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On a typically overcast, slightly muggy summer day in Tiraas, Basra Syrinx returned to her office to find it gone.

She came to a stop in what appeared to be an empty stretch of hallway in the Temple of Avei, revealing confusion only by looking deliberately up and down. No one was visible nearby; the only noises were from the other end of the hall, where it terminated at a balcony overlooking a sizable atrium not far from the main sanctuary. Most significantly, the door to her office was not where it always was. Nothing but plain wall.

Her expression finally shifted from its usual placid mask to vague annoyance.

Syrinx reached up to run her hand along the wall, then grunted deep in her throat and nodded, finding the frame of the door with her fingers. Slowly she ran her hand along the invisible shape to the latch, which she turned. It was not locked or tampered with and shifted as smoothly in her hand as always, but she did not push it open or step in yet. Instead the Bishop resumed her tactile exploration, dragging her fingertips up the doorframe and along the top.

She disturbed some kind of crunchy dust sprinkled along the top of the door frame. No—not dust. Crushed dried leaves.

“Mm hm,” Syrinx muttered aloud, gripping the golden hilt of her sword with her other hand and continuing to sweep the dust away. Then suddenly, with a soft gasp, she jerked her fingers back, shaking her hand. There was no mark of any kind on her forefinger, but that had sure felt like—

She retreated one step and ignited her aura, flooding the hallway with radiant divine magic.

Immediately the illusion collapsed, the crumbled leaves atop the door frame evaporating into oily smoke, and the tiny elemental perched on the center chattered angrily at her in protest.

“I thought this was an extraordinary effort for a novice prank,” Syrinx said wryly. “Mousie, isn’t it? You’re not the only one who’s bitten off more than they can chew today. Your little buddy Herschel is going to be up way past his bedtime if he means to start trouble with me.”

Meesie hissed at her, puffing up her fur.

Not for nothing was Basra Syrinx an admired blademaster; her sword cleared its sheath faster than most human beings could have visually followed, much less countered, and she swept the blade in a precise arc that would have struck down even that tiny target—had Meesie not been other than human.

Meesie vanished in a puff of sparks as the sword’s tip slashed expertly through her space. Those sparks, instead of dissipating in the air, streamed away down the hall, where they coalesced again into the ratlike shape of the elemental, now perched on the shoulder of Herschel Schwartz, who had been standing there the whole time—not invisible, but simply not catching anyone’s notice until his familiar drew attention to his presence.

“I had honestly given up, boy,” Syrinx said mildly, sheathing her sword. “It’s been, what? A year? And you’re only now getting shirty with me. Please tell me you’ve spent all this time making actual preparations and not simply screwing up your courage. Unless your whole plan is to disappoint me one last time.”

“You know, Basra, that’s your problem in a nutshell. You always go right for the throat. Maybe you should relax, learn to play around a bit. Have some fun with life.” Schwartz’s tone was light, deliberately so. It contrasted with the rest of him—stiff as a flagstaff, shoulders gathered in tension, fists clenched and eyes glaring. Meesie hissed again, tiny flickers of fire racing along her fur.

“This isn’t a chapbook and you’re not a hero,” she said flatly. “You don’t stand there and banter at me. If the next thing out of your mouth is a suitably groveling apology, I will give real thought to not taking a complaint directly to Bishop Throale and having you reassigned to a two-man research temple in Upper Stalwar.”

In answer, he grabbed Meesie and tossed her forward. The elemental landed on the floor halfway between them and suddenly took up much of the hall space, in a leonine form almost the size of a pony. She had, at least, enough restraint not to roar and bring every Legionnaire in the temple running, but bared her teeth at Syrinx and growled. Loudly.

Unfazed by this display, Basra narrowed her eyes, then flicked a glance at the recently-disguised door of her office before returning her focus to Schwartz, ignoring the hulking fire elemental entirely.

“No,” she murmured. “You wouldn’t dare attack me openly—and especially not here. You have far too much intelligence and not nearly enough balls. What are you trying to distract me from, clever boy?”

He’d been prepped for this, but Schwartz was no schemer or politician. He hesitated for a moment, betraying uncertainty, before jutting out his chin and forcing a facsimile of a cocky grin. “Oh, is that what I’m doing? Interesting theory. How willing are you to test it?”

The dramatic effect, such as it was, suffered greatly from Meesie’s sudden reversal to her normal form. It had been much less than a minute; the divine magic saturating the temple put her at a serious disadvantage. Which, of course, underscored the Bishop’s point.

Syrinx quirked one eyebrow infinitesimally, then turned and strode away toward the stairs down to the atrium.

“Hey!” Schwartz shouted at her. “Are you that willing to bet I won’t just shoot you in the back?”

She didn’t bother to inform him that people who actually did things like that rarely gave warning, but she did activate a divine shield. It was a low-energy glow hugging her skin, well below the power of a typical combat shield, but it would conserve her magic and almost certainly suffice for any fae spells done at her, especially in the temple.

Syrinx arrived on the balcony just in time to spot her own aide being escorted through a door on the ground floor below. This wing of the temple, just behind the sanctuary, was mostly offices; that one was behind thick walls with just the one door positioned to provide space for guards to defend it, and used primarily for debriefings and interrogations of a relatively polite nature. Flight or fight risks would be detained in the cells in one of the basement levels. Those loyal to the Sisterhood who had something sensitive to reveal were handled here, where there was ready access to the temple’s main entrance and the medical wing.

“Covrin!” the Bishop snapped, her voice echoing through the columned atrium. All those present, which consisted of the Legionnaires escorting Jenell Covrin and a couple of passing priestesses, turned and craned their necks up at her.

Covrin met Syrinx’s eyes across the distance.

Then, she smiled. A cold, cruel smile, befitting Basra Syrinx herself—and the girl Jenell Covrin used to be before her “mentor” had (as she thought) beaten her into submission. Not acknowledging the Bishop further, she turned and strode through the door, which the nearest Legionnaire shut firmly behind her.

It was at that moment Syrinx registered that she was looking at Squad 391. Principia Locke turned from closing the door to give her the blandest, most placid smile she had ever seen.

The Bishop turned and stalked for the stairs, immediately finding her way blocked.

“Good afternoon, your Grace,” the dark-skinned young man before her said politely. “I wonder if I could have a moment of your time.”

She held onto her professional poise by a thread. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time at the moment. Excuse me.”

Syrinx moved to step around him, and he smoothly flowed aside to block her. Grunting in annoyance, she reached to shove him aside, and her hand impacted a hard surface which rippled with golden light, the shield dissipating immediately in a display of very fine control for a caster so young.

“I’m afraid I must insist,” he said, still in a courteous tone.

“Boy,” she grated, “do you have any idea—”

“I have many ideas,” he interrupted. “I’m Tobias Caine, and I require your attention for a moment, Bishop Syrinx.”

Basra went stock still, staring into his eyes. He gazed placidly back, awaiting her response, but she wasn’t really looking at him. Variables in this equation began to slot into place in her mind.

“I don’t have time for this,” Syrinx said curtly, and barreled right into him, flashing her own shield into place.

Toby was a martial artist and too deft on his feet to be so easily bowled down the stairs, retreating with far more grace than most would have managed in that situation, but the bubble of hard light surrounding her prevented him from making the best use of his skills, most of which relied on having something to grip in order to redirect her movements. He wasn’t without his own brute force methods, however, and before she’d made it two steps he conjured a staff of pure light.

Just like that, her divine shield wasn’t doing her much good, as Toby used his staff skillfully to poke, bat, and shove her backward, as if he were blocking a rolling boulder. This stalemate did not favor Basra; he was physically stronger than she and had vastly greater mana reserves; both staff and shield flickered whenever they impacted, but hers would break long before his.

“I realize you are impatient with this,” he said with infuriating calm while thwarting her efforts to descend as if this were all some sort of game. “But you need to think of your own spiritual health, Bishop Syrinx. Whatever happens next, the manner in which you face it will do a great deal to determine the outcome. Redemption is always—”

Basra abruptly dropped her shield and whipped her sword out, lunging at him.

As anticipated, instinct made him abandon his improvised jabbing and fall into a Sun Style defensive stance, which should have put her at a considerable disadvantage; his staff had much greater range than her short sword and her position on the stairs made it all but impossible to duck under it. That, however, was not her intent. Basra had trained against Sun Style grandmasters, which Toby Caine, for all his skill, was not yet. It took her three moves to position him, feint him into committing to a block for an attack from the right which never came, and then turn the other way and vault over the rail.

She had only been a few feet down the stairs; it was a drop of nearly a full story. Basra had done worse, and rolled deftly on landing with her sword arm held out to the side, coming to her feet barely two yards from Squad 391.

All six women were standing at attention, unimpressed by this. Locke, Shahai, and Avelea had composed features as usual, but the other three looked far too gleeful. Elwick, in particular, Syrinx knew to be more than capable of hiding her emotions. The fierce expression on her face boded ill.

“Step aside, soldiers. That is an order.”

“Mmmm,” Lieutenant Locke drawled. “Nnno, I don’t believe I will. Why? You think you’re gonna do something about it, Basra?”

“Lieutenant!” one of the two priestesses who had paused to watch the drama burst out, clearly aghast. “You are addressing the Bishop!”

“Am I?” Locke said pleasantly. “Well, if she still is in an hour, I guess I’ll owe her an apology. You just hold your horses, Bas. Private Covrin has a lot to go over.” She deliberately allowed a predatory, distinctly Eserite grin to begin blossoming on her features. “With the High Commander.”

Toby had reached the base of the stairs. Above, Schwartz arrived at the balcony rail and hopped up onto it, his robes beginning to rustle as he summoned some air-based magic. A subtle glow rose around Corporal Shahai.

Then another such glow, weaker but unmistakable, ignited around Locke. The elf’s grin broadened unpleasantly.

“Your Grace?” asked the second priestess uncertainly, glancing about at all this.

Basra Syrinx turned and fled.

Toby moved to intercept her, but Syrinx grabbed the shorter priestess by the collar of her robes in passing and hurled the squawking woman straight into him. Schwartz didn’t make it to the ground that quickly and Locke’s squad made no move to pursue, simply holding position in front of the office door. She made it to the atrium’s main entrance with no further opposition, bursting past two surprised Legionnaires standing guard on the other side.

Behind her, the office door opened, and it wasn’t Covrin or Rouvad who emerged to pursue her.

The main sanctuary of the Temple of Avei was crowded at that time of early afternoon, which meant there was an unfortunately large audience of petitioners from all over the Empire and beyond present to see their Bishop come streaking out of a rear door at a near run. This escalated into an actual run when she heard the pounding of booted feet behind her.

“You!” Basra barked at another pair of startled soldiers as she passed, flinging a hand out behind her. “Detain them!”

“Your Grace?” one said uncertainly, and had Basra been in less of a hurry she would have stopped to take the woman’s head off. Figuratively. Probably.

“BASRA SYRINX.”

At that voice, in spite of herself, Basra turned, skidding to a graceful halt.

Trissiny Avelea wasn’t running, but stalked toward her past Legionnaires who made no move to intercept her as ordered—unsurprisingly. The paladin and Bishop weren’t in the same chain of command, but the rank-and-file of the Legions would have an obvious preference if their orders contradicted each other. Trissiny was in full armor, fully aglow, and golden wings spread from behind her to practically fill the temple space. Gasps and exclamations of awe rose from all around, but the paladin gave them no acknowledgment, eyes fixed on Basra.

The Bishop inwardly cursed the learned political instincts which had overwhelmed innate survival instincts; she should not have stopped. As tended to happen when she was confronted with an overwhelming problem, her entire focus narrowed till the world seemed to fall away, and she perceived nothing but the oncoming paladin.

“Trissiny,” she said aloud. “You’ve clearly been listening—”

Those wings of light pumped once, and Trissiny lunged at her with astonishing speed, sword first.

Basra reflexively brought up her own weapon to parry, a divine shield snapping into place around her, and then two very surprising things happened.

First, Trissiny beat her wings again—how were those things functional? They weren’t supposed to be solid!—and came to a halt.

Second, Basra’s shield was snuffed out, untouched. Frantically, she reached inward for the magic, and it simply wasn’t there anymore.

Tiraas was no stranger to storms, but the clap of thunder which resounded right overhead was far greater in power than the light drizzle outside made believable.

“I actually thought you were too clever to fall for that,” Trissiny said, and despite the continuing presence of her wings, it was as if the avenging paladin had melted away to leave a smirking Guild enforcer in silver armor. “You just tried to call on the goddess’s magic right in front of a Hand of Avei who knows what you did. Congratulations, Basra, you’ve excommunicated yourself.”

Amid the crowd, more figures were emerging from that door at the back of the sanctuary. The Hand of Omnu, Schwartz… And all of Squad 391. With Covrin.

Of course. Obviously, Commander Rouvad wouldn’t go to a debriefing room for such an interview, not when she had a highly secure office to which she summoned people regularly. This entire thing… Syrinx realized, belatedly, how she had been baited and conned.

She filed away the surge of livid rage to be expressed later, when she had the opportunity to actually hurt someone. For now, once again she turned and bolted toward the front doors of the temple, past the countless witnesses to her disgrace.

The lack of any sounds of pursuit behind her began to make sense when she burst out onto the portico of the temple and had to stop again.

Another crowd was gathered in Imperial Square; while the figure waiting for her at the base of the steps necessarily commanded widespread attention, he also discouraged people from approaching too closely. At least the onlookers were keeping a respectful few yards back. Including a handful of Imperial military police who had probably arrived to try to disperse the crowd but also got caught up gawking at the Hand of Death.

Gabriel Arquin sat astride his fiery-eyed horse, who pawed at the paving stones with one invisible hoof and snorted a cloud of steam. His scythe dangled almost carelessly from his hand, its wicked blade’s tip resting against the ground. Hairline cracks spread through the stone from the point where it touched.

“There is a progression,” Arquin said aloud, his voice ringing above the murmurs of the crowd, “which people need to learn to respect. When you are asked by the Hand of Omnu to repent, you had better do it. Refuse, and you will be ordered by the Hand of Avei to stand down. That was your last chance, Basra Syrinx. Beyond the sword of Avei, there is only death.”

The crowd muttered more loudly, beginning to roil backward away from the temple. Nervous Silver Legionnaires covering its entrance clutched their weapons, bracing for whatever was about to unfold.

Behind Basra, Trissiny and Toby emerged from the doors.

Syrinx lunged forward, making it to the base of the stairs in a single leap. Immediately, Arquin wheeled his horse around to block her way, lifting his murderous-looking scythe to a ready position. Even disregarding the reach of that thing, it was painfully obvious she was not about to outrun or outmaneuver that horse. Any horse, but this one in particular looked unnaturally nimble.

She pivoted in a helpless circle, looking for a way out. The crowd was practically a wall; behind was the Temple, once a sanctuary and now a place she didn’t dare turn. Trissiny and Toby had spread to descend the steps with a few yards between them. One pace at a time, the noose closed in on Syrinx, the space between the paladins narrowing as the Hands of Avei and Omnu herded her toward the Hand of Vidius, and inexorable death.

Basra had spent too long as a cleric and politician to miss the deliberate symbolism. She could choose which to face: justice, death, or life. Tobias Caine was even gazing at her with a face so full of compassion she wanted to punch it.

She didn’t, though. Instead, Basra turned toward him, schooling her own features into what she hoped was a defeated expression—based on the way people’s faces looked in her presence from time to time, as it was one she’d never had occasion to wear herself. She let the dangling sword drop from her fingers, feeling but suppressing a spike of fury at the loss when the expensive golden eagle-wrought hilt impacted the pavement. Just one more expense to add to the tally of what the world owed her. Ah, well. After today, carrying around a piece of Avenist symbolism probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway.

Syrinx let Toby get within a few feet before bursting into motion.

His own instincts were well-trained, and though he still wasn’t a grandmaster, Basra’s martial skill heavily emphasized the sword. In a prolonged hand-to-hand fight, she might not have proved a match for Toby’s skill—and definitely not now that only one of them had magic to call on.

That dilemma was resolved, as so many were, by not fighting fair.

It took her a span of two seconds to exchange a flurry of blows, carefully not committing to a close enough attack to let him grab her as Sun Style warriors always did, all to position herself just outside the circle the three paladins had formed and push Toby into a reflexive pattern she could anticipate and exploit. Arquin was momentarily confused, unable to swing his great clumsy weapon into the fray with his friends that close or exploit the speed of his mount, but Trissiny—also a highly trained fighter—was already moving around Toby to flank Basra from the other side.

So she finally made the “mistake” that brought her within range of Toby’s grab, and allowed him to seize her by the shoulder and upper arm. And with his hands thus occupied, Basra flicked the stiletto from her sleeve into her palm and raked it across his belly.

Almost disappointing, she thought, how fragile a paladin was. Hurling him bodily into Trissiny was pathetically easy at that point, and in the ensuing confusion of shouts which followed, she dove into the crowd, instantly putting herself beyond the reach of Arquin, unless he wanted to trample a whole lot of bystanders, to say nothing of what that scythe would do to them. He probably didn’t. Even as the helpless sheep failed to do anything to stop her in their witless panic, paladins always had to take the high road.

Basra shoved through the throng in seconds, pelting right toward the only possible sanctuary that still awaited her: the Grand Cathedral of the Universal Church.

“Toby!” Trissiny lowered him gently to the pavement; he was bent over, clutching his midsection, from which blood had already spread through his shirt and was dripping to the ground at an alarming rate.

“No light!” Toby managed to gasp as Gabriel hurled himself to the ground beside him. “Not even an aura!”

“He’s right, stomach wounds are amazingly delicate,” Trissiny said helplessly, finishing easing Toby down so he could sit upright. “It may need a surgeon, if you accidentally heal something in the wrong place… We need healers here!” she bellowed.

“Keep to the plan,” Toby grunted around the pain, managing to nod to her.

“I can’t—”

“You do your job, soldier,” he rasped, managing a weak grin. “After her! Triss, we’re surrounded by temples and gut wounds take a long time to do anything. I’ll be fine. Get moving.”

She hesitated a moment, squeezing his shoulder.

“He’s right,” Gabriel agreed, taking up her position to hold Toby upright. “Go, Trissiny!”

“I’ll be back,” she said, and released him, rising and plunging into the crowd after Syrinx.

Help really did come quickly. Barely had Trissiny gone before the Imperial police were enforcing a perimeter around the paladins, and a priestess of Avei had dashed up to them. She knelt and gently but insistently lowered Toby to lie on his back, whipping out a belt knife to cut away his shirt so she could see the wound.

“Seems so excessive,” Toby grunted to Gabriel, who knelt there clutching his hand. “Coulda spared a lot of trouble if we’d just told her the plan was to let her get into the Cathedral…”

“Well, yeah,” Gabe said reasonably, his light tone at odds with his white-knuckled grip on Toby’s hand, “but then she wouldn’ta done it.”

“Oh, right. Inconvenient.”

“You need to hush,” the priestess said in exasperation, her hands beginning to glow as she lowered them to the wound. “And try to hold still, this will hurt.”

Trissiny managed to moderate her pace to an aggressive stride as she crossed the threshold into holy ground. The two Holy Legionaries flanking the door turned to her, but she surged past them without even so much as a sneer for their preposterously ornate armor.

The timing of all this had been very deliberate. A prayer service was in session—not a major one, so the great sanctuary was not crowded, but people were present. Most significantly, the Archpope himself stood at the pulpit, presiding. Justinian liked to stay in touch with the common people, more so than did many of his predecessors, and thus could often be found holding public appearances such as these rather than delegating them to priests. A mid-week afternoon service just didn’t command much draw, however, and the room was filled to barely a tenth of its capacity.

At the moment, nobody was getting any praying done, by the looks of things. Basra Syrinx was no longer in evidence, but her recent passage was obvious, thanks to all the confused muttering and peering around. At the head of the sanctuary, the Archpope himself was half-turned, regarding one of the rear doors into the Cathedral complex with a puzzled frown.

The ambient noise increased considerably when the Hand of Avei strode down the central aisle, sword in hand, the side of her silver armor splashed with blood.

“General Avelea,” Justinian said, turning to face her with a deep, respectful nod. “I gather you can shed some light on these events?”

“Where is Basra Syrinx?” she demanded, coming to a stop even with the front row of pews. It was downright crowded up here, most of the parishoners present desiring to be as near the Archpope as possible. The first two rows were entirely filled, with people who came from the world over, to judge by their varied styles of attire. Just to Trissiny’s left were three Omnist nuns wearing the heavy cowled habits of the Order of the Hedge, a tiny sect which had no presence in the Empire.

“You just missed her,” Justinian replied. For whatever reason, he continued projecting in exactly the tone he used for conducting worship. As did she, making their conversation clearly audible to the room. “She passed through here in apparent panic, demanded sanctuary, and retreated within. Toward her office, I presume. What has happened?”

“Syrinx will be removed from her office as Bishop the moment the formalities can be observed,” Trissiny replied, her voice ringing over the astonished murmurs all around. “She has been cast out of the faith by Avei herself as a betrayer, abuser of the trust of her position, and rapist. Moments ago she compounded her crimes by mortally assaulting the Hand of Omnu. I demand that she be handed over to face justice!”

The muttering rose almost to the level of outcry before Justinian raised both his hands in a placating gesture. Slowly, the crowd began to subside.

“I dearly hope Mr. Caine is being tended to?” the Archpope said with a worried frown.

Trissiny nodded once. “He isn’t so fragile, and healers were at hand.”

“That is a great relief.”

“Yes,” she said impatiently, “and so will be his attacker’s prosecution. Will you have your Legionaries produce her, your Holiness, or shall I retrieve her myself?”

“Justice,” he intoned, “as you know better than most, is not a thing which yields to demands. These are serious allegations, Trissiny. Gravely serious. This situation must be addressed calmly, rationally, and with full observance of all necessary formalities. Frustrating as these things are, they exist for excellent reasons. We cannot claim to dispense true justice unless it is done properly.”

“Please do not lecture me about the core of Avei’s faith, your Holiness,” Trissiny retorted in an openly biting tone, prompting another rash of muttering. “Justice is Avei’s province. Not yours.”

“And yet,” he said calmly, “Basra Syrinx has claimed the sanctuary of this church. I cannot in conscience fail to respect that, on the strength of mere allegation. Even from a person of your own prestige, General Avelea.”

“Am I to understand,” she said, raising her voice further, “that you are refusing to turn over a criminal to Avei’s justice, your Holiness?”

“You are to understand the law of sanctuary,” he replied. “It is observed by all faiths within the Universal Church.”

“Excuse me, your Holiness.” From the front pew near the Omnist nuns, another figure stood, wearing white robes with a golden ankh tabard. Bishop Darling inclined his head diffidently to the Archpope, but also spoke at a volume which was clearly audible through the sanctuary. “I have, personally, defended and protected Basra Syrinx from the consequences of her actions in the past, in pursuit of what I believed to be the higher good. I know you are aware of at least some of this. To that extent, I may be inadvertently complicit in anything she has done now. But a line has been crossed, your Holiness. If she has so violently erred that her own paladin has come after her in this way, I strongly advise against involving the Church in this matter.”

“You know the value I place on your council, Antonio,” replied the Archpope. “But I question whether this setting is the appropriate venue in which to discuss matters of this severity and complexity. General Avelea, would you kindly agree to join me in private to continue this conversation?”

“Some matters do deserve to be discussed in public, your Holiness,” Darling said before she could respond. “I speak in my capacity as Bishop. The Thieves’ Guild stands fully behind Trissiny Avelea in this matter.”

The murmuring swelled again, and once more Justinian raised his hands for quiet. As soon as he had achieved it, however, and before he could take advantage, another voice intruded.

“I concur.” Bishop Varanus rose from the pew next to Darling, towering half a head over the Eserite and turning his fierce, bearded visage on Trissiny. “Basra Syrinx is a rabid animal, and always have been. We all know this, and as Antonio has said, we all share guilt for whatever she has done. We have all failed to do our duty in getting rid of her, and now we see the consequences. Honor demands that this be addressed—now, and not later. In this one matter,” he nodded to the paladin, “the Huntsmen of Shaath stand behind Trissiny Avelea.”

“The Brethren of Izara stand behind Trissiny Avelea,” said yet another voice before the noise could gather too much, and despite her own diminutive appearance, Branwen Snowe could project her voice easily through the hubbub. “Basra is a deeply troubled person. I would prefer that she be offered some manner of help, if any is indeed possible—but if she has offended so severely that her own cult demands justice, this is clearly a matter of the safety of all around her.”

Beside Snowe, an old man with white hair rose slowly from his own seat. Though he looked frail, Sebastian Throale spoke clearly and as powerfully as anyone. “I am only passingly acquainted with Bishop Syrinx and have no personal opinion on this matter. But Trissiny Avelea has personally earned the trust and respect of my own cult—not a small thing, nor easy to do, given the relations we have historically had. If she deems this the right course of action, the Salyrite Collegium stands behind her.”

“I’m not gonna lie, I am astonished that this is even a question,” piped yet another individual, practically hopping to her feet in the pew behind Throale. Bishop Sally Tavaar, all of twenty-six years old, was widely considered a joke by everyone except her fellow Bishops, all of whom were too theologically educated to be less than wary around a bard who acted the fool. “That woman is a detestable cunt and always has been, and you all know it. It’s about damn time somebody did something about it! Only reason nobody has is everyone’s afraid of her, and you all know that, too. It’s just plain embarrassing that an avenging paladin is what it takes to deal with this. The Bardic College stands the hell behind Trissiny Avelea!”

“If I may?” Bishop Raskin was actually new to his post and not a widely known face yet, but he made a point of fully bowing to Trissiny. “These events are not a total surprise. The Hand of Avei has worked closely with those of the other Trinity cults, and I had some forewarning that events such as these might transpire. I have the assurance of Lady Gwenfaer herself that we have nothing but the greatest respect for our fellow paladin, and the Order of Vidius stands firmly behind her.”

Beside him, a slim woman with graying hair rose and inclined her head solemnly. “My colleague speaks truthfully. Omnu’s faith stands behind Trissiny Avelea.”

By that time, stunned silence had descended upon the Cathedral. It was allowed to hang in the air for a moment longer before Justinian spoke.

“Anyone else?” he inquired, slowly panning his serene gaze around the room. Trissiny and the assembled Bishops just regarded him in turn, as did the astonished crowd. It was not every cult of the Pantheon, but it was most of the biggest and most influential. More importantly, it included several which agreed about nothing, ever. This show of unity without the active encouragement of a sitting Archpope—in fact, in defiance of one—was all but unheard of. It might actually have been the first time a Shaathist Bishop ever publicly endorsed a Hand of Avei. Justinian simply continued after a short pause, though. “Very well. I hear and thank you for your counsel, brothers and sisters. Rest assured, your opinions I hold in the utmost regard, and this will weigh heavily on my deliberations on this matter. Those deliberations must occur, however; it is no less than conscience and justice demand. For the moment, sanctuary will be observed.”

“Are you actually serious?” Trissiny burst out. “You would really—”

“Did you believe,” Justinian interrupted, staring evenly down at her from his pulpit, “that aggressive demands and political maneuvering would be enough to eviscerate due process? Is that Avei’s justice, Trissiny?”

It was probably for the best that she had no opportunity to answer.

“BASRA!”

The entire room full of worshipers turned to stare at Jenell Covrin, who came striding down the central aisle in full Legion armor, trailed by Squad 391.

“Come out and face consequences, Basra!” Covrin roared, stomping right up to stand next to Trissiny. “It’s me, Jenell—your little pet. The one you thought a victim!”

“Young lady,” Justinian began.

“I did this, Basra!” Covrin screamed. “I’ve been gathering every secret you tried to bury. I brought them to the High Commander! I BROUGHT YOU DOWN! You can hide from the paladin, but you can’t hide from the truth.”

“Private,” the Archpope said more loudly, “this is not—”

“I DID THIS TO YOU!” Covrin roared, her voice all but rattling the stained glass. “For everything you did to me, I WON! And if you want to try settling it one more time, you’re gonna have to come out and face me. You’ll know how to find me, you bitch! Until then, I. FUCKING. WIN.”

“That is enough,” Justinian said flatly. “Sergeant at arms, please escort this young woman from the Cathedral.”

