Salute the Dark

There was agony writ large on many faces around the circle, so when the tears started up in Achaeos’ blank eyes, nobody noted or cared. Between them all the air shook and trembled, not through the force of their will, but with their sheer frustration. All throughout Tharn apprentices and servants gave of themselves, ancient archives of power were looted, gems went dark, books burnt and staves cracked. The Wasps were suspicious now: even they could tell that something was happening. Already they were seeking for their governor, not guessing that he was part of the conspiracy against them. Soon there would be soldiers storming ever upwards, drawn by a taste in the air that would become stronger and stronger.

But not strong enough. Even with all this, with not a man or woman among them holding back, the ritual was failing.

It is too late, Achaeos thought. Perhaps a hundred years ago, this could have been accomplished, perhaps even fifty, but we are too late. Magic had died, year on year, giving place and ground before the monsters of artifice and engineering, fading from the minds of the Lowlands until only those like the Skryres of Tharn even believed in it still. And belief was all, in the final analysis.

We are too late. A little longer and those who scoffed at magic’s existence would be proved right. Even with Che’s borrowed strength, Achaeos could not force the ritual to happen. The tightness in his chest was only increasing, and there were constant stabs of pain inside his head as though men were fighting a war within his skull. All around him the other ritualists had started swaying, faces gaunt with exhaustion.

He took the power that Che had lent him, took it with his mind, with both hands, and in a last desperate cry he hurled his voice out away from Tharn, across the Lowlands, and cried, Help us!

It was intended to be his final act before acknowledging defeat, before letting the pain that was clawing at him drag him down at last.

But it was not.

We will help you, little novice.

The words were the dry rattle of old leaves across stone – and he had heard them before.

‘No!’ he started, speaking aloud, not that any of the others truly heard. Something chuckled in his mind.

We will help you. We are bound, you to us, and us to you. The Shadow Box is open, and for a moment we may stretch our limbs. He saw the limbs in his mind, and they were spined, thorned, many-jointed, not remotely human.

‘I do not…’ He did not want their help but he had opened the door to them, and in they came. He felt their approach as though he watched a storm scud over the sky towards him, coming all the way from the dark, rotten vaults of the Darakyon to Tharn. It was power that had lain in wait for a fool like him for five centuries, from the very cusp of the time that magic had begun to die.

Pure, ancient power. Evil power. Power of terrible, twisted might. It came to the mountain-top at Tharn like a crippled giant, tortured and raging, and it fell on them like a hammer.

Achaeos screamed. He was not the only one. At least one of the others fell within the instant, face gone dead white, pale eyes filled with blood. Achaeos tried to let go. but he was held up like a marionette dangling from the Darakyon’s broken fingers. He burnt. The vitriol of their power seared through him, and now he could not even scream.

The ritual exploded. There was a thunderclap of utter silence, a second’s stunned pause, and they all felt the tide of their blighted magic force itself down into the mountain.

Within Tharn all the lamps, all the torches or lanterns, went out at once.

The screams came soon after, the screams of fighting men in utter terror, engulfed by a wave of invisible force they could not fight. It opened their minds. It found where their fears came from, and it released them, each man becoming the victim of his own beasts. The Wasp-kinden, and many of their Moth subjects also, went mad.

Some fell on one another, hands crackling with the loosing of their stings, mouths foaming, tearing with nails and teeth. Some just died, seizing up and stopping like broken machines. Most fled, crashing into walls and doorways, and into each other: fighting through the pitchy tunnels and hallways, trying to find the open sky. Those that found it cast themselves out, and some of them flew and others fell…

And Achaeos, with the whole might of this horror pouring through him, now unstoppable, felt something catch inside him. Such a small thing, but his next breath seemed intolerably hard to draw, and his wound was abruptly open again and bleeding, and something lanced through his mind, a pain so acute that it came almost as a relief, blotting everything else out.