The shadows remained still, frozen unnaturally in place like ice, for a single moment. Then with a swiftness that defied explanation they came at him like a dozen blades at once. Kain had faced creatures composed of shadows before, Shade creatures under the thrall of the Elder and now given over to Abaddon to command. But this was different. This was the first time he found himself having to defend against his own shadow. Attached to the bottom of his feet, his dark silhouette swung at him with its own shadowy version of the reaver blade, somehow leaving its horizontal surface of the floor and driving it up. Kain had to bring his own blade around to parry that attack and as the two identical swords met he felt them clash as if the shadow had been a physical object.

Recoiling back in alarm at such a thing, Kain turned and slid side to side rapidly to avoid another pair of shadows which curled in upon themselves and became lances aimed directly at his flank. One he dodged sliding to the left and the other he parried, striking it with the Reaver to divert it from its course. More shadows were coming at him, sliding across any surface vertical or horizontal like a nest of snakes before leaping at him in swift stabbing attacks. Dodging and evading so many attacks all at once had Kain dodging to fast his body blurred in a dance of fancy footwork.

It was like fighting dozens of enemies all at once, all striking at him from different positions simultaneously. Each shadow was a unique formed weapon, twisting itself into a blade, blunt instrument or piercing spear when it launched itself. What gave Kain the only edge he had was a warrior's instinct, honed over centuries, to sense the intent of a conscious mind against him. While the weapons hurled against him were unconventional the mind of the enemy was not. He could anticipate just where and when an attack would come. But that would only suffice for so long. He needed to draw his hidden enemy out.

-0-

"There was no respite from this hunter. For even my own shadow was an avenue from which an attack could come. The ability of Shadowmeld was a rare talent and I had never seen it employed with such skill and grace as this before. Truly, Baphomet's mastery of this ability was nothing short of artistic. In another time and place I might have marveled at such skill. But here and now it was a deadly advantage held by an enemy."

-0-

"I carry an offer of truce and parlay, directly from your God!" Kain cried out even as he parried another strike from his own shadow. It kept him from staying in one place, forcing him to continually move across the cathedral floor amongst the smoldering piles of Zephonim corpses. "Would you risk his wrath by assaulting me?"

He also did not entertain much hope of this guile being successful, but if he could distract Baphomet-Divus even for a few moments then he might be able to locate his enemy amongst these concealing darkness.

"I have only your word of such an arrangement, Kain." The reply came echoing out of the shadows all around them, as if spoken from the mouth of a vast cave. Kain listened carefully trying to source out amongst those echoes where originating from. "I have heard nothing of any 'truce' offered to the rebellious races of Nosgoth, and my standing orders are that you and any who stand with you are to be killed on sight."

As soon as he touched down on the floor, Kain's own shadow leapt up to meet him with the Reaver's silhouette drawn back for a piercing thrust. Acting on pure instinct the Vampire ducked and rolled to the side to avoid it, parrying it off to one side to avoid it thrusting through his chest.

"If it turns out you are telling the truth, then I will owe my God the greatest of apologies. I do not imagine however that I will be severely reprimanded."

The two Reaver blades exchanged blows several times in a fast blur of motion, sparks flying each time a collision occurred. Even through the haze of battle Kain was judging everything around him, taking stock of the movements the shadows made against him. They came at him most often in twos and threes and only occasionally would all attack at once. Even so these combined assaults were clumsy and relied on strength in numbers rather than precise strikes. Here was a weakness, Kain realized. Baphomet's control of these shadows was limited by how many ways at once he could split his attention. Even a practiced, disciplined mind could not divide their consciousness in so many ways for long periods of time.

The key here would be finding a way to distract this assassin, to force him to divide his attention so much he would make a mistake and leave himself open to an attack. But he was not going to find it simply by reacting to his enemies' unseen strikes. He had to force the battleground to chance to better suit himself.

