‘That’s halfway across the world!’ Tellona sat up. ‘What’s there?’
‘I don’t know.’ As an afterthought he took off the saddlebag that was loaded with most of the food and threw it down. ‘You’d
better have that. There’s nothing to eat here except what you can suck out of the aether.’ They shared a glance for a moment
and he saw the slight hesitation of the light elf when faced with the prospect of drawing out
the life force of living things by the shadowkin method of feeding. It was only a twitch though, not the whole nine yards
of horror, so he guessed she was one of the progressive ones. He nudged Unholy and the drake took off with a leap that sent
showers of sand in all directions.
It took Teazle a long time to understand what he was seeing. He watched from several vantage points high in the rocks of the
waste-lands as a huge humanoid demon, some ten metres tall, staggered its gigantic way across the vast red tundra of the desolation,
which lay between the true wilds and the borders of civilisation.
A miasmic crimson cloud flowed over and around it periodically closing in on its body where it would modify some part – growing
larger hands, bigger claws or sprouting fans of razor edge bones from the processes of its spine. Meanwhile the figure was
a drunken, leering monster who groaned and lashed its purple forked tongue as though it had been thoroughly poisoned. Sometimes
it clawed at its face and opened large gashes. When the blood poured the crimson aura speeded into a cloud of blood drops
and grew darker and stronger.
Other demons came to meet this creature, hypnotised into complete submission from afar. When they got close enough the giant
would pick them up and rip them to pieces, gorging itself on blood and pain. The pain part interested Teazle the most. He
would have bet that this demon of the wilds – a barbarian creature of sophisticated form but basic drives – would have gloried
in slaughter and possibly had some skills at luring gamma-class demons into its clutches, but the aura it possessed immersed
itself in the dying, tormented bodies with a lush devotion. Not that there weren’t tracts of demon lore and life devoted to
torture but there was something about the crimson cloud that smacked to him of a fetish, which was absolutely not a demonic
quality. No demon would be slaved to a desire.
After killing, the giant threw the bodies down with disgust – again, an undemonic kind of notion. It took time and some patience
but after a while Teazle had found a name for what he was watching and it
surprised him; he wasn’t used to thinking about anything in terms of evil.
Legions of demons with a bent for philosophy had done all the thinking about evil that needed to be done long before Teazle
came along, so he had only to apply what he learned in school. He watched this monster lurching into shape over the course
of several miles. It changed en route, gathering up the talents and abilities of those it consumed and adding them to itself.
This rarely required a physical alteration, which is why it took him some time to figure out what was going on. When it paused
and looked around, scratching but clearly bothered by some intuition that made it turn his way, he knew he was running out
of time in which to stay hidden. Intelligence, talent and power were approaching a critical mass within it. If the old, dead
demon he had met on the way was correct, Teazle could expect to be added to this collection, which is why he hadn’t gone in
with a direct attack, but as time went on he didn’t perceive an alternative. And then he remembered that the cloud’s behaviour
looked a bit like Zal’s shadow body when Zal was asleep and it remained wakeful.
Zal kept his shadow well away from Teazle at all times when he was conscious although Teazle had seen him envelop Lila in
it completely. Great intimacy with Zal wasn’t something he wanted so he hadn’t given it any thought. If Zal was still mostly
like other elves then it was an aetheric form that demons could fool around with destructively though they hadn’t got any
other influence on it. Demons with a taste for elf got some pleasure from the buzzing pain that the ordinary elf aether body
could inflict on them, but the general loathing between the races meant there was no science of the interaction. They only
used it to torment one another.
Faeries of course were rendered unconscious by the elf aether body, so there need be no science of that. Some speculated the
aether body was the spirit of the elf but this wasn’t quite correct because it had mass of its own. All Teazle knew is that
when Zal slept sometimes his aether body spilled out of him. He knew because the buzz of it touching him had woken him up
and made him drag himself off to sleep elsewhere on several occasions. When this happened he had briefly found himself dreaming
Zal’s dreams. He knew they were Zal’s because they made no sense and were full of music.
