They didn’t have long. Three people and a comatose dragonoid made noise, left tracks, and otherwise made it extremely easy for others to find them. They couldn’t move with any real haste. There was no easy way of finding their allies.
They were, in short, in a deep pit of shit.
Leda followed along, trailing just behind the human and the beastman. She kept glancing around, expecting a platoon of enemy soldiers to pop out from behind the trees. At the same time, she tried to rack her mind for any spell that might help their situation. First on her mind were offensive and defensive spells. Electro Deus and Incendiary Explosio. Desidia was supposed to make others feel like they were moving through a vat of sticky syrup, slowing them down, but she needed a line of sight for that. She also wasn’t sure how many it could affect. There was another spell Arkk had taught her, one that made people move fast, but the words for the incantation just wouldn’t come to her stressed mind. Longer spells were right out. It was a wonder that she had remembered Flesh Weaving. They just had too many words. Like, she knew Zullie had some spell or ritual that could lessen the weight of objects—that would help with Priscilla immensely—but Leda could only remember the first three words of twenty or so.
There had to be a better way. There had to be something she could do.
Leda scowled as she trudged through the forest, wondering what Arkk would do in her situation.
He wouldn’t have forgotten spells, first of all. Arkk was dedicated to his studies. Zullie knew more and could probably have created a shoddy spell on the fly, but that was only because she had been working with magic since she was little. Leda hadn’t paid enough attention. She had been so enamored with the magic crackling under her fingertips that she had felt practically invincible.
Now, she had all that magic but nothing to do with it.
So what would Arkk manage in her situation assuming he also didn’t know a wide variety of spells?
He had the fortress. Walking Fortress Al-Lavik, he called it. Leda hadn’t named her tower—Al-Mir, Al-Lavik… she didn’t really get his naming conventions. But Elmshadow was a distance away. It would ruin his underground tunnels, disconnecting the tower from them, but he would have immediate reinforcements and a place of safety. Once it moved close enough, he could teleport straight to it. Leda could teleport herself and the others as well as whatever subordinate she was to Arkk, but she couldn’t make the tower move closer.
Leda didn’t have Walking Fortress Al-Lavik. Her tower was out in the middle of nowhere, awaiting orders to charge into Evestani. Even though she could peer through its halls and direct her shadow servants, it was too far to be of any use.
Or was it?
It wouldn’t arrive here in any appreciable amount of time, but it did give her a quick idea.
“Slave Natum,” she whispered, waving her hand.
The shadows around the forest came alive, swirling and twisting to her fingers. It took longer than the bubbling masses of Arkk’s minions to form up but a shadow coalescing into a vaguely humanoid form was far less nauseating. As soon as the shadow could move, Leda gave it a quick mental command, and off it went.
It trudged through the bushes and trees, moving roughly north-east. Leda’s group was heading almost directly east, a bit south. Unlike her and her companions, the servant didn’t try to hide its trail. Her shadow servants weren’t all that great at digging through rock and stone—as far as she could tell, fortresses granted by the Lady Shadows were all designed to be above ground—but they could obliterate softer materials with ease.
Leda hopped forward, quickly catching up with Joanne and Kevin. The former shot her a questioning look.
“It’ll make a trail for our pursuers to follow,” Leda whispered. As soon as she spoke, a second idea popped into her head. “And once far enough from us, it’ll cause a ruckus to draw attention in case they don’t fall for it.”
The look Joanne regarded her with was… probably approving. The human didn’t smile or anything, but she gave a curt nod of her head. “Got any other tricks?”
“I’m trying to think of more…”
“It’d be nice if you could get one of those teleportation rituals.”
Leda thought a moment. She didn’t know the ritual, but through her link to her tower, she could see one—the one they used to transport people and supplies to her tower. A brief spot of hope welled up in Leda as she thought to copy it. The enemy could likely use them as well, but if they could get to reinforcements first, they could turn around and ambush anyone who came out of the ritual. Or she could have a servant destroy it after they left. Arkk had used that trick before.
Just as she started looking around for a clear patch of ground to scribe the circle into, a thought occurred to her.
All the teleportation rituals were slightly different. The base design was the same, but they had coordinate arrays to determine where the exit would end up. Leda didn’t know how to determine the exit point or even which parts of the circle were the coordinate array.