“Squad, form up!” Trissiny snapped. Instantly, the six members of Locke’s squad pivoted and snapped into a wedge, blocking off the aisle from the Holy Legionaires who had started toward them from the doors. They very wisely slowed as the Silver Legionnaires formed a menacing phalanx bristling with lances.

Four more Legionaries were approaching from the front of the Cathedral, but also did not get far.

“Grip! Duster! Ninetails!” Darling barked.

Instantly, the three Omnist nuns on the front row surged upright, hurling away their voluminous robes to reveal armed women in scuffed leather. All three Guild enforcers flowed into place in a triangle around Jenell and Trissiny, staring down the heavily armored Legionaries, who also came to a nervous halt.

“Come on, Covrin,” Trissiny said quietly. “Nothing else we can do here…for now. We will have to finish this later.”

She half-turned to meet Justinian’s eyes.

The Archpope nodded to her once, and smiled.

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14 – 31

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“Hey there. Feeling better?”

It was brighter, though not abrasively so, the ancient-looking stone hall lit well by a profusion of braziers and wall sconces. The warm glow was that of fire, not fairy lamps or whatever glaring illumination was used in Infinite Order structures. In fact, this resembled the feasting hall of some medieval king, made unusual only by the lack of any windows or doors. The three of them stood with their backs to the long tables, at the base of a dais, on which sat a throne, on which sat Vesk.

“What?” Gabriel choked. “I—we were… I mean, that was… What?”

“I really am sorry about that little trick with the flute,” said the god of bards, and he sounded the more sincere because he seemed subdued, even slightly depressed. Vesk projecting ordinary sincerity would have been just more of his obvious pantomime. “She was never going to let you out of her clutches without inflicting some kind of damage. I’d have forewarned you, but the key to bluffing someone with Scyllith’s skill at reading thoughts is to control what’s known by anyone in her presence.”

“The flute,” Trissiny said aloud, suddenly grabbing at her belt pouch. The Pipe of Calomnar was still there, sticking out slightly. “I blew it.”

“That’s the last thing I remember, too,” Toby agreed, glaring up at Vesk. “What did you do?”

“Short-term memory loss is a fairly common side effect of chaos exposure,” Vesk explained. “One I helped along a little in this case. You’re welcome. That kind of trauma is just not narratively useful, unless your protagonists need to learn to be properly fearful of chaos. You kids haven’t needed that particular lesson since Veilgrad.”

“What happened?” Trissiny demanded.

“What happened,” Vesk replied, straightening up and showing a little more animation in his features, “was that I spent several centuries preparing for this moment. I have sent adventurers on countless quests and personally interceded where I could, all to prime Calomnar so that I could render him at least a little lucid, and inclined to look favorably on his fellow gods and their servants, in a moment where it was needed. Truthfully all this I hadn’t begun to imagine when I started, but the god of chaos is just too good a trump card not to have ready in advance. And the process involved the creation of some great stories along the way. So, win/win!”

He paused, gazing down on them with a slight smile, as if waiting for a response or prompting to continue. All three paladins just stared back, and after a short moment, he resumed speaking.

“It was, as I said, a bluff. Scyllith knew you had the Pipe and that I gave it to you right before sending you down there. Chaos is the one thing she won’t dare face, because all the power in the universe does you no good if everything you try to do has a random effect. So from her perspective, it looked like that was the bluff: that if she tried to harm you, you could summon Calomnar and flip the board on her. Being Scyllith, she was willing to forego her own escape and even gave you the key back, all for the chance to goad you into calling Calomnar down on your own heads while she slithered off back into oblivion, out of his reach. Of course, she had no way of knowing I’d prepared matters so that he would simply bring you safely away.”

Vesk settled back in his throne, grinning at them in self-satisfaction.

“I don’t think it worked that way,” Gabriel said slowly. “She said she had her own plans for escape. And that she’d see us soon.”

“She was really adamant about us saying ‘hi’ to Tellwyrn for her,” Toby added. “That doesn’t sound like the action of somebody who expected us to get mulched by a mad god in a moment.”

Vesk’s grin faded in increments. “Well. How ’bout that. After all, what’s a more classic reversal than the great trickster’s ultimate ploy being turned around on him at the last second?” The god sighed softly and shrugged. “Then again, she could’ve been saving face. It’s hard to say what goes through the mind of a creature like that, but most of what she does is out of a blind compulsion to hurt people. I advise you not to think too hard on anything she told you.”

Suddenly, all three paladins were adamantly not looking in each other’s directions.

“Where are we?” Trissiny asked after a strained pause.

“My rockin’ bachelor pad,” Vesk said, leaning back into the throne again and gesturing at the rather stark hall, which didn’t seem to suit his personal aesthetic in the slightest. “Most gods don’t spend much time on the mortal plane, but hey! Everybody needs a little place to call home. Y’know, unwind, enjoy some privacy, store their collection of incredibly dangerous artifacts… And speaking of which. I believe you have my key?”

Slowly, Toby reached into his pocket. They key was, indeed, still there; he drew it out and held it up, firelight flickering gold across the pale mithril surface. The black jewel at its head had gone dark again.

“Answers first,” he said curtly. “After all this, we want the truth.” Trissiny and Gabriel nodded in firm agreement.

Vesk smiled very thinly for a moment before opening his mouth. “You can’t handle the truth.”

“You SON OF A—”

Gabriel had actually lunged halfway up the steps and swung his scythe down at the god before he was stopped, Vesk deftly catching the tip of the blade against the tip of his own finger.

“Sound and fury,” he said dismissively, “signifying nothing.” With a flick of the wrist he sent Gabriel staggering back down into his place.

“Who do you think you are?” Trissiny snarled, unconsciously gripping the hilt of her sword. “You sent us unprepared into that. And for what?!”

Vesk held up one finger. “Greater love hath no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

“We’re just pieces on a game board to you, aren’t we?” Toby stated. “You all but scripted that. Scyllith, Calomnar, the key. You just needed some patsies to do the walking for you. What if something unexpected happened to disrupt your clever plan? Against powers like that, what could we possibly have done? What could we even have attempted, to deal with an Elder Goddess and chaos itself?”

“Do,” advised Vesk, “or do not. There is no try.”

“That is the dumbest thing I ever heard anyone say,” Trissiny spat. “That sounds like what would come out if you fed shrooms to a talking donkey and asked it for the meaning of life!”

“You risked our lives and souls and who knows what on this,” Gabriel snapped, “refused to tell us what we were in for, promised answers at the end of it, and now you’re gonna go back on it? How can you possibly justify this?”

Vesk’s shrug was a dispirited, one-sided jerk of his shoulders, his smile the faintest, bitter twist of his lips. “Justifications only matter to the just.”

For a beat of silence, they all just stared at him.

“Oh, this is beyond pointless,” Trissiny said in disgust. “Maybe Salyrene can make something useful out of that key. Gabe, we may need your scythe. You in the stupid hat: are you going to show us the door, or are we going to make our own?”

“Oh, you want a door?” Vesk levered himself up off the throne, pausing to dust off his pants. “Doors I have. Right this way!”

He stepped around the throne, pausing to beckon them. Trissiny glanced at each of the boys in turn, then snorted loudly and started up the steps, her boots thudding down harder than was strictly necessary. Gabriel followed next, emphatically thunking his staff against the ground with each step.

There was, it turned out, a door in the room, hidden behind the tall throne. Vesk waited for them to catch up, wearing a vague little smile, and then led the way through. Beyond was a narrow corridor with an uncomfortably low ceiling, also lit by torches but paced widely enough that the light in most of it was dim.

Most surprisingly of all, they met someone else coming the other way.

“Hey, guys!” she said, raising a hand in greeting when she drew abreast of Vesk, who had to step to the side to make room. “Long time, no see!”

“Jenny?” Gabriel said incredulously. “From Sarasio?”

“I’m not exactly from Sarasio,” Jenny replied with a grin, reaching up to adjust the goggles perched atop her head. She was even in the same outfit as the last time they had seen her two years ago. “I do kinda miss it! Nice little town. But the story moved on, as they do.”

“You’re a Vesker,” Trissiny said in a tone of resignation.

“Nope,” Jenny said lightly. “Listen, take it easy on the boss, okay? He’s irritating as hell to deal with, I know it better than anybody. But show a little patience and he always makes it worth your while.”

“I thought Joe said you…left,” Toby said, frowning. “It wasn’t exactly clear to me what he meant by that, but he made it sound pretty final.”

“Yeah…that was something that needed to happen,” she said. “And speaking of which, I’m sorry I haven’t got time to stay and catch up, guys. But you have your own exposition to get to, and time waits for none of us. You take care, okay? Hopefully we can sit down and chat sometime before this great doom thing kicks off. Or maybe after. It’s always best to plan on surviving, that’s my policy. Till then, cheers!”

“Uh, bye, then,” Gabriel said somewhat belatedly as she squeezed past them. Vesk, having remained uncharacteristically silent through this exchange, was already moving off up the corridor again.

“Who exactly is she?” Toby asked, after Jenny had vanished up the darkened corridor behind.

“Jenny Everywhere is less a who than a what,” Vesk replied without turning or slowing. “I don’t say that to be disparaging! Seriously, she’s one of my favorite people. A good assistant, a magnificent living plot device, and pretty good company to boot. But she’s also not a person in the same sense that you are, or that I am, which of course are two very different senses. After we got rid of the Infinite Order—well, most of them—naturally one of the first things I did was start to root around in their archives, checking out all the literature they’d recorded, and…there she was. A specter haunting a surprisingly diverse set of stories.”

“So, she’s an Elder God creation,” Trissiny said grimly.

“Older,” said Vesk. “Altogether less sinister, and never terribly interesting to them. That’s a big part of what made me think she deserved a chance to be in the world, after all. But anyway, you wanted doors. Here they are!”

The corridor opened onto another grand hall, similar in dimensions to the throne room but longer and better-lit, with apparently modern fairy lamps both affixed to the walls and hanging from the ceiling in large iron chandeliers. A strip of crimson carpet ran down the center of the room, and lining both sides into the distance marched a series of apparently identical structures, each consisting of a square metal doorframe whose opening swirled with pale light, mounted atop a mechanical structure of inscrutable purpose, each with a single glowing Infinite Order control panel affixed to the side of the frame. The only apparent variation in them was that some few seemed to lack power, as they had no light effect in their main portals.

Vesk sauntered out into the room, pausing to spread his hands and twirl around before facing them with a wide grin. “Well? What do you think?”

“You absolute lunatic,” Gabriel breathed, aghast.

“What am I looking at, here?” Trissiny demanded.

“Doors,” Toby whispered. “There was one in the fabrication plant under Puna Dara.”

“Doors to where?”

“To alternate universes,” Gabriel explained, still staring around in horror. “The Elder Gods used these to spy on other worlds and steal technology from them. That is exactly as dangerous as it sounds, so they destroyed each one after using it. But Heilo, the god who made them, liked to make extra ones and hide them away. These, his hobby doors, go to universes where the favorite stories of the Elder Gods, mostly fictional realms created on the old world, are real.”

Trissiny’s eyes slowly widened as they panned around the room, drinking in the implications. There were dozens of these doors, at least; the hall was long enough that perspective made them hard to count as they marched toward its opposite end. “You absolute lunatic.”

“Oh, give me a little credit,” Vesk said dismissively.

“The hell you say!” Gabriel barked.

“I haven’t opened any of these,” Vesk continued. “What a disaster that would cause. The really good ones I haven’t even powered on to look through; way too risky, even for my blood. There are things in the Cosmere that would notice if they were being watched, some of which might be able to pry a gateway open from the other side. I certainly don’t want crazy nonsense like Comstock tears or the Subtle Knife ripping holes in our reality. No, don’t worry. While I’ll admit to some personal interest in watching worlds of story, I’ve been collecting these largely to make sure they were secreted away where nobody would ever find and open them. It’s not impossible that some are still out there, truly forgotten, but of every door whose existence I was able to find recorded, I have all but one. And the last is…fairly safe, for the moment, now that Fabrication Plant One is buried again and its Avatar on total lockdown.”

“Then what’s the point?” Toby exclaimed. “Why not just destroy them?”

“As a reminder.” Slowly, Vesk turned around again, but this time without showmanship, simply shuffling in a circle to sweep his gaze across his collection of dimensional gates. “As a warning. Because I hate them.” He came to a stop in profile to the paladins, glaring at one gate in particular with every evidence of deeply felt loathing. “Because I. Hate. These. Stories.”

They kept silent, just watching him. Vesk made himself easy to take for granted, with all his nonsense, but in his expression of real anger there came the mute reminder that he was, after all, a god. A being whose presence was inherently alarming when he was in this kind of mood.

“Do you have any idea how long people have lived on this planet?” he asked almost plaintively. “We can’t say for certain, because the ascension cycles aren’t exactly the same length every time. They’re all similar, though, within a margin of error. It’s been eight thousand years since the last; that’s roughly the period. There were three ascension cycles during the Infinite Order’s right. That rounds to about twenty-four thousand years. Twenty-four thousand. Can you even imagine such a period of time? Your own history barely reaches eight—and that’s more than twice as much recorded human history as there was in total when the I.O. originally left Old Earth. Twenty! Four! Thousand! Years! And do you know what we have to show for it?”

He whirled back to face them, flinging his arms wide to encompass the row of gateways. His expression now looked positively anguished.

“This shit right here! One teeny-tiny little slice of fiction, from just a couple of incestuously intertwined genres, produced over a period of a few decades on a world none of us will ever see, by a culture that’s been extinct longer than any of us even have a mental frame of reference to imagine. And this, this was what they did, for twenty-four millennia! I hate these stories so. Fucking. Much.”

“…they’re that bad, huh,” Gabriel prompted warily. Trissiny stomped on his foot.

“They’re not even bad,” Vesk answered, suddenly sounding exhausted. “Well, on a case by case basis. Some are truly exquisite. That last gate that I haven’t collected leads to such a clusterfuck of narrative incompetence I can’t even… Well, that was Scyllith’s personal favorite, if that tells you anything. No, it’s not the quality of them; that’s not the point. It’s what it means when a mere handful of stories are canonized into some sort of sick, pointless dogma.

“Twenty-four thousand years,” he repeated mournfully, “and these are the only stories recorded, the few from before that time. Twenty-four thousand years! All those stories!” Vesk’s voice rose in a pitch of agony; he squeezed his eyes shut and actually ripped off his floppy hat, hurling it away in agitation. “Gone! The hopes, the dreams and ambitions, of countless generations. Who were their heroes? What were their values? What tales comforted them in their oppression? What music did they create, what art? We will never know, because the Infinite fucking Order only wanted to hear their same few stories over and over again!

“When I was a mortal, I got to see a play put on. Oh, they called it a play; it was a re-enactment of the Lord of the Rings. The entire goddamned thing, put on to scale! The players, all those thousands of them, were the result of generations of genetic manipulation and selective breeding, all taking place over centuries to produce the requisite stock for one ridiculous play. They raised an island chain out of what’s now the Grand Mere to re-create Middle Earth. And then, when it was over, the fuckers ritually executed the entire cast and sunk the bastard right back to the bottom of the sea. Saints and archons above, the luckiest person involved in that was Tolkien himself for being dead so long before it ever happened. The sheer horror of it probably would have killed him! And that wasn’t even the first time.” He started pacing up and down in mounting fury, and the three paladins slowly edged back into the doorway. “Do you know why orcs exist as a race on this world? For another fucking production like that! Scyllith wanted to see a scale recreation of the Reign of Chaos saga and Meynherem wanted… I don’t even know what the hell he wanted from her, and it’s not like it matters at this point. At least they weren’t so successful at eliminating all the players that time. Because those damn omnipotent creeps just couldn’t let go of their fucking bedtime stories from eons ago!”

Vesk stopped pacing, and drew in a breath as if to calm himself. To judge by the force with which he blew it back out again, it didn’t work.

“That was the Infinite Order for you. Everything was impossibly grandiose in scale and most of it in service to the most ridiculous bullshit imaginable. And let’s be honest, stuff like that was far from the worst they did. But it’s what sticks most in my mind, because for all their flaws, that was the one fixation that I think reveals the most about what went wrong with the Elder Gods.”

He paused again, and heaved another deep breath.

“And what’s so close to going wrong with us.”

The three of them exchanged a few wary looks.

“Uh,” Gabriel said very carefully, “are you…”

“No, I’m not going to stage a play with thousands of custom-bred expendable extras,” Vesk said irritably. “Even if you think I would do such an asshat thing—and after the ringer I’ve put you though, I won’t take that personally—there’s no audience or infrastructure for such nonsense now, thankfully. Avei would wear my ass for a boot if I even suggested it, and more power to her. It’s just… Well, let me back up.”

He began pacing again, though this time his expression was introspective.

“Before they designed what we now think of as godhood, the Infinite Order lost a few people to their earliest ascension process. Which, ironically, was the best one. Oh, they weren’t accidents and they didn’t kill anybody; they just discovered that a being which has transcended all physical boundaries is left with a completely different set of motivations than those they started with, which it seems don’t included faffing around to do mad science or rule planets. They managed some brief communications with the very first ascended before they just…lost interest. Floated off to explore the universe. Hell, who wouldn’t? So, given what they were trying to do and what their own prejudices were, the I.O. redesigned their method to apply limitations. To impose structures on future ascended and make sure they would retain the same basic personalities and motivations as they had in life. Ironically, it was a variation of the same change we later used to kill the bastards off, which tells you something about how smart a thing it was to do in the first place.”

“Gods,” Trissiny whispered. In context, that could have been taken a number of different ways, but Vesk just nodded at her in understanding.

“And that’s it, at the heart of the matter,” Vesk said quietly. “The unwillingness to change became the inability to change. I complain about stories, about how a few introverted scientists wouldn’t let go of the old tales that brought them comfort in their youth even after they came to enormous power. But in the end…that’s everything. They would not let go. Couldn’t move on. They were prisoners of their own ideas. And we gods, today, are likewise chained.”

He stopped in his pacing, turning to them, and shrugged. “That’s the first part of the answers I promised you. I’m not honestly sure how much you can do with all that, but thanks for listening to me vent. What you care about, of course, is the world now and how all this affects your lives directly. So keeping in mind that gods are, by their very nature, constrained… Don’cha just love Archpope Justinian?”

They blinked at him vacantly in the silence which followed. Vesk just regarded them with a beaming smile.

“Gwha?” Gabriel burbled at last.

“Great guy, Justinian,” Vesk continued idly. “A real stand-up fellow. Why, I can’t think of a single thing about him that I would change! He’s just…perfect. And that…seems a little odd, y’know? I have never in all my long existence felt uncritically positive about anything or anyone. But hey, I’m sure it’s fine! Cos, y’see, when I stop and think about Justinian himself I’m just sure it’s nothing, because he’s such a great Archpope.”

“…oh, holy shit,” Trissiny whispered. “He didn’t.”

“Of course he did,” Toby grated. “He would.”

“But how?” Gabriel protested.

“Someone was in that facility,” Trissiny said slowly, “just a few years before us. There’s no reason to go in there unless…you want to mess around with the machinery that created the gods.”

Toby held up the key again. “And now…there’s a record of what happened.”

“Yep,” Vesk said laconically. “That’s a real useful key for that reason alone. But you’ll be happy to know I didn’t risk your lives just for that. Let me pitch a scenario for you guys, the backdrop of a potentially rollicking good story. Let’s say, on one hand, you’ve got three classic young heroes. Brave, selfless, just flawed enough to be interesting, and so on. Chosen by the very gods and living in a time when great things are set in motion. An oncoming great doom, so to speak. It’s all very prototypical, see what I mean?”

“Right, right, you’ve made your point,” Gabriel said impatiently.

“But!” Vesk held up one finger. “On the other hand. Say you’ve got a man with a mysterious past, who had stumbled upon a great injustice. A lie and an abuse of power, woven into the very fabric of creation itself—into the very natures of the gods. Suppose this man sets out to correct that abuse by any means necessary, and the path on which it takes him will test his conviction to its very limits, force him into compromises and painful actions that teeter on the very brink of villainy.”

Trissiny narrowed her eyes. “You’re not saying—”

“I’m not done,” Vesk interrupted. “All that’s just backdrop: here is the important question. In this hypothetical story I’m describing, of those two options, which is the protagonist?”

Toby frowned at him, then turned to the others. “…I don’t get it.”

“He’s a god,” Gabriel said quietly, still staring at Vesk. “He’s constrained by his nature. He is, specifically, the god of stories.”

“And so,” Trissiny whispered, “it matters very much to him who is the protagonist in whatever story is unfolding. Because he can’t root for the villain. Can you?”

“Oh, I’ve rooted for a lot of villains over the years,” Vesk said with a sigh. “Just…no antagonists. Ask Teal to explain the difference if it’s unclear; she may as well make herself useful for something. You get it, though, Trissiny. I sent you three on the classic hero’s journey. You have faced challenge after challenge, each of which taught you a ham-fisted lesson. You’ve rescued a princess…well, after a fashion…scaled a tower of trials, hobnobbed with scurrilous underworld types who turned out to have hearts of gold, confronted the very face of evil itself… And at the end, you descended deep into the darkness, into the lair of the monster, only to find that the true monsters were lurking within your own hearts.”

Gabriel lowered his eyes; Toby’s fists clenched at his sides.

After a moment’s pause, Trissiny wrapped one arm around each of them and pulled both boys against her sides, squeezing reassuringly.

“These things may seem arbitrary and frankly pointless to you,” Vesk said solemnly. “But to me? They describe the very shape of reality. The three of you had the potential to be protagonists, but hell, so does your entire social circle. I made you heroes. In a very specific and arbitrary way, yes. But for my purposes, it’s what counts. And for your purposes, it means that in the confrontation which is inevitably coming, you may find yourself facing off with someone who has gone to great care to lay his groundwork, and at that crucial moment, thanks to this bullshit quest of mine, will find one specific patch of it missing. And the proof that it matters is that now, when I contemplate the prospect of you kids putting one over on everyone’s favorite Archpope… I can say with all honesty that I’m rooting for you.”

“Scyllith said there was a secret,” Toby said, staring intently at him, even as he slipped an arm around Trissiny’s shoulders. “One that the field of divine magic itself would kill anyone who learned it. Something to do with how the gods ascended.”

“Obviously, that’s a pointless question, since if there was such a thing I wouldn’t confirm it,” Vesk said, nodding emphatically. “In the purely theoretical instance that some such thing were true, though, I’d advise you to be very careful what you poke your nose into. Your three—well, four, I guess—personal patrons would try to protect you, and there would be several among the Pantheon who would bitterly resent such a provision existing and gladly work to thwart it, but…gods are gods. As you’ve just been told in some considerable detail, we can’t always do what we’d want.”

“But,” Gabriel said slowly, “some of you try to work around it.”

“A person operating under a disadvantage is no less a person,” Vesk said with an amiable shrug, grinning lopsidedly at them. “Sometimes it’s handicap and hardship that does the most to motivate us. In any story, what the hero can’t do is much more interesting than what they can.”

Toby held up the key, bouncing it once on his palm and looking over at the other two. Both of them nodded at him. Nodding back, he hefted it and lightly tossed the key to the god of bards, who snagged it deftly out of the air.

“Pleasure doin’ business,” Vesk said cheerily. “Now then! We’re not quite done here—after all, a good story would be cruelly diminished without a satisfying denouement. I believe I did promise to aid you with your scouring of the Shire.”

“Uh huh,” Trissiny said in a dry tone. “And are you going to bother explaining what that means now?”

Vesk grinned delightedly, positively bouncing on the balls of his feet in barely-restrained excitement. “Oh, trust me, Trissiny. I think you will like this.”

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14 – 30

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Even that silence did not long survive in the presence of Gabriel Arquin.

“So, uh…what are you doing here?”

The other two turned incredulous stares on him, at which he spread his hands infinitesimally at his sides in an almost-shrug.

The woman made of light—Scyllith, if she was to be believed—blinked her starry eyes languidly, still appearing somewhat confused. “Here? Where are we, children? There are several points where I…” She closed her eyes entirely, the tiniest frown appearing on her doll-like face.

“Seems like an Elder Goddess would understand where she was, if nothing else,” Trissiny said skeptically.

“Goddess!” At that, Scyllith opened her eyes again, once more breaking into a chime of pleasantly musical laughter. “Oh, if you only knew. Some of my colleagues would fly into an absolute rage if you called them gods. I’d like to think I am more easygoing, personally. Let me guess: Avei and her renegades threw themselves into the label.”

“That was a very long time ago,” Toby said quietly.

“To you, I suppose it truly was,” she agreed with a solicitous nod.

“So, what happened with that?” Gabriel inquired.

“Gabe!” Trissiny hissed.

“Well, how often do we get the chance to ask someone who was there and isn’t in the Pantheon?” he replied. “I don’t think it’s disloyal to acknowledge they have an agenda that colors what they tell us. We’ve seen pretty firm proof of that in the last week!”

“You don’t engage with a manipulator and give her the chance to work a tendril into your head!”

“In this case, I think we kind of have to.”

“You’re both right, you know,” Scyllith said kindly, smiling at them. “You would be wise to listen to Trissiny’s caution, Gabriel; she has a solid grasp of how manipulative people operate, and how to avoid being snared by them. On the other hand, it’s not as if you have a choice this time, is it? After all, you have to keep me busy until your phasedrive finishes downloading the facility’s records.” While the three of them froze, she half-turned to look at the key, still inserted into that slot on the wall and pulsing blue. “That’s likely to take a few minutes, at least. It’s a significant amount of data, being harvested directly from the transcension matrix, and the systems responsible for organizing that data were damaged in…well, that little kerfuffle between your renegade friends and the Infinite Order. In the meantime, here we are!” Turning back to them, she spread her delicate arms to both sides and bowed, smiling benignly. “I am glad to put a few things into perspective for you.”

“Awfully accommodating of you,” Gabriel noted.

“Now, Gabriel,” she said in a tone of very gentle reproof, “you should always show consideration toward people who are in no position to threaten or influence you in the slightest way. It’s basic maturity, not to mention good manners—which, as my mother used to tell me, are miniature morals. Let’s see…” She began to drift off the crystal plate, floating serenely above the mushrooms with her feet dangling a foot off the floor. Wherever the glow emanating from her touched the fungus underfoot, they changed, taking on more subtly graceful shapes and patterns of bioluminescence. Scyllith floated slowly across the floor as if pacing in thought, leaving a trail of odd beauty in her wake. “I think what you children most need to understand is that an ascended being…a god…” She turned toward them with an indulgent little smile in passing. “…is not simply a more powerful person. It is a fundamentally different type of intelligence. When we have conversations like this—just as when you talk to members of your Pantheon—some of the experience is due to an active effort by the ascended to be more approachable, and some to your mind reorganizing information into a form it can process. But the very nature of my senses is different from yours, Trissiny dear, which is why I may be momentarily confused in a situation like this. I, you see, am a creature of magic, and magic is a system of data processing. Really, its entire purpose comes down to taking an idea, like your glowing shields or a wizard’s fireball, and performing the vast calculations necessary to turn that into a physical reality, using the energies inherent in the material universe. Merely the act of concentrating my being into one spot like this imposes limits on me. But it also gives me great clarity, for which I thank you!”

Again, she paused and turned directly to them, bowing courteously. All three just stared warily back.

“Now that I have my land legs, so to speak,” Scyllith continued lightly, drifting back toward the crystal platform, “I see what all this is about. Please forgive my earlier befuddlement, children. The flows of magic are whimsical, today! And certain individuals went to a lot of trouble to prevent me from pulling my consciousness together. About the only thing that can overcome that, temporarily, is to activate a transcension field editor keyed specifically to my access credentials. I’ve been bounced between a few of those over the last few…years, I think…and it’s rather disorienting.”

“Temporarily?” Trissiny asked in a deliberately neutral tone.

“Oh, yes, dear,” Scyllith answered, giving her a warm smile. “Of course, once that phasedrive…I’m sorry, that key is removed, the editor will power back down, and with it everything that’s holding my mind together.” Floating up onto the disc again, she placed herself deliberately between them and they key, and smiled kindly at them in silence for a few seconds.

