Hasdrubal's Tale

Chapter Six

I stood and stretched, then knelt by the pool to splash water on my face as the sun dropped behind the distant mountains. We’d spent the day preparing ourselves for the rite, rising with the sun and eating a simple breakfast before meditating on our goals and plans for the future. It hadn’t been easy to fast for so long, but it was part of the rite. We had to prepare ourselves as much as we had to prepare the spellware, wardstone and everything else we needed. It was hard not to feel that we were on the cusp of something great, that the world was about to change. We were ready. Was everything else?

We ate a sketchy dinner, while the potential thrummed around us, on the verge of becoming real. My brothers and I were practically one, sharing understanding even though we weren’t speaking. I felt magic pulsing through the air, our souls binding us together. We’d wondered, as we planned the rite, if our father had had something like this in mind all along. There was no one else, even amongst the most experienced ritualists, who could hope to make the rite work. They simply couldn’t work in perfect unison.

I sipped my water, remembering Uncle Mago. He’d held out the promise of acceptance to us as a way to keep us under control, constantly backing away from actually keeping his promise and making the family council acknowledge us. He was in for a shock, I thought, when it dawned on him what we’d done. If we had something the family needed desperately, they’d give us whatever we wanted. It would be easy to demand our uncle be banished from the family. He’d made promises and then broken them. It spoke, I felt, of a lack of integrity.

And also of a degree of short-sightedness, I thought. The longer you keep someone dangling on a string before telling them you won’t keep your promises, the greater their anger and resentment and their determination to make you pay.

“It’s time,” Void said, quietly.

We stood, brushing down our robes and stamping out the fire. The forest seemed different, somehow, as we made our way to the shrine and carried out one final check of our work. The wardstone sat at the centre of a complex network of spell circles, runes and wardlines, all surrounded by four smaller circles for the casters. We wouldn’t be holding hands while casting the spells, something that made it harder to hold the magic in place long enough for the spell to work. We’d have to move in perfect unison… we’d rehearsed twice, going through the motions as best as we could, but there was no way to rehearse everything without casting the spell itself. I felt cold as we crossed the wardlines and took our places. The moon was starting to rise. When the moonlight reached the circle…

“This is it,” Hamilcar said. “If this works, there will be no more limits.”

“Yeah,” Himilco agreed. “This is our last chance to back out.”

“It’s already too late,” Void said. “We have to do or die.”

I nodded. He was right. And yet… I braced myself, taking a long breath as I prepared myself for the coming ordeal. It was never easy to summon a demon, for reasons none of the old books chose to discuss. They rarely came unless they were called by their name and their names were hard, almost impossible, to divine. I had no idea how the ancient DemonMasters had done it, so long ago the history books were more legends than sober facts. We needed a powerful demon, one who hadn’t been summoned before. It was going to be a nightmare to lure him into our snare.

My eyes wandered over the circle, making sure of everything one final time. Void stood on the far side of the spellwork, his eyes meeting mine. His face was calm and composed. I wondered at his thoughts as I waited, wondering what he was really thinking. The whole plan had been his idea… not, I conceded as the moon rose higher, that I’d said no. We’d all agreed. We couldn’t have done it — we couldn’t have started — unless all four of us chose to give our all. Hamilcar and Himilco stood to each side of me, their faces grim and yet resolute. My thoughts ran in circles, repeating the same things over and over again. We had no choice. We’d committed ourselves the moment we stole the wardstone. And yet, we could back off…

No. We couldn’t. We couldn’t keep working for the family, for a prize we knew we’d never be given, nor could we abandon the family and walk away. We’d been pushed too far. It wasn’t enough to be acknowledged, not now. We wanted to make them grovel before us, to acknowledge how poorly they’d treated us… to beg for us to come into the family as equals, to beg for what only we could give. The resentments pulsed around the clearing, a mocking reminder of how little the family cared for us. We wanted to rub their collective nose in how badly they’d treated us.

A shaft of moonlight flowed from high overhead and struck the wardstone. The world seemed to hold its breath. It was time.

Void held up his hand, palm outstretched, and spoke in the oldest of tongues. “I give you my family name,” he said. It should have been meaningless, nothing more than words, but they throbbed with a terrible power. A shiver ran down my spine. It wasn’t that we were abandoning the family name. It was something more. “I give it to you, and ask only that you manifest before us.”