The ritual circle in her tower exited east of her tower, further into the Duchy.
If she copied the one in her tower exactly, would it also exit to the east, toward Elmshadow? Or, since her tower was to the west, would it point in the other direction? That was dangerous. If it worked like that, using it might drop them off in the middle of the enemy base. Or it might not work at all if it tried to go to the exact spot her tower’s ritual exited, since it was too far away. Or it might kill them if they tried to use it for the exact same reason.
Leda didn’t know enough about the teleportation ritual.
She could… experiment? Summoning a servant worked, so she could send one through to see where it ended up. Arkk liked to test things on his lesser servants too.
Leda glanced back, peering through the forest. The glowstone lights in the distance were closer now. Would they give up ever? Or chase them all the way to Elmshadow?
“I might be able to. It might be a waste of time,” Leda said, honestly unsure which case it would be. “But let’s move on foot for now. Get away from here and hope the decoy does its job. That’ll buy us some time to draw out the circle.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Kevin said as the two resumed their careful walk.
Leda felt a little spark of elation light up in her chest. “It does, doesn’t it,” she murmured, more to herself than anyone else.
She made a plan. A real plan. One that might even have a chance at succeeding.
And she wasn’t done yet. Realizing that she could look in and copy the teleportation ritual from her fortress reminded her that she could look into anywhere in her fortress. There weren’t as many books in it as there were at Fortress Al-Mir, but Leda had some. All it took was ordering one of the shadow servants to open a book to a page and she could look down at it and study.
They would get out of this mess. She would get them out of this mess.
A small, hopeful smile spread across Leda’s face.
The false-Arkk leaned in close, forcing the real Arkk to turn his head aside. Pinned as he was, unable to struggle against the strength of the creature, he wasn’t able to do much else besides run through a list of spells in the back of his mind. He only needed to break the creature’s hold for an instant and he would be able to teleport again.
“Bankorok Pargon Sant—”
The false-Arkk opened his mouth wide. Too wide. A thin black tongue darted out, more like a gorgon’s tongue than Arkk’s—or a segmented worm. It lashed against Arkk’s cheek with the crack of a whip. He felt a stinging burn trace a narrow line from his ear to the corner of his eye. A spray of blue-green motes of magic surged from the cut, drifting through the air before dissipating into the aether.
The demon—for what else could it be—smacked his lips repeatedly, as if assessing a new flavor. “Spicy,” he said in Arkk’s voice. “A little tingle on the tongue. You enjoy lightning a bit much, hm? Over reliant on it, I’d say.”
Arkk barely heard his copy’s words.
Something was wrong. Something within. It was like a door slammed shut in his face, like he walked behind a large stack of hay. The Heart still beat in both his fortresses, but they were somehow muted, soft and distant. In a panic, he tried to teleport a simple pen from one side of his desk to the other—he could still see his territory, but it was through a hazy fog. The teleport felt slow. The normally instantaneous movement had to pass through a vat of honey before it could reach the other side.
“That’s it!” False-Arkk laughed. “That’s the face I wanted to see.”
In a feat of acrobatics, False-Arkk flipped backwards, landing on his feet to Arkk’s side.
The moment he was released, Arkk tried to teleport himself. Just like with the pen, it was slow and sluggish, as if his feet were trapped inside a thick layer of cold molasses. His counterpart simply reached out and grabbed him, ripping him out of the malformed teleport, throwing him back to the floor.
“You may or may not have come to this conclusion already, but allow me to clear up any lingering doubts. I am a demon.”
“Contracted to Prince Cedric.”
The Arkk in front of Arkk put on a sly grin. “You aren’t as foolish as you look.”
Arkk didn’t take his eyes off the copy of himself. Although he had guessed that already, hearing the confirmation brought an irritated twitch to his eye. The fact that a demon had been summoned after all meant there was a serious flaw somewhere in his methods of information gathering. If he had missed the Prince summoning a Light-damned demon, who knew what else slipped by.
In retrospect, this was what the Prince had been warning him about during their meeting. He hadn’t said it directly. At the time, Arkk had thought that he simply didn’t want his men engaging in a mutiny that would end with half of them dead while Evestani was knocking on the door.