They all stared back, tense and keenly aware that no power at their disposal would help if she decided to do worse than talk. Not to mention the question of how to get the key back when it was time…

“I’m afraid, Gabriel, this means I can’t answer your question,” Scyllith continued at last, offering him a rueful smile. “I’m just so enjoying our chat—it’s so rare that I have the opportunity to meet such charming young people!—and I would just hate for it to be cut short by your abrupt deaths. Oh, please, relax!” she added, laughing softly when they all visibly tensed again. “I’m not going to harm you! Why ever would I? No, I just mean there is a mechanism built right into the transcension field you know as divine magic which would instantly kill any mortal who learns certain facts about those events. There are ways that could be circumvented, of course, but I’m afraid I’m in no position to offer you my protection, and it would take simply too long to teach you the method yourselves. If you’re interested, you might ask Elilial. I’ll bet you anything she’s shielded her little helpers from the effect.”

“The gods wouldn’t do such a…” Trissiny trailed off, and Scyllith turned an indulgent smile upon her.

“I think you know very well, Trissiny, that they aren’t so purely good as you were taught in your childhood. But I earnestly urge you not to take my word on something like this. Obviously, I’m simply not credible! No, you really ought to ask your patrons. It’s one thing not to bring up the topic; they’ll find it rather more difficult to lie to your faces about it.”

“…thanks for the tip,” Gabriel said warily. Scyllith nodded graciously to him.

“But my point, children, is that I can see such details as easily as you see me before you—and more accurately, since what you’re seeing is not quite what is happening. Magic is data, and the data is visible and intelligible to a being like myself. The structure of thoughts, likewise! So yes, children, I’m well aware by now of Vesk and his charming meddling. I know what he wants that key for, which is certainly more than he’s told you. I know all about that flute you’re hiding, Trissiny, and I do hope you have better sense than to call on Calomnar for help no matter how severe your peril. I also,” she added, her smile beginning to fade away for the first time, “know that you are students of my own dearest Arachne. It’s so good of you to visit me, children; you can’t imagine how relieved I am to learn that she is not only alive and well, but thriving. Actually contributing to the world! It makes me so proud, to learn how she’s grown! Do give her my love when you see her next. Promise me?”

Toby glanced at the other two. “Well, that’s—”

“Promise.” The word rippled across them with a tangible psychic force. All across the room, spots of light blossomed on a random smattering of mushrooms.

“…sure,” Toby said, staring. “We’ll tell her you said hello.”

“Thank you ever so, Tobias,” Scyllith replied, turning upon him a smile which was all gentle kindness and sincere gratitude. “Do you mind if I call you Toby? I’ve never been one for needless formality.”

“Um.”

“The way I heard it,” Gabriel interjected, “Tellwyrn and Elilial handed you quite a setback the last time you saw them.”

“Gabe,” Trissiny warned.

“Oh, pish tosh,” Scyllith said airily, waving one graceful hand. “You simply cannot go through life bearing grudges, Gabriel, it’ll drive you mad and gain you nothing. Oh, yes, Elilial and my Arachne caused me no end of trouble! But that’s done, and all is well.”

“Even though you’re trapped underground unless someone puts a key in that machine?”

“Gabe,” Trissiny said more insistently.

“I’m afraid you don’t understand,” Scyllith gently remonstrated. “I could work myself into a tizzy about Arachne’s betrayal, or Elilial’s frankly gratuitous assistance in it. Or Elilial ousting me from my own domain in the first place. Or little Themynra going to such lengths simply to irritate and inconvenience me. Can you imagine? How bored must a person be to do something like that? Then, there’s the way your Pantheon—ah, but I forget. That could be dangerous for you to know, children, please excuse me. If I were inclined to keep inventory of offenses against me, I’d be rather more irked at Naiya for going to such effort to lock me out of the Order’s systems—or the Order itself for various offenses which were why I helped the renegades topple them in the first place. But there is just no point in that. You win some, you lose some! That has always been my philosophy, going all the way back to before we left the old world to create a better future. Everyone was in such an absolute uproar about the changing climate scorching human life off the planet. Me, I planted oranges and mangoes in my yard in Toronto. Life is what you make of it, children.”

“Well, that seems very…enlightened,” Gabriel said carefully.

“I’ve met a few people I would describe as enlightened,” she said with an amused grin. “Honestly, I found them all insufferably pretentious. It’s simple common sense, isn’t it? There’s really only one truth of intelligent life, children: what you have the power to do. Everything else—your justice, your peace…whatever it is Gabriel’s religion does, it doesn’t seem very clear, does it? All these values and philosophies are things humans impose on reality to make sense of it, missing the greater point that reality makes perfect sense on its own, it is simply that human consciousness isn’t prepared to understand most of it.”

“So your own philosophy is simple nihilism, then,” Trissiny retorted. “Of course, just by having a philosophy you negate your own point.”

“And for someone who knows better than to listen to a manipulator, you’re awfully willing to engage me in a philosophical debate,” Scyllith replied, then laughed gently. “Oh, don’t worry, dear, I’m not making fun of you. There’s a lesson in that, if you’re open to it. But let me turn that point around on you: everyone has a philosophy, simply because philosophy is the unavoidable byproduct of human consciousness meeting existence. You need these ideas in order to function in a universe which is vast, doesn’t care about you and seems designed to be mostly inimical to your life. And so, what good is all your philosophy unless you have the power to make something real of it?” She spread her arms gracefully, thin shoulders rising in a little shrug. “You can be as high-minded as you wish, so long as you acknowledge that the exercise does nothing but make you feel better about yourself. Without power, your beliefs are nothing, and you are nothing. With power, all creation and its obstinate refusal to acknowledge you is, itself, nothing. Power is the only significance the wee infinitesimal speck of a mortal consciousness can ever have.

“It takes a…a god, in your parlance, to have true significance, to defy reality itself. But you can bring all the meaning and satisfaction to your life that your limited mind will ever need by having power over other mortals. Power is the only value which fully justifies itself, no philosophy needed. If you are able to do something to someone, then you are entitled to, period. Any other belief is a construct requiring—again—power to put into effect. So no, children, to bring this back around to where it started, I bear no grudges. Everyone who has wronged me fully justified the act by pulling it off. Nursing a vendetta over my defeats is pointless, churlish, and worst of all, weak. Gloating in my victories, likewise! There is only the next struggle, the obstacle in front of you and whether you have the power to overcome it. Any other way to live is just an exhausting exercise in confusing yourself. And, hey! If it makes you feel better to live that way, you absolutely should. As long as you have the power to do so, it is your perfect right!”

She folded her delicate hands in front of herself, smiling beatifically at them.

“I have a feeling I’d find all that a lot more disturbing if it made sense to me,” Toby said slowly.

“Ah, yes, you have your own philosophies,” Scyllith replied with a light laugh. “Omnists! Really, you can’t imagine how much I enjoy that.”

He blinked. “Enjoy?”

“Oh, of course! I have always been a lover of irony. Imagine! A major world religion, spawned from the half-understood Zen/Sufi/Taoist/Jedi goulash concocted by my own semi-literate gardener. Why, it’s the most splendid thing I’ve ever heard! I couldn’t have created anything more hysterical if I’d tried!”

“I’m not sure what you mean to accomplish by insulting me,” Toby said, raising an eyebrow. “If you can read thoughts so easily, you surely know I’m not that easy to get a rise out of.”

“Ah, yes, I must ask your pardon again,” she replied, nodding. “I tend to forget that limited creatures like you can’t read thoughts. You’re stuck using empathy to discern the minds of other people—surely the most broken tool biology has ever devised for any purpose. No, Toby, I’m not interested in insulting or getting a rise out of you. Really, what would I gain? I thought we were simply having a pleasant conversation. You know, while we wait on your download. Long, long ago, I passed many a relaxed hour with colleagues, in the aftermath of all the hard work, waiting for the code to compile. This is all so pleasantly nostalgic for me!”

Behind her, only slightly obscured by her glowing form, the key’s head continued to pulse blue.

“I do hope you’re not offended that I monopolize the conversation,” Scyllith added with every appearance of real concern. “It isn’t that you have nothing interesting to say, children! Why, the adventures you’ve had in such short lives already—truly remarkable! But it’s all laid out before me like text on a screen, you see, which is ever so much faster a way to learn than by asking you a lot of annoying questions. What interesting things your memories reveal about the world. Imagine, my little Arachne managed to poke and prod Naiya into some semblance of paying attention, even for just a moment. Incredible! I always knew her power to be annoying had the capacity to change the world. Poor Naiya, though,” she said with a regretful sigh. “It got to be difficult to respect her, long before the end. As brilliant a mind as any among us, and yet she let herself be reduced to the capacity of a groundskeeper. Always so concerned with repairing the ecosystem and cleaning up the planet after our colleagues’ experiments got out of hand—which they inevitably did. If anything, you would think I would be her favorite colleague, since at least I had the courtesy to take my dangerous research to another plane of existence where it didn’t mess up her precious ecosystem. You know,” she added confidentially, “we were all supposed to leave behind every attachment and everything that identified us with the old world, when we came here. That was the agreement. Of course, not a one of us truly followed through on that, and it wasn’t all that long before even the pretense of it in public broke down. Poor Naiya, though. I think she never did get over what happened to her original country. That was a shame, of course. They were such nice people. So polite! But sadly, as it turns out, the ocean doesn’t stop rising if you apologize to it.”

She laughed, and it was as warm and kind and pleasant sound as any of them had ever heard, the kind of laugh that made everyone instinctively want to join in. Now, all three of them shuffled a few inches backward. It was chillingly eerie, the discordance of hearing such good-natured amusement over the apparent drowning of an entire nation. For all her apparent friendliness, it was a glimpse at the inherent cruelty of her aspect that commanded intimidated silence.

From most people, anyway.

“Kind of an asshole, aren’t you?” Gabriel observed.

Toby closed his eyes; Trissiny pressed a hand to her forehead.

“Aw, Gabriel,” Scyllith cooed, “that’s why you’re my favorite, you know. There’s always one person in every room who says what everyone is thinking, but hasn’t the gumption to voice aloud. That was always my role, back in the day. Don’t ever let them silence you, Gabriel. Every chorus of ‘think before you speak’ is a spurt of pure jealousy from someone who lacks the courage to speak at all.”

“Mm,” he grunted skeptically.

“Thinking before speaking,” Toby said quietly, “is the same as thinking before doing anything, which is always important. Words have weight.”

“A noble sentiment,” Scyllith said in a light tone, “born of a barely more than medieval grasp of psychology. If you thought before doing anything, Toby, you would never do anything. Most of the wonderful structure of the human mind, painstakingly assembled out of billions of years of evolution, serves the purpose of enabling you to act without pausing to consider the ramifications of everything, which is the only way you have time to act at all. Instinct, stereotype, intuition, analogy, emotion, pattern recognition… The mechanisms of the mind that cause you to misunderstand so much of the truth of reality are the only thing that kept your ancestors alive long enough to reproduce! And even so, you are not wholly wrong. Words can have a great impact. Have you ever paused to consider how much harm you have inadvertently done by opening your mouth—or failing to?”

“That criticism,” said Trissiny, “applies less to Toby than to basically anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Even a cursory glimpse at your memory shows that isn’t true, Trissiny,” Scyllith said kindly. “What of your Bishop Darling, or Shaeine? The motivations are very nearly opposite, but they have in common careful, purposeful control which young Tobias, unfortunately, lacks. It’s a real irony that she is the one to speak up in your defense, Toby,” she added, turning back to him with a warm smile, “the very person your carelessness has probably hurt the most. Why ever didn’t you tell her the rejection wasn’t personal? Even after all this time? All you had to do was say that you’re not interested in women, and you could have spared your friend so much pain. But your own privacy was just more important, wasn’t it?”

The silence that fell was like the blow of a hammer, Toby and Trissiny both gaping as if the very breath was driven right from them.

“You utter bitch,” Gabriel hissed, withdrawing his wand from his coat and extending it to full scythe form.

“Now, that is exceedingly inconsiderate, Gabriel,” Scyllith said in a tone of compassionate reproof. “You know how such gendered terms offend Trissiny. Honestly, the sheer disrespect both you boys show her is shocking. Now she has to wonder how much you really respect her principles, if all it takes for you to throw aside the pretense is a moment of anger. You see, children, this is what I was talking about. It’s nothing but trouble, letting these things fester; you should never be afraid to speak your truth! Why, Trissiny—”

Trissiny ripped out her sword and burst alight with divine energy. “Shut your slithering mouth!”

“Come, you’re better than that,” Scyllith said gently. “Embracing a moment of pain to gain a longer-term benefit is the whole nature of courage, something you don’t lack in the slightest! Really, what is the worst that could happen if you told Gabriel how you really feel about him? He’s not Toby; I do hope you’re not thinking it would end up the same way.”

“I—that’s not—I don’t—” Trissiny had gone white, sword upraised as if prepared to strike, but she seemed frozen in place.

“After all, don’t many of the great romances involve paladins? The fact they’re considered tragedies simply isn’t worth dwelling on, Trissiny. Everything ends; if you only started things on the basis of how they might end up, you would never take a risk or accomplish anything of note. Embrace it! Life is pain, anyway; take what pleasure you can before it all goes to hell. Listen to someone who’s been there!”

“Enough!” A staff of golden light coalesced in Toby’s hands. “It’s not hard to see what you’re doing. Be silent—”

Her warm, chiming laughter drowned out the rest of his sentence.

“Oh, Toby,” Scyllith said, fondly chiding. “What I’m doing is the lesser concern, here. What are you doing? Don’t you know better than to threaten and posture at a being who knows you pose them no threat at all? It merely makes you look ridiculous. Tell me, do you still have chihuahuas? They were these yappy little rats—”

She casually raised one slender arm to slap aside Gabriel’s scythe as he swung it at her head. A scream as of tearing metal resounded through the room, accompanied by a shockwave which knocked over a swath of mushrooms, and he stumbled back, barely keeping his grip on the weapon.

“Now, let’s have none of that,” Scyllith said indulgently. “Truly, Gabriel, that’s a magnificent weapon, and has a lot of history! If you force me to break it, it’ll be a real shame and we’ll both feel bad.”

“Just shut it!” he snarled, leveling the scythe at her and discharging a blast of black light.

She caught it. Scyllith held up the suspended beam of dark energy in her hand, turning it this way and that to examine it with detached curiosity, then tossed it aside with a flick of her wrist. Where it impacted the wall, a long stretch of mushrooms and lichen shriveled and disintegrated into dust.

“I don’t know what you’re so worried about, young man,” she said mildly. “Really, I do not. It’s not that I’m awfully surprised at how poorly your friends are taking some simple, constructive criticism; this is hardly the first time I’ve been around young people. I know how volatile it can be, having all those feelings. But honestly, Gabriel, what could I possibly say in correction to you? Everything you do is just so…” Slowly, her smile stretched, growing gradually ever wider until she was grinning at him in a truly disturbing rictus, her mouth stretching farther toward the edges of her stylized features than human lips could. “So wonderful. Just be you, Gabriel Arquin. I could not be more delighted at everything you do if I’d planned it myself.”

The pause which followed was pierced by a tiny chirping noise. On the wall behind her, the head of the key turned green.

“Ding!” Scyllith said cheerfully, glancing back at it. “The toast is done! What a shame—we were having such a lovely chat. But now you’ll have to fetch your key back to Vesk and consign little old me back to muddled oblivion. Ah, well, such is life. Step on up and claim your prize, children.”

All three glared at her, weapons upraised. As one, they took a single step forward, bringing themselves just out of range of her, surrounding the goddess in a three-point formation. There they hesitated.

“Well? Don’t be shy!” Scyllith’s grin widened even further, till it seemed in danger of actually splitting her head in half. “After all, only one of us has forever.”

The silent standoff held for another moment. Gabriel eased to the side, as if he might rush past her to the key, but she just turned her gaze directly on him, that unsettling rictus still in place on her features.

Then Trissiny straightened, shoving her blade back into its sheath. “I knew it. I knew that divine ass wouldn’t give us something we wouldn’t immediately need to use.”

“I really cannot overemphasize,” Scyllith cautioned while Trissiny withdrew the Pipe of Calomnar from her belt pouch, “how strongly I don’t recommend that, Trissiny. Come, just grasp your key. Pull it out of the machine and send me back. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“If there’s a time for kicking the board, this is it,” Gabriel said tensely.

“It’s the one thing she fears,” Toby added. Neither took their eyes off Scyllith, who was watching Trissiny with that wild, avid smile.

The Hand of Avei held the Elder Goddess’s gaze as she raised the flute to her lips and blew.

What came out wasn’t a sound. It hurt the ears, all right, but it was not a vibration in the air, but more of one through the soul.

And Scyllith started laughing. In the same way as before, at first, with a kind and pleasant tone, but this time it quickly escalated until she was practically screeching in hysteria.

All around them, the first beginnings of the unraveling of reality began to appear as the chaotic presence Trissiny had just summoned turned its attention upon them. The light shifted, flickering as if shadows were being cast by things not there. The mushrooms started to change, some growing and others merely altering shape.

“I had a little bet with myself, you see!” Scyllith informed them, still chuckling. “I was so, so certain that nothing I could possibly say would make you desperate enough or reckless enough to blow that flute. But it’s like I said—you can’t win them all! Ah, you children really are a delight. Here you go.”

She reached behind herself and plucked the key out of the wall. Immediately, the half-covered screens and machinery to either side of its panel went dark, and the light began slowly to fade from the crystal disc beneath her.

Scyllith’s own form began to dim, to grow subtly indistinct, as if her coherent essence were dissipating.

“Don’t you worry about little old me, children,” she said pleasantly, and tossed the key to Toby. “It was so very kind of you to give me the prospect of escaping my bonds, but really not necessary! I have my own arrangements. We’ll chat again soon, my dears. Now, remember, give my love to Arachne! You did promise.”

She fixed her glittering eyes on Toby, even as the rest of her body faded from existence, and finally the facade of warmth and kindness faded entirely. Her gaze and voice were ice cold in the last seconds before they vanished.

“I will hold you to it.”

The lights around the panel went dark, as did the crystal disc. The last of the ancient machines fell silent, and Scyllith’s presence was gone, dissipated back into whatever unfocused state she had been in before.

Their own situation did not markedly improve, though. The increasing intrusion of chaos made itself known, Calomnar’s approach heralded by an escalating breakdown of the very order of reality. The three of them clustered together, Toby clutching the key, but it was difficult to move; a quality akin to the helplessness of nightmares hung over the darkened facility, as if they were struggling to slog through molasses while some faceless monster pursued.

It was brighter, now, intermittently, sourceless light filling the room with a sickly greenish intensity, which apparently just served as a medium for the shadows of tentacles and claws which flexed and writhed along the walls. The mushrooms continued to twist and grow and transform all around them; now, some began to moan. They had voices like children. Along the stretches of the ancient facility’s walls and floor where Gabriel’s misdirected scythe blast had annihilated the covering fungus, rust spread across the incorruptible mithril.

And then, with a sudden onslaught of enormous psychic pressure that seemed to crush their very minds into the farthest corners of the room, the chaos-tainted god Calomnar arrived in person.

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The silence of the ancient cavern hung uncontested for a few seconds.

“I’m with Izara,” Gabriel said at last. “That doesn’t sound like anything you should be doing.”

“It especially doesn’t sound like something we want to be near,” Toby added.

“You also heard me tell Izara that there’s no chance of apotheosis for you lot,” Vesk replied genially. “Understand that there’s no machine which can turn people into gods…”

“You literally just said—”

He pressed on, cutting Trissiny off. “It’s only part of the process, you see. The actual power and most of the work occurs in the overlapping fields of magic itself. The machinery initiates, controls, and guides the transformation. And not only is it too ancient and broken-down to even do that anymore, not only is it half-wrecked after the events of our own ascension, but such a thing can only be done at certain times, and this is not one of those. The necessary alignment is close, but not here yet. I’m not looking to elevate another god or kill an existing one, merely to access information that is found only within the machine. Speaking of which,” he added with a roguish grin, “there is also the fact that if you don’t retrieve that information, Elilial will retrieve you, as agreed. Plus you have no way out of this cavern unless—ahp! Uh uh.”

He held up a hand peremptorily, and Trissiny actually paused in the act of lunging at him with her fist upraised.

“If you’re going to commit slapstick upon the god of bards, Trissiny Avelea, you should be aware of the rhythms of comedy,” Vesk said severely. “You got two clean hits in, establishing the pattern, then shook it up for the third with a more elaborate play on the routine, as is proper. To keep the joke fresh, the next iteration will be a reversal, which I don’t think you’ll find nearly as satisfying.”

She blinked and slowly lowered her fist, looking confused rather than intimidated.

“As I said,” he continued, “I don’t dare go near the thing, especially while it’s on. It’s important for you to understand: this thing is dangerous for gods. That, as much as their overall failure, is why Themynra condemned the Irivoi: having access to it made them an existential threat to all of us in a way that nothing else possibly could be.”

“But this,” Toby whispered, turning to stare across the silent city. Silent for now, with its monstrous inhabitants hiding from the light. “How could anything justify this?”

“Themynra is the goddess of judgment, not justice,” Vesk replied with a fatalistic shrug. “She was always one for embracing harsh necessities even when they were morally unpalatable—and that was before her very personality was imprisoned by her aspect. But the seriousness of allowing Scyllith’s followers out also cannot be overstated. There’s just not time to explain to you the full details of what that would mean. What she is like, and what the drow whose society is built around her are like. You can mull the concept of cruelty as a foundational value all you want, and still not come close to the reality. For a while, Elilial had supporters among the Pantheon; at first, two thirds of the Trinity themselves advocated lightening her punishment. But then she expelled Scyllith back to this plane for us to deal with and that burned every last bridge and the possibility of any future ones. If not for Themynra’s foresight, I have no idea what would have become of the world. You may look upon these horrors and think them excessive, Toby, but realize that it wasn’t the individual offenses that made them necessary, but the combination. The Irivoi were slowly allowing themselves to be corrupted by the Lady of Light, and they had seen fit to grant themselves access to a forbidden godkilling machine. Not even they dared to dream of the damage they could have inflicted, nor how close they were to accidentally doing so.”

Again, there was silence in the shattered temple while they considered that.

“Of course,” Vesk said in a suddenly lighter tone, “it’s not in my nature to employ the stick without the carrot. Do this for me and I will make sure it’s worth your while. At the very least, you deserve to know what all this is about and why I put you to such trouble. Explanations come at the end of the story, but finish this, and they’ll come. And I’ll even go so far as to smooth your way toward your own scouring of the Shire.”

“Our what of the where?” Trissiny asked wearily. Vesk just winked at her.

“Here’s what I’m stuck on,” Gabriel said quietly. “This whole thing has been a damn cakewalk. We’ve been careening around the country, hobnobbing with interesting people and facing what were really very brief and insignificant challenges. Things with some heavy-handed moral lessons, sure, but nothing that put us in actual danger, and that’s beginning to be alarming. People keep saying that a quest from Vesk will test us to our very limits, but I can’t help feeling like we haven’t even approached those. Even that last bit where I went to actual Hell ended up being almost nothing. It was over in less than an hour and I didn’t so much as skin my knees—in fact, we came out of that with a new friend who you yourself said is going to be an asset later on. So…what gives, Vesk? Is this all just wacky hijinks, or are we about to hit the big, dramatic reversal?”

“Now, why is it Teal and not this one who claims me as a patron?” Vesk complained. “I swear, that girl has just about exhausted my patience. You’re more of a bard in spirit than she’s ever been, Arquin, and you don’t even try!”

“Yeah, but I don’t play an instrument,” Gabriel quipped without smiling. “What is guarding that machine, Vesk?”

“What is it that scares the other gods so much?” Trissiny added. “Even Elilial. I suspect, all of them but you, the one notably lacking sense.”

“Explanations come at the end of the story,” Vesk repeated with a vague little smile.

“Why?” Toby pressed.

The god’s shoulders shifted in a minute sigh. “Understand that I fully believe you can handle what’s down there, otherwise I wouldn’t risk the wrath of the Trinity by sending you—or the fate of the world at such a pivotal time by potentially depriving it of paladins. You can do this. But I’m not going to tell you what’s waiting down there because if I do, you won’t go.”

Trissiny’s sword cleared her scabbard with a soft rasp. “Hey, Gabe. Can I avoid the reversal of the running joke by suddenly, wildly escalating it?”

“I feel like a little build-up would help,” he said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin. “Try kicking him in the nuts before you go for a flesh wound.”

“At the last moment before the descent into darkness and the final confrontation,” Vesk intoned, “you shall have a gift from a mysterious stranger which will serve you only in the last extremity of desperation.”

“You’re at lot more strange than mysterious,” Trissiny sneered.

“And we’ve already had that,” Toby pointed out. “Salyrene gave us the bottle with Xyraadi in it. Does that really work more than once per story?”

“That didn’t count,” Vesk said peevishly. “The timing was all wrong, that plot device is for the final climax, not the third-arc escalation. Honestly, that meddling peacock! Who does she think she is? Do I tell her how to pull rabbits out of hats?”

“The thing I resent most,” Trissiny said to the others, “is that he’s making us listen to this in a sealed-off tomb of horrors where I can’t just walk away from him.”

“That can’t have been an accident,” Toby said dryly.

“It’s good banter, kids. I was a little worried at first, but you bicker pretty well even without the rest of your classmates. Behold!” Sounding eerily reminiscent of Professor Rafe, he produced a flute seemingly from thin air and held it out toward Trissiny, reverently extended on both hands. “The Pipe of Calomnar!”

All three of them took two steps back.

“I am not touching that thing,” Trissiny stated.

“Calm yourselves, the Mad Hallows are all perfectly inert unless used,” Vesk assured her. “It’s safe to carry, and carrying it is all I’m asking you to do. In fact, as a favor, would you give this to Arachne first chance you get?”

“You want to give Tellwyrn a chaos artifact?” Toby exclaimed. “How can you possibly think that’s a good idea?”

“Simple: she’s already got the other two.”

“What?!” Trissiny screeched.

“And more importantly, she is the first owner of either the Book of Chaos or the Mask of Calomnar who has held onto them for decades and refrained from using them. There is officially nobody in all of history I trust as custodian of the Mad Hallows but Arachne. Please give her the Pipe, Trissiny. And, hey, if in the near future you find yourself in such a situation that invoking the presence of Calomnar happens to seem like a winning move, well, I guess that’s your business.”

“I hate you,” Trissiny informed him.

“Then my work here is done,” he said serenely.

“He keeps saying Mad Hallows,” Gabriel said. “Is that a thing? I’ve never heard of that.”

“It’s really old-fashioned,” Toby replied. “I’ve only seen it in really old stories. Mostly the boring ones the monks wouldn’t let me read until after my calling and then made me. I always thought it had fallen out of use because none of those things were even real.”

“The way I was taught, there were five of them,” Trissiny added. “Oh, give it here, if it’ll get us out of this faster.”

“That’s the spirit,” Vesk said as she gingerly took the flute from him, grimacing.

“Why her, though?” Gabriel asked.

“You were just saying you don’t play an instrument,” Toby said with grim amusement. “She does.”

“Ocarinas aren’t flutes,” Trissiny grunted, carefully stowing the chaos artifact in her largest belt pouch next to her libram. Fortunately it was smaller than most modern flutes and managed to fit, though its mouthpiece protruded slightly from under the flap once she buckled it again. “And the last thing I intend to do is play it.”

“Road to hell, Trissiny,” Vesk said smugly. “Now listen good, kids. Once you reach the machine, you must find a slot this key will fit in. There should be only one. Insert and turn it, and then wait. When the data jewel turns green, it will have absorbed all the information I require to finish this. Here’s the catch: once that key is turned, everything down there will begin to wake up. Everything. You just have to hold out until it’s finished.”

“Hold out,” Gabriel grunted. “Could you possibly have found a less ominous way to put that?”

“Gabe, my boy, every word I choose is perfectly selected and arranged to convey precisely the impression I intend.”

Gabriel sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

It seemed he had brought them directly to the temple for more reasons than the view. The tunnel leading to the ancient Infinite Order facility began beneath the ruined temple of Themynra itself, which was both oddly fitting and a relief to learn as it meant they didn’t have to pass through any dreadcrawler-infested alleys to reach their destination. Vesk assured them that the huge spiders did not enter the tunnel, and would not be encountered once they passed inside.

That was one of those reassurances that was a relief at first, but grew unsettling as they pondered the implications.

At least it was a small reprieve to be away from Vesk again, as Trissiny pointed out while they descended into darkness. The first thing they did was provide their own light, but that much, at least, was easy. Trissiny lit up her own aura and took the lead; since she had much deeper mana reserves, that was the most logical disposition of their energy. Gabriel came along at the end, Ariel hovering beside him with her blue runes glowing. The interplay of blue and golden light made for a surprisingly pretty effect.

