had it come from something else?
He thought he knew what this was now. One of those places where the survivors had hidden, before they had come out, years later and declared an end to the technology that had ruined their world. Most of those places had been destroyed and all they represented along with them. Most of those places were whispered legends, but they were known. How could there be one left that still had power fueling it, technology humming within it that repelled magic as surely as the wards had protected the fortress that had resided above it?
He called the witchlight back and it almost hurt this time, it was so much of an effort. The magic did not wish to function here. He set off again, a little more careful of his pace, the arm sending screaming jolts of pain up past his shoulder. It was enough to take his mind from the constant outside pressure worrying at him. He didn't think he had a whisper of a chance at healing it. Not if it took so much effort just to summon a witchlight.
What had happened to Lily? Please let her be alive. Angelo hadn't the time to cast anything else at her. He'd gone through the hole in space before Kall-Su had been entrapped by it. Grant her enough sense to go find Schneider and tell him what had happened. Schneider would know something was wrong. He would have picked up on the cast spells. It was just a matter of him knowing the specifics so he could do something about it. Do what? Cast another of his incredibly inventive witchcraft spells? No likely, at least not for another cycle of the moon. He needed a full moon, if Kall recalled Schneider's scribbled notes correctly and that had been two nights past. Not another one for a month. No help there. They still didn't even know where this place was, other than the assumption that it was somewhere in the mid-western mountain range. That covered a lot of ground.
There was a double door just ahead that seemed the crux of three halls. He passed it and it slid open as if by ghost hands. He scooted back a few steps, managing to avoid a yelp of surprise. A wash of cool, oddly scented air flowed out at him. He almost expected Angelo, since the door had apparently opened by magic, but there was no movement and no attack. Curiosity got the better of him and he stepped forward, slipping quickly and cautiously through the animate doors. His light seeped into the room. Large chamber, filled with lines of tables and chairs. A eating hall perhaps. The tables all had things lying upon them. Covered oblong shapes. Hundreds and hundreds of them. There were more piled along the walls haphazardly, as if someone had gotten tired to stacking them neatly and decided to drop them with no respect to order. He stepped on something brittle and it crunched under his boot. He looked down. Clutching hand flung out on the floor, flesh eaten away by time, bone gone yellow from the same culprit, the rotten remnants of clothing still clinging like spider web to the frame of a body.
He carefully stepped back, suddenly wary of what he would see if he looked to closely to all those other shapes in the darkness. A thousand people down here when this place was alive. How many skeletal corpses in this room?
Something brushed at his arm like a whispered caress and another vision blared behind his eyes.
People were dying. It had gotten in, somehow. The infection -- the germ released by Ansasla had somehow slipped in past all the safeguards and it was eating them up from within. It went through them like death waving his scythe in a field of wheat. They fell, with no regard to rank or placement. It even struck the holy. But the old man, in his dying moments, struck out in desperation, using the innate power of his mind, and the scant power given him by what he thought was the messenger of his god and discovered a way to prolong his existence. There was a man beside him, sick and dying, but not so far along as the old man, broken with the sure knowledge of impending death. A hopeless man with no reason to fight, when a determinedly righteous one invaded his mind, crushed his soul and drew out the essence of his life. The old man left his body and found himself a new one. Not healthy by any means, but buffered by the combined life-force of two beings. He was like a vampire feeding on the weak. He was so desperate for existence that he threw away whatever compassion he held for the sanctity of life. They were all dying anyway. What did it matter?
They never knew what hit them. They never knew the name of the second plague that ate away at their resources. He went through them all, because every body he took weakened and had to be disposed of. He took the healthiest if he could. He tore apart their unguarded mundane minds and reaped the benefits of their bodies. And somewhere along the way he gained enough power to purge himself of the virus and he went out into the world. But he left behind a warren full of ghosts, a maze of souls that he'd raped and torn from their hosts all in the name of a god whom he thought had preordained his survival over the survival of all others.
A filmy haze shifted at the corner of his vision. He couldn't be sure it wasn't part of the hallucination. He turned his head, trying to follow it, and there was another wisp further into the room. A pale luminescence that hovered like fog over the tables piled with bones. Almost it seemed to light the room. But it was no fog. It was nothing natural that clung with desperate fervor to the remains of men and women dead four hundred years. With growing dread he felt the forlorn, tormented cries of murdered masses. Heard the whispers -- the wind blowing through a forest of dry leaves -- of countless voices crying to be avenged.
