Chapter Ten
The carriage, when they found it, was a stolid, muddy vehicle, heavily built, from whose sides glinted an occasional flicker of forlorn gilt, hinting at a time when it had been a fine transport, delicate and clean-limbed. But bit by bit it had fallen apart over the years, an axle here and a sideboard there. The broken pieces had been replaced with items of sturdier stock, and it had been rebuilt into the artificial equivalent of a Clydesdale. Power and doughtiness practically shone from the scored wheels, and one had the distinct feeling that with a good team, it could pull a Hannibal and go over the Alps.
The horses themselves were an unprepossessing lot, lanky and knobby-limbed, but with that peculiar lean look to their faces and flanks that indicates great speed and endurance. The driver looked much like his beasts, a gangly, unshaven individual who rivaled Zelgadis in taciturnity and surliness. He charged triple the fare of any normal coach, and became, to all appearances, silently enraged when they paid him on the spot with no quibbling whatsoever. All in all, they felt they had made an excellent choice, both being possessed of the cynical, ironic turn of mind which told them that it was the scruffiest, most unwilling-seeming carriage that would get them there fastest and with the least incident.
This instinct proved correct. As soon as they were both inside the coach, the driver leaped to his seat with the wizened agility of a monkey and clucked to his horses, who had begun to move in a sullen trot even before the door had completely closed. The mud-colored vehicle pushed its way through the crowds with an avalanche-like impassivity indicating in the most unequivocal terms imaginable that anyone believing himself to have the right of way was sadly, and quite possibly, painfully mistaken.
The first three hours or so of the ride saw them entangled in the labyrinthine bowels of the clamorous city. Though the streets did not, perhaps, curlicue in the magnificent ringlets of the days before the Great Fire, in a city like London, urban clutter and outrage and bustle soon makes newness and straightness irrelevant, in much the same manner as corals soon make a respectable reef out of a straight-laced battleship, and they more often found themselves swerving to the right or the left, or even going backwards than straight.
Once out of London, they joined the boisterous pulse of traffic thronging to and from the city. Oily merchants, honest men, wives and young women in droves, the occasional rare specimen of country naiveté, thieves of all descriptions…at some point in time, every single class of human imaginable has made its way through London's digestive system. The coach moved steadily through this torrent along a road following the Thames. It had been the fashion about a century ago for the very wealthy to build summer homes along its banks when there had actually been room to build them. Now suburbs had sprung up all around them in haphazard mushroom patterns, but the villas themselves were still magnificently gloomy landmarks. It was in one of these, unfortunately located in a swampy area and so still relatively isolated, that Rezo made his home.
The two occupants of the shabby coach passed the ride quietly. While in the city they stared out the windows at the dimmed rustling of the crowds. Lina would occasionally point out an item of interest, and pontificate exasperatedly on her opinion of the matter, whatever it was. Zelgadis would peer critically at whatever she pointed at and put in an incisive comment for one side or another. (Usually for Lina's. He had no intention of fighting Rezo, much less Shabranigdo, while recovering from a Fireball.) And so for a while they would engage in the sporadic, relaxed conversation of friends playing the game of distracting each other from something neither wants to think about. Once they left the city's limits, there wasn't as much to comment on, and first Zelgadis, then Lina fell into an uneasy sleep.
The muddy coach pushed forward, its horses never going faster than a trot, but eating up the ground in gulping strides. The sky darkened around them, and the rumble of traffic quieted into a hum and a whisper and finally to isolated steps of individual travelers, hollow against the dusty ground.
After a long period of liquid black dreams, Lina startled awake at the coach's sudden halt. She cracked open the door, and was greeted by the driver's grimy face, his head turned to face her in a wry-necked gesture of grudging courtesy. He grunted something to the effect that they had stopped only to change horses. The words of the sentence were entirely unintelligible, and the phrase was imbued with the snarling "Leave me alone" that usually accompanied insults, but he nonetheless managed to make his meaning perfectly clear.