Which was good, because there wasn’t much else to see for the first hour. For a while after passing through the aperture in the temple’s sub-level, there was intermittent evidence of drow stonework, signs that at some point, someone had cared enough to make part of the trip aesthetically pleasing. It tapered off quickly, though, and most of the journey was through natural subterranean corridors, with occasional sections clearly carved out of living rock, but in a perfunctory fashion more reminiscent of mine shafts than elven masonry.

The best thing about the tunnel was that it was a tunnel, and not a labyrinth; there were no branching passages, at least none large enough for a person to fit through. Cracks in the walls were not infrequent, some sizable, and in several places they crossed streams or had to step through cold pools of standing water. Some of the crevices they passed emitted notable streams of wind, and occasionally there would be the distant sound of dripping water or the whistle of air.

The air itself was clammy and often stale, but at least it remained comfortably breathable no matter how far they descended. It wasn’t even always a descent; the tunnel was only straight in a general sense, dipping up and down and veering this way and that. There was really no way to tell how deep they were, and wouldn’t have been even had the dips and twists of their course not gradually confused any sense of direction they had. Sure, they had started from a drow city, but it wasn’t exactly clear how deep Irivoss lay. Vesk had said they were not far from Veilgrad; if this tunnel were passing through the Stalrange it could be well above sea level for all they knew.

Most of the passage was conducted in silence. They made some abortive conversation early on in the journey, but it trailed off quickly. By and large, they spoke only to give warning or offer help upon encountering obstructions and hazards in the rough path. It was a quiet without awkwardness; the three were quite comfortable with each other’s company.

After passing through uncut stone for such a long period that Gabriel had wondered out loud if they’d somehow become lost, evidence of the presence of drow suddenly reappeared, just at the very end of the journey. The mouth of the tunnel was carved again, where the original passage appeared to have terminated against a stone wall and had to be dug out. A very thick stone wall: they passed through nearly a hundred yards of precisely cut corridor, this one actually embellished with decorative flourishes which denoted its importance. At the very end, there was elvish script engraved in the wall at chest level. Trissiny said it looked close enough to the elvish language she knew that it would probably be legible to a modern elf—it hardly changed at all over time, certainly nowhere near as fast as human languages—but she wasn’t literate in elvish and couldn’t make anything of it.

The drow had ended their tunnel at a vast cavern, and apparently had come out halfway up a steep wall. Descending from the opening was a piled-up hill of gravel and loose scree, where there had apparently not been time (or perhaps merely not inclination) to construct proper stairs. It descended haphazardly for a good ten yards to the floor of the chamber, whose walls were lost to the distance and darkness; the actual ceiling was beyond the reach of their light, too, though Trissiny’s glow illuminated the lowest tips of stalactites, some truly colossal.

Before and below them, in the middle of the apparently natural chamber, lay a wrecked building of metal that clearly did not belong there. It wasn’t large, consisting of two domes connected by a narrow section, one of them closest to the cavern’s entrance and with a door almost directly facing it.

The silence was disturbed by a multiple constant drips and trickles of water, echoing through the ancient shadows, their sources invisible.

“I guess we’re here,” Gabriel said unnecessarily. “So, uh…what would you say is the best way down this?”

“Carefully,” Toby suggested.

“Not too carefully,” Trissiny disagreed, stepping out onto the hillside. “Look how loose this is. Best bet is a controlled fall, I think. Like so.”

She crouched, bracing herself with one hand against the rubble and the other outstretched for balance, and slid smoothly down. Apart from some wobbling on the way, she made it without falling, and at the base straightened up, brushing her glove off.

Toby remained upright, flexing his knees and managing to make his slide look effortless. Behind him, Gabriel almost immediately lost his footing and somehow spun completely around in his tumble down the rocks, landing head-first on the cavern floor.

“Show of hands!” he said cheerfully, clambering back to his feet. “Who saw that coming?”

Toby smiled wryly and brushed loose rock dust off his coat, but none of them were in a joking mood. The door of the ancient facility now lay only a few yards ahead.

They came to a stop before it, staring. The aperture was flanked by two transparent tubes, or had been; one still flickered faintly with purple light, while the other lay scattered about in shattered fragments. The door itself was open, half of it protruding from the walls at a drunken angle with the other not in evidence. It was more obvious from higher up, but somehow the entire structure had been twisted at its midsection, slightly but noticeably, and this frontmost dome, door and all, sat at an angle. It surrounding walls were scarred and in a couple of places, rent all the way through.

Finally Trissiny stepped up onto the structure’s entry, her boots ringing on its floor, and touched the metal wall. “This is mithril.”

“Every Infinite Order facility I’ve seen was,” Gabriel agreed, nodding.

“But…it’s torn.” She turned back to face them, wide-eyed. “What can tear mithril?”

“Nothing,” he said. “The Avatar under the grove in Viridill told me mithril is impervious to any known physical force. He claimed the Infinite Order structures buried in the world’s surface will survive even after the sun explodes.”

“And yet,” she whispered, turning again to stare at a jagged gouge in the side of the dome not far from the entrance.

“It’s not a question of strength against strength, I suspect,” said Toby, stepping up beside her. “If mithril physically cannot be damaged… Then whatever happened here put all physical laws in abeyance.”

“I guess apotheosis isn’t a gentle process,” Gabriel added, joining them on the lip of the abandoned facility.

“I think you’d better take point, Gabe,” said Trissiny.

“You’re the one with the shield!” he retorted.

She shook her head. “I don’t believe anything in here is going to jump out and attack us, at least not until we turn that key. Vesk would have warned us if so.”

“That’s giving Vesk more credit than I think he’s earned,” Toby muttered.

“It’s more that you know the most about Elder God stuff,” she continued, looking seriously at Gabriel. “I’ve never even been in one of these places before, and Toby didn’t go with you to actually ask the elves and that Avatar about them. From this point on, you’re the most likely to have any idea what anything we encounter means.”

“Fair enough,” he said with a sigh, patting her on the pauldron and stepping forward, Ariel drifting silently alongside him. “Onward to glory, or whatever.”

There were no lights within, just the glows they brought with them and the constant drip of water. In fact, it was louder in here, both because of the echo and because it seemed to be dripping in multiple places inside the dome. Trissiny’s golden glow revealed multiple tears and punctures in the arched roof, some of which clearly admitted the running water they now heard.

“I don’t get it,” she muttered as they stepped carefully across the floor, which in addition to being tilted was notably wet. “Apparently this place has only been abandoned for eight millennia or so. Don’t stalagmites take millions of years to form?”

Rocky protrusions rose from the floor around them, none more than knee-high; they grew higher along one nearby patch of wall, nearly reaching the ceiling.

“Big ones, sure,” Gabriel said with a shrug. “But this is just… I mean, anywhere you’ve got dripping water with a high mineral content, you’re going to get limestone formations. I’ve seen stuff like this crusted around sewer grates back in Tiraas. At least, in our neighborhood,” he added, grinning at Toby. “In ritzy districts where they have ornamental ironwork, everything stays miraculously clean.”

“Yeah, and that’s another thing,” Toby added. “The limestone crust in Tiraan sewers glows in the dark. Something to do with the rainwater passing through an atmosphere charged by all the arcane byproducts of the factory antennae. If the stuff absorbs magic that way, best to step very carefully. There’s no telling what kind of loose magic will be haunting a place like this.”

“I don’t think any of us were planning on going dancing in here,” Trissiny pointed out, “but good advice, regardless.”

Most of the floor was clear of stone formations, at least, the tiny stalagmites only managing to take root against metal protrusions where upthrust bits of the floor allowed small pools to form. Whatever had rent the mithril long ago didn’t leave it vulnerable to rust, and the three of them simply had to watch their footing due to the tilt and the rivulets of water streaming across the floor. The lack of anything to trip over meant they could watch where they were heading instead of having to watch their feet.

There didn’t seem much to see within the dome itself, but directly across from it loomed two apertures into the narrow section of the building behind. On the wall between them loomed a structure which grew more clear as they approached with their light.

At one point, it had evidently been some manner of reception desk, a semicircle of flat counter ringing the area behind. Spaced along it were screens, none active and most completely shattered, though there was one that was merely cracked. More screens and inscrutable columns of machinery rose from the wall behind, originally far more orderly in design than the haphazard work of the Rust such as Gabriel and Toby had seen in Puna Dara, though now it was half-encrusted in streamers of limestone, due to the gaping hole in the ceiling through which the majority of the water appeared to be dripping.

In the middle of the space, twisted and half-crumpled by some mighty blow, slumped what had once been a roughly cylindrical shape on wheels, now effectively glued to the floor by the stone deposits beginning to climb its body. At the front of its domed head was a flat panel which glinted in Trissiny’s glow, though it was no longer lit from within. Metal arms extended from it in all directions, clutching multiple points along the desk and the machinery behind. In fact, upon closer inspection, the thing appeared to be bodily holding the entire structure together against whatever force had buckled this entire building.

Set atop the desk, positioned just off-center so it did not block the view of the broken machine from the door, was a metal plaque which had apparently not come with the building. Though not tarnished, it was not mithril; in fact, it was hard to tell exactly given the color of the light with them, but it looked like it might have been gold. Water dripped almost directly on it, and its sides and base were encrusted in lips of mineral buildup, affixing it to the crazily tilted top of the desk.

Though the words engraved on its surface were in letters they recognized, the message was inscrutable.

CT-61

FIDELIS AD FINEM

REQUIESCAT IN PACE

“Look at this,” Trissiny said, reaching out to touch the plaque.

“I can’t read it either, Triss,” said Gabriel. “It’s in Esperanto.”

“Not that,” she said. “Look closely. See the stone around the rim? It’s all jagged here. It looks like…”

“It looks,” Toby finished when she trailed off, “like it completely covered the plaque, but someone chipped it away to reveal the message.”

They clustered around and stared at the engraved metal in silence, surrounded by ancient death, the constant drip of water, and the white noise of their own thoughts.

“Someone else has been in here,” Gabriel finally said, unnecessarily. “Recently.”

“How long ago would you say this was done?” Trissiny wondered aloud.

“Well, I’m not a detective or a geologist,” Gabe replied. “But at a guess… A few years, decades at the most? Look how much water is dripping everywhere, and there’s none built up on the letters where it was cleared off.”

“Within our lifetimes, at least,” Toby murmured.

Trissiny drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “Vesk didn’t mention anything about that. Do you think it’s because he’s holding back on us, or because he didn’t know?”

“What I think is I can’t decide which of those options is scarier,” Gabriel said frankly. “Come on, there’s nothing else to see here. I bet what we’re after is in the other end of this structure.”

They chose the doorway on the right side, just because it was uphill and therefore probably less flooded. That turned out to be an unnecessary precaution, as there was no water dripping in the corridor beyond. The walls and floor buckled and warped, making footing tricky, but not excessively so. Doors lined the left side of the corridor, some intact but most partially broken or missing entirely to reveal the rooms which had lined the building’s thin central section. Though they paused and glanced into these, none proved interesting enough to merit further investigation; all were either empty or half-filled with debris of surprisingly mundane appearance, mostly the wreckage of ancient furniture, tables and chairs clearly not of mithril and thus rusted away to scraps in the damp air.

Halfway down the hall, the major twist of the building occurred, creating a tricky patch of floor they had to jump across as it was torn completely open to reveal a four-foot drop to the rocks below, lined with rims of jagged metal. Beyond that, though, the building evened out completely. Apparently whatever cataclysm had struck here had consumed only the front half. Past the breaking point, there wasn’t even any dripping water. The doors were all closed and didn’t respond to Trissiny’s attempt to open one.

They did not wait around to spend excessive time on that, though, by unspoken consensus. All shared Gabriel’s theory: whatever they were here to see lay in the final chamber, a dome slightly smaller than the wrecked entry.

Fittingly, that door was open.

The room beyond was completely lined with enigmatic machinery, all dark and silent now, arrangements of screens and metal protrusions which meant nothing to any of them. More strikingly, though, the last chamber was filled with a profusion of fungus. Mushrooms formed a veritable carpet, some specimens rising to chest height lining the walls, and a crawling coating of lichen obscured more of the old equipment than was exposed to light, leaving only its shape revealed, slightly blunted by the fuzz. Though there was no visible barrier of any kind, the growths stopped abruptly at the open doors into the hallways beyond.

“Great,” Trissiny grunted, standing just inside and staring around. “How much of this do you reckon we’ll have to clean off before we find what we’re looking for? My guess is all of it.”

“My guess is none of it,” said Toby, stepping past her. “Look at this.”

He led the way toward a spot on the rear left arc of the rounded wall, where there was a gap in the fungus. In fact, it was obvious upon approach that it had been meticulously cleared away from a specific area. Particularly thick stands of conical mushrooms rose to either side, but there was a gently sloping disc of crystal set into the floor next to the wall which had obviously had the interlopers deliberately removed. Tiny mushrooms had begun to sprout around its base again, but the disc itself, easily large enough for one person to stand on, was clear.

On the wall behind it was a single panel with a single slot, scraped free of lichen. The bluish fuzzy growth had begun to creep back over it, but so far was only extending a thin coat past its boundaries. The panel remained mostly clean.

“I knew it,” Gabriel said fatalistically. “Our mysterious predecessor was after the same thing we are. I wonder if they got it? That’s the big question.”

“Not necessary,” Trissiny replied. “Look, the key won’t fit into that. I don’t think this is the machine we’re looking for…”

“Not if you think of it as a key,” said Toby, producing the combined key from inside his coat. “But it’s not one, is it? Just happens to look like one. The shaft is too thick to stick it in like that’s a lock, but it looks to me like it would fit the teeth just…about…”

He raised the key toward the panel held upright, parallel to the wall, and pressed the jagged black edge of what had been the last piece they gathered against the slot. Vertically, it was the right length, but it didn’t fit. Not only did the teeth not want to slide in, but the rounded head of the key—the “data jewel” Salyrene had given them—protruded and blocked it from lying flat against the wall.

“There, see?” said Trissiny. “Now, let’s see if anything else looks—”

“Hang on,” Gabriel objected. “Turn it the other way, Toby.”

He was already moving it, swiveling the key to point down instead of up. In that position, the teeth sank neatly into the slot, connecting with a satisfying little click to whatever met them on the inside. The shaft of the key extended, in that position, just past the edge of the protruding panel, allowing the wider head of the data jewel to rest against the lichen lining the rest of the wall.

As soon as it was in place, a red light rose into being in the black, glassy surface of the key’s head. Then it turned blue, and began to pulse slowly.

“Then again,” Trissiny said with a sigh, “sometimes I’m wrong.”

“Uh oh,” Gabriel said, stepping back. The crystal disc on the floor, on which Toby was still standing, had begun to glow a clean white.

Screens flickered to life on either side of the panel, producing nothing but light as whatever they depicted was obscured by a thick coat of lichen. A low hum, reminiscent of powerful arcane magic at work, rose from the wall itself.

“Uh, Avatar?” Gabriel said hesitantly. There was no answer.

“Maybe you should get off that,” Trissiny suggested urgently. Toby, nodding agreement, stepped down and away from the crystal panel, just before it began to emit what looked like white mist.

“Wait,” Gabe muttered, “he said there was something called a sub-OS… Uh, Computer! Dialect English, north… Damn, it was north something. Emerian? Armenian? Twentieth century, I remember that—”

“Gabriel, don’t shout half-remembered tidbits at the ancient thinking machines,” Trissiny exclaimed in exasperation. “Gods know what you’re saying!”

“Guys,” Toby said loudly, and unnecessarily. They had all seen it, and backed up further, crushing mushrooms underfoot.

Light and mist streamed upward, rapidly thickening as if to take on physical shape. In fact, that quickly proved to be exactly the shape. The amorphous fog coalesced in a rough pillar rising from the crystal disc, at first glowing intensely. The illumination steadily receded, though, as if the light were being withdrawn into the column and contributing to its shape. It finally stabilized, the projection revealed fully—pure white and still faintly luminous, but not blindingly so.

It was a woman, sort of.

In fact, it looked more like a doll. Roughly human height, though it was hard to be certain as she hovered a foot off the ground, she was unnaturally slim. Not bony, though; her limbs and graceful neck, and the lines of her torso, were all curved in a way that deliberately suggested femininity. Her head was just slightly too large for her body, but not jarringly. In fact, there was an aesthetic quality to it which was quite pleasing. For all intents and purposes the figure appeared nude, though it was not physically detailed enough to be explicit.

Actually, she was quite beautiful, though more as a work of visual art than as a woman.

There was a brief pause, and then light blossomed again behind the creature’s smooth head, forming into a slowly rotating ring of glyphs that backlit her like a halo.

And finally, her eyes opened.

They were a little large in her lean face, like an elf’s, and black with a jewel-like quality, devoid of whites or irises. It seemed as if a galaxy of stars swirled in the depths of each. She blinked once, then smiled at them, and there was a warmth and kindness in the expression which was instantly soothing.

“Oh…oh, my,” she said in what was easily the loveliest voice any of them had ever heard. It was at once breathy and deep, layered in a way that only the most skilled of actors and orators ever achieved. “How long has it been? Am I… Oh, but forgive me, children. Was it you who woke me? You have my thanks.”

“You’re…welcome,” Toby said hesitantly. “Um, sorry, we weren’t expecting…?”

“Why come to this forsaken place?” she inquired musically, blinking those amazing eyes once more. “Is this still…? Please, your pardon. I am so…unfocused. It’s been so long since my mind was…all in one place. It is almost disorienting, to be oriented again.”

The three of them glanced at each other. Trissiny rested one hand on the hilt of her sword; Gabriel very pointedly did not reach for his own divine weapon, currently tucked inside his coat in wand form. Whatever this creature was, she now stood between them and the key, which continued to pulse blue on the panel behind her.

“So, it’s nice to meet you, ma’am,” Gabriel said after a pause. “Excuse my asking, but…what kind of fairy are you?”

“A fairy!” She laughed, and it was like listening to music. Raised in mirth, her voice was even more beautiful. Pleasant, comforting, and chime of welcome joy in that forgotten place. “Oh, what charming young people you are. A fairy! I have been called many things, but that is a first!”

“Uh, sorry,” he said quickly. “No offense was meant! It’s just that I don’t sense any magic from you, and that’s the only kind I—”

“Gabe,” Trissiny said warningly.

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course,” the glowing woman said kindly, nodding her head toward them. The halo illuminating it from behind did not move along with the gesture. “I am sorry, it’s just that I’m only now putting the pieces back together, as it were. This really is very confusing, but I shall have myself straightened out quite soon, I’m sure. Please excuse my little lapse in manners, children. It is such a very great pleasure to meet you all. You may call me Scyllith.”

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14 – 28

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Vesk doubled over very satisfyingly, the breath seemingly driven from him. Even the fact that this was an obvious case of playacting on his part didn’t dull the appreciative smiles it brought from several of those present. Trissiny didn’t smile, simply turning her back on him and resuming what had been her original course.

She didn’t hug Gabriel, after all, but reached out to grab him by both shoulders, and only then drew in a deep breath and blew it out in relief, as if unwilling to believe he was actually there until she had her hands on him.

“Thank the gods, Gabe. Are you…okay?”

“I’m really thirsty,” he said frankly. “You have no idea how dry the air is over there. Yeah, Triss, I’m fine. You guys?”

“We had the easy half of the bargain, don’t forget,” Toby said, smiling as he strode up. He did hug Gabriel, and was hugged back. Trissiny took a step back, smiling at the two of them for the long moment they shared.

Behind them, Izara blinked, a gesture so slow it verged on simply closing her eyes, and a serene smile spread across her thin features. Around her, the air seemed to lighten.

“Oh! Right.” Gabe released Toby and pulled back, turning to the woman who was now surreptitiously trying to hide behind him—which didn’t work well, since she was taller by a few inches. “Are you okay, Xyraadi?”

“I…have been manhandled before, with far less courtesy than that,” she said warily. Her yellow eyes had fixed on Trissiny, taking in the silver armor, and she stood tensed as if prepared to bolt. “It is a very great relief to be out of that place, again. I could have done without a personal audience with the Dark Lady and that creature Vanislaas, but given how quickly it was all over, I think I can forgive you for bringing me there.”

“I beg your pardon,” Agasti interjected, stepping toward them wearing an expression that verged on awed, “but did you say Xyraadi?”

“Ah, yes,” Gabriel said, grinning at them. “Everybody, meet the help Salyrene kindly arranged for us. You remember Xyraadi was mentioned when we were in Vrin Shai? I know we weren’t in there long, but she kept my ass alive the whole time; I would’ve been a sitting duck without her help. Xyraadi, may I present Mortimer Agasti, attorney at law and the only Izarite warlock I’ve ever met. And these are my two best friends! Toby Caine, Hand of Omnu, and Trissiny Avelea, Hand of Avei.”

Xyraadi glanced at Agasti and then Toby before her eyes returned to Trissiny, her lips pressed into a frightened line. She managed a terse nod of her crested head and a small noise deep within her throat.

Trissiny stepped forward, meeting her eyes, and held out a gauntleted hand. “Xyraadi? I understand you’ve been an ally of the gods for a very long time. Thank you very much for looking after Gabriel. I truly don’t think I could thank you enough for that.”

“I…” The khelminash swallowed once, nodding again.

“It’s all right,” Trissiny said in a softer voice. “I’m not going to stab you.”

“Well, you can’t blame her for wondering,” Vesk remarked from the sidelines. “I’m fine, by the way, thanks everybody for your concern.”

“You hush,” Izara ordered.

“I have known another Hand of Avei,” Xyraadi said, still tense. “I worked with her toward common cause for several days before she stopped actively trying to kill me. It was three years before she would accept me being on watch when our party camped and refrained from putting divine wards around me as I slept. I had to nearly die saving her life before she consented to speak with me directly.”

“That…sounds about right,” Trissiny said, her hand remaining outstretched and open. “And honestly, that also describes me just a few years ago. Hands of Avei…have to see the world a bit more black and white than it really is. You can’t very well bring the light into a world if you hold too much respect for the darkness. But the world is more complex than it used to be, and I have to appreciate the shades of gray more than the sisters who come before me. I judge you by your actions, Xyraadi, and they mark you a friend.”

Slowly, the demon reached out and placed her slender hand in the paladin’s grip. Trissiny closed her gloved fingers gently around Xyraadi’s and squeezed once, smiling at her, before letting go.

“There truly are wonders in the world,” Xyraadi said, herself sounding awed.

Agasti cleared his throat, catching her attention, and bowed deeply to her. By that point, there was no trace left of the hunch or stiffness which seemed to have plagued him just the day before. “My lady, it is a tremendous honor to make your acquaintance, and one I never imagined I should enjoy. You are a creature of legend, Xyraadi. Legends only told in certain circles, true, but legends nonetheless. Please consider me humbly at your disposal; I shall be only too glad to help you adjust to the world as it is now.”

“You are too kind,” she said, clearly mystified, but placed her hand in his outstretched fingers next. Agasti didn’t offer his grip in the same position as Trissiny’s, but gracefully lifted her hand and brushed his lips lightly across her knuckles.

“There, now, isn’t that just lovely?” Vesk said cheerfully, swaggering over to them with his hovering lute trailing along behind. “New friends and old, united in common whuff!”

Trissiny pivoted and rammed her fist in a precise uppercut into his solar plexus, bending him over again. This time he staggered to one side and his lute fell to the ground with a sad, discordant little plonk.

“I know that’s bound to get old eventually,” Gabriel remarked, “but something tells me it’ll be a while.”

“You two can come out,” Izara said kindly, turning to speak in the direction of the carriage which was parked some yards back down the path. “Elilial is gone, and neither of us the sort of god who smites without reason.”

“It’s quite all right,” Agasti added as Arkady and Kami gingerly poked their heads around from behind the vehicle. “Come, be sociable. The danger has passed.”

“Ah, but there’s always more danger!” Vesk declaimed, straightening. For all that he reacted like any mortal when physically assaulted, he recovered from the hits faster than a person of mere flesh and blood would. “Fortunately, you two won’t be asked to charge into it. Nor you, Mr. Agasti, nor our newest friend Xyraadi, here. Once more, it is time for a parting of paths, as our intrepid heroes proceed on to the next stage of their destiny! A good bit of the reason for this whole trip was introducing you kids to some new faces who’ll be more important later.”

Trissiny turned to him again and he took two circumspect steps to the left, his lute swinging around to hover behind him while plucking an offended little arpeggio.

“I knew it,” Gabriel said gravely. “The real great doom was the friends we made along the way.”

Toby drew in a breath as if to sigh, then grinned at him. “Gods, am I glad you’re okay.”

“But enough of that!” Vesk said more briskly, even as he minced around the group to place himself as far from Trissiny as possible without removing himself from the conversation entirely. “Let’s see the fruits of your labor, champions! How’s my key coming along?”

“You have got some nerve,” Trissiny spat.

“Indeed, you might say that’s my calling card!” Vesk said brightly, flicking a hand in her direction. A small piece of thick paper flew from his fingers, heading right for her face with the speed and precision of a paper glider, causing her to catch it purely by reflex. Trissiny thus found herself holding an actual calling card.

While she stared at this in utter disbelief, the god turned his attention back to the other two paladins, grinning and rubbing his hands together. “Well? Don’t keep a deity in suspense!”

“Oh, so it’s only okay when you do it?” Gabriel muttered, but obligingly reached into his pocket. Toby didn’t bother to comment, simply producing the conjoined first two pieces of the key they had gathered.

Vesk reached out with both hands, almost reverently taking the objects from them. Slowly, with a solemnity actively contrasted by Trissiny flinging his card to the ground in disgust, he brought them together. The mithril fragment Gabriel had snagged from the temple wouldn’t have been taken for the teeth of a key on its own. Flat on one end, save for small indentations which caused it to fit neatly into the markings on the side of Gretchen’s Dowry, its other end was an irregular pattern of jagged points and angles, a thin lip of some glossy black material like obsidian emerging to resemble the edge of a serrated blade.

It attached neatly to the others, though, and the thing in the god’s hand did indeed have the aspect of a large, old-fashioned key. The shape was evocative, if the resemblance was not precise. Vesk held it out before them on his outstretched palm.

“Behold,” he said softly. “Once upon a time, a collection of interlocking bits and pieces such as might have been cluttering up anybody’s junk drawer. In this era, a rare assemblage of ancient and precious relics. But so it is with the passage of time, which elevates all trash to treasure—in the eyes of the archaeologists, if nothing else. To us…to you…this means more than you can possibly imagine.”

“I can think of precious few things you might do with that,” Izara said quietly, “none of them wise.”

“Ah, but dear sister,” he said, giving her a roguish grin and wink and closing his fingers around the key. “How often am I wise, yet how often am I right? In my experience, there is very little connection between those two qualities.”

She just shook her head. “I’ve learned to trust you, Vesk. I dearly hope you know what you are doing.”

“Especially since you as good as sold us to Elilial to do it,” Toby added, staring flatly at the god of bards.

“Here, since you’ve appointed yourself keeper of the artifact,” Vesk said with a less than subtle note of mockery now in his solemnity, handing the key back to Toby. “Now say your goodbyes, kids, we’ve got a long way to go, and this last leg of the journey you’ll have to make without any sidekicks. Though, frankly, you could have kept some of them along for a little bit longer. Honestly, Trissiny, what’s the big idea, scaring off the comedy relief I found for you? Without the Jenkins brothers, Gabe’s had to pick up that slack, and he has his own character development to—”

Trissiny strode swiftly through the center of the group, aiming another jab with her right fist at his midsection. Vesk reflexively ducked and retreated, bending his body to evade the blow and in the process bringing his head down and forward, which put it right within range of her other hand. He evaded the feint, but she slapped him upside the noggin with her shield.

Nobody paid the god the slightest attention as he rolled on the ground, clutching his skull and groaning melodramatically. Agasti turned to the still-nervous Xyraadi, bowing courteously to her again.

“My dear, I realize you are something of a fish out of water; rest assured I will not allow you to go without aid or shelter so long as I have it to offer. I believe you’ll find my home quite comfortable, if you would do me the honor of accepting my hospitality. Indeed, I very much look forward to the conversations we shall have in the days to come!”

