Sorcha's Revolt
CHAPTER TWELVE - DELUGE

She turned from Vashta and hurried towards the western gate, trusting her feet to lead her while she let her awareness reach upward again into the echoes of the battle carried on the winds of sorcery. Three sorcerers she had detected at the start of the battle, with other lesser powers around them. Now, a fourth great power had revealed itself.

DeKellia had withdrawn from the lip of the gatehouse and turned his eyes towards the great pyramids of Silveneir, surmounted one by the Warmistress' palace and the other by the Temple of Iaran.

Power rose in him. Sorcha knew neither its nature nor its origin; it was utterly unlike any sorcery she had ever experienced. Vashta had warned her of the sorcerous might that DeKellia himself had denied. Now Sorcha felt, as real as gale-force wind blasting out from him, the gathering of the man's power, that needed no words or gestures of magic to make that will manifest.

And at DeKellia's will, the earth trembled. The tremor went on longer and deeper than any blast as yet unleashed by the Darian Warmaster. The walls of Silveneir shivered and cracked to their foundations. Towers and ramparts trembled and came slithering down in rubble from the walls to bury defenders and besiegers alike. Fissures appeared in the city streets as the sewers caved in, and from the depths there arose first a stench born upon an unclean fog, and then a distant howling that rose into the shrieking of the damned as a living tide of corruption burst up from the dark.

Sorcha saw it from on high with the eye of sorcery, but she was standing in the centre of the street when it happened. The earth shook and the cobbles beneath her feet gaped wide like a maw into the earth. She leapt aside just in time to avoid being swallowed, but in the next instant she was wreathed to the knees in the foul mist that seemed to caress her bare legs with oily ethereal fingers. Then something scurried past her foot, the first critter in a tide of rats that raced chittering around her feet in a living carpet of foetid fur.

Sorcha screamed in revulsion and ran, scampering through the horrid mass until she reached a stairway leading up to a second terrace of shopfronts above the lower main street. From this vantage, above the mist and the rodent horde, she saw larger, fouler creatures emerging from the riven sewers, and knew them for DeKellia's allies.

First came Akurites, huge misshapen things, twisted ogres birthed in the mind of a mad Warmaster slain long ago, remnants of the oldest wars between Daricia and wild westerly Uria. Behind these came their lesser cousins, horned Goro beastmen and shambling bear-like Wadwo, hybrids of distant Darian descent despised by their untainted progenitors. Behind and flanking these came an army of the damned, the beggars and lepers of Silveneir who lived in the alleys and drains of the affluent city, rising up in a ragged militia answering the call of anarchy.

Sorcha did not wait to see it all with her mortal eyes; the vision of the All Seeing Eye showed it to her in an instant even as she fled, running as fast as she could for the frontlines of the battle where she had last sensed DeSilva's numinous presence.

Behind her, the living damned that DeKellia had called to his aid rose up and overran the city. Panic ensued, people who had taken to their homes to await the outcome of the battle on the walls suddenly driven forth into the streets by an incursion from beneath the very foundations of Silveneir.

Physical terror vied with the psychic horror that threatened to overwhelm all other vision from the All Seeing Eye. Sorcha swayed dizzily and had to lean against the nearest wall, stumbling towards the city walls now but barely able to see or stand for the onslaught on her senses. Her tattoos still smouldered with green fire, and she saw, in her mind as clearly as mortal sight, the numinous beacons of sorcerers and heroes blazing brightly against the living shadows of the worst arisen denizens of the underworld.

To the south, a pillar of silver fire advanced upon Silveneir's smaller seaward gate. The power of the Warmaster flared up from the west and the earth shook again. Lightning stabbed down and shattered the towers of the southern gate; the portal fell and the silver warrior rode in unopposed to strike deep into the heart of Silveneir. With him rode fifty knights in shining mail, every man a fell-handed swordmaster: Daricia's elite and the knights of Avellar, with Grandmaster Kaldarsis riding at their head. Sorcha sensed his coming as if the Warmaster had struck a blow with a sword.

Then behind her arose a shadow dark enough to blight even the silver argence of the Avallian Grandmaster. Out of the earth rose a thing like a deformed child, riding upon a crippled dog and giggling maniacally. A crown of filth was upon its head, and it carried a goblet brimming with black ichor.