Lina took him at his word, and shortly her faith was rewarded by his subsequent disappearance and reappearance, the latter while bearing the reins of a pair of beasts to all appearances exactly the same as the ones let out of the traces – lanky, downtrodden, and with coats naturally the color of an incipient case of mange. The new horses were harnessed in, the coachman grunted, and the vehicle resumed forward motion at exactly the same steady trot of the last part of the journey.
Lina sighed and settled back in her seat. By this time true night had fallen, and it seemed that the early nap had driven sleep away for its duration. She glowered over at Zelgadis, who was slumped over in the opposite corner of the coach in a sleep that, while far from restful, was certainly more so than her current state of tense wakefulness.
She wasn't worried, per se – just…tense. She didn't want to die anytime soon, but if they couldn't beat Shabranigdo, that was exactly what was going to happen, first to her and Zel, and then to the rest of the world. Nothing much she could do about it except what they were already doing.
Her gaze returned to her companion, who by this time had shifted into what looked like a rather uncomfortable position; that is, cramped into the corner, one arm sprawled out along the seat, the other crossed over his stomach, head bowed over his chest, snoring softly. The normality and unguardedness of the position contrasted sharply with his customary cynicism and distrust. She thought she had made a good choice in offering her friendship. Aside from the fact that he obviously needed it…well, the fact was she didn't have many friends either. It was nice to have someone around to talk magic with, and Zel was sensible and levelheaded in situations in which Lina herself often resorted to a fireball. He had the guts and, well, lack of self-preservation necessary to stand up and argue with her. It was a very pleasant change. If they got through this, she'd have to make a point of enjoying his company.
And Lina turned to the window to watch the Earth's lumpy, torn bedspread pass by them.
The coach jolted to a bumping halt, and Zelgadis started awake and quickly took stock of his surroundings. Lina leaned at the window, eyes half-lidded and dozing. She shook her head, blinked, and stretched, looking far more awake at the end of this process than she had at the beginning.
"This it?"
After glancing out the window, Zelgadis nodded sharply.
"Yes."
"All right, then. Let's go and get this over with."
"Agreed."
The two stepped out of the coach and made their way to the slumbering, lumbering mansion, leaving the coachman snorting discontentedly in much the same tone and timbre as his horses after being told by a determinedly cheerful Lina to "Wait here until we come out. Or until the world ends. Whichever comes first."
Rezo's abode crouched silently, a dark hulk rendered featureless in the night. Its silhouette could have described anything from a mundane, mossy boulder comfortably settled into its hollow of soil, to a sleeping giant, liable to toss and turn at any moment to crush the observer. The only thing to betray its identity as an abode was a patch of white, white light, too pure to have its source in meager flame and tallow, hovering in the dark from an upper window.
Zelgadis and Lina walked up the path, steps sounding oddly in the heavy air.
The door proved no obstacle, and the way to Rezo was as clear as water tracks in dust. Magic surged through the house's creaking rooms, crackling and ferocious, almost thick enough to grab and shape with bare hands alone. They followed its sinewy tendrils up the stairs and were faced with a wall bare of doors but for one positioned, Cyclops-like, in the very center. Silence held for one second as they exchanged glances, and then Lina nodded towards Zelgadis, who stretched out his hand and unlatched the door.
Rezo stood in the exact center of the large, bare room, facing precisely toward the door, head half-bowed. Glare jumped from the complex runes inscribed on the floor to crawl sinuously up the stark walls, illuminating the otherwise dark room. The blind man tipped his head to the side, as if listening to a faint, almost-identifiable sound before speaking gravely in the same dry, toneless voice of their previous encounters.
"Zelgadis, is it? And Miss Inverse also, if I'm not mistaken. I thought you might come. It's only fitting that you be here now. If it hadn't been for your interference, it would not have been necessary to resort to these drastic measures."
Lina felt, rather than heard, Zelgadis growl beside her and hiss out in a tight, strangled whisper, "Rezo, you bastard…"
The priest's voice cracked out across the empty room like a whip.