It wasn't a mere twenty some bodies Angelo had taken over the centuries. It was hundreds and hundreds and the evidence lay here, a vile collection of bones and the whisper of ghosts who had no power to avenge themselves.
"Oh god." Kall-Su said very softly, taking a step backwards in horror.
"There is no god." Angelo whispered from behind him.
He whirled, backpedaling in shock, holding his hands to his ears uselessly as what had been ghostly whispers turned into a banshee wail of allegation and fury. The filmy presenses swirled about the chamber like a hive of angry wasps. The pulsing lights strobed in his eyes. Angelo didn't seem to see it. He stared with maddening intensity at Kall-Su, nothing but the sickening assurance of victory in his eyes.
"Can't you see them?" Kall cried, panicked, backing away steadily into the graveyard of the Prophet's making.
"What? These old bones?" The old Angelo smile flickered into place. The Missionary's smile. "They gave their lives for the good." He held out a hand. "Don't fight me, boy. Its inevitable."
Something whipped past Kall's head and he ducked, staring after it. The Prophet's gaze followed his, his eyes narrowing as if he thought some joke were being played upon him. A tick began in his cheek. His gaze flickered about the room uncertainly.
"Don't try and distract me." He hissed.
Kall almost laughed, aborted it with a strangled sound and accused. "You killed them. They trusted you and you fed off them."
Angelo's eyes widened. His lips pulled back in a snarl of utter rage. "Shut up! Shut up!"
Kall felt the power gather and had just enough time to form a haphazard shield. A high impact energy spell hit him, battered him backwards and ate at his shields. The dry rotted canvas that covered the remains on the tables went up in flames. Bones burned. Another blast hit him and he slammed backwards into a table, overturning it, falling in a shower of brittle bones. Something snapped. Fear, revulsion, desperation, anger all came to a head and he pulled power recklessly, siphoning inner reserves when outside magics were sluggish to respond. He bombarded Angelo with an ice spell. A hurricane hammer of cold powered energy that blew bones and tables against the walls in its path to envelope the Prophet. The Prophet in his mad rage had not even had a shield up. He was that sure of his dominance. It blasted him back, through the open doors and against the hallway wall. Red blood spattered the frost covered wall. Angelo slumped to the floor, his shoulder a bloody mess, his left arm just gone. Ice rimmed his hair and brows, crusted on his robes.
He didn't move. There was no hint of breath frosting the air.
Kall's did. Quick and hard and he crouched there, panting. The power for another strike hung in the air around him, waiting to be directed. He pushed himself up, stood there swaying, with bones about his feet. Bones all around.
You -- little -- bastard --
It clamored inside his head. Burning tendrils of pain lashed behind his eyes. He cried out, lost the tenuous hold on the power he'd gathered and it vanished as if it were running for its life.
You think I can't destroy you? It seared, like a brand into flesh, only it was mental passages that were being tormented -- destroyed. He felt gashes ripped inside his head. He doubled over, trying to fight it off. Tasted blood in his mouth and felt it trickling down his lips, running from his nose.
He threw out a frail blast of energy force, and it hurt -- god it hurt so bad to direct that feeble bit of power. Only Angelo wasn't where he had been. There was nothing there but a blood splattered wall. He couldn't see the ghosts anymore. Either they had fled, chased away by the magic, or he just couldn't see them anymore with the agony in his head. He whipped his head around, more interested in finding Angelo than the ghosts. The room was dark now. Not even the witchlight, which had dissipated at some point during the exchange.
The pain sliced into him again, and he screamed, crumpling back into the bones. This time he knew it was more than mere pain -- there was damage done. There was a wrongness in his senses, in the natural pattern of things.
Do you think I don't know the byways of your mind, Kall-Su? Do you think I didn't map out the channels of your demon spawned power? Do you think I can't burn you out, if I want? Do you think I haven't done it in the past when the sinner I needed was too stubborn to give in without destroying the magic that sustained them? So much trouble and time to heal, but I'm a master of the mind, am I not? And I'll have all the time in the world once I have your body to heal what I destroy in order to take it.