Fixing the information network was a problem for future-Arkk. Present-Arkk had a demon standing over him. A situation ever-so-slightly higher on his list of problems to deal with.
Arkk rolled off to the side, away from the demon. Gingerly, as he pushed himself up to his feet, he touched at the spot on his cheek where the demon had licked him—or lashed him. His fingers came away moist, slick with blood. There was something in the blood. A faint green glow that sparkled with tiny motes of magic.
“What have you done to me?”
“Just had a little taste. Blood is well and good but creatures like you,” the demon grinned. “More magic than flesh… I can’t tell you how much I’ve been suppressing my cravings.”
The demon leaped at Arkk, mouth opening beyond the capabilities of a human. And it just kept going from there, like a creature within were trying to escape.
Arkk stumbled to the side. The demon went flying past him, reforming into Arkk once on the ground again. Arkk clenched his teeth. His legs and arms felt slow and sluggish. Poison? Had he been poisoned? No magic. Weakened constitution.
He pulled out a thin black dagger from a sheath on his back. Even without knowing that the Prince had summoned a demon, they had still been preparing and walking around without one of the products of their research felt irresponsible at best. However, all their creations required magic to activate.
His magic wasn’t gone, just diminished. The thumping beats of the Heart, muted though they were, were slowly increasing in force.
He brandished the blade, holding it in front of him as he eyed his counterpart.
That he still wasn’t dead was suspect. The demon just stared at him, grinning wide. His copied red eyes didn’t even flick down toward the dagger. Arkk mirrored each step the false-Arkk took with a step backward.
“What do you want?”
That segmented tongue flicked out of the demon’s mouth again, though with the distance between them, it didn’t come close to Arkk. “Simply to squeeze every last drop of magic from your blood and lick it from my fingers.”
It wasn’t doing a particularly good job of that. Was it really just playing with its food? Or was there something more going on? Why was he still alive at all? With Kia and Claire out of action and his magic on the fritz, why wasn’t he dead? Why the dialog? Why pin him to the floor? Why admit what it was?
“Come on then,” Arkk said, shifting his stance as an idea wormed its way into the back of his mind. “If you think you can, do it.”
“Confidence. Almost as enjoyable as magic.”
The demon lunged again.
Arkk stood upright, lowering the dagger. No matter how much of his weakened magic he shoved it into it, it remained stubbornly inert. Hardly any different than a simple metal blade. He stood straight, not even bothering to dodge.
In the last few months, Arkk had done research. He had spoken with Abbess Hannah, Vezta, Sylvara, and just about everyone else who might know anything about demons. They were creatures from another realm, somewhat like the denizens of the Underworld, the Necropolis, or any other world he had visited lately, except they allegedly lacked a god. It hadn’t always been like that, but the people of their realm had somehow killed their god, all of them gaining a sliver of that power in exchange. All of which, for all Arkk knew, was hearsay with little basis in reality.
What wasn’t hearsay was how demons typically functioned. They could be summoned through a complex ritual involving the sacrifice of a varying number of people. The exact number depended on the magical strength of the sacrifices. Upon being summoned, a properly designed ritual would entrap the demon until a contract could be formed. An improperly designed ritual might lead to a rogue demon—a situation in which several teams of inquisitors would be called in to deal with.
Contracts were surprisingly simple, all things considered. A verbal agreement between the summoner and the demon, usually following a negotiation. Demons were said to be master wordsmiths but they couldn’t lie during the contract process. Whether that was some quirk of their species, a compulsion from their dead god, or magic interwoven into the ritual circle wasn’t known to anyone Arkk had asked.
Once an agreement formed, the circle would release the demon or, in the case no agreement could be made, banish them.
The demon crashed into Arkk. Its maw, jutting out from its mouth, snapped at Arkk’s throat as they both fell back to the ground. But it didn’t bite. It snarled at Arkk. It postured and posed. And, most of all, it looked… uncertain.
“You can’t, can you?” Arkk said, donning the demon’s former grin.
“You…”
“Let me guess… Can’t kill those who aren’t enemies of Cedric? You admitted to being his demon, trying to get me to see him as an enemy. Perhaps the wording is slightly different, but that’s the gist of your contract.”