"That is enough, grandson. You think you desire a 'cure' for your condition? I seriously doubt your sincerity on that count. Your efforts lack both patience and determination. If you truly desired a cure, you would find it, as I have. If you truly desired it, right now, you would be doing this, not I."
And Rezo's hand snapped forward and over, palm facing the ground, as if pressing down some immense weight, and he barked out a short phrase. Magic flooded the room in palpable waves and the runes on the floor exploded in brilliance.
And then, in the midst of the roaring white light, Rezo's locked, sealed eyelids fluttered and opened, at first slowly, and in a rush, hurrying to satisfy the greed for color and light and shape of newborn eyes, red as the Earth's last dawn.
As soon as they saw that piercing crimson, both Lina and Zelgadis knew.
Rezo had absorbed Lina's Dragon Slave.
Xellos had said that it had been Shabranigdo's idea to resurrect Shabranigdo, the Ruby-Eyed.
And Rezo's sealed-shut, incurably blind eyes were red.
In the center of the room, Rezo bent nearly double, leaning on his slender staff, red, red robes billowing around him, a bleeding stab-wound in the clean blankness of the hard white light. His eyelids pressed grotesquely and unblinkingly to the very tops of his eye sockets, and he scanned the room hungrily, all the while laughing purely and childishly, triumphantly happy. And his eyes opened farther and farther, until there was nothing left but a churning red mass whose laughter lacked anything of purity or childishness, but rang wholly triumphant.
Zelgadis was furious. Furious with Rezo for achieving a cure, even more furious with him for it being the horrific falsity it was, furious with himself for not seeing it sooner, furious with Shabranigdo for arbitrarily surging up into the middle of his own private, sordid mess of vengeance and betrayal. Now, while Shabranigdo was still only partially anchored in the here and now, was undoubtedly his best chance. He ordered his thoughts into the precise, resonant array of spellcasting and drew a deep breath before extending his consciousness out into the Astral Plane.
"Source of all souls…"
Lina felt energy gather to Zelgadis, orbiting in ever tighter, frantic spirals as the spell began to manifest in his hands, and silently thanked the Lord of Nightmares that her initial estimation of his magical aptitude had been correct as she recognized the chant. A strong Ra-Tilt was probably the only normal spell outside of White that had a chance of halting Ruby Eye, even in his present, barely-formed state.
The spell keened viciously in his grip and flung itself out of his hands in a flare of retina-searing light. It burst against the flank of the newly formed Dark Lord and broke, shattered across the Astral Plane by the strength of Shabranigdo's outer defenses. Hoping the Ra-Tilt might have imperceptibly weakened the monster, Lina followed it with an Elmekia Flame.
By now, Shabranigdo had manifested fully, and he walked relentlessly toward them, laughing all the while as they threw spell after spell at him, furiously determined to force at least one to work. He left deep, smoking footprints in the fine wood of the floor, and his horny shoulders scraped against the roof, tearing a jagged swathe of sky through the ceiling.
Lina gritted her teeth and dived to the side with Zelgadis as Shabranigdo's hulking presence approached, firing an Elmekia Lance at his exposed back on the way and mentally raging. They had gone through every Astral Shamanist spell there was; Zelgadis had even desperately repeated his Ra-Tilt, all to no effect whatsoever.
What really got Lina was that Shabranigdo was beatable.
It was theoretically possible to beat anything if you get crack open its Astral defenses enough to blast a spell through. On any other being, Lina would have been Dragon Slaving right and left by now, and using the weakness caused by severe physical damage as an opening to Astrally shred anything that survived the blast, but using a Dragon Slave on Shabranigdo would probably just make him laugh harder. After all, it was his spell. And his defenses were strong. Astral Shamanism was having absolutely no effect at all. It was like trying to wear down a cliff by throwing buckets of water at it. That could, however, simply be because Shabranigdo guarded specifically against that type of magic. She could probably force her way through with a Giga Slave, but she wasn't sure that even that spell would have enough juice left to do Shabranigdo in after wiping out his defenses, and no matter how weakened, the Ruby-Eye Lord was the Ruby-Eye Lord. What she really needed was a spell that he wasn't guarded against that could worm through his defenses so she could blast him inside out.
