All Spell Breaks Loose

Chapter 9

Sneaking was best done at night.

But when the people you needed to avoid were goblins, broad daylight was the way to go.

It wasn’t like we were strolling down the middle of the street, but I still felt as naked as the day I was born. Though I had to admit there was something strangely liberating about doing my sneaking and death dodging on a sunny afternoon. It almost made me forget there was a humongous price on my head.

Almost.

Sarad Nukpana and his allies were in control of the city. Goblins weren’t fond of direct sunlight, so they stayed inside if at all possible. That simply meant we weren’t likely to see as many goblins on the streets, and any goblin out and about would be cloaked and hooded. Worked for us. Mychael and I could hide pale skin, ears, and eyes that were a color other than black. We were cowled, cloaked, and cautious.

Where Imala was leading us, we saw more rats than goblins. In fact, we didn’t see anyone—but that didn’t mean no one was seeing us. Since it was the middle of the day, empty streets and shuttered shops shouldn’t be all that unusual. But too many of the shops I’d caught glimpses of through the alleys we’d passed weren’t just shuttered; they were closed, and looked like they had been that way for a while.

Imala noticed me noticing.

“The people are afraid,” she said. “My agents have told me that Sathrik no longer limits his arrests to magic users.”

I frowned. “I imagine the Saghred will take plain old souls when it can’t get the magic-flavored kind.”

Imala nodded. “Sathrik knows that the people of this city are more than capable of rising up against him. Those who are able and willing are helping us.”

“With the rest hiding behind locked doors until this is all over with.”

“The majority of goblins are peace loving. All we want is to live our lives and raise our families.”

“So where does the goblin national pastime of spying and intrigue fit into that?”

Imala smiled. “Between the living and raising parts.”

It didn’t look like this had always been the bad part of town. Though with Sarad Nukpana in charge, the entire city now shared that distinction. The town houses along the length of street we were on now looked for the most part as if they’d been abandoned, discarded for something new and trendy.

Kind of like what Tam had done to Kesyn Badru all those years ago.

And Tam felt responsible, at least to a point. Like many mage-wannabe teenagers, Tam had thought he wasn’t being taught fast enough. Pretty much without fail, teenagers were confident that they knew everything; they underestimated their limitations and overestimated their abilities. Magic wasn’t only about casting spells and building wards; it was knowing when to do it—or, most important, when not to do it and why. That meant acknowledging your shortcomings, your weaknesses, and taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions—things a lot of egocentric, magically talented teenagers weren’t keen on doing.

Sarad Nukpana and Tam had both been Kesyn Badru’s students. Nukpana had chosen the dark path; Tam had rejected it—eventually. Now we were going to find Kesyn Badru and ask the guy to save civilization as we knew it by helping us.

By helping Tam.

Tam had reasoned that his former teacher would be hiding where no one would come looking for him—and he meant no one, not even Sarad Nukpana.

There was a house that was considered cursed, possessed, haunted, you name it; this place had it. And since the people doing the considering were goblins; that said a lot in my opinion. Before we’d left his house, Tam had given us the quick and dirty details on this place. People either went in and were never seen again, or they felt the sudden need to kill the friend who’d gone in with them. Down through the years, a few families had been stupid or suicidal enough to actually buy the place and move in. They ultimately came out in either coffins or straitjackets—and others had never come out at all. But the icing on the cake was when Tam told us that as a boy even Sarad Nukpana had been scared of the place. What scared you as a kid tended to stick. So if Kesyn Badru wanted to be left alone—and he did—there was no place he’d rather be.

Yeah, I saw this ending well. Kind of like Carnades being responsible for getting us safely home. Look how that had turned out.

We approached the house from the back, using a narrow side street that was little more than an alley running between the dark granite wall surrounding the house and separating it from the one next door. Roots had grown up underneath the walls and street cobbles, making walking a challenge; and the dead leaves crunching underfoot made doing it quietly impossible.

