Shadeslayer (Pharim War Book 7) Read online

  Balud raised an eyebrow. “You’re talking like you’re not going to be here.”

  Jez glanced over his shoulder at Osmund and Lina before looking back to the chancellor. “We won’t be.”

  “We won’t?” Osmund’s voice drifted from behind.

  Jez shook his head. “I’ve tried leading an army, and you know what? I’m not good at it.”

  “That’s only because you lack experience,” Fina said.

  Jez looked in the direction of the capital, though the trees blocked his view. He half expected demons to jump out at him, but of course none did. He spoke softly. “This isn’t just a war, Master Fina. The whole world is at stake. There isn’t time for me to get experience, but what I can do is fight demons.”

  Lina stepped up next to him, standing so close that her robes brushed against his. “What are we going to do, Jez?”

  “We’re going to get into Rumar and start taking out Sharim’s summoning circles.”

  Osmund groaned, but he didn’t do a good job of concealing his smile. “Not another one of your plans.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Jez suspected Sharim had defenses that would prevent him from entering the city from below. Jez had moved through the earth too often for his enemy to be unaware of the ability. Similarly, there would almost certainly be wards against illusion that would stop them from using Lina’s magic to enter undetected. Sharim had proven himself to be a master of subtlety and had no doubt considered a hundred ways Jez might sneak in. However, a brazen attack might be exactly what they needed to get in.

  “Jez,” Ziary said in a voice that carried far more fear than Osmund normally showed in his transformed state, “are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “They’ll never expect it.” He had to shout to be heard over the rushing wind.

  “That's because no one sane would ever try it.”

  They were flying nearly a mile above the city, with Jez holding Lina in one arm. They were so high that Osmund had to craft special workings to keep them warm and the air thick enough to breathe. At this distance, even the keep seemed like little more than a toy, and they could only make out the vaguest movement. There was a slight glimmer in one spot. It could’ve been just a trick of the light, or it might have been one of the summoning circles calling another demon. Jez focused on it and tucked his wings and dove.

  The ground rushed up at them at a terrifying pace. Jez held his sword pointed down. They were more than three-quarters of the way to the city before a bat demon saw them and cried out an alarm, but by that point, they were going too fast for even demons to react to. Jez’s sword tore through a magma demon. The creature let out a deafening roar before its cry went silent, but it was already behind Jez, and he didn’t see its destruction. He barely even felt the heat.

  There was a sound like shattering glass as they crashed through whatever ward Sharim had in place. They were going too fast and would never be able to pull up in time to avoid hitting the ground, but that had never been the plan. Jez enveloped himself and Ziary in a bubble of terra magic. He had never been able to be subtle with that particular school of magic, but over the years, he had developed a few tricks. They passed through the earth, right in the center of the summoning circle, as if it were made of water. He sent out a surge of power before he had gone out of range, disrupting the runes of the circle.

  They were still moving downward at an incredible speed, but using both his wings and terra magic, they slowed. As they reached a more manageable pace, he sensed the other edge of Sharim’s ward before them. He’d been right. The human demon had encircled the entire city. Jez turned in the earth before he reached the ward and headed up.

  He directed them to a small, isolated room whose only way in or out was a worn wooden door that led to a back alley. They came up through the dirt floor. It was cramped and dirty. Even the smell of demonic energy in the air didn’t quite overpower the scent of old sweat that the previous inhabitants had left behind. Lina let out a gasping breath and tore away from him. It took her a few seconds to regain her composure.

  “That was...” She shivered. “It was like I could feel the earth sliding through my body.”

  Jez nodded. “It takes a while to get used to.” He turned to Ziary. “Are you all right?”

  “It wasn’t pleasant, but I’ll be fine.” He looked around. “This is that same building we were in before, wasn’t it? The last time we were in the city hiding from Sharim.”

  Jez nodded. “It was easier to go to a place I’ve been to, and I didn’t think the keep was the best idea.”

