Into the Abyss

On the gatehouse roof, Lenamare turned to Jehenna. “Well, you set them up; you know the strength of your support in building them. Will they hold without the priming?”

“You know as well as I, if Exador’s got the kind of force we think he does, and decides to use it in concert with that demon, the shield can’t hold for more than a few hours. If we could have gotten them set up properly...”

“I know. No problem, I designed them myself. Damn Exador and his sped up time scale. We’re gonna have to shift the shield to let the demon in.”

Jehenna thought for a moment then said, “But how? Demons are both magical and material. Thus, he’s blocked no matter how we balance the shield. That’s why pentagrams work so well on demons... remember.”

“Yes, I realize that,” Lenamare said testily. “We can however, play a few tricks with the oscillation frequency of the balance and sneak him in.” Lenamare motioned to one of his students standing nearby acting as a page. “Tell Hortwell and Elrose to meet Jehenna and myself in the primary ward chamber in five minutes.” The child ran off immediately to follow his orders. “Follow me,” Lenamare told Jehenna, and they set off to the catacombs.

∼

The children were gathered around the woodpile getting their third loads of wood. They couldn’t take much at one time, actually Rex was doing most of the carrying. Rex didn’t mind however, the primary point of having the children carry the wood was to keep their minds off the situation. Besides the hard physical work also kept his mind off the situation.

As he bent to pick up another chopped log of wood, he felt a change in the air. Reaching out with his mind he could feel that the pentacles were oscillating. He could only guess that Lenamare must be trying something to let the demon in. The shields couldn’t be shut down temporarily without having to start from scratch to put them back up, but they had to do something to get the demon in, before it seriously weakened the force field. Rex’s quick mind saw what Lenamare was trying to do.

The best bet would be to set the field on magic mode and set it to oscillate at a resonance frequency with the demon’s spirit’s energy frequency. The demon’s physical body would pose no problem, since the field would be keeping out only magical energy. They’d have to risk only a short time of physical attack; unless Exador got clever and sent energy into the field at the same frequency as the resonance. That would be a forcing of the system, and if he sent enough energy in, it could overbalance the system and lead to a stochastic field, meaning the field would disintegrate into a bunch of isolated stability points and collapse.

Of course, Rex rationalized the possibility of Exador timing things that well was almost insignificant. However, it was just what Lenamare would figure Exador to be able to do. Sometimes that man’s reasoning was positively twisted. So Lenamare would probably set the field to physical mode and try to achieve a multilevel resonance with the demons very simple material resonance frequencies. This would be about five times harder and a lot more impressive of a feat; which, of course, meant Lenamare would definitely do it. The only good part of this was the fact that Exador wouldn’t think Lenamare crazy enough to try it, it was simply too difficult of a feat in the middle of battle.

Rex shook his head, and smiled at Lenamare’s twisted genius. As he bent to get a piece of wood, his ears detected a roaring sound, like a large blaze in a fire pit. He turned in the direction of the walls, where the sound was coming from, in time to see several great globes of fire hurling over the walls. Almost without thinking he traced its trajectory and saw that one would land among the children gathering wood with him.

Reflexively he stood and began a neutralizing chant. “Urbido proveteum, sig falthos nors verboten. Sig Dispateum, vog El Mer serioul.” He spread his arms wide, mind reaching out to the rapidly approaching fireball.

The onrushing ball of flames seemed oblivious to the chanting figure, except perhaps to focus on him even more specifically than before. Quickly it came down, directly at Rex’s torso. Roaring filled his ears, and his eyes were blinded by the light, Rex ignored it all, keeping his mind on his spell.

The ball struck Rex directly in the heart. It quickly began to expand and engulf him. Normally, the ball would have expanded to about a forty foot diameter, devouring all nearby, this ball however, only expanded to his arms-length. His entire body was hidden in the roaring conflagration. Momentarily his body was outlined within the flames in bright orange light, and then it was over. The fire died, dissipated within his body.