I’d noticed that more than a few of the more affluent goblin homes had sharpened iron spikes along the tops of their walls. They might have been meant as a deterrent to thieves; or, heck, considering that these were goblin homes, they may have been meant to be decorative for all I knew.

This house’s wall didn’t have spikes. It had vines. Vines whose sole purpose appeared to be growing thorns the length of my fingers with the sharpness of my favorite stiletto. They weren’t decorative, at least not to me, but they were most definitely a deterrent. It told me one thing loud and clear—this house and Kesyn Badru did not want visitors. I wondered if he’d take into consideration that we didn’t want to be visitors. If we’d had any choice at all, we wouldn’t be lurking outside of the gates of his newly adopted home.

Above the wall and the thorns loomed a hedge. Beyond that I could just make out the house’s roofline with the rain gutters ending at the eaves of the house in honest-to-God gargoyles that looked like some sort of goat demons. The place had “evil villain hideout” written all over it. It made me wonder what Sarad Nukpana’s house looked like.

Unlike some of the other formerly fine homes we’d passed, there were no broken windows. Though with the overgrown bushes, I couldn’t see the downstairs windows, so neither could any wandering pack of Sathrik’s Khrynsani youth looking for some twisted fun. There wasn’t any shattered glass on the second and third floors, either. One of the king’s punks could have easily chucked a rock or ten that high. Either no one had the guts to try, or the house tossed rocks back at their throwers. Judging by the creepy-crawlies presently working their way up to my neck, either one was possible.

“So, based on your hunch, we’re going into a house that makes people kill their friends.”

Tam gave me a smile that looked more than a tad nervous. “Told you Regor was exciting.” The smile vanished. “Kesyn doesn’t consider me his friend; and I don’t want to find out what this place would make him do to a brat who helped ruin his life. So be glad you’re not me.”

I glanced at one of the goat demons again. “I’ve been glad I’m not you for quite some time.”

A rusted iron fence surrounded the grounds. By “grounds” I meant property. The place was so overgrown that I had no clue what the actual grounds looked like. A broken stone pathway led to what I assumed was the front door. I assumed because I couldn’t see it for all the under- and overgrowth. Once we got close enough, I saw that one of the front doors sported the same sign as Tam’s house—no trespassing by order of the king, resulting in death, dismemberment, etcetera. I wondered if the house had eaten the poor sot who had to nail the sign to the door.

The other door was opening slowly, complete with creepy creaking.

Normally, an open door would be a welcoming thing, but the knot in my gut found it even less welcoming than Sathrik’s death and dismemberment sign.

Tam started forward. Imala got a hand on his arm, stopping him.

“We’re dealing with a pissed-off mage who has who knows what lurking in those bushes. Plus, he hates you. And you propose to walk right up to a conveniently open door—”

“Which I don’t think the wind opened,” Mychael added. “Mainly because there isn’t any wind.”

“Psycho houses don’t need wind,” I muttered.

Mychael held a loaded crossbow pistol by his side, the tip of the small but lethal bolt bright with magic. I hadn’t even seen him draw it.

“Think it’s an invitation from a Khrynsani patrol?” he asked.

Tam’s gaze grew distant. “I don’t sense any.”

“And I don’t smell any,” Imala added. “Would Kesyn Badru know if you were here?”

Tam tensed. “He always did.”

My body decided to have itself a good shiver. “Well, that leaves either psycho house and/or psycho goblin.”

Mychael’s sharp eyes were fixed somewhere beyond that open door. “Okay, Tam. He was your teacher. How do you want to play it?”

“I’m going in. Alone.”

“No one goes anywhere without backup.”

“Then I go first.”

Imala drew a curved short sword. “No one’s going to deny you that.”

I indicated the sword. “What are you—”

“In case we’re not Kesyn’s only guests today.”

I kept my eye on the street. If a Khrynsani patrol appeared at the gate, we’d have three possible exits and none of them were appealing: charge into a pissed-off mage’s hideout, hack our way through the undergrowth to hopefully escape, or hack our way through the Khrynsani patrol and hopefully survive.