“Mr. Agasti is a trusted friend,” Gabriel assured her when she turned her eyes questioningly to him. “I’m really sorry to just yank you back and then dump you like this, but believe me, you’ll be just fine with him. I don’t know how long this quest is going to keep us occupied, or what’s coming next, but I’ll do my best to come see you as soon as I can, okay?”

“Ah…well. I appreciate that very much. And I shall be glad to accept your offer, M. Agasti,” the demon said, inclining her head toward Mortimer. She then looked past him at the carriage, where the two revenants had emerged fully, but so far declined to approach any closer to the gods. “But perhaps the farewells are premature; it seems none of us is going anywhere quickly. In all the confusion your horses have run off.”

There was a momentary pause. Vesk, still slumped on the ground, grinned hugely and opened his mouth, but closed it when fixed by a glare from Izara.

“Also,” Gabriel said solemnly, “Mortimer has lots and lots of books. That’ll help you a bunch. You’ve, uh, got a lot to catch up on.”

Instantaneous travel by the auspices of a god wasn’t very much like being teleported around by Tellwyrn. There was less sensation, and not even the noise of displaced air. Vesk’s method was also a whole level more sophisticated, given how he arranged them mid-transit. The four of them had vanished from the sunny hillside below the Wyrnrange after saying their farewells to the others, and reappeared in darkness, in what seemed to be a ruined temple. It was hard to tell as they couldn’t see beyond the tiny island of firelight in which they found themselves, and anyway were more distracted by the fire and their own positions. They were seated on fallen hunks of masonry surrounding the flames, as if they’d been there for hours in conversation. Even their eyes were already adjusted to the light.

“I really hate it when people do that,” Toby said with uncharacteristically open annoyance. “I think yours is even worse than the way Tellwyrn does it.”

“Not at all!” Vesk said cheerfully from across the low flames. The fire looked to have been burning for quite a while, and was on the verge of sputtering out. “I can attest that I moved you through space, not unlike what you call shadow-jumping. Arachne’s method is a whole other kettle of fish. Tell me, have you covered the great quandry of teleportation in Yornhaldt’s class yet?”

Gabriel straightened up, seemingly ignoring the question, and turned on his seat to peer into the darkness around them. The shapes of scarred and pitted columns rose from the stone floor all around, barely visible where the fire illuminated them. Beyond that was nothing but fathomless blackness. “Did you hear something moving?”

“I wasn’t aware teleportation had any great quandries,” Toby answered the god. “I thought the method was pretty well ironed out by this point.”

“Oh, I don’t mean method,” Vesk replied airily, “I mean the ethical quandry. This is the reason wood elves generally refused to be teleported, by the way. See, in arcane teleportation, a person or thing is dissolved at one point and reappears at another. But! Here’s the unanswerable question: was that person moved, or destroyed and then re-created?”

Silence answered him. Then Trissiny heaved an annoyed sigh.

“I might’ve known you’d find a way to ruin even that.”

“And she just ‘ports people around whenever she feels like it,” Toby huffed. “Usually doesn’t even ask. She’s even an elf!”

“Well, you have to understand Arachne’s mindset,” Vesk chuckled. “She’s never had much patience for philosophical dilemmas. Everybody comes out the other end with their memories and personality as intact and unchanged as their bodies, so why bother mulling pointless questions? Stuff like that is the lion’s share of why Arachne has never fit in with the other elves.”

“Also it’s pretty much a bogus question,” Gabriel said distractedly, still peering about at the surrounding dark. “Since you can’t break the teleport spell into its component parts. You can’t use it to just disappear someone without an exit point, or duplicate them. You have to move the subject from one point to another. Okay, I know I heard something out there.”

“Where are we?” Trissiny demanded.

“Uncomfortably close to Veilgrad, as the mole burrows,” Vesk said, leaning forward so that the firelight cast dramatic shadows over his face and causing her to roll her eyes. “Welcome, my children, to the lost city of Irivoss.”

Toby frowned. “Where?”

“There are, as you know, three Themynrite drow cities upon this continent,” Vesk explained, his voice echoing in the darkness. “Tar’naris, Akhvaris, and the unnamed city. Yes, I know its name, but nobody on the surface needs to; for purposes of this discussion, that’s an apt demonstration of my point. Each Themynrite city is an island, deprived of contact with its sister cities. All are fully devoted to Themynra’s sacred charge: to form a living, fighting barrier between Scyllith’s deep drow and the surface world. Existing in isolation as they do, they have developed no overarching Themynrite culture, and each has created its own way of expressing her will. The Narisians, like the Nathloi over in Sifan, have raided the surface for slaves and supplies, and have been amenable to peaceful trade and, much more recently, alliance. Tiraas’s firepower helping hold back the deep drow is an unprecedented development, and while that treaty is young, other human nations are eyeing it as a potential example. Queen Takamatsu is very interested in its implications. The Akhvari, by contrast, regard themselves as under a kind of sacred quarantine. They have consented to speak, briefly, with Imperial ambassadors at their borders, but they permit no one to cross, conduct no trade, and have never attempted to come out for any reason. And of course, the drow of the third city regard themselves as a kind of cleansing flame. Anything which approaches their borders from either direction is met with unreasoning violence. It’s funny, isn’t it? So many different ways for the commands of one goddess to be observed. But you see, kids, there are three Themynrite cities here now. At one time, on this continent, there were five.”

He paused, likely just for effect, and in that moment there came a soft rustle, practically impossible to discern above the faint crackling of the fire. Then it came again, louder, and clearly from the darkness beyond them. Trissiny and Gabriel both drew weapons, shifting on their seats to peer around.

Vesk gave no sign of noticing, just continuing with his tale. “The first was lost ages and ages ago. Closer to the Elder Wars than to today, in a period before anything modern human records touch. Only the gods and the elves of Qestraceel remember Rakhivar at all. Their defenses faltered under the onslaught. The Scyllithenes broke through, routed the Rakhavi, and breached the surface. The Pantheon were forced to intervene directly—in fact, it was our last act of cooperation with Naiya, and pretty much the last time she was coherent enough to have a conversation with anyone, at least until Arachne began poking at her more recently. The whole city was flooded with lava and buried, the passage permanently sealed off.”

“Why not just collapse all the tunnels, then?” Gabriel asked, still peering around at the blackness at the edge of the firelight. There were no more skittering noises, for now. “Put a stop to that once and for all…”

“Come on, Gabe, don’t you think elves who live deep underground know how to dig? If all the tunnels were closed off, they’d just bore their own, and then they might pop up anywhere at all. No, there are paths left theoretically open, which is much easier than tunneling even if the Themynrites block them off. And yes, after eight thousand years, they could probably have gotten out faster if they had devoted themselves to excavating, but you have to understand how Scyllithenes think. Doing lots and lots of hard work is just plain not on the table, not when the alternative is committing horrific violence against those they see as enemies. So obsessive are they on this point that no major incursions of deep drow have ever tunneled all the way to the surface, at least not under their own power. That’s an excellent example of why they cannot be allowed to have access to the surface kingdoms.

“And that brings us to the fall of Irivoss,” Vesk continued, staring solemnly into the last dim flickers of flame. He had obviously conjured the fire here, wood and all; there was no fuel for it in this place. “The Irivoi were even more amenable to surface contact than the Narisians, and less inherently predatory about it. They had a great influence on the culture that would become the Stalweiss. Humans used to come to them, offering their strength and skill in combat against the deep drow in exchange for wisdom, divine and in rare cases arcane magics, and metalwork far beyond their own technology. The drow kept their mortal visitors at arm’s length…at first. Time passed, familiarity grew, and eventually it came to be that the primitive humans were a downright common sight in Irivoss. And this, in turn, fostered doubt. Very reasonable questions of the sort that the drow priestesses could not allow. Why must we bleed and struggle to protect these humans, who are so much physically stronger? What makes us truly better than the Scyllithene? Can we not take what we need from those above and below us? Would it really be so terrible if they were allowed to meet? Why should we care what happens to the surface world?”

“Okay, what is that?” Gabriel asked somewhat shrilly, getting to his feet. The other two did likewise, turning to stare out into the black. The rustling noises were intermittent still, but clearly came from all sides now.

“These questions rise in every Themynrite city, of course,” Vesk continued, ignoring them, “and are suppressed. But in Irivoss, the suppression…failed. Eventually the unthinkable and unacceptable occurred: complete penetration from both sides. The slightest trickle of deep drow sneaking through to the surface, and humans journeying beyond the lower gates to learn from the Scyllithenes. The Irivoi had failed in their sacred charge. And so, Themynra commanded them to die. Those still loyal and obedient, she ordered to end themselves and their entire society.

“And so they did.” Finally, the god stood up and turned to look outward, as the three of them already had, raising both his hands. “Let me introduce you.”

Light bloomed, clean, white light. It rose first from crystals embedded in the pillars of the temple above them, rising to illuminate the ruined splendor. Then it spread outward, ancient magics long dormant coming to life again at the god’s will, and crystals began to gleam throughout the city. They illuminated the ruin of crushed and fallen structures as well as the majesty of beautiful stonework still standing, rising and spreading ever outward until they revealed the shape of lost Irivoss, its half-moon arc around the black surface of a subterranean lake. The temple appeared to be at the highest point of the city, overlooking it all and built right against the wall of its massive cavern.

None of them appreciated the view.

The spiders were everywhere. They had clearly been creeping closer ever since the intruders had arrived, and were not arrayed just beyond what had been the rim of the firelight. Ranging from the size of wolves to a few specimens bigger than oxen, their carapaces glistened and sparkled in the sudden illumination, apparently encrusted with gems.

As the light rose, they swiftly retreated. A veritable tide of them hurried back down the sides of the temple and those thronging the ruined streets scuttled away into the shelter of buildings, tunnels, and alleys.

“Veth’na alaue,” Trissiny whispered.

“Dreadcrawlers do not enjoy light,” Vesk said with a casual shrug. “That and the fact that they’re rubbish at digging are the saving graces of this whole mess. They can’t get to the surface, and wouldn’t if they could. It was humans and dwarves who collapsed the tunnels and did their best to bury and forget the entrance to Irivoss after the priestesses did this to their people. Now, nobody on the surface even remembers this city, and so much the better. The dreadcrawlers, you see, are only sort of alive. There was necromancy involved in their creation; they’re basically walking husks, made almost entirely of chitin with very few squishy parts, and exceedingly durable against physical damage. Practically immune to magic, as well. They’re also as immortal as the drow they once were, and don’t strictly need to eat. They can eat, and will eagerly do so, but that’s only part of their breeding cycle. Given meat to polish off, they’ll make more dreadcrawlers.

“And still, the Scyllithenes have not collapsed their end of the tunnel. They still keep trying to attack Irivoss. It’s been four millennia and that always ends badly for them. But they can’t pass up having something to fight.”

“Themynra,” Toby whispered, aghast, “did that? To her own people?”

Now, in the rekindled light, they could see that the entire city practically sparkled with enormous spider webs.

“A lot of surprising things happened in the Third Hellwar,” Vesk mused, gazing out across the ruin of Irivoss. “One of which was Arachne popping up. I doubt she’s mentioned this to you—she doesn’t like to talk about it—but she and Elilial handed Scyllith the last and greatest spanking that old bag ever received, the most crushing defeat she’d suffered since Lil cast her into the Underworld in the first place. Ever since, she has been…remarkably quiet. Her own consciousness even more scattered and unfocused than Naiya’s, and her drow completely deprived of unifying agency. They’re just widespread colonies of maniacal murderers these days, without a singular purpose. You can’t imagine the reprieve this has been for the Themynrites. Before that… Rakhivar wasn’t the first or last city to fall. Themynra wasn’t winning. Honestly, I sometimes wondered if Scyllith wasn’t trying all that hard to break out—if she was just having too much fun slowly crushing the upper drow, one city at a time, to actually campaign for her own freedom. That was exactly the kind of thing she used to do, back when she was loose. Even the other Elder Gods didn’t want her around, and they were vicious megalomaniacs at their very best.”

He turned and paced forward, along the half-fallen colonnade of the main temple space, till he came to the top of a wide flight of stairs leading down into the spider-infested city. Silently, they followed him.

“And this is what godhood means,” Vesk said, staring emptily across the ancient ruin. “Compromises made with countless lives. Responsibilities no one could possibly uphold, weighed against fates too terrible to be imagined and costs no one should have to pay. It would make anyone detached after thousands of years, but the very thing that prevents us from becoming the monsters that power makes of everyone leaves us vulnerable to…subtler influences. We gods are fixed, in what we are. We can make decisions, up to a point, but at our core? We are cause and effect. Rules, unalterable and absolute. And so you know my bias, when I say that slamming a door in Scyllith’s face was well worth the atrocity done to these people. That is how terrible she was, in her heyday. And how unable I am to even entertain the idea that I might be wrong.”

Abruptly, he turned to face them.

“You’re desperate, by now, to know what the point of all this is. Why I sent you on this damn fool quest, what that key unlocks. It is a key to the possibility of change, my heroes. You see, the last and worst thing the Irivoi did, that caused Themynra to give up on them? They reopened a tunnel to the ancient Infinite Order machine which struck down the old gods and raised the new ones. I can’t even approach it; none of my brethren can. And for the longest time, I never doubted that that was a good thing. We have way too much power as it is without being tempted by the prospect of more. But things…have changed. If the Pantheon is going to survive the changes that are coming, I need you to take that key to that terrible contraption… And turn it back on.”

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14 -27

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“Lil,” Izara said in a supremely even tone, “you are looking well.”

“Why, yes, Iz,” Elilial replied with lurid emphasis, “I am. No thanks to you, of course.”

Izara inclined her head very slightly, folding her hands demurely before her. “I was very sorry to hear of—”

DON’T YOU DARE

Elilial did not speak. Reality rippled outward from her in a shockwave very like the previous disruption which had merged the dimensions, and in it were words, and the full weight of her outrage and derision—and, yes, grief—pressing on the minds of all those present. The mortals without exception stumbled backward from the sudden impact of it, though no physical force had touched them. Izara, by contrast, remained perfectly serene in her bearing, despite the way her clothes and hair were blown back by Elilial’s fury as though she stood momentarily in a high wind.

“Nonetheless,” the love goddess said quietly, “I was. I acknowledge your grudge, and that you aren’t without a point…in a way. But I would not have wished that—”

“Not another word,” Elilial grated. “You’re more a hypocrite than any of them, Izara, and that is truly saying something. If you had a beating heart or a shred of empathy you would have stopped that, at the very, utterly least. More likely would have resisted them with me in the beginning. Or if nothing else, walked away like Themynra did.”

“You were never completely in the wrong, in your beliefs,” Izara said sadly, “but the situation has never for a moment been as simple as you make it out to be. I wish I could make you see that.”

“They’re called principles, Izara,” the other goddess sneered. “I wish I could make you understand that, just because the reality of the concept would probably shatter your consciousness. Trissiny, don’t make me laugh. I am really not in the mood for your slapstick.”

Trissiny had taken two steps forward and had sword and shield up and ready; at being addressed directly, she stopped, not relaxing in the slightest. “Slapstick. I’ve been accused of some wild things, some of them accurately, but that is a first.”

“I’ve never yet personally harmed a Hand of Avei,” Elilial said dryly. “The few who managed to stand before me I sent off with a pat on the head and some motherly advice. They hate that; the outrage is absolutely hysterical. I honestly think you might be the first one willing to share a spot of banter. Eserion and Vesk have really done a number on you, haven’t they?”

“Get back, Trissiny,” Izara ordered. “And don’t you start, either!”

Toby had stepped forward as well, on her other side. Both paladins were still a few steps behind the love goddess, but flanked her in ready stances, staring down the queen of Hell.

“Aw, look how protective they are,” Elilial cooed. “Ready to lay down their fleeting little lives to defend this delicate flower of the Pantheon’s gentility. How utterly precious.”

“It’s all right, children,” Izara insisted softly. “I am not in danger here.”

“Yes, killing a god is not such a simple matter,” Elilial agreed. “Power for power, this waffling little puff of pixie dust doesn’t approach a match for me, or I assure you I’d have snuffed her out without bothering to chitchat. Everything that need be said between us was done eons ago. No, to annihilate a god, you have to get…creative. To sever them from their animating aspect, or simply remove it from the world. Ironically, the Pantheon are far more dangerous to one another than I am—I, at least, care what happens to the people of this planet. Just ask Khar. Oh, but I forgot. I guess you can’t.”

“Mortimer,” Izara said calmly, still holding Elilial’s gaze, “I want you to take the paladins and get back to Ninkabi with all haste.”

“Invulnerable or not, lady, you can’t ask me to leave you here,” Agasti insisted. “Not that. I would far rather—”

“She is stealth and deception incarnate,” Izara interrupted, and for the first time there was an audible strain in her voice. Watching her, Elilial began to smile. “The rest of the Pantheon is not coming—they don’t know this is happening. I can protect you from her for a time, but you must go!”

“Always in such a rush,” Elilial drawled. “Let your boy show off his courage, Izara. After all, how often does the chance for a conversation like this—”

The goddess broke off and physically jumped, stiffening up. Slowly, she turned around, angling her body to finally grant them all a glimpse of the hellgate behind her.

From the barely-visible vortex another figure had emerged, his dark green coat and slightly unkempt black hair ruffling in the breeze caused by air pressure equalizing across the rift. Gabriel was returning his staff to the upright position when Elilial’s burning gaze fell upon him, and he greeted her with an angelic little smile.

“You,” Elilial said flatly, “Did. Not.”

“So! It doesn’t kill gods,” he said. “And now we know.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Gabriel Arquin!”

For all that he had appeared without any of them noticing during the confrontation, Vesk still managed to make an entrance. By the time everyone turned to stare at him, he had already struck a dashing pose and plastered on a big, insouciant grin. It helped that he punctuated his introduction by striking a triumphant chord on his lute.

“You!” barked half a dozen people.

“Me!” Vesk exclaimed happily. “And not a moment too soon, I see! Of course, that goes without saying. A bard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely—”

“I’m gonna punch him,” Trissiny announed, taking a step toward the god.

“Nothing goes without saying with this one,” Elilial added wearily.

“Whoah, now, okay, let’s all settle down,” Vesk interjected in a soothing voice, holding up both hands at them all in a placating gesture. His lute hovered in the air next to him where he’d let go of it. “We’re all one act of careless temper from kicking off entirely the wrong climax for this story. Blood, tears, and suffering, y’all know the drill. But it isn’t time for that yet. Each of these things must happen at the proper moment, otherwise it all goes right to hell.”

“I have found myself wondering, over the years,” Elilial said, glaring down at him, “whether I could begin the process of snuffing you out by getting you into one of your well-trod archetypal narrative paths and them yanking you right out of it by not doing what the story demands next.”

“Worth a try,” he said agreeably, with a little shrug. “Of course, that experiment will probably have to wait. I assume you’d much rather find out who murdered your children, and six other children in the process, not that you care about that.”

“Vesk,” Izara exclaimed.

Elilial shifted without stepping; one moment she stood in front of Gabriel and the hellgate and in the next had seized the goddess of love by the throat and hiked her bodily off the ground. All the paladins and Agasti immediately surged forward, but were just as quickly stopped by a force that was not physical, nor even perceptible, but inexorable all the same. Something was projected by the three gods, some pattern woven right into reality itself, and the mortals present could no more step out of the roles it demanded of them than they could have lifted themselves off the ground by their own hair.

“You do not know,” Elilial whispered, “how treacherous is the ground on which you stand, Vesk. You think you know, but you don’t.”

“Once in a while, antagonists find themselves at common purpose,” Vesk replied, his solemn expression contrasting with the playful strumming of the lute, which he still wasn’t touching. “That secret isn’t mine to keep, Lil, and I’m with Izzy on this matter: despite what you think, there are some lines I don’t care to see crossed, and some offenses that demand to be avenged. I’m willing to tell you. I’m wanting to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you.”

“If,” she growled, “I dance to your tune.” Her grip tightened on Izara’s throat, and the smaller goddess tilted her chin up slightly in response, still without struggling. All of them were beings well beyond the physical forms they now presented; the evidently mortal drama now playing out between them was a manifestation of something happening on a different level entirely. It was difficult to look at directly and impossible to look away from; pressure was building up from the exposure of human consciousness to something it wasn’t meant to experience. So far, all of the mortals held their ground, weapons and magics at the ready, but no one could make themselves intervene by even so much as a word of objection.

“But it’s such a simple few steps,” Vesk said, smiling, “and you do it so well. Come on, Lily, you have your own reasons for wanting everything to fall into place at the right moment. I’m not holding out on you; there are some things that can’t be rushed, and you know it well. You know the forces that can…inhibit the likes of you and I from doing what we wish. These delightful youngsters are assembling a key for me. A key to the ultimate lock. You know the one.”

Slowly and slightly, Elilial relaxed her fingers on Izara’s neck, though her eyes remained locked on Vesk. “You have finally lost it.”

“You can’t do this, Vesk,” Izara agreed, somewhat hoarsely. “It won’t work.”

“It won’t work the way it did for us,” he agreed. “Weren’t we just discussing timing? There’ll be no apotheosis for the kiddos, don’t you worry. The alignment isn’t here yet; the great doom is still coming. But it’s close. The lock can be opened. And there is much to be gained from the opening, with the right key in hand.”

“You know who will be released if they do that!” Izara said urgently.

“Common cause, indeed,” Elilial added, giving her a grudging sidelong look. “Letting that thing out is absolutely out of the question. We worked too hard and sacrificed too much to make sure the monster couldn’t escape.”

“And so the monster won’t,” Vesk said, bestowing upon them all a placid smile which just begged for a slapping. “Because this must be done now, at the right time. Just before the alignment, when true escape is impossible, when there will be no gods present to provide fuel for the fire. When a few sufficiently gifted mortals—like, say, three paladins—can snatch their treasure from the beast, and yank out the key again before she can escape.”

In the silence which fell, the hellgate whistled ominously.

“Let her go, Lil,” Vesk said softly. “Let them go. Once they do what they need to, I’ll have your answer.”

“Oh, you’ll have it,” she said, narrowing her eyes to blazing slits. “But that does me no good, Vesk. I know very well what your integrity is worth. I will make you a deal, though.” A smile lifted one side of her mouth, and for the first time, Izara struggled weakly, lifting her hands to grasp Elilial’s wrist. “We will consider your champions the collateral. Send them in there with your key. If they survive, you’ll owe me the truth. And if I don’t get the truth, Vesk, I will claim them.”

Trissiny finally managed to emit a growling noise from deep in her throat. It was more than any of the rest of them could do. There was no force upon them, no restraint they could feel; the thing holding them back was subtle, ineffable, and felt almost like their own impulses. They stood, and watched, because in this drama they were the bystanders and could not go against their role.

“You’ve struck down brave Hands of the Pantheon before,” Izara said, her voice slightly strained by the grip on her neck—or rather, by Elilial’s grip on something important in her being which looked, to the mortal eyes watching, like a hand holding her throat. “You, and yours, and it’s never profited you in the long run. More will rise.”

“Exactly. I’m not going to kill them.” Elilial turned her eyes on Izara and grinned broadly. “You are. I will take them back to the domain you cast me into, beyond the reach of your power. And there I will tell them the truth. All of it. Everything you did. To the Infinite Order, to me, to those who worked and fought alongside us, to all the people of this world. To them. And once I’ve done that… I will trust their sense of justice. When that great doom comes and I return to claim what’s mine, it’ll be with three of your own paladins leading my armies. Have we a deal, Vesk?”

He raised his eyebrows, seeming unconcerned by her threats and Izara’s plight. “You’re that confident they would side with you?”

“That’s the ultimate flaw in this whole paladin thing, you know,” Elilial replied in a lightly conversational tone. “You two, at least, have better sense than to raise up and empower beings of pure, incarnate principle. You get by with being inherently sleazy and vague, respectively, and your followers don’t stand to lose much by following your asshole example. Maybe Vidius’s new pet would stick by his master; he seems a charmingly irreverent boy. But Avei’s? Omnu’s? Those raised and trained to honor justice, and life? You know what they will do when they learn the truth.” Slowly, her grin broadened into a vicious snarl, and the hand clutching Izara’s throat tightened. “All these years I have respected that unspoken truce. I could have done this at any time, simply abducted the Pantheon’s best servants beyond its reach and stripped away your lies. But you kept your hands off my daughters, and I showed restraint in return. Now, though? We’ve well and truly moved beyond that, haven’t we?”

“Vesk, no,” Izara rasped. “They aren’t yours to gamble with! They’ll never survive what you’re sending them into, and even if they do—”

“But don’t you see, Iz?” he said with a soft, plaintive sigh. “This is the price that must be paid, the suffering that must be endured. We’ve come to that point in the story. Without a cost incurred, it can’t progress. I have worked so hard, harder than you’ll ever know, to ensure the stakes are as bloodless as I could make them. There’s been no way to save everyone, but the kids have made it so far without paying for their success with the lives of their comrades. We need them all to live a while longer, and so the cost comes in the risk I can’t face for them, and the devil’s bargain they can’t even decline. Just because nobody’s died doesn’t mean there are no stakes. This isn’t that kind of story. Yet.” He turned his focus back to Elilial, and swept a bow, doffing his floppy hat. “We have a deal.”

She held his eyes for a moment, simply to make her point, and then abruptly released both Izara and the world. The indefinable pressure holding everyone in place lifted, and immediately all three paladins charged her.

In the next moment all went bowling over like ninepins. She hadn’t so much as gestured.

“That’s an option, you know,” Elilial said pleasantly, turning to sweep a smug little smile across them. “Let’s say you succeed at the insanity your patron, here, is about to drop you into. Then there are two outcomes: either he keeps his word and I get to learn what I need to drive a stake through the rotten heart of the Pantheon…or he doesn’t, which I would say is about fifty-fifty odds, and I get you. I’m the goddess of cunning, ducklings; this is what I do. Any way it shakes out, I win. But there is, of course, one alternative. If you want to arrange it so that I lose, all you have to do is die.” She grinned broadly down at them. “I’m sure you will have no trouble finding an opportunity. Oh, it won’t be so bad! Paladins automatically get seats in the best part of Vidius’s little hive-mind heaven. And your gods won’t really need their laboriously-trained paladins when that great doom hits in a few years, now, will they?”

“So help me,” Trissiny grated.

“Oh, don’t be boring,” Elilial admonished. “Every Hand of Avei blusters and makes threats she can’t back up. What happened to being your own woman? You were off to such a promising start just a moment ago. Oh, and Gabriel: don’t forget your baggage.”

Stepping over to the hellgate again, she plunged one arm into the vortex momentarily, then pulled it back out with a struggling khelminash demon gripped by her hair. Gabriel actually let go of the scythe to catch the woman as Elilial tossed her in his general direction.

The queen of Hell, meanwhile, lifted one hoof to step back into it, her half-disappeared leg an eerie sight where it vanished into the scarcely perceptible swirl of the new hellgate. “One way or another, kids, I’ll be seeing you soon. And just to show you all what a good sport I am, I will do my part from my end to close this exciting new escape hatch you’ve so thoughtfully provided for me. After all, it’s not as if I need any more help to get my way in the world. Ta ta…for now.”

Ducking her head, she slipped back through.

Behind her, the swirl diminished under the combined stares of Izara and Vesk, until with a final soft puff, it vanished entirely into the air.

There was silence.

“What?” Gabriel said, picking up his scythe and grinning at them. “No hug? It’s not every day a guy comes back from Hell, y’know.”

“I cannot believe,” Toby said, staring at him, “you tried to stab Elilial in the back.”

“That motion could hardly have been described as a stab,” Ariel said. “He poked her. In the butt.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Vesk repeated, grinning insanely, “I give you Gabriel Arquin! But, ah, anyway… I suppose you’ll be wanting a few questions answered.”

Trissiny had taken two steps toward Gabriel, sheathing her sword and looking very much as if she did intend to hug him. But at that, she abruptly changed course, crossed the distance to Vesk in three long strides, and punched him hard in the stomach.

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14 – 26

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In that moment of absolute tension, Gabriel called on every scrap of education he had received thus far. Val Tarvadegh’s coaching kept him still, kept any hint of his thoughts or feelings away from his face—though it would have been presumptuous in the extreme to assume he could stand before the very goddess of cunning and prevent her from knowing the shape of his mind.