Parrying the copy of the Reaver his shadow copy held, Kain freed his right hand from his blades hilt and held it up. Into his palm he poured as much arcane energy as he could muster, forcing a ball of blazing light into existence. It was brighter than any ball he had had need to create before, bursting with intense light so bright that it filled the entire immense hall of the Cathedral. Against its brilliance the shadows shrank back, receding rapidly and even Kain's own shadow shrank into a harmless small pool beneath his feet.

"Very clever, Kain!" Baphomet's voice came from the receding shadows, tone filled with annoyance. "But that is a lot of force you're expelling. Just how long can you keep that up?"

Ruefully Kain was forced to admit his adversary had a point. He could not keep this spell up indefinitely. Already he could feel it draining his deserves. He had to think of something else, something to lure his enemy out. Or perhaps better yet, drive him out.

Quickly the vampire moved, sheathing his sword and running to the edge of the chamber. Once there he jumped towards the inside wall and latched himself onto it with his talons sinking deep into the old stone. As fast as he could he hauled himself up the inside wall, ascending higher and higher.

"You can not run!" His enemies' voice taunted him as he climbed. "Wherever there is light there is shadow. And wherever there is shadow there is me!"

The cathedral was an ascending series of floors rising higher and higher to its tapering summit, all of them riddled with immense pipes like veins all the way to the top. Many of the pipes were like those below, broken and battered from a long time without proper care and maintenance. A few were wrapped in a sticky, thick thread forming slumping cocoons which bulged with visibility recognizable human bones. The Zephonim always did like to play with their food.

As he climbed, Kain carefully gauged the almost of space around him. While he could not perform the act itself, he understood the technique of Shadowmelding. It required allowing the mass of your form to pass through one shadow and into another, forging both to fit whatever shape the user desired. The limiting factor however was physical space. If there was no opening of sufficient size to push into, then the technique was useless.

Climbing so rapidly was putting an additional drain on his reserves of strength and Kain was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that he had not had opportunity to feed since the battle with Abaddon. His ball of arcane light flickered as it ascended with him, its brilliance waning despite his best efforts to keep it alive. But this played to his advantage. No doubt his adversary was watching for any slackening of the light, any shadow large enough to form into a weapon.

This would be Kain's opportunity. He would give Baphomet that opening and when he took it, he would strike. But his counter attack would have to be something unpredictable, something his enemy would have no means of countering before it struck home. Any attempt to draw the Reaver or discharge a destructive spell would be instinctively reacted to. He would only get one chance to make this work and he had to make it count.

And that was when he remembered that strange and unbidden ability that he had displayed back in the ruins of Raziel's clan territory, an ability which had come to him without providence or warning. When his very blood had answered him in a moment of dire need and become a weapon to use against an enemy.

-0-

"I had performed this skill once before when I had defeated Puriel-Divus. Now it was time to see if I could reliably do so again."

-0-

How had it felt, when at that critical moment in the fight, his blood had surged from his wounds and become a spear with which he had killed his enemy and avenged Ansu's murder? That powerful rush unleashed as if from behind a locked door. Even as he climbed he tried to focus on that feeling, that sensation of rushing power.

It did not take that much effort. With the smallest amount of concentration he could feel his blood surging down through his veins, hot like molten iron streaming from a smelter. It was somehow both reassuring and disconcerting to feel so much control and command over his own blood. Only thing to do now was to give this ability the practical trial by fire. Either he could do it by the command of his own will or he could not.

Purposely Kain allowed the orb to dim, making it flicker as if it were running out of energy on its own. The light grew fainted but a darker patch opened directly behind the climbing Vampire, into an opening with just enough space before it to allow a strike to come. Kain then closed his eyes and let his other senses extend and expand to compensate, tying them to his instinctive motions. Everything inside him tightened in expectant anxiety. Any doubts and fears that he could not pull off this maneuver were forced firmly out of his mind.