Something scuttled and rustled its way through the undergrowth to our left, and I caught a glimpse of a pair of eyes that were way too yellow to belong to anything with friendly intentions. The rustling quickly scurried around behind us.

Imala’s eyes suddenly went huge. I looked where she was looking.

Uh-oh.

I couldn’t see the gate. It was probably still there, but I couldn’t see it through the hedge that had moved—yes, moved—across the path. Our exit had just been completely blocked by plants, plants with roots that should’ve kept them from doing things like that.

Imala tapped Tam on the shoulder. He turned and saw.

“Kesyn ever do that before?” she asked.

“Son of a bitch.”

“I’ll take that as a maybe.”

Mychael cautiously started toward the door. “Looks like we’re being encouraged to come in.”

We went inside.

The only light was from the open door, spilling a single beam of sunlight onto the black-and-white-tiled marble floor. Though neglect had turned that into black and dingy yellow. Above our heads was a massive wrought-iron chandelier, beyond that only featureless murk. Tam and Imala could see in the dark just fine. Neither of them went for additional weapons, so I assumed nothing carnivorous or merely homicidal was charging out of the dark at us.

In response, the door slammed shut behind us.

And locked.

Instantly my hand was on my sword hilt. I didn’t draw it, but I wanted to. I really, really wanted to. But before the lights had gone out, the only people close enough to stab were friends. Hopefully they still thought I was a friend, not someone they suddenly decided needed murdering.

“Easy,” Tam said, making no attempt to keep his voice down. Maybe he was talking to me; maybe to a mage whose door slamming might be about to escalate into deadly spell slinging.

Or a vindictive house.

“Easy,” he repeated.

I’d take it easy, but I wasn’t taking my hand off of my sword.

The lights slowly came up. Pinpricks of flame like tiny eyes grew into candlelight. Either Kesyn Badru or the house was being polite to a pair of night-vision-impaired elves, or he and/or it wanted to get a good look at our last expressions before he/it killed us.

Tam’s home had been stripped clean. This house was badly in need of cleaning. It was all too obviously untouched, either by Kesyn, Khrynsani, or a housekeeper. The marble floor in the entry wasn’t the only thing that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since Chigaru’s mom was on the throne. A long hallway extended into spooky darkness on our right. The furnishings appeared to be nice enough, but it was difficult to tell for sure since everything was covered in sheets of cobwebs, moving as if with a life of their own in the disturbance of air when the door had slammed shut. I hoped we wouldn’t be meeting the spiders that had made those.

“My nerves don’t need this,” I muttered.

“Well, that locked door will keep anyone from coming at us from behind,” Imala noted.

“I’m more concerned about what’ll come at us from the front.”

“Sir,” Tam called.

Silence.

Mychael shimmered slightly with a protection spell; Tam likewise shielded. Their combined wards reached back and around, enfolding me and Imala in their protection.

Imala gave an exasperated sigh, stopping just short of an eye roll.

“It’s a big house, Tam,” Mychael said. “If he’d barricaded himself anywhere, where would it be?”

Tam took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and I assumed tried to sense Kesyn Badru.

I began to sense the house.

I didn’t hear any sound other than our own breathing, and nothing moved except for the shifting cobwebs. Yet I had a growing awareness of a presence, a solitary entity, not the haunting of spirits or demons that I’d expected. I’d never been able to detect anything like this before, even when I’d had my magic. Maybe the absence of magic enabled me to perceive other things, other levels of existence. Who knew? I certainly didn’t. And the how and why didn’t matter; finding Kesyn Badru and living long enough to get out with our sanity intact did. However, my awareness of this thing could be knowledge; and an opponent you knew was an opponent you stood a better chance of surviving.

The entity didn’t live—or whatever—in the house; it was the house. Not merely the stones and wood, this thing had been here before the house had been built, buried for literal ages, deep in the bedrock below the foundation. When the house was built, its foundation bit into the bedrock containing the entity. Over the years it had become a part of the house itself, indistinguishable from the timber and granite. The closest my mind could comprehend was that the house’s wooden frame had become the entity’s skeleton; the granite walls its outer shell.