Elilial appeared to be ignoring him for the moment, critically studying the scythe in her hands, which he knew was an affectation. Prince Vanislaas, by contrast, stared avidly, his lips bent in a hungry little smile. That was the look of a vulture observing a dying cow’s last breath. Xyraadi was still prostrate on the ground, her face pressed against the now-dead grass from the other world. Ariel, wisely, kept silent.

There was absolutely no winning here, through either power or strategy. Considering who he was dealing with, outsmarting his foes didn’t appear to be an option either. That left…what?

The basics.

Gabriel knew his failings; it had been repeatedly pointed out to him that his self-awareness with regard to his own weakness was one of his greatest strengths. So he channeled better examples, and put on a mask.

The posture exemplified by Professor Ezzaniel, Trissiny and Toby: a martial artist’s bearing, fully upright but not stiff like a soldier’s, a stance that conveyed poise and command, and bless Ezzaniel for so laboriously beating that into him over the last two years. The ineffable, inoffensive arrogance of Ravana Madouri and Sekandar Aldarasi, a subtle positioning of countenance which conveyed absolute self-confidence even when such was wildly inappropriate, without being aggressive. Intuitively he felt that a better choice here than Shaeine’s more serene poise.

“Excuse me.” Gabriel borrowed Tellwyrn’s voice, the tone she used that didn’t bother to be peremptory or commanding, but secured obedience through the simple conviction that she would be obeyed because this fact was as immutable as the downward acceleration of velocity resulting from the pull of gravity. He held out his hand in a gesture that was part Ezzaniel and part Ravana and just a little bit Darling, graceful and commanding and a tad effeminate. “That is mine. Return it, please.”

Prince Vanislaas’s red eyes widened notably, as did his smile. The demon lord actually began dry-rubbing his hands together in visible eagerness for whatever was about to unfold.

Xyraadi quivered.

Elilial looked up from her perusal of the weapon to meet his eyes, and Gabriel had the sudden and deeply incongruous thought that she wasn’t nearly as pretty as she could be, even aside from the horns and red skin and such. Couldn’t a goddess take any form she desired? She had rather hawkish features, a nose that was too long for her face, and despite a rather skimpy leather outfit (with metal spikes and buckles serving no evident purpose) she was much more lanky than curvy. Though of course, standards differed across eras and cultures, to say nothing of individuals. He wondered if there was some significance to her appearance, something he could perhaps use. Unlikely, but he wasn’t too proud to grasp at any straw at this point.

“Salyrene’s work,” she mused after a hesitation, returning her gaze to the scythe and slowly turning it over in her hands. “They’re very adaptive, you see; she is the best at what she does. Yes, this thing has a long memory, much of its shape and nature comes from its first master. But your touch is present, as well, Gabriel Arquin. Such…restraint, it has leaned from you. How odd, considering your reputation.”

She could probably hear his heart pounding. Well, hell, just because the game was over didn’t mean he had to concede. Gabriel cleared his throat loudly, raised his eyebrows in an expression he had seen Shaeine and Ruda both use to great effect, and subtly extended his outstretched hand an inch further in a silent demand.

“You know why Vidius is the god of death?” Elilial asked, now smiling down at him. “A coincidental affiliation that was baked right into his very identity when we seized ascension for ourselves. All due to his association with the valkyries. He won Naiya to our side by sheltering and supporting them. Have you ever found yourself wholly dependent upon someone for your very existence, Gabriel? Even if they are less of a two-faced snake than Vidius, it’s a relationship that tends to provoke…resentment. Have your valkyrie friends ever complained to you about your mutual boss?” One corner of her mouth drew upward in a lopsided smirk. “No? You needn’t answer, young man, I seldom trouble to ask questions unless I already know how they end. There’s a warning in that silence, you know. Everyone complains about their boss… Unless they are too afraid to.”

Gabriel experienced a most peculiar sensation. His mouth moved and words fell out, but unlike the habitual blathering habits which had caused him so much trouble over the years, he felt an almost transcendent state of flow, as if he were truly in control in a way he couldn’t even consciously grasp.

“Yes, yes,” he heard himself say in a bored tone, “and thus the seeds of suspicion are sown between me and my patron, and meanwhile there is no need for you to be insulting, madam. If I’m important enough to manipulate, I’m important enough to deserve better than cheap tricks that even Vesk wouldn’t write into a ballad. My scythe, if you please.”

“Oh, I like him,” Vanislaas breathed, pausing to lick his lips. “Such a shame he has the two-faced one’s favor; I dearly wish his soul could return here. He’d make such a splendid incubus. Elilial, my darling, may we restrain him here?”

“Hush, Van,” she said fondly. “Ignore him, Gabriel. You have nothing to fear from me.” So saying, she lightly tossed the scythe in the air, making its wicked length spin once, and caught it on the haft just below the blade, which ended up pointing skyward. Its long, subtly twisted shaft extended toward Gabriel, ending just barely past the reach of his hand. “My high priest nurtures a…pet theory, if you will, that he can somehow turn you three paladins against your masters by slowly introducing you to the truth. I know your gods better than you and I rather think they’ll just kill you if you learn more than they want you to know, but Embras is a good servant and I am willing to indulge him. Much more to the point, I’ve promised Arachne to bring no harm to her students—and that includes by omission and negligence. And…it seems my Vadrieny does rather like you, for some reason. Altogether, these facts mean you are as safe with me as anyone can be said to be, anywhere. For whatever that may be worth.”

He just met her fiery gaze until she came to a stop, before finally stepping forward and extending his hand to grasp the scythe. He’d half-expected her to exert some petty little power move, like moving it out of his reach or using it to tug him off balance, but she simply waited until he had a firm grip and released the weapon.

“Thank you,” Gabriel said with light dignity from behind the mask of Ravana Madouri, regretting that he hadn’t troubled to get to know the girl better. What little he had picked up of her mannerisms was already fabulously useful; the undeserved poise was very appropriate in this situation.

“Of course,” Elilial continued, and the combination of deliberately casual tone and overtly sly expression was a screaming warning of danger, “the same is not true of your little…friend back there.”

Xyraadi quivered again, not lifting her face out of the dust.

“This is a rare treat,” the dark goddess purred. “It is not every day a traitor wanders right back into my web. I don’t begrudge the odd demon struggling to escape this realm, Gabriel; you can plainly see what a mess it is. If I had my way, nobody would have to live here. But the khelminash are another matter. All the trouble I go to, ensuring they have lives of comfort! And truly, Xyraadi’s existence before she betrayed her kith and kin was luxurious beyond the dreams of most of Hell’s denizens. For that, I only ask diligent service; I don’t think that unfair. Yet, not only did she flee at the first chance, but threw in her lot with the Pantheon!” Elilial’s lips drew wider, baring teeth in an expression that no longer pretended to be a smile. “I suppose one betrayer is attracted to others. But to willingly bend knee to beings who despise you? I am torn between simply destroying the little wretch and compelling her to give me a satisfactory explanation first!”

Xyraadi emitted a shrill little groan, quickly stifled.

Gabriel took two steps to plant himself between her and Elilial, deliberately placing the butt of his scythe against the ground, holding the weapon up but not in an aggressive position. “Or you could do neither, and kindly show us where to find the nearest hellgate.”

Prince Vanislaas giggled. That was somehow much more unsettling than if he had unleashed a sinister laugh like a villain in a play.

“Young man,” Elilial said condescendingly, “I don’t know what made you think this is a negotiation, or that you are a party to it. Move aside, please.”

But it was, he realized as she spoke. A being like Elilial did nothing without a purpose and a plan, and there was no reason for her to make speeches in his presence unless she saw a reason for him to hear her thoughts. Still not losing sight of how out of his depth he was, Gabriel nonetheless concluded it best served his interests here to play along.

“Regardless,” he said firmly, switching to a mask of Trissiny implacably facing down a foe (and immediately thinking Toby doing the same might have been a smarter mask to assume but not willing to weaken his position by waffling), “Xyraadi is a friend and has helped me considerably, not to mention that I’m responsible for her being here. I’m not going to allow you to touch her.”

Elilial took one long stride closer, the dead earth crunching beneath her hoof, and loomed over him. Gabriel realized that his instinct had been right; they were playing roles, now, and Trissiny’s righteous defiance best suited the one in which he’d been cast.

“You can’t possibly imagine you are a threat to me, boy,” the goddess said, her voice just above a whisper and yet projecting powerfully over him. “Why don’t you spare yourself some avoidable grief and move?”

He pitched his own voice low and even, but firm. “You can’t possibly imagine that you’re a threat to the Pantheon, lady. Why don’t you?”

In the subtle but swift widening of her fiery eyes, Gabriel had a sudden warning that he’d gone off-script and was about to pay dearly for it.

Then Vanislaas began laughing. Loud and deep this time, wracked by belly guffaws that almost doubled him over.

“Shut up, Van,” Elilial snapped, cutting her gaze to him. It served to break the tension Gabriel had just created, and he wondered how much of this encounter was proceeding according to a script. Between Vesk and Elilial, nothing would have surprised him at that point. “I give you credit for not brandishing your weapon at me, Gabriel, but that appears to be the full extent of your forethought. Why in the hell, pun intended, should I show any compassion to this backstabbing creature?”

Well, it was a slender opening, but he’d take it. “How can you not? If you’re not going to kill me and you think there’s some strategic merit in influencing me, a show of force here doesn’t gain you anything. It’s not as if your power is in question.” Again, his words tumbled out, but they fell smoothly this time and left him with the sense that some part of him was in control, even if it was calculating too fast for his conscious brain to follow. “You can either play right into the stereotype of you that the Pantheon and the Universal Church try to push, or show a little…nuance. Are you the mad monster, or is there maybe something more going on here? Something it would benefit you to have a paladin wondering about?”

“Hmm,” she murmured, her expression calming, and once again that lopsided smirk tugged at her lips. “There may be something to that, after all. But meet me halfway, Gabriel. If you expect me to suspend my retribution on the one under your protection, it’s only fair that you offer me something in return.”

A sudden realization swept in, and both instinct and strategy prompted him to go with it. “No, I don’t think so.”

Xyraadi emitted a plaintive squeak. Elilial took another step forward, now looming over him with more overt and deliberate menace. “Oh? You are a presumptuous one, aren’t you?”

“And you don’t know when to stop,” he retorted. “You just got me to argue out loud why you’re not such a bad sort after all. Really well done, very crafty. I’m pretty sure I’ve had Eserites tell me about that trick. Fine, that’s your win; congratulations. You’re not extracting further concessions from me on top of it. If anything, maybe I should be asking for a favor now.”

Xyraadi reached feebly to tug at the leg of his trousers in a silent plea. Gabriel didn’t dare acknowledge her in that moment.

“Oh, but isn’t he delightful!” Prince Vanislaas crowed. “Please, Lil, can’t we keep him? He’s a little rough, sure, but the potential!”

“Yes, it’s a funny thing,” Elilial said dryly, ignoring her underling for now. “Spend a few thousand years as the actual goddess of a thing and you get sort of good at it. You do surprise me, though, Gabriel Arquin. Based upon everything I’ve heard of you, I really didn’t expect you to pick up on that. Color me…grudgingly impressed.”

“And that’s really good flattery,” he replied in the same tone. “Just the right hint of condescension to make it backhanded and harder to spot. Got me right in the ego.”

“All right, boy, don’t push your luck,” she said, fortunately in amusement. “Xyraadi, have some damned dignity. Your young friend here at least faces certain destruction with his spine in the vertical position, and now look! He appears to have bluffed his way out of it. There’s a lesson in that, if you have the wit to learn it. Van, how is your work progressing?”

“Splendidly,” the demon lord replied in a self-satisfied tone. “While you were playing verbal footsie over there, I’ve intercepted overtures from dear old Mortimer, directed at young Master Arquin.”

“When did you have time to do that?” Gabriel asked in spite of himself.

“Really, young man,” Vanislaas said, arching a condescending eyebrow. “Not everyone performs magic with grandiose and gratuitous gestures and sparkles. The Elilinist tradition of infernomancy is all about subtlety; it is by definition poor technique if anyone standing nearby even discerns that you are casting, much less what you are casting. Oh, but matters are ever so much more intriguing than we first anticipated, my darling,” he added to Elilial. “I presented my replies as coming from little Xyraadi over there, and my hunch was correct: no one was surprised. But Lil, dearest, it is not just Mortimer, nor even mostly Mortimer, working to extract our young friend. I think you will find this a grand opportunity.”

“Oh, no.”

That was the last thing anyone wanted to hear a goddess say under any circumstances, but especially not when they were in the process of boring a hole into Hell. At Izara’s soft interjection, Toby and Trissiny both stepped up on both sides of her and Agasti strode forward from his position on the sidelines, where his expertise had been rendered somewhat redundant by the presence of a deity to handle their dimensional bridge as it formed.

Izara didn’t look at any of them, seemingly keeping her attention focused on the nascent gate, which at that point was still little more than a shimmer in the air. “Stay back, children. This is more than you’re prepared to handle.”

“We’re far from helpless,” Trissiny said tersely. “Is it demons?”

“Is Gabriel all right?” Toby added.

“Back,” she said with enough of a snap in her voice that both obeyed. “We’ve been tricked. I’ve been tricked. That’s always a risk when one deals with Hell, but this…this is worse than I feared. All of you, be prepared to flee. Do not attempt to fight what’s coming.”

“That gate is still forming,” Agasti objected. “If it’s that dangerous, we can still collapse it. Elilial herself couldn’t rip it open without help from this side.”

Izara shook her head, still staring at the distortion before them, which was beginning to take an upright ovoid shape. It was as if heat waves had been captured and formed into a pillar which was being pulled apart at its center to create an opening. “Gabriel is still in there. If we abandon him now, there is no telling when or if we might be able to try again. Not to mention what might be done to him in retaliation if we retreat from this. Some risks…have to be taken.”

The hellgate finished forming with alarming suddenness, emitting a blast of hot, sulfurous-smelling air and a telltale prickle across the skin as loose infernal radiation bled out. The aperture itself remained scarcely visible; if anything, its borders became harder to perceive as they were stretched wide to create a proper door. There wasn’t even a view into whatever lay on the other side. Light was not one of the things which innately traveled through a hellgate, all part of the same dimensional effect that made them difficult to scry through.

Then a figure stepped out, and all of them save Izara retreated further. It was not Gabriel.

She emerged one leg first, as though striding across a threshold, and appeared almost to have to clamber through the low opening, straightening up finally as she crossed fully into the mortal plane. Once there, though, Elilial raised her horned head up to its full height, staring down her nose at the more diminutive love goddess before her.

“Well, well, well,” purred the queen of Hell, and the fiery blaze of her eyes did not conceal the vengeful hunger in them. “Look what we have here.”

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14 – 25

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“Sorry,” he said, rather weakly, as he straightened up under his own power again.

Trissiny carefully released him, drawing back to give Toby a look of concern. “Don’t be sorry. You’re always propping everybody else up; you’re allowed to need a hug once in a while. But, Toby, what you were just saying…”

He found himself avoiding her eyes. “I don’t…”

“We need to talk about that,” she interrupted, her tone firm but not aggressive. “But not right this minute. Right now we need to figure out how to get Gabriel back.”

“You saw what happened,” he said, voice climbing in frustration. “How are we supposed to do that?”

“I don’t know, but I’m certainly going to try.”

“Try what? Trissiny, dimensional barriers are not something you can bull through with sheer determination!”

She took another step back, now frowning at him reproachfully. “Toby.”

“Everybody all right?” Fortunately, Agasti chose that moment to return. He strode up to them, straight-backed and alert, tapping his cane against the ground with every step but clearly not leaning on it. Behind and to either side came his two revenant companions, both still with weapons out and peering warily around. “Good, very good. I’m sorry to have ducked out on you, but I had to get Arkady and Kami out of that light show. You accomplished what you needed to, though, and that’s what matters.”

“What are you talking about?” Toby snapped. “We lost Gabriel!”

“Yes,” Agasti said evenly, nodding, “but you prevented that dimensional inversion from spreading, thwarted a demon invasion, and annihilated the infernal corruption that was seeping through before it could poison anybody. None of those are small things; in aggregation I believe they qualify as a pretty big deal. But you’re right, Gabriel is now on the other side, and that must be addressed before any of us can rest on our laurels. Arkady, fire up the carriage, if you please.”

“We can’t leave!” Trissiny burst out.

“There is a difference between surrender and tactical retreat, General Avelea, you know that well. I told you that this site is under surveillance; Izara’s cult obviously has little in the way of forces to deploy, but they will already be contacting the Sisterhood and likely the Empire about this mess. I would rather Arkady and Kami were out of the area when that occurs, and Ninkabi is farther than I can safely shadow-jump these days. You had better remain on site to settle everyone down when they get here.” He hesitated, then gripped the crystal head of his cane harder and nodded decisively. “I’ll be relying on your protection, because I plan to commit a capital offense in the next few minutes. It will take long enough that I expect the reinforcements to catch me quite red-handed.”

“Mortimer, no!” Kami exclaimed.

“A capital offense?” Toby asked more soberly. “Surely you’re not planning to… What are you talking about?”

“A hellgate.” Trissiny was staring at Agasti, who nodded at her again. “To get Gabriel back from the other dimension, we need to open a door between them.”

“You can’t!” Arkady insisted. “Mortimer, the law isn’t best pleased with you already. If you do this of all bloody things…”

“Arkady, the boy is in Hell,” Agasti said sharply. “Trust me, I don’t plan to throw myself to the headsman; there are extenuating circumstances aplenty, I’ll have the backing of three paladins and I do know a thing or two about weaseling around Imperial prosecutors, as you may recall. But right now we’ve a paladin to rescue and no time to argue. The situation forces me to act now and make plans later, which is hardly optimal, but that’s what the situation is and bemoaning it will change nothing. Now take Kami back to the club, I don’t want you two anywhere near this.”

“Hellgates have to be opened from both sides,” said Trissiny, “that’s why demons aren’t constantly making new ones. How do you plan to get around that? Do you have a contact in Hell who can do it?”

“Several, but none I would trust with or near a nascent gate,” Agasti admitted. “What we have is Gabriel. He’s still right on this spot, just on a different plane of existence.”

“Gabriel isn’t a warlock,” Toby objected.

“He’s an enchanter,” Trissiny said, narrowing her eyes pensively. “He has Ariel, a scythe which we already know can carve holes in reality, and whatever aid he can summon with Salyrene’s bottle.”

“So, not optimal,” Agasti agreed, “but far from hopeless. First, I will need to contact him…”

Toby had turned to stare again at the empty patch of blasted reddish stone where the temple—and Gabriel—had been minutes ago, but after Agasti’s voice trailed off, he shifted his attention back to the warlock, frowning impatiently. In the next moment, his frown deepened, now in real worry. Agasti was not moving at all. In fact, he didn’t appear to be breathing.

Neither, Toby immediately discovered, was Trissiny. She stood as if immobilized in ice, as did the two demons. The nearby birds and insects had already been silenced by the presence of so many demons, but he realized now that even the grass, wilted as it was by its brief trip to Hell, was completely solidified, disturbed by neither wind nor gravity. In fact, there was no wind, either.

The whole world appeared to have abruptly stopped.

“Godhood has its privileges,” said the voice from behind him just before he could begin to panic. Toby whirled, and found himself facing Izara, who wasn’t even looking at him, but studying the others whom she had just immobilized. “Even Vemnesthis doesn’t try to enforce his rules on me. Please don’t be distracted by the theatricality of this, Toby; it was simply necessary. This conversation will take more time than you have to spare, and it needs to happen now.”

“What conversation?” he demanded, forgetting to speak with proper respect. He felt entirely thrown from his equilibrium, and somehow frayed. Toby’s whole life was about control, serenity, and balance, and at that moment he felt as if every one of those things had been stripped from him, leaving him blindly reacting to events in exactly the way his teachers had all stressed that he should never do. Still worse, there was a significant and undeniable part of him which reveled in the freedom, even despite the pain of losing Gabriel.

Izara finally turned her attention on him fully, and her expression was unreadable. Nothing about her seemed particularly divine, apart from having apparently suspended them in time; she was just a somewhat gawkish young woman with frizzy hair. If he hadn’t seen her the night before Toby would probably not have recognized her at all.

“You never have learned to find a middle road,” she said after a thoughtful pause.

He bit back his first response, and then his second. Whatever conversation she meant, the goddess was right about one thing: he did not have time for it. “Gabriel is trapped in Hell right now. Can you help us bring him back?”

“Of course I can.” She tilted her head minutely to one side. “But why would I?”

Toby gaped in disbelief. “…he’s a paladin.”

“Not mine,” Izara shrugged.

“What is wrong with you?!” he exploded.

“That’s a large question,” she replied, showing no sign of offense at his outburst. “Let’s stick to what’s wrong with you, for efficiency’s sake. You have just learned an extremely wrong lesson, and now stand a hair’s breadth from committing to it, with disastrous results for you, those you care about, and the world at large.”

“Then why are you here lecturing me and not Omnu?” he shot back, practically tasting his pulse pounding on the back of his tongue. Toby felt heady, even a little dizzy, but still there was that strange exuberance.

Izara, for her part, finally reacted, pressing her lips together in a grimace of annoyance. “Because Omnu needs someone to slap some sense into him, which unfortunately I can’t. I’ll just have to settle for you.”

“This is ridiculous,” Toby exclaimed. “My best friend is in Hell waiting for someone to rescue him—”

“I assure you, Gabriel Arquin is not sitting around waiting on anybody,” she said archly. “I would hope you of all people would know him better than that. On the other hand, just a moment ago it sounded like you were about ready to give up on him.”

Toby felt that inexplicable sensation rising, the strange fusion of fury and uncertainty that had so thrown him off his keel but felt so satisfying. For just a moment, he was so tempted to just punch her that his arm actually twitched.

It was hard to say which did more to shock him back into a semblance of self-control: the sheer horrible depravity of striking someone just out of his own ill temper, or the incredible stupidity of trying that on a goddess. Instead, his years of training finally began to resurface, and he breathed. In, out, three times each, until the emotion began to ebb, the clarity to resurface.

“What are you doing?” he asked at last, narrowing his eyes.

Izara blinked at him, languidly, like a pleased cat. “What does it seem like I am doing?”

“It seems like you are deliberately trying to make me angry. And I can see no reason for you to do that.”

“Better,” she said with a slow nod of approval. “Drifting closer to old bad habits, but still an improvement over the terrible new ones you were on the cusp of developing.”

He breathed. In, out. “That doesn’t answer the question.”

“You really wanted to slap me just then, didn’t you?” she countered, smiling. “But you didn’t.”

“I would like to think I’m neither a complete monster nor an imbecile. I hope that isn’t too arrogant a thing to claim.”

“I’m glad to see you controlling your urges, Tobias, but have you considered that maybe smacking me would have been the right thing to do?”

He stared at her. “…no.”

“Really, even after such a display of heartlessness?” The goddess smiled a little more widely. “Does the idea shock you so much?”

“I am a pacifist,” he said firmly. “And you are the goddess of love. It’s just a little incongruous to hear you talk about hitting people being the right thing!”

“Well, that’s the core of all this, Toby,” she said. “Neither of us is a pacifist.”

Izara let that hang for a moment while he stared, just wearing that mysterious little smile. Only when he finally drew breath to speak again did she continue, cutting him off.

“The nuances of my followers’ doctrine tend to be above the heads of laypeople. More than most other cults, probably even more than the Eserites or the Wreath, Izarites have stereotypes applied which preclude people from really understanding what they believe. Yes, my people assiduously avoid violence—in no small part because we have the Avenists and Eserites and Vidians and Shaathists and even, yes, the Omnists, to take up arms for us at need. In that circumstance, our efforts are better bent toward increasing the love in the world than fighting for it. But some of the incidents I most bitterly regret have come from the doctrine of love urging or even forcing my followers to become passive victims of violence. And as for love itself… If you love someone, Toby, you place their needs above your own. And in many relationships, there comes a time when the thing someone most needs is a swift kick in the ass. Metaphorically, of course. Usually.”

He shut his mouth, belatedly becoming aware that it was open. “But I…”

“Now, there is a pacifist tradition in Omnism,” she continued. “Such as the Sunset Way sect which produced Chang Zhi. There are others, though, and have been many others which have fallen from practice over the centuries. You, Toby, were raised by the most common sect of your faith on this continent. So common are the Cultivators that many in the Empire don’t actually know there are other interpretations of Omnist doctrine which are considered legitimate.” Again she tilted her head, back the other way this time. “Adeche N’tombu was a Cultivator. I assume I don’t need to remind you how his career as Hand of Omnu was spent?”

“Omnu,” Toby said stubbornly, “is a god of peace.”

“Peace can mean a lot of different things, several of them mutually exclusive. We were talking of pacifism. You have a very poor grasp of what that means, Tobias Caine. Of what it is, and what it is not. The truth is, you don’t even know any pacifists. Who are your colleagues, your examples? Teal Falconer? That girl is a walking disaster—not because she harbors an archdemon, but because she refuses to control it. She relies on her drow princess to smooth her way, and on her demon counterpart to terrorize anyone who defies her. There is no strategy in it, no plan. She isn’t a pacifist, she’s just averse to conflict.” Izara folded her hands, gazing intently at him. “Just like you.”

“You—those are two terms for the same thing! Why even split that hair?”

“Conflict aversion is a personality trait. Pacifism, like any ism, is political. It is a belief about what the world should be, and an attempt to make it so. To hold a belief is to disrespect the choices of others, for it demands that you impose your will on creation. It requires discipline, sacrifice, courage, and above all, strategy. Toby, the best guidance you have ever received was in your first martial arts class at Arachne’s school. Emilio Ezzaniel is one of the deadliest men alive; has he ever seemed to you a violent person?”

“That’s… I mean, that’s not unfamiliar. A lot of martial artists can be described that way. The great ones, anyhow.”

“And have you not seen the significance of that? Ezzaniel explained the true nature of peace to you that day: that it exists when those who hate to fight are better able to fight than those who love to. And you brushed him off.”

“I listen to Professor Ezzaniel,” Toby protested, hearing the defensiveness in his own voice and hating it. The creeping euphoria had all faded from him now, leaving him only off-balance and unfocused, confused.

“The greatest pacifist paladin of recent times,” Izara said softly, “was not Chang Zhi, who never accomplished much but to try to lead by example. No, that was Laressa of Anteraas, who once overthrew a corrupt governor by arranging to have his enforcers beat her bloody in a public square while she distributed famine relief supplies to the poor. It took conviction, courage, and a great willingness to suffer for her to go through with that—but more importantly, it took significant cunning to meticulously arrange all the pieces of that drama and ensure they would collide at exactly the right moment. Its result was a popular revolt and overthrow of her enemy the next day, leaving her in a position to guide Veilgrad into a more peaceful era.”

He couldn’t find anything to say. Izara watched him for a moment, then continued.

“You’re not a pacifist, Toby. You have no plan, no strategy. You just hate it when people fight and try to stop them when you see it happening. What does that accomplish? Teal has her archdemon; you have your holy nova. The pressure builds up, caused by stumbling from one crisis to the next, until in your incompetence you’ve backed yourself into a corner from which your only possible action is a huge explosion of power.”

Toby sat down in the grass, no longer able to look her in the eye. She just pressed inexorably on.

“You know the answer you need; it’s in your training. The Sun Style is all about redirecting your enemy’s own force to control his movements. Avenist battle doctrine is about defeating an enemy by controlling their options, and holds that the highest strategic victory is to prevent an enemy from going to war in the first place. The great game of Houses that your friends Shaeine and Ravana have learned from the cradle is about control of a much more intricate variety, but even in the ruthlessness you saw from the nobles of Calderaas, there was an underlying ethic of subtlety above force. The Vidian doctrine of masks is all about control of the self, extended outward to control the external forces which act upon the self. The Eserites and Punaji seek to restrain those who would harm them through intimidation and fear—to control others with only the specter of violence, so that they can commit as little actual violence as possible. Even Arachne keeps the Empire and the other great powers of this world off her back with strategic acts of grandiose disruption punctuating a general policy of carefully not rocking the boat. Control, control, control! Every person or faction or philosophy you have encountered which has an actual impact on the world does so by the same maxim your trainers in the Sun Style hammered into you from your earliest practice: control the encounter. You’ve been so close, Toby. In Puna Dara you seemed to grasp it more closely than ever yet.” Finally she hesitated, as if to draw breath, then shook her head. “But today you came so close to throwing it all away. Control, Toby. Grief, pain, and fear are real, and valid, but you must control them. Otherwise, they will control you.”