Sorcha was immobilised, driven to her knees by the mere psychic echo of the thing. Curled into a foetal ball in the corner between the pavement and the wall, Sorcha knew only mindless terror until the voice of the horror called her by name. She looked, her gaze yanked as if by strings to fasten upon the creature in the flesh. It smiled down upon her, reining its limping steed to a halt to study her. The thing's head was larger than its body, which had no waist and was void of detail as a doll's. The thing's limbs were all of equal length, each ending in a prehensile hand. Its eyes were tiny baubles of black set too close together in so wide a face, its mouth likewise too small but yet full of needle-sharp fangs. Its voice was a manic sing-song.

"Hail! We are the King of Uria, the son of Urien Tain who made all things! We are come in judgement, little one, to ensure all things be as they truly are. This is the game of the King of Uria!"

Sorcha knelt trembling before it, all her senses mortal and magical overwhelmed by the horror of the creature. It was ancient beyond reckoning, a thing truly immortal, as ageless as Odacon who had enslaved her and equal to the primordial power that DeKellia had summoned up.

As she gazed at it, stricken beyond speech or thought, the thing's eyes were drawn up and past her. Sorcha turned mechanically and beheld at the far end of the street the silver-mailed figure of Grandmaster Kaldarsis in the flesh for the first time.

Very tall, he was, most ancient of Darians, called the eldest of their race. His face was hidden in a winged helm, but his great beard and moustaches flowed out from beneath his visor to cascade upon his breastplate. He carried no lance, armed solely with a sword that blazed white as if fresh from the forge. His horse reared and plunged, then thundered forward at the charge towards the childlike King of Uria.

Sorcha cowered back from the horse's path, barely evading the slashing hooves. A split-second from collision, the Grandmaster's horse reared and flyleapt back, eyes rolling in terror. The King of Uria laughed, the cackle of an insane child, and toasted the Grandmaster even as the Darian's armoured body crashed to the cobbles.

He was on his feet at once, sword in hand, but by now the knights who rode with him had appeared from the evil fog, silver figures in tall helms, armed with long swords that shone as if imbued with sunlight.

"Greetings!" Cried the evil mannequin, "Hail, knights of the living dead, thrice damned for evermore, for here is the Akurite you have so long feared; here is the Jester of Urien Tain. And you will laugh in madness to know me as your king, for Things you are and all Things belong to him that sits crowned King in Uria!"

The phalanx of advancing knights dissolved into madness as every man in unison screamed and toppled from the saddle, clawing at his eyes and writhing on the cobbles. Then they staggered to their feet, still screaming, bleeding from their eyes and throats by their own mutilation, and set upon one another with their swords.

The fight lasted only moments, but it haunted Sorcha's nightmares forever; each man was a fell swordmaster, and each swiftly dealt and received in perfect synchrony and deadly grace a flurry of mortal blows. But they did not die. The King of Uria laughed and cackled and sang as each knight in turn was slain only to rise and stagger from the field, vanishing into the evil fog.

Only the Grandmaster, standing directly before the King of Uria, remained untouched by the command of insanity.

"Go," the wizened creature said, "You have another foe to seek, and another doom to die."

Kaldarsis turned like a man in a trance and marched stiffly towards the distant walls of Silveneir, which still smoked and shuddered between contending mortal armies.

"And you," the King of Uria said to Sorcha, "go you too, and seek your lover. Flee with him if he is unharmed or bear his body from the field if he lies wounded; if he is dead, fly yourself and live for his sake. Begone from our sight, this battle is not for such as you, Sorcha."

She fled, sprinting in the footsteps of Grandmaster Kaldarsis without a backward glance. Behind her, she heard the mad creature cackling gleefully, "Go! Go with the blessing of the King of Uria!"

Keeping the shining figure of Kaldarsis in sight, Sorcha hurried towards the city walls. The horrors from the earth ravened on all sides, pursuing the city inhabitants in screaming droves, but while she followed on Kaldrasis' footsteps, Sorcha made her way in safety.

Occasionally the great knight's sword would flicker and cut down some shambling thing, but he walked calmly through the madness as if resigned to some yet worse fate. There was power in him; Sorcha could not mistake it, the inner radiance of Kaldarsis' spirit revealed by the All Seeing Eye. Sorcha followed him as if in a trance, certain that where this knight went there could be no danger. To the very foot of the wall he brought her, but there she could follow him no further; he raced up a flight of steps to the rampart and immediately vaulted the battlements, his mission apparently leading him back to the Darian lines beyond the city.