The voice was inside his head, like the ghost voices, but it brought with it fire and suffering. He knew what was wrong now. It was Angelo wrecking the pathways that allowed power to flow. The channels that so very few people had, that allowed them to be sensitive to magic. He knew of wizards who rashly used more power than they were capable of channeling, who burned out their own abilities, but he had never known it possible to wreck that same circuitry from the outside. Yet that's what it felt like was happening. It felt like open, raw wounds were being gouged inside his mind.
It hurt. It hurt worse than any torture Angelo had subjected him to. It blinded him to everything but the white searing destruction. He couldn't fight it, because Angelo knew the ways past his mental barriers. Had probably planted pathways past before Schneider had ever gotten him out. He stretched out his cringing, wounded mental voice and desperately tried a summons. Find an elemental bold enough to venture down here despite the humm of technology. Something that didn't require power from him, other than in the calling. Something that would attack of its own violation and under its own strength. He couldn't grasp hold of one. His summon spells fell on deaf, or stridently preoccupied ears. Anything then. Draw in anything, even the little ones who owed no fealty to him and let them run rampart down here long enough to distract Angelo. But the little ones were rebuffed by the engines that ran this place. But something else came sniffing, curious of his desperation, curious of the strange power of this bunker. Not afraid of technology, because it was not a thing that had ever been threatened by it. It held some hint of familiarity. Senses fading, Kall held onto the faint recollection of the elemental he had perceived the morning after he and Lily had first slept together. The very old, very powerful presence that had come on the tails of all the younger, more gleeful elementals. It seeped down now, mindless of the earth that sat between sky and this place, a vastly, ominously ancient force that he clutched at with failing mental fingers and implored succor of.
He didn't even try to command it. Did not begin to think, even under better circumstances that he could bring it to heel by force. It delved into him, who had called it, with much the same force that Angelo was invading him, but with less finesse and a trailing residue of much, much more power. It grasped hold of the pain and the fear and the hatred towards this place and the man who had made it his liar. It was not used to human emotion. It had never known the taste of a human mind. What he had seen of it, he realized in some astonishment, had only been the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It was beyond fathoming the extent of its power. Ancient, ancient elemental out of the frozen northern poles that even the nomads did not venture. And despite all that, it latched onto his fear/hatred/destroy -- took it into itself and went wild.
Angelo sensed it as it began to release its energies. He called down a massive fire attack to drive away an ice elemental, and the fire sputtered and was lost in a growing maelstrom of wind and blowing ice. The floor began to freeze over, ice forming and growing, thicker and thicker until it started to creep over the scattered bones, to encase the tables and chairs, to seep up the walls and coat the ceiling. Angelo screamed in fury, yanking his attention away from Kall-Su, trying to master the elemental that was in the midst of throwing a mammoth tantrum. And the thing recognized the object of the fear/hate and descended upon him.
Half a scream got out, before the ice swarmed over his body. Kall hadn't even realized where he was before that physical scream alerted him to the position. And then all he saw was the swiftly thickening ice and the winds battering the indistinct shape so forcefully that pieces of it began to chip away, until the whole of it was battered down to nothing. Nothing but pieces of frozen ice and blood and bone that mixed in with all the others that were flying about the room.
And it didn't stop. It circled outwards, the ice eating into the
walls and bones of the bunker itself. Taking over room by room, level
by level of a place vast enough to have housed a thousand people. It
climbed over the generators and the great engines that ran this place
and they ground to a halt. It seeped up through the earth and went
mad with the currents of air to feed it. It grew. Concentrically it
devoured the earth, wider and wider. Trees were frozen solid in
moments, toppling at their own weight. Animals were caught
Kall felt its hunger, its madness. Felt the ever growing pattern of its destruction and could do nothing. All he could do was sit untouched by a thing that was systematically destroying everything in its path. The center of the storm that still raged in the death chamber. Kneeling there, miserable and hurting, with a cold so violent that even he was effected by it. He wrapped his arms about himself, not quite believing the Prophet was gone. But there was no new pain inflicted inside his head, just the burning sensation of the old; the throbbing of mangled power channels. He tried to call the elemental back, desperate to halt its destruction, even though the effort cost him dearly. It did not respond, utterly beyond his control and he thought he might have worsened the damage inside his head. He sobbed helplessly, tears sliding past his lashes. They froze on his cheeks. His clothing was stiff with ice. It frosted his hair. His flesh might be immune to it, but at the rate the ice was growing down here, it wouldn't matter, he'd been encased within anyway.