Shamanism was apparently worthless in this situation.
She couldn't cast any of the White spells that might be powerful enough to do the job, and apparently neither could Zelgadis.
Black was out of the question as all the Mazoku hierarchy fell under Shabranigdo.
Of course, it was highly likely that there were at least one or two high-level Mazoku willing to turn traitor for the possible gain in power they would receive with Shabranigdo's weakening, but now wasn't really the time to feel which Mazoku's allegiance might not precisely fall under Shabranigdo….
…Wait a minute.
Zelgadis was part Mazoku.
Lina glanced over to where he crouched, panting, back to the wall in frustration. Shabranigdo boomed another laugh and flicked a wave of blackly burning energy at them, playing with them. Lina's hamstrings keened almost audibly as she dove away and Zelgadis' leap to the other side was noticeably slowed from his usual quicksilver speed. They were now situated on opposite sides of the room, the Ruby-Eyed king's form hulking squarely between them. They wouldn't last much longer.
There would be no chance at all to warn Zelgadis or ask his permission. Hell, she had no idea whatsoever what the spell would do to him, but in this situation she was going to have to assume that if it didn't bother the Mazoku Lords, it wasn't going to bother him.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Zelgadis was not going to forgive her easily for this – if he ever did.
Zelgadis saw Lina across the room, sweaty strands of cinnamon-red hair plastered across a face the sickly white of limestone in the glare of Shabranigdo's power, mouthing something at him.
"Distract him."
Zelgadis forced down a bitter, ferocious smile (after all, that was all they had managed to do so far, wasn't it?), shrugged, and snapped his feet in the appropriate direction for a flanking attack. He was nearly dry of magical power, and considering how much effect it had been having lately, he preferred to forgo the suffocating mental fatigue that came with complete magical exhaustion. His sword and knives would just have to do. Shabranigdo let out yet another belly laugh as he leapt and twisted midair to dodge an off-hand swipe of the kind one uses to discourage mosquitoes.
What a way to go.
Lina saw him dive in, and breathed a mental sigh of relief as Shabranigdo turned to follow his attack. This would have to be done quickly and precisely. She extended her will into the Astral Plane, finding that bitter edge of cold that marked Zelgadis' odd, patchwork presence, now even sharper than before, flickering in malevolent, desperate defiance of the burning, roiling heat that the Ruby-Eyed lord cast over the plane. Working quickly, she extended ghostly prehensile tendrils, tugging at its fringes in thorough, hurried inspection, trying to find a loose end, a lean towards one form or another. As Mazoku go, Zelgadis wasn't very powerful, but the interference of his human and golem components made his Astral signature complicated and difficult to manipulate.
Mid-dodge, Zelgadis felt an indescribably odd tugging on the edges of his mind, as if someone was trying to comb through the tangled knots and snarls of his thoughts. The sensation was so abrupt and disturbing that his duck under Shabranigdo's sweeping limb turned into an impromptu roll, nearly allowing the Shabranigdo to squash him underfoot. As he leapt backward into a reflexive crouch, he swept a figurative net through the Astral, searching for the source of the disturbance, hoping it would not turn out to be some insidious curse that Shabranigdo had tagged him with when he hadn't been looking.
To his shock and outrage, it was nothing of the sort.
Lina, his friend, was trying to find a way to manipulate the side of him that was purely Mazoku into forming a spell.
As he leapt and dodged frantically, hoping to remain unpredictable enough to forestall his inevitable demise for at least a few more minutes, his thoughts careened through the same convoluted course that Lina's had followed earlier and arrived at the same conclusion.
That did not prevent her actions from bearing the acid sear of betrayal. Lord of Nightmares, she was meddling in his Astral essence without his permission! What other reaction than outrage and indignation was possible?