The world seemed to shiver. I felt unseen eyes glancing at us, from a distance, and then looking away, so quickly it was hard to believe I hadn’t just imagined them. There were parts of the forests surrounding Whitehall no one, not even the bravest student, dared go for fear they would never come out again. The creatures that lived there, the Other Folk… I wondered, numbly, if even they were daunted by what we were planning to do. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, if they were. There were powers loose in the world, in the wake of the wars, that couldn’t be corralled, if they chose to lash out at us. If we could stop them, we’d be heroes. They’d remember us long after House Barca vanished into the dust of history.

“I give you my family name,” Hamilcar said. His words held power too. “I give it to you and ask only that you manifest before us.”

My throat felt dry. It was hard, so hard, to speak. I had to wet my lips before I said a single world. “I give you my family name,” I managed. It felt as if I were caught in a storm of magic, except the storm was inside me… part of me. I’d cut myself time and time again, dripping blood into containers for potions and rituals, but this was far — far — worse. I felt as if I was tearing apart my very soul. “I give it to you and ask only that you manifest before us.”

The magic flowed around me, the wardstone starting to glow with an eerie light that bypassed my eyes and stabbed right into my brain. I barely heard Himilco completing his part of the rite by offering up his own name, barely heard Void complete the first set of rituals by channelling power into the wardstone. It was all I could do to stay on my feet. I jammed my eyes shut, but the wardstone’s light kept pulsing into my brain. I heard one of my brothers groan — I couldn’t tell which, not when the light was hurting so badly — and cursed to myself. I didn’t dare say the curse out loud. Who knew who — what — might be listening?

We spoke in unison, evoking the Words of Power that would reach out to the demons waiting in the darkness. The magic spiked, then fell back into nothingness… no, it was flowing into the darkness itself. My eyes hurt, even though they were firmly closed, as my awareness started to expand. I was suddenly very aware of the wild magic rustling through the air, drawn towards us as though our rite was a whirlpool sucking in water. My brothers were shining stars, beacons of light in the darkness. We roared and chanted, balancing the power perfectly. A ritualist team needed a master caster, someone to lead the rite… someone who could easily lose control or exploit the rite for their own purposes. We didn’t. We moved as one.

My throat ached, my hands and feet moving of their own accord. The rite wasn’t precisely a dance, but… it felt as if I had surrendered all control to a dancing master, to someone who was directing the dance. Sheer terror washed through me as I realised we no longer controlled the magic — the magic controlled us — before I pushed it away through force of will. The raging storm pulsing around us was terrifying — no doubt about it — but we knew what we were doing. We’d planned the rite to the very last detail. It might be controlling us now — and it was — but we’d planned how.

The magic rose to a crescendo and stilled. I nearly collapsed and caught myself only just in time. The world hung on a knife edge. Time itself seemed to have stopped. I recalled, suddenly, canoeing down a river only to paddle right over a waterfall, a brief second of realisation holding me spellbound before I fell. Here… the magic hung in the air, a blow about to fall. Our thoughts moved like lightning. Our bodies moved so sluggishly they barely seemed to move at all. We held our breaths…

… And then spoke the words.

Magic flared. Wild magic flowed through the forest, through the wards, and into the wardstone. The light grew brighter — it dawned on me, too late, that the light might be visible from the school — burning through my eyelids and stabbing deep into my brain. I gritted my teeth against the pain as my awareness followed the magic, punching a hole in reality itself and reaching out into the darkness. Power — raw power, so raw it couldn’t even be called magic — lashed out, trying to break into our realm. We blocked it without thinking, our thoughts recoiling from power so intense it could do anything if it could be controlled. And yet, it couldn’t. I wondered, as the magic continued to spiral into the darkness, just how the DemonMasters had done it. We were a perfect team, so perfect we were practically one mind in four bodies, and yet we had to struggle to avert disaster. There’d never been anything else like us. And yet, somehow, the DemonMasters had figured out how to summon demons and bind them. How?

They might have caused an entire string of disasters, I thought. Or one of us thought. It was hard to be sure where I ended and my brothers began. For every successful experiment, there might have been a hundred explosive failures.

I pushed that thought aside as hard as I could and concentrated, my mind following the magic as it spewed out of our world. My body ached, so tired the word tired was a considerable understatement. My head throbbed with pain, my magic aching as it streamed out of my body and into the spell. I had enough power to daunt anyone short of a necromancer and yet, it barely seemed enough.

The four of us wove our spells together, careful to ensure the weight of the spellwork was shared equally. We couldn’t carry it alone.

No one could.