It was ageless, crouched and waiting.

And it was hungry.

Like certain predators, the entity knew how to attract its preferred prey. People with volatile emotions, unbalanced minds, violent tendencies—the entity called to them when they passed close enough to the land and later the house built on the land that it had taken for its own. It called to them and eventually claimed them—as well as those who its seduced ones had brought with them—friends, lovers, family, children. It fed on the violent emotions of its chosen prey, and the terror of their victims.

Fed and was content.

The entity wasn’t content now.

It hadn’t called to us, and we sure as hell didn’t want to be here. Which meant that none of us were certifiable, which was good to know. But just because none of us were nuts now didn’t mean the entity didn’t have the ability to make us that way, and the thing had locked the door so it could give it its best shot. It wasn’t like we didn’t have anything for the entity to work with. We all had violent tendencies aplenty. This thing hadn’t survived and thrived for however long as it had by starving. When it hungered, it would feed, one way or another.

Exactly like the Saghred.

I hadn’t fed the Saghred—at least not of my own free will. And I wasn’t feeding this thing, either.

“Raine?” A voice called my name from far away.

I snapped out of my thoughts to Mychael’s hands on my shoulders, shaking me.

I looked up into a pair of concerned and wary blue eyes: concerned for me, wary of what might be in my mind with me.

“Think happy thoughts,” I told him.

His fingers tightened on my shoulders. “What?”

“This thing feeds on the other kind.” I gave them the quick and dirty version of what I thought the house was and what it wanted.

Tam glared down the long hallway that suddenly seemed to have gotten longer. “Then let’s get what we want and get out.”

I’d like nothing more. Though other than Tam’s process of elimination with Kesyn Badru’s possible hideouts, we had no guarantee that the old man was even here. And if he was, had the house turned him into its pet loony—a magical heavyweight loony who believed he had every reason to strike Tam dead and anyone else in his immediate vicinity?

The entity didn’t wait for the old man to put in an appearance.

It literally unleashed Hell.

Creatures out of a psycho’s nightmare charged us from all sides, including overhead and underfoot. The floor buckled and tilted, sending us sliding toward the gaping maul of what looked like a giant rat with a mouthful of serrated fangs. Tentacles tipped with hooks shot up through the floor. I didn’t have magic, but I had steel, and I put what I had to good use. Tam shouted two words of incantation, stopping Imala’s slide into the rat’s mouth as if she’d slammed into an invisible wall. The borderline panic in her eyes screamed how Imala felt about really big rats and somehow the entity had known it. Apparently the insight I had into it worked both ways. The entity knew what scared me, what scared each one of us. Since none of us were crazy, at least not to the point of making us a decent meal, the thing went with violence and terror. Either one would make us tastier to it, so the entity set about forcing us to strike at it, scare the crap out of us or, best of all, both.

My worst fears didn’t take a genius to figure out. I wasn’t what anyone would call complex, so my opinions, emotions, and fears all lived together close to the surface. The entity scooped them up like dice on a table. The Saghred, Sarad Nukpana, torture, dagger through the heart, eternity inside the rock—all were there for the knowing and exploiting.

Apparently Mychael, Tam, and Imala were better at hiding any fears they had, as evidenced by the increasing fury with which the entity attacked with anything in its arsenal.

Hornets the size of giant bats threw themselves by the dozens against Tam and Mychael’s shields in sacrificial waves, their bodies bursting into flames on contact, making room for the next attack. The shields were holding, for now. But Mychael and Tam couldn’t hold it for long. We’d all fought for our lives multiple times since breakfast, and Tam had taken out four Magh’Sceadu that had nearly eaten—

Four Magh’Sceadu appeared as if on cue.

Dammit.

“Sorry!” I yelled while trying to unthink them. It didn’t work and wouldn’t work, at least not with bat-hornets igniting inches from my face.