But he was damned if he would let Shabranigdo née Rezo kill him when such a brilliantly poetic revenge offered itself up to him.
With that, he completely released his habitual mental control, the hidden viciousness and keen desire for violence crashing over his thoughts in roaring tides. Throwing himself forward onto the balls of his feet, he darted in for another useless attack, faster and crueler in intent.
Lina felt the brush of Zelgadis' consciousness, searching for the disturbance he had felt. She half expected him to slam up a barrier to protect his much-abused privacy out of sheer reflex, and was prepared to tear it down by force if she had to. Instead, she nearly lost her precarious grip on Astral reality when the Mazoku tint to his aura suddenly flared, steady and deathly chill, straining toward the looming presence of Shabranigdo with unmistakably deadly intent. Lina wasted no time in pondering the sudden shift. The dominance of the Mazoku element made it much easier to grasp and mold into a shaped attack.
And take it and twist it into shape she did, a nasty little spell that snarled and hummed in her hands before hurling itself at Shabranigdo's flank in a short series of dark blades, its point of origin presently darting madly between the flaring magics the Ruby-Eyed sent against him in lazy amusement. The distraction proved enough, and the spell struck home.
Zelgadis felt a twisting clawing at the base of his skull, and realized dimly under the sharp-edged darkness that covered his thoughts what it was. The feeling briefly crescendoed, molten lead shot up his spine, and the next thing he knew his knees wobbled under him and his mind clouded with the familiar gray haze of magical overexertion.
He managed somehow to dodge the next three swipes before being struck by a heavy force that threw him up against the wall and past it to the edge of broken oblivion.
Lina saw Zelgadis fall to an enraged swipe of the Ruby-Eyed Lord's open palm, but didn't, couldn't, concern herself with it. She had no time, no time at all. Shabranigdo was turning toward her. There was no time to check if the spell had opened a chink in his defenses, she had to cast the Giga Slave and cast it now.
Rezo, if there's any left of you at all, now is the time to show it!
In an impossible response to her impulsive Astral shout, Shabranigdo's steps slowed infinitesimally and came to a brief halt. It was all the time Lina needed to launch into the fastest Giga Slave of her life.
"Darkness beyond blackest pitch, deeper than the deepest night!
Lord of Darkness, shining like gold upon the Sea of Chaos,
I call upon thee, swear myself to thee!
Let the fools who stand before us be destroyed by the power that you and I possess!
GIGA SLAVE!"
Her mind filled with heavy molten metal, encasing her thoughts in aureate liquid, packing her skull walls tight with power before it burst out of her and plunged into Shabranigdo. The Ruby-Eyed Lord roared, but Lina was too busy collapsing to notice. The Mazoku Lord fought against the Giga Slave's inexorable grind, but the Lord of Nightmares is a stern mother, and brooks no disobedience from her children. Splintered boards flew from the walls and the house's foundation gave a brief shudder before splitting with a monstrous crack. The floor collapsed and everything not caught up in the Giga Slave's vicious howling fell with it, Lina and Zelgadis disappearing in a limp and fleeting glimpse of color into the rubble.
The nearby Thames raged in tidal waves, and the ground tore open in a raw sore of exposed topsoil. The surly cabby and his horses had long ago taken flight, the quaking ground making their path uncertain. The air snapped and hissed under the spell's furious shriek. In perhaps an hour, the Giga Slave ended as abruptly as it had begun, and the suddenly silent morning was left with the quiet, shattered bones of Rezo's mansion.
AN: Once again, I've tweaked the Slayers magic system to my own ends, but you people have been remarkably lenient with me on that count, so I'm going to shut up and not worry too much about it. And I still can't believe nobody's gone and lynched me for not making this a "real" romance. You guys are incredible!
Just one more chapter to go… Man, it's been a long time in coming, hasn't it? Thanks for sticking through with it this far. And many, many thanks to PKNight as usual for beta-reading.