  “How long do you think it’ll be before they find us?” Lina asked. Her voice had steadied, but she still looked a little green.

  “Hopefully, they won’t be able to. I don’t think I left a trail they can follow, and Sharim never knew about this place.”

  “But hasn’t he been in your mind a couple of times?” Ziary asked.

  “Well, yes, but he wasn’t digging for random memories, and I haven’t thought about this place in years.”

  Ziary nodded. “Still, we should probably get out of here. Lina?”

  Lina nodded and waved a hand. Ziary shimmered, and his form became like that of a chezamut. Lina became a wolf-like demon, and Jez knew his own body had also taken up a demonic visage. He would’ve preferred it if they could’ve moved unseen, but in their transformed state, Jez and Osmund had too much power for Lina to hide entirely, so they had to settle for wearing an illusionary disguise as they went outside.

  Demons crowded the street. Much of the time, they seemed to be patrolling, though almost as often, they just wandered aimlessly. Sometimes, demons fought each other in what appeared to be meaningless combat. The type didn’t matter either. Chezamuts fought each other as often as sidens or other demons. Jez and his friends got out of the way where they could do it without seeming weak. When they couldn’t, Jez would unleash a binding. Lina had apparently disguised him as a hagine, and his workings attracted no great attention. In the end, their presence went relatively unnoticed. It didn’t take long for Jez to find the first summoning circle.

  It was centered on what had once been a guardhouse, though half of the building had been torn away. Every quarter hour, the circle would flare and three chezamuts would appear. The demons would then stalk into the city, in the direction of the closest wall, no doubt eager to attack as soon as anyone came close. They watched for a full hour, but there was no variation to the pattern. As soon as the latest summoned group had gone out of sight, Jez moved toward the circle, but Lina grabbed his arm.

  “This seems a little too easy. Where are the guards?”

  “They control this whole city,” Jez said. “Why would they need to set guards?”

  Though the illusion covered her face, he could practically see her rolling her eyes. “Because Sharim has been one step ahead of us this whole time, and we didn’t exactly come in quietly. Jez, they know why where here, and they’d be idiots if they didn’t guess what we were doing.”

  Jez considered for a second before nodding. “You’re probably right. Do you sense any illusions?”

  Lina closed her eyes but opened them again after a moment. “Nothing.”

  Jez placed a hand on the ground and sent his awareness into the earth, searching for anything that might lie beneath the surface, but he found nothing.

  “There could be something woven into the working itself,” Ziary said. “We’ve been caught by that often enough.”

  “I’ve never been able to detect that until it was too late.” Jez eyed Ziary and Lina. “Why don’t you two go about a hundred yards that way?”

  Ziary’s eyes blazed. “Jez, we’re not going to let you be the bait.”

  Jez closed his eyes and crafted half a dozen protective wards around himself. It would take too much power to keep them up for more than a few seconds, but that should be all he needed. “I’m not bait. You’re my backup. You’d better go before you get caught up in whatever it is.”

&n
bsp; He could feel Lina glaring at him, but he kept his attention locked on the circle. It was linked to a power source, most likely Sharim himself. There was a companion working to it as well, one that weakened some sort of defensive ward. His eyes went wide. Of course that’s how it would have to work. Between touched on all places. That was how they’d been able to get from Randak to Rumar in a matter of seconds, but it also touched all realms. One could not go from one realm to another without passing first through Between. Normally, the traveler passed through it so fast they didn’t even notice, but they always had to pass through it. If Sharim had really cut the city off from Between, he wouldn’t have been able to summon anything. Instead, he had crafted secondary workings to carve a hole through his barrier with Between, which, in turn, brought the demons through. That meant Jez didn’t need to disrupt the circle. He just needed to dismantle the weakening working.

  Jez reached for it. The strands of it were delicate, interwoven with the summoning circle itself. It accomplished its purpose more through complex weaving than raw power. In fact, there was a limit to how much power it could hold. Jez sent a surge of energy into the working. The runes forming it didn’t so much as glow. They simply puffed out of existence just as the chains wrapped themselves around Jez.