“Shut up!” The bellow seemed to come from everywhere at once. Neat trick. A master spellsinger’s trick.

I froze; so did the others. Even the Magh’Sceadu looked around.

“Idiots! Get in here!”

Mychael and Tam’s so-called impenetrable shield was ripped from top to bottom, opening it into the long hallway that wasn’t dark anymore—and wasn’t a hallway. A tunnel of blue light extended from the shield to what had been a blank wall. A small section was open and filled with an enraged old goblin, aged somewhere between sixty and roadkill.

Kesyn Badru, I assumed.

Tam hesitated, torn between possible death by the entity and equally likely death by his pissed-off teacher. That Tam was afraid of him—and that he’d ripped our shield like a piece of wet paper—told me Kesyn Badru was seriously badass. That was all I needed to know. I ran down the tunnel toward him. I’d take badass over bat-hornets anytime.

When I got within sniffing distance, I knew what the old man had been doing to pass the time while hiding out in a possessed house. Coming from a family of pirates, I knew what a crew coming back from shore leave smelled like. My nose told me loud and clear that Kesyn Badru had been on shore leave a long time.

Once the four of us were inside, he slammed the section of wall closed and rasped out some wicked-sounding words. The opening vanished, leaving us in a single room that had been sealed—walls, floor, and ceiling—with a thick, gelatinous coating. Ick. It must have been some kind of solid ward. Fortunately, the coating on the floor had hardened. However, since we were in here, and the entity and its playmates were out there, being in a room coated in ick was perfectly fine with me.

Kesyn Badru glared at us with some seriously bloodshot eyes. “What the hell are you trying to do, bring the roof down on my head?” He didn’t pause for an answer; he just turned those bloodshot eyes on me. “You’re that Benares girl, aren’t you?” His eyes darted up and down, taking me in, inside and out. He snorted. “That’s all you’ve got? I’m not impressed.”

I just stood there and blinked. “Uh…”

Badru turned on Tam. “And thank you once again for fucking up my life,” he snarled, “or what you left me of it. What are you going to do next, boy? Stomp my balls?”

The room shook like a toy building block some evil kid was trying to break in half.

That didn’t even slow Badru down. “The best damned hiding place in the whole city, and you screwed it up.”

Mychael put himself between the goblin mage and Tam. “Magus Badru, we need your help.”

Something hit the other side of the wall next to me like a giant fist.

“What do you call what I just gave you?” Badru snapped. “And who the hell are you anyway?”

“Paladin Mychael Eiliesor of the Conclave Guardians,” he responded in formal, flawless Goblin.

“Conclave, eh?” The goblin chuckled, a dry rasp that sounded like he hadn’t used his voice for anything other than yelling in a long time. “Those old bastards send you here to save their wrinkly asses?”

“We came to destroy the Saghred.” Mychael dropped the formality and went with angry paladin. Mychael had had it. We all had.

That got the goblin mage’s attention.

“That’s a fancy way to kill yourselves. I prefer staying drunk—and alive.”

Something hit the ward over our heads with enough force that fist-sized gobs of ward goop fell from the ceiling. I barely avoided getting splatted with the stuff.

Badru didn’t so much as bat an eye. His full attention had landed on Tam like a slab of granite. “Well, what do you want?” He actually didn’t snap or snarl. “You come home after two years with the head lady of the secret service, the Conclave’s paladin, and that unfortunate elf girl who had the piss-poor luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong rock.” He crossed his arms over his chest, smiling now, though some might say he looked more like a wolf that’d spotted its next meal. “What is it, boy?”

Tam told him everything. Why we were here, what we had to do, and when we had to get it done.

And how we needed his help to do all of the above.

“So, you need me to be your Reaper wrangler,” Badru said. “If I’m all you’ve got, you’re scraping the bottom of a bone-dry barrel. Am I your last hope, too?” he asked Tam. “Or are you just slumming and playing tour guide for your friends?”