Sorcha went up the stairs behind him and found herself on a clear stretch of the wall. There was fighting in the tower behind her, and a knot of Silvans and Darians grappling further along the rampart, but where she stood now there was currently no danger. Nor was there any sign of DeSilva; Sorcha could still sense him, some few hundred yards along the wall, but out of sight of her mortal eyes.

She looked across the wall in the direction Kaldarsis had gone, alerted by the convergence of numinous forces in the Darian lines that some response was ready to DeKellia's summoning.

Even as Kaldarsis marched stoically back to face his Warmaster, a lithe figure dressed all in black detached itself from the Darian ranks and ran towards the city.

Sorcha knew him at once; brother to DeKellia, the uncle who had initiated DeSilva into the warrior rites of the Kraag; the Dacoit Master Noth Kalidor.

Approaching the wall, he jumped, an impossible leap twenty feet forward and thirty feet up, rising as if he flew to land in a crouch with impeccable balance on the battlements ten feet from Sorcha. He caught her eye and smiled, baring his implanted Kraag fangs, recognizing her.

Then he dropped onto the rampart causeway and charged the knot of fighting men and women further along the wall. Their sole warning was a deafening roar that resounded across the entire battlefield. Noth Kalidor carried no weapons; unarmed he fell upon the Silvan defenders of the wall, denting armour and crushing bones with his bare hands.

A dozen Silvan warriors, who had stood off as many Darians with grim determination, were dead almost in the instant Kalidor stepped among them. With the same deadly grace as his brother DeKellia, he simply walked into the fight and killed all who stood in his way as easily as drawing breath. Reaching the door to the tower buttressing that stretch of the wall, Kalidor paused. The door had resisted all Darian efforts to break it down thus far. Kalidor glanced at the Darians behind him, then loosed another deafening shout and kicked the door to matchwood. The Darians followed him into the tower, but there was nothing for them to do; within moments Sorcha saw Kalidor on the top of the tower, wiping out the defenders with the guiltless ease of a man killing insects.

Sorcha had seen the Dacoit Master in battle before, but never this passionless trance of murder. But even as Kalidor paused for a moment on the tower battlements, now clear of all other foes, a figure in red armour burst up from the lower levels and tackled him bodily.

Sorcha only recognised Kam Daishen when the red knight and his black-clad foe struck the battlements fifteen feet from her. Somehow, Kalidor had flipped them in mid-fall so that Kam crashed to earth first. The Dacoit Master sprang away, only to leap to the attack before Kam could quite gain his feet. The Daishen went reeling back but closed his gauntleted hands on the shoulders of the Dacoit Master. Kalidor seized the Daishen in turn and flipped acrobatically even as he was born off his feet by Kam's great strength. Seeming to swing around the Daishen as an ape swings through the trees, Kalidor locked his legs around the red knight's throat and flung them both bodily off the wall again. Sorcha was halfway down the stairs before she even heard the second crash; by the time she rounded the curve of the stairs and had them in sight again, Kalidor and Kam Daishen were on their feet.

From the changed sounds of the battle all around, Sorcha realised that the fighting had moved into the city. The wall was all but clear of combat now, but she saw flames licking in the windows of buildings and smoke going up elsewhere in the city. Darian and Silvan warriors fought running battles in the streets, battling on through the evil fog that coiled about their knees and contending with the panicked citizens and monstrous creatures also rampaging throughout the city. Nearest to Sorcha though, Kam Daishen and Noth Kalidor fell to in earnest, the red knight's long sword and armour against the agility and killing fists of the Dacoit Master.

The outcome should never have been in doubt; an unarmed, unarmoured man, no matter how skilled, against a fully mailed swordsman who was master of his trade. And yet Noth Kalidor danced effortlessly between the Daishen's strokes, levying blows in return with his bare hands that rang like temple gongs through his opponent's armour.

Time and again Kam Daishen was sent staggering, overbalanced and overwhelmed by the relentless assault of the Dacoit Master. A final ringing volley of blows sent the Daishen reeling back from the fight. In that moment, Kalidor produced from within his black jacket three steel throwing blades. His hand flickered and he gave three clipped shouts, loud as the clash of armies and culminating in a bark like a laugh. All three blades slammed home, finding chinks in the Daishen's all but impenetrable mail.

Kam Daishen straightened and hefted his sword, only to groan and topple like a felled tree before he could take a forward step. Sorcha stood staring in shock at the fallen body of the Daishen, only to spin and look up in ultimate horror when she heard her sister's voice.