  His power vanished, and his form shrank to that of a human as his wards faded. He tried to draw on Luntayary’s power, but it would not come. The weight of the demon settled on him, and his legs gave out. He didn’t hit the ground though. Instead, the chains wound around each other, forming a pair of legs. Others clanked together above him. Jez didn’t have to see the creature to know what form it had taken on. He stopped trying to grasp his power. Not even a pharim lord would be able to do that in his situation. The chains would have formed into a vaguely humanoid shape, binding his power as surely as it bound his body. No doubt it would deliver him to Sharim. At least it would try.

  Ziary dove out of the sky, a streak of red flame. Before he reached Jez’s captor, however, a circle on a nearby wall glowed, and another shariek leaped out of it. Its chains spread wide, but it passed right through Ziary, who continued to descend. For a moment, Jez was shocked. Ziary’s sword passed through the demon with no effect before the limaph vanished. Then, a ball of scarlet flame shot into the wall that held the shariek’s circle. The circle flared up as scarlet energy ran through it. Pieces of it burned away, and the whole circle went dark. The real Ziary streaked down from the roof of a nearby building and impaled the demon that had tried to imprison his illusion. He didn’t wait to see it die before turning on the one that held Jez. Trapped as he was, Jez didn’t see the blow that banished the demon. The chains around him rusted and fell away before its pieces evaporated. After a few seconds, he was free. He took several deep breaths.

  “Good thinking with the illusion.”

  Ziary shrugged. “We figured that if we followed your plan, something would go horribly wrong, so we improvised.”

  Jez groaned as he resumed Luntayary’s form. “You know you’re not funny.” Ziary grinned, but Jez went on. “We should get out of here. Someone will have noticed that. I don’t think it can be repaired without taking the whole thing down and building it back up from scratch, but we still shouldn’t be here when whoever comes to fix it arrives.”

  Ziary nodded. “On to the next one?”

  Jez shook his head. “Back to the room. We’ll hold up there for the next little while.” He turned to Lina. “You can hide us a lot better if we’re not moving, right?”

  “Yes,” Lina said, “but why?”

  “Because I think I figured out a way to shut down all the summoning circles at once.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Jez sat in the silence of the cramped single room home. It smelled of old sweat and unwashed clothes, and the three of them could hardly move around without bumping into each other. Lina maintained an illusion intended to stop anyone from detecting them with either the five natural senses or the seven associated with the seven dominions. Ziary stood ready to attack in case the misdirection failed. Jez sat in the middle of the room with his eyes closed. His protective senses reached out for the ward shielding the city from Between.

  It wasn’t difficult to find. A working that large and that powerful could not be easily hidden. His power ran along its strands, searching. It only took him a few seconds to find the flaw. It was a wrinkling in the strands of the working, so subtle that he might have missed it if he hadn’t known precisely what he was looking for. It was how the summoning circles worked. That wrinkle, if exploited, could allow one to come through the barrier. If Jez had understood it better, he might have been able to use this working to his own ends, to transport his army into the city. He couldn’t do that without a lot more study, but he could, at least, deny his enemy its use.

  His power flowed into the flaw. The wrinkle itself was a small thing when compared with the rest of the working, but that was like saying a mountain stream was small compared to the mountain. It still flowed throughout the working, and he had to fill every inch of it. His power thinned as it stretched out. He drew more of Luntayary, and a dim part of his mind recognized Lina telling him that he was holding too much magic to hide for long.

  “Well now, what is this? You must be Jezreel.”

  The voice came from nowhere, and it took him a second to realize he had heard it in his mind instead of his ears. He tried to pull back his power, but it held fast. He struggled to open his eyes, but his body wouldn’t respond. A creature, seeming to be a man made of smoke, materialized in the darkness of his closed eyes. It smiled, though how Jez could tell that, he had no idea. A wave of cold washed over him.