The air pulsed with power as something responded. I felt it pushing against our magic, slowly following it back to our world. Great heaving thoughts pulsed through the air, each one so loud it felt as if someone was shouting directly into my brain, yet so incomprehensibly vast I couldn’t even begin to understand them. I felt as if I’d gone fishing for minnows and suddenly discovered I’d caught a shark. The entity — the demon — was so vast my mind refused to look at it. And yet I knew, as I looked around the presence, that what I saw or sensed was like an iceberg. You see the top of an iceberg, poking out of the water, while the far greater remainder lurks under the sea.

It’s just a protuberance, I thought, numbly. A tiny fragment of something far — far — greater.

I understood, suddenly, how animals must think of us. Their worlds were so small and so mysterious. A tiny human settlement must be completely beyond their comprehension. Humans themselves were strange creatures, entities that sometimes helped and sometimes hindered and — mostly — went about their strange incomprehensible tasks, ignoring the world beneath their feet. The entity following our power back to the surface was… so alien it was easy to believe we were making a terrible mistake. And yet, our spells were already pulling it into our web. I saw it now, as reality groaned around us. Our spellwork was fragile, compared to the entity, but there were limits to how much of itself it could bring into our world. Reality itself was a far greater prison.

A man who gets his foot caught in a mantrap may be largely unharmed, I reflected. But he is still stuck in the trap, unable to escape.

The world seemed to pause, again, as the protuberance reached the surface. I tried not to flinch as the wardstone — somehow — grew even brighter. I could feel the charms starting to break under the pressure, too late to cost us everything. The wards were growing stronger, drawing power from both the surrounding forest and the demon itself. There was no way it could escape, according to our calculations. If it thrashed around, it would only make the bounds stronger; if it stayed still, the wild magic would keep it trapped. I felt the ground shake beneath our feet as the entity, the demon, started to manifest. The wardstone gave way to…

My head ached. The entity kept changing. It was a young woman, as naked as the day she was born; it was a young man, so handsome as to be utterly inhuman; it was a child and an old man and a monstrous creature and… the wardstone’s light had been bad enough, even when my eyes were closed, but the creature was worse. It was naked and yet there was no hint of vulnerability. I’d gazed upon a dragon, meeting the eyes of a creature that knew itself to be the apex predator, but this was different. If I had been alone, I would have dropped to my knees. It was still a very close-run thing.

“We bind you with our names,” Void said. Even he sounded tired and worn. “And we command you to assume a pleasant form.”

The entity changed, one final time. A young — and naked — woman looked at us, practically perfect in every way. I felt my manhood stiffen, felt a tug pull me out of the warding circle… I gritted my teeth, trying to close my eyes before realising they were already closed. The woman was too perfect to be real. Her face, her hair, her breasts, her legs… I tried to blot the image out of my mind, but it haunted me. It wasn’t until I risked looking at her eyes that I felt myself go limp. Her eyes weren’t human. They were cold and hard and so very — very — cruel.

Perversely, it made the next step easier. We raised our hands and chanted in unison. The demon girl regarded us calmly, saying nothing as the wards grew stronger. I shuddered as I saw her shape start to splinter, the inhumanly perfect body giving way to something so alien it was impossible to look at it. My head ached as we pressed onwards, sharing the pain as well as the effort. It was nearly over, I told myself, as the demon’s power started to flow into our wards. And yet… I saw a translucent smile lingering in the air, burning into my eyes. A flicker of fear ran down my spine. It felt as if something was about to go wrong…

“Stop,” someone snapped.

It took me seconds — precious seconds — to realise the voice was a human voice, and that it had come from outside the circle. My awareness seemed to splinter, part of my mind holding the giant ward network in place while the other half fell back into reality. Professor Bodoh was standing on the edge of the network, staring at us in horror. Magic sparkled around him as the spells reached for him… I swallowed, hard, as I realised what was about to happen. We hadn’t planned for a fifth person… how could we?

“You lied to me,” Professor Bodoh snapped. I screamed at him to run, to get out of the shrine before it was too late, but he didn’t seem to hear me. There was so much magic in the air that it was blinding him to what was really happening. “You lied…”

He must have changed his classroom, my mind yammered. And he was suspicious enough to check Robin when he returned to the school.

“The Grandmaster couldn’t have authorised this,” Professor Bodoh insisted. “You should…”

The magic spiked. Professor Bodoh’s body collapsed into a pile of dust, his magic drained in an instant. I felt my mind stagger as more power, uncontrolled power, rushed into the spellwork and…

In a flash, we lost control.