Tam drew himself up and I half expected to hear something Talonesque come out of his mouth. He surprised me. “Sir, you’re our only hope.”

Tam had been eating an awful lot of humble pie since we’d arrived. It looked like he was developing a taste for it. Swallowing your pride might choke you the first time you had to do it; but apparently the next one went down a little easier.

“You were disgraced and banished because you refused to step back from what you stood for,” Tam continued. “You refused to teach rich, young thugs a level of magic they had neither the morals nor restraint to learn.” He paused. “I was foremost among them.”

The old goblin’s eyes glittered. “You think so?”

“I know so. I’ve turned from the dark path.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard people talking. Talk isn’t necessarily the truth.”

“I have renounced black magic.”

Kesyn Badru’s sharp black eyes looked like they were boring through to Tam’s soul. “Not entirely, you haven’t.”

Tam shifted uneasily. “When there is a great need, when no other magic would—”

“Save lives,” Mychael said. “Sometimes it is necessary to do what is distasteful for a greater good.”

Badru studied Tam, all signs of drunkenness gone. “And you think you’ve grown enough sense to tell the difference?”

“I’m trying, sir.” Another slice of humble pie. “Knowing the right thing to do isn’t always easy.”

“There’s more to why we need your help,” I told the mage. Best just to come right out with it. “My magic is gone.”

“Yeah. So?”

“And… I don’t have any magic.”

“That’s obvious. Don’t worry, I don’t think anyone inside these rotten city walls would have a clue.”

That was more than a little disconcerting. “How can you tell?”

“I don’t smell any magic coming off of you.”

“You mean sense?”

“I say what I mean. Smell. Others may sense, but I smell. Don’t let it worry you, little missy. It’s a gift—or a curse—depending on how you look at it. I can see people for who and what they really are.” He looked at Tam appraisingly. “So, while there’s no cure for stupid, you at least seem to have found a treatment.”

“Thank you, sir. I think.”

A chorus of disembodied howls, screams, and roars shook the room around us.

Kesyn Badru walked to the nearest wall, pressed his hands up past his wrists into the goop, and started murmuring. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the wall began glowing with the same blue light of the tunnel he’d created for us to escape through.

The howling, screaming, and roaring stopped. Instantly and completely.

“The beastie thinks we’ve vanished.” He scowled at the lot of us. “Though with the four of you here raising a ruckus, we only have less than an hour before it cranks up again.”

I shifted uneasily. “It senses and feeds on emotions, doesn’t it?”

Badru nodded. “No emotion and no violence equals no problem. Staying drunk helps.”

Finally, an activity I could agree with.

Imala looked at the faintly glowing walls. “How do we get out?”

Badru shrugged. “With what you have planned, I don’t want to get out.”

“We do.”

“Then I imagine leaving this room, then running like hell, would be as good a plan as any.”

Tam moved close enough to his former teacher that Badru could have punched him in several sensitive areas. “Sir, we can’t do this without you.” He hesitated, the smooth muscles working in his jaw. “Please help us.”

Amazingly enough, Kesyn Badru seemed to be actually considering it, though he took his sweet time doing it. “I’ll be honest with you,” he eventually said. “I’m sitting the fence on that whole ‘saving the world’ thing the lot of you are bent on doing. From what I’ve seen lately, there’s not much out there that deserves saving. Now, destroying this rock that’s become Sarad Nukpana’s reason for living—I’ll have to admit that has a certain appeal. Not because it’ll save anyone; because it’ll annoy the hell out of Sarad.”

“Actually, sir, I’m planning to kill Sarad,” Tam told him.

“Destroy his reason for living, then kill him. Even better.” Badru pondered this while he absently scratched at something under his robe. “I’d be risking my life a couple dozen times before we get to the fun part.” He scowled. “If we get to the fun part. There’s not enough money to pay me to take this job.” The old goblin mage stopped and smiled, showing two missing teeth and a chipped fang. “But anything that ends with publically humiliating and killing Sarad Nukpana? Hell, I’ll do that for free.”