Then it came. He felt the air push harshly against his back as something physically moved against it, lunging at him from the rear. In that split second, acting before his conscious mind could even issue the command, Kain spun and in that same motion carved open the skin across his forearm with one talon. His blood instantly surged up out of the self inflicted wound, bubbling in an instant to fill in the shape of a jagged, red javelin.

Firmly he seized the weapon in one hand and then threw it forward towards the oncoming dark shadow, its own black inky spear. The two attacks passed by one another in a single instant of blurred motion. The shadowy lance missed, sinking into the stone of the wall several inches passed Kain's left flank. The spear of blood flew on, whistling in the air. It buried itself into the shadow from which the attack had come and struck home.

There was an audible, even loud, wet 'thwack' sound that echoed out from the shadow, followed by a loud yell of surprise and pain. A shape was flung from the shadow by the blow, emerging as if surfacing out of water, to slam into the side of an ascending bronze pipe. It was a tall figure with an elongated set of arms and legs. The head was hidden beneath a black cowl which was draped over the shoulders, while the rest was covered in a light fitting leather armor fitted with the occasional bit of overlapping scale-mail. Out of the back came the tell tale pair of black raven like wings of the Ancient Vampire, pulled tight to the back to keep out of the way. The spear was jammed firmly into his stomach just above the naval, blood running out the back and dripping down the side of the pipe.

"I'm sorry, did I catch you off guard?" Kain asked, holding onto the wall with one hand and his face split by a wide smug grin at both his enemies injury and the fact this test of the new ability had proven to be a rousing success.

"H..how did you..?" Baphomet-Divus began in baffled consternation. But then he grunted, grasping the spear in one hand. With a growl of pain he pulled it free and tossed it aside, the wound revealed as a gaping hole right through the stomach. For a normal foe such a wound would be instantly fatal but the Divus were made of sterner stuff.

The face remained hidden beneath the cowl even as Baphomet glared up at the Vampire, clearly less than pleased.

"I w..was given a long, detailed lecture of your abilities!" He said, one hand over the bloody hole. "But this... this was never mentioned!"

Kain chuckled back at him evilly.

"As much as I would enjoy poking fun at the Divus' gathering of reliable intelligence, I can not blame you for your ignorance. It was a recent development." It was bragging, he knew and usually one should frown on such prideful boasting. But Kain felt inclined at this moment to indulge himself.

His Divus enemy took several large breathes to steady himself and the bleeding from the wound seemed to slow.

"It will not save you!" He declared firmly, before pushing himself off the pipe in an acrobatic swing and diving into one of the shadows as easily as he would into a pool of water.

Kain did not wait. Instantly he started climbing, pouring as much energy as he could muster into both his ascent and the ball of light following him. But the attack he had landed upon his enemy had drained more of his reserves then he had first anticipated for his pace was slowed and the light cast by the orb dimmed.

Baphomet was injured and now he was going to be a lot more alert and cautious and he was not going to fall for the same trick twice. Kain knew he was going to have to come up with some other tactic, one where he had an opportunity to deliver a firm killing blow. Determinedly he pressed on, ascending as fast as he could until he came to a pipe which at some point had been broken off to leave a large jagged hole in it.

This was not some random direction. The pipe was narrow enough that he could fill it with light from the spell without expending much energy and it allowed little in the way of space for Baphomet to strike even from Kain's own shadow. Still he could not simply hide in a pipe and hope his enemy would just go away. He kept on climbing as best he could, continually heading upward. No doubt the pipe would open out somewhere else, somewhere where he might hopefully find something he could use to his advantage. Already a plan was forming in his mind, based on his observations during the battle.

Suddenly Kain became acutely aware of the presence of something just ahead of him in the pipe. A second glowing orb of light, not as brilliant as his own but luminous all the same. In a flash he recalled that he had not been traveling alone and he frowned in distaste. He had forgotten about Moebius during the struggle.