All emotion vanished from the demon’s face. Since it was Arkk’s face, it looked almost like he had been knocked out, though his eyes were still open. It was just for a moment, but that sudden shift made Arkk think he was wrong about his guess, that whatever pleasure the false-Arkk had been taking from their little spar had run dry and he was simply going to snap his neck.
“Most don’t take so kindly to the one setting a demon on them,” the demon said.
“You don’t know that the Prince warned me of you. If he wished for me to die at your hands, he wouldn’t have done so.”
The reinforced fortress floor tile behind Arkk’s head shattered as the demon clenched its fist, crumpling it like it was a simple sheet of paper.
“He warned you about me,” the demon snarled through teeth clenched so tight they were starting to crack. A clawed, scaled hand grasped at Arkk’s face, skimming his skin. A few more hot streaks of pain crossed Arkk’s skin, but without that drain on his magic. More importantly, the demon was clearly trying and failing at crushing his head. “Bastard.”
Arkk remained still, even lessening his own smile. It was tough. The relief he felt—he had not been sure about that little gambit—was difficult to suppress. But he had confirmed what he needed. Antagonizing the demon further wouldn’t help.
Especially not as more plans started to form.
“You want magic, do you? Does it have to be mine?”
The demon snarled, maw all but ready to bite off Arkk’s face.
Leda wiped away a layer of sweat from her brow as she finalized the ritual circle that would hopefully take them closer to Elmshadow.
Joanne and Kevin stood guard, watching out for any sign that their pursuers hadn’t fallen for the decoy. Priscilla still hadn’t woken up, resting with a log as a pillow.
Leda couldn’t help but bite her lip. If this worked, it would be great. They would be home free. If it failed, they all would have done nothing but waste twenty minutes that they could have used putting more distance between themselves and danger. If it catastrophically failed, they could end up with a ritual circle directly to the enemy encampment, one that their enemy could use in reverse to appear right in their midst.
Leda gnawed at her lip.
Maybe it was best to drop this idea before it backfired terribly.
“Finished?” Joanne whispered. She had been growing increasingly nervous over the past several minutes. It wasn’t hard to see why.
The glowstones in the distance, although they seemed to be following the decoy’s trail, had come a hell of a lot closer.
“Priscilla first then? Get our injured out of here—”
“Servant first,” Leda interrupted before muttering the incantation to summon another mass of shadows. “Then one of you. Someone will have to move Priscilla away from the ritual circle after she goes through.”
Kevin and Joanne glanced at one another. They must have been good teammates because they both quickly nodded their heads. Without a word passing between them, Kevin stepped closer to the ritual circle.
The shadowy figure Leda summoned moved forward first, taking its place in the center of the circle. It moved carefully so as to not disturb the ritual circle. That was something they would have to be cautious about when it came time to move Priscilla into place.
Leda hesitated. Her fingers trembled. This could go very wrong or it could go very right. She glanced around, first to Kevin and his unreadable face, then to Joanne who tried to keep the pained grimace off her face even as she had been limping and pressing at her side the entire time. Her eyes came to a rest on Priscilla, still unconscious but still alive as her faint breaths misted the air around her face.
Leda didn’t know if the dragonoid would be alive for long. Her breathing wasn’t quite as strong as it had been earlier. The skin around her missing wing and arm was blotchy and blackened. The haphazard healing job Leda had done clearly wasn’t enough. She needed Hale.
She needed Hale soon.
“Okay,” Leda said, pressing her hands on the circle. Either it worked or it didn’t. That was a fifty-fifty chance, right? She just needed to get lucky. “Okay. Here we go.”
Pulsing her magic into the ritual circle made it flash. The servant vanished, teleported elsewhere, but Leda sat stunned. It wasn’t normally a bright flash. Here, in the dark, lightless forest, with her eyes accustomed to the dark, it might as well have been as bright as the sun.
Her eyes didn’t readjust instantly. She could barely see. Joanne swore somewhere to the side. Kevin hissed as well, hiding his face with his hands.
In the distance, Leda heard shouting carrying through the trees. Cries of alarm.
“Leda,” Joanne hissed. “I hope it fucking worked.”