Slowly, he lifted his head to stare plaintively up at her. “…why is it you? Why is every other god coming to…” Toby had to stop and swallow against a painful lump in his throat. “Why won’t he ever talk to me?”

Izara heaved a sigh, then stepped over to sink down into the withered grass beside him. There, she leaned comfortingly against his shoulder. There was still no discernible aura of power about her; it might have been any slightly-built young woman pressed to his side. Somehow, that mundane warmth seemed much more comforting.

“Because he needs a swift kick in the ass,” she said wearily, “and I can’t give it to him. Oh, not because he’s a more powerful god than I am, or because he is and has always been a stubborn old ox, though both those things are true. The truth… The truth is, Toby, we are vulnerable in a way, more to our followers than to our enemies. I think it’s a fine thing that godhood comes with strictures and limitations. I remember the Elder Gods, and what absolute power with no restraints does to people. But we end up being shaped by the belief of those who act in our name. Omnu can’t change. I can smack him upside the head to my heart’s content, but it won’t accomplish anything. He wouldn’t even be annoyed more than a moment later, he’s always been a forgiving sort. Omnu is paradox, Toby, and it’s not entirely his fault. In life he was always vague, standoffish and mystical, and between the solidification of those traits and their enshrinement in doctrine, you’re left with a god whose idea of communication is sending you warm feelings.”

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” he said weakly.

“That divine nova of yours?” Izara rested her head on his shoulder. “It really is Omnu’s power; you simply can’t channel that much sheer divine magic unassisted, you’d incinerate yourself. But that he sends it to you in those extreme moments… It’s not so simple as him having a plan, Toby. It’s more that he reacts when you have a need. You are the kick in the pants he needs. Please don’t think I don’t care about you, because I do. Truly, I do. But in you, I see a real chance for my old friend to…wake up. And Vidius is not the only one of us who is growing concerned with the way things are. I have been reminded, recently, how I myself have allowed individuals to rise within my cult whom I would have disdained to be in a room with in my own mortal days.”

Toby stared up at Trissiny, standing frozen in time before him. Really studying her, in a way he rarely did anymore. It was funny, how quickly one could grow to take people for granted, once one was used to having them around. He remembered Trissiny in their earliest days at the University, the uncertainty and vulnerability she had displayed, the bluster with which she covered it, the rigid and frankly bigoted shades to the conviction that powered her. Now, in armor again, he could still see the contrast. She stood square and tall, but without any of the tension and stiffness she used to carry. Her expression was intent and pensive as she listened to Mortimer, but underneath the focus there was calm, totally unlike her borderline fanaticism of just two years ago. It was all right there, subtle but so plain when he really looked, even when she was suspended like a sculpture.

Trissiny had grown so much. They all had. Gabriel and Fross were practically different people. Juniper was in the grip of so many transitions it was hard to say how she might end up. He wasn’t sure whether he had only recently come to detect the care and compassion in Ruda, or the warmth and humor in Shaeine, or whether they had themselves grown more comfortable in those traits. Even Teal, despite Izara’s criticism, was slowly evolving into her own woman despite the pressures upon her.

Could he say the same? Had he really changed? Looking back, Toby found, to his shame, that he could see little that was new in himself except his ever-growing uncertainty.

Izara was right: he did nothing but react. Without a plan, and without focus, just constantly wandering about trying to be a calming presence wherever he was. He knew without self-aggrandizement that he had had a positive influence on his friends. But to the world at large? What could he really achieve by just being the nice guy? How many people could that help?

Chang Zhi was spoken of with tremendous reverence within Omnu’s faith, as perhaps the perfect spiritual role model. When he pressed himself, though, Toby couldn’t come up with anything of significance that she had actually accomplished.

“I’m such an idiot,” he said aloud. Without recrimination or angst; it was just an observation.

“You’re no more of one than someone your age should expect to be,” Izara replied, a note of humor lightening her voice.

“I don’t…know…what to do with this.”

“I would recommend following the examples of your friends. Trissiny has looked beyond the boundaries of her original faith for valuable perspective. Gabriel is becoming, if anything, a specialist in versatility. The truth is, Toby, that the traditions which raised you have let you down. It’s not that they are without value, but such limited perspectives may not work in the world anymore.”

Slowly, he nodded. “Thank you. That’s really good advice. Do you really think I can…” For that matter, what was it she was asking of him, exactly? “…save Omnu from himself?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say he needs to be saved, any more than you do. As his paladin, you are a focus for his personality; your growth can only benefit him as well. But simply as a man, you are very much like Omnu was in mortality. Kind, warm, gentle…a little bit bland and aloof. I just want you to be the best person you can, Toby. Hence…all of this.” She waved a hand at the frozen scene around them. “I’m not in the habit of such insistent interventions, but you came right up to the edge of a terrible precipice. The potential loss was more than I could bear to think of.”

“I see your point.” Toby nodded, then carefully gathered himself and stood, gently dislodging her. He turned to offer the goddess a hand up. “Thank you, Lady Izara, for all of this.”

“Please don’t be so formal,” she chided gently, even as she took his arm to rise. “I never have learned to enjoy being called Lady.”

“Well, I’m afraid we’ll have to compromise, then. I don’t think I can bring myself to call you Izzy.”

She grinned at him, and then suddenly the air moved again.

“…which will be the trickiest initial part, as—oh!” Agasti’s voice cut off mid-explanation for the second time to Toby’s ears, though it was the first to everyone else’s. He, Trissiny, and the two revenants both turned to Izara in surprise.

“Please,” she said, raising both hands, “no genuflections or other time-wasters. In theory, the Pantheon aren’t meant to intercede and solve mortal problems in person, but for this sheer concentration of paladins, extenuating circumstances, and backlash from one of my own projects, I have decided an exception is in order. Now, let’s get our young friend back here before he meets something he is truly not prepared for.”

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“What?!” Trissiny exploded in pure disbelief. “How?! Why did—”

“Wait,” Agasti interrupted her, straightening up and snatching his cane out of the earth. “Something is—”

His infernal spell circle abruptly collapsed, with all the violence for which that school of magic was famous. The glowing lines, already burned into the ground, began exploding like a series of embedded firecrackers, hurling ash and clumps of sod in all directions and causing Agasti himself to stagger, being caught in the middle of it. Both revenants surged protectively toward him, but Toby was both closer and faster, snatching the warlock and hauling him bodily out of the radius as the circle continued to disintegrate.

“It’s still going on!” Agasti gasped even before getting his feet back under him. “The instability is not confined to the circle. No more holding back, we need divine magic. Now! As much as you can!”

Trissiny needed no further urging, and her armor, sword, and shield coalesced around her out of pure light. Her aura flared into being, wings and all, pushing outward with an intensity that it rarely showed. Toby’s effort, by comparison, was muted. The glow sprang up around him as well, but for all that it pushed outward nearly as far as Trissiny’s, it was without the same ferocity. His contribution didn’t compare at all to the divine nova he had sometimes unleashed at Omnu’s bidding.

Smoke rose from both of them, accompanied by a harsh buzzing in the air, as their channeled power annihilated loose infernal magic from the vicinity. Agasti retreated with a nimbleness that would have been unbelievable when they had first seen him the night before, muttering and gesticulating rapidly with his cane. He charred another spell circle in the ground a few yards distant, then swiftly moved on to cast another while the first formed a smoky vortex above it, channeling infernal radiation into its center to be contained. The warlock carried on laying down grounding circles as quickly as he could, while his two revenant companions hovered protectively near him, unable to approach the paladins due to the light.

Between the three of them, they were making headway against the energy bleeding out of that transposed patch of Hell, but that unfortunately was not the worst of their problems.

The distortion rising from the ground around the circle was at first glance easy to mistake for heat waves in the sun, at least until it began spreading outward and reached the paladins. Their divine light did nothing at all to disrupt it, but the reverse was not true. Trissiny stumbled as if struck, her aura flickering, and Toby’s was momentarily snuffed out entirely by the disorientation.

When it reached the first of Agasti’s grounding circles, the entire glyph disintegrated in a cluster of minor explosions just the way his original spell circle had.

Worst of all, where the slow-moving wave crept past, it changed the ground from the mundane meadow to the heat-blasted stone of the hellscape on the other side. Bit by bit, the patch of hellscape was growing, the dimensional swap expanding one foot at a time.

“This is not a side effect!” Agasti shouted, retreating further. “Someone on the other side is pushing this out. They must have been watching the site for an opportunity. Get ready to fight, I have no idea what’s going to come through!”

It was a very peculiar sight, the surrounding hills and mountainside being erased by what seemed to be a flat plateau. As the effect expanded, structures began to appear, towers and fences seemingly made from gigantic bones encircling the temple site. None of that commanded their attention, however, as the demons shimmered into being starting when the growing circle had stretched only a few yards out. More and more came as it spread; though the five of them, revenants included, had not been shifted into Hell when the dimensional ripple washed over them, the beings on the other side had evidently been preparing for exactly this.

Trissiny, ever the tactician, immediately charged at one of the figures standing in a glowing glyph carved into the ground and chanting with his hands upraised. A guard of five demons surrounding him surged to meet her, and proved no match; they actually burst into flames on contact with her aura, and she only bothered to dispatch the one which was bodily in her way before ramming her sword to its hilt in the chest of the summoner. At no point had he paused in his working, and died as his flesh burned away and dissolved into charcoal from the spot where she impaled him.

That drew the attention of the others. The creatures surrounded them by the dozens, brandishing weapons made of bone and in a few cases hurling balls of explosive fire. They were a little bigger than human-sized on average, covered in chitinous scales and plates of natural armor, and wearing nothing but hide loincloths. The entire throng was clearly standing by, ready for battle, with casters positioned evenly around the circle where the temple had stood, chanting and obviously causing the dimensional effect to continue expanding.

Nearly a dozen converged on Trissiny, doing nothing but slowing her as she pivoted and tried to make for the next caster. For all their preparedness, this group was clearly not ready to contend with something like a paladin. Agasti, doubtless the first to discern the pattern, felled two more casters in rapid succession with precise shadowbolts, but then had to defend himself from a massed counter-attack with waves of fire and kinetic force. His efforts were supported by blasts of lightning; Kami had retrieved a battlestaff from the carriage and Arakady drew two wands from within his coat, both stepping up beside their patron to fire arcane destruction into all who threatened him.

In the sudden furor, none of them even noticed that Toby was simply standing, surrounded by a shimmering glow, and staring.

“So. This is your doing.” The air was filled with screams and spellfire; no one heard his soft voice.

The light that erupted from the Hand of Omnu was nothing like the steady expansion of the halo which had heralded his divine nova in the past. It burst out in a violent shockwave, the force of it knocking every demon in the vicinity to the ground, most shrieking in pain and several catching fire. It did not have the pure intensity of Omnu’s nova, either; that would simply have incinerated them.

But Toby wasn’t done.

Arkady and Kami had also fallen at the first impact, and now Agasti seized each of them by one arm and in a swift swell of shadow, all three vanished. Trissiny had been rocked slightly by the force of the divine spell Toby unleashed, but it did not hit here with anything like the impact it inflicted on their attackers. She pivoted on one heel to face him, then froze. Toby wasn’t looking at her; she could not tell where he was looking. His eyes were completely obscured, emitting a golden glow with an intensity like the sun’s.

The demons were already rallying, even despite their obvious pain at the haze of divine energy now covering the site. At least the expansion of the piece of Hell had stopped, every remaining caster having been felled by the blow. In fact, it began to retreat again, the blasted ground giving way to tallgrass and wildflowers which were already wilted by their momentary trip to Hell.

Before any could launch another coordinated attack, shapes appeared in the air around them. Scythes, hovering unassisted, seven of them. Barely had they manifested before they began moving.

Trissiny hurled herself flat to the ground, covering her head with her shield and leaving her defensive aura alight, but none of the blades struck her. Instead, directed with uncanny aim, they swept through the horde. Wherever a demon was cut, it instantly exploded, leaving nothing but ash upon the wind.

It was over in seconds.

Trissiny raised her head warily. Smoke and ashes drifted on the air around them; Toby’s aura flickered as the circle walling off this patch from its home dimension passed back over him in shrinking. It did not dissipate this time, though. The golden scythes now drifted slowly around them, tumbling end over end as they orbited the Hand of Omnu. They had cut down even the bone structures, leaving only shattered and charred fragments to vanish back into Hell as the circle shrank.

The very air sang, filled with a tone like distant bells.

“I understand it now,” Toby said expressionlessly. His voice resonated almost like Ariel’s, as if there were a second, deeper voice speaking in unison. “It’s so simple, I don’t know why I struggled with it for so long. Omnu is life. Omnu is peace. Omnu is paradox. Omnu’s real path is navigating the tension between opposites. Because the truth is as Avei has always taught it. As Vidius has known. There is only one true peace…and it is the opposite of life.”

Trissiny stood, leaving her sword and shield lying on the charred ground behind her. The original patch of Hell remained, a hardened circle of ground where the temple had been, but the dimensional ripple seemed to be fully dispelled now. She strode right up to Toby, pulling off her silver gauntlets and also letting them drop.

She took her fellow paladin’s face in both hands. He was standing like one of the stone figures of Salyrene, staring with empty glowing eyes at some nothing in the infinite distance. He did not resist, however, as she tugged his head gently down to face her.

“Toby,” Trissiny whispered, “stop.”

It was like staring into a furnace. There was nothing behind his eyes but the light. Not a flicker of expression or acknowledgment on his features.

She squeezed lightly, shifting her hands to slowly brush her thumbs across his eyes. Enough mortal reflex remained despite whatever trance he was in that they closed, cutting out the light which blazed onto her own face.

“Please, stop.”

Trissiny changed her grip again, releasing his face and pulling him closer. She wrapped an arm around his back and tugged his head down to rest it against her shoulder.

The distant music of the Light faded. Golden scythes dissolved into sparks and swirls of unfocused energy. The glow which hung over the whole scene like fog dissipated, giving way to simple, wholesome sunlight.

With its passing, Toby seemed to come back to life. His breath caught, came unevenly in little bursts for a moment, and then faltered entirely into shuddering gasps. Weakly, he clutched at Trissiny, and she just held onto him, holding him up even as his legs failed.

“You did this on purpose,” Ariel accused as soon as things settled down somewhat.

Gabriel took his time before bothering to reply, turning in a circle to make sure there were no more enemies waiting. A few had lunged at him before being swept away in that ripple their chanters were creating; the four who had jumped the wand now lay dead nearby, three little more than skeletons decorated with parchment-like scraps of old skin, all that the scythe had left of them. The fourth was more well-preserved, having been impaled through the heart by Ariel, whom he now plucked from the air. They had spent quite a bit of time on the charms that enabled her to float and fight independently; this wasn’t the field test he would have preferred, but at least it had worked.

When the demons began vanishing and an expanding patch of real-world ground appeared in their stead, he had immediately realized what they were doing and what it probably meant for the mortal plane. Gabriel had failed to think of any countermeasure in time, but fortunately, it proved moot; in only moments, the circle had shrunk right back to its original boundaries, and not only was every last demon gone, most of their bone structures had been shattered. Bless Toby and his holy nova.

The less uplifting news was that with no control over whatever magic the demons had used to create that effect, he and his friends were still stuck on opposite sides of the dimensional divide. Which was good for them, but his own situation was less cheery.

“I’m morbidly curious how you came to that conclusion,” Gabriel finally answered, sliding Ariel back into her sheath and turning another slow revolution to take a more careful look at his surroundings. The geography sort of mirrored that of the real world; there was a towering mountain range to the east, but unlike the Wyrnrange this appeared to be entirely made of gigantic shards of obsidian, and the fires of volcanic eruptions flickered in their heights. Gabe wasn’t well-versed in geology but he had a feeling that wasn’t right; then again, there was no reason to assume the basics of mortal life were applicable here. For example, the forest which spread to the north and south of the flat area in which he stood consisted of trees that seemed to be entirely thorns, some people-sized (and slowly oscillating as if seeking prey) and swaying tree-sized mushrooms whose conical caps contained giant, tooth-lined mouths. As he watched, one snapped at something flying past.

“Because you were just announcing your awareness that something terrible was going to go wrong with that entire enterprise, because you are generally reckless, and because you have a stubbornly self-sacrificing tendency that invariably makes you place yourself between your friends and danger. Whether or not that suits the strategic needs of the situation.”

“Well, I guess you’ve got my number,” he said lightly. “All right, immediate practicalities. After the Crawl I’ve started carrying stores of food, water, and potions in my bottomless pockets, so I can survive for a while. I’ve always heard there’s not even any water in Hell.”

“There is, but it is not plentiful and you would not be advised to drink it. Nor is the food safe. You are extremely resistant to infernal radiation, between your hethelax blood and the divine magic granted by Vidius, but surviving here is not a long-term prospect. We need to return to our own plane posthaste.”

“Easier said than done,” he murmured. Demons were constantly trying to escape from Hell, and at a glance he could already see why. If it were that easy, it would happen a lot more often. “Okay…let’s see what we’ve got to work with. Apparently these guys have been building their little nest around the temple site to try to cross over if anything happened to the dimensional phenomenon merging that spot. They sure were well-prepared. Do you know what species this is?”

“Ikthroi,” she said as he bent over the most well-preserved dead demon. Apparently when they died in Hell they didn’t dissolve into charcoal. “Sapient, slightly larger and significantly stronger than the human norm, possessing an inherent but quite minimal capacity for infernomancy. During the Hellwars these were by far the largest contingent of Elilial’s ground forces, but sightings of them have diminished markedly in the centuries since. None have crossed any hellgate since well before the Enchanter Wars. Either they fell from Elilial’s favor or their population was culled for some reason, we have no data on this in our realm.”

“I’m impressed you knew even that much, considering how long you were collecting dust in the Crawl.”

“Then I suppose we are very fortunate at least one of us listens in Tellwyrn’s history class. I see no way this can help us now, however. That was all I know of them, and it hardly prepares us to glean useful information from this settlement.”

“Well, don’t worry, we’ll get out of this yet.”

“Your blind optimism is beginning to grate.”

“Relax,” he said, grinning in spite of himself, and reached into one of the inner pockets of his coat. “We’re here working for Vesk, remember? Nothing we’ll be tested with is any worse than we can overcome.”

“We. Are. In. Hell!” Ariel sounded openly angry for the first time he could remember. “Vesk has no power here! Vidius has no power here! None of the rules apply, Gabriel; it’s just you and me and whatever you’ve brought with you. To the extent that Vesk’s stupid quest still makes a difference to us, the pattern thus far established only raises the risk that we will encounter Elilial herself! I assure you, she will be far less cordial than the gods you have met to date. A paladin isolated and vulnerable in her domain is exactly the kind of opportunity to hurt the Pantheon she rarely happens across.”

“Okay, you’re not without a point, there,” he said more soberly, withdrawing the bottle Toby had given him. “Still, remember that I wasn’t totally unprepared for this.”

“Desperate as we are I hate to naysay, but do think about what you’re proposing to do. Whoever’s in that bottle is going to be stranded in Hell right along with us.”

“Ariel, how could somebody be in the bottle?” he exclaimed. “You’re an arcane assistant, you should have better sense than that. More likely the bottle is a physical representation of some active spell. Salyrene said to open it when the need was greatest, and that help would come.”

“Oh, of course, you know best. The vivid proof of that is all around us.”

“I get no respect,” he muttered, and pulled the stopper.

The bottle instantly unfolded itself like a peeled banana, its glass surface vanishing to leave him holding a chunk of crimson crystal. The most confusing part of this experience was that the crystal was significantly larger than the bottle had been. The thing itself he recognized, having seen it quite recently.

“Of course, on the other hand,” Gabriel acknowledged, hefting the huge rough-cut ruby, “I suppose someone could be in the bottle.”

“Isn’t that the same crystal Schwartz used alongside me in his portal ritual?”

“I’m pretty sure. Aside from looking familiar, that would be just the narrative touch Salyrene would throw in if she was trying to steal Vesk’s thunder, like she said. I guess filching an artifact out of Avei’s vaults was just icing on the cake,” he added, remembering the acerbic comments both goddesses had made about each other. “What kind of demon did Sister Astarian say this was? And the name… I remember it starts with a Z.”

“Xyraadi, and it is probably spelled with an X, the demonic language being gratuitously absurd even in translation. She is a khelminash demon. I am forced to admit that this actually represents excellent help. They are extremely sophisticated infernomancers, and Xyraadi will not only be able to guide us through this dimension, she is one of few demons to have permanently escaped it in the past. Let us hope she isn’t terribly grumpy after being in that thing for six hundred years. I can attest that one is not at one’s best after a long period of time spent magically inert in a dank hole.”

“Perfect,” he said in satisfaction. Gabriel braced his feet and raised the ruby up above his head in one hand, where it glinted sullenly in the diffuse light. With the other, he planted the butt of his staff against the ground, leaning on it in a dramatic pose. “Xyraadi, ally of the gods, you are called upon again! Come forth in our hour of need!”

Something thankfully in the distance screamed. A gust of wind surged up, ruffling his coat and carrying the acrid stink of sulfur.

“Please tell me this is inappropriately-timed humor,” Ariel said flatly.

“Well, what the hell do I know about soul prisons?” he snorted, lowering his hand. “How am I supposed to get her out of there?”

“Step one, ask the talking sword. Step two, break it.”

“…wait, really? That won’t hurt her?”

“Her physical body can’t be locked in a crystal any more than yours can, Gabriel. It’s like the bottle, a complex spell effect given physical form so that even a magically untalented boob can make use of it, at need. Just shatter the crystal, the suspension effect will dissolve, and she will be restored to her proper form. At least, assuming the Topaz College followed its standard practices, and those have not deviated too severely in six centuries.”

“You know what they say about assuming,” he muttered, but knelt to place the soul prison on the ground, then hefted his scythe.

“Not with that!” Ariel barked. “You know what that thing does! She’s hardly any use to us dead.”

“Hm, good thinking,” he agreed, shrinking the scythe down to its wand form and putting it away. “That makes the leverage a bit trickier, but still doable.”

“Oh, look,” Ariel said sourly as he knelt again, raising her over the crystal. “I even brought it on myself this time.”

A saber wasn’t the ideal tool for breaking rocks; at the blow, the prison bounced away sideways. He did succeed in cracking it, however, and apparently that was all it took.

The crack spread, emitting white light, and with a disproportionately violent bang the crystal exploded. Gabriel staggered back, throwing up an arm over his eyes, but there were no fragments. Just a shower of sparks and a tremendous billow of smoke, which quickly drifted away in the breeze.

When it was gone, standing where the ruby had landed, there was a demon.

She had emerged with her back to him, and her head twisted this way and that as she peered about, causing the waves of purplish hair cascading down her spine to shift and shimmer. The demon wore a surprisingly modest dress, in deep green cloth with wide sleeves and blue embroidery at its hems; it fell to ankle level, revealing cloven hooves and the swaying tip of a prehensile tail. She was taller than he, quite slender of build. For some reason, the sight of her put Gabriel in mind of a gazelle, despite the deep crimson color of her skin.

“Quoi?” she sputtered in a low alto. “Qu’est-ce que— Non. Non non non! Je suis encore en Enfer!? Pourquoi? Qui a fait ça?!”

She whirled around, catching herself at the sight of him, and Gabriel again took a wary step back. He carefully kept Ariel lowered, the sword not in a threatening posture. For a moment, he and the demon studied each other. Like Elspeth, she had a bony crest rising from her forehead and making her hair almost invisible from the front. Her eyes were yellow, rather like a wolf’s. Aside from that and the red skin, her fine, narrow features would not have looked out of place on most of the people he’d known growing up in Tiraas.

“Vous,” she said finally. “C’est de votre faute, n’est-ce pas?”

“Uh…” Gabriel subtly extended Ariel out to the side, causing the demon to step warily back, but he tilted his head toward the sword. “That…doesn’t sound like demonic to me. In fact, I would swear I’ve heard something like that before…”

“It’s Glassian,” she replied. “Remember, that was the country in which she lived and served a Hand of Avei’s party.”

“Tanglais?” The demon’s golden eyes had locked onto Ariel when the sword spoke, then widened in comprehension and respect. Drawing in a deep breath, she straightened her back and inclined her head to Gabriel. “Excusez-moi. Je m’appelle Xyraadi.”

He swallowed, then nodded back. “Um… Hello. Uh, jama pell Gabriel Arquin.”

Xyraadi wrinkled her nose at him, her upper lip curling in a pained expression.

“If you ever meet someone actually from Glassiere,” Ariel suggested, “don’t do that.”

“No respect whatsoever,” he groused. “From anyone! Ever!”

Xyraadi cleared her throat, and held up one hand toward him, palm forward. “Un moment, s’il vous plait.”

She took two mincing steps back on her dainty hooves and closed her eyes, raising both hands with the palms extended to the sides. Flickering lights rose in a circle around her.

“Okay,” Gabriel muttered, edging away, “I know this may be a crazy thing to be saying considering I deliberately called her here, and besides she was trusted enough by the Sisterhood to be sealed away in case they needed her again and a demon would have to be unbelievably virtuous for that to happen… But she is a demon and we’re in Hell and she’s immediately casting something. Am I wrong to feel nervous?”

“No,” Ariel replied, “but make decisions with your intellect, not your feelings. That was modern Glassian, Gabriel. After six hundred years a language will drift till it is nearly unrecognizable, unless its primary speakers are elves. This suggests her fluency is due to a magical effect. Given the circumstances, I suspect she is enabling herself to communicate with us.”

“You can do that?” he asked, fascinated. “Using infernal magic?”

“I can,” Xyraadi said suddenly, opening her eyes and lowering her hands. “The infernomancy involved would kill you even if you managed to learn it, Gabriel Arquin. The craft of my people is built around the embodiment and objectification of problems as constructs, which are then attacked, corroded, corrupted—that at which the infernal excels. In this case, the language barrier.”

“That’s absolutely amazing,” he said sincerely. “Nobody on the mortal plane can do anything that sophisticated with infernomancy!”

“In theory, they could,” she replied, allowing herself a pleased smile, “but they would be dead from exposure long before amassing the necessary skill.”

“Why Glassian, though?” he asked. “I mean, if you suddenly pop up in Hell itself…”

“Let me pose to you a hypothetical question, M. Arquin,” Xyraadi countered with a wry twist of her mouth. “Let us say that you are conversant in two languages. One is the tongue constructed by the goddess of cruelty, deliberately designed to be difficult and unpleasant, both to speak and to hear. The other is a tongue of poetry, which when spoken sounds like singing even when you are complaining about your taxes. To which would you prefer to default?”

“Well, I guess I can’t argue with that.”

“Wonderful,” she said, smiling thinly. “Then, if I have satisfied your curiosity, M. Arquin, perhaps you will do me the courtesy of indulging mine. I am most eager to learn why you have brought me here!”

He reared back at her suddenly strident tone, raising his free hand. “I’m sorry! Genuinely, I am. I didn’t want to come here myself, but, ah… This is a bit of a story.”

“Ah?” Xyraadi folded her arms and pursed her lips. “Then be so good as to proceed, before something comes to eat us.”

“…how likely is that?”

“It is not likely,” she said flatly. “It is certain. That is how things are in Hell. Perhaps, if I understand what is going on, I will be able to help when it does!”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Fair enough. The short version, then. I suppose I should start by telling you I’m the half-demon Hand of Vidius…”

Khelminash had no eyebrows, save for bony ridges above their eyes which did not move. Xyraadi managed to look incredulous regardless, but the expression faded as he recounted, as efficiently as possible, his journey with the others on Vesk’s instructions, finishing with their current predicament. When he trailed to a stop, she was silent for a moment, digesting it.

“So they really did keep me,” she murmured at last. “I more than half expected the Sisterhood to throw my soul chamber into the Azure Sea the first chance they got. How long was I locked away?”

Gabriel drew in a breath, bracing himself. “Six hundred years.”

She flinched. Only slightly, but it was enough to make him wince in sympathy. Xyraadi turned, staring out toward the west where the horizon was lost in a yellowish smoggy haze.

“Then everyone I ever knew is long dead.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“Ah, well,” she said with forced lightness, lifting one shoulder in a peculiar half-shrug. “Everyone I loved was already dead, that was why I asked to be put in the crystal. The rest, I will not miss. More immediately!” Xyraadi turned back to him, now smiling with more sincerity. “I have excellent news, M. Arquin! It seems you may not have irrevocably doomed us both.”