"I don't suppose it's within your sphere of influence to offer assistance?" Kain asked in an annoyed, climbing up and past the flickering face of Moebius. The spirit of the long departed Time Guardian adopted a startled expression, captured in the flickering of the spectral flames he was bound to.

"What is this? The mighty Kain seeks help from me? From ME of all people?" Moebius asked in feigned surprise.

"The irony is not lost on me." Kain muttered darkly, continuing to climb. He kept the light just ahead of him to see where he was going. The pipe seemed to curve up ahead at a sharp ninety degree angle.

"I fear however Kain that currently, all I may do is follow and observe. I feel nothing of any ability beyond that." Moebius said, bobbing along gently in the Vampire's wake.

"That you know of, at least." Kain remarked.

As he pulled himself up and around that bend in the pipe, Kain suddenly found himself face to face with a large dark patch of shadow on the side of the pipe that his spell had not yet reached. Instinct alone saved him, pulling him back even as that shadow bunched up and launched itself toward him like the thrust of a sword point. It came uncomfortably close though, passing sheer inches from his nose to slam with a tearing crunch into the roof of the pipe. Quickly Kain threw his hand forward and directed the ball of arcane light to illuminate the tunnel before him, cutting off his enemies avenue of attack.

"A bit of professional advice, Kain!" Baphomet's still angry voice came echoing, seemingly from all around outside the confined of the pipe. "When trying to hide from an enemy, it's best to not to talk to yourself!"

-0-

"Talk to myself? Could this assassin not see my enforced companion? Were all beings other than myself blind and deaf to Moebius' spirit? Oh how I envied them."

-0-

Kain kept on climbing, going higher and higher as quickly as he could while flooding the pipe just ahead and behind with arcane light. It took a great deal of concentration to maintain the effort.

"You appear to be having difficulty with this one." Moebius remarked in an offhand sort of way.

"He is...troublesome." Kain admitted, voiced strained in his continuing exertions. It was hard to judge just how far he had climbed, the Cathedral structure was an immense eddice, but he reasoned that by now he had to be approaching one of its major pipe convergences where air was gathered to project sound up to the spire at the top.

"I had heard of a Baphomet Divus before. He was known as the silent sword of God in many texts." Moebius went on. "Honestly, I had thought him allegorical, a symbol of the swiftness of God's wrath on the nonbeliever."

"Your knowledge on this subject is quite telling." Kain replied flatly. "No doubt you wished to be addressed as 'Moebius-Divus' sometime during your life!" Moebius floated a little closer as they ascended. His expression was bleak.

"It was my ambition to be elevated to Divus status, Kain. I make no secret of that. But alas, it was not my fate."

The Vampire snorted derisively.

"Oh pardon me while I wipe away my tears for your loss." He said, his voice dripping with viscous sarcasm.

The pipe came to an abrupt end and Kain found himself emerging from it into another large chamber, this one formed more by the thick brass pipes which ran tightly together more than actual stone walls. The floor itself was made of large stone blocks but they were covered in more of that thick sticky webbing projected by the Zephonim, spreading across the surface of the stone like a carpet and clinging to the pipes as it ascended up to the ceiling. Thick wrappings like immense cocoons hung down from above, each one decorated with a few twisted, emaciated limbs sticking out from them. Victims long since drained of all blood.

Kain had never been privileged enough to ever see a design for the cathedral so he could not say exactly where he was but making an educated guess this had to be a chamber where sound from the pipes feeding up from below was amplified before being sent to the top of the cathedral.

"So what are you going to do?" Moebius asked as Kain beheld his surroundings, a smug little smile slowly oozing across the Vampire's face.

"Utilize available resources."

He had only a few moments before his enemy would strike again so quickly Kain scanned the chamber with his eyes. His smile widened as he saw that the only broken pipe was the one he had emerged from. The others, while coated in a thick layer of webbing, were intact. It would be enough to execute the plan which took shape in his mind. But that webbing would have to go first.