Now he stared at the lurching hulk moving towards a distant town and considered what that might add up to, if the cloud were
an elf body that had taken possession of a demon of the wilds, starting with
stupid but powerful and ending up as a giant collective horror with the intellect of a master magus. He liked the notion,
and he had no doubt that if he were included it would be a horror that could conquer worlds.
This, then, would be the legendary Hellblade moulding itself a body.
Teazle stayed back as the creature advanced. On his back the two swords hummed softly and he wondered, not for the first time,
what they were. He knew they were only in the form of swords for a convenience, because the form suited their intent and that
of their mistress whose instrument it seemed he was, and in that he was no different to the swords themselves. He knew he
could expect no direct interventions from her. He
was
the intervention, as Hellblade was someone else’s.
With delight approaching ecstasy he stalked the beast and watched it grow. He delayed the precious moment of death or victory,
savouring its approach. For him this was the perfect moment, predator and prey on the edge of for ever. He let it go and teleported.
At his largest and in his deadliest form Teazle was only half the size of Hellblade but he was more than big enough to blow
its physical body to bits when he materialised in the centre of it, every scale a blade, vibrating on frequencies that shook
apart what wasn’t shredded and burst by his arrival. A rain of bloody ruin fell around him, splashing down into a pile of
ruddy, steaming gore. The thick, awful stench of half-digested flesh and stomach fluids filled his nostrils for a second before
the aether body, in which he was now fully contained, snapped tight and cut off the air.
At the same time an awareness of Hellblade’s total existence filled him. He had expected frenzy but instead there was a calm
that almost matched his own. They permeated one another and knew each other in an intimacy far closer than anything Teazle
knew before. The wholeness of Hellblade’s story soaked into him with every nuance of retreading that the spirit had given
it over the long years of its banishment and he knew its purpose at last, even as he began to asphyxiate. It was a simple
story.
The three had been told that they were to face a horror beyond comprehension at the gate of death itself, beyond which even
spirit would be dissolved for ever. The power they had taken on and the monstrous transformation they had endured meant that
they could
stand on this plane and give battle to the creature that was waiting there, slowly wearing away at the wormhole the mages
had inadvertently created between Alfheim’s reality and the peculiar no-place of the unliving things.
They were made according to what they had absorbed. Hellblade had been a guard at Delatra once, so long ago it boggled the
mind, and he had been as demon-hating a son of the trees as the next pureblood light elf. Some insanity had leaked in when
he found himself fused with a demon of blood and necromancy. They had fought within the confines of their joined minds as
their bodies disintegrated under Zoomenon’s pitiless stare and neither had exactly won or lost. They had come to be a new
thing that called itself Hellblade and which knew only the
geas
of the command to kill the sleeper.
They went, all three of them, Hellblade, Wrath and Nemesis, incorporeal, transubstantial, into the lifeless no-space beyond
Last Water where even the Void and its massive emptiness came to an end and there they found their quarry as promised – a
darkness of exquisite malevolence and unbridled hatred. Because they weren’t hampered by the corporeal world any more and
had what Hellblade laughingly recalled as The Sight, they recognised it immediately and realised the mages had got it all
wrong. All of it.
The whole story was bullshit.
Yes, there was a place full of spirit forms. Yes, some of them had never lived in the material worlds. Lots of them didn’t
want to. Lots of them were beyond comprehension and most were below it in that they had nothing like a mind or an identity.
They were things without names that would never have names. There were certainly beings that corresponded closely to the unmentionables
mentioned in the
geas.
But none of them were what the mages had seen in their vision quests. The mages had seen something living. It vibrated lower,
it existed closer to their own plane, they could see it from where they were, and what Magus Xaviendra and the rest of them
had spied was a very dark thing indeed. But it was not a separate thing. They had created the Mirror of Souls and thought
it was a window.
They had seen themselves from the other side, from spirit, and not recognised what they were looking at. Immediately they
had judged themselves monsters. Correctly as it happened, but that was another irony not lost on Hellblade or the others.