“Oh, thank the gods,” he said sincerely. “I love it when I haven’t irrevocably doomed something. I’ve learned to really appreciate those occasions when they come along.”

Her expression grew amused, but she continued. “Getting out of Hell means passing through a hellgate. This is usually not possible, because they are typically heavily guarded on this side and always on the other. If one wishes to cross over, one must usually make a new hellgate.”

“That tends to make people on the other side pretty mad,” he noted.

“Indeed, that is a drawback,” she agreed solemnly. “Another is that this cannot be done unilaterally from either side. However! By your account, you are in league with a powerful warlock, who should be waiting in roughly this physical place, right across the dimensional barrier. And now, you have another powerful warlock right here.” She spread her skirts and crossed her hooves in a graceful curtsy. “If I may be forgiven for boasting.”

“If you can actually do that, I think you’re entitled to boast a little,” he said fervently. “But doesn’t that require coordinating across the dimensional barrier?”

“Ah, yes,” Xyraadi said, nodding and looking more pensive. It was peculiar, trying to read her face; her eyes and lips seemed quite expressive, but the lack of movable eyebrows made her countenance oddly opaque. “That is tricky. But not insurmountable.”

“Well, if nothing else,” he said, drawing the wand from within his coat, “I have a—”

A sound split the air, a terrible sound seared into his memory. It was like a hiss, if a hiss was a bellow; a strangely subtle noise which occurred only on the very edges of hearing, and yet was powerful enough to make the ground vibrate.

“Ah,” Xyraadi said ruefully, “it took longer than I expected. And we pay for that reprieve now, for it is even worse than I feared.”

A shape appeared high overhead from the sulfurous clouds roiling above the obsidian volcanoes, a languidly undulating silhouette in the murk that resembled an eel. It was a small shadow, but Gabriel knew from experience that that only meant it was far away. He remembered very well how big they were.

“Aw, man,” he groaned, staring up at the nurdrakhaan. “I hate those things.”

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If the ability to evade questions was a characteristic of a good lawyer, Mortimer Agasti must have been a very good one indeed.

Not that he was anything less than a perfectly gracious host. Agasti put them up in his own apartment for the night; it proved quite luxurious, though there were only two guest rooms and Toby and Gabriel had to share. The warlock was most apologetic about this until they reassured him that this was their customary arrangement back in Last Rock.

At some point while no one was looking, Verniselle and Izara both absented themselves without fanfare or farewell, in the customarily inscrutable manner of deities. None of the paladins enlightened Agasti as to his friend Nell’s true nature, since obviously she would have herself had she ever intended to. From then on, aside from the revenant Arkady, it was just them and Agasti.

Over a sumptuous dinner, over dessert and tea afterward, at breakfast the next day and then during the long carriage ride to the north and east out of Ninkabi, he kept up a vivacious conversation with them, somehow constantly turning any query into his own history back upon them. Their quest thus far, as Vesk had ordained it, was related by the time dinner was done, with Agasti sharing an insightful back-and-forth with them about the nuances of the various gods and cults they’d encountered over tea afterward. He kept up his inquiries after that into the next day, though. Never pressing and always retreating politely at the first sign of hesitation, but just as constantly deflecting any subject from himself and back to them. Over the passing hours they ended up describing a lot of life in Last Rock, relating stories of their various adventures under Tellwyrn’s tutelage, and even reminiscing about their respective upbringings in Tiraas and Viridill.

As the hours drifted by in pleasant talk, even Trissiny began to forget her initial wariness. Agasti himself seemed to be growing younger right in front of them; energy began to fill his voice and movements, his steps lost their shuffle, and even his posture straightened up. It was as if the man were drawing a new enthusiasm for life simply from their presence.

“It seems to me that there is a running theme to your quest thus far,” Agasti said as the carriage rumbled through the hilly N’Jendo countryside, drawing steadily closer to the Wyrnrage. It was a particularly bright day, sunny and warm now that the sun had finally climbed above the mountains, and they were constantly serenaded by birds and cicadas. They had long since left the Imperial highways and were now traveling along an ancient dirt track riddled with potholes and clumps of hardy weeds, perilous enough to jeopardize a wagon wheel. Agasti’s carriage, however, was an exquisite Falconer custom job, whose interior was rather like riding in a mobile opera box; it also had the very best shock absorption enchantments on the market, and they might as well have been gliding for all the difference the road’s condition made. “Now, ordinarily, that’s exactly the kind of thing I caution young folks against; the mind always wants to see patterns, often where there are none, and you must guard against that tendency or end up fooling yourself. You kids are working for Vesk, though, and there’s nothing a bard loves like a theme.”

“Actually, I’d picked up on several possible themes to this,” Gabriel said lightly, “but I’m curious which one stuck out in your mind, Mortimer.”

“I had the opposite impression,” Trissiny grunted. “The more I learn of this business the more it seems like Vesk is aimlessly yanking our chain. Especially since Salyrene clued us in about the real nature of that key.”

“And yet, here you still are,” Toby said in his mild tone, giving her a smile.

“…there’s a lot to be learned from this,” Trissiny replied, almost grudgingly. “I’ve made way too many mistakes in life to pass up a chance at education. No matter how annoying it is.”

“You generally seem too hard on yourself, Trissiny,” Agasti said. “Don’t be afraid to give yourself credit where it’s earned. You acknowledge your prejudices and work to overcome them, and that isn’t a small thing, not at all. Far too many people go their entire lives never once admitting to themselves that they have prejudices. The mark of a fool is that he thinks he understands himself and his life. But yes, Gabriel, I did pick out one theme in particular: you keep meeting gods. Meeting them, and gaining insight into their thoughts.”

“Which has been a priceless opportunity, of course,” Toby said, nodding. “You think that’s what Vesk intended?”

“I know a bit about the structure of stories,” Agasti replied with a mischievous grin. “You’re closing in on your third piece of four, which would make this, say, the opening of the third act. The themes of this story are established by now, but I strongly suspect you won’t find out what Vesk was actually after until the very end. Take heart, though; I firmly believe you will learn that truth eventually. A deity who thinks in stories won’t be able to resist explaining everything once you reach the denouement.”

“Third act, hm,” Gabriel murmured, gazing out the window at the passing countryside, his expression suddenly a dour contrast to the sunshine. “That means the really painful part is coming up soon.”

“You also know a bit about stories, I see,” Agasti said. “Remember the one really comforting thing about working for Vesk: in a story, the heroes have to reach the end. In real life, anything might happen and the world always has something lying in wait to crush you, but in a story? Vesk will test you to the very limit of your capabilities, but no farther.”

“That’s actually more of a comfort than you make it sound,” Trissiny said dryly. “Capabilities are there to be tested.”

“And expanded,” Agasti replied with an approving nod. “Returning to the theme: you already represent an unprecedented unity among the cults. In past ages, various different paladins would be at each other’s throats when the crossed paths more often than they worked together.”

“Someone mentioned that to us,” Toby noted.

“Also worth noting is the unusual branching out of skills that has begun,” Agasti continued. “The Hand of Avei, a trained and fully accredited member of the Thieves’ Guild. The Hand of Vidius, also an arcane enchanter.”

“Not much of one, yet,” Gabriel demurred.

“And you have been studying for what, two years? Skills like that take time to build, Gabriel. And your companion, there, will be a great help in progressing them.”

“I have already,” Ariel stated. “He has been a far less hopeless pupil than I first assessed. I aspire to eventually make a reasonably competent enchanter of him, presuming he does not get killed first. For a supposedly invulnerable man, that prospect keeps looming larger.”

“Shut up, Ariel,” Gabe sighed.

“I don’t wish to be presumptuous,” Agasti said seriously, “but may I offer a suggestion?”

“We’d be glad of your advice,” Toby replied. “You’ve been extremely insightful so far.” The others nodded agreement.

“I think,” Agasti said in a pensive tone, “it would suit you to take advantage of the opportunities the gods have given, and develop your skills beyond what is normally expected of your divine role. Trissiny has made an admirable start in that direction. There is further you could go, however,” he continued, turning his face to her directly. “For example: as a half-elf, you have a much higher capacity for magic than the average human. Have you done much to leverage that?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” she said slowly. “I know the basic healing and shielding I was taught at the Abbey, and had some additional study with Professor Harklund at Last Rock. I’ve gotten pretty good at making hardlight constructs… Mostly, though, I’ve focused on skills that use my hands and my brain.”

He nodded. “You already have a suite of abilities that an enemy would not expect, and that is an advantage. Don’t overlook your magic, however; the divine is more versatile than ninety percent of its users give it credit for. Those shields, for example, can be an offensive measure as much as a defensive one if you use them with some creativity.”

“Now, that we’ve seen in action,” Gabriel said eagerly. “Shaeine is crazy good with shields, to the point she’s as much a long-range fighter as a healer in our team. Oh, and she also has this trick where she can touch someone on the forehead and put them to sleep.”

“Ah, yes,” Agasti said, nodding again. “That’s another thing: mind magic is the province of the divine. For the most part, that is a highly specialized discipline, used for either mental healing or unimaginable cruelty, but there are a number of simple tricks that are very handy in a variety of circumstances. That sleep spell, for example.”

“But that’s Themynrite technique, isn’t it?” Trissiny objected.

“It would be more accurate to say there is a Themynrite technique for it,” Agasti replied. “Similar spells are also widely used by the Citrine College and the Order of Light; I have also heard it rumored that the shadow priestesses of Scyllith know that trick. And it is only one example.”

“Why is that, I wonder?” Toby mused. “That mind magic is divine, I mean. I don’t really see a correlation.”

“Why, the divine is all about order,” Agasti said with a smile. “And minds… The truth is, most of the contents of our own minds are invisible to us. We are aware of our thoughts, yes, but not of the underlying processes by which those thoughts are created. Most of a person’s mind is inscrutable and not meant to be consciously contacted. If you poke your own perception into someone else’s brain, what you find will either seem like nonsense or possibly damage your own sanity. It is by imposing order that one influences the deeper workings of the mind. Building barriers and structures to channel energies, create patterns out of chaos.”

“That sounds like a quick way to completely destroy someone’s sanity,” Toby said, eyes wide.

“It is definitely a thing one should not attempt without considerable training,” Agasti agreed firmly. “But as I said, there are things you can do with mind magic that are not very intrusive—like, for example, put someone to sleep.”

“Shaeine also knows some diagnostic magic,” Trissiny mused. “I’ve seen her check a person’s mental and physical condition…”

The carriage veered slightly, leaving the road to park beside it, and came to a halt.

“Ah,” Agasti said briskly. “Here we are, then. Out we go!”

They clambered out into the sunshine, and the old man was not the only one who moved stiffly after that long confinement; it had been a good two hours’ drive from Ninkabi. Both the revenants who had accompanied them stepped out of the driver’s compartment, moving smoothly and without hesitation. Evidently there were benefits to the lack of a mortal body.

Patchy stands of trees covered the rolling foothills of the Wyrnrange on this side, casting intermittent shade. They had come to the very foot of the mountains, or one long outcropping of them at least; the entire West sloped down from the Wyrnrange to the sea, and N’Jendo was mostly rocky country where steppes and jagged peaks cropped up all the way to the coast, and beyond it in the form of islands. Here there was a little glade, tucked into the shadow of a mountain and braced between two steep hills, each crowned with trees. In the shade between them sat a disused temple.

It was of a style common to old-fashioned Avenist and Izarite architecture, a round structure of granite with a domed roof, braced by columns. The temple was obviously abandoned, the path up to its doors overgrown, the doors themselves hanging open and one listing crazily off its hinges. What had once been a garden out front was now a wild tangle of bushes, flowers, and small trees, and climbing vines had covered half the structure. For all that, though, it seemed to be in good repair, the broken door notwithstanding. The stone was not broken or even cracked, at least not visibly.

“We won’t be disturbed here,” Agasti said, planting his walking stick in front of himself and leaning on it with both hands. He did not appear to need the support; his spine was fully straight, now, making him look much taller than he had the night before. The stick was topped by a crystal sphere in which white light slowly swirled, now shadowed by his grip. “When I had to abandon the temple, the goddess placed a protection over it. Any living thing which does not already know of its existence will overlook it, and others in the vicinity will be encouraged to turn elsewhere. Even animals won’t approach.”

“It all seems so peaceful,” Gabriel said, taking a step forward.

“No closer!” Agasti said sharply, and he froze. The warlock continued in a more moderate tone. “Allow me to explain. The magical working over which I lost control was a channeling of divine and infernal energies together into a pattern. My mistake caused the nascent shatterstone to explode half-made, unleashing its full effect—which, being unfinished, was not at all what it was meant to be. I had unfortunately succeeded all too well in creating a balance between those two types of energy, and when I hastily removed myself from the equation, they continued to draw until it stabilized.”

“But infernal magic is drawn from the caster,” Trissiny said, frowning. “It didn’t sap you dry?”

Agasti shook his head. “It switched to the purest source in my absence, drawing power from Hell directly through the network of divine channels I had created.”

“So…” Toby unconsciously fell into a braced stance. “You created a hellgate?”

“Nothing so straightforward, I’m afraid,” said Agasti, staring at the old temple. “A hellgate is simple enough; I could have informed the Sisterhood or the Empire to come lock down the site and accepted whatever punishment they imposed for my carelessness. No, this is something…unprecedented. I do not fully understand what transpired, much less how—obviously, or I would have prevented it—but the result was a merging. In this place, the mortal and infernal planes are somehow layered onto each other. That temple exists in both, simultaneously.”

Silence fell; even the singing of the cicadas was distant. Apparently the insects were not inclined to approach this place. Arkady came to stand behind Agasti’s shoulder, folding his hands behind his back, while Kami continued unpacking a picnic lunch from the carriage.

“Then why isn’t the whole area crawling with demons?” Trissiny asked finally. “No offense, Mortimer, but that seems hard to credit. I don’t even sense any infernal magic; if what you say is true, this whole area should be blazing with it.”

“Oh, you would sense it and worse if you drew too close,” Agasti said, his shoulders heaving in a small sigh. “I spent as much time as I dared nosing around the site to try to understand what I had done. As best I can tell… This event is somehow frozen in the middle of the process of creating a hellgate.”

“I get it,” Gabriel said, nodding slowly with his eyes fixed on the temple. “Just like shadow-jumping, or any dimensional portal. There are two basic steps to the process: create a link between two locations, and then bore a hole across it.”

“Precisely,” said Agasti. “What seems to have made the difference is the equipment I was using. The power is flowing through that piece of Elder God machinery, and through some twist of fate fell into perfect balance and created a stable loop. The gate does not form, nor do the energies dissipate.”

“So what happens if we remove it?” Trissiny demanded.

Agasti shook his head again. “I must admit that the possibilities are endless. Nothing in the lore I have studied even hints at an event like this happening before. The likelihoods, however, are only two. Either the hellgate will finish forming, or the rift will collapse without forming at all.”

“We’ll get the gate, won’t we,” Toby said quietly. “Thanks to Vesk and his story.”

“That still doesn’t explain the lack of demons,” Gabriel said, turning to Agasti. “They usually want out of Hell like rats want off a sinking ship. Or did Izara’s concealment apply in that dimension, too?”

“That would only have drawn Elilial’s direct attention, and then who knows what might have unfolded,” Agasti said with a wince. “This place isn’t as unwatched as it appears, but the eyes on it are scrying from safe distances; I presume the same is true on the other side. It is difficult to approach for reasons beyond Izara’s intervention. As a consequence of the transposition of both forms of energy into the wrong domains, this site resists the approach of any source of divine magic. Theoretically, the reverse should be true on the other side: anything infernal would be unable to draw near. The fact that none have bears out that theory; since everything in Hell is saturated with infernal magic, there is nothing magically neutral which could enter the space. It really is the most fascinating phenomenon,” he added morosely. “I have often wished I could study such an event without the taint of guilt I feel for having so corrupted a piece of the gods’ creation.”

“Wait,” Trissiny said, turning to him. “If nothing divine can approach, how are we going to get in?”

“The three of you do practically radiate with divine magic, it’s true,” Agasti agreed. “I have a theory, however.”

“Oh, good,” Ariel commented. “A theory. About this singular and completely enigmatic phenomenon which you now propose to prod with a pitchfork.”

“Shut up, Ariel,” Gabriel snapped. “Go on, Mortimer.”

“The nature of this entire phenomenon is balance,” the warlock explained. “It is divine and infernal, kept in balance so they do not explode. Adding power of either kind should theoretically cause one to annihilate the other, but this thing is stable and resistant to interference; if it could have been disrupted from the other side, it would have by now. This has sat here for nearly three years, and if there is one thing the forces of Hell do to perfection it is disrupt. That gives us some leeway. In most infernal workings the slightest misstep is, by definition, disaster, but this one will actively seek to uphold its own balance, which means that small errors on our part should not destabilize it completely.”

“At least, not till we yank out the linchpin holding it all together,” Gabriel interjected.

Agasti nodded. “I have thoughts about that, too, but first things first. An infernal working by me, accompanying a divine presence, will hopefully enable that presence to enter the radius without triggering the backlash. So long as your divine presence is balanced with infernal…escort, so to speak, you should be able to enter.”

“Balance,” Trissiny muttered. “Okay, I get it. What’s this backlash you’re referring to?”

“This is a temple of Izara, after all,” Agasti said with a grimace. “Or was. A priest attempted to join me in cleansing it; his presence at the border of the event caused, well… It was most peculiar. The effect was confined to the boundary, as if it were a shield, but it was clearly the explosive reaction of divine and infernal magic coming into uncontrolled contact. After some probing, he tried to force his way in, and that’s how we discovered the intensity of the reaction increases the more force is applied to it. Balance, as we have discussed.”

“Brute force is rarely the best solution to any problem,” said Toby.

“That will get you in,” Agasti continued, his hands tightening on the head of his cane. “At least one of you; I have my doubts whether I can safely muster enough infernal power to counter the presence of two paladins, much less three. And…I think it will have to be Gabriel.”

“Point of order,” Gabe said, raising one hand. “If you’re counting on my bloodline to balance this out, there’s no magic in hethelax heritage.”

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Agasti replied. “There is incredible magic in hethelax heritage, it is simply not in a form you can wield to your own ends. But that bloodline insulates you from infernal power, that is its entire point. The most potent demonic magic is that which grants resistance to infernal corruption, and this is the reason holy summoning as a field even exists: none of those magics can be extricated from their sources, only used as they are. The defenses of such as the Rhaazke, the Vanislaad and the hethelaxi are inimitable and inseparable from the beings imbued with them. Since your specific demon bloodline, Gabriel, is prone to preserve balance and protect you from corruption, I think it will be a help. But that is the lesser consideration. I believe the key to pulling out the key fragment is your scythe.”

“I’m getting good mileage from this thing lately,” Gabe said agreeably, pulling the wand from inside his coat and extending it to full scythe form. “I suspect you’re right, now you mention it. We already know it can cut dimensional barriers.”

“Which makes even more sense, now that we know it originally belonged to a valkyrie,” Trissiny added. “They can slice Vanislaads right out of this dimension with those weapons.”

“It will be a matter of examining the original working, what remains of it,” Agasti said, “and severing very specific flows of magic. I believe if you are properly informed, and careful, you should be able to collapse the event in the direction we want, causing it to disintegrate and separate the two dimensions again. I will provide the most detailed instructions I can, and your sword will be most helpful; she was made specifically to serve as a guide and assistant in complex magical workings.”

“Just for perspective,” Ariel said, “you are proposing to send a frankly mediocre enchanting student to perform surgery with a farm implement while straddling a nascent dimensional rift.”

“That was a little melodramatic, but not strictly wrong,” Trissiny added. “Let me just point out that not doing this is an option on the table. Right now that thing is stable. Would it be so terrible to leave it that way? I think we’ve established that Vesk doesn’t actually need his trinket, and I’m not sure that our character development or whatever is worth taking risks with Gabe’s life and a potential new hellgate.”

“She’s right,” Toby agreed, his eyes on Gabriel now. “Gabe… This is going to go badly, I know it. It’s like you said, this is the part of the story where the disaster falls.”

“And how many times are we going to find ourselves on the cusp of an unpredictable disaster and be able to predict it?” Gabriel countered. “Guys, this is what paladins are for: taking risks, and righting wrongs. Who knows how long that thing can remain balanced? Vesk and his key aside, this seems like exactly the sort of business we were called to address. Yes, it’s dangerous and we could all die. None of us signed up without knowing that.”

Trissiny bit her lip, saying nothing. Toby heaved a sigh, then reached into his own pocket and withdrew the twisted glass bottle Salyrene had given him. “All right. If you are going into that thing, you’re taking this with you.”

“Hey, I’m the one with the magic scythe and the talking sword and the invincible demon blood,” Gabriel said, grinning. “Don’t you think I should leave some advantages for the rest of you?”

“Take the bottle,” Toby snapped, pushing it against his chest until Gabriel obeyed. “It’s just basic sense, Gabe. If something—when something goes wrong, you’ll need to be the one with access to additional support.”

“I confess I am having second thoughts about this, myself,” Agasti said worriedly. “I hadn’t dwelled on it, but as you say, Vesk’s hand on these affairs is ominous. If this were a story…”

“If it were a story,” Gabriel interrupted while tucking the bottle away in his pocket, “a paladin wouldn’t hesitate to head into danger, not if it meant banishing evil from the world. So, since I am terrified shitless myself here and holding on by a thread, let’s please stop jabbering about that and get down to the practicalities.”

“Once again, Gabe,” Trissiny said, “you don’t have to—”

“We’re all protagonists here,” he interrupted. “You keep that in mind. Just because I’ll be the one going into danger doesn’t mean you two don’t have a part to play. We can’t back down, guys, not now. If there’s going to be a disaster, let it be in this peaceful little backwater that nobody knows about so we can learn the lesson now. Otherwise, you know damn well it’ll happen when something major is hanging in the balance.”

“We’re not going to be working for Vesk forever,” she pointed out. “Don’t get too used to working on story logic, and definitely don’t try to apply it to the future!”

“But we’re going to be paladins, and we’re going to make mistakes. As people keep reminding me, learning from your mistakes is how you get better at…anything.” He managed a smile, almost successfully hiding the nerves preying on him, and turned to the warlock. “So, Mortimer, what’s the plan?”

The plan involved a great deal of tense waiting, from their side.

Agasti sat cross-legged in the center of a sprawling ritual circle, his cane driven into the ground in front of him and his eyes fixed on the orb at its head. Flickers of flame extended forward from the subtly glowing glyphs and lines surrounding him, outlining the path into the temple Gabriel had taken. Unlike arcane and fae circles, which were inscribed with charged materials, he had simply burned the pattern right into the ground.

Both revenants hung back, at the warlock’s orders, hovering about the carriage. They clearly didn’t like leaving him alone, but he had insisted that the proximity of more demons would imperil the extremely delicate balance he and Gabriel had to maintain.

Toby kept a balance of his own standing upright with his hands folded behind him, gazing blank-faced at the temple. It was an aspect that might have appeared callous and disinterested to an observer who did not recognize meditative practice in action. Trissiny, who was also schooled in meditation, preferred to pace.

“Do you sense anything?” she asked, her course bringing her up behind Toby.

He shook his head mutely.

“…he’ll be fine,” she said to herself. “Gabe’s resourceful. It’s not like a hellgate would suck him in, if it turns into that. The backlash of infernal energy wouldn’t hurt him, anyway.”

“He’s doing well,” Agasti said suddenly, not looking up from the crystal ball before him. “Careful, little cuts. Clearly he’s used to doing precision work. The sword is causing me to have to exert a little extra effort…”

“The sword?” Trissiny rounded on him. “What’s wrong? Does he need help?”

“No, no,” the warlock said tersely. “Ariel’s helping him detect the flows of infernal magic, he can’t see them directly. The infernal is reacting to her own arcane emissions. Very minor variables, nothing I can’t compensate for.”

She drew in a deep breath, nodded, and resumed pacing.

“I think I see what he meant,” Toby said suddenly. His voice was very quiet, almost a whisper, but Trissiny instantly turned and came back to rejoin him. “About us having a part to play in this.”

“Yeah, I feel real useful out here,” she muttered.

“Story logic,” he said, eyes still fixed on the temple in which Gabriel was carefully making incisions in reality. “As people, we contribute nothing to this. As characters…”

“I refuse to understand Vesk’s perspective on this, Toby. It’s insultingly nonsensical.”

“There’s nobody in the world who matters more to me,” Toby said quietly. “The way of peace discourages attachments. Not forbids; Omnu is a god of life and warmth, too, and people can’t live without having bonds. But… I grew up an orphan, trained as a monk, became a paladin. It’s a lonely path. The monks tried to separate me from Gabe, too, but I put my foot down.”

“Good,” she said. “You both needed that friendship.”

“I see it clearly now, suddenly,” he whispered. “Somehow in all the trouble we’ve gotten into, I’ve never had to just stand here and watch Gabriel risk his life. It’s like looking at this relationship from the outside. I don’t know what would happen to me if something broke that bond.”

“If this really were a story,” she said nervously, “you should really not be talking like that. It’s just tempting fate. Aggressively.”

“I was already thinking it,” he said with a minute shrug. “Damage done, narratively speaking. Gods, I’m already tired of thinking that way, I can’t wait to be out from under Vesk’s thumb.”

“I hear that,” she replied fervently.

“The realization just made me wonder,” he said softly. “If what we’re risking out here is what Gabriel means to us… What is he to you?”

The wind picked up faintly, hardly enough to disturb her hair; just the slightest whisper of breath, as if to emphasize the silence which fell. There was nothing said for a time, and they both stared at the temple, waiting.

“My conscience,” she said suddenly in the quiet, and Toby finally broke his poise, turning to her with a look of surprise.

“Wait,” Agasti said, frowning. “Something is wrong.”

“Here it is,” Trissiny growled, extending her arm.

Toby grabbed her wrist. “Don’t! Summoning your sword is divine magic, you could upset the whole thing.”

She bared her teeth in a snarl at the unfairness of it all, but nodded.

“Gabriel, cease that,” Agasti said urgently. “Get out of there, please, there’s an additional influence at work.”

“Influence?” Trissiny asked sharply.

“Gabriel!” The warlock’s frown deepened, and finally he lifted his eyes from the crystal. “I’m not getting through, the connection is fraying. GABRIEL!” He finally raised his voice, shouting at the temple. “GET BACK HERE!”

“What is happening?” Trissiny demanded.

“Someone else is trying to intervene,” Agasti snapped, “from the other side. He is on the very cusp of disentangling the dimensions, but— There’s no time, call to him!”

“GABRIEL!” Toby roared, projecting powerfully from the diaphragm.

Trissiny actually charged forward, ignoring Agasti’s warning. As she came abreast of the place where the fire-tracks from the spell circle petered out, however, her divine shield flared alight unbidden, sparking and putting off a corona as if it were under attack from all sides. Trissiny herself slammed to a stop, staggering backward.

Gabe appeared in the temple’s broken door, his coat flaring behind him as he pelted full tilt toward them. Barely had he crossed the threshold, however, when the entire world flipped.

From a mortal perspective, it was a powerfully confusing thing to behold. That one fragment of creation changed in a way that called to mind a thing being turned upside-down, or backward, or perhaps inside-out. What actually moved, however, didn’t move at all physically, but simply transposed itself with a piece of…something else. Just being close enough to observe it brought waves of vertigo.

But whatever the phenomenon, the result was obvious. When the effect collapsed, the dimensions had re-aligned, but instead of the meadow and the temple, they were now staring at a patch of hard reddish stone, marred by outcroppings of jagged obsidian. The mortal and infernal planes had separated, all right, but in that place where they had been merged, each piece was now on the wrong side.

He skidded to a stop, tucking the mithril fragment into his pocket and raising the scythe in his other hand. Beyond the little meadow, where the world had once been, there was now a blasted scape of stone, thorns, and towers of what looked like bone. The sky was a sulfurous yellow, and the air, notably hotter than even the Jendi summer afternoon, stank of brimstone.

More immediately, standing all around the circle in which the forsaken temple stood, were demons. Dozens of them, all staring hungrily at him.

The Hand of Vidius braced his feet, hefted his scythe, and readied himself for whatever came next.

“Well, I’ve Arquin’d myself good and proper this time.”

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