-0-

"These pipes had stood silent for many hundreds of years, cut off before they could ever be utilized to fulfil their terrible purpose. But now the time had come for the cathedral to sing its hymn, for the first and last time. Such irony that I, the one whose empire this weapon was constructed to fight, would ultimately be the one to utilize it."

-0-

Taking the Soul Reaver in hand, Kain began striking at the webbing, slashing it free from the pipes as quickly as he could. The serpentine blade cleaved through the Zephonim threads easily, scattering them in every direction. The complex system of webbing swayed at his assault and several of the cocooned emaciated victims dropped to the floor with a rattle of dry bone.

"Do you merely do this for the exercise or do you have some strategy in mind, Kain? I certainly hope it is the latter, or this chase is going to end very anticlimactically for me." Baphomet remarked with some amusement. Kain paused in his work and turned his head sharply. Crouched on the side of one of the pipes just above, beside a shadow large enough for him to have emerged was his enemy. Baphomet-Divus was indeed an Ancient Vampire. Most of the Divus were aside from a scattering of exceptions.

Now he could see him relatively close, Kain saw that the visage beneath Baphomet's hood was hideously deformed. Baphomet did not just have one face. He had three, all joined together across the front of the skull. The main central face had the most articulation and expression, clearly the seat of the conscious intelligence. The other two seemed half finished and distorted. He looked like a set of conjoined triplets sharing one singular body. Kain stared at his enemy grimly. No wonder Baphomet preferred to hide in the darkness of the shadow.

"Why don't you come down here and find out, assassin?" He asked, holding the Reaver forward with its time toward his enemy. Baphomet laughed at that and drew back, arms outspread.

"And put myself into the jaws of your trap? I do not think so. I know not the method behind your madness but I know better than to underestimate you again."

Kain unleashed a telekinetic bolt at him reflexively but Baphomet swiftly vanished back into the shadow again. Kain did not wait for Baphomet to attack from another shadow but turned and tossed the ball of light he had been maintaining up into the air above him, driving the harsh shadows closest to him away. With his protective shield of illumination to keep his enemy at bay, the Vampire set himself to cutting away more and more of the webbing. He needed to free the pipes if his plan was to have any chance of succeeding.

His light could not reach to fill the entire room as by now his strength had waned significantly and dark looming shadows were growing taller with every passing moment. Baphomet began his attack from such shadows immediately, spears and swords composed of darkness stabbing at him from alternating directions at all once. Kain swung low out of the way then backflipped to give himself distance, slicing more obscuring webbing from a pipe as he did so. As more of the pipes were revealed and air could pass freely through them once more they began to rattle and vibrate, a strange metallic harmony ringing out and slowly rising in volume.

As the Vampire was dropping back down to his feet Baphomet suddenly plummeted from a shadow directly overhead, a blade rutting out from his bracer and aimed directly at Kain's back. It was a kill strike, an assassins plunge intended for a killing blow. The brush of swift air across his skin was the warning Kain needed and instinctively he sharply turned and parried the assassins strike, their blades colliding in mid air with a spray of illuminating sparks.

The pair of them struck at each other over and over, their blades colliding and clashing in a blur of frantic motion. Baphomet was just as fast as Kain, perhaps even a bit faster but Kain had the advantage of sheer brute strength. It did not take long for Kain's sword to prove the superior however as with one hard swing the Vampire smashed Baphomet's blade in half, sending it spiraling off to embed into the floor several feet away.

Instantly Kain went on the offensive, slamming his shoulder into Baphomet to knock him back causing him to stagger. Spinning his entire body around Kain brough the Reaver around in a sharp arc aimed directly at Baphomet's head, a blow which would have cleaved his skull from his body with one swing. But the assassin swung his entire body backward, bending back at the hip so the sword passed harmlessly overhead. As soon as it cleared him, he bounded backwards out of reach.

"Can't catch me, Kain!" He called out before jumping backward into the concealing embrace of a shadow and vanishing from sight.