Sabra stood on the stair above her, sword in hand and her eyes locked on Noth Kalidor. Sorcha did not wait to see or be seen, but fled, blinded by tears, too overcome to bear witness to the certain outcome as Sabra advanced upon Noth Kalidor.

Stumbling on the cobbles, Sorcha collapsed against the corner of a building and covered her ears from the scuffle of feet and the thud of blows behind her, the grunts of pain and crack of ribs, the steel whisper of futile cuts at a foe as untouchable as a shadow.

Hauling herself up, Sorcha stumbled on. Behind her, a gunshot echoed, but then wider sounds of battle closed in. The mist nauseated her and added to it now was the smoke of burning buildings. Sorcha staggered through a reeking smog, darting back from every shape that emerged from the darkness, fleeing in panic when battling soldiers or lumbering monstrosities lurched into visibility.

At one point, a moment of lucidity in the nightmarish gloom, she heard the chime of sabres in contention, and stepped out momentarily into a crossroad where a burning building on one corner lit up the fog.

From the cross-street, on Sorcha's right, the ring of swordplay grew closer. She heard the shuffle of footwork and laboured breathing, two swords clearly now, and then saw the combatants.

A Silvan woman in grey police uniform, armed with a sabre, and a stocky Kellion man wielding a polished cutlass; Commisioner Naylansis and Messerach Veen.

They paid Sorcha no heed at all, passing by her in a grim debate of steel born of long harboured hatred on both sides, a personal feud so bitter that it survived even the fall of the city that had been its stage for so many years. Sorcha let Veen and Naylansis pass before she stumbled on, the sound of their combat fading into the fog again behind her. How long she wandered, numb with horror and stricken with grief, her blood seething with the witch-fire that still shimmered in her tattoos at every echo of sorcery, Sorcha did not know. She only noticed when the sounds of battle died away and she wandered in silent streets.

Ahead of her, out of the fog, a shadow loomed. The flames of a burning building lit him up from behind and cast him for a moment ten feet tall, a giant armed with a cannon. Sorcha blinked her eyes clear and looked again through the fog, the perspective correcting so that she saw now only a lean man, six feet tall and dressed in battle-stained black, with a swordcane thrust through his belt and a volleygun in his hands.

His black hair was unkempt and overlong, but his equally black beard was neatly trimmed. His eyes were a blue darker than midnight, and he bore two black scars on one cheek. The smell of wilderness and cordite, horses, liquor, and tobacco, reached Sorcha against the bitter tang of smoke and fog.

Appearing from the smog as if manifested of the battle itself, Montesinos DeKellia stopped and looked at Sorcha. He stared blankly, shaking off the trance of war before recognition sparked in his midnight eyes.

"Sorcha? What in Haroum's unholy name are you doing here?!" Anger flared and died in one breath. He walked quickly toward her, then stopped and shook himself again. For the first time, a look that Sorcha recognised as fear gleamed momentarily in his eyes. "No. I'm sorry. You shouldn't be here, Sorcha, and I don't have time to see you to safety."

He swallowed, backing away even as an odd pallor assumed his skin. Through the eye of sorcery, Sorcha saw the force of his will shudder as if beset by unaccustomed doubt. She realised, suddenly and to her complete surprise, that DeKellia, assassin, exile, killer of kings already set upon his mission, was torn by conscience at leaving her to the battle's will.

"Get out of the city, Sorcha!" DeKellia barked the instruction and pointed through the smoke the direction she should go. "Find DeSilva if you can, but get out! Get as far away from the city as you can, tell everyone you meet to run for their lives!"

His tone cut through her immobilising terror, and the purpose for which she had first set out from the inn blazed again suddenly clear in her mind.

"What are you going to do?!" she screamed at DeKellia.

"As if you didn't know." He turned away as he spoke, starting to walk on into the fog only to spin suddenly back to face her, his dark eyes suddenly smouldering passages into hell and his voice a ragged snarl. "I'm going to blast this city off the face of the world!"

With an effort, he recovered himself, shook off the quivering fury and stood straight again, though the boundless murder still burned in his eyes.

"Go," he said again. "Run from me, Sorcha. The farther you run from me, the safer you will be. Take my son with you."

Sorcha nodded and fled, unable to face the awful stare so much more terrifying even than the mad eyes of the King of Uria.