  “You’re trying to interfere with our working, aren’t you?”

  “Your working?”

  The being waved his hand, and suddenly, what Jez had assumed was darkness, resolved itself into smoke that stretched as far as he could see. He could just make out the vague outlines of buildings scattered around. In the distance stood an outline that could only be Rumar Keep, and Jez realized he was seeing smoke blanketing the city. Angry whispers, too soft for him to hear what they were saying, sprung from the silence. An image popped into Jez’s mind of a great fog that had surrounded him and reached into his mouth to kill him from the inside. That had been in the abyss, where demons were stronger, and their forms were more terrifying. His insides started to burn, though he told himself it was only his imagination. He had never been able to figure out what kind of demon that had been, but he had an uncomfortable feeling it was of the same kind as this.

  “Well, naturally I can’t allow you to do that,” the demon said in a voice so deep Jez could practically feel the air vibrating against his skin. “Fortunately, you have been kind enough to open your mind to us.” It turned into fog and surrounded him. It closed in on him, but a shimmering blue wall appeared around his head. The creature drew back and hissed.

  “Your mind is shielded.”

  “My mind?” It made sense. This obviously wasn’t a physical manifestation. It was all in his mind, which was protected by powerful mental wards. There were only a couple of reasons a demon would try to enter into him in this fashion. The first was to pull information out of his mind. The second was to take control of him entirely. Jez lunged forward, drawing on Luntayary to summon his crystal sword.

  Nothing happened.

  It was like there was a wall in the way. He passed through the demon, his mental wards flaring brightly as smoky tendrils tried to warp around his head. The demon laughed, and all those around them echoed the sound. It would’ve made the hairs on the back of Jez’s neck stand on end if he’d had them in this place.

  “Foolish mortal. We are not in your mind, we are in ours and here, I can bar you from your power. Your mental wards may hold us off for a time, but not for long. If you had not tried to alter a working made from our bodies, we never would’ve had this opportunity.” Its head materialized just long enough to nod to Jez and vanished a second later. “I wonder ho
w Andera will reward me when I bring his greatest enemy as a puppet.”

  Pressure exploded against Jez’s wards as a legion of demons crashed against them. Again and again, he tried to summon his sword or to call some other working to battle the demons, but in this alien place, his power may as well not exist.

  His wards cracked, and he directed more power into them, and to his relief, the power came. Even so, it was only a matter of time. He tried to cry out. Lina was skilled in mental magic. If he could alert her, she might be able to help, but his body remained stubbornly frozen. He could feel her shaking him. He dared to hope. If she would only look into his mind...

  His wards shattered. Most of the fog retreated, all except for the first bit, the part that comprised the demon that had spoken to him. It floated toward him. Jez tried to back up, but not only was there nowhere to go, there was no ground or air for him to push against. He doubted even wings would’ve been of any use here. He was completely frozen, unable to do anything as the demon streamed into his nose and mouth.

  Luntayary’s mind had been separated from Jez’s by Sariel himself. When Sharim had taken the Academy, Sariel had weakened the barrier, allowing Jez to call Luntayary forth but at a terrible price. He wouldn’t be able to pull the pharim back. Unless Luntayary surrendered control of his own free will, Jez’s consciousness would simply be set aside, overwhelmed by a mind millennia older than his own. When the choice was being controlled by a pharim or by a demon, however, only a fool would choose the latter.

  He reached inside of himself to open the door and allow the pharim in, but it would not budge. He had waited too long. The demon had complete control.

  CHAPTER 15

  The world rushed back into focus. When Jez had lost control to Luntayary years before, his mind had been subsumed and had joined with the pharim’s, as a drop of water joining with the ocean. He had lost himself. This time, he knew exactly what he was doing. His wings stretched out, knocking his friends away. Lina looked at him in confusion. His arm slashed, his sword appearing in mid swing. Desperately, Jez tried to stop, but he had become a mere observer in his own body.