Their ambition and their lust for power was manifest in spirit form, visible, tangible, all of its
tendrils and might illustrated. It was the stuff of spirit and the aether itself, from which all ghosts and constructs flowed
across the totality of the dimensions.
The three phantoms understood that their mighty fight, their sacrifice and heroism was a goose-chase of a spectacular proportion,
fuelled by blindness and fear.
The
geas
was a bond, and now it was also, for Hellblade, a revenge.
Hellblade had reached across the fragile veil of the Mirror’s flickering surface to rip away the closest souls, of those who’d
sent him beyond life to this undead hell. His was the power of slaying and he gloried in it like a true demon and abhorred
it like a true elf and there was no reconciliation of these things, they existed in contradiction that was fierce and endless.
He seized and rent. Then, true to her making, Nemesis judged, sundering the remains into pure spirit energies for Wrath to
consume. They had other names then: Render, Judge and Eater. Those were their names from the book in which their task had
been written in the ink of blood and tears.
The mages they attacked from the spirit plane soon died, gibbering and mindless as babies but with a deal less charm. Time
moved faster for the spirits. It left enough in Alfheim for the last remaining mages to rally and investigate.
Mage Xaviendra found the three and offered them a bargain: if they spared her life she would ensure that the
geas
was lifted. Without this intervention as soon as the last mage died they would be sucked beyond the edge of everything into
true death. She also offered them a second spirit mirror, the Mirror of Refraction, through which they were able to see into
and partake of the material worlds, watch their loved ones and remain connected to Alfheim and Demonia and Faery. They took
this.
The mirror was a trick however, and as soon as they looked into it they were trapped. It was the mirror of the Faery Queen
and although it did exactly what was promised it kept them in the thrall of the visions it offered, helpless to escape until
a faery King or Queen should look into it.
What happened to the mirror itself the three didn’t know but there was a moment when someone did come and look into it – an
elf boy with golden hair and a nondescript dog, white with black spots – and then the mustered strength of all the years was
enough for them to break the trance, not least because the mirror was hoping to find its
way home by then, since it was one of those objects that doesn’t like to be lost.
Then they came to finish their task, but by this time their rage had cooled. What Teazle found in Hellblade was a cold determination
to escape the hold of the geas by any means and so end his existence. The demon part of him didn’t want to die, but the elf
did.
Both of them had taken a hateful pleasure in enslaving and driving their erstwhile hosts here in Demonia but they were changed
now. The flesh had made them remember their mortal lives. What had been called Hellblade before was really only an intent
to catch and slay with a few fleeting memories still attached to it like dried flesh to an old bone. But with the addition
of blood they were suddenly vibrant with the possibilities of life and the will to die was at war in them. Meantime Teazle
had destroyed their lovely new body, that perfect essential vehicle of meat and blood. So they would have his.
Teazle recognised immediately that he had no defence against Render, Hellblade’s purposive element. The soul-rip that Render
could perform was the same method through which the beautiful Sorcha had been killed the last time Teazle fooled around with
wild demons – and it was this kind of creature that had been involved in Render’s making. However, Teazle wasn’t quite what
he used to be. The swords he carried began to vibrate at frequencies so high that they were imperceptible to ordinary beings
but they were quite perceptible to the phantom that screamed in agony as it felt itself beginning to shatter. At the same
moment that Teazle was feeling terrible pains and the loss of his senses from lack of air Hellblade felt an inexorable entropic
force beginning to ruin all that was left of him including his final plans.
Both realised the solution, offered and accepted the deal on that instant. Air returned, pain and loss abated.
Teazle and Hellblade stood in an uneasy silence in a pile of stinking meat, sharing one body. Because Hellblade was a phantom
they were no longer exactly one or another but they were sure that in this state, however long it lasted, there was nothing
earthly or much divine that was going to stand against them.
Teazle stepped out of the heap of guts puddled around his legs and smelt the blood in the air. Hellblade’s necrotic
andalune
weaved around and through him in a strange revelry of lustful satiation with his excellent body. He felt violated and exultant
but also he felt the
compulsion of Hellblade’s bonds and his will to execute the poetic justice therein decreed.