“Just a second,” Leda said, shocked back into focusing on the task at hand. She closed her eyes and followed the link to the tower, then followed the link to the shadow servant. They weren’t in exact opposite directions. The servant was south and east. More south than east. Looking around it, it seemed to have cut into the side of a tree in its appearance, destroying a slim chunk of the trunk. But it was otherwise safe. Safe, not in the middle of the enemy encampment, and far away from here.
“Okay. Kevin!”
The spider beastman didn’t say a word. His spindly legs stepped right over the ritual circle’s delicate drawings and into the center. He didn’t bother waiting for Leda to activate the circle, choosing to push a little of his own magic into it.
He vanished with another blinding flash of light.
Joanne was already trying to get Priscilla up on her back. Without Kevin there to help, it wasn’t exactly an easy or fast task. Leda, tiny as she was, couldn’t help. The most she could do was help heft up Priscilla’s feet so they didn’t drag through the circle as Joanne maneuvered her into position.
Joanne didn’t bother setting Priscilla down nicely. She dropped the dragonoid like a sack of rotten potatoes.
Leda lacked the time or wherewithal to complain about the treatment of her friend. She slammed her hand into the ritual circle and, as soon as Joanne was out of the way, pulsed her magic.
“Okay,” Leda said, letting out a small sigh of relief at seeing Priscilla off to safety. “We have to wait until Kevin drags—”
Something slammed into the tree next to Leda, vibrating with a twang just above her head. She slowly looked up, gulping at the sight of the arrow that would have hit her head if she had been just a little bit taller. Her eyes dropped, looking in the direction the arrow had come from.
The glowstones weren’t just glowstones anymore. She could see people. Knights armored in black.
“Electro Deus,” she shouted, flinging a bolt of lightning through the trees. It struck an archer just as he drew back another arrow. “Electro Deus!”
Lightning crackled in both of Leda’s hands. She felt the magic flowing from her tower straight into her, filling her with power. It was almost enough to make her start laughing as she slung bolt after bolt at the armored knights. Although they usually crashed to the ground after being hit, they didn’t seem to stay down. Something about their armor just absorbed her lightning. But that hardly mattered.
“Try to get up after this,” Leda barked out with a nervous laugh that she just couldn’t help. The tension in her stomach released with the laugh, making her feel a little better. A little more confident. She brought both her hands together, sending out a continuous wave of unlimited power.
“Leda!” Joanne called from her back.
A quick glance at her shadowy servant with Kevin and Priscilla showed the all-clear. “Go,” Leda said, not stopping the flow of lighting. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Joanne looked like she wanted to argue. It looked like she wanted to grab Leda and throw her onto the ritual circle first. Her eyes roamed over the lightning and she shook her head. It was a bad idea to touch the lightning fairy.
A pulse of light signaled Joanne’s departure.
Cutting off the lightning, Leda turned and hurried back to the ritual circle. “Slave Natum,” she said, forming another shadowy servant.
This one would destroy the ritual circle as soon as she was gone, keeping these soldiers from following her.
“Electro Deus,” she shouted, flinging another lightning bolt over her shoulder. It was a blind shot, but it would hopefully keep them hunkered down for the short few seconds it would take Joanne to vacate the destination circle.
As soon as she saw the circle clear through her link with her other shadowy servant, Leda pulsed her magic into the ritual circle.
A fiery pain struck her back just as the bright light engulfed her.
Leda staggered out of the end circle. Joanne smiled at seeing her, a brief moment of joy at having successfully gotten out of that situation. The smile only lasted an instant before a look of horror crossed her face. She shouted something but it didn’t quite reach Leda’s ears.
Leda stumbled forward, feeling something warm run down her back and her front. She looked down, finding the sharpened point of an arrow sticking straight out of her chest.
Her knees hit the dirt. Joanne rushed over, grasping hold of her before she could fall forward into the dirt. She was trying to cast a spell. Kevin was too. But their faces were foggy and hazy.
Some part of Leda’s mind focused outward. The shadow servant she had left behind. It needed a job. What was it again?
Destroy the ritual circle.
That was it.
As it swept its shadowy arms over the ritual circle right in front of the armored knights, everything went dark.