Before Kain could react, his own shadow stabbed up at him with its own dark silhouette of the Reaver. This time it caught the Vampire across the side, cleaving a deep wound. Kain stifled a groan of pain, one hand going to cover the wound and the other parrying off further attacks with the Reaver. The wound had thankfully hit nothing vital inside of him but it had caused enough damage that healing it was draining more of his reserves. He needed to end this battle quickly before his strength left him completely.

As another shadow lanced toward him, Kain side stepped and from his open wound he drew forth his blood. It obeyed him once more, coming to him upon command and forming itself into a long sharp spear. Grasping it like a javelin he hurled it directly at the source of the shadow. Instantly the shadow recoiled and the lance it had formed arched up to crash into the blood spear and knock it aside.

Kain had not anticipated that his attack would strike home but it did provide him with the distraction he required, turning his attention back quickly to the webbing coating the pipes. The air moving through them now was causing those webs still remaining to heave and contract, loose and ready to come down with one good dislodging disturbance. Quickly he thrust his now free hand out with talons spread wide and began to take hold of the entire tangled mess with his mind.

"The hunt is over Kain! Meet your end with some dignity!" Baphomet's voice taunted him as all about the Vampire the shadows loomed, quivering and shaking as the assassins conscious command over them took hold.

"Tell me, Baphomet, how are you with music?" Kain asked, glancing back over his shoulder. The shadows paused.

"Music?" Baphomet's puzzled voice repeated, echoing from somewhere amongst the darkness.

"Melodies, harmonies, hymns! I would imagine the Divus to be quite the musical critiques with all their time for idle luxury."

"What are you blathering…"

Tensing his arm Kain tore the remaining net of webbing down with a single guess, all of it bursting off the pipes in one immense gush of telekinetic force. With a roar the pipes rattled and surged with sound as free air was allowed to rush through them in a burst of released pressure. The entire chamber seemed to vibrate with the sheer intensity of it.

"Why don't you tell me what you think of this little number?!" Kain demanded and then slammed his fist into the side of one of the pipes, punching a small hole in it with a rending tear of ancient metal.

The sound produced by all that released air being forced out through that small hole was so powerfully high pitched that Kain was certain that had there been any glass nearby it would have shattered. It was a sound produced by an engine who's entire purpose had been to produce noises deadly to the ears of Vampires. The impromptu vent Kain had created was not exactly perfect for this task and hardly something the cathedral's architect would have approved of, but it did produce a sound so painful Kain's head felt it was going to explode.

But Kain was no stranger to pain. Pain had been his faithful companion for many hundreds, even thousands, of years. He could endure pain, even pain of this magnitude. But a Divus used to soft living in the comforting depths of Fanum-Divus, on the other hand?

Baphomet burst from one of the nearby shadows, crying out in utter agony. His hands were clasped either side of his head and he staggered forward, body twitching uncontrollably. With a thud he was down on his knees. Blood was running from his ears and dripping down out of his cowl to splatter on the blood. Even wracked by his own pain as he was Kain could not help but grin. It would seem Ancient Vampires, even those unaffected by the Dark Gift, were not immune to this weakness of their wide ranging species.

"Delightful symphony, isn't it?!" Kain asked, raising his voice to a shout to be heard over the noise.

"My head is on FIRE!" Baphomet screamed, tearing his cowl back with both hands and leaving his distorted triple face on full display. He was hideous. Only Melchiah in his degenerate latter years could have matched such warped flesh for sheer repulsiveness. Three faces, four eyes, three mouths, all bunched so close they seemed to overlap. Contorting in agony, the mess the assassin called a face was a chaotic jumble of contradictory and contrary movements. "Stop! Make it stop!"

"Gladly." Kain replied in a dark and grim tone. He grabbed the Divus by his shoulders in both hands, the grip of his talons like iron. "Goodnight, assassin." The Vampire's mouth spread wide, fangs extended.

He did not make it quick. This was a meal he intended to make last.